 I'm Joseph Cado and let me tell you about an epic story of victory defeat, friendship, betrayal, heroism, cowardice, deep respect, blind hatred and above all else, the struggle for survival. It is my new book, Runaway Masters, a true story of slavery, freedom, triumph and tragedy beyond 1619 and 1776. Check it out on Amazon by following the link below. The paperback is $9.99 US while the Kindle version is $4.99. If you are a Kindle unlimited subscriber, you will be able to read it for free. I hope that you enjoyed the book. Joining me tonight is Luke Ford. Luke, how's it going? Good, Joseph. How are you, sir? Doing well. Thank you. It's interesting. I mean, there's a lot of stuff to go over. Hopefully a few different topics will be addressing tonight, but obviously if you have a reasonable and responsible question or comment for Luke or myself, please do leave it via Streamlabs. I will be throwing the link into the live chat imminently, so get your stuff in as soon as possible. Thank you very much in advance. Luke, one of the things we'll be discussing is the fall of Howard Stern, which is quite interesting because it has some socio-political ramifications. It's not just the story of one guy, but Howard Stern is someone, I'm sure everybody knows who he is, but in case anybody's watching that doesn't. He is the most prominent American radio personality of the late 80s and the 90s and the early to mid 2000s. He's a shock jock, you could say, but he's someone who dealt with many different social and political issues on his show in a very reverent fashion. He often liked to, in a manner of speaking, speak truth to power and to point out hypocrisy. His politics were all over the place, which made his commentaries especially interesting. So you really never quite knew what you were going to get with him. You often do these over the top theatrical things to keep people interested. Obviously, it was entertaining, but he did, not just informative, but he is someone who absolutely had a huge influence on American popular culture. There's even a movie made about his life. It did very well. The film was called Private Parts, but it's titled Well and Keeping with Stern's persona. In the early 2010s, in my opinion, Stern became more PC. He became more politically aligned with the left. And now he's someone who basically critiques the right. And he's the sort of person that he would have lambasted, his previous iteration, sort of lambasted. As a matter of fact, in his most recent book, he encouraged people to burn his previous two books because he had changed so much since then. And Stern has achieved, he's fallen off the face of the earth in one respect with this. Radio shows popularity. It went from traditional radio to satellite radio, and it incurred a huge ratings drop then, and certainly that drop continues. But now he's basically well known to the extent he is well known for picking fights with people who are more in the spotlight than he is, such as Wendy Williams, Joe Rogan, and Donald Trump. And it's quite interesting to see how with Stern's personality shift, so to speak, he's become less popular and he has resorted to basically clout chasing, as it's called. I mean, it's interesting to see how his politics apparently have changed. It's interesting to see how his public persona has changed. Now he's much more mellow. He's much more a suck up to the Hollywood entertainment media, whatever you want to call it, establishment. And he's basically, like I said, become the sort of person his previous iteration would have would have found absolutely appalling. Luke, any thoughts on any of this? Yeah, well, I've never been a big Howard Stern fan or listener, not not because I have any necessarily any animus. It's just that there's only so much time in life. And so I just I just never saw the bang for the buck. I think I probably listened to two hours total of Howard Stern live. And then I've listened to a few more hours than that of his his highlights. And so some of his highlights are very funny. There was just never enough value for me. I have read his box, at least sections of them. And it does seem to me that Howard Stern probably has become a better person. He does, you know, he's probably more nicer. He's probably more social, but making you a better person doesn't necessarily make you a more compelling personality on the radio. So just as with professional athletes, usually when they find Jesus, that that marks the downward trajectory of their career. So to Howard Stern discovering his humanity through years and years of psychotherapy, that that may have taken the edge off. And so I think about my younger self, I started blogging at age 30. And so I was often rough and tough and mean and rambunctious and confrontational in ways that I would not do so today. But that made me a more compelling personality than than I am today. Today I'm a little more light laid back. I have a little bit more empathy for other people. But empathy for other people doesn't always necessarily produce the best entertainment or the best the best radio shows or TV shows. So I think he has mellowed the guy is 67 years of age. And so he was he was at the top of his field until his divorce. After his divorce, hardly anyone seemed to speak about him anymore. And then once he went to satellite radio around 2006, he completely dropped off the radar. So I'd never hear it's been more than a decade since I've heard anyone say, hey, did you listen to how it's done today? So I see he's get much more respectful treatment in the New York Times. But I never hear anyone in real life, just like with the Daily Show. Once John Stewart left, I don't know anyone in my life or anyone who I follow on Twitter who says, oh, did you see the Daily Show? It seems to have completely dropped off the map. So the nasty edge that also led him to do a lot of ugly things and also a lot of good things, because what made him so compelling for I think many people in the distant right is that he was not PC, that he was willing to go against sacred cows. He was willing to say things that were relatable to the average person. And so he was not willing to let go of the OJ Simpson being obviously guilty of a double murder. He was not willing to let go of all sorts of polite pieties that were pushed in politics and in mainstream culture. But now he's rich, he's successful. He seems to be more important to him to hang out with people who are similarly rich and successful. He doesn't want to rock the boat. He's only working three days a week and doesn't sound like anything he's doing anymore has any resonance in wider culture. No one talks about it on anyone that I follow. Nobody has said to me for more than a decade. Hey, did you hear what Howard Stern said today? You know, it's obviously I mean, he could have legitimately grown more mellow with age as a lot of people do. But then again, a lot of people don't. There's the stereotype, of course, of the grumpy old man. And there is a grain of truth in that. But when it comes to stern, he also converged toward a consistently left-leaning political alignment. And he became rather he wound up droning on about with his second iteration things that were trendy or PC or fashionable. And I don't think that that's really the product of mellowness. It seems like a calculated change in the format of the show, basically. And my take is that when he went to satellite radio in the 2000s, he expected to have much more of a following than he ultimately got. Obviously, his ratings were going to tank because listening to him for free via traditional radio was one thing with him. He got a satellite radio, which is a subscription based platform. People, a lot of people aren't going to follow him. And a lot of people didn't follow him. And so my perspective is that, you know, of course, we may have mellow legitimately as the years passed. I think that his the change in the nature of his show is something that came about because he believed that his old formula was no longer working on satellite radio and he needed some sort of shift to appear popular. He there was that there is the famous video of him for 2013 going on and on and on about his show needing to essentially widen itself up and become relevant to people in order to get, you know, big name interviews. So I think that stirred his change may in part be based on a legitimate personal transformation. He has been therapy for quite a while, as Luke said, but I think also it's something rather calculated. He believed that his old format wasn't working for him. And I would say that that was a bad analysis on his part because his show was just really destined to lose the overwhelming majority of its listenership when it went to a paid subscription based satellite radio format rather than, of course, the traditional free radio format where Stern initially became so tremendously popular. Right. So he's making bank. I mean, he must be worth well over a hundred million dollars. Oh, no question. So he's got that taken care of. And now now one thing for people in his position and in our position is that to some degree, we depend upon access and to some degree, we depend upon just our raw reaction to events. And these two dynamics are at odds with each other to maximize your access to interesting people. You probably need to watch what you say so that you don't needlessly irritate people. On the other hand, that makes you more watered down in the things you say. So that there's always a dance between having access to people and saying raw unfiltered things that people can't get elsewhere. And I'm not exempt from that. Howard Stern is not exempt from that. No one in this sort of space is exempt from that. But I do know that as you get older, you become less inclined to take risks and you become you put more of a premium on comfort. So I heard I remember in 1982, we we blew back from California to Australia for my sister's wedding. And so my dad at the time would have been about fifty two years of age. And we took boxes of my father's books like I had a box under my feet on the airplane, which was not very comfortable, but we're in a very dire financial position. My parents had made the biggest financial mistake of their life that just as interest rates were soaring, they they found themselves stuck with two homes. Like they thought they could get rid of one home. So they were paying the mortgage on two homes on a minister's salary. Times were very, very dire, so dire that they were even OK with sending me to public school. So we were carrying around these books on the plane trip to Australia. So my dad could sell copies of his books at very speaking engagements that he booked around my sister's wedding. Now, normally at as you get into your fifties, you don't carry around books to your speeches anymore. People just tired of that. Dennis Prager mentions this that when he was in his 20s and 30s, maybe even into his 40s, he used to carry boxes of his books to his speaking engagements. But by the time he hit his fifties, he was no longer inclined to do that. So as you get older, you put more of a premium on comfort and not just comfort in not physically carrying things around, but also comfort in your overall life because there's not just the show where you want access, but you become less inclined to have a show that is at odds with what's best for the rest of your life. So I assume how it's done by all appearances has a good marriage. And I assume that the one thing that comes with that is a recently decent social life. And so I think he puts more of a premium. I think he's putting more of a premium on his own happiness and and on his relationship with his wife while in a previous iteration, he was willing to sacrifice his relationship with his wife for the sake of the show. Now he's willing to sacrifice his show for the sake of his relationship with his wife. And that makes the listener the loser. But it may very well make Howard Stern and his new wife the winner. So what about his political realignment? How would you say that factors into this? Well, I don't think about how it's done, primarily in political terms. I think he's probably less inclined to rock the boat with with his peers. And his peers are overwhelmingly going to be on the left. So he was more of a rabble rouser, man speaking from the working class or from the struggling lower middle class. Now he's rich and he's speaking like other people who are rich. I don't think he deliberately staked out any political position. I believe that these are his natural inclinations that this reflects the the worldview of the people that he has done these deals with, the people who manage him, the people who he looks to, the people he socializes with, I think it's just a natural manifestation of a change in social status and less of a need to to rock the boat. Because the people who do occupy the high ground in culture, particularly in media, are overwhelmingly on the left. And so it becomes very easy to to just align yourself with the people who dominate your particular sphere. I remember I went into college very right wing and then about a year or so into college, I thought, oh, wouldn't it be fun to be a left winger? Like, let me just try this out for size. And it was effortless because all my professors were left wingers. So everybody in power over me in college was a left winger. So it became really easy to just go with the flow. Most people just go with the flow. And most of the time we don't even notice that we're going with the flow. Just before we get back to Stern, how was it then that you wound up going back toward the right? Well, I got I got really sick and I left college. So the incentives to be on the left disappeared because I was no longer in college. And I was just on my own. And so I kind of reverted to my traditional right wing tendency. So from about age of 12 or 13, when I was first able to to form a political world view, the world of of hierarchy made more sense to me than the world of enforced equality. So almost all my natural tendencies are on the right. But I do have like a performance aspect to my personality where I like to try things out. And so for a couple of years, it was really fun to tell people that I was an atheistic communist and I just kind of enjoyed the intellectual challenge of trying to articulate the dominant world view in ways that seem funny and utra. But when I was on my own and just me and the ceiling, then then or my also, I think when you're sick, you become much more vulnerable. And so you become much more afraid of change and traditional ways hold more appeal to you, sir. By the way, I see obviously you've recovered from your sickness. I hope that it was nothing which kept you down for too long. Oh, it was awful. It kept me down. Frankly, it kept me down for six years. I was basically bedridden in my 20s. And I was never the same after that. I managed to make about two thirds of a recovery. But I've had really lousy health all my adult life. And the number one thing that people would tell me is you need to eat meat because I've been a lifelong vegetarian because that's the way I was raised. I've never eaten meat or fish deliberately. Like occasionally someone stuck it into my food and I didn't notice it. But when I did notice that I'd have this violent reaction. Then a couple of months ago, I thought, you know, let me just try these beef organ capsules that I can't convince myself to eat meat. But I just tried these capsules and I started off with just one and then started taking two a day and then after a couple of weeks started taking three a day. And then when I was riding my stationary bike, I remember I passed about 10 and a half miles on my stationary bike. And I thought, I feel great, but what the heck is going on? And then I thought there's only one change in my life over the past month. And that is I'm now taking beef organ capsules. So I feel better than I felt in four decades. And the only variable that's changed is ancestral supplements, beef organ capsules. I take six every morning. I feel great. I mean, I can't believe it. I can't I can't get over my early programming in my taste. I could not deliberately reach out and eat some salmon or any meat, but I can swallow capsules. I don't have any reflux. I never taste it. I'm just able to swallow it. I don't know what it is because I know that vitamin B 12 is really hard to assimilate just from tablets or shots, et cetera. So maybe it's the vitamin B 12. I don't know what it is, but beef organ capsules have changed my life for the good. And it's funny when you have something that completely transforms your life for the good, you have two options. You can look back and get my God at 55 wasted years of my life. Or you can think, oh, my God, now I've got life restored to me. So I'm preferring to focus on the latter rather than the former. Gotcha. Well, it's good to hear that things are going well for you. Of course, I've never been one for vegetarianism, so I can't really relate to that. But it is good to hear that the beef capsules are before you well in your day to day life and talking, I suppose, getting back to stern before we do move on. Now, if one, I suppose, were to look at his audience, which has obviously declined tremendously, declined when he went to satellite radio in the first place, and then it's declined. Now it's what I understand it's really declining because he's basically phoning in his his performance on his show. He is doing it by a video conference where obviously in the past, when we get together in the studio and that made for a sort of environment, which is very engaging. As a matter of fact, on a recent episode of Stern Show, there was Steve Martin and Martin Short sitting together and Stern talking to them on a TV monitor. I mean, it just really looked crappy and not because of anything. That's that Martin or Short did. It was just because, you know, it's screwed over. Stern's absence from their physical presence screwed over the context of the environment, I should say, of the interview. And I think this really says to me, perhaps, that Stern has reached the point, even though he certainly was not at this point. I know from just what I even saw what he said in the 2010s, particularly the early 2010s. But now it seems that he's reached the point that maybe he just doesn't care anymore about the quality of his show or about how, you know, how many listeners it gets. This is certainly departure from where he used to be because, I mean, we have his own words on that video for 2013, which indicated he absolutely cared about it then. But now even the stuff that he's discussing is very tedious. His longtime fans generally speak, you're not happy with it. It's sort of becoming, in many respects, a show more like a personal diary. And, you know, all this stuff combined is certainly resulting in increasing listener dissatisfaction with his program. So it could just be that over the last few years, at some point after 2013, he arrived at the conclusion that he did not care about how many listeners the show gets, and with COVID now, with him, you know, phoning it in, he might not even care about the aesthetics of his program. It would just seem that he really is just, as the old saying goes, phoning it in. I have anything to say about that? Well, he's making over $1 million per show. It's absolutely incredible. He's making $120 per year. He's only doing 112 shows per year, maybe up to three hours a day. So 112 shows per year, 253 days off, has had over one million per year. I like what the New York Post wrote, April 27th of this year, that Stern's show is now defined by pessimism, anger, and a worldview that shrinks ever inward, limited in size and scope to the basement, literal metaphorical dwelling place of this once great show. What would you suppose is might be the impetus for this, because it seems like he's sort of lighting his show on fire. By the way, I think he said $120 per show. I know that's not what you meant. But anyway, $120 million per year. Yeah, that's exactly what I thought that you meant. Yeah, he signed a deal with satellite radio, a $500 million deal. So I presume that means he's contracted for a few more years. But anyway, so why do you think then that by all appearances, he doesn't care anymore? I think it's just that he has the money and he figures screw it. I just want to focus on my own comfort or do you think it might be something else? I think, you know, the perspective I just laid out seems to be the most likely one, but perhaps it's too simplistic. Well, it's really hard to do a high quality show. And sometimes you just don't have it anymore. And it's also hard to turn down a million dollars a year. So I don't think he's a million dollars a show. So I don't think he's deliberately phoning it in. It's just that sometimes you just don't have the fastball anymore. Sometimes you just don't have it anymore. You can't phone in a quality radio show. You can't just phone in a quality live stream. It takes a fire in your belly. And it's really hard to have a fire in your belly when you're worth hundreds of millions of dollars when you've got a guaranteed contract. I mean, look at Ezekiel Elliott. I'm a Dallas Cowboys fan. And Zeke was a dominant running back when he entered the league. But then once he signed his big deal, I think, 2019, he was fat and he was lazy and he completely lost his burst. And he was just phoning it in. Now, it's impossible to just phone it in as a running back and still succeed. So he was just a waste for the Dallas Cowboys because once he had his guaranteed contract, like many players, they lose their motivation. And so I think Howard Stern has just lost the inner fire. And it's not surprising. I mean, how many people doing a daily radio show are able to keep that fire burning four decades later? Absolutely. But at the same time, his obviously preferred method now gaining publicity, which he cares about, I think, you know, I don't think it's gone away. Him wanting to get recognition for his show. His preferred method of gaining publicity is picking fights with people like Wendy Williams, Donald Trump, and of course, Joe Rogan, people who have much more fame on a day to day basis than he does. I would see that this is a form of clap chasing, which is typically what people do when they're lower on the fame and fortune totem pole than somebody else. And it looks rather desperate for someone like him, who obviously used to be at the top of that totem pole. Any thoughts on that? Yeah, we never get to graduate from the game of status competition. We never get to rise above it. We never get to be so spiritual or so successful that we don't need to concern ourselves with status competition because where we are in the status hierarchy, that has a huge determinant on our health, on our psychological health, on our happiness. So do do people look up to us? Do people admire us? Do people enjoy us? Do do people want us around or do people shy away from us? For example, let's say I I tell a story about yesterday. Let's say I someone tried to rob me and I had to fight them off. And let's say the first two people I try to tell that story to, they just blow me off. It's like, aha, and they just walk off. But by the end of like two or three engagements like that, I would start to doubt that what happened had really happened. All right, we understand ourselves in relation to other people. Howard Stern understands himself in relation to other people. We never get to graduate from status concerns. We all have a ferocious desire for status. Most of this ferocious desire we're not even conscious of. We unconsciously will start to imitate the speech mannerisms. The pitch, the intonations of people above us in status. We will unconsciously start to mimic their beliefs and how they carry themselves and how they dress. This isn't even conscious. We just unconsciously start aping and imitating people above us in social status. So we are wired to ferociously compete in the status game. And people will usually compete in it until their last conscious hours on earth. I mean, nobody wants to be thought of as a loser. I mean, that's embarrassing and an embarrassment. Like embarrassment is awful for you. It's devastating to your health, to your psychological health. A precipitous drop in status is probably the most effective predictor of someone committing suicide. People deal very badly with precipitous drops in status. So even when you're worth hundreds of millions of dollars like I was doing, even when you're making over a million dollars a show, you will hate steadily falling in status and you won't even be conscious necessarily of it, but you will be clawing back to try to be in the conversation again. And I don't think any of us are immune from this reality. I would agree entirely. And before we do finally move on, because there's other stuff to discuss, by the way, if you have a reasonable responsible question or comment for Luke or myself, please leave it by a stream labs. Thank you very much in advance. But there is the question, Luke, of why Stern has kept on at these ridiculously exorbitant rates, his salary. Why is he kept on at this level when I think it's obvious that he's not making this sort of money for his platform, for satellite radio? I can't see how he hasn't been trying to go over the numbers in my head of what they probably are, and I just don't see how it's profitable for his employer to be paying him this kind of money. They have to be incurring a loss on it. And if it were a loss of anything less than ten million dollars, you could see how it might be a convenient write off for them that they could use for their own benefit in some unexpected ways. But the sort of money they're paying, Stern, I don't think you could boil that down to a write off. I think that there has to be something here because Stern, I think very clearly, it's not worth the money that he's being paid. I mean, he's making more of a way more than Rush Limbaugh did. And Limbaugh himself was vastly more popular even at the end of his life than Stern is now. I don't know the economics of satellite radio, but I suspect that it's not as not an open and shut case as you present. So they may well be overpaying, but it may be as a lost leader. There may be other ramifications. It's a little bit like the United States relationship with Israel. On the face of it, the United States subsidizing Israel to the tune of four billion dollars a year and other close intimate connections between the United States and Israel does not seem to be in America's best interest, but there may be other other benefits that the United States is getting from this deal that I'm not seeing. And there may be other benefits that Sirius is getting that you're not seeing. So I suspect it's not just a ridiculous, complete idiocracy of a decision. I'm sure that there are some payoffs to satellite radio, but I have no idea how Stern could be bringing in for his employer at least a million dollars a show. I don't think there's any way in which that's possible, especially when you consider that there's no advertising on satellite radio. You know, on his old show on a traditional radio, absolutely no question. They would bring in a million dollars per show and advertising hell is a lot more than that. But with satellite radio, I just don't see the profitability. It has to be in terms of there being enough people who subscribe to Sirius just because Stern is there. And I simply don't think that he has that sort of listenership any longer. I think his listenership on Sirius today is less certainly less than that. Say, but Limbaugh, God, even at the end of his life, when his popularity had waned considerably. So anyway, that is the discussion about Howard Stern before we do move on. Luke, anything to say about him or his predicament? No, it's bewildering how he how he keeps going because it seems like he's embarrassing himself. He's a little bit like a 50 year old prize fighter. Wasn't there some 52 year old prize fighter who just came back a couple of weeks ago when Donald Trump was doing the color announcing and he got knocked out in the first round. So for most fighters who keep fighting after age 40, it's usually a ludicrous spectacle. And some part of Howard Stern must be embarrassed by what he's turning out. I don't think there's any doubt about that. And now talking about abortion, this is an issue which had gone away for a while in the national dialogue, but it is back. I think it's worth noting that the GOP has been pursuing this for generations now. And it was something that was big on the agenda before Trump came along. When Trump came along, they moved to more economics and national security, specifically immigration and, of course, withdrawing troops from certain engagements overseas or not getting into those engagements in the first place. And the GOP sort of followed a different path. Even though Trump did promise to not further the pro-choice agenda as president, which I think he very clearly made good on that promise. And I say this is a pro-choice person myself, who wishes he would have done something different, but I can't deny that he did not. He certainly did not let the anti-abortion folks voted for it down. But now that he's no longer in office, certain elements of the GOP have brought this anti-abortion debate back, front and center, even though it's something which is clearly a loser for Republicans in election season, and they brought it back to an extent with this new Texas law that is almost beyond what words can describe because this law, it's creative, you know, it doesn't outlaw abortion in and of itself, but it allows people to sue those who get abortions and those who in any way, shape, or form, assist in people receiving abortions. And, you know, it means that not only the abortion practitioner could be sued, excuse me, not only abortion practitioner could be sued, but somebody who drove someone to an abortion clinic, theoretically the receptionist of the clinic, somebody who gave somebody money to get an abortion, and people can sue someone, any of these people, from out of state, people who've never even been to Texas can file a lawsuit. And I mean, the whole thing, it's really incorporates some of the worst elements of the political left, where you have this over-latidiousness designed to use lawfare against people whose views are disliked, even though what they're doing is legal. And then also it builds a culture of what the Cubans will call a chivato, or what I will call here chivatoism. Chivatos were snitches for the government who would go around spying on their neighbors and reporting anything that they did, which was not kosher, but the party line to the party itself. And then these neighbors who were reported on would get, they have some bad things happen to them. That same culture now certainly has been inspired by the Texas Republicans have come out with this ridiculous law because they've essentially deputized private citizens to do what the state wants and stop these abortions. And the people are stopping these abortions by filing these absurd lawsuits, which if they lose the lawsuit, they cannot be made to pay the person they sue's legal fees. So I mean, it's a totally bizarre situation. Even if you very much oppose abortion rights, I think one has to say that this law is absolutely bonkers. But, you know, it is what it is. Luke, anything to say about this? Right. So on the face of it, it seems bonkers. But you have to have to then look at one of the repercussions. I mean, perhaps this is a law that will stand up against the Supreme Court scrutiny. It seems like there's every indication that this law will pass US Supreme Court scrutiny and it will be imitated by other states such as Florida. So after four decades of ineffectual activity by the Republicans to try to restrict abortion for the first time, it appears that they have struck on a winning formula. And if the formula is an appetizing, if the formula is offensive, if the formula seems to be appealing to the worst in us, that's one thing. But what if it works? What if it rallies the Republican Party? What if it brings Protestants and Catholics and brings about a Republican coalition that's then able to do other things? So so events like this abortion law and not just events on their face, there's usually a deeper meaning behind it. Now, there's nothing inherent in Christianity that makes it permanently opposed to abortion. So people like to think that there's like some essential characteristic of Judaism, some essential characteristic of Islam, some essential characteristic of Christianity, some central characteristic of black people, some essential characteristic of Nordic people, some essential characteristic of Japanese people. But there aren't there aren't any essential characteristics of any particular religion or people. What happens is certain people manifest differently in different circumstances. And so Christianity, Protestant Christianity, Catholic Christianity suddenly became obsessed about abortion in the late 1970s. This was entirely brand new. And as late as 1984, abortion was not a partisan issue. So what happened was that the conservative people like Phyllis Schlafly and Paul Wyrick and other movement conservatives, Richard Vigory, Jerry Falwell, they were looking for some way to expand their base beyond those simply opposed to the civil rights movement. And so abortion was a way of uniting everybody with traditional ties. So it unites people who don't like big government, who don't want Northeast liberals and pointy heads on the Supreme Court or federal politicians legislating what can be the law in one's own home state. People, some people just don't like threats to the traditional way of life and anything that opens up access to more sex because anything that opens up more access to more sex, it makes marriage more unstable. It increases temptation for man and it weakens the hold of a woman on her husband because when abortion is legal, the man has more opportunities to cheat, screw around and get away with it. So all sorts of people were incentivized to get aboard the anti-abortion bandwagon. So I think you could make a strong argument as the left does. So often I think the left has very sharp analyses. Think you can make a very strong argument as the left does that abortion is really a proxy for race. In the 1970s, you had Bob Jones University which until about 15 years ago, it forbade interracial dating. And so you had the racially segregated private schools that were losing their tax-exempt status. And this was not an issue that could unite conservatives. You don't get to bring together Protestants, Catholics, traditionalists, conservatives, right-wingers around an issue of we need to restore tax-exempt status to racially segregated private schools. That's a loser. But attitudes towards abortion basically reflect attitudes towards race. So whites who score high on racial resentment and racial grievance, they're far more likely to sport strict limits on abortion than whites who score low on those measures. So racial attitudes are linked to a whole wide of disparate issues including social welfare, spending, gun control, immigration, climate change. And so abortion in and of itself is a very little significant to Christianity and anything inherent in conservatism. But it is a powerful proxy for stay out of my backyard, states rights, and it's really a powerful proxy for race and white people would never rally around on explicitly a racial platform, but they will rally around on issues that are proxies for race and abortion is essentially a proxy for race. People who are strongly opposed to abortion tend to be strongly opposed to affirmative action, to massive social welfare spending. They tend to be massively opposed to relaxing criminal enforcement. They tend to be very strong law enforcement for long prison sentences for people who commit dangerous crimes. And so these are proxies for issues that tend to unite Republicans. A few, quite a few things. First and foremost, it's unlikely that the law in Texas will come to Florida. Somebody has filed a bill which is actually a watered down version of the Texas bill in the legislature, but it's even DeSantis and the Republican leadership in the legislature not endorse the bill. They just made some noises about being pro-life. Typically what happens under the Florida Republican Party very well on how it operates. What it does is it avoids these hot-blooded social issues and it addresses them at all to the very sort of fact door moderate sounding way. For instance, DeSantis signed a bill a few years ago which mandates parental notification for abortion, but it includes a judicial bypass option. So really anybody would just go get the judicial bypass and the parental consent goes out the window. So I mean, it's a toothless act. But talking about what the Florida Republicans will do, but I find it very unlikely that this bill will pass the Florida legislature or probably die in committee in at least the house or the Senate. It might get through one committee in one of these chambers, but it being signed by DeSantis is unlikely. He has asked the state legislature not to bring any controversial bills to his desk in an election year and he did so for obvious reasons. And now looking at the popularity of this thing, I'm not big on public polling as everybody knows. I think a lot of it is garbage, but I don't deny something that's very obvious. And there is an obvious trend which shows that most Americans dislike the sort of abortion while that was passed to Texas, specifically one that does not allow any exceptions for the victims of rape or incest. So I think that quite clearly this is a very unpopular bill, even many Republicans dislike it, but it certainly was done because the Texas Republicans thought they would get something out of it in terms of political benefit. I'm just not quite sure what that is, but I cannot imagine this bill being very popular in the long run. As a matter of fact, if you follow this sort of thing, and I think Luke probably does more than I do, which is to say that if you care about it, Abbott's approval rating has gone down massively in Texas since this thing was brought into power. And obviously that means he's losing support among people who voted for him. But so I think that the popularity of the Texas law is quite marginal. And I think that it's the likelihood of it being replicated in other large states is also quite low. But you know, beyond that, looking at abortion, if people, abortion is what keeps the Republican Party in office, or at least it's what keeps it viable because the people who get abortions are disproportionately from the left. They're socially and economically downscaled with people who tend to not have a lot of long-term planning. Well, that's not absolutely the case, obviously. And people who get abortions typically get pregnant because they don't take proper steps to avoid becoming pregnant in the first place. And so it attracts a certain sort of person who's very likely to vote for the left, who's very likely to want instant gratification, which makes them even more likely to vote for the left beyond general principle. And it also attracts a sort of person who's not very much interpersonal responsibility or else once again they would have taken a precaution at a time. Now of course there are cases where birth control and prophylactics don't work, but those are, I mean, they are there. But I mean, they're quite marginal in reference to the overall situation where people just don't take proper precautions at a time or they don't get tubal ligations or vasectomies. So I think that there's no question that abortion, demographically, is good for the right and bad for the left. And so for people on the right who are enamored of anti-abortion politics, they're really advocating for something that will destroy their power within the electorate. Because if there is no abortion and everyone has kids who would have had an abortion, then the left is going to have a supercharged demographic majority within a generation's time and the right is going to get swamped. So I don't know how it makes sense for anyone on the right who's concerned with demographics to be anti-abortion. That's actually a total self-own. By the way, it's also a self-own for the left to be pro-choice because they are ensuring that their demographic power is not as great as it would otherwise be. Yeah, there's a good point. So there's a big difference between conservatism and say the distant right on this issue. The distant right understands that abortion is overwhelmingly eugenic. That it's the less intelligent people who are the most likely to have unwanted pregnancies. So there's definitely a eugenic angle. But I don't see any way how this plays out in Republicans long-term favor. And yet this issue does have a strange hypnotic effect on people who have some traditional tendencies. So I view all abortion as killing, but I don't view it as murder. So that is the traditional Jewish perspective. Yes, it's killing, but it's not murder. It's not the equivalent of taking the life of someone who's born. So I view the overwhelming number of abortions as immoral. And so if this could perhaps prompt a change in attitudes towards sexuality, that it's not quite as recreational an activity as people may want it to be. If this prompts a little bit more soul searching, then obviously those would be good consequences. I'm having a hard time. I can't see how this Texas law leads to positive results for Republicans down the road because I have never been able to resonate with the fervor of the anti-abortion cause. Even though I morally share the fervor, I do think the overwhelming majority of abortions are murder and killing, but it has a hypnotic effect on people which is a little bit beyond my can. On the other hand, I remember I met this very nice girl, very lovely girl who had a party after her abortion. And that attitude is even more foreign to me. That's even more appalling to me. That's even more hideous to me. That you would throw a party after having an abortion that you would celebrate having an abortion or as some leftist women that I've dated have said, well, abortion is just something that women go through. That cavalier attitude to killing appalls me. So I can't join the anti-abortion fervor of conservatives, but I am far more appalled by the pro-choice side who think that abortion is something to celebrate. I'll just, I suppose, lay my cards on the table. I am very pro-choice. I think it's good for society in terms of demographics. I think it's good for the constant of individual rights and liberties. I think that if personhood were granted to a pre-viable fetus or an embryo, it cheapens the dignity of human life under the law. But at the same time, I do just like very strongly. I think there should be a legal and less disabled life for mother abortions from fetal viability onward. If the fetus is alive in and of itself, if it's able to sustain its own life, if it is developed to the point where it is alive on its own merits, then it just so happens to be inside of the woman. That's my point of view. And affording it then, I think quite clearly is infanticide and I oppose it as such because of individual rights and liberties. Although, of course, if the woman is going to die for having continued her pregnancy, then I think she should get preference over the viable fetus, even though it is obviously a very murky matter in any case. But no, when it comes to the abortion of embryos or unviable fetuses, I have no problem with it. I don't think they're alive in any philosophical or bio-ethical sense. That being said, I do feel most comfortable and I think everyone generally speaking, well, not everyone, but most people do, with abortions being performed within the first trimester, within the first 12 months. It's what Roe v. Wade originally referred to for a reason. And I think that it's good that most abortions are performed in this period. I think 12 weeks, three months is more than enough time to get an abortion. So ideally most would happen within that 12 week window and once going to call an embryo and something that should have the same rights as an infant, I really don't have any words for that. I'm gonna talk about Luke, I'm saying generally. I think it speaks to a certain biological ignorance. I know Luke is not ignorant of human biology and I did not mean to make it seem like I was talking about him here. I'm just speaking generally about what I've heard from a lot of anti-abortion people. So it's really an interesting matter and a host of respects. And there are a lot of different views on it. There's a lot of nuance, but it attracts a lot of fanatics. Luke mentioned fanatics on the left who have abortion parties, which is a little out there to say the absolute least. And then of course, the people on the right who basically would choose to save, if given the opportunity, a bunch of frozen sperm and eggs in a case as opposed to a three-year-old girl from say a collapsing building because they viewed the sperm inside of the egg as just as much of human being as a three-year-old girl. So in their very skewed mindset, it's better to save the case full of these sperm and eggs which have met rather than a three-year-old girl. So I mean, you get fanatics on both sides, but it's really crazy stuff. I think when you reach the point of having the abortion party or do you think that the sperm and the egg are more important than say the three-year-old girl, I think you've really gone to a place that is profoundly unhealthy. And of course, if I say you wanna meet Luke, it's a general thing. Luke, anything to say about what I brought up? Well, there are primary emotions, here's an analogy. There are primary emotions and there are secondary emotions. So for example, anger is usually a secondary emotion. Anger is a reaction to feeling hurt. So if I got really angry, God forbid, at Joseph, and let's say I misinterpreted what he just said as some kind of personal attack of me and I got really angry at him, that would be a secondary emotion. It would be because I felt hurt that he had dismissed me or diminished me or scored me or put me down in some way. And then to cover up that hurt, I would try to cover up that primary emotion of hurt with anger to try to disguise it. And so too, I think there are primary issues and primary identities and secondary issues and secondary identities. I don't believe that abortion truly energizes people. It's a secondary, it's a proxy for identity. I think everything comes down to identity and people with shreds of traditional ties to identity to a local city or a local state or a particular way of life or to a religion or to a traditional ideas of family are going to use things like abortions as proxy to try to maintain their way of life. I think relatively few people actually care intensely about abortion, but tens of millions of people will be energized by abortion because it's a proxy for something deeper, which usually comes down to matters of identity. And now, Luke, before we do move on, because I suppose this hot button of an issue is abortionist, there's only so much one could say about it. Why do you think that so many on the right who are obviously concerned with political demographics trending against them strongly? And I obviously do agree with you that there's no way this Texas law pans out well for the GOP electorally speaking. But why is there so many of these conservatives who are obsessed with the Democrats getting more and more of the electorate then oppose abortion knowing that if there are no abortions the democratic share of the electorate increases exponentially. Oh, well, I guess maybe I've gone ahead of myself. Do you think it's that they don't know this or do you think they do know it and they don't care? Do you think it's some sort of something else? What's your take on the matter? Well, I think when you can't say things out loud, people become more reluctant to even think things. So obviously different peoples have different gifts but you can't say this out loud with any specificity or you were removed from polite society. So therefore because you can't say such an obvious thing that the average gifts of Ashkenazi Jews are different from the average gifts of Japanese which are different from the average gifts of Sub-Saharan Africans and different from the average gifts of Eskimos, all right? So because you can't say such a basic thing out loud people in positions of importance, positions of fame, positions of influence are reluctant not just to say these things out loud but even to think them. So because you can't talk about the demographic repercussions of abortion out loud what you just said that this would be frowned upon and therefore I think people, many people refuse even to think about these things because they know that if they think about they group differences or demographics that they will be that much closer to saying something out loud. Like a lot of people think, oh, I'll just say it to my friends but then somehow it spills out. So I think people are afraid to even think the truth even deal with the profound consequences of demographic repercussions of abortion as you just mentioned. People are so afraid of being associated with the word eugenics that they won't even think in ways that are eugenic or dysgenic. And so then they end up in some kind of bizarro land that is quite disconnected from reality. Indeed, and that's where a lot of conservatives are. I mean, they'd have to know deep down that anti-abortion is not good for them or they might have some inkling of it but they just shoo it away and they instead of focus on the moral side of this or perhaps a short-term political pragmatism I think we'll be able to get more voters by pandering to them on this issue. But it's really a sad situation on the whole because the left is not focused on its long-term benefit which would be anti-abortion. It would be shoring up its own demographic power at no question. And then the right is not focused on its own long-term benefit either. It's focused on, I think, ridiculous things instead. Both sides here, there's a lot of way to go around and neither one is acting in its best interests. And I think identity is like everything else is contingent and contextual and takes place within a wider culture. So you had Roe v. Wade, you had this from everything that I've read by legal experts, this is just a horrific ruling on a legal basis that there was no basis in law for Roe v. Wade, that has then repercussions. And so suddenly people who'd never cared or thought about abortion, they were triggered by Roe v. Wade and the horribleness of this ruling to suddenly take abortion seriously and to push back against Roe v. Wade. So all sorts of people, for example, who never thought strongly about Christianity and now suddenly coming around to embracing a muscular version of Christianity that they would never have done so if not for the overreach of the secular left. Here's an analogy. I visited England in 2005 within an hour or two of getting off the plane and going to a pub. I found myself speaking in an exaggerated Australian accent but I didn't know why I was doing it. I didn't know why I was going, oh, mate, why was I carrying on in some exaggerated, but that context of being in England suddenly brought out what was usually latent in me. I don't normally go around like an Australian larrican but that context suddenly brought out the Australian in me. So the context is America's context changes. All sorts of identities that are latent in people suddenly come out. People who never thought about being white are suddenly thinking about being white. People who never thought about muscular Christianity are suddenly thinking about muscular Christianity. People who've never given a damn about states' rights are suddenly thinking about states' rights. People who've never cared one way or another about homosexuals. Once you have homosexual marriage as the law of the land suddenly they have an instinctive reaction to it. People who've never thought about transsexuals once they see it being extensively celebrated and even mandated that we celebrate it in the media they suddenly have a reaction against it. So what is identity? Identity comes out depending on context. So in one context my conservative side is gonna come out. In another context my orthodox Jewish side is gonna come out. In another context my Australian heritage is gonna come out. In another context my Anglo heritage is going to come out. In another context my American identity is gonna come out. In another context my Los Angeles or Californian identity is gonna come out. When we had that recent big submarine deal between the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom suddenly like my Anglo identity got triggered. It was like this is fantastic. The Anglo powers are uniting to do something wonderful that's going to push back against growing Chinese influence. This is gonna be good for Australia. This is gonna be good for the United States so it'd be good for the whole Anglo sphere. And so an identity that was reasonably latent in me suddenly became primary in reaction to events. So when Harold McMillan I think was asked in the 1950s what would determine the success of his government I believe he answered events my dear boy events. And events also have a profound effect on our identity. In one context our primary identity may well be Christian or Jewish and in a different context it may be Texan or conservative or Southern or Anglo. So as events change and context change our identities what was latent or buried in us will come to the fore. So when Israel won the 1967 war on a massive basis millions of Jews who had very little Jewish identity suddenly became hyper chauvinist Jews. It just came out of nowhere. It shocked them and it's as Tom Wolf said back to blood. Blood is probably the most basic and primal of all identities and in a growing age of confusion then often these most primal identities will come to the fore. I agree entirely. I don't think there's really any two ways about what you said. I think it's just a fact of human nature all what you've related and it very much is what it is. And I will say though if you for a reasonable responsible question or comment for me for myself please leave it by streamlapse. Thank you very much in advance. And now talking about our last at least the last issue that I have marked down here for tonight. It is the matter of Afghanistan how what happened there happened. And I mean that's such a multi-faceted issue that it's hard to even think about how to address it but we did agree to address the US leaving Afghanistan. So looking at the situation Luke I mean it's hard to even figure out where to begin to look at because there's so much to look at. What do you think the ramifications of this are likely to be in a nutshell in terms of America standing on the world's stake? So I believe that when this was going down I think you may have said something to me on Twitter about how this provides credence for your perspective of fairly critical or negative take on the trajectory of American power relative to the rest of the world. And I don't see that whatsoever. So I don't believe that America standing in the world is at all affected by however humiliating a withdrawal from a particular place like Afghanistan is. America standing in the world depends primarily on its military and economic power. And America's military and economic power is not at all diminished by us getting out of Afghanistan. In fact it is to America's benefit to get the hell out of that place no matter how embarrassing it is just as if you're in a bad relationship and you get out of it and in the process of getting out of it your soon to be ex-girlfriend puts flyers all over the neighborhood saying you're a pedophile and calls your workplace and gets you fired and you go, oh my God, this is such a humiliation I'm gonna have to leave the country. You're still better off getting out of that dumpster of a relationship even with all the humiliation that comes with it. United States is in a better position being out of that dumpster fire of a relationship no matter how humiliating the exit. So America's power depends primarily on the strength and vibrancy of its economy that the American dollar is the dominant currency it's the world's currency and also America has the dominant military. We have the best military even with all the crazy things that the Biden administration is pushing. We still have the aircraft carriers we still have the nuclear weapons we still have the aircraft we still have the training we still have the drones we still have the technology and going around the world and knocking over regimes on the one hand there are a lot of negative repercussions that come with that but it also is a warning to people that yeah, we can do crazy stuff. So how do you deal with someone in your neighborhood who on occasion just lashes out and punches people you don't gratuitously offend that person you give that person a wide berth you generally won't confront a person who is liable to go off unpredictably with some crazy amount of violence and yet somehow they're in good with the police and they never get arrested. So the United States power and prestige in the world is not diminished just because this looks like a humiliating it was a humiliating exit. So America's power depends on its economy and its military America is better off for getting the hell out of Afghanistan and it's a manifestation of how much power and wealth the United States has that it can go into Afghanistan for two decades and blow two trillion dollars and just power on it's like people who light a cigar with a hundred dollar bill like people who light their cigars with a hundred dollar bill that's not their last hundred dollar bill they do that because they have so much money they have money to burn the United States in comparison to other countries has money to burn. Now obviously I think we all agreed here that staying in Afghanistan was a terrible decision I think even going into there in the first place was a bad decision that the right wing approach to 9-11 of treating it as a culture war was a bad decision and that the instinctive left wing approach of treating 9-11 as a law enforcement matter we would have been much better served by going with that left wing approach but the left didn't even have the courage of his convictions it was so scared by what happened with the Iraq Kuwait war and how successful the US military was that they didn't have the courage of their own convictions but in retrospect I think the normative left wing response of treating 9-11 as a law enforcement matter rather than a culture war would have been correct and going into Afghanistan and Iraq were just absolute terrible awful disasters but what's amazing is the United States still has so much wealth and power I mean but think of the far better things we could have done with those resources than what we did. Obviously Luke presents a powerful analysis here and he presents his argument quite well and I agree with it in certain respects but actually before I get into my point of view I will say that this is not the last call but it is the call before the last call we have a reasonable and responsible question or comment for Luke or myself please leave me via streamlabs thank you very much in advance not the last call but the call before the last call so get your stuff in as soon as you can thank you very much in advance once again. Now the thing of it is is that what has happened over the last 20 years or so is that Americans have they went from being ultra patriotic ultra confident in their military around the time of 9-11 to after the events of the Iraq war actually as these events were unfolding they became more sour on American military power overseas and this has been something that has built up over time and now we've reached the point where military recruitment is anemic very few people want to join the military now appeals and I've seen their appeals they appeal to people on the basis of the economic benefits of joining the military the patriotism argument is out the military top brass are very openly doing what they can to dissuade people from joining that don't align with their politics I think that the obvious goal of the military as it's presently led is to have a much smaller military they know they're gonna have soldiers not renewing their contracts because of all this infantry meant to be precise and a few officers but they've viewed as dissidents who the leadership would rather have out anyway but I think the goal of this whole thing is to have the military be a federal law enforcement a federal police agency to basically enforce as time goes on very unpopular in some areas of the country lefty dictates which may not even be constitutional but the military would be used by the executive force in any way and it's a brilliant strategy because the Democrats do have a friendlier and friendlier map in presidential elections but at the same time the control of the U.S. House certainly the U.S. Center for them in the long run is nowhere near so rosy so I think they've made the they've gone the route of saying well we're probably gonna have the executive more often than not during the years to come which is to say the presidency and so we'll just use the military then for whatever aims we want I think that's where the Democrats are coming from here and so for them having the military be remade in their preferred image is absolutely crucial and they would not need a military big enough to invade countries the U.S. obviously want to work as the Chinese today in terms of sheer manpower it would be overwhelmed the people in charge of the military know this they're not stupid so I think they're just retooling the military to be used in time for domestic purposes as a police force I really think that is that that's what they're doing and now talk about how Americans view their country and its standing abroad Americans generally speaking have a lack of confidence and this is across the political spectrum of their country's ability to project strength overseas now and some people say well on the right we say well it's all because of what Biden did and that's it contributed to it for sure but it's not the whole thing like I said this has been building up for about 20 years so I think that the situation now is that Luke is correct that America is not you know just going to get weak and collapse and blah blah blah the thing that really powers America as Luke mentioned is its economy America is very similar to the EU nowadays where you have a collection of entities that can govern themselves to a limited extent but they're overseen by a massive bureaucracy which binds all of these governing entities together and what really binds these entities together is the common market the domestic market in the case of the US and if that market were not so valuable then the country itself would cease to exist America today simply exists because of its gross domestic product that's it just as the EU exists because of its common market it simply has two valuable of the common market to fall apart and the US has two valuable of the GDP to fall apart that is the bottom line and so America is not just going to collapse that however what's happening is that the country no longer has a core of identity or a macro culture it used to be sort of an Anglo-centric macro culture that had a pluralism from place to place variations is what I'm saying but it still was there it used to be there something people assimilate to from sea to shining sea but since the 1960s that has been eroded and now with wokeness obviously that sort of Anglo-centric macro culture is viewed by many as something demonic so we're in a situation in the US where people do not feel fraternity with each other from place to place they remain in the same country simply because of the domestic market which fuels the federal government and that's really it and I don't think that a country can truly be successful in projecting strength on the world stage if it's people do not believe in the country itself most Americans nowadays have no common cause to rally around they as I said before there's no national core of identity and there's no country-wide macro culture to build fraternity so while America is not going anywhere now it is rotting from within and in several generations time that could create a situation where there no longer is a US but it's that marketplace that domestic marketplace which makes it so likely to stick around for some time to come but I don't think that America I certainly don't think America is destined to be the world power I think we're entering a multi-polar world where there's going to be many more global powers and they'll have their own sphere of influence in different places and they'll be running things either literally or by proxy in these areas so I think that's where everything is headed I look at things say about what I just brought up I just started thinking I wanted to try to come up with a contrary take so that we at least have an interesting discussion so here's a possible contrary take it may be that the primary reason for the decline in national feeling and whether the decline in communal feeling has nothing to do with wokeness or the left or even immigration it may have to do with the growing individuation of lives so we have increasing specialties in professions we have increasing specialties in recreation so it used to be that a community would gather around its church for example that would be the primary source of emotional solace so I'll just speak from a purely secular perspective for a minute so the church or the synagogue or the mosque and organized religion would be the primary source of emotional comfort to people and I think that was true until maybe midway through the 19th century it also used to be true that your religion was the primary source of information that it would be transmitted through your church synagogue or mosque and through say printing presses or through the transmission of documents via monks or other people and that's no longer true so it used to be that the way to get status was to participate in your religion and there was many volunteer opportunities for laity in particular in Protestant Christianity but in other religions as well to gain status by participating in religion and that's no longer true now people get status by holding a book club by holding poetry readings by organizing gaming by being in a yacht club by coaching Little League by being in a sewing circle there are so many different individual ways that people get status these days they no longer need religion there are so many different ways that people seek comfort these days they no longer primarily turned to organized religion some people turned to marijuana some people turned to their favorite movies and TV shows other people turned to yoga other people turned to a special diet to a special exercise program to special hobbies to a social circle there are just so many opportunities for comfort that are immediately compelling and that many people probably most people find even more useful for providing emotional comfort than religion so status, comfort, information there are so many places to get information now you don't need to get it from your church or from your church sanctioned information outlets and so people increasingly lead all these individual lives and so there's been a dramatic loss in common feeling and I think this took place before the 1960s I'm thinking out loud that this primarily took place before the 1960s before mass immigration before the rise of cultural Marxism or wokeism or whatever you want to tell it I think it may be inherent in the nature of modernity that we have a loss of common feeling a diminishment of national feeling a diminishment of common ties with people whom we live around and then immigration and wokeism and some other things may exacerbate that but it may be that modernity has changed the way people operate and so I think we've had a steady decline in religiosity over the past 150 years and I think with that with all these individuating processes of modernity comes a loss of common feeling and that hollows out a communal sense and also perhaps a national sense to some degree I'm just thinking out loud so I'll just leave it there No problem No, it's very, very much worth hearing and I think there's more than a few grains of truth in it so to speak as a matter of fact I think there's held a lot of truth in what you said I do think though that even what you said to the extent that I agree with it and I just have to reiterate I do agree with it quite a bit but if one looks at America it did have something of an identifiable macro culture even in an age of modernity that began in the 19th century as you mentioned it had an absolutely identifiable macro culture until the 1960s but it certainly had one even after that it was withering away but it was still there as a matter of fact last night I was watching rewatching after a while since I'd seen it fast times at Ridgemont High which obviously is in San Fernando Valley a place Luke knows well and it's about high schoolers and their experiences and the culture represented there is not what you see in the San Fernando Valley today and that movie came out almost 40 years ago now 39 years ago it was filmed in 1981 so that would make it actually 40 years ago and you can certainly see how a common culture there has turned into something today what you see in the San Fernando Valley today is quite disjointed in comparison I'll just leave it at that and I think even though California is not the US on the whole it certainly is by no means a microcosm of it the same phenomenon that played out in the San Fernando Valley has played out across the US in different ways into different extents from place to place one can't generalize too much but it has played out on the whole and that has produced a situation where people no longer feel commonality with someone just on the basis of being an American certainly not in the way that they once did and so it's quite fascinating to me but still the modernity stuff which Luke brought up I think absolutely is worth considering and I have no doubt that it has contributed to the present state of affairs in many respects but there can also be no doubt that an American cultural identity began to really take a hit in the 1960s with the social revolution that produced many things but chief among them in terms of having I think a long-term impact was multiculturalism and the sort of vacuum that multiculturalism created and the lefty administrative state's success in pushing multiculturalism this stuff certainly opened the door for wokeness which is not so much a political philosophy as it is a secular religion that just happens to play itself out in the political realm so it's a very, it's a fascinating situation I think when people look back on this they'll be like, wow, all this stuff happens at a short period of time this sure was an interesting era in which to be alive from the 1960s until the 2020s that's likely beyond that I don't think things are gonna quiet down within the next decade I certainly don't think the rate of socioeconomic as well as political change is going to slow down within that time span so it's really, it's fascinating stuff and if we weren't living through it it really would be I think fun to watch sort of like as a spectator sport but all the same these changes are occurring and they are what they are and it has resulted in a far less cohesive America and one without a national identity for people to rally around particularly during hard times for countries such as the one we're going through now with COVID and other things so Luke, I suppose, before I do the last call there are a lot of people on the right who want to bring back an America that they recognize essentially even if there are many different perspectives on it people want to bring back a traditional America which in their mind tends to be the America that existed from the 1950s to the 1980s with obviously some things that they disliked, edited out and they seem to be very intent on doing this even though as Nick Carroway told Jay Gatsby you can't repeat the past so what's your take on this conservative perspective? Right, on the face of it I don't see how this is a viable path forward but maybe some aspects of this will be taken on maybe some things will be given a lot more lip service than true devotion is paid and other things to which true devotion is paid will get no lip service so for example, abortion is a proxy I think for race and there are all sorts of other things like NASCAR that are a proxy for race and so there's no connection between rhetoric particularly the rhetoric of groups the rhetoric of religions the rhetoric of communities the rhetoric of politicians the rhetoric of political parties and reality but we may get invocations of the past to forward a whole new agenda so there's no necessary connection between people calling for a return to traditional values and the effects of what they're actually instituting And now this is the last call if you have a reasonable and responsible question or comment for Luke or myself please leave it by stream labs leave it as soon as you can thank you very much because this is the last call Luke I must say this has been we've had many good conversations I should go without mentions but this has been one of our better conversations I think we've really addressed a lot of stuff that's very difficult to disseminate because of its multifaceted intricate nature we've managed to address it pretty quickly and at the same time in a very respectful and substantive fashion Yes, I really enjoyed it and I just wanted to add one more story because I noticed a lot of people and particularly conservatives in the media they are outraged about the COVID lockdowns in Australia Oh, I forgot please though, yes, let's discuss that as we absolutely as we wind down tonight please go ahead And so the New York Times has an article today has COVID cost Australia its love for freedom and my friends cannot understand how Sydney, Australia for example Australia's biggest city has been locked down with a severity virtually unknown to Americans for four months so in Australia they're routinely handing out $5,500 fines for violating COVID lockdowns so the severity of these lockdowns the repercussions for these lockdowns the use of law enforcement, drones the military to enforce these lockdowns is absolutely appalling from an American perspective and I think I have a really simple explanation and I prefer explanations that don't make one side good and one side bad so here goes that for Americans their primary value is freedom because America emerged out of the first British Empire before the Enlightenment it emerged as an armed revolution against the British Empire and Americans resolved to be free so Americans place far more emphasis on their freedom than do Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans English, Europeans like freedom is the number one American value now by contrast in Australia and New Zealand and to a lesser extent in England the number one value is fairness so from an American freedom loving perspective these COVID lockdowns in Australia are an anathema from the average Australians perspective these lockdowns are a reasonable response to an unusual situation that preserves lives and therefore it is fair so Australians have 20 different ways of saying fair they have all sorts of expressions that Americans don't use fair go is a very common Australian expression I don't recall Yanks talking about a fair go fair dinkum, common Australian expression that someone you know is a decent bloke you say he's fair dinkum I don't recall that being used in America so there are all sorts of expressions for fairness in Australia and New Zealand that are just never used in America and it reflects the Australian and New Zealand obsession with fairness because Australia and New Zealand emerged out of the second British Empire the post-enlightenment British Empire there was not an armed revolution and so by and large Australians and New Zealanders have a government that works for them they may complain about it but in the United States the government is frequently seen and experienced as the enemy you get off the plane you go through bureaucracy customs in the United States you are treated as the enemy as an American you are treated by your government as the enemy when you disembark from an airplane and go through customs you go to Australia and you're an Australian and you go through customs you're treated as a friend you're treated as a mate you are treated by people who look like you and sound like you and you are welcomed so Australians have a government that for all its flaws basically works for them they may complain but Australians by and large support these stringent COVID lockdowns now to what extent these lockdowns reduce death I'm not expert enough but it is conceivable to me that they have played an important role in reducing death rates and so the death rates from COVID in Australia about one-fortieth the death rates in the United States and in Europe so I also believe that Americans by and large support a strong COVID response I believe if Trump had come out for say stronger lockdowns even let's say that's bad public policy but I think it would have been a winning political policy we saw Gavin Newsom resoundingly defeat the recall Gavin Newsom was the first person to lock down a state he locked down California in reaction to COVID I think that Americans by and large had more of an appetite for more restrictions than even their government gave them and so I think it's interesting in contrast to freedom lovers that I think by and large the average American wanted even stricter government responses to COVID the average Australian by and large as I understand it has supported these very stringent reactions and people often value things more than freedom and so I just find that fascinating. In America the closest thing to the fairness ethic you refer to in Australia is the concept of a square deal but that really pertains to business whereas in Australia as you mentioned it's more of a cultural thing and certainly I think the Australian and New Zealander devotion to the concept of fairness as a cultural identifier not just to something that's a good practice it's something that's not even seen to that extent in the UK and I think you mentioned that as well it's something unique to Australia and New Zealand on the basis of what these societies came out of and in the case of Australia obviously it was a penal colony so the people there were gonna have a big appetite for what they would perceive as fairness or compassion that sort of thing. Now looking at America it did come out of the Enlightenment era of course whereas Australia, New Zealand are post-enlightenment but judging from what you said in your analysis of America's desire for stronger lockdown policies and this is a general thing what you're saying obviously because I mean all Americans are going to want this but it sounds like you categorize Americans as being more freedom loving than fairness loving but on the basis of your perspective on what they want with these COVID lockdowns it sounds like they're not really all that much interested in freedom they would much rather have the Australian or New Zealander perspective here that fairness standpoint. So perhaps then what could say that in analyzing your argument that as you compare American freedom to Australian fairness nowadays that's not even an apt comparison in terms of what most people in America want. Yeah I think America is probably less freedom loving today than 20 years ago in part because the demographics have changed but also rhetoric can hang on after its reality on the ground has diminished so I think we still have tremendous American rhetoric about freedom when perhaps that doesn't reflect on the ground reality as say used to and then it also brings up the vision of the distant right and where it differed from say Republican free market principles and where paleo conservatism differs from free market conservatism is the paleo cons and distant right they don't put necessarily the market first they want the market to serve the people rather than the people serving the market. So if you're looking for a coherent society with higher levels of social trust where people basically trust their government and have good reason for believing that the government is attempting to act in their best interest and the people collectively are willing to make substantial sacrifices in their individual freedom for the collective good then perhaps there's something to be learned from Australia because the individualistic free market approach is not the distant right approach the distant right that the paleo cons we want to call back to a higher sense of community and more willingness to give up some of our individual freedoms for the sake of more communal feeling and more communal participation and a greater sense of cohesiveness and trust with our fellow citizens so even if it increases the GNP 10% to like import a million extra immigrants because of the decrease to social trust and social cohesion from a tried right perspective that would not be worth it we don't worship the God of GNP and so even if certain government policies perhaps even these COVID restrictions which may reduce the GNP far more than say a free market approach but if this is in the collective self-interest if this protects lives perhaps there's something to be learned even if these policies are wrong perhaps there's something to be learned from the willingness of Australians to forgo certain individual liberties for the sake of the health of the community and there is something for us on Streamlabs before I get to it though I will say you know it's interesting talking about not so much Australia or even fairness but talking about the dissident right to alio conservatives I'm not obviously a member of either a group on socio-political realists my views are all over the place even though they pulled toward the right because I think that the right has a generally speaking and I have to say this is only generally speaking less utopian more realistic understanding of human nature than the left does although on issues like abortion the right certainly sounds a lot like the left with some more utopian language which is I think frankly nonsense but looking at America as it is and as we've said you know there's really not much cultural commonality you know national core of identity is the whole paleo-con America first or even dissident right thing of you know like I think I've said that America first is that really just something that is nonsense I don't see America first going anywhere since America can't even define itself coherently nowadays unless America first is supposed to mean you know let's try to find consensus among everyone who has American citizenship but that obviously is not what the American first movement whether it's espoused by Donald Trump or Nick Flentes and these people obviously a very different take someone America first is but it's obviously not in any case what America first was down to so do you think that really America first today if one wants to have a sort of more traditionalist conservative or traditionally right-wing perspective of giving up one's rights to be part of the broader community if one looks at America where there's no real sense of community from sea to shining sea doesn't this whole paleo-con dissident right how do I put this with that America first thing doesn't that just become sort of ridiculous well it all depends on context everything's contingent so if we experienced another 9-11 you would see an upswell in patriotism and nationalism if the context change national identity and national feeling and communal feeling can be triggered so there are millions of Jews who are completely indifferent to Israel and then when Israel won the 1967 war their latent Jewish identity was triggered so national identity is fairly natural and it can be triggered and if events change then people's reactions and identities will change so one minute people may put a priority on playing video games and getting laid and making more money but you have another 9-11 and people will start having block parties people will start gathering with their neighbors people will start flying the flag people will start volunteering to fight in the armed forces people will start volunteering to visit old sick people so events can change identities I think that what you say certainly is how things have traditionally gone but as we've seen with COVID something that really should bring people together metaphorically if not literally because of the nature of the disease it has not done so traditionally in a time like a pandemic people do rally together in one way or another to support each other but it's only made America more divided I think that there were another 9-11 today it would only further division it within the country one side would blame the other side for it and it would create I think some really nasty stuff so socially, politically, maybe even economically so I think that America is sort of beyond this thing where people can come together in a time of crisis to rally around a common identity I would say certainly there's much more of an enriching coherent identity than being Jewish regardless of which strain of Judaism one follows regardless of what one's amount of Jewish heritage is if any but there's certainly something much more inherent much more cohesive much more enriching about a Jewish identity than a present-day American identity which is almost undefinable because nobody can really say what America stands for today in any sort of cohesive cultural or moral sense the country is very much in odds with itself well I think it would have been conceivable the pandemic could have brought us together if our political leadership and other leaders had acted differently so for example in Australia the government and the opposition rallied to propose and carry out policies around which there was coherence around which there was broad-based agreement so the ruling conservative coalition and the opposition Labor Party essentially agreed on COVID policies and so there weren't these political fights over COVID such as you had in the United States so I think if Donald Trump and Republicans and Democrats had played things differently we may well have had an upswell in national feeling I mean look at what happened in Europe where people were going on their balconies and singing together you didn't have that nearly as much in the United States but I think it could possibly have been triggered I just remember when I was in high school I didn't really give two hoots about my high school and then suddenly one day I had a different feeling and then suddenly I was like I was a proud placer hillman and I don't know exactly what happened but an identity which meant nothing to me suddenly got triggered one day near the end of high school and so I still think that American national identity can be triggered to become to come to the fore I have a few things there before we do get to stream lives I think that one looks what happens what you mentioned in Europe that's because these places even though they've had great demographic change they still do have at some level a stronger national cultural identity than the US does and so even when they are in this situation of having their culture subjected to all these very strong alterations there still is something that binds them that could come up in a time of crisis to function as it did when you saw people singing on their balconies in Australia certainly I don't think you eat I don't think you would just give this for a second there's much more of a macro culture a binding culture than you see in the US and that certainly helps people have more trust in their government and in each other to do things which are inconvenient in order to get through tough times in America I can't think what a national identity would be centered around today because different folks in different parts of the country have totally different conceptions of what it means to be an American some people even say being an American means you were born in North, South or Central America so everyone is an American therefore it's really American today it's very much a country without an identity to the extent that you don't see in Europe even countries in Europe that have gone through extreme demographic change with the exception of Germany Germany I think is a country about as identity-less as the US if not more so and obviously that was done because it's a form of atonement for Nazism so people essentially looked at Nazism in Germany said well any foreign patriotism is bad and they ran in the opposite direction and in America it got to the point where multiculturalism and other stuff made it uncool to sort of embrace the old Anglo traditions and other things were emphasized as results and that meant that people had nothing to bind them together and there have always been divisions in American society even when there was a very strong Anglo-centric macro culture so it's the lack of that culture today in many respects it just made these divisions more apparent so I just don't see there is being a strong American national identity today that people could rally around I really don't you know the honest truth is that if California were invaded by Mexico a lot of people in Alabama and Mississippi would be cheering and they would really be cheering likewise say if Mobile Alabama were attacked by Cuba and Cuba wound up occupying Mobile and they crossed over to Mississippi and they got Biloxi a lot of people in Washington state in Seattle would be cheering they would be and that's because the national identity of this country has become that weak Well, Donald Trump just came out of the blue in 2015 I never thought he had a chance until I watched a rally that he did in Alabama in something like August of 2015 I just started watching it and I saw his plane they showed his plane circling to land and suddenly just looking at his plane I started to get a shiver and then watching the pageantry unfold and the screaming people and then Jeff Sessions coming on stage and then Donald Trump talking about the power of genetics and I was all a quiver I was like Chris Matthews I felt a thrill running up my leg it was like, whoa I'm not somebody who cares about politicians I've never enjoyed watching politicians' speeches I've never cared about political pageantry that much but Donald Trump somehow was able to tap into something primal and I remember his last rally in the 2020 campaign when Mike Pence I think just gave a beautiful prayer in I think Lansing, Michigan and that last rally where I had this doom sense that the Trump presidency was over and I had a few tears watching that final rally he was able at times to tap into something primal not just me, but in millions of people and the Make America Great Again movement that the devotion that millions of people had to that movement I think reflects that there is still a national feeling out there that can be stimulated I think Tucker Carlson taps into it at times and so I think a wise, smooth Kenny operator with pageantry skills can possibly tap into it again and all sorts of identities are latent waiting to be made active I mean, think about the person who's been sexually dead for five years, 10 years, 15 years they have a since sexual interaction and suddenly they're a sexual being they are completely transformed they've got sex on the mind they're having regular sex their identity has completely changed prior to this they were just a stockbroker with a whole bunch of obligations and now suddenly they feel alive because some part of themselves which was dead for 15 years has overflowed like a volcano and that can also happen with nationalism though I also take your points No, it absolutely can happen with nationalism I will say that what you say about the sentiment which Trump conveyed it's absolutely correct it did happen but I don't think that's really a national sentiment I think it's a nostalgic sentiment for an America that did exist culturally nationwide during the time of say fast times at Ridgemont High I think that it is something about a memory that people have of America rather than the America which exists today and one should also note that the sort of nationalistic sentiment which Trump absolutely did awaken in people and also perpetuate within them it was something that alienated a greater number of people because even though we had different views on legitimacy of the election in certain states we both agree that there's no question Joe Biden beat Trump massively in the national popular vote and so I think that the nationalism which Trump represented the nationalistic sentiment which you speak of absolutely it's there but it's not really nationalism it's really something of a cultural memory that only applies to certain regions of the country and you know not even in many cases in games they have region more like certain counties within states within a region of the country so it's really an interesting matter I don't think it's enough to provide a sort of broad-based, left-right spectrum-based agreement on American culture or identity going forward what Trump represented but certainly he did tap into something profound and I think really it's rooted in nostalgia for what does seem to be nowadays a better time I think he squandered many of the emotions and devotions that he brought out so by being so childish, so petty he was undercutting the transcendent magnificence and primal power of his message so it's a shame that he was such a flawed vessel at the same time he was also a master of pageantry so I think much of the opposition to Trump was not in opposition to the nationalism and the pageantry but it was in opposition to his erratic childish egocentric and unappealing petty aspects of his character I think that if you look at what the Democrats brought out of the 2020 DNC it's clear that they did have an opposition to anything beyond Trump but to the sort of sentiment that he was conveying that pageantry I think they absolutely bear aesthetics and in the philosophy behind those aesthetics I think the Democrats really dislike that sort of traditional Americana what I call Norman Rockwellian America perspective and I think that it absolutely pulled people I think people on the left and the right made too much of Trump as an individual and really Trump is a creation of the times in which we live at least his political career as his business career was a creation of a time gone by but his political career is the creation of this era and it's an era of polarization and so make America great again was perceived regardless of whether it was him or somebody else saying by people who liked the idea of going back as something good, something positive something wonderful but then again, people on the left perceived as something bad, something awful because they dislike where this country has been and when you have a country that polarized you cannot have a coherent national identity because it's a hot and cold kind of thing and obviously the two are not going to meet with any degree of success. Well, I think that the Trump showed a winning formula for Republicans going forward and so someone competent takes his formula I think they could achieve great things like if Ted Cruz were competent and he was able to use Trump's formula and he got into power he may well be far better at governing than Trump. Now getting to streamlabs, I'll just say quickly I don't think Ted Cruz could ever win a national election and I think it's going to be more and more difficult for any Republican to do so because of changing political demographics but getting to streamlabs because there is some stuff there for us now which I'm just refreshing the page actually to get all of it. I don't want to miss a syllable of it. From Roehouse, let's see here. Where do Kato and Luke Ford think the USA will be in 10 years best guess in relation to China and electoral politics? Well, I think the US will obviously still be here. I think that in electoral politics the Democrats will have basically a solid majority for presidential elections while the US Senate and the US House will be much dicier. I think those will still be immensely competitive. I think that in terms of the USA in relation to China I would say the Chinese will have much more power domestically in terms of their control over the American economy. I think they'll have exerted far more influence in the South China Sea and I think they will be certainly thought of as an unambiguous superpower by that time. Although it still will be I think a multipolar world it won't be like China's running the whole world. And in 10 years the big America will be even more divided. I think it will be a place that is looked upon as a place of perpetual social conflict. And I think that the country itself will be very much at odds with itself even more than it is today. Luke, anything to say about what Roehouse brought up? Yes, I believe that China will exist as we know it in 10 years. I believe that China will have fallen apart. It will have divided up and possibly gone into catastrophic civil war costing tens of millions of lives. So I don't believe that China is long for this world. I believe that I do not believe we'll be living in a multipolar world. I believe that we'll be living in even more of a unipolar world than we're living in now. I believe the United States will be more powerful vis-a-vis its competitors in 10 years than the United States is today. I believe that essentially the United States will be a rogue nation that will simply dictate how things will work. And there will be certain alliances that the United States will have, such as with Mexico, with Canada, with Australia, Japan, and the United Kingdom. And all those countries essentially have to be vassals of the United States. And in exchange for that, they get to have some special relationship with the United States. But I think the United States will set the terms of what goes on in the world even more decisively in 10 years and look for China to completely fall apart and devolve into civil war, I would guess, in the next 10 years. I just want to reiterate my point because in 10 years' time, I think people will be watching this or listening to it. And I disagree with what Luke just said, just to be as clear as possible about that. From Roehouse, do you guys believe in the terms moderate or centrist? Do you guys believe in the terms moderate or centrist matter much anymore? Do you guys see yourselves as centrist or moderate on some issues? Also, was Bill Clinton a moderate? I tend to think of him as one. Clinton was moderate relative to today's Democratic Party. He was also relative to obviously the left wing of the Democratic Party during his own day and age. He was always centred left, but you could say he was a moderate, but once certainly he moved leftward. But still, I understand a very technical basis of moderate all the same. And certainly a moderate relative to today's Democratic politics and relative to the left wing of his time and obviously the 1990s to early 2000s. Now, also as to whether or not I see myself as centrist or moderate on some issues, my political views are all over the place. As I said, they generally do pool toward the right though. On some issues, people might see me as a centrist. On other issues, some people might see me as being very clearly on the right. On other issues, people even call me a liberal or a progressive or whatever. But no, I'm a sociopolitical realist. It's hard to say I'm a centrist or a right-winger or anything like that because my views are just so much all over the place. So I wouldn't use any of those labels to describe myself. But anyway, now also as for K-Max, asked, do I believe in the terms moderate or centrist, whether or not they matter much anymore, they matter in the sense that people particularly left leaders who don't want to think of themselves as Bernie Sanders supporters, they will call themselves moderates. Doesn't amount to much though, because the people they vote for are going to vote generally as their party dictates and the left wing of the Democratic Party is ascended within the party itself. So that's gonna have more and more pull. Certainly the left wing of the Democratic Party today is more power than it did five years ago, 2016. And that's a trend which is gonna continue because of political demographic shifts. So I think that for those people, for those Democrats who don't like the Sanders Estas, moderate and centrism still matter as terms. I don't think they matter much beyond that, even though some Republicans do like to think of themselves as centrist or moderate. But I think that as the country becomes more polarized, the entire concept of being a centrist or moderate has less and less appeal. Luke, anything to say about what Roehaus brought up? Yeah, I think centrist or moderate has power in some circumstances and in other circumstances, it's a losing formula. So sometimes it's a winning formula, sometimes it's a losing formula like everything else, it is contingent. It is dependent on context, time and place and events. So a moderate centrist stand may look magnificent one moment and look like weak T the next moment because events have changed. But one through line that I see is that you should not engage in rhetoric or behavior that energizes and arouses your opposition more than it energizes and arouses your supporters. So I saw that Trump did a lot of things that energize and arouse his opposition more than he energizes and arouses his supporters and that's why Trump lost. Trump lost the 2018 and the 2020 elections by losing the suburbs by 2%. And I think that's the problem. And I think that the alt-right flamed out because by doing things that titillated their supporters, they fired up their opponents to a degree that was absolutely unfathomable to the alt-right and the alt-right got absolutely crushed because they didn't think about the consequences of what they're doing. So you could blast music from your window like late at night and have complete disregard for your neighbors, but there are probably gonna be negative consequences to that. So you can treat your neighbors badly one minute and you think, yeah, I got away with that because I'm such a powerful person, but you have no idea of the whirlwind that you may be reaping through energizing your opposition. There's no question that Trump did supercharge his opposition, but it's also worth noting that the Democrats have been more and more supercharged by any Republicans from 2004 onward because any Republican presidential nominee has been increasingly demonized by the media, which is ever more polarized, ever more partisan. And as a result of that, people on the left tend not to hear as much good stuff about Republicans as they used to. And say to people on the right, they don't hear as much good stuff about Democrats as they used to. But especially on the left, any Republican from 2004 onward has been increasingly demonized by the press, Mitt Romney, who went out of his way to be inoffensive was demonized more than McCain was. McCain went out of his way to be inoffensive, he was demonized from George W. Bush was. And then Donald Trump came along and really did add fuel to the fire, at the same time, even though he accelerated the trend, the trend existed with or without him. And I think that the reason for this trend is because in the year 2000, so many people just could not accept the results of that election. They were very sketchy, by the way. I'm not saying that they were actually, that Bush actually won that thing, but the results were very sketchy. People on the left felt that they had won and then they defeated. And so as a result, they, in the media, the left grew ever more angry toward the GOP, which began to be viewed as not only politically unfortunate but politically illegitimate. And certainly that's where we're at today, but on steroids. So that's the situation there. As far as the suburbs go, the GOP has been losing ground there since 1992. And Trump just accelerated the trend of a lot of the same people who voted against him, either literally 2016 or by proxy in 2018 or literally again in 2020. A lot of them were on the fence with the GOP to begin with. A lot, there was more and more people you saw in the media who were leaving the GOP from the time of McCain onward because it was getting too partisan, too nasty, too mean toward Barack Obama. And this whole thing is part of a cultural realignment where in the educated suburban dwelling class and some urbanites as well, a few rural people, but it's mostly suburban and urban. They find it less and less socially desirable to be affiliated with the Republican Party. And Trump absolutely did accelerate this trend. He played a role in making what it is now. It's not like he had no part in it. But the trend has existed since 1992. And he simply accelerated it. And there's no indication that it's going to stop anytime soon. As a matter of fact, it just got, like I said, supercharged in the 2000s. And Trump, he cranked it up to number 11. And it's just a cultural shift away from the Republicans' traditional base of suburbanites or white-collar folks. And these suburbanites, whether Trump is on the GOP ticket or not, are not going to vote for the Republican Party increasingly because they think it's morally defective and being a Republican carries immense social, even economic disincentives for them. Before we get onto the last thing here, who do you think saved that one I just brought up? Yeah, there's a socialist pollster's name I'm forgetting who says that prior to Trump, most Americans who were eligible to vote and did not vote were likely to vote for the Democrats since Trump, most voters who were eligible to vote and don't vote are much more likely to vote Republican. So I think there's been a sea change. And unfortunately, Donald Trump, by deriding mail-in voting, not only cast the Republicans to Senate seats in Georgia, but put the Republicans on a bad path because I think most people who aren't voting in America and who are eligible to vote now would vote for Republicans because I think the Republicans have consolidated as the party of working people. And so I think their prospects are much sunnier than what you think. All right, and now for the last thing here from Roe House, if ever I could find it, I'm trying very hard Roe House, so here it is. For Luke, has anyone contacted you for a debate yet? Ethan Ralph or Frody from Guide to Culture, I know you would do well in any debate you are signed up for. Oh, thank you. No one's contacted me for any debates, but I enjoy debating. So what basketball or playing chess does for other people, I enjoy a hearty debate. Yeah, it's interesting. I know my debates actually won an academic medal for my performance in debate class back in the day. I used to have it around here somewhere, but I hope I didn't throw it out. But anyway, but no, over the years, I've come to see the debating really does not change much of people's minds. So I prefer dialogues, conversations that I hope would in time at least make people more informed. But, you know, a team chooses also people love debating and that's their product. Here it is. I can't believe I still have this old thing. It's from speech class, the old medal that I got for it. But it's been some time, but I never did throw it out. I probably sometime at some point did not throw it out just because I didn't happen to have a nearby. And there was some bag that was just thrown a bunch of rubbish into, and that would have been pardoned but I'm glad I did keep it. So no, a debating is something that I do have respect for. It's something that I used to do quite well. But at the same time, over the years, I've come to the conclusion that dialogues probably are better than debates because I don't think anybody's mind really gets changed by it today. You're probably right. I just, I enjoyed the recreationally and intellectually, I enjoyed the challenge. I'm not primarily an activist. So I didn't think in terms of activism, but I think of myself as someone who tries to pursue truth even if it cuts against my tendencies. For example, I recently read a book by a sociologist of medicine. And the book was called Diagnosis Therapy and Evidence Conundrums in Modern American Medicine. And this book says that people who become obese as adults not only don't have diminished lifespans, they actually tend to live longer than skinny people. Now that completely goes against what I understood as reality, but if that is the empirical truth, I embrace it. So I noticed just before going on the show, someone was tweeting, wow, if we just convince millions of Americans to lose weight, we'd save millions of lives. And if this book that I just read is accurate, that's not true. And so I want to embrace truth even if it goes against my tendencies. A very noble trait, one that I think that I have and I hope that I actually do, but I always try to identify the facts regardless of where they might lead because for me, I'm not satisfied until I believe that I actually understand the situation as it is, even if that's not how I would like it to be. Anyway, folks, we have reached the conclusion of this episode. It went longer than I thought it would, but it went longer for good reason. Luke, thank you very much for joining me tonight on the show. Yes, thanks, Joseph. I always enjoy talking to you. I always enjoy speaking with you as well. And I do wish to thank everyone for having tuned in. And I'll even do the last refresh now just to make sure nothing has been missed, but I don't think it has. I think we got to everything from Streamlabs. So anyway, folks, thanks again for having watched. See you next time before we go though. If you liked this episode and want to support the show, please consider donating to it by clicking on the PayPal link in the description below. Paul and I appreciate your generosity very much. Also, be sure to check out my new book, Runaway Masters on Amazon. I think that you might like it. I hope that you do. Check it out there. That's that. So take it easy, everyone. I have a good rest of your week. There's not that much left. And of course, cheers. Cheers, bye-bye.