 Good, I made 40 years, so I'm pretty shocked that Brazil is having violent protests. I mean, when does anyone ever associate violence with Brazil? I mean, does Brazil have an above average crime rate? Brazil has a history of massive violent protests. Brazil is a particularly dangerous place to live. Brazil tends to lack social cohesion and social trust. I'm not a Brazil expert, but they've got astronomical crime rates. So why would we be surprised if supporters of the previous president, Jair Bolsonaro, violently protest? Yeah, I'm hoping this doesn't affect my Brazilian stocks. What sort of Brazilian stocks do you own? Why on earth would you invest in Brazil? The Brazilian demographic is about half African. So, yeah, of course, in a country filled with criminal violence, misbehavior, low social trust, low social cohesion, why would you not expect violent protests? It's like January 6th. All right, the 2020 election was rather passionate, a review order highly divided in America. Brazil has good dividends. Well, good luck with that, mate. So I'll never forget something I read or someone told me that when you have a liquor store and it gets robbed in Argentina, you virtually never get shot. Argentinians are largely from Italian heritage. We all know that Italians are peace-loving people. But you get robbed at gunpoint in Brazil. There's a really good chance you're going to get robbed and shot. So in the United States in 2020, right, the summer of George Floyd, we had massively violent protests leading to a dramatic upsurge in murder, in driving deaths, in pedestrian deaths. We had this massive upsurge in crimes of exuberance. So where would you think you could have a massive upsurge in crimes of exuberance? But one side of the political spectrum would be completely removed from this. Right, once you start to have massive numbers of crimes of exuberance, you can't just expect that it'll only be limited to the left side of the political spectrum. You can't just expect, oh, this would just be related to Black Lives Matter. This is not going to have an effect on anyone else. So in Brazil, a high crime country, of course, generally law-abiding, conservative Christian supporters of the defeated candidate can't be expected to completely absent themselves on the kind of behavior that is normal for the supporters of the winning left-wing candidate. And so too in the United States, right in the summer of George, we had this massive upload of murder, crimes of exuberance. Why would we expect that that would just continually limit itself to Black Lives Matter and, you know, Biden voters? If Biden voters get away with massive amounts of crimes of exuberance, why would we not expect some Trump supporters not to get in on the fun? So greetings, welcome to the exciting city of Brisbane. Right, so I'm making my way back to Sydney. I'm in the Big Smoke. Got a few hours until my plane takes off for Sydney, and then I've got another couple of weeks in Sydney where I head back to the Big Smoke of Los Angeles. But, you know, I read these news stories and people are just shocked. You know, absolutely shocked that supporters of the conservative candidate might somehow be affected, might somehow imitate to some degree the massive amounts of criminal violence committed by the left. When you let one side off the hook politically, when one side riots and loots and rapes and rampages and burns and destroys and murders, you don't think the other side is going to want to get in on this at some point? Right, it's not going to be under, you know, the exact same conditions because when we react, we never react exactly, right? You punch someone in the stomach, they're not going to just punch you in the stomach. And so Trump supporters during 2020 were repeatedly punched in the stomach by Black Lives Matter on the left. And then they finally responded, January 6th, like, where would we be surprised by that? People, when they talk about January 6th, they usually discuss it as though it's something that happened in a vacuum, or it happened just purely as a result of, you know, right-wing misinformation and, you know, right-wing agitation. But it occurred in a context where we had this massive upswing in left-wing violence. So too with Brazil, right? You've got the left-wing committing massive amounts of criminal violence. Why would you not expect at some point that the conservatives, the people on the right, are going to respond, right? Everything we do provokes a response, and that applies to the left as well. But all these stories you see about January 6th, doesn't put it in the context of the massive amounts of social dislocation and burn neighborhoods of looting and violence and murder carried out by Biden voters. It just focuses on Donald Trump's comics. So maybe we'll get with Ron DeSantis, like someone who's a little more disciplined than Bill Trump. Someone who's a little more strategic. Secret to Ron DeSantis's success. This is from Boone's black dismissal. Yeah, this is a great point. Black Lives Matter and Tiefen violence has dismissed a speech. Right, even though it destroys the millions of lives. But somehow right-wing violence on January 6th, that's never considered just speech. Through on a campaign pledge to require all public and private employers to screen workers' legal status through the federal E-Verify program. Yeah, so it sounds like Ron DeSantis might be serious about cracking down on immigration. This move threatens not only sugar, but also two other major flaws. What are my thoughts about gummies as a means of delivering vitamins? Like, I don't see a downside. So I'm not aware of peer-reviewed evidence, bro, that shows that vitamins and gummies are going to provide improved health results. But I don't see a downside to it, so it sounds delicious. I don't see the problem. It should at least provide you with a placebo effect. A placebo effect is a beautiful thing, bro. Now we all deserve some more placebo effect in our life. So if it makes you feel better, you know, have some vitamin-infused gummies. The industries that rely on immigrant labor, tourism, and construction. The state chamber of commerce complained that employers... Oh, immigrant labor. Notice how they always conflate illegal immigrant labor with legal immigrant labor. So any attempt to restrict or penalize illegal immigration, that's always described as an attack on immigration. Alright, guess what? There is legal sex, meaning sex between consenting adults, and there is illegal sex, such as rape. I started taking airborne gummies on Friday. Oh, yeah, for your cough. So, you know, zinc-infused stuff, right? You'd think that would help. No substitute for wholesome foods and source of nutrition. Oh, well, it's working for you, Elliot. Blessings. And let's not discount the power of prayer. I think the power of prayer in the chat has probably helped improve both your cough and your rising levels of sex attraction. So together we can do this victory over sin, guys. Victory over sin. Let's together pray the gay away. This would be unduly burdened by the new requirements. Yeah, the difference between legal and illegal sex is so obvious. It's never conflated in the media. Why is the difference between legal and illegal immigration continually conflated? It's for a political agenda. There is legal and illegal shopping. Alright, illegal shopping is looting. It's theft. So, you don't see a conflation of legal and illegal shopping. Alright, no matter how left-wing with the news media, illegal shopping is still called looting and theft. And just plow to head anyway, condemning the use of cheap foreign labor. Wait, I think he's condemning the use of illegal foreign labor. Like, does the news media not see the difference between legal and illegal shopping, legal and illegal sex, legal and illegal family relations? Like, if members of the same family are hooking up, alright, most people would look at that as scants. They wouldn't just say, oh, great, family members are getting closer to one another. Accolades on Fox. His victory was limited. The collective forces of the corporate opposition watered down the legislation, so only public employers and their contractors, but not private employers. Yeah, big business does not want limits placed on hiring of illegal immigrants. So big business is no friend for average Americans. That's one way that I've changed in my life. The more that I see how antithetical to the interests of America, business forces frequently are, such as their desire for massive amounts of illegal immigration, in addition to pushing frequently a work agenda and funding and supporting Black Lives Matter terrorism. We're required to use e-verify. Does Santa seem to take this opposition personally? Steve Saylor made a great point that he noticed that the more alpha the male, the more they tend to take things personally. So, I'm pretty beta because I don't tend to take much personally, and Steve Saylor, similarly, he doesn't tend to take things personally, but people like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, they seem to take things very personally. And I guess, is this just a symptom of like the high testosterone alpha male approach to life? Because one thing to mark and derive radical harmful production as we teach ideology, but to make light of same-sex attraction per se, why not? This is enlarged by a comedy show, right? Andemic struck, and many Florida corporations refused to endorse his controversial COVID policies. Oh yeah, so that's a big way that I've changed in the past 30 years, just increasing skepticism about business. Now, I used to think that what was good for business is good for America, but now I realize that that was rather naive. In October 2021, without notifying his own party, he held a press conference to announce a special session of the legislature devoted to penalizing companies that required their workers to be vaccinated. This only deepened the rift. So, I was ambivalent about vaccine mandates, didn't oppose them, didn't support them. In retrospect, it seems like vaccine mandates have played a pretty big role in fueling anti-vaccine sentiment. So, often trying to mandate things, trying to legislate things that would be better left up to the individual's decision, but it tends to provoke a backlash. It's just like left-wing violence in 2020 provoked a right-wing reaction, January 6. Left-wing violence in Brazil provokes a right-wing reaction today. So, to government mandates and business mandates and enforcing people to get vaccinated has pushed many people in the very opposite direction. We've always been against government mandating what business can do and can't do, complained to the executive director of the Florida Chamber of Commerce. DeSantis. Well, that depends upon how business conducts itself. So, in life, if you're conducting yourself in a pro-social way, there's a blessing to other people that they're generally going to leave you alone. But, if you start conducting yourself in a way that is hurting other people and hurting your community, then they're going to be much less lazy fare. It's not like business, it's just some innocent party. It's not like business is just lying prone. What about those who struggle with same-sex attraction, those who experience conflicts between their primordial instincts and their religious or other beliefs? That's a burden that they have to take on. It is not the responsibility of your live-streaming host and comics to accommodate every different sinful or self-destructive or anti-social yearning or attraction that people have. So, I guess this is a difference between, I think, the traditional perspective of life where man time is his castle and then the kind of courtier morality where we always judge everything we say by how it might affect this person or that group. So, if I carefully calibrate everything I say because someone in some group may experience it negatively, that puts severe restrictions on discourse. One can also take things personally that are not directed at one person. So, you can interpret what I was just saying as mocking those who experience sex attraction or you can mock the parasocial nature of the group. Praying for each other and changing health outcomes and psychological outcomes. So, we see what we want to see. We're sensitive to what we want to be sensitive to. It was once against mandates like this, too. The bullying of private industry, he wrote in Dreams from Our Founding Fathers, was part and parcel of the notice on behalf of the homeless. So, bullying, alright? Usually I hate bullying, but the most important question is what's the alternative to bullying? If there is a prayer or just what you're particularly mocking the idea of those affected turning to prayer? I didn't know what I was mocking. I didn't deeply consider it. So, what's the alternative? Oh, basketball player flatlined on the court today. He collapsed suddenly. So, whatever it is, whether it's marginal tax rates or mocking something or bullying, the most important question to ask about whether or not this is the right response is what's the alternative? Sometimes bullying is better than the alternative. Sometimes mocking is better than the alternative. Sometimes silence is better than saying something. Sometimes taking echinacea and zinc-infused gummy bears is better than doing nothing. The morality or the efficacy or the efficiency of whatever it is that you're talking about is determined by what are the alternatives? Nothing exists in a vacuum. So, if you say the United States sucks, you have to say compared to which countries in the real world? Under Obama, the federal government exercised a roving review authority over the business decisions of a number of large companies. So, let's take it seriously, the idea of praying the game away. I think for a tiny minority of people, that may be one tool in an arsenal. I did talk to a psychiatrist who said he had considerable success helping men with same-sex attraction channel that and restrict acting out on it so they're able to maintain relations with their wives and girlfriends. So, yeah, I think prayer can be a valuable tool, but if you fundamentally have strong same-sex attraction, I think for a minority of people, prayer proved to be the most effective efficient tool for overcoming it. A few days later, DeSantis was the keynote speaker at the chamber's annual meeting in Orlando. In a remarkably obstreperous speech that was met mostly with silence, he blasted the rise of woke capitalism and issued an unvarnished threat to the state's business elite. I know that conversion therapy can work, but it's been demonized yet. So, there's similar type of therapy that psychiatrists and therapists still do, but they don't call it conversion therapy. It's focusing on your actions so that you can... I mean, if you know any men, you know that we all pretty much have wild impulses in this arena that we're going to be decent people, we have to channel. And so, this is just one more example of channeling a wild impulse that could be disruptive to our lives and be helpful to other people, and you can take that energy and that impulse and that desire and you can channel it into more socially acceptable expressions. It's not just saying sex attraction, it's almost every man is attracted to all sorts of women that you can't have sexual relations with, and society or the psychiatrists or the therapists or the 12 step program or good community or good friends can help anyone channel wilder impulses towards socially constructive ends. So, the prayer need not be with an expectation, the attraction itself will vanish, but rather the God help the individual to at least keep it under control. Yeah, and that's going to be useful for some people. Just like the 12 step program is going to be useful to some people, but not everyone is going to resonate with the 12 step approach, not everyone's going to resonate with the prayer approach, not everyone's going to resonate with the therapeutic approach. I'm sure that different people find different approaches more or less helpful. And so if I was talking to someone one on one who says struggle with the same sex attraction, I would not be mocking that. But I'm not talking to one person right now, I'm just broadcasting general views. If you're using your power as a corporation and you're leveraging that to try to advance an ideology, you warn. So, this is a good point. Yeah, we're understanding this. If you're using your power to try to leverage your desires to transform society, you shouldn't be surprised if people push back against that, if they don't like your changes. So, we all have power. There's almost always someone who looks up to us in one area of our life. We almost always have considerable influence over something. And if we use that power to push a social engineering agenda, whether it's individuals or members of groups, we shouldn't be expected as a pushback. So, if your church or synagogue is like stridently against same sex marriage and makes this key message inside the church or synagogue, you shouldn't be surprised if you then get targeted. So, whatever you push in the world, there's usually going to be some kind of response and reaction. I think it's very dangerous for this country, and I'm not just going to sit idly by. Former aides and allied strategists say DeSantis was driven by more than personal peak. His popularity in Florida, particularly among independents, was steadily rising, and nationally, Republican voters. So, this idea that run DeSantis was driven by more than personal peak were always driven by all sorts of things, which we only are dimly aware. So, we usually don't even have clarity over our own motivations, let alone what drives other people. We're becoming more attuned to corporate behavior. Like Democrats, they've begun choosing brands that align with their values and morals. As Matt Uskowski, a former Trump campaign strategist and co-founder of Human Behavior, a consumer intelligence company. A conservative backlash against corporate America had been brewing since at least 2019. That summer... Is it even possible in the present world climate to honestly investigate something as third rail as to whether or not sexual attraction can be altered? Well, it depends how you frame it. So, the frame of conversion therapy, that's not a winning approach, but if you rename it and slightly shift the focus, then you can probably have more success. Oh, I think liberals can have legitimate personal peak. The Business Roundtable, the National Association for CEOs of major corporations, issued a statement signed by the chief executives of Apple, BlackRock, Disney, and dozens of other big companies, saying that the purpose of the corporation was no longer simply to generate returns, but also to respect the people in our communities and protect the environment by... Wait, so does that respect for people in our communities? Say, cover people who believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman? Is that what they mean by respecting people in our communities? I don't think that's what they mean. Respecting people in our communities sounds very much like a left-wing agenda, but they're using these euphemisms and this way of speaking that no decent person can have any objection to. So, I am currently at the Brisbane Airport, right? It's a beautiful Brisbane. It's 90 degrees Fahrenheit outside, hanging out here for a few hours, reading the new book on J. Edgar Hoover, reading the news on my phone, and I'm even thinking of discontinuing my subscription to Richard Spencer's substack. I'm spending $9 a month on his substack. I think it's time to cut the cord. Yeah, it's a little warm, but at least I'm here with friends. It's kind of stunning, though, to see that Brazil getting its own January 6 protests. So, often things start in America, then spread around the world. So, of course, the left will then use this in Brazil to reduce freedom of speech, freedom of association, and to crack down on the right, which will then produce a right-wing backlash. It says it's never been easier to consider alternative points of view. Embracing sustainable practices across our businesses. Sustainable practices. Doesn't that sound nice? But somehow, I think they're only referring to left-wing environmentalist perspectives on sustainable practices. So, a normal understanding of sustainable practices means that marriage is restricted to a man and a woman. Does the author discuss the rumors of J. Edgar Hoover's female eroticism? Yes. So, I don't think there's any evidence that J. Edgar Hoover ever had gay sex. He did have intense friendships with men. But that used to be normal. It used to be normal, natural, healthy. I just read two books on friendship, and I placed them on my blog, so maybe I'll talk about those. But with more affluence, we get to be more choosy about who we hang out with, and so perhaps this has contributed to us giving friendship greater importance in our lives rather than just kin. Back to this Bloomberg Business Week article by Joshua Green, a lefty on Ronda Sanders. Any conservatives were aghast at what they saw as the nation's top business leaders abdicating the single-minded pursuit of profit, which they believe is the basis of US capitalism. No one understands business as the single-minded pursuit of profit. Every business has to be based somewhere. Every business has employees. Every business is susceptible to public opinion and to political pushback and to government regulation. Yeah, husbands trying to make their wives their best friend. Yeah, that's frequently a mistake. So this caricature, the traditional right-wing conservative approach to business is that they should just make the single-minded pursuit of profit. Their only agenda is to force from reality, because we're all embodied. We all have a body. We all have to sit, stand, sleep, eat somewhere. Businesses have to have employees who are based somewhere, and we're all far more vulnerable than we want to think, and that includes business. And so political tides, social tides, cultural tides, all sorts of things outside the immediate bottom line can negatively affect or positively affect a business, and they're aware of that. Really seemed to supercharge Republican animosity toward CEOs and businesses was the corporate response to the murder of George Floyd a year later. The public expressions of solidarity with protesters and support for Black Lives Matter, along with Trump's condemnation of these moves, dramatically altered Republican attitudes toward corporate America. Yeah, it dramatically altered my attitude towards corporate America when I realized that corporate America was funding the Black Lives Matter terrorist group. That's one of the rare times I actually lost my temper. Normally, I think I just try to be disinterested, try to be objective, just try to understand what's going on without getting emotionally involved, but our story is like corporate America funding Black Lives Matter that brings out the passionate anti-murder activist in me. Now, I don't like murder. To the extent I'm an activist, it's anti-murder. I'm anti-social dislocation. Now, I'm at the Brisbane Airport. Look at beautiful Brisbane Airport. It's a lovely sunny 90 degrees outside. This is an enormous airport. I'm surprised how big it is. It's much bigger than LAX. Work Corporation was starting before Floyd now, or Street is Audemarie. Yeah, it was starting before George Floyd, but then it just became so dramatic. What's that right in Christian chicken place? Even they were sending funding to Black Lives Matter. Fortune 500 companies would fund the Black Lives Matter terrorist group. That really bugged me. Back to the USA. Not yet, my friend. Not yet, in a couple of weeks right now. I am back to Sydney. Last year, a Gallup tracking poll found them. Chick-fil-A has gone so left. Like it used to be a Christian conservative organization, and now they're just continually cuck to the left. And they just fund Black Lives Matter again and again and again. They're just cucking to the left. Publicans' unhappiness with the influence of major corporations almost doubled in the year and a half after Floyd's killing. Yeah, gee, I wonder why that happened. That's so shocking. Why would Republicans be unhappy with big business funding a terrorist group like Black Lives Matter? From 36% to 68%, while Democrats' views remained largely unchanged. Yeah, so a majority of Republicans have developed a negative attitude towards big business. Yeah. Fortune 500 companies hold it like a cheap camera, as the late Bob Grant would say. It's corporate regulation. Yeah, like required HR sexual harassment training. Yeah, it's in part because of the ever more facing complexity and legalism of civil rights movements and vulnerability to being sued so that corporations have to minimize their chances of being sued. They have to fit in with the law of the land. So the law of the land is heavily incentivized corporations to institute all these HR trainings, et cetera. When openly there's more, Chick-fil-A I worked five years ago, the whole staff was extremely nice and smiling, and people probably had to come to church. And so sad that Chick-fil-A has gone awoke. It used to be one of the rare right-wing corporations. After Disney a few months following his chamber speech, it wasn't simply striking back at him. So remember what everyone thought that Rhonda Sanders was going to lose because of his striking back at Disney because of his anti-corporation approach because he sent those illegal immigrants to Martha's Vineyard. Like all the conventional wisdom was that Rhonda Sanders was going to lose because of whatever he was doing. But now in retrospect it looks like Rhonda Sanders was picking on a winning formula. Employer critical of his administration. He was seizing a leaking role in a national drama that's become increasingly central to Republican politics. Yeah, Rhonda Sanders through his effective moves has seized the leading role. How many people still get the metaphor of affording like a cheap camera? I would expect people over what, age 45, 48, 50? Political standards. A governor attacking his state's marquee employer would be an act of unimaginable recklessness. No, this never happens in a vacuum. If a governor attacks his state's leading employer, starting with Obamacare, we forget his corporations are begging for Obamacare, especially Disney. And many corporations also encourage their employees to get food stamps, right? But if a governor attacks his state's leading employer for absolutely no reason, just completely out of the blue, yeah, then it would be shocking. But nothing happens just completely in a vacuum. Rhonda Sanders attacked Disney because Disney went increasingly woke, right? It wasn't like Disney was just doing nothing, just minding its own business, that the Disney was just going for a jog and listening to a Bible lesson while it was out for a jog. Tell us the donuts as a phrase, it should be retired. Dennis will likely nickle when the phrase was coined. Welcome back to Glyde Medley. But DeSantis have read the landscape correctly. As corporations have gotten bigger and bigger, their local ties have weakened, says Brad Coker, a pollster in Florida. It used to be if you were a corporation based in Pittsburgh, even if you weren't a steel company, you had your finger on the pulse of what Pittsburgh voters cared about. Yeah, everyone's got a home address. Every corporation has employees who have home addresses. So when you get disconnected from the concerns of your most important customers, your most important employees, and you allow abstract intellectual, ideological, philosophical concerns like the work approach to life to take over, you're going to get into trouble and you're going to cause the blowback that Disney's reaping, which cost its CEO its job. Delicious. Now that's gone. The big secret about Disney is that Floridians don't go to Disney World. They see Disney as a California corporation. When Coker went into the field with his survey team, he found no drop in DeSantis' poll numbers. It hasn't hurt him at all. Quite the contrary. Joe Biden was completely disconnected from Pennsylvania as he still won Pennsylvania. Well, it's an election between two choices, all right? So it's not so much that Pennsylvanians were voting for Joe Biden. It's that Donald Trump lost about 2% of the suburbs. There was a 2% swing against Donald Trump in the suburbs. So I think most of the Joe Biden vote was an anti-Donald Trump vote. So Donald Trump had a political philosophy of just appealing to his base. But then that antagonized much of the country. And Trump playing to the base caused blowback in the suburbs. And the 2% swing in the suburbs was sufficient to transfer power to the Democrats in the 2018 election and transfer the presidency to the Democrats in the 2020 election. So it wasn't so much that voters were voting for Joe Biden. I think it was primarily they were voting against Donald Trump. I remember when I was various times when I've been riding on a particular beat. And there are those fleeting days and weeks where everyone's talking about what I'm riding about. It's just an amazing feeling to be the focus of attention and to produce writing that has transfixed the entire community. And I'll discuss it with you. They're all scared shitless. Everybody's operating deemed as... So yeah, there were times when I was blogging and I was just breaking the story out of the story. But a lot of people just absolutely scared to death that I would reveal some dark secret that their business was hiding. Keep your head down and don't be the next Disney. The Santas' attacks on business didn't dent his ability to raise an arm of sums of money either. His reelection campaign and its aligned political action... So remember this article is by a left wing author, Joshua Green. I should have extorted them. No. I got a hero system, bro. But this article is by a left wing writer, Joshua Green. And he's got nothing damaging to say about Ronda Santas. It's amazing. Committee generated more than $200 million. Donors included at least 42 billionaires who are members of billionaire families. So the other elite media writing about Ronda Santas talked about how he's not very nice and he wasn't very nice to donors. There's a quality that's far more important in politicians than how nice they are and how interpersonally warm. And that is, you know, how effectively do they respond to events? How effectively do they respond to changing situations? So far it looks like Santas is highly effective. Including titans of finance such as Ken Griffin and Thomas Pederfe. One Republican strategist describes the core of Santas' donor network as financial guys who don't like the cultural direction America is going in. His landslide victory two weeks later only substantiated this state of affairs. The contrast. Are there any Republicans who like the direction of the country? Like, I'm not aware of anyone in the conservative or traditional camp that likes the direction of the company. I think we just vary in the degree to which we loathe and fear it. And the sense that Santas' rival on the national stage was Trump's strong support for the campaign shifted attention to the other telepathy and never wondered as much about the country on the screens. What does Santas' role do at the moment? At Trump, does Santas' deal with what's about how he makes his fights? When he vowed to go after him? Yeah, I think that's a really good quality. That's what I got told when I was vlogging and I was just in constant conflict with people. And wiser heads would tell me, be careful, be selective when you pick fights. Capitol, he wasn't making an abstract threat. He had something specific in mind. In late July. So unlike Trump, he just seems to react and to rage. Hunter Santas sounds much more strategic. He seems to have very specific agendas in mind. He's deliberative. Flanked by Florida's Republican leaders, Santas introduced proposed legislation beneath a banner emblazoned with the slogan government of laws not woke CEOs. He laid out how his initiative would protect Floridians from Wall Street's perversion of financial investment priorities under the euphemistic banners of environmental, social and corporate governance and diversity, inclusion and equity. ESG, as it's known, refers to a set of standards that measure a company's adherence to socially conscious investing goals and encompasses a product. Yeah, socially conscious, right, depends on whose hero system, right, socially conscious investing goals are overwhelmingly socially conscious investing goals of the left. You could have socially conscious conservative investing goals which is the direction of business and our society should be towards protecting the nuclear family. That would be a socially conscious investing goal. At least $8 trillion in the U.S. won. Formerly, the legislation amends Florida's deceptive and unfair trade practices statute to prohibit what Santas says is discrimination against conservatives by big financial institutions through the use of ESG social credit score metrics. Colloquially, as Florida's new House Speaker Paul Renner put it at the rollout, it places the force of law behind Santas's threat to stop woke financial titans who seek to dictate policy to Floridians by classifying ESG score. I'll admit I haven't paid close attention to Ron Santas. I only started paying close attention to him over the past two months. So I noticed he was always in the news and it was always for some anti-work action. But when I wasn't paying very close attention, I thought it was just more, you know, Fox News show voting. I didn't realize how strategic, selective, careful, and effective he was. First, as deceptive trade practices. What you do with telecasts works back in the middle to be the central term in this year's legislative session. Politically, it will give Santas a new platform for which to attack a fresh line of influence who inflame Republican passions. ESG boosters such as BlackRock CEO Larry Fink and groups such as the Business Roundtable that have fallen out of favor because of their perceived liberal sympathies. It will also create a big new tempest over corporate wokeness that's sure to keep Santas in the national spotlight. At particular issue will be who should manage Florida's $240 billion portfolio of pension and disaster funds. Many of the firms currently handling it are also big investors in ESG, led by CEOs who think of themselves as enlightened stewards of corporate social responsibility. In the past, managing the fund wouldn't have conflicted with espousing concerns of the environment. Florida, like most states, has generally treated its pension fund as an... Okay, Ron DeSantis is not going after big corporations because they espouse concern for the environment. He's going after their overall work agenda and concern for the environment is just one aspect of the left wanting to remake society, remake the world. Inviable sanctuary sealed off from partisan politics. Now DeSantis is making it the subject of a national political drama that lets him once again be the aggressor against prominent companies that he alleges have succumbed Florida has a long history of keeping politics out of its pension fund, says Brian Ballard, a top Florida lobbyist with ties to DeSantis. But I think those days are over. You can try to avoid politics, but sometimes politics might sneak up and start targeting you. So all sorts of people used to be apolitical and become political because they've been targeted by the left. I think the pension fund will become fertile ground for the conservative stance against corporate wokeness. DeSantis isn't waiting around for lawmakers to act. On December 1st, Florida's chief financial officer, Jimmy Petronas. That was funny. I was staying with someone who, when he shaved, he would always miss large sections of his neck. And when he'd listened to the radio, he didn't have the antenna set up right, so there's all sorts of static. It's good to interact with people because they can call you out. Why are all these bushes of unshaved hair here? Why don't you tune the radio? We can be so slovenly when we don't have a lot of people who care about us interacting with us. But when people care about you, interact with you, they can challenge you. What the heck is going on here? Making social justice issues the end all of one's political life, entire life, is right from the Communist subversion of the playbook says the chapter. Announced that the state was pulling $2 billion of investments managed by BlackRock because of the company's use of ESG principles, Petronas called out Fink in his statement. If Larry or his friends on Wall Street want to change the world, run for office, he said. Start a nonprofit. Donate to the causes you care about. Using our cash, however, BlackRock's social engineering project isn't something Florida ever signed up for. Yeah, that is a very lucid critique. If I talked to more people, I'd know more about Ron DeSantis or if I looked it up myself. Yeah, I've just started paying attention in the last three months. Have demonstrated how nimbly DeSantis can revise his own narrative to suit his political needs. Elliot says big work will always have a constituency because the numbers of incompetent economically handicapped will continue to stack up like God would. They always have a constituency because different people have different hero systems and the reason that different people have different hero systems is that different responses to the universe, to the world, to life, to reality have proved themselves adaptive. The reason there are left-wing responses and right-wing responses is that at various times and places, one type of response is proved more adaptive than the other. The left-wing response, because there are going to be circumstances where the left-wing response will be more adaptive to this confusing, challenging world which is beyond our individual comprehension. So our political instincts are hard-wired over thousands and thousands of years of evolution. So there are aspects of the work response that are adaptive to reality, more adaptive than our own instincts. I don't know under which situations that will occur, but that so many people are woke, I don't think that's just an evolutionary dead-end unless overwhelming the people who are woke don't have better-than-replacement birth rates, then it will prove to be an evolutionary dead-end. How distressing was the Dallas Cowboys' performance today? They're heading into the playoffs after playing their worst game of the season, going up against Tom Brady in Tampa Bay. The Cowboys are still three-point favorites, but I'm not feeling good about this, guys. He's gone from running TV ads in 2018 that featured his baby son in a Trump onesie to ignoring Trump, to beating Trump in a handful of hurly, to hurly polls for the GOP's... All right, so there are going to be times when it's useful to invoke someone else. There are going to be times when it's expedient to show obeisance. Money equals economic survival is the ultimate hero system. No, bro. Nobody has the hero system just all about money. All right? It's more complicated than that. G'day. How are you, mate? 24 presidential nomination. The question now is whether DeSantis can revise the party's narrative to allow for a possibility it hasn't seen for many years, a leader other than the former president. Presidential hopefuls such as Pence and Pompeo are trapped in the old narrative. They're programmed for caution, and they're Trump credentials. So how many people are excited about Mike Pence for president or Mike Pompeo for president? But be the basis of their campaign. But Trump himself already fills that lane. DeSantis has set himself apart by choosing target... Most work is total contradictions of the chat. They cry about gentrification, then they whine about white flight. They say white culture absorbed into all others' culture, then blame the culture on whites. It's all subversion. It's wisely and bearing his teeth, carving out a distinct political identity. Interesting mixture of evolutionary orthodoxy and postmodernist independence heterodoxy. That doesn't depend on Trump's past or future. His fortunes could ultimately hinge on whether his war against corporate wokeness excites the Republican masses the way Trump once did. He's pushed this issue of wokeness to the point where it's now orthodoxy among Republicans. Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union says approvingly, but can Larry Fink, Eclipse, Crooked Hillary, and Lion Ted in the pantheon of mega-villains? DeSantis will soon find out. He won't encounter much opposition. The business community, at least in Florida, is no longer the Republican Party's ally. He says, Matt Schlapp, a veteran of Florida lobbyist who put the party with Trump to come. They are its servants. The real challenge then will be persuading Republican voters to transfer their loyalty. Wow, it sounds like he's saying that Ron DeSantis has made the business lobby his bitch. He doesn't apologize for the savage rule that drives liberals to distraction. If DeSantis pulls it off, it would represent yet another unlikely turn in Republican politics. A libertarian congressman railed against government interference in private business, turning round and winning the nomination by using his own governmental powers to bully corporate giants. Okay, so he's talking as though someone's libertarianism, someone's libertarianism has no respect to the situation. In today's works, they could flourish economically by becoming a variety of work. The work loves their kids as much as we do. They're just as fine of people. They're good people on both sides of the work, anti-work divide. Honey of work, people would make great neighbors. Oh, so someone could be libertarian in a particular circumstance. And then when the circumstances changes, their political ideology could change. This article treats Ronda Sanders' libertarianism and then his anti-corporate woke stance as though their contradictory, as though the situation hasn't changed, as though corporations haven't changed. When business changes, when corporations change, when social mores change, when circumstances change, then one's adaptation to them will have to change. Christian nationalists, most of them would just be regular Christians 50 years ago. But now you have to put much more effort into trying to maintain a traditional Christian way of life that that extra effort is now known in some circles as Christian nationalism. But the situation has changed. Christianity is no longer the default. It's no longer just accepted as what automatically happens. And so in this changing world, then, yeah, it shouldn't be surprising that in an increasingly secular America, you need a more vigorous Christian response if you're going to maintain your Christian identity. But before that can happen, one big obstacle new is trouble. The next 18 months will show whether DeSantis can make himself into a national figure who inspires the kind of fear and agilation. Yeah, didn't Disney put pressure on Florida over the Dense Age? And yeah, and Disney made certain choices, right, that then provoked a response from Ron DeSantis. He didn't just pick Disney for no reason. Disney was not just lying passively on the ban saying to Ron DeSantis, you know, please screw me. Disney was an active participant in this ban. Now Trump does have to stay on the ban. Eventually, he'll have to stare down the drain, something that for all his success, he's thus far avoided doing. But when he's ready to make the jump from understudy to a meeting date, he can point voters to Florida, where his conquest of the Republican Party is now absolute. Now, the thing he has to do is to ban his own as well. It's kind of like, you know, in your balcony's got a cup. So the court is like 6, 2, 7, 2, 1. That was the secret 27. OK, I just read two books on friendship. I've got to talk to them now. So one book was called Big Friendship. Another one was like a cultural history of friendship. OK, here we go. Big Friendship, How We Keep Each Other Close. This book came out in 2020. It says in the late 18th and 19th centuries, when it became common to marry for love. So really prior to the 19th century, it wasn't the norm to marry for love. We don't ask people again worrying that the couple would have to have, would have no reason to stay married if their affections dissipated. So with more men working outside the lock for the home, women were newly responsible for domestic life. Really, is that new in the 18th and 19th century that women became responsible for domestic life? And the idea of separate spheres developed? Oh, so there was no idea of separate spheres prior to the 18th and 19th centuries. So this is the only version of the notion that men are from Mars, women are from Venus. So this book by a couple lefties, wants us to believe that prior to the 18th and 19th century, there was no idea, no notion that men and women were fundamentally different. So this led to the intense romanticization of the other. Well, yeah, there was a growth of romance as a reason for marriage. The more traditional your way of life, then the less emphasis is placed on romance as a reason to get married. Yeah, women were just cutting down trees and everything. Oh, some of them, the tough ones were. But it allowed for the real flowering of male-male-female-female friendship, because these were the people that you had everything in common with. So you just romanticize the opposite sex and then develop friendship with the same sex. Well, I see a point there, but I think for thousands of years, men have had more male friends than female friends, and women have had more female friends than male friends. So in 19th century correspondence, women refer to men as the grossest sex. I think that's still true today. Friendship and romantic relationships are a place where women felt free to be themselves and to express their emotions. Yeah, it's often a lot easier to be yourself and to express your emotions with your friends as opposed to your spouse. Your relationship with your spouse is going to be a lot more freighted. And I would think that if men are emotionally open with their spouses, frequently their spouses will lose all erotic or romantic interest in them and come to despise them as weak. Like women usually don't wanna know what you're struggling with or what you're insecure about or what you're having a hard time with. Like women often smell that as weakness and then despise you for it. Intense female friendships are accepted because women were supposedly so pure that they wouldn't have sex with each other even if they slept in the same bed on that walk. The same went for men. Men were sometimes sleeping in the same bed with other men and it wasn't suspected that they'd be having sex. The woman professed to have a crush on another woman. It wasn't seen as a commentary on a sexuality. But yeah, people used to have very intense friendships until the LGBTQ era made them look much more suspiciously sexual. There's nothing inherently sexual in having an intense friendship. Yeah, men who identified as heterosexual would talk about falling asleep with their head lying peacefully on the breast of their good friend. Well, there's nothing sexual about that until we got into the LGBTQ era which then started sexualizing everything and made same-sex friendship much more challenging and much more open to derision. There's nothing inherently gay about a bloke falling asleep with his head on another bloke's chest. But this idea of men and women as opposites, normally we're going to Brazil, I prefer to see the military take over and say the corrupt leftist Lula, says Angus. It'd be hard to believe you'd have a nail-biting election in a violent, socially dislocated country like Brazil and there would be some sort of violent blowback from the right. Okay, so the idea of men and women as opposites had a chilling effect on friendships between men and women. Also, the reality is that very few men and women have ever been able to be strictly, botanically friends without one partner wanting more. Right? That's just the nature of reality. Hello, Ron, this is a film of one called The Honest by 627 in Melbourne, so gradually middle-class Americans adopted the practice of dating, all right, which emerged in the working class. I didn't know that. Came more acceptable for women to appear in public, even to work, talking about the 20th century here. This led to the rise of what was called companion at marriage. It's not yet the year of I married my best friend, but it came accepted that women and men should share activities and pursue a mutually fulfilling sex life. Hasn't this always been true? But yeah, I guess the idea of pursuing mutually fulfilling activities outside of sex is probably more of a modern thing. This dealt a huge blow to close same-sex friendship, suddenly became less acceptable as they came to be viewed as a threat to the male-female romantic partnership, really. Did the idea of companion at marriage threatens friendship? When did sexual behavior become elevated to the status of an identity? Well, that's part of the woke left-wing evolution. So during the 1960s, when you had an explosion of multiculturalism and an explosion of victimhood, men and women should have their own separate activities. Women only clubs, men only clubs. Yeah, I agree. Generally speaking, men and women are happier when they're with themselves separate from the opposite sex. But is it true that the whole idea of companion at marriage threatens same-sex friendships? I would think there are a lot of couples who have certain activities that they like to do together and also have same-sex friends. Title IX is ridiculous. Women's sports should not be funded at the same level as men's sports. Absolutely, because men and women have different needs. Men need sports because men are much more competitive. Men have higher levels of testosterone. Yeah, also probably as we became more secular, all these multiple identities such as around the pursuit of pleasure and it became much more socially acceptable. Now, I can't imagine publicly identifying by the type of sex that I prefer. That just seems such a distasteful way of constructing an identity. Men found themselves under suspicion if they walked down the street the way they used to around another guy's shoulders. That's because of the rise of LGBTQ, which has tried to sexualize everything, tried to normalize having sex with other family members, having sex with kids and trying to destroy the whole idea of a nuclear family. What the LGBTQ agenda is not about is marriage. Marriage is simply a tool to destroy the nuclear family. Very few gays want to get married. It's the way to destroy the whole idea of a nuclear family. I remember when a girl joined my little league team in Brentwood, I was living back in 1985. Us guys on the team hated this. She was a good player for the girl, but held the team back, yeah. But supposedly we have to deny team cohesion. It was good for the team. We have to let every little individual express their inner selves. Non-binary is a precursor to gentleness, yeah. Hetero versus homo is about far more than really the type of sex that one prefers. Yes, that is a good point. But it still seems a productive way of identifying oneself. Why would one not identify oneself as a lover of culture or a humanist or a Christian or a Jew, rather than an identity of pleasure and certain aesthetic tastes? Women in close relationships with other women could be labeled lesbians, yeah. It was a mistake when we started sexualizing everything. Life is better for the individual and for society if we keep sex in a particular compartment and not allow all of life to become sexualized. We don't want the family to become sexualized. People prefer to make friends with other people who can help them achieve their goals. Yeah, that's a good point. But we're not usually even aware that that's something that we're selecting for, yeah. One way that we choose friends is, will this person help me become the person that I want to be? There's almost no academic research concerning dynamics within friend groups. So most academic work around friendship is focused on one-on-one relationships as if they exist in a social vacuum, but we never exist in a social vacuum. So there are no default rules for dealing with extensive and overlapping friend groups. So I like to keep my friends in separate compartments and when I'm at events where friends from different compartments are gathering together, it tends to make me nervous. And I admire those who are much more at ease with bringing together friends from different compartments of their life. So this is a metaphor, right? Okay, there are no default rules for dealing with extensive and overlapping friend groups. So do you like to keep your friends in separate compartments where you find when they overlap? A few people talk through their expectations and insecurities before the inevitable problems for them themselves, what do you do? And to friends you've introduced to each other, have a disagreement, level of responsibility, do you bear for a friend's behavior? So as a tribal, do we not have a hunting instinct working all day until sunset? Yeah, men in particular have a hunting instinct. We need a challenge. Nowadays people desperately latch onto any sort of power play they can, even if it's ultimately at their own expense in the end. Well, probably the less powerful you feel, the more desperate you will be to invoke a power play. The more at ease you are in yourself, then the less need you will have to play gratuitous power games. So here's a great New Yorker essay from Humorous David Sideris. He wrote, The Four Burners Theory of Life Priorities. Okay, life is like a stove top. One burner represents your family. One burner represents your friends. One burner represents your health and one burner represents your work. So your stove can't run for long with all four burners burning brightly. To be successful, you have to switch off one or two or three of the burners. If you want to be really successful, you have to just pick two to keep lit. So a few people have the luxury of switching off work. Many people switching off family is unthinkable and switching off health is unsustainable. So for most people, a friend's burner is the first to go when you get a family. Yeah, that rings really true. Okay, here are three categories for friendships. Active, dormant, commemorative. The active ones, the ones that are important to you right now. You spend time with them. Dormant friendships are ones that were once active but aren't going strong on a daily basis. And commemorative friendships are ones that ended abruptly or faded away and you don't expect to ever come back. So I'm amazed by those people who have never lost a friend. I've never fallen out with a friend. Okay, then I was reading this 2014 book called Friendship, A History. So it says the second half of the 20th century saw the triumph of a particular form of intimate and reciprocal friendship. Western societies, especially in suburbia where most people made their home became more and more common to rely on friends for the kinds of advisory sources of recreation that once would have depended upon family and kin. So this form of friendship as an experience came to be characterized by ever-greatest emphasis on emotional and private rather than practical and public obligations. So it's kind of a luxury good. The 21st century friendship may still have practical effects and even influence people but gaining advantage of fulfilling obligations not as chief intentions and could undermine it. Friendship is freely chosen. Become more and more different from other kinds of relationships which instrumental benefits resumed obligations play a large role such as those with family, kin, co-workers, or neighbors. So for me, friendship is primarily the result of shared activities. So it's such as orthodox Judaism, writing groups. So those are two places I've primarily got my friends. I worked in Hollywood decades as a writer and four years as a writer, private behavior I've seen from hedonistic Hollywood people as disgusting as the chat. So yeah, all my friends come from shared interests, shared commitments, shared activities. Yeah, I am currently at Brisbane Airport. I'm about to get on a jet plane and making my way south to Sydney a couple of weeks. Now at the end of January, I'm going to return to Los Angeles. So we now expect real friends will help us sort through difficulties that we used to turn to family and kin for help with. Friendship is reaching new levels of depth and complexity. There's diffusing and often replacing kin and family relationships that's never before. The ability to choose friends with selected people rests on an increasing ability to spend limit and deny obligations to others. Yeah, when you make one friend, you're giving up something often. With every friendship comes obligations and commitments. So we're now often choosing friendship at the price of suspending, limiting and denying our obligations to others such as kin and neighbors. And we can do this because we expect that public services, social welfare will take care of kin or neighbors. So people now get to prioritize chosen over obligatory personal relationships and to idealize friendship as an emotional rather than an instrumental bond lies upon robust universal and public entitlements. People choose friends of convenience and for instrumental reasons. But I think primarily from shared activities and shared goals, friendship is always a selective and exclusive relationship. It's tempered by our ability to access forms of entitlement based upon most personal bonds such as citizenship. That's interesting. So this is very much a left-wing socialist leaning book. It says it's the generous provision of social services that enables us to spend more time with friends and to leave kin and neighbors to social welfare agencies. Okay, I think I'm gonna go back to my book on J. Edgar Hoover. Talk to you later, mates.