 What is your libertarian white pill? What's the thing that makes you the most optimistic? OK, well, I'll say things are headed here. Let me let me give the Gene Ebbstein the Gene Ebbstein case for radical optimism, which I always love. This just like speaks to my soul. But so this was his thing that he said was he was like, I hope I do it justice. But he was like, OK, if you were sitting around in 1845 and you said to your buddy, you went, you know, I think in 20 years, slavery is going to be abolished. They'd be like, you're out of your mind. Like the slave trade is like at the height right now. Like slavery is it's just been an institution for all of human history. Like what in what world could you imagine that in the next 20 years across the West and in the United States of America, there's just not going to be slavery anymore. But that crazy guy would have been right. I think he does one for the Soviet Union, too. Like if you have been saying in the 80s, the Soviet Union was just going to be gone within the next 15 years. It'd be like totally crazy. Unthinkable evidence in history. And so like it is not there. There are moments like that where things that were seen as like just inevitable institutions are just gone and they don't come back, you know. And so I would say right now, like, look, in the year 2002, and I remember, you know, I'm old, me and Zagor, old, you're not. But now you're at a point where I could go back 20 years and still I was an adult then. But I remember the whole year of war propaganda leading up to the war in Iraq. And like that was just it. It didn't matter if you got your news from Fox News or the New York Times or MSNBC or anything. It was just unanimous. You know what I mean? That it was like, hey, they got these nuclear weapons. They're friends with the terrorists. They helped us do 9-11. We can't let them hand these weapons off to the terrorists. You know, the weapons they don't have to the terrorists who aren't their friends. But they sold the story. And there was just no one else. Like, I mean, there were other people, but they didn't have like a platform. But now it's like you have Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson and then just like a million different shows that have. There's shows you don't. We don't even know about that have half a million followers. There's there's probably 50 shows that we all don't know about with half a million people watching that show all the time. And so much of that, those dissident voices are getting out there now. So I'm like, I think for the first time, maybe in human history, the monopoly of governments over the the, you know, like receiving of information has been broken. I think they're freaking out about that quite a bit. But I think this is see, this is an enormous white pill. And I just hate I also just hate pessimism. I hate it. It's like the. So I was going to say this is more what I say on my show. I was going to say, it's the gayest thing out there. OK, is pessimism allowed to say that or show you will probably get hate mail, but I think that's OK, I don't mean gay like being. OK, anyway, but it's just like, it's just I don't. I just think there's like no, like I got little kids. There's no option for me to be a pessimist. Like that's just not an option. That's like, you know, I use this example sometimes, but it's like analogy or whatever thought experiment. But like, it's like if there were like five men with guns trying to break into my house because they want to kill my wife and kids and I'm there with with a gun and I just sit there and just be like, I don't know, man, there's like five of them and there's only one of me. I just I don't really think I'm going to win. You know, it's like what? Like I got a wife and kids. I don't have any option to feel that way. I'm going to right away start. You know, it's like, OK, what are we doing? All right, get in the attic. I'm going to snipe them off from here. I'm going to, you know, I got a thing of gasoline. I'm going to make a bomb real quick or whatever. You know, but you're trying something. So it's like, you don't have an option to just like feel bad about the future. Yeah. I mean, my my white pill is very similar. You know, I made a at the end of the decade, I made a kind of like, what was the 2010s all about? And it was called the death of the gatekeepers. That was when it all started. And during covid, we saw them try to come back and they certainly did. I think what was revealed in the Twitter files and all that shows how close we were to having that information landscape kind of captured across all the major platforms. And so it didn't happen, though. You know, Elon bought X. He calls himself a free speech maximus. I don't think he is, but he's at least trying to do something different. There's also now technological solutions. You know, I'm a big Nostra fan. It's a distributed network. I've got a documentary about Bitcoin mining that I'm here in New York for. And that's that's another major white pill is the the loss of control over money. I mean, how much more libertarian like could you get there? So between speech and money being uncontrollable at this point, I'm pretty optimistic. I think for me, it's a little bit different. I like the idea of like the disruption of the information industry, the disruption of the gatekeepers. But I think for me, the thing that gives me the most optimism about the future of libertarianism is actually oddly enough, the dirtbag left. I think we're currently seeing this weird fracturing of this sort of wokeness culture that I think for a long time had really seized people's hearts and imaginations. And, you know, I'm 27, a ton of people my age were just like totally wrapped up in this. And there was a little bit of this sense that I know this, you know, analogy has really been used far too much, but the sense of like burn the witch and looking for heresy and then trying to stamp out heresy and trying to ruin people's reputations and livelihoods to the fullest extent possible in this almost like as if your your heart was just seized by this fervor, this passion for this, you know, new religion of wokeness. And I think the thing that we're seeing that is so wonderful now is people are realizing how many false promises that religion, you know, gave them, they're realizing a lot of the lies there. They're realizing the degree to which some of these mob dynamics can really turn on them. And, you know, if you're in this constant pursuit of moral purity where it's not even clear what these morals are based on. Boy, have you really been sold a false bill of goods and landed yourself in a very difficult situation. So I think the irreverence of a lot of the dirtbag left and the sort of people from within the left who are willing to look at their own side, their own teammates and say, hey, what you're doing is just crazy. And frequently they'll do so in almost the terms that you're talking about, the ones that, you know, you use on your podcast and sort of like this boldness, this irreverence. To some degree, I think we're in a moment where, like, if you would call the 2010s this era of, you know, extreme overwrought earnestness, I think to some degree, the 2020s are thus far the era of, like, there's absurdism that's on the rise. And I think you see this a lot with Genzi. You see this a lot with the dirtbag left. And I think that it's actually a really good thing to be able to poke fun at, you know, so much of the bullshit that people were peddling in yours prior. And I think also to some degree, as people get older and like all of us have kids and so, you know, whether you like it or not, we have skin in the game. There's more at stake. There's a sense of I care what the future looks like. I care that my son has a good life. And I think to some degree, you also see there was a lot. And not just care, but like care like more than I've ever thought cared about anything I would do anything to it. And I think, you know, any parent feels the same way. But I think there's this sense of like, even if it took, you know, millennials or people of our rough generation a longer time to get to that stage and maybe they did that later, they're doing it. And I think to some degree, you see people who maybe in their early 30s were obnoxious, you know, lefty activists who now are raising kids and seeing kind of the error in their ways and thinking, Oh, actually, I suddenly value different things than what I valued before. And I think when kids are taught things that parents disagree with in public schools, or maybe even not things that parents disagree with, but things that aren't phonics and aren't math instruction, there's a certain amount of like, well, an awakening that happens. A sense of like, what lies was I believing and what lies, you know, was I peddling all along? And I think that we're seeing a lot of this wokeness crumbling right now. And I'm kind of delighted by it. I look forward to the ash heap and hopefully people will gravitate toward more freedom, you know, and sort of learn the appropriate lessons from that. I don't know if they will. It's it does seem it seems to me like there's there's like there's several different layers of like unsustainability with this country right now. Like there's like the financial level of like where you could just look at like numbers on paper and be like, this can't keep going. Like, I don't know exactly when this has a car. But yeah, like these entitlement programs, like just look at the numbers on them. This doesn't work. And there does seem to me to be something about wokeism that is just inherently, you know, like this this can't continue like this. It's just like this might work for the four years you're at college or whatever. But like, how do you have a life afterward with this? And and it does seem to me that one of the big like the one of the big reasons why the kind of not even right wing or but the the anti-woke crowd, let's say is is winning in a lot of ways is just because to to be woke is also it seems to be miserable. Like you're just you're sentenced to like a life of constantly being miserable over this and whereas like, you know, other people can I'm not saying like I politically agree with like the like conservatives, but you're allowed to just like have a family and be fairly happy and not like, you know, be at war with every inch of the world. It's a religion with no absolution. It's a religion with no redemption. And I think at a certain point, people get a little sick of that because it's like you said, it's a miserable way to live. And I don't know, I at my core, I am a huge optimist. And I think people frequently try to do good. And I think people also frequently sort of yearn for a greater, more robust sense of morality than the weird version offered to them by wokeism or wokeness. And so I sort of look at the degree to which some of this is fracturing and splintering. And I begin to feel really good about it. I'm wondering, you know, how much more DEI bureaucracy will various industries have to deal with before we essentially realize we're paying a ton of middle managers and have seen amount of money. Hey, thanks for watching that clip from our new show, just asking questions. You can watch another clip here or the full episode here. New episodes drop every week. So subscribe to recent TV's YouTube channel to get notified when that happens. 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