Rudyard Lynch on Dating Apps, Moral Decline, and the Risk of Civil War

Rogard Lynch, welcome to Dad Saves America.

Thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure to be here. So, um, if all goes according to plan, this will be our Thursday episode, right before the election. And I figured you are, um, you are among, I would say, the prognosticators of civil war in the United States. But you also are someone who lays out kind of anthropological scale stories about where we are as a civilization. You know, I sort of, I, I, I see a lot of, like, the Fourth Turning type of thinking in your stuff. And I first came across you on, um, Chris Williamson's podcast. And so, um, I guess let's start off with, you know, what do you do? What is it that you do?

As I said on the last podcast I was on, I am a 23-year-old with no credentials whose job is betting against God. And so I'll start there. And, uh, I'm Rogard Lynch, and I'm a college dropout. And I started this channel when I was 13. Uh, I started largely out of boredom. And we made a lot of videos, or I made videos about, what if the South won World War II? And what if the Nazis won the Civil War? And after seven years of alternate history, I gradually morphed into different kinds of content. Content. And now I make more anthropology and history and philosophy and that kind of content. You could say that the shared idea of all of it is human nature and trying to understand how human nature operates across various contexts. And so I'm known for several different things. One of which, and the thing I've gone for the podcast I've been on before, is my prediction from about five different historic models that America is on the verge of a crisis like the French Revolution or the 30 Years' War or the Black Death. And there are very significant historic patterns that say that. And I could go on for a bunch of other stuff talking about everything else in my life, but I think that's a solid place to start.

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Yeah, I think, um, when I first saw some of your stuff, my immediate reaction was a deep skepticism because I, I'm generally a little skeptical of sort of grand historical narrative structures and pattern recognitions like the Fourth Turning or Ray Dalio's got his, you know, cycles of a, you know, the, the changing world order. And they seem very low resolution and almost like a tautology. So I guess let's start with, like, how do you have any confidence in even entering into these kind of waters, never mind being a 23-year-old self-taught histo historian?

Um, we can come back to that, but I'm more receptive to that having been a self-taught economist. So I, I, I don't mind self-teaching. I think that's fine. But, uh, every time you talk, you use at least one SAT word. You used tautology this time, and you used another one I forgot last time. Um, so when I was in high school, I thought confidence is free, so I can choose to be confident. And on a balance sheet, confidence is better than not being confident. So I decided to be confident. And, uh, that's, that's my attitude.

Um, so did you ask me why, uh, I, I'm so confident that we're going to have a civil war? Or what is the intellectual journey that led me here?

I guess why do you even, at the level of, like, almost how to think about problems, why do you have confidence that such a prediction is possible instead of just, I don't know, I don't know what the future holds?

The, the world is complicated because the world is fundamentally unreasonable. And expecting it to be reasonable is unreasonable. And, uh, so I have confidence as I look back across history, and people have consistently been able to predict the future. And I say that my job is betting against God because it's impossible to predict the totality of the world because everything's connected. So to predict, you have to end up predicting everything in order to predict a very good model of the future because, uh, that's just how the world works. And so you're betting against God. You're betting the totality of the universe. That being said, you do look back over history and you find people who were able to predict the future pretty accurately. And there's this, uh, book called Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner. It's a brilliant example. It was written in like 1968 and it's set in the year 2010. America has its first black president. The world's population is 9 billion. You have nihilistic school shooters. You have the fall of the Soviet Union. China becomes America's new rival. You have, uh, advanced computer technology. You have, uh, AirPods and you have that and, uh, headphones. You have moral degeneration, the collapse of religion, and a bunch of other things. They even have a president Abomi, but he's in 2011, but President Abomi is a country in, he's president of a country in Africa. And so I look at that and I thought to myself in high school, how did the author of this book get so much right? And the conclusion I came to is that he got two intellectual props down correctly and he was able to follow that logic. And those two were collapse in traditional values and population growth. And I realized those two variables account for significantly more of the changes since the '60s than we would believe. And I find with intellectual topics, everything is almost like a spell. And once you can learn the spell, you can break the rules of it. For example, medicine. If you were to tell someone 200 years ago, actually 200 years ago, they'd get it. 400 years, you'd say we basically got rid of malaria, we basically got, at least in America, we got rid of malaria, Dengue fever, polio, all these illnesses. And you would say, they'd say, how do you do that? That's incredible. You would say, we studied them. We found that there's these little, basically spirits. And then you can use soap and other types of disinfectants and other types of medicines to wipe out these illnesses. So the world is comprehensible and you can find ways to deal with it. And the world is testament to that. There should not be a large population in Florida because it used to all be swamp. We found a way to drain the swamp.

So I think one of the things that I sometimes, the way I will think about these things about the future and about is that there's certain kinds of problems that are complicated. Yeah. And then there's that certain kinds of problems that are complex. Now, this is semantics, so I'll define what I mean by that. Um, and this is not my approach. I'm borrowing at some from somebody. Yeah. I don't remember who, but that complex problems are more like chaos theory type problems. They're problems that have thousands or millions or billions of variables all in dynamic constant movement. Um, and so understanding where they're going to head is like understanding where a flock of birds is going to go. Yeah. Um, it's not totally impossible, it's just very low resolution at best. Yeah. Then there's complicated problems, which is like trying to get a rocket to be caught by two metal, um, two metal chopsticks. Yeah. Like Elon just did this past week. Which is huge number of variables, but all basically inanimate objects, um, that are responding to the laws of physics and can be modeled in a computer with math. So, um, the weather is an example of the former. Like, we can't predict the weather more than like 40 hours at best. Yes. But human activity is, I would think, is mostly in the latter category. So do you think about it that way, or do you think, no, actually, there's a, that's not the right way to think about it?

I think that's accurate. I'm very careful about what I do and don't predict. Because for example, I've never had a pretension to understanding AI. And I will never issue an opinion on AI until my frame of either one of two things happen: there's something that's completely obvious for the direction of AI that I, as a layperson, can see, or if I spend a tremendous amount of time studying that field. And so a lot of stuff I refuse to have opinions on. I refuse to have opinions on Europe for the near future because I don't know enough about their political context. I am confident for the civil war in America, which is why I've gone on so many podcasts. That's why I have a $1,000 bet with Andrew Heaton that there will be 10,000 deaths by April. Which I really don't want to be true. You know, this show's called Dad Saves America because I want America to continue to exist. And I think it deserves to be saved from its, uh, depravity and its disasters. So let's get into, I, I want to somewhat bookend our conversation around your hypothesis here because I think in the middle of it, there's a bunch of stuff I want to talk to you about that I think is really interesting to me, at least. But, okay, lay out the historical reason why you think shots fired in America by April and what could be called a civil war. Why, why, what's the patterns that line up in history that say this, we're on the precipice?

I use a combination of intuition and empiricism. And I'll explain this through both. On the empirical side, I've studied about five different historic models which all say that America will have a civil war in the 2020s or a large war in the 2020s, depends on the model. And for all of these, they, except for one of them, they stem back to the 20th century. So this is a completely different era. Even the most recent one, Peter Turchin, he called it in 2010. 2010 is a very different world, saying that we'll have a civil war in the 2020s. And 2010 requires a lot of balls. And well, it is the aftermath of the Great Recession and the rise of the Occupy Movement. So there's a couple things that are like, uh oh, we're not in the Great Moderation anymore. Yes. Right. No one in this room would have guessed that though. Fair. Probably of the people watching, I would guess, I don't know, like 15% would have, uh, would have thought that we'd have a, a civil war in the 2020s. And those people are probably the schizo Alex Jones types who just say stuff and some of it happens to be correct. Alex Jones is not a prophet. He just says a lot of stuff and some of it turns out to be accurate, right? Sort of broken clock. Exactly. Verbal diarrhea guarantees you know it's gonna happen. Yeah. So, uh, Dinesh D'Souza in 2012 made this documentary saying that if Obama was elected, it would be the end of America. And I thought he was insane for saying that as an 11-year-old. And looking at what happened, I don't think he was wrong because Obama in 2012, what happens immediately after it? Wokeness. Because Obama was appointing all of these woke people to positions of power. And I think Obama precipitated this weird chain of events. It's incredibly paradoxical that it created wokeness. I can explain that if you'd like. But, uh, I think you asked me a question, so I'm going to answer the question. Um, and the model that I study the most, I got from first David Hackett Fischer, who wrote a book called The Great Wave, which I've recommended to you. It's one of my top recommendations to you. And it's a history of inflation for the last thousand years of Western history. And what it looks at is that you can correlate inflation with revolutions pretty closely. And there's especially certain types of inflation that are going to have revolutions where you have these cycles of inflation and deflation that each last something a little bit over a century. And he wrote in the 19, 1989, I think something like that, that's when The Great Wave came out. He said that America would have a crisis like, and these will be the examples they keep returning back to because they're the parallels I'm drawing from. And to be clear, and this is a conversation I've had with many friends recently, I don't think we'll have a World War. I don't think we'll have nuclear war. I think, and when people hear war, they think it's a zombie movie. The reality, and this is the thing I said in Timcast, is most of you will keep your, keep working your jobs, you'll keep taking care of your kids, you'll stay watching Netflix. Our YouTube channels will probably still be around. So if you go to Egypt or Sudan or Ukraine or, uh, a lot of war zones, life just keeps going. I like to joke, we are a dystopia where you're still expected to go to your job and pay your bills. Because the thing with most dystopias is they get so bad that that mundanity stops. No one cares about paying their bills in 1984. No one cares about paying their bills in Brave New World.

Yeah, you're pointing it out something that is, um, easy to forget even when you think about the Great Depression, right? Which is, okay, so you have 25, pushing 30% unemployment at its depth, but that still means the overwhelming majority of people were employed. Yes. The other, and people even made wealth and and built fortunes and and things got invented. Like the society broke down quite a bit, but most of it was still functioning. I'm also glad you picked the Great Depression because it teases out a point I like to say, but no one brings the conversation in this way where whenever I talk about war, people think World War II. Because World War II is the only mental register we have for war. Uh, World War II though is a very strange war historically, where, uh, if you look at most wars in history, and I'm going to use the Hundred Years' War and the 30 Years' War, which are two conflicts which I use as parallels for our current conflict. Both of those countries, so frame of reference, I forget, no one knows history. 100 Years' War was England versus France for over a century in the 1300s. 30 Years' War was everyone in Europe except for a few countries, basically doing Marvel Smash in Central, in Central Europe. And, and the time frame for, for the 30 Years' War, 1618 to 1648. It's one of those few wars that actually does fit the name. Like 100 Years' War is like 115 years. It's actually literally just 30 wars, 30 years. My, one of the things that, um, and I don't know if you, I think we've talked about this, um, a little bit. Martin Gurri, who's been on the show and who's a friend, has a book, The Revolt of the Public. And one of the things he talks about is that we're in a fifth wave of information, as he puts it. And that, you know, being the internet, and its level of disruption, we still don't fully appreciate. But the maybe the best corollary is the printing press. Yeah. And he lays the 30 Years' War at the foot of the printing press. And the rise of Protestantism that follows from that. Is that how you understand sort of, I know these are kind of big meta-narratives, but I mean, think I agree with that, but that's not the point I'm trying to make sure. Uh, I've talked at that in a previous video, the printing press versus the internet. That's a tautology point too. And the, so 30 Years' War, 100 Years' War, all the countries involved were very weak. And England, France, all the countries in the 30 Years' War, these were all countries where if they had two bad winters, they'd have a civil war. And the thing with these historic periods of crisis, and the examples, uh, I get from both The Great Wave by David Hackett Fischer and Peter Turchin's work, is that these are crises where countries normally both fight an external war and an internal war at the same time. Because every country in the global equilibrium is weak. And with those wars, the main aim of the war was to weaken the social fabric of the other country's society. So they experience social collapse. The World Wars are very rare historically. And that the World Wars are these incredibly strong countries just fighting to the death. And that only that happens very infrequently over history. A previous example being the Punic Wars. But it's very rare to have a society, and this is the thing we forget all the time, where the state is strong enough to wage total war. It happens for less than 10% of human history or human civilization. And so with the wars we're looking at now, I don't think America could have a draft, for example, because we just lack, there's no reason to die for the government. Young men would die to destroy the government. They wouldn't die for the government. And that's also more of a normal historic thing. Normally, uh, the king is this person that you don't, I, N. There's this whole leftist theory that nationalism is recent. That's actually a lie. We've had nationalism for thousands of years. But the degree of nationalism you saw after the Industrial Revolution is historically very high. And though when I talk about wars, keep in mind, most people in this audience, most people in this audience, you will probably continue to live your life. And the thing I wanted to bring up with the Great Depression, that's fascinating, is that the Great Depression in us have some core similarities. And that people are really struggling. The difference though, and one of the things that make the Great Depression not that bad, is quality of life during the Great Depression went up really fast. It was an era where average wages went up, where hours worked went down, went down, where, uh, people's ability to, uh, buy a lot of stuff, where the cost of living, the Great Depression was super cheap. It was super cheap to have a family. And besides the unemployment, it wasn't, it wasn't really an unpleasant time to live in. But it's for completely different reasons than our era. And so the thing I find very compelling about, uh, The Great Wave.

And wait, wait, why do you think it wasn't unpleasant? Do you mean for, I said, I meant to say it was unpleasant. Okay, okay, okay. It was, it was unpleasant. If I said it wasn't unpleasant, that's insane. I apologize. I meant to say it was unpleasant. Um, yeah, I, I, I, I know relatives who lived through the Great Depression. I'm aware it was unpleasant. Okay. Um, and yeah, but it's a different kind of unpleasant from today, where if you look at, uh, the examples I've, you brought up before, French Revolution, 30 Years' War, or the English Civil War, and then the Black Death, if you want to look at these kinds of economic crises, you see skyrocketing real estate costs, you see cost of, of living also skyrocketing, you see, uh, cost of food and other essentials also skyrocketing, you see stock market bull runs and crashes, you see mass government printing of money, the government going bankrupt from their inability to, uh, to have a fiscal budget, government bloat. You see, I'm glad that you have a background in economics because I haven't been able to get this detailed in other podcasts. You also see incredible inequality. You see competition for elite jobs that's very stark, average wages crashing, and you see geopolitical tension and political polarization. And an example people forget is that the average age of marriage has stayed relatively constant over the last thousand years of Western history. Where before the Black Death, before the 30 Years' War, and for the French Revolution, the average age of marriage was 27, 28. And whenever you hit that range, you're going to have a revolution or a civil war. And I have this whole theory, I think you might find interesting, that feminism is all back, is in some ways largely backhanded cope for people not being able to afford to have families. A woman will be like, oh, uh, I'm a boss babe, I'm just working hard to follow my dreams. And the reason, part of the reason she's saying that is because she legitimately can't afford to start a family. And so it's this backwards rationalization for a, a decrease in the cost of living. Or she can't afford to have a single income family. So she says, I'm a boss babe to rationalize, uh, no longer being in a society where a single man can support a whole family.

I, uh, the nature of sort of the cost of living crisis that's going on, and especially for, you know, we're separated by enough that I could almost be your dad, which is funny. It's Dad Saves America, after all. One of the reasons why I actually wanted to have you on is you're closer in age to my son than to me. Yes. And so you're actually in, um, you're in the middle of, generationally, this thing that's going on. You're in the midst of several forces that sort of I've aged out of. And I want to come back to these, but I want to really get the civil war full picture. But the, the divergence of men and women politically, the, the fact that the boy crisis has come to like full flowering. So basically, like, 70% of college graduates are women. And women really want to be married to someone with at or higher level of educational attainment than them. So that creates a crisis. So you've got all this stuff that is hitting your generation that didn't hit me as a Gen Xer. And I want to talk about that because it feels like it feeds into this. But let's set that aside. And how does, how do these historical episodes of inflation and instability set the stage for what's happening now? America, aren't we fundamentally in fairly different circumstances, even if that pattern is true? And isn't the inflation not bad enough to cause a civil war? I mean, we, it hasn't been as bad as the '70s. We didn't have a civil war in the '80s. So why would the recent inflation cause a civil war?

Because the average American lives desperately close to subsistence level. And so the slightest thing that goes wrong could completely ruin their lives. And, I mean, my question is, what evidence would you, because whenever we, I get into these discussions, we keep getting to there's a lot of moving goalposts. So my question is, what evidence would you need me to show you to show that the average American exists in desperation?

Well, I, I want to go into that because it's like, there's other pieces of that that are challenging to me and that I have biases against that I, that like, I want you to challenge on. Yes. But before we do that, the, the civil war part, like, what will that mean? Oh, like, what is going to happen as a result of these forces that are historically, that are historically repeated? Oh, there's going to be wars and plagues and possibly, uh, in wars and plagues and famines. I mean, stuff that's always happened. Um, and I mean, this is just life. I mean, this is just what happens. But I mean, is it literally, do you see it like people holding up in their neighborhoods? I mean, we're here in Austin, Texas. Texas is a super red state, but Austin's very, very, very blue. But it's not as blue as New York. So, but like, how does this play? How would a civil war in the US play out geographically? Like, it's not like the North versus the South where like, oh, you're in the North and you're in the South. It's like, is it the cities versus the sub, versus the rural people? What happened?

So part of the reason I moved here is I assess this would be one of the best places if there's a civil war because I kind of did the same thing. Yeah, yeah. Continue. Exactly. Because actually, this is a good way for me to talk about the, uh, how I think a conflict like this would start. Yeah. Please. Where I have a tier list. And I've studied these previous historic conflicts. And the historic conflicts I use as the best proxies are the fall of the Roman Republic, the English Civil War, the French Revolution, and the, uh, US Civil War. And so I look for sympathetic connections between them. And the biggest one I would normally use is a budget issue. But due to the, uh, circumstances we exist in, I have changed that to an election issue. So my tier number one: election issue. Number two: budget issue. Number three: Trump getting assassinated. And if you guys watch this podcast, and I've used a different order for my previous podcasts, I apologize. But this is also not your problem. Um, so Trump getting assassinated, external war, and Black Swan event. And for those that don't know, Black Swan event is a randomized event. Like, uh, giant, let's say, low probability, high impact. Yeah. Exactly. An example, let's say an immigrant, uh, kills five young white girls in a Chicago suburb, and then this spirals out into riots across the country, like what happened in the UK and would happened in 2020 with George. Yeah. Exactly. Something like that. So, but, and so budget issue was the normal one I put as number one. It was shoved to number two because the English Civil War, the French Wars of Religion, and France's previous crisis in the 13th, Civil War in the 1300s between the Armagnacs and the Burgundians, and then the French Revolution. France starts every single crisis for the last 700 years in the exact same way. There's a struggle between the monarch and the parliament over a budget issue. Then the, uh, then the monarch tells the parliament to shut down. The parliament tells the monarch to go to hell. Twice. They, the, the parliament has convened in a tennis court and then launched independent government. France, you see these weird genetic patterns in how societies have civil wars. Um, and budget issues, number one, and that's, or normally number one, it's number two now. And budget issue really scares me because look at our budget. I mean, well, why is it number two? Because I, I would, I, I can speak to this a little bit, but I want to hear why you've moved it to number two. Because the election's less than a month away. You should just have an election counter in the background. So whenever your audience watches your show, they'll know it's seven days until DEFCON. One of the things we will have to do is have you back in not too distant time to see how we're doing on the predictions because the world is moving fast. But is that it? You just think that just in rank order of Doomsday Clock, it's like the budget can't become a disaster as fast as the election will be a disaster? Exactly. That's what I think. Where it's like, imagine you have a house, and for a lot of young people, you, you do have to imagine that. And imagine you have a house and your roof is about to cave in due to an issue. And you know something's going to cave your roof in. You, you look there staring at your roof thinking, oh, is this storm going to make my roof cave? Is this storm going to make my roof cave? Is it going to cave naturally? These things happen. And, and if the best scenario I have, and these are one of the things I predict with the lowest probability because when you look at statistical projections, you can assess certain scales of things relatively easily. And then the individual group level is harder to predict because you're operating more out of chaos. And my best scenario is something like this: both sides deny the election results. And I think both sides will deny the election results because for both the right and the left, they are stuck in a situation where they physically can't afford to lose this election. Do you want me to explain that?

Yeah, please. This is one of the things I've been on a lot of podcasts. I'm always annoyed. No interviewers ask me this question because I frequently say the right and the left can't afford to lose. Yeah. That's a, I mean, what does that even mean?

So civil wars happen when each faction, plausible deniability to the radicals inside their faction is more important than the other side. And I went on plausible deniability to the radicals in their faction is more important. I've, what does that mean exactly? I've gotten very into studying the human nature of plausible deniability because plausible deniability is everywhere and no one realizes it. Because humans use plausible deniability for all social interactions. And I mean, give me like, a super pedestrian example of daily life plausible deniability. Um, so let's say, uh, you don't like someone and you don't want to hang out with them. And then they ask you to hang out and you say, oh, I'm sorry, I'm on a trip to Turkey now. And so let's say, and, and this is completely unidentifiable. The vast majority of the public, let's say you periodically travel out of your town to avoid dealing with the people in your town. And so you're taking this vacation to get plausible deniability to avoid everyone around you. And so you have plausible deniability, but also it serves multiple purposes at once. Or I have something I can point to. Yes. That is not the real reason for the thing happening or the thing I want to to do. Yeah. But I can point to it and it's plausible that that's what. Yes. So let's say I'm a complete degenerate and I, I want to be a degenerate without other judging me. So I can say I'm a club promoter. And so by being a club promoter, I have complete plausible deniability to be a degenerate. And everyone thinks, oh, that's his job, that's how he makes money. And so, and, and plausible deniability is especially big for women. And one of the things my friend said is, when you hear women talk, think about what the thing they said gives plausible deniability for something. And that's just completely changed my life.

Why is that? I know we're going into a rabbit hole, but risk mitigation. And so, uh, it, plausible deniability gives risk mitigation because it allows you, if, if you are going to lose a fight, plausible deniability gives you the ability to get out of risky situations. So it's, I don't mean to say this and have it be like women are cowards, but it is kind of the coward's way out. Like, like I, rather than just telling the person, I'm sorry, I don't, I just don't want to hang out. I'm sorry. Women are cowards because it's their thing. I mean, let's be blunt here. No one expects women to die in war. No one expects women. It's completely fine for them to be cowards in the same way it's completely fine for men to be [ __ ] at least under certain circumstances.

Okay, I will, I'll let the, can we at least add on average or something here? I, I know a lot of women that could kick my ass. So let's be including my wife. Everyone on this podcast has an IQ high enough to move past knapsack. Very, very fair. Fair enough. Um, I, I will give you the, the rope necessary for us both to be hung in the civil war to come. Uh, okay. We already, I already passed that bridge, man. So we've got, uh, we've got this situation where you believe both that the Democrats and the Republicans lack plausible deniability for why they would lose with the crazy people in their sides of the aisle. Is that, is that how I, the point I was trying to convey there is that the right and the left care more about pleasing the radicals inside their faction than the other side. What I just said is an example of that because I care less about offending the left at this point than the far right. Because we're stuck in a situation where the sides don't talk to each other. And so if you're on the right, you think more about how do I avoid getting eaten by the radicals on my side than by the other side. And that's when you know you're going to have a civil war. And you see it where some huge amount of streamers and political, uh, content creators have literally called for violence. Destiny, Hasan Piker, right-wing Twitter. I literally put out posts, partly as tests, partly because I genuinely do care. There, I say atrocities are bad. And I say it's immoral to commit atrocities. And all these guys are like saying, oh, you're a, oh, sorry, do I swear on this podcast? You can swear, but we will, we will bleep it because we're a little more normy than than average. So they say like, you're, you're a [ __ ] R, you're, how dare you say that atrocities are bad? You're like, you're a white traitor. This is what the hard right says all the time. And I, every single time, and I'm not, uh, I'm not like a bleeding heart liberal, but I do think like burning downtowns and, uh, raiding villages is bad. And so I'll, I'll tweet that out. And even the most basic humanitarian sentiment, the hard right hates. And how does that square with any association with Jesus Christ and his teachings? Oh, I've, I've had multiple tweets about this where I say that you guys aren't real Christians and you guys don't actually care about Christ and you're complete hypocrites. And they either, we do not exist in a rational space. Things don't need to rationally make sense. It's so emotional where like, context, for context, imagine you have a friend who's had a really bad day. And then they just got a parking ticket. And then after that parking ticket, a homeless guy asks them for cash. And they scream at the homeless guy. That's the emotional state of both political sides now, where we're way past rationality. And we're at the point where most people are normal, decent people. And then there are radicals who have been taken in by sociopaths and very angry people. And so the worst possible scenario, but one that I think will probably happen, is that these very intolerant extremes start bullying the rest of the population. And kind of brown shirts on both sides. Exactly. And there are definitely people who would want to do that. There are definitely people because no one has better stuff to do. Where if we were a normal society, so let's destroy the society. Yeah. Exactly. Where if we were a normal society, people would have hobbies and they'd have extra money and they'd go out to dinner and they'd get laid and they'd watch movies. There are no movies now. There's no new music now. Uh, people aren't getting into relationships. Are not making enough money. Legos have gotten too expensive. And so war is becoming the easiest hobby for a lot of the population.

Okay, I, uh, because I'm going to be especially indulgent in this conversation, I will push on different things, even though they extend the length into the stratosphere. I've heard you make this claim before, there's no, there's no this, no that. Yeah. There are movies. There are new things that happen. That's a, isn't that, isn't that a kind of hyperbolic way to frame that's that's that's hyperbole, isn't it? Yes. Why is it useful hyperbole instead of just [ __ ]? We constantly use hyperbole in society. It's just we're tolerant of some kinds of hyperbole and not other kinds of hyperbole. The left, for example, says that all of American history can be traced back to slavery. Right? That's a completely ridiculous statement. Yes, but we socially accept it. I don't. Society wants us to accept it. Um, other examples of hyperbole. America is uniquely the slave state, except for the entirety of all of human civilization and existence. If you cracked over a book, I use hyperbole when I'm trying to convey an emotional point. Where there are new movies, but none of them are worth watching. And that is kind of mostly true. I will say. And so it's basically true that there are no new movies if none of them are worth watching. You're not going to movies. If you look at the Aristotelian telos, or the drive for something, nothing is fulfilling its telos. So for example, for those that don't know, for those who haven't studied Aristotle, normies. I mean, telos is the natural endpoint of what your divine aim in life should be. And so for example, the university's telos, and this is something your friend John Height has spoken about, is to actually teach people stuff and look for the truth. They're not. So it claims it's got Veritas, they they etch it in stone and then violate it on day one by lining people up based on how much melanin is in their skin. Yes. Yes. And so nothing is fulfilling its telos. And so I use the hyperbole to get people into the proper emotional state. I'm speaking to their subconscious. It's like, you know, of course, I would not compare myself to Nietzsche. You know, Nietzsche just perfectly speaks. He speaks in very insane and very schizophrenic language as a way to convey the emotional depth of his point.

So this, this reminds me of something recent, which is JD Vance on this, um, New York Times podcast. Yeah. And he articulated something that, if you believe, is maybe interesting and justifiable, but he's also a clever guy, so it might also just be dancing around. Yeah. Yeah. Which was the, the, the interviewer asks him about, you know, his change in, change of heart on Trump. Yeah. And he more or less says, look, in 2016, I thought we lived in essentially like Normie America. Yes. Trump's bombastic, cray-cray language and like, you know, construction guy from New York ways, yeah, was just unmanly and inappropriate and dangerous for the country. And then four years later, no, we're not actually in Norm America. I was delusional. We're in Crazy America. Yes. And he actually argues that Trump's rhetoric is not merely a reflection of the times, which I would agree with. I think it is a reflection of the times, but he actually goes further, which is up for debate, at least, and says it's necessary.

Oh, I agree. It's, it's good. It's a, it's a good strategy. It might even be morally important to be a crazy troll.

Yeah. So is that, so you're, is that what you're saying?

Yeah, I agree with that. Although I think there's different degrees and different strategies. And this strategy is going to get old in the next few years. Yeah. So, you know, a week after this goes live, we'll be in post-election day, whatever chaos that will take. But the rhetoric isn't going to go away. If Trump vanished into a vortex, the rhetoric of our times isn't going anywhere. We are as a society, people don't realize how much control by the bureaucracy has already warped our social norms. And an example of that that I like to throw out is one of my favorite areas of study is the anthropology of America. And that was a really difficult thing to study because there have only been two offshoots since World War II in this top, David Hackett Fischer and Thomas Sowell, both of which are conservatives, both of which have been kind of sidelined by academia. And you think, you think someone's someone's ancestry matters a lot to who they are. You are very evidently Italian. Being Italian is part of your character. I am very evidently English and British. These are, sorry, British and Irish. That's the sort of thing where it does. Like if you go back to Philly, the cops are going to be heavily Irish, and that's going to affect to the cops act. These are things that matter. But you can't study them because the managerial class views ethnic differences inside America as this break on them just turning everyone into a cog. And I'm using this as an example because it's something innocuous that's already been controlled by a class interest. And I don't see the people in charge as my friends because they basically want me dead. If you're a young white man, the people in charge don't, they don't want you there. And that's how I feel the current society, where the language they use, it's explicitly or it's a strategic decision to keep people in this emotional range because if you can keep people in this emotional range, they won't realize they're getting screwed over.

And what do you, what, when you say this emotional range, what are you talking about? What do you mean?

So I, complacent or hyper, hyper anxiety. I recently spoke to a friend, uh, uh, who is a libertarian pundit. Not Andrew Heaton, by the way. I spoke to a friend, it's a libertarian pundit, and I said, Trump should run on civilizational side as a platform that the left is trying to kill the West. And a vote for Trump is a vote for civilizational survival. And he said, that's an intellectual point. That's not a political point. And I said, you don't understand the emotional pitch most Americans live at. Because if we can't have discourse, the managerial class hates emotional polarity. It's why they hate masculinity and femininity because human meeting is based upon irrational polarity. Like you are irrationally masculine and irrationally feminine. And then that's what makes you attractive to the other. And so they hate that. And they want people to stay in this emotionless range. And so cubical, cubical NPC creatures. Exactly. I recently went to a wedding. And when I was at the wedding, and this was in Boston, no one there was smiling. No one there was excited. I can tell people were happy, but they, and I was thinking to myself, you're happy, express some emotion. It's a freaking wedding. And I was thinking, if you can't express happy emotion at a wedding, when can you? But we're a society which trains people to think in cubical brain. And so, and so you can't express this natural emotional polarity. And I use hyperbolic language to convey the psychological reality of the situation. And I could, I don't feel beholden to the current ruling class because they're not offering me any incentive to cooperate. So I don't know why I should go along with the social standard. I mean, there's, I'm not speaking for social anarchy, but I think our current social consensus is so fundamentally broken that you have to break past it to something else.

Okay, so we are, um, we have a large number of Americans who are struggling to get by. Yeah. Who are, um, who who see conflict as perhaps meaning-making, or at least more interesting than the alternatives. That's, am I hearing that correctly? Is that, and we've got two parties who are beholden to the psychopathy of their radical bases, yes, such that they would rather continue dueling into oblivion than admit defeat.

There's another factor, which is desperation. And desperation acts as something in its own right. Where I'm going to use an example. When I hiked the Appalachian Trail, I was in Connecticut, and it had been 15 miles since I'd last had a drink of water. And I had to go to bed really thirsty. And I thought, and it's hard to understand how being really thirsty changes how you think. And people don't really know who they are when they hit really crazy situations. And one of the things I frequently said is that we are not a moral society. We put up this facade of morality that's actually very thin. Where if you were to go back a century ago, people's fat, society really put its, um, money where its mouth was. Where you had people going to church every week. You had moral standards that society upheld. You had an advanced philosophy going back millennia for why you should believe morality. We have, we don't believe in anything now. And so I think, what do you mean by that? We don't believe in anything. Who is we? And where is the basis for this? We just not believe in anything. You and I are genuine Christians. You can take us out of the conversation. I mean, I mean the general public. And I mean, we're, we're a pretty Christian country, are we not? Yes. I think we might be one of the, maybe the most religious participant country in the Western world. We're up there for one of the most religious industrialized countries in the world. We're more religious than Iran at this point, right? But what I see as an example of this is that there's no logical system that justifies bringing religious morality into life. So it's all, it's like we're religious, but we leave it over here, and it's not connected to the rest of our material political decision-making. Uh, and lots of people are very thinly religious as well, where they might go to church and pray, but they have no.

moral structure that actually explains how it applies to their life. And we've siphoned off religion from the general life.

And so, as an example, I know a lot of people on the right. It's a space, uh, young men on the right is a space I know a lot about. If there is a major war, and I'm in a room with a bunch of other conservative leaders, it would be difficult for me to explain to them why they shouldn't commit atrocities. Because, what I would normally jump to is that this is a violation of God. This is immoral. Enough of the people would laugh at that, that you wouldn't be able to have that be an argument in of itself. They don't believe in human rights. They don't believe in, there's not a moral button you can push to get them to admit that committing atrocities is bad.

I see this on the left too, where the left really scares me. And people ask Rudyard, why do you think the right's going to go this crazy? And it's because the left already has. Where I find, and I've, I've brought this up in so many podcasts because it's still an important point, the Columbia protest. Yeah, and that's Columbia in New York. And you have these kids, actually, you made a good video about this. You have these kids who are my age, and I know what they went through for the school system. They went through so much anti-Holocaust programming. The second thing, become adults, they then say, we should genocide the Jews. And we should support just this complete destruction of this race. And that is so unhinged and so evil. And it's crazy how quickly the programming fell apart. And I think, who is telling these kids no? Because the answer is basically no one. Their professors aren't telling them no. Their friends aren't telling them no. Their parents aren't telling them no. And so this has been a systemic moral failure of our society. That these, these are kids from probably the wealthiest families of America, the best educated people, the people who, in a normal society, would be raising the new ruling class, the people who write the new books, who lead the country, who die in the wars. And they have completely failed. And these kids, I would respect them more if they leaned into the innate savagery of their political position. But these kids are cucks. Like, if you were to actually meet them, they lack any ability to actually do stuff, or courage, or wisdom. They're combining genocide with being cucks. And it's just, this is the worst combo. I mean, what comes to mind is the protesters who were holed up in, was it, I think it was a Columbia building, or it might have been NYU, and were complaining that water wasn't being brought to them by the police. It's like, you're in New York City, open the tap. There are sinks in the bathrooms. Yeah. What are you talking about?

So, one of the things you especially would find interesting about my backstory is I've been part of, I've been part of a bunch of weird ecosystems. I formed a social group for influencers in Los Angeles. I've been part of other groups for talented young people. I've been part of conservative groups. So I've been part of several Zoomer groups in the past. And so I've had the real privilege of interviewing dozens of Zoomers across social classes, across regions, or hundreds of Zoomers. I've interviewed, depends on what you mean. I interview, I've spoken down for like half an hour with basically hundreds of people in my age category. And weird ecosystems. I know a lot of people at Harvard. I know working-class people. I know people in Los Angeles, my hometown, in Pennsylvania, Texas. And a very large amount of my analysis comes from speaking to all these different types of Zoomers. Because it's this weird cross-reference of the population. And actually, the reason I got on the Civil War discourse is that I had enough critical mass talking to Zoomers across every group that I was able to pick up underlying trends. And I basically realized Zoomers of every, even the highest achieving Zoomers, had a series of really bad issues. Mental health was one of them. Yes. Almost all had financial issues. Almost all of them just did not have the basic things you would need to live a decent life. And so I thought, if this many young people are screwed, you're going to have a revolution. And one of the things where I only got on the revolution Civil War discourse, uh, I, I started in 2020. And it really got kicked into overdrive, this is going to happen soon, in 2022. Because that was when I got, I'd spoken to enough people where I had pieced together, this is the only way that this equation will solve itself.

And one of the things I think you would find interesting is that my assessment with what happened to Zoomer, you have all these bureaucratic systems that kept operating longer than anyone involved expected, expected to. And so these things that people think, the way I like to phrase it is that things that people think should be 5% of the equation are the total equation. So DEI hiring is an example. When older people talk about DEI, they're assuming, oh, you have 100 applicants, we're going to increase DEI positions so that say, five out of the 100 will go to diversity people. The current equation is that in the, the top, I believe, 500 companies, in the job openings since COVID, 95% went.

I remember that. I don't know if it was Forbes or Inc. It was one of those business magazines that basically touted that exact stat. That's what you're drawing from, right? It was like, look, you know, post-George Floyd 2020, the corporate world said, we're all in on diversity. And they did it. They did it. It actually happened. Yes, they did it.

Um, what's wrong with that? Why is that bad? I mean, jobs aren't a zero-sum game, right? If something's big enough, it's a cancer. Everything, if it's big enough, is a cancer. Um, whereas Aristotle said, everything pushed to an extreme is evil. And so if it's 95%, that means young white men aren't going to get hired. And right. So you have this, I've heard this also from people in my age bracket. They're just too expensive now. They're actually experienced. They're high value, which means that they should earn more money. And it's like, no. Yeah. And they've, they've like earned their way into unemployability. I am probably in that category. Were I not entrepreneurial, it'd be like, I don't know where I'd work. I, I'd work in construction would be my choice personally. I'd be working a minimum wage job if this channel didn't exist. And so my attitude is, if someone gives me an offer, I take it for all it is, because you don't get that many offers.

And, uh, is this just, is this just right-wing white male wokeness, what you're saying? This like, woe is me, the DEI. I mean, isn't it the case? I, I want to push on you for a little bit for, for a couple reasons. First of all, because it's fun. And also because I should. And because I'm, I've been an employer for a long time. Yeah. And, and maybe this, maybe it's because I've been a small businessman since, since I left Viacom. So maybe that's different. I think most people are still working for small businesses. Finding someone that will show up on time, yeah, will not ask you about when they're going to get their first day off in their job interview. Yeah. And, and the, the basic decorum of, you will probably be a good partner on the team. Yeah. When you find one of those people, you're like, yes, yes, can you start today? I've literally had this kind of thing. People here have had me say, great, can you start tomorrow? Because they meet what, in other times, would have been relatively basic criteria. Like, don't ask us about PTO in your job interview. Yeah. Yeah. Don't ask me when I'm going to pay you to not work, because the answer is, you're never going to get paid and you cannot work. So that mitigates for me a little bit against what you're saying. Like, oh, woe is me, white, young male, can't you just go get a job? Just go get a job.

My question to you is, because you asked a question that's big enough, where what evidence would you want me to show you? Would you want to look at, uh, demographic information? Would you want me to look at anecdotes? Would you want me to look at, uh, statistical data as it relates to quality of life, the school system? It's a whole, you're looking in ecosystem failure. So it's difficult to pinpoint a single point in the ecosystem where it's, as I said, over, it's like 10 bureaucracies failed at once.

So, let me lay out a couple things. Yeah. As part of this, because I, I think to move into some of the underlying stuff behind concern about Civil War, I think is what this is about. Yes. Right? Because, and it's so, I think where we agree, we probably, having watched about 15 hours of your content, we overwhelmingly agree on things. And I actually think that even when I'm pushing you on, I am, I am skeptical that my worldview has been constructed by statistical work that might not really be good or correct. But the first piece of the puzzle for me is all of that's true. The education system sucks. It's been taken over by commie whack jobs. I talk about that all the time. I don't mince words about it because it's horrible. If you're a parent, pull your kids out of government school and be very careful about the private school because it might be even worse. Yes. Yes. Um, so probably homeschool, next up Catholic school, and if you can find the rare school that's not a woke zombie nightmare, do that, please, for the love of God. That's number one. So I agree completely. I've seen this firsthand. The Coddling of the American Mind played a big role in my thinking about this. Seeing it at the systemic level, like your generation has come up more anxious, more prone towards suicidality, all those things, suffering from mental illness in profound ways that I think are very scary and worrisome. All of that's true. But the middle class, as as defined, it's always like these things like, we'll always have the poor. If you define the poor as the bottom 10 percent, right? Like the bottom 10 percent can be living like kings. But if we define our understanding of the world on the basis of percentages instead of absolute terms, we'll always have the poor. As I understand it, the middle class has shrunk dramatically in this country over the past several decades because it has increasingly become upper middle class. And that the inequality story, as it has been told to us, is actually statistically false. It is a product of media programming. That is not to say there isn't a lot of problems in the society and a lot of people that are living in in dire circumstances. I, I have, I'd like to think, earned my way to a place where I'm reasonably comfortable. But I'm not trying to deny anybody's circumstances. But that's the stuff I have consumed. And it might be, maybe it's [ __ ], maybe I'm, maybe that's like some phantom I know. And I, I don't like to go off on too long of a tangent as an interviewer. But I'll just say this, the past five years seems to have changed the game in a couple ways that are pretty profound from my perspective. One of which being the median cost of housing, which is a bare necessity, has gone into weirdo land where you have to be a six, you have to earn six figures to be able to buy a house. Yes. So that, that I can see plainly. The rise in homelessness on the streets in major cities, you can't not see it. Yes. So there's a bunch of, it's not like I'm, I'm not like a complete blind, normie, Panglossian, Steven Pinker is in my backpack everywhere I go. Yes. But I may be closer to that than you. So, so make your case for why I should throw Steven Pinker in the garbage can.

So I find, I find Steven Pinker funny because we, he and I basically agree on everything. And I still don't like reading his books. I've started like four or five of his books and finished none of them. Because he and I are such different animals in the ecosystem where I read the stuff he says and I'm like, I factually agree with what you're saying. I agree. I think you're a smart guy. I think you're honest. But I still dislike this. Where his whole thing of, there are more toilets in Africa, thus progress has happened. And that, thus the struggles of, uh, normal Americans today are fine. I just want to throw that book in the trash. And so I'll start with here. I'll tell you, and we're friends outside of this, and you, you've seen I'm a pretty industrious person, pretty hardworking, and that sort of thing. And I can tell you why, if I didn't have this channel, I would try not to have a job at all.

So let's look at it through this lens. So let's say I work a normal job for someone my age. Let's say I make $10 an hour. An appetizer can be $14. So you work seven hours, um, then the appetizer, then $70. A dinner is often $50. So that's just covering food. And if you look at the statistics, you find basically 75% of Americans live hand to mouth, live paycheck to paycheck. So they're paying off the money they have now just to work more at, just to work again, and to keep doing it. And the numbers I find most telling are, first of all, that the, uh, first of all, 40% of Americans don't have $400 in the bank. 70% of Americans don't have $1,000 in the bank. People are lying about these numbers. You, these are not numbers you can expect to tell the truth about. And so that's one thing. And if that's, and when I was a teenager, I made the calculation, if I don't become an entrepreneur, I'm screwed. Because, uh, my mom ran a brewery, and I worked at the brewery, and I would talk to other people at the brewery, and they would grumble at how the job market was terrible, and money wasn't worth anything, and that stuff. And also, I'd go to school, and we were working like, uh, people in my class did stuff over, they did various forms of class for like over 12 hours a day. And I hated that. I really, I was really disaffected in school. And I saw that everyone's working, they said, you're going to go to college, after college, you're going to get a job. And I was looking around and I thought, where are the jobs? Because I didn't really, what, like what industry sucks up these people out of college?

So you can make like a hundred grand driving a truck. Yeah, like today. Like you can, there are, there is something like, I don't know what the number is right now. And again, even you look at the current revisions of the Fed statistics, and trusting any government stats, yeah, needs a gigantic asterisk on it. Yes. But there are jobs. It's, there are jobs that may pay pretty well. A lot of them are physical. Some of them are not physical. Yeah. But there are a lot of people working. You, you know, we said earlier in the conversation, right, even in the Great Depression, 75% of people were working. Yes. So it's an ecosystem failure. That's what I keep saying. Because we, but that's a little bit like, like socializing the analysis. So connect the dots for me. Okay. So let's go through the ecosystem failure. The purpose of a person's life is, or the things people, the things people need to have in life to not feel like failures are: gainful employment, housing, a mate, ability to support children, um, some kind of value system, and friends. These, this is the bare minimum that even someone in Egypt or the Congo would think that's what a person needs to have a decent life. I mean, Arthur Brooks and his work, who's a, who I did a film with and I, you know, can truly call a friend, yeah, says, you know, the matrix of happiness is pretty simple: faith, family, community, and work. Those are the, the four quadrants. Um, he built on other work, like the fact that conservatives are the most charitable people. So his book, Who Gives, but he, his books about happiness, and he basically, like, look, you know, that's what you want to be. So we can start with faith, work, mate, and what's the fourth? Community. Community. Okay. So we can go through each of those. Um, the, so mate, let's start with mating, because I think that's something I've spoken a lot about. That's the one that seems to me like I got on the last chopper out of Nomad, meeting my wife at work, yeah, before swipe swiping things. Yeah. And, and now it's the Thunderdome disaster. Yeah. And all of the worst elements of human nature, supercharged into Oan. Yeah. So, um, am I right? Is that, that's what, that's accurate? Yeah. And so two-thirds of men under 30 are single. And again, people lie about these numbers. Two-thirds. Yeah. I'm surprised you don't know that stat. Two-thirds of men 18 to 30 are single. And I think the numbers are really higher because most people when they say in a relationship, they're in a situationship. And or maybe not most, but a very large amount. And I don't count situationships as relationships. And I can see the pain in your face.

Well, not to interrupt the train of thought, but, um, the almost singular piece of advice I've been giving my son since he's graduated high school is, I don't care about any other part of what you decide to do with your life, find a woman that shares your values and team up with it. That's very Italian. My father growing up said, the only thing that matters in life is honor. Rudyard, I don't care if you're poor. I don't care if you're a failure. I care that you have honor. It is very Italian. You're right. It is very like, it is a very inherited, multigenerational Sicilian, I trust no one but the family, yes, have the family, the family is everything perspective. When Uncle Tony from Palermo had all of his money stolen from the mafia, he could support on his wife, and then they moved out to S, and then they moved out to Messina, and it was all fine. But he trusted in his wife.

Wait, is this, is this a hypothetical? Is you have, have you actually an Uncle Tony? No, I made all this up. Okay. I was thinking of an Italian chain of logic. Yes. Yes. Okay. But all right, so keep going. So you got this two-thirds of your generation. Um, I'm named Rudyard William Lynch. Where is the Italian in that name? I know. Um, the Roman Empire, baby. We got around. Yeah. So, um, yeah. Um, so a third amend or 30 are virgins. Again, I assume that's an undercount. And so this is a huge issue. And so this is the incel revolution, which is one of. Exactly. Yes. And so let's say you work all the jobs and then you can't afford to have a family or you can't get laid. What's the point of working the job if there's not the reproductive payoff? So for that's one. Second thing is, you can't afford a house to support kids, uh, because that's through the roof. And keep in mind, young people spend two-thirds of their income on rent. And I mean, I did that when I got out of school. I worked at, in Viacom at New York City. I didn't make enough. I was just racking up credit card debt. And two-thirds of my income was the rent. That's exactly. Yeah. That's also New York City, though. Like, New York City. No, all of America is New York City. I'd see. Exactly. Yes. But New York City's a peripheral. Like, New York City is a horrible example. That might have been normal when you were in New York City, but now that's the whole country. And also, rent is money that's not, it's not like, uh, economically reproductive. So there's certain, it's not an investment. Yes. And so that's a second thing. So you have, uh, you have mating issue. You have rent issue. That's what's the heart of the mating issue, very briefly, because this is, there's entire, I mean, Chris Williamson spends a lot of time on this kind of stuff. Yes. So the shortest answer I could give is, it's an e, it's a, I would say it's heavily an economics issue due to the structure of dating apps. Where dating apps, and I'm friends with a lot of like dating content creators. This is something HTH has also said, that dating apps are the thing that killed it. Where you look at the chart of male virginity, it jumps from 8% when the iPhone was invented, and then it immediately went up to 27% over a 10-year period. And that's due to the introduction of dating apps. And keep in mind, over 60% of relationships today are started online. For Gen Z, I'm going to guess it's higher. And this is like the harem effect. It's like one high-status male attracts all the attention of the females. And the disparities there leave everybody else like, oh, what are you under 6'2"? Forget it. And I think dating, I blame dating apps the most. Because if you were to go back to like 2015, this is a much healthier ecosystem. And there was still feminism, there was still all these other things. And then the dating apps and the screens. And when people give dating advice, the most common dating advice is, go to group events, go to community stuff. But if, if you look at what the average Zoomer does, the average Zoomer spends eight hours a day on screens. I think even independent from work. And so what that means is no one's going outside. And so if no one's going outside, that creates an issue. And I look at, it's the problem of even from a parenting, young kids perspective, if you want to send your kids outside, yeah, and no one's outside, outside's super boring. Yeah. And so pretty quick, you're like, well, I put you in the backyard and you're there kicking dust around. And after 30 minutes, I kind of understand you don't want to stay outside because no one's outside. Outside's a parking lot. And because people say, I mean, it also annoys me, people say, Rudyard, you should touch grass. Like, I've hiked the Appalachian Trail. I've lived in seven countries. I've traveled around the country. I've done a lot of cool stuff. Going outside is what got me to believe this stuff because I talked to people outside and they were not satisfied. And outside, there's a, I once, I was on the Tom Bilyeu podcast and I was in West Hollywood. And I thought, I'm going to run a test. I'm going to walk around for an hour. And if there's a homeless guy in this wealthiest, if I'm basically going to, I'm going to sightsee the homeless in West Hollywood, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the world. And there were this homeless guy doing PTSD shakes and screaming, I want to hurt someone. And I thought, there's no reason for this. This neighborhood's very wealthy. You could choose not to have this guy here. But it's a sign that's outside. And go outside. Oh, no, there's, I might have fentanyl needles thrown at me from a crazy person. Fentanyl is Philly's greatest export. It's from Kensington. And yeah, the, so, so the dating situation is a complete catastrophe. Dating apps would be the second most unequal country in the world today, where it would be behind South Africa and ahead of Venezuela. And it's the worst possible equilibrium. Because I know lots of guys in that top 20%, and they don't like it either. Where the guys who were doing well on the dating apps, hedonism is overrated. I've consistently found. Like the guys in that 20%, they mostly don't actually like being there past a certain threshold of hedonism. They do actually want to get a girlfriend or get married or that stuff. But the apps don't sort for that kind of person. And so they're, they sleep with these women as a way to get around not actually having a better alternative. Uh, and I think society treats men as more cynical and more, basically animalistic than men are. I think most men are actually very kind. I think most men have the natural paternal instinct in them.

Well, one of the things to speak to that, when I, um, when my son was born, and I've talked about this on the show because, in some ways, it is the animating force. I was working at Spike TV. My wife, uh, Lisa, she actually, we got engaged, and the pregnancy happened right around that time. Not, and so we were relatively young. Like my, you know, I'm under 50. My son is going to be 20. Would have been normal. Now, I don't know anybody that's got kids that old at my age. His, it was so exciting to become a dad. Yeah. It was, it has been the thing that has anchored my reality. I don't care about my political opinions. I don't ultimately care whether my work succeeds or fails. All of that's gravy because my family and because of especially my son. And, but the nar, like it's like there was a revolution for men that just didn't get acknowledged. Like my wife and I, and this is true of all of my peers, yeah, we didn't, we aren't like 1950s men. Like we were changing the diapers and getting up and wearing the backpack on the front thing, the Baby Bjorn or whatever the hell that thing was called. Yeah. We were doing all that stuff. And yet the public cultural narrative is still like, bumbling out Bundy, that doesn't carry his weight. Yeah. And, and like, I did this whole ad campaign at Spike TV called True Dads. And it was like, hey, you know, one of the ads was like, you know, I, we know, we know you supermom, the work, the kids, but what about you, Dad? Your super title. And it's like, we just literally never got one. It was like, it was like, do better, guys, do better. It's like, we've been doing better. What are you, who are you talking to?

That's a good point because it brings up the point I was going to make. There's no incentive to cooperate inside the system. So you're talking about, uh, why someone would show up to work and not do a good job. And I can completely understand that because that was me in school. And if I had a job, I would not, I don't think I'd work hard at a job. If I had a normal job now, I would be completely disaffected. And I, I work hard in my current job because I have a sense of investment in it. And also it's my work. I'm responsible for it. I can do it how I want. I have agency. If you don't give men agency, men aren't going to work. You've actually talked about this in some of your videos that actually there's a point, you identified a political correlation between people who have jobs that give them a fair amount of agency and autonomy, like their choices matter for the nature of their work, and those that don't.

Talk about, yeah, men need, men need respect. And if you don't give men respect, men will either kill you or leave or be, or turn into slaves. So three choices. If you don't give a man respect. And I've said before that one of the biggest right-left correlations, and this comes from the Unabomber, is the low agency versus high agency. Because the Unabomber said that the left is a resentful reaction against the machine of modernity. Modernity transforms people into cogs. And the school systems is a great example of that. I'm sure your audience would know about that where the school system, you don't remember anything in school. The thing that school really teaches you: sit down for hours, wake up early, do tasks you hate, and shut up. So that's the skills school really teaches. It was Prussian cannon fodder machine. Exactly. Transplanted with an extra layer of that might be good for my factory workers as well. But that wasn't you. Yeah. Exactly. And so the reason that the bureaucratic industrial civilization panders to women so much is twofold. The first is women don't fight back when you push them too hard. The second is that, the second these claims are really, this is just go over great. This is obvious. I don't know what's controversial. See, you met, you've met my wife. My wife is has more masculine force than than you or I, or maybe the two of us combined. So why have women never launched a revolt in history? Why is it always the men who grab the gun? I, I get, I get the, I get the general, I get the general thing. But I can't not, I'm sorry, maybe I'm a little, I have a little bit of a. But the second thing is, women control 85% of consumer spending. And so if you're in a corporate capitalist society, and that's the case, you can see the natural pandering. And one of the things that that does, I'm sorry to interrupt, but, um, having worked in advertising in New York City, is it does mean that ad-based business models are inescapably going to suffer from being attacked by hor. Yeah. Exactly. By like, by by 20-something communications grads from Syracuse working at OG and Ma. Yes. Ethics is what is going to drive the everything. Every business that relies on ad dollars will be driven by 26-year-old Ogal V Syracuse comrade. Yes.

I never understood how these big corporations cave to criticism because there's no incentive to do so. There's no, he's like Disney as an example. Disney constantly responds to Reddit posts where they say, oh my God, this character is really gay, and this character actually is a symbol of this weird thing that you shouldn't care about. And then Disney legitimately has changed their stories to reflect subreddits. And they haven't yet realized that Reddit is a human swamp. Because it's responding to these, these are one of the things Eric Weinstein said is, he said, you have to differentiate criticism that exists to tear you down versus to help you. Because in the jungle that is human nature, certain animals are scavengers. And most critics today are scavengers. They want to pull you down. And you have to avoid the scavengers. But the point I was trying to convey is that the reason I would be disaffected at a normal job is several. The first is that modern society is so anal, and it's so obsessive that I would just get checked out past a certain point because I would hate it. Where let's say I work at an, let's say I work at a job at, let's say I work at Best Buy. And I, and they say, just the level of hyper-specific control over the people involved means that if you're a young man, you're going to grow resentful of it. Where if you look at, I'm going to use Taylorism as an example. Taylorism is a theory of modern management that you should treat workers as robots. And if I remember the school system, which is a great example of this, when I was in fourth grade, the teachers called my parents in because I was drawing swords. When I was in fifth grade, my friends and I were playing board games, and we were arguing over a rule set. And the teacher said, if we didn't clean up the argument immediately, they'd make us stop playing the game. This is just guys arguing over a rule. When I was in fourth grade, with the sword thing, they told my parents, we're doing this because we're afraid he might be a school shooter. And the thing is, oh, if they, my teachers had seen our, we had these copy books that we called the wars that involved every character we could draw murdering each other with chainsaws and being put on conveyor belts and dropped into. Exactly. Oh, yeah. What's this? What did you draw here? Oh, it's, it's Mickey Mouse gutting Donald Duck. Exactly. Yes. And, and my mom thought this, I was upset by this. And I later found out my dad was like, no, no, no, this is, he's a boy. This is what boys do. Yes. Yes. And magnify that across someone's entire life. And you look at the modern corporation, where so a bunch of finger-wagging. Yes. Where if you express agency in most low-level jobs, they actively punish you for any agency. Let's say I work at a, a warehouse. And I put my AirPods in to listen to history books. That's very important to me. It has no effect on them. I'm still going to get the job done. They'll say I can't listen to the AirPods because that, it doesn't fit a corporate policy. That's the exact kind of thing that.

Have you worked in any of these jobs? Where are you getting this from? So my best friend worked at a, he worked at Dunkin Donuts. He worked as a janitor. He worked at UPS. He, he's also my age as well. I, here's what I'm sort of like struggling with a little bit. And it's like, because I've worked a lot of, I've also, I've worked, I worked as a janitor at my mom's brewery. I also worked at, uh, a security company. And I've done, I've done various other stuff. Yeah. I've waited a lot of tables. I've worked in warehouses. Um, and then worked in television, which at the entry point, there's something I'm leaving out that I need to throw this in before the thread goes somewhere else. These jobs are tolerable if they're a rite of passage. They're not tolerable if there's not social mobility. Where if it's something you do when you're a teenager, then make some cash, that's fine. When you're doing it after a long period of time, it becomes completely intolerable. Especially one of the things I've said in a lot of podcasts with the incel revolution and stuff is that if these issues weren't hitting elite aspirant, high agency men, they wouldn't be that bad. And but the fact that for the, the day in crisis is an example, one of the things that I constantly get in for the incel revolution is that if this justifies the bottom half of men, nothing would happen. Because the natural elite, who would be the kinds of people who would rise to leadership, they wouldn't be affected. Instead, what you're getting is again, two-thirds of men are single. And keep in mind, we frontload the mating crisis to just be guys not getting laid and not getting married. It's people not having satisfied marriages, not being able to have kids. It's people who, it's relationships with the partners don't respect each other, where people, don't feel seen or heard or loved. There's a huge amount of issues going on here. And I think when we look at just the sex angle of it, we're doing the whole situation a disservice. And I pulled my audience, do any of you? And I get 30,000 views on polls, normal, I get 30,000 responses on polls normally. And over half of the audience felt like there was no one in their life who who understood them. And then only less than 15 to 20% of people said there was more than two people. And so you add up, this is heartbreaking. It's horrible. And no one cares. And you are right in that about that, that that's probably, that's correct. Yes. We, and it's funny because there's another YouTuber, um, Sho on Head. Oh, yeah. Who I think is pretty great. Yeah, she's cool. And, um, she, uh, talks about this all the time. And she's like, uh, she's like, I don't know what, how don't know you, how you classify her. She like likes socialism, but she's, she talks a lot about men's issues. Be like a communist 100 years ago, you know, when communists were more masculine and they weren't cucked. Oh.

So, okay, so to, to sort of, um, put a little, uh, connection back to the Civil War thread. We have, one might say, hey, you guys went off the rails talking about all this, this disastrous men's issue. The audience is going to love this stuff. The audience is going to hear this. I'm like, this is my vibe. This is exactly. But I think, I think the thing is, is like, it's all connected. Because who starts wars? Young men. Yes. Who causes revolutions? Young men. Yes. Like, if you, if your, if your thesis is, we are on the verge of a civil war, then spending the time trying to understand the plight and circumstances of young men is the causal, the first place to look. Like, do we have a bunch of like, listless, broken young men who see nothing else to do with themselves? And we used to send them off to war and die. Now we don't, by and large. One of the things, the reason I keep on asking the question, what do you need to see? Because the answer I consistently get is, people would need to see the revolution to believe the revolution would happen. Because I add up all these facts, I don't believe it. I don't believe this. And the conclusion I always come to is that we, you've hit the point where you are so close off the potential of the revolution that the revolution would happen. Because you have no interest in looking at these issues unless there's a revolution.

How do you know that you're not in a, uh, pattern recognition feedback loop of confirmation bias? That you are, you are finding yourself in touch with people who are, um, who resonate with what you're saying, who then, who, and therefore are self-selecting into being like, I am in the 7 million American prime age males that can't find a job, or I'm no longer looking, and I'm, I'm just playing Call of Duty all day, and therefore I'm completely unattractive to women. And, and then when I, and then I, I don't have a father, and there's no one even to tell me other than Rudyard, to get my freaking act together and just go get any job and stick it out, and you'll end up being the manager in in a year if you're not a complete schlub. I mean, there's a part of me that I know sounds like it sounds like graveyard old man [ __ ] but it's like, just stick it out and you'll, you'll be all right if you have skills. But maybe the skills gap problem is now the thing. Like, they, they don't shut up. Woke is a colloquial term for someone who works wage work. Well, okay.

So how do you know that this, it's just not confirmation bias? Good question. Because I didn't want to believe this. I was forced to believe this over time. And the, it's, I'll give you two answers. The first is that nothing in the outside world has disproved my thesis. Where I desperately look for things to disprove my thesis. Yeah. So our politicians, we don't have a functioning electoral democracy. We're not going to get past. Both sides are disputing the election. We don't make any, there's not any new good songs since at least, I think the Trump administration killed pop culture. There's two or three new artists since 2020 that are popular, and they've all, most of them are actually older artists, and they all only have one popular album. Album. That's fine. That's Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter, and Dua Lipa. I think Jack Harlow was also recent. Uh, I'm probably not paying attention to rap. But also, I, I don't listen to rap. Um, and you're barking up the wrong tree to know whether any of this makes any sense. It's like, I still listen to Billy Joel when I'm driving in the car. So no pop music. I was looking at the last 10 years, and we basically have no new film franchises for the last 10 years. It's all old IPs. Academia doesn't produce new books or Academia doesn't produce new ideas and new concepts. They've become Stalinist. Jobs market, there aren't new jobs. I know a lot of people in hiring. Hiring is completely desperate. Tech, tech has devolved into, there's no new investment funding for projects. Tech has devolved into Orwellianism. What does that mean? It's devolved into Orwellianism. Tell us screen. Tell us screen. So just, just talk to me, ChatGPT, my future friend. Tech, tech at this point, its express role is to extract stuff for you for the deep state. I mean, so sort of a surveillance capitalism. Yeah. I mean, freaking, uh, if you think the internet's fair, I don't know what to tell you. The internet is constantly being manipulated. And like, even Elon, Elon is a great man. He acknowledges all of these things. Elon is the kind of person who always looks for solutions. And yet he realizes things are desperate. We've hit the point where even my Boomer father thinks things are going to fall apart. It's hard to get a Boomer to reach that threshold. And it's like, so my question is, what works? Show me something that works. I, I've have a lot of buddies who want to move the Pacific Northwest. And I tell them, okay, there's this weird Yankee of the Pacific Northwest, like line. I've seen it half a dozen times of Yankees from New England because I always try to get them to move to the South. And like, no, we got to move to the Pacific Northwest. Because Yankees, he's just like, the South. Um, and so I'm like, okay, you're going to move to the West Coast. There's not a functioning legal system, not a functioning school system. The roads, that Baltimore, that Baltimore bridge that fell down, that's not going to get rebuilt until the government system changes. Uh, we can't build roads, or we, we can't re, we, our infrastructure is crap. The academic research system doesn't work. The Biden administration just up nearly a million jobs in their stats. They didn't apologize. We reached the threshold where the Biden administration literally, they were campaigning for the entire presidency off, oh my God, we're growing jobs, there's more, uh, employment. And they just made up nearly a million jobs that statistically weren't there. And this should have been a national travesty, and it wasn't. And I think similarly, the FBI, no, no crimes gone down. And then I think in the past two weeks, it was like, oh yeah, no, it went up. Yeah. And no acknowledgement of that by any of the formal institutions at all. Crazy. What works?

Well, I think one way to look at this, again, I don't really disagree with you, but I'm playing devil's advocate here for for the fun of it, and because I'm a father and I have a son, and I want his his life to have a shot. Um, well, plenty of things work. Work. Plenty of people. I mean, like, what works? This is where I think hyperbole can go wrong. There's, there's plenty of people making making a solid living, increasing their actual savings over time. It's not like there aren't. There are. Yes, there are. Our quality of life is still pretty good, even for people who are struggling relative. I know this is like, gets into like, I don't care that in 1850 people lived worse than today. That's irrelevant. Fair enough. But most things do work. You go outside, you can get in, you get, you get in your car, you can fill the gas tank. It still works. Like, you in California? So I mean, I mean, but I mean, I'm being serious though. There is a, for all the brokenness, everything's always been broken, right? Hasn't everything always been? There's no utopia. Time that where where stuff wasn't like some mix of kind of working and kind of broken? You're using hyperbole here where you're trying to. There's always this gradient. There's this gradient of things being broken. If you go to the Congo, there's still restaurants in the Congo. There's still hotels. Okay, fair. The Congo is still a failed state. Yes. And so there's a range here. The range has gotten significantly worse. If you showed people in the 20th century our lives today, they would say it's a dystopia. And that, I mean, a lot of that, I think you are right about fundamentally. And you just, you add up these things that happen in your life. And I look at random stuff that would never have happened before in my life that you have to deal with. And, uh, give me an example. Remember the time I told you a prostitute solicited sex for me at a gas station in the suburb I live in? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That shouldn't happen. This is so, I was to the gas station, and, and I live in a place where that this stuff doesn't normally happen. I don't share where I live. Yeah. Um, and I was at the gas station, and this lady who looked like she looked like the mom of someone I would have known in elementary school who works in insurance, she walked up to me and she said, hey, do you want to buy me a motel and get me groceries? And I was, I, I.

told her no. I told her to go away. And besides that, I was thinking to myself, the motel is a weird detail here because I'm thinking, oh, this is a legal way to do prostitution because what that means is, buy me a motel and buy me groceries is a way we can make an exchange here under completely legal, gift-based pretenses. Um, and that shouldn't happen. Even if you, even if we give her the best intentions, this should not. There are too many things that shouldn't happen. I worry about, we have to, we have to monitor what we're saying, saying on our own show in a country with freedom of speech.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. This is definitely, I mean, this is unquestionably happening. Yeah. Um, we had an episode with Cheryl Aason that was, that we had to like, cut half of it out. We, it got deleted. I, I realized like, oh, well, YouTube's a private company. Um, it's bizarre. It's like, but there wasn't even anything in it particularly offensive. It's like, what, what, what is this? And we know it's all being strong-armed by the government.

Yes. Yes. And I don't consider myself a political radical. At least I wouldn't be a radical in a normal society. I have the views the average American would have had for most of American history. And the fact that you would face, you faced a tremendous amount of discrimination having completely normal views. I couldn't get hired at most companies due to being conservative. I could never go to college again unless it's an explicitly very Christian school. Um, YouTube is shadow-banning a lot of stuff. Google is. I mean, you know, there's, there's this ad firm that controls 90% of ad spending, which is Omnicom. Yeah. Yeah. And they use it explicitly against conservatives. That's not normal.

And what I would say is, you look at various historic crises. Soviet Russia before it fell was a less desperate society than we are today in social functioning. In the Soviet Union, more of their social institutions operated. If you wanted to look at Europe before World War I, Europe before World War I, people, people were getting richer, it was getting less unequal, uh, technology was advancing really rapidly. It was normal to get married at age 21. So, World, Europe before World War I, it was a much better functioning society. Things can, or your, the world before World War II was less desperate than today. And so bad things can really happen. And when the bad things happen, the question is, because what, what I say is, we can talk over details, we can waffle until the thing happens. And when the thing happens, and you didn't take the warning shots from God, that's your problem. And what I've said is that we've gotten, like Trump's our presidential candidate has been nearly assassinated three times. If that, that's a literal warning shot.

Yeah. No, no, that's right. And it's been, and the sense in which that these were things that in the 60s were the kind of thing that people to this day said, where were you when? Yeah. Yeah. And now weeks later, it's forgotten. So that's pretty weird. Also, the universe is a holistic system where everything connects to everything else. And so when you look at these political tensions, these social tensions, it's coming from somewhere. And one of the things I've never heard conservatives talk about, and I wish I had voice earlier, is it's a tragedy how unhappy the left is. And I say this in all sincerity. You look at the left, it's heartbreaking how miserable they are. You look at the, the leftist movies, the leftist TV, what kind of person makes this content? What kind of person pushes for national suicide? Because we need to be honest that the left wants the West to kill itself. And if we can't talk about that, we're doomed. And what psychological state gets someone to the point where they want their entire civilization to kill itself? And they think that their entire contribution to the world, because if you attack, if you attack, uh, Christianity, if you attack whiteness, if you attack men, if you attack Christopher Columbus, I'm fine with attacking some of these people. Christopher Columbus was a horrible person. But, and I'm fine with a certain degree of criticism, but past a certain point, it's a complete rejection of the self. And it's a complete rejection of everything that we are. And it's heartbreaking that so many people have gotten this lost. And we never had a discussion. There should have been a point where we sat the left down and said, okay, why, why are you this sad? Why are you this nihilistic? And that never happened. And the left is burning society down because that never happened.

Is it really as simple, in your view? This is, this is as God. I mean, I, I come to this kind of new, this way of thinking because it's like, I have my decade plus of being excited about economics. And you can't really, economics, the economic way of thinking to me has this black box in it. Yeah. And I actually gave a talk. I was invited to the Mont Pelerin Society in Guatemala. And I, I, I, I, it was all classical liberal, yeah, marketeers. And I gave this talk basically putting up Jonathan Haidt and Jordan Peterson and saying, I know at least half of you in this room that know about Jordan Peterson, especially if you're American, don't like him. Yeah. And that you don't pay that much attention to Jonathan Haidt. And I think you're all wrong because economics as a con, as a, as a way of thinking is predicated on an assumption. And that assumption is, where, whatever your subjective preferences come from, isn't our concern. Yes. Like, what you value is up to you. Yes. What happens next is, is what we're here to explain. Like, okay, there's a change in the, in demand. That's people have decided they want more of X or Y. Yeah. Now we can start to talk about what happens. And if you put price controls, blah, blah, blah, and consumer surplus, blah, this is, it turns out what, where your actual preferences come from, and whether they are good or bad matters a lot. Yes. And it's like, the, the sources of that seem to have just been in freefall. Yeah. Family, faith, coherence, a sense of identity that has any coherence and, and, and goodness in it. Yeah.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with one of my close friends where he was trying to get me to watch podcasts about basically made by Nazi apologists. And I, and he, he kept on. And the, the thing I want to convey, I am the weirdo for being against this in the right-wing young male space. I am the weirdo for being against consuming Nazi apologist content. So, so the Democrats who saying all, okay, please go. I, I wanted to get to this before we, he hit me up a couple different times. And what I said is, you don't understand. I loathe these people. I don't want to see them in politics. I would actively, these people make my blood boil on a biological, visceral level. And we had a conversation. He said, like, you should be more, you should be intellectually open to these things. And I said, no, there is a line you have to draw where you are not open to things. And one of the things my father said is, he said, your status as a man is dependent upon choosing what hills to die on. And there are certain lines I draw morally. I refuse to cross. And I will die over those lines. And I thought, that's a normal thing. I thought everyone establishes moral principles. I will die before I cross this line. It's basically very, very rare. Um, and the problem is, if you don't have those lines, there's nothing worth living for. Because for men, if there's nothing to die for, there's nothing to live for. And because you need to have that natural emotional polarity where this is what I'm fighting, this is what I'm for. And without that, you're just completely lost. And I see these people who are silly, the things we care about as a society are completely silly. I don't give, I don't give a [ __ ] about a lot of the stuff we talk about, like transgender bathrooms or, uh, or a lot of the celebrity gossip or so much of the political debates we have are completely performative, symbolic issues that are designed because they give one of two sides the ability to emotionally manipulate their followers. And the fact we even talk about this issue is ridiculous. And we should talk about the real things, like population decline, like the decline in values, like the mental health crisis, like, uh, there's so many real things. And we use all these obfuscations to avoid the real things. And you need to have the line in the sand where you just say no. And it terrifies me that that line doesn't exist. Because I know that until we make that line, we will devolve into the most evil things possible.

And the thing I realized as a, because I grew up in rural Pennsylvania and I moved to Philly as a teenager, and it's a relatively big cultural jump. Especially since we're both from roughly the same area where the difference in, let's say, Allentown and Philly recently got bigger as the culture wars got ratcheted up. And jumping from, uh, jumping from further out into Philly, it's like going to a different civilization. And I realized conservatives and progressives are basically different religions that posit different understandings of the cosmos and human nature. And I realized the first, because I was dropped into a very woke space immediately, uh, without much of a background. And I jump from two out of 10, three out of 10 wokeness to 8 out of 10 wokeness or 9 out of 10 wokeness. And I realized school. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, my high school and college were super woke. Um, and I realized the end point of this logic, if everything is permitted, that means the Holocaust is fine. That means Stalin is fine. Because if you can't say everything's permitted and then say, yes, but, and I realized the end point, I read this even as a teenager, the end point of everything is permitted is permitting totalitarianism to say that nothing is permitted. And that's exactly what happened where they, it's this very weird psychological manipulation the left is playing where, oh, we permit everyone. And the thing that is permitted is the, the belief that everything is permitted. It automatically creates the jump. Okay, so if everything's permitted, I don't need your belief that everything's permitted. And they never made that jump. And they, it's this shell game to get people to believe Marxism. Because the immediate next jump is everything permitted except not being a Marxist. It's so dishonest.

It's, there's, um, you have a video about the 20th century that I think, you know, lays this out in a pretty compelling way. Yeah. In which you basically say that the 20th century represents a battle between three essentially religious meta-stories: Marxism, communism, uh, fascism. Yes. And liberalism, properly understood. Liberalism, not as in like, like I'm a super Democrat liberalism, as classical liberalism, John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith, people, individual liberty matters, we should be free to basically live in a relatively laissez-faire society. That's liberalism, properly understood. Lay out, lay out the way, the way that interplay, uh, sort of happened. And, and, and we can use that as like a bridge back to this frightening fascism, uh, among your peers. Because I think that's a good place for us to kind of start to wrap things up in horror. Um, the, yes, so this is a thesis I actually got from Yuval Noah Harari. And saying, you read Yuval Noah Harari is not socially accessible on the right today. But he's actually a very intelligent author, even if I disagree with a lot of his premises. Is, and he talked about the 20th century being the humanist wars of religion where the, the Marxists, the Liberals, and the fascists fight each other. And all of them are built inside this implicit thing of the technological project. And one of the things I've learned is that we have all these mental assumptions associated with modernity that we never think about, but which aren't tested. And we're stuck inside that paradigm until we can break the glass and break out of the modern paradigm. We're going to be stuck just spiraling into the left's game. Because the end point of all of this is nihilism. Because the modernist world says that progress is an implicit goal in of itself, and that human nature is perfect, and that material abundance will give us happiness. Right? All false. Yes. And like provably false in life. Exactly. In the 20th century was disproving them. The drive for Utopia created the most horrifying atrocities in history. We got the material wealth and made us miserable. The second half of the 20th century was pretty close to a Utopia. And so I really dislike, one of the things I really dislike about the right today is it's all the right and the left is, it's all still stuck around Hitler. I don't want to talk about Hitler. I don't want to talk about a failed 100-year-old ideology that doesn't have anything to do with me. But it's always the left calls everyone they dislike Hitler. And then lots of people on the right, like, is Hitler there's this huge pro, you know what the whole, uh, Churchill discourse. So it's saying Churchill was the bad guy. Yeah. I, I, well, I know this vaguely because I think, um, Tucker interviewed a guy like, oh, you're like the most important his, you know, he did a sort of hyperbolic intro. And he was saying, yes, and so Churchill was the bad guy. World War. Really dislike the Churchill discourse. And this is one of the things that's going to get me a lot of [ __ ] on the right for saying it, but I have to say it. Where, uh, the Churchill discourse, I would respect it. And we're such a gullible society because we lack intuition and we lack the ability to see things holistically. And that's how. So the left, if you are a wise person, are very clearly resentful people who want to burn society down. If you read leftist authors from, well, they say it explicitly. Yeah. If you read Solinsky or Gramsci or any of those authors, they literally say it. Yeah. There's a scene in this, in Matt Walsh's book, Rage, this Mist, where the race to dinner people just say, like, America is a piece of society, it should be destroyed. It's like, yeah, yeah. The kind of, the kind of ahistorical, yeah, lunacy that you need to occupy to believe that and sit there in comfort and say that you are, you have crossed into being a psychopathic lunatic. That is like, just a couple hang, couple ornaments on you and your, and your pull pot. Yes. Yes. Um, so the left, we took the left on complete face value and we were incapable of seeing the pretty obvious conclusion of what they really wanted because we took, oh, we care about black people and women at face value. I see the right doing the exact same thing and I hate it. Where they're taking the fascists on face value. Where I'm by with questioning Churchill. Churchill was a high school hero of mine. Reading his autobiography when I was suicidal at age 16, that was him and Marcus Aurelius were the two books that gave me the will to keep going. And I'm fine with questioning him, but I understand the motivation. With this, it's not fair because their top criticism of Churchill is that he killed the British Empire. And that's ridiculous. Where Churchill was the most dogged defender of the British Empire. He fought at Omdurman in Sudan, he fought in India, he was trying to hold the empire together. If you were looking for honest blame for the death of the British Empire, you would look for the Labor politicians that immediately came after. Because Churchill was desperate trying to hold the empire together. And the Labor politicians sold out the empire. They made Britain a socialist economy. They gave away the colonies. And why does any of this matter? Why are we talking about this? Because they're attack, the reason they're attacking Churchill is because he didn't cut a deal with Hitler to end the war. That's the criticism. They said he killed the British Empire because he didn't make peace in 1940. And let's talk about what is going on here. So, yeah, you've got this, you've got a, um, great power struggle in the 20th century between fascism, which is this kind of ill-defined will to power, masculine thing. The way I encourage everybody to watch your video, I put a link to it because it's really good. I think it's really thoughtful. Um, you've got the communists, who are just utopian whack job murderers. Yes. Who are instantly murderous to the extent no one's ever seen before or since. And yet 28% of Gen Z thinks communism is good because we're living in crazy times. Yes. Um, so now we're in a place where, and I, as we sit here, it's October, um, 18th, yeah, as we're, as we're recording this, um, in our politics right now, the last ditch effort to try to turn around the dialogue on the left with, uh, the Harris campaign is now everyone's back to calling Trump the new fascist. That we're coming up on fascism. Yes. So, are they right? Because you're like, I've got a, a bunch of my right-wing friends want me to watch Hitler propaganda. Is Kamala Harris right that actually we are at risk of a fascist destruction?

It's funny. The answer is obvious to me. And I realize it's not obvious to other people. Trump's very much not a fascist. There's nothing you can really hang Trump on for being a fascist. Um, where he, but is Nick Fuentes and this like weird dark movement that likes Trump? Are they, are they? Is that fair? So Nick Fuentes doesn't like Trump actually. He's backed off from Trump and he's endorsed Kamala. So, you know, you know my beef with Nick Fuentes. You mentioned it off the other day where, uh, I accused him of being a fed and then that got three million views. So he's, he's a Kamala supporter. And he says Kamala has the meme magic. And he dislikes Trump. He also supports the Muslims in in Europe against the local white population. So the Trump is very clearly not a fascist. JD Vance is not a fascist. Mencius Moldbug is not a fascist either. The people who the left calls fascists are not fascists. There is this fascist undercurrent on the right that I'm worried will grow up. And it has this ferocity and this vigor and this virility that it's hard to match. Because what I said for Churchill, I'm going to get a lot of crap for that. And I accept that. None of my classical liberal buddies are going to protect me in that. The fascists will come after me because they have the virility. And the rest of us are too much of cowards to say no. And that's what wor. It's how the communists won on the left because no one stood up against them. And that's what really scares me. Because we keep pushing good moral people to be cowards. And then the evil win. And that's, this is one of the feedback loops in our society I really loathe. Where if there's a, a nice, smart, moral guy, and we, let's say someone insults him, and then he beats the guy up, we'd say, oh my God, you're a horrible person for beating this guy up. Then what you, you've done is you've incentivized the moral person to never engage in basically threatening behavior. While the evil people will do it anyway. And, yeah, Jordan Peterson talks about this, that there's actually below the surface of a lot of interactions, there's a sort of the threat of violence at some level. Yes. It's like, look, it's, it's kind of peace through strength. You want to be good, you need to be prepared to, you need to know that the sword is at your side, and you need to be prepared to brandish it. And if you're not, you're going to get walked all over, and you'll lose. And you can have whatever utopian nonsense you want. Yeah. But your throat's, your head's going to be on a pike. So your Utopia will be your head on a pike.

I've had interactions with Vou, who we spoke about before. Vou is the biggest critic of mine. He's a leftist who was caught, uh, with anime. And he said publicly, he wants to multiple times, all to be censored on this show. That's, that, that, for the viewer, viewer, listener, that was, that was one, that was an incomprehensible set of audio dropouts. Continue. Don't edit that out. They need to hear it. Yeah. No, we'll just, we'll just pull the audio down because, you know, Vou is a complete degenerate. And he made over 12 hours of content trying to debunk me. And he calls me a fascist libertarian. And, um, slightly incoherent. Right. Right. From the start. No, that one of the top criticisms of me is I'm a, a libertarian masquerading. I'm a fascist masquerading as a libertarian. Um, so, and so Vou hates me. And, uh, Vou has said my only source is my crack pipe. And so whenever I, he ever criticizes me, he pulls up an image of me with a crack pipe. And he copy and pastes a crack pipe. And one time I sent him, and you've been to my house, you've seen some of my bookshelves. I have lots of bookshelves. And I texted him an image of my bookshelf and I said, hey, this is my crack pipe. And then all the comments in the audience is, why are you engaging with Vou? He's an idiot. Why are you doing this person? I'm thinking, and this has happened multiple times when I've spoken back against bad people, including people on the hard right, where they're like, or I've got them. Why do you engage with Nick Fuentes? And my attitude is, okay, when these people attack me, their people completely support them. Meanwhile, when the reverse happens, and you stand up to them, you get flak from your people. And I'm thinking, this is what I see with the Hamas-Israel thing. Where Hamas attacked Israel, Israel fights back. And people criticize Israel for fighting back, even though Hamas started the war. And the way war works is, if you, around you find out. If you attack a foreign country and they destroy your country, you found out. That's the consequences of your actions. When Japan declared war on us, and we firebombed Tokyo, that was the consequence of their action. And it's horrible, but this is human life.

There's a, um, there's something that I've come to find in myself that there's a kind of like philosophical multi, two operating systems, or more than two, probably running at the same time, that I become more comfortable with. And one is a fairly radical libertarianism. Yeah. Which is to say, which is also kind of riding on top of my Catholic faith. So, yes, as a Catholic, as a Christian, Jesus basically says, we are all created in the image and likeness of God. Have like a universal, that's what Catholic actually means, dignity. Yes. So that's super crazy radical. Like almost nothing else happening that gives rise to essentially the West. Yes. Like the notion that there should be any kind of equality, that the, that the divine right of kings is, is not a thing. That's all Christ. So, so I think like a kind of radical libertarianism can emerge out of that. And then it can kind of forget that and evolve into nonsense. But still, but then there's this other layer that, that as I've aged, has has come in. And I don't think it's incompatible. It's a certain Machiavellian realism about the nature of the world. Yes. And this is where something like the Israel-Palestine thing comes in from it. Yes. Which is like, I don't know about these land claims historically or otherwise. Here's what I do know. Um, every nation-state has been constructed and won by conquest. Yeah. That's just observable fact. And if you start a war and you lose, tough [ __ ] luck. Yes. Yes. I'm sorry. I agree with that. Like, well, you know, the British left India and India and Pakistan was a bloody disaster. But that's history. Yes. So the rest of this stuff is like, not really, like I don't think they are really serious about it. It's just like, well, you just want to win and you lost. And let's just, isn't it, is it really anything more than you wanted to win, you lost?

Yeah. I'm curious as an external observer, what would you see as my political and philosophic, like, if you had to write to another friend, what my political and philosophic influences are, what would you say? I would, that's an interesting question. I mean, I think that they're very similar to mine, actually. I'd agree. Um, you're, and actually, this is a good place for us to kind of talk a little bit about your background as a way to, to start to wrap up our conversation for now. So, um, let me turn it back on you. So if, if there's, if there's a viewer who's here and said, like, that this was a really interesting conversation. I seem to recall you saying you're like a 23-year-old college dropout. So wait a second, why should I care about anything you have to say? Why is this, why are any of your opinions anything other than the rantings of of a hubristic young man who hasn't lived, has lived more than some, but still hasn't lived enough to be so confident? Go to hell. Yeah. Go to hell. No, seriously, it's a reasonable question. Oh, you judge someone based off the quality of what they say, not their credentials. I mean, it's like war, where when all is said and done, the question is, do you win or do you lose the war? And you can talk about the supply chains, you can talk about the strategy. The question is, do you win? And so if your opinions are accurate, they're accurate. And if they're not accurate, they're not accurate. And I want to be judged based off whether or not my predictions are accurate, not when you look at the great thinkers of history, you look at Socrates, he was a stonemason's son who just hung out in the marketplace trolling people. You look at Confucius, he was a failed basically DMV worker for the society he was in. You look at Marquis de Sade. And de Sade actually, he has a trem, he has a tremendous philosophic importance on leftist philosophy, which is something they'd never say. And I don't want to get too deep in that because I think it does a disservice to the left. He was a degenerate sociopathic nobleman. There's a comic book series that I read a while back called The Invisibles, yeah, that venerates the Marquis de Sade. And in some ways, in looking back on it now, was like a super proto, here's what a sci-fi woke utopian, yeah, hero, hero experience would look like. And I didn't realize it when I was reading it at the time because I just found, oh, this is kind of interesting. But it's actually like, yeah, it was a Mary to transhuman degenerate hellscape experience to to go. De Sade's thing was his idea that if you, if you use degeneracy, you can strip away the external trappings of people's personalities to attain some deep, perverse spirituality. I mean, it's basically, I think it's satanic. I can say that comfortably. And I look at a lot of wokeness where it's, we want to strip away every single part of your identity to get this like pure, authentic core, your truth, exact. And I, I, so these things are, these things have all become, I'm sorry to, I'm kind of interrupting, but do you find it all in spending this much time with these ideas that the slogans just become like a joke? Yeah. And you're shocked that people, that anyone takes any of them seriously? Oh, yeah. I feel that all the time. Where I listen to like the believe all women thing. I, I grew up in the Me Too era and I realized that really screwed over a lot of Gen Z guys because their first introduction to dating was basically, uh, always worry about if you're coming across as too strong to a woman. Believe everything a woman says. Um, you should always be like, you shouldn't try to be hyper-masculine, you try to be sensitive. And that really screwed over a lot of Gen Z guys. I think that's actually something that not enough people have really talked about. Yes. Because it's, it is my, I've talked to my son about this and he's, he's said similar, like things that the, and he's the, he doesn't, he can explain the dynamics. He's actually had girlfriends and stuff. And he's, he's like, he's like, he's like 90s normal. Yeah. Yeah. So that is a great credit to give. But the, the paralyzing fear and the sort of imputed guilt for the generation that was just born in the past 20 years and has nothing to do with the past. Yes. Like the sins of the father befalling on our sons thing is so evil. Yes. It's so contemptible. As a father of a, and as a mother, like how could any parent look upon their children and not be like, what, what did you say about my kid? Like, go, go after yourself. Yeah. Like, I don't, I don't get. Man, that gets my, that gets me going. I feel the same way. Uh, and it's why I say most of the issues with Gen Z are Boomer bureaucracies that pushed way further than anyone wanted them to. And there was no, I don't think the Boomers ever thought, what would happen to future generations? I think that whatever they believed the conditions were when they were growing up would continue magically. And they had no concept of the immense sacrifices their parents made to give them the America they had. And well, they were 60s radicals who then got jobs at Goldman Sachs and now live in super zip codes in places like Montclair, New Jersey. Yes. With married with kids, earning reasonable, like mid to high six-figure salaries. Yes. And holding luxury beliefs that destroy everyone around them, but not them. Yes. Yes. Um, and I mean, examples of the bureaucracies that went too far: immigration, academia, inflation, the school system. There's like 15 of these. And for all of them, all, all of the traditional corporate press. Yes. It's, it's a Boomer virtue signaling to their buddies without any care of the costs they're inflicting. And that affects young people in my age, especially. And the thing I can't get past is the school system where they told young guys my age, we have too many. They would say in science class, we have too many white males, uh, in science. And we need to make space for other people in science. This is, yeah. What does it even mean? What does it even mean? It's like, they have in their head, yeah, that progress is a game of, um, my, I used to play this game with my dad, King of the Hill. Yeah. The Jersey Shore. We would build them, we would build up just a small like mountain of, of sand. And then my dad would get stand on the top of it and he'd invite me to try to knock him off the top. It is zero-sum. Because these people aren't competent, so they can't build anything. So the, they're, they're parasitic people without skills. And so it is zero-sum for them. And yeah, that's the horrible thing. Like these are not, and I came to the conclusion, these are not morally good people. Because I've been watching through Hollywood movies over the last year, and it's hard for me to watch a lot of older Hollywood movies because the hypocrisy gets to me. Because I know what Hollywood was actually doing. And Keith was part of the Los Angeles influencer world, so it's something I was at least peripheral to. I know what they were really doing. And then when I see the messages they push on Hollywood, I find it disgusting. Like the dissonance is there. And of course, I can watch a lot of older movies. Like, there's lots of great Hollywood movies. I think Hollywood in thousands of years, at least five movies from the post-World War II era will be read, read about. In the same way, read, we read Roman and Greek classics. Maybe people in 2,000 years in the Mars colony will be watching The Godfather. And the, but it's intensely hypocritical. And it's intensely parasitic. And it's evil that we did this to an entire generation of young people. And there's, what, just the complete lack of psychological comprehension in the situation shocks me. And were the era of history, it's funny that there's a direct correlation between the amount of time they'll spend in therapy and their actual understanding of psychological issues. Where there's multiple things where we should have investigated, why is the left suicidal? Why, uh, is there this entire generation of young, of women that openly say their complete disdain for men? They'll openly say, men are gross, we don't need men, I don't need no man. That's a, that's a big issue. And it's not, not discussed seriously. Um, why is there, why, why are they saying this message to young men? It's this whole thing where there has to be this, actually, this leads back to the point you posited where the 20th century viewed things in purely material, scientific terms. And that's the real issue. Where we're facing, what's I think is a spiritual issue. It's, it's an issue with the human soul. And we have no frame of reference to understand how the soul works.

How do you think about, um, what an individual, yeah, should do if you're, if you're, you're soaking in all this and it's like, okay, so let me get this straight. We are at the end of a, of some kind of epic time, yeah, where, um, degeneracy and piracy and, um, and sort of luxury beliefs have set us up for a crash. Yeah. But, and even all the worst crashes, the majority of people still survive. Yeah. And then things get rebuilt. And it isn't, we won't know what it will look like. Yeah. So, so, you know, let's close out with, right, what to do? What to do as the individual? I, we don't get to, we don't get to manipulate systems. We get to act as individuals with agency. I'm careful with a lot of advice because most people when they give advice, they just say what's worked for them. And they have no frame of reference because the human, well, then let me, let me posit it along those lines. I have an answer. Okay. I just, I'm positing that first. Sure. So, uh, human society is an ecosystem. We're all different animals who are different. And most people's advice doesn't work for me. And so what I say, know yourself and know God. Because I don't know you, random guy in North Carolina. Random guy in North Carolina, you have a beautiful life. I know nothing about. I don't know what you like or dislike. So know yourself, know what you want, know what you're willing to put up with, know your asymmetric advantages, and take advantage of all of that. Because I find everyone wants to be a cog, or society tells you to be a cog. And they give this advice that's not good. And I hate. We tell young people hedonism is a moral good, which is it's ridiculous, but it's true. We tell young people, you should go to the club, you should get laid a lot, you should party, you should make a lot of money. That's not what most people want. Most people are only hedonists because they, they're told to be hedonists. They don't have a better idea. And one of the things I found in Los Angeles is the most depressing Hedonism is Hedonism with no pleasure attached. Hedonism as an addiction because you don't know anything else to do. And once you know who you are, and once you separate, it'll take you, it'll be almost like opium withdrawal. Once you pull away from all society's expectations and you know what you actually want, do you really want the fancy car? Or do you want the fancy car to impress people? And once you throw away their desire for the fancy car, you can think, okay, I really like doing woodworking. I'm going to be a, a carpenter. That'll make me enough money to get by and I won't hate myself. And once you know God, you will have all of your actions be an extension of the universal whole. And so by knowing yourself and knowing God, you can disentangle yourself from all of the mind going on all around you.

I think that's fantastic advice. I, I endorse that advice wholeheartedly. Yeah. Um, even, even with the giant caveat that the know yourself is a giant chasm of of place to explore. Yeah. Um, I asked this question of every guest. I call this show, we call this show Dad Saves America. I believe that in that path, that us as men, this is, I think the most heroic thing we get to do, yeah, to be a father and to be a father who's present and active and embraces the heroism of the role. How do you understand your role in the American story?

I'm here to go hard and do my thing. I mean, so I went through a multiple-year grieving process of realizing everything's happening is, I thought I grew up in the John Hughes Simpsons America. And I realized as a kid, I loved Lord of the Rings. I loved reading about the Vikings and cowboys. I have five ancestors who died in the Indian Wars. And when I was a kid, I always resented the John Hughes Simpsons America because I wanted the glory. I wanted the accomplishment. I wanted the danger. I wanted the thrill of death. And I realized I'm blessed to actually live in that timeline. Because once you move past your grief about the world, you don't have, you can think about the world you do live in. And nothing's more thrilling than this. This is incredibly exciting. And I know that's what a young man should say. Because an older man say, hey, kid, like, be careful. And, but you, you got to find your things to cope with. We all have to have things to cope. And we all have to find ways to deal with a bad situation. So if it's a bad situation, lean into it.

Roger, thanks for being on Dad Saves America. Yes. Thanks. Thanks for having me. This was a great show.