How Elites & Baby Boomers Collapsed America | WhatifaItHist - PT 1

Summary

Podcast Summary: Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu

Episode: How Elites & Baby Boomers Collapsed America | Whatifalthist - PT 1

Date: August 20, 2024
Guest: Rudyard (Whatifalthist)

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Main Theme & Purpose

This episode dives into the roots and trajectory of the current crisis in America, exploring how the actions of the elites and Baby Boomers, as well as institutional and cultural trends, have set the stage for potential societal upheaval. The conversation ranges from historical analogies and economic crises to predictions about civil conflict, the impact of debt, the role of technology, and the collapse of societal cohesion. Through historical parallels, economic analysis, and cultural critique, the discussion aims to provide listeners with a clear-eyed view of systemic challenges and possible futures.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Historical Patterns of Societal Collapse and Civil Conflict

• Small Radical Factions Drive Upheaval:
  • “Most people won't want a war. Most people just want to continue with their lives. And then small groups, groups of radicals will seize power.” (A, 00:45)
• Historical Examples:
  • French Revolution, Russian Civil War, English Civil War: In each, just a small, highly organized minority catalyzed major change.
  • “The Jacobins were 3%. ... The unit of French politics that time was cafe based. So very small groups of people.” (A, 01:23)

2. Factors Leading to Current Crisis in America

• Economic Desperation Growing:
  • “Debt’s one. Where I said before, we've doubled the amount of debt we've had in the last 10 years… The sheer amount of debt we have is just never going to get paid back.” (A, 02:45)
  • “Most Americans can't make it another five years. ... Americans have gradually gotten poorer and poorer as a demographic, and so you're hitting desperate levels.” (A, 03:54)
• Political Legitimacy Failing:
  • Both left and right no longer trust elections; both threaten to dispute future results.
• Societal Frustration and Resentment:
  • “No one riots for normies. … The radicals organize, the normies don’t. Thus the normies’ voices get canceled out.” (A, 04:22)
  • Psychological malaise (“psychological Black Death”), loneliness, and a breakdown in social connectedness are rising.

3. Civil War Scenarios in the Modern U.S.

• Potential Triggers:
  • Disputed election leading to two rival governments—one in Washington, DC/Los Angeles, one in Austin, Texas.
  • Budget crisis or inability to address exploding debt.
  • “You would have the American people's government based out of Washington D.C. or new or Los Angeles. Then you would have the American patriots government based out of Austin, Texas.” (A, 08:57)
• Texas Border Crisis Example:
  • “Within a day, 25 states said they supported Texas over the federal government. Ten states said they would use their militaries to fight the US Government.” (A, 09:38)
• Violence as a Gradualist Process:
  • “I think it would be a gradualistic process where no one could take direct responsibility because humans hate taking responsibility.” (A, 07:38)
• Who Would Win?:
  • 80% chance for the right, based on military, geography, logistics, and cultural unity. The left are more “city states,” less territorially contiguous, and lack key infrastructure and military support. (A, 15:47)
  • Memorable quote: “The military tilts markedly conservative… the parts of the military that tilt the most conservative are the guys with the guns and the low level officers.” (A, 16:49)

4. The Economic “Great Wave”: Debt, Money Printing & the Collapse of the Middle Class

• Debt as a Leading Indicator:
  • “Debt is the dominant predictor of all this stuff.” (A, 20:46)
• Money Printing and Inequality:
  • Welfare and money printing post-COVID benefitted the wealthy, funneled money into assets, and drove up real estate and cost-of-living. “If you inflate money into the economy, it will naturally result in inequality skyrocketing.” (A, 25:35)
• Artificial Economy & Elites' Interests:
  • “America's not a capitalist economy. We're a fusion socialist capitalist economy because half of America's total economy is driven off the government.” (A, 21:27)

5. Explaining Inflation and Real Estate Distortions

• Inflation as Stealth Theft:
  • “People do not understand money printing. They don't know what it means. They don't know money printing is where everybody is stolen from and only the rich benefit.” (C, 19:55)
• Real Estate as an Illusory Store of Value:
  • Putting money into real estate is “paying for the privilege of keeping up with inflation.” (C, 27:27)
  • “People feel that there's this constant search for the other. … Spoiler alert, Scooby Doo, peel the mask off. It’s you.” (C, 29:00)

6. Elites, Ideology, and Institutional Myopia

• Shortsightedness Among Elites:
  • Policy-makers often ignore historical warnings (e.g., Spanish hyperinflation in the 17th century). “No one at the Fed knows about this economic crisis.” (A, 37:43)
• Worldview of the Elites:
  • “They train themselves into ignorance. … If you're just focused on that one thing … you can ignore the historical patterns.” (A, 39:43)
• Empty “Progress” Metrics:
  • “Because world line progress go up … you have to sacrifice your own well being for progress.” (A, 40:54)
  • GDP obsession leads to perverse incentives (e.g., bloated healthcare sector).
• Suicidal Civilizations:
  • “I just think the real answer is suicide. I think we're a civilization trying to commit suicide in every possible way.” (A, 83:40)

7. Societal Malaise: Dating Crisis & Technology Addiction

• Dating Apps and Inequality:
  • “If dating apps were a country they would be the second most unequal in the world after South Africa and ahead of Venezuela.” (A, 66:18)
  • “The easiest thing to do is just get rid of dating apps.” (A, 66:18)
• Technology as Social Disconnector:
  • Addiction likened to alcohol; personal discipline is limited—what’s needed is the rebuilding of social institutions and third places. (A, 69:35)
  • “There was all of these social institutions that facilitated not having screens, where there were third places young people would meet. … We made screens the easiest answer for young people.” (A, 71:34)

8. Potential Remedies: New Values, Communities, and Decentralization

• Integrating Tradition and Modernity:
  • “You need to find a way to integrate traditional value systems into modern science and modern culture.” (A, 55:44)
• Moral Guardrails:
  • Set unbreakable personal code (“Never going to dehumanize my enemies. … I'm never going to promote nihilism.”) (A, 55:44)
• Importance of Community:
  • “I actually think the biggest issue in modern society today is loneliness.” (A, 55:44)
• Emphasis on Decentralization:
  • Decentralization as defense against authoritarianism and technological overreach, especially as AI/genetic engineering mature. (A, 55:44)
• Core Axioms:
  • “Honor, truth, and freedom. … there's an important duality where there's the duality of the masculine and the feminine. … We need to have a masculine value system.” (A, 62:28)

9. Messages for Young Men and Gen Z

• Building Healthy Masculinity:
  • “I want there to be the establishment of a healthy masculine based off actual principles, not resentment. … Resentment's a fire that burns everything down rather than building.” (A, 63:07)
  • “If you're a young guy, don't do the things that make you think, that make you look cool or edgy… know who you are as a person and do what you actually want to do.” (A, 63:07)
• Gen Z Divided:
  • “The top 20% of Gen Z, and this is my personal experience, is 80% of the skills and 80% is 20%. So I think there's a subset of Gen Z who are the most competent generation since the greatest generation, but most of the generation are just, they can't function.” (A, 74:04)
• Just Do Things:
  • “It's often more important to make a decision than a good decision. … My father said, Rudyard, we live in a capitalist society, so get as many skills as possible and someone will pay you for one.” (A, 74:04)
  • “Hiking that far seems hard, but the task is just putting one foot in front of the other.” (A, 76:13)

10. 2024 Election and Cultural-Political Tensions

• America as Culturally Communist:
  • “Our entire society is underlied by Marxist assumptions. Where, where Marxist assumptions involve world is oppressor versus oppressed. … We are philosophically communist while we are social structure and economically not.” (A, 76:31)
• No Good Outcomes in the Next Election:
  • Either side winning likely leads to unrest—left fractures in case of clear conservative win, right escalates claims of illegitimacy if the left wins. (A, 78:19)

11. Immigration as a Catalyst and Sign of Societal Weakness

• Motivations for Mass Immigration:
  • “Vote stuffing ... keeping down wages ... destroying the collective social unity of the society ... the attempt to make things worse so that people beg to have the government save them.” (A, 80:05)
  • “Nearly a hundred percent of new job creation since COVID has gone to immigrants. … Reason three, destroying the collective social unity of the society.” (A, 80:05)
• Civilizational “Suicide”:
  • Societies can opt for self-destruction much as individuals do; “a society can be so sick that it welcomes invaders in.” (A, 83:40)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On small groups driving revolution:
  • “The radicals organize, the normies don’t. Thus the normies’ voices get canceled out.” (A, 04:22)
• On debt and historic ignorance:
  • “No one at the Fed knows about this economic crisis ... If they don’t know about the 17th century at all, it means they’re just making stuff up.” (A, 37:43)
• On societal malaise:
  • “I think we're a civilization trying to commit suicide in every possible way. And this is just one vector for suicide.” (A, 83:40)
• On healthy masculinity:
  • “Resentment's a fire that burns everything down rather than building people. Hurt people hurt people.” (A, 63:07)
• On progress and “line go up” thinking:
  • “You have to sacrifice your own well being for progress. … They see the line go up and think if we can just push further, we'll get progress.” (A, 40:54)
• On building a durable culture:
  • “You need to find a way to integrate traditional value systems into modern science and modern culture.” (A, 55:44)
• On what to do when the future is unclear:
  • “It's often more important to make a decision than a good decision.” (A, 74:04)
• On youth and action:
  • “Just do things. … Hiking that far seems hard, but the task is just putting one foot in front of the other.” (A, 76:13)

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Timestamps of Key Segments

• Civil War Prediction and Small Radical Factions: 01:17–06:43
• Texas Border Crisis as Modern Precedent: 09:33–12:00
• War Scenarios – Who Would Win?: 15:47–19:25
• Debt, Money Printing, and Collapse: 19:55–25:35
• Explaining Inflation & Real Estate: 25:35–32:12
• Elites’ Worldview and Tunnel Vision: 37:29–42:25
• Cycles of Collapse – West & China: 44:01–48:04
• Potential Remedies (Tradition, Values, Community): 55:44–62:56
• Advice for Young Men & Gen Z: 63:07–76:13
• 2024 Election Scenario Analysis: 76:13–78:19
• Immigration as Catalyst for Crisis: 79:54–83:40

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Tone and Language

The discussion alternates between empirical, historical analysis and a sometimes wry, sardonic critique of current events and institutional foolishness. Both Tom and Rudyard are candid, at times grave, but maintain an energetic, sometimes darkly humorous tone.

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Final Takeaways

This episode delivers a broad historical and cultural diagnosis of why the U.S. is at a critical social and economic juncture, connecting economic policy, cultural malaise, generational change, and political polarization into a framework for understanding how “elites and boomers collapsed America.” Listeners are urged to rethink not only mainstream narratives, but also their own role—as members of the public, as voters, and as individuals seeking to shape a different future.

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For continued analysis:
Check out Rudyard’s channel, Whatifalthist (YouTube), and his podcast History 102.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

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[A]

Spain did something that's pretty comparable to what we're doing where Spain had all this silver from Mexico and South America, the Spanish hyperinflated their currency and this killed the economy of Mediterranean Europe. It's why Italy stopped being the richest place in the world. Most people won't want a war. Most people just want to continue with their lives. And then small groups, groups of radicals will seize power. The thing that really shocked me there is that within a day, 25 states that they supported Texas over the federal government, 10 states said they'd use their militaries to fight the US government.

[C]

You now have Texas state militia or National Guard facing off against the US Military.

[A]

Yes, exactly. That's perfect. And I can give three historic examples to show exactly how this kind of thing would happen. The big prediction I'm known for is I think we're going to have a revolution or civil war within the next five years. And I really think within the next year. And I say these things. So you guys know that I'm a charlatan, so I'm actually falsifiable. If I wanted to con you over, I'd say a bunch of vague things and say that when the era of Sagittarius starts, then there will be great strife in the land. No, I predict we're going to have a civil war or revolution within the next five to one years. So the reason I say that is that it's inside the incentive structures of the elites involved, where if you look at these historic crises, and I said this in a dozen other podcasts, is it's not the majority population that leads to them. There are small groups of radicals that hijack the process. So for the French Revolution, The Jacobins were 3%. Sorry, all leftists were something like 3% of France's population. And the Jacobins the faction that won were so small that you could pick out factions in the French Revolution based off what cafes they hung out in. It was the unit of French politics that time was cafe based. So very small groups of people. Russian Civil War the Bolshevik communists were like, again, less than 3% of Russia's population. The Bolsheviks were a minority of the communists in turn. English Civil WAR it was commonly said that the English were so weak as a people because it had been a century and a half since England had had a real land war. People said the English had grown too soft to fight. What happened instead was that the two factions, the royalists and the parliamentarians, they would just draft men. And so in our society, most people won't want a war. Most people just want to continue with their lives. And then small groups of radicals will seize power. And again, something I've said before is that no one riots for normies. No one pushes for normie interests people. The radicals organize, the normies don't. Thus the normies voices get canceled out. And so there's a bunch of levers I see can't get pushed much further. The debt's one. Where I said before, we've doubled the amount of debt we've had in the last 10 years. This is just. This is one of those things where, like, the news should be screaming about this every day, but they don't, that the amount of. The sheer amount of debt we have is just never going to get paid back. But we spend more paying off the interest, which is 5% of the debt, than we do the military. Now how are we going to pay off the rest of the debt? So debt's one. Immigration is another. Where we had like 40 million immigrant illegal immigrants before Biden's added around another 10 million. We can't push immigration much further. Economic issues are another one where Americans have kept getting poorer, where Americans built up a lot of savings over Covid and now something like 2/3 of Americans, they don't have a $1,000 emergency cost. And so Americans have gradually gotten poorer and poorer as a demographic, and so you're hitting desper levels. And so just on a financial basis, most Americans can't make it another five years. And so when you add up all these things, debt, financial issues, psychological issues, immigration, neither side is going to. Both sides have not respected the last two elections. So there's no chance the right and the left respects this coming election where both the conservatives and the left have said that they do, they will not basically honor the results of this election where I mean, that was Trump's thing from last election. He's cast doubt on it this election. And for the left, there was a senator who said that, who said that if the Trump wins this election, that they'll try to use the 14th Amendment to get the results thrown out. And so you have all these triggers that can't really get moved much further. And what happens when you get in a very hard situation where there aren't easy answers is you just say, screw it, we're going to have a war. And so you end up with this place where there, the leaders involved have an incentive to defect, because past a certain range, if you're a conservative politician and the left asks for another budget concession, it's your active incentive for you to just start a war because you have a higher chance of getting reelected doing so than, than you do if you cooperate. And so all these wars start when one side asks concession from the other side that they're not willing to do. That was the French rev. The French Revolution, the English Civil War were caused by budget crises, the American Civil War by an election dispute. The fall of the Roman Republic was the assassination of a popular political candidate. These are all examples. And so, um, the. Of all of those, I think the most important one is budget issues, where we're getting to the point where the average American is economically desperate enough that if you're in debt and you're not going to get laid and all that stuff you don't have, you're going to roll the dice. Because if you roll the dice, even if there's a 50% chance of dying, you know, you're screwed in this timeline, so might as well roll the dice.

[C]

Okay, so here's what I just heard. Let me know if I missed anything. You've got everybody in a terrible economic situation. Older people are aware enough of how things have changed that they are dissatisfied. Young people just don't like their lot in life. You've got the levers that are maxed out. There's no way to go any farther. And now the breaking point is going to be either, hey, we're about to lose power, and so I'm better off in a situation where I refuse to acknowledge this election, for instance, and we tell the people, hey, the election's been stolen, you need to stand up and fight for your right, and then people actually do that, or the flip side, that the concession is asked for, we're unwilling to give it, and now somebody actually outright calls for violence.

[A]

Yes, like that. I think it would be a gradualistic process where no one could take direct responsibility because humans hate taking responsibility.

[C]

Where does the first shot get fired?

[A]

So let me give you a couple different scenarios. The most likely scenario is an election issue and I would say budget issue if the election's not right up and close to us. And so a scenario, I'll give you like two or three scenarios. One scenario is that there's an election issue. And then like Philadelphia, I'm from Pennsylvania, Philadelphia is an incredibly corrupt city. If the conservatives said that the Philly government was stuffing the ballot box, they would have complete plausible deniability whether or not it's true. And so the conservatives, there's an election issue. And I think for both a budget or election issue, the parallel would come from the American and the English Civil War where and countries tend to repeat there tend to be genetic patterns and how genetic or cultural patterns and how societies have crises where in three different French court crises there was a budget issue and then the Estates general formed an independent legislature. But what I think would happen in both cases is that there would be an issue and then they would form two different governments. And then you would have the American people's government based out of Washington D.C. or new or Los Angeles. Then you would have the American patriots government based out of Austin, Texas. And so you have two governments that are claiming to be the one true government. And what that does legally is it removes any legal rights to whole. It removes any legal right to not do bad things. Because if you are the one true government, you have the legal. You have the legal right hand. And what would happen is, I would guess something some minor violence that spirals out where if a conflict's like this, it's one thing and then it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. It's like a snowball.

[C]

It's like you lighten a specific example here. How does the Texas border crisis.

[A]

That was a great one. And so when I saw that, it sunk into my gut that we would have a war. Because I live in Texas, I know lots of people in the Texas government. And so I was relatively. I saw as it happened. That was fascinating. And for the people in your audience who don't know, and I'm surprised, I've talked to a lot of people, especially Europeans, they never knew the crisis happened. It was blocked outside of America is that the state of Texas basically tried to guard to block its southern border with Mexico. And the reasoning for it, because on a constitutional basis the federal government are the people who maintain external borders and states aren't allowed to. But The Texans said, because the government's not doing that, we get to step in. And so the thing that really shocked me there is that within a day, 25 states said they militarily supported Texas. Sorry, 25 states said they supported Texas over the federal government. Ten states said they militarily supported Texas. That's a huge deal. Within a single day, 10 states said they would use their militaries to fight the US Government. And National Guards aren't a joke. The Texas National Guard would be the fifth. It would be in the top five most powerful militaries in the world. It has air assets, it has tanks, it has that stuff. And. And so with conflicts like this, what

[C]

do you think in that would have happened? Because Biden just backed down?

[A]

Yes.

[C]

So if Biden had pushed the issue, is that the kind of thing you see spiraling out of control where Texas is like, hey, enough is enough? Yes, because I. For people that don't know, Texas was like, hey, you have to stop all these people flooding in. Government says, no, we're not going to. So Texas puts their own barbed wire up and stuff.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

The. The federal government comes in and cuts it down. I mean, this was not like a, hey, you know, a nice conversation. This was. Actions were being taken, countermeasures were being taken to let people into the country. I mean, this is like, literally crazy to me. And so all these states get behind Texas, and Biden's like, all right, all right, fine. But in that moment, in this scenario of how things could go awry, had he said, no, no, no, you don't understand. That is a federal border, and we will have it run our way. You now have Texas state militia or National Guard facing off against the US Military.

[A]

Yes, exactly. That's perfect. And I can give three historic examples to show exactly how this kind of thing would happen. American Civil War. The Southern states. Lincoln won the country on an abolished slavery platform or stopped the growth of slavery platform. And then he did. He won by not winning a single Southern state. So the south said, because none of our states voted, we're going to secede. And then there was a battle at Fort Sumter between federal troops and South Carolina National Guard. That's what started the US Civil War. American Revolution. The British were blockading Massachusetts for disobeying the British laws. And then the British marched out to Massachusetts militia, a Massachusetts militia, to take their gunpowder. And then what happened is that. Is that the. The Massachusetts militia fired on the British. Conflict starts English Civil War. The. The English government tries to force Anglicanism As a state religion on Scotland. The Scots are Presbyterian Scotland rebels. What happens is that the English government tries to get the monarch tried to get the, the Congress or the House of Commons to fund, to raise funds to fight a war against the Scots. The problem is that a majority of the English Parliament were also like Presbyterians, same as the Scots. So they said we're not going to, we're not going to pay for a war fighting against people who have the same religion as us. The King of England tried to shut down the Parliament and then it went out from there. So this pattern in the English speaking world is politically entrenched issue, legal dispute. And then from that there is a skirmish. The skirmish results in like the match being lit and then the gunpowder blowing up. And for all of these wars, the English speaking world is never ready for wars. Every single war the English speaking world's had for, I don't know since the Middle Ages, the first six months were just preparation because no one was prepared for it. And so what would happen is you have some kind of skirmish, let's say between Pennsylvania, New York State, National Guards, Ohio, Texas versus the federal military. Things spiral out from there then for the first six months, unless I have a wide variation between the of the war could either be done in two weeks or it would be a long and bloody multi year war and so on. The, and so what would happen in, in the larger war scenario is that for the first six months both sides conscript young men, they build up their economies and militaries and then the war happens.

[C]

But there's no difference between men and women. Why would they only conscript young men? Rudyard, tell me more.

[A]

I mean we all really know the answer. I mean we can play with. You can use women in some military roles. The Soviets did it with snipers. And keep in mind the act of warfare has not changed that much since World War II. I think the amount of military gear soldiers carry has doubled since World War II. So if anything warfare has gotten more physically enduring. It's using women for frontline soldiers is not effective. You can use women for snipers, for air, Air force, for like some I think for and for back end roles. But no, you, you'd. The point I was trying to make is you can script young people.

[C]

So the reason I bring that up obviously somewhat tongue in cheek is that the outcome of a civil war between the left and the right feels some somewhat scripted in terms of how the outcome would be. How do you think that plays out?

[A]

So I think there's an 80% chance the right wins. And I think it could either be the right wins over the long time or the short time. And the right has a series of strategic advantages over the left that I'm shocked no one in the left notices. So the right is a single geographically coherent territory. The right, if it became a country, would build its capital in Texas or the middle states. And you could go from central Pennsylvania out to like the Sierra Nevadas in California. As a single coherent conservative territory, the left is split up in city states and even on their core territories in the Northeast or the West Coast. Los Angeles is hundreds of miles From San Francisco, 100 miles from the Pacific Northwest. You could the territory between Washington D.C. and Philadelphia. In New England it's there's red territory in between. So the left is stuck between all these city states, lots of them stuck hundreds of miles inside conservative territor like, like Chicago or Minneapolis or Atlanta. And so the conservative single coherent territory, the military tilts markedly conservative. And the military is the most defining ba the most defining variable for civil wars historically. And the parts of the military that tilt the most conservative are the guys with the guns and the low level officers. And those are the people that determine the tilt of the military historically. The police tilt more conservative, gun owners tilt more conservative. Conservative areas of the produce the electricity and the food and the oil and the manufacturing. And conservatives also have a culture that's more masculine and warlike and hierarchical. And if we can look at leftist, and you could say this isn't indicative of the left's full power, but if you look at Chaz, you look at, at the Columbia protests, what happens in each case is within 12 hours the social structure of those places broke down because they don't, they can't organize people, they can't have strict rules, that stuff. So 80% of scenarios the right wins. In the more radical scenarios there's just a military coup like Indonesia, where in indonesia in the 60s the army backs the anti communist faction and overnight they wiped out the Indonesian left. Same things happened in a bunch of places in history like Hungary or Nazi Germany or that stuff and, and other scenario long scale war. Red and blue states end up with different power blocks, different internal economies. The war continues for years. Wars tend to be more bloody than people predict as a general rule, they tend to be more difficult than people predict. And the scenario the left wins is because thankfully the US government, thankfully the US military is loyal to the law and the Constitution. So if the right is very unhinged and launches a revolt where it's clearly not not legal. Then the left could use a conservative leaning military to crush the rightist rebels and then use that as plausible deniability to crack down on the right. When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Granger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's that's why Grainger offers millions of products in fast, dependable delivery. So you can keep your facility stocked, safe and running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

[B]

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[C]

Okay, so that is a very clear picture of what happens if something is sparked that's already militaristic in nature. Let's walk through the debt concession one so I think the most important issue of our time right now in America for sure by far is the debt. Yeah, people to your point, you don't know how people aren't screaming about this day and night. I feel the same. It seems crazy to me. I cannot believe people look at that and don't see any problem. People do not understand money printing. They don't know what it means. They don't know money printing is where everybody is stolen from and only the rich benefit. Now I'm rich and so when I start screaming about this, somebody really should start paying attention. I am legitimately freaked out that people are so nonchalant about debt. But how does debt spill into civil war in the next five years?

[A]

Debt is the dominant predictor of all this stuff. And so that's why, that's why the David Hackett Fisher Great Wave book is, was so important to me. Because you can use I talked about the three factors before, like inequality and wages. Debt and inflation are also really good predictors because what happens here, and I'm going to use the examples of it happened in all of these. It happened in the Black Death, it happened in the the English Civil War, in the French Revolution is that what happens over time is end up with it's like a failed marriage. And failed countries are often like failed marriages. Where now we've reached the point where, let's say Ryan Long, the comedian, has a really funny skit about what if America was a marriage between the right and the left? The marriage is completely dysfunctional now. And so imagine you have a failed marriage and then because you can't agree on shared directions, you get into debt where let's say because there's no shared sense of cultural unity. And so the right and the left are unwilling to make concessions to each other and all. Also there's this whole thing of as people get desperate and as there's lots of as people get desperate, they care more about their own survival and less at the common good. So there's more stuff with people pushing for the government to bail them out. And so an easy example of this is corporate corruption, where corporations, I like to say America's not a capitalist economy. We're a fusion socialist capitalist economy because half of America's total economy is driven off the government. And so what happens when people get desperate is they use the government to push personal corruption. And all of these desperate interest groups latch on to the government in order to get its stuff. So the military funding needs to stay high, the welfare funding needs to stay high. The funding for various corporate interests to support American interests need to say hi. So as society gets more desperate, people won't sacrifice to the whole. And to put off this issue, they it goes, the debt becomes this way to put off all these issues where if you're a president, you're like, I can't solve this issues. I'm going to just get more and more debt because we're not in a good place. And I'm just going to keep spreading debt so that I don't have to worry about this 30 years down the road. It reminds you of a Homer Simpson joke, man. I really, Homer Simpson said, man, Homer tomorrow. That guy must be. I feel so sorry for him. It's glad I'm not him as he's binge drinking. And that's kind of where it's at with the debt. And so debt's a really good predictor because it's a sign of social desperation. And it just keeps growing and growing and growing. And then I think a lot of

[C]

people, they, they don't understand why debt is a problem. I hear really smart people not lamenting about debt. So let me make it really tangible for people, okay? So it's gonna go something like this. And you tell me if you think this is crazy, you guys. We have created this feminine structure where we're gonna take care of everybody we want. Everybody has their insurance, Nobody gets left behind. Everybody has a good quality of life. Get as close to equal outcome as humanly possible. To do that, we're going to need to fund this the way that we're going to fund it. We either have to ask money to Congress basically to vote for things we know they won't do it. So what we're going to do is keep raising the debt ceiling. And the way that we're going to meet our obligations to the interest on the debt is through money printing. Now, for anybody that has not yet heard me talk about the way money printing works, it goes something like this. This, you were putting extra dollars into the system with no corresponding increase of things to buy, which means everybody's buying power goes down. But I look at my bank account and if I had a hundred dollars in my bank, I still have a hundred dollars. Now, the fact that that hundred dollars can now only buy $75 worth of stuff, I don't really notice that. I. I feel it emotionally, but I can't explain it logically. And so I just keep going with it then, because even though it isn't a one for one, for reasons that are too complicated to address right now, there is not a one for one. If you print 25% of the money supply, you will not get exactly 25% inflation, but it is the exact same phenomena. So when you print money, you get inflation. So we print money, people's buying power goes down. That is inflation. Though that sounds counterintuitive. So we're printing money. The cost of goods go up, up. I'm not able to buy as much. And now I start to have a real problem. I already couldn't make my payments, I couldn't buy all the groceries I wanted. And now this starts to push me into a period of desperation. And now we're back to, you can't be a weak man. You can't not be paying attention because you're going hungry. You can't put gas in your car. You can't feed your kids, can't feed yourself if you're single. And so all of a sudden that malaise is waiting for a demagogue to come along and tell you why your life sucks.

[A]

Yes, you explained that perfectly. Yeah, you nailed that. And the thing is, it makes sense for the people involved. It makes sense for them to do it because they don't bear the costs. And people seem to think that a Great irony is that there was huge welfare payments for Covid and that resulted in massive increases in inequality. The one of the sharpest we've seen in record in American history because you have Covid, you give someone a check to keep them around, keep them alive. They spend it on Amazon. That goes to Amazon stock. It goes to Jeff Bezos, Pocke. And so if you inflate money into the economy, it will naturally result in inequality skyrocketing because the money will naturally coagulate into the stock market, into real estate. The reason real estate's so ridiculously expensive is the government printed all this money and even invested it in real estate because a house is always going to be there. As the currency gets worse, you're still going to have your kitchen sink and you're still going to have the house. So real estate prices are artificially inflated in that they've nearly doubled in the last five. But people aren't buying houses. And it's a remarkable thing where the real estate costs have stayed very high for years because there's all this excess money that ends up in real estate because it's one of the best hedges against inflation. But then it destroys the average cost of living for normal people because lower class and young Americans spend two thirds of their income on rent. And so that's ironically the government, to get out of this sort of crisis made it vastly worse. Because if, if you increase rent, and that's two thirds of young people's income, you're, you're wipe. It doesn't matter if electronics prices have stayed stable or like, I don't know, food's not as bad as real estate. It's the elephant in the room.

[C]

I have a growing hypothesis about what's actually happening in the real estate market. I think people misread real estate a little bit. Let me lay it out, see what you think. I think that the reason people put money into real estate is it is a forced discipline to pay into a savings account that will allow you to pay for the privilege of keeping up with inflation. But the reality is you can't just put money in a house and expect 40 years later that that money will be there matching inflation. The reality is to get the value of your house to go up to match inflation, which only happens because buying power is going down. And so really it would would the right way to look at the increase in the cost of housing or the value of the house you own.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

Is that the purchasing power of the dollar is going down. Now you have to constantly pay into that house to keep up the maintenance, all that stuff, property tax, all that. So you're actually essentially paying into an insurance scheme that is your property that says, hey, if you keep up all of your payments of property tax upkeep on the house, all of that, that, that, yes, it will more or less match inflation over the long run, but you paid a lot of money for the privilege. And the reason that house housing prices are staying so high is a combination of. People still believe that a great place to put your money is into real estate. And BlackRock is just buying up all these single family homes, ironically, by aggregating the money of people who are putting their money with BlackRock.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And so, so people feel that there's this constant search for the other. Who are all these people that are doing all of this evil shit? It's you, boys and girls. Spoiler alert, Scooby Doo, peel the mask off.

[A]

It's you.

[C]

Like if you own money or you have your money with BlackRock, they're investing that money into snatching up the houses. So it isn't just BlackRock that is benefiting from this, it's anybody that has money with BlackRock. Yes, so. So it is a very weird system. And yes, there really are elites and yes, the game really is rigged against you and all of that, but it's rigged in ways that people don't fully understand. And because of that, they lash out at the wrong people and remind me of the cats that you were talking about at the beginning.

[A]

Exactly.

[C]

And they start lashing out at the wrong people. It's crazy.

[A]

I'm glad you said that. That's one of my least favorite things because whenever I talk about these macro demographic economic crises, people say it's the left, it's women, it's the Jews, it's the globalists, it's the lizard men.

[C]

And they lost me at the lizard men.

[A]

There are people who believe that, like

[C]

literally believe they're lizard men.

[A]

I think like 1 or 2% of the population actually thinks it's. Keep in mind, like, I'm officially terrified. No, yeah, I think they, they've done studies on this. A couple percentage of the population actually think lizard men run society. Keep in mind, average iq, half the population's beneath that. And so, yeah, I mean people like to blame someone because that's an easy answer. And the thing with the reason BlackRock has such a huge amount of money and BlackRock pushes its social agenda in a variety of ways. Whether ESG scores the stock market is because of the government money. Printing because the government money printing. If you. If. Because at this point a majority of our currency is false. In a healthy economy, currency should be representative of actual physical things like this mug. But no, in a false economy, it's reflective of what the government prints. And the problem you run into past a certain point, and this is the issue of our entire society, is that when the, when the currency becomes a reflection of the government, stuff goes to political buddies. And so that's what's going on in our society where blackrock has the ESG score which is based around various leftist social issues. And so the reason that there's all this leftist culture today and the reason why it Keep in mind for a company like Disney, some minuscule amount of their market cares about leftist issues because keep in mind they make most of their money outside America. And in PL America they're woke people are 10% of the population in Indonesia and China, it's none. And so the reason they're doing that is because the economy is mostly artificial. And thus you get good things in an artificial economy by playing to the people who are giving you the artificial money. And it's also why there was this, this advertising scheme where it can. It's 90% of advertisers and it's constructed around not working with conservatives because. And that's insane when you hear it because when the money is artificial, the economy becomes a pandering to the people making the fake money. But that's not sustainable in any way, shape or form.

[C]

Yeah, I want to go back to something that you said about the money should be something physical like the cup. I will try to make this as like deadly simple as I can to see test my own knowledge and see if it can be useful to people. Yeah, it doesn't need to be tied to physical goods.

[A]

Agreed.

[C]

However, if you create a physical good and put money into the system, that's how you keep the imbalance from of printing money from getting out of hand. Okay, Set that aside. I believe that people have a moral right, the kind of moral right that should be protected in the Constitution that says you should have a store of value that you can use that cannot be inflated.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Now, spoiler alert. I am into crypto. I refuse to be labeled a crypto. Bro, that is not at all my vibrant thinking. But I do believe in crypto in the sense that bitcoin cannot be inflated. Now what I like about about bitcoin, even though I fully recognize that part of why people love it right now is its volatility that's what people like. Once you understand that people like the volatility, it becomes less confusing. But set that aside for a second. It is a thing that right now has cultural energy. People believe it has value because they believe it has value and it cannot be inflated. You can actually store your money there. Now, when I see the government attack that, I get very upset. Set.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

Because what they are doing is making it impossible for people to escape the system where your money can be taken from you, your purchasing power can be taken from you by printing without needing to talk to Congress or get the vote.

[A]

Yes, that.

[C]

That is immoral to me. And I believe that we have to have something where somebody can work their whole life, save 10% of their salary, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. And when they retire, the same purchasing power that was there when they saved is there when they retire.

[A]

Yes, yes, agreed. The great irony is that when you look at the things the elite says they're doing now, it's remarkable. I frequently look at the things the World Economic Forum, and that's not a powerful organization in of itself, but it's representative of very powerful people. And it's a weather vane. And I'm like, why would you ever say this stuff? If I was a mastermind trying to do all this stuff, I would put up this front and this facade of just being completely cuddly and completely undangerous. Why would you say you will own nothing and be happy? Why would you say you're going to live in a pod and eat bugs? And I think it's just that they're that socially detached from the mainstream that they don't realize how it comes across. But I mean, they have advertising people worth millions of dollars who should know that, but they don't. But I mean, so you look at. This is most pronounced in Europe and China, where the attempt to get rid of a physical currency. Where Europe, a lot of North European countries, they've had negative interest rates for years. And for people who don't know economics, what that means is that the government basically takes money out of your pocket. Well, if you hold it in assets. And it comes from this economic philosophy called Keynesianism that you should just spend all the time to stimulate the economy. And I don't want this to turn into a Cane versus Hayek debate. But what they're doing is the creation of a completely artificial currency, negative interest rates. This is about the establishment of a permanent serf class, because you're not supposed. If you can't build up your assets. It means you can't own stuff on a social basis. You have to work in a big company or for one of the government's cronies. You can't own your house. You have to rent the. Twenty years ago, it was rare to rent a Surface. Now every single service is rentable. I bought Photoshop before it moved onto a renting system explicitly so I wouldn't have to rent Photoshop Shop and Adobe. Adobe Premiere. And so, yeah, it's the attempt to gradually turn the population to be completely servile economically. And it's gone furthest. They don't use physical currency in China. In China, every single interaction. And I've been there, I've seen this is done with your phone, the wallet. The problem, though, is the Chinese government can say you posted a Winnie the Pooh me a Winnie the Pooh meme. Your social credit score is too low. You can't go to restaurants anymore. That's what happens when you move to a completely artificial deflationary currency. Where. I mean, the freezing of bank accounts is something that terrifies me. Where in Canada, and I'm a Canadian citizen, I've lived there. They froze the bank accounts of the truckers, and that was completely what the things the truckers did were completely legal in their Canadian. Canadian rules. And so if you can freeze someone's bank account, you completely control them. And the public are just. I can't believe this isn't an issue of greater discussion, bro.

[C]

It gave me heart palpitations. Yeah, I can't believe it's insane. Let me ask. Because the thing on all of this that I think is problematic is people don't understand where this goes. And it seems like even the people that are in the economic driver's seat don't seem to understand this.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

So. So I know that you know some people at the Fed and you ask a really simple question about what they knew about Spanish financial history. So tell me that story. Walk the audience through what we should learn from that.

[A]

I've lived a bizarre life that I can't really explain, but I've seen a lot of things in that life. And so I have a couple different avenues to look into what the elite believes. And I have two friends that used to work at the Fed and I asked them this question. Do you know about Spain's hyperinflation in the 17th century? Because Spain did something that's pretty comparable to what we're doing, where Spain had all this silver from Mexico and South America, the Spanish hyperinflated Their currency. And this killed the economy of Mediterranean Europe. It's why Italy stopped being the richest place in the world. And no one at the. I asked two of my friends who worked at the Fed, does anyone at the Fed know about this economic crisis? And they said, no one. And that was horrifying because these people are paid very significant amounts of money to know about the economy. This. This should be their job. And the 70th century, from a historian's perspective, is recent. It's called modern. And so if they don't know about the 17th century at all, it means they're just making stuff up. And they have no. It means they can only. And this is a strange story where I spoke to this. I was speaking to this lady. She's him. She's very wealthy. She's worth tens of millions of dollars. She's like 27 years old. And so we had a conversation where she said, is investing in real estate a good idea? And I said, I think the price of real estate will crash over the course of your life. By the time you're 60, the price of real estate will be much lower than today due to population decline. And she said, you're a historian, you should look at history and see that real estate's kept rising over the 20th century. And I said, said, you can't just. Like, that's just the last lifetime. History's so much longer. But it's lots of very myopic stuff like that. And from what I've gathered about the elite, the impression I get is that they train themselves into ignorance. They train themselves into not seeing obvious things because it's against their self interest to see obvious things. And so it's this hyper fixation on whatever topic they study, and they use that to do evil things. Where if you're just an economic. If you just study economics, you can ignore the historical patterns. You can ignore how what you do affects real people. You can ignore what the social consequences of it are, how it affects your society, because you're just focused on that one thing, okay?

[C]

There's a lot of economic corruption going on right now. What is the end game that they think they will achieve if the end game is that it all blows up and it leads to war? Because money printing, you just can't do it forever. What is the end game they think they reach?

[A]

I don't know, man. These people, their conception of the universe is not mine. And it's funny that we grew up in the same time period we probably read, we supposedly went to the same education system through a certain point where I think they've removed anyone who can see the big picture. And so they're looking at, you know, the meme that goes line go up. World's good.

[C]

Or I don't, but that I follow.

[A]

Yeah, it's a parody of it's. And one of my friends has got a term called pinkerism. And pinkerism. And I don't dislike. I think Steven Pinker is a wonderful thinker. I think he's done a lot of. I think I agree with every single book he's written. He's not my vibe though, but I do respect him. But what Steven Pinker does is he says, because there are more toilets in Africa, the world's a better place. And then you ignore the collapse in quality of life in America or the deaths of despair because. Because world line progress go up. I was speaking to a friend where I was telling her about my worldview was informed by deindustrialization because I'm from the Rust Belt and my entire area got screwed over. And the thing that really got to me was it was just abandoned streets. And Philly's got a smaller population today than it did in 1950. And what the elite said the whole time was we are going to teach people coding jobs. We'll find some way to not to fix this, don't worry about it. And those were all complete lies. Uh, and then I, I was speaking to a friend and what she told me is the way the elite sees this is that you, you supporting your area's self interest against progress is selfish. You have to sacrifice your own well being for progress. So your idea that you deserve to have a real currency, your idea that you deserve to have a house, this is selfish because line go up, equal progress. And so they see the line go up and I think if we can just push further, we'll get progress.

[C]

And what is the line though?

[A]

What total. It's total gdp. There's a fascinating book called the Growth Delusion by David Pilling, and it's a look at how GDP stats mess with how people deal with the world. So for example, the reason the healthcare industry in America is a huge tapeworm, it just consumes this massive part of our economy for very little benefit. If you look at, like, if you look at a bunch of other countries, it's a more efficient economics. We spend like four times as much on healthcare per person as France does for significantly worse service in a variety of ways. And so the reason that's not a political issue is because the more money you spend on healthcare, the bigger the total GDP status. Kenya has an economy. So Kenya has an economy six times its size in fact, compared to its GDP stats. Because the way GDP stats are measured, Kenya is measured at one sixth its real size. And so what they're looking at. And so I could tell even as a teenager, I could tell when I was 16 or 15 that quality of life had gotten worse since the 70s because I talked to my parents and I would watch older movies and it was obvious from older movies in my parents that average life had gotten worse. But if you brought that up, people would immediately jump down your throat. And it wasn't even a discussion. And it's because total GDP number went up. And if total GDP goes up, even if that's mostly inflation, then you're winning. It's this very warped tunnel vision understanding of the world.

[C]

Okay, so how much do you think of what is happening right now is just in inescapable biological cycles? And how much of this is bad ideology that if we could replace the ideology, we could move in a better direction?

[A]

Whoa, man. Everything is itself and yet nothing. All things are connected, man.

[C]

Am I going to need to hit on the bong for this answer?

[A]

Yeah. So it's hard to disentangle things, I think because. Okay, I'm not going to give you the philosopher answer. A lot of it's natural cycle, a lot of it's our own stupidity. And they're, they, they're, they're mixing together. So let's say imagine you had an infinitely wealthy society. In an infinitely wealthy society people could allow to become infinitely stupid. And so it is this duality and I think it's, it's a combination of them. But something that I'm going to find very fascinating when I'm older is comparing how different societies have faced this demographic issue. And people like to do stuff like, like let's say blame the left or blame Jews. And I'm like, you can trace a lot of this stuff in China. And so if a lot of these same trends are happening in China, it's not the Jews fault.

[C]

And because really interesting.

[A]

Thank you.

[C]

Not heard anybody say that before.

[A]

I invented the idea. Yeah. Where because China, you have feminism. Birth rate in China is worse than America's, which is strained because poorer countries tend to have higher birth rates. China has says the Chinese government deals with this in the funniest way possible. Sorry. If you are Chinese, I am terribly sorry you have to live through an Orwellian dystopia. For me, 6,000 miles away, I can chuckle at it. But in China, and this is again, something we need to talk about as a society, but we don't, the government is going full authoritarian. And so I can see this as the parallel between the Western world and the Eastern world, where in the west the government enables it. Well, in China they go against it. Where, for example, they've planned, they've banned playing video games for too long in China, they've banned women wearing bikinis or like porn or like even cleavage in movies because they, they don't want men to. They don't want men. They want to force men to like, get married and like, go out with women in order to see boobs. And so a really funny thing is that so because women can't wear bikinis in China, they have men wear bikinis to model the underwear. What?

[C]

I'm sorry.

[A]

Yes, exactly. So the Chinese government doesn't let women wear bikinis publicly, so they have men wear them instead. And the Chinese government also has banned homosexuality. So what you're looking at China versus America, the Western world, the government enables the mouse utopia, and China, the government actively pushes against it using authoritarianism. And, and so you can see the cultural manifestations of the same underlying trend where everything I talk about, the psychological black death. The psychological black death, demographic crisis, inequality, it's happening at the same time in both China and America. But it's taking wildly. It's taking thinking. You see the same underlying economic trend manifest wildly differently in a different civilization because the context is so different. And so in America it's right versus left. I think China's going to have a civil war too. I think for them it'll be basically communist countryside versus capitalist cities, where the right versus the left is weird. In China, where their hard Marxist left are the social conservatives and the capitalists are the socially liberals people. So it is, to answer your question, it is an economic thing, but it's also, it manifests differently based off the ruling class and culture.

[C]

Why would it be happening at the same time? In the west and in China, these cycles sync up.

[A]

So the last time, the last verge time this cycle hit was mid 19th century. And so Central Europe had the revolutions of 1848 and then France had the Taiping Rebellion, 1853, both of which are. The Taiping Rebellion is the third bloodiest war in history. In the 1600s, in the year 1645, every major country on earth was fighting both an internal civil war and an external war at the same time. You have a couple that had it before or after, in the year 1348, the entire world was having a civil war and the Black Death. And then you can go back even further where the Chines Empire, the Han Dynasty fell at the same time as the Roman Empire, around 200 A.D, around 900 A.D. the Abbasid Caliphate in the Middle east, the Frankish Empire and the Tang Dynasty in China all fell at the same times. These cycles are linked historically and the more interconnected the world is, the more the cycles are linked. And so what we're seeing now is roughly approximate social issues around the world. And, and I, I've seen this living, I've lived, I lived as a digital nomad for a few years. So in France there were these, the Yellow Vest riots were happening. So I'd see explosions in the streets. In Peru, the Communist Party had just been elected there. In, in Canada they have their issues, America has issues. China, right after I went there, it became authoritarian and they shut down people from the west. India is having its nationalism, Russia is having a war with Ukraine. The European Union having, is having its crisis. Brazil, Brazil's getting really ugly. And so this is a normal historic thing where different areas of the world often experience their own crises at the same time as other crises.

[C]

As we look back on this moment between the US and China, what response to what's happening now? Are we going to look back and say that was the right way to play that man?

[A]

I don't know if I had a good answer. I don't think anyone's got a good answer. So for the US in China. China I. You're talking about if China attacks Taiwan. Right.

[C]

I'm just saying more. They're both confronted with the same issue. You got. America is right now this huge battle between the left and the right.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

Which to give my characterization on the left and the right, the left is compassion, the right is personal responsibility. I think those are given to us by evolution. I think for a society you need the dynamic tension between the two. But we've got this wild held imbalance due to the left taking over all the institutions and pumping out kids that just tend to lean left. But they're now bumping up against reality. So that's what I feel going on in America. And theoretically we're, what we're trying is do we reduce freedoms. But within our system you see a cultural giving up on things like freedom of speech. So that's how things are going here. Campus protests, things like, yes, over in China you've got got massive authoritarian crackdown, you've got the Uyghurs and concentration camps. But the play there being, hey, we need value homogeny. So we need everybody to see the world the same way. You've also got the credit score. So we're going to gamify, which you'll hear me talk about all the time. Gamification is amazing. And as I build out my virtual world, I think a lot about how do I avoid a Chinese dystopia. Yeah, but you've got them using credit score visibility into everything you do. The zero COVID lockdowns, like, I mean just really stamping down on it. But even though you have to give up your individual rights, will that end up being the right place? So let me go one step further. So there's one more thing just for the audience I want them to hear. China is passing all of these educational reforms is probably the right way to think about it. Trying to make sure that men are more masculine. Which is why I was so like they're having the men wear bikinis.

[A]

That's Chinese media.

[C]

Yeah. And that's the culture.

[A]

Sure.

[C]

So you've got we only want kids being taught by. We want kids focusing on physical education. We want physical education only being taught by former athletes. We want people looking up to masculine men. Like we don't want them to become effeminate. Okay, so those are the, the two different things happening right now.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

And will either of those be a winning solution or is it going to be something else entirely?

[A]

They're both going to fit fail. I mean you can't force people to do stuff where oftentimes your intention when you do something or how you do it's more important than the thing itself. And so I think the Chinese, the Chinese are realizing a lot of the mouse utopia stuff. But when you force someone to do something, it's going to backfire. Like if you have telling people they can only play video games for they can't play video games for longer than an hour a day is just going to make them resent you. And it's to going to completely backfire. If the Chinese forced this on the, if the Chinese government forces this upon their youth, their youth will just learn to hate those values. And this is one of the things we've seen with the left today where the left pushes things that are by all accounts pretty good, like racial tolerance, sexual tolerance, whatever, but they push it in such a ham fisted way that it creates the opposite reaction of a resentful right. And so that's what I would see happening in the left. And I think I Think no government today has the mental capability to understand what's happening, because if they did, we wouldn't have the crisis. And I find that for these historic crises, the worst thing that happens to a society is that they become too constrictive after said crises. So after the Black Death, everywhere in Eurasia except Europe became too socially conservative after the Black Death. After the. After that whole crisis, China became more authoritarian and they lost a lot of their creativity. Islam became more like hyper fundamentalist religious, and India also became more religious. And so Europe after the Black Death was able to maintain a more fluid social structure, while Asia became more constricted. It's funny, I brought that point up three times in this podcast so far, but it's not something I talk about that much on the channel. But so if you also look at after the end of the 17th, the crisis of the 17th century is that England and the Dutch did the best. Because what happens with these kinds of crises is that authorities use the world crisis as an excuse to crack down on dissent. And then when you crack down on dissent, you crack down on creativity. And so with the crisis of the 17th century, it's what killed Italy and Spain as being some of the wealthiest countries in the world. And so the thing that worries me about a crisis like this is, let's say a world crisis. Birth rate crashes, psychological Black Death, civil wars out of it, like complete religious fundamentalists or people who are authoritarians win. And then we fall into a dark age. Because if what happens in this crisis is just like hardcore religious fundamentalists braid, is that like you, you can say goodbye to science and modern art and all that stuff.

[C]

Okay, so if we don't have the playbook right now on how to do this, well, another here, not in China. If you had to solve this problem for us, what does either history tell us or what does your intuition tell us that we would need to do at a cultural values level to avoid the mouse utopia?

[A]

Life is a journey, man. It's the friends we make along the way. Life is the journey itself, and it's not the destination.

[C]

Now do you believe that? And it's just too earnest to say without.

[A]

Yes, exactly. Yes. It's one of those points that I got. My generation got shoved with propaganda in at such a young age that saying it comes across as ridiculous. But I mean, so the thing is, this crisis is just starting. My estimation of these events has changed markedly in every single year, especially the last four years. I don't know what I'll be telling you in four Years in. The good thing is that we have decades to figure it out. We're going to be here for decades. Hopefully we can face information as it comes, integrate new aspects into our worldview. What I would say though is there are several things that are incredibly important and I should make a video about this though, one of which is you need to find a way to integrate traditional value systems into modern science and modern culture. Where there are lots of things in the pre industrial world world, they're just never going to happen again. I can't see like I, at least I hope that arranged marriages don't come back after this because when people see what non arranged marriages look like, I don't think they, they can or like you can't go back to the pre scientific world because we've seen science. You can't go back to saying God wishes the spheres to orient. We have to incorporate science. And so my hope is that this century is going to be a philosophic and religious golden age age has thinkers incorporate as thinkers incorporate because we don't have the mental tools to deal with what's about to happen. Modernity is predicated upon infinite progress and infinite growth. What happens when that stops? Modernity has to go through a period of self reflection to figure out mental tools to understand what's happening. So first thing develop intellectual tools and value systems to assess it. Number two is develop communities. And I think if, if there's something I've heard from a bunch of wise friends at mouse utopia is if you're stuck in mouse utopia, leave the cage. The difference between us and mouse Utopia is mouse utopia is this self enclosed environment. If and it's comparable to the start of the Bible where Abraham saw the degeneracy of Uruk. And so Abraham went out into the desert with his family and formed the gentleman Jews. We've actually, we've looked at the genetics on that, we've looked at everyone who claims descent from Abraham and there was a Y chromosome ancestor in that place that time. So value system form communities of people who are opposed to mouse utopia and who can. Because I think, I actually think the biggest issue in modern society today is loneliness. So find a way to solve that and also develop guardrails against insanity. And so for example, when I saw things were going to go bad and I saw that we would spiral into political fanaticism, I gave myself rules for bridges I would never cross because I knew that this would affect me as a person. My mind is not immune to it. So I told myself I'm Never going to dehumanize my enemies. I'm never going to going to promote genocide. I'm never going to say that the truth doesn't exist. I'm never going to kill myself. I am never going to promote nihilism. And so I made those rules to myself because I think to myself, rudyard, you are in a rational place now. There may come a point where you're not rational. So you need to make rules for when you're not rational. And so we need to do that as a society where I think a great rule is don't enable nihilism. Where, because nihilism has no benefit. If you're like, yeah, people like the human race is just terrible and we should never have kids and we should hate each other and everything is lame. Why are you believing that? There's no benefit to believe it. And fourth is established decentralization. Actually, you guys should watch my manifesto I released a few months ago. Decentralization is incredibly important because my biggest worry here is that, that authorities use genetic engineering and AI and robots to enslave the population. Because what with these technologies that are coming into existence, and again, technology is impossible to predict. But a lot of this tech is already here is I don't want a society where the government as of now can monitor us every day, every second with these telescreens and that telescreen screen. The government can listen in on this conversation. I don't think that's. This is a ticking time bomb where if we don't solve this now, it's going to bite us later. And so I think the decentralization of power is my fourth thing where we need to develop incentives against basically governments using new technology to enslave the populace and especially so genetic engineering people into subservience. Because the government is every incentive, incentive to genetically engineer people to be subservient. And it doesn't have to be a bad thing. It could be this nanny state, very like helpful, like goodwill government, like we're gonna genetically engineer depression out of existence. The problem is that if you genetically engineer depression, you've genetically engineered everyone who's a social dissident. And so it's this double sided thing, if that makes sense.

[C]

It does very much. I think rules are critically important. It's something I talk a lot about, that I think people leave out of their lives at their peril. Peril. The rules that you implemented are actually very interesting. The manifesto, why did you write it? What did you want people to take away from it?

[A]

Yes. So I See a lot of factional development inside the right, where the left is a coherent ideology. The right doesn't. The right's this alliance of all these various factions. And if you guys haven't figured it out, I am some shade of a conservative politically. And inside the right, I see all of these different factions that have nothing to share. And it reminds me, I've read a lot on the evolution creation of the left over the course of the 19th century. And it reminds me very similarly to a period of leftist history after the French Revolution, where it's just chaos. And I think we're in that place for the right, and the right will develop a new culture. So I wanted. And most of the people I see who are also doing this, they're either sociopaths or grifters. So I thought, what could I do here I am going to drop my mental model for this before other people do so to basically get ahead of the competition.

[C]

Okay, if people were going to live by call it one to three axioms from your manifesto, what would they be?

[A]

In the manifesto, I say honor, truth and freedom. And those aren't all the values that I care about. I think there's an important duality where there's the duality of the masculine and the feminine. Feminine. In our society, we've got the feminine down for love and caring and support and community. We need to get the mask. We need to have a masculine value system. So those aren't your entire values, but I think they're a very useful antidote to the issues of our society.

[C]

You made a video that was aimed at young men. It was like my message to young men. What. What do you want those masculine values to be? What would be your message to young men?

[A]

So, like, I spend a lot of time in conservative space, and so I have a pretty good understanding what people are doing in different places. And it frankly scares me, like, being. Not being a sociopath is discouraged. Where I do stuff like I'll release on Twitter, you know, human rights are good sometimes. And all the comments are calling me a cuck. Or it's like, even stuff like the Holocaust is bad. People call you a cuck. And once you get to a culture where any appeal to humanity is tarnished and spat at, you have a culture that's about to do evil and is rationalizing evil. And so I want there to be the establishment of a healthy masculine based off actual principles, not resentment. Because resentment. Resentment's a fire that burns everything down rather than building people hurt people hurt people. And so you create this cycle of suffering. And what I say for that video, and I've gone through a phase of all the masculine self improvement guys like Peterson and Tate and those guys, is that none of it's about being happy. It's all about, like getting rich and getting girls and looking jacked. And like, I know lots of people who do that stuff. Most of them aren't happy. Why don't we just cut out the middleman and do what makes you happy? Happy. And the reason, the way you figure out what makes you happy is to know yourself. And so what I say is that people should increase their level of sentience. And sentience is a psychological trait which is your ability to assess yourself independently from the world. So most people in life, they follow the path that their social class, their iq, their region, their period of history tells them to do. Even most successful people follow the track they're left out in life. And so for sentience, you have the capability to analyze your place in the world and how you differ from that. And thus you can make decisions. You gain a degree of self awareness that gives you control over your life. And I think honor, freedom and truth are important values because they establish a moral framework through which to act in the world, where freedom establishes enough independence that you're capable of being a. They're capable of surviving from the tyrannies of culture or state. Honor gives you a moral code that you can hold yourself to as an individual, and truth gives you a good sense of the world. And so what I say is that if you're a young guy, don't do the things that make you think, that make you look cool or edgy or that know who you are as a person and do what you actually want to do do.

[C]

All right, we're in the middle of a pretty gnarly male dating crisis. So if my shade of what I've taken away from you, which is ultimately, if society doesn't create the tension where a lot of men can be successful in getting laid, then you're going to have a problem either of withdrawal or violence. Realistically, how do we solve the dating crisis?

[A]

The easiest thing to do is just get rid of dating apps. And I think so. A lot of people in my space blame women mostly for the dating crisis. I think it's mostly the mechanics of dating apps where. So imagine you're a man and an attractive woman in a major city gets a thousand offers of sex a week.

[C]

Week.

[A]

I've looked at the. I looked at their phones. It's often 200 a day. And so if you have that you go to the club, that stuff, you have infinite sex. That's a horrible incentive structure because it puts people for the women involved. It gives them such a high degree of selectivity that it, it, it's you're removing women are. So if dating apps were a country they would be the second most unequal in the world after South Africa and ahead of Venezuela. So if Tinder was a country it would be be like a failing third world communist country with a nobility. And so it's reasonable to understand that if you put any person under those kinds of incentives what it would do to their ego or like, like we all know rock stars are known for being super humble and great guys.

[C]

Yeah, that's what we know.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. And, and so I think people just so I'm going to be a boomer. Just people should go outside. The problem is that going outside is effort where if you're a zoomer, other zoomers don't go outside. And so it's this tragedy of the commons situation where like I think the biggest issue is because so over 60% of relationships are formed online now and among zoomers I'm guessing that's even higher. And that's not a good thing because the selection pressures for online dating are not as good as other forms. It's basically attractiveness. And, and so if you act and this is. John Haidt talks about this. This is just a broad issue in our culture that like you should see these things as heroin. These things are like meth. And I couch myself sometimes on a quiet Sunday to spending 12 hours on my phone and I feel disgusting. But the problem is that there's no mechanism against theft that and so we don't have any institutions against phone because

[C]

the you here I have before me a very bright Gen Z. And so let me ask the obvious question. You already know the power of rules. Why don't you have a rule around how much you use your phone?

[A]

So the problem is that you don't want to have nanny state rules because then in the after a generation or two people get resentful of I'm talking

[C]

personally and political posed. I don't want these from the top down that like I you should be able to let me duct tape my phone to my forehead if I want to. But I'm saying so I tweeted out today because of you think of screen time, video games, all the modern wonderful things as like alcohol. Yes in small quantities, ton of fun. Yes in large quantities, absolutely destructive. And it comes down to your personal discipline. Discipline as to whether or not it's going to be a problem or it's going to be something that you use when you want.

[A]

The problem with that is that statistically personal discipline is not effective for most people. You know, 95% of diets fail. And so on an individual basis, you can build up the willpower, but on a social basis, that's not going to work. And so what? The absence of something's normally not effective. What you need to do is the replacement. So the reason alcoholics are such big issues is alcohol has become their life. They're happy, they grab a drink, they're depressed, they grab a drink, they're with friends, they grab a drink. The neural highway to alcohol in their life is just very strong. And so the issue is, how do you fill up other stuff in their life that they can do instead of alcohol? And it's the. They build up hobbies, relationships, a bunch of other things. And so phones are the same way. And the problem with screen addiction, and I'm going to use an example of this, is that when. When the nate. When the Europeans in. Introduced alcohol to the Native Americans, it just completely destroyed their society. Native Americans would spend all day drinking. They just because they had no social protections against alcohol. So native communities would actually. There was a weird part of American history. There was a prophet and a messiah called Tecumseh based out of Illinois, who launched this warrior confederacy from Alabama to Canada in like 1810. No one remembers it, but he banned alcohol. And. And so the problem with us with screens is that it's a tragedy of the common situation where we. There was all of these social institutions that facilitated not having screens, where there were third places young people would meet. There was social etiquette about how to talk to someone. There was, people say, play outside. Outside, for most Americans is a parking lot. And so implicit in the problem is that we removed everything. We've made screens the easiest answer for young people. And so in the same way that for Alcoholics Anonymous, you tell an alcoholic, here's an organization where you're accountable to people. We need to find that institution for screens.

[C]

It's interesting. So I will assume that just like drugs, you have, when it comes to screen time, you have people that use it too much because they're not putting in rules. They're not thinking, hey, I should go spend a certain amount of time with other people, whatever, whatever, in physical space. And then you have people that just have an addictive personality. And more or less, no matter what they're going to find their way to an addiction, whether it's work, sex, drugs, alcohol, phones, whatever, they're, they're going to have an addiction. But I really believe while you're not going to catch everybody with building out rules, I think you catch a lot of people. To me, the, the big thing that falls apart is people don't know where they're trying to end end up. They don't have any hypothesized strategy on how to get where they want to end up. And there is this sort of nihilism, giving up the thing that I am glad you're making me confront because whenever somebody from Gen Z comes to me and says hey Tom, I want to be successful, but I feel lost. Whatever I don't know how to achieve, my answer is always the same. If you know how to make people money, you will always make money. And you can get so good at something that people can't stop you from doing it. So you can get so good at helping somebody else make money. You don't even have to start your own company company. Even if people are actively trying to stop you, you will be able to find a way. And that is true of Gen Z as much as it is true for anybody else. And so to me, dear Gen Z, the thing that I would say to you guys, because you are the future, you're going to get to run the country the way that you want to run the country and nobody's going to get to stop you because they are all going to die. And so my thing to them is what do you want it to be? You're, you can look at me as some dumb boomer who doesn't know what he's talking about, doesn't know how hard it is in your life, or you can look at me as a student of history who understands how all the shit moves in cycles. And there are always the people. You said it's, it's always a minority that can organize, that has a clear vision, that rallies the troops, conscripts the army saying don't be one of the conscript conscripted, be one of the people that rallies people. And then if you know where you want to go and you're willing to face your anxieties and get better at that and deal with the mental illness and not just hide and a hole and push yourself to get outside of it. And as someone who has struggled with crippling anxiety, you cannot point a finger at me and say that I don't know what it's like. I was an early adopter of that. So I very much know what it's like to deal with anxiety and to say I want to get somewhere. And anxiety is standing between me and my goal and I'm going to have to find a way to deal with that.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

So what in that message sucks?

[A]

I agree with all that. And, and so, yeah, I mean, there's a million things to say. Gen Z is the most class divided generation I've seen in a very long time, where the top 20% of Gen Z, and this is my personal experience, is 80% of the skills and 80% is 20%. So I think there's a subset of Gen Z who are the most competent generation since the greatest generation, but most of the generation are just, they can't function. And so it's going to be very, very strange to see that play out. And I mean, my piece of advice is just do stuff. Just do things. And my father, he had a couple quotes. One of it is, it's often more important to make a decision than a good decision. And he said, rudyard, you should do well in math. So if there's a major war, you can be in the artillery, not the infantry. And he also said, said Rudyard, we live in a capitalist society, so get as many skills as possible and someone will pay you for one. And I think that's a pretty good mental system. And so in my life, when I dropped that, when I. When I left high school, I hiked 600 miles in the Appalachian Trail alone, from the top of Massachusetts to the bottom of Pennsylvania because I wanted to do something. I wanted to face the real world. And through facing the real world, I would know who I was. Because I never liked school. And I wanted to because school felt really fake. It felt like a bunch of, like, hamster wheels. And so I wanted to do something hard and real. And then I worked on the channel after that. And then I. In the first semester of college, I was making enough money that I dropped out. And then I lived as a digital nomad in Mexico and a few other countries. So what I would say is, and what I remember from the Appalachian Trail is hiking that far seems hard, but the task is just putting one foot in front of the other. Hiking 600 miles involved involves the actual act, is just walking. And that's the case for most difficult things. It's. It looks intimidating, but just do it.

[C]

All right, let's talk the 2024 election. You've said that America is already communist. 1. I'd be curious to know what leads you to that? And which of the candidates leads us either to more communism or away? Or are they both just pushing in the same direction?

[A]

America's culturally communist. The video you're referencing is the four religions. And so the context of this video is I'm talking about what philosophic assumptions underlie a society. So America is obviously not economically communist. If it was, we'd all be talking with her in a breadline now. But on an, on a philosophic political basis, our entire society is underlied by Marxist assumptions. Where, where Marxist assumptions involve world is oppressor versus oppressed. Oppressed equals good. Pushing the interests of the oppressed is the moral thing. The world is material. Is. Is all material. Moral standards don't exist, thus increasing the economic level and equality of society. Is the morally correct outcome come that so much of our society is communist, indirectly or directly, that we forget it? Even conservatives today are philosophically communist in ways they don't understand, myself included. And so we are philosophically communist while we are social structure and economically not. I mean, that's an obvious question. I mean, the left is more culturally communist than the right is. I don't think either side is actually pushing for economic communist. And I think that, I mean, so the left, at this point, they aim at putting in their priests into every part of society because HR departments and DEI employees are really priests. It's a secular religion and they exist to monitor. Do the people in the organization follow the religion in the same way that back in the day you'd have a pastor?

[C]

All right, what's more likely to spark violence? If Harris wins but people don't believe it, or if Trump wins but people don't believe it?

[A]

I mean, I think there's going to be violence either way. If Harris wins, it removes plausible deniability from the right. And so there's a higher situation of Harris wins that the left can say that the right is completely unhinged and then used a military to back to destroy the right. So Harris victory, what happens then? Then again, it's all margin. If it's razor tight, both sides can claim that they really won and will if it's an overwhelming conservative victory, the left, you will see lots of antifas and we'll see lots of chazzes and maybe Blue City is forming city states, but that would put the military in, in the, in the right. And so you'd pick something. If the left wanted to gauge that war and there was an overwhelming conservative victory, they'd pick abortion or something like that. I don't know immigration, they'd say that for inalienable human rights we have to fight. And then if the left has an overwhelming victory, what happens is that the right would have less plausible deniability. And so if the right launches a revolt, the left could use the military to crush it.

[C]

Okay, in all of this, one thing that's sort of been dancing at the edges of the conversation, but we've never pulled it in, is immigration.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

What is the point of an open border? Why is the left pro immigration, just like unchecked immigration? Why the right against?

[A]

I was pro immigration until 2020 and then I turned around and the reason I was pro immigration was I just thought it's good to have more young people, it's good to harvest tal all the economic reasons you see. And then what happened was I saw that immigration is being pushed irrespective of economic interest. In Britain, for example, the British government spends 40,000 pounds a year on housing immigrants. The average immigrant, the average Brit makes less than 40,000 and in some parts of Britain the average is like 15,000. So that's just insane. And the Brits are losing a tremendous amount of money. And look at New York City. They're probably Los Angeles to New York City, they're housing immigrants in hotels for an incredibly expensive price. And so it's clear that past a certain point it's not, it's not economic self interest for the society. I think it's a constellation of a bunch of things. One is vote, vote, vote stuffing, where I didn't really see the importance of using IDs for voting until pretty recently, but now I see that if you don't have ideas for voting, you can just bunch bus a bunch of immigrants in. And then when, keep in mind 15, 10, 8 to 15 million immigrants have crossed the border since Biden, that's adding another Pennsylvania to the country. So it's not a small thing. That's first thing. Second thing is that it if we didn't have immigration, we would see a skyrocketing of wages for local Americans because due to aging and due to the trade war with China, where a lot of industries coming back to America and so capital and the elites don't want this to happen. So the only way to offset a natural massive increase in wages is to import a shit ton of immigrants. And an interesting thing, and I, I didn't believe this statistic is that nearly a hundred percent of new job creation since COVID has gone to immigrants. The statistics are absurd. And so what I've heard from people is that for agriculture as an example example, they are busing in immigrants to replace entire. I don't know if this is true. It wouldn't surprise me if they are busing in immigrants to replace entire farms or entire industrial systems. So reason one, vote stuffing. Reason two, keeping down wages. Reason three, destroying the collective social unity of the society where Western culture has developed all of these social traditions dating back to the Middle Ages that make it difficult for governments to open overreach where and Western governments have private individual rights, they have weapons ownership, they have a concept of the individual soul, separation of powers, whatever. And so most of the countries immigrants are from are not countries with those heritages. In Mexico, they've been ruled by an oppressive caste system for the last like 700 years, going back to even before the Spanish. And so. Or if you import Middle Easterners, the Middle east has never been a democracy, so you're importing populations that are familiar with government overreach. And also I think a lot of the motivation here is the attempt to make things worse so that people beg to have the government save them. You remove the police, crime gets too bad. Now you need political. Now you need the political brown shirts to protect you because the police are gone. And finally, I just think the real answer is suicide. I think we're a civilization trying to commit suicide in every possible way. And this is just one vector for suicide.

[C]

You're going to have to say more on that. Why? Why would society want to commit suicide? Is this just tied back to whatever biological thing breaks as we get to a certain size, or is there something else?

[A]

It's funny, this is obvious to me. So it's funny that I. It's funny to me that it's not a widespread idea. But I mean, SOC is not rational. Why would a person commit suicide?

[C]

Like, let me answer that. A person will commit suicide when they no longer believe they will ever feel good about themselves again. Yes, it is entirely about feeling.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

So it's a mistaken belief. But at the societal level, why would the. I mean, is this work if you believe that we're a cancer on the face of planet Earth and you want to save planet Earth, that's why you commit suicide. Like that's the only reason I could insert.

[A]

That's a rationalization. So it's the breakdown of social connection inside society, meaning that the individuals in the society push the collective to suicide. If you look at suicide notes that we've studied, the number one word is useless. People want to kill themselves where they feel when they feel like their lives don't have value and they feel like they're trapped. Once you hit critical mass of those people in the society, they push for, they push for it on the entire social structure. And this is, it's happening at a way worse level now. But for example, when the Persians conquered the Babylonian empire, the Babylonians opened the gates for them. There were lots of Greek cities that opened the gates to the Romans. A society can be so sick that it welcomes invaders in. That's happened before. And a society, it's not a rational thing, it's just the people involved, involved. The society is the manifest. And this is one of. One of my favorite video ever is the emotions of society. The emotions over history video where I talk about Asian cultures are shame based, Western or guilt based, tribal or fear based. And so the group manifests psychological neuroses in the same manner the individual does. And so if an individual can get suicidal, so can a society. And I believe we're suicidal because I mean, first of all, our own elite, our society. And it's strange that the west governments are democratically elected. They elected, they were elected to do this. They want the destruction of Western culture, the removal of our history and the statues of our leaders, the demographic replacement of white populations, the removal of traditions, the breakdown of the family, the. Just every single thing that would result in the West's identity we are actively trying to destroy. And it goes into stuff that, like deindustrialization in Europe. I can't believe that deindustrialization is an actual political agenda, but it's happening in the wealthiest and the most educated countries in the world, like Denmark or the Netherlands or Britain, where they're, they're making, they made farmers nearly get rid of their own cows, which is, it's just, it's insane.

[C]

It is insane. All right, man. Where can people follow you as you track a world going mad as you see it?

[A]

You should check out my channel, what if alt Hist. What if alt Hist. It's all free on YouTube. I have a second podcast called History 102 where I spend an hour explaining various historic periods like the fall of Rome, the American Civil War, etc. And I've got various other social medias. Thank you so much for having me, brother.

[C]

Thank you for being here. Guys. Do not sleep on history. It's one of the most important things you could be looking at in order to understand where the future future is going. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends be legendary. Take care. Peace.