"Great Depression Is Coming In 1-5 Years" - Civil War, Debt Crisis, Trump, BlackRock | WhatifaltHist

The big prediction I'm known for is I think we're going to have a revolution or civil war within the next 5 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. Um, if if I wanted to con you over I'd say a bunch of vague things and say when the era of Sagittarius starts then there'll be great strife in the land. No, I I predict we're going to have a civil war or revolution within the next 5 to 1 years. Um, so the reason that I say that is that it's inside the incentive structures of the elites involved. Um, where if you look at these historic crises, I said this in a dozen other podcasts, is it's not the majority population that leads to them. They're 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 uh 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 the unit of French politics that time was cafe based. So very small groups of people. Russian Civil War, the Bolshe- communists were like again less than 3% of Russia's population. The Bolsheviks were a minority of the communists in turn. Uh 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 debts one where I said before, um 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? Uh so debt's one, immigration is another where we had like 40 million immigrant illegal immigrants before. Biden's added added around another 10 million. We can't push immigration much further. Uh economic issues are another one where Americans have kept getting poorer. Where Americans built up a lot of savings over COVID and now uh 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 desperation levels. And so just on a financial basis um most Americans can't make it another 5 years. And so when you add up all these things, debt, financial issues, uh psychological issues, um 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 a senator who said that uh 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 uh just start a war because you have a higher chance of getting reelected doing so than uh uh than you do uh 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 Revo- The French Revolution, the English Civil War were caused by budget crises, um the American Civil War by an election dispute, um the fall of the Roman Republic was the assassination of a of a popular political candidate. These are all examples. And so, um uh the f- Of all those, uh 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. [snorts] Okay. So, uh here's what I just heard. Let me know if I missed anything. Um you've got everybody uh in a terrible economic situation. Um older people are aware enough of how things have changed that they're dissatisfied. Young people just don't like their lot in life. Uh 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 uh in a situation where I refuse to acknowledge this uh 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 or we're unwilling to give it and now somebody actually outright calls for violence. Uh yes, like that. I think it would be a gradualistic process where no one could take direct responsibility because humans hate taking responsibility. Um and does the first shot get fired? So let me give you a couple different scenarios. Uh 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. Um and so a scenario I'll give you like two or three scenarios. One scenario is that there's an election issue and then um 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. Um 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 in how genetic or cultural patterns in how societies have crises uh wherein 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 um 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 hold 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 the conflicts like this is one thing and then it gets bigger and bigger and bigger it's like a snowball it's like you like a a specific example here? How does the Texas border crisis? 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 and so I was relatively I saw as it happened that was fascinating and for 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 so right 25 states said they supported Texas over the federal government 10 states said they militarily supported Texas that's a huge deal within a single day 10 states said they'd use their military 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 um and so with conflicts like this What do you think in that would have happened cuz Biden just backed down? Yes. So if Biden had pushed the issue is that the kind of thing you see spiraling out of control where Texas like, "Hey, enough is enough?" Yes. Cuz 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. Yes. The the federal government comes in and cuts it down. I mean, this was not like a hey, uh 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. Uh 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 [snorts] border and we will have it run our way." You now have Texas state militia or National Guard facing off against the US military. 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 uh Lincoln won the country on an abolish slavery platform or stop 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 uh a Massachusetts militia uh to take their gunpowder. And then what happened is that um 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's 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's a skirmish. The skirmish results in like the the 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 had for, I don't know, since the Middle Ages, the first 6 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 and New York State National Guards, Ohio Texas versus the the federal military. Things spiral out from there. And for the first 6 months, unless I have a wide variation between the of the war could either be done in 2 weeks or it would be a long and bloody multi-year war. Um and so, on the um And so, what would happen in in the larger war scenario is that for the first 6 months both sides since conscript young men, they build up their economies and militaries, and then the war happens. But there's no difference between men and women. Why would they only conscript young men? Rudyard, tell me more. I mean, we all really know the answer. I mean, we we can play with we can play with the You can use women in some military roles. The Soviets did it with snipers and uh This And keep in mind, the act of warfare has not changed that much since World War it's it's actually the I think the amount of military gear soldiers carry has doubled since World War so if anything worth 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 the and for back-end roles but no you you'd the point I was trying to make is you can script young people. 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 somewhat scripted in terms of how the outcome would be how do you think that plays out? 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 is a series of strategic advantages over the left that I'm shocked no one on 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 away from San Francisco and hundreds of miles from the Pacific Northwest you could the territory between Washington DC 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 territory 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 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 country produce the electricity and the food and the oil and the manufacturing um and conservatives also have a culture that's more masculine and warlike and hierarchical. And if we can look at leftists, and you could say this isn't indicative of the left's full power, but if you look at Chaz, you look at uh 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 thing's happened in a bunch of places in history like Hungary or Nazi Germany or that stuff. Um and and um other scenario, long-scale war, red and blue states uh end up with different power blocks, different internal economies as 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. In the scenario the left wins, it's because thankfully the US government the 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 legal, then the left could use a conservative-leaning military to crush the rightist rebels and then use that as plausible deniability to uh crack down on the right. 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. This seems crazy to me. I can't 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. Uh I am legitimately freaked out that people are so nonchalant about debt. But, how does debt spill into civil war in the next 5 years? Debt is the dominant predictor of all this stuff. And so, that's Why? That's why the David Hackett Fischer Great Wave book is was so important to me because you can use inf- I talked with the three factors before like inequality and wages. Uh 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 and the French Revolution, is that what happens over time is that you 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. Um 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, um 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 also, there's this whole thing of um as people get desperate and as there's lots of as people get desperate, they care more about their own survival and less of 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 I 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 onto 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 stay high. 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 spending 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 the the 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, uh 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 past I think a lot of 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 uh tangible for people. Okay, so it's going to go something like this. And you tell me if you think this is crazy. Um you guys we have created this feminine structure where we're going to take care of everybody. We want to make sure 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 uh we either have to ask money to uh 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. Yes. Now for anybody that has not yet heard me talk about the way money printing works, it goes something like this. Uh you are 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 $100 in my bank, I still have $100. Now the fact that that $100 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 uh 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 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 uh 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, 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 uh 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 uh if you're single. And so all of the sudden that malaise is waiting for uh a demagogue to come along and tell you why your life sucks. Yes, you explained that perfectly. Yeah, you nailed that. Um, 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 uh, to keep them keep them alive. They spend it on Amazon. That goes to Amazon stock. It goes to Jeff Bezos' pocket. 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 uh, real The reason real estate is so ridiculously expensive is the government printed all this money, and people 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 5 years. Um, 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 2/3 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 2/3 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. 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. Uh, I think that the reason people put money into real estate is it is a 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 and 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 the right way to look at the increase in how the cost of housing or the value of the house you own Yes. 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 uh 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 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. Yes. And so people feel there's this constant search for the other. Who are all these people that are doing all of this evil [ __ ] It's you, boys and girls. Spoiler alert, Scooby-Doo, peel the mask off, it's you. 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, 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 and they start lashing out at the wrong people. It's crazy. I'm glad you said that and that's one of my least favorite things because whenever I talk at 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." And uh You lost me at the lizard men. There are people who believe that. Like literally believe there are lizard men? I think like one or two percent 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. Um keep in mind average IQ, half the population's beneath that. Um Yeah. And so, yeah. I mean, people like to blame someone uh because that's an easy answer. Um and the thing with um the reason BlackRock has such a huge amount of money and BlackRock pushes its social agenda in a variety of ways, with their 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. Uh but no, in a false economy, it's reflective of uh 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 uh 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 America there 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. [snorts] 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. 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. Yeah. Now, spoiler alert, I am into crypto. I refuse to be labeled a crypto bro. That is not at all my vibe or thinking, but I do believe in crypto in the sense that Bitcoin cannot be inflated. Now, what I like 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. Yes. 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. That 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. 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 meet 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 have 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 while if you hold in assets. And it's 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 Keynes versus Hayek debate, but what they're doing is the creation of a complete artificial currency, negative interest rates. This is about the establishment of a permanent surf 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 some one of the government's cronies. You can't own your house. You have to rent the or 20 years ago, it was rare to rent a service. Now, every single service is rentable. I bought Photoshop before it moved on to a renting system explicitly so I wouldn't have to rent Photoshop. Um and Adobe Adobe Premiere. Um and so yeah, it's it's the attempt to gradually turn the population to be completely servile economically. Uh and it's gone the furthest and 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 and 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's 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 uh in Canada, and I 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. Woah. Yeah, it gave me heart palpitations. Yeah. I can't believe it's insane. Let me ask, cuz the 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. Yes. 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. I've lived a bizarre life that I can't really explain, but I I've seen a lot of things in that life. And so, I have a couple different avenues to look into what the the elite believes, and I have two friends that used to work at the Fed, and I asked them this question. Uh Do you know of that 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. Then the Spanish hyperinflated their currency, and this killed the economy of Mediterranean Europe. It's why Italy's stopping the richest place in the world. And and no one at the I 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 17th 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 the the it means they can only And this is a strange story where I spoke to this I was speaking to this lady. She's um 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 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 economics 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. Um there's a lot of economic corruption going on right now. What 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. Um what what is the end game they think they reach? Uh I don't know, man. These people their conception of the universe is not mine and it's funny that I like we grew up in the same time period. We probably read at the we supposedly went to the same education system through a certain point where um I think they've removed anyone who can see the big picture. And so they're looking at like you know that the meme that goes line go up world gooder? I don't, but that I follow. 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 he 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 world's line progress go up. I was speaking to a friend where I was telling her about my world view 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 uh was like it was just abandoned streets and Philly's got a smaller population today than it did in 1950. And what the elites did the whole time was uh 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. 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 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 they think if we can just push further, we'll get progress. And the line though? What line? 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 in if you look at a bunch of other countries um it's a more efficient economics. We spend like four times as much on health care per person as France does for significantly worse service in a variety of ways. Um and so the reason that's not a political issue is because the more money you spend on health care the bigger the total GDP stat is. Kenya has an economy so Kenya has an economy six times its size in fact compared to with GDP stats. Because the way GDP stats are measured Kenya is measured at 1/6 its real size. And so what they're looking at and so I could tell even as a teenager I can 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 and 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. Uh and it's because total GDP number went up. And if total GDP goes up even if that's mostly inflation uh then you're winning. It's this very warped tunnel vision understanding of the world. Okay so um 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 can move in a better direction. Whoa man everything is itself and yet nothing. All things are connected man. Um Am I going to need a hit on the bong for this [laughter] this answer? Yeah so it's hard to disentangle things. I think uh because okay I'm not going to give you the philosopher answer. Um 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 um and I think it's it's a combination of them uh 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, 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. Um and That's really interesting. I've not heard anybody say that before. I invented the idea, yeah. Um where because China, you have feminism, birth rate in China is worse than America's, which is strange because poorer countries tend to have higher birth rates. Uh China has uh the Chinese government deals with this in the funniest way possible. I sorry, if you are Chinese, I am terribly sorry you have to live through an Orwellian dystopia. For me, 6,000 mi away, I can chuckle at it. Um but in China, this is again something we need to talk about as a society but we don't, uh 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 uh 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 uh they don't want men they want to force men to like get married and like go out with women in order to to see boobs. And so a really funny thing uh is that so because women can't wear bikinis in China, they have men wear bikinis to model the underwear. What I'm sorry? Yes, exactly. Be So, the Chinese government doesn't let women wear bikinis publicly. So, they have men wear them instead. Uh and the Chinese government also has banned homosexuality. So, what you're looking at China versus America, the Western world, the government enables the mass utopia. In China, the government actively pushes against it using authoritarianism. And um And so, it it you can see the cultural manifestations of the same underlying trend where everything I talk about the psychological black death, uh the um 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 You see the same underlying economic trend manifest wildly differently in a different civilization because the context is so different. Um 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 uh basically communist countryside versus uh capitalist cities. Where the right versus the left is weird in China, where uh their hard Marxist left are the social conservatives, and the capitalists are the socially liberal 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. Why would it be happening at the same time in the West and in China? These cycles sync up. So, um the last time the last verse time this cycle hit was uh mid-19th century. And so, Central Europe had the revolutions of 1848, and then France had the Taiping Rebellion 1853. Both of which are uh the Taiping Rebellion's the third bloodiest war in history. In the 1600s, in the year 1645, every major country in 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 Chinese empire, the Han Dynasty, fell at the same time as the Roman empire, around 200 AD. Around 900 AD, 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, um And so, what we would what we're seeing now is roughly approximate social issues around the world. And I I've seen this living I've lived it 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. 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, I don't know. If I had a good answer, uh [laughter] I don't think anyone's got a good answer. So, for the US and China, I You're talking that if China attacks Taiwan, right? 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. Yes. Um which to give my characterization on the left and the right, the left is compassion, the right is personal responsibility. I think those are um given to us by evolution. I think for a society you need the dynamic tension between the two. Uh but we've got this wild uh imbalance due to the left taking over all the institutions and pumping out kids that just tend to lean left. Uh but they're now bumping up against reality. So that's what I feel going on in America and uh theoretically we're what we're trying is do we uh reduce freedoms but within our system you see a cultural giving up on things like freedom of speech. Uh so that's how things are going here, campus protests, things like that. Over in China you've got uh massive authoritarian crackdown. You've got the Uyghurs in concentration camps. But the play there being, "Hey, we need value homogeny. So we need everybody to see the world the same way." Um you've also got the credit score. So we're going to gamify, which you you'll hear me talk about all the time, gamification's amazing. Uh and as I build out my virtual world, I think a lot about how do I avoid a Chinese dystopia? 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 um go one step further. So there's one more thing just for the audience I want them to hear. Uh China is passing all of these um educational reforms, it's 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?" That's Chinese media. Yeah, I know that's the culture. So you've got uh we only want kids being taught by uh 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 effeminized. Okay, so those are the the two different things happening right now. Yes. And will either of those be a winning solution or is it going to be something else entirely? They're both going to fail. I mean, you can't force people to do stuff where uh Often times your intentions 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 Mao's 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 video games for longer than an hour a day is just going to make them resent you and it's going to completely backfire. If the Chinese force 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 at the the left today where the left pushes things that are by all accounts pretty good like uh 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. Um and so that's what I would see happening in the left. And 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 um 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. Um 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. Um but So, if you also look at after the end of the 70th 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 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 what if what happens in this crisis is just like hardcore religious fundamentalists breed is that like you you can say goodbye to science and modern art and all that stuff. Mhm. [snorts] Okay, so if we don't have the playbook right now on how to do this well in other year not in China. Um 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? Life is a journey, man. Like it's the friends we make along the way. Life is the Life is the journey itself and it's not the destination. Um Now, do you believe that and it's just too earnest to say without Yes, exactly. Yes. Uh it's one of those points that I got my generation got shoved with propaganda in it 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 4 years. I don't know what I'll be telling you in 4 years. And 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's lots of things from the pre-industrial world that are 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 philosophical and religious golden age. As 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 in 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 that if if there's something I've heard from a bunch of wise friends at Maus Utopia is if you're stuck in Maus Utopia, leave the cage. The difference between us and Maus Utopia is Maus Utopia is the self-enclosed environment. If and it's comparable to the start of the Bible where Abraham saw the degeneracy of Uruk until Abraham went out into the desert with his family and formed the Jews. We've actually we've collected the genetics on that. Um we've looked at everyone who claims descent from Abraham and there was a Y chromosome ancestor in that place that time. So, uh 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 um and also develop guardrails against insanity. Um and so for example, um when I saw things were going to go bad and I saw that the 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. Uh I'm never going to promote genocide. I'm never going to say that the truth doesn't exist. Um 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. Um and and um fourth is establish decentralization. Uh actually, you guys should watch my manifesto I released a few months ago. Um decentralization's incredibly important because my biggest worry here is that authorities use uh 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 the government can listen in on this conversation. I don't think that's this is a ticking time bomb or 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 has every 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 where like we're going to genetically engineer depression out of existence. The problem is that if you genetically engineer depression you genetically engineered everyone who's a social dissident and so it's this double-sided thing if that makes sense. It does very much. I think rules are critically important is something I talk a lot about that I think people leave out of their lives at their 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? Yes um so uh I see a lot of factional development inside the right where the left is a coherent ideology the right doesn't. The right is this alliance of all these various factions um and if you guys haven't figured it out I am some shade of a conservative politically and uh inside the right I see all of these different factions that have nothing to share and the 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 uh 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 um to basically get ahead of the competition. Okay. Uh if people are going to live by call it one to three axioms from your uh manifesto, what would they be? Uh the In the manifesto, I say honor, truth, and freedom. And those aren't the all 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. In our society, we've got the feminine down for love and caring and support and community. We need to get the mas- We need to have a 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. You uh 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? Uh 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 I 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. Um or it's like even stuff like uh 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. Um 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. Peop- Hurt people hurt people. And so you create this cycle of suffering. And um 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. Uh 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? 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 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 uh 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, um 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. All right, we're in the middle of a pretty gnarly male dating crisis. So, um if my shade of what I've taken away from you, which is ultimately if society doesn't create the tension uh where a lot of men can be successful in getting laid, then you're going to have a problem either of withdrawal or violence. Um realistically, how do we solve the dating crisis? Um the easiest thing to do is just get rid of dating apps. Um 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. I've looked at I I've looked at their phones. It's often 200 a day. And so, if you have that, you go to the club, uh that's tough. You have infinite sex. That's a horrible incentive structure because um it puts people for the women involved, it gives them such a high degree of selectivity that it it it's your remove and 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 like a failing third world communist country with a nobility. Um 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. Uh yeah, that's what we know. Yeah, exactly. Um 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 a group effort where if you're a zoomer, other zoomers don't go outside. [laughter] 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. Uh 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. Um and so, if you act and this is John Haidt talks about this. This is a just a broad issue in our culture that like you should see these things as heroin. Uh these things are like meth. Um and I catch myself sometimes on a like a a quiet Sunday to spending 12 hours on my phone, and I feel disgusting, but the problem is that like there's no mechanism against that. And so, we don't have any institutions against phone use. because the you here I have before me a very bright Gen Z'er. 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? 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 them. I'm I'm talking personally imposed. 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, uh think of uh screen time, video games, all the modern wonderful things as like alcohol. In small quantities, ton of fun. Yes. In large quantities, absolutely destructive. And it comes down to your personal 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. The the problem with that is that statistically personal discipline is not effective for most people. You know, 90 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, um a bunch of other things. Uh 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 when the Europeans 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 were 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 uh warrior confederacy from Alabama to Canada in like 1810. No one remembers it. But he banned alcohol. 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 uh People they 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. [snorts] It's interesting. So, I will assume that just like drugs, you have when it comes to screen time, you have people that uh 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, in physical space." Uh 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. Um 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 up. They don't have any uh hypothesized strategy on how to get where they want to end up. And there is a sort of nihilism, giving up. Um 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." Um 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. Even if people were actively trying to stop you, you will be able to find a way. Um 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 cuz 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 uh 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 [ __ ] 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. I'm 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 in 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. Yes. So, what in that message sucks? I agree with all that. Um, and so Um, yeah, I mean there's a million things to say. Um 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 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. Um, and And uh I mean, my piece of advice is just do stuff. Just do things. And I My father would 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." Um, and he also said um He also said "Rudyard, we live in a capitalist society, so make as 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, uh 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 be a school felt really fake. It felt like a bunch of like hamster wheels. Um 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 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. All right, let's talk the 2024 election. You've said that America's already communist. One, 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? America's culturally communist. Uh the video you're referencing is uh the four religions. And so the context of this video is I'm talking about what philosophic assumptions underlie a society. So, America's obviously not economically communist. If it was, we'd all be talking with her in a bread line now. Um but on an on a philosophic political basis, our entire society is underlain by Marxist assumptions, where uh where Marxist assumptions involve world is oppressor versus oppressed, oppressed equals good, pushing the interests of the oppressed is the moral thing, uh the world is material is is all material, moral standards don't exist, thus increasing the economic level and the quality of society is the morally correct outcome. Um 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. Um and so we are philosophically communist while we are social structure and economically not. Um 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 communism. Um and I think that I mean, so the the left at this point they aim at putting in their priests into every part of society because HR departments and uh 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. All right, what's more likely to spark violence if uh Harris wins but people don't believe it or if Trump wins but people don't believe it? 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 if Harris wins that the left can say that the right is completely unhinged and then used a military to back the to destroy the right. So Harris victory, what happens then? Again, it's all margin. If it's razor-tight, both sides can claim that they really won and will. Uh if it's an overwhelming conservative victory, the left you you will see lots of antifa's um and we'll see lots of chaz's and maybe blue cities forming city-states, but that would put the military in in the um in the right. Um 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 like for inalienable human rights, we have to fight. And then if the left has an overwhelming victory, what happens is that um 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. Okay. Um 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. What is the point of an open border? Why is the left pro-immigration just like unchecked immigration and why is the right against? 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 talent. 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. Um 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, too. New York City, they're housing the immigrants in hotels for an incredibly expensive price. And um 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 IDs for voting, you can just bunch bust a bunch of immigrants in and then win. Keep in mind, 15 10 8 to 15 million immigrants have crossed the border since Biden. That's adding another Pennsylvania to the country. Woah. 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 [ __ ] ton of immigrants. And an interesting thing and I I didn't believe this statistic is that nearly 100% 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, they are bussing in immigrants to replace entire I I don't know if this is true. It wouldn't surprise me. If they are bussing in immigrants to replace entire uh industrial systems. So, reason one, vote stuffing. Reason two, keeping down wages. Reason three, destroying the collective social unity of the society where um Western culture has developed all of these social traditions dating back to the Middle Ages that make it difficult for governments to overreach where um and Western governments have private individual rights. They have weapons ownership. They have uh a concept of the of the individual soul, um 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 and also, I think I think a lot of the motivation here is um 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. You're going to have to say more on that. [laughter] 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? 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 society is not rational. Why would a person commit suicide? Like me answer that. A person commits suicide when they no longer believe they will ever feel good about themselves again. Yes. entirely about feeling. Yes. So, it's a mistaken belief, but at the societal level, why would the I mean, is this where 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. That's a rationalization. Um 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. The society is the manifest and this is one of one of my favorite video ever is the emotions of the emotions over history video where I talk about Asian cultures are shame-based, Western are guilt-based, tribal are fear-based. And so, the group manifests psychological neuroses in the same manner the individual does. Um 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 elite, our society, and it's strange that the West's governments are democratically elected. They elected They were elected to do this. Um they want the destruction of Western culture, the removal of our history and the statues of our leaders, uh the demo- graphic replacement of white populations, the removal of traditions, the breakdown of the family, um the just every single thing that would result in the West's identity, we are actively trying to destroy. And it it goes into stuff like deindustrialization in Europe. I can't believe that deindustrialization's 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 it's insane. It is insane. All right, man. Uh where can people follow you as you track a world going mad as you see it? Uh you should check out my channel What If Alt Hist. Uh 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, thank you for being here. Guys, do not sleep on history. It's one of the most important things you you could be looking at in order to understand where the future is going. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. If you like this conversation, check out this episode to learn more. There is an expression, a saying in [music] in the Islamic context, "First, we come for the Saturday people, [music] then we come for the Sunday people." The Saturday people are the Jews, [music] the Sunday people are the Christians. I can I can link pretty