It's Not Right Vs Left... THIS Is The Real Reason For Division...

Humans are terrifyingly dangerous animals that kill in brutal fashion once we're triggered in a certain way. And right now, we're being triggered in that certain way. In 2025, a major international survey found the United States was the only country surveyed where most people say their fellow citizens are morally bad. 53% A majority of Americans look at the majority of Americans and see bad people. In 2016, about a third of Democrats said Republicans were immoral. Today, it's 2/3. The number doubled in under a decade and roughly 40% of Americans on both the right and the left now flat out say that the other party is a threat to the survival of our nation. We are on an extremely dangerous road known as populism. And if we do not change course quickly, we'll trade our current crop of political buffoons for something truly deadly. So, that's what we're going to cover today. I'm going to walk you through how economic dysfunction makes people anxious and hungry for a strong man with all the answers. That causes people to reason emotionally, and once they do that, all hell breaks loose because there is a secret about wars and genocides that we must come to grips with. Mao killed almost no one by his own hand. Neither did Chavez or Hitler, but nonetheless, under the rule of the strong men of the 20th century brought to you by populism, nearly 200 million people died. The ones who actually did the killing were ordinary men. Ordinary men who were scared and began acting in emotional and terrifying ways. That's the danger of populism. You're not going to believe some of the things that I'm going to show you today, but history has a stark warning about populist moments just like this. But, it also shows us a way out. I'm going to show you all of that and more in three parts, and do not skip part three. That is how we get out of this mess without bloodshed. Welcome to part one. It's the economy, stupid. In 1928, Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party only received 2.6% of the German vote. They got their asses handed to them. They were nothing more than a fringe party with almost no support. Five years later, however, and Hitler was the Chancellor of Germany. So, what changed? It wasn't the ideology. Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, which laid out his exact plans while he was in prison in 1924. No, what changed was the economy. If you ask someone what destroyed Weimar Germany and handed it to Hitler, they will almost invariably tell you about the loss of World War I, the Treaty of Versailles, and the hyperinflation of 1923. That's not true. The Nazis only got like 6% of the vote in 1924. And by the 1928 vote, hyperinflation had ended, and the Nazis did even worse, getting roughly 2.5% of the vote. Germany was well down the road to recovery by then. The currency was stable, times were good, and in good economic times, a populist party like the Nazis is going to struggle to find support. And Hitler was like the final boss of populist leaders, so he was very unpopular in good economic times. And then, the Great Depression hit. The economy cratered again, forcing Germany into brutal austerity. The government gutted unemployment benefits, pensions, and even forced wages down across the private sector, all while people were already drowning. By 1932, 6 million Germans were out of work. That was one in three people unemployed. People started freaking out, and suddenly Hitler was really popular. Many didn't know where their next meal was going to come from, and that is exactly how the Nazis went from getting 2.6% of the vote to 37% in just a handful of years. The kind of uncertainty that came with the Great Depression was absolutely crippling, and it's not the kind of situation that makes people rationally contemplate solutions. It is the kind of feeling that makes them act like a frightened animal. When people are scared, they look for shelter. They look for strength. And when millions of frightened people start looking for strength at the exact same moment, they don't form a careful union. They gather round a demon-summoning circle and pull forth a populist leader. It can be a left demon or a right demon. It does not matter. History is rich with both. All that matters is that they promise safety and security in a terrifying world. But the thing that gets lost when historians look back on populist moments is what caused it in the first place, and the answer is always the same. It's economics. Shockingly, it's not death and destruction. Look at England during World War II. Despite the mayhem of the Blitz, they came closer together. When England almost tore itself apart, was when the economy fell off a cliff. It was the 1970s, and the economy in Britain was in free fall. Inflation hit nearly 27% in 1975. In 1976, Britain, one of the richest nations on Earth, had to go to the IMF to beg for a bailout. And then came the winter of discontent, 1978 into '79. Everyone was going on strike. The garbage collectors, the truckers, the hospital workers. In some towns, even the gravediggers put down their shovels. It was mass chaos. A country that had calmly endured the Blitz from Germany, that had taken Nazi bombs night after night and pulled together, was suddenly being torn apart by a bad economy. And it didn't stop there. The chaos swept Margaret Thatcher into power in 1979, and she hit the economy with brutal austerity to break inflation. It worked, but the price was savage. Unemployment blew past 3 million, which was the worst since the Great Depression. In some inner cities, youth unemployment topped 50%, and in 1981, those cities erupted. Riots in Brixton, and Toxteth, in Liverpool, and Leeds. Then, in 1984, the miners walked out for an entire year, and the whole country watched police and strikers beat each other bloody in pitched battles like the one in Orgreave. Now, I don't know about you, but this sounds way too much like America since the ironically named Summer of Love in 2020. That's because it has the same underlying problem. In 1970, the typical American home cost a little over two times the median household income. Today, it costs about five times the median household income. And in most big cities, it's even more. Real wages have barely kept pace with the cost of living for decades, while housing, healthcare, and education have gone vertical. And the gap between those at the top and everyone else just hit its widest margin in roughly 100 years. The richest 10% of Americans now own about 70% of the nation's wealth. The top 1% alone owns as much as the entire bottom 90% combined. This is a textbook K-shaped economy. A small group rocketing upward, while everyone else treads water trying desperately not to drown in debt or rage as they watch wealthy people live it up on Instagram. It's the exact same pressure that built up in Weimar Germany and 1970s Britain. It is a pattern that repeats. Strip away the flags and the slogans and the speeches and underneath every populist explosion, you will find the same thing. People who are terrified or angry about money. It will dress up as other things, but people don't riot when everyone is getting richer and they don't elect populist starter kits like Trump, Mamdani, Bass, or Pritzker. And they sure as hell don't elect or champion or celebrate the murderers at the pinnacle of populism like Hitler, Chavez, Castro, Lenin, or Mao. But when they're afraid, a strange part of the brain takes over and it creates all kinds of problems. So, welcome to part two. You are not who you think you are. In 2004, a team of neuroscientists at Emory University ran a shocking experiment. They took 30 die-hard political partisans, 15 hardcore Republicans, 15 hardcore Democrats, slid them one by one into a brain scanner, and showed them their own candidate flat-out contradicting himself on the record in undeniable fashion. There was nowhere to hide. And both Republicans and Democrats did the same thing. They instantly spotted the hypocrisy in the other guy and then bent over backwards to excuse their own guy. When you look at the brain scans, it becomes clear what's going on. When these people were reasoning about their candidate, the part of the brain we use for actual logic, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, just went quiet. Just takes itself offline. What lit up instead were the emotional centers of their brain. And then right at the moment each person finally landed on a conclusion that let their guy off the hook, the brain's reward centers lit up like the 4th of July. We're talking about the same brain circuits that light up for food, sex, and cocaine. Coming up with a reason why your team leader is right even in the face of obvious contradiction triggers the same response as cocaine. If you ever wondered why people on social media will twist themselves into a pretzel to make their political views seem rational, this is why. The lead scientist on the experiment, Drew Westen, put it like this. Partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it. The reality is most of the time we think we're carefully reasoning our way through an argument, but in reality we're not. We're just behaving emotionally, and our brains are handing us a hit of pleasure as a reward for outright inventing a justification for the thing we already want to believe, regardless of the evidence to the contrary. This is the factory setting of the human mind and the very thing that leads us astray when the economy breaks and we find ourselves in a populist moment like the one we are in now. No matter what we want to believe. We're not rational creatures. We do not gather facts, weigh them, and then carefully arrive at a conclusion. We do the exact opposite. We feel the conclusion we want first, and then employ our reason like a defense lawyer to build the case for what we already want to believe, which is entirely governed by what we want to feel. If you've ever argued with someone who sounded completely crazy to you, this is why, but never forget you're just as likely to reason emotionally as they are. You're just as likely to be the person on the other side that they think sounds crazy. We'll get right back to the show in a second, but first, let's talk about longevity. 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Now, you might think the fix is to just be more logical, to shut our emotions off, and just run pure, cold logic, like Mr. Spock. But that quite literally is impossible. We know this because some people actually can't feel. They're normal in every other way, but they can't experience emotions. That part of their brain has been damaged, and the outcome doesn't look like you'd expect. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio studied patients with damage to the emotional centers of the brain. Their IQ was perfectly intact. Their logic was fine, but they were entirely unable to make decisions. They are cognitively paralyzed when it comes to choice. Ask one of them simply to pick a date for their next appointment. They will sit there for 30 minutes listing the pros and cons of every option, and yet still be unable to choose. The brutal reality of being a human is that emotions drive us to do incredibly stupid things, up to and including the mass slaughter of others. But if you strip emotion out of the equation entirely, we break. We're left with no ability to navigate life. It's like having an eating disorder. Unlike other drugs you can just cut out completely, if you try to cut out food you die. We can't function without emotions, and yet emotions are the very thing that leads us astray. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt has a really clear picture of how this works. Your mind, he says, is broken into two parts, what he calls an elephant and a rider. The elephant is your emotional center, the gigantic beast that is going to go wherever it wants, regardless of who tries to stop it. The rider is your conscious reason, sitting ever so precariously on top, gripping the reins, convincing itself that he's in control of the giant beast, but in reality he's not. If the elephant decides it wants to go somewhere, it is going to go. When the elephant leans, the rider isn't actually steering it, but he does scramble to invent a reason for why he actually wanted to go in that direction. Reason, as Haidt explains, is merely the press secretary for one's already existing emotional whims. Its job is not to find the truth, its job is simply to defend the boss, which is the emotions. And that's not just a clever metaphor, we can actually measure the press secretary in action. The neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga worked with patients whose two brain hemispheres had been surgically cut apart, so the two halves of the brain literally could not talk to each other. He flashed a picture of a chicken claw to one half and a snow scene to the other. Then, he asked the patient to point at related images to what they just seen. One hand pointed to a chicken, the other hand pointed to a shovel. Both, by the way, were correct. Then Gazzaniga asked, "Why'd you pick the shovel?" Because the guy he was asking had a brain whose hemispheres could not communicate to each other, the talking half of the man's brain was completely unaware of the snow scene. But the brain has some sort of innate algorithm that says there has to be an answer to everything. So, when asked, it just makes one up as a matter of course. In reality, the only true answer to the question was, "I don't know." But that's not what the guy said. Without hesitating, he said, "Oh, that's easy. You need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed." It was a total fabrication, delivered with complete confidence, and he had no idea he was doing it. He wasn't lying per se, he actually believed what he was saying, and that's how the mind works. Gazzaniga named the part of the brain that coughs up these kind of fabricated but connected answers the interpreter. Its entire job is to spin a believable story for decisions it never made and doesn't actually understand. That's what Haidt is referring to when he speaks of the rider that fools itself into thinking it's in control of the emotional elephant. When you put the brain's tendencies together, you quickly realize that your brain pays you in pleasure for swallowing a self-made story that's untrue but justifies you actually pursuing your emotional pleasure rather than what is objectively, logically useful. This is not a flaw of stupid people, it's how all humans work, and it's what allows populism, periods marked by extreme emotional reasoning, to become because while there may be wisdom in a crowd, there is also danger when populism enforces group compliance. In 1951, a psychologist named Solomon Asch ran what looks like the dumbest experiment ever designed. He just showed people a line of a certain length on a card and then three other lines of different lengths and asked which one the line matched. That's it. Just which lengths are the same? The answer was so obvious that when people did it alone, they got answer more than 99% of the time. But Asch added a twist. He surrounded each real subject with a group of actors, strangers, who were secretly instructed to look at the obvious answer and yet confidently say the wrong one out loud one after another before the real person had a chance to answer. And three out of four people caved. About 75% of them looked at a line that was plainly longer and called it shorter because that's what the rest of the group had done. People went from being right 99% of the time to being wrong 75% of the time simply to conform to the group. They denied the evidence of their own eyes just to avoid being an outsider. When Asch interviewed them afterwards, most of the people who caved knew the right answer the entire time. They weren't confused. They saw the truth perfectly well. They said the lie anyway because being wrong with the group felt safer than being right alone. That's how the populist machine eats society alive. When an economy gets bad enough, people will do almost anything to stay safe. That's why in this moment in history, we must be incredibly careful and find a way to interrupt the populist momentum because history shows that the direction we are traveling in right now can be avoided. But when it's not, the outcomes are horrific. Welcome to part three. The two ways our current era is going to end. On July 13th, 1942, a battalion of about 500 German policemen arrived outside of a Polish village called Jozefow. They were not the SS. They were not hardened killers. They were just middle-aged reservists from Hamburg that were too old for the regular army. They were truck drivers, salesmen, dock workers. These were family men, just your average neighborhood guys. That morning, their commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp, stood in front of them with tears in his eyes and told them their orders. Round up the 1,800 Jews in that village and shoot everyone who couldn't work. The women, the children, the elderly, all of them. And then Trapp did something almost unheard of. He offered the men a way out. He said out loud that any man who didn't feel up to it could step aside. There'd There would punishment, no consequence, just step out. Out of 500 men, only about a dozen of them did. 12. The rest spent the day marching mothers and children into the woods and shooting them at point-blank range. Over the next 16 months, that single unit of ordinary middle-aged guys shot 38,000 people and packed another 45,000 onto trains and sent to the gas chambers. 83,000 human beings. From the truck drivers and salesmen of Hamburg, the historian Christopher Browning studied them for years. His conclusion? He didn't do it because they were monsters. They did it because of a desire to stay within the safety of the group. They had a team, and no matter what it took, they wanted to stay on that team. When you study something like that, try to imagine yourself as part of the killers, not the 12 who walked away. I know we all want to imagine we're in the 12, and hopefully we all do something to make sure that we are, but the easiest way to actually become one of the 12 is to recognize that your brain wants you to be one of the 488 who pull the trigger instead of risking becoming isolated. These are the exact same brain mechanics at work, by the way, from the Asch experiment where people lie about which line is longest, except now the wrong answer isn't the length of a line on a card, it's shooting a child in the back of the head. But when people are scared, they will do insane That's why you should be very worried about what populism is building towards right now. You have a population that's scared about money, all armed with brains that feel first and only deploy reason to explain away the emotion. Everyone is increasingly on a right team or a left team. No one wants to be isolated in the middle, where it is legitimately more dangerous, and everyone is looking for a strongman leader that promises they have all of the answers and knows exactly who you should hate. Hitler spelled out in Mein Kampf exactly how leaders can exploit this setup. Now, I know most people are terrified to read Mein Kampf, but good lord, he gives the whole game away. In the book, he wrote that to exploit a group's fear, a leader must give them someone to hate. They then must concentrate all of the group's animosity onto one enemy. Conveniently right now, the right tells you to hate the left and the left tells you to hate the right. And as Hitler noted, it doesn't matter whether the enemy is actually the root cause of the problem or not, they simply need a target to aim their rage at. Once the enemy has a face, the herd mentality will do the rest. As Mao showed us in China, by the way, the leader is never the one who does the killing. During Mao's revolution, it was teenagers, the Red Guards, who dragged their own teachers and parents into the streets to be beaten, humiliated, and killed. Children turned into executioners because the group demanded it and their feelings told them the group was right. And when your feelings are used as proof of rightness, all hell is guaranteed to break loose. That is the great fever of our time. People actually say it loud and proud. There are tons of influencers out there whose brand is I feel it, therefore it is. If you want to know just how damning this becomes, you need look no further than this stat. According to the work political scientist R.J. Rummel, the populist strongmen of the 20th century managed to get their populace to murder nearly 200 million of their own people. Now, let me be crystal clear about something. I'm not saying Trump is Hitler or Mamdani is Mao. They're not. Thankfully, we're nowhere near that stage, but we're on the path and our current partisanship and wild swinging from right to left and back again is part of an escalatory path that will lead to bloodshed as it has done so many times in the past. Here's the trap we're actually in. It's not one strong man on one side. The right and left hate and fear each other. Left populism worked its way through the institutions for decades radicalizing entire generations so right populism rose to fight it which made the left populism more extreme which radicalized the right even farther. Each side pointing at the other as the enemy that must be stopped at all costs. That's the stat about 40% of Americans who think the other side is a threat to the nation's very survival that we discussed at the beginning of the video. And let me assure you 40% will be 50% soon enough because so far no one on either side has shown an appetite to get off of this upward spiral. So how do we break out of this destructive pattern? History is shockingly consistent on the path out. Every single time a society has pulled back from the edge without first having to go to war or revolution, it did the same thing. It fixed the economy. Until the underlying problem is solved, nothing but violence will stop the populist escalation. Look at your own country. 130 years ago, America was a powder keg. Wealth inequality had become toxic. We had robber barons, an extremely K-shaped economy, and an armed and furious farm population. A populist revolt exploded and it could have gone the way of Germany, but instead, the bomb was diffused. The progressive era and the reforms that followed took that rage and turned it into a fairer system. They broke up the monopolies that had rigged the game. Standard Oil alone was shattered into more than 30 separate companies. They went after the corruption that let a tiny elite capture everything, handing voters the power to elect their own senators directly, and creating the SEC to police the Wall Street fraud that had been fleecing regular people. And they reopened the path to ownership, building the modern long-term home mortgage that finally put a house within reach of an average family, and giving people, by the way, a real shot at getting ahead through their own hard work. The fix wasn't to make people permanently dependent on the state. It was to rebuild an economy that actually worked for regular people. They didn't have to crush the populace. They simply removed the thing that created their anxiety, fear, and rage. That broke the fever, and the populace wave receded on its own. Greece did a version of this just in roughly the last decade. Its neo-Nazi party had surged to become the third most powerful force in the country. And then, as the economy stabilized and the courts moved in, it collapsed without the economic anxiety to keep it alive. And even in Mao's China, after the famines and the Cultural Revolution had killed roughly 45 million people, China was able to pull itself back from the brink, not by swinging to the opposite extreme, but by using market reforms to drag the country back to a functional middle. Now, there's no doubt they stayed politically authoritarian, but when it came to the economy, even the die-hard communists realized that if they wanted to stop people from dying en masse at the hands of ordinary men, women, and children, they had to make the economy work. And that's the lesson. That's the whole ballgame. The fever that drives populism is economic in nature. Hopefully, that makes it obvious that the cure will need to be economic as well. You fix the money, you diffuse the mob. You stop the wild populist swings that only serve to ratchet up the tension and move us closer to war or bloody revolution. So, step one, we have to balance the budget. Deficit spending that outpaces economic growth is the death of a nation. It forces the government to money print, which causes inflation, which steals from ordinary people. Step two, limit handouts to temporary assistance to those who need it to get back on their feet. Permanent handouts are the mechanism by which the government excuses deficit spending. Everyone needs to take personal responsibility for themselves and their families or we will stay in this death loop. When you invite the government to fill the role of family, you end up with too many people living off of the government and not enough people contributing, especially in times where birth rates are declining. It becomes untenable and budgets become unbalanced and money gets printed. That forces the government to steal via inflation, which creates economic uncertainty, which starts the populist spiral towards violence. And when you have an aging population like we have now, you may have to make changes to the retirement age as well. You have to do whatever it takes to fix the economy because when you fix that, you starve populism of its only fuel. Then, protect yourself from your own mind. When a political take gives you the jolt of righteous certainty, be paranoid. And remember, statistically speaking, you are far more likely to end up as the perpetrator of violence trying to fit into your group than you are to be brave enough to stand alone. So, guard against that to ensure you steer by your values and not your fears and your emotions. Refuse to view your political opponents as the enemy. Assume they are both well-intentioned and smart and simply see things differently than you do. The only path forward is to identify the emotional root of their position. If you can't solve for what's causing that emotion, your words are wasted. So, focus on cause and effect. This is a deterministic universe. It does not run by magic. It runs on a set of rules and even though the human mind is frustratingly emotional instead of rational, the emotions have causes that can often be addressed. Remember how this whole argument started. Humans are terrifyingly dangerous animals once we're triggered in a certain way. Economic fear is that certain trigger. People's tribal instincts get turned up and everyone joins a team. The brain then rewards the people for doing the mental gymnastics to justify the aggression of their team's populist leader. It happens on the left, it happens on the right, and suddenly that economic fear gets turned into righteous rage, which gets aimed at a single enemy. And when the enemy is the political opposition, you get caught in an escalatory trap that ends in violence if the underlying economic issue is never resolved. Everyone is seeking safety. And the great tragedy is that humans will kill whoever and whatever they need to to feel safe, including each other. So when the fear comes for you, and it will, be the one who steps out of the line. Refuse the enemy that they try to hand you, and throw your weight behind the only thing that actually breaks the populist fever, an economy that works for ordinary people. Because the strongman never fills the graves himself. We do, which means the power to stop this belongs with us as well. All right, if you want to see me explore ideas like this in real time, be sure to hit the subscribe button and join me Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 7:00 a.m. Pacific time. I hope to see you there. Till next time, my friends. Be legendary. Take care. Peace. If you like this conversation, check out this episode to learn more. The biggest bet in the history of capitalism is being placed right now. $700 billion this year alone, $6.7 trillion by the end of the decade, all spent on