Half of Americans Think Hard Work Is Pointless. They’re Wrong.

Welcome back to Impact Theory. In today's episode, the conversation focused on a provocative shift happening in American culture—more and more people no longer believe that hard work pays off. Is this just a crisis of perception, or is there something fundamentally broken in the system? Drawing on recent polling and global comparisons, the discussion explored why, while America still stands as the most sought-after destination for immigrants worldwide, so many within its borders feel left behind or disillusioned about their prospects. A key theme that emerged was the outsized influence of media on shaping our mindset. We dig into how relentless negativity, the 24-hour news cycle, and the viral spread of “doom and gloom” stories can fuel a pervasive sense of stagnation, mistrust, and envy. The discussion also turned to the rise of conspiratorial thinking, the reemergence of socialism, and the timeless human temptation to blame “the system” or a specific group for society’s woes. The conversation explored complex issues like anti-Semitism, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and generational demands for justice, weighing the costs of staying focused on the past versus building a better future. Several points were raised, including how prosperity has actually changed the problems we face, why expectations versus reality matter so much for our happiness, and what kind of mindset is needed to adapt and thrive in an imperfect world. Ultimately, the episode challenged listeners to look beyond narratives of defeat and envy, to take ownership over their own stories, and to focus on the practical steps that still lead to success—even in a world that sometimes feels rigged against you. Stick around—this is a conversation you won’t want to miss. Tailor Brands: Check out Tailor Brands to launch your business starting at $0 + state fees: https://bit.ly/TailorBrandsSept Quince: Free shipping and 365-day returns at https://quince.com/impactpod Incogni: Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code IMPACT at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/impact Pipedrive: Get more leads and grow your business. Go to https://www.pipedrive.com/impact and get started with a 30-day free trial. Netsuite: For the first time ever you can try NetSuite Next for free. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, go to https://NetSuite.ai/Theory https://netsuite.ai/Theory. Butcherbox: Go to https://ButcherBox.com/IMPACT https://butcherbox.com/IMPACT to get $20 off your first box, plus your choice of free ribeye, new york strip, or filet mignon in every box for a year — with free shipping always. What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: Want my help starting a business? Join me here inside Zero To Founder https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show Sign up for my AI Masterclass: AI Masterclass https://tombilyeu.com/ai-masterclass?utm_campaign=Live%20Masterclass&utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=evergreen Follow Me: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 1:07Speaker 02

  No, they're, they're, they're wrong. Is that true? Is that from a poll?

• 1:10Speaker 01

  It literally is true from a poll, yeah. It's an AP-NORC, American 250 poll. So, it came out in June 8th of 2026. Wall Street Journal ran one as well. So, you had 36% of people believe it's just completely broken back in 2023, 34% 2024, 31% 2025. But when you broaden it out to include people that also just don't think it ever worked, you get up over 50%.

• 1:36Speaker 02

  There's always been something about that phrase that is overly general and wishful thinking, meaning some people are born on third base, some people are born to, you know, familial wealth funds, and some people struggle so much and have seemingly so few natural talents that hard work seems to return less for them. And that's all true. But what we mean as Americans when we say that hard work will get you somewhere is really that hard work will get you further here than it will get you most other places in

• 2:15Speaker 02

  the world. What we're really saying is comparatively speaking, the American economical, economic and political system is more sensitive to hard work than the rest of the world is, is more meritocratic than much of the rest of the world is. America is still the number one destination, desired destination for migrants around the world. If you ask everyone who's trying to move out of their country, whether they want to move out of Ghana, or China, or, or Uruguay, what's your number one choice? It's America. More so than any

• 2:55Speaker 02

  other country. So, I think that's, that's what I would mean when I say that hard work does pay off.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  So, why is it then that people outside of America go, "America looks dope"? People inside America go, "America looks like ass"?

• 3:10Speaker 02

  People judge the state of society less by their own individual experience or life circumstance right now, and more by their gut sense of how things are going from the news. And if you're watching the news, you are seeing the world's first trillionaire.

• 3:35Speaker 02

  You're seeing people amass huge, just huge sums of wealth through AI and tech startups that aren't spread throughout society. It seems like just a small portion of the American economy is growing extremely rapidly, and the rest is growing fairly slowly. So, from that point of view, even if you're doing okay, you could say, "Well, you know, it seems like the people, there's a small number of people getting rich and everyone else is stagnating." People around the world, I think, are right still to perceive that,

• 4:14Speaker 02

  "Hey, if I'm a hardworking guy from Nigeria, where do I want to be in order to build generational wealth for my family"? I mean, it's, it's still America. It's easier to open a business here. It's easier to, to play the game of the market and win than it is in, even in very nice countries in Europe, easier here than in Canada for, for economic reasons. And, and so, I think they're right as well, but their, their higher opinion of, of America is more based on the actual reality, the actual promise on offer here. And the opinion

• 4:58Speaker 02

  of Americans who are already here may be more based on the vibe they get from the media.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  Do you think that if we changed, like, if we could wave a magic wand and make everybody focus entirely on the positive things, do you think that we would see a cultural shift? Or is the system here rigged to the point where so many people are still gonna fall out, get knocked out by something, racism, classism, whatever ism, to the point where, it doesn't matter, you can try to say all the positive things, true things, by the way, but it won't matter because enough people will get knocked back, it just won't change the cultural belief?

• 5:41Speaker 02

  I think we would definitely benefit from a more positive culture. You know, Steven Pinker and many other people have made this point, but the news selects for what is negative. It literally, of all the interesting things that happened on planet Earth today, only the negative things, only the bad things are considered newsworthy. So, you know, it could be the case that, you know, another, another third world country has cut extreme poverty down to 10%, and you'll just never hear about it. But you will hear about the one tragedy that happened. You'll, you'll hear about, you know, the mother that strangled her three kids with, with, with exercise equipment, right? And

• 6:26Speaker 02

  you'll hear about, you know, the vigilante that killed a healthcare CEO. And so, the world is big enough that there's just always enough bad things to fill the 24-hour news cycle, which is what cable news figured out in the 90s. And so, if you get your sense of what's going on from the news, which most people call like staying informed, which is one of the biggest, one of the biggest lies about society today, is like, you have to stay informed, and the way to do that is just to watch the news, or whatever, whatever sliver of the news enters your TikTok, or Instagram, or YouTube Shorts feed. And that's what staying informed means. If you do that, you're just gonna have a negative picture

• 7:10Speaker 02

  of the world. You're gonna have a sense that things are going to hell in a handbasket. More recently, you might have the sense that AI is going to exterminate humanity or the world. And, you know, while some of that can be a spur to good action, like, seeing a threat can help people organize to prevent it, the overall negativity, I'm not sure that that's a good thing. You know, I think it's probably a bad thing. It makes people less likely to build and take risks and feel good about their country and feel comfortable partnering with people. It drives a general level of negativity that's bad for people's

• 7:50Speaker 02

  psychology and wellbeing. And I think we could get most of what we want from the point of view of preventing threats. We could get almost all of that while still having a much more positive and optimistic outlook on the world.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  I have an intuition, there's something very different going on. And I've heard your argument around, well, if you look at where things really start going pear-shaped here in the US, it's all gonna go back to 2013. That's when people really started spending time on their phones. And there's clear data to suggest that. But your own argument that people outside of America, they can see America more clearly in terms of the opportunity. People inside America can't see that. But that sort of implies that people outside of America have either a better media diet than we have here, or something else. That, that doesn't seem to make sense to me. Before I say what I think

• 8:49Speaker 01

  is actually going on, address that for me. Is it that people outside just really have a better, more optimistic media landscape, and that's what allows them to see that America really is great?

• 9:01Speaker 02

  Put yourself in the shoes of a 25-year-old guy from Mexico who maybe wants to move legally or illegally to America. What does he consume every day? He probably consumes a bunch of negativity about Mexico, but not really about America. And it's probably Spanish language. And the same is true for an immigrant from, from South Asia or, or Africa. And so, my guess would be they're consuming a lot of local negativity, but they're aware they have a relative who moved to New York or Dallas, and that relative is making a lot more money than they could back home. And they're sending a text saying, "Hey, we can set you up in an apartment here." And so...

• 9:48Speaker 02

  That's the picture, right? Once they get here, maybe it'll get some negativity in their, in their news diets about America, but they have a more accurate picture of America because they're probably not seeing that much of our American-directed news. They're not the audience for it.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  What I look at is, I think, somebody that is outside of America is forced to contend with reality all of the time, and so they're forced to contend with, uh, there really isn't enough money to go around, there really is a bunch of violence on the streets, there's a level of corruption that makes society just impossible to navigate, um, things are not going well economically in my country, and so my head pops up and I'm looking around and I'm going, where are their economic opportunities? Where is the currency strong? Where am I going to be able to go, um, such that I'm not experiencing hyperinflation? Uh, where does things look like law and order largely prevails? And when they pick their head up, they see, depending on where you're at, you might look at Europe and think, okay, I'd rather be in Europe, you might see Canada, I'd rather

• 10:50Speaker 01

  be in Canada, you might see America, I'd rather be in America. So there are a few places that I would say largely the West writ large, where you're going to say, okay, that's a place that has more stability, more prosperity than where I'm at. And the West largely, including the US, now have these huge social systems that create a massive sucking sound for immigration that pull people in. And in the US, I believe we've been prosperous for so long that people aren't making contact with reality. And what I mean by reality is if you've ever watched a season of Alone, you very quickly realize how hard it is just to stay warm, to get enough calories to survive, and we've

• 11:33Speaker 01

  built this incredible country that has a ton of things that allow people to take for granted how hard it is to actually achieve the level of economic success and stability that we've achieved. And so if you're living in a country where you don't have any of that, it becomes self-evident, you can show me all the negative stuff you want about America, but I'm just literally looking at the shots and I'm like, that looks like heaven compared to where I'm at. And if you're here, you're being fed a non-stop diet of basically guilt, that, uh, the West, I would say even far more than just America, but the West should be ashamed of itself, we should be guilty. And so people have like guilt on that scale, I think, is a luxury belief, that when things

• 12:17Speaker 01

  are going so well, that you can actually spend time thinking about whether I should feel guilty for what my great, great, great grandparents did, uh, is just, it, it is a totally different way of navigating the world than somebody that's in a developing nation or a third world country. It's like, I don't have time for that shit. I just need the real answer about where am I going to have either a government that can take care of me or an opportunity to succeed. And so that's why you get just a sucking sound on immigration all across the West in a way that you don't get virtually anywhere else.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  People that actually live lives of consequence, where their decisions can be the difference between living very poor, chaotic lives on, on, on the margin, like, living on the vicissitudes of, of, of, of chance and violence and all this, they have a deep incentive and skin in the game to, to understand reality. Most Americans above, above a certain income level, and it doesn't even have to be a particularly high income level in the American context, have, have actually escaped the problem of

• 13:34Speaker 02

  scarcity in the way that our ancestors would have recognized. What do I mean by that? I mean, to be poor in America, you are more likely to be obese than to be starving, right? And that is, you know, like, the past, probably 50 or 75 at most, 100, no, not even 100, it's gotta be more like the past 50. That's the only time window in the history of humanity where that has been true, where poor people have been more likely to be too fat than too skinny. And I think you've all know, Harari is the first person I heard make that point that

• 14:12Speaker 02

  way, and to actually draw the right lesson from it, to draw the lesson that we have, we have crossed a threshold in the West, a meaningful threshold where poverty is still a thing in a circular sense, like, it will always be a thing because we define the lowest, you know, decile or quintile as, as poor. But we actually have practically eliminated the kind of poverty, what poverty has meant throughout human history. We've, we've eliminated those consequences, uh, almost entirely in the West, and that's

• 14:55Speaker 02

  not to say poverty comes with no problems, it comes with a new set of problems and a set of difficult problems, but it's not the same package of destitution that any of, you know, that would have been recognizable before 100 years ago at any point in human history. And so what does that mean? That means that those of us that have crossed that threshold and have been living in what is essentially a fantasy world to our ancestors our entire lives, well, we still have those same hardwired instinct to seek out and seek out negativity, seek out threats and, um,

• 15:39Speaker 02

  and survive, and yet we don't actually need to survive. We have very few actual threats. And so where does all that energy go? Well, I think it goes to a kind of, uh, a kind of pornography of negativity and pornography of threat that is the media. And that feels real to us because we, we don't really have actual threats, right? That feels real to us, whereas to someone who's really still living before that threshold, who's living in, in the old world, it doesn't feel as real, or it doesn't feel as real as the real world does, if that makes sense. And so they're more able to see, well, look, America is where the jobs are, it's where

• 16:23Speaker 02

  the stability is, Canada, Western Europe, these places are better, it's a better place to raise my children, and they're less likely to be pushed around by the latest moral panic.

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• 19:58Speaker 01

  Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action. If that's an accurate read and we have created a prosperous society that detaches us from real sort of life and death struggle and gives us the bandwidth to get sucked into psy ops or dumb cultural ideas, what are the things that people are paying attention to right now? That if I can get you to agree that our culture is sick, that is deranging our culture? What are those like small handful of ideas that are most damaging?

• 20:34Speaker 02

  So the first one that would come to mind is conspiracy thinking. This seems to be more a problem on the right, political right at the moment. If you look at the popularity of Tucker Carlson's show or Candace Owens' show,

• 20:50Speaker 02

  you will see that people are at minimum entertained and at most actually compelled and believing almost every conspiracy you could possibly imagine. A lot of it becomes antisemitism, some of it doesn't have to do with Jews. You know, it's, Bregent Macron is a man. Candace Owens does an eight hour series on this with no evidence other than just, you know, connecting random facts on a cork board with string.

• 21:22Speaker 02

  You know, Israel controls every aspect of the American government and, you know, the recent attempted hijacking of an Israeli plane was an inside job. And Kamala Harris is hiding her Jewish ancestry. And Lyndon B. Johnson was secretly Jewish. And, you know, on and on and on. Trump is being blackmailed because of Epstein. And this is a symptom of the sickness. Well, I think it's partly a symptom of the fact that people have lost so much faith in mainstream media that they are now open to any alternative, any media that positions itself as against the mainstream.

• 22:06Speaker 02

  And they have a lot of reason to be skeptical of mainstream media because mainstream media has lost its legitimacy by, by being pretty low quality for, for a long time, by making, by engaging in group think, by canceling people that, you know, blow the whistle on certain fashionable progressive ideas. It's become a sickness and it's something we have to, we really have to get a handle on. We have to develop new cultural norms around conspiracy thinking.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  And I think, you know, the Jew obsession is the, the one that's the most telltale sign of the sickness, right? Like the fact that someone like Tucker Carlson can say with a straight face, I'm not obsessed with Jews. And then when you count how many times he has mentioned Jews on his podcast in the last year, it's like literally 400.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 23:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, someone went through and counted this guy on Twitter named Milk Bar TV, who has been really doing great work kind of as a media watchdog, just strung together a clip of every time Tucker Carlson has mentioned Jews on his podcast in a single calendar year. And it was something like 400.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  Do you have a sense of why, and it does seem to be largely tied to down economic times, that people turn specifically towards the Jews as, I wouldn't have initially said the conspiracy, but they turn towards the Jews as the thing that they become convinced is the problem?

• 23:45Speaker 02

  Thomas Sowell has a great essay on this called, Are Jews Generic? And his thesis in that essay is that when a minority population comes to be successful economically in certain professions that are poorly understood or resented by, by the population, they often get scapegoated as parasites on a society, mostly because the masses are kind of dumb and don't understand that you can contribute economically to a country without say making things with your hands.

• 24:28Speaker 02

  So if you, if you go back to look at Nazi propaganda in the 1930s and 1940s and there's a great, you can, you can look up on YouTube, The Eternal Jew, which is a Nazi propaganda film from around 1940. One of the points the Nazis hammered on was that real Germans make things with their hands. We make things you can touch, you can feel, you can sell. That's an honorable way to make a living. But the Jews repackage things and they're merchants and they're not actually making anything. They're just profiting off of things that other people have made. And this was an emotionally powerful point. It must've been to Germans.

• 25:09Speaker 02

  It's also total nonsense because as, as anyone who has taken an Econ 101 class knows, there is a reason that merchants exist and it is because they provide a lot of value to consumers, right? If I go to the deli on the corner of my street, he is not marking up the goods that he bought wholesale for no reason. He's marking them up because he provides value by gathering them all in one place and allowing me to, to purchase them, right? This is a crucial service in an economy, right? It's not, you can't just get rid of it. So if you have a situation as, such as when I used to live in Harlem, every deli was owned by Yemeni's.

• 25:55Speaker 02

  If you have a situation where a small ethnic group comes to successfully run a lot of one particular industry, they often are the subject of resentment. And Sowell goes through countless examples. He goes through East Africa, West Africa, the Lebanese in West Africa, the Indians in East Africa, who were kicked out of Uganda in the 1970s, partly for this reason. And his conclusion is that, well, what has happened to the Jews throughout history is just one special case of this pattern, this, this pattern that human societies have

• 26:33Speaker 02

  as a result of our, our flawed nature essentially. And it's a pattern that always ends up hurting the very majorities that think they're doing something good by kicking out these quote unquote parasites. But it never ends up well because it turns out those people were doing something positive sum, win-win for the economy at large. And so that's his theory of where antisemitism comes from. I think, I think it's, I think it's correct. I don't think it's the entire story though. I mean, I think in a way, what he's really saying is something deeper, which is that envy, envy is the source of so much of what is terrible in, in politics.

• 27:18Speaker 02

  When you have a group of people that are resented, not because they are doing anything to you, not because they are taking anything from you, but because their success threatens your sense of self. Their success points the finger at you and asks, why aren't you as successful? When people feel that they're in that situation, they lash out at the successful group and they latch on to any theory that portrays the successful group in the, the harshest possible light.

• 27:55Speaker 02

  And this is, you know, this is not only behind antisemitism, it's also behind communism. If you think of like, why is communism just such a reliably popular, like, like how can, after the record of 20th century communism, how can it still have any political purchase? Right? Because it taps into an endless source of human emotional energy, which is envy. You know, the rich people took it from you in one way or another, right? They don't have what they deserve. They need to be hurt. They need to be taken down, even if it takes down all of society with it, even if it's a lose-lose.

• 28:41Speaker 02

  And so, you know, I think that the envy problem will always be with us because of human nature. But I agree with you, there are certain circumstances where the politics of envy are going to be more popular because, because of the perceived inequality in, in the economy.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  Okay, so let me make sure I understand. Thomas Sowell is saying they're generic. I assume he does come to a positive answer to that question, that they are generic and they're just the stand-in for, "I hate the successful minority."

• 29:18Speaker 02

  Yes, "I hate the successful minority." That is successful in industries where, industries where the value is not intuitive. Banking would be another one. A lot of people don't understand the value of having a financial industry. They don't understand why it's good for an entire economy to have a robust finance industry. And so they view bankers as parasites in general. And they have a general, like a negative affect. If you look at Thomas Jefferson, he had this really strong belief that America, it only stays virtuous if we're all basically farmers. This was a huge part of Jefferson's disagreement with other founding fathers.

• 30:01Speaker 02

  He felt that there's something inherently virtuous about farming your own land, making food, you know, being self-sustaining, and that many other, other industries were inherently not virtuous, right? And so I'm not ascribing any of this other stuff to Jefferson, but that's just to say, people have this intuitive sense of like jobs that are like moral jobs. Most people would say being a teacher is a moral job, right?

• 30:30Speaker 02

  Helping children, you know? And people have a sense that other jobs are sort of inherently parasitic, like you're taking from society. A lot of people would say maybe running a casino is parasitic, right?

• 30:45Speaker 02

  And I actually might agree with that in that case. But, but people have had those sorts of opinions where they are not warranted. And this is why economists are often unpopular, because they're often in the position of explaining, "Actually, these professions over here are totally necessary." I mean, even like the tax collector is a necessary profession. We need, we need some taxes, right? We need to repair roads. I mean, go, go to a third world country that can't collect any taxes and therefore has no infrastructure and tell me that taxes aren't necessary. Nevertheless, tax collectors historically super unpopular, right? And so there can be this mismatch

• 31:29Speaker 02

  between whether a job is necessary and whether people feel that the job is necessary. Because human beings are not, we're not omniscient. We have, we have intuitions that misfire because we're not educated. And, and so those minorities have, that are in that precarious position of being successful in disfavored professions, they are often the, the, the subject of mob violence, attempts at sometimes extermination, expulsion. And so it goes all around the world to find cases of this that have nothing to do with Jews in order to demonstrate that it's a generic pattern.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  I have seen you collide with people over Israel. How much of the hypothesis that this is generic, that this is really about envy, plays into Israel-Palestine?

• 32:20Speaker 02

  There is no doubt in my mind that envy is a huge part of Palestinian nationalism. I just had Elliot Kaufman on my podcast and I'm stealing this point from him. But he made the point that during the height of communism, you would, you would always have to argue with socialists about actually existing socialism. Because if you pointed to the failure of socialism in any given case, East Germany, Soviet Union, Cambodia, North Korea, they would say, "Well, that's not real socialism." See, right here in the Communist Manifesto, when, when we actually do it for real, it's going to be fantastic, right? So instead of arguing against socialism or communism,

• 33:05Speaker 02

  you'd have to argue against actually existing socialism and make that distinction for people. There is a, a version of Palestinian nationalism I could easily imagine in my head that I would support wholeheartedly. That would be about state building. That would be about securing a home for Palestinian Arabs, you know, somewhere in historic Palestine. And it would be, it would be willing to make painful but necessary compromises to support that goal because having a state would be the end goal. But actually, existing Palestinian nationalism

• 33:49Speaker 02

  has been much more about tearing down the Jewish state and destroying the Jewish state.

• 33:57Speaker 02

  And envy is a crucial part of that. I mean, there are so many motivations that we in the West ascribe to Palestinian militants that are belied by like the sum total of their actions and choices. First, you know, we, we say, we in the West, we think occupation is the reason they hate Israel so much. This makes perfect sense to us because look, look at our own history in, in, in America. We've occupied places, they've presented it.

• 34:37Speaker 02

  You know, this, this makes perfect sense from a Western point of view, except when you consider that

• 34:45Speaker 02

  by, by the definition that people use, Egypt has been occupying Gaza just as long as Israel has. They've been blockading Gaza just as long as Israel has. According to The Times of Israel, or rather, I think it's Jerusalem Post, Egypt has killed Palestinians by filling tunnels under Gaza with poison gas, just flooding them with poison gas. Whoever's down there dies in order to stop smuggling from Gaza into Egypt. You know, if the, and yet Hamas doesn't fire a single rocket in, into Egypt. Now, why is that? If it's about occupation, why would they not fight both occupiers?

• 35:29Speaker 02

  Unless occupation is a smokescreen intended for Western consumption, where the real desire is to get rid of the humiliation of a Jewish state. And again, why is it, why is a Jewish state a humiliation? It's partly because it's holy land that used to belong to Islam. And it's partly because the success of the Jewish state is a permanent cause of, of envy. And, and so to lay out your question is like, what assumption do I hold about the conflict that makes sense of my position?

• 36:08Speaker 02

  The assumption that I hold about the conflict is that it's, it's a lot less about occupation or violation of human rights. Those, though both of those things exist and should be talked about, those are things we care about. But the things that the critical mass of Palestinian society cares about is the humiliation of having a Jewish state there at all. That makes much more sense of the totality of choices that Palestinian politics has made over the past 78 or 80 years. To, to give one example, the, the PLO was founded in 1964. In its founding charter, it said,

• 36:52Speaker 02

  in so many words, "We're going to destroy Israel. We're going to destroy the Zionist entity." And why? Why at that time? There was no occupation. Actually, worse, there was an occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It just wasn't by Israel. It was by Jordan and Egypt. In the PLO's founding document, they don't even mention that they have to get the Jordanian and Egyptian occupiers out. Why? Because it was always about getting rid of the Jewish state. Now, all of these, you know, someone like Jay will say, "Well, it's about justice." Okay, I think that's what he would like it to be about. Because that would make it a cause that, that he could fight for

• 37:37Speaker 02

  and alongside without any contradiction. But if we recognize and take seriously what the jihadist faction of Palestinian politics actually says with their own mouth, in their own words,

• 37:58Speaker 02

  then we should recognize that standing shoulder to shoulder to them is incompatible with having Western liberal democratic values. The, the final thing I'll say on that front is it really is important to actually listen to people in their own words. For instance, the slogan, "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free."

• 38:22Speaker 02

  At some level, what Westerner could debate that slogan, "Free, we're all about freedom. America is founded on liberty, right? We rebelled from the British for liberty. So if other people want freedom, that's great. Ah, but what is the actual slogan that's actually chanted in Arabic? Well, it's much more often, "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab." No Westerner could in good conscience chant that slogan, because that is a slogan that seems synonymous with ethnic cleansing of Jews, basically. And yet, most people don't actually know that that's the slogan that is usually used in Gaza and the West Bank and elsewhere in the Arab world.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  Is that contested? Because I've never heard that claim before.

• 39:08Speaker 02

  I don't think it's contested. I think you can see video of people chanting it in Arabic and the Arabic slogan.

• 39:14Speaker 01

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• 42:07Speaker 01

  Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action. One thing for me to understand, and I've said this before, so my audience will be familiar with it, but I have no reason to believe you've heard me say it. My wife is Cypriot, and so her family was in Cyprus when Turkey invaded, cut the island in half. Her stepmother directly was like, "Hey, you're going to have to go to a relief shelter for the weekend, but you're going to be back in your house on Monday," only to never again return to her house. Obviously has emotional trauma. If you bring it up to this day, it's going to be the kind of thing where you elicit tears

• 42:49Speaker 01

  and the suffering feels all too fresh. But yet, they look only forward. And while they did for a long time very aggressively, now they still do, but it's sort of more peripheral. They, you know, "We want to get Turkey out of Cyprus, and we want things to go back to the way that they were." But they just economically have moved on. You don't see the kind of fighting back and forth that you see in Israel-Palestine. And for me, this comes down to how salient this idea of justice is for people.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  To me, there's like a direct link with the African-American experience and a sense of justice over slavery. And I would put forward that the more somebody's obsessed with, like, there need to be reparations, there need to be some sort of make-good so that we can finally heal and have justice, the more somebody's obsessed with that, the less likely they are to be moving forward in a meaningful fashion. And I would put that the same with Palestine, that while I completely understand that, whether it was your grandparents or your great-grandparents, whoever it was, that actually lost their property, you've had to re-instill that belief generation after generation to

• 44:13Speaker 01

  keep people hopped up about it, because the people alive today didn't actually experience that. And so, from where I'm sitting, I'm just practical. I'm always asking myself, "Okay, bad things have happened to me, to somebody else, whatever. What can actually be done about that that will make my life better than simply going, 'All right, it is what it is. I'm now going to move forward towards the thing that I really want.'" And when I map the conflict from that perspective, I certainly understand why people would be irate in terms of this thing happened, but what becomes very difficult for me to map in a way where I'm like, "You're making good use of your time," is two or three generations

• 44:57Speaker 01

  on to still be in that same zone of like, "No, no, I'm going to dedicate my entire life to fighting for this thing." That now, it's like, from where I'm sitting, the consequences of the two sides now being in active war have been orders of magnitude more devastating and created this new sense of like, "There's an injustice here that has to be made up for." And so now it's just going to spiral and spiral and spiral. Does that feel like a reasonable read, up to and including correlating it to the African-American experience, that while I certainly understand a cry for justice, there is a point at which

• 45:38Speaker 01

  so many years, multiple generations have gone by, it's just no longer fruitful for an individual life to stay focused on that?

• 45:48Speaker 02

  Yes, so you're noticing a similarity in psychology that is real between advocates of, say, reparations for slavery and advocates of justice for Palestine, which might mean... And again, I've debated many people who believe this, a right of return, right? Every Palestinian whose, say, grandparent was kicked out of somewhere in modern-day Israel gets to go back to that location, that very town, that very house, if it still exists. Probably doesn't, but that very location. I mean, the first thing to notice there is that in both cases, something is being presented

• 46:31Speaker 02

  as just like standard justice that anyone should receive, which has never happened anywhere, ever, in the world. So there's never been reparations paid to descendants of slaves after 150 years. I think reparations should have been paid immediately, and it was sad that American politics couldn't accommodate that outcome after the Civil War. But it's 160 years ago, and I'm like the sixth generation removed from slavery. There's no case you can find me in history, anywhere... And again, there's slavery all around the world.

• 47:15Speaker 02

  There's hereditary slavery all around the world, in Europe, in Russia until the 1860s, in Korea until the 1890s, in China, basically until the 1940s. There was hereditary slavery in medieval Japan, hereditary slavery in West Africa and the Cacoda Empire until around 1900, millions of slaves there. Hereditary slavery everywhere in the Ottoman Empire until the Ottoman Empire dissolved around World War I. And to say nothing of, of course, Brazil, South America, Caribbean, all over the world, hereditary slaves of every race.

• 47:56Speaker 02

  No group of them have been given reparations en masse, much less six generations removed. And if you think those examples of slavery are brutal, that's because you haven't read anything about them. The same is true of so-called refugees, right? The definition of refugee for every other conflict on Earth is not hereditary. If my grandparent got kicked out of a house, I'm not still considered a refugee, except in the one case of Israel-Palestine. And why is that? Well, it's because the refugee issue has been used by the anti-Israel coalition as

• 48:39Speaker 02

  a cudgel in order to destroy the Jewish state.

• 48:45Speaker 02

  There's no case, and again, if you look, if you take the decade of the 1940s, how many people were kicked out of their homes during war in the 1940s? Easily over 10 million between World War II and the various wars that took place in the aftermath of World War II. There is only one group of people that is still demanding that they go back to the homes that their parents, grandparents, or in some cases, could be great grandparents, lost in the 1940s. No other group of people on earth would be taken seriously making that claim. This issue is not being used in good faith.

• 49:28Speaker 02

  It's not as if in the Middle East, there is this massively strong concern, general concern with human rights and undoing the expulsions and flights from war of the 1940s. It's that all of this happens to be useful to portray to the West as the face of this cause. And when you take the mask off, the cause is October 7th. It's massacring and expelling Jews. So you're right that there's a psychological similarity in that people are making demands that in any other case would be considered unreasonable.

• 50:11Speaker 02

  The disanalogy there is the demand African Americans make for reparations is not, it's not really like destroying our well-being as a people. Whereas the demand that Palestinian society makes for quote unquote "justice" or "right of return," those demands have stood directly in contradiction with the prospect of a flourishing Palestinian Arab state. If there is going to be a flourishing Palestinian Arab state, which I would really like to see, it's going to have to start with a few, a few basically non-negotiables.

• 50:51Speaker 02

  One is that the Jewish state next door is not going to take all your refugees. That's the whole point of the Palestinian state, right? The whole point of having a Palestinian state would be to say, "Hey Palestinians around the world, those whose family were affected by the wars with Israel, you now have a home and it's here in Palestine." It would make no sense to then say, "The condition for this state is that also all of those refugees, instead of coming to their home state where the national language will be Arabic, the religion will be Islam, you're going to go to the state next door that we've been at war with for 75 years." It makes no sense.

• 51:35Speaker 02

  And then you can say that's unjust. Okay, but it's, it is the only logical, long-term solution to this problem. And if you cared more about solutions and state-building and future flourishing than about past grievances, that is a compromise you'd be comfortable making. And it's, unfortunately, it's not a compromise that any Palestinian leader has been able to budge even an inch on.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  We come to a very similar conclusion when I put forward my guiding principles in life. It's, "I've got a goal. What am I trying to, how am I going to achieve that goal?" When I put that what the Palestinian goal is, is simply to reclaim the land that they had before, the way they're behaving makes sense, that I'm willing to fight and die for this, and I'll teach my kids to be willing to fight and die for this, I will teach my grandkids to be willing to fight and die for this. And then, "Oh, okay, cool. All the behavior makes sense." When I put on my hat of like, "Oh, I want my kid's life to be better materially than my life," it stops making any sense whatsoever.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  And so for me, coming back to base assumptions, I look at that and I go, "Okay, this whole conversation has been nested inside of this idea of what are the, the mind viruses, just to keep it easy, that I think we're all susceptible to, but what is the mind virus that has captured the West? And now we're here looking at another mind virus that has captured a people." They obviously would vehemently disagree with my categorization of, I imagine many of them believe that God wants them to behave in the way that they're behaving. And so for them, it will feel righteous in a way that it does not look to me as somebody who doesn't believe in God.

• 53:32Speaker 01

  But that at least, it's all predictable. Okay? If you're going to keep fighting for that, then your life is going to be war until you're victorious, and then only through power and strength will you get peace. And then you can hope that the victory is so total that you don't have to fight anymore moving into the future. But I certainly ascribe to, if you were to get the right of return, it would end in just an unending amount of civil war between the two sides. I don't see, there's nothing I know about humans that leads me to believe that they would suddenly be like, "No, it's all good." You would just shift the, whether it would immediately shift over to Israelis just saying the same thing, "Now, this is a call for justice because my family's been living in this home for as long as I've been alive, as long as my parents have been alive.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  And so now it just feels completely unjust to us, and so we're going to fight just as hard." But it will be something like that. There will be an amount of resentment, or it could be mask off, as you say, and we realize that it's from the river to the sea. Palestine shall be Arab, in which case we have, "Hey, we have an additional problem we now have to address." But I don't see anything that says that that's going to lead to prosperity. The only thing, and I fully understand that some people are going to think my sense of prosperity is ugly or grotesque, which is, is life expectancy going up? Are we better off materially than we were before? Is life more beautiful and comfortable? Do we have better hopes for our children than we have for ourselves?

• 55:00Speaker 01

  Like, those are the types of prosperity that I would want to see them embrace. And I don't see a way out of this unless they make that choice. Now, hearing somebody like Jay Shapiro say, "But then there's no justice," I'm like, "I get it, man. Humanity is so brutal." And this is where I don't think people are being honest about what it takes to have a stable society. It is ridiculously difficult. But all of us were raised in the post-World War II era of an unusual amount of stability. Obviously, not total stability, but a very ahistoric amount of stability. And so from that lens, you aren't making contact with reality, and you can stand back

• 55:44Speaker 01

  and say, "Well, this is really just a question of justice." But when you play it out in real life, it's just more bloodshed on the other side of that. Do you have a sense of like, the sharpest argument against the practical take? Or does it always default to, it's a moral injustice that simply cannot be tolerated?

• 56:06Speaker 02

  Look, I agree with your practical sense. So I'm not, maybe not the best one to voice the argument against it. To me, it's, it's obvious that you should want to move forward rather than move backward. You should want to create a society where people are flourishing. You should be sensitive to realistic constraints on the possibility of perfect justice. I mean, if you were to ask an Israeli, half of, half of Israel's population was expelled or pushed out of Middle Eastern Arab countries or Iran, right?

• 56:50Speaker 02

  They didn't, they never got justice. And if they're not continually demanding it, because I think they, as most people around the world, understand when tragedies happen and recede into history, the, the, the demands of justice on, on the one end have to be weighed against the benefits of moving on, on the other. And often, the benefits of moving on are immense. This, this is just a fact of life. And so it seems to me that Palestinians have to, have to absorb this, and it's a painful lesson.

• 57:34Speaker 02

  It's not an easy lesson to learn. It's a lesson that requires, you know, long-term wisdom over short-term satisfaction. But it's also, to be fair, a lesson that people all around the world learn every day, seemingly with a lot less friction than, than, than for Palestinians. And so there's, there has to be a change in leadership and a change in culture from the top down that finds a way to frame moving forward in terms that the average Palestinian can accept and can swallow.

• 58:14Speaker 02

  And I don't know how to affect that, but I, that's what needs to happen.

• 58:21Speaker 01

  Okay, if we bring this back to an American context, because we got there, I was asking you, what are the beliefs that people have or the cultural movements that are causing the problem that we see here in the West? And you said conspiratorial thinking, that led us to the Jews, that led us to Palestine. If we back up to the way that the West is approaching the Jews, or maybe more specifically Americans, what is the thing that they have to unwind there? Is it simply, "You guys are feeling economic stagnation that's making you feel envious, you're looking around at the generic Jew, as Thomas Sowell calls it, you're, you're just looking for the person to blame for why you're not as successful as you want."

• 59:04Speaker 01

  Is there a right target for that frustration? Is that frustration completely nonsensical and it shouldn't exist in the first place? How would you help people extricate themselves from the loop of conspiratorial thinking that leads to envy, so on and so forth?

• 59:21Speaker 02

  If you check, and I think, you know, envy is like the theme of this conversation, but if you check your own tendency to envy the abstract other in your society that you think has more than you, and maybe undeservedly, and instead focus on what you can do to get more of what you want out of your life, I think, I think that's really the, the goal here. And, you know, it tipped me off when I was doing research about Nick Fuentes. I was writing an article about him, and I was reading, I was, I was just watching all his videos on Rumble. And in one video, he said,

• 1:00:07Speaker 02

  Offhandedly in passing that Jews were privileged. And that's the word he used, privileged. And I thought that was very telling because it meant that part of where he's coming from is an admiration and an envy.

• 1:00:24Speaker 02

  In his view, Jewish Americans, Jewish Westerners have something that he wants.

• 1:00:33Speaker 02

  Okay, is it a successful being, being born into what is now a successful, economically successful community with a coherent culture, with traditions?

• 1:00:45Speaker 02

  That you can be proud of and that you can affirmatively stand up and say, I'm proud of being Jewish and so forth. Is it that? Is it some concatenation of those variables that he is envious of, which leads him to be hateful? Right?

• 1:01:05Speaker 02

  I think it is. And, and again, what's the solution there? Well, every time you are hateful or resentful of someone in life, it's almost always because you are envious, or you, you recognize something you want in what you think they have. And so the solution is to turn inward. And to ask yourself, how can you get more of what you want?

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  When you turn inward and what you see is, but the system really is rigged. And so there are people that are successful in the rigged system, but I would really like to dismantle this system that is rigged. Now, to answer that question, I'd first like to know, do you think the current system in the US, and I can get as specific on what I mean by that as you need me to be, but do you think the current system in the US is rigged in a way that somebody who's being honest and assessing it will go, oh, yeah, there are some real problems here? Or nope, not at all, just do better?

• 1:02:04Speaker 02

  My honest answer at the individual level is no, not at all, just do better. Because even if the system is a little rigged, you've got one life and you gotta act now. You know, don't wait, don't be a spectator in your life. Don't be waiting for it to get less rigged.

• 1:02:23Speaker 02

  That's my answer from the point of view of individual advice.

• 1:02:28Speaker 02

  My answer from the point of view of like, what is true at the objective level?

• 1:02:34Speaker 02

  Would be that yes, there is always, there's always, it's, rigging is always a matter of degree. Because human societies are never perfectly meritocratic, never will be.

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  And so, so there's never going to be a system built by humans or made by humans that is perfectly free of rigging. The question becomes, you know, how, how bad is it? I, I do think American society is historically one of actually the least rigged societies on planet earth. And there's a lot of research to back that up, including just the fact that

• 1:03:19Speaker 02

  if you, if you look at the data on how likely someone born into the bottom quintile of economics is to end up at the top quintile. America ranks, you know, among the highest in the world that, that there's, there is a reason we have these folk phrases in, in the culture like rags to riches. There was a reason, there used to be a folk phrase called shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations. I don't know if you've ever heard of that one?

• 1:03:48Speaker 01

  Many times.

• 1:03:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. So this is, these are both versions that you can go from rags to riches and riches to rags in America, which is actually, actually the definition of, of, of a meritocracy and a, in a, there, there will never be a fully classless society, but relatively speaking, a relative, relatively classless society in the good sense.

• 1:04:14Speaker 02

  But if you tell me more what you're, what you're, what you're, what you mean by rigged, that would help me answer the question.

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the thing I really want to understand is if we think the, the system is rigged in the same way, and I just tip my hand in terms of what I think is rigged, but the way that I think the game is rigged against people is, you can boil it down to one word, inflation. So we run these debts very intentionally. It is part of the economic structure. If America is going to be a non-gold backed global reserve currency, all you have is debt. The dollar became debt once we broke the tie to gold. And so now every dollar that you put into the system,

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  you need a lot of them because you're going to have a lot of people that want to buy oil, buy whatever it is that they're trying to buy, that they need access to dollars to get, oil being the most obvious. And so now you have a system where you have an incentive to run deficits. People have an incentive to vote for the person that's going to run the deficits because they're going to do it to promise free things and get people in the system. But what they don't understand is the very thing that they're voting for is their own demise. Because you're going to get an invisible tax known as inflation when you get the deficit spending happening. And so we export some of that inflation, but that's beginning to end, which is a part of the reason that you're getting more and

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  more inflation here at home. But because people don't understand inflation, they don't understand that socialism, for instance, is going to make all of this worse, worse. Every free thing that they vote for, they're paying, you know, for by a hand magically reaches into their bank account or their pocket and takes that money via purchasing power. That's what creates populism, which I think is the symptom that is driving us all mad. But the cause of that symptom is an economy that inflates your money to nothing and creates an exit ramp for people who understand assets. And since the vast majority of people do not understand assets, they don't, they first of all, don't even understand how they're being stolen from. And then they don't understand

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  that the solution is actually pretty simple. But they're not going to take the time to understand it, so they don't do it.

• 1:06:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I don't disagree with any of that. Inflation is obviously, it's a regressive tax on people without assets. Which means the poor and lower middle class. And it's an invisible tax because if you're not paying attention to it, you're just, you're the one getting taxed. Like if you're not actively, if you don't have an active kind of anti-inflation strategy to your own portfolio, then, then, then you're on the menu, as it were.

• 1:07:07Speaker 02

  Although, when you say that's what causes populism, I'm skeptical that that's the main cause. How, how? Would you, would you say that there is a role to play for just the, the entire political spectrum of America and in the case of Europe, being to the left of their societies on the question of immigration for decades and decades and decades that creates this demand for someone to come up and, and take advantage of that vacuum and in populist form?

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  I'll, I'll answer the question and then correct me if I've misunderstood exactly what you're asking. But the role of immigration in the rigging of the economy goes like this. The US decided that it was going to lean into globalization, that it was going to mask a declining growth in the economy by importing cheap labor and importing cheap goods. So we exported a bunch of jobs to where labor was cheapest. We imported, when it was something that had to be done physically, we imported cheap labor via immigration. That masked the fact that we were basically hollowing out the middle class because people were actually getting things cheaper and cheaper. And so it declined that worker power stagnated. They were getting much less of the productivity that was being added by technology. And so

• 1:08:28Speaker 01

  that was accumulating to the top, the people who already understood assets as well. So that sort of doubly makes it bad. When you disempower the worker, you end up in a situation where inflation begins to hurt you. Because if your wages keep up with inflation or slightly outpace it, you're fine. And so post-World War II, we have a similar debt to GDP that we have now, call it roughly 130%. And what we did was, we did massive inflation, but it was slightly lower than the growth rate. We did financial repression by holding interest rates down. And so now you have people that feel great. They're super stoked. The 50s were rad. People were making, middle class was making more money year after year than

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  inflation was taking away from them. And so we were able to make the debt smaller through inflation, but people were making more in their pockets than they were being inflated. So they were richer tomorrow than they were today. Their kids were going to be richer than they were. Everybody was ecstatic. But we then hyper-financialized our economy, stopped actually making things here in the US, and ran the immigration policy that I was just explaining. And so all of that, the vast majority of people just don't even understand how it works. And even that, by the way, was a gross oversimplification. But at least it makes it something that we can have a conversation about. But because people don't understand how it's working, they just know, hmm, things aren't working as well as they used to, and I don't understand why.

• 1:09:55Speaker 02

  A lot of this is about the distance between expectation and reality because by any global metric outside of maybe the 1970s and stagflation, the oil crisis and the financial crisis of 2008, the American economy has been really good, but it hasn't been as good as Americans expected to be.

• 1:10:23Speaker 01

  And it's only sort of true, and I'll be, I don't know how close attention you pay to the economy, but our economy goes something like this. You've got a massive K-shaped economy, so people that are tied into the stock market, they're loving life, doing well, spending money, everything is great. If you're on the bottom side of the economy, your wages have been flat for a very long time, and then COVID inflation ended up hitting you over the head with an absolute stick, and you're now about 30% behind where you were. Then you have a radical shift in culture, which gets more to what you're talking about, where you've got the whole burrito gate, I don't know if you paid attention to that.

• 1:11:00Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:11:01Speaker 01

  People are like, yo, food is so crazy, this is nuts, a burrito costs $20. Now, anybody paying attention knows that's absolute bullshit. It costs $20 if you're going to order it on DoorDash, yes, then it's going to cost $20. If you go to the grocery store and you walk there or drive there yourself and you pick everything out yourself and you meal prep for an entire week, now your burrito's like $3. So that's where now your expectations are so wild that you're just living in a totally different world, where someone in my generation, you didn't have the option to get food delivered. So you would have had to have had a personal assistant 20 years ago to get food delivered to you.

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  So those expectations between Uber, DoorDash, you know, the software internet economy has just radically changed people's expectations. But the economy really is not good for the middle class. So the middle class ended up getting shifted. So part of the middle class got pushed up into the upper class, and then part of the middle class got pushed down into the lower class. And so you can spin the economy to sound great, but the reality is that you have hollowed out your manufacturing. And so you said something at the beginning of the interview that I didn't follow up on, but I really worry about just, a lot of this is going to break along intellectual lines.

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  And if you've got the ability to understand the economy and investing, yeah, you're probably going to be fine. If you don't, you're going to stall out, and there's going to be real problems for you. And so now you have a double whammy of you're creating a real class system, and you're going to make that class very, very sticky by making it extra hard for people that can't understand the only exit ramp, which is all this fancy financial stuff. And so that's where this gets to really be a double whammy. So you'd have to define for me what you mean by it's been great, because there certainly are numbers where it's thriving, but then where the rubber meets the road, you end up

• 1:13:07Speaker 01

  with a difference in, I used to be able to get a good job and support a family, do me something blue collar, and I can't anymore, and that's pretty real.

• 1:13:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess my point there is that Americans, whenever we talk about, you know, how the economy is doing, we have as our benchmark for great, like when an American thinks of when was the economy great, you might think of, for instance, post-World War II. You might think of pre-World War II, you might think of, maybe you think of the 90s. Those time periods were some of the greatest economic expansions in the history of Homo sapiens. And so my point is, the American standard of great is roughly as great as it gets or has ever gotten.

• 1:13:59Speaker 02

  And so our expectations, that's where our expectations are, that's where we feel we should be able to get at any time. And that's all I meant when I said that, if you were to judge America's economy right now just against the rest of the world, I mean, would you say there's anywhere in the world right now that has a significantly better economy than the United States in a sustainable way, in a sustainable way?

• 1:14:34Speaker 01

  Better actual economy, no, but the economy mixed with expectations in terms of the psychological feeling, yes. So China's a tricky story, but I'll paint a quick speedrun as to why I think so many people in China feel much better. Mao starved 45 million people to death in the like 50s, 60s, and 70s, and so you're not talking that long ago. So for them to do the reformations and do free markets has, you know, pulled out however many hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. And so that trajectory of my life is going to be better tomorrow than it is today, my kids' lives are going to be better than mine, they still have that.

• 1:15:16Speaker 01

  Now, they have real economic problems right now, so I don't want to oversell China, but if you want to understand why China is far more optimistic about things like AI, they're far more optimistic about where they're headed than Americans, they haven't been prosperous as long as we have, that's a huge part of it. And then also, they've really tiered things out. So if you're in a like tier three city, well, you can long to be in Beijing, and it's like, whoa, one day I could be in a tier one city. And if you can believe that that leap is possible, you're going to feel pretty good. Now, how much somebody in a tier three feels like they can make it to a tier one, I actually don't know. But, you know, China's obviously pretty tight lipped about how people actually feel.

• 1:15:57Speaker 01

  But that is, I think, the most compelling argument is going to be that. A big part of what's going on across the West is either stagnation or decline in, it isn't just, it certainly isn't nominal dollars, it's what can I actually buy with my money? And because you have that going flat to backwards in a lot of places, and/or expectations going in a ridiculous direction where I'm expecting a $3 burrito to be delivered to me by an Uber driver, it's like, you start putting all of that together and it creates a negative sentiment, as you were saying.

• 1:16:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I agree with that. I mean, it just comes back to the point about expectations, you know, happiness is the difference between expectations and reality. And if you're in China and you remember the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution, it's like, yeah. And now China's like growing 5%, 10% or whatever, then you feel you're on the upward trend. And Americans, we've grown to feel more normal that my, you know, my kid is going to do much better than me, because that's been true since World War II, and now maybe it's not true. Or maybe it's not true in a way that's obvious. And so the political problem that that creates, I mean, it seems to me ironically, that creates

• 1:17:22Speaker 02

  precisely the kind of attitude that will make the problem worse. Because when I ask people my age, and I'm 30, when I ask like, you know, my non-political friends about Mayor Mamdani, like, what do you think? Well, they say things like, well, look, what we've been doing the past 20 years, I think, hasn't been working between the financial crisis, COVID, inflation, the felt sense that maybe, you know, my parents had a house with a picket fence, and like, that seems unattainable for me.

• 1:17:59Speaker 02

  Clearly, what we've been doing hasn't been working, so let's try out what the socialists are saying. You know, like, this is an argument that has been made to me in defense of Mamdani.

• 1:18:11Speaker 02

  It seems to me, everything the socialists are saying, because they have a bad model of how wealth is created, it's all going to backfire and make almost every problem that people my age are worried about worse, but they have a message that seems to address the concerns. Very few of them are talking about building more, even though there's a direct correlation between property prices and building more. There's a direct correlation between why you can't afford the apartment or house that you want to be able to afford, and the fact that it's illegal to build more houses in so many situations.

• 1:18:56Speaker 02

  And yet, socialists seem totally unconcerned about that, and if anything, double down on anti-building, because, why? Because landlords, bad, capitalism, bad, making money off of ownership of property, bad, right?

• 1:19:12Speaker 01

  Do you have a sense of how that idea took hold?

• 1:19:18Speaker 02

  It comes straight from communism at the end of the day.

• 1:19:21Speaker 01

  But is it like a long march to the institutions? Is it every teacher ever is left leaning? Is it economy is broken and this is just the obvious response? How did our expectations become so misaligned? Yeah, what, what has led to the rise of socialism?

• 1:19:42Speaker 02

  My theory has been that basically, and this is a very cynical and pessimistic theory, I think. My theory is that socialism and communism are just naturally appealing to people. Because they tap right into the human flaw of envy that we've been talking about throughout this episode. The most natural thing in the world is to see a guy you don't know, who has more than you, maybe doesn't look like you. That helps and has more than you and say, okay, screw that guy.

• 1:20:22Speaker 02

  Screw the fact that he has more than me. Screw the fact that he has, he, he's able to make money by sitting on the assets he already has. Which makes it seem like, well, it is passive income. It's literally called passive income. And I'm out here being very active, having to be very active with my income. Screw that whole, all the envy that you are wired to feel as a homo sapiens is going to activate in that situation. And then an intellectual comes along, plugs right into that feeling and says, here's, here's an ideology that explains why everything you're feeling is right and you shouldn't question any of it. And we're going to take down the motherfuckers that have more than you.

• 1:21:05Speaker 02

  To me, that is just an inherently winning message in, in most cases. So then the question becomes not why is socialism popular right now? The question becomes, why was socialism ever not popular in America? That's the really interesting question.

• 1:21:24Speaker 01

  Do you have an answer?

• 1:21:25Speaker 02

  There was a cold war and our great enemy as Americans was the Soviet Union, which was socialist communist.

• 1:21:34Speaker 02

  And we had, so all of the tribal psychology that we had as Americans was, was pointed against socialism for a very long time. But what happens when the, when the cold war ends? By 1991, there's no great socialist communist threat anymore. Which means that anyone who wasn't alive to have that programming is now back at the baseline of susceptibility to the appeal of socialism and communism. And again, I argue that that baseline susceptibility is just very high. And so who is it that is, who is it that is most susceptible to socialism right now in American politics?

• 1:22:18Speaker 02

  It's people under the age of 40, which is pretty much the exact cutoff for if you experienced as a child or, or young adult, the, the cold war mentality of what America used to be.

• 1:22:35Speaker 02

  Without those antibodies, in other words, without those antibodies, the, you know, the ideology takes its natural strength.

• 1:22:42Speaker 01

  Okay, so if this is, we had inoculation against it. We stopped taking the vaccine and now we're having an outbreak again. How do we stop it? I assume you feel the same way that I do, because you said earlier that it's going to make virtually everything worse. Is there anything other than, well, I guess they have to lay their face on the stove or they have to smash their hand with a hammer. But there's a lot of us here that are going to have to go through that same thing that can already tell you this is a bad idea and we want to back out. So is there a way to win people over with ideas? Or what, like, how do we avoid this fiasco?

• 1:23:25Speaker 02

  Okay, so my hope is that because America is a coalition of 50 states, each, each of which really runs its own economy to an extent and, you know, state regulations are extremely different. And California is so different than Texas and Florida. And all of those differences have economic consequences that can be observed. My hope is that, you know, this, there's going to be states that go hard and have already gone hard into socialist assumptions. And they're going to go harder, you know? But there's going to be states that do the opposite, if only to not be like the other states.

• 1:24:05Speaker 02

  And so that natural experiment, I hope, is going to serve as a constant check and reminder and, and proof of concept or disproof of concept for socialism. That will lead to better results in, in the long run. Now, on the other hand, we've been running that experiment for the past 20 years and it's, it doesn't look good because I guess people don't really learn their lesson until so much harm has set in.

• 1:24:40Speaker 02

  Like, why is it the case that California has a net outflow and New York have like a net outflow of people almost every year for like the past several decades, whereas Texas and Florida have a net inflow?

• 1:24:55Speaker 02

  That shouldn't be the, I mean, California is like one of the most blessed locations on planet earth in terms of a million different variables. It should be, I mean, Americans should be by any logic, like scrambling to get into these great cities or once great cities. And no, no knock against Texas or California or, or any of the red states. But is there any objective reason they should be cleaning up? What, as people vote with their feet, the way that they are? I'm not sure, other than that they've chosen policies that support growth.

• 1:25:35Speaker 02

  The ability to build and therefore afford property.

• 1:25:40Speaker 02

  And, and yeah, the ability to build businesses and houses at the, at the end of the day. And California has done the opposite. And yet it seems like very few Democrats have like, who is the Democrat that's going to come up and say, like, ring the alarm and say, guys, we have something really good to sell here, we're just ruining it with stupidity.

• 1:26:03Speaker 02

  And we've got more popular policies on abortion. Like we've got the winning hand on abortion. We've got the, probably a winning hand on common sense gun control. Why are we ruining it with, by basically telling people, you can't build anything. You can't do anything in our states. So I think we're waiting for the Democrat that's going to come along and say that.

• 1:26:30Speaker 02

  And it's, it's a mystery to me why, why, why that hasn't happened already.

• 1:26:38Speaker 01

  Well, let me put forward an idea. I think that basically what is happening right now in the Democrat party is politicians want for one thing. What is going to be the thing that allows me to gain and retain power? We're running because both sides wanted for a long time to run an immigrant policy where we could get a ton of cheap labor in. Republicans wanted it because it kept costs low for business owners. And then Democrats wanted it because they knew that they were going to vote for them. And so given that, you're now in a position where you have constituents that are going to vote to keep you in power as long as you keep promising them free things or make available.

• 1:27:20Speaker 01

  I, I have a growing suspicion, though I don't have enough data yet, but I have a growing suspicion that we're going to find just an unimaginable amount of fraud. That is going to be absolutely dizzying in terms of one of the things that keeps drawing people in and that that fraud finds its way back into campaign donations. Again, that'll have to be proven out and I will gladly admit, if I end up being wrong, I have no friction around that kind of thing. But when I try to map out why this would be the case, because I've lived in California now for over 30 years and I have watched it go from bad to amazing and back to bad. So it's pretty wild.

• 1:27:57Speaker 01

  And so you just see from a policy perspective, if you keep making those decisions, if you push the marquee industry out of the state because you think that, well, why should we have to give them any breaks? We're LA, this is where the industry is and you're not able to project out, well, the industry will stop being there because these guys have a business to run and they're going to go find whoever courts them. And they can live here, but then go film somewhere else and then come back and you're going to lose the industry. And that's precisely what happened. Whenever you import people, you do not force them to become American, if you will. And you don't force any kind of assimilation. Then you're going to see people tribing up. Those tribes are going to vote for what they're going to vote for.

• 1:28:41Speaker 01

  They're going to try to get a hold of the shrinking pie, as we were talking about earlier. That's my read, not yours. That I think is precisely what's going on in California. And I actually think that's a broader symptom of what's going on in the West. Is there stuck in, you have to throw in a true left leaning personality, which I think there are good things too. But then there's also a susceptibility to envy. That also leads to the whole socialism, tear it down, that whole loop.

• 1:29:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I mean, I, I agree with all that. It's a depressing picture, though.

• 1:29:22Speaker 01

  It is a depressing picture. Like you, I think about, okay, what can I do at the individual level? But my thing is, it is far better to understand what's really happening so that you can actually address the world. And I think this is one of the things that anybody that watches enough of my content either gravitates towards or is really rubbed the wrong way by, which is, I'm always just looking for where are we interfacing with the real world. I believe we live in a deterministic universe. I think humans have a nature, and so they act in largely predictable ways. Certainly, when you take them as big groups. And so, show me the incentives, I will show you the outcome. If you have a system that invites people into your country because you offer

• 1:30:03Speaker 01

  handouts, that's going to attract a very different kind of person than if you have a country that says, hey, we'll give you a shot, but you might freeze to death in the winter. You're going to get two very different kinds of people. If you have a government run by people that understand man tends towards tyranny, you get the American system that structures itself with balances of power because it doesn't fucking trust anybody. But if you have people that hunger for power, then you're going to pack the courts and want a one-sided government like we have here in California. I would be terrified to live anywhere that always elects the same type of person. You're ultimately going to end up with a problem. You need the checks and balances. You need people who disagree with each other. You need the populace to have different people to go to when

• 1:30:48Speaker 01

  they think that you're really driving them off a cliff. When I look at the what's going on, I go, okay, we broke the economy by essentially outsmarting people. So the people that understand how like high-level economics and finance work, they're gonna set a system up that they can win and have been doing for hundreds and hundreds of years. And so they'll just move from place to place. That definitely gets into my conspiracy thinking. But I do think politicians and bankers are the people that we should be very traumatized by. So, we structured the economy in a way that we can steal from people via inflation. We convince them to vote for more free stuff. Both

• 1:31:29Speaker 01

  sides do it. And then, we end up in a position where elites are going to win, essentially, no matter what happens. People start deranging. And the given flavor of derangement that we have right now, you can have your derangement on the left, or you can have your derangement on the right. The derangement on the left is lets we feel guilty about who we are. We should let anybody and everybody into the country. Not force people to assimilate, because who are we to say that our culture is better? When people are pilfering and defrauding us, as long as that money ends back up in my campaign fund, I'm gonna turn a blind eye, or maybe even facilitate

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  it. And because we've been prosperous for so long, socialism starts rising again, because people don't realize how hard it is to produce something profitably. And yeah, you end up in a dark zone. But, my thing is, if you can articulate it, and if I'm accurate as to what's broken, then you can fix it. And so, the only thing that is a series of question marks for me is, do you just completely give up on adults and run the French playbook of the long march through the institutions? And that's why, and this is something you and I talked super, super briefly before we started rolling, but I'm in game development now. And the reason that I'm in game development is, I want to focus on children's entertainment, because I have one

• 1:32:55Speaker 01

  idea that I want to push far and wide out into the world, which is, if you spend time and energy on getting better, you will actually get better. So, you know, the opening thesis of this whole interview was, the majority of Americans no longer believe that hard work will yield to good outcomes. And my whole message in life is, that just isn't true. If you work hard, even in a rigged system, if you identify, how is it rigged exactly? What do I have to do to win? Then, I'm gonna do that thing. And people often will, people on the left, I should be very specific, get very frustrated with me, because I am not very impressed with Trump at all, but I

• 1:33:39Speaker 01

  voted for Trump. And I look at the left, and I'm far more animated by the mistakes that they're making than I'm animated by the mistakes that Trump is making. And the way that I explain it is, listen, I am not gonna justify a single thing that Trump is doing. I think he's making an unending string of errors. But he's not breaking the engine of prosperity. The DSA is actively, willfully, trying to break the engine of prosperity so that they may be in control. And either, they're too dumb to realize that they're doing it, which disqualifies them, or they're sinister, and they're doing it on purpose, which disqualifies them. But anybody that starts talking about

• 1:34:21Speaker 01

  controlling prices from the top down, immediately, history says that goes to a way darker place than the guy that's like, oh, I want to make sure the stock market is working so that I can make a ton of money off the stock market. And I think that the way that Trump engages with the stock market is grotesque in all capital letters. I literally can't believe it. This is like fucking insane to me. Forget the war, you can even set that aside. But, but it isn't breaking the engine of prosperity. This, on the other hand, will. And it leads to unimaginable amounts of death, cruelty, oppression, et cetera, et cetera. And people, just to your point earlier, when you said, you were talking about slavery, and you said, if you don't believe that that stuff was brutal,

• 1:35:03Speaker 01

  then you just haven't read about it. And because I know that you teach the history of slavery, that certainly carries weight. That's how I feel about socialism, communism. If you think it's even remotely a good idea, you just haven't read about it. Like, it's fucking insane to me. And so, yeah, that one gets me wound up every time. So.

• 1:35:23Speaker 02

  What would you, what would you say if someone responded, okay, well, yeah, forget Soviet Union, and Mao's China, and Cambodia, and North Korea. Focus on Western Europe today, or the Scandinavian countries today. That's what DSA is fighting for. They, they still have seemingly an engine of prosperity.

• 1:35:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, they do. And if the DSA were actually fighting, if the DSA were actually fighting for Scandinavian countries, they'd be like, okay, I get what you guys are trying to do. If you want to tax the little guy 50% of his wages, okay. Like, that's a real debate that's worth having, but that isn't what they want to do. First of all, the Scandinavian countries are screaming from the top of their fucking lungs, that we are not socialist. We are free-market capitalists. We are not democratic socialists. So, they themselves have literally come out, heads of state have come out to say, guys, for fuck's sake, stop calling us socialist countries. We're not. Now, the reason that they do that is, they were headed down that path at one point,

• 1:36:22Speaker 01

  and they saw how badly it was backfiring, and they had to start going the other way. And when you look at the Nordic countries, they've made a decision, which is that, we're not going to innovate, we're not as much, we're not gonna prioritize that. We just want to have a super homogeneous society, where there's ultra-high trust, and we raise everybody to go, you shouldn't be on the dole too long. You might, every now and then, something bad might happen, and we're gonna take care of you, but then you need to get back off your ass, and you need to get to work. And so, everybody looks around, and it's like, yeah, nobody's taking advantage of me. I feel good contributing into this. Yes, we're not like a hyper-growth country like the US or China. We don't have the, the kind of upper bound of prosperity, but we have higher measures on

• 1:37:07Speaker 01

  happiness and satisfaction and things like that. Now, those are kind of outdated numbers. They're getting their ass handed to them now by immigration and lack of assimilation. But, even setting that aside, the DSA is not saying that. The DSA is talking about seizing the means of production. They are openly Marxist. These are people, like, if you want to drag Hassan Piker into all this, these are people that the, the man was given the Little Red Book of Communism on camera, and was like jizzing all over himself, and taking it with reverence, and not like the way you would take a Nazi artifact of like, oh shit, like, this is like heavy, fuck me. He was like, oh my god, like, this is amazing. And his friend turns to the cameras like, some people

• 1:37:52Speaker 01

  say this is more important than the Bible. And I was like, fucking hell. Now, I know Hassan knows that 45 million people were starved to death by Mao. So, is this like, you just gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet kind of thing? Like, that is so outrageous to me. He dressed as Mao at one point. So, those guys are absolute envy-laden lunatics, in my opinion, for whom I have no tolerance, for they will lead to a level of oppression that finds me in the street with

• 1:38:27Speaker 01

  very 1776 kind of vibes. Like, that is, that's my red line. So, I just know what history tells us about where all that goes.

• 1:38:44Speaker 02

  I couldn't agree more.

• 1:38:47Speaker 01

  Well Coleman, do you have any parting words for people that want to get out from under whatever this malaise is, whatever mind viruses, or whether it's other elements of conspiratorial thinking or cousins thereof, that will help them, help us as a collective? Because you've already been very clear at the level of the individual. But what, what ideas do we need to permeate culture with?

• 1:39:12Speaker 02

  I admire what you're doing with video games. It's novel. I haven't heard of it before. I think we need more people thinking along creative novel lines to influence the youth in ways that are, that are different. I'm trying to do my part by teaching at University of Austin. I have a course on slavery that tries to present it in its global context that reads progressives, liberals, and conservatives in equal measure. And tries to chart a path towards thinking about past sins in a way that is positive

• 1:39:54Speaker 02

  on America and not neutral on America, not neutral on Western civilization. I really resonate with everything you said about the importance of maintaining the engine of prosperity. I know people have good faith disagreements about Trump, like you. I'm, I'm never tempted to defend Trump, except when he's like egregiously quoted out of context, which is happening less and less these days, but it's still happening. I'm never tempted to defend his character as a person, which I find really objectionable, nor his corruption. But it is important to keep in perspective that the engine of prosperity, the engine

• 1:40:35Speaker 02

  of economic prosperity that revs in America, in America and the West, is the source of almost everything that we care about, no matter what your politics are. And so it's really important to think about how to protect that. So I admire what you're doing. Keep it up and I will stay in touch.

• 1:40:59Speaker 01

  I would love it, brother. As always, I thank you very much. I've said off camera many times, I'll say once again on camera, I think you are one of the most important intellectual voices out there and may you continue to grow and get more and more visibility. I think it's well deserved.

• 1:41:16Speaker 02

  Right back at you.

• 1:41:17Speaker 01

  All right. Where do you want people to follow you?

• 1:41:19Speaker 02

  At ColdXMan is my Twitter. Listen to my podcast, Conversations with Coleman, produced by The Free Press, and read my column, also at The Free Press.

• 1:41:32Speaker 01

  I love it. I vouch for all of it. All right, man. Thank you again, everybody out there. If you have not yet done so, be sure to subscribe and until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do. You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic, you skip it. When you travel, you skip it. When your routine breaks, everything tends to break and that inconsistency compounds against you every single day. AG1 is designed to solve the execution problem. One scoop, eight ounces of water, and you're done.

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