Noel Bagwell (Social Media, Libertarianism, Religion, The Future)

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In this episode of the Judgment Call Podcast Noel Bagwell and I talk about:

• 00:01:41 Where do political topics and memes come from? How does 'the crowd' select and rank them? Are we being intentionally mis-directed politically?
• 00:10:55 When did the Internet get 'corrupted' from its ideals? What happened to Social Media companies?
• 00:15:30 An ode to psychopaths and sociopaths...
• 00:21:15 The short history of the emphasis on individual freedom in 'the South'.
• 00:26:01 Is the current mental health crisis a product of unrealistic expectations?
• 00:31:20 Are we missing out by not teaching children enough about philosophy and economics?
• 00:35:03 Why is the US politically so much 'on fire' now?
• 00:48:16 Why libertarianism is misguided?
• 00:57:20 What is the new role of religion? How it has changed over time especially in America.
• 01:20:22 How are wisdom and knowledge related?
• 01:32:22 Will working with AI look like following GPS directions?
• and much more!

You may also watch this episode on Youtube - Noel Bagwell (Social Media, Libertarianism, Religion, The Future).

Noel Bagwell, is President and Chief Legal Counsel of Executive Legal Professionals.

Noel runs his own podcast 'Profit from Legal'.

Welcome to the Judgment Call Podcast, a podcast where I bring together some of the most curious minds on the planet. Risk takers, adventurers, travelers, investors, entrepreneurs and simply mindbogglers. To find all episodes of this show, simply go to Spotify, iTunes or YouTube or go to our website judgmentcallpodcast.com. If you like this show, please consider leaving a review on iTunes or subscribe to us on YouTube. This episode of the Judgment Call Podcast is sponsored by Mighty Travels Premium. Full disclosure, this is my business. We do at Mighty Travels Premium is to find the airfare deals that you really want. Thousands of subscribers have saved up to 95% in the airfare. Those include $150 round trip tickets to Hawaii for many cities in the US or $600 life let tickets in business class from the US to Asia or $100 business class life let tickets from Africa round trip all the way to Asia. In case you didn't know, about half the world is open for business again and accepts travelers. Most of those countries are in South America, Africa and Eastern Europe. To try out Mighty Travels Premium, go to mightytravels.com slash MTP or if that's too many letters for you, simply go to MTP, the number four and the letter U dot com to sign up for your 30 day free trial. To find out what's kind of your pattern, what things really matter to you and why why does that happen, right? What this is an endless amount of political topics we could talk about from the ancient times all the way to what happened literally yesterday. Do we like Biden's speech or not? What I'm trying to find out is how people run that algorithm that they get involved excited so to speak with one particular issue and then it seems to be gone two months later or six months later or maybe never, right? So but what is that topic that really excites them in that moment and how do you think that's something that is a conscious decision you made or it's someone else's decision that put this in your brain so to speak and you just didn't realize it? Like social media, right? Or maybe your friends or maybe your church or maybe it's some crazy liberals. I mean, which I fully agree with, they're crazy, right? I think they're crazy. But where does this actually come from? Where do we get excited about things and then we forget about them? I think it comes out of identity whether you have a well formed identity or not, like whether you have been thoughtful and intentional about cultivating specific character traits and values. And if you have done that work and it's work, it's hard work and you've been skeptical, you've been through a period of extreme skepticism where you've rejected a lot of the things that you initially were raised to believe and then subjected them to radical doubt and then perhaps readopted them freshly for yourself. You didn't just accept them and hold them continuously from the time of your youth on, but you rejected them and then I think that period of radical skeptical rejection is a period that the most enlightened minds always go through. It's kind of a hellscape of the soul that you have to charge across to burn away all the stuff that doesn't necessarily hold up to logical scrutiny. We are raised with a lot of superstition and fairy tales and stuff like that from our childhood and while it's good to cultivate imagination, just buying into that whole hog unquestioningly is not the hallmark of a rational mind. I really like what you just said. What I feel is it's still perplexing to me is there's this enormous amount of potential topics we can choose from. And I don't think, and this is a list of thousands and thousands of topics that are important, is how we develop the economy, how do we create fairness in the society, how do we run our justice systems. It's probably endless amounts of topics, but if you look at the daily channel box, so to speak, of Twitter and Facebook, there's a relatively limited amount of topics that actually seem to gain traction and create an emotional connection with people. This is what the AI algorithms, what social media is really accentuating is what the AI feels it can promote to the next user and get some engagement from. And I think, me included, we are not really aware that most of these topics are actually presented to us because we created an emotional reaction with other people. And that's why the algorithm thinks we will also emotionally react to this. And we also, I have trouble remembering what I saw on Twitter a couple of days ago. I might, still, if I know the account, I might remember the account and there was something interesting, but that's about it. So what I'm trying to gather is we look at all these political issues and we feel very strongly in that moment, and maybe even a couple of weeks later. But there's so many more interesting topics that, in my mind, would frame the future of this country or the world and are much more impactful. And nobody really cares about them. But you can talk about them on Twitter, but you get two likes. And it doesn't matter who tweets them, right? It can be a very popular account. What we argue about these little things, you could obviously infer more important things from these little things. But it seems almost like there is somewhat consciously misdirecting us. That's what I'm trying to get at. Yeah, I think the social media algorithms are definitely designed to stir up hype, first and foremost, because that's what draws attention. And what draws attention draws ad revenue. So we have to understand that these are advertising companies, that Facebook is an advertising company, Twitter is an advertising company. And if you're not buying it and you're not selling it, then you're the product being sold. That's what people don't, they don't realize, they don't see, that if you're not buying it and you're not selling it, you are the product being data or advertising impressions are the product. And so whatever pulls data out of you, whatever pulls engagement out of you, any kind of data points that they can get, no matter what they are, then that's something that they want to get out of you. So they will provoke you as often as possible to do that. And then whatever will draw you in to engage with the content and the platform and keep you there longer, trap you there longer so that they can put as many ads in front of your face, they'll do that too. That's a horrible formula. That's like a toxic narcissistic friend that constantly talks about themselves and everything they're interested in and doesn't really listen to you. And then when you do speak, they're only listening for something that they can use to hook you and redirect you to somebody else and something else that they have an ulterior motive and some kind of agenda to push. And if Facebook was a friend, like if Facebook was a girlfriend or a boyfriend, if Facebook was your spouse, would you divorce them for better way? Would you not speak to, would you like ghost that friend for treating you that way? Of course you would. If Facebook was a person in your life, a human in your life, and they acted the way Facebook acts towards their users, you would hate that person. And yet we trust Facebook with our logins, our accounts, our data, our family pictures. And I'm as guilty as everybody. I'm on there because my grandmother's on there. And I want to make sure that she can see the family pictures and what's going on. It's her windows through the world. Same thing with just about every social media company. We use them because they're convenient ways to talk to other people, but they insert themselves in an intrusive way in those relationships. And then they make themselves inextricable and they do it all for these very devious motives. I kind of want to go back, if I can, for just a second to the point that you asked me about before, like why people are kind of the way that they are. It reminds of a quote by Confucius. He said, at 15, I set my heart upon learning. At 30, I had planted my feet firm upon the ground. At 40, I no longer suffered from perplexities. At 50, I knew what were the biddings of heaven. At 60, I heard them with an awful ear. At 70, I could follow the dictates of my own heart for what I desired no longer overstepped the boundaries of right. It took him 70 years, in other words, basically the whole lifespan of a person, to finally restrain his own passions and develop a character that he could be proud of. That that's a lifelong endeavor is what he was really saying, but it's a process. And then there are certain milestones along that process where you'll see progress. But a lot of people never at 15 set their heart upon learning. That lifelong commitment to learning and personal development is not for them. They don't care about that. They just want to have a good time. And if they are those good time folks, they'll peak early and they won't leave a legacy. They won't have a huge impact on others. They will live a selfish existence. And that's the difference. I like your comparison that you made. That's a psychopath friend. That's something very well put. And I think the majority of users in the US are finally waking up to this. One is this intrusion of privacy. And then the other side is that it is nothing healthy that that comes out of these algorithms. And again, this can be fixed, right? So there is a model for a conscious and a useful friend that could be social media. The question is, can they make enough money with this? And it is a corporate culture that these companies have is that compatible. When you watch the social dilemma, it is almost like recovering criminals. Well, when you see former executives of these companies, so they know they had the conscience and then it bothered them for years, but they made a lot of money. They made bundles of money. And then eventually when they were rich, they got out, right? So they didn't get out. And the first day when they realized what's going on, they got out when they were rich and they could actually get stock options. But you feel that this is laying on them. It's definitely a weight. That is a really strange development because Silicon Valley didn't really start out that well. It started out as a kind of more hippieish idea of democratizing access to knowledge. At least that was the big overtone. It got very commercial in the 90s. But I think in the early days, there was a lot of goodness to it. And I think we see that the internet has really delivered on this. But there's been... Do you believe that? Can I just jump in and ask, do you believe that really? Or are you willing to entertain the idea that that perception could be attributed to some historical revisionist PR on the behalf of the... No, because I was involved in that. I met a ton of people who had exactly that mindset. And now you can say, oh, well, that depends on the timeframe, but these people are still around. And maybe they are just a minority, the majority. You could make that argument. But there was a strong movement that was actually driving a lot of those forces. And then obviously, I believe it on VCs, right? VCs give you so much money and you say, well, it's great, right? Why wouldn't I take a couple of million? And then you put them to your business in 12 months there. They say, well, but now we need to have 10 times the amount of views and you're like, what? And then you go somewhere where you don't really want to go. And then they say, well, you did it last year. So it's been like a criminal gang, so to speak. You know, they force you to do something illegal and then they hold it against you the rest of your life. And I feel this is more of a conscious on the VCs, but their hands are clean, right? They never got their hands dirty. That would be my explanation. Well, the money's... Yeah, I think that's true. But again, remember the Pareto principle that 80% of results come from 20% of causes. So even if 80% of the people in Silicon Valley had the kind of peace net could be, you know, change the world for the better mindset. And there are your boots on the ground, engineers, the traditional people who work in the business and make things happen. The 20% of people actually driving 80% of the outcomes might not be those people. It might be the other 20% of the people involved in the business who are, you know, at the top in the power structures, the CEOs, the CTO, COOs who may have an agenda that's more selfish, more profit centered, a profit, you know, a stronger profit motive. And of course, you know, nobody really wants to be aligned with just profits hearing regardless of the impact on society. Nobody wants to be seen in that way. So they have a powerful incentive to retroactively, you know, massage the narrative around what they've done and make it seem like the culture of Silicon Valley is, you know, very enlightened when in fact, it's just free market capitalism, which is great. You know, free market capitalism is great, but you can't do free market capitalism without some really fundamental awareness that that's the game you're playing. Capitalism gets durous when you, when you're playing that game under false pretenses, when you think that you're doing something not for profit, but for good, then you will be easy to do and people who are there and who make no bones about being there for profit, you know, they're going to see an advantage and they're going to take it because that's what you do. Yeah, it is a problem of time horizon. So there's a short time optimization graph and there's a long term optimization graph duping your users and being, being just a psychopathic friend is not going to give you a long term result as a girlfriend, boyfriend, as a spouse, or as a company, it's just not going to end well. And you know that, but you still might go for it because you feel that's the best solution for you. And I think this is okay. It's just people need to recognize this. And I always say that, you know, we've been, been living in the civilization and cities for so long, but still we have to see, we seem to have a stable amount of psychopaths in our society of criminals, that criminal behavior should be, you can say eradicated, right? Because we genetically select the next, the next generation as to be one that fits right into society that has made their life, was able to live their life very properly in that society. So I feel like these things are necessary of, of, let's be clear about one side, we just need to develop a certain, we need to get away from this naivete that a lot of people have. So we need to, we need to see society as it is. I agree. I agree with that. But look, but I want to, I want to clarify. And we're very cavalier about how we toss around terms like psychopath or narcissist. I mean, I kind of use that term or introduce that term to the conversation. And so I need to take ownership of that. But when I talk about someone being a narcissist or a toxic narcissist, that's very different from being a psychopath, being a, someone who's a psychopath or a sociopath, which those terms aren't really clinically used anymore. The term is now anti social personality disorder, or in Europe, dis social personality disorder. Someone who's actually struggling from that actual psychological condition is not necessarily a bad person. In fact, the world needs psychopaths, the world needs sociopaths. I absolutely agree. Some of your top performing CEOs, doctors, lawyers, politicians, some of the, some of the people who are like driving society forward are, you know, they had, they, they fit the criteria for these diagnoses and they often go undiagnosed because they don't run a foul of the law. And people with anti social personality disorder and dis social personality disorder get a really bad rap because there's a disproportionately large percentage of the prison population that also fits that diagnosis. And so we sort of lazily associate these conditions with being a criminal or being a bad person. When in fact, what they really are is the alphas of society. They're the alpha predators of society of the human population. And human, humanity, just like every other species needs alphas and we should not demonize them. So I really think that actually it sounds counterintuitive to say, and it's not socially acceptable, and it's probably social suicide to say this, but it's the truth that we owe a lot of our species development to, to what we would call in a cavalier way, sociopaths. And we need to stop demonizing that diagnosis. Oh, I fully agree with you on that. And I think it's a marker for how much. But you gotta watch them, right? Because they are predators. I mean, they are the alphas. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a marker of how much risk people are willing to take. And it's, it's, it's obviously, there is a deeper reason why these behaviors are part of pretty much any society you go in the world or every single society you can go to Papua New Guinea, and you will find the same behaviors in certain amount of people. So there is something to it. And I think we can't just, we can talk it away with some theory where we feel, well, this is a negative behavior and we should suppress it. I think you would be absolutely agree on this. I think it's just about accountability. Because sociopaths like anybody, they respond to incentives. You know, you give, they're very rational people there. And in fact, that's probably the primary difference between what we would call a sociopath and everybody else. Everybody else tends to respond more strongly to empathy, to the feelings that are, they're emotionally driven. Whereas someone who we would consider a psychopath or a sociopath is someone who is more logical, less empathetic, less feelings driven person. But, but just because they're driven less by feelings doesn't mean they're driven less by incentives. So when we have the right incentives in the relationships in society, and when we structure incentives appropriately and we make it clear that there's accountability, that if you do good things, you'll be rewarded. If you do bad things, you'll be punished. Then I think people who are psychopaths that actually have good impulse control, which weak impulse control is part of the classic diagnosis for antisocial personality disorder, you know, psychopathy, sociopathy. But there are a lot of people who are on that spectrum and it's a spectrum who do have good impulse control. And the ones with good impulse control will be phenomenal people, but you do have to, you do have to structure their incentives appropriately. It's all about incentives for me anyway. Well, I can see A, the knowledge that you have in that field. And you must have clearly thought about that and B, how specific you, you are with the terms, which I guess is part of your, your habit and part of your profession, right? So you run your legal pro, your legal professional office in natural, which often is associated with, with a higher degree. And that's probably an image and just, just like an image that people have in their mind, but it's associated with a higher degree of individuality. If I think of cities in the US, and I think of high individuality, I would think of many cities in Texas. I would think of, that would come to mind. And I think this shines through with what you just said. Yeah. You know what? There would be no Texas without Tennessee. And I love to remind my friends in Texas of that. There would be no Texas without Tennessee. They would, they would be part of Mexico without Tennessee. And so I think that they're, they're sister states that they, they definitely, there's a strong cultural affinity between Texas and Tennessee. You look at a city like Austin, Texas, for example, pretty liberal city, just like Nashville is a pretty blue city and an otherwise red state. Memphis and Knoxville also pretty blue cities. And if you look at the state flag for Tennessee, it's a red field with a blue circle and three white stars. And I always consider to Nashville and Knoxville, Memphis to be sort of blue stars on the otherwise red background of, of the state. So they're pretty progressive, but, and Austin is, is like that as well. It's a pretty progressive city, but they both have the arts in common. You know, there's a lot of music. Nashville's called Music City USA. That's, that's what it's known for. You know, the Grand Ole Opry was there. It's the, the home of country music. And it's just sort of like the hub for a lot of, of historically music and art and everything in, in this part of the country at least. You've got some other really art heavy cities like Asheville, North Carolina, and then of course, you know, New York is a haven for the arts, San Francisco, Miami, you know, for different types of, for different types of art. But in the South, I mean, and especially for country music and things that are popular here, Nashville is really the hub of all of that. And I think people come here for the same reasons they go to LA. They come here to make it. I was actually just talking to a friend of mine who's the executive director of the National Alliance on Mental, Mental Illness. And she was talking about the mental health work that, that they're doing in Davidson County where Nashville is. And she was talking about how many people come to them for help because they came to Nashville to make it as a, as a musician, as a singer, songwriter, and they, they didn't, you know, it's a tough industry. It's hard to make it. And then when they don't make it, they encounter issues like depression, substance abuse, and so on. Not to mention all the financial struggles that a struggling artist can have. So Nashville, you're right. It's a very independent city. It's like a place like LA where you can go and make it big, or you can go and wait tables, you know, like, is the old running joke about actors in New York or a stage actors in New York and film actors in LA. It's the same thing in Nashville. So yeah, it's a very individualist city. You're right. You know, I live in San Francisco, and we had the big exit out of California, especially San Francisco. We lost a huge amount of people. The estimates are somewhere between 30 to 50% of people who actually had something to do in the city of San Francisco, so they commuted from nearby cities. And Nashville, Austin, Miami are typically the choices for most people that would exit the city. Very often, they would go back home to their parents if they're young enough, otherwise they would just move their family to one of those destinations. There's other places, but those were certainly the prime suspects. And one of the things that a lot of people mentioned, and I'm not sure how much that fits in, and there is obviously the political debate in California, and especially the cities in California, terribly run. It's basically like an anarchy. There's a lot of richer signaling on a political level, but there isn't anything goes. There's very little things that actually get enforced in San Francisco. I think there's parking and maybe some violent crime. Everything else is basically open to anyone who is here. There's no parole. The DA basically refuses to prosecute anything. We're very strange places, homeless people everywhere. They're being ignored. They're not being helped, but they're also not being hassled. So everything goes, anything goes. And I saw that Oakland is going to start paying, and I think this is an unconstitutional and racist policy, by the way, but they're going to start making $500 payments. No questions asked to low income families, but only people of color. So they're actually using racial discrimination to determine who gets its publicly funded funds, like government money, taxpayer money, is going to be redistributed to people. No questions asked. It's basically a universal basic income, but it's race based, and I think that's a horrible precedent. It's a horrible principle. It's racist. Yeah, once in a while. It won't survive in that way. I think it's unconstitutional. Yeah. I think everyone agrees, but it's Oakland. They put out these policies. It's 90% virtue signaling. It will probably never happen because they don't have the money for it. I do think there is a lot of good with UBI. Well, one argument that I wanted to make before we go into these specifics is, and you said that earlier with people going to national and going to LA, and they're trying to make it, and I think this is a very American thing, and this is a wonderful thing. There's probably only good things on average that come out of it, even if it doesn't work out for a lot of individuals. But if you see social media, and if you see how the world has already transformed itself in the last 10 years, what I sometimes feel is that the expectations of what defines success have been going up so much, especially in cities that are more open, that are more cloudified, so to speak, where more people think in these terms of social media and the way they think the world should run. They raise their own expectation of what defines success, and everything else is a frustrating failure. And there's only so many actors that we need that are really famous, right? So maybe it's a thousand people, maybe it's 5,000. It's a relatively small number. You can say the same for country singers. Nobody can listen to 100,000 country singers and make them famous. It's just not possible. We can listen to them, but it wouldn't be famous. What I feel like everyone wants to be famous, that was true before, right? But people always felt that was a special thing where they needed to be super, super lucky, and they need to take a huge risk. But relatively few people went for it. And now, because of social media, or because whatever it is, everyone wants to be not just famous. When you look at young people, they all want to be YouTubers. They all want to be on TV, whatever they want to be, actors. It seems like these expectation levels, what happened is we put this huge depression on ourselves because right now, we can't really fulfill the expectations we have of ourselves and of our friends. I agree with that. But I think that that's a symptom of a deeper problem. And the deeper problem is a lack of awareness in two major fields that just are not effectively taught in school. One is philosophy. There's virtually no critical thinking that's being taught in a systemic and meaningful way throughout the public school system. We don't teach philosophy in public schools. And philosophy comes from two Greek words. It's actually a compound word, philo and Sophia, right? Philo is love. And it's specifically the kind of love that the Greeks refer to as brotherly love. It's the love of a brother, like the love of a relative, philo. And Sophia, which is the Greek word for wisdom. So philosophy is the love of wisdom. How can we not love wisdom? How can we value anything more than wisdom? Wisdom is what lets us make good choices. It's all about philosophy. It's all about making good choices. And what should we be teaching children in schools if not how to make good choices for themselves? The fact that we're not teaching philosophy is an egregious oversight. But if we teach critical thinking, then people will start to critically think about the government. They will start to ask themselves, is this a good policy? Does this person really have my best interests at heart? Do they just want my vote? Are they using me? And those are uncomfortable questions for politicians who control the publicly funded school system and use it to indoctrinate children generation after generation into a two party system that has no one's best interests at heart. So it's no wonder the way education is structured that we don't teach philosophy. But it's because we don't teach philosophy that people make stupid choices. They make bad choices. They make choices against their own self interest because they're not taught how to love wisdom. And then the other field that needs to be taught is economics. Economics is the science of human decision making. It's the reverse side of the coin of philosophy. Philosophy teaches you about meaning and value and purpose, how to critically think, how all of that works and what your values should be. But then economics is the mechanics of all of that. It's the engineering to the theoretical physics, right? It's how to put all of that into practice. Economics starts with a single simple principle. And that principle is that incentives matter. And when we look at the incentives that we respond to in our behavior, whether they're social media companies or government, I mean, it's literally everything that you're talking about. All of these various issues, they are boiled down to really two deficiencies in society, a lack of wisdom and a lack of love for wisdom, so poor philosophy, and a lack of understanding about how human beings make decisions, the science of human decision making. And I would recommend two books to start your journey to solving these deficiencies in your own life, no matter who you are. The first one is Ideas Have Consequences by Richard M. Weaver. This book is fundamental, I think, for every person. I think if you can get a copy of this and read this, I can guarantee you it will change your life. And then the other one is Common Sense Economics by Dr. James Bartley and a number of other economists. There are several authors, but it's Common Sense Economics. Both of these books are very easy to read at an eighth grade reading level. Any person can read them. Any person can get a lot out of them, guaranteed to change your life. And they're just really, really good. The Economics book, Common Sense Economics, talks about economics generally. It talks about economics and good government. And it also talks about economics and personal finance. So there are three main divisions of that book. And every single part of it is useful. And I think if more people took the path, like Confucius, of setting themselves to a lifelong commitment to learning and personal development, and they started with these two books and then built on and built on and built on with related reading, they'd have better outcomes in their lives. They wouldn't be so depressed because they wouldn't be spending all their time on Instagram looking at fake people and their fake lives that, you know, they're just showing you the highlights, right? It's like reading the news, but never reading the articles, only reading the headlines and letting yourself get all worked up about it emotionally. It's the same way with social media. When we look at someone's Instagram feed, we're literally seeing the high points of their life that they've personally selected and curated to brag to say, look at how great my life is, look at where I'm visiting, look at where I'm traveling, look at what I'm eating, look at what I'm wearing. And they're literally broadcasting the best, but they never show themselves on Instagram in their darkest hours. They don't show themselves without makeup or when they're down or when, you know. I think that's a new trend. People actually just post that. Like that's another new trend. I think you're absolutely right with a lot of these remarks. And one thing that I would say that we have to keep in mind to moderate that, it's one thing to feel like we should teach philosophy and economics and I'm fully video. That's one of the two things that probably don't get enough exposure in most classrooms. But on the other hand, I was exposed to tons of philosophy when I was 17, 18, 19, I read Hegel, I read Kant, I read Schopenhauer. But you know what? I couldn't understand it. I mean, I could understand the words, right? I could understand what they are trying to say. But it didn't, I couldn't find a connection that made sense to me because I didn't have the life experience. And that's not about IQ, this just. Or a teacher. You need a teacher. It's like, how can people learn if there's no one there to teach them? But I'm not saying we shouldn't teach it. I'm just saying the expectation that people understand what's in these books, I think it's relatively rare. That doesn't mean we shouldn't teach and try. Why give up before we try? No, I mean, I'm with you. But my expectation would be there is relatively few that actually sticks. Now, I picked it up later on again, and then I fully understood it or like partially, and then definitely didn't fully understand it. But it helped me to have this prior knowledge and then just build from it. So it is a shortcoming. And the question is why, and maybe you know the answer to this, we see these shortcomings of people developing in ways that we feel are strange looking at them, right? And we say, well, the schools might play a big impact. And I think we have the school system that prepares students for saturation that was normal 50 or 100 years ago, but the work environment has changed, learning environment has changed. And 100%. It's a bureaucratic institution. So it changes, not at all, until we, unless we really force it to. But before that, all the failing institutions go woke for a while, right? So that seems to be when your business model fails, you go crazy woke, and then you fail anyways, that seems to be true in journalism seems to be true for colleges seems to be true probably for schools at some point. And I think this changes on the way already. But why do you think do we see this major societal change? If I come from a different country, and I landed us a I already know everything about the US political debate, which is odd, because 20 years ago, nobody really cared. There was a little bit of that, but not that deep. And second, we, if you land here, you feel like more displays is ideologically on fire. There's so much change going on. At least people are abstracted out. They feel like there could be a big amount of change coming on both sides. Or you can say there's hundreds of different sides. What do you think does it happen now? What do you think we have? We didn't have this debate 40 years ago when there was actual communism on the other side that we could have used as a template. Well, I think there's still actual communism. I think it's still it may not be overt. And there may be a lot of lip service paid to the death of socialism, the death of communism, the death of Marxism. I think that's premature. We're declaring victory against Marxism prematurely because you're starting to see a large resurgence of that. As authoritarianism increases, so does the attraction, the allure for authoritarians of Marxist policies. I mean, authoritarianism and Marxism always go hand in hand, whether it's, you know, fascist socialism, or nationalist socialism, or communism, or some other version of Marxism. But they're all the same. They're all just variations on cancer. It's like they're all cancer, one's liver cancer, one's lung cancer, you know, one's brain cancer, but they're all cancer. They're all cancer. So, I mean, you just need a healthy dose of radiation to kill it all. But why is that the case? I think it's because we're in the information age. I heard a guy say not too long ago, or maybe I read it in a book, it's all a blur. But he said, if I emailed you the plans for a B2 bomber, it would get lost in your email inbox. Like information isn't, you can't sell information anymore. People aren't willing to pay for information because they're a wash in it. There's just more information than anybody can handle. And I think that that's part of it, is that we have the library of Alexandria at our fingertips, and then some. And I think people get emotionally stirred up partially because of the media intentionally stirring up emotion and hype. I think social media companies do the same thing, and they do it for the same reason. They have a profit motive to do so. And most people are not aware of that. They're not hip to it. And they are at an identity level, at a core identity level, a lot of people are invested in labels. They are fans of things. And what is a fan? It's short for fanatic. They are fanatics about things. They obsessively collect material possessions that are branded. You know, whether it's Gucci bags, or Louis Vuitton, or Star Wars paraphernalia, or Star Trek stuff, or whatever, right? Like, people are collectors. They're trying to fill the holes in their lives with stuff. This materialism and then also their ideological hoarders as well. They're one of the two big brands. I mean, it's Republican politics and Democrat politics. As someone who has for at least a decade, I can't remember exactly when I shifted out. But I think it was probably at the end of the first Bush administration. I really solidly became a libertarian, not a capital L libertarian, not the libertarian party, but a lower case L libertarian, where I'm just not a joiner. I'm not part, I'm not ideologically aligned with anybody. I think we should treat every human being with charity, compassion, understanding, all of that, right? But I also don't buy into the whole woke thing. I'm not woke at all. Versus like woke people, I'm basically comatose. I have no wokeness whatsoever. I don't speak the vocabulary. I don't find any of that valuable because what they're all looking for is not just tolerance, but validation, acceptance. Like I have to say to a person who's woke, what you're saying is true for you. And I don't believe in true for you. I don't believe in personal truth. I think that there's truth. And then there's every person's individual subjective experience of that objective truth. And I'm not going to say, oh, well, that's true for you because I think that that's not true. I think that you have a perception, I have a perception and the truth is probably somewhere in between. And I don't want to be coerced or forced into saying something that I don't personally believe is true. And I think that that's what woke culture mandates and requires. And that's why I think it's dangerous. I think it's ideological authoritarianism run amok for what they perceive to be virtuous purposes. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions. So even if they have the best of intentions, I think their methodology is cancer. I think it's horrible. Yeah, there is a lot to this new phenomenon. And I think we agree generally on the tenets, that's how wokeism and many parts of it are something pretty nasty. But it's wider than this. And I think people associated with the postmodernism, which doesn't seem to be so right than people associated with Adorno, which is probably more right, but this guy's really old. And I'm really, I'm really surprised. And nobody's really given me a good answer. So lots of this stuff has been around for a long time and has been debunked and has been rejected by pretty much any country on the planet. Weirdly enough, all of these ideas come out of Germany. So I feel really guilty. Well, that's the German way to feel really guilty. Like every after World War Two, that's all Germans seem to be allowed to feel is guilt. And you guys need to forgive yourselves, man, because you're not part of that old regime. I'm joking, but there's a lot of nasty intellectual stuff that came out of Germany. And, you know, Karl Marx was a German. And Nietzsche, who ironically died of sift, I mean, the most appropriate end of any human being ever, right? Like Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche. Yes, yes. But he is not as dark. I think people make it darker than I feel what he actually wrote. But obviously he was he was in different scale of intelligence and arrogance. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, against for sure. But what what really surprises me is why does this stuff come up now? And what's wrong? That it gets so many followers. So clearly, these people must be unhappy with what's currently going on. And I trace this back to the lack of opportunities. I trace this back to the race of expectation. But on the other hand, there's very few opportunities, say, in many coastal areas for a young person to find a job and something that makes enough money, consistently, not just for a month or two, to raise a family is almost impossible, even paying rent is almost impossible. And I can say, oh, well, you can always go to another place in the US. And I think this is what works. We're sorry. This is not the start of business. But even the opportunities to start a business, I think that is, they're still better than anywhere else on the planet in the US. But this, they're more limited than it was 15 years ago, or 25 years. Sure. Although we have more access to information should have gotten easier. But to really extract money out of those is really tough. It's not impossible. But and people should I really, but on any chance I encourage people to do this, because the self fulfilling prophecy A and B is more entrepreneurs we have, they generate opportunities. It's not a zero sum game. They, they have more opportunities for other entrepreneurs. But it seems like there's a lack of opportunities and people can feel that they can relate to that they can discover for themselves. And they get really pissed. And I think that's why you're in California, extreme positions now. You're in California, you're living through. Yeah. So you're living through the, you know, the results of over regulation. What is it? What happens when your government tries to take on regulation of every aspect of life? They choke the life out of business. They tax their people to death. What happens? People respond to those negative incentives. When you tax something, you get less of it. When you subsidize something, you get more of it. It's fundamental. It's like gravity. What goes up most come down the mental laws of economics that will never change. Because like my grandmother, who's 100 years old, my grandmother says, what I've learned in my life is that times change, but human nature never changes. This is a woman who saw, she was born in 1920, right? So she saw things go from living her family of six plus her parents and her grandmother in a farmhouse with no running water and no electricity to putting a man on the moon. And she's now on her, you know what I mean? Like she's, she's seen the civil rights movement. She's seen World War II. She's seen the Vietnam War. She's seen the fall of the Berlin Wall. She's seen the fall of capitalism. She's seen like the nineties, the World Trade Center attacks. Like she's lived through all of this. Her mind is still sharp. And she's telling me, I've lived a hundred years, times change, human nature never changes, never. And that's why economics doesn't change. And that's why when you tax something, you'll always get less of it. So when you tax income and you tax productivity and you tax business and you tax jobs, you'll get less of them. And when you subsidize homelessness, when you subsidize not having a job and staying at home, when you subsidize having children out of wedlock, when you subsidize all these self destructive behaviors, you will get more of them. And that's what California has done. They've taxed productivity and they've subsidized the opposite of productivity. And that's why people are leaving there to go to states like Tennessee that has no income tax. We don't tax income here. We tax consumption. We have sales tax. So the incentives are better here for you to start a business, for you to have more like economic opportunity. It's a less regulated society. So it's easier for you to do things like own a gun and defend your family and that sort of thing. Now that comes along with more personal responsibility, but there are always tradeoffs. There's no such thing as a free lunch. That's another fundamental economic principle. There's no such thing as a free lunch. You're going to have to pay for everything in some way. And so the way you pay for more freedom is with more personal accountability. And I think that's what you're that's what you're seeing. And the question that you raise, like, why is all this happening? And why is it happening now is a really complex question. But there is a book that really tackles this on and tackles this in a comprehensive way and I think provides a satisfying answer. And it's called The True Believer by Eric Hoffer, H O F F E R. And The True Believer by Eric Hoffer is just he won the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It was awarded by Ronald Reagan in the 80s to Hoffer. He was a brilliant what I would consider blue collar philosopher. Just a brilliant guy, very humble. Few people have ever heard of him, but he's he's amazingly influential and just a brilliant dude. And that book pretty much answers your question in full. It's far more than we could get into in a podcast episode. Okay, that sounds awesome. When did he write this book, relatively recently? No, no, Hoffer's I think he's been dead for a while. I think I think it was written in the 50s, 60s. I'd have to look it up. But I read it a few years ago for the first time. And I started I like it was so moving. And so I was like, Oh, my God, this is super relevant to everything that's going on right now. Like, where has this been all my life? And I started posting quotes of it on Facebook. And one of my buddies from law school goes, that's my favorite book ever. Like, I'm so glad that you're reading that. That's just that's really good. He was like, how how relevant is this to today? And I said super, super relevant. Like it basically is a perfect explanation of everything that's going on right now. Okay. Yeah, I love to learn more about that. I just I feel we and I think every state in the US and places in the US is slightly different strategy about that. But we feel that there is definitely a strong change in how big parts of society have moved. And what I've realized, there is this argument. And I think it's somewhat libertarian that goes, well, if everyone else just go goes crazy, I go somewhere where people are not crazy, right? So to speak. So I kind of withdraw from that part of society. I tell them, you know, if you want to drop out of the US, you're good to go. But obviously, nobody wants to because the fat prints all the money. So nobody really wants to drop out of the union right now, because we all want that sweet money that seems to be free. So that's never going to happen. And the problem with that perspective, that's I was pretty much on this for the last couple of years. I would say, well, you know, we don't need the dollar anymore, we just go Bitcoin. And if you have the dollar, that's great. If we we, we don't really need to worry about these people, so to speak, we just we just build a wall. So for the mental wall doesn't have to be a real wall, right? So anything that that they feel there isn't enough value to to stay in a useful collaboration, we just shut ourselves off. But what I've learned, relatively recently, I've changed my mind on this. And I felt, when you think about the dollar is is maybe in trouble, but it's relatively easy to fix. It's not it's not really tough fix. Most cities in the US seem to be desperate in certain areas. But it's not a really difficult fix if we all pull in the same direction. And there is 100% on anything, of course, but there is a certain way we can find solutions in the middle. We've been doing this for so many hundreds of years in the US. I feel there is a larger picture that people that are libertarians kind of shout out. And I think it's not healthy. It's a bit like saying, you know, we don't really need roads because there's some people out here who don't like a road to be built. So what we do, we all just get a pickup truck, and we just leave the dirt road because it's too difficult to even make it a road. Or we privatize the road like they did in Indiana, they privatized huge sections of the interstate there. And it was phenomenally successful. And I don't think that the libertarian argument is it's not necessarily the money arguments also that people obstruct the road or construction sometimes. But the libertarians don't want to obstruct the development of infrastructure. They just don't want to be forced to pay for things that are not really public goods. And roads aren't the best example because they are public goods. But there are lots of things that go. You have to have to put all that effort into persuading people and keep trying because without society and putting big parts of your society behind you, the game's already over. You will, you cannot flourish as much as you can. If you convince the rest of the society that what you have in mind is the best solution. But how can you persuade them? Yeah, and I hear you and I agree with you. But it sort of begs the question, how can you persuade anyone if you rob them of the tools of good choice making, decision making, right? And this is well traveled ground in this conversation alone. And we've robbed them of access to philosophy. We've robbed them of access to economics and their public education. People can get that. It's like, you know, Jesus Christ. Well, like you said, they're not going to get there on their own because that's where the sick people are, not where the healthy people are. So he wanted to convince the most hard on those Jews he could find and make sure they know about what his power is, so to speak. And I think this willingness to convince other people is a bit of the problem. I mean, on the vogue side, they want to convince a lot, but they don't want to talk because they feel like, well, can you really hold it up? And they don't want to convince. They want a course. They don't want to convince. That's why they can't. That's why they have canceled. That's why they have canceled culture. They're not out to convince you. Convincing you requires you to persuade them to work. Yeah, yeah. They'll convince you in the reeducation camps that they want to send you to. I mean, that's that, you know, you'll have to apologize to death and you'll get canceled. You'll lose your livelihood and everything if you're not woke. And that's the danger of not being woke. But free people will never elect that. I mean, maybe, but they will regret it pretty quickly. Free people. Well, we just did. We just did elect that. We just did. I wouldn't call Biden woke. No, but I would call Kamala Harris. She's definitely part of the the woke elite. Yeah. And I think Biden, yeah, but Biden's a Trojan horse. He was, look at him. I mean, he's falling up the stairs, getting on Air Force One. The NRA is out there publishing ads like you'll never get our guns because we keep them upstairs. Ha, ha, ha. You know, like he's he's a joke and everybody knows that he's a joke and never knows that he's probably not going to survive his first term in office. And then Kamala Harris will be president. And you know, it's a Trojan horse administration and everybody knows that nobody wants to talk about it because it's super uncomfortable. But I don't think Biden's really a fact. I don't think he's really running his education. He's not an intellectual leader. He's a puppet. He's a very obvious puppet. He's basically the equivalent of a houseplant. Yeah, I think we we we can all kind of see, see these these main threats out there. But there is a larger duty, I think, for us as citizens is to convince and constantly persuade people. And if for some reason, I agree, we shouldn't just retreat and say, Oh, well, then I'm just going to go where the people are like my because that's I feel the mistake that don't read attribute to work people, right? If they don't, well, we instead of we don't say we have to go to the gulag, but we would say, well, I just never going to talk to you again. Or I like, I restrain my communication. Let's put it this way. Yeah, and that's, I think that's not it's not good for this country. And it's something that changed me where I felt, you know, there is a lot of common ground and it might be really uncomfortable to get there. But I think the common ground is 99% when you go down to the actually specific issues, right? Do we need to give money to people who are in need that are on the streets? Yes, I think everybody says yes. How do we do it? And how do we enforce it? And what do we do that people don't go crazy? Well, that's a slightly different story, but we need to help them. If this money comes out voluntarily, or not. Yeah, exactly. Religious institutions, I think voluntary charity is only charity if it's voluntary. And I think that giving giving voluntarily to help people is is real virtue signaling you brought out Jesus, right? What did Jesus say? Jesus said render unto Caesar that which is Caesar, render unto God that which is God's. In other words, your taxes meet your civic obligations, even if you are oppressed, which by the way, the Jews at the time of Christ were severely oppressed and treated as second class citizens by the Romans. In fact, a Roman soldier walk or a Roman citizen walking along the road, if he encountered a Jew, could tell him, you have to walk with me and carry my burden for one mile. And what did Jesus say? He said, go the extra mile, go the go, don't just walk with him, don't accompany him one mile and carry his burden, go go a second mile. That was beyond the legal obligation of the time. But it was an expression of charity and concern for what the Jews at the time considered an enemy. It's part of what Jesus taught of love your but he also taught us to give charitable to those who are in need to take care of people. He didn't say give, pay taxes and push for higher taxes so the government can do it for you. Charity is supposed to come directly from us, not from the government. But you know that if you have the same religious instinct, they have the same exact expectation as everyone else who believes in a more common religion. But they don't have the means. They're giving people money. There is no function for this. There's no method. So their method is giving money through the government. There's tons of 501c3. I don't buy that, frankly. Sorry, I don't mean to cut you off, but honestly, look around. How many 501c3 non profit organizations that are not faith based charities exist and really take a walk in San Francisco to put stuff your pockets with cash or coupons for fast food restaurants or whatever you want and just start handing it out to bums on the street. I mean, that's taking care of your fellow man. People do that. People do that. That's why I had all the rich neighborhoods. Yeah, great. They never, I mean, there's a sleeping neighborhood and then there's a neighborhood where you go during the daytime to collect some money. So the system is in place. So I feel if you go down to how we live our lives and how we think about that, and I was talking to Jim Rod yesterday, who is a very strong atheist, and I was trying to convert him to the utility of religion, so to speak, which I didn't succeed. I didn't go, didn't get anywhere. But I think this is an argument where people listen to what does religion actually deliver. And I think that's misunderstood. And I think this is a problem. Religion has been so old that it kind of doesn't explain itself so well anymore to people who are not already believers because it doesn't have to, but because it has massive amounts of believers. And it's like, well, we really don't care so much about the next group of new believers. Well, individualism, the failure of, yeah, individualism and the failure of religion kind of go hand in hand. And I'm not talking about individualism in a healthy general way, but I'm talking about radical individualism. And what in the early part of the 20th century, the Roman Catholic Church called the heresy of Americanism, you can go and look this up that Americanism is considered a heresy by the Catholic Church. It doesn't mean that the Catholic Church is obviously, yeah, right. It doesn't mean the Catholic Church considers America to be heresy or the idea of America to be heresy. Instead, it's this radical, what they called Americanism is this radical, hyperindividualistic, myself before all other people kind of approach. And when you started to see Christian religion decline was in the 1500s under Luther, Ulrich, and Zwingli, Martin Luther, Ulrich, Zwingli, and John Calvin. So it's Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli. These were the three major leaders of Protestantism. And Protestantism has baked into the cake, the atomization of society. Every single new Protestant denomination is predicated on separation from preceding Protestant denomination. So how are new denominations born? They separate, they come up with some theological dispute or distinction or difference or political dispute or difference with their predecessor, and they separate off. And so it's just constant division and constant atomization. And in the United States, that religious and cultural ideological foundation was also the foundation of our political structure. We don't have one unified government, we do kind of under the federal government, and that's much stronger after the Civil War. But we still have 50 individual sovereign states, 50 laboratories of law, 50 different regulatory structures, 50 different legislatures, 50 different judicial systems, right? It's everybody's different. They're all pretty individualist. If you don't like California, you can move to Tennessee or Wyoming or Montana or wherever, right? You can go somewhere else. And different states have varying degrees of success. On one hand, I think California's economy is something like the eighth largest economy in the world by itself, right? But on the other hand, people are fleeing in droves because of the crushing tax burden and insane government and over regulation. It's phenomenally successful on one hand and a dismal failure on the other, just depending on which axis you're looking at. In California, it's figured out how to be successful without a government. When you go to Florida, it's the opposite. The government's excellent, but the citizens, you have to look carefully to find someone you would describe as excellent. Maybe these things go together. And I don't know about the relative failure of religion in the US. It's kind of funny because that's been something that's been going on in Europe for the longest time. Well, since Protestantism, right? Since Protestantism, but it's, I mean, it becomes really the, when you ask people, do you subscribe to religion? This has dropped off really the last 60, 70 years. Maybe the... Well, post Vatican II because Protestant ideology started to infect and really sonic thought. And we're getting borderline conspiracy theory territory here, but you look at what led up to the ideological changes in the Catholic Church that led up to Vatican II. And you see the changes that were wrought by Vatican II. Even though dogmatically nothing changed, the way dogma was distributed and taught sort of through the liturgies in the church and all of that in the Catholic Church, that significantly changed with Vatican II. But hang on. No. Well, what I wanted to get at is that the US is the market place of states. Maybe I don't get it, but what I wanted to say is there's a marketplace of states, right? So we figure out what's best in the US. And I think everyone's trying to copy that from us and some get it right and some don't. But we also have this marketplace of religions. We're pretty unique in the world that we have a pretty widespread marketplace of religion. So we should do better than others. So religion should be most successful because of the nation built in in the US. And it used to be. We don't really have a big market because most of it, I mean, up until, I mean, for years, it was illegal for Catholics to even own land in the United States. Even though there are a lot of different religions in the United States, the vast majority of them are anti Catholic. And I think that Catholicism and the reason I'm kind of hammering this point and we started talking about Vatican II is I really do believe that that anti anti Catholicism is dangerous because whereas Protestantism has baked into the cake division and the atomization of social structures, whether they're, you know, families or churches or larger social groups, Catholicism has a unifying effect. And it's like the opposite of Protestantism in that the word Catholic comes from the Greek Catholic, which means universal. It's the universal church. It's meant to wrap everybody up in this one church, this one body and really bring bring them all together in a unifying way. And that's what's healthy for society. What we're seeing in the atomization of society, people sort of divide things off into their own echo chambers, not really trying to persuade others. I think that comes from a deep ideological route that that is intrinsically tied and inextricably bound up with Protestantism. And I think a more Catholic approach would be healthier for society that needs unification right now, not division. That's just my opinion. Yeah, I don't know enough to be to be honest about the specifics. I've studied the text pretty intensively, and I went through all the big three books of the New Testament. It's a little smaller, fortunately. It's easier to read. And you can say that the Catholics would make the same claim or the Jews would make the same claim about the Catholics. And, you know, Muslims make a similar claim to other people of the book and especially infidels, right? Yeah. So I'm not sure this is really unique to Catholicism or Protestantism. Maybe it is. I actually don't know enough about the specific differences. And, you know, there's Orthodox Church, which was around at the same time. So it was a strong competitor for the Catholic Church. And the Catholic Church was more organized, was more Roman, and the Orthodox part was more religious, so to speak. That's why it's called Orthodox and had slightly different opinions. But in the end, they came out relatively similar. The difference was political office much. Yeah, the difference was largely political up until 1180 when there was a big for political reasons. Basically, the Bishop of Rome, the Pope, excommunicated some of the patriarchs in Constantinople. And so that's where you started to really see a schism politically in the division of the church as an institution. But what's interesting is that from a dogmatic standpoint, the Orthodox Catholics and the Western Catholics, the Holy Roman Catholic Church, really believe the same things. I mean, there's a bit of a difference when it comes to like, can priests be married at a certain point? And things like that. There are some minor differences in the way it plays out doctrinally. But from a dogmatic standpoint, which is where the rubber meets the road, they're effectively still the same. There's both Catholic. And I was raised fundamentalist evangelical Protestant Christian in like the Southern Baptist denomination. My parents were Charismatics. And although they might, my dad at least might resist that label, they both were Charismatics, kind of Jesus peop