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Jan. 3, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
52:56
ELON MUSKISM Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep993
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Thank you.
Thank you.
Coming up, it's Debbie and my Friday roundup.
Now, I do want to mention to you that by the time you watch this, we will be in Washington, D.C. We are going for Brandon Gill's swearing-in ceremony, so we're pre-recording this episode, but covering a number of items that have come up during the week.
We're going to talk about the life and politics of Elon Musk.
We're going to talk about why Democrats don't like celebrating holidays with Republicans, an especially nasty attack on the state of Texas for its pro-life law, and some new data on marriage and happiness.
Hey, if you're watching on YouTube or Rumble, or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
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Debbie and I are, well, we're excited to be heading off to D.C.
Except for the fact that it's going to be cold.
Very cold.
I'm not looking forward to cold, as you know.
Right.
Well, it means we probably have to go equipped.
Yes.
And we rarely go to D.C. twice in a month, but of course we go back for the inauguration.
And the inaugural ball.
Well, and we may be going more often now that Brandon is going to be a congressman.
Right.
You know, just for fun.
Well, the swearing-in ceremony is fascinating because apparently it's preceded by choosing a speaker.
And so normally they would say the swearing-in is at 4 p.m., but because there could be an issue over who's going to be the speaker.
The process could be held up.
So today, when this airs, they're picking a speaker.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
Exactly.
So big, you know, big implications for how we go forward with Mike Johnson or without Mike Johnson, with someone else, potentially.
But let's talk about this issue that has been sort of roiling social media all through this past week, namely...
Well, I mean, I think that you could be a cosmopolitan and be a patriot at the same time.
I don't see why there should be any kind of difference or distinction.
In fact, you know, I was telling you earlier, I was always amazed.
I came to this country not knowing any English.
Of course, as many know, my mom is Mexican-American from the Rio Grande Valley.
My father, Venezuelan, did not speak English.
He tried, but he butchered it.
And so growing up in Venezuela, I didn't need to speak English.
My mom would speak to me in English.
And I would answer her in Spanish.
So obviously I knew what she was saying.
I just didn't speak it.
Right.
So it was a lot easier for me to pick it up once we moved here permanently.
But I always felt like, for some reason, a lot of my friends, you know, people I knew...
Thought that knowing more than one language was just not good.
You know, you should learn English.
And of course, where I ended up living, right, where my mom is from, the Rio Grande Valley, everybody speaks Tex-Mex.
They speak...
They speak a kind of a hybrid.
They mix the two, and that drove me nuts.
I was like, either you speak English or you speak Spanish, but please don't mix the two.
And make sure that you speak proper Spanish, because that's kind of butchered.
I don't like it.
Yeah, I mean, I understand why there are people who believe that if you come to this country...
You can and must learn English.
And I get that.
I agree that there should be a, you know, a lingua franca, although that's not an English term.
But a national language, a common...
But you know, English is not the national language in America.
No, I mean, officially you're saying it's not.
No, it's not.
Right.
But as a practical matter, it's good to have a single language.
In fact, in India, you don't have a single language, even though people think Hindustani is like the national language.
It's really not.
It's spoken in the...
Well, you didn't speak it.
I didn't speak.
I mean, I did speak it as a second language.
But there are large parts of the country that don't speak it at all and that have other languages.
It does make it a little more difficult to think of India as a single country for that reason.
So I think the people who want Americans to speak English are right.
Now, the prejudice against knowing a second and third language, I think, is a mistake.
Because that's only going to enhance your experience.
And it does actually make you a little bit smarter.
It makes you smarter, and it also makes you realize that when you read things in another language, the translation is not as good as the original.
It never is.
People talk about lost in translation, but the truth of it is, translation is saying something...
Quite different than, so if you, I mean, I've never been able to, like, read Dostoevsky in the Russian, but I bet it is a more profound experience than reading, you know, to basically Russian professors who have translated Dostoevsky.
Now, the other issue here is American exceptionalism.
And I think that some people wrongly believe.
That if you are for American exceptionalism, you're like against other cultures.
Now, it is true, I would agree, that the exceptional elements of America are not to be found elsewhere.
That's what makes them exceptional.
They are a magnet for why people want to come to America, because they're attracted by that exceptionalism.
The exceptionalism has also made America...
The strong and prosperous country that it has been for 150 years.
But I think that, you know, we're losing a lot of our exceptionalism.
The exceptionalism that was still quite visibly present when I came at the age of 17. I could look around and I could identify.
I was always thinking about America in connection with the rest of the world, specifically India.
And I would go...
This seems to be unique about America.
Then I would run a little inventory to say, would you find this in Europe?
Would you find this in Asia?
And I found a lot of things.
I wrote an essay called 10 Great Things About America many years ago, identifying these 10 things.
But if you went down that list now, you would be hard-pressed.
At least on some of those elements, you'd stop and go, well, number one, Other countries are now doing that too.
And number two, we're not doing it as well as we used to.
So the exceptionalism has been diminished really at both sides.
Others are better at it now, and they're doing more of it.
And so, you know, take a simple example that I just saw, a short article, unconnected to this debate.
It was about how American ports today are among the worst in the world.
And it sort of caught my attention because...
Like ports of entry?
Yeah.
In other words, a lot of the world's trade is conducted in ports.
If you order a car, it comes through ports, as you know.
Yeah.
Ports are the entry point of trade because heavy items cannot be carried by plane.
They have to be carried by ship.
They come through ports.
So the American ports at one time were the best in the world.
And in fact, if you go back 50 years and you listed, let's say, the top 20 ports, America would have most of them.
Great ports on the East Coast, great ports around the Southwest, great ports on the West Coast.
And now you have all these sort of no-name countries, banana republics, third world countries, and their ports are better than our ports.
Why?
There's a complex of reasons.
Part of it is that we have deteriorating infrastructure that's not replaced.
Part of it is that you have unions at these ports that don't want anything to be automated.
And so they oppose even the simplest forms of automation, whereas other countries jump on all this technology and go, yeah, let's automate our ports.
And so what happens is now you compare our ports to other ports, and the other ports are just simply better.
And we see this in many other areas as well.
The airports in a lot of other countries are now cleaner, bigger, better, more efficient.
The buildings are newer.
Go to a place like New York where the buildings are really old.
I mean, the whole place is like falling apart.
And this was, I think, for most of the 20th century, the greatest city in the world.
Hard to say it's the greatest city in the world now.
So these are all ways of saying that it's not that we're not exceptional anymore.
We still are.
But we need to work on it.
I think this is the meaning of Make America Great Again.
Exceptionalism is no longer something we can take for granted.
Yeah, I agree.
So this debate between some MAGA people and Elon and Vivek, it's very interesting.
It is.
Because, as you know, the way I became a citizen was through my mother.
She handed that down to me because she was a U.S. citizen and therefore I became a U.S. citizen.
So I'm not HB1. H1B. H1B, whatever it's called.
Or any of that.
Or any of that.
I didn't have to do any of that.
But I do understand the level of anger that people have towards me and towards other immigrants because they don't think it's fair.
They don't think it's fair that I got my citizenship through my mother.
And so I can imagine.
And then you didn't go through that visa either.
right you became a citizen how did you become a citizen well i i i came in as a student on a student visa uh and i was a dartmouth on a student visa and um and then i applied for a a green card through a program it's not h1b uh it's it is in fact for kind of like exceptional exceptionally talented uh foreigners to apply to america
uh and it it's a lengthy process to go through it I went through this in the 1980s.
The remarkable thing was it would seem like I would need to go through the process, become a citizen, and then work at the White House, but it didn't work for me like that.
It was the opposite.
I worked in the White House first.
87, 88, I became a U.S. citizen not until 1991, and that's because of a five-year naturalization process.
But talking about the anger, I've never experienced any anger directed at me, and I don't think you would toward you.
In fact, your mom, your mother's family has been in the country.
Since the 1840s and before that, right?
So you are, in fact, you are an older American through your mother than a lot of people who came after that.
Came from Italy, came from Greece, came from so many places, you know, later generations of immigrants.
But I think what people are saying is that, look, we have communities in the country that have been devastated by the policies of the last...
30 and maybe 40 years.
And one of the way you heal those communities, one of the way you get to the root of problems like drugs and broken families is you offer people well-paying jobs.
I mean, people are looking back to when their parents could, you know, have the dad working and the mom could stay at home.
And they could still earn money and save money and take a vacation on one salary.
And with a job that could be counted on.
And so I think the driving force, and we can pick this up in the next segment, is simply the idea of bringing back that America that seems to be no more.
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I mentioned in the last segment this America as it was.
Let's just say America circa 1965. And here I want to mention something that Vivek Ramaswamy said that's proven to be very controversial.
Vivek basically says we cannot get that America back right away because our culture has become so degraded.
I think Vivek would agree that this degradation is produced by liberal policies.
But regardless of what the cause of it is, maybe it's liberalism, maybe it's neoliberalism and free trade, maybe it's getting our goods made in China, and maybe it's shutting down the steel plants, and whatever the cause.
I think what Vivek is saying is that the ordinary American student The ordinary American worker is not as well-trained, doesn't have the same work ethic.
In other words, the qualities that built America are not so present anymore.
And this has caused a lot of people on the MAGA side to get really upset and basically shriek and say, not true.
These people have not been given a chance.
Now, in fairness, what the MAGA people are saying, I think, is that DEI preferences have shut the white guy.
I've seen people who say, hey, my son is a science student.
He's very high SAT scores.
He's very good in math and engineering.
But he applied to MIT. He applied to Caltech.
He didn't get in anywhere, basically because he's white.
And I suspect there's a lot of truth to those kinds of complaints.
So this is a very, this is a complex organism.
And you have some experience as a teacher that bears upon all this.
So how do you look at it just based upon your own experience?
Well, I mean, so I taught high school in the late 90s and early 2000s.
And the students I had, I taught in a very multicultural area.
There were a lot of kids from different backgrounds, ethnicities, you know, races.
And a lot of those kids were from, some were from China, some were from Vietnam, some were from, a lot were from India, Pakistan, Middle East.
And the families that had Well, those students, the Asian students, were the most dedicated students.
But I also noticed that it was really a factor of the family.
Their parents.
Their parents instilled in them fear.
If they didn't, you know, come out with, like, you know, straight A's or high grade point average or whatever, I mean, it was like...
Hell to pay at home, right?
And I think you were making the point to me that an average or satisfactory...
Oh, that was not acceptable.
That was failure in their eyes.
Right.
Oh, yeah.
And they were very strict.
They had really no real extracurricular life.
Their extracurricular life was basically piano lessons.
To get to college.
So you can fill out that you've got extracurriculars.
Right.
So anything that was outside of that, it was student council or, you know, piano lessons or something academic because their parents wanted no less than Ivy League education.
They wanted their kids, you know, when their kids were born, their parents had already picked what they were going to do with the rest of their lives.
You know, they were either going to be a doctor, an engineer, something like that, something great like that.
A lot of Americans would find this, like, sort of appalling.
Yeah, well, I mean, I was a little appalled myself because that wasn't my attitude.
Right.
You know, I was like, why can't you have, like, fun?
You know, why can't you go to a dance and, you know, be a cheerleader and, you know, all the fun things that I got to do in high school.
I was not extremely studious.
I was studious enough, but...
No, I was certainly not thinking of I'm going to be a, you know, I did want to be some things that I was just not meant to be like a doctor.
I did want to be a doctor, I admit.
But my math skills, horrible.
So I knew already that that was not going to happen.
But now could I have like studied more?
Absolutely.
Do I find that?
Some of the American kids versus those kids didn't perform like those kids did?
Absolutely.
But they also didn't have that parent pushing them to do it either.
Yeah, I think one of the differences, and this would corroborate Vivek to a degree, is this whole ethos of self-expression, of finding yourself, of, you know, we have...
We have as well as know people who say things like, I'd like to take a year off.
I have studied, but I don't know if I want to go to law school or if I want to...
What do they call it?
A gap year?
A gap year.
Right.
So an American culture, not always, by the way, American culture since the 1960s.
So the 1960s to me is the decade that took...
Bohemianism.
Bohemianism has existed in America since the 1890s.
You could find it in Greenwich Village in the 1920s or in the Haight-Ashbury, certain areas of San Francisco.
You could find it before, but it didn't go culturally mainstream.
What happened in the 60s was Bohemianism became...
The American culture, particularly for young people.
The hippies, right?
The hippies.
And the hippies were all about, you know, tune in and drop out.
And love and free love.
Exactly.
So imagine the, so you have polar opposites.
On the one hand, you've got this rigorous kind of Asian discipline, which I'm very familiar with.
I'm a product of it to a degree, although like you, I don't fully embrace it because I think that it is one-dimensional.
I know that the education system in India was, a lot of it was rote memory, which I don't think is the essence of critical learning.
I do think that people today tend to dismiss rote memory and act like rote memory is unimportant.
Wrong.
If you are a lawyer, you need to memorize to the detail the facts of the case.
Oh, and if you're a doctor, you need to memorize every...
Aspect of every human body.
You have to know where all the organs are located.
You have to know all the systems.
If you're a chemist, I'm sure our friend James Tore has memorized the periodic table up and down.
You have to memorize the multiplication tables.
Rote memory is very important.
I couldn't do the podcast without having memorized a vast amount of information.
Because as you know, I'm generally not functioning off of notes or scripts.
So I'm drawing on a fund.
Yeah, but you have critical thinking skills because you wouldn't be able to put those things together without the critical thinking.
Dartmouth and my subsequent education for that.
I did not get that from India.
In fact, when I was first asked to write critical papers, I remember being almost immobilized because I didn't know what does writing a critical paper even mean.
So that is a good example of something I learned in America.
And yet, it is such a tragedy to encounter so many American students, which I've encountered over the years.
Well, we're losing it.
That's what I mean.
Partly due to the fact that a lot of schools are driven by high scores for, you know, the star testing or whatever, the school testing.
Because a lot of kids are missing that critical skills part of it.
They're trying to do more rote memorization and less critical thinking.
And so what happens is that they're not able to combine the two areas.
And I think, I believe that's what's missing.
Kids can't come up with something on their own.
They're like clueless.
And so they don't know how to put it together.
Now, the figure that stands as a symbol of this whole debate is Elon Musk.
And it's been interesting to watch because Elon Musk has...
Doesn't just have an opinion here.
He has weighed in with great ferocity.
Well, he's a product of it.
He's a product of it.
I think he sees himself as himself an import from another culture, South Africa.
I think he sees the skilled immigration laws as the transmission belt that brought him to America.
I think he works with lots of people who are a product of those laws also.
In other words, you think of Tesla engineers, for example, or SpaceX engineers.
And these days, if you go to a place like MIT or Caltech, I'm talking particularly about the hard sciences and math and science.
These top universities are densely populated with foreigners.
are now in America, or they're actual foreign students.
In other words, they're Chinese citizens.
So they're going back to the country.
They're either going back or they will try to navigate their way and stay in the country.
And so Elon Musk has come to the defense of this system.
Now, Elon Musk, in fairness, has also admitted that the H-1B program needs to be reformed.
So it's not that he's unaware of that.
Well, like all programs, a lot of them are abused.
Widely abused.
Widely abused.
Yeah, I think he does know that.
But when we come back, let's talk more about Musk, because I think that he embodies a certain idea of America that we should examine critically.
I see that Elon Musk has gotten, he's getting quite viciously attacked by some people.
It's kind of ironic.
He creates Twitter, or X, as a forum for free speech.
And it is the forum on which he is getting blasted.
So in a way, his free speech is being tested.
But he's coming out, I think, of it quite well because what he's doing is he's letting these people have their say.
And they are having their say.
I wish that the people bashing Elon Musk showed more appreciation for what he has actually...
What he's done.
What he's done for free speech.
I mean, not just what he's done for free speech, but what he did for the election.
What he did for the election.
And this is worth pointing out.
Not only has he put a lot into the election financially, this guy was like living in Pennsylvania toward the end.
He's going to open forums and taking questions from people.
When in fact, he doesn't need to do any of it.
He doesn't need to do any of it.
He didn't need to buy X. He could have said, listen, this is somebody else's fight.
But imagine putting $44 billion of your money.
Into what at that time he clearly knew was an unprofitable platform.
But as he put it himself, he goes, free speech has no price tag on it.
You can't say it's worth this or it's worth that because it's kind of the foundation.
Well, for him, it's worth everything.
It's worth everything.
And so if I summarize Elon Musk, I would say that he's devoted to two ideas.
On the one side, free speech.
And on the other side, merit or excellence.
That's what he represents.
Now, in his personal achievements, it's hard for me to even compare him to anyone.
Certainly to anyone alive, but I don't even know if I can compare him.
Even figures like Edison who come to mind.
Oh, you mean because of the space flight and all those things?
His cars?
Never have I come across a guy who makes claims that at the first glance are preposterous.
Things like, let's make a colony on Mars.
I would have to say someone like that is out of his mind, right?
But I will not be entirely surprised if the guy pulls it off.
I mean, because again, self-driving cars, rockets, private rocket launches, the boring company, which is astonishing.
And then it's almost like this guy does X in his spare time.
Yeah.
And so he is himself a phenomenon.
But, you know, we can't say that everybody is like Elon Musk.
In fact, no one is like Elon Musk.
Yeah, I don't think so.
Not even Trump is like Elon Musk.
And no one's like Trump.
No one's like Trump.
But in a telling conversation, Trump said something like, you know, I sat down, Elon Musk, and I... I tried to ask him what it is he actually does.
Like, what is it that has made him, let's say, the richest man in the world?
And I think at the end of it, Trump was like, I'm still trying to figure it out.
It's not really clear what it is that this guy does, particularly since of late he's been hanging out at Mar-a-Lago, apparently with a lot of time on his hands.
But what I'm saying is that if somebody is devoted on the one hand to free speech and the other hand to excellence, I mean, who can deny that these are core principles of this country?
I mean, everyone should strive for that.
Right, right.
And some of the rhetoric against Elon Musk, I think, has been a little disturbing because it has been to the effect of Trump needs to pull Vivek and Elon Musk off of Doge.
Think of what a ridiculous and self-defeating move that would be.
And second of all, We should debate, and here I'm on the MAGA side of this debate.
We should debate what excellence means.
We should debate, because I think that part of the complaint of some of these MAGA guys has been, look, you know, the white male has been the object of consistent demonization for like 30 years straight.
And so the white man knows.
That everybody else is not only promoting their group, but they're acting in a tribal manner.
Remember, we both looked at a very interesting comment on Twitter, on X, about a guy who says, listen, one of the problems is when you bring in these Indian guys into these tech companies, they hire all Indians.
So in other words, they don't hesitate to behave in a tribal manner.
I'm Indian.
It's not that I'm conducting some merit...
I'm just going to find a bunch of my fellow Indians.
I'm going to kind of assume that they're the best at what they do and pull them all in.
It's easier for me to relate to them.
And of course, some of these tech companies have like...
They have like an Indian chef that provides lunch because there are just so many Indians and they all want to eat Indian.
Wouldn't you like that?
I would like the food.
I'm not sure I'm cut out for the tech environment.
No, definitely not.
Definitely not.
Oh, no.
In fact, you are the techie of the house.
I know all about that.
I'm not even that much of a techie, but I will say I'm more techie than you.
You are, for sure.
No, absolutely.
All right, so we've talked a little bit about Elon Musk.
We've talked a little bit about this debate.
Let's pivot to something that's happened.
In Texas.
And that is this article.
Was it in the Washington Post?
It was in the Washington Post.
Yeah.
I don't get the Washington Post, so I only get articles where I can click on it, but then I can't see it.
Hey, this is our advice to people not to subscribe to these mainstream media outlets.
You don't want to give them money.
You're keeping them in business.
These days you can pick up an enormous amount of information right off of social media platforms.
And the headlines.
The headline is, Baby in Dumpster, a state of a spate of abandoned newborns unsettles Texas.
Okay, so this is a very good exercise in...
In our side, decoding what they're getting at.
Yes.
Right?
Because on the surface, the article appears to be one of those, you know, articles you get in the news about some depressing...
Yeah, but it gets better because then there's a little bit of, you know, a subhead there.
Critics say...
These cases are no coincidence in a state with one of the nation's most restrictive abortion bans and near-bottom rankings on women's health care.
Kaboom.
So this is the media.
Let's expose the technique.
The technique is to pretend that here's a phenomenon that you are neutrally observing.
Yes.
Let's just say three cases of a newborn Now, if you found those three cases in Rhode Island, you wouldn't write an article about it because you would not have...
Or California.
Or California.
You would just basically treat that as a crime story or something like that.
But here in Texas, they want to attach or bootstrap it to an attack on Texas for its pro-life laws.
But the writer can't say, in my opinion, Texas' pro-life laws are to blame.
Therefore, the critics say.
So what this guy is doing is he goes and finds critics.
And don't you think he'll call the local head of Planned Parenthood?
Don't you think it's true that all of this is related?
Or he'll call a left-wing academic at Rice University or UT Austin.
And these are the experts or the critics.
So the whole thing is an ideological construction, right?
As if to say that Texas is responsible.
Now, why is Texas, why is this article maliciously false?
Why is Texas not responsible for what they're saying it is?
Well, because it's all on the woman.
It falls on the woman.
Why on earth, when you have churches, you have firehouses, because you can go take your baby to a fire station.
You have all kinds of hospitals.
Why can't you go, you know, even...
Even centers for children, you know, exploited children, whatever.
Go and say, listen.
Pregnancy centers.
I've spoken at at least two big ones in Texas.
There's a lot of pregnancy centers that will take your baby and put the baby up for adoption.
So this is nonsense.
This is all on the women who just are either lazy or malicious or both.
These are the same women that would have an abortion just to have an abortion.
But look at the interesting thing is these women have no qualms about killing their baby in utero and out of utero.
I mean, what does that tell you?
It tells you that these women are baby killers.
And it tells you that the Washington Post is, instead of calling for personal responsibility, instead of saying, hey, guys, there are many options available.
For you to have this baby, you can't look after it.
Alright, here's what you can do.
Instead, they used the tragedy as a battering ram to basically say...
This is what you get for having a pro-life policy.
Exactly.
And they also push that narrative.
So a lot of women have no idea.
Now, some do, but a lot of women don't know that they can do these things, that they can actually go to a pregnancy center and have, you know, the...
The agency helped them through their pregnancy, make sure that they get their vitamins, and then put the baby up for adoption.
Why don't they know this?
Because the media doesn't want them to know this.
Yeah, the message of the media, the Washington Post here is a perfect representative, is basically, and this is how, they could be using a sample size of three.
But what they want people to get out of the headline, epidemic of abandoned kids.
So, gee, you may not like abortion, but isn't it better than having live newborn babies left in dumpsters?
Ergo, abortion is the lesser evil.
Exactly.
That is the ideological bottom line of this headline.
It absolutely is.
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You showed me an article about the holidays and about sort of the politics of exclusion in the holiday season.
And look, this is a topic a lot of people have some experience with.
Well, didn't Bill Maher do something about that?
He did.
He did.
And he was, in fact, he was blasting the left.
in effect that I'm hearing a bunch of leftists who are like, I refuse to go to Thanksgiving.
I will not be attending Christmas this year.
And Bill Maher said, you know, count me out of this mentality.
Well, it's quite interesting because I have personal experience with this.
I'm not going to mention who, but it's a close relative of mine who has...
Made politics basically the reason not to have a relationship with him.
Right.
And it's extremely sad because these are the very people that say that we're intolerant.
Yet, yet I have no problem with his politics.
Right.
But yet he has a problem with our politics.
And it's like, okay, so you're the one that's intolerant.
Right.
And so it's really, really sad that you can have something so trivial affect a lifelong relationship.
Well, I don't think it is trivial, because let me put it this way.
In a certain sense, we on the right and our opponents on the left agree that a lot is at stake.
We agree that these policies on the left or on the right make a huge difference in whether the country is saved or destroyed.
The only difference is that we think that these policies will save the country and they think that those same policies will destroy it.
And they think that their policies will save the country and we think it will destroy it, right?
So I wouldn't say that this is an inconsequential matter because...
To say it's an inconsequential matter would be to say something like, America's going to do fine no matter who wins the election, no matter which party is in power, and we don't believe that either.
We think America needs to have the right policies, but I think here is where the core meaning of tolerance comes in, because tolerance comes in particularly when you strongly disagree.
If you didn't disagree strongly...
It wouldn't be a matter of tolerance.
Let's say, for example, you like vanilla ice cream, right?
And your relative likes chocolate ice cream.
So what?
It's no big deal.
It's not important whether you have chocolate or vanilla.
Or if you like horror movies and your relative likes romantic comedies, okay, what's the big deal?
After all, a movie is a movie.
But on the other hand, if you're talking about things that are fundamental, it does make a big difference.
So tolerance then comes into the test.
And if you say, I'm willing to put family above politics, I'm willing to have at least a very civil celebration, enjoy the day, we can then go back to our political activism, then that shows tolerance on your part.
But what you're saying is it's not matched on the other side.
Nope.
Not at all.
Or not really.
It depends.
It depends.
But probably not as much as I would like.
Right, right.
Now, I think that what the left has done is to give its own team the idea that we are...
Totalitarians.
That if we had our way, we would crush them.
Now, ironically, we have experienced the tyranny of the other side.
And yet, I don't think...
They won't admit it, though.
They won't admit it.
No.
But we still don't think that the rank-and-file Democrat or even liberal is a totalitarian.
We would say Merrick Garland is or Mayorkas is.
So that there are malevolent forces at the top.
Or Obama is.
Obama is.
So there's genuine wickedness on the other side.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
But on the other hand, we still think that the rank-and-file Democrat, by and large, has been duped.
Yeah.
That guy has been, you know, drinking the Kool-Aid, absorbing the propaganda.
But the propaganda is dangerous because...
It leads them to actions in which they truly believe.
I'm sure some of these...
But it's interesting because I've had the same conversation with that relative who says we're the propagandists.
That we're the ones spewing propaganda.
And so it's like, well, you know, propaganda is actually spewed typically by a government that wants you to do A and not B. And so if we're the...
The propagandists, we're not winning that debate.
In other words, we suck at it.
Here are two tests.
In my opinion, there are two clear tests that can tell you if you are being a propagandist.
The first one is, all propagandists, by nature, want to shut down the free speech of the other side.
Because they believe that there's only one opinion that needs to be disseminated.
Now, are we trying to do that?
No.
But is the other side trying to do that?
Yes.
And the second test for propaganda is this.
Can you have, can you observe legitimate debate even on your own side?
In other words, forget about the other side.
Do you see internecine debate on your, do you see Democrats and liberals arguing animatedly among themselves about things?
Not really, but the closest comes with Bill Maher because he is arguing with his people.
He does argue with them, but I do not think that he is committed.
So he's that leftist.
He's culturally on the left.
He's morally on the left.
But I think economically and in foreign policy, he's not on the left.
Now, he was very anti-Trump.
And I think it pushed him further to the left.
But his natural...
Remember, this is a guy who started a show called Politically Incorrect.
So his instincts are not with ideological homogeneity.
But one of the interesting things I think is that look at this recent debate over H1Bs with a part of the MAGA movement and the tech pro-Trump techies.
A lot of people on the left cannot comprehend this debate.
They say things like, there's a civil war breaking out among the Trumpsters.
No.
The thing is, they have become so cut out from the idea of debate.
That when they see a real debate, they can't believe it, and they don't know what's going on.
They think it's chaos.
They think it's animus.
They don't realize that, you know what?
On the right...
There's opinions.
Right, and we know, going back to the Reagan days, you had the libertarians, the paleoconservatives, the neoconservatives.
The neocons, yeah.
I've been, like, physical witness to very animated arguments among these camps, and this has been going on from the beginning.
So the right is not...
Ideologically homogenous in that way.
And so, again, who are the propagandists?
If people can animatedly debate on their own side, that's a sign that they're not propagandists.
That's right.
They're not line-step with each other.
Right.
So it's not just that we say they're propagandists, they say we are, and there's no way to adjudicate.
Yes, there are ways to adjudicate.
There's a way to know.
Let's close out by talking about this interesting article that we saw.
We don't have it right in front of us, but essentially it's telling you something that...
I think is unsurprising.
At least, I don't think it's surprising.
And that is the importance of marriage, but particularly of a happy marriage, as the foundation of human happiness.
How would you summarize the article that we both read it?
Yeah, yeah.
So, I mean, basically, it just says that it had categories, right?
Right.
And it was, if you're married...
Your level of happiness is greater than if you're not, than if you're single.
But if you're happily married, it's like way higher, way higher than even if you're married.
And I guess the thing about what is being happily married?
What does that really truly mean?
Right.
I mean, its root, as I see it, is in a certain...
Like, deep-rooted consideration, mutual respect.
You're always looking out for the other person.
So, like, when we have a debate, it's not important for me to win the debate.
This is a case where, yeah, it's the largest predictor of overall happiness.
I think what's interesting here is that this guy, the study, looks at alternatives.
So, like, to what degree does a college degree predict happiness?
Right?
And the answer is, it does a little, but not a lot.
What about higher income?
Which many people would say, wow, that's very conducive to happiness.
And that counts for more than a college degree.
Very satisfied with work.
Again, something that people would say is key to happiness.
I want to have a fulfilling job.
And it turns out that score is higher than higher income.
So in other words, having creative and satisfying work is important.
And then like you say, just being married, now they're not saying, on average, married people report.
And the cool thing here is that you don't have sociologists who are trying to figure out what happiness means.
They use the happiness of your definition.
So, in other words, they ask you, are you happy?
Based on your job, based upon your education.
And finally, they have, quote, very happy marriage.
And then you can see the column is like four times as tall as all the other columns.
It becomes the decisive factor.
Yeah, no, I thought it was really interesting as well.
And in that category, I noticed that they also put down, if you're...
So if you have like separate checking accounts and if you have, you know, separate this, separate that, that dilutes the happiness of your marriage.
And so they're saying that if you have joint checking accounts and you make joint decisions on things, you have a happier marriage.
I mean, I think that the whole business about, and we see this sometimes with young people who have now, A lot of them come to believe that, you know, you have to, like, live together as a rehearsal or an examination of whether you're suited to marriage.
Now, when you have two single people who move in together, they're going to typically have separate accounts.
So what they're really doing is they're inhabiting the same abode, but they're living at least to some degree as single people.
And then that carries on to marriage.
And I've seen couples, neighbors, and so on who operate.
In marriage as two distinct units.
And they even negotiate over things like, okay, well, you know, if you want to name our child, then, you know, I get to pick out the patio furniture.
I mean, this is, I give this example semi-humorously, but it's a real example.
I think what you're saying is that the studies are showing what could have been predicted by common sense in advance that real marriage is combining your life together, right?
And putting everything into the pot.
And I think, too, it's interesting because a lot of people ask, well, you and Dinesh, you like to do the same things and you have the same interests and everything.
And it's true.
I mean, we spend...
24-7 together.
For the most part.
For the most part.
And we do like the same things for the most part.
And we don't get tired of each other.
Surprisingly, perhaps.
That could happen, right?
If you spend so much time with a person, you're like, oh, gosh, no.
But every day I wake up, it's like, oh, good morning.
Good morning, honey!
Like, I haven't seen you in years, you know?
So, anyway, and then it was really funny.
You know, you just tweeted something, and it was hilarious.
Basically, it was, hold on a second, I'll tell you.
Patriarchy, right?
And so the photo that you tweeted, it's like a little meme where the husband, she's going to cross a little creek and the husband, like, he does like a...
It's a small creek, so he can lean over the creek.
So she can walk over.
Him, right?
It was too funny.
I'm like, would you do that for me, honey?
And the funniest was the guy who commented in there and he goes, well, Dinesh, I need to take some workout classes to have the...
To have a better...
He has to have a strong core to do that.
A strong middle body to carry you.
And so anyway, but I know you would totally do that for me and...
You know, honey, here's to a wonderful new year with more adventures.
We're closing in our nine years of marriage, so almost a decade.
Hopefully with some more to come.
With many more to come.
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