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This is why you guys need me here as a community college dropout with all you Ivy League nerds.
You were just making fun of me because I brought that up.
And now you're bringing that up.
Well, I'm bringing it back to the real world.
No, no, no.
You're reading the study totally wrong.
That's not what the study says.
Okay, now I really want to move on because Matt's offering a moderate opinion and Ben is agreeing with him.
Everybody, welcome to Friendly Fire.
All Daily Wire Plus subscriptions are 50% off right now.
Get them right now.
DailyWire.com slash subscribe.
Also, stick around because we have the world premiere of the trailer of Pendragon, the Pendragon cycle, the rise of the Merlin that is coming up at the end of the show.
But before we get to any of that, speaking of wizardry, I want to talk about AI and whether AI is really good, like everyone seems to think it is, like all the financial speculators have thought, which is why it boosted the Mag 7 stocks until recently before our impending stock market collapse, or whether AI is probably mostly bad for all of us.
To kick it off, the most optimistic person on the panel, Mr. Walsh.
I become more anti-AI with each passing day.
I hate AI.
If I could, I said before, if I could commit some sort of anti-AI genocide, I would totally do it.
I think that, and here's what blows my mind about it, is that we can all, most of us anyway, can see, even people who are behind AI, like Elon Musk, can see coming this like potential civilizational level catastrophe.
And basically nothing is being done about it at all.
Because what is absolutely going to happen as far as I can tell is AI at a minimum is going to wipe out many millions of jobs over the next five to 10 years.
How many millions, there's no way to say for sure.
I did ask, by the way, ChatGPT before we went on, I asked ChatGPT to estimate how many jobs it will take and AI will take from us in the next 10 years.
And I think the answer I got was 15 million or something like that.
15 to 25 million.
So who knows?
It's millions of jobs are going out the window.
We know that because of AI.
And they're not going to be replaced by anything.
They're just, they're going away.
They're not coming back.
That's going to happen.
We're going to be, we're already, we're almost there now, but we will soon be in a situation online where you just simply cannot tell reality from fiction at all, where the AI videos are going to be so good that if anybody wants to smear any of us here, I can't imagine anyone would want to smear any of us because we're all so beloved.
But if anyone wanted to do that, I could just make a video of any of us doing or saying something horrible and there'd be no way for us to prove what it did.
That cat video radicalized me.
I don't know if you guys saw the cat playing the didery do and everything.
It was very good.
If I didn't know that most cats don't play didgeridoo, I would have thought that was a 100% real video.
But Michael, that's the other thing that's going to happen about AI is that people are just sitting there looking at this slop made by an algorithm all day, every day while their minds are melted.
And then on top of all those other things, it's going to completely destroy every creative industry is all going out the window.
And so what are we doing about this?
Are we just going to sit back and let it happen?
Because that seems to be the kind of defeatist attitude that most people have.
Well, we can't do anything.
So let's just, I guess, you know, we had a good run, human beings.
let's pack it in and uh i i do want matt i want to ask you seriously Do you think that AI is going to kill all of us?
Or is this kind of your list of, because I know that's sort of the most catastrophist take on this, is that AI is going to turn around and do gigantic murder to all of us.
No, Terminator 2.
But no, like, this is your list of complaints.
I just want to make sure that that's the list of complaints that I can argue with them.
No, the Terminator thing, I don't, that's like, I'd prefer that.
I mean, at least that's that, you know what?
If AI becomes Terminator, then that at least gives us jobs that we can do because we're fighting the AI.
So it's not that at all.
I'm not looking at any science, you know, sci-fi scenario.
It really is.
The main thing is people will not have much to do because AI is going to do everything and it's going to take all of our jobs.
And I don't think that we have the capacity to sustain that.
I don't think we have any plan for what we do when 20 million people all of a sudden have no job.
That's the main thing.
Okay.
I'm going to argue with everything you just said.
Okay.
So I'm not a person who believes that AI is the cure for all problems.
I also do not think that what we are in right now is sustainable economically.
I've been saying this for a while.
I've actually been saying it for well over a year is that I think we are in a bubble.
I think pretty clearly we're in an AI bubble.
That doesn't mean AI is not important.
It just means that the overinvestment in infrastructure at some point is going to have to pay off in actual earnings or the entire pyramid is going to crumble, at least for most of these companies.
As far as I'm hearing kind of three arguments there.
One is the AI is going to take all of our jobs.
Two is that if the AI takes all of our jobs, what are we going to do with our lives?
And three is the quality of AI is demeaning to sort of the human being.
What's going to happen to human art?
What's going to happen to quality?
It's all going to kind of descend into AI slot mediocrity.
So one at a time, I will say that AI is going to cause job dislocation, but it's not going to take out nearly all of the jobs.
And in the end, what you will see is a job shift, actually predominantly away from the white-collar industries and more toward the blue collar industries.
What you'll see is all the people who are telling welders to code 15 years ago, all those people are now going to have to go learn to weld.
That's actually what's going to happen.
There are going to be a lot of people who are going to have to be in sort of more physical industries.
They're going to have to do more nursing, for example.
Like there are certain things human beings want from other human beings that AI isn't going to provide.
It's going to be more of an aid than anything else.
And it's going to take slower to work its way into the market than everybody thinks.
Everybody always thinks it's going to be transitional boom, like tomorrow, all jobs replaced by AI.
And it's not true.
The people who it's first going to replace are the coders.
You've already started to see some of this happen at Google.
And I know people, friends and family to whom this has happened.
But it's going to take a while for it to filter into all business and there will be transitional job loss and then it will move into other areas.
This is what happened with the internet.
This is what happens with every kind of great industrial age invention is that there's a tremendous job dislocation at the beginning and then the job market moves.
And I don't think AI is going to destroy wholesale all of these jobs.
But let's move to part number two, which is sort of the idea that it will destroy all the jobs.
Let's take that as an assumption.
So here's my thing.
I was actually at a conference with a bunch of people who are like the creators of these systems and they were arguing kind of what you're arguing, Matt, that eventually AI will be better at everything and none of us will have jobs anymore.
And what are we going to do with our day?
And I raised my hand.
I said, you know what?
I know what I'm going to do with my day.
I'm going to take care of my family.
I'm going to go to synagogue more often.
I'm going to, you know, learn the holy books.
I'm going to actually spend more time getting in touch with God.
Like I think that actually religious people and community-oriented people will be fine because we actually have a thing to do with our day.
I think that secular humanism is going to have a real problem determining what to do with its day in a way that many religious people will not.
And then just as far as the quality of it, I'm not sure that AI is ever going to be creative enough.
Visually, it will be.
It'll be able to fool you visually.
But in terms of the actual creativity of truly great writing, I don't think AI is ever going to be a great writer.
It's all derivative.
I think that AI, because it's predictive text mechanism and you will end up with mid-range slop for the most part.
But the way that I've used AI in my own work is to save time asking a sophisticated question that would take me a while to research, for example.
Or if I'm doing creative writing project and I don't want to take a lot of time looking up the details of Soviet Russia in 1938 or something, then I can ask a multi-part question.
It'll spit out an answer.
If I asked it to write dialogue, the dialogue would just not be as good.
And so I agree that there will be a lot of slot, but I think that the people who are best at their craft will actually end up benefiting from AI.
And usually when the best get better, that's actually good for everybody else because it tends to drag everybody else along in terms of quality.
So I have been saying, you're pointing to the religious people who, you know, they'll know what to do with their time or the educated people or the cultural elites or whatever.
I totally agree with that.
But to me, this is what's really worrisome about Matt's point, that it's going to displace 15 million jobs and most people are not going to know what to do.
Because I agree with you.
You will figure out what to do.
No, no, but in the white-collar jobs, Michael, in the white-collar jobs.
No, in the white-collar programs.
But those are the people who you're talking about, like largely blue-collar people who are, like you're saying, you know, all the people who are like the intellectual elite, those are the people who are now most likely to lose their jobs.
No, no, no, but I'm drawing a distinction here.
There are plenty of people in white-collar jobs who are complete Philistines, who are secular humanists, who are who I don't know that they are going to figure out what to do.
Because really what it gets down to is a perennial question, which is what we do for leisure time.
That's what the liberal arts were supposed to teach us how to do.
Now we think of them more as trade school, but it was supposed to teach us what to do with our freedom, how aristocrats are supposed to live.
We obviously don't really have that.
So my fear is that the promise of AI is really just an extension of the promise of the internet.
The internet was going to make us all smarter.
We were going to have all of human knowledge at our fingertips.
We learn a new language.
It's all the same stuff we're hearing with AI.
And the reality is, for some people, the internet did make them smarter and more productive and more thoughtful and have fuller lives.
And for more people than that, really for most people, I think, it made them dumber and it made them more vicious.
And I think it made them more likely to look at porn and it made them more likely to ignore the great works.
And this goes all the way back to the Federus, you know, Plato's dialogue where Socrates is saying that written language, books, essentially, are going to make people dumber because they're going to have the simulacrum of wisdom, but they're not actually going to memorize anything.
They're not going to know anything.
And so I fear, I think you're right.
I think for people who have their lives in order and are religious and have a cohesive view of the purpose of life, I think it could improve their lives.
And I think for most people, it probably won't.
Drew?
Well, if I could take you and Ben and Mash you together just for my own personal pleasure, that would be great.
But also, I think that what you're saying, you're hitting that.
The problem is not AI.
The problem is human beings.
And it's always the problem.
I mean, people talk about, are we going to have to regulate an industry?
You don't regulate industries.
You regulate human beings.
You have to regulate human beings because they're sinful and broken and will kill each other and rob each other and do all these things.
Already we see with AI, I mean, recently, last week, I think it was, they brought out an AI where you can record somebody and then after he's dead, you can continue to talk.
We'll give you an AI version of your dead relative so you can talk to mom even after she's passed.
I mean, that is idolatry of the worst possible kind.
There have been AI dolls that have been put in children's rooms that talk them out of believing in God and tell them how to get drugs and things like this.
So the problem is not the AI per se.
It is what people are going to do with it.
It is going to make porn spectacular.
I mean, the porn that's going to come out of AI.
I mean, I can already see that it will do anything you want it to do.
It's going to rob people of their desire to read.
I mean, it's already people are like condensing books.
Well, now I've got war and peace.
It's just going to be two paragraphs.
But that's a complete destruction of what it means.
And so people who don't have the meaning of life or don't know where it lies, which is in the internal life, are going to be lost.
You and I, Knowles, had a conversation with a very powerful leader in AI just the other week or so.
And I went up to him and I said to him, don't you understand that when AI speaks, it's not speaking.
It's not conscious.
And I said, it's like I quoted the great Louis Armstrong saying, I see friends shaking hands saying, how do you do?
They're really saying, I love you, meaning that when we speak, we deliver our inner selves to one another, even if our words are not precisely that meaning.
AI has no inner life.
And these guys don't know that.
They are convinced that because it can imitate an inner life, they think the Turing test, which is the stupidest idea anybody ever had, is indicative of an inner life.
If it can confuse us about its inner life, it has one.
So what I'm worried about is it is in some ways the ultimate idol.
And we know what people do with idols.
You know, we know that when all Moses has to do is leave town for five minutes, they start worshiping the golden calf.
That's where I think the danger lies.
I think jobs will be created.
I think creativity will exist.
You know, to keep your point, Drew, it's a really important way because part of that conversation, and I've had this conversation with other people too, is can AI write a poem?
And people get really, really, I don't know, vitriolic about this.
They have very strange, because it's really the heart of the AI debate.
And my argument was they can't write a poem because to write a poem, you have to have sensual experience.
You have to be able to describe a grape in a way that gives someone the sensory experience of that.
And you have to be able to take language, which is just full of dead metaphors.
It's like the graveyard of dead metaphors.
And you have to create a new metaphor, something that's evocative.
And AI in particular cannot do that because it doesn't have any senses yet.
It's worth pointing out that with robotics, it actually might have sensory experience.
And two, it's just learning on dead language.
So in my view, it can't make a poem, but I don't know, maybe it can.
And all of this is a little bit beside the question of, all right, if it's going to have these negative effects, what do we do about it?
Do we regulate it or do we not let the market run its course?
What are we going to do?
Hang on a second.
This is why you guys need me here as a community college dropout with all you Ivy League nerds who immediately, this becomes a like, can AI make a poem?
And what will we think about in our leisure time about AI?
My question is, how are people going to eat?
Okay, I'm not talking about leisure time.
How are you going to feed yourself?
How are you going to make money to buy a house?
Like that, that's the first question here.
And if the answer is, well, we'll live in some sort of AI socialist dystopia where AI will provide all that stuff for you.
Well, I'm very skeptical that it will work out that way.
I think what's actually going to happen is you're going to end up with a handful of trillionaires off this AI stuff and a lot of other people who are totally destitute.
But even if it did work out that way, okay, well, then that's our life that now we're living as people that are totally dependent on this non-human algorithm to provide for us.
I think that's a pretty horrifying vision of the future.
But look, it's also, this is, it's not just white-collar jobs.
This is not creating new jobs because this is different from any other technology that has ever existed on the planet.
It's not analogous to anything else because the whole point of it, the whole point is to take the human element out of it completely.
It's not a new tool for humans to use.
It's not like going from a carriage driver to now you're driving an automobile.
This is the human is gone.
We don't need you anymore.
It's artificial intelligence.
And so these jobs are leaving and they're not being replaced.
For all the drivers who are not going to have a job anymore, there's not some new thing.
Oh, well, you'll go over here and do this.
There's nothing for you.
You're out now.
And that's a million dollars.
Why do you think that's true?
They say this every time a new technology is going to be.
No, I'm not.
I want to get, I want to get, no, Drew, it's fine.
I want to get to it.
But before we get to it, we need to eat.
Okay.
The only way we're going to eat is if I read this ad right here, this one.
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AI can do this right here.
I hope not.
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Okay, now, Drew, you want to say something?
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Say, here's my problem with the no job scenario is that it comes up every single time there's a new technology.
Every time.
And it's why government is so bad at managing economies.
It's why you don't want a top-down economy because when the cart and horse goes out of style, the government says we must save the jobs of buggy whip makers, you know?
And the thing is, there'll be new jobs.
There will be new jobs.
And the thing is, maybe we can't even imagine.
I think this has happened a million times before.
You can't imagine what the new job is going to be, but there'll be jobs to do because people are endlessly creative.
It's like the people who worry about running out of oil.
You know, you don't run out of energy because energy is a product of the human mind.
The human mind turns things into energy.
And if we run out of oil, we'll turn something out.
We'll mash up Knowles.
We'll use him for energy.
I mean, you can always run for it.
You can always make energy.
The human mind and imagination and creativity is bottomless.
It's endless.
I don't fear this about AI at all, although I do think Ben is right that there could be difficult transitions and knowing how people are will handle that in the worst way possible.
But I do think when you have a powerful new tool, you have to start to think about human sin.
You have to start to think about the things we're going to use it for that are destructive.
And that's where I see that.
Yeah, I totally agree with this, Drew.
I mean, my worry about AI is the endless pornography, the endless narcissism, the things that social media has done to human beings by exacerbating our worst qualities and that getting even worse, obviously.
That's the thing I worry about.
But as far as sort of the economic point here, I'm significantly less worried about that for a couple of reasons.
One, because I'm just less worried about it based on the history of technological innovation.
If you go back to the early 20th century, well over 80% of jobs in the United States were agriculturally based or early industry based.
And obviously very few people do agriculture now.
If you go to the middle of the 20th century, America was a manufacturing-based economy.
Now we're a service-based economy.
Jobs tend to move around and human beings are quite adaptable.
If the question is, you know, will I be endlessly poor while a few people are trillionaires, that wouldn't work because they wouldn't be trillionaires if everybody is endlessly poor.
That's not the way that actually wealth distribution happens.
They don't take their wealth from a bunch of super duper poor people.
If there's no wealth for them to take, then they don't generate the product.
So the actual thing that would happen, the kind of worst case scenario that people are talking about actually would be a sort of Star Trek replicator machine.
So in Star Trek, I know not a lot of Trekkies on the line here, but if you are Trekky, my understanding is that there is a replicator machine whereby you can literally generate any product from nothing with no resource use, essentially.
And so you don't have to worry about anything.
Well, if you don't have to worry about anything, I thought that that was mostly the goal of human beings because work, I mean, we all understand that work is important, but there are other types of work, right?
Like, for example, spending time with your family, it's a different type of fulfillment.
It's not really work, but it's service, what we would call in Hebrew avoda, which is the same Hebrew, the word for work and service is the same.
It's avoda.
The same type of thing, I think, is true in our lives, right?
When I think of like the things that I do that are important, my work actually comes maybe third or fourth on the list after family and religion and the stuff that I'm doing in my community and for the country.
So, you know, I'm less worried about the kind of how do I get my stuff?
If things work out great, we're all going to be way richer and have a lot more leisure time.
If you're worried about the leisure time, that's a human nature problem.
That's what Drew is talking about.
And then there is the other problem, which is what's the alternative?
People keep talking about, okay, we could regulate it out of existence, right?
We're just going to regulate it, stop it from taking trucker jobs.
Okay, let's say that we were able to do that.
Let's say we were able to ban all the self-driving cars.
Does anybody think that any other place on earth is going to ban the self-driving cars?
So the actual thing that will happen is that China will gain complete economic dominance over planet Earth, unless you are going to essentially make America autarkic and poor.
That is the way that trade actually works.
China will gain the advantage of every efficiency on planet Earth while we hamper ourselves and we will live in relative poverty compared to what we are now, while China gains significantly more power globally and then uses that power in order to cram down its terrible vision of the world.
But then hopefully is your view then like pure laissez-faire, no regulation whatsoever.
Let the market lead in it and that way we'll beat China and we'll maintain our destination.
Except for morality and national security, yes.
So I don't think we should be selling NVIDIA chips to China because I think China is our enemy.
And I also think that we should be heavily regulating pornography, period.
And that applies also to AI.
But if we're talking about like, should we stop AI from generating healthcare solutions because people in the healthcare industry are going to lose their jobs?
I mean, let's be real about this.
Like, it's easy for us living in a first world country with an average life expectancy above 80 to talk about the evils of AI.
But if AI, for example, in the medical industry, extends lifespans by another 20 years, which could easily happen, that seems like a pretty good thing to happen.
And I think that one of the big mistakes I see people happen, there's a mistake that I just generally object to.
And that is, I think it happens on the Marxist left, and I think it sometimes happens on the populist right.
And that is they take a spiritual problem, people's emptiness and inability to function in the absence of particular guardrails.
And then they say there's a material solution for that.
And it is very rare to me that there's actually a material solution.
No, hold on.
That's very bad.
That's a very good point, Ben, because it is true.
Sometimes people think like with the birth rate problem, you can just fix it with a lot of material solutions and there's not a lot of evidence.
However, there's a distinction between a material solution and a government solution because the government influences culture.
It promotes certain ideas, suppresses others.
It promotes religion traditionally and I think inevitably.
And so, you know, like for the, to use the birth rate example, the only thing that seems to reliably increase birth rate is the promotion of religion.
But the government can do things there, either explicitly promote religion or at least stop the suppression of religion like, you know, we saw under Joe Biden and we see under a lot of liberals.
So is there any role, just before we get to the other guys, is there any role for the government here in maybe not providing a material solution to the consequences of AI, but some role for the government?
I mean, I want to know the specifics.
It always comes down to the specifics.
And this, by the way, no one, the problem with AI is a bunch of unknown unknowns, right?
It's not known unknowns.
It's just we literally don't know what's going to happen next.
How do you regulate for that?
Which is why the Calci markets, right?
Calci's one of our sponsors.
Right now in the Calci markets, like 5% shot that there's any serious regulation of AI because no one even would know what that looks like.
What does that even look like?
I mean, this is a question, honestly, Matt, this is a question for you because you want to regulate AI, I assume.
You want to do something to stop sort of the forward march of AI.
So on a practical level, what does that look like?
Well, I think that, and I don't have all the answers.
I'll fully admit that.
That's why it's so frustrating to me that we're not at a serious level even having this conversation.
I mean, we're having this conversation right now, but including like our lawmakers having this debate about what can we do?
What should we do?
And that conversation just isn't happening at all.
And if I had all the answers myself, then I guess I wouldn't be frustrated by that because I could just say, well, here's the answers, guys.
I don't have them, but what I know the answer can't be, well, whatever.
We'll see how it plays out.
That can't be the answer when you're facing something that is going to fundamentally alter our civilization the way that this is going to.
Now, there are some things that can be done.
I mean, people have suggested when it comes to, and this is kind of on a lower level, but things like intellectual property.
This is another huge problem with AI.
And I think some of you guys have already kind of touched on it, that AI cannot create anything.
It can't make a poem.
It can't write a poem.
It can't do a screenplay.
You were just making fun of me because I brought that up.
And now you're bringing that up.
I'm bringing it back to the real world.
So the problem with the reason why I can't do that is because it's stealing from what other people have done.
And right now, AI lives in this kind of like bubble where the rules of plagiarism don't apply to it.
So there are things that you could do there legislatively.
There's, again, it's not easy to do, but I do think you have to do something there to protect people from having their creative property slow.
But I would kind of, I would flip it back the other way because what I'm going to ask is, okay, the drivers are all going to lose their jobs, most likely.
Customer service, the customer service industry, a lot of that is just going away because when AI is adopted, and I don't think this is not some kind of like sci-fi speculation, it's just extending out a little bit.
It's like pretty clear that if we keep applying this stuff, there's not going to be anything for people to do in a lot of these jobs.
So I think a lot of these customer service jobs are going to go away.
And then, yes, there's also the white collar, but I care about those people too.
Anyone who sits in a cubicle all day and enters data into computers, which is millions of people, probably a lot of their jobs are going away.
And I think that that matters too.
So my question is, if that were to happen, let's just say, and maybe AI all breaks down and it doesn't happen.
I think it probably will.
If that happens over the next five to 10 years and you've got tens of millions of people who not just their job, but really their entire industry just went away.
What are we doing with them?
What are we doing?
And for them, wait, wait, wait, wait.
I want to go to question.
Hold on, let me just answer that.
It'll take me, I promise, like four sentences, okay?
So here's the answer to that.
If I had asked you that same question in 1998, the advent of the internet is going to kill a bunch of jobs and it will kill a bunch of jobs, you know, based on all the supply chains being changed, everything getting a lot shorter.
You won't have to go to the local mom and pop shop.
You can order it off the internet.
And I said to you, don't worry, in 20 years, there will be literally millions of people who are working on AI coding and database building, data center building.
You would say, what the hell are you even talking about?
What do those words mean?
I don't know what those words mean.
If I said to you, there would be legitimately thousands of jobs that were people who were social media editors and marketers.
You say, what the hell?
What's a social media and how do it work?
This is the whole point of the market is that jobs that we don't even know exist will come about because that's what the market does.
The market generates innovation because human desire is endless.
And the human desire for new and innovative things is also endless.
This is different.
This is different.
I want to hear from you.
Yes, yes.
We can't imagine these things.
I totally agree with Ben.
I think they're going to be jobs that we have no idea could possibly exist.
But the question that Knowles asked, and actually Ben referred to, is the really important question.
Back in the day, when you wanted to get a pornographic magazine, you had to walk into a store, shame yourself.
You have to make sure none of the neighbors saw you.
You went home with this piece of paper that you could look at and all this stuff.
Not true.
Not that you have any experience.
No, I have no idea.
I'm just describing that.
The one right end.
Theoretically, a friend of mine, theoretically, right.
But nobody, when people said, oh, we've got to ban this, and they did ban it.
And they censored things.
And then they said, oh, yeah, we got to censor Ulysses too.
It was silly.
You had to get rid of it.
Now you've got this sewer of porn wiping people's lives away with no regulation whatsoever.
And so now conservatives, when I come out and say things, for instance, like, you should not be able to censor opinions on YouTube.
Conservatives go, oh, my, regulation, regulation.
Well, no, it's a new thing.
It needs new regulations to make sure the freedom of speech lives because if you censor things on YouTube, you have virtually taken them out of the public square.
So what do you do with pornography?
I mean, I, who would have said, you know, so what, pornography 30 years ago, now think, holy, this is, this is a toxin being pumped into the human psyche like never before.
Dude, I wrote a literal book on pornography.
Yes, you did.
What it was going to do to destroy young people in 2005.
And I was mocked for it.
I was 21 years old when I wrote that book.
No, these are the questions that we're not addressing now, where we know the danger, we can see the danger.
It's only going to get worse.
These are the issues I think we should be addressing, not whether jobs are going to disappear because everything will change or we don't even know what that's going to look like.
All right.
Matt, last word.
Yeah, on the regulation side of it, I mean, obviously the most, the most, you know, the sort of the most heavy-handed and obvious thing if we're talking about regulation is the government saying that, hey, okay, you want to wipe out all the driver jobs.
You want to wipe out of all your customer service jobs if you're McDonald's.
And it's a law saying, well, you can't do that.
We're just, you're not, you can't do that.
We're not going to let you do that because we're not going to let you put millions of people out of work all at the same time because we just can't sustain that as a society.
It can't happen.
And now that's very complicated.
That's the kind of thing that I normally would not support.
And there is this tension between like free markets and then this other huge civilization level concern.
So that's just, that's, that's the thing.
That's what we're dealing with.
And I do think, and I just go back to that this is a different kind of thing.
I think any analogy breaks down.
Ben, you brought up the internet.
Well, the internet is a different kind of thing.
The internet is a very high-tech, sophisticated form of communication.
It's just a way of for people to communicate and connect with each other.
And so that in and of itself is not going to take away jobs.
It might change what the jobs are, but you still need the, you still have humans who are on the internet communicating with each other.
And that's the case with all of these technological innovations, that it's just a different tool for people to use.
And so, yeah, maybe the job where you use the more primitive tool goes away, but now you use the more sophisticated tool, and that's the job.
And I think with AI, it's just different because, as I said, it's artificial intelligence, which means the entire point of it is that we don't need a person to do this at all.
It's not a new thing for you to do.
You're not needed.
And because we're facing this totally new kind of thing, which I really believe is unprecedented in human history, I think we might need to embrace solutions that otherwise would make us uncomfortable.
In fairness, we don't know if that's even Matt really talking right now.
That could be Rock or Gemini or something.
Now, I want to get to, it was something we touched on, though.
It's related, but it's a totally separate topic, is affordability.
It's the word.
It's the meme that everyone's talking.
It's the new 6'7.
Everyone's just saying affordability all the time.
I want to get into what that actually means.
But first and foremost, I want you to tell us.
Here is something that AI cannot do.
It cannot eat your vegetables.
It can't even eat my vegetables.
In fact, I can't eat your vegetables.
It's a very, very complicated thing, these vegetables.
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It's because I have so many of these damn things that I don't even have to open them.
I got more downstairs that are open.
Balance of Nature, what they do is they freeze-dry fruits and veggies, then powder them and blend them into the most convenient nutritional value.
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Now, Knowles, what were you saying?
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Absolutely fitting, apt way to talk about affordability, which is a very serious problem.
Usually sweet little Elisa does the shopping in the house.
Occasionally, I had to go out the other day to get lemons for a cocktail that I was made, not even for food, just for a cocktail I was making.
And so I got a great cocktail.
That's a story for another time.
Anyway, I go to the grocery store, and the prices are insane.
I see why Elisa had been keeping me from them largely.
I mean, the affordability problem is very real.
It's not that it's not being pounced on by political actors and it's obviously become a big political talking point, but it's very, very real.
A ton of Americans are hurting.
A lot of the fundamentals of the economy are a little shaky right now, even though those Mag 7 stocks that we were just talking about, AI, is pumping up the market.
It's really, really tough.
And so there are a bunch of related questions.
One, can the government do something to fix this?
Or is the government only going to make things worse?
How is this going to affect the midterms in the 2028 election?
Are we headed for an economic disaster?
And Ben, you got in a huge amount of trouble because there was a short clip of you going around saying, yeah, listen, if you can't afford stuff, move out of your town.
Even if it's your hometown, even if your family's been there for a long time, just get, you've got to get out.
You've got to be mobile.
And you were variously exalted and pilloried for this comment.
So what's it mean?
Yeah, so let me start with what that comment meant.
That was a piece of personal advice to people that I think every single young person that I know has at some point taken, which is if you're living in a place that you can't afford and the policies aren't going to change and you want to make your life better, you do have to make a significant calculation as to whether you think your life is going to get better where you are or whether you're going to have to go pursue a dream someplace else.
And you've seen this.
You've seen tremendous population movement in this country right now out of New York to places like Austin, Texas.
You've seen tremendous population movement from the blue areas to the red areas of the country, specifically because people are seeking economic opportunities.
So what I thought I was saying was something that's fairly obvious, which is that if you are on a personal level in a place where you're stuck and you can't afford to live there, you have to make the best decision for yourself and your family.
And that does include the possibility of actually moving as opposed to shouting at the wind if the policy isn't going to change.
That's a separate question from what sort of policies could be pursued in order to make things more affordable.
I mean, I'll start with this.
If you're talking about Manhattan, Manhattan will never be as affordable as Des Moines.
It just is not going to.
And anybody who says that it is going to is totally lying to you.
It's just a flat out lie.
The reality is there are only two ways to make things more affordable.
One is to drop the demand for a product and retain the same supply.
The other is to radically increase the supply of a product and to retain the same demand.
That's it.
Those are the only ways that things become more affordable.
There is no magical third way.
The only way things become more affordable is if the supply greatly outstrips the demand.
And the only ways to do that are to increase supply or reduce demand.
That's it.
So if you're talking about how to make things more affordable, one of the things you can do to increase supply is remove regulations, right?
You can get rid of tax structures that disincentivize investment.
You can get rid of a lot of the difficulty in building, for example, in New York.
But are you ever going to build enough units so that suddenly the real estate prices there reflect what it would be across the river in sort of rural parts of New Jersey?
The answer, of course, is no.
And when people talk about affordability, the thing that makes me totally crazy about this is I'm totally sick in politics.
I'm sick to have people in politics doing this routine where they say the problem over and over and over, we're providing zero solution.
And then when you say, you know what, I don't really see a solution to the thing you're talking about, they pillory you for noting the obvious.
Like, okay, if you're not providing, Zorn Mamdani is not providing a solution.
Him saying affordability didn't make affordability magically appear like Betelgeuse if he said affordability three times.
And also, politicians are in the business of lying to you.
Okay, when the president of the United States, who I generally agree with, he made a mistake when he came into office and said, I'm going to make things affordable again.
The answer is, no, you're probably not.
And the reason you're probably not is because all of the inflation that Joe Biden embedded in the economy already made things so wildly unaffordable that the best you're probably going to do is keep prices stable.
Right.
What the Federal Reserve seeks to do is keep the inflation rate at like 2%, which is an increase in the prices, just by the very nature of it.
And what people actually want is for there to be deflation.
They want the prices to be back at 2019 levels.
They're not talking about going back to 2024 levels.
They're talking about 2019 levels.
The only way to get back to 2019 levels is probably in economic recession.
That's just the reality.
And so, again, saying unpopular things, the best that the inflation rate could look like for President Trump is like this under Joe Biden and then like this under Trump.
Okay.
So here's, okay, this would be Biden, this gigantic spike.
And then Trump stays steady.
The problem is people are looking at the prices here and they're saying, well, they don't look like the prices here.
Well, yeah, what's Trump supposed to do about that absent a radical increase in the interest rates that would sink the that would sink the economy?
So one thing that has happened, everyone was predicting that Trump's tariffs were going to be inflationary.
And the Treasury Secretary Scott Besson was doing a little victory lap because when he was being confirmed for his position, he said, no, I actually think tariffs are going to be deflationary.
And the San Francisco Fed just came out and said the tariffs are deflationary.
No, no, no, no, you're reading the study totally wrong.
That's not what the study says.
I read the entire study.
It's 150 pages.
What that study says is that when you look at the inflation, when you look at tariffs, over time, there's a spike at the beginning because things get more expensive because you're reducing the supply and the demand retains the same, right?
So the price goes up temporarily and then people start to lose their jobs.
And when people start to lose their jobs, the demand goes down.
And when the demand goes down, the prices go down.
No, no, no.
So you can say it's deflationary.
There was a big caveat, even in the popular reporting, which is the caveat is it hurts employment and it hurts economic growth.
Yeah, yeah.
So there's obviously big caveats.
There's one further point on it, just to why I think your video went viral, Ben, is because one thing people are hearing is they're not missing the context of you're giving personal advice to someone who's asking, you know, but at a macro level, at a political level, what people are hearing is, hold on, you're telling me my family's been in this town forever.
I'll use my own example.
I have dozens of family members buried in the local cemetery in my hometown.
And even before that, the Knowles initially were from New Hampshire.
And they arrived here, the Knowles side, in 1660.
The Knowles family home stood from 1660 until 1994 when the home burned down.
There are still Knowles all over that area in New Hampshire and Maine.
And what I think a lot of people are looking around at is part of the reason that housing in particular is unaffordable right now is because of government decisions, government decisions to flood the country with a bunch of like Venezuelan criminals or Somalis or something and increase the cost of housing, or government decisions that are going to compromise certain industries or certain jobs because of trade deals or whatever, going all the way back to NAFTA or even further.
We don't need to litigate those in particular.
But you're saying, no, there's part of this political order that has led to this crisis, at the very least with migration.
And so why is it that I'm just supposed to say, oh, shucks, I got to lose my hometown because, well, you know, Republicans and Democrats together flooded the country with aliens.
Isn't there a good to having, you know, long family histories in a single place?
Of course, sure.
And there's a good to having your family live near you.
I have tons of family that lives near me.
I'm a person who grew up in LA.
I spent my entire life living in LA until I was 35, one mile from my parents.
And then I moved to Florida and I still live one mile from my parents because I took them with me.
So I'm very much in favor.
One of the things I talk about on the show all the time is having family structures nearby because you need those supportive family structures.
That's not the case that I'm making is that you should abandon this sort of stuff or that mass migration should replace you in your hometown.
I think everyone here is very much against mass migration is very much in favor of what President Trump has been doing on the immigration program.
The problem that I see is not any of that.
I agree with all this on policy.
But if there's a mentality that sets in that says, I bear no responsibility in changing my own life if I can't change the outside circumstances.
And now I'm just going to sit here and bitch about it.
Like that doesn't seem like a specific recipe for individual success.
But Matt, I want to know what you take because I think you and I are, as usual, we are on opposite ends of the spectrum in some ways.
I agree with your practical point and I agree also with, maybe I'm somewhere in between because I agree with your point.
I also agree with some of the criticism, the more rational.
You have a modern position, Matt?
Well, no, here's the way I put it.
Ben's correct.
And I've said the same thing many times, that especially as a young man, I also think there's a gender element to this that is a sort of a different topic.
But as a parent, I want my sons, when they become adults, to move out of the house.
I don't want them to move 10 hours away, hopefully, but if they have to, they have to.
I do want them to move out and experience living on their own a little bit before they come husbands and fathers.
My daughters, I would love for them to just stay home with me until they get married many, many, many years in the future.
So I do think there's like a gender element to it, but that's a separate thing.
I think if I totally agree that if you're in a spot, particularly if you're a young man and you can't afford anything, you can't get a job, can't afford to live anywhere, well, you're single, you have no kids, you have no dependents, you can go anywhere and do anything and you can take risks and the stakes are pretty low.
I mean, worst case scenario, you go somewhere, you end up sleeping in your car or something for a while.
That's not good, but it's like, well, it's just you.
You can handle that, especially as a young man.
So you could take risks.
You can go out and pursue opportunities.
However, at the same time, it's also true that you shouldn't have to do that.
Like something is wrong that so many people have to do that.
You should be able to.
To Michael's point, if you're a young man and you're looking at, okay, well, my parents were born here.
They lived here.
My grandparents lived here.
Maybe my great-grandparents lived here.
So generations of a family lived in the same place, and now all of a sudden, and I have the same kind of skills that they do.
I might even be more educated than they were.
So I'm in many ways more qualified for a job than even any of them were.
And yet all of a sudden everything's broken down.
It doesn't work for me to live in this town anymore.
Something is wrong.
Something is broken.
It should not be this way.
We need to fix it.
But on the practical level, well, it is this way now.
And we want you to still succeed.
So you might have to go somewhere else, hopefully with the intent of eventually coming back to live around your family.
Because I totally believe, I mean, we emphasize the nuclear family so much, which is important, but also the quote-unquote extended family is also important.
So getting back to them, and that's what, you know, what a lot of us did, what I kind of did, move around, move around, end up back with your family.
So you might have to do that practically.
You shouldn't have to.
It shouldn't be that way.
That's the policy end of it.
And so we need policies in place that make it possible for people to live with their family and then move next door and stay with generations of families their entire life.
You should be able to do that in a functioning and thriving society.
One of the ways to make that happen is the thing we all agree with.
Get all the illegals out.
There's a lot.
They've been saying 20 million illegals in this country.
They've been telling me that since like 20 years ago, they were saying it was 20 million.
It's way more than that.
We don't know how many.
Get them all out.
Shut down immigration.
And that's one of the policy changes that could be made.
And we need to do that.
But until that happens, yeah, you got to figure out what you're going to do in your life.
Actually, Matt, Ralph, I totally agree with you.
I want to hear Ben's point.
And I want to hear from my great-great-grandfather, Andrew Clayton.
I want to get to a little baby.
I was just going to say I agree with Matt, actually.
So Matt and I are actually in total agreement on that.
Okay, now I really want to move on because Matt's offering a moderate opinion and Ben is agreeing with him.
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Okay, Ben agrees with Matt.
Matt has a moderate opinion.
I'm totally scandalized.
And I want to hear from Drew.
So I disagree with Ben in a couple of ways here.
I mean, first of all, Zora Mandani is one of the scummiest politicians I've ever seen in my entire life.
But he did do half the job.
He did raise the issue.
And when you raise the issue, people perk up.
No, it's a terrible thing.
He raised the issue and then offered socialist solutions that we know will be utterly, utterly destructive.
It's not plain candyman to say the word that people are thinking about.
The worst thing a politician can do, and the thing will destroy any administration, is to show people a chart that shows them they're not suffering when they can't afford Christmas presents for their kids.
Like, here is this chart.
You're doing great.
And people know exactly how they're doing, and it makes them incredibly frustrated.
What they're frustrated with Trump now is he's doing something I think is urgently important.
I think we're going to be very grateful to Trump for what he did five, six, seven years down the line when China finally invades Taiwan.
I think he's totally rearranged America's priorities in absolute great ways, but he didn't pay attention to the thing that's right there on the table, and he has to pay attention to it now.
The other thing I disagree with is normally it is true that you have to put people out of work to bring down inflation.
That's what Reagan did, and he lost the midterms.
He didn't lose the houses, but he lost the midterms because of it.
And everybody said, oh, this is a disaster.
And then the economy turned around for the next 25 years because of what Reagan did.
But the other thing that there is a third way of dealing with inflation, which is raising the investments and the salaries of people.
If you can steady, you know, if you can cut inflation off and make the prices level out and then wages start to rise, then you can actually, that is the same thing as bringing down inflation because now people can afford the things they couldn't afford before.
So Matt is totally right that we got to get rid of all the illegals.
And as far as I'm concerned, I don't care who it is.
I've lost all sympathy with the illegal immigrations.
I know some of these people are great people who snuck in.
They got to go.
Everybody's got to go.
And we've got to give the country back to the people who are here and who were born here.
No question about that in my mind.
I cannot have compassion for 20 million people.
I can only have compassion for one person at a time.
If one guy sneaks in, I can have compassion for him.
I can't have compassion for an invading army, which is what the Biden administration gave us.
But the other thing is we have to have capitalist solutions.
And I think there are capitalist solutions.
For instance, I think a lot of companies are now offering people stock.
A lot more companies are offering people stock and investment as payment, as part of the payment.
I got that when I worked for Coca-Cola.
I was a reader for Columbia Pictures, and Coca-Cola owned them, and they gave me Coke stock.
It was transformative.
I mean, all I had to do was hold on to it.
And now I had an investment in the company and in the economy.
And I think that's really important.
Trump is talking about personal savings accounts that I think is also a really good idea.
Some of his ideas, like the 50-year mortgage, I'm not too happy about because it's like double the price of homes.
But still, it might be a lot of people.
Lifetime debt slavery.
Lifetime debt slavery.
Exactly, yeah.
But I think that there are ways for capitalists to increase people's participation in the economy so that when things work for the bosses, they work for the people too.
I think it's a wonderful thing that this country, when it is working on all cylinders and when the capitalism is in place, it makes so much money that the big guys can afford to share a little bit with the little guys, not by having the government redistribute it, but by saying, here's a piece of what you're working for.
Starbucks did it.
It worked really well for a long time.
And I think a lot of companies should do it.
And so I think that there are ways of dealing with this, but I think that dealing with it is something government has to do.
It is a policy problem.
Government creates inflation.
People do not, it's not the greedy banks.
It's not the greedy drugstores or whatever.
It's the government that creates inflation.
They can actually do things to bring it down.
And I think one thing, you're right that we don't want deflation because it means the economy is tanking, but you can get wages growing in a lot of different ways.
One of them by reducing the workforce by getting rid of the people who shouldn't be here would be a great first step.
I don't disagree with some of those policy prescriptions, but I think that the thing that I am kind of stuck in, and it's driving me a little crazy, and I think it's the reason why the country is penduluming side to side incredibly wildly.
You'll see, like right now, Calchie is one of our sponsors.
I'll mention them again here because I did on my show earlier.
But if you look at the polls, right, like the Calci markets right now, Democrats, according to that market, and I kind of agree with this, are actually the favorites in 2028.
And I think the reason for that, and I think the reason that the country just keeps swinging wildly poll to poll is because when you have politicians who are actually saying the same thing, but none of them are saying what is true, this is what you end up with.
So if everybody says affordability is, I agree, affordability is a problem.
This is why I'm kind of waving that away.
Labeling problems is the easiest thing in the world.
You can do it in your life all day long.
And I can agree with my wife on every single problem that exists in our life.
It's when you get to the solutions that things get a little bit complicated.
And when you have politicians who always say the same thing, but from different sides of the aisle, which is, you're right, it's government's job to solve it.
Okay, there's only one problem.
If the thing that you're saying is not going to solve it and you're asking for additional centralized power in order to solve the thing, what you are going to end up with is failure.
And then the other guy is going to say, give it to me.
And so they're just passing the ball side to side.
The only thing that is going to create affordability is a dynamic and innovative economy, which means a few things.
One, a consistent level of regulation or less regulation, right?
Like actual certainty in what's going to happen tomorrow in the economy.
Two, you're actually going to need innovators to innovate and you need to leave them alone and allow them to innovate and actually capture the profits that they're creating through innovation.
And then you're going to need to get the hell out of the way.
I mean, the magic of the Reagan economy, I know Reagan has now become anathema for some reason that I cannot even imagine.
I can't imagine why the right has decided that Reagan was suddenly bad other than because we need to cast up a false villain in order to elevate, you know, whatever the news is.
This amnesty irritated some people in retrospect.
I'm not saying everything about Reagan was wonderful, but I don't think everything about Trump is wonderful either.
I do think that the Reagan economy generated more job growth and pulled us out of a greater economic morass than any president in history, probably.
And so I think that is worth something.
And so if you look at Reagan's pitch, his pitch was, I can't solve all your problems for you, but I can get the government out of your way so you can solve your own problems.
And I just want one politician who will say that.
Like just one, as opposed to this kind of centralized government bullshit where everybody says, no, no, don't worry.
You sit there and I'll solve all your problems for you.
No one is going to solve the vast majority of problems in your life.
No politician will do it.
The best they can do is get rid of the obstacles that are in your way, the systemic obstacles that are in your way.
And then most of the decisions in a free country ought to be up to you.
And that is scary because it means that actually your success or failure is largely on your own shoulders.
This is different.
I agree with Ben 100% on all of that.
No, but in defense of those who are critiquing Ray, obviously I still love St. Gipper and politicians come and go, you know, Nixon was in the crater for a while.
Now Nixon's making a comeback.
Coolidge was the man for a while.
Now people are looking more toward, I don't know, they like Teddy Roosevelt, they used Adam.
So this happens as we rethink history and as we move on to new circumstances.
Part of the reason that there's a little more of a critical lens, you know, as opposed to just exalting St. Reagan as being perfect in all ways, is because, you know, in the 80s, mass amnesty for illegal aliens, for example, wasn't really all that big a deal.
But it did set the stage for a major problem.
And so we're rethinking that.
In the 80s, obviously Reagan was massively successful in his economic policy, as was Thatcher, as was that whole kind of movement.
We do live in a different world today.
And so it's not to say we throw out all of their solutions.
It's not to say that we throw out all of their solutions, but it's to recognize that there are more difficult economic problems that we have to deal with.
And so one of, you know, Drew actually offered some real solutions here, which is he, you pointed out, Drew, that having people really bought into the economy, you know, Coca-Cola, giving you some stock back in the day, is helpful.
Back when we were rethinking some of the problems with industrial capitalism 100 years ago, you had writers, especially Catholic writers like Chesterton and Belloc, saying we need some option, not socialism and communism, not pure unbridled capitalism, but some other option.
They propose something called distributism, which is too complicated to get into here and probably isn't all that practical.
But a lot of it, what it comes down to is give people some ownership, give people some stake.
And I think that's really, really important.
And so here's another criticism maybe of what came out of the Reagan era is that we judge the health of an economy purely by GDP.
And GDP is a fine economic indicator, but it's not the be all and end all of everything.
And I think what a lot of people are looking around at today is saying, look, you can show a lot of economic activity in all sorts of ways by the pornography industry, to use the topic we keep coming back to.
You know, the pornography industry is booming.
Look at that.
GDP is going up.
You know, there are all sorts of very destructive industries.
We brag now about how women's employment is the highest ever.
I'm not sure that's a great thing.
You know, I mean, who's taking care of the kids?
Who's watching the home?
Isn't there some cost to that as well?
And so I just, I wonder one slightly practical solution might be to say, all right, look, maybe GDP isn't the be-all and end-all of everything.
And maybe there are certain areas of the economy that are legitimately immoral and destructive.
And we used to heavily regulate them, like pornography, for instance, but all sorts of other kind of vicious and degrading avenues.
We've liberalized gambling.
I don't know that that's really great.
Maybe it ticks up GDP a little bit, but it doesn't, I don't think that's really great for the true health of an economy.
Maybe we need to rethink what economic health really looks like because the changes that came about in the late part of the 20th century did have some negative side effects as well as positive outcomes.
Can I address the Reagan thing for a minute, though?
Because a lot of this, I think, started with that Caldwell book, The Age of Entitlement, in which he blamed Reagan for things that Reagan actually didn't.
Reagan said he failed to cut down the government.
That was the big failure of his administration.
But we've edited the Cold War out of history.
And, you know, Reagan, like, won the Cold War.
He freed like a huge, huge section of the globe.
He set people free.
And what they did with that is up to them, but he actually did that.
You can't imagine how unheard of that was, how unexpected it was, how nobody thought it would ever happen, how we were dealing with the Soviet Union for the rest of our lives.
Not just people who thought that communism was going to work, but people who thought it's just never going to go away.
He made it go away.
And I think for that, he's a hero.
And yeah, what Knowles is saying is true.
We now are living in an absolutely new economy.
And while the basis of deregulation, I totally disagree.
There's no such thing as a new economy.
Let me finish it.
The basis of deregulation and freedom and free markets are absolutely the same.
They don't change at all.
But the problems that arise, no system solves human problems because human beings can't be solved, the problems that arise in the places where the peaks of problems are change, and then we have to address those.
And one of them, you're absolutely right.
One of the key ones is the role of women in our society, which I think has screwed up so badly that it's destroying everything.
We've actually stopped reproducing, which to me is always a bad sign.
That economic indicator.
Another indicator.
I mean, so actually, this teaches me a lesson.
I should let Drew finish his sentences because when he finishes them, I'm more likely to agree with them.
That'll be a whole new relationship.
But at the same time, Knowles, I'll pick on you a little bit.
When we say, you know, terrible, we shouldn't look at GDP.
It's not a good indicator of economic.
It's not the be-all and end-all.
Okay, it's not the be all and it's the be- Okay, so there's no such thing as an economic be-all and end-all.
Okay, but I think that we are mixing up a few terminologies here.
And I think that we ought to tease out the strain for one second.
There's a difference between economic health and societal health.
These are not the same thing.
You can have a very economically healthy society that is breaking down in a lot of social ways with tremendous pathologies.
I think that's what you're actually seeing.
And so, yes, it turns out that we are materially significantly better off than we were in the 1980s.
In fact, we are materially significantly better off than we were in the mid-2000s.
When people talk about the unaffordability of homes, that's because an average home in 1950 was a 980-foot square foot brick house with no insulation and no heating or air and maybe a bathroom outside.
Like this kind of idea that we're living worse than your parents or grandparents is just belied by every available fact.
Maybe you're living worse than your grandparents are right now, but you're not living worse than your grandparents were at the same age.
If you're a 20-year-old living in 2025, you're not worse off than your grandparents were living as a 20-year-old in 1958 or 1960.
You have an iPhone, but you don't have a house.
I mean, they need to do it now, but your apartment is nicer than their house was.
Okay, that is a reality if you're living anywhere except for New York City.
And by the way, the idea that you couldn't move somewhere and get a house, now you're getting back to my original point, which is on a personal level.
If you want to live a life like your grandparents, you might have to do the thing that your grandparents did.
Okay, your grandparents went to a war and then they came back and moved to a town that they actually probably did not grow up in.
And then they got a house that was like off the lot from some government, from some big corporation that built a bunch of standard box-looking houses that now you drive past those on the freeway and you say, I can't believe somebody ever lived in those.
So it's kind of, you know, rose-colored glasses about the past drives me a little bit insane.
And again, I think that if we want to look at the real problems in our society, we shouldn't create a mythical past and we shouldn't create a mythically terrible present.
We should actually look at the problems in our society.
And one of those would be people not having kids.
One of those would be deep depression and unhappiness.
People killing themselves with opioids.
You know, people being, yes, people having their jobs taken by illegal immigrants in certain industries.
Like those are actual real solvable problems.
But I don't have a DeLorean.
All I have right now is the way that people are living right now.
And so now we have to look at the problems in front of us and how do we solve those.
Yeah, but that's the one part where I, so, so at the buzzer, I get to disagree with you, Ben.
I remember there was one thing you said in that, in that clip that I did disagree with, I couldn't remember, but then you just said it again.
So the one part about, well, this is, you know, America's, it's how America's always been, that you, you, you leave and you go somewhere else away from your family.
And I think that like back in the pioneer days, I mean, there is something about that that's in the American spirit of like literally going out into a wilderness and building your own life, maybe a thousand miles away from anyone that you know.
And so there is that's American in a certain sense, but that was back in the pioneer days.
I think for most of for most of us for most of American history, it's like anywhere else in the world.
People, they grew up in a place.
They didn't move that far away.
They stayed where their support is.
We are less mobile now.
I'm by the stats.
We are less mobile now than we have ever been anytime in American history.
Quick, raise your hand if you are currently living in the town where you grew up.
But you're saying we're less mobile now.
And I'm saying that we are a unique breed in that we actually, like, we're a little older than the Gen Zers, okay?
Like, we, but the people who tend to be more successful, and again, as a piece of advice, are the people who tend to actually move in pursuit of opportunity.
And if you look historically speaking, it is not true that in 1920, everybody is living in the town where they grew up.
In fact, in 1920, there were more people who were moving across the country at great expense and difficulty than there are today in 2025.
Exceptional people, exceptional people move, they go into the wilderness, they build new towns, but most people are not exceptional.
That's the only chance to meet people.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah, right.
So, and you want us and you want a country filled with communities and filled with people with traditions and things like that.
So, I kind of half agree with you on this.
I do believe that exceptional people should and will move, but I think that Matt is right that it shouldn't be like that for everybody.
Sorry, go back to Matt's and Mac and finish disagreeing with me because I'm making it a jerk again.
No, I think that's it.
I don't know.
The claim that people were more mobile in the 1920s, there's also a technological side of this too, that for a lot of American history, moving away from your family and going to another state over was like a three-month journey.
And people are going to die along the way.
So, this is one of the reasons why we know that for a lot of American history and human history, people didn't tend to do that.
I mean, sometimes they did, but that was, again, that's like you're a pioneer.
I think that the, at the very least, and I don't think we're disagreeing on this point, that the desire to stay in your community, where you were born, where your family is, stay with your support system, with your families and your family and your friends.
That's a good desire.
There's nothing wrong with that.
I heard that.
And a healthy country is one where people, if they want to do that, are able to do it.
So, but I think that's the part.
I think we all agree on that, right?
That's you know, this gets back, though, to this point of the neat and pat distinction between economic health and social health.
I'm not sure that we can, obviously, they're distinct concepts, but I'm not sure that we can totally separate them, you know, especially as increasingly in the modern age, we think of ourselves as omo economicus.
You know, we're like primarily economic creatures.
And I don't, I think we're just an integral creatures that, and we have all of these things together.
And so, you know, especially at this kind of moment, you look now, compare it to 1980 or 1880 for that matter.
One of the major problems that we have is that social solidarity has really frayed, that religiosity has declined precipitously, though there are some signs that that's turning around.
And you can't divorce that from the birth rate problem.
You know, you can't divorce that from the fact that people aren't having kids.
These are great predictors.
You know, stability, tradition, and religion are predictors of people having kids.
And you can't divorce that from the economic problems because if we don't import the entire third world, we're told that our economy is going to collapse, the GDP is going to collapse.
So that's the whole argument for mass migration.
And so these problems are all so deeply intertwined that it seems to me that there has to be some firmer political solution to rather than just say, look, we're going to let the free hand of the market, you know, work its way and we'll let the chips fall where they may.
A lot of people are looking around and saying, I don't like where the chips are falling.
Well, I mean, this is a great place for us to conclude because I'm going to disagree for one second with Knowles and just say that there are many, many more impoverished countries than the United States that have less severe pathologies than the United States.
And in the past, we were a less wealthy nation with less severe pathologies.
And so this is why I say that trying to tie the economic situation to the pathologies, I think in some cases, I think in most cases, actually, it can be a fool's errand.
But we'll have to save that for next time because here's the deal.
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Well, in just a moment, we are going to bring you the magical, mystical trailer for finally the Penn Dragon Cycle, Rise of the Merlin.
It's coming January 22nd.
Guys, thanks for stopping by.
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Hopefully, never for the rest of our, but actually, we will see you here in a couple of weeks.
And we'll get together and disagree in friendly fashion on Friendly Fire with one another.
Without further ado, here's the trailer.
Oh, this is an illusion.
An echo of a voice that has died.
And soon that echo will cease.
They say that Merlin is mad.
They say he was a king, and David, the son of a princess of lost Atlantis.
They say the future and the past are known to him.
Let the fire and the wind tell him their secrets.
Let the magic of the hillfolk and druids come forth at his easy command.
They say he slew hundreds.
Hundreds, do you hear?
That the world burned and trembled at his wrath.
The Merlin died long before you and I were born.
Merlin Emirus has returned to the land of the living.
Fortigen is gone.
Rome is gone.
The Saxon is here.
Saxon Hengist has assembled the greatest war host ever seen in the island of the mighty.
And before the summer is through, he means to take the throne.
And he will have it.
If we are too busy squabbling amongst ourselves to take up arms against him, here is your hope: a king will arise to hold all Britain in his hand.
A high king who will be the wonder of the world.
You to a future of peace.
There'll be no peace in these lands till we are all dust.
Men of the island of the mighty, you stand together.
You stand as Britons.
You stand as one.
Get it back down!
Great darkness is falling upon this land.
These brothers are our only hope to stand against it.
