It's not just a matter of being the next guy who invents something cool and then figures out a way to sell it.
No.
It's, do you want your children to be able to live here?
Do you want to have grandchildren at all?
And if you're not brave, that won't happen.
I think it's very clear at this point.
And I could bore you with a lot of dark stats, but I'm not going to because you know them.
And so, be brave.
And by the way, there's nothing easier.
The key to being brave is brooding about death.
This is just true.
I believe.
The key to being brave is brooding about death.
All anxiety and all fear stems from the most basic of all fears, which is the fear of death, which is inborn.
You feel it from the moment you arrive.
Because you know it's going to end on some level.
My deepest child on our fifth birthday burst into tears and I said, why?
All my other more shallow children were psyched for the cake.
My deep child said, well, I don't want it to end.
And I said, what?
My life.
I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
I could drown in these waters.
They're too deep.
I did start crying.
Yes, I did.
Okay, I'll admit it.
But anyway, but whether we articulate it or not, that is the root of all anxiety.
And so you need to focus on that.
And I grew up in a place when I was a kid called La Jolla, California, which had a lot of...
I know someone just snickered.
Okay, got it.
Yes, I know.
It has a lot going for it.
It's beautiful and all that.
But in retrospect, the one thing that made it a really bad place actually to grow up and to live and why I don't visit anymore is there was only one taboo in La Jolla and in all kind of affluent towns like La Jolla in the West, which is death.
It's like the one thing you could not talk about.
I mean, people had freaky sex situations in La Jolla that would, even in Wilmington, you'd be shocked by it.
I'm serious, okay?
It's a little inside joke for people from Wilmington.
Oh.
Anyway, sorry.
But you would be.
Like, nothing was judged.
Like, well, I ended up, you know, marrying the babysitter, but then I brought the massage therapist in for some polygamy, and people were like, oh, that's cool.
Really?
Yeah.
No problem.
No judgment whatsoever.
None.
The one thing you couldn't do was talk about dying or any of its attendant symptoms like aging.
No aging.
And if you got old enough and your age was visible enough, you had to go to Palm Springs.
No, I'm serious.
It was our equivalent of putting you on the ice flow.
Like the Inuit do.
And it's like, whatever happened to Mrs. So-and-so?
I don't know!
She was in our 450 SLC just driving.
Driving east, never saw her again, and she's in Palm Desert and Thunderbird or whatever, and now she's, you know, you don't know.
But the one thing you could never say about Mrs. So-and-so is she died like we all will.
Totally not acceptable.
And as a result of that, beneath, and those of you who've lived there or know the area or any town like that, I doubt Aspen or Jackson or any different, right?
The one thing about those towns is...
The anxiety level is crazy high.
And that's why everyone's on benzos.
Or like climbing to the top of Snow King manically or whatever, doing so much cardio that they calm down.
I'm not joking.
Anyone familiar with the culture I'm talking about?
The white wine, now Casamigos, it's changed, but whatever, same idea.
There's a crazy amount of anxiety because no one can acknowledge the core truth of life, which is that it ends.
And any attempt to even talk about this or engage in a religious discussion, which by definition implies death and powerlessness, was rejected as repulsive and an attack.
And it made everyone crazy.
And it made them cowards.
That's true.
It made them cowards.
So as long as you're afraid of that...
You're not going to be very effective fighting against people who really are serving a cause they believe is larger than themselves.
Now, I think it's Satan or whatever you call it, but it doesn't matter what I think.
They believe they are acting on behalf of something larger than themselves, the revolution.
And if you're just like, make it go away, I don't want to be uncomfortable, you're going to lose.
And the consequences are going to be horrible.
Probably not for anyone in this room, because everyone here is kind of higher income and older like me, but certainly for your kids.
There's like no chance they'll prosper in a country like that.
There's no chance.
And your grandkids, I mean, they'll just be like texting.
So they're like, where can we move?
Where can we move?
Oh, nowhere.
So it's essential not to be afraid to die.
And once you decide, I'm really not afraid to die, nothing scares you.
Like, what's scary at that point?
Bring it on.
Oh, you're going to criticize me on Facebook.
You're going to bring suit against me.
You're going to arrest me.
You're going to kill me.
So what?
Go ahead.
And I would make two arguments, and I'll stop with this because now I'm really getting crazy, but I mean it.
I would make two arguments on behalf of not being afraid of death.
And the first is just an obvious mechanistic argument that I think everyone, regardless of religious faith, can understand, which is you're going to anyway, and it's going to be horrible.
So, like, why not?
You're playing with the house money.
And I would recommend one of the greatest essays I've ever read was by George Orwell.
Written as part of a book he wrote called Down and Out in Paris in London, but he winds up in a hospital in Paris in the 30s during the Depression with tuberculosis.
George Orwell was a man of famous and proven physical courage, shot in the throat by a sniper standing guard during the Spanish Civil War on the wrong side, unfortunately, but whatever, he was trying.
And didn't mention it in his diary.
Didn't mention it in his diary.
I mean, this is a man who had, you know, went to Eaton, you know, in 1913. Grew up rough in the way that the British upper classes used to raise their boys.
In a martial way, actually.
And he winds up in this hospital for the indigent, and he's in a huge bay, like the size of this room, filled with metal cots, and people around him are dying.
But they're not dying of anything interesting.
They haven't been shot in the throat by a sniper with any of your mouths around.
They're dying of, like, diarrhea and the flu.
And he describes in this wonderful essay how horrible it is.
And he has this line there.
He says, you know, there's so many tears shed for guys who die, you know, during the Great War, which is only 10 years before, 20 years before, going over the top of the trench and getting mowed down by a 50-cow.
And he goes, that's very sad.
Obviously, he grew up in a world where all the men were killed that way.
But he goes, that's kind of nothing compared to the way the people around me are dying.
Like, it's going to be bad no matter what.
You might as well die with your shoes on doing something you believe in.
That was Orwell's conclusion.
In the end, he died of tuberculosis alone.
But whatever, he didn't get to choose.
None of us do get to choose, but we can have the mindset.
That frees us from the anxiety over something that we can't change, that's gonna happen, and at very best, we can imbue it with meaning.
That's the point.
That's the choice we have.
We're gonna die.
Should it mean something?
Should our life mean something?
That's the only choice we get to make.
The rest of it is out of our hands.
And the second point I would make is something that, you know, I've come to very slowly over many years.
But, I mean, let's just be totally real.
All the religion stuff, basically true.
It's basically true.
It is.
And this is the only civilization that I'm aware of in all human history, and I mean the West post-war, so the last 80 years in the Anglosphere and Western Europe, is the only civilization in history that has proceeded on any other assumption but there is a god, or gods.
It's like, that's a brand new thing.
It turns out, actually, spoiler alert, it doesn't work.
Okay.
It doesn't work at all.
There was something about the atomic bomb going off, in my opinion, that completely changed people's assumptions.
And I think that display of godlike power gave people the false impression that they were gods.
That's my personal belief.
I've never heard anybody say that, but I sincerely believe that.
But whatever it was, post-war are assumptions about...
The universe changed.
And I think in retrospect, we look ridiculous.
But nobody else has assumed that.
From the Hivro Indians at the Amazon headwaters to the Swedes.
And by the way, thank you for hiring Swedes.
Nobody does.
You know, the most secular nation in the world.
They were fervent evangelists until about 20 minutes ago.
I mean, this is a brand new world that we live in.
Not just secular, I mean, that began hundreds of years ago, but a civilization whose core assumption omits the possibility that we're not the most powerful force in the universe.
See, this never happened.
And so, I mean, you could even, like, just do the law of averages here.
Are we right?
Or is every other human being who's ever lived right?
So it's Kamala Harris versus all history.
What do you think?
And I'm kind of thinking the overwhelming evidence lands on the other as a god.
And this is not the end.
Nobody's ever not thought that.
And so if you're willing to kind of roll the dice on that, considering you're going to die anyway, there's really nothing to be afraid of other than cowardice.
Living as a slave, hating yourself, being held in contempt by those closest to you.
Living without purpose, those are the things to fear.
So, I will stop with that and just say, take heart.
Take heart.
Your bravery is scarier to the other side than any weapon you could marshal.
They melt in the face of it.
They've only advanced this quickly because they've met no resistance at all.
Because everybody is a cucked coward.
Oh, I don't want to make anybody mad.
Yeah, really?
You know, it stops here.
If you had 10% of the population take that posture, this crap would end immediately.