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Oct. 3, 2023 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
01:04:08
The Anti-Racists Have Become Racist - ZUBY | The TRUTH Podcast #40
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Time Text
The anti-racists have become racist.
The anti-fascists have become fascist and violent.
There's a reason we need to make that change.
We make it just incrementally.
The system is built to stop that incremental change in its tracks.
Don't let anybody hold you back.
Amen.
Just do it.
Presidential candidate Vivek Ramos.
We should not be apologetic to stand up and speak for the truth.
Let's talk truth.
I'm here with Zuby.
We've been looking forward to this conversation.
I have been certainly for a while.
We sat down in Washington, D.C.
We happened to be at the same table at a dinner where we were both attending a conference, hit it off.
I had been familiar with some of his work before.
And after we hit it off, we said, you know what?
We got to sit down and have a longer form conversation than a passing dinner.
So here we are.
Welcome to Columbus, and thanks for joining us, man.
No doubt, man.
Happy to be here.
Good to see you again.
So we were starting to talk about your background, but I think it's interesting.
You're an immigrant, or you're from a family of immigrants.
That's similar to my experience as the kid of immigrants in the United States, but you were the kid of immigrants to the UK. Mm-hmm.
Tell me about that upbringing.
Yeah, sure thing, man.
So I was born in England.
I moved to Saudi Arabia as a baby.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
How old were you when you guys moved to Saudi?
Under one.
What took you there?
My dad's a medical doctor, so he got an opportunity to work out there, got a job offer.
He's an internist.
Internist general.
Internist, and he specializes in diabetes as well.
Okay.
So this is, you know, mid-80s, I guess 1987 or so.
I was born in 86. Whole family moves out.
I'm the youngest of five, so family of seven moves out to Saudi Arabia, which...
So all my earliest memories begin in Saudi Arabia.
Really?
Riyadh?
No, I grew up in, firstly, a place called Abkek and then a place called Yudalia, so on the east side.
On the east side?
The east side, yeah.
So the nearest big cities that people may have heard of would be like Dahran, Damam, Al-Khobar.
Those are some of the cities.
Giant cities that most people know.
Yeah, those are some of the biggest cities that some people might know.
Most people may not even know those cities.
But I wasn't like in Riyadh or Jeddah or anything like that.
And nowhere near the water?
Not too far.
Not too far.
About three hours from Bahrain driving.
Got it.
Yeah.
So where I grew up was an expat community.
So I grew up in an expat community surrounded by people from all over the world.
Various North America.
Was it pretty cloistered relative to being integrated in the rest of Saudi life?
Yes.
I see.
But you experience both because if you want to do anything interesting, if you want to go shopping, if you want to go out into the city, whatever, you know, you go into a real Saudi.
Because where I lived, it's, you know, there's one school, there's one store.
And it's dramatically different than the rest of Saudi.
Dude, it looks like, I mean, it's crazy.
I just came from Scottsdale.
Yep.
I flew in from Scottsdale yesterday, and when I was in Scottsdale, and even when I've been in certain parts of, like, Houston or Orange County, California, I'm like, this looks exactly like where I grew up.
Yeah.
So it just looks...
And this was in the 90s.
This, yeah, 80s, 90s, and I'm 37. 37. 37, yeah.
So, um...
Yeah, so I went through that.
Then I was in boarding school for seven years in the UK, university for another three.
And it was only in 2008 that we permanently left Saudi Arabia.
Yeah.
So I lived in the UK sort of consistently from 2008 on.
Just to dwell on the Saudi Arabia upbringing.
Sure.
I mean, one of the things that we talk a lot about in this country, maybe a little bit more than I think we, you know, more airtime than we get use out of it for, but is the existence of racism in the United States.
Okay.
I'm curious about what that was like in Saudi Arabia.
I didn't even know what it was.
Really?
Never heard of it.
I didn't hear about racism at all until maybe I was about 9 or 10. It's not something I'd ever experienced, heard about.
I grew up in a truly multicultural place.
You're in an international enclave.
But one of the things you do hear a lot about, and I don't know if there's truth to this, but Is that places like Saudi Arabia or other countries in the Middle East have denigrating attitudes towards many of the African immigrants there?
It's not something you experienced at all?
No.
What I would say exists in Gulf countries, if anything, is passportism.
It's more like nationalism.
Literally, if you are an American or you're a Brit or you're an Australian or you're a Canadian and you hold that passport, regardless of your color, versus if you hold a Pakistani or Sri Lankan or Indian passport, that can affect even how much you get paid.
Social hierarchy there.
Yes, and even financially.
Financially, sure.
And is there a separate social hierarchy there, too, or it's more because of the financial?
You know, everyone will have a different experience.
It's not something I perceived.
Okay.
That passport...
Passportism.
It still exists in the UAE. It's still there.
I'm sure it's still there in Saudi and so on.
But it's based on nationality, not on skin color.
That's interesting.
And that makes sense to me, actually, now thinking about my limited time in those countries.
I think that's what you see is if you have a different color skin person, but from the UK or US, you're going to get a heightened treatment.
You or I would be treated very differently.
If I were a Nigerian with just a Nigerian passport, or you're an Indian with just an Indian passport versus you're an American or I'm a Brit, then there can be a difference in certain situations.
Got it.
That sounds about right to me, actually.
That makes sense.
So anyway, what got you into then your career of becoming a rapper, walking through the rest of what got you to the doorstep of doing what you're doing now?
Yeah, sure thing, man.
So I did very well in school.
I got into Oxford University.
I went there, studied computer science.
When I was in my first year of university...
Computer science?
Yeah, I'm a computer science graduate.
Oh, really?
I didn't know that.
All right.
Very interesting.
Did you finish in computer science too?
Yeah, I graduated.
You didn't switch majors?
Okay.
No, no, no.
I stuck with it.
So when I was in my first year of university, I started rapping just for fun.
I became a big fan of hip hop when I was in boarding school, you know, age of 11 or 12. And then all through my teen years, I was a massive, massive hip hop fan along with many of my friends.
And then I just started rapping when I was 18. Just started doing it for fun.
And I released my first album when I was 19. When you were 19?
Yeah, when I was still in university.
Good for you, man.
So, second year of university, I put out my first album.
It was called Commercial Underground.
Over the course of time, I ended up selling over 3,000 copies of that, just independently, hand-to-hand, just talking to people, promoting my stuff, you know, back on MySpace in the day, but mostly going out on the street and just talking to people and playing them my stuff and selling it to them.
So I graduated in 2007. I took one year out, did my music full-time for a year.
Then I moved to London, and I actually worked in the corporate world for three years.
I was a management consultant.
Not everybody knows this.
So 2008 to 2011, I was a management consultant whilst moonlighting as a rapper on the side.
Got it.
It's like a John Legend story here.
Exactly.
Yeah, because he was a consultant as well.
BCG. Yeah, BCG, I think.
So I was doing the two of them, and then 2011 comes, Both careers are progressing to a point where they're starting to conflict too much with each other.
Just from a time perspective.
Yeah, I need to be like, all right, which one of these am I going to do?
Not from any other perspective, just time.
Just time.
Yeah.
Time and, you know, commitment.
But it wasn't like when you say conflict with each other, it wasn't like you felt like your job as a management consultant made you less credible as a rapper or vice versa.
No, it wasn't a credibility thing, but it's a time and energy thing.
It's a time and energy thing.
Yeah, I get that.
And, you know, with these corporations as well, they kind of want to own you.
Right?
They don't really like someone pursuing a side hustle or another career outside of...
Well, especially in that business model, right?
Because the way it works is...
I mean, there's an arbitrage that these management consulting firms are playing.
It's like the investment banks that had an internship at Goldman and this and that, too.
Is you're getting people who are way more talented than what you're paying them, but what you're giving them in return is the prestige of saying, I work at...
Did you work at one of the...
I don't normally reveal it, actually.
I worked at Accenture.
Yeah, I worked at Accenture.
Yeah, I know.
I was just thinking, I was like, I don't think I've ever publicly said that.
Well, here you are.
So whatever, Accenture.
That you get that name brand, that's part of what you're getting for being somewhat undercompensated relative to the amount of work you're doing, right?
I mean, I think if you do the math, a lot of these consulting analysts, you probably know it well, might be paid less than somebody who's working in An ordinary service industry at a hotel or at a restaurant on a per hour basis.
But then if you've got your side hustle, that impedes the economics of squeezing out the number of hours out of you.
So that doesn't surprise me.
I've seen that firsthand.
It's not a career that's made for that.
But not too many of the people who are in consulting have aspirations as rappers either.
And the thing is, people have to remember, is at this point, by the time I left that job, I had already released two albums and two EPs.
I had already built an audience of a few thousand people.
I'd sold over 5,000 albums independently.
So it wasn't like...
You're like early 20s.
Yeah.
I guess when I left my job, I would have been 23 or 24. So it was September 2011. So you're already selling...
You know, a not unrespectable number of records.
Yeah, exactly.
And that was doing it part-time.
Yeah.
So, beginning of 2011, I decided by the end of the year I'm going to be a full-time rapper.
Okay.
So I left my job.
That's 2011. Nice.
Yep.
So I left my job September, October 2011. I started my company, COM Entertainment.
And I just started hitting the road, man, for the next eight years.
I was just a road warrior, traveling all around the UK, you know, various parts of Europe.
Did you have somebody who was doing the production?
Me.
And it's all you.
Yeah, it still is.
And booking and everything else.
Yeah, it still is.
That's good.
That's the way to do it, actually, because then you have control over the chain.
Yeah.
And it's still just me.
A lot of people think I have some massive team behind me.
It's still me.
You don't have like a...
I still do all my own bookings.
One-man band.
I love that, literally.
Yeah, still.
And so, yeah, that's when the adventure just so from...
Yeah, anyone who knew me and found out about me in that period, they would have probably met me on the street or they would have just, you know, seen some of my social media or whatever.
I was just out there just selling CDs, talking to people, hundreds of thousands, traveling all over the place, like I still do, but on a smaller scale.
And then late 2018, early 2019, Early 2019, I was doing the last pop-up shop I ever did.
So I started doing pop-up shops around 2015. So I'd go in shopping malls and, you know, rent out those kiosks and I'd be selling my t-shirts, hats, hoodies, CDs, all my merchandise and everything.
I did that for several years.
That was my main source of income from 2014 until 2018. And then February 2019, I was doing the last pop-up shop I ever did in a city called Darby in the UK. And as I was standing at my store, it was like 9.30 a.m.
I'm just scrolling through Twitter as I do.
And I saw two different stories coming out of the U.S. of men beating women in their sports after identifying as women.
And I'm just like, this is goofy.
Like, I've seen this for the last couple of years.
I'd started seeing this really bubbling up 2015, 2016, but I'd never publicly said anything about it.
And out of curiosity, I was just like, I wonder what the British women's deadlift record is.
And so I searched it for my weight class, and I saw it was 215 kilos.
And my max...
Which is...
That's a serious amount of weight.
That's a good weight.
Yeah, it's over 500 pounds, but my PB was over 600. You had done 600 pounds?
Yeah, my PB is 275 kg, which is 606 pounds.
Sweet.
At an 84 kg body weight.
What is it in men's?
It can't be that much higher than that.
Oh, boy.
Men's is going to be 800 plus.
Oh, it's going to be 800 plus.
In that weight class.
Total weight class.
The world record is over a thousand.
Yeah, but for you, I mean, how much do you weigh?
Like 70?
Yeah, at the time I would have been about 185. Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
Yeah.
So I already had a video on my phone from one of my training sessions of me pulling 230 kilos, which is more than the women's record.
So I was just on my phone.
I put out random tweets all day, every day.
I've been doing this for well over a decade.
And I just tweeted, I keep hearing about how biological men have no strength advantage over women in 2019. So watch me destroy the British women's deadlift record without trying.
P.S. I identified as a woman whilst lifting the weight.
Don't be a bigot.
And you just posted the video?
I just posted it.
Nine-second video of me doing this deadlift.
At the time, I had 19,000 followers on Twitter.
So this is February 2019. Vivek, within 10 seconds, I was like, something is happening.
I don't know what's going on.
Within 15 minutes, the video had 10,000 views.
20, 50, 100,000, 200,000.
By the time I go to bed that night, 300,000.
I wake up in the morning, half a million.
Hits a million later in the day, 2 million, 3...
I was...
I didn't know what was going...
I don't know what...
Glitch I put into the Matrix, right?
But this thing went bananas.
For weeks and weeks and weeks, this thing was just going viral.
I started getting contacted by various media channels, BBC, Sky News, Fox News out in the US. You have to remember, I'm just a rapper, independent rapper in the UK at this time.
No one in the USA had heard of me.
I'm starting getting shared from now, you know, Candace Owens reaches out.
Ben Shapiro reaches out.
This, this.
Piers Morgan.
A couple weeks later, I wake up one morning and my phone's going crazy.
A couple weeks later?
Yeah.
Everyone's like, yo, Joe Rogan just mentioned you on his podcast.
Joe Rogan, Joe.
I'm like, wait, what's happening?
And then I listen to his recent episode and he's done a whole segment.
Covering my tweet, shouting me out.
He starts following me on Twitter.
He sent me a DM just saying, dude, this is one of the funniest things I've seen.
And then fast forward a couple months, I just keep this ball rolling.
During this time period, I'm gaining like a thousand followers a day.
So I've gone from, you know, 20,000, 30,000, 40,000, just going up.
And then in July or August, Dave Rubin reached out to me and was like, hey, I'd love to invite you to the Rubin Report.
We've got a studio out and they were in Los Angeles at the time.
And so I was like, cool, I'm going to LA for the first time.
So I went to LA September 2019 and Joe Rogan was also in LA. So I DM Joe Rogan and was like, hey man, I'm a big fan of your podcast.
I'd love to be on it.
If there's an opportunity, I'm coming to LA. And he was like, Hell yeah, absolutely.
He's in Texas now, but in 2019, they were all in L.A. So I go to L.A. for the very first time.
I thought I was going to be in the U.S. for about two weeks.
I ended up staying three months.
The very first week, I land in L.A., First day I'm there, Dave Rubin interview.
Second day, Joe Rogan experience.
Then the Daily Wire reach out.
Ben Shapiro's like, hey man, we'd love to have you on the Sunday special.
So I go out, I record with Ben Shapiro.
And it just goes crazy.
I get invited out to the Blaze to record with, you know, Glenn Beck and Chad Prather and Sara Gonzalez, all those guys.
I end up in D.C. I get invited to the White House.
I get invited to the Pentagon.
Like, it was crazy.
It is all on the back of this.
Well, that was the flashpoint.
But once I had the chance to go...
What was your message on the back of that?
It's the same thing.
So, my message hasn't changed throughout my whole career since I put out my first album.
My message is about truth, about positivity, about trying to be the best human being that you can be.
So much of hip-hop is denigrating and it's negative and it pushes a lot of bad values.
I've always put out positive music that's designed to inspire and uplift people.
And a lot of people just got the chance to discover me.
So what happened was it wasn't just the tweet went viral, but I went viral.
Right?
So all this happened four and a half years ago at this point, but it allowed me to just introduce my personality and my views and everything to other people.
So a lot of people were like, oh, cool, came for the deadlift, stayed for everything else, right?
From the music to just listening to me speak, to me sharing my ideas.
So people very quickly realized, oh, okay, this isn't just like a flash in a pan.
This guy's actually very interesting.
Oh, Born in England, grew up in Saudi Arabia, Nigerian background.
He's got these interesting views on society and culture and politics, all this.
So that was the year where I really went from being just a rapper to being somewhat of a social commentator.
I started my own podcast that same year, put out my first book that same year.
And from that point onward, obviously there's a whole decade plus before that, which I've explained some to you.
But from that point onward, the trajectory has just been flying upwards.
How have your views changed over the course of this journey?
I'm sure you've been challenged from multiple different angles.
You also started as a relatively young person.
It's probably unusual to have your full worldview baked at the age of 23. Yeah.
Fifteen years in, I mean, how have you evolved?
Yeah, it's a good question.
It hasn't changed as much.
That trip to the U.S., how old were you when that thing blew up?
That was 2019, so I would have been...
Four years ago.
Yeah, like 32, 33. Like, maybe since you got started, but even over the last four years, how have your views evolved on some of these questions?
Yeah, I mean, I guess it depends on the specific issue.
I would say it hasn't changed, certainly in terms of my principles and values, they've been very consistent.
They've been very consistent.
All that's happened is more people are hearing them.
And a lot of these ideas, you know, as a musician, I never really wanted to put out my thoughts and ideas too much about, you know, certain cultural issues or let alone politics and things like that, right?
I didn't want to rock the boat or polarize my own audience or...
And I also just didn't feel much of a compulsion to.
And then somewhere around 2016, 2015, I find was like a massive turning point in the West.
I think there have been many turning points.
I think 2001 was a big turning point.
I think around 2015, 2016 was a big turning point.
I'm sure there have been others.
Some people will go back to 1971, so on.
Stuff that happened before we were even born.
What happened in 2016?
I'd say 2015. Yeah, 2015. 2015 was the mainstreaming of wokeness.
Yeah.
2015 was the mainstreaming of transgenderism and all of that.
And also, I think, the rise of Donald Trump as a backlash to much of what that establishment was kind of coming to a head.
In the U.K., there was Brexit.
Brexit, absolutely.
In the U.S., there was Trump.
Right around 2016, right?
2016. They happened around the same time.
So all the stuff that Americans went through We're good to go.
All of these conversations are now happening.
That's also why my deadlift went so crazy, because I was one of the few...
I was like one of the first people with a significant platform who just kind of skewered that whole idea.
Because when I tweeted that, the idea of men identifying as women, competing in the sports...
If you go back to the beginning of 2019, people weren't really talking about that.
Some people had some awareness, but if you spoke to the average person, they'd be like, that's not happening.
What are you talking about?
Four years later, five years later, it's a big conversation.
So it just kind of like captured the imagination, not just in my country, but all over the place.
But coming back to your original question, I'd say that over the course of time, my views have simply become more refined.
I'd say from a political perspective, they've become...
I guess I've become more libertarian on certain things whilst becoming more conservative on some other aspects.
But I haven't had a big shift, and I'm not someone who has a story of like, oh, you know, I used to be a lefty and then, you know, I found...
What's the difference between libertarianism and conservatism to you?
That's a fantastic question.
I think about it a lot.
Yeah, that is a good question.
I think it mostly comes down to There are some differences in what should be done, but I think a lot of the differences are in who should do them and what should the size and scope and role of the government be.
Give some examples.
I'd say an example is, okay, viewpoints on drug policy.
I'd say that's an obvious one where there's a difference between traditional libertarian perspective and conservative.
That's an easy one.
That's an obvious one.
I'd say the general size and scope of the government.
How big should that even be?
And what are the things they should and shouldn't get involved with?
Libertarians are generally going to be more hands-off.
More traditional conservatives are going to be like, no, these are certain things that there should be laws around and the government should get involved in.
See, it's interesting you say that.
I think I sit somewhere between the two.
I think the conservative movement is now—maybe you and I are similar in this respect.
Maybe there's some differences, too.
I think the conservative movement is at a crossroads right now of defining, at least in the United States, what it actually means to be a conservative in the year 2023. I personally would like to see not a ton of daylight between the government's role,
certainly at the federal level, between what a libertarian would want and what a true conservative would want in terms of dismantling an administrative state that really is the source of most of the federal governmental control over our lives.
But my reason for calling myself a conservative rather than a libertarian is really twofold.
One is I think that a lot of libertarians don't really walk the walk fully when it comes to being libertarian.
So they'll criticize, say, a conservative proposal to say that businesses shouldn't be able to discriminate between viewpoints, fire somebody for saying the wrong thing.
But they're perfectly fine with still the other protected classes of race and gender and sexual orientation and religion and national origin.
I know a lot of libertarians who are happy to blow that all up.
Well, that'd be a true libertarian, but you don't see that even amongst the libertarians who actually wield any modicum of political power.
Once they get there, they've become...
You won't find somebody who, even with libertarian leaning, who takes up the issue of saying that we need to rescind protected classes.
And so that was sort of an internal frustration of libertarianism for me.
It also just wouldn't be a popular point.
I think the hard thing...
I'm not sure it wouldn't be popular.
Actually, if you were willing to make the case.
See, the problem is whether or not something's popular is whether or not you're actually able to have the open debate to make the case.
I think it's such an easy...
The thing with that position is it requires a lot of explanation.
Yeah, and the old adage in politics, if you're explaining, you're losing.
Yeah, I just think if someone came out and they said that they wanted to repeal or roll back certain protections and anti-discriminatory policies, that is such an easy position to...
It's absolutely skewed.
Yeah, exactly, right?
Because it just sounds like they want to do a wicked thing.
Oh, you want people to be able to discriminate and be racist and be sexist and be homophobic?
That's exactly how it would be framed.
Let's just talk about that for a second.
It was what I was planning to talk about with you, but why not?
Because people very rarely talk about this.
Let's get this straight.
Let's say you're a business that doesn't like, fill in the blank, Asian people, black people, Jewish people.
You're a business owner.
You operate a restaurant or...
A hotel or whatever.
So you're saying that I want the government to tell me that I have to bring that person in.
Think about who that's serving.
So now you're going to have a proprietor who is hostile to the people who are showing up, but we're making them do it anyway.
Who is that good for at a moment in our history?
Now, you could debate it in past moments in prior points in history, but at a moment in our history where 99.9% of good providers of goods and services do not have those biases, Shouldn't that person just be out-competed out of existence rather than having somebody who's Indian or black or Jewish or whatever walk into that proprietorship and say, whoa, I'm a little surprised this person doesn't like me.
I would rather than just put that sign up out on the front so I could go to the next place where there are plenty to choose from.
I'm saying this half-jokingly, but only half-jokingly.
I think that's a persuasive justification for a lot of people to say, hey, we don't live in a, well, I guess it's one of the questions on the table, systemically racist era.
I think we don't.
Well, this is part of the problem.
That's part of the problem.
If half the population does believe that.
I don't think half the population does.
I think it appears that half the population does, but it's really just 10% that wields a lot of power over the country.
I mean, you travel the country.
Do you think half the people at the level of individuals do or half the people on social media who make social media posts do?
I think half the people in the real world in the US would agree.
I mean, I haven't seen a poll on this explicitly, but I would not be surprised if 50% of people would believe that there is some form, in some way that there's some degree of institutional racism.
Same with sexism.
I'd say at least half the population would agree with that statement.
Yeah, I guess the path forward definitely changes depending on whether you're in your camp of believing that 50% of the country really believes in this modern critical theory, race, gender, sexuality, systemic inequity narrative.
I don't think you'd even have to go that far because people interpret that question differently.
It's weird.
I've had people ask me, do you believe in systemic racism or do you believe institutional racism exists and so on?
I'm not a huge fan, and I typically avoid using those terms.
Yeah, they're kind of hollow.
Yeah, they need to be more specific.
My answer to that is, well, what do you mean?
Yeah, it's a good question.
What do you mean?
Because there are some people who, if you say institutional or systemic racism, they think they include vestiges.
So those things absolutely 100% Totally existed through most of U.S. history.
Yeah, I got about it.
Very clear.
It's only in the 1960s.
Yeah, things changed.
Yeah, exactly.
So, and that has, and by the way, this is where I think conservatives can take some L's because I think too many conservatives are not willing to properly consider and explain and think about how those vestiges, how those policies that did exist for 100 plus years have an impact on individuals and communities Now, and there are some people who would call that institutional racism.
They don't mean that right now I can point to you a law in the books that's racist, but they're saying, look, there were all of these racist policies.
And so downstream of that, even though it's a few decades later, There's still a lasting impact and legacy from that.
But the question comes down to the prompt that got us on this is, do we believe we can trust the marketplace today to say that we don't have to ban an individual hotel owner from discriminating or not?
My personal answer is yes.
That we can trust the market to do that today.
Yes, I do.
I think so too.
I think that free market capitalism is one of the most truly anti-racist things that exists.
Yeah, of course.
Green is the color we really care about.
Yeah, if you want to be a massive bigot and you've got competitors, then you're going to get out-competed.
Get with the program.
Yeah, and unless you live in a very truly racist society, you're going to get out-competed, you're going to get put out of business because actually discriminating against people in an unfair way is a competitive disadvantage.
So I'm with you on that.
I just don't think that as a policy position, if someone came out and said, okay, we want to roll this back, we want to roll back the anti-discriminate nation policies, we want to roll back certain things that might come under the banner of civil rights, people are not going to like that.
Because you're not going to get the time to explain everything that We understand.
We've thought about this through, but most people have not.
They're just going to be like, wait, so you want to be able to discriminate against people by race and by ethnicity and by all that?
Like, no, I'm not with that.
And so most people would be against it.
That's what I'm saying.
Yeah.
I am...
I hope not naive about this, but I think that too often, one of the reasons I'm doing what I'm doing now, too often you have...
Political leaders, politicians, even just people in leadership positions outside of politics who view their job as to be a bean counter.
Micromanager.
Yeah, but even of the country, just to sort of say, hey, here's what people think, and so I'm going to shape what I say in the shadow of that.
And I think that gets backwards what the job of a leader is.
I mean, Thomas Sowell had this famous expression, you know, Thomas Sowell is...
Yeah, of course.
Yeah, he's...
I'm gonna get it approximately right, but he says something like, if you care about somebody, you tell them the truth.
If you care about yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.
Yes.
And what I see in the landscape today is a bunch of leaders who tell people what they want to hear instead of telling them the truth.
Now, that's not because they're lying.
I think it's mostly because politicians, the class we've bred in the United States anyway, are mostly vessels.
They're like mirrors.
It's like holding a mirror up to somebody and saying that I want to reflect back to them what they're already sending into the mirror.
And I don't think that's useful.
I mean, my first reaction when I sometimes, not all my ideas poll well, and some of them still don't.
And that's okay, but my first reaction when I see that I mean, it's a rational reaction.
It could be this.
I'm not blaming people who feel this way.
Hey, I have this policy idea.
Let me put it out.
Let me pull it.
And then come back and see, oh, it wasn't particularly popular.
My reaction is not, oh, wait, let me figure out something else to say.
My reaction is, well, the first question is, am I sure I'm right about that?
Is that really my belief?
It's always a good thing to check.
Sometimes maybe you should change your own mind on some things, and it's good to be open-minded.
But assuming that's something that I really have conviction in, my real reaction is, okay, well then how do I persuade people?
I'm not doing a good enough job of persuading people of this is what people still think, and yet this is the fact of the matter, the truth of actually what ought to obtain.
Got my work cut out ahead of me.
So if we believe that truly we can leave it in this narrow case, and we could talk about this on anything, but leaving it to the market to decide what a business owner, who a business owner doesn't want to do business with, Then, if our problem is people aren't going to be convinced of that because that position can be easily caricatured, or, you know, I had a discussion the other day with somebody saying, well, that's going to be your problem when you get into D.C., when you say you want to shut down the FBI. I understand your logic for wanting to do it, that you have a clear, practical plan for doing it.
But they're going to tear you down based on the narrative that they spin up around it.
My view is that I need to do a better job.
That means I'm doing a pretty awful job of explaining why this is my position.
And I believe that human beings are not animals, that we're subject and open to persuasion.
Is that a naive view, do you think?
Or the unrealistic in the modern world versus the old world?
I mean, I hear you completely.
And I think it's difficult because even as a politician or I'd say even any type of leader, but especially when it comes to politics, you are simultaneously someone who has your own vision and ideas and policies.
But you're also a representative of a much larger population of people.
So there's certainly a line to be straddled between, both in terms of how you speak and in terms of policy, of giving people what they want and representing what they want, whilst also forming your own vision.
And I think a lot of this is also just, a lot of it is iterative, right?
Because you can have a goal, but sometimes if something moves too quickly, I think To their credit, I don't even like to use the term the left, but the left is very good at this.
They're very good at incrementally, incrementally realizing their vision, right?
Rather than just coming on day one and saying, okay, we want to just completely do this thing.
And then people have a massive reaction to it.
It's like, okay, just tweak that.
We want to tweak that.
And then there's a long-term vision.
So say for example, again, from even a conservative or libertarian perspective, I know many, many libertarians, even anarcho-capitalists, who are like, we just want to gut the entire thing, right?
Just blow up the entire...
Abolish the entire federal government, right?
We just need to get rid of it all, whatever.
And I'm like, okay, like, I can...
Whether or not I agree or disagree, I can understand that vision and sort of end point.
But if you come in on day one and it's just like, okay, all of these things that have existed your entire life and decades before, you know, I was even born, we want to kind of explode all that.
And it can be deemed too radical by people.
Well, this is a fun conversation because I think there's two things going on there.
So maybe we can click in a little deeper here.
I disagree that that's a desirable end point.
Okay.
Right.
I mean, maybe you agree, too.
I'm not an anarchist.
Yeah, I'm not an anarchist.
I believe that there are certain limited roles for a government to appropriately perform with the consent of the government under limited circumstances.
So there, like I think that you say anarcho-capitalist people say the whole thing.
The problem there isn't the stepwise progression to it.
It's that I don't think that that is a valid end.
I think it's both.
Well, it could be both.
But I think that...
Okay, let's say...
The question I'm isolating for, though, is one where...
So I at least reject the premise.
Sounds like you agree that it's a valid end.
Let's pick a valid end that is still drastically different from the status quo.
The question is the path to get there.
Let's say that the valid end is simply what conservatives say.
Smaller, limited government, right?
Because the government is not small, it's not limited.
It's gigantic.
The tentacles are everywhere.
I don't know how many alphabet agencies you guys have in this country.
Yeah, totally.
It's enormous, right?
It's enormous.
So even if the goal is that conservative approach of, okay, not abolishing the government, but reining it back, even to what it originally was supposed to be when the USA was founded, right?
The federal government, as far as I'm aware, as a Brit who has some awareness of this stuff, the federal government was never intended to be as large and overarching.
And powerful and complicated as it is in its current form.
So even most conservatives, I think all conservatives would say, yeah, the government needs to be trimmed down.
It needs to be cut down.
But the truth is, whether you've got a Democratic administration or Republican administration over the decades, it still just continued to grow.
The spending continues to grow.
All of that.
So if the goal is like, okay, we need to shrink down the scale, scope, and power of the federal government.
Massively shrink down, right.
Exactly.
So we can make that the end point.
Do you go in steps or do you go in quantum leaps?
Yeah, exactly.
And I can see pros and cons towards both approaches, but I think the more radical the approach, number one, the word radical scares people because people just get used to things.
I have an interesting point, by the way, which is, and this comes from my experience in dozens of different countries and just observing humans and I think the biggest conservative advantage...
I think there's two.
I think the two advantages that conservatives have, which they sort of underutilize in their messaging and narratives, is most people around the entire world, most people are pretty conservative.
There are more conservatives in this world, by far, than there are leftists or progressives or whatever.
Most people...
So even what I'm saying here, the reason why the incremental approach works better is because most people are inherently conservative.
Most people don't like massive, massive, very quick change in anything in their life.
Most people don't like that.
Most people have a fairly conservative approach to their life.
I think the second big advantage conservatives have, of course, is that the policies actually...
It works, right?
You don't need to indoctrinate people into certain values.
They work on their own merits.
They work on their own merits, right?
You don't need to put someone in a, you know, re-education camp of, you know, five years of university or brainwash them in school or whatever for them to come along to the principles, right?
You have to...
By default, most people would understand that, you know, something like the police makes sense to manage crime, or that there should be law and order, or most people should and want to get married and have children and have this whatever.
You have to, like, you have to indoctrinate people into ideas like abolish the police, abolish the family, disrupt the nuclear family.
Those are things you have to brainwash people into.
And progressives have been very successful in doing that, right?
Despite how poor and ill thought out many of these ideas are, they've managed to brainwash millions of people into them.
And I don't think conservatives are taking enough advantage of the fact they're like, look, we've actually got our ideas just make sense and they're more in tune with what's already in your brain and in your heart.
So how can we sell this message and vision better?
Which, by the way, to your credit, I think you are of all the people I see out there talking, I think you are doing this very well.
I think you're talking about many points that are just missing from these conversations.
I love that you talk about purpose.
I love that you talk about meaning.
I love that you talk about family and the importance of marriage and, you know, the things that people know But for whatever reason, again, maybe it comes back to the too much politicizing and polling and all this stuff.
People are kind of afraid to talk about these things that they just know to be fundamentally true, right?
It's so obvious to me as an outsider even.
It's a big problem in my country, but it's an even bigger one in the U.S. that absent fathers and broken homes are...
The, arguably the biggest problem in this country, right?
That's something America's number one at, that America should not want to be number one at.
And most people don't want to talk about that because it might upset people, it might trigger people, it might be.
It's a little uncomfortable to talk about the breakdown of marriage and high divorce rates and the huge numbers of children growing up without fathers and single motherhood.
It's not pleasant to talk about because we all know people who are coming from this or who are experiencing it and whatever.
But that needs to come into the conversation.
It needs to come into the conversation because it's, you know, it's massively important.
So, yeah, just to your credit, I love that you talk about the uncomfortable topics.
And I like that, you know, you go into the lion's den as well to do it.
You're not just sticking to the easy ones.
You're not running to lead a political party.
That would not be worth it.
You're running to lead a country.
You better be willing to talk to everybody, agree with you or not.
But it's so rare.
I'm listening to you speaking.
I think actually that's also one of the challenges that I think one of my challenges in determining whether or not I succeed in this Republican primary is going to come out, I was just jotting down some of the things you said, comes down to a tension between the values that I'm advocating for are deeply conservative values.
But my method of wanting to get there...
Is radical in terms of a quantum leap to a worthy destination, not abolishing the government, but abolishing a fourth branch of government where it ultimately exercises political power today.
And there's a tension in that.
And I see it in many of the Republican audiences that I talked to.
I saw it in the first debate and the response to it a little bit.
Is that the people who share the conservative value set that I share and I'm advocating for, it's in the name.
They want to conserve, right?
Whereas what I'm talking about is getting into some of these agencies and bureaucracies and even the swamp exists in the private sector to shut it down, not through incremental reform, but through a quantum leap of actually shutting it down.
And so that is, I think, a methodology that is inherently in tension with the people who want to conserve rather than drive radical change.
But my challenge back is what happens when the things that you want to conserve no longer exist?
And I think that that's something that we have Yes.
Actually, is the things that we want to conserve when they don't exist, then we have to actually create from the ground up.
And that takes a quantum leap to accomplish.
Do you know what I consider you?
I consider you a progressive conservative.
You know, it's funny you say that.
It's interesting.
Progressive in the methodology, maybe.
Yes, exactly.
But conservative in the content.
Because conservative can be...
Country to country, person to person.
Conservatism in the UK is very different to conservatism in the US, right?
And the battles are very different and the way people talk about things are very different.
But I think there's sort of two fundamentally different ways to understand conservatism.
I think your approach is almost looking back at what The principles the USA was originally founded upon, like those core ideas and values, and wanting to cut off the stuff that is not in line with that.
So again, it's like a libertarian approach.
It's leaning it all down and going back to the origination point.
Whereas for other people, conservatism means maintaining the status quo.
So that's the challenge you're describing.
So for people who want to maintain the status quo, even if it's not serving them well, even if some of these organizations are corrupted or they're not serving a purpose or they never really had one to begin with, they still in their mindset are very apprehensive.
About those things being shut down, especially when you use that like, you know, shut it down, right?
Or on the left side, you know, they're like abolish, you know, abolish this thing.
You know, dismantle this thing.
And it makes people go like, wait, wait, I'm used to this thing.
This has been here my whole life.
If you say, I want to shut down the FBI, I'm not even American.
But as far as I know, the FBI has like, it's existed my entire life.
This organization's always been there.
I assume it serves a valuable purpose.
Whatever, you know, people just get used to things.
And so, if someone says that, it's like, there's a natural reaction to it.
But, yeah, I think that's perhaps a battle that's going on even within conservatism itself.
You have the sort of conservative conservatives, and then you have more, like, progressive conservatives who are like, no, no, I want change, and I want massive change to achieve what conservatism was originally supposed to be.
Yeah.
And that's...
A challenge.
It's an inherent challenge.
But I think that my view is we're not going to get to that destination incrementally.
Not in the moment we're in.
I think there might have been points in our history where that was true.
But even if you think about this issue of taking on the administrative state...
It's hard.
I think that that's something that's a false belief to think that let's just take the FBI, which, by the way, this isn't a partisan point.
This is the same FBI that went after Martin Luther King with really unjust threats based on incorrectly collected tapes threatening to commit suicide.
That same FBI is now going after political opponents of a different persuasion, parents who show up at school board meetings calling them and terming them domestic terrorists or otherwise.
Yeah.
It's an institution that fundamentally, I believe, in its very system, its organization, its culture, was designed to be corrupt.
Still the J. Edgar Hoover building of the FBI that people walk into.
So some Republicans, I think, have appropriate frustration with this institution today, but say, we're going to fire Christopher Wray, who's the current, you know, head of the FBI. Pretending like that's going to solve the problem, when in fact it's part of the cultural rot in an organization that's comprised, here's the tough part about it, of many good people.
Yes.
So if you try to, it's kind of the systemic racism debate backwards, right?
If you try to pin it to individual action, you're missing the point.
Yeah.
Because it's actually the system that's broken.
And I view it differently in the other context.
But here, in the context of the administrative state, I view it, individual action is not the problem.
It's actually the failure of the system as a whole, which means you need non-incremental change to accomplish, which means anybody who thinks that, okay, we're going to get to that destination, but we're going to get there incrementally, They don't know they're making a false promise, but it's a false promise because you're never gonna actually get there when the system reacts.
That machine, every time it's like an immune system, you sort of attack it a little bit.
It compensates for that wound and heals with a scar, which is worse than the original thing.
And so that's why I would say, take the risk of overshooting.
Eviscerate the whole thing.
And then, if we've overshot, fine, we will narrowly build from scratch that which was missing.
And I think that that's an interesting juncture for us right now.
I'm definitely representing one view of that in the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
And it's extremely important to bring those ideas to the forefront.
Yeah.
Because it's been really stagnant for a while, right?
And I think, again, that's one of the...
I've already...
I've talked about the inherent advantages I think conservatism has.
I think one of the inherent weaknesses is this idea of maintenance of the status quo, right?
There's no...
Conservatism doesn't...
struggles with slogans.
Yeah.
Right?
If you're a progressive, there's slogans, right?
Change, right?
Change.
Yeah, hope it change.
Yeah, change, change, change, right?
Whereas, you know, if conservatives had a slogan, what would it be?
You know, slow down.
Slow down, keep things the same, right?
Like, it's not really sexy, and it's hard to sell, especially to younger people, because younger people typically want change.
But this is the thing that's interesting, and this is why I really like what you're doing, again, because most conservatives also want change, regardless of their age.
They might not want it as fast, they might want different changes, or change to happen in different ways, but most people do actually...
Want progress.
Yeah, they want progress.
I think there's a misnomer even in the terms.
People have this idea that conservatives don't want anything to be different or don't want to move forward in any way.
That's absolutely not true.
But you don't want to blow up the things that are functioning well You don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
You don't want to just abolish every social, cultural, traditional idea that's existed and that has been serving humanity as a whole well for a long period of time.
Whereas the more progressive approach, you know, at least in modern times, it's way more reckless than that.
That's right.
It's change for change's sake.
Right.
Let's just abolish that.
Let's blow this up.
Do we really only need two genders?
Why don't we just have infinite?
Do we even need the police?
Do we need law and order?
It even shows up in smaller and more boring contexts, like when the Democrat movement sort of said we're going to get rid of the early primary voting states.
I don't know if you're familiar with how the presidential process plays out, but the tradition was due to Iowa and then New Hampshire.
No one did it in last year.
They just broke up, woke up and said, hey, we don't need to do it that way.
Yeah.
And they changed it.
I picked this example because it's a relatively in the scheme of things to most people, a boring example.
But it's the attitude of just saying, hey, I'm not going to give the presumption to the status quo.
I'm just going to say, if I feel like waking up on a given day and feel like it should be done differently, boom, it's going to be done differently.
Change for change's sake.
Mm-hmm.
And I agree with you.
I think that's where the content is different from the approach that I want to take with grounded and conservative values is to say, no, there's a reason we need to make that change.
But if we need to make that change and we make it just incrementally, the system is built to stop that incremental change in its tracks such that that becomes an illusion.
Which I think is an interesting crossroads for the conservative movement today is are we all willing to adopt the quantum leap approaches that the progressive movement brings, but with a vision of either the wrong destination or none at all.
But to take that method and learn something from that method and say, that's what we're actually going to adopt.
For driving change of the right kind towards a destination that we know is worth pursuing.
Yes.
I think that's the moment we find ourselves there.
It is.
You know, and it's a matter of communication.
It's a matter of communication.
It's a matter of selling a vision, not in a sort of fake way.
Yeah.
Because the truth is, again, regardless of where, I think it's important for people to also remember, because this gets forgotten, is that most people are not, you know, right or left.
Vast majority of the population, probably at least 60 to 70 percent of people are somewhere in the middle, you know, pretty centrist, bit conservative leaning, bit more liberal leaning, whatever.
But there's like the majority of people in the USA and in any country are hovering around that middle of the normal distribution and they can be They're persuadable, right?
Especially if it's the right candidate, right policies and so on.
And I think when it comes to the vision, people's visions, yes, there are, you know, there is a 10% on this side, there is a 10% on this side who has like a very, have a very different view for what the vision should be, right?
But the majority of people want the same basic things.
This is the thing, like all around the world, this is something I really learned, whether I'm in Saudi Arabia, or I'm in Qatar, or I'm in South Africa, or I'm in Nigeria, or I'm in the US or UK, whatever.
Most people do want very similar things.
And I think the proper role of a government that exists should primarily be to Allow that to, I think, you know, we both agree that the government isn't supposed to do everything, right?
It's supposed to be limited.
But it should sort of just tick along in the background and you don't notice it too much and things functionally work on an infrastructure level.
Immigration is just sort of functioning and taking care of, you know, the police and the fire departments and these things are working.
We've got functional roads, whatever.
And then, okay, the rest is up to organizations and individuals and private companies and charities and families and all that stuff.
We just create this general environment and then you go out there and you pursue your dream, right?
We don't do everything for you.
And most people are cool with that.
Most people want their communities to be safe.
People want low crime rates.
People want good schools.
People do want to get married.
People do want to have children.
People shouldn't believe all this propaganda that the vast majority of people in the world, they want it.
By far, like 90% plus.
People want these things.
People want to be able to speak freely.
People want to be able to practice their religion and peace.
People want these very basic things.
So I think oftentimes who will win when it comes to these political things is who can really communicate that and What I find a lot, I think a lot of politicians make the mistake of not connecting the policies with that vision.
They're really sort of fixed on a policy and an idea, but they don't do a good job of explaining how this policy leads to the thing that people want.
You see what I mean?
Yeah, absolutely.
Big conservative talking point is about the border, especially here in the US. UK is different because it's an island.
Immigration is still a big thing, but it's different here.
So if you're talking about the border, If someone just says, whether it's build the wall or tighten the border or this or that, most people, if you're into the world of politics and culture and social, you understand the effects of uncontrolled immigration.
You know what that leads to downstream.
You know the impact on the economy, on employment, on safety, on all of these things, even just how fair or unfair it is.
But if you don't, you have to connect the dots for some people.
You have to connect the dots for people.
You have to let them know, okay, why should you even care about what's happening at the border?
How does this affect you?
How does this affect the community?
How does this affect the country?
So I think that when people are promoting their policies, they need to say, okay, we want to do this, but here's how this is going to help you.
What I would love, one thing I would love to hear more from conservatives is, not here, not just here, but see done.
Is we all...
I mean, I talked about this at the YAF National Conservative Student Conference, right?
That's where we met.
Yeah, exactly.
I said, you know, put your hand up if you'd like to get married.
Right?
Room of late teens, early 20s.
Every single hand goes up.
You know, put a hand up if you'd like to have a family one day.
Yeah.
Put your hand up if you'd like to own a home one day.
Put your hand up if you think this is harder to do now than it was in your parents' or grandparents' generation, and every hand goes up.
I bet you, yep.
Okay, so what are conservatives doing?
Every conservative agrees these are good things that people should aspire towards.
Inherently good.
All else equal, inherently good.
Yes, these are all good.
But what is being done to make them more possible and more achievable?
Because it's hard, right?
Or even one step worse than that.
What is being done to make these things more difficult?
The incentives that the government creates otherwise.
And it's actually a funny and interesting moment where if you ask young people that today, 20 years ago, it might have been heterodox to say no.
No, I don't want that.
Whereas today, if you want to be heterodox or you want to stick it to the man or be a hippie, if you're a young person, try saying you want to marry someone, maybe even of the opposite sex, and have children, and stay married, and pursue an education, and value that, and maybe Have instill in them a faith in God and instill in them a basic belief in the country they live in and being patriotic towards that country.
Boy, is that sticking it to the system.
That is heterodox.
And so it's a promising moment the way I see it is you have at once amongst young people today the opportunity to stick it to the system and stand up while doing the thing that most people innately actually want to do and recognize as best for them.
Yeah.
And I do think that's an opportunity that we have.
I think it's a huge opportunity.
I'm just thinking about your story even about, I mean, thinking about earlier the tension between traditionally the people who favor one vision.
I was talking about the conservative movement in politics, but one vision, who are reluctant to pursue a particular nontraditional method of getting there, the method of progressives, radical change.
It's in the apolitical context kind of similar to Your career.
I mean, you're talking about truth and positivity.
That's usually delivered through mediums that are different than rap or hip-hop.
Yes.
It's kind of an analogy.
I don't know.
I feel maybe it's part of why you and I hit it off the first time we spoke is maybe remixing the methodology of delivering substance that doesn't match that method.
It's like, you know, if we got one set of fluid, but usually it's delivered through one set of pipes, maybe we got to just build a different set of pipes for that same fluid.
100%.
And I think that this people are To me, sane liberals and sane conservatives are very close to each other.
I think people have an idea because perhaps it's a function of the political party dichotomy that exists in the US with a country of this giant size only having two real big political parties.
It creates this artificial binary that you just have the right and the left.
Whereas the truth is, like, a left-leaning person who's pretty centered and a right-leaning person who's pretty centered are much closer than they are to people who are on the fringes of either side.
And that often gets forgotten when you talk.
It's part of why I avoid using the terms the left and the right, because it sounds like it's more polarized than it truly is.
And I think that what's good that's happening is both sane liberals and conservatives and libertarians are increasingly seeing the importance of culture.
I think it was a massive, massive mistake to just leave culture and art and media and music, just completely leave that for the progressives, just leave that for the far lefties and people.
Now people are complaining about the downstream impact of that, but it's like, look, if you abandon these things, then they're just going to be taken over.
And you've seen that happen in academia.
You've seen it happen in big tech and arts and music and Hollywood, all of these things.
And I think it's great that now you are seeing On an independent level and on a small company level, you're seeing this rise of new types of media from music, comic books, acting, movies, all of that stuff.
I think it's fantastic.
So I think we're at the very early stages of, I don't even know the right term to use for it, but like a sort of We're moving into an increasingly multipolar world, but even a multipolar media and multipolar culture.
Speaking of which, a very tactical question on that.
Sure.
So take that to the next level.
Are you on TikTok?
No, it's the one that I don't use.
Yeah.
So I just joined it recently on the premise of actually, you know, it has its faults, no doubt about it.
But A, someone's not going to get to the position I want to get to to fix it without actually being successful.
But B, that's where it is a different medium, where a lot of people are.
Why not?
I mean, I was persuaded of it, so I get it.
Yeah, I've had people trying to get me on it since it was called Musically.
Oh, is it called that?
I have no idea.
Yeah, yeah.
So before it was even TikTok.
I mean, I think it's...
At its core, I think it's a...
I literally believe it's a Chinese weapon.
And I don't even want to install the app on my phone.
I will probably get someone to run one for me.
Yeah, I mean, that's what I'm saying.
Not on your phone either.
Yeah, I don't even install it on my phone.
The reality is...
I mean, this is a whole discussion for another day.
Much of American capitalism as it exists today...
Has been deputized into being a Chinese weapon, too.
I mean, Airbnb turns over user data of US users to China as a condition for doing business in China.
So I share that concern.
But on the other hand, if we're going to drive change, how do we use the methods that we have to get to that destination we want to get to?
It's another different version of the methodology needed to get to where you want to go.
For sure.
I know I have videos.
There's clips of me on there.
I bet.
I bet.
So I don't actually have my own account.
That's kind of how I found out about it, too.
I don't have my own account, but, you know, I will probably outsource that to somebody.
Yeah.
That's just a one-off.
When you were talking about the methods and the new media, it's how far, how far.
Or do you take that down the chain?
Yeah, but, you know, it's exciting.
I think there is so much threat, and there's so many concerns that people have, but with all that does come massive, massive opportunity.
And I think that people need to see that.
I think that people need to be very careful to not get caught up in the black pill, doomsday mindset of, everything's falling, the entire nation, the entire world is crumbling, and the globalists this and this.
And, you know, I'm increasingly seeing more right-leaning people becoming Turning into all of the things that's made the left side of the aisle so off-putting over the past 10 or 15 years, they're oftentimes turning into that.
And I understand where it's coming from, and I understand the demoralization, but I think people need to be very, very, very careful With all of that, I'm even seeing a rise in identity politics popping up on the right in some concerning ways.
That's been one of my biggest criticisms of the left side of the aisle for the past decade is just this continuous obsession with race and gender.
I do think that we would do well to remember maybe T.S. Eliot here.
This is how the world ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper.
The way the culture war may end is, and I'm intent to make sure that it doesn't, but I worry about it, is that each side borrows the methods of the other in a way that you're still left fighting without realizing that there's not really that much of a difference in what you're actually fighting for.
In some ways, different than what you said, but there are other ways in which, as my second book was about this too, is I worry about Two sides fighting each other, adopting the methods of the other.
It's sort of back to when you were fighting terrorism in the early 2000s here in the West.
If you're willing to go after innocent families and children to defeat the terrorists, What distinguishes you from them, right?
And I think the same question comes up and surfaces itself now in the modern political-cultural world where we have to remember why we're doing what we're doing without losing what we're fighting for in the process.
Absolutely, man.
And, you know, having principles is always difficult.
Yeah.
Right?
It's the right thing to do, but taking that by...
I can understand why some people have The by any means necessary type of approach.
But once you do that, I think you lose your own soul.
You lose your own values, your own principles.
You become a hypocrite.
You become the thing that you initially fought to set out against.
That's a big thing that's happened throughout the left, right?
The anti-racists have become racist.
The anti-fascists have become fascist and violent, right?
The feminists have become...
You're saying that can go in both directions?
It can go in both directions.
The feminists have become either man-haters or throwing women themselves under the bus and not even knowing what a woman is, right?
So...
I had a tweet a couple years ago go very viral where I said, any social movement without a clearly defined finish line will eventually end up becoming what it's set to fight out against.
And that's the overcorrection that's been happening.
So what I would love to see is just a, and I think this is happening, I think the pendulum has started to return back, just coming back to Just common sense and reality and maturity, not just the mudslinging and the fighting and whatever.
And again, to give you props, man, I love the fact that you will talk to anybody.
There's been too much of the, okay, we're just going to stay in our little silo here.
Stay in our little silo there and point at the other one and go, you're bad, you're bad, you're bad.
And it's goofy and it's immature.
So good on you for breaking that.
Thank you for being here, man.
It's good seeing you, and I feel I'm going to be talking for a long time to come.
I appreciate it, man.
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