Is America Rome? 3 Historians Debate Decline, Faith & Agency | Weds LIVE Ep.57 transcript

This week, China's central bank bought more gold in August than it has in any single month in nearly three years. 20 tons of the stuff. That's their 22nd consecutive month of buying at record prices without stopping or slowing down. They're not doing it because gold is cheap either. They're paying top dollar. They're doing it because they've made a decision about what the next 100 years is going to look like, and they're positioning themselves accordingly.

Now, this isn't necessarily a case for the gold standard, and we probably shouldn't take our economic cues from a bunch of commies, but when we look at what the Chinese Communist Party is doing right now, it's clear that they're playing a long game. They're acting like a civilization that intends to be here tomorrow and well into the future. The question is, do we act like a civilization that intends to be here tomorrow and well into the future?

Forget it 100 years or even in 20, are we going to be here in 10? Do we believe we'll be here two years from now? If you look at our politics and our culture, our institutions, you don't see people planning for the long game. You see people planning for the next quarter or maybe the next election or even just the next news cycle or next consumable product. The US isn't stockpiling gold. We're stockpiling debt. This year, we're projected to spend over $1 trillion on interest alone on our national debt.

Our currency is backed by will only. It's backed by the might of our military. It's backed by America's ability to maintain its global influence. Now, on the American right, a bunch of new voices are emerging, calling for America to shrink back, to withdraw from the world, to hand over power to China and Russia. Isolationism is all the rage. There's a general feeling that America's time in the sun is passed. Our culture isn't fairing much better.

At the very moment that our secular age shows signs of waning, and mythology and religion are once again asserting themselves as unavoidable technologies for understanding the reality of who we are and what is our role in the world. Our particular mythology appears shattered in our movies and entertainment. The American mythos has given way to self-doubt and even self-hatred. The stories that upheld our western tradition have been deconstructed, scorned, and subverted.

And underneath all of this is a single question that a lot of Americans are quietly and not so quietly asking themselves. Is any of this fixable or is it already over? A few years ago, a viral joke went around. You might remember it. wives started asking their husbands how often they thought about the Roman Empire. The answer was pretty much every day. It was funny and it was endearing, but I think there's a profound reason that men are haunted.

So, it's our job as men to preserve civilization. We worry that we're failing. We wonder if we're following the same dynastic cycle as all the civilizations that have come before us. We wonder if our decline is not only inevitable but at hand. Whether future civilizations will point at our spacecraft and our skyscrapers in the same way that we point at Roman aqueducts or Egyptian pyramids and ask ourselves how on earth did they make that?

Is the fall of the West overstated or are we in real trouble? Can men save it or is it too late? What can history tell us about our current moment? And can those lessons give us the tools we need to save the West for future generations? Are we doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past? Or do we in fact have agency to break the st the cycle at least for another generation? Tonight, I'm joined by three men who have taken this question seriously and might have some answers for us.

Jeremy Ryan Slate is an historian and expert on the Roman Empire. He's also the CEO of Command Your Brand and the host of the Roman pattern. Spencer Claven Spencer Claven, [laughter] >> where to begin? is an Oxford classist host. Yeah. Yeah. [laughter] >> Fortunately, what I'm supposed to say is in the prompter and I never ad lib. >> Spencer Claven is an Oxford classist, host of the Young Heretics podcast and author of several books including How to Save the West and Light of the Mind, Light of the World. >> That was very disciplined.

Well done. >> Not related. [laughter] All the things you didn't say. And Stephen Kent is a columnist and commentator, host of Geeky Stokes podcast, and author of the upcoming book, Great Escape: 30 Reflections on Stoicism, Faith, and the Wisdom of Great Stories. Gentlemen, thank you for being with me this evening. >> It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having us. >> Spencer, I was told that I have to go to you first for reasons that make absolutely no sense to me. >> Hello.

I mean, I don't I'm as confused as you are, I [laughter] am doing here again. You know, we we were talking before the show uh about this idea that the secular age of the last really 500 years, but in earnest the last 300 years is showing signs of fray. You know, it it feels to me that mythology and narrative that religion are all reasserting themselves in quite a large way. Our friend Rod Dreer calls it the reenlightenment, right? this idea that we're um and in fact he worries about a dark reenlightenment. >> This idea that we're moving back toward the sort of wonder with which we approached the past uh as as a man who spent his life considering the mythologies of the civilizations that came before us.

What do you make of our moment? >> Well, I think the other word that comes to mind when you ask that question is enchantment. >> Sorry, I said reenlightment. It's it's the dark uh re-enchantment. >> Yeah. only because enlightenment has been subject to a brutal propaganda camp. The whole that that word is kind of has been has been beat to death for a number of reasons. But yeah, enchantment is this idea I mean disenchantment which I think it was um that the Taylor was the philosopher who came up with this idea that there had been a kind of recession of the spirits from the world and I think one way of considering this is as a stage in the life cycle of the west.

Now it's one that probably all of us here are not particularly pleased with having and yet it is the moment into which we were born. We were born into the tail end of I think it is a 500y yearlong trajectory and it begins really with the scientific revolution and the invention of the printing press and indeed even the Protestant Reformation all of which are complicated multi-layered things that we might have a variety of opinions about but which irrevocably changed the course of the west and the cast of the western mind and I think all of them to a certain degree tended toward demystif ification.

They had this element in them. And I think this was perhaps part of the ground swell they all represented that >> it was becoming increasingly difficult to believe in a god-haunted world, in a world filled with spirits and motive forces and powers. Now, that's different from saying that the world is not in fact God-haunted or imbued with mind and meaning and all kinds of things that we don't fully understand. It just means that what was going on at the time in our sort of first European civilization and then American civilization afterward had to do with understanding the world which has always been a part of of Western civilization but really became I think a particular kind of understanding of the world really became front and center in the western mind.

Isn't isn't the idea that that science was going to sort of eliminate many of those questions for us in the 20th century and Steven Meyer talks about this often that science has sort of walked us right up to the line where we are actually sort of confused again about the realm of the spiritual cosmic truth. I mean we are now talking about our universe or our galaxy existing inside a black hole that might you know function like it's coming out of a spring.

I don't even know what that means, but that's what the scientific community is talking about now, leading us back to to question everything that has come for the past 100 years. >> But I think at the same time, there's even the last several years we've lived through where we were told to trust the science and things like that, people have started questioning, you know, is the science even correct, right? And I think we're at an interesting inflection point for even that >> and what can the science tell us and what can't it, right?

I mean, you're right. I think Stephen that the premise a part of the premise of science was that we were going to bracket certain kinds of questions and only look at things that we could quantify. I mean this is basically the the sort of cliffnotes version right is that we're going to take a a lot of the questions that have been central to western philosophy including you know teiology what's the purpose of man or of the universe and we're and we're going to kind of just agree to to put those to one side and we're going to look at these more readily answerable questions that have these definite kinds of answers how much of this stuff is there and how can we move it around and I think the best scientists have always understood that that didn't mean we had answered questions of teiology or eliminated them from their importance but science was so powerful and so effective that I think it did create in its wake and this is another big yeah Steven Meyer point that in the wake of say the Newtonian revolution you get people like PRC Monlas who are saying you know I have no need of God in as a hypothesis in my system >> um and you're absolutely right Stephen that that is now reaching the limits of its explanatory power, right?

And it's doing so in science. Quantum physics is kind of confronting us with the necessity of something like consciousness or mind on the other end of the material world. >> And yeah, you're going to see a lot of people, you're already seeing a lot of people reacting to this with very recognizably religious impulses, impulses to kind of imbue technology with all kinds of supernatural power or to bow down and worship various political powers or what have you.

That's the only way to understand why someone like John Lennox of Oxford, the head of mathematics at Oxford, is just building so much cache in the podcast world and and YouTube talking about the case for Christ. He's um he's frankly a little bit of a CS Lewis 2.0 coming out of the UK and just talking to people about numbers. We we don't even understand the codes by which we think science is revealing truth to us. We don't even know today what gravity is.

This is something he talks about all the time. We know how gravity works, but we don't actually know what it is. All the way down to to DNA, you know, we just we talk about these things, these codes for human life, but we don't even know what is beneath the compounds, beneath the proteins. There's just so much in the unseen world that science is revealing to us. We know nothing. This was a George Lucas point. You talked about it on on your show last week in his his conversation with Bill Moyers.

You know, he said in that same interview, believe this was in 1999 when he was promoting the Phantom Menace, um you know, that cavemen understood about, you know, 1% one out of 10 of human life. And today we understand about five. And that was in 1999. So maybe we're at like six or maybe we've gone backwards. >> Well, [laughter] maybe maybe it's.5. I just want to compliment you uh on bringing up a mathematician in this the year of our lord 2026 when we have revealed that all algebra is true magic.

It's >> a scop. >> I was told that >> John Lin ever built a kil. I ask you >> I was told that algebra is is coming comes from the Arabs, right? Isn't this isn't this is the exact opposite? >> It's a conspiracy. It's apparently an [laughter] Arabic conspiracy. As we >> algebra is the symbolic world, you know, in short. I mean, it's it's so it's so funny. >> That's a great take. >> It's so funny to see Tucker Carlson, cuz we have to invoke his name at least once, >> lash out against this thing >> that makes us question what an X or a Y is.

And we're going to figure out what the answer is because truth is truth. >> They're undermining, the opponents of the West are trying to undermine not just curiosity, but basic truth at every turn. The left did this with math during the BLM days and the George Floyd pandemonium. The left was questioning math as some sort of white settler colonial objective truth philosophy. Oh, you know, maybe numbers don't actually add up to what we say they do.

And now I say our people, but you know, Tucker Carlson who's left the reservation is talking about this as well. >> This is unbelievable. >> Really a great point. And can I pose a question to the panel about this? And when you're talking because when you're talking about John Lennox, right, and this awe, wonderment at numbers. >> Yeah. >> I I think okay, that's actually an ancient western impulse. The name that it brings to mind to me is Pythagoras, who's known for at least having this movement or the movement followed in his wake that kind of related numbers to the mystery at the foundation of the universe.

And it's not the same kind of when we hear that now we might think oh this is just a pure materialist kind of uh reduction of everything to math but no this was the idea that when you say something like one or two or indeed x not to bring up you know verbotent topics when you say those sorts of things you're invoking something in your mind >> which describes something in the world that is not actually reducible to any object, right?

I can say one water glass and one sword and one, you know, nebula because there is something called one that seems to obtain all across the universe and these are these, you know, sort of astonishing mysterious facts that it does sound like people are coming to grips with. Yet granted, there are enormous resources in the Christian tradition and in the western tradition more broadly for receiving this new discovery that people are coming to and directing it, channeling it toward a revitalization of the west. >> Also, [laughter] it would seem that many other things could happen with this kind of impulse, right?

There could instead be a new tech mysticism. there could be a rebirth of like, you know, paganism or some sort of weird demented neopaganism. And I guess I wonder what you guys think about the prospects for each of those various possibilities. And >> well, one thing I would say is that the the answer is usually yes. >> You know, the many of the enlightenments that have happened in this country over the last 250 years were accompanied by huge surges in alternative religious ideas, not only Christian enlightenment, right?

And so, you know, it's not it isn't the case that just because Christianity does well, it does well at the expense of all other ideas. It's usually the case uh that when there's an action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. That when one thing grows, other things grow in opposition to it. And so I don't think that the question before us is will we you know will we in this mo take the AI moment for example will AI be a force for good or a force for ill the answer is just yes >> you know AI is going to unlock human uh potential as every new tool has unlocked our potential in uh enormous ways that give us enormous new capabilities to do good and people are going to worship it and wars are going to be fought over it >> industries are going to be destroyed.

Industries are going to be created. You know, one of the things that the West has done fairly successfully, although I say fairly successfully, and you've had 30 years of war right after the praying press was invented, basically, but one thing we've done over time well, is absorbed technological advancement in such a way that most of the negative impacts are front-loaded and over time we experience many of the more sublime benefits of technological advancement.

And so we have this concept in capitalism called creative destruction, >> which is yes, when >> you know when the trains arrive, the the Pony Express suffers, >> but there isn't less mail. There's more mail. There's not there aren't less opportunities, there's more opportunities. In the moment, there's destruction for people who are in particular parts of the economy. Over time, there's advancement for everyone in in the economy.

But in the but that doesn't that's a that's a sorry consolation for the guy who right now loses his job or who right now I think that every advancement ends up being this way and you know and some advancements are uh more obviously more substantial than others. AI just an example I do think will be accompanied by an incredible moment of false religion. You know, >> I believe that I know someone who's fallen prey to uh what you might call like chat GPT psychosis >> and destroyed her marriage over it because it reinforced in her many many ideas that simply were not so.

You know, it's a it's desire to be agreeable and to continue uh causing you to be engaged. um led her down, I believe, a very very very dark path indeed that in any other time and perhaps in times to come we would rightly identify as being a spiritual >> movement. You know, I could monologue on this for six hours, so I'll I'll wrap with this only to allude to something else that you and I have discussed in the past and even today, >> which is this sort of question of, you know, in Nolan's The Odyssey, there's this idea of in a time of of >> apparent magic.

Yeah. My least favorite moment in our >> And every and every encounter with the supernatural within the film >> could be interpreted as being seen through the lens of his PTSD or is in a flashback or a memory or a dream that he's having. >> I don't I actually think that that could be an interesting narrative tool for helping largely secular people >> begin to believe that enchant the ideas of enchantment are plausible. >> Yeah. >> When it gets past their their initial objections.

Um, the thing about the supernatural though is that it's the most natural. [laughter] >> It's the naturalist. >> Okay, >> the naturalist. >> Uh, it's supernatural. And what that means to me is, >> huh, >> it may well be the case in my friend's example that what led her astray was not uh is a force that we can understand through math. >> The fake the fake world in which we live. The the the numbers and letters uh that make up the symbolic um technology because math is a technological innovation.

The scientific process itself is a technological innovation. It's been the source of many subsequent technological innovations, but it itself is a technology >> to help us achieve a goal, an outcome, which is understanding of the natural world. >> Yeah. >> Understanding of the world in which we live. It's not the only technology or useful tool for helping us understand it. But for the last 500 years, it's become more and more the dominant and at times perhaps the only uh available one or or acceptable uh one.

We may look at what happened to my friend and say that is the product of ones and zeros. >> Yeah. >> But that doesn't make it less of a spiritual uh phenomenon because we only see through the glass dimly and the things that we're trying to observe in the natural world are themselves imbued with supernatural uh reality. And so it isn't the case that just because we understand something through na as a natural phenomena through natural mechanisms that that is the only plausible understanding of it or even a complete understanding of it which I would argue it certainly is not. >> I I I think I agree with this this last point.

I mean, I definitely agree with the it's always yes to everything point and it does seem as if AI and digital technology generally mashed together are our new printing press. So we are now at the brink of a new 500year period which will be just as turbulent in its initiation as anything uh you know before sense but will perhaps settle out you know god willing into something actually quite beautiful I think all the time in this connection of I think his name is Fritz Hobber the scientist who develops the technology basically for they called him the man who drew bread from the air because he found this chemical process that was able to fertilize soil in this new way and so is responsible for a lot of our um agricultural technologies that we now still use >> and abund a agricultural abundance. >> It's also I'm pretty sure that I'm getting the right name.

It's also one of the main parts of building Ziklon B which was one of the gases. Yeah. Uh you know and so so this is like a technology that perfectly encapsulates everything you're saying. It's it's a onested one death dealing and lifegiving. It's the technology that's going to help us beat cancer and also help normies develop biological weapons, right? It can do both. >> And it is possible that like I don't I don't have the god's eye view to say this with certainty, but perhaps if you zoomed out, you would say actually even though there was this mass death in the moment in the trenches, you know, with with cichlan B that actually does get swallowed up over time with all of the many people relative to all the many people who have been fed by these these fertilizers, right?

Certainly the case that in a fallen world every good thing kills you. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> There's no life on earth without the sun and the sun as sure as anything else will take your life from you. That's the nature of >> it. Yeah. Cancer when you go >> the the same technology that destroyed Hiroshima now powers cities like there's always a yes and >> but I think I think as well like when I look at something like this I always try to understand these things don't happen in a vacuum as well.

And I think when we look at kind of the direction culture is going right now, we we we are in a world at the moment where incompetence reigns and competence is seen as dangerous, >> right? So I just I just saw a movie on the plane in the way here um called The Death of Robin Hood. I don't know if you guys had have seen >> Oh my gosh, I have not seen he's the one person alive who's seen this movie. I can't >> I thought it I was on the plane.

I had a couple hours to Russell Crow. >> No, it's Hugh Jackman. was one of the worst movies I've ever seen >> because it takes the >> character of Robin Hood that we've come to admire as this person that, you know, steals from the rich, you know, gives to the poor, tries to improve conditions of a tyrannical ruler, and it makes him into somebody that highly regrets all the things he's done. He feels bad for every person he's injured, and he commits and he commits assisted suicide at the end of the movie.

[laughter] and and I and I look at kind of this theme that we're in and the thing that that comes to mind for me is if you look at even even late Rome and the situations that they were dealing with um in 408 there's a man named Flavius Stilico. Um and Flavius Silico is one of the best generals in Rome at this point in time. He's actually responsible for keeping the Western Empire together and he's serving for an emperor named Hanorius and Hanorius is concerned that Silico might get his power that there might be some issues. because he's more concerned about raising his chickens.

So he has Stilico killed and two years later in 410 Rome is sacked. >> So I look at these advancements and these things that are changing in society and I also look at in the backdrop of what is competence and and how is competence looked at and we really are in a moment where competence is seen as a dangerous thing and you have to wonder how does that fit with the souls of men and the backdrop of >> things like this technology.

I I think it's undeniable that if we're talking about broadly whether or not we're going to save the West, it involves re-engaging men in the struggle for its survival. And young men, particularly who are following my channel, Geeky Stoics. And I think you probably experienced the same sort of thing with young heretics are are grasping for not just cosmic meaning to their lives and where they are in the universe and who is their maker, but what does society expect from them? what what did they want them to do? >> Uh we've of course gone through the period of time of them being criticized uh for you know being toxic just for having any sort of semblance of masculine virtue but also just the economy is is not geared towards competent men right now who want to do things who want to labor who want to take risks.

Um, we're gonna have to figure out as a people how to get men busy and get them in the business of building things and taking risks and and technology is is not necessarily going to just unlock that. >> I think every I think the most recent job report >> found that virtually every single job uh that was created and added to the economy in the last uh measurement cycle went to a woman. >> Virtually every single one of them.

Yeah. It's not like the majority of them, >> all of them. >> It's a it's one of the most remarkable statistics I've ever seen. Now, part of it is because most of the jobs that were created during the measurement period were created in healthcare, which is overwhelmingly dominated by women, but I don't think it's exclusively true that it's because it was healthcare anymore. Virtually every field is becoming dominated by women.

You know, the the church itself is 60% female in the country right now. the and really has been for a generation or more. So, yeah, the the dis the the fact that men have disengaged. >> Yeah. >> Um now, young men will feel that they've been pushed out and to the extent that they're, you know, joining a song already in progress, I know that it feels that way. >> But the truth is, men have been not removed from their position of prominence in society, but have have seated their role at the head of society.

Can I offer something goofy? Because the most excited I've been as an American in recent history has been when Donald Trump started talking about Greenland. You know, the idea that our borders might not be set, that we as a country could still possibly grow, that there might still be lands even if they are barren, icy, and horrible, and no one would want to live there. That there's something that young men and people could do to adventure.

As Americans, we live in a world where it feels like every stone has been turned over. >> Yeah. And this is big >> for men. This is very demoralizing. And the energy gets turned inward to destroying our downtowns. It gets turned into crime and uh pornography addictions. And that energy has to go somewhere. We don't have a draft. We don't have national service requirements. we just have put everybody into this narrow lane where they're supposed to I don't know what sit at a desk >> and [laughter] I think America and the West are particularly attuned to this problem.

In other words, this problem affects us and our cultural sensibilities and our traditions maybe most of all or at least very intensely because America famously had its frontier for so long was itself a product of imperial mythology about Yes. Exactly. And you know even looking sort of wider than that the philosopher Otto Spangler who's one of the great sort of philosophers of the west and his book on the decline of the west sort of identifies westernness with the fouian the questing spirit right the hungry mind and the pitilous dark and we reached this very delicate moment where not only do we conquer all the territory that was available to us to conquer but at the same time that that sort motion into the future that that quest for the next thing brought us also to genuine moral insights about conquest which I know this makes me a little bit lib to kind of grant that there's something to this but >> you know it wasn't just France Fenon and the wretched of the earth that convinced us it was bad to like kick people out of their territory it was also the implications of the American experiment itself at a at a philosophical and an intellectual level kind of made us think twice about and reconsider, right, the mode of conquest in the 21st century.

And this brings me to Mars, right? This brings me around to space exploration because it does seem as if like one thing that really speaks to people and Greenland is another example because like there's basically nobody in Greenland, right? It's almost a proxy for the idea that now in the next this next page of our history. >> Yeah. So I do think I mean one thing that I feel is a that I'll throw in here and then I'll shut up about this like an ingredient that we touched on at the beginning that is missing as of yet is is teology right is purpose and I say this because you know one thing I've learned from teaching students one of the great joys of teaching young people kind of in you know just coming into college and I teach at the University of Austin so I'm perhaps especially lucky But you notice like when you when you teach literature, you think, "Oh, I have to build my way up to the big questions, right?

I have to kind of start small and maybe pick something relatable. Let's talk about like, you know, Adysius sex life or something, [laughter] you know, and then let's get to purpose and moral meaning." >> The opposite is true. People at that age, you know, we we talk about them as if they're disconnected from big questions, but they're actually voracious for them. It's all they want to talk about. You have to bring them back down to earth, not the other way around.

Right? This is natural to young people actually to think in terms of capital W questions. What, why, and why? You know, which means that it's time to stop getting embarrassed about the the big W question, which is why, right? What's my purpose? Why am I here? And I do think that like competence is, you're absolutely right, is is one of this these key kind of instrumental virtues that we need to recover. One reason why I think we've had a hard time with it lately is because competence is an instrumental virtue in the sense that it's only actually a virtue if it's pointed in the right direction. >> But Spencer, you know what's interesting about that is is I think the thing people often miss with competence. >> Yeah. >> Is where does competence come from?

But confidence, right? The number of times you've done something, the number of times you've failed at something, number of times you succeeded at something. And I think even if you look at children now, they're in school so long >> and they think that that first thing they need to do comes out of school has to be perfect because it kind of does. They owe a lot of money, right? So we we don't have a the way things are set up where you can try things.

You can fail. You can maybe not go to college. You could figure out a way to to gain that confidence and that competence through production. And I think that is something that is sorely missing is the idea of accomplishment creating that competence. I I take this point. I do want to I want to bounce it back at you and ask like because again, you know, of course I'm a college professor. I'm going to say >> I went to school way too long too.

So not as long as you Yeah. [laughter] Listen, I'm practically still I don't I haven't gotten over it yet. But yeah, I mean I I am actually with you on the not everybody needs to go to college point. I'm with you on the let's get people's hands dirty. Let's give let's skill them up and let's give them a chance to of trial and error. I return though to the question of like isn't part of that trial and error learning where your competence is best directed in other words like what is your aspiration what's a meat or fitting >> aim for your aspiration and it does seem like you have to kind of ask that at some at some level I think sometimes it comes from trying different things too like trying careers that do work for you don't work for you I think >> um you know sometimes life can be trial and errorm Mhm. >> Yeah.

I I would even point to your own experience, Spencer, and say that >> even in the time that I have known you, the direction of your life has has uh shifted due to forces beyond your control. What you thought you were setting out to do isn't what you in fact ended up doing. >> Yeah. >> And I think that's, you know, I think I've told this story before, but uh at at my church, um once a year, we get all the high school seniors up on stage and they tell us what they're going to do with their lives.

And it's a church that puts an emphasis on people going to college. And every year there's the one kid who says they're going to join the Marines or that they're going to go into the workforce or whatever. And everybody claps a little less. >> And then they wind up kind of staring at their shoes, you know. And I've I >> I have a lot of admiration for my pastor. He's a man who cares deeply about the people under his uh under his charge.

And I brought it up to him. I sent him a letter and I said, "Hey, you know, as as a guy who didn't go to college and did quite well for myself, >> yeah, >> I I have a lot of sympathy for that kid and I was I always single that kid out and make a point to go tell them, you know, that I appreciate them." I said, "But I think that we're putting the empasis on the wrong sal. >> I don't like that we're getting these kids up there and letting them tell us with authority what they're going to do >> and then we clap for them as though they're not liars." I show I showed that clip to my teenage daughter who does not want to go to college and you did that monologue because that is so encouraging to young people, >> right? >> That there is total it's perfectly fine to not know what you want to do with your life and to go on a searching seeking quest. >> And further than that, the kids who who do say what they're going to be when they grow up are not telling the truth. >> Every kid who says, "I'm going to go to Notre Dame and I'm going to become a neurosurgeon and you know, I'm going to work at Cedars." Well, one of those things might be true.

Everything downrange from what you're going to do immediately uh is subject to all of the forces that impact every one of us throughout our lives. And you know, a dream and a vision uh and a map are very useful for getting out getting you out your front door. >> Um but they lose their efficacy over time. Okay? And and what gains efficacy over time is the vote that reality gets. Maybe maybe I've come at this the wrong way by tying it to college, which we actually I think probably agree. >> I might have pulled you off on that.

I apologize. Sorry. >> I might have pulled you off on that. I apologize. >> No, no, not at all. I mean, I I think this is that that is an interesting but kind of separate question. Yeah. >> Which where we probably agree more than disagree. >> All of the examples though that we've given, including my college kids, but also your uh marine. But but I actually want to my my point isn't I have sympathy for the way that we treat the kid who says he's going into the Marines compared to how we treat the kid who tells us with certainty what their life is going to be like.

My problem isn't my my issue isn't actually college or not college. I'm generally less bullish on college of course than you are but college might be a very is for many many people right a very useful >> uh step in the path of disco of of self-discovery and discovery of purpose and discovery of mission and discovery of cause >> um it's it's not really I'm I'm agnostic on the on the particular of >> well then again agreed that that's really kind of beside the point right like each of the pe the kinds of people that we're talking about Stephen your daughter the people who go to the young people who go to your church, right?

I I agree with you and it's definitely true in my case that there's a lot of sort of trial and error and miss and redirection. >> A 17-year-old should not be telling us the answer to why. They should be standing before us asking the question of why >> postulence listen couldn't agree with you more about that. But I just want to say that all of the settings that we've just articulated we're describing young people who are steeped in teological thought.

These are people whose entire environment because they're because you're her father and because your church they're going to your church, right? They're they're surrounded and immersed in higher order questions about >> what is worth what kind of life is worth living, right? And I just don't think you can even begin the trial and error process unless you've landed on something. I mean, I think I think it's worth trying to get >> back in the direction of you mentioned Mars >> and what our mythology is going to be, what our mission is going to be to engage people in this new century. is Joseph Campbell.

He also talking to Bill Moyers and it's it's in the book the power of myth is talking about how in the 90s and 2000s we will probably develop eco mythology and I think that panned out quite well that we will >> get invested in the earth mother earth protecting that and that we will start to in many ways devolve into earth worship. I think we did that for 20 years. seen the Apple ad period of of climate change fervor which just reading the room I feel like it's sort of died down a little bit and people are now moving on to the AI technological questions but then we have this this crazy guy Elon Musk who is sort of stepping up as a cultural hero to meet a cultural need that people are yearning for and he spoils it in many ways when he runs his mouth and gets involved in you know feuds online that he shouldn't be involved in >> sends his heart out in weird ways to people Yeah.

I mean, he still [laughter] he still is capturing in many ways the energy of the moment, which is that people are just dying. Yeah. >> To chart uncharted territory and take big risks. And we're going to need to engage young people in changing their minds, reforming their bodies in order to take that adventure. I think one great example is at the Air and Space Museum. They put you through this module where you experience what it is going to be like for you to actually make a trip to Mars.

And it is it is stoicism 101. You are not going to be able to get emails when you want them. You are not going to be able to swipe your way through the day and just enjoy those sorts of uh click-based comforts. You're going to have to get you're going to have to get comfortable in solitude. [laughter] >> You're going to have to get comfortable reading a book. You're going to have to redevelop patience. So there is this future coming that is right within our grasp where we might have to demand of our young people that they restore discipline to their minds and their bodies so that we can have the future that we want and to save the west because Lord knows the Chinese are doing this past for that too. >> I I want to say though that Mars is very cold.

Mars you have very high levels of uh solar radiation. uh Mars, you can't go outside unprotected, much like Greenland. And so [laughter] if you want if you want a proving ground for the conquest of Mars, >> yeah, >> you got to first you got to terraform Greenland. [laughter] But I would say you could go back to the past first because I so I went to to Catholic undergrad, Catholic uh grad school. And so I went to school with a lot of seminarians. >> And I think when when you look at the seminary, I think one of the things that gets lost in it is the purpose of it isn't just to become a priest. >> It's to decide should I be doing this for the rest of my life?

Like discernment is a really big part of that. And if you look at kind of pre-industrial revolution, um something we had a lot more were apprenticeships where you would work in a particular field for a period of time, decide is this the right job for me, get some experience and um you know now we have people getting internships but we don't have any real apprenticeships and I think actually if that was a step even before university when we're harnessing that desire to do something and that desire to experience that desire to learn and then you decide from there well what do I do with this you know, having apprenticeships could be an extremely valuable thing and also gain some competence from it. >> There's another thing that apprenticeship brings that that's completely missing, which is male mentorship. >> You know, that when you do an internship, quite often you don't even meet the person for whom you intern. >> Correct. >> Uh you know, I I know a man who is one of the pre-minent um constitutional lawyers in the country, argues probably more cases for the Supreme Court than anyone.

And he was talking about how co necessarily changed their practice and so much of it now is remote. And someone said, "Well, it's terrible because, you know, it used to be that the way you became an attorney is you had these internships, you know." I said, "Well, we still have the internships and we require the interns still to go into the office." Well, the obvious follow-up question is yes, but if the attorneys themselves aren't in the office, >> then what exactly is >> there's no experience?

This is enormous the experience >> AI challenge by the way because one of the things that AI seems to me to be doing is getting really really good at the kinds of tasks that you would previously have hired an entry-level person to do. >> We Jeremy I don't know we may disagree with this. A prediction I have is that one thing AI will not do is transcend do so many of those menial tasks that it trains itself into full autonomy and replaces say the upper level management at a law firm.

One reason for this being that it does seem as if some measure of hallucination is kind of baked in and you need the AI people say a human in the loop, right? So there's always going to be someone somewhere like supervising because otherwise how would you be able to confirm except buy more machines. Right now I raise all this because you now have the choice as the head of a law firm to hire a firstear attorney and have him draft your contract templates and then edit them and fill them in >> or to sign up for GPT Astra and have it do the same thing probably better than most people.

Right. And then the question of the first year attorney becomes a question of investment in young men and also women in the case of attorneys but in the case of male mentorship right like this is really forcing the question of do we value these mentorships for their own >> sake and I do think that some measure and I'm sorry to keep like harping on this because like the question of why is then going to become really important right why does one run a law firm for instance Is it simply to produce the max value for the clients who currently have the people who are currently working there or is it some in some small way a an investment in the future and a and a vehicle for the future? >> I I'm I am a seeker personally, but I don't think that we can have a nation of seekers.

We're going to have to give people a mission. it. We're going to have an entire generation, multiple generations of people just wandering around trying to figure out what internship they can or can't get, what job they fill in society that previously they would have been able to get. I I don't think you can have a nation of seekers as our enemies are rallying around the world and joining arms to actually advance a mission of overturning American power.

Are you saying this because I raised the question of why or are you saying it as >> I I just kind of locking in on the subject of, you know, what are men going to do in terms of their internships? >> Well, there's an important caveat here, which is I I I'm talking about answering the question of why, not just asking it indefinitely. I mean, maybe that's a clarification, right? But again, Mars, right? Great. Why Mars?

Why do we actually believe in expansion and even indeed the perpetuation of the human species? Why is it good for because why will determine what right unless you have and I'm again you know we would probably agree about the answers. Um but I don't think Elon Musk necessarily would agree with us about the answers and that's going to have material consequences for his space colony. >> Do we know his why or is it just the the childlike dream? human consciousness is a flickering candle and it needs to be pres I mean these are sort of the way he talks about it is that and and again in many ways that I find sympathetic and agree with but also consider insufficient including this idea that we're going to have a kind of planetary direct democracy when we arrive there right there are political consequences >> Plato would disagree about direct democracy working long term >> wouldn't he just so so would the founders right I mean so would the American founders would also say like this is a recipe for disaster.

You think that you've transcended human nature. Human nature's is going with you to the moon and to Mars. Right? And these are all what I mean when I talk about the why question. >> Also, freedom, freedom in space is a very tricky question. >> Uhhuh. >> You know, it's one thing to say that uh you support, for example, the second amendment on Earth. When you're in a a sealed pressure- sealed vacuum traveling through the expanse of space, a person cannot you cannot allow one person to be able to make a decision that kills every person on the on the spacecraft.

And so all of the ways that we think about these questions have to we have to find the parts of of these questions that are that have universal application, >> right? Then we also have to invite that universal application into the particular. >> Well, I completely agree and this is these are two legs of the scissors that do the cutting, right? There's and I'm not proposing that we should sort of like have our heads in the clouds and ignore altogether the question of like >> No, no, that Elon Musk does have his heads in the clouds on on some of these parts of of these issues. >> Yes.

Well, I mean, again, right, I you're you're absolutely right that like centralized control is going to be the most obvious command structure on the first however many Mars missions, right? Then you're going to get off the spaceship, God willing, and you're going to have to build a society and you're going to have the habits of centralized control ingrained in you from all that journeying. >> Except I'll challenge you on that.

Okay. Well, we actually have, I think, a great example of how this can work in practice. Uh, and it's the the the oceanfaring forebears that brought us to this country. >> Wait, I completely agree with you about this. We're not disagreeing. >> Okay, ex accept that. Right. The why is it that the the people on the Mayflower tumbled off that ship and made the Mayflower compact? It's because they were predetermined in advance on the purpose of their voyage.

Right. The >> very specific The voyages are Marshall. >> Yes. >> But the but the purpose is not Marshall. >> And so the only So if you're going to put a bunch of people on a spaceship, right, and they're going to be answering these immediate material questions, they have to have in mind the long view of ultimately establishing a free civilization or else they're going to answer those material questions in the most obvious way possible, which is going to be autocracy, right?

I mean, >> like, so I guess again, I'm just like not to not to ride a hobby horse or whatever or brow two guys about something. we basically agree on. It's [laughter] just that like if you haven't determined with great precision the the purpose of your voyage, >> your answers to the what I would call credential questions that you're raising are not going to come out right. They're going to come out really wrong and in a in a bad way. >> We're just running away from all of our mismanagement here.

Uh >> well, I see this in our current political struggles in this country right now that we have forgotten our why even now >> and there are great moves left and right in this country to rewrite the why. >> Yeah. >> Uh and we we sort of understand what that looks like on the left because it's been evolving uh somewhat gradually over the last century uh or so. On the right, it feels like it's suddenly arrived almost fully baked.

And so it's alarming and and startling, but it's really only been a part of our major national discourse for about a decade. >> Um and it didn't devolve slowly, or if it did, it evolved slowly behind the scenes, >> right? >> But it is there is this idea now um that the best way to the most virtuous future is autocratic >> and that in fact liberty has been the source of our uh of of our moral decline. I think that's an anti-biblical view.

I I think that the Bible's very clear that uh that righteousness couldn't exist under the law, that you had to have freedom in order for righteousness to exist in the first place. I've been I I had this realization only this week that if every good person on earth just killed one bad person, then you would only have bad people. >> Which I think is an answer to the temptation toward autocracy. You know, it's easy to think if every good person killed one bad person, you'd only have good people.

But alas, that is not >> people who had chosen to kill bad people. >> That's right. You would only then have bad people. And so the means, you know, this sort of idea that that the integralists in particular sometimes espouse that there are mavlian means to arisatilian ends. I I don't think that that carries any water. Certainly doesn't hold up under any scrutiny. I feel like I have had half a dozen conversations in Washington DC bars with Catholic integralists who when we start talking about Tolken and the Lord of the Rings, Argorn comes up and the whole idea is the return of the king, right?

You know, we need someone to actually step into this role and to restore order to a disordered world to fix and mend brokenness which is funny because that's actually the definition of of algebra. Uh apparently [laughter] apparently algebra algebra is to mend broken. >> Oh. Oh yeah, that's [laughter] true. >> But the the the Aragorn question, you know, if you sort of look at that specifically as a mandate for what kind of society we need, which those people are, they're looking for a king.

You could also look at it as no, every man is Aragorn. You are supposed to step into the role of king who is restoring order to your own realm in what you know I guess Gandalf would have said that we all need to actually tend our own gardens and mend the soil so that future generations >> let's not pretend that Denithor wasn't an autocratic ruler >> it's not as though what was missing from the west was autocracy >> you know what what Aragorn represents is the ideal he's the arththeran character in the story he represents the idealized king And I was asked recently by our friend Nick Freighus an actual an actually interesting question which is why in fantasy you know we if if you have any sort of classical liberal sensibility uh then you are sympathetic toward lowercase R republican government and democratic institutions and yet in our fantasy we still have kings and he asked why and I said well I think there's three reasons one fantasy mostly takes place in the past and it's simply a fact that that was the form of government in the past when most of our fantasy narrative was created.

Two, because the great stories of the West are innately Christian and God is not subject to democratic processes because God isn't like us. God isn't limited. He isn't he he knows all the things we don't know. He knows exactly how much toilet paper they need in debute, right? Like he he's smarter even than the invisible hand [laughter] of the free market. Uh he's >> even than the penoptic. He's he's more he's more just than the systems that we've created to to help us establish justice in a fallen world.

And so in if if the king is Christ, then I'm a monarch. Uh the the question is about earthly kings. >> Yes. And these stories are allegorical. >> These stories are allegorical. But that that's actually the third piece is that the the nature of a story is it takes large ideas. This is true of every story. Mhm. >> They take large ideas and reduce them down to to things that can be encapsulated by characters. You have to personify every ideal.

You have to personify every vice. You have to personify the what is good. You have to personify what is bad. And so in telling a story about virtuous government, a king is the great character by which one can tell that story. That doesn't mean that in practice that king can exist. >> What's really profound about this is >> I thought I was [laughter] >> 10 dragon cycle on Amazon Prime. Yeah. >> Which also me. >> Yes. Which listen is a beautiful piece of work in [laughter] um >> John Milton.

I'm sorry. You know I love you know that I love you with all of my heart. You know that I have the highest possible respect for you. John Milton is you know to compare great things with small. Yeah. Um [laughter] Paradise Lost, right? This is a guy who's participated in a revolution, who is been part of an anti- monarchic republican Protestant kind of um political fatal political action who has seen also the way that these things very quickly curdle and revolutionary governments can turn inward upon themselves and exemplify all the flaws that they were [clears throat] initially rebelling against. who retains I think an enormous sensibility for liberty.

I mean he's one of our great you know treatises on the freedom of the press is is from Milton right is the area of pitica. So this is a guy, you know, he's not yet a a classical liberal exactly, but you know, we we recognize in him a lot of our our impulses. Um, as you know, those of us who think of ourselves as classical liberals. And yet in Paradise Lost, Satan is the great revolutionary. He is the one who rises up against God.

And one of the things that Milton is grappling with, you know, people tend to say, "Oh, Milton was at the Devil's Party." This is the kind of William Blake line on it that Satan is secretly the hero and this has done enormous damage to a lot of I mean like watch wicked and that's kind of the idea you know the idea of what Milton was saying. He wasn't saying that at all. I mean you read Milton and Satan begins with this grand idea of himself as an epic hero and ends up in the body of a toad like peering in on Adam and Eve as you know he's a miserable and increasingly sort of self-destructive creature.

And the reason for that is the thing that he's rebelling against, the order that he's rebelling against is the order of reality. So God is as as monarch, right, doesn't actually take kindly to or wellreceive republican revolution, which is a different kind of thing than government among men, right? which is like that's a so there there's like a a kind of misreading of the story going on maybe in these guys that want to be Aragon and all Aragorn and all of that or rather that want to take back the use the ring for good.

Um there is also yeah this thing that you said Jeremy about like losing the plot a little bit right like what exactly are we you know invested in as a civilization and when you say we could just appoint a CEO to run America with an AI right that would bring about virtue and real justice it's like >> there are concepts of virtue and justice implicit in that argument that are not actually the ones we would want to endorse.

Well, I go back to the word virtus, you know, of of the Roman definition of vierus, which is, you know, being upright in in the way that you are as a public individual, having true masculinity, taking care of your family, public involvement. And we've really kind of bastardized that word of of of virtus. You know, what is true virtue as a man? It is to make sure that your family is cared for. It is to make sure that you are producing.

It is to be civically involved. like that was seen as the ultimate thing for a Roman man was to have virtus >> and entails just a measure of of personal liberty, right? It's not untrabled or unfettered personal liberty. >> Well, then octuratas then kind of connects with that a bit of your own personal authority. >> Yeah. I mean, in order to even have the degree of freedom required to build a family, become a potter familiar to do I mean, yeah, these are all things that require a a a walled garden, an open field of free choice within a structure of of law and order.

But if you just say like, well, we could make it all about the law and order and take away the free choice and then we'd have a really righteous society, it's like that is kind of >> ruining the game. But it's like if you flip over the chest board then [laughter] you can win or whatever. >> It's been I think for for anyone in the audience who hasn't been following sort of the the ideological arguments on on the right for a couple of years you know we've been having an argument about action >> about whether or not the conservative movement is one that can do muscular things that can wield the ring or actually use government for certain ends.

And this is kind of what I've been going back to is that we we have all of these different problems, these places that we want to go, but we don't even reform our constitution, which gives us the power to do those things. We don't govern ourselves. Uh the House used to grow. The House of Representatives used to grow on par with the population. It was frozen in 1929. And now we we don't even have enough representatives to cover the amount of Americans we have.

We just don't even govern the House that we have. and then we're talking about the places that we want to go. It's a huge, huge problem. And I think for conservatives, we have to figure out that middle road between passivity and just letting the left kick down Chesterton's fence that they don't know anything about why it was there. And remember that Chesterton has another fence that he talks about in in orthodoxy, which is that the conservative puts a white fence down and he thinks that it will remain white if nothing is done to it.

But time and storms and nature will turn the fence black, >> that you have to continue repainting the fence. That that is what it means to be a conservative. It's an action-based philosophy. You have to govern yourself. You have to update law. There are so many things that I think that we we miss in sitting back or choosing to just go allin as progressive authoritarians in government. >> Really well said. And it because it's we should say this.

It's not as if the impulse to bring in a muscular sort of autocrat to run our lives emerged out of nowhere. Right? You can account for it by sort of gesturing vaguely in all directions and saying look at the state of things, right? And the I think the left the leftist critique of America is see how wretched our state is. This is because the nation was conceived in infamy and it has a kind of core injustice baked in right by by nature.

The right-wing critique is slightly different but remarkably close to it which is you know America was was nobly founded in its aspirations. The people who founded this country thought that they were carrying on the best of the western tradition but really all they were doing was taking the poison pill of the enlightenment. Right? that and and that therefore becomes like the the stain on the on the Constitution from the beginning that really this country just is bound up with all the stuff we started out with with like hyperrationalism and uh like a kind of low view of human nature and no like no concept of justice or virtue or any of these things.

And so I do think like you're starting to see both of those uh revolutionary radical critiques of America as a country gain all of this power and momentum because we haven't been doing the quiet careful work of upkeep that you've just described. And so it's easy to sort of look at this broken machine and be like look the machine is broken. We need a new machine. And the sort of I think classical conservative answer to that is well actually there's a whole history to how that machine got broken and it really worked pretty well.

Like if you look at the blueprints, the design's pretty good, you know? >> Yeah. And and it's interesting though because I think that's why I'm so excited about talking about history because I feel like it can teach us those lessons. Like if you that one of my favorite books about the fall of the Roman Republic is called the Roman Revolution by Dr. Ronald Sim >> and Sim actually traces >> the last hundred years of the Roman Republic and how it fell.

And very often think people just think we get Julius Caesar that's the end of the republic and then we get Augustus as our first emperor. And what Sim actually traces is it's a hundred years of men breaking precedent. And because each person broke it, it was easier for the next person to break precedent. And I think the thing that I get from that is as conservatives, as individuals, how important it is is for us to make sure that we're holding everybody in our group accountable, right?

And making sure that we're our system works the way it's supposed to work and not just saying we're going to alter because of this emergency or change it because of this. We need to make sure the system continues to function because each time you break a president, >> we were talking before the show about the brothers, Gra, >> the Grae brothers 133. >> Yeah. We have a couple of different options in front of us in terms of how we're going to I I don't want to say just get another hundred years out of the republic, but continue >> 100 years of civil bloodshed. >> I would love I would love if we could just get a hundred more years.

That would be great. Um but what are we going to do? Are we going to have to reform certain elements of government? actually govern ourselves. Are we going to have to concede certain ground that the left has probably been clamoring for? I think you talked on the show recently about student debt forgiveness. And I I don't want to misquote you, but I feel like you said they're going to do it. We should probably just do it first.

You know, do we need to alleviate debt? That got talked about in Rome. That pleases the people. That buys you more time. What did they do to reform government? Did they ever have substantive reforms in Rome that gave them more shelf life? >> The difficulty in it is the Rome had a way of doing things that was called the mostorum. The ways of the ancestors. We we do things this way because >> they've always been done this way.

And the difficulty is every time an emergency arises the way we do things changes because uh in the republic they had an office of the dictator and Rome would have two consoles every year and those were the two people responsible for the the major movements in the city. But anytime an emergency happened, a dictator would be appointed for 6 months or the end of the emergency, whichever came first. And that holds for a period of time.

That's why you hear for of Cincinnatus, you know, the the great man that solves the problem twice in his life. We call George Washington the American >> story >> or is is it? >> It's hard to say. It's a lot of early republic things. It's hard to say. Just like Romulus, did Romulus exist, didn't he? >> It's hard to say how much of it's actually true. Um, but I I guess my my point in saying that is they had things to solve an emergency as they hap as they happened.

They didn't have a written constitution. And we do have a written constitution. The problem is we've altered it so much that we don't operate on certain things. You and I were discussing before the 17th amendment. You know, state legislatures don't really have a voice anymore. And that is a real problem at a national level. The House and the Senate essentially doing the same thing. So I think part of the problem is also getting back to constitutional government and we've made changes through amendments and other things that have pulled us off of certain things. >> Can I float?

Oh, sorry. Go ahead. >> I just want to say this an aside uh Catus did exist. His name is George Washington. >> George Washington. [laughter] Yeah. The whole sculpture way in which a myth became true. >> Absolutely. And inspired. >> That wasn't an accident, right? That was a direct inspiration and founders were absolutely steeped in this stuff. Um let me can I float something? So, one of our topics today is are we doomed to repeat these cycles of history.

And I was thinking about that on the way over here and thinking about the great historian of cycles, Palibius, who gives us I sort of the rudiment. I mean, we get it in Plato and Aristotle, but he really assembles this idea of the cycle of regimes. Um, and he's often cited, especially, you know, book six of Palibius is often cited as this, you know, kind of wheel of time sort of story about, well, you begin with a monarchy, but the the son of the monarch is is corrupt and so then the aristocracy rises up and the aristocracies becomes a cron becomes sort of like a cronyist oligarchy and then the people and so on and so forth.

And then we repeat the cycle because democracy devolves into mob rule and you get the the king. And this is, you know, very satisfying to >> invoke as just an explanation for everything, right? >> Yeah. >> It also occurred to me and I hadn't ever really put this together that one thing Polibius also says explicitly in his history is I'm writing this history so we can learn from the past, which is a common Roman refrain.

And you know, Palibius as a as a kind of Greek exile in Rome is picking up this this idea. He says, you know, one thing you can do is you can learn from your own mistakes, but you really can't make enough mistakes to learn really. Well, so we can learn also from the mistakes of of the past. So implicit in the whole purpose of much Roman historioggraphy is the notion that you're not doomed to repeat these cycles, right?

Having said all of that, let me return to the Grai brothers and ask because of course you know Tiberius and gas the first uh civil bloodshed in Rome inaugurating a hundred subsequent years followed by uh by the transition to the to an autocracy to the empire. So like failure mode, right? Not what we are trying to go for. On the other hand, right, >> one of the things that Plutarch does when he tells the story of Yeah. when he talks about the life of of Tiberius, he records this speech that Tiberius he puts in Tiberius mouth and it seems plausible that it's, you know, >> at least his subject matter is correct.

And Tiberius is is sounding a lot like a populist. He's saying, "Look, you soldiers, you went and you fought for Rome, but you've come back and discovered that the patricians with their kind of legal uh loopholes and roundabouts have hoovered up all of the land that we've acquired, and now you have nowhere to lay your heads." That the the animals have somewhere to lay their heads. Yeah. >> But but the the Romans don't.

And this is what really I think galvanizes people behind both Grai brothers and gives so much power to their in the case of gas really radical constitutional reforms. I mean correct me if I'm wrong but >> gas is much worse than Tiberia. >> Yeah I think it's Mson who said the great historian theater says something like this was amounted to a full-blown constitutional revolution. This would have been and so it's not like the things that they did necessarily solve the problem.

They also prefigure I think what's going to give Julius Caesar his power because it's Caesar also who like speaks to the soldiers in a way that they can like see their problems reflected. >> That's one of the reasons that Sullah tries to remove tribunition power because that tribune of the pleb's power of going directly to the people is something that men that have wanted power use that entire last century of the republic. >> Okay.

So I I say this now advisedly because whenever I say like maybe we should take some cues from Tiberius or Julius Caesar, right? like this that seems this seems like bad news bad. However, one thing that's in common with all of these guys is that the effectiveness of their politics depends on the accurate and honest acknowledgment of the problems that the working man is going is going through, right? They're all about saying basically the Senate either won't or can't admit that this problem exists because their interests are too bound up in concealing it.

I'm going to tell you that in fact like there's been some kind of monkey business that means you are not getting the Roman dream right you're not getting access to the Roman dream in the wrong hands that kind of rhetoric is extremely dangerous because it makes you able to mount an army against the state and cross the Rubicon so however it might be that like that is a real key to good politics also in our populist moment know that like sort of being uh cleareyed and honest about the problems that say AOC is weaponizing in her defense is like a kind of necessary ingredient of conservative politics. >> Oh, this is this is this is a somewhat edgy thing to pose.

[laughter] >> I'm going to blush posing it. This is not an I welcome it. >> But when we talk about Western civilization, we talk about the Roman Republic. We also talk about the empire and we just kind of like, oh, it's all it's all part of the path to get us here. you know, can the western can western civilization endure if we descend into autocracy? And are we do we consider that still part of the overall story arc that can still have a redemptive element to it?

Do we think that it's impossible to save it off? Tucker Carlson's promoting it all the time, right? >> Tucker's constantly now promoting the benevolence of dictators who are more responsive to their populations than American politicians. >> Get some bread in their grocery store. absolute an absolute bizarre contention. But um it makes me wonder though, you know, if certain things in our political breakdown are somewhat inevitable, but can Western civilization still endure in those environments?

I think it's a question of who your autocrat is. >> Well, I mean, yeah, >> and where which side they >> I think the struggle I've also had as well is is because I've I've had these conversations about, you know, what does the decline and collapse of of the Roman Empire look like as it relates to America. And I think that the struggle I have is once again history is not like that I guess being from the ' 80s that map in the mall that says you are here. >> It is a lot of things that that do rhyme but they don't exactly repeat.

And I think when we look at our political system we see parts of the fall of the republic >> which have different solutions >> than the parts of the fall of the empire that we also see happening at the same time which have very different solutions. And I think because if we look at it um when I talk about the Roman pattern I talk about three things happening with the collapse of the Roman Empire. The first being monetary debasement around 15,000% inflation by 284 AD.

You also have borders which are no longer controllable. We have that >> and then you have a central power which is trying to just rearrange deck chairs in the Titanic before it sinks rather than do the right thing. So the question I have is if we're experiencing symptoms of both at the same time, like how do you solve that? And I often look at the Roman East for that because if you look at how the Roman East solved that, Constantine brings Christianity to the empire after the uh Milvian Bridge.

He reforms the currency, which is something that's not talked about very often. He he puts them on a gold standard, and he does it gradually over about a 20-year period. So it goes almost 700 years without inflation. So, so you have to wonder is the solution bringing back spirituality in men which we are seeing happening but is it also the currency reform which I think is the bigger issue. I don't know if there's appetite for that.

No, certainly >> there is not. [laughter] But but but you I mean I I greatly appreciate your framing of kind of elements of the >> kind of either like we aren't Rome is the argument. >> And it's funny how often I'm sure you get this all the time. Somebody will will like DM you or an editor will be like can you write whether we're going through the fall of Rome and you're like do you know which one you mean? like you know [laughter] are you a kingdom or a public like and but but in fact like as as exactly as you say and this was kind of my the point I was gesturing toward with Palibius right it's like you don't write history unless you think there's some point of at least you shouldn't write history unless you think there's some reason to read it and change >> it's also it it's a particular kind of uh arrogance to always think that the moment you're in is the moment right >> is the fall of the republic yeah the end >> there have certainly been moments in the history of the country and the west more broadly where people almost certainly believed it was the end. >> I don't imagine that during the psalm people thought that there was a a bright future for the west you know like this it nothing like it had ever happened before an entire generation of men was being wiped off the face of the earth truly had never you know mechanized warfare at that level had never happened before the great monarchies were collapsing all across Europe.

Uh and yet, you know, we've we've got a century on since then. And uh and to your point, another century wouldn't hurt. You know, I I don't know that we can securing the future isn't our job like in some complete abstract >> Yeah. >> sense. You know, it's our job to secure the immediate future for our children and our children's children. And beyond that, they're going to have their own responsibilities and other people have to take up the mantle. >> What were these conversations like? >> Mhm. in the recent past when they've when people in our civilization have felt that they were at the end and what choices did they make >> um perhaps rooted in the great lessons of history that allowed us to to ek another generation or two or 10 out. >> Well, I think the difficulty is too is is a lot of times we think collapse is an immediate thing, right?

Like we hear Rome fell in 476 and we think that everything's going great and just the buck stops here. And I think very often um I think of Gibbons decline of fall of the Roman Empire. He often says that one of the greatest times to live is the time of the antinines. You know the the the time of Marcus Aurelius and after Marcus Aurelius he looks at the decline really happening with comedus. Well that's 193 that's almost 300 years till the western empire kind of really ceases to exist as an entity.

So I think when we look at things such as collapse or even the American Revolution, the American Revolution was generations. It wasn't just a battle was fought and we're free. So I think very often the struggle is we look at these things in a postcript and we look at the date rather than looking at the experiences of the men that lived through those periods and not realizing that they're going through something that is a dramatic change. >> I mean can I underline Jeremy something you said about like it's kind of always the fall.

I I would venture a guess that it's more often the fall than not. Like that most historical periods actually don't regard themselves as living at the pinnacle of of their civilization. >> The the the the turnings, right? It's every 80 years. Exactly. But then in the 80 years, it's broken into four. Only one of them's good. It's the 20 years of boom and then the other 60 are >> didn't you say I hope we don't get into the fourth. >> I brought in [laughter] Well, then in that case, I feel better.

I feel better about like, have we raised CS Lewis yet? We're a little ways in. We can like, you know, how long did it take us to talk about CS? But Lewis has an essay about learning in wartime where he says a speech, I think, where he's saying basically like the bombs are falling outside and you're asking why I should read Marelius or whatever. And the answer is that if you study history, one thing you'll learn is like most of the periods that you think of as Pacific kind of civilized and wellorganized situations.

If you go back, you'll find people kind of fretting and uh laboring and you know, mankind's lot on the earth is kind of has this quality. >> Someone should let Ryan Holiday know that uh Marcus Aurelius was not sitting on a golden throne and musing. He was actually in the mud near the Danube with men dying all around him writing in his journal, "How do I deal with all this stuff?" while auctioning off his wife's jewelry to handle the treasury. >> Completely.

I mean, Caesar, again, I'm sorry to be [laughter] such a Caesar stand on this podcast. I really don't feel this way, but >> I think Caesar actually might have been the good guy. I don't know. >> Okay, so we can [laughter] discuss that perhaps off Mike, but like >> the truth comes out. >> But Caesar Caesar is writing a a grammar, a treatise on Roman Latin grammar while he's crossing the Alps into Gaul, right? like and so this this sort of product of the flowering of Roman literature which really extends from like Cicero through the transition into the into the empire up to Virgil under Augustus you know it's like that is all happening while all the stuff that we were just talking about is going on and like a lot of things even that we remember from like ancient Greek civilization like the amount of time that ancient Athens was not in an existentially threatening war >> is maybe a generation and a half right like you get The our three trajecles and Uripides span the gamut from the Persian wars where you about to get bulldozed by you know this macdaddy empire from the east up to the pelpeneisian war when they're basically just turning inward upon each other and like destroying each other.

And so at at that point you know you you do start to say well it's not maybe what this means is that the the seeds of decline are always are always present. >> Correct. And it would be worth asking, yeah, like what are the more recent examples that we have? I mean, the obvious one would be kind of this the America's weathering the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union. Like what are the And it you certainly feel like at that time America seemed down for the count.

People felt like there was the rise of this new, you know, managed economy was really going to take us over. And we sort of forget this part of it that it wasn't always pmpkin villages and red lines that for a while the Soviet Union seemed all of our journalists were going over and saying it's just great. >> Yeah. Yeah. So it's like I mean I guess one thing would be perhaps just not believing the hype about being doomed, right?

Like he's just sort of saying no actually we're going to make a go of it. >> Um >> we get the PGA competitor to the Live Golf Tour like everything was great. Bigger prize money chapter 11 last week. I mean, well, look, like [laughter] Tucker Carlson in a Russian grocery store is just the same guy as the journalist that used to go over and say everything's hunky dory in the Soviet Union, right? It's like the same >> with so much more ability to to spread the propaganda.

And I, you know, when it comes to peace time and times of chaos, the online world and and you wrote about this a little bit in your your forward to the gateway of the Stoics, everybody is sort of living in a constant realm of chaos. >> Uh everything feels disordered. Social media and our online lives are engineered towards often the worst because that is what keeps us the most engaged. Many times the algorithms that people are engaging with are feeding on that desire to be afraid and to scroll and be anxious.

That's not going to change, which means that the shadow is just never going to lift. And we're going to constantly live in a world where people are always on edge and hearing from influencers who have so much more reach than a a journalist in the 80s. >> I don't want to grant that that's never going to change. >> Yeah. You know, everyone is so worried about AI. I'm still just worried about social media. >> I think social media is all I think the most destructive force isn't the one ahead.

It's the one that we're living through right now. >> Yeah. Like the Gen Z stare that they're online so much they look at you like we treat as normal. Yeah. And that and it reinforces all these purity death spirals where everyone has to become more and more and more and more radical within their you know sort of self- selected uh uh constituencies and we have less and less and less in common because we have less grace for each other because the internet social media doesn't in doesn't have room for grace. >> You know social media is a place where if you say you like pecan pie the apple pie guys call you a pedophile.

I mean, it's [laughter] >> a pedophile. >> Yeah, a >> pedophile. I'm sorry. >> I think you will not be invited back. See myself will not be invited back. [laughter] >> That's a linguist. >> I'm just glad you didn't jump the puns. >> That's right. That's right. [laughter] That was next. Yeah. But I I I truly don't see a way back to a common culture, which is the fundamental requirement of being a nation in the first place.

There has to be >> there has to be a set of things that we're all willing to live, fight, and die for, or you aren't a culture. There have to be things that you're willing to live, fight, and die for, or you're not a family, for example. H >> [clears throat] >> uh I don't think that there's a way back to that that doesn't look at this social media problem square in the eye and say there is something we can do about this.

You know, it doesn't require tyranny to recognize that uh that some regulation is in order. There's almost no part of our lives that aren't regulated to some degree. I'm probably the most libertarian guy on the panel today and even I am saying there is a role for for government in how we interact with this technology and the fact that we've essentially allowed now 20 full years to go by leaving it completely unadressed is is probably the greatest um abdication of responsibility maybe in the history of country.

Now, we can see that there are ways to regulate it that are wrong. China regulates it and it's wrong. >> You know, they've taken a tyrannical approach to the regulation of it. Uh Europe regulates it in many ways that are wrong. They've taken a sort of technocratic nanny state typically typically European uh approach that hampers free expression and hampers >> don't say mean words >> growth. I'm sorry. and uses the technology itself in this hyperbureaucratized managerial and oppressive way.

But I do right yeah but there is an American tra there is an American legal tradition. There's a way that America deals with these problems that we have not brought to bear on this the most disruptive technology that we have yet encountered. >> And you know what like this is something we've gotten a little twisted because the tech is so challenging especially the social media. I agree. I think a lot of our AI problems are actually social media problems.

So, you know, >> that's because of what it rewards. It rewards negative. It rewards the most extreme rather than, you know, more of the centrist view on things. >> And so, look what's happening now. We're all getting together in agreement about how terrible tech is. And everything that we've just said, I agree with, right? Including the stuff I said amazingly. But th this does place us in this position where the conservative position is like the tech skeptical or the tech tech phobic position.

That is not the American position. Americans freaking love technology. This is built into our DNA. You read Alexis Stokeville. He goes down to the shipyards and talks to a guy like a you know an average dude who's patent his ship and boasting that it's going to be out of date in 10 20 years because technology is moving so quickly. The fact that your MacBook auto updates every five freaking seconds is a feature, not a bug.

This is >> every time I log into Zoom, I can't find everything. >> Yeah. You want to talk about the pioneer spirit? Yeah. You want to talk about like questing into the unknown. All of that is in there for us. And at the same time, >> you do need to be asking about what are the constraints that come under the heading of the things that are above and beyond the tech. This is teological. This is what I was trying to talk about with teological thought earlier.

Not quite getting my point across enough. I think that like in order to answer the questions about where the guards rails do and don't go, you have to have prime order first level. >> And I am not a tech skeptic. >> Okay. No. No, you are not. Yeah. >> I'm a per I'm a people skeptic. >> I understand human nature. Yes. >> And I understand that if you turn, as I've said before, if you turn every destination vice into a ubiquitous vice, >> you it's very easy. love this point and I only recently heard you make it on this show. >> Maybe you could >> reiterate for it re it for us because >> that that one way that we have managed vice historically >> Yeah. >> Uh isn't by outlawing it utterly.

It's by allowing the sort of pressure valve of geography or or practical possession to become a component. And so >> you can go gamble if you want to in Las Vegas. And that's a thing that most people can afford to do. a handful of times in their lives, right? >> And that turns the pressure valve. Whereas if you outlaw gambling completely, this is one of the problems with totalitarianism that people misunderstand. Yeah. >> Is that when you when you use force and law to create good behavior, you have not created virtue. >> You've create you can use coercion to to elicit good behavior, >> but only exactly as long as the whip is applied.

Mhm. >> If you want to inculcate virtue in people, people need freedom. And one way that we've done that historically is is that we've allowed vice to exist in these destination ways. You can go to Vegas and gamble. And could someone still develop a gambling problem? Of course. People are people, >> right? >> But for the vast majority of people, >> yeah, >> there simply isn't enough access to a slot machine >> to become addicted to a slot machine >> until you put one in your pocket. >> Until you put it in your pocket. >> Now it's ubiquitous.

Now, there's never a moment that you can't be gambling. Conservative media companies are are advertising uh uh prediction markets. That's a >> this stuff drives me baddy. >> When I was at the Daily Wire, I had a policy that we would not do sports gambling. >> And when I left to make the pin dragon cycle, uh some the leadership team made the the Chesterton Spence mistake. They didn't know what the rule was there for. They said, "Well, the rule's keeping us from making money." And they set the rule aside and they took on some sports betting uh advertisers.

As soon as I got back and I learned of it, I stopped it a new >> because yes, there was a lot of money for it. Uh and yet it is a very very bad thing. I'm not a tea totler, >> right? >> I don't want to live in a world where there's no whiskey. I don't really drink, but I don't want to live in a world where there's no whiskey. Uh I don't want to live in a world where there's no gambling. Another way that we've dealt with vice in the past is with turning a blind eye to low-key examples.

And so, >> yes, you have to go to Vegas to play a slot machine, but if you have a poker night at your house, the police aren't going to kick down your door. Nobody cares because again, it's sort of a pressure valve that allows people to exist as free and actually to face down some of these problems and grow. You know, you you you don't gain any muscle density and zero gravity. You have to have some gravity to actually develop virtue.

Virtue is is a habit. >> Weren't we at a poker game where the cops beat down the door, you and I? Yeah. >> Am I making this up? Cuz we did we've had a poker night in co one time and I think we got a knock on the door from >> Were they mad about the [laughter] social? >> We're breaking breaking a lot of rules at all. >> That's right. It wasn't actually the gambling that was making them upset. [laughter] >> The ubiquity of Vice though. >> Yeah.

You know, I'm not making an argument for pornography, but I'm saying there is certainly a difference between what pornography meant when it was a magazine at your uncle's house or you had to stare across the convenience store counter and ordered and ask for the magazine from behind the counter. That was a kind of pressure valve that existed in society. >> The fact that the average 13-year-old now has seen more breasts than Solomon is a unique phenomenon that is technologically driven.

The technology isn't the problem, though. We're the problem. >> Yeah. that technology can be regulated in ways that that prevent the kind of ubiquity of the experience and all you know television great example. We recognize that people do need leisure. There is a time when you need to turn your brain off and not be thinking about the Roman Empire. You need to be watching TV show. You need to be watching TV shows about the Roman Empire.

You know, [laughter] >> the passive experience. Um, but we watched TV in the evenings. You got home from work, you ran your kids around, you got the kids to bed, and you had time to turn on one show with your wife and watch it. It wasn't ubiquitous. It wasn't this ability to be scrolling short form videos 100% of the time. So, I say all of that to say that there's this conservative perspective that says people can always choose >> from any possible choice.

And while that is theoretically true, it is not practically true. >> The practical truth is that most people most of the time can only choose from the most readily available options. And part of what you have to do as a civilization is make sure that the most readily available options are the least destructive options. >> Yeah. >> And so it yet conservatives like to say, well, you should have graduated high school, don't have a kid till you're married.

Um, and you know, you probably won't experience poverty. And that's true. >> Yeah. Now what? I didn't graduate high school. I did get my girlfriend pregnant. Like now what? And conservatives like well you didn't have to do that. Well that's not a useful answer anymore. You know if you grew up with in a single parent household as a frightening number of children in this country do today. Uh if you had no father to model masculinity uh for your virtuous masculinity.

If you had a mother who was um now having to do what a mother is not intended to do, which is to be the the head of the household. Um so you're getting even even if it's often well-intentioned, you're getting a negative expression of the feminine because that isn't what the feminine was for. uh if you grew up abused, if you grew up and your parents were alcoholics, if you grew up in um areas of the country where education isn't prioritized, yes, hypothetically you could, and some people do, you could be Clarence Thomas. >> Yeah. >> And thank God there is a Clarence Thomas and he certainly proves that people can, but most people won't. >> And so part of what we have to do as conservatives is make sure that there is a virtuous set of choices available to people.

And that's why I say there are ways to approach this social media problem that don't require tech skepticism. They require they require human realism. >> It's very arisatilian what you're saying. I know the idea that virtue is freely chosen, is inherently free choice, but also takes place within this thick thick network of sort of priors that build you up into a kind of person, including your past choices, but also including the family you're born into and the civilization, the polity, the the government around you.

And I do think, you know, there is there there was an old comedy routine about announcers at a a soccer game watching guys go up and forth back the field. And the joke was that they would they would watch somebody, you know, let a goal in and they'd say, "You didn't want to do that because it's worse if the other team scores the goal." And the conservative commentary you're describing can have this quality to it, right?

You he didn't want to be born into a ghetto. He didn't want you didn't want to make that choice to impregnate a 13-year-old, right? Like it's like correct. Okay, great. We acknowledge that these are suboptimal circumstances. >> Now, what do you do if that occurs? >> And right, can we have a reasonable and noncrazy conversation about the sorts of laws that might be conducive to those positive sort of >> laws laws and um cultural norms? >> Yeah.

And so for for example, a big one. Yeah. >> Easy law. >> Easy law. Don't let kids use social media before they're of a certain age. We could argue about what the age is. Yeah. Don't let children use social media. That's a very easy law to put in place. Cultural norm. >> I think restaurants should be able to have a social media and not social media section like they used to have a smoking and non-smoking section. >> You get your food a lot faster in the non-social media [laughter] section. >> That's right.

And we're going we're going to create environments >> where it is no longer socially appropriate to be glued to the phone. This is this is the main thing is that parents look at each other funny in 2026 when your kids are wandering around the neighborhood on their own unsupervised, which I think is wrong. Of course, I grew up in the >> in the '9s, but they don't look at each other sideways when their kid is on an iPad at the Chili's dinner table with grandma and grandpa.

Nobody seems to care that this kid is completely checked out. And I I was getting pizza with a friend the other day and the grandpa was at the table. The kid busted out his iPad and the grandpa put the screen down. He said, "I want to talk to you." And I I was just listening in on this and he was drawing that kid into conversation. We've gotten so used to the idea of pacifying and pushing the children away like we don't want to hear them.

We don't want to hear from them their disruptions >> because we are sort of an anti-child society in many ways. I ran for city council in Manasses, Virginia. And one of the most unpopular positions that I took was that we needed to incentivize the school board to pick up yonder pouches in the school and lock the kids' phone away in mag sealed containers during the day. This is something that polls well with kids if they know it will be evenly enforced. >> Kids don't want to be left out.

They have to trust the adults to make sure that everybody has their phone locked up during the day. But you know who hates it? >> The parents. No doubt. >> And you know what? You know what they would say? They would they would leave in my comments in my email inbox, "How will I reach them in an emergency?" as if landline in the as if the landline in the office doesn't [laughter] exist. How did your parents reach you when they needed to pull you out? >> Also, what kind would go over the intercom?

I would be in the office. What kind of emergency is there where oh my god we're in the middle of a crisis. Quick get the 12-year-old on the phone. >> It's so true. It's like the question is how will how will the young kid reach you when there's an emergency is a is a more it's the shootings. That's that's kind of what everybody is thinking about. The the studies have been done on this like the phones are not helpful in that situation because you have so many calls coming out of a school at one time.

It confuses the authorities about what is actually happening. We need adults to be adults and make the call. >> One of the most memorable experiences I've ever had as a teacher was an intensive course I taught on Marcus Aurelius on the meditations and it was just it was like three hours a day for some extended period of time and I made what has now become just my blanket rule which is I'm in the business of books not bots.

You come in and you put your phone in the bowl and then you turn everything off and if I see a screen like I do like grandpa and I'd be kind of you know whatever. At the end of this process, which was not at the University of of Austin, Wizard, a different set of of students, um I asked them, "What did you think about this no phones experience?" Expecting them to be like, "Well, Professor K, like you, you know, we like Marcus Aurelius, but you kind of suck for whatever.

We hated this part of it or something." Instantly and unanimously, [clears throat] without looking to each other, they all said the word relief and some version of it. I feel relieved. Yeah. >> And the major one, this was particularly interesting, is I'm relieved that I have an excuse not to text my girl back >> within 5 seconds because relationships now transact. >> It's in what, book two of meditations? I think it's the line focus like a Roman. >> Yes.

Uh, and that there's several passages just the beginning of book two where he he talks about the manly virtue of not having your mind flitting in multiple directions at one time and to focus on single tasks. And in that line where he says you need to focus like a Roman instead of being distracted at all times, learn a new skill. >> And I mean, this is this is 2,000 years ago. I mean, this is so applicable today. And and I've shared just that book with several people in in my Boy Scout troop because I see them and they need that and they're so stressed out by their own choices and their parents' inability to actually guide them and help them develop these skills.

And what are schools going to be for in this new century? I I don't think that we need schools to function like they did for the last 100 years. I think we're going to have to go back to the absolute basics. how to manage your mind, have basic forms of discipline. Let RFK make them do all the push-ups. I would be very content if that is what school was like for the next 100 years cuz that's what they're going to need more than ever in the AI age to be successful. >> And again, this is actually not a tech skeptical point or it doesn't have to be.

It can be a very pro pro AAI point which is like >> great let a thousand clawed bots bloom. Like I use it too all the time for all sorts of things. I'm excited about the potential of this technology. didn't one of them seemly just solve one of the millennial problems. Like there's a lot going on that's really cool about this stuff. Here's one thing that's going to happen is it's going to create by default without our intervention and without the kinds of careful parenting that you're describing and careful instruction that we're that we're talking about.

It's going to create a lot of people whose brains are outsourced into the machines who have trusted this tech for the kind of sustained moment to moment focused thought that Aurelius is talking about and that whatever era you happen to be in is inescapably like a pillar of a robust soul. It's just one of the things you need to function as a as a fully formed adult. And you're going to get a lot of people who are going to be basically oneshotted by this technology into not having that.

You might think that this means therefore this skill is now for the first time in human history going to cease having its utility because the machines are going to do all this stuff for us. I would suggest that the opposite is actually going to happen. In its rarity, the power of focus and detention is going to become one of the most economically valuable. >> Is this where the homeschoolers take over the world? >> Absolutely.

Well, listen, it's already happening. Yeah. Yeah. [laughter] anybody right that is telling their kids and shaping their kids and giving them daily instruction in disciplined focus >> they're going to be able to string two thoughts together and nobody else on the job market is and like >> well I know we homeschool and I believe you do as well correct >> and I know my my wife went for a haircut last week and she went to she was talking to some of the mothers about >> the local school because we're in a very red area with very good schools and she found out from one of the other mothers they don't have books anymore >> right >> they only have computers >> and some of the kids are trying to get >> declared to have a learning disability so that they can use the computer longer since the tasks are actually harder to do on a computer than if they just opened a book. >> Yeah. >> It's literally us Americans don't have maps.

You guys remember that Miss America flub from a million years. I I personally believe that US Americans don't have maps. It's like us Americans don't have books. >> [laughter] >> I uh I remember when when my daughter was four, uh we were in the doctor's office and I because I am a millennial who have I have phone problems. I was play I was playing a game on my phone in the waiting room cuz I have no patience left and she asked to play and hypocritically but you know I meant to be nurturing her.

I said, "Once you have learned to be alone with your thoughts and be okay, I will let you play with my phone >> and then you'll never be alone with your thoughts >> and then it'll be over for you." >> And and so she never ended up having a phone. And she had a childhood of staring out the back window and just being okay being bored on long drives. Now, I had a Game Boy in the 90s. Again, I'm a hypocrite, >> but I think that this is the thing that we need to steer for toward with social pressure. >> And I think that we are going to get that.

Kids today call one another screenagers who are too addicted to their phones. I haven't heard that one. They rigidly judge teenagers rigidly judge one another. And particularly the kids under them. Again, I'm in I'm in Boy Scouts and there is a lot of sneering towards phone addiction. So, I think that there is going to come a point where there might be autocorrection because people understand that the older kids, the Genzers, the millennials, that they're totally zonked out and they don't want to be like that. >> I love this. >> I think you'll get a correction. >> One of the things that this teaches me is that it's actually not made up that there are better and worse ways to be, right?

We don't just say we would I would rather not be a drooling, brain deadad zombie because that's my personal preference. It's actually self-evident to the nature of human the nature of mankind right that people would rather be alert uh you know circumspect capable autonomous all of this stuff and so you don't actually have to teach the kids eventually they look around and they see like that's not a way that I want to be right so this is inherent and and I think that like again some of these things about human nature about the good life they're actually the the sort of default intu intuition if you don't get in their get in their way and they are it's related to what we began with which is sort of the return of the spiritual attitude right worship is also a natural human impulse right and so we've had actually a very anomalous 500 years it's very unusual what we've been through I kind of think it was part of our process as it were but what whatever you think about the whole scientific revolution materialism stuff right it's extraordinarily bizarre way for people to look at the world. >> Even even the Marxists are talking about this now. a bearded lady at the most recent Marxism 2026 convention that they just held in Minneapolis >> uh spoke at length on a panel about how for Marxists to succeed in the new century, they're going to need to uh develop an idea of the spiritual uh the spiritual realm and that through movement work possibly communists will be able to touch uh the face of God and experience the divine.

I it's a it's a bizarre clip worth taking a look at because this person is talking about this and can't stop himself herself from laughing as she's talking about it. But she seems to want there seems to be an idea that the audience is reaching for something that Marxism has previously not supplied in the materialist realm of politics and that even these you know these Zoomer communists at this convention that they are also still looking for something spiritual and they're taking it out uh in movement work and they describe going to the sites of George Floyd and people who were killed by police and having rituals there.

They didn't use the word worship but that these places become sites of ritual. So there is this movement happening. We see it on the right. Yeah. >> It's happening on the left and it's going to go in dark places. >> Uh I think particularly for them because they don't want to name God or engage with the reality but just get the substance of it. >> You see it on the right too though with so many people talking about demonic experience. >> Yep. right >> now on the right and because Christianity on the right uh more than at any time certainly in my lifetime has a has is often invoked as a sort of tribal indicator not as a not as a uh fact of personal faith uh then people's expression of Christianity is sometimes only by way of their encounter of the demonic >> and and that's a somewhat terrifying uh realization. >> This is something I've noticed about horror movies which are our dominant film genre. >> Yes, it is number one. >> They are everywhere.

Some of them I think quite good. Others I find just totally dull. But >> many of them take place in a universe where there's Satan but no God effectively. Right. And this is kind of the I think this is the um as you say the the the mode of spiritual expression that might come most naturally to some people who are sick with secularism but not ready to or embarrassed maybe or sort of shy about traditional faith. And this is one of the things I I um one of my favorite tweets ever is Ross Dowit.

If you don't like the Christian right, just wait until you see the post-Christian right. Yeah. Till you meet the post-Christian right. And there's definitely a lot of this going on. Now I you know personally I think it would be really good for most American Gen Z communists to get a lot more movement work in just judging by their physiques. So I I [clears throat] in support of this in principle. Are you calling them disgu [laughter] but doesn't working out make you >> turns you into turns you into a conservative? >> You're don't tell don't say that part aloud. >> So if they do the movement work and then they start working out quiet don't don't give away the game.

Okay. [laughter] >> Yeah. No, exactly. This is there's a secret kind of caveat here. But no, I think you're right. Like the the the American far-left is tradition allergic. It's kind of part of the It's kind part of Marxism, I think, or part of at least American cultural Marxism to be traditional urgic. And so there's a there's a higher density of like really kooky spirituality and recognizably sort of neopagan practices.

Um, but there is also among a sizable portion of right-wingers, there's also this really dark kind of spirituality taking shape. And this is what I mean or the question I was posing earlier, right? It's like it's going to be all of that. Is it also going to be >> a revival of of Orthodox faith? Is it also going to be Christianity? [sighs and gasps] >> Well, you know, when we talk about will the West survive, I think that of course begs the question of of who's trying to crush it.

We of course have the ongoing question of of Islam and what that is going to pose to the West's overall survivability. we have China but you know that person who was talking at that panel at the Marxism conference she mentioned several religions that end up resulting in supremacybased viewpoints or you know fascistic viewpoints of course they mentioned Christianity mentioned um Hinduism and Jewish you know Jewish uh uh faith nothing nothing of Islam I thought that was uh not a a um uh unintentional omission And then I don't know Tucker's admiration for the faith, the people, the religion who has a will to survive.

You see that very much. I think that's where it's coming from is like these people have a will to survive and enact their will in the universe to have families. So clearly they must be on to something and Christianity's made us weak and dull. Well, Milo's also had a pretty interesting week as well. [laughter] >> I'm so glad he's he's been saved by Allah. Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. I mean, I think this is a a huge blind spot that Americans have.

I've been thinking about it. Uh just in relation to the 25th anniversary of 911, which of course is coming up this week, which by the way means since this is America's 250th birthday, that uh 911 was 10% of the history of the country ago, which for those of us of a certain age is is >> incredible to think about. >> Freshman in high school, >> 10% of our history. But it's only to say that uh there is a civilizational struggle always going on and the west since this end of the [laughter] second world war convinced itself that history was over and stopped living as though uh there was a conflict of civilizations but no one else stopped. >> Yeah. >> Well, that's a spookyama and the postmodernists were were way too far into that. >> [laughter] >> everyone continued on and maybe that's one of the lessons that we have to learn in every generation is that uh that there are there are generations to come. >> Well, yeah, the thing about that that that book the end of history is a great example of a book being a victim of its own title.

It title was too good for its