Frontier of Ideas - US and Europe (W5wkeavKDWQ)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=W5wkeavKDWQ

there’s an old parish house that’s 150 years old and it’s been sold. Look, it’s not the worst thing in the world, but if you can imagine maybe 50 years hence when there are people who don’t understand how old these things are coming into possession of it, it’s at that point that it becomes important to have some of that preserved here and whatever else I guess, shipped off to the US. But most people are distracted by that now. Most people are basically caught up in, I don’t know if it is an exact image of it, but it certainly looks similar to the Ubeross of the snake eating its own tail. It’s getting too focused on these internal divisions and not looking at the fact that you’re living in the present right now and that there’s a future. I think in the US that’s much more apparent. That’s why there’s so much investment and so much kind of spirit in fighting over what the future actually turns out to look like. Right. Well, I mean to some extent there’s an empty space where the cathedral should be and that’s why you can come here and build the Shining City in the hill. All right. Well, I have a special treat on Navigating Patterns today. We’ve got Adam back and instead of talking about history, we’re going to talk about sort of the present and hopefully tie it into our previous conversations that were more historical in nature. We’re going to talk about Europe versus the United States. Adam, what do you want to say about yourself and then framing the topic for us? Well, I think I’ve said kind of who I am. I’m just a dude on the internet. Got a bit of knowledge of history. I live in Ireland, so I’m coming from let’s say the European perspective on this, if that’s even a useful category at this stage in that way. But in terms of how I’d frame it, I’d say it’s probably we’d probably be going around the topic of the present or the more modern relationship. I think we’ve covered enough of the history that there’s at least some frame of some already contrasting sort of ways of viewing the two. And we’ll see how, yeah, there’s a kind of weird relationship between modern Europeans and modern Americans kind of following the blind, leading the blind, nobody really leading anywhere. Yeah. Yeah. One of the things I sort of noticed early on, because I’ve been on the internet like my whole life, there hasn’t been too many times in my life where I haven’t known and talked to Europeans and Asians and people from India and South America. And I’ve just always had access to talk to people from around the world without traveling, which is a good thing and a bad thing because I’ve only been over there twice, unfortunately. So I need more time and more trips. But the thing that I always noticed was when you talk to people on the ground about where they live, you get a very different story from the story that gets filtered in through the American ears, we’ll say. And look, I mean, I don’t want to get into the blame game about, well, is it the media? Is it magic lizard people controlling the message or any of that? I don’t care because it’s not germane to the issue. It’s probably not going to change anyway, except by traveling. You want to know the world, travel. If you’re not going to travel, you’re not going to know the world. You’re going to be limited in how you know it. The interesting thing that I heard not too long ago was Paul Van De Klay had a, this is the rest is history, right? I don’t remember the guys on it. I don’t know the other guy on it. It’s Holland, right? Tom Holland and the other guy. And they, from what I can gather, they were both in the US, right? They’re Europeans in the US, right? Who were at the university. And this is a problem I see at the universities quite a bit. And you can say, Mark, what do you know about universities? I lived in Boston, 30 colleges and universities in 10 square miles. I know quite a bit, actually. Well, then that’s one of the places that, it’s not the only place. It’s one of the places that the other universities look to for leadership. Harvard does something in the humanities space, we’ll say, or in the legal space. Everybody sits up and listens, whether you’re Oxford or not, right? So and vice versa, you know, so that the university world though is very different from the world that we’ll say I’m used to, because I didn’t go to university. I didn’t get indoctrinated into their little cult. And so, and I’m so glad I did. Now, looking back, I feel like a genius. Like, wow, man, did I dodge a bullet there, right? But the thing that I noticed was when they talk about Europe, they’re not talking about the place that my friends in Europe are talking about. And I’m like, these are just two different places. So what they were saying was, oh, yeah, all the Americans, you know, you know, realizing that things are messy in Europe and, you know, not making the connection. And I’m like, nobody outside of the universities thinks that Europe is bad. They all think Europe is awesome and perfect. Like, nobody. Like, oh, no, their public transportation is fantastic. And then you read a book, like, especially if you were like, oh, London, and they’ve got the tube and all this great stuff. And they’ve got all these trains, right? And then you read autobiography of Richard Branson. And he’s talking in one of his books about trying to make safer, cheaper trains for the British government and them not letting him. And it’s like, what? And it’s like, yeah. And then you go there and you find out what a mess the trains are. And you’re like, oh, man, this is pretty messy. No, it’s not to say that they don’t have better trains or more trains or any of that. But wow, it isn’t anywhere near as smooth as the US train system is by far. We may have less of it, but we’ve got it way more organized because we started that. We started that whole thing. Right. Because you don’t have the opportunity to plan your cities. Well, plus you don’t need time zones in Europe. Yeah. You’ve only got a three hour spread across the whole place. That’s true. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And most of those places weren’t trading with each other because there wasn’t a big, you know, but about us, we’ve got one country that spans three time zones, one country. And then you’ve got these rail systems that go all the way across. Right. And that’s part of just to give a historical context, part of what happened was we went from shipping being the big shipping by boat being the big thing right off the coasts to shipping internal over canals. That was the part of the US industrial resolution was canals. Right. And how they interface is sort of the bridge between the industrial revolution and everything that came before and then rail. So the way that the Vanderbilt’s got wealthy is Cornelius Vanderbilt had a shipping business. In fact, most of it was sailing vessels around outside of New York City. So that was all his shipping was in the New York City area. And he sold that business at the top, at the very top and bought into railroads in the beginning. And that’s how the Vanderbilt’s made all their money. And they were one of the wealthiest families of all time right behind the Rockefellers, if memory serves. So you have this whole legacy of timing and clocks and time zones coming out of the US that Europe’s actually following. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think some of it has precedence in Napoleon’s time, the way we get the system of road traffic and all of that. I know, I think this is kind of slightly apocryphal, but it’s basically the side that the army ends up marching on. But it eventually becomes legislated basically later on. And I think, yeah, the US definitely had a greater need for rail. And just because of the nature of, I mean, and it’s a landmass which is largely open to that as well. I mean, if you have large flat spaces, whereas you’ve got quite a bit of distance between places and not many mountain ranges, you do have mountain ranges. Whereas if you think about even Western Europe, you have the Alps, you have the Pyrenees, basically the space between most modern European nations, there are some either hills, which are significant to train, you have to bore tunnels, or it’s something like the Alps where, yeah, I mean, you need a lot of engineering to even get that far in the first place. Yeah. And I think too, there was expansion. So Europe’s not expanding at this point, right? They’re consolidating around cities, which is good because you need to farmland. You shouldn’t be expanding into your farmland. That’s not good. It’s actually one of the big complaints when I was growing up here was like, oh, the farms are getting taken over by developers and they’re building houses. It’s like, yeah, but we do all our farming in the middle of the United States. And I live in New England, so who cares? I think it’s not profitable to farm in New England anyway, probably is now with all the food prices. But yeah, we don’t understand these. These are not little differences, right? Expansion is a big deal, right? Rail’s a big deal when you go straight across the middle of the United States all the way from one range of mountains to another, right? And we don’t kind of appreciate that. And yeah, I mean, we’re sort of small building in the US. We’re building, we’re making sort of these small super achievements, right? Because, you know, the canal systems, right? Especially the Erie Canal, right? Which actually does go across mountains. And that was the big challenge was getting it on the other side of the mountains, right? You get to the river. That was a big achievement, a big engineering achievement. But it’s not like there’s a hundred of those. You just need to bridge the Great Lakes, right? And then problem solved. Right. And right. We’re using a lot of the existing infrastructure there, right? And yeah, once you reach the Great Lakes and you get to the ocean, not through Canada, basically, right? Not up the St. Lawrence. And because the St. Lawrence is a problem, that changes everything. Like everything changes immediately. So yeah, it’s kind of a big deal. And then having a rail hub in something like Chicago, which again is right on the Great Lakes, right? That’s a big deal because now you can go south, you can go east and west, right? And that becomes like the hub for things like Butcherice, right? Because all the cattle go through there and things like that. It’s crazy. It’s crazy. Whereas in Europe, it’s all consolidating around the cities and leaving the sort of the pristine land pristine, right? And then that spawns the same sort of habit over here. So in Boston, for example, they had a, I think it’s the Walnut Grove Cemetery. I think that’s what it is. There’s a famous cemetery, I think it’s in Newton, Massachusetts, with somewhere a mass. And then that spawns this whole idea that Europe already had, which is preserved space, preservation of land, because we didn’t have preservation of land. And then it became- We got so much of it. Right. Right. Well, we didn’t need to preserve any of it. There were only a few people here and, you know, smallpox had already wiped out most of the native population. It’s not war that did it. Smallpox wiped out most of them long before settlers were here. And we’ve got all this land, right? And then Europe has all this preservation. And then they bring that over because of course, everybody’s here, pretty much Europeans, unless they were natives, right? And then what happens is New York City copies this sort of upper class. And this is really where it comes in, right? Because it’s the upper class and what they are emulating. So the upper class in Boston at the turn of the century is stealing stuff from Europe left, right, and center, right? As the European countries are running in trouble, right? So the states are being sold off, whole buildings are being moved brick by brick across the ocean, like people don’t realize this, right? Yeah. Yeah. There’s whole museums, like the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, which is the best museum in the world by far. It’s her house. And in the middle of the house is open. And then it’s got a skylight made of, you know, metal trusses that are all, you know, corroded from the early 1900s or whenever it was built, right? And in the middle is a garden. It’s wide open. And it’s like a four story building. Another one of that is London Bridge, the old London Bridge. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We stole the London Bridge. We’ll take anything. Fair enough. Fair enough. Right. So we’re trying to import the history over, right? And the art in some, to some extent. And so the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is filled with all kinds of wacky art. Like really none of it makes any sense. No. It’s all put together nicely. I mean, she curated it. But I mean, she had people over there grabbing artwork from Europe and shipping it over. And so there’s mosaics and there’s Roman bathtubs and all kinds of crazy and all kinds of paintings. The paintings are gorgeous. Yeah. If you ever get over here, Adam, you’re going to go to the Isabella Stewart Gardner. In fact, let me know. I’ll find a way. We’ll get together. I’d love to take you through that museum. It is awesome. They’ve changed it in recent years. But you can, so you can see the sort of history of America following Europe, right? Because they’re actually like just trying to import some Europe. Let’s get some Europe in here quick. Right? So there is this, there is this expectation of the upper class that that’s what, that’s what should be done. Right? And then at some point, and you’ll have to tell me where, because I don’t know, right? It flips. And then suddenly the Europeans are looking to America and trying to import stuff from there. But the interesting thing to me about this particular podcast was here’s these two guys who were in academia talking about, well, you know, the academics realize the problems of Europe and they’re not, but that does not reflect the people. When I talk to people, they’re like, oh, we need to be more like Europe. And then I explained to them what you mean, like France that has 75% of their power nuclear. And they don’t believe me. They think I’m lying. I’m like, no, no, I’ll go look it up. And then because they don’t like that, like nuclear is the worst thing ever. Like there’s nothing could be worse than nuclear power because Hiroshima or something. I don’t, I don’t know their logic. It doesn’t make any sense. But at some point it kind of flips. Right? And then, so we think that we’re following a vision of Europe. It’s this pure thing where there’s no nuclear power in France and forget about it being the primary power mode. Right. But also things like rail, right. Things like, oh, you can just get around. It’s really easy. And then I did this seven hour stream last Friday. And in it, this woman, Elizabeth was talking about being, you know, trying to get around and not being able to get around because it was a rail strike. Yeah. There’s the contrast. I mean, I think we’ve identified one major contrast just in terms of space before getting onto the attitudes, I guess, is the contrast, at least with an immediate one, is America is still frontier territory. Maybe not even just fit like geographically, but, you know, kind of also in the world of forms and ideas, it’s frontier territory. Whereas Europe, I mean, in terms of the last geographic frontier in Europe is actually kind of around the Russian step. And the Russians have done a good job on bridging that. But largely it’s Europe. I mean, I make this joke about Ireland because it’s, and it just struck me one of the days, this is unique to Ireland, but I think you can use a general rule of thumb to sort of extrapolate to the rest of the European continent. Ireland is one big farm. There are no wolves in Ireland. There haven’t been wolves in Ireland. There haven’t been wolves in Ireland since the 1700s. Right? We have no sort of, you know, we don’t have earthquakes. We don’t have tsunamis. You know, the worst thing that happens here is that the river floods occasionally and we have a lot of rain. You can make a similar argument for much of the rest of Europe. It’s not like there isn’t any wild territory, but if you go to the old western part of the Roman Empire, you see that a lot of that is quite well domesticated. And if you go to the Fertile Crescent and Turkey and all that, that’s been inhabited for so long. But in the US, you have all of that frontier territory. So you have, it’s still being, the US is still trying to be made a home in some sense, whereas Europe is largely, it’s like, well, it’s not a question of how do we build the house. It’s, okay, well, we’d like to move these things here because there’s stuff piling up over there and we need this, we need to make this, maintain this as a livable space. I like that idea that you’re making a relationship between the geographical frontier and the frontier of ideas. Right? Because yeah, at some point, the ideal for the ideas, for the new ideas, is no longer the Royal Society. Yes. Right. And it’s not just that because a bunch of things flip. So little known fact, while it was done in France first, it wasn’t done particularly well, the sewerage system. So the first viable, well thought out sewerage system is actually in Boston, Massachusetts. I didn’t even know this until a few years ago. I was stunned. What? And it’s around Beacon Hill. And so Beacon Hill in Boston’s got all this special connotation because that is the shining city on the hill. Like actually for the crazy Puritans at the time, that was a hill and that’s where the Capitol building is. And it’s got a golden dome on top and the whole nine yards. And all the wealthy people to this day live on Beacon Hill. It’s a beautiful place. It’s got Boston Commons at the base and yeah, oh, it’s gorgeous. Yeah, I could never afford to live there, but I had some clients on Beacon Hill. So I’ve been in some of the brownstones and stuff on top of the hill. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Older houses. And how old would you say they are? Just out of curiosity. Because I’d be curious. 17s and 1800s. Some of them are 1700s. No, it’s not bad. It’s not bad. But I mean, that’s the second oldest settlement, right? Pretty much is that area. Not really. It’s Plymouth, but Boston was like, that’s the, it’s probably the second or third oldest city, right? It might be Charleston, South Carolina, actually, ironically, where I live now might be a little bit older. And cities, modern cities, because there’s a lot of debate over whether or not something that’s occupied three months a year for the purpose of government is a city, because then that would place it in the Virginia and North Carolina area, I think. But that’s Colin Woodard, American Nations. Great book. Kevin read that book. That’s a great book. You’ll understand so much. I learned so much about US history. And I’m angry ever since because I’m like, I should have been taught all this. Why did you talk to us? It’s relatively new way of looking at things. And that’s the thing, we gain new perspective over time. But this sewerage system is for the wealthy on Beacon Hill. And because it’s Beacon Hill, and stuff flows down, and they built all this pipeline system, and it floats out through Quincy, which is quite a distance, especially back on the day. Boston and Quincy are not that close. I think it’s 12 miles or something to North Quincy. So you can see this. And then what else are they doing? Well, they’re building up Boston by steam rail. So it’s a steam shovel on a rail system. It’s chomping down mountains about, what is that? That’s 16 miles out of the city. So about 16 miles out of the city, somewhere in that range, and then taking it on rail and dumping it in the swamp at the base of Beacon Hill and extending the city. That’s the back bay, roughly speaking. So at some point, you have this switch because now we’re the ones doing the innovative stuff in terms of ideas and implementation of ideas within the geography, whether that’s long train systems, or it’s sewerage systems, right? Then I think London was the next one to copy that, and they copied our system. So yeah, there’s all this weird innovation swapping going on in the frontier of ideas. I like the way you framed that. Yeah, I think it’s necessary to make that distinction because it’s, and I don’t think it’s not that, for instance, people in Europe aren’t more innovative. In fact, all the innovative ones go to America because people are willing to put the money forward, whereas when you have the problem of maintaining a livable space in Europe, things pile up. They’re more, let’s say, and I mean this in the old sense of the word, economical decisions, right? The good running of a household rather than, let’s say, technological or engineering sort of decisions, right? Which you can play around with. I mean, that Beacon Hill, what you’re describing to be there, kind of put me in mind of the old Roman city, right? The rich people living on the Capitoline Hill or something like that, and having a very well run sewage system, which you do have in Europe, but of course, it’s harder to make something like that new when you’re built on the old Roman ruins and you have houses stacked so close together, and you don’t have just an open space to try something new. And if there is an open space to try something new, you’re going to have about 15 or 16 different people, maybe not all of them even very innovative, trying to get their idea put down. Right. Well, and I like what you said, too. So one of the keys is the innovation leaves Europe. The innovators take off at some point, and they come over here, and it’s like, what’s going on there? And this is an interesting story that, and I don’t have the reference because my mother told me this years ago. She said there’s basically a book with a thesis out there of something like, well, one of the reasons why we were so successful in the Revolutionary War is because, and what people don’t realize, all of that is about shipping, like actual ships and shipping. And so we had the lumber, which the UK didn’t have anymore because they were in one of those slumps where they had cut down all the hundred year old trees. Right. And we’ve got places like Maine, which has nothing but trees. But because we had the lumber, it wasn’t just the lumber that we had, because the good lumber, the hundred year old trees were in abundance in the United States, all the shipwrights had left the UK. All the talent on how to build a ship, the hundreds of years of experience and distributed cognition through time that gets concentrated in a craft, that has left. So your distributed cognition is gone, and it’s over here. And then that’s why it’s old iron sides, right? The USS Constitution, which I’ve been on, by the way, many times, because I’m from Boston. So that’s why when they fire the cannon at it, it bounces off because the wood is that good. And you haven’t played with wood, especially, you know, fresh cut wood. You really don’t understand. There’s different grades of wood, believe me. And it’s not just different types of trees. It’s how old they are. It’s how they were cut. It’s how they were hardened. It’s all kinds of things that go into it. You think it’s an easy equation, like, oh, oak is harder than pine. Yeah, not always, buddy. And it’s not always better either. So yeah, there’s all this stuff that goes into that. But that knowledge, because of the innovative opportunities, right? So in Europe, everything’s sort of locked into the monarchical system, right? Where you’ve got the king and the noble class, right? And they basically control all the money, right? And this is where the capitalism comes in handy, right? Because the control of the money is really in their hands. And so if I have the same amount of money as they do in whatever form it takes, I don’t care if it’s gold or if it’s coins or if it’s cash, I don’t have access to buy the same goods. I just don’t have the access. So I don’t have the access to the people and I don’t have the access to the goods. And one of the great things about capitalism, not that there are problems with capitalism, because there’s basically too much freedom in some sense economically, but one of the good things about capitalism is now you have the freedom to go to whoever, you know, whatever person you want. Like the nobles don’t have all the ship rights under their control. Like a merchant can go to the shipwright and say, no, no, I’ll outbid the nobles because there’s no nobles here. We don’t have that problem. Now we’re developing that problem interestingly in modern times through the government, the government contracts, government pays more money than everybody else right now. So that’s terrible. But they didn’t have that problem in the beginning. So opportunity abounded because you had access and equal trade value in the money, in the currency. That’s what capitalism is. It’s equal trade value in the currency. Now all of a sudden you have equal access and equal trade value. Well, now you can build things that you can’t build in Europe because you don’t have equal access. Right. And the opportunities have gone away because for instance, all the old woodland in Europe is cut down. A lot of it had probably been cut down for a long time. The only place you could probably get good lumber maybe at the 1800s would be Germany. And even then it would come at a premium. On the point about the nobles, I think that’s true to a large extent, but it’s probably a little bit overestimated on account of the industrial revolution. Because when you have the industrial revolution, you have basically almost a solidification of hierarchy. Just kind of, well, it’s not so much a solidification, but for instance, in the 1600s, you had the nobility here living among the people. And to some degree, you probably actually had something like a pseudo, what wouldn’t I call it, a capitalist. But if a rich up and coming merchant had enough money to buy a house, he might actually be given a title. The problem of course is that when you hit a massive population growth, the massive population growth, the industrial revolution, you have all these strange pressures. You have all these new diseases which were almost essentially like not non-existent, but because everyone’s moving into cities, you have this kind of really rigid stratification that shows itself. And I guess in the US again, because cities, they exist in the US, but not in the same way and not to the same necessity as in Europe. And if you can imagine the sort of population growth that you would get in the US and Europe at the time, the US was much more equipped to handle it because he could just spread out, send more people west, manifest destiny. Right. Well, yeah. And that plays into the vision because one of the problems I was watching, I don’t know where this was, or sometimes I find things. How did I get here? It was a baking contest over in the UK somewhere where they were talking about, the person who baked the bread was very valuable. And this is in this time, they were apparently doing it chronologically, which I probably should watch it all because I love things that are in chronological order because then they make sense. But they were talking about in this period, the baker was really important, but the problem was that they’d be working like 16 hour days because that’s how long it took to make that much bread because you’re in the city. And you’re right, the population explosion causes all these problems, including killing a bunch of people because the industrialization is done by humans. In the case of baking bread, there’s no machinery in the beginning to bake bread en masse like that. And they’re talking about the quantities they were talking about were so big. I was like, I don’t, I’m not, I can’t engage with that. Industrial quantities, factory, factory level. You need a factory to supply that. And it’s not a factory, it’s four people. And it’s a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny building because space is a premium. So you’ve got these two competing forces, oh, we need space to, and they’re literally throwing a half a bathtub’s worth of flour in a bathtub or something larger than a bathtub of the day, actually, it’s bigger than a normal bathtub. And that’s how they’re making the bread and they’re needing huge, I mean, they’re enormous piles of dough. And I’m like, how are you even doing this? And that’s, and they’re making three different grades of bread. And I’m like, my brain’s just exploding. I’m like, how the hell did they do this? And so yeah, you have all these differences because we don’t go through that. We just start a new village and start another new village and start another new village. And so in some ways, the success of Protestant denominations getting along in the US is just due to the landmass size and the fact that if you have a conflict, you can just leave. Right. So that’s a very different sort of engagement from the engagement of dealing with having to be in the same space at the same time. Yeah. And there was a lot of space, nevertheless, for innovation and also entrepreneurship in Europe all the way up until about pre-World War I. In fact, Europe was still at that point. And I don’t know how steep the trend was. I would say Europe was still front leader in innovation. Even though I think at that point, you would have had comparable populations. Maybe the US, I’m not sure about the population figures at that point, but certainly the US was kind of getting up and running at that stage. And they did have the talent. But once World War I happens, you have a shattering of that old order, which was probably leveling out to a kind of equilibrium stage where you had industry being able to, people being largely employed, you had people in relatively comfortable conditions. You still had these industrial diseases, but maybe, we know in time enough, you actually developed quite effective cures for them. Right. But there was also that room for innovation. The problem once you hit World War I and World War II is that you just flatten, you kill a large portion of the population through not just war, but the disease that follows. And then you impoverish a large portion of Europe as well because of the massive costs that are associated with prosecuting what was basically the first industrial scale war. We were talking last time about Napoleon’s armies reaching just at that point, you start to hit the armies going about 100,000, the biggest battle that you have in the Polonic Wars. Is it 100,000? I’m not sure. Borodino I think had maybe 1 million, but that was like, that was exceptional even for the ton of- An outlier. Yeah. A really massive outlier. But then you hit World War I and it’s like, oh, the Battle of Tannenberg or whatever, and you’re easily hitting the million, the some, easily hitting those sorts of numbers on that sort of scale. And that’s the kicker. Whereas the US, I mean, it’s not that they didn’t have that sort of industrial war. I mean, the US Civil War, towards the end, your, what was it, Grant, Ulysses Grant was using trench warfare to destroy the Confederates. And at that point, you got a glimpse into what we call- We started trench warfare. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s interesting too. But I wondered like the World’s Fair, right? Because at some point, the World’s Fair started happening in the US all the time instead of in Europe, right? So there is this slow transition from who’s leading the, I like this idea, the frontier of ideas, where the frontier of ideas seems to move away from Europe and towards the US. And then it just becomes strikingly obvious with World War I, but that’s only because we’re second generation industrial revolution. And so all of our stuff was updated. And one of the things, now we can get in some good esoteric grounding history to show the difference. So what happens is, and this goes to the point earlier too about the money, let’s suppose all the good lumbers in Germany, you’re not going to get access to it with your money because the nobility is going to protect that resource. And so it’s not like somebody from England can get. Now in the US, because we never had that, no one was protecting anything except for money. It’s just purely capitalistic, right? And that was to the advantage, at least for a long time. And maybe that has to change, right? But the other thing that sort of starts to happen in this whole shifting, because a bunch of things are actually shifting, is that in the US, we don’t have industrialization. So we send this guy Lowell, that’s his name, right? Two investors, I think it’s just two, send him to the UK to figure out what all these automated mill things are all about. And that the part of the untold story of that, not that that’s a well-known story, you have to be from Lowell, Massachusetts, like, hiya, to know all this. But part of that story is, sure, he comes back, he’s got an eidetic memory. So he goes and tours the things, he’s not allowed to write anything down, no pens, no paper, right? But he goes back to the hotel and then just sketches everything out that he saw. Perfect. But when he gets back, they don’t use those sketches. They improve on all the designs. And so our industrialization, unlike the industrialization in the UK, in England, is already a step ahead. And then because we have this freaking enormical country that people here just can’t conceive of how lucky we are, this country is huge. And we have all this water, we have waterways everywhere, right? It’s good for industrialization, they’ll all run off of water power, right? Because of all that, now all of a sudden, we’ve got this momentum, right? And so when it comes to mechanized warfare, or mechanized anything, we’re going to outclass Europe because of the space, and because we have better mechanization technology, because y’all are working on the old stuff at that point. Yeah. And so that’s the frontier of ideas. And then you have a brain drain, because like, Nikola Tesla wasn’t from the US. Why did these people not go to London, or Paris, or whatever? They usually stopped there on their way over here, but they really wanted to be here in the frontier of ideas. Yeah. Yeah. And to your point about the mechanization, I mean, once you get to World War II, right, and Europe is so, even by that point, it is so well devastated. Once the US troops land in Africa, all of their logistics corps is drawn off of mechanized cars, whereas the German logistics corps, they do have mechanization, but they reserve that for their tanks. So they reserve that for combat, so they can get as far as they can. And largely the German logistical corps is then otherwise run off of horses, the old horse and cart, right? So they’re still on Napoleonic technology. And I think that, yeah, that certainly puts an extra nail in the coffin. I think once you hit World War I, the brain drain is just so far accelerated, because why stay in a place which is just getting, normally is supposed to be made a habitable space, but is busy having a massive family argument and people are pulling knives? Yeah. If you’ve got a few brain cells to rub together, why not head for the US and see if you can make your way? Yeah. And so, yeah, all the innovation is there. And also, look, when you’re conducting a war over an ocean like that, the Atlantic’s pretty big. I’ve flown over it a couple of times. It’s not small. You can’t rely on the resources on the ground. No. So you got to bring them with you. And it’s way easier to bring mechanized things with you than anything else, right? Because at least you know what to expect. And you’re securing a different type of supply line all of a sudden. And so all of these technologies, it’s like, well, in Europe, it’s hard to know. I mean, one of the innovations of World War II was the supply line technology. But that sort of supply line technology was already perfect in the US, because we have a huge country. The distance between, say, Germany and Russia, whatever, that’s California to New England, man. That’s nothing. We already had that down. It wasn’t a first time for us. But then we have a huge country. And so we’re going to have to deal with that. And the strategic long supply lines? No problem. We’ve got this all worked out. So yeah, there is this change in that mechanization. And so the material follows the ethereal. You’ve got the frontier of ideas. And then you’ve got the frontier of mechanized warfare. And then we’re leading in country and your mechanization is newer. And that’s really what it’s all about. And we’ve already stolen all the talent because we already have the frontier of ideas. So we’ve got this huge advantage all of a sudden. And then now we, we still have this longing and this yearning and this, you know, I want to look at old art, right? We still yearn for that historical grounding that we lack. Right. And so we project this romantic ideal on, we’ll say modern mechanized Europe, which, you know, look, I mean, there are definitely some advantages in Europe. I mean, I would count France’s nuclear system among them, ironically enough. But it’s not so clear who’s winning that race anymore. Right. It’s not, it’s not clear that Europe’s actually ever been ahead of the U.S. in terms of technological innovation since, since, to your point, I think World War I for sure. And maybe slightly before that, they may have had the momentum in things that are old and work and can’t be improved upon. And that’s really important for sure. But they don’t, they don’t have the momentum in the frontier of ideas. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s a matter of space. And this is where I guess what brings us to the modern day. Because, you know, the U.S. still has that frontier space in it. Whereas, again, Europe is kind of languishing and is kind of getting, basically getting overcrowded. And things are only getting worse as time goes on in terms of to take that analogy of the home. Right. So America is kind of, the U.S. is kind of learning how to live with itself, how to live kind of, and finishing off, let’s say, the details of making the United States a home. And part of that is importing the homely aspects of, you know, ultimately where the U.S. was sprouted from. And to some degree, then, yeah, you’re going to see a longing. And yeah, there’s going to be a sort of rose-tinted aspect to that. And on the other end, Europe looks to America, sort of in some sense, here’s the disconnect for me, though, is that Europe, looking back at America, you will see this phenomenon of basically the old world kind of looking down its nose almost. But at the same time, it’s looking back at the world it’s looking down its nose at the U.S. and not really conceding the degree to which it is now being influenced by the U.S. You know, I think, Burn Power, the anadromist, had a video and he was recalling a time when he went over to the U.K. for the first time in the 80s or the 70s. And he hears the clash in Oxford, I think it is. And you see these men with the old bowler hat suits, the suits with bowler hats and everything. And it’s like, oh, I never left the U.S. at all. And it’s like, there’s the, once you hit that point, the sort of overturning has happened. Right. And any sort of longing for the old world, there’s still a place for it. But, you know, looking at the present situation in Europe, there’s nothing to be coveted about it. And whatever, whatsoever. Yeah, no, I remember that story, right, that he told about, oh, I never left. Like you guys are just following along and they don’t know. And I think part of what you’re talking about is, look, I mean, we can argue about the World War I thing because that’s a different story, right? But can’t argue about World War II. Like we saved Europe. There’s no question about that. So now you’ve got your savior and the person who is, sorry, the entity, right, the distributed cognition, if you will, that was not only the frontier of ideas, but also stole all the talent and used those ideas in a way that you couldn’t, right? Like Europe was never going to be able to afford that. They didn’t have, they’re not the U.S. Like they weren’t one country, right? The cities are crowded, like everyone’s all over the place. They’ve all got their own little individual culture. They don’t have a common identity. And so the Germans are looking down at their noses at the Dutch and just crazy, like to us, it’s crazy. That’s like two states, like whatever. And then not that it doesn’t happen, but the states trade just fine. Sure, there’s a snobbery, but we all trade and we’re all happy and we’re all, we all rib each other about being from New England or being from the South or whatever, right? It’s not the barrier that it is in Europe between countries for whatever reason and for better or for worse, right? I don’t want to argue one way or the other, but you’ve got this simultaneous like, oh, here they are with the mechanized systems that are better than ours, right? They finally surpassed us and they saved us and who wants to be saved, right? Like, no, we’ve got the history, we’ve got the art. Who are you young upstarts, right? How dare you supplant us? And then I think we get into this habit of playing this one-upmanship game. Yes. Because yeah, to your point, Europe’s got this reflection, right? But they don’t, they’re actually following what they think is going on in the US, right? But they’re not following the US because the US isn’t there. And at the same time, they’re not acknowledging the things that are in the US that they are following. Maybe they shouldn’t be, right? With the hats and everything at Oxford. Used to be such a good place. Well, you know, it’s the most of the South of England now is this no-go territory for me anyways. So further South I went was Coventry. Yeah. But yeah, no, I think that’s a problem that is solved only when the old world, Europe, takes the position that it essentially needs to, which I think I’ve said this before, is basically it needs to shepherd and help America. Now, the thing is that the position that Europe got into wasn’t always so. In fact, there was a time when Europe probably did very much mimic the US in terms of its unity because you did have, you know, let’s say, let’s give a year, let me give a year, probably about 1300, let’s say, where you have this, 12 or 1300, you have this unified political, res publica cristiana, right? So it’s even using the word republic, right? And it’s all Latin sort of phrasing. And when you hit, yeah, once you hit 1500, once you hit the sort of split of the Reformation and you have this kind of polyvalence, right? You have this, there’s all of these multiple spaces now that can be inhabited. You kind of cut off the head for some people and then they’ll replace it with whatever they like. And then the others maintain, retain that sort of binding principle. So once that happens, it’s kind of, that’s a kind of real almost inflection point where the entropy is like, okay, it’s gonna start going. It’s gonna get worse and more disorderly from here. Right, right. And I sort of see this, you know, in talking to people, especially nowadays in Europe, I sort of see this competitive nature where, you know, I’ve got the same argument about four times in the past three years, right? Where somebody will say, well, yeah, but we’re leading you in greenhouse gas, whatever, or climate, whatever, right? And I’m like, wait a minute, you’re all from different countries and you all claim to be the first in some climate thing. Well, yeah, what’s going on with that, right? And then it just turns out that by some measure, sure, they are, right? But we’re all just outsourcing our bad climate to China. So it does, but we’re not really making a difference, right? It’s just, it’s a weird, illusory game. But then I, you know, I was talking to this one guy in particular, this is probably the last conversation I had about this. And I said, I get the American exceptionalism thing, but which American, and you know, from what region of the country said this to you? And he thought about it and he was, I don’t know, particularly honest. And he said, you know what? I’ve never heard an American say that. And I thought that because everybody I know over here goes Europe is great. Europe is wonderful. Europe is the best. We should be more like Europe. So I’m like, where does American exceptionalism come from, coming from if everybody I meet, except outside maybe academia, is saying things like, well, Europe’s awesome. They have the best treats in the world. They have way better everything than we do and their money system is better and blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? And then the Europeans are like, no, you guys are all coming over here telling us how awesome you are. You know, and I finally, you know, I had, you know, essentially put that argument down and say, look, guy, by anything that matters, America’s first. I’m sorry, we are. That’s not our fault. We’re just on this wonderful, you know, part of the earth. Literally, right? The geography here is awesome. There’s almost nothing that isn’t here. There’s a few rare metals. Yeah, materially you have essentially everything that’s like the oil reserves, right? It’s whatever you want. You got it. Whereas Europe is. We’ve got the Midwest where we can grow enough food to feed everybody else on the planet. No, really. Right? We’ve got, and you know, that includes the ability to have the animals and graze them and like the grazing space over. The Midwest is amazing. When I went to Thunder Bay, I went across the Midwest and I hadn’t been to Midwest for a while. So it was just like, wow, you know, I haven’t been here a while and it’s gorgeous open skies, flat planes, the size of, you know, more than two European countries in almost all cases, right? Like I’m driving across this thing and it’s just, it’s beautiful. And then you’ve got mountains and you’ve got plenty of water power, at least in the East, East Coast in particular, there’s plenty of waterways, right? And you’ve got, you know, a nice coastline, right? And the only thing that I think it’s an advantage that isn’t, we’ll say ideal, but actually has its advantages is the weather is all over the freaking place. I mean, the weather over there is so well mediated. I mean, you guys always complain about the temperature, like your temperature hardly moves at all. Even the average winter and average summer temperature moves less in the UK than a daily temperature swing here. Yeah, so like insane. It’s insane. You guys have a really temperate climate that doesn’t move much. And that’s also due to the US, by the way. So there it’s the Gulf, which comes out of the US, the Gulf Coast. So, so actually without us, we’re nothing Europe. You know, when you start measuring these things, right? When you start saying like, well, who has the, you know, the productive capacity and the raw materials, just got minerals all over the place. We still have mountain ranges we haven’t even touched yet. We’ve got coal, we’ve got oil, to your point, right? We’ve got space, we’ve got the ability to power and cool nuclear plants along rivers all over the place, right? We’ve got access to ocean that happened to be able to connect the rest of the continents to each other, right? Like we’re right in the middle of these things. And then we’ve got rail across the whole thing. So we can actually get something from one coast to the other without having to go through a canal in South America. There’s all kinds of wacky things going on, right? Yeah. And like, yeah, you can’t compete with that. You got all these little tiny European countries. Like you’re not going to be able to compete at that scale because you’re not at that scale. It just makes sense. But there is that competitive streak. And I think it is somewhat a rebellion of being saved, right? And at the same time striving to regain glory. Most of the fights of the European countries are over, well, we used to rule you once and crazy to me, crazy stuff like that. What? Really? That was a long time ago, guy. You got to get over that. I mean, your great grandfather didn’t have these problems. Like I think he got over it. You know what I mean? Why are you stuck back in? And where do you stop? Right? Because yeah, it was all Rome at one point. So what do you do? Like you guys didn’t even exist. There was no Europe. Europe is informed in some sense by Greece, Rome and Israel, right? But also by its own encounter with the foreigners, with the northerners, those crazy Irish people and the Scandinavians, for example, right? So it’s this melding between sort of what’s coming out of southern Europe, like the Middle East and the North, the cold North, where they actually do have some of these things, although it just never gets warm, which is whatever. So it’s very different. It’s a different kind of place. It’s definitely a unique and important melding of these much older traditions. But then it’s looking at its own subjugation. And Europe has no one but Europe to blame for Europe’s problems, right? It’s not like Russia caused Hitler or something, right? It’s not like Russia or China or India or any of these other, or the Middle East, for that matter, caused Europe to go to war with Europe. Europe had a long history of going to war with Europe, and maybe exacerbated by Napoleon and his grandiose dreams. But it is those grandiose European dreams that seem to be creating this difference between, we’ll say, the image that Europe has of the United States and the difference that the United States has of the image of Europe. And they seem to both be following that image and nothing to do with reality. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, burn power has that sort of phrase, which I do like, of this psychic trauma of the world wars. And that manifests itself in one way in the US, but in a different way in Europe. And part of the way it manifests itself is that resentment to somewhat this resentment to the US, because I mean, think about this sort of depth, the sort of the depth and the breadth of Europe in the 1900s, where you actually, there were frontier territories, but Europe wasn’t the frontier. It was the colonies. It was South Africa. It was India. It was Australia, New Zealand, and even other places. Yeah, exactly. And exactly. So you have not just the British Empire, but the Spanish, the Portuguese, right? Large swathes of Africa at that time had significant minority European populations. It just so happens that the only ones that we remember are usually Rhodesia and South Africa, and that’s it. But you have to remember the other Portuguese colonies, the German colonies, even the German Empire, the Dutch were given, had colonies, not just in Africa, but elsewhere. And how do you go from that, right? You can imagine a sort of picture of living in Europe in 1910. And there were men who were alive. That’s just somebody who I know off the top of my head, Tolkien, right? Just who I know would be alive and conscious of what’s going on at the time. In 1910 or 1912, who are, who see the collapse of that and die, Tolkien dies, I think, in 1967, or 72 or something like that. And so by 72, it’s like the colonies, you could just see that whole world is overturned. And the US has its problems post the World Wars. But if you can imagine the sort of psychic trauma of that in Europe, and it’s like, in some sense, I completely understand how people here can walk past churches that are, that come from the 1100s. Some of which actually, you know, forget 1100s. If you live in Greece, you can go to the church that St. Paul preached in. And you could go there and still, and look, it’s not that it’s completely faithless, right? I’m sure the Greeks are actually rather more pious than, say, the French, for instance. But, you know, it’s no wonder that, for instance, Europe is just kind of existentially tired to the point where all it has, like any person, if you can imagine a person of this sort of image, all it has to grasp at is basically resentment. And it’s not accepting what’s going on around it. I don’t think it’s, that’s something that’s great. I think it’s something that’s sad and needs to be ameliorated somehow. And part of that is the U.S. importation, is the U.S. importation of that heritage. But then it’s also the preservation of what it is at the home place. You know, like even this, down in my village, there’s an old parish house that’s 150 years old, and it’s been sold. And look, it’s not the worst thing in the world. But if you can imagine maybe 50 years hence when there are people who don’t understand how old these things are coming into possession of it, it’s at that point that it becomes important to have some of that preserved here and whatever else, I guess, shipped off to the U.S. But most people are distracted by that now. Most people are basically caught up in, I don’t know if it is an exact image of it, but it certainly looks similar to kind of the the Ubeross, right, of the snake eating its own tail. It’s getting too focused on these kind of internal divisions and not looking at the fact that you’re living in the present right now and that there’s a future. I think in the U.S. that’s much more apparent. That’s why there’s so much investment and so much kind of spirit in fighting over what the future actually turns out to look like. Right. Well, I mean, to some extent, there’s an empty space where the cathedral should be, and that’s why you can come here and build the Shining City and the Hill. Yes. Because there isn’t a Shining City. There aren’t any any cities, and so we can sort of, you know, in a very Rousseauian way, start over. And if you build the perfect city, we’ll have the perfect people, and then you get into Prohibition, the 10-year failed experiment, right, and things like that. It’s very much a North versus South divide for very good reasons. Call and order, American nations. First time I understood that, and I’ve been trying my whole life to understand that divide. And I think, yeah, I mean, you bring up a good point about sort of what they’re watching is a collapse. And I read, well, I wish I could remember this reference. I read somewhere, somebody was writing, I think it was in the early 1900s. He was writing about, I think he said 1915 when they had globalism. And it was like, what? What do you mean you had globalism? What are you talking about? You’re lunatic. And he was, I think, if I remember correctly, he was a Brit living in either Africa or Indonesia, one of those places, one of the far-off colonies, right, one of the colonies you couldn’t really get to all that easily. Africa’s not easy to get to, it’s a big place, right? Indonesia’s just far away. He was saying, basically, I could order anything that you could get in the in the streets of London. Mm-hmm. That’s it. Right. And it was like, what? Wait a minute, really? Like, I didn’t have to walk the streets of London. I had access to all of it. I could just order it. It would take a while, right, because it’d come by boat and possibly also by train or mule cart or whatever, right? But all of that ends with World War I. So the first actual global society, the first global structure and culture that was built by Europe, by basically the East India Company, which is fascinating history. You think corporations today are bad? Read about the East India Company. We’ll talk about how, whether or not corporations have gotten better or worse over the years. You’ll be wrong, by the way, if you think they’ve gotten worse. Like, really wrong in ways you cannot possibly imagine. And there was the Dutch East India Company, too, and they were no better. None of these companies were better. And they were also much larger than the corporations we have today by any measure, which is even more frightening. Controlled more money, controlled more by population, more percent, right, things like that. So we have it relatively good now, but you have this collapse of this structure for better or for worse, right? So they see the collapse of the structure, of the colony structure as a result of the infeasibility of keeping these far off colonies the way they were keeping them. You can always argue, well, like the Dutch did a much better job. For example, the Dutch colonies, I mean, some of them I would still say they still have to some extent, right? Whereas England really screwed them up. In Portugal, they never had a chance because they were just mean. The Spanish, the same thing. They were just abusing the natives left, right, and center because they didn’t have manner virtue out there. They felt they did, but they actually had psychopaths of virtue out there, if anything. And that was part of the problem. But even England couldn’t really maintain their colonies. And then when war breaks out, now it’s all over, right? But then, then we start redrawing lines. Yes. Right. So now the structure really shows where it fails. And so, you know, you can look at something like Ukraine, where they just basically, you know, really were drunk and drew arbitrary lines on a map and put a government place and said, and therefore. That is exactly what happened to the Middle East at the end of World War I. That is exactly what happened. And what did we get from day one? War in the Middle East. The Middle East has been warring since we did that. And apparently we didn’t learn our lesson about that. And we’re still trying with things like Ukraine, you know, decades later. It didn’t work. It’s not going to work. You can’t, you can’t impose government. So this great structure that everybody relied on in their hats that they thought worked, right, has fallen. It’s crumbled. It’s shown its limitations. Its limit has been laid bare for all to see. And it results in war and death and destruction and terror. I mean, there’s a lot written about this. A lot of people don’t know this. World War II, World War I to some extent, but World War II actually to a larger extent. As the colonies crumble, the newer countries like Germany, which is a very new country, it’s kind of handy to know, because I didn’t realize that until very recently, actually a few years ago. What they see is not the crumbling of a broken system or a failed system. What they see is an opportunity to take over. Right. A misguided opportunity for sure. Right. And they’re not the only ones. And I mean, to some extent, that’s what that’s that was some of the tension of World War I. It wasn’t that was the underlying tension of World War I. The real tension of World War I was treaties, right, with and too many treaties and nobody knew what they said. And so nobody could anticipate the dominoes falling because you had all these tiny, tiny empires with treaties with one another that not no one person could have understood what was in the treaties. And so they couldn’t have seen the war coming. And unclear heads of state too, because I mean, the kings at that point, they didn’t want to go to war. A lot of them didn’t want to go to war, but their their governments said, no, we’re going to go to war. And so it’s it’s it there was tension there as well. And another part of that is, is a large part of that collapse was self inflicted. And what I mean by that is the UK decided to destroy its empire when it got into World War I, when it decided to go down the line for Belgium, right, because actually as it and it was day one that that happened because Ireland is the exact consequence of that. The reason Ireland is independent is because once the UK went into World War I, they said, we’re going to put a hold on you getting basically dominion status like Canada, for instance. And then you basically catalyze a revolution in Ireland. So then you have the current state of things, right. But basically, you get that republic and that’s declared. And similarly for all the rest of the empires on the European continent. And but but I know I know the only one that I know very well is is the UK is that this was something that they wanted. And the men who were there, like some of them kind of were hoping for more. But, you know, there was a there was a lot of cost associated with it. There was a lot of unintended consequences. And by the time they had finished with World War One, they didn’t want to do it again. And by the time you end with World War Two, you have basically what happens with the UK and in particular, but I imagine there’s something similar happening elsewhere is you have the gold reserves, the last of the gold reserves of the UK being shipped to the US and into the Federal Reserve. And so it’s not like and of course, you know, you could see where the resentment might come from. But at the same time, if you’re going to be the one who’s going to take out loans with the US, which they did in World War One, that’s why they were sending it there. They the US part of the reason the US got involved with World War Two was because they wanted to make sure that they got their money back to protect their investment. Yeah, that’s very true. Very sad, too. Yeah, yeah, certainly. And, you know, you look at that and it’s like, well, well, what what can you say for the old world in that in that instance, it was it got greedy and it was and made itself decrepit because of it. And, you know, yeah, there you go. Like there’s there’s the current state of things. And so post World War Two, what you have is you have base US bases in Germany, but essentially a large part of the European continent is occupied, but not in the same way as conventionally, right. It’s it’s it’s seeded a lot of the territory. Well, it’s it’s got a it’s got an interesting line drawn, right, which is military occupation, as opposed to political occupation. Right. And and it’s got military occupation in Germany by two different countries. It’s like, right. Whoa, what’s going on here? Right. And it’s all this is all new experiment. No one ever did that before in that way, because previous occupations say the Mongol hordes, what did they do? Well, they took over the kingship. Right. They were like, right. And they weren’t moving large numbers of people in. They just replaced the royal family and said, I was just going to leave your country and you’re going to pay us and everything’s going to be fine. And then they lived in exile, but in luxurious, luxurious exile with titles. Right. And they were very fair rulers, actually. Right. But they they weren’t doing military occupation. Military occupation is a relatively modern idea, as near as I can as near as I can figure. And yeah, look. And so at the same time, you’ve got this. Well, let’s break out the colonies. And then after World War One, that’s a bad idea. Let’s ignore what, you know, the deal that Lawrence Arabia cut in the Middle East and will claw back. Right. Which was to some extent necessary. But this is also the US’s fault for protecting British petroleum, which goes back to protecting their investment. That’s why the Middle East is a mess because of oil. Just not in the way you think and not in the time frame. You think it happened in World War One. It happened at the end of World War One when they broke their promises that they had the British government had given Lawrence Arabia the ability to cut his own treaties. So to get the war done. And he did. And the UK betrayed the Middle East. And they used the US and forced that. And that because now we’re the military occupiers from World War One on actually. Right. In some sense. So yeah, there’s a big there’s a big problem there. Yeah. In some sense, World War One, what we did didn’t work. We figured Europe would calm down and figure it out. And of course, they didn’t. And now we have to militarily occupy. Just keep the keep the natives in check all the sudden. Right. With this new method of military occupation where we’re not interfering with the government in a direct way. But then it’s sort of like, well, you’re under the thumb of the US. Right. Like all of Europe is disarmed for a long time. I mean, probably still to this day, to some extent. Right. I don’t think France has much of an army still. And you could argue that they never did. That’s a different it’s a different problem. The French do. The French do. But basically, everyone else doesn’t. The French are the only ones who are willing to try and attempt to arm themselves anymore. Letting alone the issue of civilian armament, which in 1900, there were still a lot of firearms owned privately by civilians in Europe. But unfortunately, we did not follow the US’s example in allowing firearms to the general population. Right. Right. Well, and so now you’ve got this resentment, as we talked about. Right. And you’ve got this image of what the US is. Right. Because, oh, look, all these crazy Protestants that we couldn’t tame. Like, they got kicked out of Europe for a reason, guys. They didn’t get kicked. Protestantism was already a problem. And here’s the most problem groups that can’t get along with anybody else. And what do we do? We put them on a boat, ship them over to this new place and say, have at it, guys. And what do they do? They don’t fight with each other. Right. And so we misread that like, oh, well, maybe they were on to something. No, they weren’t on to anything. They just had enough land that every time they fought, they’d move. That’s all that happened. Right. But we think it’s like some mystical force. Like, oh, the US is, and I’ve heard Paul Vanderbeck talking about this, you know, you have some miracle force that, you know, everybody gets here and gets along because Protestantism, you know, works or something. It’s like, that didn’t happen. I get it. But that didn’t happen. That’s not how it rolled out. And there was a lot of fighting in the early days in the US, particularly between like, Connecticut, Eastern Connecticut and Western Connecticut, which is closer to the Dutch, to New York City, to New Amsterdam, right. And Long Island. Like, there were battles, people died. Like, it was messy. It is not the utopic sort of vision that the Europeans see, or even the Americans for that matter. Almost nobody knows that history. So you don’t sort of see any of that. Right. But it didn’t unfold that way. So you’ve got this image in Europe that, you know, you took all our rabble rousers and turned them into the most powerful country in the world. Well, kind of, right. But also kind of not. I mean, a lot of how we got powerful was stealing, you know, the frontier of ideas, right. We stole all the innovative people from Europe and we brought a lot of Europe over here with us in the construction of cities. And we stole the technology, right, and improved upon it, to be sure. But again, we stole all the talented people. So it makes sense. All the growth opportunity is on the big continent now that wasn’t there before. And you know, you can’t compare it to Canada because Canada is a frozen wasteland of beavers and trees. So, you know, I mean, that’s where my people fled to from France. And like, fair enough, it’s a huge upgrade. But still, you know, it’s nothing compared to going a little south of the border there. And, you know, I mean, look, I grew up in Louisville, Massachusetts. How did that happen? Right. And we came from Bitterford, Maine, right. So it was France, Montreal, Bitterford, Maine, Lowell, Mass. Bitterford’s another mill town, right. So it’s, you know, it’s on the river. It’s on the Saco River, right on the coast, right on the beach. And then we go to the beginning of it, all Lowell, Massachusetts, beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the United States. And all immigrants by that point, because the mill girls were long gone. And so, wow, okay. You know, from France to Canada to the US to the better part of the US, because Maine is basically Canada. It’s a frozen wasteland. Forget that. It’s trees, beavers and snow. That’s all that’s there. Beautiful beaches, but only in the summer for like three months, and then you got to get the hell out of there. So you can see this sort of misapprehension again, as we talked about before with the French Revolution, right, this misapprehension that there’s something magical about what the US is doing, and not about the physical nature of the US, which is ironic for me to talk about. It’s actually the materialism here that works, not the idealism. The idealism actually fails. That’s prohibition. That’s Shining City on the Hill. That’s the fight between North and South. And for that matter, the fight between the North, the South, and Midwest at this point, right. And then the West Coast is a whole different mess, because that’s the Spanish occupation, right. So there is this image of the US as this magical force, and they’re doing things in a way. And what really makes it work is all this trade. So what we should do is because we’re about the same size, we’re about the same size. If we all get together in this union of Europe, I know we’ll call it the European Union, and we’ll standardize our currency, because they’ve got a standard currency over there. And of course, England wisely says, no, we’re not doing that. You guys can standardize your currency all day long. We’re going to keep our ducats intact. Thank you very much. Very wise idea. Good way to head your bets. But yeah, you can see the sort of misapprehension leads to the adoption of these strategies, and be thinking that’s the strategies, it’s the materialism that’s the magic, when in fact, that isn’t the materialism that worked. The materialism that worked is just we have a big country. And now that it’s getting more full, we’re having more problems. Kind of a big shock, I know. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and the how that plays out with Europe, or at least, let’s say, let’s look at this vision of the US, right? Because it doesn’t strike me as a new pattern. It’s an old pattern. I mean, if you look at the old Western Roman Empire, that’s the same pattern playing out. Like a lot of it wasn’t actually very well settled. And that was a part of the reason that made it so, I mean, it was moved into by all these Germans who came out of the woods, in the late, late 400s, basically, right, who were fighting in the Roman armies. But you know, they came from the woods. And so that they had to colonize the woods, they had to go back in that direction. A large part of the early and early Middle Ages was actually, and middle Middle Age, most of the Middle Ages, in fact, actually, that’s right. You have this push, the settlement of all of this wild territory, which was outside of the borders of the Old Roman Empire. And even within the Old Roman Empire, it was largely desolate, desolate because of all the warring that had gone on. So you have that sort of massive space out there to move into from, from a, let’s say, a more civilized or more populated core, let’s say, of the southern part of the Mediterranean, the Levant, and let’s say, Greece, you have that, you have that space to move back in. That’s, you know, the pattern, let’s say, that’s the pattern, that sort of plays out 1000 AD onwards. It’s just, you know, it looks like it’s happened, happening again in the US. And the only difference, and at that time, let’s say 1000 AD, you have, you have a unified faith in the Catholic faith. So you have, and you have a head of like a clear head of the church, and a temporal head as well. And once you get Charlemagne, right, you have, you have him being crowned emperor of the Romans, and you have the Pope being the spiritual head. So you have this, you have this idea of this, Res Publica Christiana. I don’t see how that isn’t mirrored in the American Republic presently, except that, of course, it is, it’s not, in this case, it’s not Catholic, except, and then maybe the minor alteration. And I don’t know, I don’t know how close this is. But, you know, with the emperor and the Pope, there is a personal relationship that you have, because he’s the Pope, he’s the emperor, but he has to answer, actually, you’re his subject. So he has responsibilities to you. With the US, that’s a little bit less clear, because you have the separately, going back to that talk with Oz Guinness and John Anderson, you have this kind of separation of powers, which, right, obfuscates that somewhat. I mean, like, do you, you know, do you have a personal relationship with the president? Well, not, not really. I mean, he’s a kind of an abstract figure. I mean, he does have responsibilities to you, but they’re outlined in a document, they are outlined in him being, let’s say, the king, right, and having to be a father to his people. Well, so it’s sort of interesting. So something you probably don’t know that I actually, I didn’t really sort of appreciate until that sneaky Paul VanderKlay guy manipulated my entire life and sent me to the Billy Graham Library up here in North Carolina, just over the border. Yeah, Oz, man, that was a weird week. That whole week, I was like, what is, I don’t understand the world I live in at all. Talk about irrational world and weird coincidences and synchrony and all that stuff. I was like so freaked out. Billy Graham was lauded at the time for years as the pastor for the president and for several presidents, like that happened. So we have this, this relationship, right? And in the old days, it was always reported on when a religious figure went to the White House from any Protestant denomination. It could be anything, right, or one of the Catholics or whatever, right? And that relationship has sort of fallen apart over the years, I would argue. It’s gotten less and less. It’s certainly gotten less attention, for example. But that was one of the things that was always front and center in the news was Billy Graham meeting with the president or any of these heads, right? And in fact, you’d see it in the local news. So the local pastor would speak out when there was a shooting in Boston, right? And the pastor for that neighborhood. So not some high up, no, no, no, this guy lives in that neighborhood. These are sorts of things. It’s like, whoa, what’s going on, right? That’s very different. So you still have that relationship. I mean, to some extent, maybe you still have it. It may not be reported on and that may be more important than having it. This is going to be arguments I’m going to make later on my channel and videos about signals and signaling. And I have some videos on that. So I’ll be posting those for sure. But there’s other pieces there for sure. So there’s an influence that is not noticed. Whether it’s still there or not is I can’t tell. Like I can’t, you know, did Trump meet with, I don’t know. I just don’t know because every the reporting around Trump was so terrible. And I think that’s part of the problem is that, you know, and again, I don’t want to dig down into how did the Europeans get this terrible idea of America, right? Because it’s all stuff that’s in the news that isn’t real, you know, because like, because I, and this is, this has been talked about to death, right? But there’s a lot of Europeans that think like, oh, there’s all these shootings in these cities. Yeah, there’s no, there’s no shootings in American cities. It almost doesn’t happen, except in Baltimore, which is run by Democrats, Chicago, which is run by Democrats, and a couple of other cities that are nothing compared to those two, because those are like the murder and Detroit, Detroit’s another one, run by Democrats. You might see a pattern there. I don’t know. And that’s the problem is that, is that if you really, if you don’t dig into the numbers, you don’t realize that like Boston, until very recently, never had any shootings. You get two shootings a year in Boston, maybe, and it’s not Boston proper. It’s in the neighborhoods that were given over to the poor people to make them better in the late 1800s, early 1900s. Hint, the experiment fails. But whatever, who could have seen that coming? So, but it is, it is this sort of this idea that, well, the US is this certain way because of these certain materialistic things, or because they’re following this pattern. But then in Europe, you’re not even seeing that pattern correctly, because you didn’t even realize until I said it, oh, Billy Graham was the pastor of the presidents. Like he, every new president, he was there for the inaugurations and stuff like that. Like, and he would advise them and he’d get on the phone and they would report on it in the news. So it’s not like there’s no spiritual guidance coming from spiritual figures. It’s just that it’s not one spiritual figure. And I would argue that slightly better, distributed cognition, you know, multiple perspectives. I’m like a ton of arguments on that if you need me to, but I mean, you don’t, but the audience probably doesn’t, much less on my channel. All my videos are awesome. Jesse told me the other day that my old videos are gold. Yes, thank you. Too bad I changed my form. I do like the older videos. I do, I do. It’s, they’re always handy to come back to. Nobody, nobody tells me these things. All right. Well, that’s good to know. We got two votes. Okay. Two votes from important people that are overseas, no less, which is really good. Cause actually that was the more the audience I was going for was like trying to engender understanding between people who don’t get it. And I would argue that the people in the U.S. we’ll say below a certain age, have the same blind spots as the Europeans. Cause you’re getting their information from the same source somehow. I haven’t quite figured it out. I’m not going to make a claim. I haven’t quite figured that out, but it certainly looks that way to me, right? So the hatred of Trump in Europe and the hatred of Trump in the U.S. looks exactly the same and seems to be for exactly the same false reasons. You know, there might be legitimate reasons to hate Trump. I’m not saying there aren’t reasons to hate him, but the projections that were out there, and this is very much what we’re trying to talk about is projection. The projections that were out there looked mysteriously identical to me. And that always worries me. Right. So, I mean, you can make arguments about something like the second Iraq war, which I have a video on by the way, coming out soon as soon as I can get my editor to help me out here. The view in Europe about the Iraq war is totally different from the view in the U.S. about the Iraq war. But the view on Trump is totally the same between Australia and the UK and most of the Europeans I have talked to and the U.S. And that never happens. So it’s like, oh wow, what’s going on? You know, you should be, there should be different perspectives and different understandings about this situation. And there aren’t. And it’s the same with, you know, different political situations, right? Like the situation in Ukraine and the tensions in Israel and things like that. Right. They aren’t the same stories, even when they lead to the same conclusions. So there is some projecting going on there. Now, the projection might be accurate, real and important, right? It might just be you’re paying attention differently. But I think in the case of Europe and the U.S., largely the U.S.’s impression of what’s going on in Europe and how Europe works, why, what’s good about Europe and what’s bad about Europe is vastly different from the reality and vice versa. Right. The impressions of Europe on the U.S. are completely disconnected from what’s actually going on here. And I think that was so part of the seven hour live stream was talking about art and, you know, all the Europeans have the art. And my point was, yeah, and you got a bunch of zombies in Edinburgh. Edinburgh is gorgeous. It is gorgeous. One of the top most pretty cities in Europe. I mean, yeah, it’s not number three, but it’s also not near the bottom and it’s not near the middle. It’s way up there because, you know, you got volcano, a hill with a castle on it and an ocean. And, you know, I mean, it’s just beautiful buildings everywhere. Right. There was that whole revival over there, right. And they started building stuff and then they built monstrosities up Colton Hill, which is a monstrosity. But yeah, it’s a town anyway, I guess. So, you know, you have this flourishing, but it doesn’t see the art, even though it’s old art in that case, for the most part, except the Scottish Parliament building, which should be burned to the ground immediately. You know, a lot of it is not holding against the zombies. And so you have a bunch of zombies walking around, literally looking like this. There’s a volcano right over there and you’re staring at the ground. Like, what do you, or across the ground, like, what are you doing? You know, there’s rainbows everywhere every 10 seconds. Like, what do you, why are you, why are you looking down? You don’t even, like you don’t even need the buildings. Like just the weather produces, you know, nine rainbows on my train trip from Inverness, you know, like, wow, nine, nine, nine in four hours. Like that wasn’t all the rainbows of the day. That was just like nine rainbows in four hours on one train trip. It’s like amazing. I don’t think I had seen much more than 12 rainbows in my life up until that point. So for me, that was just like overwhelming, right? So it’s not the beauty because that’s not what, that’s not what’s, it may be what the last vestige was holding Europe together. That’s possible. I don’t know. But there is this image that we have and we’re desperately trying to figure out why Europe isn’t suffering from what the U.S. is suffering from in some ways. But my argument is no, no, no, no, Europe’s in way worse shape along the same sorts of measures. And I don’t know why people don’t see that, you know, because when you talk to them about like the yellow vests or something, they don’t, A, they don’t know what you’re talking about. They don’t understand that there are protests that shut down the entire transportation system and hold people get trapped in countries because they can’t get to the airport. It’s not possible. They don’t even understand that, right? Because that’s not, there’s big people here. So we had a big airline shut down recently over, well there were a couple, unfortunately. This is not a good sign for infrastructure. But one of them was over some storms and the IT systems actually got overwhelmed so they couldn’t do the logistics anymore for the planes. But you know what? Oh, I can’t take a plane. So they rented a car and drove. Yeah. You know, now, now it could be a three-day drive, and in many cases was a three-day or four-day drive. But at least they didn’t have to rely on the airplanes, right? Or the trains, or some people took trains instead of planes. There’s all sorts of ways around all of these problems in the US because there isn’t one state-run infrastructure. And when people revolt or rebel or protest or whatever you want to call it, it doesn’t disable the whole country. It just kind of takes out one part and the rest of the parts kind of deal with it because it’s decentralized. It’s odd that everyone talks about more decentralized stuff in the US. I’m like, you’re not going to get much more decentralized in the US without flying apart into nothingness. We’re pretty decentralized here. We’ve got state governments. We’ve got alternate transportation systems. They’re not controlled by one central source. It’s not bad. It’s not bad. It’s not perfect, but it’s not too bad. So there is that projection, right? And people don’t understand what’s going on in Europe, in the US. They have no concept with the stuff going on in the Netherlands. No concept. Most of these people have no idea what’s happening. They don’t know about the farmer protests. Yeah, taxes, whatever the case may be, just how it is to live in either case. How are the taxes over there, Adam? Effective taxation of about 66%, two thirds. You’re losing about two thirds of your income on not just income, but that silly taxes that are- They’re taking 33%, Adam, over here. 33%. People bitch about that all the time. I’m like, I can’t even engage you. Then you need to read a tax rate for any other country and then we’ll chat. Yeah. I mean, like Ireland, talk about manifesting an extreme Ireland to be able to insure your car here. And of course, this will vary in the US as well, I’m sure. But for here, there’s only about two or three insurance providers. For a young man like myself to get a new car, like just a small, again, the European car is going to be very small, right? Like 1.5 liter, you know, little Ford, I don’t know, Ford Fiesta or something, let’s say, right? And it’ll cost me about 2,000 euro to buy it. It’ll probably cost me about 3,000 euro to insure it fully in the sense that like if I crashed it or whatever, in any circumstance, they’d cover it comprehensive. That’s the sort of level, and that’s not a tax, but that’s a consequence of poor government, bad, badly run economy in the sense that like we’re forced to have to have insurance by law, but then there’s only like one or two insurance providers that are even in here. There’s regulatory pressure, of course, because of that. And there’s no room like there might be in the US to kind of do it yourself. It all has to be these, you know, far away foreign companies that have a lot of money to make sure that they can, you know, make themselves comfortable within the market. So. Well, but this is a good example of European projection, because you guys think you have cars. You know what in the US we call those little devices cars. We have cars. Transportation units. Yeah. Right, right. You’ve got glorified bicycles with tiny three-cylinder motors in them. And they’re very expensive. And they’re extremely expensive. Yeah. Well, and yeah, we don’t have, yeah, we don’t have that. So actually, in the state that I’m in now, in South Carolina, I technically don’t need to buy car insurance. Well, at all. Well, I think that I think the deal is you have to, I haven’t looked into it because I would never consider it, especially because I have a brand new, you know, sexy car and it’s and I don’t own it. Right. I’m paying for it. So it’s not even an option. Like if you’re not paying for your car, you have to get the comprehensive, right. The collision insurance. But I think you pay like $250ayearorsomethingintosomefund.Incaseyougetintoanaccident.Buttha{t}^{\prime }slike,tha{t}^{\prime }slikeonemonthlyinsurance.I{t}^{\prime }skindoflike,itsoundslikeaprettygooddeal.Yeah.Yeah.Sothereisa,thereisafundrunbythestate,thestateinsuranceeffectively.Not,notmanystateshavethis,butther{e}^{\prime }sastateinsurancefundeffectively.Soyeah,yo{u}^{\prime }vegotlotsof,lotsofinsurancecompaniestochoosefromfordriving.Andtheyallcatertodifferent,differenttypesofdrivers.Soyeah,Imean,butyeah,people,peopledo{n}^{\prime }tunderstand.Andtha{t}^{\prime }sfine.Ifyou,youknow,ifyouthinkyoucanliveinEuropewithoutacar,tha{t}^{\prime }sfine,butyo{u}^{\prime }reprobablyacitydwellerandnotanybodywholike,Ica{n}^{\prime }tlivewhereIlivewithoutacar.Tha{t}^{\prime }snotafeasiblething.Thenearestgrocerystoreactuallyisthreefreakingmilesaway.Actualmiles.Tha{t}^{\prime }soneway.Soi{t}^{\prime }sasixmilewalk.Youknow,andyouknow,youcanget,youcangetsmallvehiclesorwhatnot,butthoseare{n}^{\prime }tgoodforgroceriesbytheway.Right.Ther{e}^{\prime }snobuseshere.Icanwalktothebus.Thebusisfivemilesaway.ThenIcangetintothebigcityactually,becauseIamnearthecapitalcity.Butlike,noneofthisisfeasiblewithoutacar.Right.AndIdolivelikeactuallyinthewoodswoods.Solikethereai{n}^{\prime }tnothinghere.Thenearestgasstationisalsothreemiles.Ther{e}^{\prime }stwogasstations,threemilesfromme.Right.Butthenifyougetfivemilesin,ther{e}^{\prime }sa,youknow,ther{e}^{\prime }sanIMAXtheaterandallthat,buti{t}^{\prime }snotfeasiblehere.Ther{e}^{\prime }ssolowpopulationoutwhereIlivethatyouwould{n}^{\prime }twantpublictransportation.Noonewoulduseit.Ther{e}^{\prime }sjustnotenoughpeopleheretomakeitworthwhileanyway.Andithastogoallovertheplace.Andyouknow,theonlydownsidethatIreallyhavethat{I}^{\prime }mactuallyalittleannoyedaboutisIca{n}^{\prime }ttakethecheapairportshuttletoCharlottebecauseitwo{n}^{\prime }tcomeouthere.Ilivetoofarout.Right.Sotha{t}^{\prime }sadisadvantage,buti{t}^{\prime }snotfeasible.AndinpartsofEurope,itmightnotbefeasibleeither.Ontheotherhand,peopledo{n}^{\prime }tunderstand,evenifyo{u}^{\prime }reinBoston,whichhasexcellenttransportation,thebesttransportationintheUnitedStates,Iunderstandthat,butitisactuallyisinthetoptier,believeitornot.I{t}^{\prime }sstillatwohourbusrideeachway.I{t}^{\prime }sstillatwohourtrainrideinsomecaseseachway.I{t}^{\prime }snot,andthe{y}^{\prime }renotgoingthatfareither.So,youknow,inbetweentimingandyoudropyourcaroffandthenpickitupatthetrainstationsortofthing,right.Stufflikethat.Sure.But,youknow,andinfact,whenIwastakingthetraininthecity,intoBoston,whenIlivedabout30milesoutofBoston,duewestinMarlboro,whenIwastakingthetrainin,thedrivetothetrainstationwasnottrafficfree.Theexpenseofmonthlyparkingwasnotnothing.AndamonthlypassmeantbasicallyIcouldsavetimeandmoneybyparkinginthecity.Itdoes{n}^{\prime }twork.Likeitjustdoes{n}^{\prime }tfunction.Right.I{t}^{\prime }sjust,itdoes{n}^{\prime }twork.Likewhyareyoudoingthis?Youcansavetimeandmoney.Youleaveworkwheneveryouwant.Yo{u}^{\prime }renot,youknow,yo{u}^{\prime }renotbeholdenanymore.Andtha{t}^{\prime }sabigdealwhenyouworkintheU.S.becausealotofwhattheU.S.isbuiltonisnineand10hourworkdaystwiceaweek.Thosearethepeoplethatgetahead.Theguysthatclockinandclockout,look,theyhaveanice,safe,stablejob.The{y}^{\prime }llneverbefiredprobablyunlessther{e}^{\prime }sbiglayoffs,butthe{y}^{\prime }realsonotmakingthebacon.Guyslikemethatwouldworkanineora10hourday,right,whetherwegotpaidforitornot,w{e}^{\prime }retheonesthatgotahead.Right.Iboughtthishousecashforareason.AndthatreasonwasIworkedhard.AnditworksintheU.S.toworkhard.And{I}^{\prime }mwellawarethatitdoes{n}^{\prime }tpaytoworkhardinEurope.Andinfact,inplaceslikeGermany,five{o}^{\prime }clockrollsaround,theythrowyouphysicallyoutofthebuilding.Andwhenmyfatherwasthere,hetoldme,hesaid,no,no,no,h{e}^{\prime }dbeenthereacoupleoftimesfortraining,trainingpeopleandstuff.Hesaid,therewerealotofpeoplewhodidnotwanttoshutdownthetrainingatfive{o}^{\prime }clock.Buttherewerealotofpeoplewhowantedtostayandworkandtheywould{n}^{\prime }tletthem.Andi{t}^{\prime }slike,well,nowyo{u}^{\prime }reholdingbackentrepreneurship.Yo{u}^{\prime }reholdingbackthedesiretodobetter,right,ongovernmentregulationalone.Right.AndsoyoucanwhineaboutthecorporationsbeingtoofreeintheU.S.,butactuallyi{t}^{\prime }stotheadvantageoftheworkerswhoworkhard.Andyouknow,maybeifyoudo{n}^{\prime }tlikethat,i{t}^{\prime }sbecauseyoudo{n}^{\prime }tworkhard.Tha{t}^{\prime }ssomethingtothinkabout.Ormaybeyouca{n}^{\prime }t,whichisfine,fairenough.Butthereareplentyofjobsthatyoucanclockinandclockoutofanddoyoureighthourswithyourhalfhourlunch,youknow,orwhatever.Butpeopledo{n}^{\prime }tunderstandthatdifferencebecausetha{t}^{\prime }sabigdifference.Becausepeoplethinklike,oh,Europeansworkhard.And,youknow,andi{t}^{\prime }slike,Imean,ther{e}^{\prime }snoinnovationcomingoutofEuropetospeakof.Ther{e}^{\prime }sthingshereandthere,ofcourse.Right.I{t}^{\prime }snoteveryonethereisstupidoranything.I^{\prime }veheardtellthatforafewgreedybankersoverinEurope,w{e}^{\prime }dhavebetterwindowsoverthereinEuropewiththecapabilityofmakingthemselvesdarkerorlighterandstuff.Butthosearejustrumors,mindyou.Butyeah,Imean,ther{e}^{\prime }slotsofthingsholdingEuropebackinsomesensearoundthelaborlawsandworkhoursandsomeoftheleastproductivepeopleintheworldareinFrance.Andtheyalsohavelikea36houror34hourworkweek.Ido{n}^{\prime }tthinktha{t}^{\prime }sacoincidence.Imightbewrong,but{I}^{\prime }mfeelingreallygoodaboutthisprediction,thisconnection.Right.Andso,youknow,itmayseembetter,but,youknow,Europe,Europeonlygotinternettothehomeinthepast10years.Americansdo{n}^{\prime }tunderstandthattherewasnohighspeedanything.Youguyshadinternetcafesabout10yearsago.Yeah.Yeah.Thereweretherewerepeopleoutinthecountry.Actually,IstillhaverelationsoutinthecountrysideinIreland.Irelan{d}^{\prime }snotvery,i{t}^{\prime }stiny.Andtheyhave{n}^{\prime }tgottendecentinternetforages.Right.The{y}^{\prime }reonlystartingtotalkaboutmaybegettingitthroughthecopperwiring.Oh,wow.The{y}^{\prime }renoteventhe{y}^{\prime }renotevenfiberorhighspeedcopperoranything.The{y}^{\prime }reDSLtype.Yeah.See,thisisunbelievabletome.I^{\prime }mjustlike,what?Yeah.Yeah.Thatdoes{n}^{\prime }thappenouthere.Look,Imean,sure.Iboughtthishouse.ItwasaverydiceythingbecauseIlook,Icouldhavegottenahousefor30grand,literally.Like,like,ther{e}^{\prime }satherewasaplacewith,Ithinkithadfour,fourandahalfacresandalivablemoveinhousefor$30,000. But there was no chance ever of getting high speed internet there because it’s just it was in the wrong place. And it’s interesting. I mean, it’s closer to Charlotte, which would have been better for job prospects for me or something. Right. Because I am I’m like an hour an hour and 15 minutes out of Charlotte’s a little too far to drive, you know, each way. Although people in the South do that all the time. I’m just from Boston. I’m like, you want me to drive more than 45 minutes in one direction? I don’t think so. Right. So not for work. My goodness. I’d be away from home too long. So, you know, there is there is that phenomena here. But in the cities, I mean, even in the cities, you guys have nothing. I mean, I remember talking to people from Europe all the time, and they were all in cafes in the internet cafes. And I was like, what are these internet cafes? We didn’t even really have that never happened in the US to the same extent. We never had them. There’s this whole phenomena that happened that we’re not even aware of. Yeah, no, that’s exactly it. And I think I think that’s I mean, infrastructure, right? I mean, yeah, in Europe, the thing is with with with pay and all of that is that it’s so the idea behind it or the impetus behind it is obviously that people want to be paid well. And paid well, compensated, basically, the idea is being compensated for your wages have to use the problem, of course, is that that expresses itself in France basically striking every second day. And when you don’t have I mean, where’s the spiritual head in Europe, right? Where’s the where’s where’s the equivalent now of of the pastor with the president, you don’t really have that whatsoever. Anywhere like forget whether it be Protestant or actually whether it be within the Catholic Church, this sort of even though it is within the remit of the, you know, the prelates or whatever, they just don’t do it. And and part of that is that they’ve kind of they’ve grown up in that sort of declining. And Europe and they sort of, well, it’s all what’s there to do what’s there to minister to is actually. And I this is this is curious. And but, you know, the pope is crowned with it. He is a crown. He has three crowns, in fact. And I was looking up. Yeah, yeah. But they don’t get crowned anymore. And yeah, I know. Last one to be crowned was like in the 60s, I think, or the 70s. Of course, it was. Yeah, there we go. Well, something happened at the 60s. But here’s the interesting part, which is important because it’s this is basically like a patrimony of an image of what this not just the European idea, but this broader, I think, Western conception of not just government, but spiritual headship and the importance of that in the broader society so that you have you have you’re not kind of looking always trying to reference yourself off of somebody else. Right. And it’s and it’s it’s now the translation isn’t great here. So I’ll have to sort of annotate it, but receive the tiara tiara adorned with three crowns and know that you are the father of princes and kings, ruler of the world and vicar on earth of our savior Jesus Christ, to whom is honor and glory forever. Now, let me just say ruler of the world. This is this is why it’s important to pay attention to Latin. And because the word used there is rector. So rector M or bis, which actually means more like teacher or governor or master. So all of those. Oh, OK. So it’s not ruler of the this is the this is this is the problem with with with translation. Right. And but that’s the that’s the sort of you’ve got the three the three crowns, the three kind of different offices there. And and where where is any of that sort of taken up in Europe? Who is the the father of princes and kings? Father, of course, in the Catholic churches is a title used for a priest, but it’s a it’s a spiritual father, rector, teacher. Right. And then what was the last one? Vicar. So basically, Vicar being coming from Latin, meaning meaning in place of. So he is he is he is he is sort of the deputy, let’s say, of right of standing, standing in place of the ideal. And so I would say ruler in what sense? Because a ruler is used to measure up against something. Yeah. And so if you’re the ruler in terms of the measure of the ideal, yeah, then it works. Right. And so it is this deep confusion with the materialism, with the with the spiritualism, right. Or the etherealism, right. It’s causing some of this confusion, right. This cultural cognitive grammar misunderstanding where we’re over tying it to the wrong thing. Right. Ruler is somebody who tells you what to do. But a ruler doesn’t tell you what to do. Usually a ruler is just an ideal that gives you a standard to measure up to. That’s what rulers do. They they are things to use to measure. They aren’t things to use to command. They’re used to measure. Not that they don’t command, because, look, when things happen, you need a commander. Somebody’s got to organize things. Things don’t organize themselves to positive advantage very often. I mean, it can happen, but you don’t want to rely on that in a war. I’ll tell you that much. Right. Or a battle or you don’t want to rely on that when you’re taking on a project of any kind. You need a head. You need some authority. And, you know, look, the pope was generally going out and leading wars, right. But he was blessing kings, rulers to go out and command their commanders, right. And then they would bless them. There’s this whole ceremonial thing that we’re missing with war, right. It used to be like you get your blessing to go out. The king would say, what I want you to do. And they bless you and send you on your way. And we don’t do that. And that’s a problem, because now we’re not using ruler the right way. You have to measure up the expectations of the king. The king just told you what to do. You have a measure to do that. And I would argue that that was one of the great advantages of the U.S. military was they, I don’t know how they arrived at it, because I’m not a big U.S. military history person, but they very much saw that, right. And then to Napoleon’s credit, he saw the same thing, right. He trusted his commanders to carry out his orders correctly without him having to micromanage them. And the U.S. military does much the same thing. They probably copied it from Napoleon, to be fair, but maybe not. So there’s a lot of autonomy in how you carry out your orders, right, unlike the Germans. So that if you start looking into World War II, and not that I recommend this, because looking into World War II is really difficult on your psyche. So I’m not ever recommending things like that. But if you start to look into some of the battles, you’ll notice the battles where they disobeyed Hitler’s orders tended to go really, really well. And the battles that Hitler was directing tended to go really, really terribly. And when Hitler made sort of assumptions on the right way to do something, and it didn’t work out for whatever, you know, various reasons. I mean, no one’s smart enough to figure out what’s going to work out. That was usually like, that’s how they lost Russia. They definitely would have had Russia, had what was intended actually happened, right. So you can kind of see that relationship having broken down in modern times, because we don’t anoint from the top, and then anoint from the top, and then anoint from the top, all the way down to the people who are setting the standard by which you can measure, as rulers, your performance, right. Because that’s really what it’s all about. Yeah, yeah. And I think that’s kind of the, it’s not so much contrast anymore, but it’s certainly one which was more clear in the past, was that hierarchical relationship that the king afforded. Again, I want to stress the kind of personal aspect to it, is that you are actually, there is maybe there is sometimes a laying on of hands or a blessing or something like that. And that is delegated all the way down. And that’s, I mean, that’s important, not just to give the rule to other people, but to engender loyalty all the way up to kind of strengthen the binding ties all the way up. And once that goes away, once you say, oh, I’m not going to listen to you, you know, because who are you, right. And it’s like, it’s the easiest thing to do. But once you do that, like that’s when the disintegration, it’s kind of like it’s catalyzed. It’s like, you’ve already dissolved pretty much the entire thing. And, you know, and there’s not really much room there. And, you know, in Europe, there still is that idea of hierarchy, but it’s, once you get it, once you’re dealing with a hierarchy and decline, the sort of, the general rule of thumb you’re dealing with there is kind of the Eastern Roman Empire. And, you know, not to find a point on it, but these were guys who in the eight, you know, progressively to get rid of political enemies and to try and make the hierarchy do what they wanted them to do. They would mutilate men, women and children who just happened to be the emperor or the part of the royal family. Right. So it’d be like they cut off their noses, they’d cut out their tongues, they’d blind them. Right. And the kind of horrible political torture, I think that’s the sort of, I’m not saying that that’s what’s going to happen in Europe. What I’m saying is that Europe’s taking part in that sort of decline of hierarchy. Whereas with America, I mean, I’d say in the past, you could afford to have less strict hierarchy because you have to move out, you got to make the space, right? You have to make the home and to make the home a house and to make a house, you know, you can’t have everything being passed through the one architect, right? You need brick layers to lay the bricks and then tell the next person, the plasterers or whatever to come in and do the plastering or something like that. You need that sort of more flat hierarchy. But as you make it more of a home, you need that hierarchy, you need the sort of fatherly figure, you need the pastor at the side of the president and you need someone like the president to have a more personal, I would say, relationship. I think you could probably still manage to have a document there, but it needs to kind of take a greater position. Yeah. Well, you still need the document. Yeah. Yeah. You do need the document because that’s how it started off, right? That’s how that sort of, so you need to have respect for the foundations of the house you build. Right, right. Well, and also the document gives you something to appeal to when the transgression occurs. Like this is the thing that Carl Benjamin sort of figured out in the fake news virus scam thing in England, right? Where he was like, well, have we the Magna Carta? We could say, on the authority of the Magna Carta, I’m opening my business and there’s nothing you can do about it, police people. There’s nothing you can do about it, parliament. There’s nothing you can do about it, right? And then the king or the queen at the time, right, and the government, the parliament are both subsumed by the document, right? They’re underneath the document and the ideals pointed to by the document. And I think the, you know, I haven’t read the book, but the strange death of Europe is more all about that hierarchy sort of receding and being replaced, right? And that was the attempt in the English revolution so far as I poorly understand it, right? Was the parliament wanted to take over the powers of the king absolutely, which is impossible because those powers have to come down from the church, right? And so you can’t replace them with a poor political system, right? A banal sort of dead, unregulated political body, right? Because the regulation has to come from the riches and the values, which have to come from the religious, ethical and moral substructures, right? So there’s no way to do that, right? You can’t flip it, but that’s still the trend from the English and French revolutions, right? And again, the misunderstanding, see the previous video, the misunderstanding from the Enlightenment and what happened in the U.S., which is again, you’re chasing shadows, you’re right, you’re chasing shadows. The things that you think did the U.S. good are actually not good for Europe. It might not even be good for the U.S. in the long term as we get bigger. And I don’t know the answer to that. I’m not making a prediction, but it’s possible. And then you have to ask yourself, well, what does that mean? And it’s like, yeah, that’s a good question. What does that mean? Like, what does that mean in terms of what Europe should be doing? Because I would argue it’s strengthen the monarchy and then weaken the parliament at this point and get back to the ruler that you’re measuring things with being the set of virtues and values rather than the political structures or the economic structures because you kind of adopted both with the European Union or the, what would you call it? There’s actually a third category I’m seeing here. Say the trade structures set up by treaties because it’s the treaties and the contracts which aren’t economic in nature. There’s something else. There’s sort of like a poor man’s version of values and virtues. Because there’s always this argument in the U.S. over, you uphold the letter of the law or the spirit of the law. And that’s the conservative judges versus liberal judges. That’s what they’re talking about. I’m not talking about political parties at all. Conservative judges are basically spirit of the law people and the liberal judges are, oh, I’m sorry, liberal judges spirit of law people, although they’re just pure interpretation nowadays. And the conservatives are more letter of the law people. And what’s the balance? Because that’s sort of like, it’s a good question. What is the balance? And that’s the fight in the courts. And then of course we confuse that because we use political framing for everything. We think that those are political positions, but they’re not in the judiciary at all. And there’s all this confusion. So we, again, we’re kind of following our own shadow in some sense, because we don’t understand that. But Europe is looking and going, well, the European Union makes sense because we can have all this united stuff like the U.S. has and we’ll do it by treaty because they use documents to do it. So in some way they’re trying to use the government to create a constitution that unites Europe. Whereas in the U.S., again, continental versus non-continental philosophy, we use the document to build the government, not the other way around. The document comes first and the government gets built around it. And that’s like really important. That sequence is really important. People don’t appreciate any of that. Yeah. Yeah. No, and that’s, that is a significant difference. I’d say for Europe, it is a return to something like a monarchy or more monarchical because it’s an institution because it’s just not in the space of Europe to really sustain something like the U.S. with a sort of federal system. Especially like these are peoples who are used to, yeah, I think that, I mean, certainly in Ireland, I could say there’s definitely room for more personal relations. That has its advantages and disadvantages. But yeah, whereas the U.S., well, the U.S. has got to figure out where it’s going. But wherever it ends up going, it’ll probably be in a better material situation and also, let’s say, a political situation for the foreseeable future compared to Europe. But yeah, Europe certainly should stop following the U.S. and really stand on its own two feet because as time goes on, I cannot see the Europe recovering from the psychic trauma of the past two world wars still attached or reliant or subservient to America in a way that it’s just, yeah, it’s got the wrong apprehension of the world around it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then this misapprehension, you know, I mean, also, like I said, we tend to see Europe as a monolith over here, right? Until you tell them, no, no, no, France gets almost all their power from nuclear. And then they’re like, what? No. And then because that’s not true in the other European countries. The Netherlands would rather die than have nuclear plants for some reason, except they have like two and only one of them is on. You know what I’m like? Oh, you guys got all the water in the world to cool the damn things. You should have a billion of them. You should export all the electricity invest to Europe. That’s what I would do. But hey, what do I know? And so, yeah, I mean, it’s just it’s crazy the sort of the way that Europe thinks the U.S. actually functions by, you know, and the thing is, you’re still sort of dependent on us. Like, you know, everybody talks about, well, it’s French and Germany pulled up the European Union. Yeah. Who holds up Germany? Yeah, it’s the U.S. military because we pull the U.S. military out. German economy is done. It’s finished tomorrow. It’s over. See you. And it’s not just that because I read this article years ago. They were doing some retrofitting of a boat in Germany that they had somewhere, I imagine, up north or around. They were using the German bases and they paid some ridiculous millions of dollars to Italy to fashion the propellers and then to transport them. And so they’re paying all this money to Italy and Germany to get this boat retrofitted or whatever. And I was just like, wow, that’s a significant part of their economy at the end of the day. It’s not nothing. And so I don’t know what happens if we’re not over there spending that money on this equipment that we’re not using, by the way. It’s just that we shouldn’t have it there because I’m a big fan of military readiness. But we’re not using it. Thank goodness. Right. Thank God for that. So what does that mean? Like, what happens if we pull out? Although lately I’ve been a big fan of, yeah, well, too bad for Europe. See you later. Bye. Get out of there. Let’s get out of there now. We already got one more. It’s not going to get better, especially not with us making it worse on purpose and everybody else in Europe making it worse on purpose. That projection of Europe as independent from us, I think that’s a projection. I don’t think Europe, really, the European Union in particular, I don’t know, European Union does well unless we’re there. And if we pull the bases out tomorrow, not that’s feasible, but although apparently we can in Afghanistan somehow, we create a big problem. And that problem is a significant problem for the European economy. And not that the economy matters, absolutely, but it does matter. And then you got to wonder, well, if the European Union was in trouble because France had to support it by itself, what would that do? Right. And then would you still be leading in the climate? Right. And we’re already on the verge of not leading in climate, whatever, right? Because you already have huge natural gas fields and coal and all this stuff that you kind of need all of a sudden because of the war in Ukraine and everybody’s mad at Russia for defending their borders. And so it’s like, well, what’s really going on? Or cleaning up the mess that they made, which is similar to the mess that we made in the Middle East. They just made that mess in Ukraine with Donetsk and Luhansk and Crimea. So it’s not clear to me that these projections are helpful because if Europe thinks it’s standing on its own and from what I’m… Each of these little tiny individual countries that I talk to people from, they think like, well, we’re independent from the rest of Europe. And you just look at the economics and like, you are so dependent upon the rest of Europe that I can’t even have this discussion with you. You can’t even have this discussion with you. You don’t even produce enough food to feed yourselves in most cases, right? Actually, the Netherlands is one exception to that rule and maybe Germany, but the rest of Europe doesn’t produce enough food. So there’s a problem, right? And then the energy crisis is like that. You can argue about that, I guess, or you can read the papers in Europe, either way. Let me know how that works out for you. And then look, you can argue, we can reverse that. Well, sure, there’s a cost to that, right? And then what is that cost? And can you reverse it that easily and that quickly? Because you can’t do that. Infrastructure takes time. And then this infrastructure is predicated on the moving of resources out of military readiness and into green energy. So you’re paying for the green energy on our dime. That’s what happened there. That’s very clearly what happened. And there’s a big joke, I’m sure you’re aware of this. Oh, we traded the British Navy for the National Health Service. Yeah, yeah, they did. And look what they got. And look what they got. Yeah, well, that’s a different topic. Yeah, and like, yeah, that’s a projection right there. The NHS is fantastic. It’s like, well, you know what? Kaiser in the US is cheaper than the NHS and provides better care. Now, it’s not national, right? Because it’s not run by the government, but also it’s not run by the government. So it’s better care. It’s better care. And people don’t know that they equate like the Blue Cross and Fields over here with the Kaiser over there. And that’s a legacy of World War II. Ironically, you’ve never looked up in the history of Kaiser Permanente and the healthcare company. It’s all World War II stuff. Liberty ships, baby, liberty ships. Yeah, there’s some fascinating connections there. So there’s all kinds of projection, right? That we don’t even understand. Like, we actually have the upper hand in healthcare. Like, we make all the drugs, we invent all the drugs, we make all the drugs. Europe tests them all for us because we have ridiculous testing laws that Europe doesn’t have. And when you tell people that, they absolutely flip out. I go, no, no, no, there’s a reason why all the drug tests happen in Europe. And it’s because they just don’t have strict laws around what people can try. Now, we can argue about whether that’s good or bad. I think it’s good. Other people might think it’s bad. But man, if we didn’t have that, we wouldn’t be developing the drugs either. But that means no one would because they don’t develop them in Europe. So very expensive to develop drugs in Europe, too. It’s just much more expensive here, but we have more money. Yeah. And there’s more wealth probably being generated in America in real terms than there would be in Europe. By far. And you just see that even by population numbers, because even, again, you have that phenomenon of the brain drain from Europe. They’re all going to America. And it’s like, still, when you look at Europe, but yeah, still, right, still. I mean, I have friends who are seriously considering going over to the US. One is trained to be a pilot. And the European pilot’s license, he says, is better than the American one in the sense that he’s got more training on it. And so in America, he’ll be accepted quicker or whatever. But the point being is that when he’s over there, it’s like he’ll be paid very well compared with what he’ll do in European airlines. And the problem that he finds there is that it’s full of people already. They’re already full and there’s not much room for expansion. And so it’s like, get in line. Whereas in America, it’s like, well, look, hey, we got space here. We’ve got stuff to do. Well, in competition, one of the advantages of Europe is your flights are cheap. But your flights are cheap because it’s all government regulated. And so they keep the flights cheap. And they are really, really cheap. And I was shocked when I was like, what? Oh, yeah, I’m six, seven planes. I don’t care. Like, this is nothing. It costs nothing. There were a few expensive places to get to from the US. But once you’re in Europe, man, the inter-European airline thing, man, yeah, you could just travel that forever on a dime. It’s like the subway system in the US. It costs nothing. So yeah, it’s great. But yeah, that limits how much pilots can make. And so now you’re in, right, there’s all these trade-offs that people don’t really understand. Over here, you’ve got competition for pilots because you have many airlines competing and they want talent. And on the other hand, there are long flights here, very long, unlike Europe, where they’re mostly just hopping across a few farms or whatever. It’s not, they’re big farms, but still you’re just hopping across a few farms, like flying into Heathrow and into Edinburgh. It’s like, wow, this is like a nothing trip. But it’s also much better than taking the train. The amount of time used, like the trains in England are horrific. The rest of Europe, I guess, are not anywhere near as bad, but still like trains in Europe. I looked into going into London for the day and stuff and I was like, you can have a day because it’s like four and a half hours from Edinburgh. I was like, man, you’ve got a bullet train. It would take no time at all. You’d be there in like 30 minutes. What’s going on? Yeah, it took me four hours to get from Coventry to Holyhead, which was the north part of Wales. It’s Holyhead’s north part of Wales. Coventry is basically in Birmingham. That’s nothing. Yeah. It took that long. Four hours. Yeah. And we tend to think, and then that’s the other thing too. I mean, to me, the biggest problem, and I know we talked about this before, is that there is a huge, huge gap between continental Europe and the UK. And a lot of the heritage that we sort of look towards is not actually European. We’re looking at the UK. So we’re not because they’re the closest to us in many ways. And the Puritans came from here. Ultimately, I know they left from the Netherlands, whatever. And they copied the Netherlands, by the way, at every step of the way. The Netherlands did everything 10 years before we did. It’s just we did it better, by the way, so we went. And also bigger country, Nyan Nyan. So we don’t have a good understanding of what’s going on in Europe because we look at the UK and we mix that up with the European train system, which is actually very good. The UK train system is not very good. It’s very bad. Worse than the US system from all accounts, from all the measures I can find anyway. And then all the people I’ve talked to have done both. And we don’t have that appreciation that Europe isn’t one place. France is not the same as Germany at all. And all the other countries are different. And the UK has a whole different philosophy that kind of straddles the continental and the US philosophies. And I think understanding that’s really important. And I like that talk with who is it? John Anderson and Oz Guinness there that I sent to, that got sent to me by Ethan. The thing I liked about it is that unlike us, he really dug in and said, no, no, no, there’s three revolutions. There’s the English Revolution, the French Revolution, and the American Revolution are all different. And I was like, oh, wow. Yeah, that extra contrast, we really touched on it, but we really didn’t get into it. And in hindsight, it would have been nice to get into that. Something I know zero about almost. But yeah, we don’t really appreciate, there’s three different things right there that you can sort of look at and that are part of modernity in some sense, right? Part of post-enlightenment, how the world works, because Napoleon had such an outsized influence, right? And he was influenced by the English Revolution and by the American Revolution, right? And so that projection of Europe is one thing, because well, it’s the European Union after all. Yeah, but the European Union was a copy of a shadow of what they thought the US did. And they did it completely backwards and totally incorrectly, misunderstanding the whole way where their advantage was, right? Your strength was in the monarchies, your strength was in the colonies, right? Your strength was in the administration of goods and services over vast different distances, right? Through different types of terrain, which the US doesn’t, it doesn’t work that way. To your point, we can just lay train tracks, whatever, you get over the Rockies, you get over the Alps, that’s it. The Arcona, Don, like everything else is simple, right? And so, I’m like, you know, and then all that’s facilitated by steel, which, you know, haha, ironically stole from, oh, is it Wales? It was, it might have been, I forget where Carnegie got the Bessemer steel stuff from, but yeah, it’s the Bessemer process that enables, so the Bessemer process is invented in Europe and they can’t, they basically, no one takes advantage of it, assuming they could, they might not have been able to, they might have had so much infrastructure already, it was no need to build a huge steel bridge over a river, like the mighty Mississippi, which I believe is the test case for that, although I might be misremembering. So, right, until that’s done, nobody really understands what good this steel is, right, and how powerful it is as a building material, and how cheap and quick, and like, there’s huge, it’s not like it’s cheaper, it’s cheaper, it’s faster, it’s stronger, it’s, right, you can now do things you can’t do with stone, right? Yeah. So, there’s lots of advantages, and you can make rail all of a sudden, which you couldn’t really make good long-lasting rail before that. So, there’s, there is this stepping stone in the UK, in England, right, in that area that isn’t Europe, and we just kind of confuse it all in the US, and mix it all up, and think it’s all kind of the same thing, when in fact there’s vastly different cultures with vastly different things going on underneath, and their monarchies are getting weaker and weaker over there, and I think that’s the last vestige. It’s not the beauty holding things together, although it certainly doesn’t hurt, and we certainly need more of that in the world. It’s the structure that got destroyed as a result of the destruction of colonization, right, the colonization strategy or something, and ironically, the best colonizer, the fairest colonizer, was probably England, and they’re the ones that sort of gave up the ghost purse, which is too bad. Yeah, yeah, well maybe we could have a look at the English Civil War. I do know about that, considering it does involve Ireland, and that as a player, and maybe we could do that some other time. Oh, I’d love to dive into that, because I know absolutely nothing about that, so learning about that, kind of fitting it into my, you know, what’s going on formula here, because a lot of this stuff I have mapped out, like I’ve known about the difference between Europe and the United States, and Europe and England for a very long time, is something I’ve been tracking pretty much my whole life, because I saw this when I was very young, and I was like, well, what the hell is this, you know, and I used to keep in regular contact with people from England, I don’t quite so much anymore, although Discord has sort of revived some of that, and yeah, you know, you get a really good read on what was going on, just by talking to a handful of people who, you know, were upper middle class or whatever, but were plugged in and knew what was going on, right, as opposed to when you talk to some of the lower class people, you know, they’re hanging out at the internet cafes, and they only care about what’s going on next week, they’re not paying attention to the other stuff, right, and a lot of them didn’t have jobs, and it was fascinating to talk to those people, man, back when I used to do that, that was utterly fascinating, but a whole different, you know, it’s a whole different view of the world, right, they have a whole different perspective, and being able to talk to people and kind of figure out, and you know, they would ask me, Quintin, what’s going on in the US? Yeah, it’s not like that, right, it’s not like that, it’s not like that, and it really is following these projections, we think the reason why the US is successful is because of this, it’s like, well, I don’t know about that, and you know, I’d have to do a little more research, which I’m probably never going to do, but it’s nice to think that someday I would, around who came up with this idea of drawing lines on maps and saying, and therefore, but I think it’s all a strictly European thing, and a continental European thing, like I think the problem that we’re suffering from, and I know I’ve bashed on France, although not nearly enough, I still trace everything back to the reprehensible French intellectuals and their sort of casting of the world, and casting of the sort of intellectual way of things, right, where they’re trying to sway things intellectually, because France lost all of its other influence in the world a long time ago, and I don’t think they’ve gotten over that, there’s still a little hurt by that, I think, and they’re still pretending it’s not true, too, to a large extent, because if you talk to them, you know, they still seem snobbish for no apparent reason, even though their country is pretty much on the verge of being in ruins, literally, with the wealth gap, and they did it to themselves, they’ve got ghettos, they’ve got Muslim ghettos in there, and it’s just not, it’s not pretty, 50% unemployment rate, you know, a government that’s been all white since forever without a single minority representation, despite having a fairly sizable minority population, I mean, it’s not, they are not Western values in France, right, and that’s why when people bitch about the U.S., I’m like, you gotta go to Europe, and we’ll chat when you get to Europe about how fair and equal and all that it is, especially with minority representation, Europe is basically non-existent, and England leads the way in that, for sure, right, so good on the UK to some extent, but the rest of the European countries certainly do not, they are still very monolithic and monocultural, even if they have more immigrants, they’re certainly not integrating them into society in the way that the U.S. does, so yeah, I think there’s a lot there. So what else, what else you got, Adam, you get any other projections that you, that you, or rumors you want to dispel about what’s actually going on in the U.S. versus what the Europeans think, or? Well, I only have a sort of inkling, I mean, when I was very young, I was in the U.S., I was in Oregon, first two or two and a half years of my life, after being six months old, we lived in Oregon, but otherwise I’m not really, like, I only know from talking to guys in the U.S., but I mean, like, stuff that’s going on here, it’s, you’re right about, I mean, look, in terms of France, I mean, it only gets worse with Europe, if you want to think about a fractal sort of look at things, the more you zoom in in Europe, the more different it gets, so you have, you know, France, a large portion of the woes of France comes from the like the excesses of Paris and the French Revolution, and like the monocultures, or the sort of more homogenous nature of Europe is homogenous in the sense of the government and its composition doesn’t become a problem until you have this disconnect of personal relation for those, from those in the government and those whom are the people of the country, right, so the people are the subjects, essentially, and once you have that disconnect, that’s when representation becomes a problem, but before that, it’s a case of, you know, I live among you, or I own the land that you’re living on or whatever, but that’s, you know, you pay me a bit of money or whatever and I’ll take care of you, once that sort of hierarchical relationship, again, is kind of broken, yeah, that’s when the need to have one of your own in there, in some sense, kind of just as a prelude to the English Civil War, that’s when it becomes very important of what persuasion is the member of parliament, you know, is he an Anglican, you know, is he just conformed to the local church, you know, is he a, what’s it, a Puritan, right, so is he kind of more mercantile, middle-class member of society, or is worse, is he a leveler, is he somebody who wants to, yeah, if he is he someone who wants to see no distinction of kind between stations of men, right, so he wants all men to be just absolutely equal and that this is, you know, or, you know, God forbid, is he a Catholic, but of course, he’d never say he was a Catholic, because of course, if you were a Catholic, you know, we’d have to expropriate his land and all of that, as you have that space, when it matters what sort of confession, let’s say, that the member of parliament adheres to, whereas, you’re right, it becomes more of a problem in Europe post-Enlightenment, because you have those ideas, anyways, filtering in kind of indirectly by the, you know, by the French trying to mimic the English Civil War, the British Revolution, if you will, but before then, you basically just have a, you know, kind of local personal relationship, and the degree to which that relationship is impersonal is really kind of the point at which you’re like, okay, things are getting, things are going off the rails, and there’s redress that can be had there, because it’s, you don’t just have to appeal to the person who’s directly above you, you can appeal to the person directly above, or even all the way to the king, and the king has to hear you, like the king has to hold, has to redress grievances, but it’s not that it’s a legalistic thing, it’s he’ll accept petitions, and you ask him, and he’ll say yes or no. Right, like the US Supreme Court does today, and I think a part of it is this whole misunderstanding thing that’s occurring to me, as you’re talking about this, is yeah, there’s a way in which we have substituted the interaction with the ethereal realm, right, that we had, we’ll say, through divine auspices, right, or through the religious traditions, or whatever, however you want to frame that, right, so the emanations were, you know, coming down, right, and we’ve substituted that with theory, based on the success of the Enlightenment. Oh, it’s theory, and so the French go, oh, well, we know theory, we can be completely unrealistic, we live in Paris, so we can just like, gin up whatever we want in our heads, and impose it, and once we impose it, it’ll work great, because everything in our heads works exactly the same way when it’s not in our heads, and so it’s that replacement of virtues and values with theories and random thoughts, right, and this like imposed order that works in my head, because everything in your head works, everything, or it can be easily fixed, everything. You want unicorns? Get in your head, you have all the unicorns you want, want purple unicorns that talk and create rainbows? No problem, they exist in your head. If you want one not in your head that other people can interact with, well, now all of a sudden there’s all kinds of problems with that, because that ain’t gonna happen, right, and then that’s where, that I think is where it’s sort of that replacement, right, where we’re trying to replace the highest, the ineffable with our own ideas, right, our own thought projections, and that’s where the theory goes, and then of course France doesn’t do this directly, right, it’s manipulating things using the intellectual class, and claiming the intellectual class, you know, superiority ring basically, and then the Germans obviously are fighting for that philosophically as well, and this whole idea that philosophy is some kind of replacement for religion, or in fact I heard somebody the other day, oh, it was Jordan B. Cooper was talking with John Vervecky and Paul Van der Kley, and Jordan B. Cooper invoked metaphysics, and I was like, why would a religious person invoke the word metaphysics? This is, I have a video on metaphysics, by the way, but yeah, I was puzzled by this, I’m like, there’s no such thing as metaphysics, you’re talking about religion, you’re talking about the poor beliefs of people, that’s not a type of philosophy, that’s not the job of philosophy, is not to do that work, and so I think, yeah, it’s very much the French sort of, you know, projection, and or the Parisian projection, to be fair, to the rest of the French, because probably just the Parisians that everybody wants away from, and probably bomb Paris and be done with it, would be a good strategy at this point, we’ll lose some art, but yeah, probably worth getting rid of the reprehensible intellectuals, so. Yeah, well, there you go. Yeah, so I think that’s where a lot of the projections come from too, and a lot of the leadership, and that seems to be the problem, so yeah, I don’t know, I think I’m feeling like we’ve reached some sort of interesting, right on the edge of our topic the whole time, maybe, but that’s okay, I think that’s actually better showing the edges than diving right into, say, specific examples, or too many specific examples, we gave a few. What do you feel, are you feeling complete, you want to close it out? I think so, yeah, yeah, I think we could try something on the English Civil War, come back to this, and try and strike more at the heart of current America versus Europe, so we can maybe have some case by case, or maybe do them both together, because to be honest, going through the English Civil War will probably, might give us some more ideas as to the contrast at present, because understanding that, we better understand the present situation of the US, and actually Europe. Yeah, and having historical contrast is actually super important, people don’t realize that, right, we’re all stuck in this world where we’re not paying attention to history at all, and so we’re losing a bunch of information that we could contrast with, because we think we’re so new and fresh, and we’ve got that chronological snobbery, I forget who said that, I love that phrase. Lewis, yes, Lewis, I think. Gorgeous, it could be, yeah, I’ve heard it a few times, and I’m like, oh, that’s the best phrase ever, that’s my new favorite phrase for the year, maybe for the decade, yeah, so yeah, we have a lot of that going on, and yeah, contrasting being the Civil War and then putting it in the framing with the French Revolution versus the American Revolution and all that might be really fruitful, so yeah, well, thanks, Adam, I really appreciate your engagement as always, and we’ll have to see what we can come up with for our next conversation, assuming people want such things, if they do, they should tell us in the comments, and interact, and tell us, like, look, if you want us to talk about something in particular, even if we don’t particularly know about it, because we seem good at working these things out as we go along here, I know, and that’s the thing that I really appreciate more than anything else, and this often happens in our conversations, I always learn a lot, right, it fits in the stuff I already know, so you’re really augmenting my thought and pushing it forward and helping me out, so I really appreciate that. Likewise, thank you. All right, on that note, we shall see you for the next video, and let us know what you think.