The American Experiment at 250: The 332nd Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

On this, our 332nd Evolutionary Lens livestream, we discuss America’s 250th birthday. In 1776, both Common Sense and the Declaration of Independence provided self-evident truths that prompted the formation of a new nation. Built on optimism and an entrepreneurial spirit, the United States of America is fracturing along political lines, each side incapable of seeing the humanity of people who believe different things from themselves. In those 250 year old documents we see implicit recognition of trade-offs, game theory and emergence—all of which are just as fundamental now as they were then. As part of this discussion we cover patriotism, antifa, dual vs hierarchical loyalties, Trump, the World Cup, and taking advantage of breaks.

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Music: "Marble Machine" by Wintergatan
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Mentioned in this episode:

Common Sense: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/147/147-h/147-h.htm

Declaration of Independence: https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript

Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2026/07/happy-fucking-birthday-christopher-hooks-semiquincentennial/

Musings with Chloé Simone: https://substack.com/@chloesimmone/p-203727669

Transcript

1:00:00

(Music) Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse podcast live stream number 332. Yes. 332, yes. I am Dr. Bret Weinstein. You are Dr. Heather Heying. That has not changed since episode one. I'm not expecting it to. In any case, you may have noticed that we are closing in on the 250th anniversary of the founding of this fine country. We are indeed. We are halfway through the year, 2026, and closing in on the, let's see, what is it? It's the semi-Quincentennial. The semi-Quincentennial, of course. We all know that. Yes, well, half, 500. Semi. Yeah, yeah. Semi-Quincentennial of the country. And we're going to talk a little bit about those months and days in advance of the founding of this fine country of ours, and where we are today, what it feels like to be an American today, and how grateful we are. Yeah, how grateful we are. And I hope we will discuss what it looks like since you and I remembers as earliest memories the bicentennial, 1976, was a big deal back in 1976. It was a big deal. And maybe it seemed a bigger deal because we were very small children, and the festivities were grand. But I think it did sort of bring people together in a way that some are hoping that the 250th will, but fewer imagining that it can. Yeah, I think the contrast is stark, and many in our audience will not be old enough to even remember or have been around for the bicentennial. So I think that perspective will be valuable. In any case, we're going to cover a lot of interesting ground, and I'm looking forward to it. Indeed. So we're going to do a Q&A today after the live stream. You can find that on our locals, and the watch party's going on the locals now. Please join us there. Consider subscribing to our YouTube channel if that is where you are watching. And let's just get right to our sponsors as always, three right at the top of the hour. And then that's the only post-write ads you'll get from us. We truly vouch for the sponsors whose ads we read. 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In addition, people using ARMRA Colostrum have noticed a decrease in muscle soreness after exercise, better sleep, fewer sugar cravings. ARMRA Colostrum is the real deal. We've got a special offer for the DarkHorse audience. Receive 30% off your first subscription order. Go to armwrot.com slash DarkHorse or enter DarkHorse to get 30% off your first subscription order. That's armwro.com slash DarkHorse. Colostrum, it's not just for babies anymore. All right, Heather, our final sponsor this week is Helix, which makes truly fantastic mattresses, but you know that because you sleep on one. Indeed. We've had our Helix mattress for over four years and it's been amazing. We look forward to many more years with it. If you have any trouble sleeping and who hasn't, the problem might be your mattress. A better mattress can help address this. No, not this. A better mattress can help you address issues like sleep apnea, back pain, and temperature problems. 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Go to helixsleep.com slash DarkHorse for 20% off site wide, 25% off lux mattresses and 30% off elite mattresses. That's helixsleep.com slash DarkHorse for 20% off site wide, 25% off lux mattresses and 30% off elite mattresses. And you don't have to be a member of the elite to enjoy one of those. It's just the name of the mattress. Once more helixsleep.com slash DarkHorse. I think like trans, elite should be a self identity kind of inclusion, where you just declare that you're elite and then you're elite. I like that. Yeah, I also feel that many of the people in first class probably aren't and a lot of the people in coach probably are. So maybe that should be a self-definitional thing as well. Like whoever wants to be in first class should be in first. Like if you're a first class person. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe first class people should be allowed to board first irrespective of where they happen to be sitting. You know, you joke, but it's the sort of thing that you that will be taken seriously by some. Yes, I can't help that. There was an emoji on that for those of you who are paying attention to that. Excellent rule. All right, so it's July 1st, 2026. 250 years ago, the country was on the cusp. The colonies were on the cusp of becoming a country. And a little longer ago than that, 250 years and about six months ago, Common Sense by Thomas Paine was published anonymously. No one knew it was by Thomas Paine. So I wanted to just give a little background on Thomas Paine, share the first couple paragraphs of Common Sense, his pamphlet, and then the first couple paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence just to just to sort of place us in the historical context of what it is that we Americans, citizens of the United States of America, are going to be celebrating a few short days. So Thomas Paine was a failed tradesman and a failed husband, whose most notable contribution in 1774, just like a year and a half before Common Sense was published. He was still in his mid 30s. He was still in England. And at that point, the best work that he had done was advocating for pay raises for excise tax collectors in England on the basis that low pay made it nearly impossible for them to resist bribery and smuggling, which is a true point. He's sort of doing some sort of early game theoretic work, but it was based on empirical experience. He had been a tax collector himself and had been chastened severely for having signed off on things on the basis that he inspected them and he hadn't inspected them. And he basically said, yep, I did it because the pay was so low that by inspecting more, claiming to inspect more things, he was able to get done with his job sooner. So I would I would just point out that this is actually a highly resonant issue right up to this day. We do not pay our public servants or frankly, our scientists or any of the people that you need not to be corrupt because when they are corrupt, it harms us all. We should think about competing with the market because if the corruptors simply have an advantage because people are poor, then they destroy whatever it is you're trying to build. And this becomes crystal clear when you travel in a truly depressed country. You and I have seen in Madagascar millions of dollars of timber lost very precious species, irreplaceable forests, because the people who are charged with preventing them from being logged are making a small number of thousand dollars a year. And when somebody is extracting millions, it's very easy for them to turn a system like that to their advantage at a cost to everyone else. So anyway, it's amazing that we haven't gotten this message through our head 250 years later. Indeed, I will say that in the modern world, an example like Madagascar, which is always at the bottom of the world's economy is in terms of in terms of how rich a country it is. I don't know what the solution is, because there's no way from Madagascar to compete with regard to wages on a global scale. And so you see that at the governmental level, you see in Madagascar, and you see it all the way down to individuals who are willing to be paid to find and extract rare Europlatists, leaf-tailed geckos, that are popular in the pet trade here and in Europe. And the people doing that have a knowledge of the organisms in the forest that probably means that we knew some of the people who could have been compelled to do this kind of work. They don't want to be stripping their forests of geckos, but if it's the only thing available to them, and if someone from the West is willing to pay them what is a pittance in the West and a fortune in the third world, then they will do so. So I don't see the solution to that in a globalized world. Well, as long as we're here, I will point out that you're right, the mismatch is between the economy where the stuff is being sold and the economy where it's being extracted, which makes this a wicked problem, very difficult to solve. The president of Ecuador attempted to solve an analogous problem in Yasuni, the most diverse habitat on Earth in the Amazon, someplace you and I have spent a lot of time. And his point was, we don't want to drill for oil in this place. It belongs to the world. But the world should pay Ecuador not to drill. And so he proposed that to the world and the world laughed in his face. And so I guess my point would be when a forest in Madagascar is logged and a small number of Malagasy are marginally enriched and somebody in charge of managing it is substantially enriched, the world suffers. And so this is one of these problems that game theoretically, you may not be able to solve it by the sort of standard local governmental mechanisms. And that's something we have to think about. It's not our right to put up condos in Yosemite, it belongs to the world, even if it is ours to steward. So anyway, that's a topic I think we're going to return to today, because it's a problem we haven't solved yet. And it will not have a static solution. There's dynamism in these systems. And there's a reason that those who want to restrict and regulate, and those who want to push towards freedom, are in tension with one another and that we need people on both sides of that divide to correct the enthusiasms of the other. Agreed. So Thomas Paine had been a corset maker badly, because his father had been. His father apparently was a good corset maker, but he failed over and over again. He failed at tax collection and then wrote a pamphlet in England that spoke to the problems of low pay among tax collectors, given that it made it very difficult to resist bribery and such. And he also failed in marriage. And so in late in late 1774, Paine met Benjamin Franklin, who was in London with grievances against the Crown. So Franklin had traveled to London in late 1774, at a point when the colonies were getting quite fed up with what was going on, with regard to the taxes and other things coming down from the Crown to the colonies. Paine met Franklin at Franklin for reasons that I am not entirely clear why Franklin, what Franklin saw in Paine, and this may be lost to history or just lost to me, Franklin encouraged and facilitated Paine to emigrate, gave him letters of introduction to various people in the United States. And by the very end of 1774, Paine had done so. Late 30s, not much to his name by most rubrics and apparent failure in life. And less than 14 months later, on January 10th of 1776, Paine had anonymously published Common Sense, arguing for the immediate and complete independence from the Crown and a Republican government. And this was at a moment when most colonists were still hoping for a reconciliation. Most colonists, that is to say, people from Europe, most of the UK, mostly, I guess it would have been, I don't know what it was called at that point, maybe just England. I'm not remembering my historical moments when names changed. Most colonists were hoping for reconciliation with the Crown, but Paine put this screed, this pamphlet, out into the world in very early 1776. And it's widely credited, this pamphlet, Common Sense, with shifting public opinion toward independence, such that less than six months later, the Declaration of Independence was made and a new country was created. So that's rather extraordinary. Yes, in fact, it mirrors two very live issues for us. One, pamphlets, we don't really have pamphlets that are worth doing anything other than putting in the recycling now. But once upon a time, pamphlets were a mechanism for introducing a, you know, an important idea. And the idea that the colonies could actually be persuaded in the direction of emancipation is amazing. It's sort of like the X of their time, where an idea can percolate rapidly through a population. But far more, far more impressive and unifying. X has, I don't think unified anyone. In 1776, America's population is estimated to have been about two and a half million people. And within a few months of Common Sense going out into the world, it is estimated to have sold over 100,000 copies, which is about 4% of the population. So to put that in modern terms, not, you know, everything is different, of course, but just to look at the numbers, we currently have a population of about 350 million. So a modern day Common Sense to make that kind of impact, you know, putting aside all the other differences would have to within a couple of months have sold and, you know, presumably these people were reading it too, because it made such an impact, about 14 million copies. That's the impact that Common Sense had scaled to a modern American population. Amazing and especially amazing in light of the fact that it was put out by someone who was anonymous. They were not trading on a reputation. They were putting out an idea that had to float on its own merits. And of course, anonymity is a resonant issue at the moment, because whereas it's important, you know, there's a reason you did it anonymously, it was not out of modesty, it was out of a sense of peril. And so the idea that we need to be able to have people circulate ideas without putting themselves at risk, that's a very real phenomenon now, especially in light of concerns many of us have about assassinations and, you know, what motivates them, what really drives them. Indeed. But we have a problem they didn't have, which was, you know, you can now have a bot farm that is manning thousands of anonymous accounts, all pushing a perspective. You can, you know, geofence people and persuade them, you know, in a bespoke way. These were not a pamphlet. You could read it. You could not read it. Buy it. Don't buy it. Anonymous doesn't matter. We have a problem where an anonymity allows things that appear to be people to have a profound impact for no good reason other than the fact that somebody spent a tremendous amount of money to persuade us. You know, as disgusting as they are, I think I prefer bot flies to bot farms. Wow. That is saying something. Yeah, I agree with you, actually. I don't want either in my backyard, but yeah. Right. Yeah, an imby in both. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Okay. So let me just share some of Payne's words from 1776 and then the words in our Declaration of Independence. The first couple of paragraphs from both. So here we have first, and you can share my screen if you like, common sense addressed to the inhabitants of America on the following interesting subjects. I'm going to just go through the introduction to the first two paragraphs. On the origin and design of government in general with concise remarks on the English constitution. Some writers have so confounded society with government. Nope. Okay. I will start that again once my computer decides to cooperate. Your computer is being a pain in honor of Thomas. Perhaps. Okay. Can you see it now? Awesome. On the origin and design of government in general with concise remarks on the English constitution. This, the first couple of paragraphs from Thomas Payne's common sense published in January of 1776, anonymously. Some writers have so confounded society with government as to leave little or no distinction between them. Whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness. The former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our fictions, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse. The other creates distinctions. The first a patron, the last a punisher. Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil in its worst state and intolerable one. For when we suffer or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government like dress is the badge of lost innocence. The policies of Kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, men would need, man would need no other lawgiver. But that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest. And this he is induced to do by the same prudence, which in every other case advises him out of two evils to choose the least. Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us with the least expense and greatest benefit is preferable to all others. Wow. It is amazing to hear it written in that language. But he, there is, you know, a the idea of a necessary evil. It's like the bill at the end of the meal, built the end of the meal has to be there, but there's nothing good about it, right? It is the cost of a meal that was hopefully, it is an inextricable cost. There are costs, you cannot simply wish away costs and have them disappear. Some costs are like that, in which case they were not true costs in the first place. But there are many real costs that simply must be paid, must pay them. And, you know, oddly, my dissertation was about this very thing. He is speaking of trade-offs. Speaking of trade-offs, whether or not he's going to use that language. He's also speaking of game theory, although he wouldn't have called it that. Yes. And he is hinting at something really deep, right? Part of the problem for kings can't just simply be tyrannical, because when they are simply tyrannical, they are wildly unpopular with a large number of people, and they therefore have to be utterly brutal and terrifying in order to maintain their power. So even the Magna Carta and the forcing of would have been King John to acknowledge the rights of the population was, it was a formal statement of something that's inherently true, even in a monarch monarchy. That even though the power of the monarch is in one sense absolute, it doesn't make any sense, game theoretically, to rule that way, that a good king has an obligation. All kings have an obligation. Good kings live up to it to govern well. Where is that going to fail? Well, the more remote you are from your king, the more likely it is to fail. And so what you're going to see in the colonies is going to be A, the externalizing of costs, because those costs are, you know, going to make people upset, who are not in a position to fight back very easily. And you're going to see rent seeking. And so, you know, the Boston Tea Party is about a predatory tax. And you know, the colonists reject it in part, because they're also safer, you know, the king has to cross an ocean to fight back. So anyway, the game theory is right there to be read in the history, the names we all know of the events and the people. And that's fascinating. It is. So actually, given what you just riffed on, I'm going to read just the next paragraph in common sense, because I think it points even more explicitly to some of the early trade offs of game theory considerations as a society is formed. In order to gain a clear and just idea of the design and end of government, again, this is from Thomas Paine's common sense. In order to gain a clear and just idea of the design and end of government, let us suppose a small number of persons settled in some sequestered part of the earth, unconnected with the rest. They will then represent the first peopling of any country or of the world. In the state of natural liberty, society will be their first thought. A thousand motives will excite them there too. The strength of one man is so unequal to his wants and his mind so unfitted for perpetual solitude, that he is soon obliged to seek assistance and relief of another who in his turn requires the same. Four or five united would be able to raise a tolerable dwelling in the midst of a wilderness, but one man might labor out of the common period of life without accomplishing anything. When he had felt his timber, he could not remove it, nor erect it after it was removed. Hunger in the meantime would urge him from his work, and every different want call him a different way. Disease, nay even misfortune would be death, for though neither might be mortal, yet either would disable him from living and reduce him to a state in which he might rather be said to perish than to die. I guess it's in the next paragraph that we get to the trade-offs. Thus necessity, like a gravitating power, would soon form our newly arrived emigrants into society, the reciprocal blessings of which would supersede and render the applications of law and government unnecessary, while they remained perfectly just to each other. But as nothing but heaven is impregnable to vice, it will unavoidably happen that in proportion as they surmount the first difficulties of emigration, which bound them together in a common cause, they will begin to relax in their duty and attachment to each other, and this remissness will point out the necessity of establishing some form of government to supply the defect of moral virtue. And it would almost be worth it to go back and rewrite this in modern terms, because the number of things that he is intuiting is amazing. I mean he talks in there effectively about emergence. If we each struggled against nature ourselves, you'd spend all your time doing it and maybe you would succeed, but you'd have nothing left over to do productive, valuable things. And four together do more than the work of individual, four individuals working alone. Right. Absolutely. That is the emergence that you're pointing to. It's emergent and it's wealth creation. So the point is we join together and we sacrifice something to our allegiance to each other in order to create more than we could otherwise. Now, a week ago, I said something that threw a lot of people that I'm in discussion with about, oh no, it was with Rupert Lowe. I said that I thought you could judge any policy based on whether or not it contributed to the net individual liberty. That is to say, if a policy net liberates over the long term, and that's very important, you'll get it wrong if you forget that part. The long term part. Yeah. In other words, we could liberate ourselves at the radical shortening of our longevity as a species that would not be justified. But if we increase liberty over the long term, I believe that it is a fair test of any policy. And the reason is because though most people will squander most of the liberty that they get, it is the liberty that allows us to discover things that we can do better, things that we can accomplish that we didn't know we could accomplish. So it is the thing that liberates us rather than toiling every day just to find enough to eat. So anyway, it's amazing. He's talking about game theory, trade-offs, emergence, all of which are very modern concepts. But you can see, oh, and he also hints at what you might call the tragedy of the commons or more generally a collective action problem. The point is a small number of people can have an allegiance to each other without governance. But as that population grows, you're going to get freeloaders. If the freeloaders come out ahead of everybody else, it incentivizes everybody else to take up freeloading. And the next thing you know, you don't have any emergence. You're not creating any wealth. Okay, I'm not going to keep doing this. But I'm going to read the next two paragraphs. Because you've just predicted exactly where he's going. Again, we're speaking of a very small number of immigrants to a space on earth in which they are not displacing anyone. This is an actually new frontier as opposed to a displacement of others frontier, the illegitimate frontiers that we discuss in Hunter Gathers' Guide."Some convenient tree will afford them a state house under the branches of which the whole colony may assemble to deliberate on public matters. It is more than probable that their first laws will have the title only of regulations and be enforced by no other penalty than public disesteem. In this first parliament, every man, by natural right, will have a seat. But as the colony increases, the public concerns will increase likewise, and the distance at which the members may be separated will render it too inconvenient for all of them to meet on every occasion as at first, when their number was small, their habitation's near, and the public concerns few and trifling. This will point out the convenience of their consenting to leave the legislative part to be managed by a select number chosen from the whole body, who are supposed to have the same concerns at stake which those who appointed them, and who will act in the same manner as the whole body would act were they present. If the colony continue increasing, it will become necessary to augment the number of the representatives, and that the interest of every part of the colony may be attended to, it will be found best to divide the whole into convenient parts, each part sending its proper number, and that the elected might never form to themselves an interest separated from the electors, prudence will point out the propriety of having elections often, because as the elected might by that means return and mix again with the general body of the electors in a few months, their fidelity to the public will be secured by the prudent reflection of not making a rod for themselves. And as this frequent interchange will establish a common interest with every part of the community, they will mutually and naturally support each other, and on this, not on the unmeaning name of king, depends the strength of government and the happiness of the governed. Here then is the origin and rise of government. Wow, yeah, and so it goes until things tear it apart because what these folks did not know about was evolution, and effectively the founders created a system with the constituent parts that guarantee evolution, and in our case the evolution of corruption, which begins to drain that system, it functions first as a parasite, and then ultimately as what we would call a parasitoid, where the parasite is so profoundly draining of the host that the host is condemned to death. The host is a shell, a skin suit. Yes, a parasitoid is formally a parasite that kills its host as part of its life cycle. Yes. Okay, so from there, January of 1776, Thomas Paine anonymously publishes Common Sense, a 47-page pamphlet of which I've just read probably a couple of pages worth. You have a population, a populace of colonists who were exhausted, angry, but largely interested in continuing to try to reconcile with the crown, and Thomas Paine's document, his pamphlet, is widely credited with changing public opinion, such that by July 2nd, Baudrillard, I believe, and then the fourth ratified and may have the dates of the words a little bit wrong, the Declaration of Independence, what we are celebrating this month in the United States of America, a nation was formed. So here we have what will be familiar to everyone who grew up in the United States, I hope still, that in elementary school, you run into the Declaration of Independence. Here we have a transcription from what is actually on the stone engraving of, it's a transcription, this says from the National Archives, the following text is a transcription of the stone engraving of the parchment Declaration of Independence, that is the document which is on display in the rotunda at the National Archives. In Congress, July 4th, 1776, the unanimous declaration of the 13 United States of America, when in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with one another, with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitled them. A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness. Prudence indeed will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes, and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to write themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient's sufferance of these colonies, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having a direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world. Such a brilliant document. Such a brilliant document, and because we are not living 250 years ago, I am not going to spend time regaling the modern audience with what our founders or Thomas Paine six months earlier wrote about what the grievances were, but history has supported their claims that they were indeed large grievances that were significant enough to warrant the founding of a spectacularly great country. Very interesting. A, I didn't know this, but you can hear in that opening that I think you can hear that actually Thomas Paine's argument from common sense is reflected. I believe that they actually allude to it. You can also hear people will have heard me maybe say that I am a reluctant radical. I believe we have to change, but the change, major change is terrifying and therefore you go into it with great trepidation. You can hear that in there as well because they are effectively making the argument. I mean, they say, mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to write themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. Yes, they say this and they say, therefore, we must not upend governance over minor or transient things. That is right. It's only something that you would do when things have truly failed. And this, the modern democratic left does not understand this. It sees nothing but grievances and sees nothing as an alternative to them, but burn it all down. And as no idea, apparently, either they say it cynically and they know what's coming and those who are really driving the policy believe they will benefit from chaos or they don't know in many cases, the rank and file do not understand that what they are inviting as a replacement for the things they find galling is warlordism, right? Or despotism or some mixture of the two. And it's not something you would contemplate if you had a marvelous country with major flaws, you would, you would fix the flaws, but you wouldn't upend it. And it, Declaration of Independence, as they say explicitly in there is not a what we're going to do document. It's a why we are doing this document. No, the constitution comes many years later. And it does come many years later and very important that they separate the two things, right? This is an easy mistake to make. And this is in part, the separation of the two documents in time and in intent makes the point that you have made very often with regard to shooting for something greater than what we currently have. You can maybe plot a course to the slope and then find your way once you are there. You can, you cannot in advance draw the map of exactly where you hope to arrive. You can navigate with skill and you will need luck, but you cannot inherently know in advance the lands that are not yet discovered. The lands may be literal and they may be metaphorical. Yeah, you have to navigate or prototype or something in that neighborhood where you can modify your direction based on what you learn in the process. And if you think about what would have happened if the Declaration of Independence and the constitution were one thing, you know, the why and the how combined, the problem is then the why is sort of contingent on how good they were at architecting, which it turned out they were very good at. They screwed some stuff up, but by and large, it's the best constitution on earth still, even though all the others had it to go by as a guide. And I mean, actually, I don't think there is explicit reference to this in the Declaration of Independence, but in common sense, pain, I believe, explicitly says, look, I'm not going to talk about who we're going to talk about the grievances with the crown, but we are going to leave out all the particular stuff that we who are living through this right now really feel the grievances against you and you and you, because that is not going to be important. And how right he is if we were being if these documents had names of minor players, minor little villains from 250 years ago, the documents will be far less resonant and far less lasting. And so the ability to pull yourself out of the moment and go, this is a moment when we need massive change, when we need to found a country, and we need to actually let the bit players that feel like the biggest villains in the world disappear, disappear from our documents and just let the ideas. Yeah. And we're going to come back to that, too, because this is another failing of the democratic left at the moment. It's obsessed with the individual rather than the structure and how the structure functions. But I also want to point to the fact, I think there's been a long battle over what's called natural law, the idea that law is not a creation of man, but that there are certain things that flow from our organic nature. And, you know, one of them, they name it right at the top, when in the course of human events, the point is, oh, there's a certain thing that can happen. And when it does happen, certain rights follow from it, you have the right to overthrow a structure that has become tyrannical. And so the point is, that's a pattern. It's something that does happen. And when it does happen, this is a rational response and a morally just response to it. And also in both these documents, both common sense and the declaration, you understand that because, I mean, they name, God given inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Now, we could argue with their phrasing of, you know, happiness in modern terminology is a pretty trivial thing. What they meant was not trivial at all. And the declaration of independence puts back together what pain explicitly separates between society and government. Right. But in the establishment of this necessary evil in order to deal with the game theoretic problem that happens if you don't establish a government, if you just depend on the fact that we all want things to work, when you do that, it constrains people's rights. And I think one of the topics that has to be focused on it at a moment in history, like our current one, is that we have all surrendered rights in order to be part of a civilization that gives us this emergence, right? That allows us to have free time and not have to fend for ourselves. But in exchange for what we have given up, we can't all go be hunter-gatherers. You can't hunt and gather in town, for example, right? It's called looting. Right. It's called looting and it's dangerous and we can't allow it. And what's more, we can't allow everybody to go hunt as many creatures in the wild as they want because there won't be any creatures left to hunt if you do that. So your rights as a hunter-gatherer, which is what you most fundamentally are or were, that your rights have been reduced. But because your rights have been reduced, the thing to which you have surrendered those rights, that governance structure, that necessary evil, has obligations to you. It is in breach of contract. And that is effectively what they are saying in this document, is that the thing which governs us is in breach of contract. And that is where our right to separate from it and establish our own governance comes from. It's an obviously true argument and it is a beautiful argument. It's very simple. You're dealing with the failure of a complex system, as you point out. They could go naming people and, you know, malfeasance aplenty and they would mean nothing to us 250 years later. This means everything to us because it isn't mired in the particulars of even this instance of tyranny. It's made as an argument against when tyrants do this, you have the right to respond in this way. That's where it comes from. And they, of course, knew that their right to respond this way did not protect them from being killed by the crown for saying these things. They all understood that. It was very explicit. Franklin himself, I believe, said, we must hang together or surely we will all hang separately. Right? They understood they were putting their lives on the line. But they also understood that they had the right to make that gamble and in some sense, the obligation to do it because the tyranny was intolerable. That's right. I think you see exactly that in those first paragraphs of the Declaration. This is one of those moments when this is not just acceptable, but we feel required. Right. And so that, of course, raises questions about our current moment because many things indicate that we are facing kinds of tyranny that were unthinkable. But the fact of tyranny is an evergreen. It reevolves everywhere it has the opportunity to do it. And we've just been through several chapters of history that suggest that tyranny of many kinds is rampant across the landscape and to return to the metaphor of a contract that the things that govern us have become predatory and that gives us certain rights. And, you know, should we be overthrowing this thing? I think it would be foolhardy. On the other hand, we have an obligation to fix the tyrannical part of it because not only is it intolerable in its current state, but it's getting worse. The trajectory is clear. Yes. And you can see if you, if the words of Thomas Paine and the men behind the Declaration of Independence resonate with you as they do with almost all human beings as truths that are in fact self-evident, then you can see what a threat the anarchists are when, you know, the the Antifa, which are not the same group as the anarchists, but were enmeshed with one another on the streets of Portland and elsewhere. We saw them most on the streets of Portland in between 2018 and 2022 when we lived there in Portland, Oregon, were literally claiming that they were ungovernable, that even when the party that they hated less came to power in the 2020 presidential election, when Trump was apparently defeated and Biden was was elected in, still there were riots on the streets that night, because why? Because there is no solution that is governmental that will be acceptable to some people. And that is simply not stable even in the short term. That cannot work. Yes. In fact, if you try to map the perspective of Antifa and all the things that function like it onto the logic in our declaration of independence, you know, that's what you would call it. It's also the name of the document, which is really cool. But if you were to map the Antifa worldview onto that, what you find out, you know, we've we've spent a lot of time talking about the fact that as troubled as we are by what Antifa is doing and saying and thinking and how it describes the world, that most of the people who are disaffected at that level actually do have a gripe. They've been betrayed. They have not been armed with, you know, an education and nutrition and all of the things that would enable you to compete in the market. And so as much as we have to defeat them because they're a danger to civilization, it's not as if they had a good deal and turned it down. They didn't have a good deal. Some of them did. Yeah, that's probably true. But in general, you find some pretty messed up people. Like asterisk, just as I was observing that it felt to me like some among the homeless were now facultatively homeless. And I know this absolutely to be true, that some people had abandoned actually comfortable middle class existences, had rejected the resources of their families. You know, not wealthy kids, although I'm sure that existed too. But I'm talking about, you know, kids who came from good homes who decided that this was a good way to spend their time by creating havoc and and ruining civilization for others. So that was an element that has been an element, and I'm sure it still is, of some of the antifa and intentionally homeless lifestyle that has taken over so many Western cities. Yeah, although if civilization was humming along, there's a question about how many people would end up there. So at some level, a broken civilization that gives people in general a raw deal is going to create these people in large numbers. But what I wanted to point out was in everything that they say, there isn't. We're pissed off because civilization is broken. Okay, they get that far. They don't say what it is that they don't have a vision for what might be better. And in fact, when things go in the direction, you know, that they propose to want, they protest anyway, because there is no instinct to create a structure that solves the problem of the current structure. There's purely a destructive impulse. And well, and it's that is true. And self limiting rules and regulations are rare. Rules and regulations that themselves will disappear when they succeed are difficult to write. And if you don't write in the disappearing mode into their origin, then once the rules and regulations have staffers, they don't want to disappear themselves. So it's one thing for an abstract idea for everyone who supports it to understand that thing must disappear once it has succeeded. But once it takes real organic breathing human beings to make it manifest, those real organic beings are not just in service of the idea, they are fundamentally in service of their own jobs. Yes. And in fact, the hate to say the radical left, because I would say I'm left and I have called myself a reluctant radical, but nonetheless, the population that we would call the radical left at the moment, they actually want, they don't aspire to create a civilization that works, they aspire straight to the tyranny that they want to manage. In other words, their vision for how to govern is not a system that would result in the system that would result in the economy and the population functioning and having the right opportunities. What they want to do is literally tell you how to behave right down to telling you that if you prefer to marry a cis person over a trans person, that there's something morally wrong with you. They want to dictate everything right down to your preferences and who you're going to partner with in life. It's obviously laughable and insane, but it is the very opportunity to become the tyrants themselves that they aspire to. And we saw this explicitly first when our long term jobs as professors blew up on us at Evergreen in 2017, where it was abundantly clear to anyone who was paying attention that the people who were agitating were not interested in eradicating oppression. They were interested in reversing oppression. Turning the tables of it. They actually argued that this was the legitimate approach because of how much oppression their lineages had experienced in the past. They weren't even ashamed that what they wanted to do was turn it upside down, turn the tables of oppression, make those who had been disempowered those in power. It actually felt fair to them. And this we see across many of these movements. Yeah. If you know how to listen to them, they actually just say it. The idea that it's not enough to be non-racist. We need you to be anti-racist. The only alternative to discrimination is some other kind of discrimination. And it is the absolute antithesis of what our founders were actually aspiring to. They were aspiring to a civilization that functions in which who you are actually does not count positively or negatively in terms of your power or your opportunity. And it's not that we got there, but wow did we make tremendous progress and why were we headed in the right direction. Frankly, we were headed in the right direction during the bicentennial. Yes, we were. Right? The direction we were headed in when you and I were children was positive. Things were getting better. The oppressed populations were less oppressed. They were wealthier. They saw hope. And this has now been dashed by a combination of these cynical would-be tyrants on the left and stingy folks on the right who have effectively teamed up to eliminate the possibility of self-improvement. It's terrifying, really. It is. And if you know what's going to replace this civilization when that combination of forces destroys it, it's even more terrifying. Yes. There's a couple more pieces that I want to add in, but maybe you want to take the lead at this point. Are you sure? Yeah. Okay. Well, I wanted to talk a little bit about, let's start with patriotism. So I have a little rule which says that when you do useful work in an analytical setting, you end up redefining terms because terms get very blunt in common usage. People will use a term like patriotism a hundred different ways. And if you're responsible for using the word so that it covers all that, it has no sharpness to it. So you end up redefining terms. So they work and most people forget that they've done it. And so when they talk to other people and they use terms that are commonly utilized, they don't realize why they're talking past them. So I wanted to start with what patriotism is and why it matters. Patriotism, I would argue, is a kind of love for a thing, some thing that has some emergent phenomenon, whether that emergent phenomenon is something like science or it's something more usually like a nation. And love, as you and I defined it in our book, is effectively a willingness to sacrifice for something. Something is elevated in its importance to you, symmetrical to yourself, so that you're willing to sacrifice for it. So the most fundamental kind of love is maternal love for a child. That's where it evolves first. And it's obvious why it's there. It's obvious before you ever discover anything about genes. And then once you do discover genes, the point is, oh, actually, this can even be mathematically defined. But it doesn't change anything about it. A mother's willingness to sacrifice for her offspring is fundamental to the kinds of creatures we are. And then that kind of love gets broadened and, you know, families grow. We have romantic love, which is a willingness to sacrifice for another person who isn't your relative at a level symmetrical to yourself. And so patriotism is most frequently the willingness to sacrifice for your country. And I want to contrast it very often on the right, people use patriotism and nationalism synonymously. And I believe they are anything but synonyms and that we have to mind the difference very carefully. Patriotism is a willingness to sacrifice on behalf of something. Nationalism is the desire to use a something like a nation to advance your agenda. So in other words, do you want to use your nation in order to accomplish something? Or are you willing to sacrifice for your nation because you think it's that important? They are not the same thing. They are almost the inverse. And I think they are very well captured in John F. Kennedy's quote,"Ask not what your country can do for you, nationalism. Ask what you can do for your country." Right? The point is your country is the lifeblood of your population. Your willingness to sacrifice to keep it going and to improve it is the fundamental thing. It's not like he was saying, give everything to your country and it's not required to give anything back. The point is it's already giving you so much back. Ask how you can advance it. Okay. And the reason that I went through all that, patriotism is a kind of love. It is a willingness to sacrifice on behalf of something. Being patriotic to your country is a real thing. You know, it's a sobering responsibility that if your country is endangered, you might send your children to war in order to defend it. Imagine losing a child because of your love for your country. Well, that's where we are. That's a real thing. And I will say, I'm sure I speak for you too, I feel that for this country. I'm very angry at its current state. I don't like what's been done to it at all. And I frequently am horrified by things that it engages in. But it is a marvelous country because it was architected by very intelligent people who had excellent values. And, you know, if my country was in jeopardy, would I be willing to serve? Yes. Too old now, but if I was young enough, I would be willing to serve and put my life at risk to protect it. If the country was genuinely in jeopardy, how would I feel about my children going to serve? I would hate it, but I would support it. I don't trust current governance structures to send them to war for the right reasons or to do so in a way that is as safe as possible. But nonetheless, in the abstract, it's a sacrifice that a person who is a citizen of such a wonderful place should be willing to make as sobering as that is. Okay. Now, I want to talk about a topic that is very charged at the moment. And I want to defuse some of that charge. The topic is dual loyalty. That's the phrase that goes back, I don't know how many decades, but it's a very old phrase. It is typically leveled as an accusation against Jews that because Jews are a fundamentally diaspora minority, that they live within other countries, but they harbor a kind of inward facing loyalty to Judaism or to other Jews that exceeds their loyalty to the country. Now that's a very real concern. But I want to point out something about its generality. Right? One does have to, we all have to ask ourselves, what are we loyal to? And I would argue that one of the problems with the accusation of dual loyalty is that it does not, it reduces the complexity of the problem too much to be useful. The problem is loyalties aren't dual they are many. Now, am I a patriot? Yes. I've already told you I would be willing to fight and possibly die to defend my country and I'd be willing to send my children to do the same if I thought the country was up to handling that responsibility under better circumstances, I would be willing. I think that makes me a patriot. Does that mean it's my top loyalty? No, it does not. I have a higher loyalty to family than I do to my country. And the reason that I would put myself or my children in danger to protect the country is that I believe that the country is protecting us, that it is necessary when you're part of a generation that faces a threat to something on which you depend. It's like, would I be willing to put my life on the line to prevent a ship that I was on in the middle of the sea from sinking? Well, yes, I would. It's a kind of enlightened self-interest. Somebody's going to have to risk themselves to plug the hole that's going to take the ship down, but if the ship goes down, we all go down. So I'm more loyal to my family than I am to my nation, but I can be explicit about that. And I don't think anybody would fault me for that. In fact, most people would have that same hierarchy. Well, exactly. That's the word I was just about to use. It's recognition of hierarchy instead of pretending that they are co-equal. The dual loyalty accusation suggests a co-equality or a pretense of same. And the argument here is you actually can't have utterly equivalent loyalty. Yes. And I think what I would say is it turns something like patriotism into a cartoon. If the idea is, well, you either are loyal to the country or you're not. If you ever put anything out of the country, you're not loyal. That's not true. You can be deeply loyal to the country, and then there can be the tiny number of things above the country in the hierarchy, and it would be expected that your own family would be one of them. So that hierarchy is natural, and it's not a threat to patriotism. And now what I want to do is take that little map of concepts that we've built and point out that we have a hierarchy of loyalties problem across many different domains. Yes, I do think we have this problem with respect to the modern state of Israel, especially under Benjamin Netanyahu, and the danger of the country has been put in over wars that I think are not in our interest, but at least the danger of the United States has been put into wars that are not in our interest. Exactly. And so, you know, there is a question. Do we have Americans supporting wars that are not in America's interest? Yes, I think we do. That's a real question. It is a valid topic of conversation, and I will not be told that anybody is a bigot for raising that question. It's a real one, and it's obvious. But I also want to point out that there is a loyalty issue, a patriotism issue with the Democratic left, and it's obvious. In fact, when you and I became public figures in 2017, I remember that there was a conversation that kept having, and I bet you if you searched for it on Twitter, you would find me involved in it in various places, where the left was understood not to be patriotic, inherently so. And the left was more or less proud of this. And I was always confused by it because I grew up in a family that was decidedly left wing. Right. But I would say we were hard headed liberals that understood that as frustrated as we were at the country for, you know, things like the Vietnam War, another war we shouldn't have been involved in, that the country was leaps and bounds better. The country and all of the other countries it inspired to try the same Western experiment was leaps and bounds better than the alternative. And so there was no conflict between being angry at the mismanagement of the country and the responsibilities that the country has to its citizens and being patriotic to it because it was, you know, the best prototype out there for for a system. But by the time 2017 happens, it's already understood by people on the Democratic left that they don't like the sound of the word patriotism and they don't aspire to it and they don't look at the flag and think positive thoughts about it or anything like that. And it's a little it's it feels I don't think ironic is quite the right word, but in general, those on the left are interested in in groups, in the idea of losing individuation into into group betterment. And this absolutely falls apart at the country level, which is the group that should be that should be bettered. But so there are these other groups that are that are created that, you know, this is what identity politics is, is the creation and ascendancy of groups, some of which are totally fabricated and some of which are real, but immutable. So like, how much can they possibly matter in terms of feeling pride in something that would be immutable, for instance, like like being black or a woman, like an actual woman. It just is right. And so there's all this desire to be proud of and have political action directed at group membership and an absolute total rejection of the group membership that is responsible for so much of the quality of life that Americans have, which is to say you were lucky enough to be born into or immigrated into this remarkable nation. Yeah, I think you're making a very important point. There is an obsession with groups over on the modern democratic left and an unwillingness to participate in this particular group. And that is that is a very interesting contradiction. I've never heard it described, but I see it plain as day. And I want to come back a little later after we've talked about some of the other loyalty hierarchy issues. I want to come back to the way this is playing out in the state of Washington at the moment because the 250th is raising this issue in a particularly concentrated way. Okay, next I want to talk about the patriotism of the dispensationalists. Now this is going to sound dry and academic, but I'll make it simple. Amongst Christians, there is a school of thought that holds the modern day state of Israel to be the biblical state of Israel. And therefore, what the Old Testament says the contract that is made with the biblical Jews is understood to be in force and to be narrowly defined as applying to that population itself. And unfortunately, the consequence of this in the context of the description of the end times is that you have many dispensationalist Christians who are in fact trying, they are politically advocating to arrange the world in ways that they see reflected in these biblical texts so as to bring about the end times. Now I don't fault anyone for reading biblical texts and reading them however they think they should be read. That is one of your freedoms, right? Specifically the country provides religious freedom and obviously things are up for interpretation. So I'm not challenging the belief itself, but the idea that anybody has a right to steer modern secular governments towards the end of the world is absurd. You have no right to govern in this way and I don't think a rational God would ask you to, right? If God wants to bring about the end of the world, He can do that. What you can't do is prioritize things that are not in our national interest because you think your religious book tells you to do that. That is actually a betrayal of your obligation to the nation as well. So my point would be the country has separation of church and state, very deliberately constructed by our very wise founders. This is exactly the sort of thing that they were trying to forestall. You cannot impose your religious understanding of the Bible on how we should govern. Yeah, let's bring about the end of the world. No, it's not yours to bring about. So in any case, this is a case in which people who I think are motivated by the best of intentions are steering us in a direction because they have a loyalty above the country and it's one that is incompatible with good governance. The next question is Trump himself. Now, I think, and you and I have argued, that Trump is patriotic in the sense that he cares about the country and I think he ran for office and hoped to confound his critics and be a great president. And I think I believe that I saw patriotism in him. I don't know if that remains. Well, that's the question. And, you know, let's just say upfront, we don't know what has happened behind the scenes. We don't know who has what leverage and why. And so it's very hard to judge what he's doing because we all have the assumption he can do whatever he wants. And I don't think the evidence suggests that he can do whatever he wants and we can't see the constraints. So I'm hesitant to judge him too narrowly. On the other hand, we can see that Trump very aggressively advocates for his own family's financial interests from his position in office. Now, we can debate whether or not there are rules that he is violating. That's not ours to discuss. But the point is, I think when you become president, you have an obligation to the nation that forces you to put those things aside and you can't do both. That's the point. The loyalty to the country requires you not to function in a parasitic way through corruption. Right. You cannot be expected to do the right thing with respect to, you know, the war in Gaza and our involvement in it by supplying Israel. If there's a land deal where Gaza becomes some glorious resort that your family just happens to profit from, right, it forces you into a compromised position. And so, patriotically speaking, you have to put your obligation to yourself aside at that level. And at the very least, I see evidence that that's not what's going on. And the last thing on this list is the folks who are diehard magga. They keep coming after those of us who were supportive of the president and are now critical of some of the things that the president is doing in office. And they get very upset at us for criticizing President Trump. And my point is actually they have a loyalty problem too, because their loyalty to President Trump seems to supersede their loyalty to the nation and its citizens. And it's the same kind of mistake. Maybe not exactly. But I think that there's an analogy to be made between the magga folk who think that critique is failure, is subversion. Okay, critique is subversion. That doesn't quite fit with the analogy I'm trying to make though. But there was an analogy to be made between these people and the parents, bad parents, who think that they are loving, who refuse to critique their children, who refuse to reprimand their children, who refuse to point out the error of their children's ways, and thus help them become better and create better human beings who will be adults who will be running the world ultimately. Right? This looks like kindness. And I don't think in the magga camp it is meant to look like kindness, but it feels in the moment like if you are criticizing you're being mean. And of course, good critique is the way that we level up in everything from children to art, like in every realm, knowing where we have gone astray and going, ah, yes, okay, maybe I figured it out myself. Maybe it took a teacher, maybe it took a parent, maybe it took a brother, maybe it took, you know, who knows what experience in the natural world, any number of potential inputs that demonstrated, I thought I was right. I'm not on the right track. I have to figure out where I was, back up, get back to the last place on which I was certain and try a different branch. And the idea that you can't critique the thing, be it a Trump or a child or a piece of art, because that is anathema to the project? No, it's absolutely not. And with regard to your example here, the project is not Trump, the project is the United States of America. And so what we need is everyone at their best ready to do their best and to accept criticism when it comes at them if what they are doing does not turn out to be good for the country. Yeah. And, you know, I think people will be a little thrown by the invocation of parents. But the fact is this functions anywhere that you have something in need of accomplishing a difficult objective. You know, critique is not subversion. And that's true in a scientific context. You know, the people in your lab look at your material before you ever take it into public and they find the flaws in it. And it's not because they're hostile to you. They're actually on your team and they're finding the flaws because better you hear it, you know, earlier and from people who are hoping that you will succeed than elsewhere. So, yes, a cult of personality isn't going to work. It's not consistent with the presidency that the founders created. And so you know, the personality encouraging writers in the streets by suggesting that because some of what they say is true, therefore all of their tyrannical whims should be indulged. A child tantrumming in a store or in a home who is given everything that they are at, that they are asking for, that they are demanding, all of these in the same way. You get more of the same bad behavior. And we seem to have forgotten how to be human and how to know when punishment and critique are actually warranted. Yeah. And to go back to the world that we grew up in. You had hard-headed liberals were frustrated with lots of ways in which the country was not living up to its potential and were patriotic at the same time. And I think that this doesn't matter what side of the political spectrum you come from. This is the obviously right thing for us to rally around. And it's amazing how different the political environment is, right? It was already quite broken by the time you and I were born. But the idea that even the people across the aisle who may profoundly disagree with you about how to govern the place still want the place to work. They are not seen as enemies of the functioning of the country the way people across the aisle are typically seen now, right? The opposition is seen as hostile. They're seen as disloyal. They are seen as morally broken, not of a different opinion about how to accomplish the things that we should all want. And that's just a very toxic circumstance. So in that light, I wanted to point to a story that I think begins to tell the tale. And the story has to do with the state fair that is being held right now on the National Mall that is supposed to include a booth or a, I don't know what you would call it, but some sort of a display for each state in the union. And this story is more interesting than I first thought. The key thing about it is, okay, you've got a fair in which every state is supposed to be represented and it's happening on the National Mall and it's obviously happening. It's going to include Independence Day and Americans should be able to go there and they should be able to look at the display that each state has decided to put on about what they're proud about the nature of their state. And there are 10 states that have opted out, 10 states, nine of which are led by Democrats. We are, of course, in one of them. Washington state has decided not to send a delegation or to outfit the booth, even though the expense of putting on the fair, the booth was already built for the state of Washington. All Washington had to do was decide to send people to staff it and some displays to show off the state. And Washington like Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Pennsylvania has opted out. The only one of those that is not a Democrat led state is Vermont and obviously that. Oh, is it an independent leading Vermont? I'm not sure exactly what's going on in Vermont. I think it's a Republican, but obviously Vermont has some very left leaning and maybe I've got it wrong. But anyway, that's it, right? Research this morning suggested that that was the case. But anyway, you've got Washington state where we live, opting out of this thing. They've done so on the basis that we don't have the money. Now, on the one hand, the state is cash strapped for reasons that nobody can figure out because they collect so much money in so many different forms and have just opened up an entirely new form and it's spooking the hell out of anybody who is in a position to be taxed in the state. Well, let's be precise. The brand, the newest taxes, which has gotten so much press with regard to Washington state, the so-called millionaires tax has not begun to be collected yet. Yes. The capital gains taxes, which are new, have begun to be collected. But the state taxes have begun to be collected. The estate taxes, which have recently gone up, have begun to be collected. There is a tremendous amount of taxation in Washington state. There's a tremendous amount of loss and misallocation of resources. Looks like corruption from where we're sitting, but put that aside, tremendous amount of resource, not yet including the so-called millionaires tax, the new income tax in Washington state with services that are, as we've covered before, among the lowest and declining fast among all 50 states. Yes. And I will just say, you and I have recently been traveling and the contrast between how well the state of Washington runs and how well a red state seems to run is shocking. It is shocking how well things are functioning elsewhere with much lower taxes. So that tells you something about either how well the money is being spun or spent or whether it's actually being spent on the things we're told it's being spent on in the first place. Let me just say, I know you're going somewhere here, but we're going to, we're going to align for the moment, exactly what red state we're talking about. But we were just for this last week in a state that pretty much across the board, votes Republican. And yes, the services were clearly better. The tax base is lower. It's a, it's a well populated state, but the taxes on the citizens of the state are far lower than they are here in Washington. And not only are the services better and the employees apparently doing their jobs with more equanimity and, and skill, everyone seems to be approaching their lives. And this is of course not going to be true across the board. There will be exceptions in Washington, the other direction and exception in all the blue states and the other directions and exceptions in the red states and the other directions as well. But upon returning to Washington, it was immediately apparent how much sadder and matter the population is. And at the moment, like it happens to be a cloudy day right now, but we are in summer now. The Pacific Northwest is one of the absolutely most glorious places you could possibly be in the summer. Like really, there was no place I would rather be in the summer. We have the most extraordinary summers and the most amazing natural resources and so many ways to get outside and glory in nature in whatever, almost whatever way you could possibly want. And yet what you see here are people who are embittered, who are depressed, who are mad at the world, who are glowering, who are just, you know, people in service jobs who clearly hate service and probably hate all of humanity. And I don't think I saw a single human being like that in the red states. We've traveled in actually a number of red states recently in the last few months and not, you know, there, there is, there is failure. There is depravity. There, you know, there are many ways that things don't work everywhere. But boy, is there a stark difference in just what seems to be the attitude of the individuals in the populations where if you walk around going like, yeah, I think today I'm going to try to be happy. People seem to be happy and they're walking around with an attitude that makes other people smile at them too. And here in Washington, where we have at the moment, the best, you know, it's just the best place you could want to be in the United States. Just, just on weather alone. Now, instead we have sad, mad, mean people doing jobs where that should not be, none of those descriptors should be, should be used for them. Yes. And we are refusing to make the case for the state of Washington. People are fleeing the state of Washington and Washington state is not sending a delegation or an exhibit to this fair on the national mall on the 250th anniversary of the country. People know how amazing our landscape is. Like everywhere else we've been in the East and the South and in the Northeast, like, Oh my goodness. Well, I've always wanted to go to the mountains, the oceans, the rivers, like, yes, the islands. It's gorgeous. But the people are mad and sad and mean. Yeah. And it's, there's no excuse. And you know, in January, I get it. It's, it's hard to be here in January, but in fricking July, come on. They're sad and mean, and they're being petty. Yes. This is my point. So we are not sending a delegation to staff this fair on the national mall on the 250th anniversary of the founding of the country on the basis that we don't have the money to do it. And how much will this cost would this cost? Well, how'd we decide to do it, which we have not the range. So they've already built the, the pavilion. So Washington has a spot that we could just populate. It would cost somewhere between a hundred thousand dollars to $500,000. Now let's assume that the, the kind of state wanted to make a truly spectacular display that really showed off what's here. And they decided to put a million dollars into it. Well, there are 8 million people in the state. We collect $11,000 in taxes on average per person. You could, if you decided to spend a million dollars on an exhibit, do it for 12 cents a person, 12 cents a resident. And we're not doing it because we can't find the money, even though the state has an annual budget of $88 billion. So this is a nonsense explanation. 12 cents a person, we could find the money easily. Right? So what we're really doing is making, we can't seem to find any of the money that we're collecting though. I get it. On the other hand, 12 cents a person is 12 cents a person. Right? You could probably do it in a way that, you know, again, that's with my assumption of spending a million dollars, which is 10 times the amount of the minimum that you would need to spend to just put up a basic display and staff the thing. So I'm, you know, making a very generous assumption about how expensive this is. And it's still nothing. So we could find the money. You could probably get people to staff the booth as volunteers. Right? It wouldn't take much to do this at all. Well, and it's not like Washington couldn't use a PR boost. Right. You know, people are fleeing and they're going to dry up because people are fleeing. So, so my point is, okay, of course, the coastal blue States are going to take this opportunity to play politics. Which opportunity are they taking? Oh, the 250th anniversary of the founding of the nation, because they're not patriotic. These people really aren't patriotic and they need to get over that. They need to come to understand that whatever they're pissed off about something great was accomplished here. And fixing it is the obvious thing to do, but instead. Well, I mean, of course, the explanation, once you get beyond the cover story will not sound like I don't believe in the country. It will sound like that man is bad. And I don't want to have to have anything to do with him. It's just the continuation of the Trump derangement syndrome that frankly, you know, the red hat people like the maggot people are not helping because they appear to be just as immovable and static in their position on the other side. But the idea that you would poke your own eyes out rather than participate in a celebration of the 250th birthday of your country. That's reprehensible. It's reprehensible. It's utterly reprehensible. Now I will say I was surprised to discover that the organization that is putting on this event is Freedom 250, which is a Trump aligned organization and that Trump in fact participated in. I think I have the story straight. There is an annual celebration in June put on by the Smithsonian and Trump seems to have shifted that celebration to one funded by Freedom 250. Now at some level, I get that that was probably a deliberate provocation. Maybe it wasn't, but regardless, there are 50 states. They are part of this marvelous country. It is the 250th anniversary. The fact that you don't like the state of things right now is no argument not to be participating in this thing on the National Mall. And the real driver is a failure of patriotism on the Democratic left and it's frankly despicable and foolish. Let me just say I just read a not very compelling piece in Harper's called Happy Fucking Birthday. Sorry, that is actually what it's called. Written by a guy named Christopher Hooks called An Exhausted America Turns 250. And I bring it up because in it he talks about Freedom 250 and it's a long piece and it's not great, I think, and he's definitely got the lefty bias. But he says here, I may have to search on it, in the first two years of Donald Trump's first term, the majority of minority leaders of the House and Senate appointed 24 commissioners. There were 12 Republicans, 12 Democrats. America 250 would be the commission's public face, a foundation capable of soliciting donations. And then we have some politicking. With a body like this, a lack of meaningful disagreements might suggest that nothing meaningful is actually being discussed. We're still talking about America 250 here. Then Hooks writes in Harper's, their unanimity is also somewhat beside the point now that the president has set up his own commemoration bodies, which answers solely to him, the appropriately martial sounding Task Force 250 and Freedom 250, the latter of which has received funds diverted from America 250. These new bodies seem to be having more success organizing, usually deranged events. So that's like the parenthetical from this guy is inappropriate, including a massive military parade in downtown Washington last year, as well as an Indy car race and a UFC fight scheduled for the summer at the White House. So, you know, here we have, you know, a journalist, I presume, having lots of commentary that is not really journalistic in this piece. Now it's a long piece in Harper's and Harper's doesn't claim to be, to be neutral. America 250 is in perfect alignment with the Trump administration's plans, is the organizer says, but again, America 250 has had much of its funds diverted to the Freedom 250 organization, whatever it is, thereby politicizing this thing. So I guess my point would be, I'm which is Trump's doing. Yeah, that's right. He did that. And the let's put it this way. You what you have is people on both sides of a hyper politicized divide, amping it up rather than putting it aside for the I will remind people again, a 250th anniversary of the founding of this great country. Yes. Neither of those is patriotic, right? Opting out because of some, because of your inability to ignore the occupant of the White House in order to make the case for your state on the national mall at a moment of national pride. That's disgusting. It's also disgusting to be diverting money in order to put your finger in the eye of the Democrats. This isn't the moment for that. It's not the moment for that on either side. And so I don't mean to be symmetrical about this. The fact is there is a booth for our state that is not being populated by our state because of, frankly, politics played here. You know, Trump provoked and we're going to play right into his hands by not showing up. But nonetheless, this is the problem is that people are failing to see their countrymen as on their team. They're seeing us as two different teams and politics is often divisive. But I think the point is what Thomas Paine said in common sense is effectively that people's natural affinity for each other for the purpose of making our collective lives better because the alternative at best is fending for yourself and actually quickly devolves into something much worse than that. That that that's the thing we've lost touch with. Right. Yes, the country needs a lot of fixing, but the bones, they're remarkable. It's still the best constitution on Earth. And we have made the greatest success the West has, starting with the founding of the United States. The West has made the greatest inroads in doing away with, you know, ancient evils, including bigotry. Yep. And we are we are a big, brash, diverse, loud country that has certainly made lots of errors. But frankly, the the enthusiasm that you see in the parts of the country where the World Cup is is extraordinary. And we haven't we live near enough to Seattle. We could have chosen to go to a game or two, presumably if we'd gotten tickets, I don't know, decades ago. But but, you know, we, like everyone else, are mostly seeing this online, right? This guy, Freddie out of Germany, who was just completely wrapped up in the joy of discovering things that, you know, I don't find joy in things like, you know, giant gas stations and and such. But the fact is that especially for Europeans, you know, the other Western countries coming here, and in his case, it wasn't for the first time, but coming here and seeing the scale and the fact that, you know, the West and the Mountain West and the Midwest, which is not really the West at all in the Northeast and the South and then Texas and Florida, which are places under themselves. And that's just the continental 48 and the Great Plains. Like, it's so diverse, not just geographically, but culturally and culinarily and just climatologically. It's an incredible landmass with incredible diversity of people. And yeah, have we had an arrogance that makes us, you know, makes ugly Americans be a thing all over the world? Like, okay, here come the people who think that by just speaking English louder, anyone will be able to understand English. Like, yeah, that's that's true about a lot of Americans. But it has been pleasurable to see the joy that people coming to the United States have taken in what it is that we are. And of course, the unfortunate coda to the story of Freddie is that there was some social media pile on and he discontinued his account. He's like, I was actually enjoying myself. This just became really unfun. And, you know, I'm done. I'm like, he was he was anonymous, he didn't put his own name or maybe his name, but his own face on his social media account. So he can continue to enjoy. I mean, maybe he's going home anyway, because Germany's out. But he can get into enjoy what he's particularly enjoying the south, what the United States offers without sharing his elation, because apparently, you're not allowed to share your joy here, because there will be a group that files on and tells you just how wrong you are and tries to destroy it. Yeah, that's really upsetting. I must tell you, there's something about the elation of visitors that I'm I'm having trouble with, because I'll just tell you, I was I think I was in Boston, I'd flown into Boston. I was on the shuttle, I think to the rental car place or something. And a troop of what turned out to be Russian thespians was on the bus. The associate with the World Cup. No, they were Russians in the country for some kind of a conference or a festival or something. And I struck up a conversation with one of them. Yeah, actors. And anyway, they were excited to be in the country. And I'm just on this bus thinking, I'm actually a little embarrassed. You know, I remember it during the bicentennial 1976. It was very exciting. I remember the minting of the new quarter. I'm sure you remember the ending of the quarter for the bicentennial. It's very exciting to see your first one and all of that. But I also remember the state of the world, right? Cold War is raging. We have this, you know, this villainous enemy, right? The USSR. The country was a remarkable place. And the trajectory was good. Right. And here we are in 2026. And I'm thinking about these Russians who've had their government collapse and be replaced by some corrupt but patriotic replacement for it. And now they're coming to the US and I'm thinking, what are they seeing? Right? They're gonna see dirty cities that don't work, poor services, fentanyl, zombies. And I'm just feeling like, you know, I wanted to, you know, it wasn't like this, maybe it will be better again. But I feel some sort of shame. And I'm shocked that the people who mismanaged the place do not feel shame over their mismanagement. How does you know the mayor of Los Angeles or San Francisco or Boston or any of these cities not feel personally responsible for tent cities that have just gone up everywhere with, you know, needles on the ground and, you know, feces and everything else. I don't understand how you could participate in this and not feel obligated to try to make it function better. And I don't think they do feel obligated. I think for some reason, that has to do with Orange Man bad, the blue state folks feel perfectly fine managing a collapse. And I can't see how you would get there. But in any case, along those lines, I was thinking about, you know, what it means, you know, in 1976, it felt kind of weird to be around for the 200th anniversary and 200 years seemed like a long time. And I now realize, okay, it's now 250 years, you and I have been around for more than a fifth of the entire time that the country has been around. I was just visiting my aunt in Pennsylvania, Judy. Judy's 100 years old, she's been around for two fifths of the time that this country has existed. This country is very young. And it's not obvious to you when you're little that that's true, because distinguishing between 200 years and 1000 years is pretty difficult. But now that you've lived 50, wow, the changes in the place, most of which have not been good over that time, it was good at the beginning. And then somewhere, things have gone very wrong. And it's, it's very disheartening. But I think there's also something to having seen it function better, having seen people function more generously towards each other. That tells you at least there's some other way to be. Well, there have been improvements. I think, I think you're in a pretty sour mood about the country. And it's the 250th birthday. And I think we can be excited if visitors can be this excited. And, you know, the sports brings people together, even the people on opposite sides. So, you know, yes, you're going to be excited to win. But we have all these videos of people on both teams just coming together in the streets. And yes, it's fueled by, you know, tribalism and alcohol, but there's nothing inherently wrong with that. And, and it's exciting for people and they're in a new place. And they're seeing some of the wonders of the US. And I will, I will just point to some of the and I, you know, some of these are being dismantled for sure. But some of the environmental advances that we have made that at the point that we were seven years old, at the bicentennial, we lived in Los Angeles County. I lived, you know, in West LA in the Palisades. And, and I don't, I don't know what part of LA and I know where you live. I don't know what it's called more broadly, but near the tarpets, near the tarpets, right in the center of LA. Yeah. So, very fancy neighborhood, but in this in the center of LA, so different parts of LA. But where you were in particular, I was close enough to the ocean that not the air quality was, was decent, but the air quality in LA just thinking about it makes me cough. It was awful. It was abysmal. What you would fly in to LAX in the seventies and eighties, you always flew into a layer of yellow that was smog. It was disgusting. And that's mostly gone, right? And you know, part of that is a singular move to get let out of gasoline and to be using catalytic converters, right? But there's a lot more to it. Well, there's a, there's a, there is a move to getting rid of emissions. That means that the big bowl shaped basin that is the Los Angeles basin, which will trap, which will trap particulates is not trapping particulates as much anymore because they're not being generated. Despite the fact that you have a much larger population driving around much larger population that if it had stayed constant, that would have been an accomplishment. Instead, it has gotten way better. It's gotten much, much better. And you know, when we were young, and we've talked about this before, but there were a tremendous number. When you went on road trips, your car got coated in sticky insect goo. And then the insects largely disappeared. And this was somewhat later. And we've talked about this for decades now. The insects disappeared. And that suggests a, an impending collapse across all of the trophic levels and ecosystems. But the insects are beginning to come back, not all of them, maybe not enough, maybe not fast enough, but the insects are beginning to come back. And there is a greater awareness now of the, you know, the kinds of, the kinds of so-called successes that the, you know, the terabosh process and the insecticides and herbicides that are being used on monocrop agriculture across the United States in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s have begun to be understood to be toxic. The organic movement took off, farmers markets began to be a thing again. You know, what we're seeing with regard to maha now was well understood by apparently supposedly lefty, like hippy dippy moms in the 70s and 80s. And that has become more mainstream. So there is a movement, a resurgence of sort of back to the land and back to the human as organism on human scale, that even America with this great giant diversity of landscapes and people has, has begun to understand and appreciate. I agree. I want to point specifically, your point about emissions is actually a demonstration of when liberalism functioned correctly. Yes. Absolutely. In fact, what happened was California, largely driven by what was going on in Los Angeles, created mandates for cars that were importing to California and or made there. And because California is such a gigantic and populated state, it didn't make any sense to make cars for the California market. I mean, I think they did for a while. But, but the point is it forced a positive change onto the entire country from which we are all benefiting at a health level. So, you know, good governance is a real thing. It used to exist nowadays. You know, if Trump came out in favor of regulations to improve the air quality, the Democrats would be for polluted air. Right. It's like that simple. Yes. And so we've lost our minds. And I hope people can see this clearly with regard to maha. Yes. You know, because it sounds like MAGA, because it seems to be kind of appreciated by the Red Hat people, you have you have people who used to shop at Whole Foods, even though it was overpriced, who are now claiming that, you know, food dyes and preservatives are just fine. Yeah, it's insane. And in fact, you know, it used to be that concern about things like vaccines and adverse events was a feature of the left. There was skepticism about pharma. And it's like, well, if I was over in Red Hat territory, then, you know, sign me up for another shot. And it's nuts. It's not a logical method. It doesn't make any sense. So I hope people do not hear me as down on the country. I'm very I love this country. And believe me, I think it started the modern West that it is the only future humanity's got. And we are absolutely obligated to fix it. And we should delight in doing so instead of, you know, dwelling on what doesn't work. Let's figure out the stuff that we haven't figured out yet and put the country back on track. That said, I'm very down on the division that is allowing the degradation, right? If people just simply looked at each other as, you know, fellow citizens that are quirky and have different views, but are not fundamentally bad. And, you know, are there fundamentally bad people? Yeah, there are a lot of them. It's a tiny, tiny percentage. Most people are good. And most people want the same stuff. And the fact is, as Thomas Paine argues in his piece, Common Sense, the way that we create the wealth that makes us all better off is to figure out, we put our heads together and we make a governance structure that fosters civilization rather than tries to figure out how I'm going to parasitize you and you're going to parasitize me. And we're going to use governance to do it by, you know, getting the balance of power. Yes. Right. We have to cut that out because what we are doing is sinking the ship that we are all at sea on. That's what it is. And it's that insane. I agree. Um, there's one more thing I want to share, and it's not going to seem like it's related, but I think it kind of is. So our friend, Chloe Belderry, her sub-stack this week is called "These are the Breaks, a Meditation on Becoming Undone." I just want to read a few paragraphs. I think there are useful instructions for taking advantage of what seem like simply negative events in one's life or one's country's life."Hello, everyone," she writes."Right now I'm in a six-week learning cohort studying the blues and jazz traditions as viewed through the writings of Albert Murray, Stanley Crouch, and Ralph Ellison. I studied Albert Murray as the Omni-Americans a few years ago and spoke about it on a few podcasts. In the text, Murray richly declares that America is fundamentally mulatto, mixed, and composite, and that what makes America possible is a skill that musicians, writers, comedians, and the fool and tarot embody, knowing how to play on the breaks. Now, I know what you might be thinking. What are those? Great question. The simplest explanation is that in music, the breaks are the moment when an instrument drops. For example, when Clyde Stubblefield, James Brown's drummer, plays on the breaks in this song "Funky Drummer," the guitar drops and the drummer keeps playing. These are the breaks. We'll get dinged by YouTube if we play this now, but I encourage you. We'll put this link in the show notes and I mean listen to James Brown. It's a great excuse to listen to James Brown."This musical moment is not a concept. Rather, it gives expression to an experience built into the very fabric of human existence. The downs, unexpected blows, sudden drops, and unpredictably spontaneous gaps in what you thought you knew about this life. These breaks simultaneously destroy our sense of an individualized self and puts us in touch with the great mystery of the life, death, life cycle, inherent in all being. This moment is recounted in all great world myths which reflect and express patterns found in material reality. When Corrie is taken to the underworld, this is a break. That's Persephone. When West Africans are taken captive and brought to North America via the Atlantic slave trade, this is a break. When the fool in the tarot walks off the cliff, this is a break. Murray notes that the capacity to play on or through these moments is a kind of surrender to the transformative initiatory process, and this initiatory process is both fundamental to what it means to be human and essential to the endurance of the human spirit. It is also the ritual foundation from which all elite art forms spring." Chloe's amazing and she's writing about something that we have talked about in different forms before, but the idea of the breaks, playing on the breaks, responding to the unexpected, to the bad, to the sudden drop of the instrument on which you thought you were depending but you keep going, whether or not you're playing another instrument or singing or just doing something else, that's what you do. You keep going and you make of it maybe even something better because this was unexpected, this is a serendipitous moment, and yes, perhaps every single read on it at the time is horror. It's negative, there is nothing good, but what do you do? Do you lean into the horror or do you find what you can and make of it what you will? That's what you do. And that's what Americans did, that's what the colonists did when they declared their independence 250 years ago, and that's what we should all be doing when we find ourselves in a situation that seems untenable and we're mad and we're sad and we're mean because what? Because there's a person we don't like in office? Pull yourself up, find your freaking bootstraps and make of it something joyous and amazing. That's what you should do. Yeah, and it's actually a reflection of maybe the most fundamental biological principle. Yeah, yes. You play the cards that you are dealt. They may be crappy and you may still win or you may get farther than you would have gotten if you didn't play, but the the difference, we really are in a battle between people who wish to play the cards that we were dealt versus those who want to throw up the card table and not play anymore. And the point is not play anymore. A, you can decide to do that for you. They want to take the other cards. Yeah, they want to take their card table and go home. And the fact is, that's not a plan, right? Some of us have children and hope to have grandchildren and we have to have a system that takes care of them, that makes it possible for them to contribute. And destroying that system is insane. It's fool hardy. It's also not your right to do it. So we have a marvelous country and maybe. But again, chastising people for behaving badly and being sad about the state of things is, I don't feel like it's the ethos that we want here. Like, do what needs to be done. Like, play the cards that you're dealt and find joy, create joy. Like, use the moment, whatever it is, and be excited about it. And if that means going to a World Cup game or going for a hike or anything, anything is better than dwelling in the certainty that things are terrible and they're only going to get worse. Like, there's no good down that road. It's just terrible. So smile at strangers. A lot of them will smile back at you and that right there is going to make your life better. All right. You have anything else? Nope. All right. We're going to do a Q and A after this. So in 10, 15 minutes, join us on Locals and you bring your questions and we'll provide some answers for an hour or so. I think you're doing, are you doing Patreon this weekend on the 4th of July? Is that possible? Yeah. Yep. Okay. Yes, I am. Okay. So if you've been wanting to be in conversation with Bret on any of his Patreon calls, this Independence Day weekend is your chance to join. Our sponsor is this week, we're Timeline, Arma and Helix. Check them out. A reminder that we are supported by you, our audience. We are grateful to you. And especially if you're watching on YouTube anywhere really, but consider subscribing, liking, sharing what you see when you like it. And until you see us next time, be good to the ones you love, eat real food and get outside. Be well, everyone.