398: So Goes Glory with Victor Davis Hanson
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It's the way I heard it on micro. This episode is called So Goes Glory. And what a treat I have for you. I don't know, Chuck, is he going to mind being referred to as a treat? You think? No, I think he'll take it in the way in which you meant it. So Victor Davis Hanson is my guest. I'm not going to throw the hero word around too indiscriminately, but he's been somewhat heroic to me over the years.

because he's an intellectual who also happens to be a fifth generation farmer. In fact, he's still teaching, isn't he? At a couple of places. Yeah. He's a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and an author of a ton of books and articles. I think he also still teaches at Pepperdine as well. Yeah. He's in demand. You've probably seen him all over TV.

The country, in my estimation, is desperate for his point of view. And modesty aside, I think they're desperate for it for the same reason that Dirty Jobs was a hit. There's a group of people in this country who are slowly coming to the conclusion that they have not just been underappreciated or ignored or misused, but now in some sort of experiment,

And this is the upshot of the article that was sent to me yesterday that I read that I'm going to recommend you all go read now or sometime very soon. I was out for my morning hike with 50 pounds of pennants on my shoulders when I got this thing and I couldn't read it. So I sent it to Chuck, who was kind enough to read it to me over the phone. Yep. Victor knows a lot of big words, doesn't he, buddy?

Oh, yeah, yeah. There's a 50-cent word every other sentence, and he puts them together very well. I mean, this article, I've linked it in the show notes, so you can go click on it and you can read it. It is lengthy. What is it, 1,880 words? It's almost 1,900 words. And full disclosure, we just recorded a version of this preamble where I read the whole thing, because I just really am a fan of what he's done. But it took me 20 minutes, and I don't want you to wait 20 minutes to read it.

To get to hear Victor Davis Hanson talk about why he wrote what he did. But let me just tell you this by way of introduction. The article is called America's Lab Rats. And it takes a position that roughly, well, here, I'm just going to read the intro because I got it in front of me. There you go. And it spells it out. Starts like this.

Half the country thinks something has gone drastically wrong in America, to the point that it is rapidly becoming unrecognizable. Millions feel they are virtual lab rats in some grand research project conducted by elites who could care less when the experiment blows up.

And then he goes on to list a number of things that you and I have talked about on the podcast before that I've always compared to, you know, it's like the emperor's new clothes. How much of this are people going to take? And look, not to show my own slip too much, but just last night watching the Olympics flicking by and seeing a biological male in the boxing ring flatten that girl from Italy.

I'm sorry, I just had the same feeling again. Like how much of this are we going to watch before the portion of the company that feels like they're being experimented upon, the portion of the country, I should say, finally just says, no, enough, uncle, I've had it. So we're very proud, Chuck and I are, of the evergreen nature of this podcast and of its apolitical nature. But

We both just felt like this is an article that really speaks to a divide in a way that's not entirely political, but is more dirty jobbian in a way, if I can make up a term.

I think it speaks more to class warfare, if you will, than political. It's not really left versus right. It's the elite and the non-elite. It's the elite and the working class. And that's what irks us more than anything is because obviously we identify with the working class.

class yeah anyway victor is with us momentarily i'm going to ask him why he wrote what he did you're going to love his answers he's thoughtful he's measured yeah sure he has opinions and not everybody listening might agree with him but you cannot doubt his bona fides you cannot doubt what he's done for history both the classics military history

I'm a fan, and I bet you will be too when you meet the man himself right after this. Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-dum.

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Or I assume maybe that you're in your farmhouse somewhere in the Central Valley? Yeah, I'm somewhere between Visalia and Fresno, right halfway in between. And for people who have never been to either such place, you know, you're looking down from heaven at California. Where exactly is that vis-a-vis north, south, east, and west? You know, I'm almost in the exact...

center of the state. I'm about 75 miles to the crest of the Sierras and about 130 miles from the Nevada border, and I'm about 150 miles, 40 miles to the central coast, San Luis Obispo. It's right in between the two of them, and then I'm exactly halfway between San Diego and the Oregon border.

Do you think of it in terms of northern and southern, or do you think of it more like eastern and western in terms of how the state might be divided? Well, it's such a huge state, and it has so many different regions and pockets, but

Since I was a student, I grew up on this farm and I had to work when my grandfather ran it and then my parents and when I did. So I was going back almost every year. I mean, every weekend from UC Santa Cruz, which was kind of the left wing Mecca in the 70s, and then to this area, which is very conservative. I did the same thing at Stanford. And I work at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. So I get these two different polarized views of

I always think of the San Joaquin Valley, not just the Central Valley, because Sacramento is now very different, but somewhere between Stockton and Bakersfield, all of the foothills, all of the eastern mountain ranges, and then the Inland Empire that is east of Los Angeles to the Arizona border as kind of a, not just conservative, but maybe more conservative than red states, ultra conservative. And then I see that

A 900-mile corridor, 50 miles wide from La Jolla to north of Berkeley, into the wine country is ultra-liberal and bluer than any blue state. So the state is 30 million hardcore leftists and 10 million hardcore conservatives. And then the region reflects that too. It's almost, if you look at the map, 75% of California is probably conservative regionally.

Right. And the 25% that's not has 75% of the populations. It kind of is bizarre that we produce Adam Schiff and Devin Nunes in the same state. Yeah.

I mean, not to belabor the point, but I just think it's so interesting. I've been reading your books and following your commentary for years, but I didn't get really interested in your worldview until I understood that you moved back in to the childhood home where you grew up and where you had established your bona fides and so many traditional, call it higher educational positions.

benchmarks, you know. This is pretty high cotton, but in the same way Jefferson was a farmer first and then an intellectual, I just always think of you that way. And it's such a short list, Victor, that really there's nobody else on it. And I think it gives your writing...

perspective and I think that while I've been really blown away by it on many many occasions this latest thing that I just saw on the blade of Perseus your website fantastic name by the way where you talk about a large population in this country that have come to see themselves as lab rats and

This is not a political podcast. We never have these kinds of conversations. They're always evergreen. But Chuck read this to me yesterday while I was out walking, and I thought, I can't take it anymore. Get Victor on the phone, please, because to me, you've written the emperor's new clothes for grownups.

And you've just gone down a list of things that I feel deeply, and I know a lot of other people feel deeply. People who, incidentally, are not, no fans of Trump, but who nevertheless feel like something so indispensable and concrete and real has been moved, shifted. And man, that to me is the conversation that

of our times. And thank you for writing it. And if you wouldn't mind, I'd just love to unpack some of it with you right now and start by asking why. Why did you write this and why did you write it now? Well, part of it is personal. I was gone for graduate and undergraduate for about, and I lived overseas for about nine years. I did come back to where I grew up, but

When I was 26, I decided not to go into academia and I just came back and farmed. And then I got back into academia at the local state university. But my point is, for most of my life, I've been going back between those two worlds. And while...

That other world, the academic, urban, Silicon Valley, Stanford world was condemnatory of this type of world. And I mean when I would talk to people about farming or Fresno, they just thought it was, you know, one person said, I don't know how you can even live near Fresno. And then when I talked to people here, to the degree they knew about those people, they

And they didn't necessarily have a positive view, but they were never hypercritical. They just said, well, that's neat. What's it like up there? What do you do every week? But these people thought a fate worse than hell would be to live among people here. It was a very diverse area of Armenian Americans, Mexican Americans, Japanese Americans, poor white, Oklahomans. Now it's mostly Mexican American from the open borders, but...

It's odd that they are assuming the ethos and the culture of the earlier mixed diverse communities. In other words, I don't know of a Mexican-American man over 40 that is not voting for Trump, but I'd say most of their kids and their wives are not. It's a very muscular, blue-collar community.

It's been very good for me also because I remember when I came home from graduate school, I was very happy that I told my father, who was a farmer and a junior college, I said, I passed my Italian, German, and French. I attached my Greek and Latin composition. I only have nine more exams. And he said...

Did you ever learn how to wire the 220 raisin to hydrator like I asked you? I said, Dad, I'm a full-time student. And he said, I know you are. And my dad had actually gone to college, but he said, I need the raisin to hydrator wired.

and I don't want it to burn up. So all of the skills that I thought people thought were very important were not important here. It was can you drive a tractor for nine hours and not take out a vine? Can you weld? Can you do rudimentary plumbing? Can you prune trees? And over there, they didn't even know they existed.

And then the vocabulary of disparagement, I started looking at these adjectives, clingers, irredeemables, deplorables, dregs, chumps, hobbits, crazies. Those are words that John McCain even used, whom I liked. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden. It's not just Trump supporters, it's looking down at those people. And

I was trying to figure out what happened, and I think a lot of it was globalization, that people who had the skills to capture that 7 billion person market in high tech, finance, insurance, the media, became fabulously wealthy to an extent we'd never experienced in the history of civilization. I mean, I see people at Silicon Valley that come on campus that are worth 3, 4, 5 billion. And then the people who were muscular

whose jobs could be Xeroxed at a cheaper rate, or they dealt with natural resources that could be offshore or something. I'm talking about people who provide our fuel or our housing, our food, our timber, our mining. They didn't do so well. They either lost their jobs or their wages stagnated. And then we created a post facto exegesis like, well, they didn't do very well because they never learned to code, or they didn't get with it, or they didn't get with the plan, or they're...

Okies or whatever. And the problem was, so the explanation followed the reality. When you would say to them, I would go to Whole Earth Foods in Palo Alto sometimes, I'd see some of my colleagues, I'd say, come over here, look, see the grapes, see the tomatoes? Where do you think they come? Look at the almonds. You know how hard it is to grow grapes, to make them look like that? Especially in today's regulatory environment or...

you know when i would go places i'd always talk to truckers you know or you know what it's like to because we used to have truckers come in and get our fruit and you talk these guys they drove all night long keep the fruit cool i'd say when would our fruit get to new york don't worry mr hansen we'll get it there in two and a half days i promise you and all of that took enormous intelligence and skill i remember one guy sold to me once

If you don't get a job, ha-ha, you can always run a 7-Eleven. I said, I don't think I could run a 7-Eleven. Inventory, labor, security. My God, those guys are walking Einsteins to be able to do that. Profit margins. As are farmers, though, the great generalists of our time. One of the first big lessons on dirty jobs for me was working with farmers and miners. In fact, it was a miner who pulled me aside one day and said, Mike,

There are only two industries in the world. The rest are jobs. The industries are farming and mining. Every single thing in the room where I'm sitting now and you was either grown from the ground or pulled from the earth and fashioned into something useful. Those are our industries. Everything else are jobs.

That was sort of the thesis of Dirty Jobs. And I so wish that I had been thinking about this in 2016 when Chuck Todd invited me on to meet the press. Everybody was stunned by the results of the election.

And because I had had a front row seat to a few hundred of the jobs you just described, they thought perhaps I might have some insight as to how Trump could have possibly won this election. I mean, they were gobsmacked. And I didn't have near as eloquent an answer as you provide in this latest piece, but I did fumble around and try to express the idea that

We're no longer two sides of the same coin. Half of our workforce has become subordinate owners of these vocational consolation prizes, and the other half has become ascendant. And that pisses a lot of people off. And that started to grow and fester. And that's what I saw on my little show. Before you comment, I just want to read a quick quote from you that I love.

Because it speaks to this weird delineation that I think we're all suffering from. You said or wrote somewhere, I see my whole career is integrated.

I grew up on a farm and inherited a tragic view from my parents and grandparents. Studying the classics for eight years, both here and abroad, and teaching them for 20 years, all reiterated the sense that human nature was unchanging and that the human ordeal was predictable. Whether it was working on a farm or reading Sophocles, the message kept being reiterated in different ways. Nothing really changes.

And that, to me, is baked into this idea that we really are two sides of the same coin as a country, at least we're supposed to be. But we're not integrated anymore. And God, what a mess that's caused.

I know. And what the founders were very worried about was, and Tocqueville wrote about it in Democracy in America as a foreign observer, is that they felt that you had to have a, not the majority necessarily, but you had to have a large group of people

as the foundation of a consensual society that worked both intellectually and physically. And they understood nature was not to be romanticized, but to be treated with respect, but to be mastered in some sense. And they were independent, they were autonomous.

I mean, the farmer was the emblematic of that, but we still have the independent shopkeeper. We have the independent trucker. All of those people are not part of the Borg, so to speak, and they're very valuable people if they're viable. Want to cut your cell phone bill in half this month and every month from now on? Here's what you do. You switch to Pure Talk.

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at puretalk.com slash row. Oh, when I look out this window, I can look 360 degrees and

There's at least 12 farms that when I was farming, I looked at my social security thing the other day from 1980 to 86, I never made more than $7,000 apparently. And they all went broke and we're all Tessera in a mosaic of about a 12,000 acre big farm. I like the guy, I know him, he's really nice. We're all renting our places out to him and all the farmhouses where they grew families together.

you know they were in the little league the hospital board the parents were on the school board they're all gone and there are people who came in here from mexico which are great people but they're farm laborers for this big corporate enterprise and there's nobody really that i know of that is farming that does their own work their owners their managers and why this is going to continue is if i look out on this orchard right out my window and compare it to when i farmed

It looks better now because there's so much science and capital on the corporate level. A computer turns on the irrigation, a computer puts in herbicide, a computer puts in nutrients and nitrogen, a machine mechanically picks. One man can do this whole 43 acres I have, but...

But when I go out there, I see there was my grandfather when I was six telling me, Victor, you've got to, this is how you irrigate. There was my father. There was my brother. There was, I went out to the shed today to get something. I remember my brother, I had a twin brother in 1983, turned around to me and said, I just cut the end of my finger off on a grinder.

And I said, my God. He said, don't worry, I'll get it. And he was out working the next day. And my grandfather, my Swedish grandfather had done the same thing. And I said, well, Frank did it. And so you're in a good tradition. But that was just everyday stuff. And it was very dangerous. Farming is statistically the most dangerous. I've seen so many people. You know, when I talk at Stanford to some brilliant economists, and I like these guys, they're my colleagues. But when they talk about

The market adjudicates. And when we have an inefficient industry, creative destruction, I get that. But when the price of raisins, which was what we used to grow predominantly, went from $1,400 to $400 in one year, everybody went broke. And a guy about a mile from here, he was my high school friend. He put a noose around his neck. He turned on the

pick up in his garage and sealed it. He OD'd on drugs and he shot himself in the head all at once. Wow. Well, he covered everything. He covered everything. And then the ditch tenderer

shot himself. Our family just disintegrated. We had 200 acres that had been our family for over 100 years, and everybody sold out and moved away, and I'm the only one left, just with my 40 acres. I have the original home place, but what I'm getting at is that devastation of globalization was caused by EU subsidizing the price of raisins at 600 a ton, and then capturing world markets so everybody...

went broke. But I was a conservative. But when Reagan's guy came out from the Raisin Administrative Commission, I asked him, we had a public meeting. I said, this is terrible. Why do you allow these people to dump this stuff in here? You know what he said to me? He said, this is good for you, Mr. Hanson. I said, how is it good to compete with raisins that have an 800 ton subsidy? And they're substandard raisins. He said,

you will have to be more efficient because you will have to beat that. Number two, the people who won't be efficient will go out of business. The consumer will get a cheaper price. And more importantly, they won't be sustainable. Well, they're still doing it, you know, 40 years later. So a lot of the economists I know believe that that, where I work, that that creates a better product. And they, you know, they despise Trump and the MAGA people for even suggesting a tariff. But

If you're on the other end and you're working really hard and your margin is 1% and a country like China or somebody is dumping stuff below the cost of production and you think that's going to make you a better producer to compete with that or it's going to help the American people for you and your operation to go broke. There has to be some balance is what I'm trying to get. You don't want a protected economy, you don't want an open, but

And then because I was at a university for the last 22 years and I went there earlier, all of these ideas, and this is getting to your point about why I wrote about it, you know, they would say to me, teacher unions are good and there's a bunch of right-wing people that want all these charter schools. And I'd always say, so you like the public school? Yes. Where are your children? Well, they're at Sacred Heart. They're at Castilea.

Or they'd say, we've got to get kilowatts up, the price of kilowatts up to 35 cents. That'll discourage electrical use and be good for the planet. We can all go wind and solar. And I said, have you ever been in Fresno or Bakersfield when it's 115? Because you should come because poor Mexican-American people are in Walmart and they're there all day long because that's how they get free air conditioning. They cannot turn on their air conditioners at 30 cents a kilowatt.

Or then you would say it would just be down the line on all of these issues that they would be protected from the consequences, really, of their... They would tell me, you know what, I shouldn't talk about somebody, you know, post-mortem, but I used to really like Milton Friedman. But he once debated me and...

It was a friendly debate. I was young. I just got the Hoover Institute. So it was on open borders. And so he said, you know, I don't really worry about open borders. Let the market adjudicate. And I said, what does that mean? And he said, when the price gets down to a dollar an hour, they won't come. And I said...

But are you going to be living on Knob Hill? And I'm going to be living where everybody's going to be trying to live on a dollar an hour to compete with that. And I've seen it happen already. And people kill themselves or they don't work. It doesn't work to let the market adjudicate letting millions of people from the most impoverished circumstances come up here without some type of regulation. They said, no, as soon as the...

Wages stabilize on both sides of the border. You don't have a problem The only way to solve it is I have an open border and I thought this is lunacy later He said, you know, you can't subsidize it, but it was that kind of jarring from both left and right I would go back and forth and it was hard to take are you more stunned like in terms of cognitive dissonance? Are you more stunned when you hear somebody like Friedman who I assume you almost categorically admire

say something that feels so out of context. Or when you hear someone who you categorically dismiss, all of a sudden stumble across some great truth that's either elevated by history or is just truthful on its face in a way that you know in your big giant brain matters. I don't know if that happens a lot to you these days, but... It happens sometimes.

It's funny, what you're describing is bifurcated when I see people on the so-called right that I'm kind of surprised that they're so doctrinaire and theoretical and they're not worried about the human implications. It's almost always economic. When I talk about people on the left, that they're hypocritical or paradoxical or they don't care.

To give one example, I was talking to someone not long ago about the busing of illegal aliens into Martha's Vineyard. And I said it was just perfect. 24 hours, virtue signaling, performance art. They need beautiful puff coats. They need food. Next 24 hours, these guys got to get out of here as quickly as possible. I cannot have them here. And sometimes when I was talking to people, they, on the left, they admitted that. They would say that.

The only problem with it is, I call it a John Kerryism. I think I mentioned that. They feel that as kind of platonic guardians, they have to have exemptions. They have to fly on...

Gulf Streams to address global warming. If they had to sit nine hours like I do trying to get a connection out of Fresno to go somewhere in the East Coast, then that hurts everybody because they're so valuable. They want public schools and they want teachers union, but their children are going to be so important to the future of this country, they have to go to prep school. And in the process, they don't realize that if you don't experience what you advocate, something happens to you.

In 2003, I was a big supporter of, because after 9/11 and getting rid of, I thought, existential threats. So I supported the Iraq war. But after about two years, I thought, you know, you're 50, you didn't join the military. Your dad and grandfather and your person you're named after, they were all in the military and he was killed.

You better get over there. So when I was embedded for two times, 2006 and 2007, it was pretty hairy. And then you start to see what your advocacy means in the real. You're talking about being on a Black Hawk at night with an 18-year-old kid from Nebraska sitting out there with a 50-mile machine gun with no... You know, he's sitting out on a little platform and you're flying 180 miles in the dark and he's looking for little signs of gunfire and you ask him...

when you land wow that was weird how often you do it i do it every night how old are you i'm 18. are you scared no i don't i'm not scared these are the bad guys my job is to get them and then when he talks to you and you're in that blackhawk are you okay if they're going to shoot me they're going to have to go shoot my first before they hit you or i was in a humvee in a bad place and the colonel turns around says stop

there's a good chance we're going to be blown up on this thing. I want you to sit on the left rear on a big steel plate. So if we go up, you're going to be okay." Or we'd go into the Sons of Saddam, the Arab Spring, and he said, "They blew up a guy here, and so you're going to sit at the door. So if there's these guys with suicide bombers, and this is a setup, and they do not want to join us, this is going to blow up. But if you're in that guard, you'll blow out the door." And when you meet people like that, then it really brings home

When you support something, you better be very careful because you're going to take people, you're going to send them to a God forsaken place. And it came up again, we're 45,000 soldiers short in the military and the military doesn't want to talk about it. And I have a lot of friends that are high generals, so they're very angry at me. But if you really dig, you can find out what the problem is because the military does keep statistics on race, as you know, and ethnic and

And that 50,000 shortfall is inordinately white males. In other words, Latinos, blacks, women, gay, everybody is sort of joining up.

I think it's directly correlated. They will argue with you, and I want to be respectful. They'll argue. But it has something to do with the Mark Milley, Austin, white racism, Reid, Professor Kendi, DEI, and then we're going to see if there's a cabal of races. And they did. And of course, in December of 2023, they released the Pentagon report and said they didn't find it. So then I was curious about who dies in Iraq and Afghanistan. And they don't want to talk about that.

But I found out, if you look at the statistics, white males died from 72 to 74 percent in Iraq and Afghanistan. In other words, the people from the lower middle classes that we rely on generation after generation, Vietnam, their grandfather, Gulf War, their father, Afghanistan, Iraq, the grandson, Afghanistan.

The great-grandson's not joining and we depend on them to do two things to join the military and die at twice their numbers in the demographic they make up about 34% of the population and yet they die at double those numbers and yet we had the audacity to consider them unpatriotic or Racist or cabal then we find out we can't find evidence. So we we

We released the report in December, the Pentagon report that finds no cabal. In the meantime, now we're short all the people that will go to god-awful places like Taji or Fallujah or Helmand Province. They're not joining now. You refer to them, I say them, and I don't want to paint with too broad a brush, but I love the expression, the muscular jobs, the muscular class. It's also a muscular...

state of mind, you know, for that kid in that helicopter to take that position that was both protective of you and just so matter-of-fact in the face of unspeakable danger, that has to be taught. That attitude, that sensibility is a result of a collection of choices. And we seem to have waged a war

on the people who make those choices. Back to your article. One of the things I love about it, it's 1900 words, 1888, by the way, don't know if you counted them. Well, it's your own website. Like some editor is going to tell you, Victor, can you shave 200 off for me just to make it a tight 1800? Probably not dealing with that. But at its heart is this indictment of hypocrisy.

But nowhere in this does the word hypocrisy appear. You don't use it. And that's so interesting to me. It goes right to the heart of what I think. I don't want to speak for anybody but me, but I'll forgive stupidity and I'll forgive ignorance. But it's very hard to forgive this level of hypocrisy because it's wanton and because it's calculated and it's so deliberate. So...

I guess if I were to morph into a question, I would say the recruiting challenge you just described in the military, which, by the way, I don't know if you've read this. Pete Hegseth has a book called The War. I have.

I mean, it's so good. And he pissed off the same people you've pissed off. He's talking about all of these equity celebrations at the expense of the very thing you mentioned, which comes back to the recruiting challenge, which is weirdly similar to the agrarian world.

the generational aspect of farming. You're fifth generation, right? Yeah. And all of a sudden, so we've got a whole new generation of kids who maybe for the first time are going, you know what? I don't think it's for me.

So somewhere in all of this is how do you make a more persuasive case for farmers, a more persuasive case in light of what's going on in the military for service, a more persuasive case in light of what's going on in the skilled trades for that kind of pursuit. Finally, I'll just tell you this. It's not quite a peripeteia, but it was certainly an anagnoresis, if I'm getting my Aristotelian terms straight for me. I'm backstage.

At a Future Farmers of America event in 2008, and I'm giving the keynote, and I'm going through some brief that was handed to me. And on the front page, it says very clearly, we are no longer referring to ourselves as the Future Farmers of America. We are now the FFA. I pulled the muckety-muck aside and I said, why? What is this?

And long story short, the word farming had become a pejorative and it was affirmatively impacting their ability to recruit. So I'm just throwing all that out there to say how much of this is self-inflicted in all of these different vocations. And is there a way to change the broader societal mindset around these jobs?

I think a lot of it did come at the beginning of the 21st century with high tech and the global markets and this professional class of people who made a fortune. These universities that went from a billion dollar endowment to 30, 40 billion dollar endowments. And these tech devices, these virtual, you know, everybody's on their iPhone and all that. And I think what's created, there's a human timeless desire for something real. And there's nothing more real than

than devotion like this guy that I was talking about on the Blackhawk. He was doing something real, he thought. I think he was doing something. He was trying to defend what he thought were the interests of his country. He wanted to protect people who were civilians. He had a tragic view of the world. And the tragic view was, "I join. If I get shot, that's the way it works." It wasn't, "I can't believe I'm here or what's happening to me. This isn't fair."

The farming is the same thing. You talk to farmers and they'll say, the price of almonds has dropped from $4.53 to $1.57. So it's boom and bust and it's bust now. And you talk to these guys and they're going broke. And they'll say, well, I still go out there every day and I produce a product and people eat it. And I said, yeah, but you're going broke. Is that tragic or stoic, by the way? Yeah, stoic or tragic, both. I don't have a way out. Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do

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What I'm getting at is that they feel that all of these people that do these types of jobs feel it's something concrete. When you lay a cement patio or you're pruning something, it's real, you can feel it, and it does something that's good for people. I had a Mexican-American guy came by about...

a year ago and you say, "Hey Victor, I helped you build the stone wall around your fence 20 years ago. You remember that? Hey, Javier, what are you doing? I gotta go look at it. Let me look at it one more time. How is it working?" And that's that sense. And when you're a virtual society, I mean, no bigger defender of American finance than me and insurance and tech, but it brings you away from concrete things. The more you do that, the more you rationalize it and the more distant you become.

And we are creating a class that you can spot now by their clothes, their accent, their attitude, that are completely divorced from what we used to think was the American center or tradition. And California is the great experiment because we are producing students

the most asymmetrical society of not just wealthy people, but hyper, hyper wealthy, not just the Zuckerbergs of the world, but I'm talking about the high professional classes making three, five, six, seven hundred thousand, and then 21% of the people below the poverty line

and people not making it in... This is new because most of the time we said these guys that are wealthy and they're right wing and they're greedy and we're going to tax them. Now, these guys are, well, we got to need this money for global warming and changing the climate and we've got to help people adapt to the high-tech world and we've got to have startups.

And we're working on climate change and diversity and all that. And it's very insidious. And I don't know what we're going to do about it. But for me right now, the great threat, and that's why one of the reasons, get back to your question, it's very hard to talk about an exploitive class because these people, the wealth in the country has changed dramatically.

I went through the Fortune 400. They're no longer fortunes and assembly, manufacturing, mining. They are all investment, tech, insurance, media, speculation. And they're mostly, not all, but they're mostly on the left side of the ledger. So they have the added...

attraction of they're doing this for everybody. The Soros's of the world are trying to help people. They're not the Rockefellers. They're not the JP Morgans. They're not the Robberborns. But when you look at the techniques of

The monopolies or the attitude about extreme wealth or the use of wealth to generate what they think we lab rats should follow, they have the exact same ethos or mindset, only they have, and you mentioned hypocrisy, at least you could say of the 19th century captains of industry, the J.P. Morgans or the Guggenheims or whoever it was,

They were unapologetic. They said, "We're building America. We've got to have railroads. We've got to have lights. We've got to have electricity. We're going to do it our way. People will benefit. I'm happy I made my money." It was upfront. These people

Well, I'm making all this money, but I'm not really rich. I wear, you know, jeans and flip-flops and tie-dye shirts. I'm just one of you, and I'm using the money for good purposes. Oh, by the way, I have five homes, and I have two Gulf Streams, and I am living a life completely antithetical to the things I tell you to do. You can't have a natural gas stove in California anymore, but I have an Italian imported one.

You can't use natural gas to heat your home, but, you know, I have an Olympic-sized pool down in Malibu. I've got to get it heated, that kind of stuff. You've got to have a little EV with a 300-mile range, but, you know, when I get off my Gulfstream, I need to have a Range Rover with 15 miles a gallon. And it's so easy to do that, and that bi-coastal elite is...

They're very dangerous people because they're almost like New England Puritans. They have that zeal to do good. We're going to make America like New England. And that was very good, you know. But these people now, they've lost their God. They're secular, but there's still that frenzy to convert people.

and to dictate and to make your lives better. And you have to give us certain latitudes and exceptions and hypocrisies so we have the freedom and the ability to make you happier as we see you'll be happier. And that's, I think, it's very dangerous. Well, I think, obviously, it's getting crazier and crazier. So much of this piece, like, you don't actually spell it out, but it feels like, especially in the early parts of it,

you're tacitly saying, how much of this are we going to take? Back to the metaphorical experiment and the lab rats in question. Will they take this? Will they? If we tell them that was a successful retreat from Afghanistan, even though we left $50 billion in materiel behind,

Do you think they'll buy it? If we tell them that the border is secure as they see millions coming over it, do you think they'll buy it? If we tell them that it's fair for that biological man to get into the boxing ring just three days ago with that Italian woman and break her nose, do you think they'll buy it? And the indictment of the whole thing is that, yeah, so far we have.

I guess maybe the question is, when do the lab rats in the experiment look around and say, screw it, we're going to chew our way through the maze? Enough. Enough. That's very... It's coming, and that's why, of course, they demonize it. Oh, you people are all going to be January 6th crazies, but it's not going to be like January. It's going to be a more broad, and it's going to manifest itself. I call it a monastery of the mind sometimes. I just talk to people, and they'll just casually say...

I haven't watched a Hollywood movie in years. Disney, I don't care about Disney. I don't buy Bud Light. I wouldn't buy it. I don't... What's the Oscars? I don't even know what it is. What is the Tonys? What is the Grammys? I turned that out years ago. I was looking at the NBA under Michael Jordan. 30 million people playoffs. That was 20 years ago. Now they're happy when they get 3 or 4 million. So there's a whole segment of the population for a variety of reasons. It's kind of checked out. So far, they're very passive.

If you talk to them, and you talk to them as much as I or more than I do, what they're worried about when you say they wake up and it's a different country, it's a nihilism. Before we had in the 70s a crime wave, but nobody said I'm an advocate of critical legal theory and it's okay to steal a candy bar in San Francisco because the law was just made up by wealthy people who don't steal candy bars.

that there's nothing wrong with stealing a candy bar if it's under $950. Or we used to have an open border, but there was a border. We never had a situation where somebody said, the borders just doesn't exist, it's a construct.

Or we used to have racial essentialism, but we didn't talk about it because tribalism is a pre-civilizational idea. And now people just openly will say things. They'll talk about their race in a way that is the most illiberal, racist manner in the world, but we're conditioned to do it. And so I guess what I'm saying, it's not that we are lax people.

is we've destroyed the whole foundation, so we don't have any measurement anymore. It reminds me so much of the French Revolution. You know, you get rid of the Bourbons, then you get a very good constitutional republic, and then you want to go a little bit further with Danton, and then you get the Robespierre brothers and the Jacobins. And they think, if a man votes equally now, that's not enough. He has to be equal in every aspect of his being. So we're going to

kill all the priests, destroy the churches, rename the days of the week, rename the months, worship a supreme deity called radio or reason, the revolution is going to be total. And that's kind of what equity is now. It's like, okay, we got equality of opportunity, but it didn't create us all equal. So we're going to go in and we're going to change names, we're going to tear down statues, and it's going to be a holistic revolutionary experience.

Crime is going to be redefined, race is going to be redefined, the border is going to be redefined. I'll just finish this rant. I was going to school about a year ago, and I had been overseas. I drive into Junipio Serra Plaza, where my office is, and something's weird. The sign's not there anymore. Just 30 days. And then I see a little sign that says, Arrow, Jane Stanford Plaza. So I said to my assistant...

"What happened?" And he said, "They changed the signs." I said, "What?" He said, "You don't work on Junipero Serra Plaza anymore." I said, "Where do I work?" "You work on Stanford Plaza." I said, "Why?" "Because Junipero Serra in 1700 whipped some people and they're all angry and so they just changed the name overnight. The students and the administration did."

I said, "This is like the Soviet Union. Did we have a discussion about it?" I said, "You could make the argument that Leland Stanford was as liberal or as illiberal toward Chinese workers as Junipero Serra." But what I'm getting at, it's an effort on the part of the left, a total 360-degree, 24/7 effort. It's really scary because it involves entertainment, the media,

foundations, the administrative state, when it's supercharged by this level of wealth and technology. I did an experiment on my podcast about a year ago. I said, I'm going to do a Google search in front of all you guys now, and I'm going to Google May 2020 riots, and we'll see what comes up. You know what came up? January 6th. January 6th, yeah. And it didn't have the word January 6th. It was May. It was 2020.

So there's algorithms and things like that. It's a revolutionary cycle that we're in, and it's not going to end well because it's all predicated, as you implied, on the patience of the people who are the lab rats and the experimenters, whether it's three sexes or separate bathrooms or...

As I said, you're going to have to get used to being a semi-truck driver where you charge your truck up every 150 miles rather than every 1,100 or something. I don't think they're going to take it. I really don't. Well, I don't think they are either, but at the moment, they are. At the moment, they are. Back to Hans Christian Andersen. We're at the point in the story where the townspeople are still nodding in agreement that

about the beauty of the imaginary clothes. The kid has started to point and ask questions and some of the townspeople are going, "A little bastard might be onto something," you know, but they're still waiting for a cue. It hasn't tipped and I'm most interested in wondering or knowing when it will tip. Will it tip before November? When does it go splat?

And when will we run out of whatever goodwill has kept things somewhat civil so far? I'm worried about that too. There's certain things that we have a rendezvous with I'm very worried. Whatever feeling about Trump, when you come a quarter inch from blowing the ex-president and leading candidate or blowing his head off, and then you have no overt transparency about what happened,

And there are people that celebrated that. I saw a lot of blogs where they said, sorry, he missed and things like that. And then the Hitler, the reducto ad Hitlerium, which they're doing all the time. I don't think they understand two things, that if you tell everybody that the Republican nominee is Hitler and he's as bad as the Third Reich,

and you also send the message inadvertently that a 20-year-old know-nothing can get within the confines of local law enforcement, FBI, Secret Service, and take eight shots at the president with impunity until he's stopped, then you're going to have a lot of people out there who think, A, I can do better than that guy. If that guy got within, I can really pull it off. And B, if I were to do it, there's going to be a lot of people who think that I was some kind of heroic figure.

And when you add those two prerequisites, you're going to have something happen danger. I'm really worried about that. And I'm also really worried that in 2020, Trump was excessive over the top, etc. But we had a candidate that did not really campaign. And we were told that he was perfectly fine, but he didn't want to campaign because of COVID. We changed the rules from 30% non-election day to 70% in most of the swing states and

And then we said that this was a very moderate candidate. That was a very brilliant tripartite approach. But if you do that again, and you say this candidate, we don't want this candidate to be out because cognitively or intellectually they won't articulate an impressive interview or they won't, but we're going to keep this candidate hidden.

and we're going to rely on 70% of the people not going to the ballot and showing an ID on election day. And this candidate is going to have a new veneer and be remanufactured as a old-time moderate, maybe not from Scranton, but maybe from Berkeley, I don't know. And you're going to present that, and you're going to get the whole media thing generated. It's going to cause a lot of problems. What everyone thinks about Biden or Harris or anything, but to see the media say,

On June 13th, there's nothing wrong. There's nothing wrong. How dare you? The Wall Street Journal should be ashamed of themselves. This is cheap fakes. Then on June 14th, oh, my God, this person is cognitively challenged. He's got to go. No, and then they say, we're not going to leave because this vice president is not able. And then he does leave. And then suddenly on June 21st,

somebody who was considered a liability is almost like George Washington. The person who resigned is no longer selfish. George Washington is farewell address, and the person who takes over is not inarticulate and not comfortable with crowds or hostile interviews, but is Cicero. I'm just taking that as one example. When you have all of this establishment in media, and they have these Orwellian narratives, and they go like this and this and this,

You can't expect the American people not to become cynical. If we had this conversation eight years ago and I said fake news, I thought that was kind of a hysterical word and it was on the fringe right and it was kind of stupid. But now everybody understands. The media is...

is kind of like a state media. And when you think, well, am I paranoid? Then you read, well, Twitter was working with the FBI to suppress the laptop information. I could not even imagine that. So incrementally, we're going to regions or territories where we didn't even imagine, but we're doing it so insidiously...

we don't realize we're going to hit a make or break can't return and people are going to push back and i think that's starting i think they're pushing back yeah it's funny i'm in a different part of california than you i'm just a little north of san francisco over in the tiburon area and most of my neighbors and friends up here are left of center and i was at a dinner party the other night and this exact conversation came up and

It was funny, most of the people there still sort of rejected the idea that there was a giant bias in the media. Maybe there's some, but really the argument was it's not determinative of anything. And I said, well, let me ask you something. And we're all friends, so just be honest. If the former president...

that got shot at eight times and got his ear clipped happened to have been Barack Obama. Where would we be right now in the news cycle, three and a half weeks out? Would we be demanding? Would the journalists that you watch on whatever channels you favor, would they just be moving on? Or would there be a giant demand?

for not just retribution throughout the Secret Service, local police, whatever, but we just got to get to the bottom of this. We have to understand. And that actually landed. Everybody at the table, because they were very supportive of that former president, said, well, yes, yes, of course. And we would be right there encouraging those demands. And I said, well, that's my point, guys.

Why would you not encourage the same level of curiosity and diligence around the orange guy than the other guy? And there it is. And we had dessert and some wine and left friends, but I made my point. And I wonder if you agree. Yeah, I've had similar situations, although some of them have been more candid and their candor kind of runs like this, but they're not the same, Victor.

because Barack Obama was a sophisticated intellectual, the first African-American, and he was an iconic figure, and Donald Trump is an orange, shyster, overweight, slob, cruel. So, of course, we have to have different... And that attitude, I know it can be easily mocked, but that attitude is firmly entrenched on all these issues. And it gets back to what we talked about before. The left really does believe...

either because they're more affluent now or they feel they're better credentialed or they control most of the institutions, that that was almost their birthright. Or maybe they're... Most of them are not actively religious, but maybe there's some type of divine force that has bequeathed them those opportunities and success. But whatever the reason is, they feel...

that they have an entitlement to be hypocritical because they are morally superior and better educated than the rest of us. And so if they make a decision that isn't equally applicable to both sides, they just say, "Well, you've got a point. I am hypocritical. But on the other hand, you can't compare who I am or where I live or what I do or what my child does or what I think with you guys."

It was brought home, there was a commercial that came out this week, I don't know if you saw it, from the left. And I believe all fair and square in politics, I don't care that, I don't think anything's beyond the pale, basically. But they had a lot of voices that they were trying to make as Trump supporters to talk about their outrageous extreme views.

So they did these interviews. I don't know if you saw it. So the first guy says, I just think what people do in their bedrooms is my business, and I don't want them to have this. That's fine. And the next person goes, I don't want one abortion. If people have to have back alley abortions, that's what they deserve. Next person, there's only two seconds. It was all these social hot, but the point I'm making is not what they said, but the way they looked.

They were fat. They had perspiration under their arms. They were half-shaven. They looked like they were deranged. And it wasn't just one. It was every single one of them. So the message is these positions that are different than ours

are held by people that don't have the same right to have them as we do because they're substandard people. And that was physically and visually and figuratively transparent when they did that. And you wanted to think, well, there's professors that believe the same as these guys. Why don't you just have one professor or one lawyer or one CEO? But they didn't. It's a reflection about what they think. And when I'm around them during the week, some weeks...

It's unapologetic. It really is how they think. Sometimes it's minor. I go to a restaurant and I show my license. If I have a credit card once in a while, they don't know me and they'll say, where's Selma? And I'll say Fresno. Oh my God, I would never go there. Why would you live there when you can live up here? Or they'll say things like, where do you live? So I asked a guy the other day, he said, there's nowhere to eat there, is there? I said, yeah, there's plenty of places to eat.

And I said, I bet you if I ask you, you can tell me five good restaurants in Paris and five good in London and five good in Rome, but you can't tell me one in Bakersfield or Fresno. What do you think? 180 miles away from you versus 4,000. And he didn't want to answer that question because he said he knew the best restaurants in Europe, and he did not want to know one 180 miles away from him. When you have that attitude, it's...

It's predictable. And the problem is the people for the first time, I think, from talking to them, they're starting to be aware that these people don't like them. And they're starting to be confident that they are the ones that make the country. They're the ones that go to Helmand Province. They're the ones that frack. They're the ones that grow food. They're the ones that find rare earth minerals. They're the ones that climb up on wind machines.

They do all the stuff that makes life possible and they feel they're not appreciated, they're not compensated to the same degree. That's over 50% of the population and what November and beyond will try to demonstrate to us will popular pushback be as powerful as institutional control. In other words, if you don't have Hollywood and television and professional sports, administrative state,

The media, the foundations, Wall Street, can you, by sheer numbers, organize people to show that you reject where the country's going? That'll be very interesting to see. I'd be derelict if I didn't ask you to throw education in there and riff on that a little as well. I don't know how much you know about me, but the foundation I've been running for the last however many years is

We award work ethic scholarships to kids who are going to trade schools. I have nothing against a four-year degree. I've got one. Served me well. And obviously, you're a man of letters. But as you look at what's happening in education...

Where do you put that particular institution in the hierarchy of the others you've mentioned, tech and Hollywood and finance? Is it the tip of the spear or is it just part of the wood behind it? I always used to say that the craziest idea in a faculty lounge takes about two years to be implemented in the White House. It's very influential.

There's too many people going to four-year colleges and they're not learning anything. We have $1.7 trillion in debt. And so the university is very culpable because we have this problem now where we went from 2.1 fertility down to 1.6. It's catastrophic in 25 years. So we've got this whole generation of young people, primarily also male young people, who they're not getting married.

They're not buying houses, they're not having children, which is affecting our fertility rate, and they're encumbered. And I have them in my own family, and I talk to them. How did you get 150,000 niece or nephew? They go three units here, six units here, five units here, and they consume their 20s because of this myth of the four-year degree. And then you have these universities, and you say to them, and I've said this to a lot of administrators...

Why don't you just tell, you know, when I buy a car, I'm told exactly what the monthly payment is, what the total cost is, and am I aware of all the ins and outs, and I have a 17-page thing to fill out. Would you just tell the student when they take these loans, what is the average compensation of a sociology major, a psych major, a classics major, whatever it is, just tell them. Tell them how much the interest will cost them, and what is the price per unit

in dollars so that they can make a decision and not just fob it off on a guaranteed loan? And then would you also pledge your endowment, get the government out, just pledge it. If you're Stanford University and you have a $40 billion endowment, why don't you just tell the students that they'll have the student loans, but you are on your responsibility when they default?

And maybe if that happened, you would offer courses that were relevant and the students, you'd be very critical of the faculty who couldn't teach. And then another thing, until recently we had SATs and the premise of the SAT was the GPA cannot be trusted.

because there's such a wide disparity in the quality of high school. So an A from my high school, Salma High School, where I graduated, is not really an A compared to Palo Alto High School. And that was true. So therefore, I had to take the SAT. Why don't we have an SAT in the back end? Because I guarantee you that where Stanford is today and watching it, they are not turning students out like Hillsdale College. I teach at both.

20 years ago, the Stanford student was far better prepared and educated and came in. Not now. And if you had an SAT that said everybody who needs a BA has to get, I don't know, 85% of 520 on the SAT, you would be surprised how much they hate that idea. And because they don't want any accountability that either they haven't taught people to improve in the skills they said were necessary to take their courses,

I'll just finish this with, I had a guy in Silicon Valley last year, I gave a lecture and he came up to me and I said, at some point their reputations are going to suffer, these four-year colleges, because they're watered down the curriculum and it's DEI. And he said, where have you been, Victor? He said, in the last three years, Stanford University let in 20% white students. We don't care what color they are. But to get that ratio, they had to exclude people

were brilliant. So they rejected 70% of those who had a perfect SAT even though it was all, you know, it was a choice. They sent it in and that became a mark of vulnerability. 0.11% of the SAT get perfect scores. Stanford refused 60 or 70% of them that applied. So then he said, and then you have the therapeutic culture. So I said, what are you getting at?

He said, when we're in Silicon Valley and we have a choice now in 2023 to hire somebody from Stanford, whether it's public relations or coding or Texas A&M, Georgia Tech, we will take them any day. And I'd say, are you serious? He said, yes, because two things. They're better trained. And the first thing they do not do is go to our HR department and complain.

Your students, they're not as competitive. Your faculty, to accommodate the new student body, had to either water down the courses, inflate the grades, but accommodate the fact that they are letting in students by their own admission did not fit the requirements that they used to preach to us were absolutely necessary. Or as he put it, in 1998, these guys would come up to us and say, you know what?

It's a very rare person that can get into Sanford University. And once they get in here, we give them the toughest classes and when they go out there, these guys are brilliant and they're trained. And so then he says to me, well, if that was true, and now they admit they've thrown out the SAT,

then they're admitting they're letting people in that can't do the curriculum on the books that they said was necessary to ensure their prestige. So why would we trust them anymore? And that's what's happening to Harvard. 80% of the grades at Yale were As. So I think what you're saying is not only is the demographic shrinking,

There's fewer students, but the costs are going up above the rate of inflation. The students are not getting any means to pay back the loans. The universities are no longer meritocratic. And that's even going into medical school, law school, business school. And so a lot of people are saying,

I want my child to go get skills. I want him to go to a trade school. I want him to go to a community college. The elite now, believe it or not, I get a call twice a week, "Victor, I'm not going to send my kid to Harvard, Yale where I went or Stanford. Is it Hillsdale? Is it Pepperdine? Is it St. Thomas Aquinas? Where do I send my child?"

Or do I send them to University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State? So I'm very confident that there is a revolutionary movement in education to get rid of this toxic, I have a bunch of letters after my name, therefore I'm educated, therefore I'm an expert movement.

And what the universities have done is almost criminal to put us, the taxpayers, on a $1.7 trillion exposure so they can raise their rates of tuition above the rate of inflation. And they're not accountable. And their students are getting, they're not competitive compared to other universities. That's not sustainable. And what you're talking about is very important because that's kind of what you're kind of leading, that people are going to look toward

The real thing is when a person says, "I'm very proud that I'm a master electrician and doesn't have to say I have a BA." And I think we're getting close to that because now they can say, "Well, I didn't go to that lunatic place and I didn't go to that watered down school. I went out and really learned a valuable thing that was meritocratic to acquire that skill." And I think that's happening. Muscular. A muscular trade.

We're in such violent agreement on that, it's almost embarrassing. You know, I only brought it up because I read something the other day that I verified that I thought encapsulated it pretty well, which was the average GPA at Harvard in 1955 was 2.56. This year, it was 3.98. I mean, if we're going to talk about inflation, it certainly does leapfrog from the economic definition into the credentialing.

That's happening and it's not happening in trade schools because you can't grade on a curve for the electrician or for the welder. You can't. I mean, isn't it funny? None of the protests seem to be happening at trade schools. None of the flag burnings seem to be happening in trade schools. No dean from a trade school has been summoned to Congress or somehow called out in some plagiarism scandal.

That's part of your article too, because if that implicit question is, how much will we take? How much will we take on faith? How much will we accept? At some point, people are going to look at those diplomas on the walls and they're not going to see a diploma. They're just going to see a receipt. And that's going to be a recruiting problem for the big boys. It's starting already. It couldn't come at a better time. I know a person,

who's got four children, you would call her in the upper, upper 1%. She is a graduate of Stanford. Her whole family went there and she just said to me, there's not a chance in hell one of my kids are going to go to that university because they're going to come home at Thanksgiving. I'm not going to recognize them and they're not going to be very well educated and they're going to have the worst of both worlds. They're going to come back arrogant and incompetent.

And I don't want to subsidize that experiment. And we'll see if they correct in time all of these universes. They know when you talk to them, they know exactly what's going on. They're worried about it. And the question, to quote Libby, is, is the medicine for them worse than the disease? And as one guy said, we know what we have to do, but that would mean a lot of guys are going to get fired. And I don't want to be the one to get fired because we know what everybody knows what's going to be due. It's kind of like

You've got to bell the cat if you're a mouse, but I don't want to put the bell around the cat's neck. It's a very strange time, and just to finish, when you say how long are they going to take it, it's going to be a transition point from passive resistance or dropping out or not participating, which we're watching now.

People are leaving the blue states and droves. They don't go to San Francisco like they used to versus active resistance. Are they going to go out to vote? Are they going to register their friends? Are they going to become politically active? Are they going to do what the left does and boycott a particular obscene ad or they find disturbing? Are they going to

you know, really pushed back in a political sense. And they're starting to, but they haven't yet realized that they have a lot of numbers and they're very strong. They don't even know their own strength yet. But we'll see. Anyway. That's probably a good place to land the plane. I mean, I should just ask you briefly about about hope in general, possibly because I'm almost finished the end of everything. And Chuck, if you haven't read this thing, oh, my God.

Thebes, Carthage, Constantinople, the unpronounceable capital of the Aztec Empire. Not just beaten, not just subjugated. Gone, dude. Gone. Gone. And Victor walks us through the ancient world in a way that rhymes perfectly with the quote I read from you earlier that ends with, "'Nothing really changes.'"

And when you think about what happened to those cities and those civilizations, and when you look at China, and when you look at Russia and Putin and so forth and so on, I don't want to go down this whole rabbit hole, but I think that's on people's minds too. And we wonder. I mean, we wonder if nothing ever changes. As a historian, I think I know what's keeping you up at night, but I don't know where you might assign a measure of optimism.

As we look forward. Well, I'm very optimistic in one sense is that I'm just always amazed how many smart people I meet. I don't mean as assessed by intellectual vocabulary or I'm talking about just common sense, hardworking, all different races, ethnic backgrounds, and how...

underappreciated they are. People don't understand what is going on. I just got back from Europe and when I watch people in Europe build and versus here, even at this period of decline, it just, it's

What's wrong with the United States is a supervisory class, but not the people who actually goes up. I have a barn right out here, and it was built by my great-great-grandmother with eucalyptus poles. They couldn't afford lumber. And it was finally, after 150 years, starting to go. So I called up a roofing friend, and he said, well, you have only two scissor trusses. We need 10. We've got to reinforce the walls. And within five...

days he had a crew up one guy had 70 pounds of Shingles on his back tiptoeing on the crest of that roof other guys were hanging from the ceiling 40 feet above a cement slab With a little safety holster working on the trusses. They did the entire job in six days It was just like they were brain surgeons one of the contractors was

He was a legal citizen, but he'd only been here 20 years. And he was talking in Spanish. They were all legal, but it was amazing. I just asked him, "How did you do this and how's business?" And he said, "I've got three months back order. My two kids are going to engineering school.

I bought a new home. And what he was telling me is that I can do stuff that nobody else in this country can do. I love this country. I'm very successful. I love it. I like these people. And there was none of what I hear on the coast. It was none. I'm tired. This is unfair. This is not nice. It was all...

Mr. Hanson, we'll get this done by tomorrow night. If you don't want it tomorrow night, then I'm going to give you a discount. And I said, well, that guy is way up there. What if he's never slipped? He's done this for five years. This is nothing. And that braga dacha, I hear that all the time. And so I'm very optimistic. The problem is not with the middle and upper middle classes. It's with the credentialed elite.

I'm not confident about them, but I think we have to hold them to account in the media and the university especially. But we'll see what happens in November. And, you know, the Republicans have a lot of problems too. But we'll see. It's not so much about Trump or Harris. It's more or less...

After 233 years, we're not going to call the country a failure and its race is systematically unfair. It's exploitive and we're going to tear it apart. We're not going to do that. Sorry. If you don't like it, that's the way it's going to be. We're going to vote. We're not perfect, but we don't have to be perfect to be good and we're better than the alternative. And for that, that's good enough. And we're going to press on. That's the attitude. And I think it'll prevail.

Thank you for that. Finally, what did they call in the ancient world the guy that stood behind the emperor and whispered in his ear, you know, you are but a man and so forth?

Sick transit, Gloria. Yeah. At the annual, when they conquered a people, they had what they call a triumph. And it didn't really have the pejorative name. They got the conquered guy and they put him in chains, Vercingetorix or somebody like that. And they had all the wealth and then they had the legions and then the emperor would come out. And right along him, his attendant, usually a slave, would whisper,

into him, "Sic transit gloria," "Sic transit gloria," "So goes glory," meaning this is all transitory and you better remember who you are. Okay, so finally,

The title of all these episodes is almost always a quote from the guest. And I know if I talked to you long enough, I'd get what I wanted. So we're going to call this one So Goes Glory. And I'm going to say in a perfect world, whoever wins, we'd be a better country if Victor Davis Hanson were whispering to our leader in the White House and perhaps imparting a history lesson or two along the way.

As for the rest of you, the end of everything is excellent. The case for Trump is back in paperback with 20,000 new words. Also excellent. The Blade of Perseus is a website. I encourage you to go there and read all about the lab rats. Maybe you see yourself as one, maybe you don't, but either way, you should share that story. Drink from the well of Mr. Hansen and you shall be restored. Thank you for your time.

Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Chuck. Thank you.

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