With a great conversation.
I'll, I'm gonna tee us up with a great conversation starter.
Okay.
Here it is.
Are you ready?
Yeah.
Mm.
I don't think women should be able to vote.
Okay.
That was, that was ironic.
Just in case you gotta let it sit there similar.
A little bit more than you just, you saved yourself too quickly.
Lemme try again.
Lemme, lemme try it again.
Um, okay.
The ruin of the American family, inflation and the Economy all
comes from the same source.
Feminism,
what is it called?
MSN what?
MSN
Now.
Wait, MN now.
MSN Now.
Okay.
So we're, we are doing MSN Yeah, we were just talking about, uh, MSN now.
Right before this I was, I was
IMSN.
Now apparently on YouTube is the channel that Ms. NBC used to be.
Yeah, I don't, uh, I watch all my TV on YouTube or on my phone on Instagram.
Because mm-hmm.
That's all I have time for nowadays.
Wow.
Sometimes it's basically just short attention span.
You don't,
it sounds like you just Well, it's, I mean, I have a baby at home that
requires constant attention, so you can't just like, put the baby in a
pot in the closet somewhere and then go watch I'm, watch a good show,
watch a good long, uh, docuseries or something.
Yeah.
I mean
mm-hmm.
You can try.
Yeah.
But it won't work.
The baby will eventually.
Right?
That's true.
How are, how are, how is baby life, by the way?
Are you enjoying that?
You, you, uh, every time I talk to you, you're like, I think sort of emergency.
What's, what's the big deal?
I mean, it's just a baby.
Yeah.
That's so true.
Uh, yeah.
You know, it's so funny, my, my transformation, my metamorphosis
into a family man who was married and has, uh, I have an older kid, right?
Seven, yeah.
Years old.
And then I have this baby who's months old.
You know, I still, my transformation into family life
is still very fresh in my head.
Hm.
Um, because my single life was very long.
I'm in my mid forties and, uh, and you know, and wild, if I remember,
uh, I mean, I don't know about wild, uh, I had friends that were wild, but,
um, a very long single life and Okay.
Um, I mean, there's a slight chance my wife and I listen to this so well, not
that she's a just wild, wild enough
to be fun.
I've
co I've commented that she is a, a Latin woman and that comes with a lot of
amazing things from the Latin culture, which I as a, I'm a child of immigrants,
so I, I kind of do get, I'm, I've, I, I am part of Latin culture a little bit.
Mm-hmm.
But she is really from there, so, got it.
Okay.
Um, she.
She was, we were whispering horror stories to each other.
And she said, what if you woke up in the middle of the night and you
looked over and you saw that I was eating something in the moonlight?
And you can't tell what it's, you look closer.
And then as you get closer, she told me that she's like laying on top of
me as we're just like, it's in the morning, the baby is handed off to the
nanny and this is the only 10 minutes we actually have to talk to each other.
Mm. Before we just like co-parent all day.
Mm. And so it's just like laying on me and we're like, kind of like
enjoying our personal time together.
And then she goes, what would you do if you just saw me in the moonlight
eating something you didn't know what it was and you, you're sleepy
so you don't know what it is.
And you kind of look closer.
And as you're looking at me eating this strange thing in the moonlight,
you're, you reach instinctively to your midsection and you realize
that your penis, oh my gosh.
And then you realize it in continued horror that what I'm eating is your penis.
Yeah.
She said that.
But without
you, without it being attached
to, which might be
better.
Right.
And then I said, okay.
And then she continued.
She's like, I, I had, I had prepared it like it was a piece of roasted
corn with mayonnaise and cheese.
Man, you really got, look, I mean, it sounds like my dog who does
eat a penis every couple days for the cow, so it's not Well, yeah,
they, they sell those, they sell those, uh, yeah, those, uh, bull penises
that you can just give to your dog.
What an insane thing, by the way.
Like, I don't know, like they have the bones and the hooves
and all this other stuff.
Yeah.
I, I get that.
It's a fairly convenient thing, but like, I don't know, man.
What if your dog ever, you know what
I think of.
Uh, well this is a very side conversation, but you know, they
always would say, like, they would always be like, well, you know, the
Native Americans never wasted anything.
And I always think, well, neither does corporate America.
I have to say they're quite similar.
Like there's this, there's this amazing Venn diagram of corporate America and
the Native American kind of mindset of like, let's not waste anything.
We can sell everything.
Huge,
huge amount of overlap.
I mean, they were the original capitalist really, if you think about it.
Exactly.
Actually, I mean that's what the, the book right?
The jungle, um, up to Sinclair, when Up to Sinclair wrote the
book about the meat industry.
Mm-hmm.
It was supposed to disgust people, but it actually ended up being an
ode to capitalism because they, they rendered, they would render the
fat from the unused pieces of the animals and, and sell the tallow.
Wow.
Which now is a huge thing in the hipster community.
Right, exactly.
You don't have, tallow can't use press seed oils 'cause
you'll get autism or whatever.
It's, anyway.
My wife is insane, which is why, yeah, I won't say that my single life was
long and I enjoyed it as long as it existed, but I What did you say to her?
Were you, uh, turned on by that?
Uh, this was,
well, okay.
Those are two different questions.
It was a pro,
it was definitely an out of nowhere and, uh, yes.
Yes it did.
Oh, good.
All right.
That's the right, that's the right answer.
You're supposed to, you're to.
That's kind of relationship
we have.
I mean, I knew what I was getting into.
I'm not one of, you know, I wasn't young when I got married.
I knew what I was getting
into.
Right.
So
I hear that and I'm kind of like,
yep.
Now I did have a, yeah, this is a story since I can say it with
pretty anonymously that I had a girlfriend who was Latin as well.
Latina, and uh, she
used to, I like the white way you say that.
It's like fun.
Yeah,
I know, right.
Let Latinx
for your pleasure.
Um, she, uh, quite.
I don't know if this would be consistent with the way you're
describing like Al Latin one, but she said to me, I said, you know, one
time we were not having great sex.
Sex was few, few and far between.
It was getting kind of dry, the dry spell for us.
Oh.
And she's, how long have you been, had you, had you been together at this point?
Maybe two, maybe a year and a half or two years.
I think.
Two years.
That is way too soon.
But that's very too, that was very soon.
And it actually had to happened earlier.
It happened like a year, year after we got together that she just, you
know, I, she didn't want to, didn't feel like it, it was not interested.
Now, um, one time I say to her, oh, Latin.
Latin, but
like
American though.
Americanized.
Yeah.
American raised.
Yeah, exactly.
Of Latin heritage.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Mexican.
Well,
I mean, okay, I will shut up about that.
No,
and, and she says to me, um, she's, well, she had told me once, I'm very jealous.
Right.
When I first met her, she was very jealous.
She said, I'm very jealous.
Okay.
And she, I think she even says something like, oh, you know,
Latin women are very jealous.
Let's, we're, we're very jealous.
So I said, okay, well I'm generally, I'm counting on that.
So I'm counting on this factoid, and I kind of pull it back.
I'm in the car with her and I kind of like say, oh, that's right.
She's supposed to be jealous.
So she told me, and I'm trying to threaten her into having, into getting with me.
Let's have some more sex.
I say to her, listen, if you don't have sex with me, if you're
not interested, what if I just went and found somebody else?
And she said, that's an, that's amazing.
That's an amazing idea.
Yes, you should, sweetie, you should go find somebody else.
And I just don't wanna know about it.
Just go find, okay.
Just don't tell me.
And I said, well, no.
I mean, uh, wait a
second.
I chance she was secretly Japanese or something.
Maybe.
She said, uh, go have, go have fun.
Um, find somebody.
I, I just don't want to hear about it.
And, uh, you know, this will work.
This will solve our problem because you really want a lot more sex than I do.
You'll get what you need.
Just don't find anyone.
What I really care about is that you're not emotionally attached to just find
someone that you're not emotionally attached to have sex with them.
Don't tell me.
And, and it's all good.
And I thought, um, well that didn't work out very well.
I was, that, that kind of backfired, unfortunately, because
I actually was fire and miss.
Yeah.
I was really not interested.
I was kind of lazy.
I was like, I don't really feel like this to go find somebody.
Yeah.
And I have to find like the right fit.
Someone who's, how do I find someone I'm not emotionally It's so hard
to do even when you're single.
Yes, exactly.
I come on.
It was hard to do.
And you know, it, it was a time that made me realize it was not gonna work out.
But, you know, I guess, um, what I would say is there's always exceptions to
every stereotype in many, many, right?
Absolutely.
You know, there's a, I mean, I, I don't know.
I, I was, I once took a very short course on regional studies for Latin America.
It was actually, it covered Venezuela and China.
This is like maybe 10 years ago.
Interesting.
That's a, that's a combine.
And they, and they talked in there.
I mean, you know, I'm not, um, ologist Latin.
You say Latin America and China.
Yeah.
It was 'cause it was a bunch of people who were interested
in writing about both these
topics.
Got it.
Okay.
And so they just kind like squeezed together, two teachers, one to
talk about Venezuela and just a southern cone of the US in general,
but
based outta Venezuela and then China.
Okay.
Which is like a really odd pairing.
But they talked about, you know, this idea of thin and thick culture.
Mm-hmm.
So, you know, ev you know, if you talk about the American culture,
there are thin and thick streams of culture that run through there.
So you could make some generalizations about American culture.
Yeah.
You know, uh, and this happens all the time.
We both lived overseas a lot.
Americans are considered brash.
Um, they're considered.
To have poor social skills.
They, you know, they show up somewhere and just wanna get down to business.
They don't want to talk about.
Got it.
They wanna, they don't want the social niceties.
Right.
They don't, they're not consider, they don't wanna get to business.
That's true.
They always say that with like Japanese business and Korean businesses.
They're not, they're not considered deals and stuff.
Thoughtful gift givers.
Mm-hmm.
They, you know, they, the, you know, they'll always want to go Dutch.
That's, which is funny.
Very much because the Dutch actually have the same reputation of just
getting straight to business.
Interesting.
They're not, you know, but then that's the thick culture that's like, okay.
Yeah.
You can, you can a lot, you can find a lot of Americans like that.
The general, yeah.
The generalizations.
American tourists dress like children.
Um, they're wearing like their Crocs and their shorts, t-shirt, a baseball cap.
That's how children dress in the rest of the world.
And then here, I mean, you know, adults are walking around like that and that's,
they don't dress up for anything.
They don't know how to dress up.
True.
And so that's the general thing.
Right.
But I know Americans who defy that.
Absolutely.
I'm, I'm an American, but maybe 'cause I'm a son of immigrants, I do believe in
social niceties and I take a long time to start a meeting, even if it's business.
Uh, because to me that sucked a nice bit is getting to know a person.
Right.
And you do have to have at least a little bit of a social relationship
before you can kind of move forward.
It just makes Yeah, business a lot smoother.
And there's this, you know, like Americans are not known in, in a,
you know, in an international office.
They don't, they don't say hello, they don't say goodbye.
Mm-hmm.
And so
I make it a point, every time I show up to my office, I say hi to everyone,
even though it's just other Americans.
Um, I show up and I just, you know, I make a point of going to, you know,
book poking my head around the corner.
And if I see that, you know, someone's there, I say hi.
So yeah, I mean, there's exceptions, right?
So in Latin culture, there are the things that most people have in common.
Latin culture, generally speaking, depending on the country, it's fairly
conservative by American standard, right?
Socially, right.
Uh, you know, evangelical Christianity is the fastest growing religion
in central America, for example.
Mm. Wow.
And there's a lot of, a lot of conservative social
morays in the thick culture.
Um, my wife is from Central America, but she is, she does
not have that aspect, right?
Mm. Mm-hmm.
She does have other aspects that I think are quintessentially Latin and part of
the thick culture, and, and, and in other ways she does not participate in it.
So, yeah, man, people are complex and generalizations are a tool that you
can use when you don't, you don't know the person, but as soon as you meet
the person and you gotta really hone in on who they are as a person, right?
So your, uh, dried up American Latin girlfriend.
I, you know, I, I'll also say this, you know, I, I get the culture crisis that
comes from being a third culture kid.
Both of my parents were immigrants from Spanish speaking countries, but very
different Spanish speaking countries.
Yeah.
And I grew up in America, so to me, I just feel like an American.
But I've had a lot of things in my life that are very Latin
culture and very European culture that are not very American.
And it's funny to me because, you know, you, I struggled, I struggled a
lot with my identity in my Latin, um, in my Spanish, you know, what am I?
And the Latin community generally embraces its diaspora.
Hmm.
Um, the Spanish community, uh, does not if you are quote unquote mixed race at
all, if you're Spanish and something else
Got it.
Inferior in, in quotes.
Yeah.
You're not, you're not Spanish.
Right, right.
Like if you were half Spanish, you half like Dutch or something,
uh, you might be Spanish.
If you're white.
Sure, sure.
If you look white, if you don't look white, then Spanish people are, are very
remiss to say that you're Spanish, so you could be half Spanish and half Dutch.
You speak with a little bit of a Spanish accent, a Castilian accent.
And Spanish.
Yeah, you're Spanish.
If you're half Spanish and half Colombian and you show up, oh man.
You're like, you're not Spanish.
Right.
It's just, it's very racial.
Yeah.
I'm not judging, I'm not judging it.
It is just the majority of Spanish people will just look at you and then hear
you, and then they'll, they'll determine if you're Spanish, they judge you
as, as an
American.
It, it, it, it bothers me.
Right.
Of course, there are plenty of Americans who think a lot of them
are in power who think that you're not American if you're not white.
Right.
And I'm not exaggerating.
I mean, I am talking about white Christian nationalism, which is a real thing.
And there are people with power now in the government who, who
very much embrace this idea.
They've said things in speeches such as your values don't make
you American, your heritage.
But when they say heritage, they're not talking about
your father, your grandfather.
They're talking about are you from a white immigrant family that's
been here more than 150 years?
Asterisk.
They're willing to make an exception, um, if for political reasons.
So there are very famous politicians who are whites and love the white nationalist
Christian brand, but whose family have very recently immigrated to the us.
Um, and so they get an exception because for white Christian nationalism
to work, you have to really broaden the definition of white and Christian
or else you don't have enough people to make the party worth it.
Um, sense, you know, this is a very, I mean, this is
just American history, right?
In the 1920s, Amer uh, Italians and Irish were broadly brought
into the white community because they didn't have enough people.
So they got recruited.
So, um, you know, I'm still keeping my fingers crossed that the two countries
my parents are from get drafted maybe one
day.
Um, I think Spanish, I'm lucky from lucky.
I think that, I think that's, you know, I would say Spanish and Portuguese.
I've thought about this at least with the Portuguese perspective, which is, uh, I
don't know.
They, they, they speak, they speak a language that brown people speak
and that's always gonna, well, that's gonna ding you some points when
you're tallying up how white you are.
But that's the problem is that if you, did you ever watch
this show called Faulty Towers?
Uh, no.
I've heard of it.
John Cleese.
Right?
There's a famous, um, not famous, there's a character in that show,
which a hilarious show from the eighties or something who's a Spaniard.
And he's, his name is Basil or so, and he's the joke of the show.
He's like the clown of the show and the number, I mean, there were, they,
you know, it's a funny show, but it's very offensive in the sense that like,
they're basically like, get outta here.
You span your little span, you know?
He is, he's short.
Yeah.
Yeah, he's very ethnic.
He's not Latino.
He's not like from South America or anything.
Central America.
He's, he is literally, he is a Spaniard.
And by the way, one of the most attractive tall dudes that I ever met was a Spaniard
in Indianapolis when I lived there.
And I was just like, do I even know what Spaniards look like?
No, I don't.
This my, my memory was this stupid show, which was very, um, demeaning.
Now they would do the same, the British would do the same.
Um, you can even see this in, um.
Sherlock Holmes in the 18 hundreds.
They worried about the, the Italians in a way that's both anarchists.
Yeah.
Well, they were anarchists.
Yes, that's true.
But they were also the way they, that he, the, the way he flavors the story
is exactly true and exactly offensive.
It's like a bunch of it, you know, they're screaming at each other.
They're fighting, they're, they're anarchists, which basically
means they're terrorists.
So it's like the old word for a terrorist, basically.
Yeah.
They were blowing up shit.
They were stealing.
No, they don't,
they don't, they don't believe in government.
Don't believe in government.
And so I, my grandfather who was Sicilian, and he was darker and he
was shorter, um, heated wasps, I mean, just hated his whole life.
Like you talked to him, he's a guy.
He works, worked at the DMV, loved, you know, loved the government, loved being
an American, called himself an American.
Sure.
But you got him on the subject of, of wide Anglo Saxons.
Had a cow.
He was just, ah, you know, so he felt very, he felt very oppressed by them.
I don't know if he was, yeah.
But he felt slightly oppressed by them.
And I, and I think that, so it's not just the US that has this problem, it's
also the northern Europeans who see themselves like the British as superior
to the Southerns, which I always, so I used to date another girlfriend.
I always have a girlfriend story for this show.
Um, nice.
I think I told you this one though.
Remember this was the one where I told you where I had this Dutch
girlfriend, well, she wasn't even Dutch.
She, she, I'm sorry, she was Danish.
That's how little I cared that I remember which, which
particular D country it came from.
But she was Danish in a sense that her parents had some Danish history,
both of them, which I thought was interesting, but that she had no
connection to Dan, to Denmark.
And uh, I think I talked to you about this where, um, her father was, was like
kind of upset or like, didn't think I was good enough because I was Italian.
Now I'm like.
By the way, one of my, but you're both
Americans, which is funny to me,
right?
I'm both northern and southern, and I actually, a good part of me is Danish, so
it's like I have the same heritage as her.
He could have cared less about that.
All he cared about was I had Italian in me, and it was like, I, it was
like a muggle blood or something.
I'm like a, like, uh, and I, and I just remember, you know, talking to her about
this and explained to her like, you know, I fine, I'm sorry your dad feels this
way, but by the way, my people conquered, you know, his people thousands of years
ago and taught him how to fucking read.
Um, but you know, before that they were basically in the jungle
killing each other and eating each other, uh, with no written history.
If you, if you go and find, go to any museum in, in Europe and say, can you tell
me what the Celtics language looked like?
What did it look like?
What, where are these, where are these amazing scriptures?
Oh, there are none because they didn't, they didn't read and they
didn't have a lot of civility.
And so thanks to the dirty people of the south, he now, you know, knows how
to use, uh, you know, running water.
You're, you're welcome.
And so it was, it was basically an interesting, I always felt
it was very interesting that where did this idea come from?
This, these people are lesser
than you.
Especially Danes.
My Dans were known as a maring raping, stealing people of Northern Europe.
Literally.
I mean, it's, it was it Rudyard Kipling talks about danegeld.
They would show up and then, and then extort you for money, or they would
raid and pillage and rape, uh, amazing, you know, your town and everyone in it.
And so they would show up and they would ask you for gold gel.
Gel, yeah.
Pay them.
And, and, and you know, the whole point of that Rudyard Kipling
story is if you pay them months, you'll have to pay them forever.
Just like the mafia sounds like.
Exactly.
And so like yeah.
Where do they get off?
But I mean, right.
And now we get to the heart of the show, which is bashing the kelp.
That's what the Show's my favorite,
favorite topic.
Funny to me.
Right.
Like, um, I thought, you know, just when I think about politics and race, um,
in America, it's just, I mean, I think these, these stories, the conversations,
they're just so interesting to me because these are all constructs, right.
Race.
Um, no matter how many people try to, I'll tell you it's true.
Mm-hmm.
It does not exist in the DNA.
Yes.
There's mitochondria that have moved throughout the globe as human
populations have moved and mixed.
There used to be other humans and we successfully killed and, um, bonded
with them to create their current race.
There's, there's now only one type of human on the planet, which is
kind of crazy to think about it.
'cause there used to be a bunch.
So we know who the violent ones are.
Yeah.
Um, to me, the conversations about race are funny 'cause there's just like,
there's no, you can't look at someone's DNA and tell them what race they are.
You can look at the mitochondrial DNA, which comes from males.
Mm-hmm.
And then you can, you can go back and look at where that mitochondria eventually
came from, tens of thousands of years ago.
But you just can't sequence DNA and be like, oh yeah, this is, you know?
Right.
This is, this is a white German guy.
Yes.
Uh, you can't do that.
Right.
So race is a constructed category.
It doesn't mean, it doesn't, it doesn't mean it's meaningless.
It's incredibly meaningful.
I mean, the US dollar is a constructed thing and look how
mm-hmm.
What happens 'cause of that.
So to me it's just interesting these conversations about race
and ethnicity and identity.
Yeah.
Especially in America are just funny to me.
When they get weaponized and politicized in, in order to.
You know, conduct a political project.
Mm-hmm.
Like, like it's always happened, right?
Whether it's mm-hmm.
You know, black power or Latin movements, the Asia, you know, Asian
Pacific Islanders, that's an identity that was created to get as big of a
group to lobby California as possible.
And the only way to do that was to bind together these regions
who kind of like, don't get along.
Hmm.
Um, Asians, the fact that you can bind Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Samoans
into one lobbying group is insane.
That's interesting.
Yeah.
Um, but you know, Asian Pacific Islanders, right?
That's an actual identity group.
Mm. It's not racial.
It's, um, it has racial elements.
It, it has ethnic elements, but what do they all have in common?
Right?
And so people talking about what white culture is, what
is white culture, all of that.
I mean, I love comedy.
I'm a huge fan of comedy.
So like.
Race and ethnicity for comedy's sake is pretty, I think, a, a
rich, a rich and deep reserved that I think is pretty funny.
But this concept of, you know, if you go to the East Coast, uh, there's
all, you know, white people in the northeast talk about ethnicity
amongst other white people a lot.
Hmm.
Like I, and I, I, I've known Jewish people who talk about like, well, you
know, I'm not white though, I'm Jewish.
And kind of, I kind of laugh at that a little bit because to me as a, as
a person who has like Latin descent and who, people look at me and
they're like, oh, you must be Latin.
Um, it's just funny to me because when I look at someone who might
be Jewish, I don't know, to me they're just like a white person.
Yeah.
But
the Jewish identity that I, I've noticed that a lot of people feel
in America makes him think like, well, I'm not white, I'm Jewish.
And I'm kind of like, wow.
This is like, how people identify and how people treat each other
is just so fluid and weird.
Yeah.
And has like zero basis.
It's very fluid.
And anything that you could just like.
You know, science, you know, shows me this thing and what
does it even mean to be Jewish?
What does it mean to be white?
Yeah, exactly.
You know, and then what you just said about this, like, she
has a strong Danish heritage.
I mean, what does that even mean?
Yeah.
How connected are you?
How strong is it now?
Weak as well.
Right.
And, and that and that her father Yeah.
Could have said like, oh, you're an Italian, but in what regard are you at?
I mean, what is he afraid of?
Exactly.
Is this an old story of, you know, southern Italian
Juliet coming to the US Yeah.
And coming to the US and, and, uh, it's not, you know, the mafia being so after
in southern Italy, is it fear of that?
You know, the
closest one was, there was a good, uh, was it Robert De Niro had a
movie in the nineties about a Italian boy, meaning like a, a black girl.
And they got together, it's kind of a Romeo and Juliet movie, and I remember
he directed it or something like that, I think, or I know he was in it.
He was like the father.
That I could see being pretty real.
Like there's some real, there's some racial differences, there's
some skin color differences, cultural differences, everything.
And he wanted to explore the topic.
I think it was a cool movie.
And, and so I give that credit, but yeah, the idea.
But there are people who will, and I used to know a bunch of these at college.
I guess that would be, you know, maybe they would be, um, even less physically
look different than a white person.
And those people would often be the most aggressive about how different they were.
Oh my God, I'm, of course I'm not this, I'm, I'm this identity.
And they would like gonna beat everybody up about it.
And it was like, you know, you really, it's like just for that person it may
have been like, I need to be special.
I need to be somebody.
Yeah.
And this is my way of being somebody versus I've actually have been,
have gone through a lot of, of, um, old fashioned discrimination.
Of the kind that I'm talking about constantly.
Um, now there, that doesn't mean there aren't real things
people are going through.
And so, um, I completely agree.
I think it's up to everybody.
Um, but there, there are people who are, um, always going to
be fascinated by this topic.
I think I, I just talked, talked to my friend the other day who's a very
good at history, and we were talking about Santa Claus and I said, um, oh,
you know, I didn't remember that Santa Claus was, you know, from Turkey.
And he is like, yeah, yeah, that's right.
He's from Turkey.
And I said, so, you know what, you know something about like, what
would he have said to this or that?
And I was like, well, how do you say that in Turkish?
She's like, he didn't speak Turkish.
He spoke Greek.
Because guess what, Turkey was part of Greece back then.
That's, and I was like, oh.
It was just like, oh, that's right.
This whole Turkish, the whole Turkish cultural and identity.
Back then you rewind the clock, there really wasn't much of it there.
It, it came about later on and now there's an identity around that.
It's a very strong identity.
It includes, um, you know, a fair amount of Islam, maybe some Christianity,
but a strong dominant aspect of Islam and, and then influence from, from
probably, uh, Arabic culture due to, to the rise of, of Islam there.
And, and then you mix that with some European, and you got, and Greek and you
got this whole new cultural identity.
And, and again, I'm thinking like, oh, that's right before that
Santa Claus was just a Greek guy.
So, um, these things didn't take class, right?
They, they changed so much and um, and we'd like to get
attached to all this stuff.
But it, that said, with regard to the European's attitude towards
the south, um, it's complicated.
It's, um, it is, it, I think it matches here what you're saying.
I think there's a white attitude towards it here, and I think
it, it's reflected also there.
And then like you're saying, even in places like Italy and Spain, they have
their own Oh yeah, man, this combination towards, you know, it's like never end.
Like no one can be is everyone's, everyone who's oppressed has
to oppress others or whatever.
Yeah.
Um, so anyway,
yeah.
I mean, I remember but there, there was a, there was a speech by, um, a high
level official that's responsible for foreign policy in the State department
who said, gave a speech in, in front of this like, uh, business chamber in
the us it might have been in Detroit.
And I think he said something like, America is not an idea.
America is a country with real people who, uh, you know, that
have needs that we need to address.
And, and the, the.
The message there was those real people that are in this country.
It's not a country of ideas.
You know, this, this concept of America is a beacon on the hill, right?
Brings in immigrants from all over the world to participate
in the idea of what is America.
Both him and JD Vance have been very
interesting,
uh, vocal about this in their speeches on policy, which are
economic policy, which is we need to make America work for Americans.
Mm. And then you hear that and you're like, yeah, okay, I'm an American.
Sure.
But that's not what they think.
Uh, they have a specific description of who is American and being an American
citizen is not what they're talking about.
No, I don't
know.
Because they said like, America is not values, it's not an idea.
It, it's a, it is a real place with American people who, you know, are
basically been screwed by the system and they're talking about white people.
And then JD Vance says, right, America, you, you knower, you're an
American by heritage, not by values.
And it's, and it's funny to me, and I'm like, well, why can't I be both?
Why can't, why?
You know, I, by the way, I mean, I'm the, like I mentioned before,
I'm being the son of immigrants.
Um, yeah.
I think, I think no one appreciates American values in what America means
more than the children of immigrants.
Maybe immigrants themselves.
Yeah.
Uh, there are exceptions, right?
Like to say immigrant doesn't mean that it's a good thing.
Yeah.
I used to have
a friend that was Russian who could have cared less about the values of America.
You gave it a citizen.
And so,
yeah.
No, it's just funny to me, right?
'cause it's like, yeah, being an immigrant doesn't make you, there's this
weird concept I run into sometimes in popular culture, and I think it's, yeah.
Mostly attributable to the left of like, brown people are
good and my people are bad.
Which is like a weird, right?
Like, it's just like a weird concept that gets applied to the strangest things, to
the, you know, to the Israeli Palestinian.
Uh, situation.
Uh, I've even heard people say that you can't call it a conflict
because a conflict has two sides, and this doesn't have two sides.
It's just very politicized language in this space about identity and about
just, uh, the very long history of human violence o on the thinnest of pretext.
Hmm.
Uh, but no, I mean, I, I, I think about this all the time about what
does it mean to be an American?
And I, I know people who don't think we have an immigration problem.
And I'm like, well, but there's, you know, there's like massive illegal immigration.
It's real, you know, I covered it a little bit in Central America.
Um, I've seen it firsthand in American cities.
And since my wife is Latin of Latin origin, she's on a lot of social media of
people who immigrated to the US illegally.
And they post stuff like, you know, we recently had a baby and you know,
I had to fight the insurance company to make sure they cover the things
they're supposed to cover in our relatively expensive health insurance.
Sure.
And, and you have people who immigrated illegally from Venezuela and Central
America on their social media feeds saying, you know, they're in the,
they're in the hospital suite and they're saying like, you know, giving
tips to other legal immigrants on how to not pay for your birth, right.
How to not pay for your hospital coverage.
They say, well first of all, like, don't tell them you're married.
Tell them that you don't work and you and a lot of these people already had a kid.
And so you get government benefits.
And if you say that you're married and, and your husband is working as
a carpenter, working construction, and your husband makes $60,000, uh,
a year, including overtime and all this money he gets under the table.
If you say that they won't cover your hospital bill, they'll bill you.
So don't say it.
Say that you're not married.
Um, say you don't have a job.
Um, also when you're at the hospital room, take as many things as you
can with you and then, um, apply for food benefits, snap benefits.
And it's funny 'cause it's like they don't need it.
They're just taking advantage of the system.
Right.
Mm-hmm.
The people who posted this stuff.
Right.
And this is anecdotal, right?
Like there's a handful of accounts and they're very popular 'cause
there's a lot of immigrants who want to come to the United States.
They don't care how they get there.
Right?
Right.
And they have this image, and I've seen it in the little rural
towns in Mexico and Guatemala.
People have this image that if they just can make it to the US they're successful.
And that they will, they will find a job, make money, send it back to their country
of origin, send it back to their family members, and be a hero, and build these
huge houses in these tiny little towns.
Wow.
And then come back and flash the money they have, flash the fact that
they buy American brand name apparel.
I've seen it.
And to me, as an American, my parents immigrated legally.
Uh, I grew up in the States.
Uh, to me it, it's disgusting, right?
Because like, those are the stories that feed into narratives that immigrants
are like, you know, all Latin, all Latin people are immigrated illegally
and that they're a drain on society.
And when I hear people respond to that by saying like, no, immigrants are good
for this country, blah, blah, blah.
I'm like, dude.
It's both.
Don't you get it?
Like
Mm. Mm-hmm.
I, I was in Guatemala covering politics when, uh, the Biden administration
approved temporary protective status for Venezuelans and the White House,
according to the reporting at the time, um, that I covered at the time, the
White House had not talked to any of the overseas diplomatic missions in
Central America about this plan they had, and they just unveiled it overnight,
which is this great idea they had.
They're like 400,000 Venezuelans.
If you have family members that can support and sponsor you, you
can come to the United States.
Mm-hmm.
We, we'll give you, right.
And it's a very legal narrow definition Okay.
Of what TPS is.
Okay.
And who can apply for it.
But all these Venezuelan diaspora immigrants living throughout
Latin America, all they really heard was Venezuelans can come
here and we'll, and we got you.
Mm. Okay.
Interesting.
So what, what the coyote networks do in Latin America, that's a business.
Their business is to smuggle humans into the United States.
So they get this posting from the White House that says
Venezuelan immigrants can come in.
There's a lot of fine details.
You have to have a, a family member in the United States
legally that will sponsor you.
Okay.
You have to apply for temporary protected status from outside of the United
States using that CPP one app that they, that the Biden administration created.
Okay.
And, and, and you can apply at these immigration centers
throughout Latin America.
That way you don't show up to our doorstep.
It was their way of trying to keep the immigrants from showing up on
the southern border by pushing out the application process digitally
and creating these immigrant centers throughout Latin America.
That was the intent.
But the execution was terrible.
They just announced it overnight, didn't coordinate with, uh, the interagency and
the government, and I was in Guatemala.
Weeks later, tons of Venezuelan showed up.
Oh.
And then they showed up in the southern border.
They showed up in Guatemala and they were like, Hey, well I,
Biden says they can come in and they'll gimme $500,000 in cash.
Or it was like some weird things that Coyotes told them.
Oh, interesting.
To, to sell the idea of bringing, he's like, Hey, no, no, you're, you're legal.
You're legal man.
You gimme, you gimme 10,000 bucks and I will take you to the US Southern
border and they have to take you.
'cause I get this thing the White House posted, and they'll just lie.
Right?
Coyotes lie about the process, about what they can do, and they train sometimes
immigrants on, like, ask for asylum.
Say You're Venezuelan.
Don't say you're married.
You know, all these things that they say to take advantage of our
very bureaucratic immigration and refugee and asylum, um, system.
Uh, and, and it just, it provokes this massive Venezuelan immigration.
And when they got to the US on their social media feeds, a lot
of people were talking about, look at the shitty hotel they gave us.
Look, they give us the same people every day.
You know, and it's funny to me, 'cause you know, all the, interestingly enough,
all these other illegal immigrants from Central America and Mexico who had come
to the US to work and, and they live five to an apartment, they worked three jobs.
They saw these immigrants, these new immigrants, and they thought like,
why don't you just work like every, and they thought they were better than
everyone else because they had come under this temporary protective status
program.
Mm-hmm.
It was a debacle and it was sloppy.
And being the son of immigrants and knowing other immigrants, it, it
was a little infuriating actually.
Yeah, makes sense.
Makes sense.
To see that.
To see that they felt so, um, entitled.
Right.
And, and I, and I, I, I suspect a lot of people feel that way
about illegal immigration period.
Anyone who comes illegal, even if it's to work, even if it contributes
to the consumer economy, even if it contributes as an input into
production, that makes businesses run at a lower cost and then makes mm-hmm.
Their products lower cost, for example.
Renovating your kitchen.
The whole cost just went down by about $5,000 because of this second
class illegal immigrant labor.
I know plenty of people who are more than happy to take advantage of that.
And so it, you know, to me this, the racial story, the ethnic story we just
talked about identity, how complex it is.
I think that same the way, same way it's handled.
I if you look at this immigrant story, which is just one of many things,
what does it mean to be American and what benefit do immigrants illegal
legal give to the United States?
Yeah,
this is a very complex thing, man.
Super.
And, and to put it in the context of our show, if I can just bring it home
for a moment, uh, just the conversations we have, I think the reasons that the
conversations we have are, are worth listening to is because out there in
the real world, there's an ecosystem.
There's.
People getting paid to create rage.
And the political system is designed, is incentivized to polarize people, you know?
True so-called Republicans so called, so-called Democrats.
'cause that label gets put on very easily.
Oh, if you're liberal, you're a Democrat.
Well the Democratic party is a party, it's a, it's an institution,
it's a political entity.
Mm-hmm.
Entity
that fights for its survival and its relevance.
And so does a Republican party.
Sure.
Just because you might vote Republican doesn't mean you're a Republican.
'cause their platform changes according to what they need to survive in this world.
Right?
Yeah.
So it is completely, and they are incentivized to create polarization.
'cause there's only two parties.
And so it drives us apart.
It makes the conversations on these topics like immigration pretty
simple and, and, and pretty ignorant.
Um, the real conversation about identity, about race, about immigration.
There are real problems here, but I know people who are so swept up
with, with, I think the liberal polarized discourse on immigration.
Mm-hmm.
No, all immigrants are good.
It's like, no, that is not true.
Right.
And, and, and I've had people even tell me like, there is no immigration problem.
And I'm like, well, you don't think massive, uncontrolled, um,
immigration into the United States, um, from all over the world.
By the way back, I mean, what, four years ago?
Yeah.
There were planes coming from Libya, landing in Honduras.
They had, um, uh, Africans, Chinese,
yeah.
Immigrants from all over the world are looking for the easiest entry point.
Right.
Um, Latin American immigrants are just like walking thousands of miles, uh, to
be able to come into the United States.
Yeah, absolutely.
And, and, and the beacon, the image, the narrative, even if it's not true,
the, the narrative of uncontrolled migration into the United States and the,
and immigrants wildly benefiting from jobs that then sending the money back.
Yeah.
And, and an open immigration system that, that claim that
narrative, as false as it might be.
Draws immigrants to their peril and to the peril of the United States economy.
And it just, it just sucked people in and, and I can see it, I've
seen it in the countries of origin.
Yeah.
People only think about immigrating to the United States as soon as they can.
As soon as they turn 14, 15,
they wanna go to us.
That's
what being successful is.
It's like if you grew up in a poor neighborhood, maybe selling drugs
or sports or whatever, easiest form of making money and, and, and
having the esteem of the people around you, you are drawn to that.
Even though it's an unrealistic narrative.
How many people can actually play professional sports?
How many people can sell drugs without getting killed or arrested?
It's very few.
It's a very powerful, you know, in that, in that sense, it's a very
powerful brand that the US has.
Yeah.
And it, it does attract.
People.
Now, I dunno if you heard much about the Somali Daycare Center situation, whatever.
Oh, the, I understand there was a, there's a massive, uh, fraud
operation, um, based on I think COVID related funds in Minnesota.
And I I understand that to some extent.
Yeah.
The, some of the perpetrators were, um, from the Somali community.
I didn't know if they were immigrants or son of immigrants.
Yeah.
Um, but I know there was one specific, I mean, I know this 'cause I read
the Fox News website every day.
Uh, I wouldn't have known this, by the way, if I only read CNN or uh, yeah,
you would know the New York Times.
Good for
you.
No, 'cause they don't mention the Somalis 'cause that's racist.
Which is an insane thing.
Just mention it like,
and I have someone Trust your readers.
Trust your readers
are stupid.
I will, um, throw in that I was, when I read this story and it came across my,
I read Yahoo 'cause it's kind of like.
I don't know what it is.
No one, no one cares about it.
Yeah, they don't, they don't have anything.
They're not,
they're, they're not selling anything because they don't tell anything.
I see FKA fair amount of CNN and Fox on there.
So anyway, um, it said this guy, this kid had gone over there.
He was doing a video, viral video.
I was like, okay.
My first thought was, well, this probably this kid came during
Christmas break or just after school.
He, he clearly was trying to, to set these people up.
So I would decide, somehow I get on this, I, I clicked from the Yahoo News article,
the Twitter, oh, the conservative, uh, the conservative activist
blogger.
Right.
What's his face?
I don't know his face, but so funny.
I click on his,
yeah, go ahead.
Sorry.
He's
very popular.
Yeah.
It was very popular.
So I click on the video out of curiosity.
I had no idea what this was.
Within five minutes, I was like, fuck, this is bullshit.
This, this is not Clearly, he's, he's onto something like they were going.
They, they would go into a neighborhood.
Yep.
Very industrial neighborhood.
There's boarded up office buildings that say daycare.
There's daycare
there,
and they knock on the door.
These people are confused as like, they have no children there, and this
is like a Monday or Tuesday and it's, it's supposed to be before Christmas
break, but even if it was, even if it was on Christmas break, he literally
talks to people in the neighborhood.
He is like, have you ever seen a child in this neighborhood?
And they're like, are you kidding me?
This is not a place that you have childcare, that you would never put a
childcare here in this neighborhood.
And no, I've been here eight years.
I've never seen a single child go in and outta that building.
So it's clearly he's on to something that there, there is a fraud going on, right?
And I'm thinking like, so then I'm thinking, damn, this is,
this is pretty significant.
I just thought to myself, this reminds me again not to go back,
not to go to my, my beloved Italian history, but it does remind me of
how my great, again, my grandfather.
Hated the mafia.
Not just the mafia.
The Italian mafia hated Sicilian mafia.
Like, like hated them with the guts.
If there was anyone who disavowed the Italian mafia,
it was my Italian grandfather who, who couldn't stay in them.
He moved to, yeah, with his family moved because they
their own communities.
It, it made them
look bad and he knew it.
And he didn't like looking like a, like a dirty, greasy Italian
that was gonna rip you off.
And he couldn't stand that.
And, and it gives
you a bad Yeah, it gives a bad reputation.
So he would be the one saying, yeah, they're terrible.
And, um, and he, uh, they moved away from New York and Chicago because of that.
They didn't like Chicago and New York because that's where the mafia was.
And they wanted to, they were already trying to get away
from the mafia in Sicily.
They didn't wanna move anywhere near, well, they weren't
the only ones moving away from those places 'cause of too many Italians.
That's true.
Um, very true.
So anyway, they moved along to the, to the California.
So anyway, I just was, I was thinking about this and I
was like, and I think, um.
My guess is that it's the same idea.
It's like if you're in the Somali community, you're looking at this
and you're probably thinking, maybe you've heard about it.
I'm sure you're not shocked by this because you like the Italians, the
ones who were not committing crimes, they knew very well that their
brethren were committing crimes.
Yeah.
And screwing people over like crazy.
And uh, and so they, they hated it.
And so my guess is that the Somalia community, I was like, I really feel bad
for most of the Somalia community that that has to deal with this, this branding.
Now what it, what was interesting though was you had these kind of random
people try to make their own viral videos on the left and they would go up.
And what I saw was kind of funny to me 'cause it was literally a guy and
he is like on the streets as if he's gonna go into one of these centers.
He's literally in front of one and he is like, or like near one.
And he is like, you know, this guy made a viral video and we looked
through all the records from the state and there were no problems.
And so you're kind of waiting like, okay, yeah, so show us, you
know, go into the, and he is like, that's all I got, and thanks a lot.
I'm like, well, you didn't even show up.
You didn't even knock on the door.
Like you're saying that this guy's, you're discrediting this guy who knocked on doors
and you're going to like, you're gonna go through the state records with which
clearly are full bullshit, and then you're gonna say that there's no problem here.
And I was just like, what is it about this kind of knee jerk reaction to be
like, no, no, no, there's no problem here.
No problem.
It's all, you know, it's all hatred.
It's all, yeah.
And I was like, no.
I mean, there
was, there was genuine, they were quick to, yeah, there were
quick to brand him a racist.
And by the way, he, I mean, he might be, I don't know, but if, if you
make a might absolutely be point.
You make a good point.
If you make a good point, you make a good point.
Yeah.
I mean,
I washed the few and I was like, yeah, there's clearly some fraud going on.
Now again, if I, if I, if you were to go back in the day and show up at every
deli, that was Italian and you know, I, there were probably one out of every 20.
That were money launder and money, and they were, and they
were full, they were phonies.
Yeah.
You could go to all, you know, you could go to every one of those and make
a documentary and show how the whole Italian community is a bunch of crooks.
Actually, they're probably more knowing that knowing them there were
probably a lot more than one out of 20.
It probably was a little higher.
But anyway,
the point is you
could, you could make a case that these are rod's dirty scoundrels,
and you would be mostly wrong because you, that's usually not how it works.
It's usually that it's the bad apples.
Um, but there were some, certainly there were some problems there and,
you know, you didn't have to be an a, a, a bright, um, Einstein to know
that they were destroying democracy.
Back in the day in Chicago and New York, all these places were
completely screwed over and run.
Um, there was so much corruption and it was a, it was a big problem.
And it's amazing that it, it finally ended to some degree, you know?
To some degree.
Yeah.
No, no.
And you know, to me, uh, man, I, I read a CNN article about this guy
because I, I seen him on Fox News.
And Fox News covered, you know, the Fox News website now has like a tab
for every story that they're following that ing want people to track.
Got it.
And they sort, they started charging for some articles, which is annoying.
That sort of, that was one of my favorite things about the Fox News website.
You could just read the whole thing.
Right.
Probably why they were so popular.
Well, anyway, um, I remember, you know, and, and they talked about
his video and they're like, yeah, I mean, he knocked on these doors.
There's no one there.
And then I looked at the CN article and they said like, well, it was
right before the Christmas break.
And, you know, there is no indication that they are not, that they are fraudulent.
And it's like, well.
So obviously there is something there.
I mean, so the Department of Justice, I mean, this was investigated before
the Trump administration, right?
Exactly.
Yeah.
So saying it's political to me is kind of like, okay, that's cover also.
Why would you cover, like we as Americans should hate this kind of fraud.
Right?
Those are our, those are our tax dollars.
Yeah.
We should hate fraud and corruption no matter where it comes from.
And, and, and the left not wanting to vilify people who are of a
minority, ethnicity, or race.
I get it.
I really do get it.
It's like you don't wanna, you don't wanna go fire,
uh, you know, guessing when there's,
when there's, when there's an attack or a murder.
I think a lot of, um, a lot of kind of like either mainstream or left leaning.
I don't actually think CNN is left leaning.
They're just not right leaning.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
I, I think they are.
They, they're hesitant to mention the person's ethnicity or nation of origin.
Sure.
I, on the other hand, want to know that right away.
And it's not like I'm not, you know, like, okay, for what, when those national, oh,
I'm not terrible attack on those National Guard members in Washington DC mm-hmm.
And it turned out he was an, um, Afghan uh, immigrant, you know, the reason
people don't wanna mention he's an Afghan immigrant right away on those
mainstream sites like CNN New York Times is because of what happened is now no
Afghan immigrant can get an A Visa.
And it's like, well, that's not the answer either.
No.
Right.
Um, you're, you're acting like he was trained in a camp in Afghanistan and then
got sent here to do that five years later.
I mean, no, I mean, and that's not common sense.
And, and I think, you know, there's been a lot of kind of like conservative
right-leaning voices saying like, well, we gotta do something about
this, you know, one, you know, and if you say, if you say like, well.
People, people get murdered, people get attacked.
If it's an illegal immigrant who did it right, and you, and you
say, well, but I mean the illegal, the illegal immigrant kind of as a
population commits less violent crime.
Mm-hmm.
Then they say, well, first of all, they're all criminals 'cause they came illegally.
Second of all, one death is too much.
Mm. Which I think, okay, I, I, I understand that point of view.
It's, it is, I mean, it is too much, but it's too much for everybody.
I, I really do.
But then when you talk about gun violence, you're like, well, we could
have prevented that mass shooting with like very strict gun control.
Mm-hmm.
Because, you know, one death is too much.
Right.
You said one death is too much.
Right.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
The, the principle of the second amendment is so important.
It's worth innocent people dying.
Literally.
I mean, that's the, and by the way, I don't, and I don't really have a, I
don't have a problem with that argument.
I think it is a valid argument for some of the time.
Um, just like for example, if you, if you think people should be able to get
abortions, even if you have one limited right to the sixth or seventh month, you
have to admit, you know, I mean, Louis CCK has a great bit about this, right?
He is like, Louis CCK said that he's pro-abortion.
But please, I mean, admit that you are killing something, right?
Like you're not, you're not doing nothing.
So like, either, either you think it's okay to basically
kill whatever that thing is.
Is it a human life?
Mm-hmm.
I mean, you can debate that all day, right?
Right.
But like, you are ending a potential for a life best case scenario.
You have to admit that.
But the, if you're pro-abortion, the answer is, and that's okay
because of this other thing.
If you think there should be no gun control and then we should all
be able to carry weapons and you know that gun violence, innocent
people will die as a result of that.
And you say, well, that's okay because of this other concept that is so important.
Um, and if you say, well, hey, let's not, let's never let another Afghan
immigrant into the US 'cause we don't want anyone to get killed like
those National Guard members did.
Well, you are going to, it's, you're not actually gonna prevent the violence.
Mm-hmm.
And you're gonna prevent a lot of people from coming here that
might have a lot to contribute.
And also maybe don't we owe them?
'cause they helped us in that war in Afghanistan.
Absolutely.
And then you say, well, yeah, yeah, those are all true, but it's
worth it if no other Afghan ever.
Right.
So we make all these bargains, we make these bargains all the time
about like, innocent people dying, bad things happening to completely innocent
people in exchange for something we think is an important principle.
Right,
right.
So, so to me, it's kind of funny, you know, tying this back to the
immigration thing, it's just like another conversation that you
cannot have on a reasonable basis.
'cause someone says like, well yeah, innocent people died,
but that doesn't mean you.
Doesn't mean you just stop all Afghan immigration.
No, no, no.
One death is too much.
How dare you?
And it's like, well, mm-hmm.
Why don't you find that reasonable compromise that you have about guns
and bring it to this conversation?
Or how about someone who's very liberal and is okay with abortion ending a
potential for a life or a life, right.
Depending on your point of view, why don't you bring that sense of compromise
of like, Hey, man, sometimes rights outweigh these potential negatives.
Why don't you bring that reasonableness into this gun conversation?
And maybe we can all just find this middle ground.
We actually, it turns out it doesn't matter if you're liberal or conservative,
you're okay with people dying.
Mm-hmm.
If
it's, if it's for the thing that you think is more important than life Absolutely.
Itself.
Yeah.
I mean, and this isn't a new concept, right?
Who is it?
The, who is it that said that I would rather let a hundred
guilty men go if it means that we don't lock up one innocent man?
I think that was Thomas Jefferson.
Okay.
Don't you know, Google me, um, I will, but to me, I, I just
wish our political discourse.
On immigration, on race, on identity just wasn't so polarized because I
think most of us are able to take almost any view depending on what the
conversation is, and it's not consistent.
Yeah.
And it's, it's very tribal.
And I mean, you know, I think there's a lot of really great things that the
MAGA movement has brought this country.
It is, the MAGA movement has brought a focus in this country that we did
not have on taking care of people who were born here, who maybe their
heritage spans back, you know, a hundred years ago, 200 years ago.
You know, don't those people also deserve to be a part of an economy that works?
And haven't politicians of every stripe sold the American worker upstream?
I mean, it's, uh, sold the American worker out in order to make money.
I mean, yeah, I, and that's not partisan.
It's a good question.
And that's not racism.
No, it's not.
And I think it, I think, uh, what I think of course is that it,
it's not that the left doesn't agree with that, but the left just assumes that the
left always assumes though, and has been operating from the assumption over the
past 50 some so years and, and is very strongly still, I think, attached to this
idea though, at least the months that I remember closely as I was, um, you know,
this is again, 15, 20 years ago maybe.
Is that of course, um.
Everybody deserves that chance.
But the, but of course, folks of, of European or, or Caucasian,
whatever you wanna say, already have that it's already sealed for them.
And, and in the, I would say a lot of times in the communities that
they're living, that is what they see.
That's what the left sees.
It's, you know, they're, so if you go to the, if you go to the coasts, if you're
in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, whatever, Boston, what are you gonna see?
You're gonna see highly educated white people.
A lot of times you're not gonna see as many, um, lowly educated white people, at
least not in the fancier, wealthier areas.
They're just not able to have, survive that, uh, or live
that live in those places.
And, and also a lot of immigrant communities.
And so very cultural.
So you're seeing a mix of affluent white people a lot of times mixed with, um,
a lot of, a lot of, uh, diversity and a lot of, um, non-white communities.
And so if you're in, if you're a non-white, you're in, in a non-white
community, you're gonna see.
Oh, well look at this guy's driving a nice car and all this stuff.
So you're gonna say, well, of course they have all that.
They have what I want.
It's when you go to places that, again, I, when I went to live in Indianapolis
is when I started to see, or Texas even, I started to see a different picture,
which was, wow, I see, uh, poor immigrant communities and poor white communities.
Whoa, what's that?
And, and there are parts of California and New York that do have those.
Of course, Kern
County.
Yes.
I mean, Jesus man, just, but
fucking Bakersfield.
Exactly.
But if, if you're, uh, in LA you're too proud to go to such areas.
You don't, you know, you're only going there as a get to
get to the, fill up your gas.
I mean, go to,
go to go to the inland dump Empire.
I mean, totally.
You know, you used to spend a lot of time in the Empire Riverside.
Plenty of poor white people there.
Absolutely.
There's plenty of poor, poor white people in Downey.
Yeah.
Um, in, uh, uh, uh, what's it car?
Carson.
Sure.
Carson City.
Yeah.
I mean a Bellflower.
I mean, yeah, I think, I think, I think sometimes people who
live in non-white communities.
Um, aren't exposed enough to poor white people.
Dude.
Uh, I don't know.
In, in la three out of five homeless people I saw were white.
Yeah.
Oh
yeah.
I missed that.
So it's almost like a, there's a blindness to it and, and yeah.
There's a blindness never in a conversation about diversity, about
classes and let's say, and maybe classes have been race, did I hear
someone say, well, what about all the white people that are homeless?
Because it was like, well, you guys are just, that's just dumb or whatever.
You know?
They, they, they have their
white, that's why that conversation about white privilege, I think irks
so many white conservatives, right?
Because they're like, well, where is that guy's white privilege?
Yeah.
And so, I mean, that's not the concept.
The concept is, okay, what would you rather be a white homeless
guy or a black homeless guy?
Right.
Well, there you go.
Exactly.
Both.
Both, both.
Slightly better.
Yeah, slightly better, better white homeless guy because you
probably will not get shot.
Probably, maybe, I don't know.
Very, very lucky.
Depends where
you live.
Yeah.
And you, you might, you know, and so I would say it's, but that is really,
you know, it's not much of a contest.
I mean, like you say, it's not exactly a contest I'd like to be a part of.
So I think, um, I think it's also,
it's, it's not, it's also not empathetic to white people who
are struggling economically.
Right.
Were privilege.
It's like, okay, that's a comment designed to further the divide.
Yeah.
Makes sense.
That is not a comment designed around empathy.
Yeah.
That is not a common designed to find common ground.
Right.
And
that's the problem.
My problem is like, my, my, my issue is a, is a process issue.
My issue is the conversations we have about these topics are
designed to create polarization.
So, I mean true.
If, you know, I was recently watching the PBS news hour.
There's like this little analysis section with these two commentators.
There's supposed to be one from the left, one from the right.
Okay.
And it was right before Thanksgiving.
And the moderator says, well, you know, what do you think about advice for people
going to Thanksgiving who might have to, you know, spend time with people who
don't agree with themselves politically?
And the first one was at the right-leaning kind of, he's not maga but he is
very, he right-leaning commentator.
Sure.
This is still PBS.
Right.
So the two people have to be like fairly center.
Mm. The right-leaning guy says, well, you know, I think it is time.
And he's speaking as a conservative who obviously is not maga
and he's, he's in his brain.
He's thinking about, oh, you're at Thanksgiving with MAGA people.
Okay.
People who are conspirator, like conspiracy theorists or whatever.
I, I really feel like that's where he came from.
He's like, well, you know, you, you should be open to listening and maybe,
maybe the conversation could be fruitful.
You could find out more about the other side.
Sure.
Um, I, listening and actively listening and not listening to prove them wrong,
but listening to understand them.
You know, if you
wanna, if you think they're wrong, if you wanna prove them
wrong, I mean, fine, go ahead.
Yeah.
But first you must understand what they, you go, they're truly trying to tell you.
Yeah.
And that's what I would say is the best thing to do in these circumstances.
Well, the left-leaning guy was like, Nope.
Fight, fight, fight, fight, fight as much as you can.
And he's coming from the perspective of, oh, I'm a left-leaning
person who is a person of color.
My viewpoint has been repressed.
Got it?
Yep.
Cool.
Um, ma Maga, people think I'm wrong.
And you have to make your voice known.
You have to make your voice known.
I mean, and this is funny, both sides.
Both sides.
This was, this was the tea parties thing, right?
Wasn't that, wasn't that a quaint movement?
When you think about it, the Tea Party under Obama,
right?
My my conservative, conservative, grassroots capitalist economy
message has been repressed, right By the dominant liberal left.
Interesting.
Who, who dominates everything.
Everything's politically correct.
You can't celebrate Christmas.
You can't say you know anything.
You can't say.
Black people are articulate.
We're being repressed right now and we are gonna have our tea party movement
'cause we're tired of being repressed.
Fight, fight, fight.
Well now it's this left-leaning guy who's like, no, no, fight, fight, fight.
And it's funny, right?
'cause that's, to me, it was so funny 'cause I just thought to myself like,
yeah, I mean, I guess the question should have been better asked.
'cause the question is, what do you want, what do you want out of this interaction
with a person who disagrees with you?
If you are a MAGA person and you have this cousin who's like a liberal lefty, 'cause
he is young, he doesn't know any better.
Oh.
Or it's your, you know, it's your daughter's boyfriend who's a liberal loon.
Like, okay, and now you're having Thanksgiving dinner together.
What are you, what are you trying to get outta the interaction right now?
Do you feel repressed that your voice is unheard?
Are you angry inside and, and you wanna demonstrate that you matter?
By making other people angry.
Mm-hmm.
And, and, and creating a fight.
Oh, okay.
Then you should listen to that.
You should listen to the commentator who said, express yourself.
Let yourself be known.
That's the only way they're gonna hear your voice is you put it out there.
True.
Hmm.
Yeah.
I mean, fine, but you will get what you want.
Yeah.
But you're, what you want is discord.
So if you want discord, that's true.
Yeah.
Congratulations.
Yeah.
You created it.
I mean, and I, and I really do mean that.
I mean like, and this is, this is this, you know, this goes
even back to the philosophy that was debated quite a lot in the, in
the African American community in the seventies and sixties between
like Martin Luther King and Yeah.
And Malcolm X and, um, I mean, it's as old as time.
These, these topics are as old as time, really.
I, I, you know.
Exactly.
And it's,
I mean, any in a, in a, in a sheer power struggle, if, um, you are
part of a community fighting for political relevance and power.
The tools available to you are the same as though they always are.
Right.
And the, and the right, the, the context for that debate, it changes
over time in, in the context.
Right.
But to me it's like, it's funny 'cause my inclination, 'cause I mean,
I make a fairly comfortable living.
I'm not losing from this economy yet, right?
Mm-hmm.
At the moment, the moment I do, I will probably be one of the third party guys.
Sure.
Absolutely.
Uh, so to to, to me it's like my, when I thought, when I heard that question on
Thanksgiving, how do people handle this?
The first thing I thought was, wow.
Actually when I, and I know plenty of people who, um, were part of the market
movement and I know family, people who are young university people who have
the most insane belief I've ever heard in my entire life from this like crazy
left-leaning, hypersensitive identity politics kind of place, I think to
myself like, wow, that's an opportunity.
It's hard to do.
That's why I, I, I think I, I really like this idea is Yeah.
Truly hear them.
Yeah.
Don't hear them.
To disagree with them.
Don't hear them.
So you can put 'em into a bucket truly.
And try to read into what they're saying.
Ask questions, ask.
'cause the first thing they say will be a part of this national polarized discourse,
because that's what people are used to.
Okay.
Right.
They're used to defending their position.
Right.
Okay.
But get past that.
Get past that.
Get to the core.
What does this person actually believe in?
What do they actually feel about these things?
Why do they feel about those things?
'cause people might have extreme political views driven by something they have lived.
And you, you know, it's funny, uh, my wife, she doesn't make a lot of
political commentary on her social media.
All she did was post she reposted a New York Times.
Uh, posts where it's the president giving his briefing about the
arrest of Nicholas Maduro.
Right.
And it's a New York Times headline that quoted the president during
his briefing that said, in quotes, the US will run Venezuela
Yes.
And sell its oil for some time.
Yeah.
And that's all it was.
It was a quote, it was a New York Times repost.
And, uh, my wife has amongst her followers, a Venezuelan woman
living overseas, very successful.
Her husband, she does not work.
Her husband works in the oil business through around the world.
Interesting.
Used to work in the Venezuelan oil business actually.
So he's probably connected to the regime.
Somehow she blew up on my wife.
She's like, how dare you say these ignorant, stupid things.
You have never had to wait in a long line for toilet paper.
You've never had to wait to people to eat.
By the way, for context.
They have a ton of money and she's super fat.
Um, you know, and, and if, and if he worked for the, another I, if
he worked for PD DVSA, which is the National Venezuela Oil Company
that was nationalized by Chavez.
And you know, to be in there, you have to at least be okay with the regime.
Right.
Um, interesting.
And if you, and if you're making money to this day on, on business
from there, you're at least okay with the government, right?
Like it's a Chy France best case scenario.
Anyway, so she just rails on my wife.
She's like, it's a good thing he is gone and you're criticizing the United States.
You're criticizing the United States, and they've done an amazing
thing and they've liberated us.
Mm-hmm.
And you hate it because you don't get it.
You're ignorant.
You shouldn't comment on ignorant things that you don't know about.
Got it.
And I was funny and I, and you know, my wife, but your wife only wrote,
she didn't actually say anything.
Right.
She didn't say anything.
She just posted, she just
posted the actual comment of
even the New York Times posting, just quoted the president.
Now could they have added context?
Probably they could have added the context of, you know, we want
a fair and just transition and we will do this until such time as
there is a fair and just transition.
Okay, that's interesting context.
'cause besides saying that the United States would run Venezuela and sell its
oil, they also said we're gonna wait.
You know, we're only gonna do that until there's a fair and just transition.
But that's a fairly significant thing for the most powerful person in the world and
the most powerful country in the world.
To say, to say, we are running this country now.
'cause it, we're gonna run it in what way?
With right, with what?
With what administration.
You know, at least in Iraq there was a plan, right?
There was a, you know, the, the, not a good one, but there was one, there was a
plan and they had a provisional government and they had someone in charge on day one.
Right.
Um, true.
And so here we have no, the only assets in Venezuela are the ones
used to remove Maduro, right?
You have the, according to press reports, you have the CIA.
Mm-hmm.
Um, and uh, and that's it.
I mean, we don't have an embassy there.
And so to me it's, it's a, no, it's a newsworthy item.
Also, if you are a, a fan of the move, if you're a fan of the
president or if you're a fan, if you're part of the MAGA movement.
Also, the MAGA movement is a little bit different.
They're, you know, they're anti-war and anti intervention.
So yeah, it'd be interesting to see how my friends in that
movement kind of respond to this.
But because there's different camps, I mean, people are complex.
The MAGA movement actually is a very large movement with so many different people,
and there was so many different opinions.
It's actually quite interesting, the, the variety of opinions there.
Yeah.
But to me, it's like, I could imagine that headline being supportive.
Because it's like, yeah, he removed a, a terrible dictator, and now the US is
gonna bring some much needed stability.
Uh, and, and, and by the way, I mean, the US companies have contracts, they have
agreements on oil fields in the Caribbean and the north of Arg, uh, in the north
of Venezuela that were cut off and not honored by the, by the previous regime.
There is a legitimate complaint there from US oil companies being
able to recoup their investment.
They invested money in, in, in oil exploration in the Caribbean.
So to me, I, I don't think there's anything particularly partisan
or hateful about that posting that quote from the president.
Well, anyway, this Venezuelan person railed on her.
And I thought that was so interesting because I saw that, and I'm
like, and I told my wife, my wife showed me, and I said, you know.
This is probably a very sensitive topic for her.
She has a lot of things going on within her.
She probably feels like a traitor for being outside of her country.
She probably feels like a traitor for living so well while
so many of her people suffer.
Um, she's probably very happy to see Maduro go.
She doesn't care how it happened.
I probably wouldn't have mm-hmm.
Cared
either.
Right.
If I mm-hmm.
Was of Venezuelan.
I don't care how you get 'em out.
Um, so, like I said, just trying to be empathetic.
I can kind of see why she reacted.
She didn't, it has nothing to do with you.
No.
She's reacting to a situation and she doesn't understand it.
She doesn't understand that you're not her enemy, but it's, it's convenient and
cathartic for her to make you her enemy.
Even though, I mean, we know her, but we've hung out with her.
Oh, really?
We were on, I, I thought we were on a, we were friends.
Acquaintances maybe got it, but, and I thought, am I?
And I'm like, yeah, she used use a lightning rod, which is not nice.
And you're perfectly.
Your rights to draw your boundaries and say, Hey, friend.
True.
I'm not your enemy.
I reposted a piece of news.
Um, I actually, it's interesting 'cause you've reacted to something I posted,
but you actually don't know my opinion.
You could have asked me.
'cause a lot of the things you said in there, um, I understand and I agree with.
Yeah.
Uh, but you, you just, you're just in the reaction mode.
And I forgive you for being in reaction mode because you're
going through a lot probably.
And I told my wife that and I'm like, that would be a really
nice way of bridging the divide.
Yeah.
And my wife said, oh, no, no, no, I already responded.
And she showed me her response and I'm like, oh, okay.
Yeah.
She chose, she chose violence the
other way.
Yeah.
Because it's sometimes
that's what you do.
You know?
That's,
so then I, then, then I thought, okay, I'm gonna apply some of this
empathy to my wife and be like, okay, so you felt very offended.
And we kind of don't like her anyway.
And we think her kids are stupid.
We don't like her kids.
Uh, we think our kids are wild animals.
And so we're like, yeah, okay.
And I'm like, okay.
You felt like you felt like.
Pissing her off even more.
But I, I'm like, and I told her like, so I get it.
That's perfectly fine.
I said, although if you really want her to piss her off, you
should have ignored her completely.
Don't even, um, don't even block her.
Yeah.
Just ignore her completely.
That's to do.
I'll say I probably would've heard more.
Yeah.
It's
not my account.
She didn't call me ignorant.
Right.
Anyway.
But I think that was like a perfect showcase of what we're talking about here.
Mm-hmm.
People just reacting.
They're just reacting and reacting.
Reacting.
No one's having a conversation.
And if I would be at the Thanksgiving dinner with people who are
different than me, I wouldn't try to budge them from their position.
First of all, I don't think it's possible.
And second of all, I have something to gain by deeply understanding what
they're thinking and feeling and why.
And so to me it was funny 'cause that one pun pundit who said like,
no, fight, fight, fight, show.
You are perfectly within your rights to let your view be known.
Mm-hmm.
And to me it's kind of like, yeah.
Whether or not it's a thoughtful.
Or helpful view.
Yeah.
Outcome.
Yeah.
Good point.
Right.
But whether or not it's a thoughtful or helpful view, we're not asking
you to search deep within yourself to question your own thoughts and politics
as you would like everyone else to do.
Sure.
We're asking you to, you know, be humanly defend your position no
matter how I Ill conceived it is.
Yeah.
And so I thought that was funny.
I thought that was like a perfect little vignette of, of what
we've talked about many times.
'cause you and I do not fit into a neat little category.
No.
You and I also being human, also react well to things.
People say kind of like, oh, you know, if I detect someone is a hopeless, crazy
hipster, I will react immediately to that without trying to understand them.
Right?
Like, if they tell me, they tell you coffee is a, uh, these tacos.
These tacos are the worst tacos ever.
Have you had tacos in Mexico City at this little, at this, there's,
there's this little taco stand in the corner of the Beas, Artes, whatever.
And it's like a white guy, right?
And you're like, I don't
think he would be able to pronounce it as well as you, but yeah.
Let's say, let's assume No, but that maybe he would Yeah.
Have you, this, this little taco five blocks away from, and it's, uh, they
have the best sweater tacos, right.
And you're just like, drive you crazy.
Okay.
You're an annoying hipster and I'm gonna react immediately to what
you just said without trying to figure out where it's coming from.
Correct.
I do it too.
I mean, we both do it, right?
Yeah.
But I mean, I think that's what's missing is, is that is, you know,
these racial things, Southern Italian, north Italians, yeah.
Everyone has a reason for saying these things that they say, people
who say that America is white people who have been here for 150 years.
Everyone else doesn't really belong here.
There are people who truly believe that.
Yeah.
Um, and you know what?
And I, I hope they, I, I hope that they're far and few between because
I think the reality is I have made efforts to understand them too.
I mean, I really do.
I see if you, if you're a poor white person or a white person even,
I mean, most people saying this, they're not poor, but like a middle
class white person who feels like.
Left out of the political discourse.
Mm-hmm.
You don't have a special identity like these other people
do, um, which is bullshit.
Mm-hmm.
Just 'cause you're white in America doesn't mean you don't
have a special ethnic identity.
Well, I think people have, we should talking about yours for God's sakes.
You know, I think the reality, 'cause I live in a small town
in rural America, and um,
I know for a fact I, I go to a coffee shop, which I kind of think of as cheers.
Basically everyone kinda knows.
Yeah.
I have a good friend there that's as maga as they come.
And he's a great guy.
I love, I love the guy.
He, he's a, he's a sweet guy, but you get him on a topic about immigrants or
something like that and he'll go off the rails about it and he would probably say
all the stuff that you're saying that you're kind of, uh, mimicking of what you
would think a MAGA guy would say about should people be allowed to be here?
Who's da, da, da, da.
And yet I've seen him interact with, um, yeah.
People that are not white often enough that I could see that in,
even in his own world, there's, well, you're not one of them.
You know that kind of mind.
Well, you're
different.
Yeah.
Not you.
Right.
So there's, so what I, what I think is happening is there's his worldview,
which he's interacting with in his head.
And in that world there's problems and da, da, da, and these people
are good and those people are bad.
And then there's his practical, real reality in front of
him that's not in a fantasy.
And, and, and when it comes to that practical point, he is
very gracious and a lovely man.
And when it comes to his fantasy world about how he thinks the
world is acting, it's a completely different, you know, situation.
Yeah.
And there are no, I mean, so, yeah.
So to me, I mean, I, I couldn't agree more.
I think this is part.
I mean, so first of all, it's a human thing, right?
Mm-hmm.
It is called, you know, cognitive dissonance.
You can have two opposing ideas in your brain at the exact same time.
Very few people can, but, um, but yes, it technically it's possible.
Who's, who's cognitive dissonance?
No, I just kidding.
You're right.
My,
my own parents, right?
They're older and they're immigrants and there's no one more racist or
homophobic than, than immigrants to us.
Uh, anyway, so, um, you know, you'd be
surprised at how common that is.
Actually,
maybe 10 or 15 years ago, I remember I once talked about like gay marriage
and they, they kind of went nuts.
I also think that they were afraid that I was gay.
Oh, of course.
Because, you know, I was still single and I wasn't getting married anytime soon.
Got it.
Yeah.
And so, like, uh, you know, they, they were, they, you know, they're like,
look, uhoh, I just don't think people should get married, blah, blah, blah.
And I called them homophobes.
Um, and it's funny because, and
did they enjoy that because,
well you No, they did not.
I think they just, like, I just, we're not homophobic.
We just think they should, we just don't think they should have rights.
'cause we're afraid of them.
Yeah.
Um, and so, but it was funny, right?
So I love my parents and I respect them.
And so, and I don't think they're stupid and I don't think they're ignorant and
I don't think they're hateful people.
And they said those things and if it was anyone else, I'd be like, well,
these are hateful, ignorant, racist.
Mm-hmm.
Terrible people, but they're not, I know they're not, you know, they real, right.
So to, so to me it was interesting because, um, like, just like you
said, actually I had gay friends, uh, my dad had a gay friend that
he refused to admit was gay.
Um, and I've seen them interact with people that they know are
gay and they are respectful.
They're polite.
Mm-hmm.
They're
very humane.
Right.
True.
And I know, I, I have Europeans in my family who are deeply antisemitic.
I have seen them interact with people that they know are Jewish and they
don't treat them hate in a hateful way.
They're respectful, but it's like, wow.
That, that is cognitive dissonance.
I mean,
yeah.
Good point.
Just
to, just to hit this point home, I have in-laws who are very conservative,
Christian, evangelical Guatemalans, who, uh, consider themselves racially
superior to indigenous people.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And, uh, and I remember I was once amazing, I, I, I had met
this person working in Guatemala, in, in the gay rights space, but
it was for like this really big impressive international company.
Hmm.
And, and it turns out that his aunt was an in-law of mine who was very conservative
woman who, and, and I talked to him once.
I'm like, oh, hey, I met your just outta, you know, Guatemala's a small place
if you're an educated elite person.
And I said, I met your nephew who works at this gigantic international company.
I won't say the name.
She was very proud of the fact that someone in her family worked at
this big beautiful company and who has a university degree and he's so
important, uh, and he speaks English fluently and blah, blah, blah.
And I said, like, 'cause he, because the guy is a gay rights activist,
but he works for a multinational company, uh, in that space, uh, that
takes international donor money.
And she was just so proud of him.
And I'm like, oh, you, you're proud of him?
Oh yes, he's amazing.
And I'm like, okay, maybe she doesn't know he's gay.
So I said like, oh, have you, I mean, have you like visited him or, oh yeah.
We were at his house all the time.
Oh my God.
His, uh, his partner and she said, partner, oh, him and his
partner have immaculate taste.
Their home is beautiful and they put together the most amazing meals.
They're just the most amazing, interesting, sophisticated people.
They're so successful.
And I'm like, oh shit.
She doesn't believe they should be able to get married.
She doesn't believe in gay rights.
Right.
And she believes, she believes people choose to be gay.
She believes if you are gay, you should be converted into straight, right?
Mm-hmm.
And then I, and then I, and then I said, oh, wow.
Okay.
So you've been, you've met him and his partner?
Oh yeah.
They've been together for so long.
It's such a, and she, you know, she puts her hand on my lap.
Such a shame they can't get married, you know?
Oh wow.
Okay.
I'm like, what the fuck?
Amazing.
And I talked and I talked to this guy about this later.
I'm like, I met your aunt.
And I thought she was a, you know, crazy homophobe.
And he is like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's so sweet.
And he has a good Guatemalan thing.
Like, this is my family and I love them.
Got it.
And, and I thought like, well, an American would've disowned
his own aunt at that point.
Uh, but no.
And he said like, yeah, sure.
That's a very good point.
Uh, he said, he said, no family is very important still.
Mm-hmm.
To Guatemalans and to most Right.
Thick culture.
Right.
Not to all Guatemalans, but to a lot, a lot of them.
And he said she's just like a very lovely woman and she's very supportive.
And I am aware of her political views.
But he said, you know, he told me, he's like, you know, this is how gay rights
can progress is, and this is back to the Malcolm X Booker t Washington.
Yeah.
Martin Luther King Jr. Debate.
Mm-hmm.
Do
you assimilate and dominate?
Mm-hmm.
Or do you fight?
Right.
Do you assimilate and, and gain acceptance the soft way over time through the
system or you break, break the system.
Right.
And so he, he said this is how gay rights have prospered globally,
but also in Guatemala is that everyone knows someone who's gay.
And so if you can just humanize what being gay is, if they can just see
the gay person as being a real person.
Sure.
Yeah.
Suddenly they'll have a
empathy and they will get there eventually.
'cause she intellectually is still not there.
Right,
right.
But emotionally she is because.
What being gay is, has a face and a name and it's a family member.
Yeah.
And that's how I feel about political stuff.
You know, you get to know people who are a part of the MAGA movement
or a part of the woke left.
You get to know them as people.
Don't get them talking about politics.
Sure.
Talk about, you know, talk about food.
Yeah.
Some people always gear the conversation towards politics.
You start talking about like, oh, what do you like to watch on Netflix?
And they're like, oh yeah, I watch Yellowstone.
And it's like, oh, Yellowstone is a MAGA thing.
No it's not.
Or if it's like, oh, you know, you watch a show and you're like, yeah, but it depicts
immigrants as being good, which is crazy.
Right.
And you're like, what?
Yeah.
Sometimes the conversation goes into these places 'cause people
are in these weird bubbles.
But yeah, man, you, if you have someone in your family that you love
and you think they're a good person, they just happen to have these views
that you don't think are very lovely.
It really gets you to empathize.
You empathize and guess you don't understand the other side.
So anyway, I mean that's, yeah, I think Cool.
That's all I has to say about that.
Speaking of family,
yeah.
My family is visiting and I Yeah, I was gonna about to
ask, how is that, uh, how's your, how's the family, um, visit going?
It's good.
I still have to work a lot while they're here, so that's a shame.
Okay.
I don't know.
How long are they there for?
Uh, they're here for another week and then they go back.
That's great.
That's exciting.
Wonderful.
And I, I have a, yeah, no, I mean, it's, I, you know, I get along
being the baby for the first time.
No, no, no.
They were there when the baby was, they were there
with the boat.
Okay, great.
Yeah.
Um, no, for me, yeah.
I used to not emphasize family that much.
I think I was really part of that kind of thick stream in American culture
where it was like it rugged independence.
You, you know, you don't depend on your family.
Yeah.
And if your family does or says or believes something you don't like,
you just never talk to 'em again.
Uh, which is very, yeah, well that worked out really good for our country.
So it's uh, yeah, exactly.
That's why we have
depleting birth rate and all that stuff.
So to me, if you wanna support the birth rate, to me, if you wanna have
families that are integral private entities that support each other instead
of relying on government handouts, the families where it all begins, then yeah.
That's how it is.
That was how it is all over, all over the world.
Yeah.
In traditional, in traditional places where you cannot rely on the government,
where you cannot rely on a safety net, your families are safety net.
That's why you have to put up with that.
That's absolutely true.
Right.
From China to Guatemala, man, that's absolutely true.
People are putting up with their parents and we, it's amazing how
we've forgotten this.
It's so, I, I, I think the US is leading this sad.
Charge into this bleak world where you don't need, you know, we have insurance
for everything and all this stuff, and you don't need anyone support for anything.
And, um, um, we don't, uh, gosh.
I mean, the parents are not wanting to be around grandchildren.
I mean, good for you that you have parents that are like, excited to do that.
Yeah.
Um, we have, um, I, I don't know.
We just have people, people that are, you know, they're given up on their elderly.
On the elderly.
It's, it is bleak and, um, I do hope that we can, you know, I heard that
China was working on kind of like, um, and this is, this probably is rumor,
but, but there's always some fire maybe between underneath the smoke.
There was an article that, um.
They'll, they've started working on like, um, you know, robot birthing
machines that, that can, uh, hopefully one day save our humanity from,
from itself by, um, you know, some sort of artificial birthing system.
'cause I think as, as depressing as it sounds, is probably exactly what
we need to be working on right now.
Um, yeah.
'cause it's going that direction and hard and fast and so, you
know, that's, that's, let's
make the matrix the movie happen as fast as possible.
Yeah.
I would love to be raised a
cold robot that that's sycophantic and gives me a lot of positive
reinforcement all the time.
Great job . It's a funny too 'cause
it's like, uh,
I hate you Molly.
You're absolutely right.
I
have been a terrible mother.
It's so funny 'cause it's like, leave it to the Chinese to watch the Matrix
and think like, oh yeah, let's do that.
Yeah.
The machines birth the humans.
I love it.
Write that down.
Write that down, down.
Take notes.
Um, take notes.
We're, we're doing whatever that is.
Oh, I think those are the bad guys though.
Ah, you know, I don't have time.
Don't worry about it.
First of all, I don't have time to debate this good or bad.
If they're the bad guys in American movie, they're probably doing something right.
So, um, what did you think about, if you don't mind, real quick, what
did you think about the takeover?
I mean, we're sitting in a pretty remarkable moment where our country has
just taken over, uh, another country with no, you know, no veneer in the, in
the past there was a veneer of, well, we're just here to bring democracy
right back and help these people.
You know, the, you know, we're not putting that on anymore.
We're just gonna run the place.
Now this, as I was thinking about it, this is nothing, nothing new.
Uh, we've done it before as a country.
I love, I was listening to the New York Times Daily and the first thing
they said was, this is the most historic, unprecedented thing we,
unprecedented thing we've ever heard of, but we haven't seen this before.
20 years.
I was like, okay, really?
It's not that big of a deal then.
Um, but anyway, we've done it before.
It's not the first time in history.
It's happened at at all.
Even in our own history, we've done, you know, taking over Puerto Rico.
I mean, there was, there was a lot of stuff we did.
Uh, we wanted to take over Cuba.
That was our goal.
If you look at, if you, uh,
Philippines fan of the
Godfather too.
Um, so what was, what's your opinion, what's your thoughts on
that, if
you
don't
mind?
Sure.
Yeah.
I mean, so to me, you know, uh, I, I guess it depends.
I mean, I, I really do think it depends on, um, on who you are, right?
So I think people are very quick to want to plant their opinion
in some sort of universal value.
This is wrong 'cause of this.
To me, I don't see it that way.
I see a lot of things as being moral.
Depends who you are, right?
If you're a Venezuelan, uh, refugee who lives outside of Venezuela, you
don't give a shit how he got deposed.
Um.
All the, all the Venezuelan people outside of Venezuela.
I know we're celebrating it sometimes, so it's just as simple as that.
Right?
Yeah.
Now I am not Venezuelan.
Um, I'm an American.
Um, so I, as an American and someone who's dedicated to the
rule of law and to democracy.
Yeah.
I mean, I am con I get concerned about the process.
I'm not just results oriented.
Right.
I think populous tend to be only results oriented.
Mm. What I
think popula miss, um, I, I am also frustrated by the lack of results.
You look at our Venezuela policy since Chavez took over and it has been
ineffectual sanctions, economic diplomatic pressure, nothing has helped restore
democracy or the rule of law to Venezuela, and it affects us as an American.
You should care about this.
It's in our own backyard.
It's driven mass migration.
It's driven some drug trafficking.
It's driven illegal.
Gold smuggling and criminal empires grow under sanctioned regimes
that then have knock on effects.
Uh, say, you know, ditto for the, the drug cartels in Mexico create
an environment of criminal activity that then bleed into other areas.
And now cartels are, they're working online scams, they're working on
fentanyl, they're working on human smuggling, trafficking in persons.
It because they have impunity and built this large criminal network,
it will eventually affect Americans, the fentanyl crisis, right.
Americans going to vacation in Mexico getting murdered 'cause they are
mistaken for people of a rival gang.
And so, um, I as an American care about America, right?
And, and to me.
If we wanna have a rule of law and a process that works for Americans, we need
to do things like this a certain way.
Now, having said that, we did things a certain way before and nothing happened.
Nothing fucking happened.
Maduro is just there forever, and the criminal networks and
the corruption and are growing.
Mm-hmm.
So I guess to me it depends.
It depends on what happens after this.
Yeah.
Uh, I think it's good.
The Maduro is gone.
We didn't invade the country.
We, uh, we mounted an incursion.
We arrested him now.
Yeah.
Noriega, right?
That's what everyone's talking about.
I was listening to commentator because I, I thought like, okay,
yeah, it's not unprecedented.
That's what we did in Noriega.
We, um, invaded Panama and we, I mean, it got, it got a little botched.
It got a little messy.
It didn't go as well as we thought it would go.
Right.
But there are ways that Panama is similar.
There are ways that Panama is different.
It's different in that we had a stronger case to make.
For the invasion and the arrest of Noriega because we had national
interests that were more directly, you could draw a very straight line.
Okay.
We had Marines there, we had a military base, we had American citizens.
We have an embassy there.
Interesting.
We had worked with Noriega to end the drug trafficking, um, from through
Panama, and he had turned his back and he had betrayed us and it put
American lives at risk in an area where, where there was a lot of cooperation.
Yeah.
Um, and, and the canal was there.
I mean, I, I forgot.
No, that was right.
Yeah.
Canal was there.
These, these are, these are two things I think about, right.
I think about like, okay, here the direct national interests, the narco trafficking
is probably the flimsiest of all of them.
Absolutely.
I think there is a case to be made about American companies and international
companies, British companies.
Being, having their oil contracts rescinded, not having their rights
respected, uh, American companies are affected, um, by the betrayal.
Is that enough to go in and arrest them?
I, I don't think so.
It, that's a really dangerous precedent if that's the reason you wanna do it.
It's pretty flimsy.
I will wait and withhold judgment to see, because one of the things I did like about
the operation was, first of all, we didn't lose any American lives in the process.
Mm-hmm.
That made me very happy.
Second of all, they captured him.
They did not kill him.
True.
And finally, he has been arrested and he has been indicted,
and he will go to a court.
Mm-hmm.
And I, despite my left-leaning friend's opinions, I still believe
in the American court system.
I really do.
Yeah.
It's not perfect.
Everyone who complains like, oh, miscarriages of justice,
and look what happened.
Okay.
Point to me please.
Like, let's be practical.
That's my problem with the left.
They're so impractical.
Point to me, one country that's nailing this, right?
Like yeah, we should always be improving our court system.
It's not perfect.
That's huge.
Gaps.
Mandatory minimums.
The drug war bias against, uh, poor and minority.
Uh, you know, defendants is a thing.
It's not perfect.
Mm-hmm.
But we're bringing this person in front of a court and if he is truly
guilty, I think he'll be found guilty.
And in which case I think that does as much.
So if he was actually, um, leading a lot of these drug trafficking networks and
it is proven in a court of law in the us.
I feel a lot better about it.
Um, but yeah, it sets a precedent.
I'm sure our, our enemies and our rivals are looking at this.
Yeah.
And, and getting ready to justify it.
But Russia invaded Ukraine.
They already did it.
True.
Russia has assassinated people on other countries soils violating
sovereignty of Western countries.
Yeah.
They've, they've already done it.
China locking up Uyghurs, they invaded Tibet in the fifties.
The, you know,
they Yeah.
Transnational repression.
The Chinese government kidnapping Chinese citizens who are dual
citizens of other countries.
Yeah.
Violating the sovereignty.
Sure.
Um, you know what, what they've done with Taiwan, these are
all, they're doing it already.
So people who are like, oh, it's such a dangerous precedent.
Yeah.
Russia's invasions set a dangerous precedent.
Yeah.
You know?
No, that's true.
Like so, so to me.
To me, it's not as black and white as I think a lot of people are painting it.
I think it's something that had an immediately good effect.
We will see if it works.
The acting president of Venezuela has said that the only true
president of Venezuela is Maduro.
And she has put a very ignatious defense of the Maduro regime together.
And she, uh, has criticized it and said that she's not gonna co cooperate with us.
We'll see what happens.
So to me, this is like everything else.
Um, I think it's complex and also let's not, let's not kid ourselves
real pique, you know, the, the US and every other sovereign country applies
every leverage of power they can.
Yeah.
And when it conveniences a country to cite international law, rule
of order, multilateralism Yes.
They do it.
Exactly.
And
when it doesn't, they don't.
So what's the difference between us?
And let's say Sweden.
What's the difference between us?
Yeah,
exactly.
What's the difference between, between US and Iraq?
We can, that's the difference.
Yeah.
There's this almost, I mean, I think we, I think what we are learning with this,
what I've learned, I should say, with this administration, I've learned many
things that IW was quite naive about.
Maybe when in the first administration and before that, especially
before this, before Trump version one, I naively believed that
international law was a real thing.
Yep.
I had maybe read, you know, history that suggested otherwise,
but I, I was like, you know this, that's, you just don't do that.
That's how it works, et cetera.
Yep.
And, um, within the country and without, inside and outside of the country.
Yeah.
I be, I, I really didn't think about, I didn't question that.
The, I, I believed this, I dunno if you heard this sort of like fairytale that
they call, but it's called like the balance of power in the US where they have
like the three, you know, pillars of Yeah.
Checks.
Checks and balance.
I believed in that fairytale.
I didn't know that.
Basically whatever branch has the most guns is really in control
and the others are basically given power by, um, by tradition.
Right.
I didn't really get that.
That was norm shock norms and traditions.
I didn't understand that.
It's,
it's, it's norms.
Is that a concrete law?
Right, exactly.
It's a norm.
Shocking to me.
This was all shocking.
So this is, to me, on, on the same line of that, there's, there's this
belief of, of, of order and the good guys and the bad guys and yeah,
maybe Russia might do something like this, but the US shouldn't be doing
that and Europe would never do that.
Well, Europe did a lot of shit by the way.
Uh, all over the world.
Yeah.
They have a lot of, uh.
They have recently,
uh, found, found their sense of shock.
Exactly, yeah.
What were they doing?
I mean, all of Africa, all of South Asia, much of, you know,
many places in a, in East Asia.
I mean, they were really, and, and the US and Americas.
So they were really up to n to a lot of no good and, and
breaking norms and all that stuff.
Uh, yeah.
For hundreds of years.
And now they're finally like, oh.
So I do think that we're in a situation, what I think this is
really about is less about drugs.
I think it's the cover.
Just like oil was the cover for the Iraq war, uh, wars I should say.
I think this is really about China, and this just keeps coming back
to me, to this is, this is really to me about the whole in Trump
administration is really about China.
I think the only reason Trump got elected twice was because before about 2010.
No one really took China's rise that seriously.
We, they were not the second largest economy.
They were a third or fourth in, in, you know, down the line.
And, uh, I can remember a time in the two thousands where it was US, Japan
and Germany were the, was the pecking order of, of econom economic, uh, powers.
And then suddenly outta nowhere, China shoots up into, around again,
late 2000 tens, we see this and suddenly people are realizing, oh,
that's where all these jobs went.
That's why I lost my job.
They weren't really putting two and two together, even though it was,
even though every product they were buying said made in China, they were
not putting two and two together.
Mm-hmm.
That this is what was going on.
And then you have a, uh, a much more aggressive or more say, assertive China
with, with Xi Jinping on the world stage, who is flexing power in a way that the
US uh, politics have just never seen.
Like we had, we had not seen anyone since the US SR Flex Power on the world stage.
And we had had a good 20, 30 years af well, let's say 20 years
maybe of the fall of, of the USSR, where we just thought that was it.
You know, that was, you know, democracy won.
And so I do think that, that that's what has resulted in this sort of panic.
Yeah.
Where for whatever reason this cohort of, you know, you call it MAGA call.
Whatever want you want, there's this populism that has said, wait,
there's something wrong here.
We're not getting a good deal.
We need to put someone in charge who's gonna do something because these
following these norms, it's your power.
Exactly.
Following these norms on the world
and internationally.
Yep, exactly.
And if we just keep doing the nice pol polite approach, assuming that everyone
has good intentions on the world stage, we're gonna be in deep trouble.
And there's some sort of inherent wisdom.
That wisdom and yet cra I, I feel like it's both wisdom and, and maybe dangerous
insanity that is going to get us in trouble and also is probably necessary.
I don't know.
It's very interesting because to to your point, um, there is this sense
of, like, we used to look at the Monroe doctrine as this archaic.
Uh, thing that we're just like, whoa.
That was when we were prehistoric and stupid, and now we're not an
off the shelf policy option.
Right.
And now that we see places like China in Panama putting lots of money in built the
built and road project there, I do think that there is a certain like, oh wow.
There, there's another power in our backyard.
In a way that even Russia was not, I mean, they, they had Cuba, they
have relationships with Cuba and they wanted to have a lot of these
relationships, but they were not as, they didn't have much to offer.
Really.
It's because it's because China's power, um, has a huge economic element.
Yes.
Which makes it way more powerful.
Way more powerful.
It's a vulnerability.
So vulnerability of capitalism Absolutely.
Is that if you have money, man, all the Soviets had was like
politics and the internationality
and military, and it's
like, oh yeah, exactly.
See how well that worked.
Absolutely.
And so to me, yeah.
Yeah.
What is gone is the international norms.
Mm-hmm.
What is gone.
Is the appearance that they matter.
Mm. Right,
right.
Good point.
Yeah.
And so it's real politic.
It's happened before, it's happened with other countries.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Mm-hmm.
Um, you know, the 2003 Iraq invasion, um, had a lot of kind
of window dressing about the Yeah.
Polish legislation of the willing we went to the UN and all this other stuff.
But I know plenty of people back then who said like, well, that is that,
and this are the exact same thing.
They're just like a Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a naked show of the America of the US' ability.
Mm-hmm.
And, uh, yeah.
I mean, I agree.
Uh, except they have gone, they have not, the only effort they went to, to
dress it up was to set up the connection that Maduro was personally behind.
Got it.
Right.
They tried a few different things.
Right.
Trend Arawa was a Venezuelan gang, and then they tried to say, no, no, it's a,
it's a state sponsored terrorist network.
Mm-hmm.
And they went to a lot of trouble to do that.
The CI.
C would not sign off on that
got
interesting.
Even though they received a ton of political pressure.
Wow.
Uh, from above, from, uh, you know, it's like a long story, but there's this guy
interesting who's the chief of staff for the Director of National Intelligence and
pressured the CIA and refused to release a report unless it said specifically No.
Trend Deua is an international criminal terrorist,
interesting
organization backed by the government.
That's the legal hook they were looking for.
Got it.
They couldn't, they couldn't get it.
Interesting.
Um, so the trend deua thing, they tried it.
The, the, was it the espionage Act?
They tried to say Trend AUA is an invasion from a state.
Right.
Interesting.
And you know, that court decision is still in the, in in appeals.
'cause the court said like, no, that's not the proper application
of this law from the 19th century.
Wow.
They tried.
Yeah.
They tried terrorist network, they tried terrorism.
And when terrorism fails, the next best bet is drugs.
Um, because only people
knew to that they should be listening to the show that they
would learn so much to Fox on CN.
But all of this is happening in the open, though.
I know all of this 'cause it's recorded.
Exactly.
But you pay attention, I think, in a way that people, and put things, you kind of
synthesize things that you read in a way that most people don't, which is cool.
Well,
every, I mean, there's tons of media outlets pointing to it,
saying like, oh, they're like building up a case to do something.
Right.
None of the media outlets I saw that made that argument, imagine
that this would be the next step.
Got it.
Yeah.
Interesting.
Right.
Um, so it's just interesting to me.
Yeah.
I mean, it's not unique even within American history.
Yeah.
Um, you know.
As a President Jackson expelling indigenous people, um, from lands
that we agreed that they could have.
That is a, that is a naked Right.
Exercise, executive power.
Um, Andrew Jackson refusing to acknowledge the Supreme Court, um Right, right.
Wanting to dissolve the Federal Reserve.
I mean, like there is so many different, and not Federal Reserve, I
mean the, the Federal National Bank.
There are so many cases of presidents accumulating executive power.
Mm. With norms in place.
The people who seated that power for short-term gain could not
imagine it would go this far.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
Uh, but it did and interesting.
And, uh, there are people who have turned that into a theory that, you know, unitary
presidential theory of like, oh no, the president can do all these things.
And there are people who say that there are people who say that
Nixon wasn't a crook, that he was.
Nixon was a repressed conservative voice of someone who did nothing wrong.
There are people who believe that now.
Yeah.
And so, you know, the revisionist history on both sides interesting.
Hides the fact that this has happened before other countries have done it.
Vietnam invaded Cambodia, 1979.
Hmm.
Uh, they did something good 'cause it was against a terrible, violent,
fastest racist regime, the KH Rouge ing.
But they did it and they said, oh, it's for humanitarian reasons,
interest humanitarian interventions.
Right.
Like this is hotly debated in international law.
And so yeah, I mean it, I think it does boil down to real politic.
I think the US will not always be able to do this.
It will eventually not be able to do this.
It won't be able to assert this kind of power.
And when it gets to that point, it will do what England is doing.
Which is like, oh, hey, we have these international interesting laws.
Yeah.
And then, and then we will suddenly become one of those countries,
just a judge, other country.
I think
it's kind of miraculous that we've given any sort of.
You know, the fact that we have given any sort of legitimacy or money or
time or attention to the UN and other multilateral international organizations
demonstrates that they must, we must be getting something out of it.
It, and maybe Got it.
It's just moral leadership.
Yeah.
But this is an administration that does not consider that
moral leadership valuable.
Right.
And the res, you know, the results will speak for themselves.
So we'll see.
I mean, the immediate result is you have a bad person not in power anymore.
Yeah.
And we didn't kill it.
We didn't assassinate him.
That's true.
And we brought him to a, and we brought him to a court.
I think those are positive things.
Yeah.
The negative things are that the United States unilaterally decided
to do it without consulting.
Any international partners, but they would try to stop us 'cause
they don't want us to succeed.
Uh, China and Russia, like the fact that there's an irritant in our region.
That's true.
Just like we like, just like we like the fact that there's
an irritant for, for Russia.
Absolutely.
Uh, we like the fact there's an irritant for China.
Right.
We support those irritants.
Exactly.
So why wouldn't they support ours?
No.
Makes sense.
It's a very I logical
point you make,
you're not gonna ask them for permission.
Right.
So I get it.
I get why they did it this way, they did it this way.
'cause they could
Yeah.
Uh,
they try to justify it for domestic audience, but it's all domestic.
Right.
The, the president didn't publish this on any official channel.
President published this on his own social media platform and
its own social media account.
Hmm.
Um, did notify Congress, uh, which is another norm.
Right.
And then, um, although I agree, I think notification leaks, uh, you know, that's
interesting.
When it's an operation, I desperately want to succeed.
Right.
The congressional notification doesn't seem all too important to me.
Yeah, yeah.
Was leaked.
I mean it's, you know, anyway, whatever the point, I mean, that's
my view is it is complicated.
Right?
It's complicated.
Very complicated.
It's not black and white.
And if you hated Maduro, I could see why you'd be very happy if you don't give a
shit about Venezuela or the US companies whose contracts were violated and you
want us to follow international norms and have a rule of law that's very strict,
then Yeah, I can see why you're upset.
I can see both sides.
It's a, it is fascinating.
And, uh, thank you for that.
That's a very good, I think that's a good, concise overview
of how, just, how messy it is.
Now that said, you, um, you have a nice day with your parents still here,
so I wanna let you get back to that.
Uh, I like your hair by the way.
Looking, looking real nice.
Hey,
thanks man.
I did, I did that thing where you don't wash your hair.
Oh, good.
Yeah, that's, I do that a lot actually.
It doesn't work as well for me, unfortunately.
I don't have the, that, uh, Pantene body that I keep being promised.
But, you know, gray hair,
I mean, you know, you have that, uh, greasy Italian hair.
All the oil weighs it all down.
That's a
joke.
That's a joke.
It's a stereotype.
It's, I probably do have, I wish I had more of that greasy hair.
I think it's, I think it's my, uh, Danish side that's leading to my thin, thin hair.
Anyway, humans, humans have greasy.
Humans do.
Humans do it.
Great to see you, sir. Uh, we'll have this posted soon.
I'm gonna, I have the, uh, system all running, so we should see
this soon in your podcast player.
And, uh, if you are listening and you like what, what we're saying,
and then you are not a robot.
Please.
Um, like and subscribe.
Put a, put a rating in in Apple podcasts for us.
Uh, you know, like us on YouTube, even if you are a
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even if you are a robot, if you have some good thoughts yourself.
Yeah, maybe, maybe you're a thoughtful ai.
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Like, yes.
At least do that favor for us.
All right, we'll talk to you later.
We'll see you next time.
Okay.