Thoughts, a basket of ideas around division. Uh specifically differences between people that are accelerating over time. And there's a lot of data that we could look at to illustrate this. But I wanna go in into a different direction and just share this report that I was tipped off to through the news
and this is from the committee to unleash prosperity. And boy, that sounds loaded from January 2024. And I'm making this in January 2024. It's entitled Them versus us the two Americas and how the nation's elite is out of touch with average Americans. Now, I want to address some of the overt directionality
of this. That's how I'll say it, this, this report and we're not, we're, we're mostly just gonna look at the charts I'm interested in the polls. But obviously, this is very loaded language. And I don't want you to Presuppose where I'm going with this because of the loaded language. So this idea about
this idea of a bifurcation of America between two groups, we'll just say two groups. It's nothing new. It's, it's, it's been going on for a long time and it's completely incorrect to think of this as a, is a political party division because that's not it. And this report is looking at it from an economic
basis and as we'll see in their criteria, I don't think that's correct either. But one of the people who looked at this a long, not, not a long time ago, but somewhat a long time ago, I guess. Sorry, the window is a little off here. Uh Is this author Charles Murray? This is the most I can move over this
picture. But this is just Amazon's web website for this book coming apart that he wrote. There you go. But Charles Murray, now the subtitle is The State of White America. I don't know why it's subtitled that. But here's the thing. If you don't wanna read this book, you can actually look for talks that
Charles Murray gave on this, on this topic. You can look it up. His thesis is very compelling. He, what he does is he walks through 50 years of history in this country to show that underneath of the covers invisible to most people, there's actually been a tremendous shift in the background of the people
who make most decisions in the United States. And that's actually true globally. He he focuses here, there's been this shift from essentially a highly heterogeneous American experience to a highly homogeneous set of small set of people who are making the decisions. And one example from the just off the
top of my head because I it's been years since I watched him speak about this. I have not read this book but I watched a couple of talks that he gave on it. And one of the examples he uses, he, he analyze his presidential cabinets over the years and just in a quick summary, he says, look, it wasn't that
long ago that on a presidential cabinet, you had a bunch of people who either had normal American lives before they got into politics or their parents did or their neighbors did growing up or whatever. As a s a simple example of this is Harry Truman was a farmer and then he became president of the United
States. Jimmy Carter was too and say what you will about their presidencies. The point is is that they had experiences outside of the bubble of this what people call elite lifestyle. Now, I hate that word. It's a word that's been co opted and corrupted. It's not a bad word. It's used always in a negative
connotation currently, but it just means better. Of course. Now today it's used as anything but that it, it's used to describe this small cohort of people who are pulling the strings who usually have a lot of money, but they always have a lot of power and that's not, we need a better word for that. If
you have a good suggestion, please put it in the comments. I'm I'm searching for one that's a co opted word that we need to get back to what we're actually saying on anyway. So in this, in this study, move this back in this study. Um What we're seeing is the present effect of this where we stand today
in this, in this division. Now, I, I haven't really talked about what that division is and I don't really care to, I think we can keep it at the superficial level for the purposes of this conversation. Just to keep it short. You can look this up. I'm not gonna read it to you. But I just wanna, first
, we have to talk about how they made the split. They talk about three categories of people here. The first division is between those who make 100 and 50,000 or more and have at least one postgraduate degree. So if you have a master's or better and you make 100 and 50 K or more, you're considered elite
for this study. Now that in and of itself is highly problematic because I think the one and I don't have access to their data to be able to say to prove this. But my hypothesis and I, I think I could argue in favor of it is that there's gonna be a gross perversion of not pervert. Sorry. There's going
to be uh uh a high distinction between the opinions of people who have graduate degrees and those who do not. I don't think that the money thing is as important. A variable here because frankly, there are so many people that make 100 and 50,000 or more in this country who do not feel the way they're
presenting here and 100 and 50,000 a year is still middle class. That's not a lot of money today in 2024 that if you're a single income family, that's, you gotta be about there to be comfortable. So that's if you want a bunch of kids and you wanna be single income, that's so that's hardly elite. You
know, if you have five kids or more. And that's what you're bringing in as a family. You might not even be able to go on a vacation every year anyway. If so, especially with housing prices today, it's, it's unlikely if you're getting into a house, but I digress. So that's just my, my full disclosure
on their use of the word elite. I don't like it, but that's what they used and we'll go with it and now, you know what they mean when they say it. So, um, now let's go through their, their survey results. First question, are your personal finances getting better or worse these days? So, voters means
everyone and again, I'm not sure why they didn't just say that. And then their quote unquote elite and then they have a third distinction, which is those who have, who've graduated from an Ivy League University. And I'll just spoil the, the punch line up front. The Ivy League folks are just a more extreme
version of the elite when it comes to the behaviors that are highlighted in this study or the positions that are highlighted in this study. So, are your personal finances getting better or worse these days? Here's the results you can look at it. I'll just say normal people instead of voters. How about
that or everyone, that's probably the cleanest way. So if you polled everyone, 40% say they're getting worse and 60% say they're getting better. But that 60% is, I'm sorry, I totally messed that up. II I misread the slices here. Uh, 40 40% of everyone says worse, 40% say the same and 20% say better.
But then when you slide into folks with a graduate degree and who are making 150 or more a year, almost everyone says better. And then if you look at the Ivy Leagues, it's even more exaggerated. 88% of them say better. 9% say the same. Only 3% say worse. So this is a very different experience, right
? Nationally. Amongst everyone. You got 40% of people who say things are getting worse and a whole 40% saying it's, it's the same, but there's a huge exaggeration to the positive side as people have more degrees and more money. So let's, let's keep looking because this trend just keeps going and it's
quite disturbing frankly, does the United States provide too much individual freedom that in and of itself is gonna flag a whole lot of people? It's gonna trigger a whole lot of people because freedom does not come from the government, it comes from God. And if you know anything about the funding, founding
of this country, you should know that quite well. That, that was, that was highly ingrained into the Declaration of Independence, for example. Anyway, does the United States provide too much individual freedom, too much government control or is the balance about? Right? And without going through the
details that you can see here, you can look them up. It's the same exact pattern and it's predictable that with more money and more degrees, people think that there's too much freedom and more than half in the Ivy League category think there's too much freedom. If you look at everyone, the majority believe
there's too much control. All right, here's a disturbing one rationing to fight climate change. Would you favor or oppose the strict rationing of gas, meat and electricity? 63% of everyone would oppose it if you go to the 150,000 or more or one or more grad and one or more graduate degrees, 77% of people
say they would favor it. It goes up to almost 90% at the Ivy League level. No, a pause here to make explicit something that I hope you've already thought about when it comes to the people who are in positions to make policy changes, government, every level of government and leading corporations. Do you
think that those people, and I'll say leading banks as well? Because I think that's a separate category to corporations. It's a subcategory, but a very important one. Do you think that those people tend to be like most Americans or do they make 100 and 50,000 or more and have at least one graduate degree
or are they Ivy League graduates in this highlight something that I have told you many times and I, I really don't think I'm being taken seriously on these points that I make by most people that watch this, which is still obviously a hyper minority of the, the general population. You look around you
, you look in your family, you look at your job, you look at your very narrow experience in your life, which that's not, I'm not knocking you. That's anyone has a narrow experience in their life, but you're not looking at the big picture, you're assuming the big picture is the same as your little picture
. And when I say things like, hey, there's gonna be rationing of gas, meat and electricity. You say what a wacko, how could that ever be? Because in my life? Yeah, I might know a few people who would support that sort of thing. But for the mo I mean, almost everyone I know, would never support that.
And we live in a democracy. So how could that ever happen? Guess what? The people pulling the strings are over here? They're not over here. And when I say the foundations have already been removed, these people are already in power and you just keep looking down at the grindstone right in front of you
and you don't see that. You don't see that because you don't work in a university faculty. You don't work in a government job, you're not on the president's cabinet, you're not in Congress, you don't know the governor of your state. Ok. If you did have more of those sorts of things, if you were more
closely working with the wheels that turn the, the, the millions and hundreds of millions of dollars, the power bases, the, the people, you know, if you were two connections away from Jamie Dimon who runs the biggest bank in the world, maybe you would see what I'm trying to tell you. It's not bad. This
isn't something that's gonna happen in 50 years. The people who believe these things are already in power and they're doing everything they can to push this out to everyone else that the, their lack of doing that is only AAA factor of them not having figured out how to do it yet. It's, they are pushing
this thing and it is moving. It's not something that's in the future, it's already happening and it's happening faster than you're realizing and admitting there. I just saw another news article and I told you about this, go watch those future warnings videos. They're shutting down even more coal power
plants in the US. There is nothing to replace those. They're not, they're not, they haven't launched something that's, that replaces it. And now they're saying, look, we've found another way to solve this problem. They're saying maybe someday we'll be able to do this with wind and solar, but we just
need to shut this down right now because there's all this pressure for green, this and green that and we just need to get rid of it. There's nothing to replace it. They're already doing this. You've already experienced the government control. I, I don't think I have to go into that. You get it. 01 thing
I did wanna bring up on this question though and this is, you gotta understand how this works. The beginning of this question is absolutely crucial. It doesn't say would you favor or oppose the strict rationing of these things? It says to fight climate change, would you do this? So the idea, the question
of what is your highest priority? What issues for you are transcendent meaning existential? Like what, what problems in your mind are so bad that the ends justify the means that we don't need to think about the cost because it just needs to get done. That's how I feel every time I need to do my taxes
. I hate doing my taxes. It's such an abominable thing at every level. It's a, it's a huge waste of time. It's so frustrating to see just how much of, of your money goes to things you don't like and just how obfuscated all those forms are and how almost all of America who just goes to H and R block or
whoever does it on turbotax has no idea. All these crazy obfuscations and loopholes and everything else that are done to carve in certain people and where that money is going to and who's not having to pay taxes. It's so I have to upgrade that to an existential thing where for a whole day I don't care
, a comet could hit the earth. I'm doing my taxes because I hate it so much that I have to upgrade it to. I can't care about anything else while I'm doing it. And for people who have no meaning in their life and to regularly do very bad things. They need a replacement for religion and most religious
people. That's what they use religion for. It's not a pathway to show them how to be better. It's an excuse for them to continue to be bad and not feel so bad about it. And that's what climate change is. For these kinds of people. They don't have religion to make them feel good while being bad. And so
they create one and they call it climate change or whatever the flavor of the week is on their existential crisis. That's what COVID was for these people. And when you make something, a supernal transcended existential priority in your life, what happens is anything you attach to that becomes justified
, no matter how insane it might seem. And now if you go back and you look at the communist regimes or the, the rise to power of the Nazis or any of these totalitarian states, it's not such a mystery of how they came into power. It's because someone managed to wedge into their heads that this, whatever
the idea was was the existential crisis and then everything else was justified. They didn't have to think about it and they could override any emotional checks. You have to be a complete moron to think it's a good idea to ration gas, gas, meat or electricity. And 89% of Ivy League graduates are complete
morons. That's what this shows why, because their system has been hijacked. These people can solve differential equations back and forth. They've got vocabularies that are enormous. They can do some really impressive things, but they don't have the common sense to see how bad this is because their system
has been hijacked. Now, you could do the same sort of study splitting this differently than these people have and with different questions to expose irrationality in other segments of society like the highly religious. It's the same problem for the same reasons. They've substituted something in place
of the actual transcendent transcendental purpose, the actual existential meaning they've been hijacked. Let's keep going with this though. We're almost through, um, how much would you personally be willing to pay each year in terms of taxes and higher costs to reduce climate change? You see the same
pattern, you probably don't have to go into details. You get it. Ok. Now this, well, I don't wanna digress. I like this phrase, the talking professions. I'd probably call it something a little more colorful, lawyers, lobbyists, union leaders or journalists, the scourge of society professions. Sorry to
any attorneys that are watching this. Um, sometimes the world has created the need for it. It's like a good warrior, right? It, it, it would be nice if we could all beat our swords into plows. But while situations endure that prevent that we need warriors, good warriors to fight the bad ones. And that's
how it is with lawyers. The other ones, I'm not so sure, I'm not so sure they're any redeeming lobbyists, un union leaders or journalists, journalists just means activists today. And it's not the good kind. I guess I, I feel about activists the same way I do about apologists. I, I don't know how anyone
applies that title to themselves in a good way. But anyway, so you see the same pattern here as well. Although it's, I think a more subtle pattern than the other questions. Uh There's presidential approval. We'll skip that for time. Here's an interesting one. This is the, I'll just read the question
if you had a choice between a candidate who said the teachers and other education professionals should decide what students are taught and a candidate who said the parents need more control over what their Children are taught for whom would you vote? So, uh I not surprisingly, there's a greater proportion
of every man who supports parental control of education. And then that trend exaggeratedly explodes towards teachers and professionals deciding what Children are taught as you go to the making more money, having more degrees. And then Ivy League, it's the same pattern of exaggeration as you go through
that those uh those layers. But what's highly discouraging is how low the percent of every person who says parents should control that. It's only 45% 17% of people said, not sure. And what this shows me is 38% plus 17% of people should not be having kids. That's what this shows me. If you think a stranger
could educate your child better than you can, you should not have Children. All right. Now, here's another one. As far as the, the banning that we talked about rationing, here's banning to fight climate change. Would you favor banning each of the following and everything I said about the other one applies
to this one, but look at these categories and, and try to tell me that. What I'm telling you is going to happen is as insane as it sounds. So, I've, I've said on multiple occasions, I've said, look, if you live in a place where you rely on air conditioning to survive, if your life would be radically
more difficult without air conditioning, you need to move and people hear that and they're like, that's crazy talk. That's insane. Why would you say that? Well, because I see the push towards these things and I understand that already. If you go to do a $200 400 dollar repair to your AC system from PRE
COVID, that's what it would cost Pre COVID. It's gonna cost 10 times as much today, 10 times as much because of a confluence of factors that you can track right now and guess what? They're all dots on a line and if you continue the trend, guess where it goes, it crosses the threshold where anybody can
afford it. If you can find it at all, you lose availability and the cost goes through the roof and not only is the cost of one thing go through the roof, it happens against the backdrop of everything going through the roof. These are simple things that, that any normal person should be able to see if
their heads aren't buried so far in their third point of contact that they can't see a dang thing because you live in denial about everything private air conditioning. I love the use of the word private. In this, only 13% of the general population would favor banning air conditioning in your house. 53%
of people with at least one graduate degree who make 100 and 50,000 or more believe it should be banned. Goes up to 68% of Ivy League grads. So, guess who sets the rules for this? The EPA does, guess who works at the EPA. It's not the third, the, the general public. It's people who have master's degrees
and phd S who make 100 and 50,000 or more a year and the people running those it, that, that becomes more true, the higher you go in those agencies and the people who make the decisions are Ivy League graduates. They tend to be same pattern for suvs, gas powered cars and gas stoves now and we're gonna
talk about non-essential travel here separately. When you see, see the word non-essential in front of something in this context. You have to understand that the people who support these bands think that they are essential. You don't have to take my word for it. Look at COVID essential. Employees had
to keep working. Non-essential employees did not. You, you see this at the, the people who go to these climate conferences and they take private jets to do so they think that the, remember the ends justify the means they're exempt from the pollution of air travel because they're serving a higher cause
it's the normal people who need to get banned from flying. Now, I've told you that the time would come when the travel we know today will come to an end. And like almost everything else that happens on a ramp with spikes in this case drops down. It's a, it's a downward ramp with cliffs in this case.
And so one of, one of these, one of the sources of that shift can very well be the attitudes of the people making the the rules and there's a million different ways that that could happen. But the point is it's going to happen. And if, if, if right now you can hop on a plane for a reasonable price and
get to pretty much anywhere you wanna go and all you have to do is take off your shoes and your belt and submit to that humiliation of the naked body scanner. The time is fast coming when you, it will be much more difficult with availability with cost with hoops to jump through. It will be much more
difficult to go into specifics is to run the risk of, oh, you were wrong because you said this is exactly how it's gonna happen. And I mean it happened but not the way you said, ok, so let's just leave it at it's going to happen. Gas powered cars, 81% of Ivy League grads believe they should be banned
. Let me tell you something. So this is what you'll find out. One of the things you'll find out in Charles Murray's book that I referred you to is that most of the people making the biggest decisions in this country have never lived in a place that's not on the coast of this country. These are folks
who have always lived in gated communities. Their, both their parents have phd s, they've always been on the wealthier side. Normal people understand the need, the utility of gas powered cars. Uh I just saw in the news today with this, this cold front that came through the US in the last few weeks, electric
cars don't work well in the cold and all these low information, people that bought electric cars. What do you mean? My car is not gonna work when it's freezing outside? I don't understand. And they were stranded. They don't understand. They just, they're banning semi trucks in California and no one cares
to do the math on the efficiency of diesel fuel versus electric when you're hauling loads. And who does it hurt the most, the poorest people? Because as we saw in the previous chart, it said something about paying a $500 tax for, for climate change. Who knows how that's actually gonna help anything.
But to a person who has climate change is one of the top priorities in their hierarchy and happens to have lots of money paying $500 for that. Why wouldn't you do that? I mean, religious people usually pay much more than 500 a year to their church. Right. So, it's the same idea. But when you get to poor
people, they don't have $500 for something that's not already spent, they have to take away from things like shoes for their kids to pay more money to something. And so to tell someone, well, you could have an electric car. It's only gonna cost you twice as much as a gas powered car when you factor in
insurance and you know, and you're not gonna be able to use it when it's freezing. But if that's a problem for you, you just need to live somewhere else. Live in a, what are they calling them? A 15 minute city? So all the rural people, all which is, by the way, I think 98% of the geographical area of
the United States is classified as rural. It's a pretty big place. It's most of the country geographically. I don't remember the statistic of, of population. Obviously it's, it's less than half. All right. I think we got through this. This is serious stuff. These are changes that are going to happen
. 11 more thing on gas powered cars. California and Washington State. I don't know about any other states, but they're probably more on the list. They're both overtly said we're gonna ban gas powered cars and we're gonna try to do it in so many years. And I think, I think Washington State, the goal is
five, five years from now. You can't have a gas powered car. Now, let's walk through this just for a second because it's a generalized pattern. One of the ways normal people don't realize this is happening until it's too late is because even when the law is changed, they'll do something like, well, it's
gonna be banned in X number of years. And so that softens the adjustment, uh, when you average it across the population, the other thing they do is say we're only going to apply this to new purchases or repairs so that the, the US government has made massive changes to refrigerant regulations. You probably
don't know about this and what they've done is they've, they've created a cap on how much of the previous coolant can be produced per year, which makes the price skyrocket if you're replacing an existing, if, if you're refilling an existing system, which is a fairly routine thing to do on an AC unit
. If it gets a leak or something, or compressor goes out and you have to take it out. And then on the newer systems, they cost a fortune compared to the older systems because they use a less efficient coolant that's quote unquote, better for the environment. So when changes like that happen, you're not
gonna know until your ac unit breaks and you call the people thinking it's gonna cost 500 bucks and it costs 5000 or you have to wait eight months to get it fixed because the coolant you need isn't available right now. You just have to get in line and wait because they're rationing it. That's already
happening. That's not in the future with these gas stoves, same deal. They might not come into your house and take your old one. But the second that breaks, which happens, you're not gonna be able to replace it with the same one. It's gonna cost way more and work way less. That's the way these things
go. So if you live in a state like Washington or California where a big neon sign has been put up that says you will not be driving gas powered cars in the near future and you don't move. You are an idiot because the cascading effects of that change are going to be enormous. Now, I was talking to a friend
of mine and so I had a little more license. I can fly off the handle in these videos because I'm not face to face with someone. And I have um, I, I, I'm less bounded by their reaction. If someone is obviously not in favor of what you're saying, you don't push very hard, you just kind of let them figure
it out for themselves. There's, there's some measure to that. But anyway, in this conversation, I had a little more latitude because this is a lifelong friend and his wife and they live in Washington State and they were like, hey, yeah, the governor said that they're so, we're probably gonna get out
of here in about five years. And I said, isn't that about when the band takes place? Yeah. But we're gonna miss it. I said, don't you understand that everybody and their brother is gonna be selling their house at the same time as you anyone with a brain, that's kind of the last chance to get out of dodge
. Don't you think you should do that a little sooner? Yeah. Well, we just don't want to be stressed out. All right. And that's how normal people think. All right. So you have to get ahead of these things and if the writing's on the wall, why sit around and wait. All right. That's the whole thing. So
hopefully this helps you think about things that you're not thinking about right now. Now, I will say if you're still with me at the end of this video here, there is a strong psychological tendency to filter out any information or suggested actions that exceed a person's intensity threshold. We'll say
so. So, you know, if we're talking about health and I say, you know, if you put this watch looking device on your hand and count the number of steps you do, you're more likely to be more active in the day and you might lose a little weight. You're like, oh, that sounds cool. I'll put the watch on, you
know, you give it to me as a gift. So I don't have to pay for it. Yeah, I'll wear the watch. We'll see what happens and you, you'll probably take more steps. You'll probably lose a little weight. Life is good. Right. But if I say, hey, you know, if you fasted for three days every two months you wouldn't
be overweight anymore. And it's a lifelong thing that you could do and it solves a problem. It's done. You never have to worry about being overweight again. That's probably outside of the window of, of extremity that you're willing to consider. Maybe a better example is if someone is trying to quit smoking
, they're realizing that little ways of trying to quit smoking are gonna fail and you really have to do something big. And most people say, no, I'm just not willing to do that until they get diagnosed with emphysema. And now all of a sudden they quit cold turkey. Fancy that. Right. Why? Because their
idea of the expected result was too far off for them to prefer it, uh, changing. Even if it comes at a high cost to just staying the same. We have to overcome this psychological tendency. We have to develop the ability to set our intensity window based on the problem at hand. You know, if you find yourself
in a foxhole that's getting shelled, it really doesn't matter if you're comfortable cowering in this foxhole, you have to do it or you're gonna die. We talked about existential problems if you don't have a gas powered car and you live in a rural area and they outlaw, I'm sorry if you live in a rural
area and they outlaw gas powered vehicles life as you know, it is over. So you're either Amish or dead. You have to understand that the gravity of the future is, everything is like that. And these are not things that are far off. I've shown you the, the people who feel this way are already in power and
that's not gonna change. It doesn't matter who gets elected it in any level of government, it's too late. The, the person can change out all of the people making the decisions stay this way. So it's time to wake up and start facing reality, even if it's gruesome. Get yourself in a place where as these