TRIGGERnometry - Why Ordinary People Have Less and Less Power with Joel Kotkin

Episode Date: July 18, 2022

SPONSORED BY:  *Ridge Wallet* Use Code “TRIGGER ” for 10% off your order at https://www.ridge.com/TRIGGER Joel Kotkin is an internationally-recognized authority on global, economic, political and social trends. His latest book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class is now available See Triggernometry LIVE in Edingurgh! August 6th and 7th 2022 Get TICKETS here 👇 https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/triggernometry-live Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We spent basically the entire period since the Middle Ages, you know, with ups and downs, moving towards a society where if you worked hard and you developed a decent number of skills, you could live a modest middle-class lifestyle, and you could afford to raise a family, and you could afford maybe to have a little backyard or a nice flat. That was what we had achieved. In 1970, Western societies, Japan as well, had achieved that role. And now we're moving exactly away from it. And if you think that you can do that without there being major social disruption, I think, you're really.

Welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisson. And this is the show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is a geographer and author of a number of books, the latest of which is the coming of neo feudalism, a warning to the global middle class. Joel Kotkin, welcome to Trigonometry. Oh, it's my pleasure.

It's really great to have you on. Can't wait to discuss your book and other things that you've written about recently. Before we do, though, tell everybody who are you, how are you where you are? What has been the journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us? Well, I was born in Germany. My father was in the Army. I grew up in New York. My family's been in New York since about 1900, so I have roots there.

I moved to California. I went to the University of California at Berkeley in the early 70s, which was interesting. And then I've been a journalist basically all my life. I've had university think bank affiliations, but my mindset is that of a writer of a journalist. And one of the things that's missing today is, as we keep trying to find, specialties so people write about this and write about that, but they don't write about the big picture. You know, it's like Sorokin wrote many years ago that we, we know more and more about less and less. And I think that's where we're, you know, where we've headed. I think of myself

as just a writer. And if I, if you say, who would I consider, you know, role models or people that I would it would look up to, would be people like the toadful, Weber, but many people who were not necessarily academics. And one of the interesting things in the last few years is that many of the really interesting books are not coming from academia.

They're coming from outside. And, you know, when I wrote the history of cities, which was published all over the world, it was really interesting to me then. And I said, well, how come you ask me? And they said, because, you know, you write in this strange language called English in a way that people can understand.

And I think that that role as a writer, as somebody without a particular political affiliation, without an ideological sort of stamp, that kind of person and function in society is really diminished in the last 50, 60 years, what we used to call public intellectuals, they almost don't exist anymore. And I think that whether or not that can be revived or not is going to be a big question. Well, we're grateful that you exist and many of our former and upcoming guests, I would say, are public intellectuals. And that's one of the reasons it's such a pleasure to have you on the show. I was going to get straight into the new feudalism stuff, but you peaked my curiosity by talking about Berkeley in the 70s, what have you seen in the last 50 years that's been happening to

our society that stands out for you since those days in particular? Oh, boy. Well, I think there's some good things and some bad things. I mean, I think certainly attitudes towards, you know, race, towards gay people have certainly improved considerably maybe gone a little bit overboard in some areas. But, you know, basically, I think those are improvements. I think the offerings, if you can afford them, of quality of food, quality of certain kind of entertainment experiences, that's gone on.

I lived in Los Angeles in 1975 with Southern California. We moved to Orange County six years ago. But, you know, living here, Los Angeles, when I moved there, it was in a lot of ways more endearing than it is today, but the food is better. culture is better. It's a more, there's certainly much more integration of particularly Hispanic and Asian Americans in the society. So there are some improvements. The negatives, the spirit of intellectual debate is being squashed. The rise of the, of the oligarchic tech companies and their Wall Street backers are constraining speech, constraining

how people talk. And even in some cases, as I, you know, as a parent, I notice, they've had a very negative effect in many ways on younger people in the sense of, you know, tying them more and more to their phones and making it a little bit more difficult for them to relate to other people. And obviously, on the education side, it's a disaster. I mean, the kind of standards that we had at, let's say, at Berkeley or in almost any school, in 40, 50 years ago, people actually read books.

I don't know if you've noticed that, like right now, if I assign three books, four books for a class, maybe they'll get read. A lot of them won't get read. And sometimes in the past, I could have eight or nine books, and they would read the books. I mean, so what we're doing is we're sort of, you know, even as we're technologically advancing in many ways,

we're socially and intellectually regressing. That's a bad combination. It is. I agree with you. And so speaking of what you're talking about in your book, which is essentially the ever-growing gap, not only in wealth and income, but also in influence and power between a small elite and everybody else.

A friend of mine who's a fan of the show sent me a graph earlier today, which was the genie coefficient for the Western world. And it's literally like a line like this for the last 60 years, basically. So the rich are getting richer, or the rich part of society is getting richer and the poor part of society is not anything like the same rate.

And what you talk about is the logical end product of that process, right? Right, right. And which is already, you know, clear, like, you know, you think about how we discuss, I say the issue of urban renaissance, the favorite topic of the progressive elites, and also the real estate interest, including many from the right.

Well, what they're writing about is the world that they live in. Like when I was working on a project in London, yes, there are some of the richest precincts in the world, and certainly in the UK, are in London. But if you bother to go outside of those areas, actually, there's also some of the highest rates of poverty in all of Europe. I mean, it's not even, you know, you see that in New York with, they'll say, oh, the cities come back. And yes, in certain areas. But the poorer areas have

become poorer. And many of the middle-class suburban areas went through somewhat of a decline. So, you know, what we have is we have a media that functions in a way, but that gives us a very distorted picture of what's actually going on in the society. And how things are reported. I mean, my wife has to listen to me when I, well, I can't, sometimes I can't even read the New York Times. I'll read a piece and I say, where was the editor? Did they ever think that maybe there's another point of view or maybe to question it, particularly on issues like race, climate, gender, it is like, you know, it is newspeak now. I mean, it's just like you cannot, you can't, you can't even acknowledge that there's another side.

you can't acknowledge that maybe there's some nuance here. So I just find the intellectual environment, you know, very, very difficult. And I have no, by the way, I have no sympathy for the far right at all. And they're just as bad. It's just that they don't have the big megaphones. And it's a great point. And what these people on the left and don't seem to understand is that by doing these pieces, by ridiculing people, by not letting people,

into the conversation, all you're doing is emboldening them, and you're radicalizing them. They don't seem to understand this. That's a really big point. I'm actually working on an essay right now, you know, talking about President Biden's just bizarre policies of, you know, we're going to help, you know, we're going to have special programs to help people by their racial characteristic, basically, you know, black. well, in a country where Hispanics are now much more numerous and Asians may eventually be more numerous, what are you going to do? Are you going to have racial vetting for positions? Are we going to decide that the number of pilots has to be X percentage to match some other percentage in the population?

I mean, this is sort of the direction that we're going. And your point, I think this is one of the biggest. spurs for white nationalism. I mean, look, I'm in what we would say in Yiddish. I'm an alter cock. I'm going to be 70 next year. So I'm, you know, I've had a pretty good run as much of my generation here. I look behind me and I say, if I were a young, a white male in trying to get a job in a corporation today, I realize that I'm in a race with lead weights on my feet. Now, if that's the case, which I think in many cases it is, those people are going to be resentful, and you're going to sow racial resentment by establishing racial quotas in societies like the UK, like the U.S.,

like Australia, like Canada, that have had some terrible racist past, but had moved to a position where they were making sure that there was no discrimination. Now we're moving to a different kind of discrimination. That can only create an ever more angry society on both the minority point of view and in the, let's say, the native-born predominantly white population. It's a recipe for social chaos. Are you tired of using bulky old wallets, giving you a bulge where you don't want it to be? My old wallet was massive, so it brought all the ladies to the yard. which was a huge distraction and got in the way of my esteemed work on trigonometry.

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It is a recipe for social chaos. And the other problem is, Joel, saying to these people, you know, you're lucky, you're privileged, and they're going around going, well, look, wages haven't increased in real time, inflation's through the roof. And by the way, I'm probably never going to be able to own a property. Right. Right. And this is an issue that I would say, if the left focused on issues of upward mobility and how to make life better for people, irrespective of the race, you know, why should we have a system

where a kid from Appalachia, in which there has been generations of poverty, or in the north of England, you know, in some coal mining town where things have not gone well for 50 years or more, why is that child who's brought up in very difficult circumstances, very similar circumstances to an inner city minority population, how do you get that population and say to them, you're a privilege, but many African Americans and certainly other minorities are upper middle class or middle class and are doing fine.

I mean, you can't, you've really got to approach it from a class point of view, from a class perspective, of how do you raise the lower classes? How do you raise the working class to middle class? How do you provide incentive for the middle class to work hard and provide for themselves? That whole sort of gestalt of politics that dominated much of American and European politics is being. transformed by an obsession on climate, an obsession on race, and an obsession on gender, which, by the way, is heavily funded by the oligarchs, because as long as we're not talking about class, as long as we're not talking about the fact that maybe it's not a great idea that Microsoft controls 90% of the operating systems on computers, as long as talk about race,

talk about transgender, talk about, you know, how the culture should relate to certain groups. That isn't what we should be discussing. The real problem in the U.S. and around the Western world, increasingly in East Asia, certainly soon in China, is this class divide. And if we don't figure out a way to provide younger people with something close to the opportunities that our generation, had my generation had, I think we're in for a lot of trouble and coming from different directions. And when I think about feudalism, I sort of see a Game of Thrones type of world, right? And one of the features, of course, is that if you're born into the royal family, let's say, you're going to stay in the royal family, you're going to be rich and powerful and influential in that world.

And if you're born a peasant, you're going to die a peasant. If you're born a blacksmith son, the best you can be is a blacksmith, right? Are you genuinely seeing that kind of future for us where your parents and their station in life almost predetermines your outcomes? Well, let's put it this way. Upward mobility is more difficult. You mentioned property, probably the most important way that the middle and working classes have traditionally developed wealth.

I mean, you think about my mother or my mother-in-law as they got into their 80s and 90s, It was that property that allowed them to retire, not in subsistence, but with a certain degree of comfort. That next generation isn't going to have that opportunity in large numbers, particularly who can afford. I live in Orange County, one of the nicest places you could ever want to live in many ways. But, you know, a house here is going to cost even at the bottom maybe $800,000, $900,000. And a decent house in the good school district is going to probably run you over a million. How many people who do not have wealthy parents are going to be able to afford that? So what you're seeing is like when you poll people and you say, young people say,

well, how are you going to buy a house? The biggest factor now is inheritance, you know, that literally you can, you know, so that like, for instance, if you, I have a friend who is selling real estate in Brooklyn. and in a very nice part of Brooklyn. And what she tells me is that over half, the people under 45 have to have co-signing parents. So if you're from a poor family, exactly how are you going to get in this market? So what we have to figure out is how do we expand ownership?

How do we expand entrepreneurship? How do we expand opportunity? Now, I think this is what Democrats should be talking about. about and what the Labor Party in the UK should be talking about, and the Labor Party in Australia should be talking about, and the liberals in Canada should be talking about. But they're not. They're talking about transgender issues and whether, you know, what a woman is. And they're talking about, you know, I don't have a particular position. I'm just like, this is with their obsession. You know, systemic racism. Cancelling people who may have said something that somebody,

somewhere may have found remotely offensive. You know, having special programs for people by skin color. This is a terrible agenda defunding the police. I mean, that's a particular issue here. Adopting climate policies where the rich who push for extreme climate policies are not affected. What they're saying is you've got to cut back. So I'm going to be told by Jeff Bezos, you've got to, you've got to, reduce your carbon footprint. Here's a guy whose company's carbon footprint is probably bigger

than those of some African countries. And you've got a guy who's got four or five houses. You know, God knows what. I don't begrudge him. I mean, I think I've met Jeff. I think he's a really smart guy. And he has created a terrific product unlike some of the other people who have also made a lot of money. But the reality is, you know, if you're going to address climate change, you can't have it in a situation, at very medieval, I have to say, where the rich buy indulges. Well, I bought, you know, 3,000 acres of woodlands in Brazil. So therefore, I can fly in my own private jet and then worry about climate change. But you better not get on that, on that Ryanair flight from London to Spain for your one week of sunshine that you look forward to all year.

I mean, you have to, if you're going to make a change, you have to look at what the effects are on working people, on the poor. You know, for instance, we go to Africa and we say to Africa, no fossil fuels. Well, here's a continent where electricity is in short supply, and there isn't going to be enough wind and solar to power those economies as their populations, one place in the world with the populations growing. We're not even thinking about the effects. I'll give you a great little story. Once in a while, you know, I don't know if you probably have these, you know, people embedded in these increasingly insane organizations. Occasionally they contact you and say, can I talk? So I talked to this guy, a PhD candidate at Stanford working on electric vehicles.

And he said, well, so here's my situation. I'm working on electric vehicles. And he's okay with it. But he says, every time I ask the question, where's the power going to come from? They say, don't worry about it. And he said, I guess I'm an engineer. I'm taught to say, well, if I do X, there's going to be. why. Now, do I mitigate it? Is it, you know, what are the effects going to be? That's what I'm

supposed to be doing as an engineer. And he's told not to do it. The group think, the desire to make, to not ask questions. I read newspaper accounts and I just, I say, you know, I said, we had fires here in California. Now, there are lots of reasons we've had fires in California for a very long time. Actually, we have less the big urban fires than we used to have. But, okay, the fires are climate change. No, climate change might be part of it. But there are very detailed reports from state commissions that say a lot of it was the policies that the Greens imposed on fires. They wouldn't let them take out the old growth and that was very combustible.

A reporter should be looking at both of these issues. they should be talking about the climate and what the effect might be. And also maybe are we doing something wrong on the policy side? Are there other reasons why these things happen than just to say, oh, it's the climate crisis? So now we're like medieval clerics running around saying every bad thing that every time there's a drop of rain that happens at a time it shouldn't happen. Or every time the temperature is higher. I always find it interesting that every time we have high temperatures, there's major coverage. there's low temperatures, we have very little.

Now, look, I believe that there's climate change. I think it's probably likely that there's something going on. But instead of thinking about how do we adapt to it, we're deciding that we're going to punish the peasants and make them essentially pay for the obsessions of the aristocrats. I mean, you know, it's really, to me, it's just incredible how we sit there and we think about making major transitions that are just absolutely against the interest of a large portion, the majority portion of Western societies. And at the same time, we're depriving opportunity to advance for the parts of the world that are the majority of the world,

which are developing countries. It's just astounding to me that we don't even seem to consider this in discussions, because, you know, basically governments in most cases and increasingly are run as technocracies. And, you know, to them, every problem has to be solved in a particular way. And we don't consider, like, for instance, here in California, they say, well, we want to cut greenhouse gases. So everybody has to live in an apartment in a dense area. Now, besides the fact that that science there is actually not very good, the reality is if you're telling a whole generation, that they're never going to own a house,

that they're going to have to pay high rents, and that there's no way that they're ever going to have what they want. What do they expect? What kind of society do you think you're going to have? You think you're going to have a bunch of happy campers? Well, you know, you better be selling Soma on a massive level if you want that bad. Right.

And, Joel, one of the things you just talked about is ideology, and I'm sure that's a big part of some of the things that are happening. But when we talk about the housing crisis, particularly here in the UK where it's very pronounced. I also think I talk about this in my book a little bit as well because what I see there is, yes, partly it's about ideology, but partly now it's all about the incentives. People who own property like me, right,

have absolutely no personal short-term incentive to see that problem fixed. Yes. Because we benefit because we are now part of like, we've got our foot on the ladder, and as the ladder moves up and further away from, over everybody else, we're going to be propelled with it and screw all the guys over there, right?

And he's pointing at me, Joel, by the way. I don't own property. And that's how we'll stay. Exactly. Exactly. He's the peasant. So Francis is going to remain a serf, which is good. But my broader point is, like, we've got to a position where none of us seem to be thinking about anything beyond our own personal short-term interest. And I've just had, my wife and I just had our first child.

And it's already shifting the way I think about this because I'm now thinking about other people, the future. It's not just about me. What is going to be the case when my son is 40 years old, right? But we don't make decisions as a society on that basis. We don't think about what the housing crisis is doing to the marriage rate, what it's doing to the average age of the first time mother, what it's doing to us as a society.

The point that you make, if everybody's living in a flat share with five other people in the city with no access to nature, no access to their own property, etc. What is that actually going to do to human brains and human behavior and the stuff that spills out into the streets? We only think about the short term right here right now, what benefit to me? Well, we have, you know, we certainly have that here. I mean, there is a strange alliance, and I think you have this in the UK as well. The upper class of property owners are also the biggest environmentalists because they they don't want to see development. You know, they don't want, you know, somebody to build, you know, 10,000 houses in Essex.

You know, they don't want to do that because they know that if that that means that my property, which has gone due to no intelligence of my own, has gone from, let's say, a very common here is to talk, California being, you know, probably one of the epicenters of all this, you know, people who bought a house for $150,000, $30,000 30 years ago, it's now worth a million half. Why would I, you know, why would I want to give this up? So the danger is also that much of the property is now owned by people who don't have children or their children are already gone. So they don't really care. And so I think that we do have a,

nobody is really looking at the future, or not nobody, but most people are not really looking at a future that I think is socially sustainable. We can't have a society in which, you know, if we go 20, 30 years from now, and let's say in the UK, home ownership goes from, let's say, 50% to 30%.

Do you think that's a state, that's going to be a stable society? I mean, we spent basically the entire period since the Middle Ages, you know, with ups and downs, moving towards a society where if you worked hard and you developed a decent number of skills, you could live a modest middle class lifestyle and you could afford to raise a family and you could afford maybe to have a little backyard or a nice flat. that that was what we had achieved. By 1970, Western societies, Japan as well, had achieved that goal. And now we're moving exactly away from it. And if you think that you can do that without there being major social disruption, I think, you're wrong. Can I just pick up on one other point that you made earlier, which is about the environmental stuff?

And we've got net zero here in the UK. and anyone who says anything about how this may cause some problems is automatically a climate change denier and all of that rubbish. I'm pretty convinced climate change is happening. I'm pretty convinced it's caused by human activity to some extent. But I also don't think impoverishing the people who are already poor in society is the answer. And the main point I wanted to raise with you is what you said about technocracy, because if you had a referendum on net zero in the UK,

I don't think you would get over 20% personally. I mean, I haven't seen the polling, but I don't think it's a popular thing to do, particularly when you explain to people how much is going to cost them. But we've never had any public conversation about whether this is an approach that we want to take or not. It's kind of foisted on us by the politicians, and no one really particularly cares what the ordinary person thinks.

They don't particularly care what the polling is even. It's just something that the people who are smarter and more, you know, respectable than us have decided that we must do. And that's it. Well, I think we're moving towards us. I think that you're exactly right. I mean, you take here in California, Governor Newsom basically says,

we're going to get rid of, we're going to get rid of the gas industry. We're going to wipe out 300,000 jobs. Because California, by the way, sits on a pool of oil and gas. Nobody noticed. But John Paul Getty's wealth comes from that. in part. But the reality is what we do is we say,

okay, we're going to, everyone's going to have to have EVs. Now, the problem is EVs are A-expensive. God knows where the electricity is going to come from. And if you know the economies of places like South and East L.A. or Oakland, they're filled with car repair stores. People, you know, constantly working on their cars.

There's a whole car car car car. culture, you'd never get that through the legislature. You would have a huge problem. You just say, see, what COVID is, one of the worst parts about COVID is it put in place a dictatorial regime. It's good for you. We're taking care of you. We now have the head of the EPA talking about not only do we want to call people who have

any question on climate science, we're going to basically. kick them off social media. Anybody who disagrees how to deal with climate that disagrees from the party line, they should be excluded to. That's where we're headed. And, you know, when I teach a class on the future, and the book that I think holds up best

is Huxley's Brave New World. I think, you know, if Huxley knew about digital technology, he'd probably have it all right. It's sort of like we have a society which is increase in control by a managerial elite, you know, what Burnham wrote about, you know, this sort of idea of there being a Uber class who know best, and they are empowered by this very wealthy aristocratic class who supports them. Now, whether or not these two classes, what I call the Clarity and the oligarchs, whether they will continue to be able to be in harmony.

That's going to be very interesting to see. It is astounding to me, by the way, that net zero is being imposed by a conservative regime. It's kind of remarkable. If the labor rights were smart, they would oppose it. The problem is that that climate change orthodoxy is so powerful on the left. I think they won't be able to do it. They'll probably say, oh, no, we have to get the net zero tomorrow,

not, you know, 20 years from now. Oh, absolutely. Isn't the problem, Joel, this. We are addicted to offering simple solutions to incredibly complex problems. Yes. That's what we're doing all the time. That's what all discussions seem to be about. Oh, I think that's exactly right.

I think that's really, you know, like, you know, people say, well, okay, a guy's running for mayor of Los Angeles. You know, I don't know if he'll win or not. Rick Caruso, who's a fairly middle-of-the-road candidate. And the LA Times starts ranting and raving about, well, you know, he's he doesn't have a climate plan. He's mayor. The city is overrun with homeless people. We have a crime wave.

The city has some of the worst economic numbers of any in the United States today. A city that should be booming. It's, you know, it's the world's large, only megacity that's in an absolutely perfect climate. Okay. That's what Southern California is. And we're worried about whether, you know, what, you mean, he's going to have a climate change policy. We're thinking about one city. If the state of California fell into the ocean tomorrow, it would make up for maybe what China does in two months in terms of increasing emissions.

I mean, this idea of there being, you know, well, the UK is going to prove how great we are. Meanwhile, China's just, I wrote a piece recently calling it, you know, the Roka Dope strategy. I don't know, you're probably too young to remember Mohammed Ali. No, no, no, we remember it. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Ali versus Foreman. Okay. Well, you know, the bottom line is the Chinese are playing us brilliantly.

And the Indians aren't far behind. They're saying, oh, yeah, we'll get to net zero, but we're going to get to it. By the time we get to it, your economies will have been destroyed. English economy is already basically, you know, moving in this direction. You'll be financial services, media, and a great vacation spot for wealthy Chinese. That's your future if you keep going the way you're going. Because if England gives up, the UK gives up, it's industrial and energy production industries and tries to go this sort of net zero route.

and while China basically supplies all the products. That's the other thing. We looked at this in California. Oh, yeah, we can reduce the emissions in California by a sending people and companies to other parts of the country. So how does it benefit the climate if a cement works leaves L.A. where the customers are right there and moves to Arizona or Mexico where they have to truck it in?

You know, it makes no sense. It's not even, the weird thing is the climate policies, I think in many cases, are more about social control and the vision that many of the left, particularly the progressive, have had. And some conservatives have had for decades, for decades. If you want to know, you know, basically these, the people who are now the dominant powers in our society really, you know, aren't really, I don't think they're thinking very clearly because at some point, the middle and working classes will push back. And it may not be very pretty when they do. And that's the worry, Joe, that they are going to push back, because here's the thing.

If you're playing a game and you have no chance of winning, then there's no incentive to play the game. And in fact, there's quite a lot of incentive, as a five-year-old would do, this game is rigged to grab the board and flip it. Right. Right. Yeah. I think that's, and I think that, I mean, that's why you get these strange results in elections today, like electing Donald Trump. How could that happen? Bernie Sanders would have been the Democratic nominee, had the oligarchy and the party establishment not rallied behind Biden and essentially forced everybody else out of the race. you could have had a socialist against the lunatic in 2020.

The anger at the grassroots level is very strong. You look at the recent elections in France. My wife's family's from France, so I kind of follow it. Melanchon, a far-left Trotskyite, his group may have been the biggest winners in the legislative election. Le Pen and Zenmour are far. right candidates, they got about 20, 25 percent, too. So at least half the population of France is rejecting any kind of liberal capitalism. All right, Joel, I hear you. Our audience are

very familiar with these arguments because we've explored them at length, because we, like you, think these are really important issues that are coming, that are already here that are affecting our lives today. What the hell do we do about it? Okay, now that, I, I think, unfortunately, I don't think either political party has the answer in our country or your country, for that matter. Yeah, agreed. Somehow a sort of radical center has to emerge. And I don't know how it could be done. We've seen some of the possibilities sometimes when we get a candidate, particularly a candidate who is either,

brilliant politically like Bill Clinton was. I think I voted for Clinton twice myself. I mean, there were bad parts about Clinton, but there are a lot of really good parts. And they're occasionally kind of, like what Rick Caruso's trying to do in L.A. is, you know, bring a centrist position in, but it's very difficult. The thing that's really surprising me and I'm trying to understand it is why are oligarchs and their ex-wives and their offspring,

why are they adopting the most extreme possible positions? Why are oligarchs? Why did they support a DA in San Francisco who's allowed one of the great cities of the world to become assessable? I don't get it. They live there. Doesn't it bother them?

Doesn't it bother them that they're a whole parts of the city you can't go to? Doesn't it bother them that San Francisco has more drug addicts than high schools do? You think that's the ideal? I mean, I look at these people and they say, if your vision of the world is San Francisco today, then I don't want a part of it.

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but it's up to people like you and people like us and other guests on our show to start to chart some of the way out of this malaise, right? So give us something. Well, I'm working on some of the ideas. I'm begging you. Can you not see you? I'm begging you. Give us the way out. Well, first of all, we have to get away from the ideology. You know, I'm writing an essay about this right now.

Daniel Bell, great sociologist, you know, wrote the most important book in many ways of the 20th century was the rise of post-industrial society, the coming post-industrial society. But Bell also wrote a book called The End of Ideology. And around 1960, it looked like ideology was dying, that, you know, parties differed, but there wasn't, you know, there was sort of a basic agreement about what we wanted. Now we're, ideology has come back and we have to get away from this sort of one, you know, there's only one thing that really matters.

You know, race, gender, you know, the climate, you know, these issues, which are ramped up to some hysterical level. We have to still say, what really works? Like, you know, Governor Newsom here in California, you know, signed this reparations bill. Besides the fact, California was never a slave state. What you know. And there were about 1,200 slaves in California when the, when, you know, you know, and there were about 1,200 slaves. when the state joined the union. The bottom line is we have economic policies

that make African-American incomes based on costs lower than they are in Mississippi. Tell me what is so great about a reparations bill when you have a state that's expelling its own black population. San Francisco has a fraction of the black population. It used to have, they, somebody even wrote a really, made a movie called The Last Black Man in San Francisco. And I remember, because I went to school in the Bay Area, and I worked in the Bay Area, I remember when there was a very vital black community in San Francisco. It's almost gone now.

And yet the same people are saying, you have to adopt our policies, but your policies are causing this. Your policies are causing poverty. Your policies are making homeownership for the next generation and minorities and immigrants more difficult. Why is it that minorities and immigrants are moving to Texas? It's supposed to be the center of racism and reaction. Well, yeah, there is a lot of racism and reaction probably still in Texas. But you know what? If I'm a young minority couple or an immigrant couple or a millennial and I can go,

and I can buy a nice townhouse in a decent area for $175,000, $200,000 in West Houston. Is that better than living in a crate in San Francisco or L.A.? I think people make choice. So is that part of the answer, then? Because I know I'm probably annoying you by focusing on this, but I do think it's up to us to start formulating some of the answers. I agree. One of the things I really admire by the United States,

particularly during COVID when we had a pretty hardcore, you know, this is good for you, so you can't do anything kind of policy over here. There were states in the United States, which you can argue whether they took a better approach or a worse approach, but you as a free citizen of the United States had a choice. You want to be freer? Go to Florida. Go to Texas. You want to be, quote, unquote, safer. Stay in New York City, stay in California, right? Is that the answer really here where, at least in the, like, we can't move, if we don't like the tax policy in the UK, we can't move to Belgium, you know, not least because we don't want to live in Belgium, but you see what I'm saying,

like the, at least you guys have the opportunity to offer different ways of doing things and people can then vote with their feet. Is that going to be part of the answer here? Yes, that's an excellent part. And frankly, I think people, you know, within reason, should be able to have the kind of communities that they want to have. I mean, now, there obviously are going to be health and safety issues that are universal. But, you know, to me, the idea that somebody wants to have a community where, you know, more traditional values are taught in the schools. And then there's another school district that wants to make Malcolm X's birthday a holiday. You know, this is a line that I think Norman Mellor used when he was running for a mayor of New York many years ago.

The bottom line is we should allow it. This was the genius of the American Constitution. And by the way, there's quite a bit of autonomy historically both in Canada and in Australia as well. I mean, I think it has something to do with the fact that you went through a very different evolution than we did. And also these are big places with lots of room and people can move from one place to the other fairly easily. The tragedy to me, and here's part of what I would do if I was in the UK, is you really want to see more activity outside of London. The more you concentrate everything in one place, it becomes very expensive. and it expels a lot of industry because it has to go elsewhere.

I mean, if you take a look at what's happening in the tech scene in Europe, it's moving to the east because it's too expensive to be in London or Paris. So I think one of the things is decentralization is going to be important. I think a lot of it has to do with self-sufficiency. So let's, like for instance, Milton Friedman actually had a very good idea, which was a negative income tax. Instead of a basic income, let's incentivize people to work. I don't think somebody who's working at Home Depot for $40,000 or $30,000 a year should be paying a lot of income tax. They really, you know, actually they should be given incentive.

On the other hand, I don't want to see what many of the oligarchs want, which is to turn the vast majority of the population. into a bunch of sort of mindless serfs who cash a check and maybe occasionally drive an Uber. That's not the vision that's going to hold a society together. So I think we have to incentivize work. We have to make it much easier for families. Like for instance, okay, instead of having a giant bureaucracy to raise children, why don't we allow, you know, grandma to get a little bit of a stipend to watch the the kid, if the wife or husband has to go out to work, need somebody to substitute.

Let's think about how do we preserve institutions like the family? How do we preserve the chance for entrepreneurship and property for the next generation? Those are the issues that we need to be addressing. And I don't see that happening anywhere. I think the right is, in many cases, just enslaved to capital. you know, anything they do is okay. And of course, you know, Google could buy the American right for one fifth of what they give to the left. So, you know, that, you know, that you'll, you'll have that. The right doesn't have the answers. The left doesn't have the answers. The

answers are going to be, what is it that people actually want? What is it that the, that, how do we help people reach their aspirations? That's what we should be focusing on. That's what, as a traditional Democrat, that's what I always thought was important. You know, whether it, you know, if you look at Harry Truman, Pat Brown, even to some extent, Bill Clinton, the great appeal of Bill Clinton is Clinton understood, having been a governor of Arkansas coming from a poor background, he understood that you appeal to people say, if you work played by the rules, you should have this. now we have a Democratic Party who says you can go you can commit crimes you could you

you could be disobedient in school you could be disruptive you could do this you could do that but you're still going to get the check right you have rights and entitlement as opposed to opportunities exactly and so somebody who's a working class person working at Home Depot working at Walmart, working at the corner drugstore, whatever, that person needs to be empowered, that person needs to be respected and not be treated or not be treated or how much carbon do you emit? You know, like, what kind of vision of humanity is that? We can, and then on the climate issue, I would say, look,

it doesn't matter what the UK and the U.S. does. We've already reduced our emissions. by a lot. And we, you know, we can continue to do it over time. But China and India and Africa are not going to be on that, are not going to do that. And that's where the emissions are going to grow. So, yes, we should try to limit our emissions in a reasonable way, but we don't have to destroy our societies in the process. And we can't kid ourselves that we live in a world in which Europe and America can determine what's going to happen to the planet. That's over. It's been over for 50 years already. Wake up. And we're not doing that. We're living, you know, and I think a lot of

it's like, I don't, it doesn't matter if California reduces emissions, 25% or 27%. It doesn't matter because China and India will wipe that out in, you know, a very, very short period of time. We need to be thinking about adaptation. You know, I'm so tired of people saying, well, the seas are going to rise. I said, well, why don't you propose sea walls? we're going to not have enough water. Well, maybe we should do desaloonization here in California. Maybe a friend of mine in MIT is talking about, why don't we build a channel, since the Midwest seems to be flooding more often,

why don't we relieve them of their floodwaters and move them to the southwest in the canal? You know, when you think about what the Chinese emperors did in ancient times, what the Romans did with their roads, with what we did here in the United States and what you did in the U.S. UK with canals. Why aren't we even thinking about how do we adapt? The Dutch learned how to adapt because of the, you know, they obviously have a CET level issue and have for a long time. We can adapt. Why aren't we talking about adapting to something that we can't fundamentally change because the dynamic of climate change is going to come from China and the developing

world for the next 20 or 30 years? We should do our. best, but to destroy our societies in the process, I think doesn't do anyone any good. Joel, it has been a wonderful interview. Thank you very much. Before we go, we always end with our final question, which is, what is the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should be? I would say more than anything else, what we really need to be talking about is the impact of social media on discussion in general and the lack of of just good common discussion.

You know, I've noticed over the years that there are many outlets, which I used to do all the time. No, my views haven't changed at all. CNN, MSNBC, NPR. You know, I wrote for the New York Times. I wrote for the Washington Post. I worked for the L.A. Times.

very difficult to get into those places anymore if you have a contrarian point of view. Very, very difficult. Sometimes I sneak my way into the LA Times, but that's about it. You know, I think that what we have is an environment where social media is sort of pushing people to the extremes and the legacy media, which should be sort of the arbiter and trying to be, sort of in-between, has decided to go on one side. And so that discussion itself has gotten weaker, and that's why we come up with ideologies that make no sense in terms of reality.

Yeah. Well, you're right. I also think, though, that there's an emerging new thing, which is social media lets us down by creating tribalism. Legacy media is taken aside for the most part, as you say. But I also think there's a new thing emerging, which is what we're doing right here. which is actually trying to have a conversation that increasingly people I think are hungry for.

Do you see some cause for optimism there? Yes, I do. I mean, I see the rise not just of, you know, podcasts like this, but, you know, what's being done on substack, you know, Andrew Sullivan, R.E. Y's. That's a very positive development of publications like, you know, and of course I write for them, unheard, spiked, Quillette.

These are new ventures. And yes, they're not gigantic, but because they are places where I can sit there and say, okay, I'm not listening to some, you know, ideologically driven presentation. I'm getting an interesting point of view. So I think that there are some signs, I think there's a,

there is a rebellion among traditional liberals against what the woke have imposed. I think that is becoming very obvious. And what's going to be interesting here in the United States after the 2022 elections, let's just say the Republicans pick up 25 seats, unfortunately, most of those seats will be for more moderate Democrats, who Nancy Pelosi has sacrificed. And the question will be, well, does a party go further left, further right. Does it go back to dissenter? Or does it, you know, did they, and whether they're

capable of learning anything is, of course, an open question at best. Joe, do you think institutions are the Washington Post, the LA Times and New York Times, do you think they can be saved, or do you think it's now we have to create our own institutions? We have to do it via substack. We have to do it via podcast like this. I don't see how. I don't see how. you turn these around. I watched an amazement. You know, I did a, I was doing some stuff on the LA election. So I said, oh, I want, you know, I have a subscription, a digital subscription to the LA Times. I said, oh, well, I'll see what the LA Times is saying. It was so incredibly biased for, you know, Karen Bass, the former Vince Aramos person who's probably going to be the next May, a good chance she'll

the next mayor, and against Caruso, favoring all the, you know, you think the San Francisco Chronicle supports Boudin, you know, the DA. I mean, the, I think these these institutions have been so penetrated now and that there's this whole generation of young journalists who have been, who have been trained to think that their job is not to inform, as we were taught in the old days, or to give people options is to instruct, to push in a certain direction, very much like, let's just say, would be the case with the old Pravda in the Soviet Union.

That's really, and, you know, what happens is, as the old, mostly liberal editors, retire, die off, whatever, and there's nobody left who says, You know, you really have to tell both sides. You really, you know, I mean, I know because I read these stories and I said, well, didn't the editor say you should talk to somebody who maybe thinks that there's something else going on? You know, whatever, you know, particularly if it's race, gender, climate, anything involving Trump.

And I think Trump is an awful human being. And the country would be infinitely better off if he didn't exist. And it would be infinitely better off if he didn't run. And it would be infinitely better off if he was disgraced. But the coverage was so venomous and so unbiased, so, you know, things that you say, well, how, you know, you can't say that in a, in a newspaper account without sounding like you're writing something for the Democratic National Committee. That those boundaries have just, they've collapsed almost completely. I mean, you almost sometimes can feel, well, here's what the party line is. and all of a sudden the coverage is all about the party line.

I mean, it is astounding. And the fact that dissenting voices are either eliminated or put into what I call the digital gulag, like, you know, and doing work, Google, I used to love Google. They had, it was great. It, if you try to do a Google search on climate, gender, or race, and you will see how incredibly skewed their algorithms are now. I mean, you know, there are certain topics where I just go to another search engine because I,

even though I think Google may be more efficient, it has been completely taken over. And, you know, unfortunately, many of the people running our tech companies, they don't really believe them in the First Amendment anyway. So, you know, and they probably wouldn't even know what it was. Well, Joel, we promised to ask you one last question. It ended up being an extra 15 minutes. So thank you for being so generous with your time. We're going to ask you a couple of questions for our locals-only supporters

that only they will see. But for now, thank you so much for joining us. I really recommend everybody read The Coming of Neo-F feudalism and really appreciate it. Where can people find your other work online? I have a website, Joel Kotkin.com, plus I run a website called New Geography.com, which runs all my stuff, but also runs a lot of other stuff as well.

Fantastic. Well, thanks again for coming on and thank you guys for watching and listening. We will see you very soon with another brilliant episode and, of course, on locals for the extra question. And for those who you like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys. Did you ask what we the people can do to stop the slide into neo-feudalism if it's not too late?