America Needs 1 Billion People to Survive

Summary

In this episode of Undoctrination, hosts Maggie and Olivia are joined by John Tilman, an influential figure in the liberty and nonprofit space, to discuss a captivating vision for the future of America. Tilman argues for the strategic growth of the U.S. population to 1 billion by the end of the century through a mix of secure borders, thoughtful immigration, and a cultural shift towards procreation. This, he asserts, would enhance the nation’s innovative capacity and ensure economic and geopolitical competitiveness, especially against rising powers like China. The conversation also touches on issues of cultural and political influence, advocating for a resurgence of American values centered around liberty, self-agency, and entrepreneurship.

Highlights

• John Tilman advocates for a strategic increase in the U.S. population to 1 billion by the century's end.
• Immigration, secure borders, and cultural shifts towards higher birth rates are key to achieving this goal.
• Tilman emphasizes the importance of self-initiative and entrepreneurship in preserving American success.
• The discussion critiques current political tactics and calls for a cultural renaissance of liberty and agency.
• A reflection on generational responsibility to uphold America's founding principles and prosperity.

Key Takeaways

• The U.S. should aim for a population of 1 billion through secure borders and strategic immigration 📈.
• The key to growth is to unleash American entrepreneurial spirit by focusing on innovation and self-reliance 💡.
• Cultural influence and revitalizing traditional American values are essential for societal progress 🇺🇸.
• Generational accountability and vision are necessary to build a resilient and thriving nation 🏗️.
• Promoting family, community, and liberty-oriented education can steer society back to core values 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦.

Overview

The podcast episode delves into John Tilman's vision of growing the U.S. population to 1 billion as a strategic imperative. This goal, he argues, would not only help America maintain its global leadership but also foster a greater spirit of innovation and economic vitality. Tilman stresses the necessity of balancing secure borders with a welcoming immigration policy to achieve this.

Throughout the conversation, Tilman and the hosts explore the challenges posed by current political and cultural conditions. They highlight the need for a renewed focus on self-reliance, entrepreneurship, and an education system that promotes freedom and individual agency as core American values.

In advocating for generational accountability and visionary leadership, the discussion underscores the importance of reviving America's foundational ideals. This involves nurturing family and community ties while ensuring that the nation's narrative remains aligned with the principles of liberty and opportunity for all.

America Needs 1 Billion People to Survive Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 the greatest wisdom in this country resides in the collective behavior of us as individuals working together voluntarily to solve problems it's a pretty simple idea and it was endorsed by people like James Madison Thomas Jefferson George Washington and John Adams who yet I have yet to see somebody who has better wisdom than what they came up [Music] with hey guys and welcome back to indoctrination I'm Magie and I'm Olivia
• 00:30 - 01:00 and today we have a really interesting guest John Tilman is in charge of multitudes of organizations and has had a lot of success in the liberty and nonprofit space and before we get into this I just want to give him the chance to John briefly introduce yourself and tell us what you're working on Olivia Maggie it's great to be with you and great to be on your show which has a fantastic title uh I was a small business entrepreneur most of my life sold a business uh in 2004 part of it then eventually sold all
• 01:00 - 01:30 of it in 2007 in the retail space and then I got involved in public paling politics in 2004 worked with some longtime veterans in the space on spending caps and term limits and property rights for three years then I launched out on my own in Illinois in 2007 uh I relaunched the Illinois policy Institute was its longtime CEO from then until 2020 I'm still chairman there and over the years have launched a variety of organizations uh co-founded the Liberty Justice Center which won the Supreme Court case uh relaunched the
• 01:30 - 02:00 Franklin news Foundation became chairman of that in 2017 it's now the largest wire service in the country that covers State House news uh second only uh to uh the Associated Press which isn't really a wire service but rather a propaganda arm of the radical left so that's why I say we're the largest uh been involved in the iron light which is a boutique for-profit marketing agency co-founded that and a variety of other things I most spend most of my time today on the American culture project which I founded in 2018 team which is intending to reach
• 02:00 - 02:30 independent uh and sort of uh voters that switch back and forth with the Liberty message that's great oh that all sounds great I was about to say I'm an independent unaffiliated voter so maybe you will get me to lean some type of way today I just want you to lean toward Freedom yeah oh I got that already all right yeah check check that's really great and um you know I actually I really admire you I'm very familiar with IP and iron light and
• 02:30 - 03:00 the Center Square all of these organizations um have been hugely influential on organizations that I've worked for throughout my career um I know we were talking earlier about uh pelican in Louisiana that was also heavily influenced by um Illinois policy Institute what would you say are some underlying principles or strategies that connect all of these organizations because I know you have um a lot of different things going on but I assume
• 03:00 - 03:30 that you have a specific Vision on how to influence the United States towards more Liberty yeah I have a theory of politics that I call the political Vice the concept of the political Vice is if you imagine a three-sided Vice kind of like the old trash compactor in the very first Star Wars movie remember when Luke and Leia and and Chewbacca get inside that trash compactor and the pressure comes from all sides kind of like that in the vice are politicians political decision makers the force side of the the top is where output happens Lefty
• 03:30 - 04:00 output or righty output depending on your political philosophy but to use those for shorthand terms and the pressure comes from those three sides media pressure public opinion the people pressure and influencer pressure and my theory is that the left understands that this is how politics works and that they understand that building capacity to work thece and apply pressure to political decision makers helps you get the output you want and that the right uh not only doesn't understand that this operates that the political ADV even
• 04:00 - 04:30 exists it clearly does not invest sufficiently in it we invest in elections we invest in uh uh political rather uh public policy and advocacy uh but we don't invest in building the broader capacities that really take control of the commanding Heights of American culture so all the work I've been doing everything that I'm involved with in some form or fashion is designed to take back the commanding Heights of American culture through media through the people or through influencers to try to get better control of the political
• 04:30 - 05:00 actors inside the vice I love that because I have frequently spoken about how the right just really either doesn't get or doesn't care to understand what is missing from our side of the political sphere because yes we do invest in candidates we invest in policy institutes we invest in all the Electoral side of things but we don't invest in culture and when conservatives try to infiltrate culture it almost comes off as like an off-brand version of left culture let's just make a
• 05:00 - 05:30 conservative parody or a conservative version of this instead of creating something brand new or investing in something brand new it's why we get so mad at Hollywood and celebrities and artists and movie stars because the left has a monopoly on them instead of promoting our own types of people yeah I've been raging about this a lot um but I'm really interested so how did you go from small business owner because I assume you weren't that involved in politics before 2004 you
• 05:30 - 06:00 said how did you go from a small business owner to someone who was starting multiple nonprofits to fix these issues what was your radicalization moment uh it wasn't any one particular moment it was a series of Life events and also my uh sort of innate interest uh I I joke and of course you'll be able to do the math and figure out my age at this point but I joke that I'm the only nine-year-old in 1968 who watched both political conventions gavel to gavel and thought it was interesting my brothers were out doing other things at most
• 06:00 - 06:30 he they were 11 and 13 at the time doing what normal boys would do but I really thought politics was sort of interesting I like the Showmanship of it the gamesmanship of it and uh so I started paying attention to politics ever since then I worked in the library in high school read all the newspapers became very interested in journalism I came of age during Watergate and the coverage of all of that and so when I went to college I started out as a journalism major in a political science minor I fulfilled my minor uh requirements almost instantly because I could not get enough of it but I eventually switched
• 06:30 - 07:00 to business and went into business when I uh graduated from college and but never lost my passion for politics I was always the guy in my 20s and 30s who would be at a party and I could tell you who all nine Supreme Court Justices were who the Senate President was who the speaker of the house was I could name half the cabinet and of course nobody gave a damn and nobody wanted to talk to me but I was obsessed with it so I was paying a lot of attention throughout my life and then of course meanwhile I was working in the uh free enterprise uh capitalist space that is our supposed market economy here in United States and
• 07:00 - 07:30 again to really see just how miraculous free enterprise is the way I've come to express that now is that the founding principles of this country and our free enterprise system are the greatest forks for good ever created in the human sphere to improve The Human Condition and that's particularly true for the poor and disadvantaged uh long story in my personal life but parents got divorced when I was young my mother was paranoid schizophrenic in and out of mental institutions and so we didn't have it too easy and there was a lot of difficult times and I was around a lot of people that had a lot of financial success and came from a affluent to
• 07:30 - 08:00 wealthy homes so I got to watch how people started out with nothing and then made something of themselves through the American system and I thought it was a miracle and So eventually when I was in a position to get involved in it uh in my mid-40s and I was selling a business I just started cold calling every nonprofit organization I'd identified by then and trying to find a way in and I as The Story Goes I literally made hundreds of phone calls and nobody wanted to talk to me there's a apocryphal story in Chicago about the
• 08:00 - 08:30 kid who shows up at the department of streams and sanitation the city of Chicago and says I'd like to work here and the supervisor looks at him and says who sent you and he says no one sent me and the supervisor in the Chicago way said we don't want nobody nobody sent and it was kind of like that when it was kind of like that when I tried to go work in public policy had no particular qualifications but eventually I talked my way in in 2004 and got started on it so just always had a passion for it and then I've always had an entrepreneurial spirit so uh I like build I really like
• 08:30 - 09:00 launching and Building Things and working with great people and great leaders and I've had the great privilege of working with amazingly talented people throughout this process well that's very admirable and what can I ask from a young age when you were entering college and you were at these parties talking about politics did you self- perceive as somebody who wanted to change the world or was going to change the world or the country someday uh as weird as it is to say yes I I I had a great imagination and I
• 09:00 - 09:30 imagine all kinds of world altering dreams most of which crashed on the rocks of reality yeah but but some but some of them uh you know I was a big dreamer and I people have years ago I was interviewing a person that I knew uh somewhat an acquaintance and we had a mutual uh friend who worked for me and during this interview with this uh person he said to me that that Mutual acquaintance who worked for me said well you got to be careful when you talk to John because has grandiose ideas and uh
• 09:30 - 10:00 you know I thought yes that's true audacious uh ideas and the Big Dreams are fun and even if you don't get all the way to the top of the Mountaintop the view from 10,000 feet still pretty good even if that peak's 2,000 feet higher the 10,000 foot view is not bad so I Like Big Dreams I've always had Big Dreams uh and I still have Big Dreams to this day so follow-up question you said a lot of those dreams kind of crashed on the Rocks but what are some of the you know your top dreams that you actually did accomplish that may have helped
• 10:00 - 10:30 change the country or change the world and the second part is what advice would you give to young people who want to do the same or accomplish the same uh I'll start actually in my business life in my business life um I took over and all I I started out in the in the call center business and in the call center business people who come to work in the call centers do it out of desperation they do it because you can make a lot of money in a short period of time it's usually a part-time job for most salespeople even though the management team is full-time and what learned very quickly when I took over my
• 10:30 - 11:00 first office and even when I was an assistant manager waiting to get my turn at running an office is that we really needed to focus on solving people's personal crisis almost anybody that walks in that door has some sort of personal financial crisis and most of my colleagues didn't look at it that way I always looked at it as if we help them become great salespeople we can help them solve their financial crisis and improve their life and it made the work more meaningful and when I got to Chicago I took over an office that had 80 salespeople in Oak Park which is on the Western border Chicago and the two
• 11:00 - 11:30 offices I'd worked in previously one in Detroit and one in Washington DC were very integrated about 40% African-American and 60% white what was interesting about Detroit it was very much workingclass both black and white alike mostly workingclass people in the Detroit office some exceptions to that but in Washington DC it was mostly Highly Educated most graduate degrees black and white alike so you got to see this really interesting racial makeup 6040 black or white to black but working class in both in Detroit and
• 11:30 - 12:00 professional in both cases and it was really an eyeopener in Detroit they were looking for that job out of desperation financially it was unemployment Detroit was about 30% of the time in Washington DC where unemployment was under 4% it was so expensive that people had to have a second job while they worked for the government back then so then when I get to Chicago we had 80 employees about 60 were uh uh White and 20 were black but we had an overwhelming demand of people calling asking for jobs 300 people would call every uh Monday Tuesday and
• 12:00 - 12:30 Wednesday looking for work now to give you some perspective on that in Washington I'd get 20 phone calls a week for people looking for work in Chicago 300 phone calls in three days but 85 to 90% of them were African-American calling from residents in the city of Chicago and it turns out my my predecessor wouldn't hire him because he thought that Southern and Midwestern whites and Eastern whites that we called all over the country wouldn't buy from somebody who quote unquote sounded like they were from the city and I knew that was I hope I can swear on your show so
• 12:30 - 13:00 we opened up the spigots and shortly after that we uh had 300 salespeople and 250 of them were um black and only 50 of them were white so we had this complete amazing cultural meu of an experience and it wasn't always easy there were lots of challenges I was accused of racism all the time and um but the beauty of that environment was a sales environment so if somebody would make an accusation that they weren't getting the good leads it's a little like Glen Clary again Ross if you've ever seen that show
• 13:00 - 13:30 it's an amazing film you should watch uh this was a little bit like that uh I would just give them the leads and say Here's the standards if you can perform at the standard you can keep getting those leads if you can't hit the standard you can't it was a beautiful meritocracy and that was life-altering for me it changed my outlook on life it made it really opened my eyes to how the world really works I always joke that everything I need to learn about leadership and management and Human Condition I learned in the call center business and I've taken a lot of those lessons with me into this world uh I think the biggest change that I brought to the movement and I say this with
• 13:30 - 14:00 great modesty there's many many people that have been involved in this but when I first started in 2004 and rolling ahead to 2007 is part of the reason I got involved is I was a marketer and a very much a data driven marketer and I wanted to bring marketing principles to selling the greatest Force for good ever created in the human sphere so I wanted to bring a marketing Centric approach I once said that when introducing the head of another nonprofit a very well-known renowned person uh later you know years later when I made my mark a little bit
• 14:00 - 14:30 and had this opportunity to introduce this person and I talked a little bit about bringing a marketing Centric approach to selling Liberty and this individual who was a little pandamic and uh tight shall we say you know a little uptight got to the podium and looked at me and said you know John marketing Centric is not even a word and in a nutshell that kind of explains the problem of policy driven idea Engineers is they don't know how to sell and I want to come here and help sell and uh I I think I've had an impact on helping the movement become better at selling
• 14:30 - 15:00 wow um and so one I would just say I think we have almost like a little bit personal connection so my family is from Detroit my grandfather moved our family from Detroit to DC he grew up working workingclass black man he work he worked up from a shoe shine to the mail room to uh a higher like a manager level in the company he was in in Detroit and he ended up moving to DC to get a job and he ended up working in uh government civil rights so he was working on
• 15:00 - 15:30 basically making sure nobody was being discriminated against unfairly in government jobs so that's so interesting that you kind of have a similar background um and so you've had many Great accomplishments as as I can tell what advice would you give to somebody who wants to make a similar impact uh find really talented people and partner with them to build something meaningful that changes people's lives for the better all of My Success is dependent on having worked with amazing colleagues uh I have spent one of the things I talk about a lot is to always
• 15:30 - 16:00 be recruiting talent and I am always recruiting and looking for Superstar Talent uh the way I used to put it in the call center business and I've applied this rule to everything I've ever done since then is you know if you have 300 salespeople you have the top performers here and you have the lower performers here and the lower performers are usually newer people who are figuring it out but sometimes those lower performers are people that have been there a month and they're never going to figure it out and you got to let them go the way I always used to put you know you have the mean right in the middle the mean performance in life we get paid by the mean we don't get paid by our best day we don't get paid by our
• 16:00 - 16:30 worst day we get paid on average by how we produce and so Phil philosophically when it comes to Talent recruitment I always say we want to when we reduce the bottom we want to add to the top and what I mean by that is you want to always be raising the mean of your talent level so the next person you hire should be a top 10% performer and if you do that successful you're not going to bat 100% but if you bat five six seven eight times out of 10 over time the 10 tent mean will rise in your organization
• 16:30 - 17:00 and so I always look for very talented people I spend probably 20 to 30% of my time interviewing and talking to potential people even when I don't have an opening for them uh because I'm just relentlessly looking for talent and eventually opportunities uh to deploy Talent present themselves um and so I think my my biggest piece of advice to somebody wants to make a difference is go seek out talented people if you're in a sort of a junior role and you're not ready to start your own thing find a leader who's Superstar talented and go
• 17:00 - 17:30 try to work with them and learn how it's done and learn from them the other thing I would say is when you're in a leadership position and your recruiting Talent is your job is to create an environment where PE people always used to say to me in my in my call center days that I was a great motivator and I never accepted that I am not a great motivator what I am pretty good at is creating circumstances in which people become highly self-motivated so what I want to do is create an environment if you two and I were working together would want to get into your heads and figure out what makes you tick and what
• 17:30 - 18:00 motivates you and I would want to create a work environment where you are going to want to go after it because it makes you feel so good and happy and proud of your own accomplishments and I want to make sure that that is aligned with the vision and mission of the organization that's I think how you approach team building whether you're starting out as a teammate or eventually become a leader we need more bosses like you I know right I'm like wow this is inspiring um yeah I think I think for my generation actually Entre R preneurship from what I've seen is on the rise within our
• 18:00 - 18:30 generation because people in our generation don't want to have bosses but I think part of this is like a rejection that older Generations have anything to teach us um and you know what I mean um and I do sadly yeah yeah um and I think that's like a distinctly negative thing although I think entrepreneurship is is like a net good on the world um but a lot of people just feel this overwhelming despair at the state of the
• 18:30 - 19:00 world and I was listening to another podcast that you had done about a year ago um where you talked about how the political climate when you were growing up um was very similar and that you were going through a lot of Wars there was a really big recession and the end didn't seem like it was in sight and how you know things did turn around under Reagan's leadership um but I'm wondering like is that turnaround still possible do we
• 19:00 - 19:30 still have hope to sell young people um for a better future or are things kind of irreparably damaged um especially within the Advent of the internet and social media yeah are we all going to die is it hopeless please tell us please tell us I I I have bad news we definitely are all going to die this is true hopefully is hopefully not hopefully hopefully not simult L is the
• 19:30 - 20:00 key the um one of the things I say a lot is uh and I and by the way all great marketing requires repetition so that's why I say it a lot is uh American greatness is not a Birthright uh it has to be earned by every generation and um I'm sad to tell you that my generation Baby Boomers have pretty well screwed the pooch I mean we have done a very bad job of stewarding this country and baby boomers are responsible not just the Baby Boomers the the generation prior to us uh but have been largely responsible for some of the systemic problems we
• 20:00 - 20:30 have both in terms of U our economy our governmental fiscal debt and as well as our cultural uh to be blunt about our cultural Decline and Division and Insanity um but the question is should we be hopeful and the answer is absolutely we should be hopeful and the reason we should be hopeful uh is we've been through terrible things before the remedies in those terrible things as I said wasn't inevitable and sometimes it took a long long time to fix the flaws in the country and look
• 20:30 - 21:00 how long it took to fix the flaw of SL slavery you know and that they started on trying to fix slavery in 1820 it took a long time generations to fix slavery and it took a very bloody horrible War to do it which was worth doing because it had to be fixed it took a long time to fix Jim Crow it took a long time to get out of the Great Depression which happened in 1929 we never really got out of it fully until the war started uh it took a long time for the Civil Rights
• 21:00 - 21:30 movements uh Civil Rights Movement uh to get fixed and it took a long time to fix the malays of the the 60s and 70s the period that you started out talking about that I lived through you know when I was coming of age uh you know we had assassin we had a lost war in Vietnam that divided the country we had the assassinations of uh John and Robert Kennedy Martin Luther King uh and uh you know we had the corruption although now it looks sort of like a like robbing a candy store but we have the corruption
• 21:30 - 22:00 of what was Watergate uh and the removal of Nixon um and then we had the Iranian hostage crisis where Americans were held by the Iranian government for 500 and some days I forget the exact number and the particular incident that I think you're referring to Maggie is U the day that the hostage rescue attempt happened in the deserts of uh the desert of AR Iran and it failed and the helicopters crashed and our brave servicemen died trying to rescue the hostages is and a classmate of mine a good friend of mine
• 22:00 - 22:30 Jim Janette uh was sitting outside a classroom that morning when we just heard the news and was crying and saying will America ever be great again and I I don't remember what my reaction was I don't know exactly what I said uh I think I said yes I think so but um you know that fall Ronald Reagan was elected and things changed and they changed fairly quickly people forget it only took a few years relative to all the 15 or 20 years of challenge within three years the country was of and running in a really amazing way it wasn't perfect
• 22:30 - 23:00 and Reagan was not perfect but it got better and the essence of why it got better is because Reagan believed deeply in the core nature of the American people and it was really the American people who he motivated by creating circumstances for them to become self-motivated he unleashed the animal spirits if you will of American desire and ambition and I think that one of the things that's interesting to me about where we are as a country and The Human Condition is there's two Natures in all
• 23:00 - 23:30 of us there's the nature that the left is now appealing to which is uh you know I have group identity I'm black I'm Brown I'm gay I'm overweight I'm too skinny I'm Too Tall I'm too short whatever victim class you want to pick because there are now 14 million of them um the left appeals to the victimization mindset the Grievous mindset and what and it's very clever because it's very appealing and seductive what they are saying to you is that when you have a calamity in your life and everyone has
• 23:30 - 24:00 calamities in their life even the billionaire in the Ivory Tower has calamities in his life I know because I talked to some of them they have unhappiness in their lives it's none of their unhappiness has to do with money but they have unhappiness just like anyone else does and um when those calamities happen you didn't get into the school you wanted your children didn't get into the school you wanted your children got flunked by the teacher in third grade for misbehaving uh you didn't get the promotion at work you thought your boss is a jerk instead of a a supportive person whatever that Calamity is what the left says to you is
• 24:00 - 24:30 it's not your fault you're a victim and you're a victim of this uh uh American founding with a fetish um individuality and the individual sovereignty and it allows people to take advantage of the system and exploit you and we're here to help you we're gonna using the government put our foot on the scale to properly allocate opportunity and resources and we're going to make it better for you if you're suffering that is a very seductive argument and it appeals to our desire for that victimization we all have been there we've all had a bad day we've all had a
• 24:30 - 25:00 bad experience of having that person put their arm on your shoulder and say it's going to be okay I'm gonna take care of you it feels pretty good but what the founders understood is there's another aspect of the human condition and that is that natural human desire to grow to build to collaborate to Aspire to have hopeful dreams uh you know the very first caveman and woman they started decorating that cave right away they might have started chipping out some more rocks to make it bigger right away the human condition is to build to improve to create that is the other side
• 25:00 - 25:30 of the coin and we are in a battle between two philosophies the philosophy that wants to draw people into dependency and victimization versus the battle for Hope aspiration and building a better tomorrow than we have today together voluntarily and I am hopeful that that vision is still resilient in the American Spirit and with right leadership uh it will be Unleashed in much the same way it was in the 1980s wow I'm hopeful now you know what's
• 25:30 - 26:00 interesting um I think part of it is this like idea that we need to be happy all of the time that like happiness is the Baseline human State um when really when you're victimizing yourself and accepting these handouts and this help um from you know the wolf in the forest who actually wants to eat you uh it's soothing right but it doesn't like that pain because do it soothed doesn't push you to um going further and achieving
• 26:00 - 26:30 something which is what's going to bring you real happiness and satisfaction it's just soothing but like that runs out you know so it's kind of like um this help is almost a drug to keep us sedated and less connected with ourselves and our purpose and that's really sad um and I think you're right it's very seductive you know I am from Louisiana and you know I grew up in in a in an upper
• 26:30 - 27:00 middle class middle class background but I've lived um in a lot of places that weren't that and I wasn't always riant on on my parents I I kind of tried to separate at the age of 18 financially for the most part um and so I know a lot of people who are in those situations and for them it is very seductive it is very seductive to like want to go on food stamps or Wick or whatever kind of government program it
• 27:00 - 27:30 is because it feels like there is no other option and we've kind of set up a society where there isn't another option because life is really expensive due to government intervention um and that's the main source of help so I totally understand what you mean it does feel like that American Spirit hasn't been fully Unleashed yet I think I've been seeing pockets of it but I think the pockets of it that I've been seeing have
• 27:30 - 28:00 been on the right but in more nefarious ideologies and movements um that are also promising the government will step in and and enforce some policies here or there and some pretty nasty ideas are sweeping throughout the right um and it seems like people are losing faith that freedom will actually solve a lot of these issues um the one Beacon of of hope that I've seen and I was telling
• 28:00 - 28:30 you earlier that I was in Argentina when he won is Javier Malay who is unleashing that he they call it the lion spirit in argentine's right and he knows that um the hardworking business people and entrepreneurs are the real heroes of society not the politicians and parasites that come in and try to take everything away um but speaking of the right like do you are you familiar with what I'm talking about this this
• 28:30 - 29:00 movement and tendency in the right now to Trend more towards yeah go ahead sorry i' I've written I I'm a signatory to the freedom conservative conservatism statement and I have written extensively about this and I think the idea of national conservatism as expressed where we're going to use the power of the government to try to work a conservative agenda is one of the most ridiculous ideas I've ever heard in my life I mean let's just look at the evidence of how the government is doing so far look around you we have un unprecedented debt we're literally uh printing money to
• 29:00 - 29:30 bankrupt the future of the country uh we can't rebuild our infrastructure because we have so much of a debt load schools fail we have record spending at every level of K through2 education and performance continues to decline why on Earth would and oh and then meanwhile during this current Administration we're making massive multi-billion doll Investments at the government's choosing into uh uh Technologies and businesses that don't have a market such as green energy whatever your thoughts are on
• 29:30 - 30:00 climate change the issue is who if you're going to invest in climate and green energy should the government be making those Investments or should the private sector who has a much better sharp pencil on making Investments be making those Investments every one of the government's investments in that respect has failed and now we want to give them more power from a conservative point of view this is absolutely ridiculous the greatest wisdom in this country resides in the collective behavior of us as individuals working together voluntarily to solve problems it's a prettyy simple idea and it was
• 30:00 - 30:30 endorsed by people like James Madison and Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and John Adams who yet I have yet to see somebody who has better wisdom than what they came up with yeah um I I was just writing this article for breit Bart recently about how uh several of the wind turbine off Coast wind turbine projects off of New York and New Jersey they've been cancelled they were funded by the government and they they came back and said actually the supply chain crisis and that inflation is affecting the cost of the parts that we need to build this
• 30:30 - 31:00 and they just stopped building it it's just really not how it works you need the free markets permission essentially to uh fund such huge projects like that and I kind of wanted to Circle back to something that you said prior to this question I'm actually really glad that you acknowledged um older Generations namely baby baby boomers for their kind of role in in the current state of today and I've tweeted about this and sometimes it comes across wrong as I'm Generation Z so it it comes across as like I hate old people like I I'm a or something I'm really not I love my grandparents God bless them love my gen
• 31:00 - 31:30 exp parents God bless them but it's it's like we didn't raise ourselves you know like the the degenerate culture that is very prominent today had Boomer and and Silent generation and generation exp parents and we were left a government and left an economy um that was put in place by these people and obviously no no one person is individually responsible besides like I don't know Jerome Powell but it's it's like let let's be for real let's actually I I know we have like this whole
• 31:30 - 32:00 collectivism thing going on right now you know maybe we can have a collective response and just acknowledge the the the the the onus that all generations have because I think Generation Z I'll be the first one to say a lot of people We complain about no jobs or or no this or no that a lot of people just don't want to work you know I think that there's a lot of Truth to that a lot of people um like Maggie said they're not uh content with just you know living the life that our parents live having like a single starter home going buying average
• 32:00 - 32:30 clothes not having the latest fancy doohickey and all that kind of stuff like we we're not reaching satisfaction as easy as past Generations do so we feel like we have to buy more and get into more debt and just just just feel really depressed with our lives so I'm glad you said it because for the audience it'll come like it'll come across a lot better coming from you who who knows these Generations who's part of these Generations who can say yeah we we we got to we kind of have to like do better we all have to do better so while you were speaking was reminded of one of the most popular subreddits um are you
• 32:30 - 33:00 familiar with Reddit John okay oh yes awesome yes despite my gray hair and my Boomer status I know about yeah I I assumed you did um but it has 2.8 million members and it is the top in the top 1% of subreddits on Reddit our antiwork and their tagline is unemployment for all not just the rich it's an entire subreddit of people just complaining about work and wishing they
• 33:00 - 33:30 could be unemployed or something and survive and yeah there's definitely this idea that like it's not fair that we have to work to survive go back to the minds or something like it's just so ridiculous we we live better we sit on our computers we're professional yappers we talk for a living we give our opinions for a living we just sit here and we so blessed like what like like a generation ago we would
• 33:30 - 34:00 have been in the freaking Minds we would have died in the Triangle shirt Wass Factory okay so I just I just I by the way this is very close to satire right here this was almost satire we're we're professional yappers we sit and talk I mean there is there is satire out there about some of that because people complaining that they have to go into an office and actually produce something of a tangible nature the I I think this is actually a really interesting and important topic because everything we just talked about there in the last few minutes is a reflection of cultural
• 34:00 - 34:30 norms and how cultural norms are shaped uh I I I was on a call recently with a group of people who are all roughly of your generation or slightly older and one of the other people on that call were was my generation and after we got off the call we both looked at each other and kind of went ah Millennials and and it was it was a reflection hates talk so bad for the Millennials they are totally in the the vice grip of between
• 34:30 - 35:00 the generations but I don't even know either of us really knew what we meant other than you know when we were coming of age there there was not this touchy feely kind of thinking in the workplace now you went to work and you either produced and did well and you got some acknowledgement uh or you didn't and you were let go or you moved on or whatever but there was not this whole self-actualization mindset like where's my pleasure on the daily basis and can I just go home tonight and watch my show or today and not have to work today I think but so but this goes
• 35:00 - 35:30 to a deeper point the deeper point is about human fulfillment and people being uh uh propagandized that fulfillment comes from not working believe me I get plenty of uh leisure time I get plenty of vacation uh but I love my work and I work a lot the key thing is that in our society we've created this Norm that work is not bringing pleasure work is one of the most important ways that humans exercise their minds their
• 35:30 - 36:00 imaginations uh and build things which is part of the human construct as I said earlier and this idea that people should live a life of not working I can assure you that if you especially when you get to be my age and so I have a lot of friends who are retiring or retired not so long ago and there's really two categories of people and I think this applies not only to the retirees I'm about to talk about this applies to people in their 20s and 30s and so forth that who to work the people who retire who have a plan and stay busy either
• 36:00 - 36:30 with their Investments or a part-time job or a hobby volunteer work whatever those people live long fruitful fulfilling retirement lives for 15 20 years those people who can't wait to quit working and they're going to go sit on the couch and do the uh the baby boomer uh version of gaming I don't even know what that would be but they're gonna sit around and watch TV or maybe read a book and really Bingo there you go bingo and do nothing those people die quickly and unhappily uh and I think
• 36:30 - 37:00 that applies if you don't have something to occupy your your mental abilities and to pursue and to build you atrophy and I that's why I think and I think this is all part of culture people have been sold that not working is a good idea I think overworking is not a good idea I I do overwork but uh for most people in our in our society uh we have enough leisure time I think to to create a proper balance and finally on this subject I I will say that um these kind of conversations in this sentiment is strictly a western thing and
• 37:00 - 37:30 particularly an American thing you want to go to speaking of Western go to West Africa my friend ORF dang who was born in Gabon West Africa he said none of these things are happening there you know why because everybody's just trying to make a living keep a roof over their head they don't have the luxury of whining about not working they don't have the luxury of pan handling they don't have the luxury of children and gender dysphoria because everybody is just trying to survive at the basis of levels Prosperity brings room to think
• 37:30 - 38:00 about other things you know and that's exactly right yeah I mean we're spoiled and like what what's the how do how do spoiled children act it goes back to what you were saying earlier about people just just not feeling enough and just it's it's just so seductive to just the idea of just being on government welfare and it reminds me of how caged or um like uh entrapped animals act after they've been with humans for a long time like in a rehab center or just
• 38:00 - 38:30 you know farm animals um they live shorter lifespans they don't they're almost like unevolved even if even if they were born in the world they're almost unevolved in that they don't have the muscles they don't have the brain capacity they don't have like the hunter or even prey mindset they don't know how to get away from predators and things like that that's how humans act when we lean on the government you know we don't even prepare for the worst to happen because we're just like oh the government will take care of it like oh the farmer will bring me my food what happen happens when the farmer doesn't bring you your food yeah you I think I think what sorry I think what people are
• 38:30 - 39:00 missing is the heroes journey in their lives like usually your 20s are supposed to be about like setting out and grind time it's grind time but I I do think like I don't mean to be anti- technology I love technology and I think it's done amazing things for our world and we're so interconnected and everything but like we are just using our leisure time in a really negative way and like imagining our our
• 39:00 - 39:30 free time as like a bowl of coins like where are we throwing those coins right like what um what are we giving to and it's usually just like Mindless entertainment and so of course people feel like they don't have you know that time to self-actualize and do all of that stuff and it's because you know they're they're putting their energy and effort towards something that's like just really mindless and and
• 39:30 - 40:00 doesn't have any impact um it's interesting that you're talking about retirement my grandfather um who lives in North Georgia he retired and used to work in nuclear energy and he was very hardworking grew up very very poor um but over time he just worked very hard and you know made a really great life for himself and when once he retired he was just like chilling out at his farm
• 40:00 - 40:30 in the mountains and went I'm extremely bored and so he got a job at Ace Hardware at the gun counter in town and he love that loves it like obviously that wasn't ever going to be his career but like he loves talking to people about Firearms he has a sense of community he's working um and like he looks very young like you would not look at him and think oh he's retired um but
• 40:30 - 41:00 it's because he's like keeping himself Young by by like you know being part of the community and working um I do kind of want to transition if that's okay into talking about how um the government's influence um in our lives has kind of robbed us of this agency how it's created the jiny individual that's just like constantly asking for Stuff um I'm
• 41:00 - 41:30 curious what your thoughts are because I know in Illinois you have had several like school choice battles um do you think public schooling has a huge part to play um or even if it's just like a minor role what do you think public schooling is is doing to this generation I think it's indoctrinating them to a mindset that is very unhealthy I think uh it it blows me away what is going on in k through 12 public education today and the fact that the pandemic helped it become public and
• 41:30 - 42:00 people got to actually see transparently what's going on in their classrooms in a way they had not before I think it's been very healthy for the country the question is will it sustain itself and will people stay on it and what's been interesting is so far it seems to be doing that people it seems like a switch has flipped in in terms of people's mindset we're seeing the greatest success of the school Choice Movement that we've ever seen with more uh movement everywhere and I think what is particularly interesting about it in terms of the the intersection of politics and uh policy and education as
• 42:00 - 42:30 a specific example is red states are starting to do what blue states do which is red states are becoming much more aggressive in passing much more aggressive pro-conservative founding principle type of policies when they have political control one of my laws of politics is that when uh rep uh Democrats get elected even with the smallest of majorities they can't wait to imp their agenda and when Republicans get elected even with the largest of majorities they can't wait to equivocate
• 42:30 - 43:00 on their agenda and that is always you know people wonder why Donald Trump got elected that's one of the reasons Donald Trump got elected and still has a great following is because people felt he was going to actually do something and Republicans forever have been voting in people who do nothing or or only do it on the margins and are not bold are not audacious big dreaming thinkers uh whatever you may say about Trump he certainly has big Ideas um and that is appealing to a lot of people but what's happening now whether it's Governor Reynolds in Iowa what's going on right now in Alabama and certainly what
• 43:00 - 43:30 governor Abbott in Texas is doing I spoke to him at a republican Governor Association an event recently about uh the Republicans who are taking Teachers Union money who are blocking reforms that give more power to parents and where they children go to school he's now taking them out in primaries and hopefully he'll be successful like that much like Governor Reynolds was in Iowa we're seeing people take on the education bureaucracy and the teachers unions I think the teachers unions are clearly the most powerful political organization in the country uh they have more employees and members in that Union
• 43:30 - 44:00 and they permeate every aspect of our society because they're teaching our children and the teachers unions over you know the teachers union in 19 the 1960s when it was nent was very different than today's teachers unions which are radical leftist indoctrination vehicles through our public education system we actually pay them to indoctrinate our children with anti-American propaganda so I think it's been very important in producing these children who are coming out and then go on to protest with the most uh hateful and unbelievable points of view on our
• 44:00 - 44:30 college campuses today the controversy at Harvard and MIT and Penn are all Downstream of what's been happening in K through2 education because those Elite students are showing up those Elite universities they've been well prepared for what those professors want to IND doctorate them in further so it's a terrible problem and um going back to your starting this out with the question of agency I think one of the most uh outrageous things about the left's desire to put people in the dependency class and the grievance and
• 44:30 - 45:00 victimization culture is it's attack on human agency essentially what they're saying to you is that you are not a whole person you do not have full uh control of your destiny of your life your life is determinative based upon the identity we assign you you're a black woman you're a black man you're a Hispanic immigrant um you're obese uh your sexuality isn't mainstream you're unique and different terms of that all those things are burdens on you and only we can come in and fix it and you have
• 45:00 - 45:30 no agency I call it critting the dependency ceiling uh yes you give up you get some security in return for giving yourself over to them and giving up your agency but you create a fault ceiling on your upside potential and they want you to have that sense of false that false ceiling to limit your upside thinking and your dreams they want you to stay uh uh uh in their control and the other side that and part of that is appealing going back to our earlier conversation because it creates security and predictability and makes
• 45:30 - 46:00 you sort of feel good that you're being taken care of there are certainly times in my life particularly when I was going through uh uh the issue with my mother as I mentioned when I was a senior in high school she was U institutionalized for a fairly long period of time and uh I you know my brothers had all left so I was living home alone and I played football and my football coach came to talk to me and said you know you really can't live alone like this while your mom's gone and uh there's these three families that'll take you in friends of mine and their parents or you can come
• 46:00 - 46:30 and live with my wife and me my football coach is like 30 years old it's unbelievable and so I live live with my football coach the fall of my senior year and the point of that is you know when they came I can feel the emotion of it right now when they came you know that that you know I was sort of a victim of circumstance when they came to me and said we'll take care of you that felt good but you know when my mother got out of that institution it was time to go home and be with her and that's what I did and it was hard because she wasn't she was never better you know the
• 46:30 - 47:00 so you have to we have to build a society that does give people the hand on the shoulder and has empathy for the struggle that people have but we should never build a society that brings them into that permanent love of that dependence and that victimization we have to always even it requires a gentle push push them back to going in being uh humans of agency to control their own destiny and pursue their own dreams so I think he kind of answer like the next few questions we had because I I I
• 47:00 - 47:30 honestly just wanted to put in and specifically name Dei and ESG in terms of public schooling and its influence on the lack of agency that people have especially in corporations as well do you have any insight behind why Dei and ESG and those types of like diversity and Equity policies these Marxist cultural policies are being pushed forward with with with such Gusto and it's it's suddenly so popular because I feel like the a few years ago it was like CRT that's the new thing critical race Theory but now it's it's in
• 47:30 - 48:00 everything I mean I don't know if you've seen the uh controversies with Boeing and different airlines about oh their hiring practices whether they're hiring the best person for their job or because we've had like multiple malfunctions with the flights this year um I was just wondering if you had any insight be behind that like why the sudden big push and will it kind of expire will people just get tired of it and just move it move on with that uh before I address your question I have to just quickly mention the Babylon B cartoon on the Dei
• 48:00 - 48:30 hiring at United Airlines and others where they have a picture of this middle-aged white man in the pilot seat as the captain and it says it's a promotion that says for a $100 upgrade you can get get a middle-aged white man to fly your plan I just thought that was saw my pilot on the way here was a middle-aged white man and I said oh I feel like I've only had middle-aged white male Pilots yeah I I do think the problem is overblown there's not like a bunch there's nobody that I have never had a pilot that looks like me or as young as
• 48:30 - 49:00 me or anything like that so I don't actually think there're just hiring like any old person to be a pilot but I think in a world where Dei is so prevalent now especially in the last few years it is concerning it's a reasonable tired or concerned to have I think I think uh I'm gonna play a little bit more with the pilot story and then we'll come back to your question because it they're connected 15 years ago when I started seeing women pilots and young Pilots relative to my age uh black and white and uh Brown and everything in between
• 49:00 - 49:30 that was happening all the time they' walk walk by the cockpit and there' be a long-haired blonde woman you know oh my God there's a long-haired blond you know it was really striking I'd never seen that before when that first started happening I never ever had a doubt about her competence ever because this was 15 years ago I knew she was qualified to fly that plane and when the young guy was sitting in that seat and he looked like he was 25 but he was probably 30 32 33 I knew he was qualified to sit in that seat whether whatever the person's race was never ever occurred to me but
• 49:30 - 50:00 now it occurs to you because they're purposely saying we're going to hire people based upon their identity not based upon their qualifications whereas then when we lived life we knew people were in those chairs because they were qualified this is such a disservice to people of color to women uh to anybody that has been given an identity it's such a disservice because now that person sits there and there's doubt you wonder are they a diversity hire and are they as qualified as they should be or um or not uh and so the Dei there's two
• 50:00 - 50:30 aspects to why this has happened Olivia in answer to your question uh one is that critical race Theory Dei this is all an extension of Marxism and Marxist philosophy the reason they had to use race and eventually identity as the core uh uh element of their Marxist theory is because the original the original uh working theory of Marxism was that the proletariat the working class were screwed by the system and therefore they had a arise and unite to take on um uh
• 50:30 - 51:00 the wealthy uh what happened was capitalism was so successful that the working class started buying Cottages in northern Michigan and having ski boats and snowmobiles and jet skis at their second home while working in the factory you lose your revolutionary Zeal when you can go up to Woon Lake in pataski Michigan with your family and you're a blue collar person with a high school education that is pretty freaking great I meant to say freaking but somehow the other one came out a little bit more I
• 51:00 - 51:30 get your point and that's when people start to break it down and say well you're white you're straight you're heterosexual you know they they they they they get new victims you know so so that's the point is they they changed identity and originally race and now identity more broadly because that won't your economic status does not affect your victimization as they have put so that is one reason because they want and the reason they want that is because only the government can come in and properly fix those problems as they
• 51:30 - 52:00 Define it so that's part A Part B of why they're doing this is because of electoral imperatives uh back in 20 after the 2012 election I was fascinated by the post-election analysis particularly by people on the right Obama narrowly wins re-election against M Romney and what developed as a meme at the time was this idea of the blue wall that the Democrat Party had these states I forget how many of it was like 17 States or so that had gone Democrat every year from 1984 Andor 1988 through the 2012
• 52:00 - 52:30 election and those blue wall States comprised 242 of the 272 electoral votes you needed to win so I thought so then what was going on on the right the political right was whoever the Republican nominee is in 2016 is going to have to run the table on all the competitive swing States in order to win because they start out such a disadvantage Democrats only had to win a couple of extra States out of those swing states to to win presidency and I thought to myself Well everybody's going to focus on uh how do you how do you
• 52:30 - 53:00 compete in swing States I started to say well what is the weakness of the blue wall and I hired a researcher from the University of Pennsylvania to to research the blue wall for me so we went back and looked at the 2012 election and every election back in 1976 by demography and it revealed an amazing story which is uh the Democrat Party has become the party of blacks Hispanics single women Millennials and the wealthy educated it is no longer had no and so we this is we're we're writing
• 53:00 - 53:30 this in developing this in 2013 and what it showed when you looked at the demographics I I'll run through some 2012 numbers the numbers apply today similarly I just happen to remember the 2012 numbers better Obama won uh 93% of the black vote in 2012 he won 67% of single women he won 71% of Hispanics and he won 60 % of Millennials all those numbers were down slightly from his 2008 numbers when he had a much
• 53:30 - 54:00 bigger Victory um what's interesting about that uh is that he only won 39% of the white vote and if you take out white Millennials and white single women he won about 32 33% of the white vote So what had been happening roughly from 1980 until 2012 is the Democrat party started to realize that their electoral chances were improved when they had a massive turn out of black voters and got a huge super majority of them same thing with Hispanics same thing with single
• 54:00 - 54:30 women and same thing with Millennials and later they added Asians and LBGTQ um and that's why group identity is important to them because it's their memes to create fear and resentment to get people to register and vote and they get super majorities of them and the reason they have to do that with those particular demographic groups is they can't win elections if they don't so if the black vote shaves down to 85% if single women goes from 67 to 60% if Hispanics go from 71 to 65 62 63% and
• 54:30 - 55:00 so forth all the blue States in that blue wall become competitive and become purple states start to move to the right that's what Trump actually did in 2016 in Michigan in Wisconsin and in Pennsylvania and nearly pulled off Minnesota he narrowly lost Minnesota which people forget the reason Trump lost in 2020 you know by an even closer margin is because Trump did even better with minorities in 2020 but white uh affluent educated men who had voted Republicans switched and voted for Biden
• 55:00 - 55:30 because they were offended by uh Trump's nature so the 2024 election is going to play out in this way all over again so those two things electoral imperatives and um and uh the critical race Theory Marxism in the government as the instit the only one that can fix those grievances are the two reasons that this has all become part of the Lexicon and dominating our culture I'm really glad you brought up electoral demographics because I I feel like my family is a great example of of of kind
• 55:30 - 56:00 of how things change so uh I'm I'm from an interracial family both my parents voted for Obama than both my parents voted for Trump so you can kind of see um where moderates were were kind of appealed to we're from Maryland we're from right outside DC and we were so excited we I I remember I was very young when this happened but we were so excited in 2008 when Obama won and then I remember my dad over the years becoming angrier and angrier and just saying such a disappointment for the black community such a disappointment
• 56:00 - 56:30 for everybody he did nothing to help us nothing nothing at all and he's also a business owner and he and he works in homeland security and so he voted for Trump he was like I don't think Trump's going to start any new Wars I think Trump's going to be great for the economy and and that's kind of why he and my family kind of made that switch and I think that there's going to be a lot more especially black men um I think are going to be switching to Trump and more and more black men have been switching to Republican in in general but specifically Trump over time I think you made a great point that while the
• 56:30 - 57:00 Democrats are are the party of black Hispanic Asian lgbtq where does that leave whites because what Republicans have done is say we don't see color we don't like identity politics and that's great and I I think that's great in a Utopia in a in a perfect world but people do see color and the Democrats play by color and so that leaves poor whites specifically I think in a very interesting State because they need help help too there there are white hoods and white trailer parks and white neighborhoods in Appalachia and West
• 57:00 - 57:30 Virginia and things like that that are just as bad maybe even worse than you know some black hoods and some Hispanic neighborhoods and things like that but they don't really have anyone specifically naming them I want to help this group of people in this neighborhood they're whites they're being ignored by The Establishment there really is no one there's there's nowhere for them to go and so a lot of them do end up on welfare voting blue or being part of like a blue Union how do you combat that uh it's a great question it leads
• 57:30 - 58:00 to I mean I love this topic in general because I think it's a fascinating commentary on the The Human Condition and sort of where politics is today and also the Trump phenomena the um you know people are always mystified by Trump it's really not a mystery uh you know he truly has paid attention as you're describing now the Forgotten man the and woman uh the um going back to those numbers I'll use Illinois as an example but ratio-wise these numbers apply to all the blue states that we were talking about here uh all the sort of blue wall states that we're referring to in Illinois if you look at those four
• 58:00 - 58:30 groups uh uh African-Americans Hispanics single women Millennials those four groups as voting blocks in the 2012 election they cast votes I don't remember which is which but let's just say um Millennials were about 500,000 votes and then it raged up to uh um African-Americans I think were about 1.1 million votes and then the other two were somewhere in between those two there was 1.5 million white men in 2012 who didn't vote at all because they feel
• 58:30 - 59:00 disaffected and disenfranchised many of them are living in those trailers in those communities you're talking about and Trump's giving voice to those people who de feel disaffected and fr dis disenfranchised and not just men it's women too so uh part of I think what is happening though and to answer your question is and I think Trump actually said this to some again I'm not an advocate for Trump necessarily at all there's a lot I like a lot I don't like but I think the more important thing is what is the most important part of who you are as a human being the group identity assigned to you by somebody living in the affluent Northshore of
• 59:00 - 59:30 Chicago or your life situation and I would make the argument that for most people your father included Your Life situation trumps everything your identity is part of your whole and it is important and it absolutely must be seen and respected my maleness must be seen and respected my age must be seen and respected my beautiful Greek nose should be seen and respected and you can't help but see it but it's part of me right it's it's who I am and all of us have whatever that is about us that makes us
• 59:30 - 60:00 unique that the left wants to turn into the defining aspect of our personality and thus our our belief system what we need to do is say I care about you and the wholeness of you and what you want to do what your dream is and how we can create more opportunities to make your dream possible and I want to respect all that makes you an individual I see your color I see your uh gender I I frankly don't care too much about your sexuality unless we're at to baring a to Tuesday night and I've had three Bourbons otherwise I don't care you know that that's where it should be that's the province of that is in private life it
• 60:00 - 60:30 shouldn't be so much about public life from my view um so I I think that's how we address it we have to treat people as individuals you know the found I always go back to the founders you know the individual uh Reigns Supreme and then it's individuals coming together in voluntary cooperation and thus Collective action that creates the greatness that is the society okay I have a question um this is when I was like dying to ask you because I know you have so much experience with unions taking on unions we even talked about
• 60:30 - 61:00 teachers unions earlier um is are unions inherently antithetical to to Liberty like do they inherently cause issues with like an individual's ability to advocate for themselves within the workplace or is there some situation in a free market where unions can be just like a nice um um effective tool for workers to bargain with an
• 61:00 - 61:30 employer so it's inherent in the Constitution that people have a right to freely assemble with whomever they choose so the idea of people coming together to form a union voluntarily to do whatever they want to do whether it's to form a church whether it's to form a community group or con for form a work group that's going to go negotiate as a collective group uh with an employer uh is perfectly reasonable what is not reasonable and what makes today's unions not reasonable in my view not only anti-liberty but I think should be
• 61:30 - 62:00 unconstitutional is that unions are given the force of law because the Democrats passed laws the Davis bacon act and many others have since that allow unions to uh form a union and then have exclusive rights to collectively bargain with an employer that employer has to bargain with that Union once they're designated as the union for that employer I don't think that's right I think the employer should say I want to hear from six different Union groups and you all can compete to get my contract you can come to me collectively or you
• 62:00 - 62:30 can come to me as individuals but all of you can compete so that's part A is the employer requirement to exclusively bargain I think is what makes it anti-liberty and in my view anti-human and unconstitutional the second part of it is that unions are coercive um most of the people that are in unions today never signed up for the union it was members way back sometimes 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 years ago when the union was originally formed and there's never been a vote since if you're going to form a union every member of that Union should
• 62:30 - 63:00 have a right to opt out at the drop of a hat you know what this Union's been fantastic for me for seven years I want out I want to go do something different I actually want to negotiate individually or I'm gonna go get a different job I resign my union membership just like you resign your church membership or you resign a job that's how it should work if we had that in place with a few others um then I think uh the the power of the unions this of course why they don't want it it would devolve the power of the Union to the worker when the Janet versus as me
• 63:00 - 63:30 case was at the Supreme Court uh when I was a chairman of Liberty Justice Center which brought that case with Mark Janice as our plaintiff Mark was an amazing and courageous plaintiff uh worked for the state of Illinois and we go all the way to Supreme Court and uh so I was there twice I was there as part of the protests in support of Mark out in front of the Supreme Court uh the day it was heard in February I believe it was February 26 of 2018 then I was in the courtroom with Mark and Governor roner uh who played a very important role in making this case happen when the case was heard and came down what was
• 63:30 - 64:00 interesting about the day in February when the protest was going on is the unions were next door doing their protest right next to us on the steps and they sent some infiltrators over to try to disrupt our protest these two women ended up near me with their signs workers rights workers rights and I looked at our signs and I said look at our signs it says power to the worker so we want the same thing right we want and and I said I said what do you think this is about this this Supreme Court case is about and they didn't know I said but let me ask you a question who should
• 64:00 - 64:30 control your relationship with your union should you as an individual control your relationship with your union or should the union boss control you and Define your relationship with the union and they both kind of looked at me with that look like I think this is a tra question but I can't help but answering it like they said I think I should control it I said then you should be protesting over here you're on our side because we want to give power to you to Define your relationship with the Union and they kind of sheepishly went back because you don't change your tribe so easily but they went back over and it was just a really revealing moment about
• 64:30 - 65:00 the nature of unions and what they do to people unions are very much like what we've been talking about the government they subjugate them and take away their agency yeah I suspect you planted a real seed of Doubt for those women and and like you said like the the herd mentality is not so easily broken but um yeah I I just wanted to clarify that with you because I know you've had a lot of experience um and and I it's been really interesting to watch what's been happening in the strikes and negotiations within Hollywood um I'm not
• 65:00 - 65:30 sure if these unions are compulsory memberships but um they are but I haven't I don't mind like the idea that a group could you know bargain with the big bosses in Hollywood but I do mind that a lot of actors and screenwriters were forced to sit on the side guidelines and not work for a really long time lest they be bullied and outcast in the industry that they want
• 65:30 - 66:00 to grow in that seems really unfair to me um and I actually know several um actors who were very like they were scraping by out of work because they weren't allowed to go on set for for several several months so that's insane yeah yeah there's a lot of social pressure within are are these people like you know from like around Atlanta yeah Atlanta is a big filming Hub um a lot of people don't know that there's a lot of studios here Tyler Perry actually
• 66:00 - 66:30 has oh yeah a big studio and and state out in uh like south of Atlanta um I I do know that because I'm involved with a studio in Atlanta I do some Consulting work for them and also uh you should know that Georgia I'm sure I don't know this for a fact but I can now say with certainty that Georgia probably gives film subsidies tax credits right that is which artificially which artificially created a market in Atlanta right it would be fun to see if it would exist the same way if there was
• 66:30 - 67:00 no film subsidy might exist someplace else yeah huh that's that's actually interesting I want to look into that because you know there could be other cities where um it would be better suited I do know there's like a lot of creatives here in general like pre pre the the big kind of like Hollywood esque boom but I know that before we wanted to wrap up you wanted to bring up the billion question right yes so I've heard that you have an interesting Theory and proposal for the United States to get us to 1 billion can you explain to us why
• 67:00 - 67:30 we should pursue 1 billion citizens in the United States and what kind of methods we should take to get to that population growth well the first thing we should do is secure the Border uh we have to have a secure Border in the modern 21st century for all the reasons I think most people understand you know there are a few open border people I'm certainly not one of them I don't think you can preserve Liberty in the American founding and the American miracle if you don't control your border so the way I put that is that we should put the same rules in place at the Canadian and the
• 67:30 - 68:00 Mexican border as we have at JFK or O'Hare or LAX or any other International Airport when you come off a plane from another country and you're uh have a foreign passport you go through customs and border control and go through a normal process and if you have a visa to to apply for citizenship you go through that normal process that's what we should do along our borders but having said that now that we've done that I think the United States uh as a culture not a government uh should create a strategic goal of getting to a billion people by the end of the century for a very simple
• 68:00 - 68:30 reason uh prior to 1900 really the the the new frontier was geography driven right the settlement of the continent and the settlement of the planet which is largely now settled so our ambition cannot be pursued in terms of more land mass other than space travel which is a long-term thing which I think we should pursue but where where is the New Frontier the New Frontier is human capacity the greatest natural resource on Earth is a human being and human beings when you are in a growth mode uh
• 68:30 - 69:00 create the greatest miracles of invention and creativity on Earth uh whether it's medicines that save people's lives and improve people's lives whether its inventions that improve our quality of life and expand our mental and emotional uh and recreational Horizons it all stems from somebody who has an idea as an entrepreneur to create an invention that does something very simple which is serving other people well the essence of the founding of this country is that entrepreneurs start a business with a singular purpose which is to serve other
• 69:00 - 69:30 people well when they raise the capital to start that business their own or others what do they do with that Capital they hire people and put them to productive work that is Meaningful and they grow and they build for the purpose of serving others well it is the greatest Service Enterprise ever created in the human sphere to improve The Human Condition and we need that is the greatest natural resource people to make that system work in the in the world uh you have roughly speaking China and India tied with about 1.3 billion people and we are in a
• 69:30 - 70:00 global competition most certainly with China and they have a huge people Advantage they have a billion people more than we do and so as the demographic dynamics of China play out in the rest of the 21st century they're going to actually shrink for all reasons that most of your viewers probably know so the United States actually has a strategic advantage through immigration to add to our pop population strategically to put us in a better comp position economically and thus from a Global Security point of view uh ensure
• 70:00 - 70:30 our security at the middle to end of the 21st century and not be surpassed by China and perhaps even subjugated by China so we should have a very thoughtful uh diverse approach to immigration we should welcome people from every continent from every country but we're not obligated to bring people in you know we don't have to bring people in from Iran if they want to kill us we don't have to bring people in from China who want to infiltrate us and steal our technology but we can bring people in from everywhere we should be bring bringing people in from Central
• 70:30 - 71:00 America and South America from Eastern and Western Europe from Asia I mean we should even bring in some penguins from Antarctica I mean we should bring people from everywhere and we should get to a billion people and it's not as insane as it sounds if you actually look at the growth at 3 and 30 million people it's a fairly modest growth per year and yes I do believe there should be some requirements and demands where you have to assimilate and become American we don't want to balkanize the country Spanish and America are sort of our two do languages we don't need more that's enough and let's uh make sure that
• 71:00 - 71:30 people become Americans my grandfather came over from uh Greece in 1909 I believe was the year and there was no greater honor for that generation of immigrants into to become America American rather and we have to go back to that mindset as opposed to coming here like Alan Omar in Minneapolis who never becomes an American oh goodness guys make sure you say some not Somalian right I'm assuming you saw the speech that she gave to a crowd of Somali where she was basically saying she's she's
• 71:30 - 72:00 Somalia first so you know shout out to Anan Omar love you um actually we don't but um okay so it's it's interesting that you brought up um basically immigration from all corners of the world what about uh increasing our birth rates because I've been personally very concerned about American birth rates you know falling below replacement level I believe it's below two it's like 1.1 or 1 point something per family it's the curse of affluence right because you know you know especially with with women we know both of us are in our careers a
• 72:00 - 72:30 lot of women they they simply wait too late um or by the time they do have kids they're just able to have less kids they they're having two and three instead of both um uh my grandfather and my grandmother both had eight to 10 siblings so it's kind of like one of those things where it's just it's just not normal to have a lot of kids and personally I would prefer the population to goow to a grow to a billion through increasing our birth rates I mean we can have you know merit-based immigration and all that kind of stuff but I would just want to put uh increasing our family sizes kind of at the Forefront of
• 72:30 - 73:00 that population growth conversation what's your take on that uh well I'm a fan of that uh the replacement birth rate is 2.1 you have to have 2.1 births uh in order for every uh um woman in order to have a replacement uh birth rate uh the United States has for the first time Fallen below 2.1 we I think we're around 1.8 right now we're not in quite the crisis situation of Italy and Jaan who are down around 13 and you can look and see in those countries what is happening those countries are literally atrophying and and shrinking and losing
• 73:00 - 73:30 their Innovative Edge and as a result of that that that is why uh you the the best natural resource is people people create Innovation and growth people create uh human fulfillment that's why we want to grow our population I am a big fan of trying to do it this way but what I don't want to do is do it through government intervention and government social engineering we want to do it through two ways one is culture and how we talk about the the joy of Parenthood and the rewards of Parenthood as opposed to some of the self- involved uh I'm
• 73:30 - 74:00 only going to have one child or no child I think you know that's right for some people we had one child we tried to have more but because of what you just said we started late my daughter was born when I just just shorted my 40th birthday and my wife is a little younger than me but still there's a cliff as you probably know it's very hard for women on average to have babies after 35 so um so I think we need to change the way we talk about in the joys of Parenthood and Parenthood is a joyful exper experience not without its challenges but it's joyful the second thing though is that our entire tax scheme and the way we tax people and families is actually anti-
• 74:00 - 74:30 procreation not in a religious sense but we the we tax people the opposite of the way we should what happens right now is you two in your 20s are being taxed at whatever your particular marginal rate is as you're at the beginning of your climb in terms of income by the time you get to your 30s and 40s when your income uh uh will rise what happens is as your income goes up of course you're tax at a higher marginal rate right around $40,000 the marginal rate goes to 22% and I think it's somewhere around
• 74:30 - 75:00 $80,000 it goes up even more I forget what it is maybe 30% and the whole that that is evil because what happens is when you're in your 30s and 40s is right when you have an opportunity to do family formation have the kids pay for the kids get a house two cars two three cars all of that sort of thing all of that is happening at the same time the government is taking a larger portion of your marginal uh your marginal uh income we should do the opposite the way it should work is so long as you're putting 15% of your money into a retirement account and saving uh you don't pay any
• 75:00 - 75:30 taxes at the beginning of like right now you should be paying zero taxes and then when you're 50 and you've accumulated this nest egg and you've had marginal income that wasn't taxed to pay for that house and pay for those kids and so you have more liquidity you'll be more open to having that third child or that fourth child because the government's taking so much now when you're in your 50s and now you've got a couple million dollars in the bank because you've been saving all that time now you pay a very high tax rate should be a flat tax rate but now you pay a very high tax rate at the peak of your earning power for the last 20 years that's what we should do to change the way this works and itth R
• 75:30 - 76:00 I like this Tax Solution personally me too me too because to your exact point it's it's just making it so much harder for when you're trying to build your life it it's setting people up to only be able to financially have kids in in their 40s which is just so unrealistic and like my parents they started kind of late my mom has three kids I was born when she was 35 and I'm the oldest and she had my brother when she was 41 so she's very much an outlier not everybody can do like that is is is really just ridiculous and so imagine how much worse the situ situation will be not even our
• 76:00 - 76:30 generation maybe not even generation Alpha but the like our my grandchildren I mean it just if the Federal Reserve if inflation keeps going the way we're going if the tax situation just keeps going the way we're going I mean okay maybe I do want maybe I do want a billion people just to fight against this so that provides some hope I guess I do think so the conservatives claim they have a solution for this right which is a child tax credit or some kind of welfare system
• 76:30 - 77:00 where people are being paid for children guess what people have done that before Argentina did that and what ended up happening was a bunch of people moved to Argentina got on the welfare system had a ton of babies so that they could get more welfare money and now the economy is crashing like in a really really really significant Dreadful way um and those benefits are eventually going to get taken away and here you have a generation that's been been created by
• 77:00 - 77:30 dependency so it's just it's a really it's a huge recipe for disaster I I agree that most of this needs to be cultural and then we need to make sure we aren't disincentivizing people through the tax system culturally I think we should just be encouraging more religiosity and more like community community orientation I think like the again the phones the dating apps like none of this is encouraging uh the kind of dating
• 77:30 - 78:00 culture that's that results in marriage and I think that's really where the issue comes in and and to your point they've they've replaced all of these good things Community Church family babies with just government with phones with dating apps with quick satisfaction with with SNAP benefits with food stamps and all that kind of stuff that's kind of my takeaway from this from from a lot of our our our conversation John is just the the disconnect that the government has created between people and the dire
• 78:00 - 78:30 dire need to repair those bonds to get to that 1 billion population and I started this conversation being like why would I want one billion people to live in this country but I'm thinking about it more it's like first of all we have the space you know we're we're a huge country we're a large country we do have the space and to your point I mean we have China India they they they have out CH Us by a billion you know and and we are below or we're we're nearing below uh or dire replacement rates it's
• 78:30 - 79:00 actually serious and they're going to start dropping in population but so are we right and that's going to become an issue um either way before we wrap up do you have any other words of wisdom um to impart on us before before you leave uh no I don't have any particular words of wisdom I do have words of encouragement I think the show is amazing I can't wait to watch uh it I had not watched it previously so I'll be diving into some of your past episodes and paying attention to make sure I get on your distribution list and I do I do
• 79:00 - 79:30 think that the the the hope of the country rests very much with people like you people who are uh uh going to be activist and committed to the cause of Liberty and building organizations to take back the commanding Heights of the American cultural narrative that is where the action is and I encourage you and all your friends and colleagues and anybody watching to think about how can get involved in the movement where we can control not not control but rather take back the commanding Heights of the American cultural narrative in media
• 79:30 - 80:00 among influencers and of course uh among the American people well thank you so much because I feel inspired I think Maggie feels more inspired now and uh and thank you for for coming on the show and I would just say this has been one of the better episodes so don't maybe don't have the highest hopes for some of the other ones no no we have great episode we do but this is one of the best because of you cuz you're you're a great guest and I hope our viewers and listeners also feel inspired so thank you very much well thank you both for
• 80:00 - 80:30 the opportunity and I look forward to sharing a Manhattan with you at some place down the road well thank you so much John I know I'm inspired I think Maggie's inspired as well I agree with your 1 billion population points and I would just like to say thank you to the viewers for watching don't forget to hit that like button subscribe comment share your thoughts ask any questions and we will see you next time on indoctrination bye [Music]
• 80:30 - 81:00 bye