The Great Lockdown & How to Enrich Your Mind through Collaborative Truths

Hi, this is Dan Sullivan and just give you a little bit of preview of our upcoming podcast in the Capability Amplifier series with Mike Koenigs. And we're going to talk about the last two years. And I am putting forward a way that's kind of a little bit different from what's actually happened around the world. And I call it the Great Lockdown. And it's without reference to the virus. I'm not going to talk the virus. I'm not going to talk about, you know, the medical thing. I'm just going to talk about the degree to which those who are in control, politically in control, could restrict the activities and the behavior of.

Large part of the planet. And I have some ideas why this happened and why the virus wasn't the cause for it. The virus was the opportunity for certain people to actually put a clamp on other people's activities. So that's what I'm doing. Strangely enough, Mike Koenix had some different viewpoints, not arguing with me, but totally different viewpoints. And so you'll see at a certain point that I'm going to be very, very shocked that he doesn't think exactly the way that I do.

Ouch. Ooh, ouch. I know. And we're still talking. Imagine that. So if you enjoy controversial topics like truck, Dr. Trudeau.

Oh, chaos in the streets, people seizing bank accounts and crypto accounts and all kinds of shenanigans, you will love this episode because Dan really does go deep. And as usual, you're going to understand how he thinks and how you can create some mental frameworks and models, even if you don't agree with either of our point of views. All that and more in this episode of Capability Amplifier.

Hi, this is Dan Sullivan and I'm here with Mike Koenix. And this is the Capability Amplifier podcast episode. I don't know, it's in the millions.

Over the hundreds.

Yeah, over the hundreds. And a really interesting time for us to do this particular.

Particular podcast, because just out in the world right now, it's kind of like it's becoming very difficult for government authorities to be taken seriously, that we still have to have the mask, mandates and everything else. And everybody, you know, a lot of people, that a lot of governments are just dropping the laws because they know they won't be obeyed anyway. And so this is really fascinating, and it occurred to me.

Recently, not, you know, maybe a month or so, that what's happened over the last two years won't be remembered as the virus. It'll be remembered for the lockdown So I call it the Great Lockdown. So, Mike, that's my feeling. I think it's our lasting memory will not be of the virus, it will be of the lockdown.

Yes. And what's going on, at least at this moment, is we've had the trucker movement up in Canada. There are rebellions going on. Depending on which narrative you listen to or believe or trust. It's either a small minority or it's the feelings of many. But you said something I found very interesting and intriguing when we were at Genius Network together, and that was, this could be a pivot point. It could be a mental pivot point in history. And there's also. You have some insights with Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau because you're a dual citizen.

And then just to add a little bit of intrigue on this, I sent out a message today to Ed Rush. We were talking about him earlier, and he wanted me to just throw out there the notion that the Canadian Prime Minister invoked emergency powers. They started seizing bank accounts, and that also included crypto accounts that the government went and grabbed, which technically aren't seizable unless you really know what you're doing, which a lot of people think, oh, I've got crypto, I'm safe. Well, no, if you got all your stuff saying Coinbase or one of the platforms, the government can come take your stuff anytime they know it exists. It's only when you really know how to create what's known as cold storage. That's a deeper conversation than we have time for, but I'd like you to kind of go down the rabbit hole of, first of all, the symbolic meaning of the truckers, what you believe is going on, your views on Trudeau, and also how this is going to affect US worldwide, not just in this concentration, because this could be the tip of the iceberg or a lever and some dials that represent the mentality or thought process of many, many people, not just the groups who are there.

Yeah. Well, just to talk about the dual citizenship for a second, I moved to Toronto in 1971 for a job offer.

And it was easy in those days if you had a job offer in writing. You came to the border, you showed to the immigration officials, and they gave you a little slip of paper that had an address. You went there the next day, you filled in some forms, and six weeks later, you had your equivalent to green card. So I've been here for more than 50 years, and it's not so much Canada that I came to, but Toronto is for my liking. It's a really neat city. It's just, you know, it's just kind of. I'm a northern guy, so I like four seasons weather, the winter, you know, I have no problem. I grew up in Northern Ohio, where we had more or less the same kind of winters that we have here and anything. But it's given me, you know, not that I was trying to do this, but it's given me kind of an interesting perspective at life in the United States because, you know, I'm not far away. But you're in another culture. You're in another.

Another form of government. And. And a lot of Americans don't know this, but when the Declaration of Independence occurred and the. The Revolutionary War.

You know, ensued from that, the result of the War of Independence actually created two countries. It created the United States, which were the colonies that declared their independence and broke away. But it also created Canada, which were the same kind of British colonies, but they stayed, okay? So out of the same event, two countries were created. And they're different. They're very, very different from each other. They think differently. And part of it is that.

You know, they're much further north. You know, I mean, and northern countries tend to be more socialized than Southern. You can't. You know, you can be, you know, you can live your life anywhere you want in, you know, in Mississippi or Alabama, but you can't freeze to death. You know, for the most part, I mean, might be. You might be caught by surprise, but when, you know, half the year, you have a good chance of dying, of freezing, you have to group together and you have to have communal rules. And so it's not so much like it's socialism for Marxism, but it's socialist for survival. You know, you can't do it alone at this height of northern. So I'd just like to establish that. But the other thing is, fundamentally.

Americans.

See government as a necessary evil, okay? Even where you support government, you see it as an unfortunate.

Necessity. Canadians have a totally different. They have a more respectful. They have a sort of a positive attitude towards government. So I'd like to say that. And the other thing, it's an entirely different form of government. It's a modified parliamentary form like Great Britain and the United States. And.

It'S a totally different kind of governmental system. We have at any time, we have at least three. We could have as many as five political parties involved, and the rules are totally different. How one becomes the leader is totally different. Everything about it is very, very different.

And the other thing is, it's a much more urban environment. If you take the entire Canadian population, 70% of the population lives in 10 cities. Okay, okay. In the United States, I mean, there's just vast expanses of people who aren't in cities. So there's just a lot of things different. A lot of things different. And the biggest difference is that 90% of all Canadians live within 100 miles of the United States. So you think of that big country up above. It's actually a ribbon about 100 miles high, that's 3,000 miles away. And Canadians, for the most part, spend a disproportionate amount of their time thinking about the United States. The average Canadian spends a disproportionate amount of their time being bombarded by images from the United States and thinking about the United States. And the average American spends absolutely no time whatsoever ever thinking about Canada.

And that's a point of real grievance on the part of Canadians. It's like it's big brother, little brother. And the big brother never knows anything about the little brother. And the little brother knows everything about the big brother. So, anyway, that's it. And I've enjoyed it. I love it here. It's a wonderful place to create a company. Because.

If you've got a really good job in Toronto, there's no place else in the country really to go. So mobility is much lower. The other thing is that the health care, the healthcare system here has an enormous advantage, is that it goes with you. It doesn't matter where you are, you take the healthcare. So it actually is very supportive of entrepreneurism. You can start an entrepreneurial company and you have healthcare and all your workers will have healthcare.

Which is not a small thing, it's actually an important thing. But the type of health care system that they have here is absolutely impossible in the United States, you can only do it because it's a relatively small country. And the way that it's organized. Covid.

Or the lockdown. Okay, so looking at Canada, what I've seen of Canada, looking at the United States, because we operate in both countries, and then looking at the UK because we operate in the United Kingdom, we get reports back from our team members. So we're up to date with a lot of the restrictions. And I would say of the three countries, the Canadians have handled it worse. They've absolutely handled it worse. And it has to do with the fact that Canadians get. It's not so much that they give politicians more respect and authority, but they give unelected government bureaucrats more respect and authority than the United States do. So the equivalent in Canada of Dr. Fauci. Nobody doubts the equivalent up here.

I got to thinking.

The opportunity to do a lockdown was rapidly seized by government everywhere. Seems like government everywhere just seized the opportunity to lock things down and to control things and to mandate masks. So that's my thesis, Mike. That's my thesis on it. That the lockdown itself is closer to the central purpose of government than whatever they had to do in relationship to.

A pandemic or anything like that. I think that was simply the opportunity which allowed them to follow through with a bigger purpose that they actually have.

Yes, I'd like to go down that. There's three paths that show up for me. One of them is I just want you to reflect on and talk a little bit about the trucker movement, because I think that in itself is an interesting.

Thing. On the origin, there's a lot of speculation and talk about. Well, it was basically United States sponsored. It was politically motivated. The money came from political places, and it was designed to create division. And there's an old saying, something along lines in politics, which is, never let.

A good.

Crises never waste a good crises. Is that the one you're taking?

No, this was about a crisis. Yeah, crises. That's right. So that's one. The other thing I just want to seed your mind with, and it may or may not be connected. I'm going to remain apolitical in this one for now. I was just. I mentioned this in the previous episode. I was at Wizard Academy. I met a woman who.

Had been hired to do audits. Her background's in auditing. And she went in. And when the lockdown happened, the other thing that happened, there was enormous amount of graft from China.

From Russia, and also various mafias, drug traffickers that use this as an opportunity to.

Buy.

Masks and all sorts of products and basically play funny money, where they were selling them multiple times to the government.

And the previous administration were laundering. They were laundering there it was massive.

Laundering and enormous amount of corruption. And that even went to the Saudis. And she got threatened multiple times. And I haven't verified this, but it made for an interesting story. Okay. And so I'm curious, to me, the tell I'll make is it seems to me that it's money, sex and power, okay? And no one in power is ever going to want to give up power. And it gives you access to all the others, you know, plenty of sex and plenty of money when you've got power. And power is more valuable than Anything. And this was. If there ever was a perfect opportunity to create a crisis and grab power, this is it.

So I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I just want to get back to the truckers and the pivot and what you think went on there. So.

Well.

A lot of people, you know.

And I vote a certain way and I'm fairly consistent of how I vote. You know, my whole life I voted straight ticket in the United States and I voted straight ticket here in Canada.

But even people on my side are spooked, you know, like, you know, you know, I mean, they say, and.

It'S like, you know, we're helpless, we're five years away from losing our freedom. So I said, well, that's an interesting point of view, but what if it's just the opposite, that the really frightened people are the people who are imposing the controls and are imposing all those restrictions.

That you think you're scared about things. You can't even dream of how scared they are. And it has to do with a different topic, Mike, and it has to do with artificial intelligence. And that is if you look at where artificial intelligence actually immediately replaces employment, it's not at the blue collar level at all. I mean, first of all, blue collar, there's no need to replace blue collar workers because they're good at what they do. You know, they fix things, they create things. They think all of the. If you're going to use artificial intelligence to increase productivity in an organization, you get rid of all the bureaucracy. You get rid of the bureaucracy, okay? Because.

They schedule meetings so that they can have more meetings. They push words. They push words from here to there.

They don't have deadlines, they don't have accountability. They don't have scorecards to say whether they're a really successful bureaucrat or not successful. They have these huge processes which every year require more money to get less done.

And it's the artificial intelligence that's being applied everywhere in the world to replace.

Inefficiency and non productivity and work that isn't. So what if there's a. And I'm not saying that the bureaucrats here understand this, but I'll take an example. The New York Times building is a major building on Times Square. Times Square in New York. And 20 years ago, if you visited that building, let's say it had 30 floors that, you know, was the New York Times newspaper, every one of those forests would have been totally packed with people doing some part of the process to put out the daily New York Times if you did the same 34s today, 15 of them would be completely empty.

Okay. And you go to any. And that's a marketplace bureaucracy. So that's a, you know, that's a private corporation. And the same would be true with all the public corporations, but it would not be true of the government bureaucracies. The government bureaucracies. If they were 30 floors before, they had filled up those 30 floors in that building and they had 15 floors more. So there's been a, what I would say a huge increase of bureaucrats in the public sector at the federal, the state and the municipal level. And these individuals.

Are unionized. A lot of them are unionized. And they negotiate. When you have a labor contractor negotiation in government bureaucracies, it's.

Government workers negotiating with other government workers for pay scale. So there's no accountability, there's no marketplace accountability for. And my perception is that government has generally gotten worse. You know, like we used to have twice weekly, you know, garbage pickup here in Toronto. We still have. And one week they'll pick up garbage and the next week they'll pick up plastics and, you know, they have two, two different bins and everything like that. The educational. The two areas where it's worse is the educational sector. And a lot of. And I feel a little sympathy for the teachers and the principals, but the problem isn't there. It's in the administration. It's the vast levels of administration that they have. And I haven't the foggiest idea what these individuals are doing. So what if the whole lockdown was really.

And again, I don't think this is a planned out conspiracy. I think it's just a mass of really spooked people.

Getting an opportunity to stop things.

Let's just stop things. Let's just stop whatever it is that's going on. Let's just stop it.

And I was saying. And I think that they're just spooked. And I said there's something that the government does not want you to know. And they say, what is it? And I said that they don't know. Yeah. What don't they know? They don't know anything. Yeah, yeah. They used to be the most informed people in the world. They had information networks. They had information networks. Do you think that there's ever. Do you think there's any more. Any government network that knows more than you do? When you look at Google or any of the sites, I bet every one of our entrepreneurial clients has got 10 information sites that they conduct. And together that's More information than government agencies have in terms of decidable actionable information. And my sense is that the entire upper echelons of bureaucracies and that's why the corporations are going weird right now too. Because the corporations so many of the people who work in the head offices and that they're kind of worthless and they don't want anything happening out there that points shines the light or puts the spotlight on the fact is they're not needed. Yeah, these are over educated underachievers.

So anyway that's my thesis and that worldwide this would, I mean the way things are run today in one country from a bureaucratic standpoint is exactly the same. The uk, Canada, the United States. The way bureaucracies, government bureaucracies operate, there's no difference in the way they operate. And I think.

It'S the great shakeout that's happening and they had a crisis on their hands where they could just stop things. Let's just stop things to do this. Unfortunately you can't stop things because.

Crucial products and services have to be delivered regardless of what you try to do. And wherever you see vital things being.

Delivered. What's always involved in that. Delivery truckers.

Yep.

Massive trucks, medium sized trucks, small trucks, delivery trucks. It's all about trucks. It's all about trucks, you know. And so.

What happened at a certain point the truckers and this all came from one decision. So the trucker thing in Canada all came from one decision and that is that trucks coming from the United States into Canada.

The truck can't come if the driver wasn't fully vaccinated according to Canadian rules. Yep.

And the truckers say we've been doing this nonstop since the whole thing started and people have been coming and you're stopping it now. And our livelihood on this side of the border depends on the individuals on the other side of the border being able to cross the border or we don't have work. And so they said well they stopped us and they're stopping us. Why don't we drive all our trucks to Ottawa and stop them?

So here's where again that's my thesis.

That's my thesis. And the virality of their example, it spread to 30 countries way tells me that they're hitting a major nerve in global society.

So it's spread to 30 countries.

And here's here are some. Again I don't know what to believe because I don't believe any side. It's more of like what I do from one of my sources of information is I read Just about everything. And I do it all at once, once a day, like my entertainment at night, look at the headlines, goes through Washington.

See Wall Street Journal, the Post, New York Times. Just like mainstream headlines, first of all, I just sift and see what do they think is important. And then I hit Reddit and dig through that, because I found in Reddit there's a news tab, there's my tab, and then there's the popular tab. If you look at what's popular, you can see what's kind of up on surface. And then on the news, it's what's showing up that's popular. And then if you dig in to some of the content, there's usually the usual just garbage. But then, generally speaking, there's someone who says, I'm so and so. I've been a sociologist for this much time, or an economist, and here's the data. And you can usually find someone who seems sane and can point to some what looks like research.

Mm.

So for this, it's been hard to unravel and decode. There's. Because there's a lot of emotion behind it. But what I had heard and seen multiple times is they say, well, 90% of American truckers are already vaccinated.

And that's true. That's true in Canada, too, by the way.

Okay. Yeah. It's actually higher than the average.

The truckers have a higher vaccination rate. And the one is they can't afford to be down. You know, the truckers, you know, can't afford time off. You know, even if they work for a company, they have essentially an independent contract. They're not employees, really. You know, in the normal, you know, normal way that most companies have employees. And the cost of gasoline, you know, the fuel has just gone through the roof. Yeah.

No, it seems to me they're just screwed no matter what, because if they're. Yeah, they're basically being financed. Someone's giving them some money to be up there and raise a ruckus or like.

I grew up, my next door neighbor, my best friend when I was three years old, is still a truck driver. He's 55, still driving trucks, and he loves it. But those guys don't make any money. I mean, you can't really.

They have to buy their own rakes, and they're A couple hundred thousand, you know, they're in debt. Oh, yeah, Yeah. I mean, they'll pay off their house before they pay off their rig, you know.

Yeah. And no.

Yeah. And then they've got to grow and take on, they're basically like farmers in a lot of ways. The amount of debt and risk a farmer takes on is insane. And then you really are a bitch to the markets. And that's like whatever direction distribution is taking, they're going to figure out how to squeeze the maximum amount out of commodity behavior. So they're, they're human, human commodities. It's, it's not that much different than working in a meat processing plant, you know.

And, and so with that, I guess I'm curious.

There's the symbolism here that you and I have talked about. Meaning. Like there's clearly a movement of. I've had it up to here and there's a movement that clearly got momentum and it captured the minds hearts of a lot of people. Yeah. So I'm curious, you know, when you reflect on that.

Not from a conspiratorial point of view, but what symbolically is happening?

Well, there's a fundamental truth that has been revealed that during normal times, most people don't think about. But if the truckers worldwide stop, the world stops.

Okay.

If the politicians worldwide stop, very few people know.

The difference.

And that seems like a. Yeah.

But they do important things. And I said, name one important thing that you can think of that political body has done that wasn't crises related. You know, in other words, it's important. It's important. It wasn't right, but it was important. In other words, it inconvenienced you had stopped things by count. The, the prime minister of our particular country who is, you know, he's, you know, in this age of, you know, male hierarchy and white hierarchy. I'm trying to think of a more privileged white male on the face of the earth than our Prime Minister. His father was prime minister, his mother was almost a movie star. Her hangout was with the Rolling Stones and she was in the news, everything.

And his ascendancy to the prime ministership was through 150 doors that got open for him and everything. And I can't think of a single significant thing. He's in his seventh year and I can't think of a single significant thing that he's done that made the country a better place. Okay? So.

What I think is that he has a mortal fear of this being found out. And he's given us a lot of proof of it over the last year. First of all, he completely disappeared for 10 days when it happened, he just disappeared. He wasn't there. And then he came back and in his very first sentence, his very first paragraph, he kind of Gave you the total.

Proof that he didn't know what to do. And he invoked Godwin's Law. Do you know what Godwin's Law is?

No.

Godwin's Law is where you have no credible argument, so you call your opponent either Hitler or a Nazi. The first person to bring up Hitler has just lost the debate. You have no proof. You have no proof whatsoever. And he did that his first time back. In his first paragraph, he says, these people have swastikas. They have swastikas. Godwin's Law just lost.

Godwin's law.

Minus 10.

I love that.

And the truckers, meanwhile.

No one was injured.

Nobody was killed.

There may have been some accidental property damage, okay? But you have to understand, Ottawa is not a natural city. It's a created government city. It has one business, which is government. And so all the people in convenience were government bureaucrats, okay? And they're just terrified because.

They didn't know that these type of people, people who actually do things, they haven't really hung out with people like people who actually do things. And they were all ages, they were all colors, they were all nationalities.

You know, some of them looked really buff and some of them were fat. And they brought their children with them. They brought their wives with them. They, you know, they had barbecues. They, you know, they had everything. And all they wanted was that the prime minister come out and talk to them. And he wouldn't come out and talk to them. And to this day, he hasn't talked to him, talked to them. You know, I mean.

But when they had a Black Lives Matter big protest in Ottawa, he was out there early in the morning and late at night, and he would kneel to the black Lives flag and everything like that. So there's, you know.

There'S protesters that he likes and there's protesters that he doesn't like. Okay? But I will tell you this, that the moment that you move across the line and enter into the banking system and you start seizing people's bank accounts, and if they arrest you, they will take your pets away from you and the pets will be put into a compound. And after eight days, your pets are no longer yours.

Really, you've crossed a line. And I think he's totally crossed a line. And I don't think there's any way for him to get back across the line.

You'll be remembered. This will be. That's why I think it was. I used the word tipping point because this is a tipping point. I mean, you can. The other thing was that really scared them. They ordered the government of Ottawa to call all the towing companies and bring the tow trucks to pull away the people. And none of the tow companies. Well, that's not, we don't do that kind of business. That's not, that's not our line of business. Yeah, yeah, they're a free company. I mean there are free, you know, these are private companies. You can't be, or you can't be ordered to do that. And I think that really scared them of how deep the resistance was, you know, they said no. Well, first of all, they're truckers. They're asking truckers to pull away. Truckers.

Yeah, yeah. When's the last time you did anything for me, jackass?

Yeah, so anyway, I think it's weakness exposed creates terror in the hearts of, you know, I think they're just being exposed, you know, I mean, I think that our understanding of expert, our understanding of authority has totally shifted in the last two years and it means nothing unless we have the mere saying that you're an expert, that you've studied. This means absolutely nothing anymore.

Yeah.

And that's. Think of all the people in universities and everything. They're terrified because they can't prove their value. And their value is up against people who can prove their value every day of the week. So this is what I think. I mean this is what I do it and it's getting out of hand. But meanwhile the artificial intelligence algorithms to replace whole departments, to replace whole fours. But it's not blue collar workers that are being, you know, there's a demand for blue collar workers. We want tradesmen, we want carpenters, we want plumbers, we want electricians, we can't find them. People who actually know how to put things together, we want them. But people who use meetings to plan more meetings and.

Have negotiated enormous pensions. They have no value while they're working and then they're going to get paid full price when they're thing. We've reached the end of that, you know.

Yeah.

So anyway, I think it's a great lockdown. It's the great lockdown. But I don't think it was about the virus.

Nebraska, the state of Nebraska never locked down once and they don't have any different results than anyone else.

That's what I like about the American state system is that every state you got like 50 little R& D labs and they can each kind of do what the president can't tell any governor what to do, you know, in the American system. And so anyway, that's just My take on it. And.

With prices going up, that and a 695 latte, you know. Yeah.

You know, get that. So I don't know. I just, you know, take a look at, you know, that.

You know, in terms of really bad diseases and epidemics, it's really big because of the number of people who've died, but it's a very, very small percentage in terms of the number of people that there are. I mean, the.

1918-2000-1918-1920 Spanish flu epidemic killed 50 million out of a population of 1.5 billion. This has so far killed about 6 million out of 8 billion. So it's a very, very tiny percentage. It's 1 out of 99. You know, it's like 1 out of 99 people. And then can we believe the statistics? Because.

That.

The hospitals, remarkably, have had almost nobody die of normal flu. They've had very few people die of diabetes. They've had very few people die of congestive heart failure. They've had very. So you name any normal. Like, in the normal year at our population in the United states, roughly about 50,000 people die of the annual flu. Okay. But they're not actually dying of the flu. It's just that they had preconditions that made them weak. And the flu. The flu put them over the edge.

The switch.

Right. And Covid was a different kind of flu. But they went in and, you know, they'll find that probably 95% of the people died were over age 65 with.

Or fat. Yeah.

Obese or fat or anything like that. And so the hospital's job gamed the system. As the government said to them, we want the death count to be high, and every death you give us with COVID we want to pay you more. 30 grand because we've got to justify the lockdown.

Yeah, no, it's 30 grand per death is what it was. And I know some doctors, so I. This wasn't just coming from the news. I've talked to people like.

Yep, yep.

Yeah, it was like. That was Covid. Right? It was Covid. Right. You know, I mean, that's basically the pressure. It's like. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.

It's Covid.

That's the ticket, huh?

Yeah. So anyway, my. You know.

There'S no one explanation to any event, but there are ones that are more central than other things. And I think.

It's my perception that increasingly, as we go into the 21st century, the lives.

The jobs, the payment, the benefits.

Of government bureaucratic workers is going to be more and more endangered by artificial intelligence, because that's a really fast way to reduce costs and to increase productivity is to stop spending on people who can't prove their value. Yep. Ooey. Oh, yeah.

Ouch. Well.

And you know, it's happened throughout history. I mean.

You know, you know, the Protestant revolution, you know, it was a lot just about the worthlessness of so many officials who were in the official church. You know, the official church, you know, they were landowners, they taxed the people, they produced no value. And you know, so my sense is that, you know, it's very, very interesting and this would be a topic for another broadcast. Why is it that people who always hate entrepreneurism is the most are the entitled children of entrepreneurs?

Entitled children and grandchildren of entrepreneurs are the greatest haters of entrepreneurism. Why is that? I mean, if you look at the Gates children, none of them are going to be entrepreneurs. Steve Jobs children are not going to be entreprene entrepreneurs. Mark Zuckerberg's daughter is not going to be an entrepreneur.

What's his name? The two at, you know, at Google, their children are not going to be entrepreneurs. Okay, Entrepreneurs. And my sense is, you know, like the Rockefeller foundation is the fourth generation, I think now of one of the truly most successful and consequential entrepreneurs in U.S. history. And they hate entrepreneurism. The Fords, the, you know, the Ford, they always show up in foundations. They take over and the foundation, the Gates Foundation.

Steve Jobs widow is in charge of that. And she's got every. She's gifts to every left wing. Cause that there's Jeff Bezos, his wife got. And she's.

Why is it that the chief beneficiaries of entrepreneurship are the greatest haters of entrepreneurship?

That's really interesting. Well, I got something today from.

Darren Hardy and here's what it says. Hard times, Darren. Yeah, yeah, we'll say hi to Darren. Darren. We love Darren. So here's what it was. A little thing says, hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.

Yeah, I read that and I'm trying to think. I think it was a.

I think it was either. I think it may be Confucius.

Okay. Yeah, I think the. I'll look it up in the background. But what I.

Really think a lot about is these patterns, these cycles. And you've got books like the Fourth Turning or Pendulum. Have you read Pendulum?

No, I read the Fourth Turning and George Gilder's Storm Before They Come.

There's a number of Books coming out about.

These issues, these type of issues. So talk to me about the one. That.

Pendulum was actually written by Roy H. Williams from Wizard Academy and he talks about the cycles of politics and belief from left wing to right wing and the synchronization and everything moves in these 80 year cycles. There's 20 year cycles. Very fourth turning ish. But it has to do with the mindsets and the economics. And right now I think we're in from a fourth turning perspective. We're entering into the winter and rapidly approaching the peak of the left wing mindset, which is the me mindset or the we mindset. That's really the distinction. So we're in we. Right now everything's about we, we, we. In the 80s it was me, me, me. And it always just swings around. And then you've got the cycles of economies and what marks the most dangerous time in a civilization. Think about the Roman Empire. Eventually it's the bureaucracy and the politicians who have legalized theft through taxation and bureaucracy basically creating arbitrary rules.

Inflation has legalized theft.

Yes, exactly.

And the government can borrow with a.

Certain kind of dollar and they can pay back with a weaker dollar.

Yep. And they can arbitrarily create rules to steal from the productive. So no matter what that is, whether it's so at the end of the day, law enforcement and ownership of private property are what creates trust in a system. And without those. And that's really the. I really understand now. I used to like oscillate between, let's say left wing politics, right wing politics at the end of the day, if you're truly. And again, I think the GOP is a total farce and it's evil the people in it, but the whole lot of them are rotten animals. But what makes for a good conservative government in general is.

Idealism towards certain standards and an obstructionist point of view when it comes to government, which is to prevent them from stealing. Okay, the truth is this one is just turned into a giant massive effery of F sticks. So I decided I wasn't going to put the truck word in here. But I don't like any party. I just think they're all rotten animals and any form of bureaucracy is bad to me. I don't see again, no accountability, no scorecard. All the things that you were talking about earlier and when you look at striking fear, as you did with regards to the truckers, if you want to punch a politician in the hoo hoo dilly, you're going to sock them in the numbers, right? And if commerce can't happen, they can't steal and they don't have control. And when you think about the multitude of ways our governments steal from us all the time, I mean, if it were only income tax, it'd be fine, but all the other taxes.

And they're always, they'll never give up power. And right now the mechanism for claiming power is social righteousness. Our movement towards.

Cancel culture is a new form of bully ism. It's a new form of power grabbing. And you can just call someone an ism. And fortunately, I think our society has become tired of this name calling and name bashing. And they realized that those who started these things, whether they're justified or not, and creating equality and sensitivity and all that, it's just another power grab. It's a way to steal.

And then there's going to be pushback from whether you say, well, it's a patriarchal white man society and they're pushing back on it.

Well, I don't know. It's something, you know, I mean, we call things justice after the fact, not before the fact. Before the fact. It's negotiation. Yeah, no, it is.

Now the winners call. The winners call it justice. That's interesting.

No, but after the fact you call it justice. You know, but before it's just negotiation. And each side, you know, it was very interesting. I was thinking about this because the family of the cinematographer, the woman who was killed by Alex. Alex, you know, he shot her on the set. Alec.

Oh yeah. Alex Baldwin or Alec Baldwin.

So they're really taking the right approach because they're not pushing for a criminal trial at all. They just sued him civilly for, you know, unrighteous, wrongful death, you know, which civil thing. And we don't want him to go to prison. We just want to have everything that's his. We'll just strip him of everything he has. And what they did is they created an animated version of the killing from their point of view. And it's been downloaded a million times since, unloosed on the Internet. You ought to go to it. It's about three minutes long. And it just shows him sitting down. The camera crew comes in, they stand and he stands up, goes, and he shoots, shoots her. And then she's caught by the other people and they're taking down. And that's the thing. And that's now vividly in the mind of the entire public.

And he'll say, well, I didn't shoot her. And I said, well, no, there wasn't anyone else doing the shooting. You were the shooter and she's dead. Yeah, but I'm not the sort of person who does. It doesn't matter what kind of person you are. We don't care about what you did before this. But in that little period of time you took out that plus they actually have it filmed because the camera was moving. You know, the camera was on when he did it. And.

You know, if I was a lawyer, I wouldn't work for fees on this one. I just want 20% of everything. And, you know, and.

That goes for all the investors in the film. And everybody will get their money. Will get their money, too. But the big thing is that that's negotiation. You say, well, that's really unfair. I said, no, it's negotiation. And the truckers are negotiating. And what the American press didn't report is that within three days, Ontario, my province, eliminated all masks. Quebec, These are the two biggest provinces. That's 40% of the population. Alberta, the next most important. They all abandoned their mandate. But the Prime Minister saying, we're still going to have mandates. We're still going to have mandates. So anyway, it's negotiation. And right now he's negotiated himself into a very bad corner. And I just think he's going to have a hard time negotiating his way out of the corner. You know, I mean, he may get what he wants and he may arrest people and he may take away their pets and seize their bank accounts, but his place in history is now firmly embedded, as, you know, as not having done the right thing. He didn't have to do this. He could have gone out and talked to them.

He refused to go out and talk to them. There's a US Senator who I love talking, and it's John Kennedy from Louisiana. Have you ever listened to.

I've seen him, but I haven't paid attention to him.

Well, he did a wonderful. It was about a 8 minute riff on this and it was on Trudeau, you know, on it. And, you know, and I mean, he's one of those southern guys who, you know, is really polite and he's, you know, just commonsensical. And.

Then you go to turn and your head falls off because he switched your throat while he was talking. Oh, yeah. And it's just a beautiful little eight minute, you know, with that very soothing Louisiana Southern accent.

I'm going to find it. I'll find it. I'll put it in the show notes.

Yeah, it's really, it's really a great thing just to listen to him. He's a phenomenal you know, the nominees, the judicial nominees, the cabinet, have to go in front of his committee. And, you know, he's a Republican, but he gets his place. And he's just devastating as a questioner, you know, like. Oh, yeah. I mean, he just, yeah. And he's very nice. He says, he says, now look, he says, you know, that explanation that you gave me, that was really smart. I know you're really smart because your CV says you're really, really smart. So I know that. And you're really smart with this, but I just asked you a very simple question and you didn't give me a real simple answer. And all the American people are watching to this and they just have a preference for judges that talk simply and straightforwardly. And you don't look like you're going to be that type of judge, you know.

Oh, yeah.

You know, and he just gets them. And they've never been up against like this, you know, they, they're word weavers, you know, they live in, they live in a world of word weavers. But, you know, there are some places where you can't weave your words and that's it. So, so anyway, I mean, that's just my personal take on what's happening, you know, I'm not saying, but I think it's a useful, I think I presented a useful structure to pay attention to things because there's certain things about it that just don't make sense once you try to find the maximum number of different solutions to the virus, why just these two vaccinations? And then check who's investing.

Which government officials approve these and what investments and which members of Congress were investing. Because as we've discovered that members of Congress can invest in stocks, even though they're involved in the legislation that favors the stocks, they can invest in them. So my sense, it's a lot of. You used the word before. It's a lot of really.

Kind of sick stuff going on that we really wish we didn't find out that so many of our high officials are really creeps.

Yeah, no, they're effort with the truck.

In between and they're.

They'Re not deep enough to be really evil. You know, they're kind of shallow. You know, they're kind of shallow. They're, you know. Yeah, they're, you know.

It'S like people who take. Walk around the tables as they're leaving the restaurant and take all the tip money from the other people, you know, for the waiters, you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's. I look at it the sign of poor character or lack of character is when you're willing to say or do anything and become a chameleon to gain power so that you can have money, so that you can control. And I understand the psychology, but what about earning it? You know, creating value? That. That is. At the end of the day, it's the lack of value creation that bothers me most. It's. It's. It's like doing arbitrage and then you're.

Being paid with tax money, you know. Yeah. You know, it's a bunch of.

It's no different than stealing, except it's clever theft.

Well, it's legally sanctioned. It's legally sanctioned.

Yeah.

Yep. Yep.

So, well, let's. Let's wrap up this episode.

I mean, not that you got my point, but what points appeared in your mind?

When I think my big takeaways are.

I hadn't thought as much about testing the power and the notion, like you said, this is a negotiation.

It's really.

What I say. It's not free game. What's it called? Free.

When you can basically go grab anything. Fair game. I think inside of this.

When you create a crisis and you can create enough misinformation and create some momentum and movement and then make a declaration and act as though it's true, you can get away with it for a long, long time, especially if it's a righteous religion.

At some point. You know, it's a typical proletariat rebellion, which is. I mean, that, to me, what I see unfolding before us right now is a setup to and for.

Tremendous conflict. Now, whether it's going to be armed or not, there are enough blue collar, uneducated people who despise the people in control, in power.

Who don't provide value, who steal from them. And we're at a boiling point. And this was a test. It really was a test. And I think the negotiation is saying, all right, yeah, throw all your rules at us. And my big walk away. I had never heard the towing companies saying, yeah, I'm not going to tow my brothers, essentially.

Whether they did something wrong or not. It's, you know, you're not going to kick your neighbor out of a house. Or if you're a repo man, you know, it'd be like, you don't want to be a repo man in a. If you live in a.

Yeah.

You know, the.

Towing companies are residents of the government capital, and they are so not afraid of the government that they said, screw you. Screw you.

That's a true test well, it is knowing where you have power.

Yeah, I mean, power, power. You know, the person who has power in any deal is the one who can walk.

Yeah. Yes.

Right. The person who can walk is the, you know, and they're saying, no, no, no, no, come on, come on, put your big boy pants out and you know, and talk, talk to them, you know, put your big boy pants out.

That is the cowardice. And again, I don't, I didn't know the nuance of this, but just not having the courage to at least have a conversation come to the table. And.

You know, there wasn't.

As far as I, I know there wasn't a violent protest there appeared in the, in the videos and the content that I saw, which again, you know, through the camera lens, here's the thing. Someone can claim, yeah, it's a million man march and there's like 100 people there. And well, if you shoot it right, it looks like a million men. So I don't know.

There were 15,000 trucks in a very.

That'S a lot of trucks in a.

Very confined area, you know, and these, you know, big, the, you know, these big cabs and big semis and everything like that. And, you know, but nobody in the rest of Canada cares for what happens to Ottawa. It's like D.C. if something happens in D.C. i couldn't care less if it happens in D.C. you know? You know, you know, so, so my sense is that.

You'Ve lost authority.

And you've lost, you know, you're losing control and people disregard you.

No, no, not going to do it.

Yeah. That is the true loss of the game is an unwillingness to come to the table and be strategic. And also.

That to me is the deep lack of respect. And that is a continuation of what we've seen inside of this entire.

Movement.

That'S been going on from the very beginning is the intolerance in the great lockdown, the lack of conversation. And I know in my own life I've talked about, to you about this before, like my sister went full on qanon crazy and.

I just quit talking to her for about a year. And then, you know, last week I decided, screw it, I'm going to be the big, you know, the big boy. Put on my big boy pants. I just called up and we stayed on the rails. And anytime she started veering outside, I said, I'm just not going to have that conversation with you, so let's stop it now. And. But there's, you know, she's deeply traumatized by this. There Were a lot of things going on. And I think that's the part of this, that at the end of it, I hear this all the time where people say, over the past two years, a lot of humans became feral. There's a lot of feral behavior. You look at what happens on the airlines and it doesn't take a lot to just get triggered. And that to me is the greatest thing. What this was is the grand separator, if it seems.

That's a wonderful phrase. I sense that. I mean we've experienced it just with zoom and non zoom, the great separation. You know, there's people saying, I'll come back to coach when I can do it live. Yeah.

I would do your lifetime extender program if it was live. And I said, it is live. It's very live. It's instantaneously live. And they said, yeah, but I can't get the feel of. I just don't get the same feel. I mean, it's about ideas, it's about your thinking.

Here's what I'll say about that. I will go so far. I've spent a lot of time going down this rabbit hole. I don't think office work will ever return to the way it was again for the same reason. Because a whole bunch of people realized it's bullshit. It sucks to be in an office wasting that time going back and forth. And if you don't have the ability, the mental ability to do some calisthenics and realize this whole game's a big illusion anyway, okay, and that, that's a deep ass rabbit hole. And we. But that. That same person who says, I have to wait until blank. They're probably the same people are like, everyone's got to be in the office. Their rigidity of thought is, you know, they're a dinosaur. It's just time for them to be shaken off the planet and repurposed particles reused. And there's just so much unnecessary waste. The greatest gift of this to me is when a lot of people realized I don't need so much. Life can be a lot simpler.

Yep.

It's ridiculous. I don't care where anyone works. I don't care if you're pink, brown, yellow, orange, rootstripe colored. I don't care what you sleep with. Do you provide value?

Yep. Yep.

Are you a multiplier or are you a tax? Are you a negative energy life form? And that's just, that's my black and white. Cut them off. And so you just gotta look at it and go like, if you can't adapt a little bit, you're a wrong fit. Hard.

No, I mean, you know, I don't care what happens to them, you know, but, you know, the people I can work with, I really care what happens to them. You know, I mean, I. And.

You know, I had this description. I said, you know.

There'S this law. It's not really a law, but it's sort of common sense or experience, and it's called Dunbar's Law.

Yeah.

And Dunbar's law said, in terms of actually caring human beings reach their first of all, the five people that you care about most uses up 80% of your caring. And then you have 20% and you have.

Trace amounts that you can get out to roughly about 150 people. And that's.

Yes, that's what it is.

And that's it. And people say, well, I care about what's happening in Africa. And I said, no, you don't really care. You care to be seen by other people saying that you care about what's going on in Africa, but you actually don't care because you've never been to Africa, for one thing. If you cared, you'd be making regular trips to Africa. But you don't really care actually care about the people in Africa. What you care about.

Is being that you have witnesses that say, you know, he's a very caring person. You should have heard what he said about how much he cares about the people in Africa. That's what you care about. You care about being seen as a caring person.

But in fact, you don't care about them because your behavior gives us absolutely no evidence that you have any caring for the people in Africa at all. It's like, I don't have any care except for one of our clients who lives in Botswana, and we have a client who lives in Kenya. And I really care about those two entrepreneurs.

Those are my full care Africans right there. And I've got a couple of South Africans, you know, and you know, well, they're white people now, you know, they're Africans. They're Africans. You know, they're fifth, their eighth generation African. Well, they don't count. They don't, you know, the usual thing like that. I said, I care about the people that I actually have relationships with. People I don't have relationships, which number is very close to 8 billion. I don't really care about. Do I wish them evil? No. Do I wish bad things happened to them? No. But I don't really care about them, you know, and people have a hard time about that. They Said, well, you're not caring. And I said, I am caring for the people that.

I know. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, it's honest. This is a great subject, but I like talking about the great lockdown rather than the P word. The P word or the C word. The C word or whatever. I like talking about lockdown lockdowns because that seems to be the. That will be the most remembered thing, how you were locked down, how you were prevented from.

Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. I think we haven't even scratched below the surface of.

The damage it's done. But also, again, I look at it through the positive lens of all my relationships that matter to me are better now than they've ever been.

I like my business better. I like how I interact with people better. I love the fact that I didn't travel and beat up my body for two years. There was nothing about it that was negative. Where we traveled, I spent tons of time. No traffic, L.A. traffic was the best. It was awesome. Things like that. So. Well, let's wrap this episode up as usual, like, chat, leave comments, et cetera, et cetera, and anything you want to finish up with.

Yeah. First of all.

I have a belief that points of view are points of view and that my brain is richer on any topic if I get a lot of different points of view about a particular topic. And. And I don't expect anyone else to give me a point of view unless I give them a point of view. So that points of view are kind of like a currency for me. So the great lockdown is just my point of view. But I realize that if I'm talking to 20 people, there's going to be 19 different points of view, and each of them adds to my understanding of the overall situation and topic. So. And you know, you. You know, you participate and you think, but you have to realize that your point of view can be useful, but it's not the truth. Right.

I think what I, what I really got out of that is.

Collaborative truth is the wisest truth. It's. And it's also interesting and fun and it's civil. So civility and civics are. If there is an outer space and an inner space and a space that matters, it's practicing civics, and that is civility.

And that really comes from.

Conversational, additive points of view to achieve greater wisdom. And also realize that sometimes it's temporary. Right. Wisdom isn't forever. As we evolve, as points of view evolve, as society evolves and our values change and the challenges that we have to deal with. So if we live in an artificial intelligence powered white collar elimination world. We're going to be facing different challenges, but I happen to believe that they will lead us to better places. I do believe the expansion of the universe is a positive thing, not a negative one.

Well, let's put an amen on that one. Amen. Thanks, Dan.

Thank you.