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Welcome to my studio.

This is where the magic happens every Wednesday night with Paul and I when we do

this Wednesday show.

And well, it's actually where everything happens for me.

Not only do I record the podcasts here,

I do all my writing here,

I do all my day job stuff,

I do the books for the company,

I do everything.

I spend a lot of time at this desk, too much time really.

It's starting to worry me a little bit that I'm tied to the desk too much,

I gotta do something else.

But I decided to do the video from here mostly as an experiment.

The, you know, normally I use the GoPro and that's fine.

I would have done it this time, but it's eight o'clock at night and it's the sunlight.

It's, you know, it's dark out and it just, there's just too much fiddling around with it.

And not to mention the fact that there's, I don't know what it is.

There's some guy up the,

up the,

the hollow from me that just making a,

he's got some sort of equipment running and it just echoes through him.

Just makes me crazy.

But anyway, it's a part of living with other human beings or around other human beings.

They make noise.

Well,

anyway,

I wanted to do some experimenting because on the Wednesday show,

we use something called StreamYard.

And Paul uses this every time I show with him, he uses StreamYard.

So I assume he's always used it.

And I don't know if he uses it for recording his regular shows,

but I'm pretty sure he does it for live streaming.

And it's mostly for, but it has some neat features.

So I thought I'd give it a shot.

I'm always looking for something.

All the recording software sucks.

It's terrible.

I've complained about it before.

It has way too many features.

It's over-engineered.

And all the whiz-bang stuff that you might use once, well, that's all up in front.

You can always find that.

The things that you want to be able to use,

like trim a few seconds off the back end of a video to make it an even five minutes

or 10 minutes,

well,

it takes three hours to figure out how to do it.

Anyway, enough complaining about that.

What got my interest to do a video this time was I was watching,

I watched a few minutes of the parade in Moscow on the 9th.

And Victory Day in Russia, it's a huge deal.

I mean, they lost over 20 million people.

You know, it was an existential threat to the existence of Russia.

That's how they look at it.

And that's probably fairly accurate.

You know, the Germans came very close to destroying the Russian government, Russian society.

And,

you know,

really,

if it wasn't for,

you know,

the Russians have said this,

if it wasn't for the enormous amount of material and money that was given to the

Russians by the United States,

mostly machines,

they wouldn't have made it,

you know.

I mean, it was that close, you know.

So they look at that as, you know, an enormous event.

by itself but of course winning it is you know that's a big deal you know it's like

this you could be uh the losing team in the greatest super bowl ever and it still

sucks you know winning really is what matters here but but still

You know, they have this big event.

And, you know, it's funny in the West, we don't really celebrate the war like we used to.

It really has kind of faded away rather quickly.

I think maybe when Reagan was in office and the Cold War was the last real big,

you know,

the big event where they go to France and to Normandy and all that.

But the Russians still do.

It's still a big deal.

And,

of course,

now,

and it's even more important because of what's going on in the world,

you know,

they see themselves as in a second great patriotic war against the entire West.

And whether you believe that or not or whether you see it that way, it doesn't matter.

They see it that way.

So this was a big deal.

So I was just kind of curious.

And,

you know,

when I was a kid,

they used to put these parades on that Moscow would do in Red Square.

They would put them on American television.

And this was in the Cold War.

And I was going to kick out of watching that stuff,

you know,

because you have American commentators talking about where people were standing and

what all this means.

It was mostly BS, but it was still fun to watch.

But anyway, I was watching this thing a little bit, and I had this guy.

He's 101 years old,

and he was a tanker in the Battle of Kursk,

which,

you know,

it's kind of ironic.

They just finished up another Battle of Kursk.

But the Battle of Kursk in the Second World War is, I think, the largest tank battle ever.

And there's video of this.

I mean, old film.

I mean, it's just incredible.

I mean, it's horrifying, the scale of industrial war.

I mean, it's just unbelievable.

And, you know, most of this is Soviet footage.

So, you know, they were actually pretty good at kind of capturing that, the realism of it all.

But, well, anyway, he was going to, he was in the parade.

And he's 101.

He was in a tank that he,

well,

not the tank,

but a tank,

a type of model tank that he used in the war.

And he's bolt upright, saluting as he goes past the podium.

It really wasn't, it was a cool thing.

I mean, you know, they did, you know, they talked about his past and everything else.

So, you know, human interest story.

But it got me thinking,

how many people are still alive in the United States who have firsthand

recollections of the war?

And so what I did is I did a little math and said, all right, what would constitute that?

How old would you have to be to really have any meaningful recollections of the war?

And I said 15 is probably about right,

because when the war ended in 1945,

you were 15,

you had already started considering the fact that you might be going to the war,

you might be drafted.

So you were thinking about it and you were old enough to understand a lot of it.

Your parents would have talked to you about it.

Maybe your dad or your brother was in it,

you know,

cousins,

you would have known men who were serving.

You would have met known men who had died.

So that's a pretty good age.

I mean,

you maybe go back a little further,

but if it's,

you know,

15,

it means that you'd have to be 95 now to have meaningful recollections.

And if you want to go back to the little, you know, five years earlier, okay, 90.

So,

How many people are over the age of 90?

Well, it turns out that it's 0.66% of the population, which is 2.2 million people.

The U.S.

Census actually keeps track of this stuff.

Now, granted, that doesn't include illegal aliens and all that stuff.

When you break it down by race,

well,

77% of the people who are over the age of 90 are white,

and only 8% are black,

7% Asian,

and 6% Hispanic.

White people were winning the race for non-agenarian.

Now,

in terms of white percentage of the over 90,

it gets a little smaller,

but then,

you know,

you have to start to factor in other things.

So,

for example,

you know,

if you say that,

you know,

72% of the over 90 population is white,

well,

you know,

half of those would be men.

Well, not really.

Women tend to live longer, so when you look up that data,

It was 32% would be men.

So that's about a half a million people in this country or men over the age of 90 who,

you know,

and they would have meaningful recollections of the war.

You know, they lived through it.

Now, a lot of these guys might not be, you know, all together.

Their memories are faded and all the other stuff.

And when you get to that age,

you know,

sometimes it's just kind of waiting for death to be blunt about it.

But now how many actually served?

And it's kind of an interesting thing.

I wasn't really sure about this.

So I looked it up and it really is incredible just how many people served.

There was of the draft eligible men, 18 to 45, the population at the time.

So the estimated draft eligible population was 25 million.

And the people who actually served was 16 million.

So,

I mean,

you're looking at almost the entire draft age population served,

which is,

I mean,

it's just an astonishing number.

I think it's roughly 70 percent.

So, you know, you break this out by race and I haven't done that stuff.

But but basically what this means is that we're.

There's two things that are going to happen.

I mean, first of all, there's no one with any decision making capacity alive.

You know,

if you're going to be,

you know,

if you had any choice in the matter,

you were commanding men,

you were making decisions,

you were running a camp or you were sending people off to a camp.

Well, you had to be 25, 30 years old at that point.

You weren't doing that at 15.

So really,

for men who served,

let's say,

18,

the youngest living members are all mid to late 90s now.

So they're all going to be gone.

In the next five years,

realistically,

there will be no more living people who participated in the war.

No men or I suppose there were some women in the wax and waves and that kind of business.

So they're all going to be gone.

And that means all the victims will be gone.

So all the people who claimed they're a Holocaust survivor, they're all going to be gone now.

You know,

we're not going to be ready to have any,

you know,

people making false claims because it would just be so absurd that you couldn't possibly,

well,

you could do it,

but...

But, you know, that's all going to be gone.

So all of those people will be gone.

And then really in 10 years from now,

anyone with any meaningful memory at all of the war will be gone.

So the firsthand experience will be gone everywhere.

And that's not just the United States.

That's Germany and Russia and everywhere else.

I mean, they're all gone everywhere.

And that's that I think is going to have an enormous impact because,

look,

you know,

the whole greatest generation business started with baby boomers,

you know,

with their parents.

I mean, that's really what it was about.

And the baby boomers are no spring chickens either.

You know, the youngest baby boomer, you know, let's say born in 1960.

You know, that's a fairly good cutoff.

I'll get letters.

I'll get emails telling me, oh, no, no, the cutoff is June 4th, 1962.

Let's just use round numbers.

that, you know, you're looking at people who are, what, 65.

So let's say youngest boomer is 65.

And then, you know, so the oldest boomer is going to be 20 years old, is 85.

So, I mean, you know, it's really going to kind of rocket through here.

But,

you know,

the baby boomers brought,

you know,

celebrated their parents as the greatest generation.

And then the baby boomers are, you know, headed to the exit too.

So, you know, it's going to change everything.

That means like, you know, I think that's a pretty big reason why,

the holocaust stuff has lost its traction you know it gets uh people make fun of it

you know it's not i mean you know some people make fun of it some people just

ignore i think most people probably just ignore and roll their eyes when they hear

about this stuff

But certainly there's a significant percentage of people who are just tired of

hearing about it,

that's for sure.

But I think that's a big part of this demographics.

And look,

a huge part of American psychology over the last almost since the war,

really,

so you're talking 75,

80 years now,

has been built around the villain idea.

know okay we you know we organized the country you know what the country is now was

fundamentally organized by fdr we formalize the managerial state we get that we get

this great organization you know this this war socialism that aim us towards

beating the fascists and beating tojo okay we do that and then we quickly

re-engineer it to do what to beat the communists that we

We did that for 30, almost 40 years.

So it's about the communists.

That's the organizing thing.

So we have a clear villain.

We have victims.

And that's a big part of this villain-victim dynamic.

It shows up in our politics all the time.

Oh, my God, we have white supremacists.

And then they'll have, oh, this poor black person.

They had their feelings hurt.

They heard the N-word.

So then, of course, the Cold War ends.

And they scramble around.

And what did they do?

They find the jihadis.

Oh, they're going to be the villain.

They're the bad guys.

And all these poor people.

But,

you know,

it's all in the context of the original bad guys and their original victims,

right?

Well, once they're gone, gone, and there's no shred of them left,

It's going to be very hard to keep doing this.

I mean, maybe that's what we're experiencing now, too.

Why are,

you know,

so much about our ruling class and politics and everything else is so scrambled is

because of that reality.

You know,

time is dragging the villains and the victims,

the source,

the inspiration for so much of our politics.

It's dragging it out of our collective memory.

We can no longer see it in the rearview mirror.

And once that happens, it's no longer around anymore.

And,

and,

and as a result,

and,

you know,

for people who are under the age of 40,

well,

it's way past,

I mean,

it's,

you know,

it's black and white there.

I mean, you know, it's, it's a part of the history they don't really think is real.

So that's maybe why younger people are far less sympathetic about any of this stuff.

That's why they're,

you know,

they have a lot of the boomeritis stuff where they don't like boomers,

but,

but it really is going to alter everything.

And,

and,

you know,

a big part of like for the Russians,

they talk about Nazis a fair amount and understand given what happened.

But this whole Ukraine war, a lot of Russian politicians talk about this.

They'll refer to it as that 20th century ideology.

That's a term they use.

And everyone knows what they mean.

But even for them, it's going to fade.

I mean, and to some degree, they're

I suppose they're looking at this war and treating it as their great patriotic war

for the same reason.

They say,

hey,

you know what,

this gives us a new model now to kind of have our identity based on us against the world.

That's always a bit of a part of it.

There's always a bit of a negative identity to any identity.

So maybe that's what's happening.

But but who knows?

I mean, you know, it can all be forgotten about once the war is over.

But for America, this is going to be a huge thing.

It should be a big deal.

I mean, look, there's people who wander around now who are under the age of 30.

They get taken to a Holocaust shrine and they have no idea what they're looking at.

They could be they might as well be looking at something.

Somebody says it was a space alien or it was from Venus or Atlantis or the ancient Greeks.

I mean, it's just it's meaningless.

And I think for things to continue to resonate like the second world war or the Holocaust,

for example,

or the Nazis or any of this stuff,

there has to be people around who have some memory of it,

who have some,

at least they can find and drag onto the screen and say,

this guy was there or this woman,

she was,

you know,

she lost her family in the Holocaust or something.

You know,

once those people are gone,

you know,

it's,

it's all becomes part of the sort of imaginary thing.

drama of life and it's just like anything else that's made up you know it doesn't

have any real connection it's going to be an interesting thing to watch and i look

i'm i'm a geezer but i'll be around to see this you know i'll i'll i'll be around

for another 10 15 more years and i'll actually see this happen you know it really

is going to be uh yeah i'm not looking forward to it so you old folks out there

enjoy the time you have make every make make uh the best of every minute you have

But I am really curious to see how it unfolds because,

you know,

without those,

without the people to talk about what happened then,

the past really just becomes a story.

It's no longer, you know, it's no longer, no longer resonates.

You know,

no one has any strong emotions about the Great War,

for example,

or the Spanish-American War,

you know,

or any of this stuff.

I mean,

you know,

maybe I guess the Civil War or the Revolutionary War,

but,

you know,

it's a little bit different.

Well, anyway, I thought that might be interesting.

I hope everyone enjoys the rest of your weekend, and I'll see you next time.