Listeners Ask Questions: Part 2

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

The star namesake Victor Davis-Hansen is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow.

at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, where Victor is right now, as you're listening, teaching.

He's got an annual two-week stint that he does at Hillsdale.

And we are recording several podcasts to make sure that you don't go without Victor while he's away.

So, on today's podcast, we're going to talk about one of Victor's recent columns for American Greatness and a few of the reader questions, many, many, many, which hundreds sent in, and we've picked a few to populate these podcasts.

Victor is, uh, yeah, I gotta say, Victor, Victor writes a lot, right, Victor.

You just before the podcast, he told me he wrote about like 20, 30,000 words of copy this week for various things.

He's a

madman, but much of what he writes, or a significant portion of that, can be found at his website, victorhanson.com.

I'd urge you to subscribe.

It's $5

just to stick your toe in the water.

You wish you had done that a long time ago.

$50 for the year.

That's victorhanson.com.

Now, we are going to get to Victor's explanation, thoughts for one of his recent pieces at American Greatness.

It's called The Worst and the Stupidest.

And we're going to hear that right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Today's podcast, or the podcast we're recording right now, should be up on the World Wide Webs on September 1st.

So, Victor, before

you parted for

Michigan to do your Hillsdale gig, you wrote one of your great lengthy essays, Ad-American Greatness, the Worst, and the Stupidest.

So, if you talk a little bit about this particular piece, and then I've got some questions from readers that have to do

with demographics and kind of a death, looks like a death spiral that's happening in the Western world.

And then, you know, a personal question about,

well, I'll get to that when we get to that.

But anyway, Victor, would you talk about this great essay you wrote, The Worst and the Stupidest?

Well, we have this David Halverstam, I think, the best and the brightest.

And that was a critique of so-called, you know, the

JFK era of Camelot, that we were going to get people from all the corporate and academic world.

And these people are going to, whether it's Arthur Schlesinger or Bobby Kennedy or you name it, they were going to bring their expertise.

It was sort of like the technocratic class that emerged out of 19th century France and they were going to be experts.

And that legacy has still stayed with us.

And they're not.

What I was suggesting in this column is that if you look at what makes somebody an expert,

what is it?

Is it their zip code?

Sometimes.

Is it their net wealth?

Maybe.

Is it the letters after their name, BA, MA, JD, MD, MBA, PhD?

Yeah.

Is it the title before?

Assistant Provost to the President.

Acting Dean, FBI to Yes.

Anthony Fauci type of titles.

So then if you just forget all that and look what has actually happened,

are they an elite?

And I think they don't have any record.

We're look at the country.

I mean,

what I'm getting at is, look at the country, what makes it work and what makes it not work.

So who were the people who dreamed up the idea to voluntarily cut back on fossil fuels when Biden came in and then to beg the Venezuelans, the Iranian, the Russians, and the Saudis to pump what we would not.

Was it because frackers were lazy?

Was it because horizontal drillers in North Dakota said, I can't do it anymore.

Sorry.

No,

it was because of our green ideological

zealots, our incompetence, or the people who don't know anything about classical deterrence and they would dare to ask Russia to pump more oil.

Who were the people when you see all these videos, Jack, of all these people that are playing the knockout game?

They're hitting people in the head.

They're kicking Asian women down the stairs.

They're carjacking.

Was that because the police are racist or they are incompetent or they can't control crime?

No, they can control crime and they can do it in a very good way.

I don't mean good in the sense of tough necessarily alone, but what I'm saying is that most of the post-George Floyd indictments against the police were false.

If you look at the 11 million people arrested per year and you want to see how many unarmed people were shot by the police versus their demographics, it was about the people who were arrested, not of the general population, which would be not a very useful way to calibrate that.

The police didn't shoot African-American unarmed people more than they did white unarmed people on the basis of how many people are arrested or come in contact with them.

So why are they doing these things?

It's because of what?

Critical legal theory dreamed up and enacted by George Saros's district attorneys, city attorneys, university ideas about indictments are not necessary, incarceration is not necessary, no cash bail, et cetera, et cetera.

So I could go on, but you get the impression that the middle class has stayed competent.

You know, when I look at the incomplete high-speed rail right next to my house, what I call Stonehenge that's shut down my avenue for two years, I can't drive on it and get anywhere because I get to work.

I have to make this circuitous delay because of this.

It's not because people can't weld or pour cement.

It's not because people forgot

the surveyors or the engineers can't do it.

It's because of our legal class, our political class, and our environmental class.

And so they don't deserve the respect that they demand.

And when Merrick Garland, what prompted me was Merrick Garland's little sanctimonious, Pete Buttigig-like sermon about the professionalism, how dare you impeach the DOG?

I said, whose DOJ is that?

Sally Yates that resurrected the ossified Logan Act to go after Michael Flynn?

Or maybe you were talking about Rod Rosenstein, who wanted to wear a wire, we were told, to

basically enact the 25th Amendment against his own president.

Or maybe it's Bruce Orr and his wife Nellie that conspired to get the steel dossier into the bowels of government and thereby legitimize for the press dissemination.

Or maybe it's the FBI and Robert Mueller and Comey and McCabe and Christopher Ray.

So these institutions, I could go on, Lois Lerner, they don't deserve our respect.

Not the top hierarchy.

They may have big salaries.

They may have big titles.

I was driving home yesterday from a doctor's appointment, Jack, and you know who was on Fox with Neil Cabuto?

Or your friend with your accent.

Go ahead.

Who?

Anthony Fauci.

Oh, God.

And Anthony Paul.

Yeah, with my high school and college pedigree also.

And he said the following.

He was asked if he had any regrets that he had shut down the country.

And he's, you know, an urged to shut down the country and lobbied to shut down the country.

And he said, I didn't do that.

That's another misinformation.

And so,

this is what's funny.

I came home furious and I went straight to a computer to go do the laborious searches of all the times he said, I advertise, we have to shut down the country.

We've just got to do it.

I'm going to urge that.

And I didn't even have to do that.

Within a nanosecond, there was on the internet somebody who had all the clips of him saying that.

And they were numerous.

And so when you look at that guy, and he still lies that he helped to fund gain of function research in the lab, and he lies that he, he said, I was open-minded about the origins.

Remember that?

No, he wasn't.

He was so happy of that fraudulent Lancet investigation by Peter Dasick's deck.

So I could go on, but the point is that these people that we are supposed to defer to are more or less responsible for why you can't walk into the downtown of a major city or why there's homeless people defecating on the streets or why we're $30 trillion in debt or somebody dreamed up the idea that no border blew it up with dynamite or whatever they did on the southern border.

And it was not

the middle class that did that.

The Border Patrol can control the border if you let them.

And there are people that are practical that can control the homeless problem.

And there are police that know how to stop this crime wave.

And it was not a captain or a major in a colonel that dreamed up the Afghanistan skedaddle.

It was our elite, and they never, ever

man up to the disasters that they inflict on us.

Right.

And I think it has something to do with this, again,

Robert McNamara type.

technocratic pretenses that they have a science and they're trained and they speak in a particular vocabulary of circumlocution.

Right.

And I think everybody's sick of them.

I'm thinking, you know what?

They just say that guy's a liar.

My wife and I have a game now when we watch the news, and there's one of these characters, whether it's Andrew McCabe coming on saying he's where he was, or Peter Strzz talking about the, we just say, he's a liar.

He's lying.

She says to me,

she's lying.

He's lying.

I think everybody does that now.

They have no respect for these people.

And I'm not going to stop criticizing them.

I did that with a number of retired generals that,

you know, they retire, they go from the corporate lobbying or the defense contractor board back into the Pentagon to refresh their familiarity, and then they go back to the corporate board.

Or

there is something called Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Do not disparage a commander and the chief.

And they say, screw that.

And then I'm General somebody.

I'm Admiral somebody.

And Trump is Mussolini.

And he put Auschwitz cages at the border.

I can say whatever I want.

Screw you.

you.

And yet, if you're another general, as we said before, and you make fun of Joe Biden, you're going to lose your contract.

Right.

So I don't have these.

I just don't respect them.

I don't respect, I don't mean blanketly and collectively and nonsensically, but there's a lot of these people that, why should I listen to what Francis Collins at the CDC says or what Anthony Fauci says?

at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Right.

Amen, my friend.

It's staggering how

brazen they are.

It is.

I just give you, I shouldn't mention names, but I'll give you one last example very quickly because I know that I'd run off at the mouth.

But I was at Hillsdale College a year ago and I was sitting next to a doctor, Sam Pappas.

He's a wonderful doctor.

He has a lot of expertise in mastocytosis, mass problems, but especially now in long COVID.

And we were just talking.

And he mentioned all of these things that were, he didn't say go do this, but he said, you know, if a person were to get COVID, there are off-label.

He didn't talk about ivermets and hydrogen.

He just said that this scientific study suggests that this combination of two antihistamines, right, are an H1 or an H2 blocker in combination.

Or he said, and he didn't advocate them.

He just said, and then there's other people, other people who advocate this type.

that in double-blind studies.

And what he was trying to lay out for me was, should you ever get COVID, we're not helpless.

And we're not going to work, we're not going to rely on blogs or personal idiosyncratic, this helped for me, but there are reliable double-blind studies of off-label use and certain things that had efficacy, not cure, but efficacy.

And he named them for me.

And then I, the next day, I

was, I think it was a Friday, I was watching Saturday News and here was Anthony Fauci.

And he was telling telling us that this $45,000 a dose designer, big pharma drug was, you know what I mean?

And this

it was no longer, you know, two boosters and you're free, but now, I mean, two shots and you're free.

Now it was three shots and four shots.

And so what am I getting at is there's people like Dr.

Pappas all over the United States, doctors.

They're not crazy and they are on the front lines and they're trying to make people who get infected and they're near death and they're trying to save them.

And they come up with all sorts of legitimate usages.

Some of them I know are cranks, but they're not the majority.

They are our middle class, upper middle class doctors.

But the elite, they don't treat patients and they

are tied in with big pharma.

And they are,

I really believe that, you know,

to ban, to actually ban drug use, the use of certain drugs as

an F you to Donald Trump.

I mean, politically.

I didn't even mind them saying this.

If they said the following,

if they said the following, and

I don't know the answer, I'm not a doctor, but if they had said the following, in double-blind studies, we finally learned that hydroxychloroquine does not have efficacy, nor does ivermedicine.

Okay.

I don't know if that's true or not, but if they had said that.

But.

If some people anecdotally use it, we discourage the use because we discourage any use of a prescription drug for an off-label use and that we don't have pure scientific use.

But these drugs have been identified by the World Health Organization as vital drugs.

And they will not, they have a long multi-billion dosage history and they are not going to, unless

for the majority of patients, they're not as dangerous or as unknown in their effects as modern monoclonal antibody or antiviral drugs.

It's just true.

Oxaboid may be a wonderful drug, but we don't know anything about it compared to hydroxychloroquine.

And as I said on an earlier broadcast, I know two or three people who are taking it.

I don't mean taking it.

I mean taking it for 30 years for lupus.

They swear by it.

It's saved them.

And they're old.

I don't mean extremely old, but I mean, you would think they would have a lot of comorbidities.

And it's a safe drug.

And, you know, Iver Medicine, I've talked to people who come from Mexico who've used it.

I've talked to people all over who've used it.

And so, my point is: I don't know if they have battle,

they have efficacy, but I do know that what the medical profession does is that they imply that because Donald Trump's fingerprints were on them or referenced them,

they're deadly.

And that's a politicalization.

Just as I said earlier, I think it was the Sammy that

they knew that the Pfizer and Moderna had some initial spectacular results in preventing the first strain.

They did that in early October or late September of 2020.

And they deliberately, Pfizer in particular, they deliberately held off that announcement that it was going to work.

And we know that.

We know that.

Until after, because of communications and the board members.

And

they were in contact

with the Biden campaign via intermediaries the whole 2020.

And they calibrated that announcement until after the election because they were afraid that it would fuel.

So I don't have a lot of confidence.

I have an enormous amount of confidence in doctors and labs all over the United States at Harvard, Yale.

They're doing their best to find it.

But the professional people that are in the government, like Fauci,

they adopt a particular bureaucratic orthodoxy and then they control grant money, and

they are the entree to the livelihoods of thousands of doctors, and they abuse that power

for their own sake.

Follow the money.

Always,

the two big issues, the two big directives of our time.

You know, right now, understand projection and follow the money.

Yeah.

If any candidate said on the Republican side,

if nominated and elected, this is what I promise to do.

I promise to make Jay Bacharia the head of the CDC.

I promise to make John Yannides the head of the NIH.

And I promise to make Scott Atlas the head of health and human services.

I'd vote for them.

Oh, yeah.

I will.

Because

I trust what they said.

Yeah.

And they would be, because the next round and it's coming of some COVID variant or something like COVID, they would be somebody that would be humble about it and they would look at things in a cost-benefit rather than an ideological matrix.

Well, as long as that president created the office of consigliary

and appointed Victor Hansen to that position,

he definitely has

Clinice would say a man must know his limitations.

Well,

okay.

Hopefully, well,

he may have.

We'll fact check that.

Your limitations, I'm pretty sure, are not limited to the next questions we will ask, and that's about demographics and destiny.

And we will get to these right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Just want to throw in a quick reminder that I, Jack Fowler, write Civil Thoughts, a free weekly email newsletter that offers a dozen or more suggested readings with excerpts from important pieces that have come out in the previous week.

It could be about politics, policy, some philanthropy.

You can sign up for it at civilthoughts.com.

It's a production of the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic.

That's where I hang my hat.

So, Victor, we have a couple of questions too.

Let me just give them to you both.

And I had filed this under a headline, Demography is Destiny.

And one is from Chris, who writes, if Russia is in demographic decline, was the Ukraine war inevitable?

And then the other question from David.

And by the way, I read today, I think it was today or yesterday, that

the decline, the birth rate decline in South Korea is so severe.

It's one of the worst.

It's a 1.1 or 1.2.

Yeah, it's like the country's population will be cut.

Taiwan, I think, is almost as bad.

Yeah,

it's a death, it's a death watch almost.

But David writes, it's becoming apparent that not only the West, but the East

are to varying degrees entering or have already entered into a demographic death spiral with this worldwide scope.

Is this unprecedented in history?

And he says, sidebar, talk about the demographic effect on the economy from the Black Death.

I don't know if

you want to do that.

And then he throws in, in short, what is the business case for China when the whole world is retired?

That's a bit of a side question also.

But Victor, your thoughts about,

you know,

we're staring this demographic nightmare.

not in the face, not only in the U.S., but much more severely in some other countries.

It is, I think, I don't know if I've seen it, but I would call it the Western disease.

and societies that Westernize,

even Mexico, I think, is down to 2.2.

So, and we were at 2.1 in 2000.

So I think we're down to 1.6 now.

So we're shrinking very radically, not like, you know, Italy or Germany, 1.4 or 1.3.

But you're right.

It's about South Korea and Taiwan and Japan.

I think it's 1.3.

So what is it?

And it's the Western combination of constitutional government, which is preferable to other alternatives, along with free market, capitalism, private property, creates a lot of bounty and affluence and leisure.

And we create people over

generation.

They get wealthier.

They have more leisure time.

Life becomes more materialistic.

We are able to satisfy the appetites.

No longer do you have three stations to choose.

You've got 700 to choose.

You no longer

have to stand in line to call Kenya.

You can do it on your cell phone.

So there's all sorts of stuff.

You don't, if you're a pervert, you don't have to go to, you know, put a hoodie on and go to a porn movie.

You just do it on your phone.

Because I only say that because the other day I was in a doctor's, I mean, an office that won't give any information.

Oh, my God.

And

somebody was doing that.

I thought, wow.

you know, right next to me looking at porn.

So my point is that it's unchecked.

And that means that a lot of people want to live in this life and they don't want to do things that detract from it like

get up at three times during the night and feed a baby or change diapers or you know just no sooner have you gone through the terrible twos than you have another baby another terrible twos and then you think you've got kindergarten then you've got teenagers driving and they don't want to do that Or they feel that women, who after all, there are women, not just transgendered males who say they're women, but there are biological women,

and they are responsible for birthing.

And the male has some obligation, a lot of obligation to share those responsibilities.

But

if you have a new empowered, and I'm glad we do, woman working in the,

it makes it very hard for them to raise children, child care, etc.

And so we have, that's another explanation of why we're not having 2.2 births.

So when you get that culture, that popular culture, and then, you know, you have the environmental green thing, AOC saying, I don't want to have children to bring them into a doomed world.

And you've got all of this cultural pessimism.

And then you have the combination of atheism that, you know what?

Hey, everybody, you don't have a soul.

So live it up because you can really, you know, dent your body and pervert it and mar it and contaminate it with sin.

And

who cares?

You're dead, you're dead, you're dead.

It's not like, you know, some Catholic medieval scholar was right that he says you're harming your soul by giving in to your physical temptations.

And then when you go into the next world, you atone for it.

Or Socrates says, you know,

your soul is like

a song.

And the song never disappears.

It just needs a body, a violin, so to speak, so you can hear it.

But that just because

you don't have a violin doesn't mean, you know,

Ave Maria doesn't exist.

It exists forever.

That's your soul.

So

whether it was classical doctrine or Christian doctrine, that is out now.

And the result is that people are not having children, both for practical and for theoretical and for personal reasons.

And what are the consequences of that?

Consequences are exactly what we're looking at in the United States.

We have a labor shortage, physical labor shortage, physical labor shortage.

By that, I mean we don't have too few diversity, equity, and inclusion $250,000 a year administrator.

Although my goal, my dream, or my agenda would be to import all the diversity, equity, and inclusion administrators we could.

from south of the border and pay them far less than what we pay our current ones and then see if they like illegal immigration.

That's another story.

But anyway, my point is, so you have a labor shortage, but the other thing is, speaking to someone who will be 69 on September 5th,

your aging population then requires more and more time.

You know, when you get to be in your 60s, you look at your toes and you go all the way up to the scalp and you say, is this thing working?

This toe?

Is this knee?

Is your stomach?

And it's like a car.

After you've got 150,000 miles, it becomes a drag to have to keep taking it into the shop, 200,000.

Well, that's what you are when you're,

I know Joe Biden

has proved that you don't really age at 79, but you do.

And you can see that with Federman, the candidate for Senate running against Oz in Pennsylvania.

So, and it's even a question with Donald Trump.

He should be very candid about it.

If he were to run again, he would be in his 80s in the second term.

And he's not necessarily as fit as somebody else, although he's much more fit being heavy than Joe Biden is lean.

But my point is this, that society then needs a lot more of its gross national product to take care of people at precisely the time it doesn't have enough people to contribute fully to the gross national product.

Japan, and you can really see that Japan, if you look at its medical science or its robotic science, it's kind of gauged at longevity, senescence, prolonging vitality in their 70s, 80s, and 90s.

They're on the

cutting edge of all that research.

And robotics, artificial intelligence, all of that.

And their idea is that we don't have enough people and we're getting old and how do we do that?

The time bomb is China.

It's got 1.4 billion, but in 50 years, it's going to have about 700 million.

It is radically declining.

And somebody's going to say, well, Victor, they still have more than everybody else.

I said, yes, but you don't understand the

equation.

You know, they're going to be older people, and they're going to need more and more unproductive labor to take care of them.

And so,

what do you, how do you deal with it?

My personal view is you try to,

in your so-called golden years, when you think you want to eat pizza and ice cream and sit in front of the TV and just say, I worked hard enough, I'm just going to lay back.

You don't want to do that, not because it's unhealthy alone, but you don't want people to have to disconnect from the workforce to take care of you.

And I mean, you want to be as productive and healthy.

And I'm not speaking as someone who's been all that healthy.

I think I've had nine operations.

Yeah, but you're indestructible.

But the point I'm making is that we all don't want that to happen.

And yet we're all getting all in a greater percentage getting older.

And we look at the younger people.

I think in the dying dying citizen,

I tried to bring the, I really quoted those statistics in the first two chapters because I was talking about the decline of the middle class and demographic changes in the United States.

And,

you know,

if you look at, I had two brothers and I had

two first cousins.

So there were five of us.

We should have had

10 children, right?

Right, right.

And I had two that have survived.

I had three, two survived, and my

brother had

two of his own and two stepchildren, and my other brother did not.

And then my cousin had three, and my other cousin had two.

And I think there were 12 all together.

And out of that 12, there should have been 24.

And so far,

there is one family has zero, the other family has zero, the other one, and there's one, two.

And then in addition to those one, two, there's three, four, and I have four grandchildren.

There's eight instead of 24.

Right.

So, and that's happening in every family.

Right.

And

we have prolonged adolescence where we have especially the male.

I don't think it's the female's culpability.

I think there's a lot of women out there who say, I'm ready to get married just as my grandparents or parents did at 23 if need be, because

there's a backlot log against Wonder Woman.

You know, I'm going to be a CEO and have two children, and I can do all that.

I don't think there's limitations on that.

But my point is, it's the male.

And the male is not buying a home.

He's not getting married.

He's not having children.

He's not fully employed.

He's sort of a pajama boy.

It's such a crisis.

It really is.

It is in every family.

Every family, you'll see some nephew or son or grandperson, grandson who is in the basement watching video games or working online an hour or two or a part-time job.

And then as far as dating, maybe he has his sexual relations with one or two.

women once in a while, but he gives no commitment.

And then he eats up with his student loans, his 20s and 30s, and then suddenly he's 40.

And so that is a worry.

I don't know what caused that, but I have a feeling that a contributory factor is that if you tell a child in the school that he's part of a patriarchy and there's toxic masculinity, and

that when you're going to be 18 and you're going to apply to college, if you're Latino or black or you're female or gay, you're going to have some

D days that the university wants, but you don't get any credit if you're white male.

And you keep pounding that in,

then you're going to have people who feel, okay, I get the message, and they're just going to kind of drop out.

That's what's happened.

By the way, Victor, we only have a few minutes left, but long term on the back on this demographic question, you know, I've probably watched Soilink Green too many times.

But

are we supposed to be eaten?

No, but you know, there will be like imagine South Korea in 30 years or Japan.

And let's not forget ourselves about the proclivity of man to

be cool with getting rid of useless eaters.

I believe that in the sense of,

was it Wesley Smith at National Review that used to just

fixate properly so on euthanasia, right?

Especially euthanasia, excuse me, in Europe.

Right.

Right.

And you can see it in Canada too.

Right.

Yeah.

Well,

it's the law in some states now.

And it's almost, it's like a popular craze.

I'm going to self-inflict this on myself, but sooner or later, the government

will be doing that.

Pray not.

But I can see that being the

being the outcome of

a world with a massive geriatric population.

And it's coming at us.

I got to pray.

I have to pray that the families that populate, say, Thomas Aquinas College, where they have 13 kids and 17 kids, is going to be a lot of people.

That's what's so funny is that when I was at Cal State Fresno for 20 years, I was considered a breeder because I had three children.

And yet, when I go to Hillsdale and I teach in the history or philosophy or talk to people in those departments or English, I mean, it's six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12 children.

And I think it's great.

I think it's great because I don't meet neurotic, angry Hillsdale professors.

I really don't.

And I've spent most of my life with them in other universities.

They're very happy.

They're family orientated.

I think there is something.

Like Brad Burzer.

Yes, absolutely.

Brad is a good son.

David Whelan, the former provost.

I don't know how many children he has, but my God.

Mark Kalkoff, the...

chairman of the history department.

All of them.

I mean, they have all of these children and they're all wonderful parents, and then they're so well-balanced and concerned about their children's upbringing, and more importantly, their children's contribution to society at large.

And it diverts their attention away from that narrow academic neuroticism,

which I found all through.

And I've been, I don't want to mention all the universities I've been guest at, but they're pretty much neurotic people in academia.

And they don't, I have a feeling statistically, they have far less than 2.1 children.

Probably.

And

that's what makes Hillsdale unique:

they have these large families in the 19th century since.

And I really respect that.

But,

you know, I have a little, I want to end the topic very quickly on an upbeat.

I'm looking out the window, Jack, and I have 41 acres of almonds.

Right.

I was in high school.

A guy said to my dad, You take your boys, and I've got 20 acres of almonds, and I want, you know, I want them to harvest it.

So my two brothers and my cousin, we went up to over, it was in the foothills, and we spent three weeks.

And we had rubber mallets and we hit, you know, and then we draw

heavy canvases on both sides of the tree.

We hit the thing and hit it and hit it and hit it to get the almonds off.

And I mean, it was a laborious task.

And then we pulled the canvases and we had to lift them up and we poured them into gunny sacks and we tied the gunny sacks and we left them.

And then we went tree to tree and there was, I think, 140 trees per acre.

So you say 20 acres, you're talking three or four, 3,000 plus.

And then we came by with a bins and a

tractor and we lifted these 70-pound gunny sacks and dumped them in to the bin, etc.

So my point is, and we didn't finish.

Yeah, there weren't enough hours in the day.

Yeah, I mean, he said to my father, who's a friend of mine, we'll pay them on $2 an hour, which I thought was a great thing.

And we got $1.25 an hour.

Okay, I'm watching this harvest right now.

First thing I notice is that there is no cross-fertilization anymore in some varieties.

This is an independence variety.

So you don't have to do two rows, come back three weeks later to get the other variety.

It's all one variety.

There was no bees whatsoever.

There is no cultivation.

Speaking of somebody who used to have to get on a tractor, and as soon as the furrows dried out, disc it with an eight-foot tandem disc, come back and sometimes have to harrow it with a cross-tooth, and then come back with listers or flat furrows and make a furrow and then repeat the process four or five times.

Think of all the diesel fuel and wear and tear.

They don't, they have not cultivated the middle of that row in a year.

What does he do?

He has a kind of a semi-organic herbicide that keeps the weeds down the shade of the orchard discourages growth but my point is hydrometers inject the water uh they tell you when to turn the pump on the pump comes on automatically they inject uh nitrogen into the the emitters so there's no irrigation there's no cultivation there's no in this particular variety, almonds, I shouldn't say variety crop, there is no plum thinning or peach thinning.

Right.

There is no pruning, no pruning.

And to the extent there is, a machine comes by and just knocks down a few limbs that get out in the middle of the road that obstruct if you're, you know, during harvest.

And then I've been watching harvest.

In fact, it's been the background noise on some of the podcasts.

I can't get away from it.

But

a machine comes, it grabs a trunk, it shakes it, it blows it.

away from the tree and then a sweeper comes right after it.

It blows everything.

It looks like your carpet it's so clean into a nice middle pile down the road and then a machine comes down and scoops it up one man in three different machines or actually two can do the whole 40 acres in about two days that took us we did 20 or five of us we never finished wow

mallets yeah and that's happening in agriculture and it's really funny all the crops that we were told you can never mechanize like raisins, you can.

You can trellis them up, you can dry them on the vine, you can have a machine come by and shake the dried bunches and

mechanically harvest them.

You can do that.

So, what I'm getting at is as labor becomes very expensive and scarce.

People are doing the most ingenious things in agriculture.

And I know it's still, you got to have a guy out there and pick apples or plums.

But we're getting to the point where they're even having some crazy ideas about

trellising trees so the fruit is all lined up in one certain place.

So a blade comes by and picks it or

you have sensors that can tell when to pick on a machine.

So I think that

we're adapting to a older, scarcer labor population, at least scientifically about

the insurance that we're going to eat and have fuel, but I'm very worried about the psychosocial aspects of it, right?

Having older people, because when you have a younger, when people don't have children and you violate that cardinal Greek idea, it so resonates through classical literature that you change diapers, so they change your diapers.

I mean, I hope that doesn't happen, but basically, why people,

one of the arguments besides to replace the species, that you, that it was the responsibility of the family that

the state or strangers not raise your children and that you did it.

And it was the responsibility of your children that you took care of your parents.

And I grew up in a multi-generational family.

I did.

I did too.

I did too.

I was responsible for taking care of my grandmother and lived with us until she was 93.

And

I think that's wonderful for having people in their 70s and 80s and 90s.

It was one of the best experiences of my life to hang out with my 70 and 80 year olds, 79 year old, 70 year old Swedish grandfather who broke horses, taught me about horses, and my other maternal grandfather who taught me farming, my grandmother.

It was just wonderful.

Yeah.

It's the wisdom of ages

does get passed on that way too.

Hey, Victor, that's all the time we have for this podcast.

I would ask you a question, but I think we go way over.

I'm going to save it for the next one.

I'll give you a heads up.

It's about your views on Band of Brothers.

But we'll get to that

on an ensuing podcast that we will be recording shortly.

So, hey, thanks everyone who listens on

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And this show, you get 99.9% of people leaving five-star ratings.

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So that's about it.

We will be back again soon, very soon, with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

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