Culture of the United States

But what I mean by that is the reality of the perishable and the very nature of the body.

We, we have a very complicated relationship with the fact that we're gonna die in American culture, and you can just see that based on our values.

Uh, it's really hard to ignore it.

Um, when we think about American culture- It's pretty easy to understand.

All you have to do is look around for about five minutes, and you'll notice that we're absolutely obsessed with youth.

You know, like, what are our priorities? What do Americans seem to value? Eh, decreasing wrinkles seems like a priority.

Uh, tightening the skin on our faces as it begins to loosen seems like a priority.

Um, keeping our energy levels as high as they were when we were teenagers, even when we're 55 years old, seems like a priority, um, because, you know, if we can maintain these youthful energy levels, then we can get more stuff done, right? That, that's actually the real thing that's happening here.

Perfect.

So as I stated earlier, I'm just looking to preserve American culture and further it, so that is respecting individuals' rights, and the Trump administration is explicitly violating those things.

I think it's incredibly anti-American to deploy the military to cities of Democratic governors who you don't really support just based on lies of mass-

Did you, this morning, look into this, um, Ilhan Omar shit? The fuck?

He gave up.

How's it going?

Look, your point that saying, uh, Republicans are destroying America and you're protecting American culture is-

100% ... uh, simply not a fact.

They're American companies.

They should have American values embedded in them because China has its own rival AI models.

And you can bet your bottom dollars that they are going to reflect China's, the CCP's values, which are utilitarian values.

and totalitarian and in which some human lives are worth more than other human lives.

We don't want to live in a world like that.

That's the kind of AI models that China's going to build to entrench their own power, the power of the CCP.

So, of course, in America, we need to have AI models that reflect American values, not A hodgepodge of values picked from Africa and China and the Middle East and Islam.

How are you going to reconcile the religious precepts of Islam and Christianity when they're so different in so many ways, particularly in the treatment of women, particularly in Christianity, turn the other cheek.

Do you realize how long that list is to choose one thing from? But if I had to, it would be immigration.

See, I believe that there is a distinct and unique American culture.

Okay.

So his number one issue is immigration.

He eventually did go to video, and now we have it.

It's a nice crystal clear video.

So, but again, I don't know when he- this actually aired, when he actually spoke these words, okay? But he said, "Eh, immigration, and we have a distinct, unique American culture." Totally agree so far.

Let's continue.

Jesse is also quite a prolific writer.

He's the author of the books Don DeLillo, Balance at the Edge of Belief, 2003, as well as American Popular Culture in the Era of Terror, Falling Skies, Dark Nights Rising, and Collapsing Cultures from 2015, which features chapters on Falling Man and Cosmopolis.

And more recently, in 2022, he's the editor of and author of the introduction to the wonderfully useful, expansive collection of essays by dozens of scholars titled Don DeLillo in Context, published by Cambridge University Press.

And it's a book that's able to offer an overview of the whole career, including, because of its 2022 publication date, a bit about The Silence as well, published in 2020.

the autistic pride flag.

And what's important about that clip is that it's just an erasure of American culture.

I'm big on it.

American culture has been erased and distorted.

And most people probably don't even know what American culture is anymore if they're in their 20s.

because they've been programmed long ago to believe that everyone is divided into a subsect.

You have to be part of either this class, this class, this bucket, this bucket, this bucket.

They've done such a good job of tearing apart what it means to be American that no one actually understands what it actually means, unless you were actually taught it by your family and actually live it.

America's global reputation is falling off a cliff.

But what about our reputation for cool? American culture has been globally dominant for decades.

Hollywood, blue jeans, jazz, hip-hop.

How is that culture faring in a time of so much global disruption? And how has the rest of the world realigned while we were busy thinking about ourselves? I invited W.

The first place I want to start is you're both Americans, but you've both lived in other countries for the past 20 years or over.

David, you've lived in Tokyo for over 20 years, and Yuni, you've lived in South Korea, Germany, and currently you've been in Paris for over 20 years.

One thing that I noticed when I moved to Paris in my 20s was that people were really excited to reference American culture to me as this shared culture that we all had, but it was quite different from the culture I had grown up with.

Like, everybody was really excited about Malcolm in the Middle, which was not a show that anyone I knew in America had ever watched or referenced.

That's hard to do.

Because the older we get, especially in our American Culture, we get very rigid in our learning and in our development sometimes.

And that's very impressive to

me.