March 29, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
03:22:23
3243 The Black Man's Burden - Call In Show - March 25th, 2016
Question 1: [1:53] - “I live in Belgium and would like to discuss the reaction to the Brussels Terrorist Attack from people within my country – as it frustrates me more than anything. I witness people with a “life will go on mentality” where they are suck in states of denial and helplessness.”Question 2: [1:27:22] - “How does an individuals emotional maturity and overall intelligence impact their ability to be successful at capital management? How can philosophy help with financial management? What impact do the emotions, fear and greed, have in financial markets?”Question 3: [2:04:01] - “I am an African American male - had a 4.3 GPA in high school, scored in the top 2% of SAT takers, got accepted into an Ivy League School, and have a full ride from undergrad and graduate school all the way through a PhD. I'm also on the guaranteed medical school path which entails that I if I keep up my GPA, I am guaranteed a spot in medical school without having to take the MCAT." "Because of my accomplishments. I've always been considered a genius by my family - the one who's going to become a doctor and take care of everyone. The ‘don't forget me when you get famous’ guy. Though this often bugged me, I dealt with it. Unfortunately, this has spread to not only my family, but the entire ‘black’ community at large as well. I've had numerous teachers, principals, religious leaders, and mentors tell me that I need to ‘give back’ and become a leader for my race once I make it to wherever I'm going." "I realize that there exist multiple problems within the African American community, but I'm a little cynical as to how that directly coincides with my success. I really want to go into health politics, so I am not really interested in race issues per say; rather, I want to help with poverty related health issues (some correlation, cloudy causation). Do you believe successful minorities have the ‘obligation’ to facilitate the restoration of their communities? If yes, monetarily? Through investments? Through advocation?”
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First caller was a man who lives in Belgium and wanted to discuss the generally unreal response that so many people around him had to the recent terrorist attack in Brussels.
And this life will go on mentality, denial and helplessness, and we tried to figure out what was going on, how to shake people free of it.
And I think we had a pretty good go of it.
So if you're interested in helping wake people up from their complacency regarding this, that's an essential call.
Second caller is a trader.
And he says, how does an individual's emotional maturity and overall intelligence impact their ability to be successful at capital management?
What is the role between capital management, sensible investing, wise business decisions, wise life decisions, and philosophy?
Now, of course, I don't do investment advice or anything, but I think that self-knowledge can be very helpful in these areas.
So we talked about that.
Now the third is a young African-American man scored in the top 2% of SAT takers.
He got accepted to an Ivy League school and he can go all the way through, become a doctor, get a doctorate or whatever he wants to do.
But he has a problem.
And the problem is not racism.
It's not white people.
The problem is his own community.
And we talked a lot about that.
That was a great conversation.
I mean, being able to have honest and open discussions about racial issues is a real breath of fresh air, and it was a great and enjoyable conversation.
Again, freedomainradio.com slash donate.
Thanks, everyone, so, so much.
Alright, up first today we have Lennart.
He wrote in and said, I live in Belgium and would like to discuss the reaction to the Brussels terrorist attack from people within my community, as it deeply frustrates me more than anything.
I witness people with a quote-unquote life-will-go-on mentality, where they are stuck in states of denial and helplessness.
That is from Lennart.
Well, hi Lennart, how you doing?
Okay, I would say...
So, do you want to go more into the question, and just help me understand where you're coming from?
Well, I'm doing an internship at the moment, and one of the people I work with has family members who were almost at the explosion when it happened.
And it was, well, yeah, okay, they almost died, and then they just went on with their work day.
And I just ask myself, how can you do that?
How can you just, okay, some of my relatives almost died, and okay, just carry on with work like nothing happens.
Right.
And how far away were they from the blast?
Were they at the subway station, or were they at the airport?
They were traveling to the airport, but the bus was late, so they arrived Just after the explosion, but they were supposed to be there.
Wait, so government inefficiency for once saved some people's lives, is that what you're trying to tell me?
Yeah, that's the weird irony of it.
Wow.
Right.
Where were you when all of this happened?
I was on transit to my internship, so I only learned of it when I arrived there and both bombs had already exploded.
Right.
And what's your sense of what people's reactions are to this situation?
It's different, but most people, I'd say, have...
They say, well, yeah, okay, it happened and life will go on.
I mean, it's difficult to explain.
They don't really react to it.
I mean, they say, well, yeah, it's horrible, it happened, and we need to do something about it.
Some people say, most don't even go that far, and then they just go on, like nothing ever happens.
Right.
And...
Do they view it as sort of like, well, it's this natural disaster, like, what's the point of yelling at the weather, or, like, how does this...
Yeah, that's one thing they often say, well, what are you going to do?
So they just, well, yeah, it's horrible, it's horrible, and just the mismanagement of politicians in the country, but, well, yeah, what are you going to do about it?
And then that's usually where they stop Talk them around it and just go on with the work or whatever they were doing.
Is it sort of like fatalism?
Yeah.
Could be.
Well, I mostly compare it to, like, an abused spouse.
Like, first time you get beaten, you're gonna resist.
Second time, it will be less.
And in the end, you just learn that resisting doesn't do a lot.
Learned helplessness, I don't know what the term is in English.
Right.
Right.
It's funny, you know, this aspect of what's going on in Europe.
It's funny because, and funny is strange, because people are sort of, they're sort of experiencing it like it is some sort of natural thing.
You know, and we all understand that when there's bad weather, there's not really much point getting angry at them.
It's like that old joke about whether everyone complains about it, but who does anything about it?
And it is sort of like the governments are saying that, well, we're kind of all in this together, you know, like, gosh, we, you know, don't worry, as your governments, we're going to be working really hard to try and Find the terrorists and find the criminals and we're going to double up security and we're all in this together to try and deal with this weird existential threat.
It's like there's this guy who's blowing smoke into your backyard while you're having parties and kind of offers to help you out and here let me get you some eye drops and maybe I'll help you hose down.
But this is not the result of some sort of Natural accident.
It is specifically the result of choice.
And for the governments to say, you know, we're on it.
We're going to put additional resources into fighting this terrorism and so on.
But this all arises.
As a result of specific government policy.
And that's what I find.
We're all in this together, say the government and the people, but as far as I understand it, a lot of people are somewhat concerned about the integration of these disparate cultures, and it comes about specifically as a result of government policy.
So, is it just that people think, well, there's nothing we can do to change what the government is doing?
I think that's one thing.
I think that they just gave up or something.
They don't see a way out or they don't want to recognize what's happening.
And some people just keep on believing the politicians.
Why?
I don't know.
But believing them about what?
What is it that the politicians are saying that people are believing?
Well, that they're gonna improve things.
For example, last time they told that they are gonna hire extra police officers, which they didn't.
Yeah, yeah, but now they are doing raids everywhere and they have arrested that many guys already, so it has to go better now.
I mean, when a child puts his hand on a hot stove, it will learn it burns.
But these people don't really seem to learn that the government won't improve things like they're doing it now.
Well, they just arrested the guy.
And then look, they arrested the guy from Paris who'd been hiding in plain sight in these Muslim areas for four months.
And when they tried to go and arrest him, 200 youths were throwing bricks and bottles and rocks at the police.
So they just went and arrested a guy.
And then what happened?
Well, theoretically, or at least the hypothesis is, that part of the retaliation for the arrest of this guy was the attack on Brussels.
So how is...
Like, there's this weird thing, like, oh, you know, some migrant raped a woman, and oh, it's okay, because, you know, he's been caught, and he's been tried, and he's been put in jail.
Well, okay, that means that he's not out there raping, I guess, people at least outside of jail.
But how is that good?
How is that, like, okay, so now we had to pay for the police, the arrest, the trial, the imprisonment, and all that.
How is that a plus?
How is that a win?
I don't know.
They might just see it like a small victory.
Like, well, yeah, okay, they did something good, so that's a plus.
Like, they...
I think they're just expected to be much worse.
Like, well, okay, they at least do something.
There are some bits doing their job, so they'll be happy about that.
Right.
Right.
Do people think that integration between North African Muslims and people like the domestic population in Belgium, do they think that's possible?
Do they think, you know, a little bit more time, a little bit more education?
I mean, do they think it's going to happen or do they just avoid the topic completely?
Well, they avoid the topic, but it's unspoken knowledge that there are certain places where you better don't go.
For example, you have Borgerhout, which is called Borgerhout because of the Muslim immigrants living there.
And one by one, the last The Belgians are living there and the percentage of foreigners there just keeps on rising.
Just like around Brussels, they're calling it the Islamic Belt just because of the amount of Muslims that live there.
Right.
And do people ever talk about what the endgame is going to be?
Like, what is going to happen if current trends continue?
You know, Europeans used to be fairly good at that.
But what are people's thoughts about what happens going forward?
What's going to be like in 10 years, in 20 years, in 40 years?
Well, there are those people in denial, and there are people that say, well, yeah, it's going to go sour somewhere.
It's going to end badly.
What does that mean when they say it's going to end badly?
I'm sorry to interrupt you.
What does that mean, it's going to end badly?
Does it mean there's going to be a civil conflict?
What do they mean?
Well, mostly it's a reaction on something that happens.
For example, the bombings.
They'll tell, yeah, it's to be expected when you let in that much people that's Don't fit in here.
If there are fights with the police, they'll tell, well, yeah, that's to be expected if you do that stuff.
So it's not like they make predictions of, well, okay, this is going to go wrong or this is going to go wrong, but they'll tell, well, yeah, okay, this happened because the politicians are just letting people in like it's nobody's business.
So it's to be expected.
I'm trying to figure out what that means.
Well...
Does that mean that the migrants...
Like, did they view the migrants as not having moral agency?
Like, this is just how they're going to behave?
You know, because, you know, a lot of Germans came to America in the 19th century and, you know, there was not a huge amount of shrapnel flying through the air or Irish or Scandinavians and so on.
And I'm just trying to think, like if I were American in the 19th century and a bunch of Irish came and were, I don't know, getting drunk.
Let's take a cliche.
They were getting drunk and writing postmodern prose.
And I said, well, it's to be expected.
They're Irish.
You can't expect anything more.
Like, wouldn't that be a...
A way of saying that Irish people can't be expected to behave differently because they're less than us.
Yeah, I think you can say that people have come to expect that kind of behavior.
Of the immigrants.
Not per se the immigrants that have lived here for a long time, but the recent immigrants of the last decade or so, I think.
They've just come to expect that that's what happens, that's what they do.
Okay, so they're considered to be not...
They don't have the same level of responsibility that...
Native people from Brussels or native people, native Belgians would have.
And the other thing too is that of course a lot of these terrorists are not first generation.
They were born in France or in Germany or in Brussels.
So how do people explain that?
I think they They don't really go to the explaining side of it.
They more go to the accusing side of it.
Well, yeah, it goes wrong and they complain, but that's about it.
They don't look any further.
They don't seek a reason why it is.
They just say, well, okay, it's the fault of the politicians.
It's the fault of the immigrants.
But to actually seek a cause or to see what they can do about it, that's too much effort.
I don't know why they don't want to go that far.
Whether it's because they feel uncomfortable doing it or they're just completely...
Helpless about it.
I don't know.
Sorry, not you, but the whole situation, plus your description of it, is kind of sapping my will to breathe.
I don't know much about, obviously, politics in Belgium.
Are there...
Anti-immigration political parties, people who say, listen, enough is enough.
We've got to take a break.
We've got to figure out what's going to happen here.
We can't just keep adding to what is clearly a problem.
And the problem, of course, terrorism is the most visible aspect of the problem, but welfare consumption, general crime rates, having too many kids without having a job...
Language, cultural, I mean, six million different problems.
Terrorism is, you know, obviously to the people who are getting the shrapnel through the head, it's a bit more than the tip of the iceberg, but it is the tip of the iceberg statistically in that a lot more people are suffering from migrants who, like, just than the people who are getting blown up.
And are there parties in the Political sphere in Belgium who are interested or say, listen, we gotta take a break, we gotta stop this influx of migrants or whatever you want to call them.
And if so, what are people's thoughts about that?
Well, there are two parties which are somewhat geared towards it, but it's not really the main focus of the party.
And there is one party which is very clear about it.
Well, we don't want any more immigrants.
We need to do something about it.
But in Belgium, the other parties have something they call the cordon sanitaire, which basically means, well, don't touch that party with a ten-foot ball.
Wait, sorry, you mean the politicians?
Yeah.
Okay, but of course the politicians don't like competing political parties, but what does that mean?
Well, basically...
If that party is called the Flamsbelang, the only way they would ever get something to say is if they got more than 50% of the votes, because no one else is interested in working together with them.
And the people are bit by bit turning around towards the party.
But before all of this, like five years ago, it was like voting for the Nazis.
It's like, well, if you do that, you're a racist, you're a bad person.
And now it's bit by bit changing.
More people are saying, well, yeah, it just isn't that bad.
We need A party like Vlaamsplan to do something about it.
Okay, so this idea that if there's anyone in the world who is not allowed to move to Belgium, then you're a racist.
I'm trying to figure out what's the argument here, what's the general syllogism?
Because if there's reasons to oppose migrants, migrant influx has nothing to do with race.
Nothing to do with race whatsoever.
It has to do with incompatible values, subjugation of women, chopping people's hands off, and the penalty for leaving the religion is death.
Lots of things.
There's no separation of church and state.
Lots of reasons as to why you'd want to have Fewer people coming in of that ideology.
There's nothing to do with race.
I mean, Cat Stevens was at the border, I think, twice.
And so it's nothing to do with race.
And also, even if we take out race, even if we take out religion, why on earth would people want masses of people coming in who are almost certainly going to spend most of the rest of their lives on welfare and why would you want people coming in let's say that it was a bunch of white people And those white people didn't speak any languages that people in Belgium speak
and wanted to put their kids in government schools and were generally not too healthy and had bad teeth.
As a taxpayer, why would you want people coming?
It's nothing fundamentally to do with race or even if we cast those things aside, isn't it just sort of economic self-preservation?
To say, look, we've got a pretty great country here, and if we let a whole bunch of people in who are going to take from the system without paying into the system, then isn't that...
The Amish used to figure this out.
If you're too lazy to go help them build a barn...
Like if you live in an Amish village, you don't feel, ah, forget it, I'm not going to go help you build your barn, then guess what?
They don't come and help build your barn because then you'd be taking out of a system of cooperation that you're not paying into.
So why on earth would it have anything fundamentally to do with race or even religion?
But rather fundamentally, it's like, well, there are people coming in here and they're drawing $20,000, $30,000 a year in total.
Not just direct payments, but $20,000, $30,000 a year plus or even euros a year plus.
They never have paid into the system.
They most likely never will pay into the system.
and they're having a lot of kids who most likely are not going to pay a lot into the Like, why can't it just come down to, sorry, the numbers don't work.
Well, with parties, there are only two which have something...
Against mass immigration.
So the left in Belgium is quite numerous.
They have a lot more parties.
So options on the other side are quite limited.
And then the flams-blams, it has a big stigma.
So like Trump, they just say, well, yeah, they're racist and they don't really listen to the standpoints.
Sometimes even other parties take over the arguments of the Flames Blanc.
And people go, well, yeah, yeah, that's good, that's good, that's good.
But they're still racist.
Yeah, when it comes from Flames Blanc, they say, well, it's racist.
When it comes from someone else, it's, well, yeah, yeah, that's a good idea.
It's a good idea.
I'm sorry, but this is what's so frustrating about it, is that if there were a group of Belgians, just old-fashioned white Belgians, if there were a group of Belgians who'd holed up in a nine-square-kilometer ghetto and threw rocks at police and were on welfare and didn't work and didn't integrate and blew people up from time to time, wouldn't Belgians say that's Not good, right?
We've got to solve this.
This is not working out.
This is bad, right?
And so if there were just a bunch of Belgians there, then the Belgians would get upset.
They'd roll up their sleeves and they'd say, okay, listen, we've got to...
This is not working out.
These people are taken from the system.
They're not paying into the system.
So this is what I find.
Like the people who say, well, I'm against racism, so I'm going to treat these black people or these Arabs completely differently than I would ever...
Treat my fellow Belgians.
I'm going to lower my standards.
I'm going to say, well, you know, migrants get a migrant, you know, whatever it is, right?
The idea that it is anything other than racism to have this soft bigotry of low expectations and to treat people vastly different based upon their race is pure racism in its essence.
So just, you could ask people, I'll ask them directly, if this was just a group of white people who were behaving like this, what would you want done?
And if this group of white people were all coming from a particular country, Gypsanistan, or whatever it is, right?
Then you'd say, no, this is terrible, right?
This is really bad.
The fact that you are eliminating your own standards and values for non-whites is de facto and de jure racism.
Well, I have tried to point those things out to people and generally most people agree, well yeah, it's not good to do this or that and then they just keep on doing what they did before.
I don't know what that means, what are you talking about?
Yeah, sorry if I'm a bit fake about things.
Well, for example, if you tell them, okay, there are this many, this is the percentage of Muslims in our country.
This is the percentage of Muslims in prison.
Then they say, okay, that's a problem.
But people don't go any further than that.
It's like they have some mental block or something that prevents them from completely processing it.
I don't know if I'm rambling completely.
No, they don't want to be made uncomfortable by the left, right?
So if they come out and say the things that we're talking about, Then, let me just give a brief thing here because I just did a show on this today, but I'll just keep it very briefly.
A long time ago, people were way out of control of their environment, right?
They didn't have any control.
They didn't know if the weather was going to be good or bad.
They didn't know if they were going to hunt and find the animals they wanted to hunt.
They didn't know if there'd be some volcano erupting or some elephant was going to trample down.
So they had this anxiety and a group of people developed Who were good at assuaging that anxiety.
They'd say, oh no, no.
Give me some money.
Perform these rituals and your crops will be well and your hunting will be good and your children will be fertile and your soil will shoot forth from the fruits of its...
Meaty loins, all the crops you can want.
And now, of course, it didn't do anything, but at least it made people feel better.
And so what happened was there was anxiety provided by nature and a group of people got together and said, hey, you know, if we can talk people out of feeling anxious, they'll give us money because anxiety is uncomfortable.
And so you got this short-term relief from anxiety by giving the priests or whoever it was the money and the priest would tell you or some resources.
The priest would tell you what you wanted to hear to make you feel anxious.
Now, The problem is that because it's a magical, nonreal solution, People prefer to pay the priests to make them feel better than actually improve technology.
Now, for a variety of reasons, we've gone into the show a bunch of times before.
Eventually, the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, scientific revolution, the capitalist revolution came along and lo and behold, people had 10 to 20 times the crops they had before.
They had relatively stable food supplies.
They had relatively stable incomes.
War diminished considerably in Western Europe throughout the 19th century.
And so nature was no longer constantly poking this anxiety button in human beings.
And so these people whose sole particular value was to ease people's anxiety, well, they didn't have as much to do because nature wasn't as much of a bitch in control as she used to be and people had ways of managing it and handling it and so on.
And so what they did was they said, okay, I think, it's hypothesis.
What they did was they said, okay, Nature isn't making people anxious anymore and so we're not able to sell relief from anxiety.
So we're going to start making people anxious instead and then sell them relief from anxiety that we're creating.
And what happened was they began inventing all these sins and these crimes to make people feel bad so that people would give them resources so they wouldn't feel bad anymore.
Like in the past it was original sin and hell, right?
And then it just became, well...
You're rich because you're an exploiter.
You're middle class because you're an exploiter.
You're doing well because you're a racist, you're a sexist, you're a misogynist.
You see, nature wasn't providing the anxiety, so these leftists are now hitting people with the anxiety so that people will give them resources In order to avoid the anxiety of the verbal abuse of the left for another five minutes.
But of course, as you pay, whatever you pay for, you'll get more of.
And so, because this torrent of verbal abuse has people running and hiding and throwing money at people to avoid being verbally abused, okay, you can have affirmative action, okay, you can have migrants, okay, you can have a left-leaning voting bloc, you can have more welfare, you can have, like, just leave me alone!
Stop yelling at me, leave me alone!
Please, just don't hurt me.
Don't harm me.
Don't say mean things at me.
And I will do whatever it takes to give you whatever you want so that I can get five more minutes of not being verbally abused.
You know, like the abused wife.
Sometimes we'll give a blowjob with broken teeth.
Just give me five more minutes of not being hit, of not being screamed at, of not being abused, of not being yelled at, of not being ferociously attacked verbally, or more than verbally sometimes, trying to get you fired or whatever.
And now we are buying peace from conflict Like they did in the 1930s, inches at a time, and the longer you do that, the worse the resulting conflict.
The longer you try to buy peace to an escalating enemy, the worse the conflict is when it comes.
That which you avoid, you create so often, psychologically and in society.
So what they're doing is they're saying, look, It's the tall poppy that sticks up that gets its head cut off.
It is the nail that sticks up that gets hammered down and squished.
And I don't want to take a stand because that will attract the attention of the sociopathic verbal abusers who are going to scream racism, who are going to contact my employer, who are going to try and get me fired, who are going to destroy my reputation, who are going to publish the most outlandish and horrifying and false things about me on the internet.
They're just going to try and smash my reputation.
I don't want to draw the attention of Of these cold-eyed, cold-hearted predators.
And so I'm just not going to say anything.
I'm not going to share anything that I agree with.
I may whisper under the covers with my wife about what I truly think and feel, but I am not I am not going to subject myself to the torture of potential ostracism and the loss of my career.
And this happens in a wide variety of environments and situations.
It happens with the race and IQ. It happens with skepticism towards catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.
It happens in a wide variety of situations and circumstances.
But And I understand it.
I understand it.
I really understand it.
But I think that the time has passed for that.
Because a conflict is coming.
And I can sort of understand, maybe if you don't have kids, and of course a lot of people in Europe don't have kids, I can sort of understand.
Where you say, okay, well, I'm...
30, I'm going to maybe live till we're about 70.
And not really terrible things are going to happen over the next 30 years, at least not that bad.
I don't have any kids, so I don't have anything to fight for in terms of what's beyond the bookmark of my own death.
I have nothing to leave.
You know, if you're a lonely old guy with no kids, no family, and no friends...
Why would you save your money?
Who are you gonna leave it to?
I guess maybe a charity or something like that.
So in convincing Europeans not to have kids by continually telling smart people to worry about abstract nonsense, They have taken the smartest people who would have the most to fight for if they had kids, taken them out of the loop.
And so people are in Europe, and you can correct me where I'm wrong.
I don't want to tell you your experience, of course.
But people in Europe, they're just, well, you know, we don't have kids, mostly.
And it's going to be fine for the next couple of decades.
And...
What's my cost-benefit?
I could speak up now.
And of course, if everyone speaks up, well, they can't attack everyone.
And as Milio Yiannopoulos has pointed out, social justice warrior stuff like the left verbal abuse hysteria is sort of at its peak at the moment.
And so, of course, his argument is that if you can take it down now when it's at its strongest, it's pretty much like a vampire with a stake in its heart, right?
Linguistically and from a social effects standpoint, it's kind of gone for good.
But So I can understand the calculations and say, well, they'll attack me.
They might get me fired.
My friends might think I'm a horrible person.
Maybe women won't date me.
You know, there's a movement in the States, Vote Trump, Get Dumped, which is basically pulling a Liz Estrada or a Chirac and saying that women aren't going to sleep with guys who vote for Trump.
And so I can understand it.
And again, It's hard to make the case for making that kind of sacrifice if you don't have kids.
Those of us who have kids have a different time frame from other people.
So they just are doing a cost-benefit analysis with no particular passion for values.
And they're coming up like, what's the point?
Does this make any sense to you at all?
Is this anywhere close to accurate?
Well, for some people I would say yes, but there are also a lot of people that have children and still react the same.
For example, one person from my internship I was talking about, she has children.
And yet she still reacts quite apathetically, I would say, to it.
Well, yeah, okay.
It happens.
And life goes on.
And she has children.
And there are other people who...
Does she have a husband?
Yes.
And what does he think?
Do you know?
No, I don't know that.
Do you know of any men who have children?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And what do they think?
Same thing?
Well, they react more vocally.
For example, one suggested that it would be best just to bomb the Middle East and put asphalt on it so that we could be done with it.
Because nothing good would I've come out of those regions, and I have heard similar opinions from other men, but it still remains the just talk on the dinner table or in the cafeteria.
Sorry, so the men with kids are more aggressive in terms of how the situation should be dealt with?
They talk more aggressively about it, but that's where it stops.
They say, well, yeah, they should do this or this or this, and that's it.
Traditionally, it has been men, and this is not just in human society, you can see this in primate societies as well, that it is the men who patrol the perimeters.
It is the men who protect the tribe from the borders.
And of course, one argument is, I don't know if you can prove it or not, but one argument is that when you put women in charge, women are just not very good at Recognizing the need for boundaries.
So if there's a bunch of primates around, and it's not true for all primates, but for most.
And, you know, there's the men, the males in the pack, in the tribe, the males are roaming the edges, roaming around, checking for predators, checking for competing apes.
And, you know, the women are all raising the babies and breastfeeding and picking nits out of each other's back and talking about Kim Kardashian and all that.
And the men are out there patrolling the perimeters.
And the reason for that, of course, is that if another tribe, and it's the men, right?
If another tribe aggresses against a particular tribe of apes, then what happens is, if the male apes break through, then they will kill the male apes in the tribe.
They will kill the offspring of They will kill the babies, they will kill the children, but they will spare the females and they will mate with the females, which is why men are constantly roaming the perimeter of the tribe and checking for incursions from aggressive competing apes or primates.
And that's because, of course, they...
They're the ones who are going to suffer, right?
The women, of course, you know, the female apes, they will mourn the infants and the children that they lose, but they will survive and they will mate with the stronger apes or the apes who conquered.
So the men are out there, the male apes are out there guarding the perimeter because they're the ones who are going to get killed if the perimeter is breached.
The women aren't.
Women aren't going to get killed.
And so when you put women in charge of a country, the theory goes, again, I don't know if it's true, but in general, if you put women in charge of the country or highly feminized men, so to speak, they just don't have as much interest in guarding the perimeter because they're not the ones who are going to be killed if there's a significant breach.
So I just sort of wanted to mention that.
And, Mike, you want to jump in here because you've got some thoughts about it.
I'm not sure I hugely agree, but you've got something I think that you wanted to mention about this.
Well, I'm just, Leonard, in your description of it, it certainly sounds like most of the people you talk to are very anxious for other people to take steps to potentially solve this problem as opposed to taking steps themselves to address these issues.
Does that...
No, because they don't even want the political party, what's called the right-wing political party, the anti-immigrant political party.
They don't even want that.
They won't even say, well, I'll vote for these guys and they'll handle it, right?
Well, voting, that actually requires effort.
You have to go to the polls and actually put in a ballot, and if you talk about it, someone might say something negative about you.
And you can't win unless you talk about it with someone, right?
If you think that it's really important to have a control-the-borders party in power, your vote is much more effective and important if you can convince other people to vote too, right?
Well, sure.
Look at the opposition that people that support Donald Trump are facing in the United States currently.
I mean, we're going to be talking about this a bit with this Ted Cruz story that's coming out.
But Amanda Carpenter has come out with a blacklist for Trump supporters, people that have publicly supported Donald Trump, essentially saying all these people should be ostracized.
Anyone that supports Donald Trump voiced any support from publicly.
We should not interact with these people.
We should, you know...
Wait a minute.
Hang on.
Mike, all the people who criticized me for suggesting ostracism based on values, boy, they must be just really attacking this woman for promoting this kind of ostracism.
I can't wait to see all of that.
Yeah, I'm not going to hold my breath on that.
Yeah, I'm not going to hold my breath either.
So there's lots of ostracism being thrown in the direction of Donald Trump supporters these days.
And no doubt, I mean, just in the caricature that people put out for anyone that supports any type of immigration policy that doesn't involve bringing in massive amounts of migrants and refugees from war-torn countries that the nations may or may not currently be at war with, depending on where...
Where we're talking, all of them are already identified as far-right or, you know, all types of slanderous labels put upon them.
And the idea that people are going to actually have to voice support for these immigration policies or stand up themselves and say, hey, we need to solve this problem.
And whether that's political or not, currently the only option to really solve immigration-related policy issues is dealing with the political process.
Unfortunately, that's a society in which we live, and that's really the situation.
And people don't want to stand up and talk about it for fear of ostracism, for fear of being attacked.
And, okay, you can stick your head down.
You can be passive.
You can do nothing.
And then what's going to happen to you?
Well, you know, you see what's going to happen.
It happened in Brussels, it's happened in Paris, it happened in San Bernardino, and it's going to happen in a lot more places.
And it just happened in Turkey, I think, today.
A brutal attack in Turkey today, or recently, and in Beirut.
They just self-detonated as well.
It is happening a lot.
This endless passivity, when there's clear and obvious problems, staring everyone clear in the face, this blanket passivity of, oh, someone else is going to do it, or oh, it's hopeless, it's sickening to me.
This passivity, in the past, none of the major moral crises in the world would have been solved with this level of passivity.
Slavery in the past, oh, gee, I don't like it.
Someone else will deal with the problem.
Oh, someone else will do it.
Oh, no, no.
It took people with courage and balls to stand up and say no mas, to stand up and say this is morally corrupt and we're not going to support it anymore.
And they faced social ostracism and they faced the fight of all the people whose interests benefited from slavery at the time and they pushed forward because it was the right and moral and courageous thing to do.
And there's been untold numbers of moral crusades and crises in the history of mankind that it's taken incredibly brave people to stand up and do something about.
And today, the fact that, you know, you get people blown up in an airport and blown up at a metro station and people still don't want to stand up and say something for fear of potentially being called a racist or having bad things said about them at dinner parties or maybe not getting an invite to the local snack buffet the next day is disgusting to me.
You know, that's about the rage I had, the talk I had in my head all week long sitting at my internship.
Just people complaining and then stopping the conversation and stopping just the whole train of thought.
There were A lot of people died and just, okay, well, it's bad.
And that's where it ends.
It doesn't go any further than the coffee room or anything else.
They just, well, yeah, it's bad.
End of discussion.
Go on with our life.
I don't, I really don't get it.
I...
Yeah.
Sorry.
No, no.
Keep going.
You don't get it.
What?
I mean, you're talking about your anger and your frustration, but you sound kind of wooden, at least in the conversation.
Where is your heart at, my brother?
It's just...
How can you say that something is that much of a problem without doing anything about it?
I mean, Belgians did a lot in the past.
Belgium has been owned by practically every country in Europe.
We had to fight our way out of it every time.
And now it's like, no, no, just gonna lay on my back and complain a bit and see when it's over.
How can people do that?
I mean, it's like when the doctor says, well, okay, Your arm is infected with some virus.
We have to amputate it.
And the person goes like, eh, it's okay.
Well, that's because they want to die, right?
That is a death wish, for sure.
I don't think it's really a death wish, but it's like...
No, I mean, in the example that you gave.
I'm not saying everyone in Belgium wants to die.
But people would generally rather fight a war of blood than a war of ideas.
This is just a great tragedy.
This was so frustrating to thinkers around the world, probably throughout history.
Maybe it's frustrating for you, too.
If people can't have discussions about this, if they can't talk about things, if they can't bring the data and the facts and the evidence, and if they can't try and make decisions based upon reality, then what happens is the conflict gets pushed down and pushed down.
And eventually, eventually.
it blows up.
I mean, this has happened countless times in history, and certainly in European history.
And so, what I don't understand is why people find it harder to hold a gun than have an opinion.
Because where this leads to is violence, significant violence.
And rather than have uncomfortable conversations, people would literally rather have sucking chest wounds.
That's what I can't figure out.
Because it can all be prevented through conversation.
And that people won't have these conversations and avoid these conversations and suppress these conversations, then it may very literally blow up.
I just...
I don't get the passivity.
I mean, if you talk about it, great, great.
If you can solve it by talking about it, that would be wonderful.
If it can't, please do something else about it.
Go to the streets, go...
Make your own party or get signatures or I don't know what you could do else about it, right?
The doing is how we paralyze ourself.
It's the thought, the passion, the commitment and the conversation that matters.
The doing is less relevant.
Europe isn't even committing to a conversation about this stuff based on facts as yet.
The doing, I don't care about the doing yet.
Opening up, you know, it's like you have to talk to your wife before you can figure out whether you should stay married or get a divorce.
You have to at least talk to her first.
Forget about leaping over into the doing.
Let's see the conversation first.
Yeah.
I'm just thinking that people, using the same example, are sitting there complaining against themselves.
Well, okay, it's bad with my wife.
And I'm just angry that nobody doesn't do anything.
I mean, there are a lot of options.
Talking is amongst them.
But they don't do anything.
And I just don't get it.
I mean, we Belgians aren't very nationalistic.
It's not very Belgium to be proud to be Belgium, someone said.
And that's true.
But people have to see that this is not going to end well.
And they're just sitting there doing nothing.
They aren't talking.
They don't do anything else.
They're just going on with their life.
Well, Leonard, one thing I learned quite a long time ago is you can't control what other people do and don't do.
You can only control what it is that you do.
And, you know, as someone who's probably put in an 80-plus hour week this week, you know, we get these messages like, man, you're putting out a lot of content.
Yes!
Yes, we're putting out a lot of content.
It requires a lot of work.
It doesn't just poof come into existence.
It requires an untold of amount of work.
And I know I've put in like 80 hours this week.
I haven't had a vacation or taken a substantial amount of time off in over a year because there are important moral issues affecting the world.
They're going to shape where we go in the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years or the next several generations.
For, you know, our children today and our children's children and where we're headed moving forward.
This, with the election cycle, with everything that's going on with the migrant crisis, this is an incredibly important time in human history.
And I can look at myself in the mirror at the end of the day and say that I am doing literally everything I can.
To try and start important conversations, put information into people's hands, to have a dialogue about these issues, give people tools to have the conversations that need to happen around this so productive things can occur.
And I can look at myself in the mirror at the end of every day and say, I put in the work that I need to.
And then when, however things pan out, I know that I have done what I can.
And you can't control what anyone else does.
And Lord knows attempting to will just drive you mad.
But you can control what you do, and I want to encourage people out there that are concerned, that do feel tempted by the helplessness.
And there's lots of helplessness out there, and I understand it to some degree.
These are big, world-shaping challenges.
What can one person do?
Well, one person can do a whole hell of a lot.
You can start a conversation that changes the world.
One little drop in a pond, you know, down the cascade of events, the butterfly effect starts a typhoon that hits Japan.
What can you do?
What can you do today?
What can you do right now?
What can you do in the next hour?
What can you do tomorrow?
What can you do with this weekend that's coming up?
What can you do that's going to make a positive difference in the world today?
And are you able, the question that everyone needs to ask themselves, because they're going to be asking it years from now, Did I do enough then?
At the end of the day, I was able to look myself in the mirror and go, okay, I can go to sleep having earned my rest, having earned my shut-eye.
Because I took a step.
Maybe some people called me a racist.
Maybe they called me a sexist.
Maybe they threw some other adjectives my direction.
Frankly, these days, if people aren't calling you a racist and a sexist, you're not talking about anything important, given the PC culture in which we live.
But are you going to be able to, when the dust settles and the smoke clears, when you're sitting on your damn deathbed, looking back at the world, whatever it's become, say, well, I did my part.
I can go to sleep, enjoy my dirt nap, knowing that I did everything I could for the people I care about, my children and my children's children.
You can only control yourself.
So, Leonard, when you look in the mirror at night, what do you think?
Well, at the moment, I think I'm going to need to stay up a bit longer.
Yes.
It has come across my mind, and I've been looking at some stuff.
And this is going to sound very cowardly of me.
I've waived some options and I'm thinking about a few but the ones I really want to take I can't because the internship I'm doing is in public sector.
And they've had some issues with things I already said.
And I'm being very...
Hang on.
You want to work for the government?
No.
And that's why you can't speak out?
No.
I'm at the moment doing an internship at the government.
And they're quite...
I don't know what the word is...
They're more irritated by people hanging on the right side of politics than on the left side.
Of course.
Leftists like people on the left and they dislike people on the right.
To be honest, I'm sitting a bit on the fence because I think it's a bit of a valid reason because I have to end my studies.
I have to do this to get my degree.
But on the other hand, it's an excuse.
It is an excuse.
It's like people saying, well, yeah, okay, you can do this because of this or this or this.
But sorry, sorry, Leonard.
I mean, maybe I'm misunderstanding something.
So if you speak privately with people...
Your employers would not likely find out about that, right?
They're not bugging your nipple or something like that, right?
So you can speak privately and focus on rousing the dormant European spirit before it comes up with scimitars.
But you could also do something anonymously.
You could disguise your voice.
You could put something out on YouTube.
Oh man, half of the blogs that I read these days, some of the best journalism is just anonymous people behind some pseudonym that are cranking out some really, really great journalistic work.
Yeah, so I don't know why it has to go directly to the people who are running your mentorship program.
Again, maybe I'm not understanding something, but I don't know.
Like now, of all the times in history, you can make a change and you can affect millions of people and nobody needs to even know who you are.
You know, we've had conversations, we've taken information from people.
We actually don't even know their names.
Don't know where they live.
Don't know race, gender, nothing.
We had a guy named Black Mask on the show not too long ago, a superhero in Toronto.
No idea who the guy is.
So, I mean, I'm not sure when you say, well, there could be repercussions.
Again, maybe I'm missing something, but how is it that it needs to go back to you?
No, you're actually right.
But this never crossed your mind before?
No.
I think, well, it was a bit of a hectic week, but you're actually right.
I've been too much focused on things that could go wrong instead of thinking, well, how can I solve this?
And look, if speaking facts about what you think and feel if speaking facts about what you think and feel if this was I don't know Leonard are you married?
No.
Okay.
You have a best friend, I assume?
Yes.
Okay.
If your best friend needed $1,000 to bail him out of a Tunisian jail because he'd been unjustly arrested or whatever, and you went to the bank but the bank was closed, would you just go back home?
No.
What would you do?
I would grab my cash money, probably, but I get the point.
You would do something until it worked.
Yeah.
Right?
You would do something until it worked.
And there's something that's completely deflated.
I don't know.
I don't want to theorize why.
It's deflated out of the West.
We used to be people who did stuff until it worked.
And if saving civilization was as important as your friend being unjustly imprisoned in a Tunisian jail, then there's no way you would have, like if it was, like I got to find a way to get these ideas out there, it would take you, if you were truly committed to that, it would take you about eight or nine minutes to think, if that, eight or nine minutes to think, oh, I can just do it anonymously.
It's not that you don't have the commitment to do something until it works.
Once you have the commitment, you know, where there's a will, there's a way.
Nietzsche says, give a man a why and he can bear almost any how.
If you have a commitment that you have something to offer this world to save the world, to save civilization, to preserve the thousands of years of bloody struggle that Europeans have Sacrifice in order to build a decent civilization in Europe and elsewhere.
If you had a true commitment, nothing would stop you and you would find a solution for every single problem.
When you don't have any commitment, then the first problem that comes along stops you.
Like, oh, well, the bank's closed.
I guess I'll just let my friend rot in a Tunisian jail until Monday, right?
No, you'd say like, okay, okay, that didn't work, so maybe I'll go to Western Union.
Okay, that didn't work.
Maybe I can find a way to wire the money through PayPal.
Okay, that didn't work.
Okay, maybe I can buy some bitcoins.
Like, you would just keep doing it.
And then if you had to fly to Tunisia with a thousand dollars in your groin, You would do it until it worked.
Because you would have a commitment.
And all problem solving, Leonard, all problem solving is nothing more or less than a commitment.
Because when you are committed, you do it until it works.
Until you succeed or you completely give up and fail and your head's on a stick somewhere.
But you do things until it works.
And if you want to solve any big problems in the world, the only thing that you need is commitment.
And people in Europe, let me tell you why.
I don't think this is you, but tell me if it is.
But this is my message to people in Europe.
You cuck-tastic, faded history wannabes.
I'm telling you, you need somebody to tell you straight.
The reason why people in Europe don't like Donald Trump is very simple.
And I know we get the messages, oh we do like Donald Trump, it's just our leaders and so on.
There are a lot of people in Europe and there are a lot of people on the right.
A lot of people who are conservatives, a lot of people who are Republicans.
They don't like Donald Trump.
And you know why people don't like Donald Trump?
Because Donald Trump has taken away the excuse Of danger from those who wish to speak uncomfortable truths.
See, people say, well, you know, I'm going to be really unpopular.
People are just going to hate me, really unpopular.
If I speak uncomfortable truths, if I get well-sourced information, if I read up on the experts and I provide the information, people are going to hate me because I'm telling the truth that is uncomfortable to them.
And, you know, we are tribal species and social ostracism is as bad for our Brain sometimes as torture, physical torture, activates the same pain centers.
So people have said, well, in order to get along, I have to go along.
And I don't want to say uncomfortable truths because people just hate me.
Yeah.
Well, Donald Trump has revealed that to be self-serving bullshit.
Because Donald Trump is speaking...
A rather large number of uncomfortable truths.
Now, they're only uncomfortable to some.
There are people in America who have spent about 50 years begging for the exact conversation that Donald Trump is bringing to the table, which is why he's popular.
But Donald Trump is speaking uncomfortable truths and the left and the right, lots of people in the middle, are attacking him with everything they've got.
They are leaving nothing.
No ammo is left in the chamber.
There is nothing left In the clip, they are firing, throwing, hurling everything they can at him.
And Leonard, how's he doing?
Well, as far as I know, quite good.
He's winning.
He's winning.
So people have always said, oh, you speak uncomfortable truths, you're toast, man, people will hate you, you're gonna...
No.
No.
He's winning.
He's winning.
So this idea that you're unpopular if you speak uncomfortable truths, well, Christ Almighty, if that was true, why am I doing 7 to 10 million views and downloads a month?
Oh, uncomfortable truths will make you so unpopular.
Uncomfortable truths will make a few weak-willed, vicious-dependent leeches hate you.
Of course, of course, of course they will because they've adapted themselves to parasitism and you're taking away the host.
Of course they're going to dislike you.
That's natural.
If you speak to people about you don't have to spend time with abusers, hey, the abusers won't like you.
Guess what?
Sun rises tomorrow.
In other news, water is wet, snow is cold.
So people don't like Donald Trump because he is taking away their excuse that they're going to be really unpopular and they're going to lose if they speak uncomfortable truths because he's speaking uncomfortable truths.
And he's, I believe, only just started.
He's speaking uncomfortable truths.
And he's incredibly popular.
Ann Coulter writes a lot about uncomfortable truths.
I mean, you know, have a thumb through Adios America and you will find some uncomfortable truths or at least well-researched data.
And she's had what, like 11 number one New York Times bestsellers?
I don't know.
When you speak truth, when you speak uncomfortable truths, you're only hated by liars.
And everyone thinks, well, the world is so full of liars because they themselves are false.
It's just projection.
The world is so full of liars, I can't speak the truth.
But when you speak the truth, you'll be amazed at how many honest people will love you.
Mike's corrected me.
10 million views and downloads this month.
Mike, how often do I underestimate that?
The numbers are pretty nuts compared to where they were even a year ago.
A couple of months ago we were doing 2 million video views a month and now we're doing 4.5 million.
I don't think that there's a single uncomfortable truth that we have that we have not talked about.
Probably not.
So, you know what?
You'll be loved and hated if you speak the truth.
But if all you do is avoid, you won't even be remembered.
You know, you just pass through life like it goes through a wall, leaving no impression behind.
Speak the truth, people will love you and hate you.
But avoid and cower and submit and defer and procrastinate.
People won't even remember you.
Leonard's gone?
Was he even here?
I don't want that for you.
Because the plus of avoidance and cowardice, right?
I mean, let's call it by its proper name.
The plus of avoidance and cowardice is in the now.
But later on in life, You will look back and I guarantee you, you will say, what was I so scared of?
Why did I sacrifice everything?
Why did I hide when I should have stood tall?
Why did I stay silent when I should have cried out loud?
Why did I vanish when I should have advanced?
The fear will all be gone.
The shame is what I will remember.
There's a saying, I don't know if it's out there.
I think it comes out of Shakespeare.
It's a saying that was very important to me when I was a kid.
I was just at lunch with some friends and we were talking about each other's best and worst qualities.
I said, well, you know, my worst quality, I can be a little grumpy at times.
But it's okay.
I'm getting to be 50, so I think it just comes with the territory.
And other people said that my best quality was nobility.
It's a very lovely thing to hear.
And when I was a kid, the sentence, the statement, you probably know it.
A hero dies a thousand...
Sorry, let me start it again.
My apologies.
A coward dies a thousand deaths.
The valiant Taste of death, but once.
And Leonard, if you're listening to this show, and this is to everyone who's listening to this show, I hate calling it a show.
I really do.
Look, here's Shakespeare.
We're going to call it typing.
Anyway.
It's a show like Jeopardy's a show.
Wait, no.
Yeah, yeah.
It's a show like show and tell.
But if you listen to this show, sorry.
You're conscripted.
Sorry, the people who listen to this show are people with passion, with curiosity, with intelligence, with language skills, with the capacity to process and focus on and understand.
Sorry, you're conscripted.
Just because you have shown your ability to think and to reason, to be curious, to accept new information, and I certainly am demonstrating ways in which you can beneficially and positively communicate these things, Sorry, you're conscripted.
If you listen to the show and you do nothing, if you listen to the show and you hide, if you listen to the show and you back away and you cower and you keep these truths close to your chest as if hoarding them will do anything other than make them die for everyone forever, if you listen to this show and you are not speaking up, you are more guilty than anyone.
You are more guilty than anyone because to have knowledge and not share it creates more ignorance Than having no knowledge at all.
To have a cure and not share it causes more deaths than someone who has no cure to share.
Sorry.
That's the deal.
Listen to this show.
Like this show.
Enjoy this conversation.
Enjoy philosophy.
Sorry my friend.
You're conscripted.
And there is no future for you but either medals or an ignoble grave.
That's what happens when philosophy passes into you.
You become a hero or a villain.
You understand?
There is no longer anything in between for you because you have the knowledge.
If I give you a fistful of pills that can save a hundred lives apiece, and you throw them into the river and walk on, you kind of become a murderer.
If you go and save these people, you become a Schindler's List style hero.
Once you have this knowledge, you either save people, Oh, you are damned.
Not by me.
But by you, deep down.
In your conscience, right, Leonard?
You know.
You know what you need to do.
You need to do more, right?
You need to take a stand.
Yes.
I was actually thinking the passivity I am hating in other people, it's just the same with me.
It's the same as I am doing.
At the moment.
This complaining that things are wrong and then stop the train when the conversation stops.
Right.
A lot of the men who I speak to from Europe, what do you think my experience, you've listened to these shows, I don't know if you've listened to the other conversations I've had from the men from Europe, but what is your What do you think my experience is in talking to the men of Europe?
I think it would be very frustrating.
You think?
Yeah.
It's a wild guess.
It's not a wild guess?
Yes.
It's not a wild guess.
No, it's sarcasm.
Yeah, do you think sarcasm is...
Gonna help this part of the conversation, Leonard?
No, but that's like my reaction.
Oh, I know that's your reaction.
It just pisses me off, that's all.
Yeah, no, it just hits hard.
the fact that I'm doing exactly the same that I'm hating in other people.
Okay, so Leonard, who in your life is going to be most uncomfortable if you start to speak up?
Bring facts, bring uncomfortable facts, challenge people, try to wake them up.
Who is going to be the most, outside of you, right?
Who is going to be the most uncomfortable if you take that approach, when you take that approach?
I have no idea.
Yes, you do.
Yes, you do.
Because when we are cowards, we're always conforming to someone.
People aren't cowards.
They're not born cowards.
They're somebody whose needs we are serving when we avoid necessary confrontations.
I mean, I'm raising a very strong-willed daughter.
You're not born a coward.
She fights tooth and nail for what she wants.
It's one of the things I love and respect about her.
You're serving someone.
By shitting on your spine, right?
Who is it who's going to be the most threatened by you?
Getting jiggy with it.
Probably the same friend I would say from the Tunisian jail.
Your friends, really?
Yeah.
I have some skepticism about that.
It certainly doesn't mean I'm right, of course, but I have a little teeny bit of skepticism about that.
Yes, you're probably right.
Most of the time, I am guessing things are going to be worse than they actually are.
Okay, how are you getting along with your parents?
Quite well.
And what do your parents think of the migrant crisis?
Because there's a reason why it's so hard for you now.
Would it have been easier 20 years ago to prevent this?
Yes.
Right.
And what do your parents, what did they do?
They complained like everybody else.
I didn't ask what they said, I asked what they did.
Nothing.
They did nothing.
When it was far easier and would have been helpful and wouldn't have put you and your whole damn generation in this mess.
Right?
Yes.
If they had fought the left, if they had pushed back, if they had challenged the narrative of white privilege and imperialism and sexism and racism and patriarchy and you name it, if they had fought back against it 20 or 30 years ago, You'd be living in a paradise.
But now, that it is much more difficult, much more dangerous, now that of course there are hate speech laws and all that, right?
Well...
Your parents' generation...
Do you think it could be conceivably argued that, as far as protecting civilization for their children, they may have fumbled the ball just a little bit?
Yeah.
Definitely.
And this is why European men, other than feminism and you name it, right?
But if you guys start acting, there is an implicit criticism of your parents' generation and people usually are not very comfortable, for obvious reasons, criticizing their parents.
You guys kind of fucked up.
You inherited a relatively free country and you handed to us a smoking semi-jihadist mess.
This is why I've done some shows about the baby boomers, one of which is just me sitting on a couch.
Quite popular because people are kind of like, if you say the world is in a desperate state, that is in implicit and very quickly will become explicit criticism of the generation who handed you the world in a messy state.
Why is it so hard for people to Fight against government debt.
Again, we're just plagiarizing the lunch today, but we were talking about how can governments go into so much debt?
Like if I want to go and borrow $10 million, they'll say to me, nope.
But if I say, okay, let me $10 million, and my daughter, you can have half of her salary to pay it off, and then her kids, then people will lend me the money, because here we've got intergenerational debt.
Why is it that people have such a tough time complaining about fixing or solving the national debt?
Because that's something we inherited.
That's something we inherited from our parents.
Screw-ups.
Our parents who decided to do moral posturing rather than Sustain and maintain the freedoms.
You have one job in this world, and that is to sustain, maintain, and hopefully extend the freedoms you've inherited.
That's the one job that everyone has in this world.
Wake up, brush your teeth, and work to sustain and extend the freedoms you received.
That's it.
The boomer generation did not do that.
They cowered down from a fight that Would have been far easier to win than what we now have to face.
I mean, if intelligent, rational, empirical conversations about race, culture, ethnicity, IQ, all of this stuff was well known.
People were publishing on it in the 70s continually and consistently.
Arthur Jensen, Richard Lynn, A whole host of others, some of whom we've had on this show.
If an intelligent conversation had been had about ethnicity, race, IQ, culture, religion, in the 1970s, if people had just said, okay, fine, we're just, look, sorry, we're going to do it.
I've got to muscle through, I've got to tell this information, I've got to share it, then it would be common knowledge by now, and we would not be in this mess.
So yeah, every time you say, We've got to roll up our sleeves because the world has become a stinking pile of camel doo-doo.
You're kind of criticizing the people who rode in on that camel and fed it a bunch of Indian food.
So, you know, this is why I say, is it your friends really?
No, I think there is an implicit criticism of the elder generation when people say, what a fucked up place we've ended up in, people.
How does the elder generation feel about that?
I don't really know.
Oh man, if you fade out on me again, I'm right on to the next caller, man.
Leonard, stay with me, man.
I feel like I'm like, you've got a second chest wound and I'm telling you to wait until the medevac comes.
What do you mean you don't know?
Come on, man.
If your kids, you grow up and your kids come to you and say, Leonard, your entire generation completely fucked up our civilization and our culture and you were cowards and you avoided fights and now we've got to go door to door, street to street, gun to gun.
Because you didn't speak up when it was easier to do so than what we've got to face.
Now, how would you feel?
Probably pissed off.
Pissed off?
How good would that do?
You'd feel shameful.
You'd feel angry.
I mean, you'd feel shameful.
You'd feel self-approaching.
You'd feel self-loathing.
And you'd feel scared.
Do you know why you'd feel scared?
You'd feel scared because if enough young people get pissed off at old people, old people wonder if anyone's going to come visit them or if they're going to get a pension.
You know, why do we pay pensions to old people?
Because they guarded freedom.
That's the job.
Hey, thanks for doing some work to guard freedom.
Here's $1,500 a month so you don't have to eat cat food.
Okay, good job.
This is why soldiers get pensions.
They went and fought for something.
But if you didn't fight for the freedoms that you inherited and you squandered them out of nihilism, out of relativism, out of cowardice, out of shallow, a latte tastes better than a difficult conversation feels, materialism.
Old people don't want young people to say the world is shitty because old people are past being able to fix things.
And they want all of the fruits of having been good people when it's too late for them to be good people.
It is too late to go back to the 1970s and the 1980s and have essential and difficult conversations.
Hell, if they'd done it in the 90s!
1994, the bell curve comes out.
That was a wake-up call and nobody afterwards who's got any brains whatsoever has any excuse for having not had those difficult conversations back in the day.
No excuse.
It was world wide news.
For an obscure academic book it sold hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of copies.
It was all over the news.
It was all over the papers.
And old people desperately want to hide the cowardice of their youth and middle age.
Because they're afraid, Eskimo style, they might be given their very own iceberg.
I'm not saying that's what would happen.
I think that's a pretty deep fear.
Who the hell stood up for it?
I mean, Dead before the book came out, but who stood out for Charles Murray?
Who's defended him since?
I've had him on the show.
I've done my defenses.
I've taken my bullets.
So, you know, if the world goes to crap because nobody acts, well, I still have my conscience clear.
And...
I think it's a very deep thing to criticize the world that is, is to condemn the elder generation and they strongly, strongly resist that.
Not for reasons of virtue, they'll claim to be shocked and appalled and how could you say that?
No, it's just because do the old people deserve the resources of the young If they failed to defend all the freedoms they inherited and pass a screwed up smoking crater of a civilization to their young, do they deserve all of the resources that they demand and need in their old age?
Well, I don't know and I don't really want to answer that question directly because it's not really the point.
I'm just saying this is probably why I won't get into that.
This is probably why there's a lot of resistance.
Not to mention, I mean, the women thing, but this is more of a generational thing.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think you're right.
Yeah, it's a lot of things processed for me because I didn't think about it like that.
Do you know how much social anxiety Mike had when he was younger?
A lot, I would guess.
Mike, how easy has this process been for you?
Oh, if you would go back to me at 10 years old, 11 years old in high school, you know, that time frame and tell me now that I would be working strongly on many of the important social issues of the day.
I would call you crazy.
I mean, I was the type of person I had social anxiety to the point where I would eat lunch in the bathroom at times.
You talk about bullying.
Those bathrooms don't exactly smell good.
Adding to the aroma of your meal.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, I kind of look at it as, you know, if I was capable of overcoming that anxiety and that resistance and that fear of negative criticism, I think just about anyone is.
Yeah.
You're right.
This has been a bit of a difficult conversation for me because it's like pointing towards things you don't want to see.
Mm-hmm.
But you're right.
It doesn't feel good to admit it, but it's just like that.
And I don't think I can just keep on doing nothing, because then I'll just be the same like everyone else.
Then I'll be the same thing that I've been criticizing, being annoyed for in other people.
Okay.
Well, listen, take some time, process it.
And Leonard, I really, really appreciate you listening to this stuff.
And I appreciate your dedication to learning the truth about things.
And, you know, I guarantee you that, you know, life can sometimes be hard when you are your own person.
But it's worth it.
I mean, there's moments of discomfort, but it's worth it.
And those discomfort things turn into thrills after a while.
And I'm going to leave you for...
This is a quote from Nietzsche.
And it's worth it.
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe.
If you try it, you will be lonely often and sometimes frightened.
But no price is too high to pay for the privilege Of owning yourself.
Thank you again.
We will move on to the next caller.
Okay.
Goodbye.
Goodbye.
Okay, up next is Wilson.
Wilson wrote in and said, How does an individual's emotional maturity and overall intelligence impact their ability to be successful at capital management?
How can philosophy help with financial management?
What impact do the emotions, specifically fear and greed, have in financial markets?
That's from Wilson.
Hey Steph, is there anything that you want me to expand upon first?
Not expand upon if you could narrow it down a smidge.
I think that would be excellent.
There's a pretty wide net.
Hey, I went fishing and I caught the ocean.
Yes, I'm an INTP Myers-Briggs, so I think you'll understand where this is going to go.
But basically, my background is in trading.
I'm a derivatives trader and I do a bunch of financial modeling.
And I've actually mathematically Found ways to illustrate fear and greed and the relationship between the two.
And basically, I think that greed is the absence of fear, but fear is not necessarily the absence of greed because there is a chaos element to it.
So I just kind of wanted to examine that.
Wait, hang on, hang on.
Greed is the absence?
You mean in the markets, right?
Yes.
Okay, okay.
It's not a general statement about it.
Okay, got it.
But there are parts of greed.
If you examine greed itself, Fear cannot be a part of it.
But if you look at fear...
Wait, fear cannot be a part of greed?
So if someone is being greedy in financial markets, they do not have fear attempting to keep them...
They don't Try to preserve capital if they're greedy, basically.
So they aren't...
Well, hang on, hang on.
So this is not a black and white issue, right?
Because, I mean, certainly when you're greedy, if you want, like if you're throwing dice at a casino and you're greedy for more, certainly there's fear involved in that because you're afraid you might not get it, right?
It doesn't mean it will prevent you.
So are you saying the action empirically shows more greed than fear?
Because it's probably not that there's no fear.
No, I would actually argue there is no fear.
It really starts engaging a different part of the brain.
And, I mean, behavioral finance, which is basically psychological finance, basically says that greed is euphoria.
And it's an emotion within itself.
And it is very different.
Hang on, hang on.
Winning is euphoria.
Because I'm not sure.
And again, I'm not trying to Be resistant.
I'm just trying to make sure I understand.
So, euphoria is when you win.
Greed is when you want to win something or you want to have something or achieve something.
And so, greed seems to me to have a certain amount of anxiety built in because, you know, let's say, like, okay, I'll just give you a brief example, then I'll shut up, right?
So, when I was younger, I used to do a lot of diving.
You know, diving boards have kind of vanished.
I guess people watch too much AFV. But diving boards, like, so I used to do these like really complicated flips and twists and turns and that on the diving board.
Now, I haven't done it in a long time.
And one of the things about pushing 50 is you start to go, hey, things quite not as bendy and strong as they used to be.
And whereas I used to heal more quickly from like workout injuries and stuff, now it's slower.
So I've got to, you know, I've just got to be a little more careful.
So, the other day, I was thinking about this and I thought, okay, well, if I was at a swimming pool with a diving board, would I ever want to do one of those dives that I did when I was younger?
And I could feel my heart like, oh, I want to.
I want it.
I will do the flips.
And another part of me thought, okay, so let's say you do it.
What's the plus?
Okay, you've done it.
But let's say that you land badly or you twist something or you hurt something or, you know, and it takes you like three months to get better.
Like, won't you just sort of kick yourself and say, well, what the hell was the point of that?
Trying to prove that you're 20 again.
And so I have greed, like I want to do one of these weird flips, but at the same time, I have some anxiety about it.
Now, of course, if I did the flip and it worked out perfectly, yes, it probably would.
I mean, I did so many of these things, it's sort of built in, like riding a bike thing.
So if I did the kind of flip and then it worked out well, then I'd feel that euphoria.
But I have the greed to do it, and I have the fear of it not working out.
Now, if I decided to do it and it worked out, then I'd feel the euphoria.
That's my experience.
And again, that's, you know, maybe different for other people, but that's sort of why I'm trying to sort of figure out where it is you're coming from.
Okay.
I'm going to push back on that a little bit.
And if you read the works of George Soros, he's actually a financial philosopher as well.
And he wrote a book called The Alchemy of Finance.
And his main theory is the theory of reflexivity, which is basically summed up as a snowball effect in markets.
So if markets start to go down, basically the consumer clutches his purse strings or closes his wallet and doesn't want to spend in the economy, therefore the economy gets worse, which makes stocks go down.
It's essentially a snowball effect.
So that also works on the upside.
So as markets go higher, You're removing fear all the way through that process, and you get to a point where people are comfortable enough that they really don't feel fear.
It is just greed at that point.
And you actually can model this and show it with derivative pricing, because if you look at derivative pricing, and specifically tail risk, which is multiple standard deviations out on the curve of movement, You can actually see this change where the tail risks really start to compress and you actually literally see fear leaving the market and greed taking over.
Okay.
So if you look at it from...
I actually do see it as a dichotomy.
I see it as two opposite emotions and there isn't much competition between the two at the extremes.
There is some interaction in the middle, and there is sort of a...
But the markets can't ever be one thing.
Otherwise, they can't function.
Right.
So, I mean, if everybody wants to buy stocks because they think the stock price is going up, they can't buy the shares unless somebody's willing to sell them.
In other words, if someone thinks the price...
If everyone thinks the price is always going up, then the stock market will cease to function.
There has to be people...
Who think that the market is not going to go up or the stock price is not going to go up.
I mean, if you knew for sure your stock price was going to double in two months, you'd hang on to it.
You wouldn't sell it or you wouldn't sell it for anything less than double, which nobody would buy for that price.
So if people, like if there's a huge amount of demand, yeah, okay, there's people who think that the price is going to go up, but they're only able to buy from the people who think the price is going to go down.
Right.
So that is the abstract version, but if you examine each individual person, you have to look at them and say, okay, when this person is wanting to sell, do they feel greed still?
Which I would argue, yes, because they want to preserve their capital.
But if they're trying to buy, then I would argue that they feel greed and not fear.
I think there's actually...
Wait, sorry, the person who sells has greed, and the person who buys has greed.
Of course, and they have greed that they can't both win on, because if the stock price goes up, the guy who bought has made a good decision, and if the stock price goes down, the guy who sold has made a good decision.
Right, but if the person who is buying, they don't feel fear, is what I'm trying to argue.
The person who is buying does not feel fear.
Okay, and is the person who's selling, do they feel fear?
Yes.
Because they think that the price is going to go down and they want to preserve their money.
So essentially it's an optimistic versus a pessimistic decision, right?
The optimist buys a stock and the pessimist sells it.
Right.
So what I do is, like I call it alpha-centrism versus beta-centrism.
And alpha-centrism is basically trying to expand your capital base, trying to Allocate to positions that do well in the market.
When the market goes up a lot, you're trying to outperform the market by selection.
Whereas beta-centrism is more of the risk-based focus, where you're more of a pessimist, a philosophical pessimist.
And examine fear itself.
And then if you do that, the interesting thing about that is, if you examine fear and try to quantify everything as a fear or a pessimistic thought or as a risk, Then you can do Benjamin Franklin's moral algebra.
I don't know if you're familiar with that, but basically what it is, he writes on a piece of paper the pros and cons for an argument, and over the span of a couple days you try to cross out pros that equal cons, and at the end you're left with a decision point.
So basically what you can do if you look at everything as a risk, you can subtract and add like things.
So instead of saying Stocks are going to go up.
You say, what is the risk of stocks going up if I were to be short them or if I were to be selling them?
So from that point, you can subtract and add two similar things and you can focus everything based on risk.
And that actually leads to very good decision making.
So fear is a little bit different from greed.
So, I mean, again, I go back to greed is the absence of fear, but fear is not the absence of greed.
Okay.
I don't know that you can come up with a lot of really viable things about human nature as a whole in the stock market any more than you can come up with viable things about human nature under communism or under some sort of theocracy or something.
Human nature, to be judged, should inhabit a state of freedom.
I don't know what the decisions are Of somebody with a gun to his head.
Right?
Like if some guy just, you know, stopped at a light, some guy jumps into your car, puts a gun to your head and says, take me to Albuquerque.
Maybe you were heading there anyway, but I don't know where you want to go.
I just know you've got a gun to your head and you're probably going to go to Albuquerque, right?
And so I don't know that we can just...
Because you asked about the philosophical side of things, you know, as far as the math and trading and all that.
I don't know, but...
The stock market at the moment is generally socialist.
It's generally centrally planned.
The government's controlling the money supply, which causes inflation, which means people have got to put their money in the stock market.
The government gives you tax breaks for putting your money into the stock market to artificially inflate the price of stocks, to make the banker friends that they borrow and print their money from happy.
Through pensions, through a wide variety of investment schemes, and just by the general giant vacuum of the market that sucks in money attempting to escape government-driven inflation, there is a lot of money in the stock market that damn well shouldn't be there.
And there are a lot of people in the stock market who don't want to be there, it's just that The Fed has jumped into the car, put a gun to their head and say, drive to the stock market.
I don't know what they, you know.
So there are people in there.
Now, when you get a huge number of people forced into a particular environment, you get irrational behaviors, right?
I mean, you can see this just, you know, pile mice five on five and you'll get a lot of irrational mouse behavior.
And if you only ever studied mice in that environment, you'd say, wow, mice are crazy.
But you're not, right?
It's like studying human nature of someone in prison.
It's like, well, no, you're studying the nature of a prisoner and you've got a self-selected group and so on.
So in the stock market, the challenge is that people don't want to be there.
In the past, I mean, 19th century, in general, there were, of course, speculators versus investors.
And I think it was my second podcast I ever did on this.
But there are speculators and there are investors.
My first driving podcast.
Anyway, it doesn't matter.
Now, the investors are people who know what they're doing.
They know the industry.
They've been investing in it for a long time.
They may have run a company in that industry.
They know what is going on in that industry.
Now, will they be subject to greed and fear?
Of course.
But that greed and fear will be tempered by knowledge.
And like...
When a new driver starts skidding on ice, they freak out.
But if you've skidded on ice a whole bunch of times before, then you have knowledge of what to do.
You put me in a NASCAR race, I'm going to be driving like an old lady in a Volvo running low on gas.
But, you know, Dale Earhart and the people who know what the hell they're doing, they can take those corners at speed that puts all of the blood in one cheek and then the other.
So, the stock market as a whole was originally supposed to be where people who knew what the hell they were doing went in and invested.
And that's how economic growth occurred, because they knew what they were doing.
Now, of course, there's people who just are in the stock market because their government union forces them to, or they've thrown money into their 401ks or RSPs in order to avoid being taxed, or they've just got to put their money somewhere because the government's eating it like Pac-Man through inflation.
And so they don't know what the hell they're doing.
They're just trying to hide from evaporating money.
So there's a lot of fear and greed in that environment in the same way that there's a lot of fighting when you pile mice 10 deep in a tiny cage.
But it doesn't really tell you much about human nature.
It just tells you what human beings will do when subject to immense amounts of predation, theft, and coercion.
Okay.
So you're saying it's more of a triangle.
It's fear, greed, and then knowledge?
No, I'm not saying that at all.
What I'm saying is that the fear and greed that you're talking about is the direct result of the government forcing people to invest who don't want to invest.
That's all.
Will there be fear and greed?
Of course there will.
But fear and greed in its current manifestation, like anytime you're looking at the stock market, you're looking at a government program.
Like people think that, I mean, Mises himself said that The basic aspect of a free market is the presence or non-presence of a stock market.
If you've got a stock market, it's mostly a free market.
But the stock market now is a government program.
The same way that immigration and education and the war on drugs and foreign policy and military matters, they're all government programs.
The stock market is a government program at the moment.
When, you know, it's like saying, well, wow, poor people just have a lot of kids.
It's like, well, no, poor people have a lot of kids when the government pays poor people to have kids through welfare benefits.
Okay, then poor people have a lot of kids, but if you don't notice that procreation itself, the actual creation of human beings is a Dr.
Frankenstein government program because the government takes away money from people who are smart and successful and so they have fewer kids and it gives money Two people who are not smart and less successful, not counting the sort of welfare, sorry, the warfare complex.
And so, like breeding itself is a government program, which is why breeding is going down.
Because, you know, whatever the government touches, it turns to shit.
And so when the government says we want more education, well we want better education, government takes over education, education goes into the crapper.
Or you can just go and read one of these grade 8 tests from like 1860.
It's insane how retarded education has become.
And the stock market is a government program.
You know, in the same way that prison is a government program.
And so what you're describing there, I think if you want, to me at least a big philosophical view of it, what you're describing there is that this is how people behave when they're in a state of compulsion.
There's fear and there's greed.
I mean, think of a guy in prison.
You know, he's afraid of the prison guards and he's greedy to escape.
Okay.
I struggle with that a little bit because of my mathematical background and how I can model.
So, yeah, I've been struggling with the philosophical point, too.
And that's mostly...
It doesn't mean you shouldn't make money in it.
It doesn't mean you could be in it if you want and all that.
But just what you're talking about here is not human nature.
This is human nature in...
In a herded and controlled state of environment.
It's my ninth podcast, FDR9, understanding the stock market speculation versus investment.
And I actually was a coder on a trading floor for quite some time and saw a lot of this stuff.
I mean, Ben Bernanke, you know, or Janet Yellen, they hint about any kind of Fed action.
The stock market goes mental, right?
I mean, this is not how things would work in a free market.
There wouldn't be a Fed in a free market.
So your main argument is basically the Fed shouldn't be doing QE, and if it were not to be doing that, then we might operate differently.
Well, of course we'd operate differently if we wouldn't.
The Fed is there to adjust things to the benefit of the ruling class.
If it didn't do any good for them, they wouldn't support it and defend it so much.
But it's not just the Fed.
Fed, it's all of the money that gets herded into the stock market that doesn't want to be there.
You like trading.
You're a derivatives trader.
You like trading.
I hope you have some knowledge.
You've got some theories and so on.
You know what you're doing.
But just think of your average union worker or your average teacher and so on.
Well, the government is taking a bunch of their money and investing it in the stock.
They don't know what the hell they're doing.
Right?
They're busy.
Let's remove the Fed from reality for a second and then examine my original positive.
it.
Sorry, I just had a liberty gasm.
I just need to clean myself up.
Please continue.
I'm just going to lie back here and smoke a stogie.
Right.
So let's pretend that the Fed didn't have control over the system of interest rates and wasn't doing QE and asset purchases, and then examine fear and greed there.
Because I understand that you think that it is coercive and it is forcing people to act in certain ways by suppressing interest rates and pushing people into riskier assets.
But what would you say if the Fed were not present?
Oh, okay.
Well, if the Fed were not present, and let's just for the moment say it's either Bitcoin or a gold standard or a basket of commodities or something where the value of money is stable.
Value of money is stable.
Well, If I were to say to you that if you don't put your money in the stock market, it will double in seven or eight or nine years, would you put your money in the stock market?
Probably yes, because there would still be a risk premium.
But you wouldn't put as much into the stock market, right?
Well, it depends what inflation is.
So inflation would be pretty high.
No, I just told you.
I just told you.
If your money were to double in seven or eight years, in real value, in real value, then would you put as much money in the stock market?
No.
Okay.
Now, right now, depending on, you know, how you shadow stats has got, of course, a lot on this, but, you know, however you measure inflation as a whole, People are losing massive amounts of value over time, right?
Correct.
Your money is...
2% compounding at least.
I'm sorry?
2% compounding at least.
Wait, you think that inflation is at 2%?
Hence, at least.
No, come on, man.
You can't claim to have knowledge about the stock market and then try and tell me that inflation is at 2%.
Well, I think core CPI is accurate, but if you factor in education, if you factor in rents, if you factor in everything that's not in the basic basket of essential goods, then yes, I'd think inflation is 5% or 6%.
Alright, so you're good at math.
If inflation is at 5% or 6%, how long does it take for you to lose half the value of your money?
Six years.
Six years?
You lose half the value of your money in six years?
Yep.
That's, I mean, that's horrendous!
Right?
And if it's 10%, it's like two and a half years or something, right?
Correct.
Right, so what we're talking about is that right now, people are losing, and inflation is more than 5%, but let's just pretend it's 5%, at least in my opinion.
So, people lose half their money in, what was it, six years?
Yeah, so it's a rule of 72.
Okay, trust me, I don't need the math.
I'm an arts manager.
So they lose half the value of their money in six years, right?
So basically, what I'm saying to people right now, for people to understand what stable money is, they have to think of their money doubling in six years.
Right.
Because right now, if their money doubles in six years, in 5% inflation, it's only worth in six years as much as it is right now, right?
Yes.
So what if you were to encourage people to invest?
No, no, hang on, hang on.
Let me just finish my point and then I'll hand over the mic.
So to get people to understand what an inflation-free world is like, you have to think of them, they have to think of their money doubling value in six years.
Now if people right now with 5% inflation knew that their money would double in five years, Or six years, sorry.
If their money would double in six years, they would be much less likely to put all of their money, or at least all of the money that currently is going into the stock market, people wouldn't bother, right?
Because they'd say, look, my money's going to double.
If I just leave it in the bank, it's going to double in six years.
Why would I put my money in?
I'll put maybe a little bit of mad money or whatever, but I'm not going to.
I mean, my money's going to...
Why?
It's going to double in six years just by leaving it in the bank.
Or putting it under my mattress.
Or buying some gold and burying it in the backyard.
So, that's my argument that if there was no Fed, then private interests would be running other private interests, non-government monopoly cartel interests would be running the money and the whole purpose of money Is to be stable over time.
That was the value of the gold standard.
The whole purpose of money.
Because if money is stable over time, future economic calculations, which are already risky enough, growth of customer base, demographics, supply of goods, prices of all the 10,000 things it takes to assemble whatever you've got into a goods or service, If you have stable value of money over time, all of the time-based calculations at least don't have to really take into account changing value of money, right?
I mean, I know this because, you know, when I was in business, we sold in the U.S., we sold in Canada, we sold around the world, but U.S. and Canada primarily.
My God, man.
Well, you know this.
I mean, the Canadian dollar relative to...
The American dollar, like the value, goes up and down like Catherine Zeta-Jones' moods.
It's like completely mental.
And you can't like, oh, what are we going to make next year?
What are we going to make in five years?
It's impossible to know.
It's hard enough to know if currency is stable.
It's impossible to know with all the crap that's going on.
With not just your government, but every government out there manipulating interest rates and manipulating the value of their currency and so on, right?
Nobody.
You can't.
I mean, you just...
Everybody's rolling the dice.
And so, without the Fed...
The way people would understand it is, okay, your value of money, because nobody knows what the value, like if I say, well, without the Fed, you'd have $1,000 in six years, like you have $1,000 now, people immediately say, well, I've lost, it's only $500.
But without the Fed, it is the equivalent of the current situation of your money doubling in value every six years.
And if you knew for sure that your money was going to double in value every six years, you'd put a hell of a lot less of it into the stock market, because it's only going into the stock market to evade the erosion of value that comes from being only worth $500 in six years.
That's all my point.
And the fact that so much of that money is being herded, billions, trillions of dollars is being herded into the stock market, trying to escape inflation.
The vast majority of people are in the stock market not because they understand how it works.
Not because they have any understanding of what they're investing in.
Not because they know.
Just go to the average person who's got even a penny in the stock market.
Directly or indirectly through pensions, through 401k plans, through you name it, right?
Anyone.
And just say, hey, what does it mean to short a stock, right?
There's a reason they have to get that hot chick in a bathtub to explain stuff in the big short or whatever that recent movie was that came out.
Oh, look, now I can put the rental off of the business expense.
But anyway.
So, I mean, what does it mean to short a stock?
I don't know.
Sell it to Martin, short it all.
I don't know, right?
So, they don't know.
They don't have a clue.
And so they just give all of this decision-making to hedge fund managers and money managers.
All of that goes to other people.
And those other people are not guessing about the decisions that That are being made by informed, intelligent, experienced people investing in an industry they understand and appreciate and have probably worked in.
As much knowledge as you can possibly get.
They're not.
And those decisions are somewhat predictable.
But the decisions of other people trying to guess everyone else's other decisions, none of it is fundamentally tied to foundational values, at least in the short term.
Man, that is nothing to do with the stock market as far as I would understand it.
Okay, I'd take a little bit of a different view.
There are a couple arguments that I'd make.
There's a short-term debt cycle and there's a long-term debt cycle.
If you have stable money, if you have money where interest rates can't be affected, if the Federal Reserve has no Say and what interest rates are or if it can do asset purchases to buy the debt back from the government and Decrease our long-term debt by buying it back and rolling it over Then what you get at the end of an 80-year debt cycle is basically a Great Depression every 80 years So essentially your two choices are either something really
horrible all at once like the Great Depression that potentially leads to war and Or something more like the Japan scenario, where you have a long, drawn-out erosion of the middle class, yes, higher Gini coefficients, but there isn't a major spout of volatility.
And it is a choice.
You really do have to choose between those two, because unfortunately, as rational as people can be, they don't know the future, and they can't accurately plan For how much debt they should take out or how much risk they should take in the market to achieve returns.
So like a company, an S&P 500 company, practically none of them really saw the 08-09 disaster coming.
And so at the end of the cycle, it's very hard for people to rationally realize where everything is going.
So when you get to the end of the cycle, you really have to do make the choice.
If you have stable money, it's going to be a bloodbath.
Everyone's going to basically, everything's going to blow up.
But hang on, sorry, I'm just trying to understand what you said something here about like there's this 80 year cycle.
And so at the end of a cycle, you end up with something like the Great Depression, as you point out, could lead to To war.
Do you view the Great Depression as some sort of natural cycle of the economy?
Yes.
So there actually are generational cycles.
Oh, no, no.
I understand that.
But why do you think...
With the Great Depression, 1929 to 1933, American factories, mines, utilities, the production fell by more than half.
People's real disposable incomes collapsed like 28%.
Stock prices went down 90%.
That's going to get people's attention.
Unemployment went from 1.6 million, 29, 12.8 million in 1933.
One out of every four workers out of a job.
And But it was 13 years, right?
And as you point out, it kind of only ended, or at least was, people were distracted by the Second World War.
But that's not a natural cycle.
I mean, the Great Depression was something that lasted because of a wild series of unbelievably disastrous and anti-free market government programs, right?
It wasn't like just some cycle, like some solar cycle or an eclipse cycle or whatever it is.
You know, massive tariff walls went up, massive government spending went up, and, you know, massive union controls were handed out.
And, you know, I've got an interview with Lawrence Reed about this.
He's got a great article called Great Myths of the Great Depression.
I'm just sort of concerned that you're...
It's sort of like, you know, the first caller with the migrant crisis in Europe and people say, well, you know, there's this cycle of movement.
It's like, no, these are specific policies that are being pursued that have specific outcomes.
And with regards to...
The Great Depression, saying it's a cycle, it's just going to happen.
These are the result of very, very specific policy decisions.
And when those policy positions were reversed after the Second World War, well, guess what?
You know, you got a relative boom and all that.
So it wasn't some cycle where you got a Great Depression.
I mean, there was the Fed cranking up money supply, which caused a huge boom in the stock market.
And then they contracted money supply wildly, drove up interest rates, which caused a crash.
And then there were these massive socialist policies that destroyed the sort of Hooverian remnants of the free market, which caused it to continue.
These are all the results of government policies.
I don't know how it's some sort of cycle of whatever, other than particular decisions.
Well, to get out of the Great Depression, though, what they had to do was revalue the price of gold.
So they had to basically say gold is worth this much money and devalue the dollar in order to pay back the debts and flush out the system.
Are you saying, sorry, I don't think we're going to agree on anything tonight, which is fine.
Are you saying that there was no conceivable other way to get out of the Great Depression other than that?
I mean, why wouldn't they just rescind all of the god-awful socialist central planning policies and price controls and wage controls and tariffs and, you know, massive union powers and America Works projects and all that?
I mean, why...
If they reverse that, then they're out of the Great Depression because there was a worse Great Depression in 1920 that only lasted, I think, 16 or 17 months, didn't go on for 13 years and result in another war because they stopped doing the stupid shit they were doing.
And if you continue to do that stupid shit, then you're going to continue to expand it.
But that wasn't the only thing that they could do.
They just stopped doing all the stupid central planning, which destroys wealth.
I'd say that's pretty fair.
So if you look at the works of Ray Dalio, he's Bridgewater Asset Management, and he has a really good video.
It's about 30 minutes, and it's basically how the economic machine works.
And he talks about the long-term debt cycle quite a bit during it.
And unfortunately, you really do get to a point where there's just too much debt and not enough growth, because if you take out too much debt, that undermines growth.
So basically what you have to do is print money to pay off the debt because unfortunately I mean one man's debt is another man's asset and It is a system so without a systemic collapse You really need to do print you really need to print money to flush out the system unfortunately and That does expand Gini coefficients.
It really does increase inequality and But what people could do is they actually could invest in the stock market more.
So if people were to invest 10% of what they make in the stock market, they would actually keep up with the highest percentage of earners.
I actually did a spreadsheet on that a couple of years ago.
And so like to me, that's really the only way to go out and fix this.
So the really beautiful thing about that is it doesn't matter.
Sorry, you fix what?
To fix our current situation, like with too much debt, not enough growth, and too much inequality.
Wait, so we fix government debt by investing in the stock market?
So if more people invest in the stock market, then that will reduce inequality.
So they'll be subjected to compound interest with what they earn, and we'll be able to compress the Gini coefficient, basically.
What if they had invested in credit default swaps or the toxic mortgages?
In a way, they were, right?
By buying housing.
Do you think that helped reduce inequality?
Well, no, absolutely not.
Again, that's not a diversified portfolio.
It's not smart investing.
But if you encourage smart investing...
Hang on.
What about the people who invested in the peak in 1929 and then...
You know, government controls and manipulations of the market destroyed the value of their stocks by 90%.
Did that reduce inequality?
Well, no, but again, I really do think that you need to print money, unfortunately, to resolve some of the debts.
So, the U.S. owes $19-20 trillion in debt.
Well, and $180 trillion in unfunded liabilities, right?
Right.
Do you think they can print more money than they make in a year and a half to solve that problem?
That's not paying the debt.
You understand, right?
That's monetizing the debt.
It's not paying it any more than if I owe you $1,000 and I pay you in Monopoly money.
I'm not paying the debt.
I'm just pretending to.
Well, it's monetizing, but it's still flushing out the system.
It's a cleansing of the system to be able to resolve those debts in some way.
Because, again, every person's debt is another man's assets.
If you just say, hey, your assets are worthless, you really do get a systemic collapse like the Great Depression.
Yeah, okay.
I just think that the debt is a fiction that is imposed upon the young through unjust means.
So anyway, I'm going to move on to the next caller because I don't really have much to say about the stock market itself because philosophy show.
But I appreciate the call and it's nice to talk about this aspect of the economy once in a while.
So thanks a lot for calling in and we'll talk again, I'm sure.
Thanks so much to you and what Michael are doing.
I really appreciate it and keep up the good work.
Alright, well up next is Mark.
Mark wrote in and said, I'm an African American male, had a 4.3 GPA in high school, scored in the top 2% of SAT takers, got accepted into an Ivy League school, and have a full ride from undergrad to graduate school all the way through a PhD.
I'm also on the guaranteed medical school path, which entails that if I keep up a good GPA, I'm guaranteed a spot in medical school without having to take the MCAT. Because of my accomplishments, I've always been considered a genius by my family, the one who's going to become a doctor and take care of everyone.
The don't forget me when you're famous guy.
Right.
I've had that too in my family, but anyway.
Though this has often bugged me, I dealt with it.
Unfortunately, this has spread to not only my family, but the entire black community at large as well.
What?
All of them?
Every single one.
Even in Haiti?
Man, you gotta move.
Mark's paying the tab.
I've had numerous teachers, principals, religious leaders, and mentors tell me that I need to give back and become a leader for my race once I make it to wherever I'm going.
I realize that there exist multiple problems within the African American community, but I'm a little cynical as to how that directly coincides with my success.
I really want to go into health politics, so I'm not really interested in race issues per se.
Rather, I want to help with poverty-related health issues.
You may not be interested in race issues, but race issues are interested in you.
I feel the same way, but go ahead.
Do you believe successful minorities have an obligation to facilitate the restoration of their communities?
If yes, monetarily, through investments, through advocacy.
That's from Mark.
Hey Mark, how you doing?
Hey Stefan, I'm pretty good.
How are you?
Good.
Can I invest in your future?
I'm just kidding.
So let's just, I mean, there's a lot to talk about and I appreciate you calling in.
Let's go back a little bit.
So you're obviously a smart guy and did you notice this sort of standing out for you when you were younger?
When did it sort of, when did this hyperdrive kick in?
I don't know.
I've always liked school, and I went to a private school, so my parents always stressed education first.
They never made a lot of money, so I'd be like, don't make the same mistakes we did.
Be better.
Take care of us.
All that type of stuff.
Wait, wait.
Hang on.
Hang on.
That was quite a bit there, but that...
That last one, take care of us?
I mean, normal parent stuff, you know, like when we retire, you know.
I'm not saying that to my daughter.
I don't know about normal parent stuff.
I got my own money, thanks.
Most of the parents I know, that's the type of, you know, take care of us type stuff when we're older.
Okay, so what, they won the brain lottery?
Is that the...
They think they did.
Yeah, well, no.
I mean, if you're, what, you can get into medical school without even applying?
Listen, you don't have to tell me.
Can you share your SAT score?
21-20.
You know, you need a Sherpa to get up that high, don't you?
Ooh, mountaineering joke.
Sorry, that's pretty white of me.
I apologize for that up front.
All right.
So, but did you, like, did you...
How did you feel, like...
In your community with this With these brains and all of that, how was it growing up for you?
And I say this to everyone, it was tough for me sometimes with the muggles around me and all that.
How was it for you?
Well, it wasn't until high school where I started to really notice the community.
It was always through my family and whenever they see me, how school, you're still getting 4.0s and that type of stuff.
But when I got to high school, I went to a public school for the first time.
And then at the school, it was like 50% white, 50% black.
But like SAT and grades, it was so disproportionate.
And like, you know, the Asians and the blacks were doing, I mean, the whites were doing so much better.
Okay, you just threw me off for a moment.
The Asians and the blacks were generally at opposite ends.
Okay, all right.
So the Asians and the whites were doing better.
Were there Hispanics at the school?
Yeah, a few.
Not enough to like, you know.
Really go off of what they got all together.
It was more, you know, like five or four or something like that.
So are you saying, so the blacks weren't doing that well in the school?
Not at all.
And at the time, were you thinking culture?
Were you thinking choice?
Because, you know, like Ben Shapiro talks about this stuff and he says, you know, There's cultural decisions, right?
I mean, like he points out, like in the 1960s, black illegitimacy was like 20% and now it's like 73% or something.
And it's not like there was no racism in America in the 1960s or whatever.
So when you notice the difference between sort of the Asians and the whites and the blacks in your government school, public school, what was your thought process about that?
Well, I was always one of the kids who'd sit in class and just look at the other kids on their phones or talk.
I don't know.
Most of the time I thought it was choice, but...
Everybody tells me, you know, this is like a common thought that, oh, it's about where they grew up and their parents didn't instill this into them and, you know, it's not their fault.
Like, I don't know.
I kind of like half and halved it, you know.
And, of course, since your parents did put these values of education and so on, you thought, well, you know, if their parents don't care and my parents do care, that may be one of the differences, right?
I don't know.
I was always a believer in, like, I'd look at the kids whose parents were terrible, but they still ended up being super successful millionaires.
I'm like, I don't think if my parents stressed education, I still think I'd be successful.
So I think it's a lot more choice than environment, but it definitely plays a role.
And I don't know if you've listened to this show at all about some of the ethnicity or race and IQ stuff that we've been talking about and whether you've mulled that over at all.
Yeah, I've listened to some of it.
I definitely agree with your point that people don't want to know because that might bring back stereotypes and racism, but I've listened to some of it.
Another thing that just struck me when Mike was introducing you was...
People were saying that you should be like a leader for the black race.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Can you imagine, man?
Can you imagine, Mark, if I said, my next podcast is, I am Stefan Molyneux, leader of the white race.
What do you think?
Seriously, what do you think people would say or think about that?
They'd think you're crazy.
I think they'd go a little bit more than crazy.
White supremacist, white nationalist, racist.
Right.
Anyway.
All right.
Okay.
So do you have siblings?
Yeah, I do.
And are they all doing fairly well?
Yeah, I have an older sister in college and a younger brother who's not really, like, I wouldn't say he's in the academics, he's more of sports, and he's still in high school.
Right, okay.
But, you know, kids, they're all doing fairly well, right?
Yeah.
And how smart would you say your parents are?
Well, neither...
Graduated college.
My mom, she went to school for a little bit, quit, and she's going back to school right now.
And my dad did a lot of technical stuff, like photography and art school.
So they self-taught themselves, curious minds, but not the formal kind of stuff, right?
Yeah.
I don't want to over-characterize your family.
You know them, I don't, but is that a fair way to put it?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, okay, okay.
Now, you know, I mean, I thought about this, you know, I looked at this question today, and I thought about this, Mark, and I thought, you know, when I, I'm a smart guy, and well-educated, and, you know, reasonably successful, but I never really thought, and people never said, well, you now represent the white race.
And that is, you know, like, I mean, there are certainly some things where I think different racial experiences are overblown.
But in this one, you know, I was just, and there's a bunch of reasons for it, I think.
But do you feel like you're sort of like, you're like the rep, you're like the representative of, like, now you've got a model for, you've got a, you know, the sort of blacks, you are out in front, and this is what people are going to see, and you've got a behavior court.
Is that how it's coming across to you?
Now, in high school, definitely.
I always had that mentality of I'm going to show these people that not all black people are getting in trouble and on their phone.
I feel okay when that's coming from me, but I hate when higher leaders try to put that on me and say, this is what you're supposed to do because we need this.
I guess for me, personally, I think there is sometimes this notion that I feel that I need to represent, but not to the extent that...
Not in the East Coast, West Coast rap battle sense.
Break some of the stereotypes that are certainly there, right?
Now, if you can share, the leaders come to you and say, you've got to do this, you've got to do that.
What is it that they're saying, and how do they even approach you?
Is it through church?
I don't know if you're religious or not.
Definitely church.
That was a big thing growing up.
When I got older, it became different volunteer events and different programs I was in.
I was in a lot of different programs.
In ninth grade, I went to this black male leadership institute.
That's where I finally realized how bad it was.
Our race needs this.
You need to do this.
If you have the ability, then that's what your job is.
And it was like...
It's sort of like being drafted or something, you know?
Yeah, that's it, yeah.
You've got really great eyesight and a steady trigger.
You've got to go and shoot.
Do you know, like...
Mike, just look this up.
Mike, do you want to...
Mike, sorry.
Have you ever had your IQ tested?
Me?
Yeah.
Oh, no, I haven't.
Do you want to know what your...
SAT score translates to an IQ? Sure.
Mike, would you like to share?
Approximately 150.
Ooh!
That is some seriously top of the peak IQ, man.
Wow.
Mike, give him some percentages.
Top 99.949%.
So that's one in a very, very tiny number, right?
And if some of the race and IQ stuff is...
True, then that's rarer still, right?
I mean, so you are like...
I'm going to have to start using big words.
I mean, that's all I can tell you.
Okay.
What do you think of that?
150.
I think that might be a little far, but, you know.
Why?
Come on, why not?
Why not?
Just by SAT standards.
Like, I'd have to actually take the test.
Okay, maybe.
And...
Mike, where does the genius IQ kick in?
I think it's there.
Like, I think it's lower than that.
I can't remember exactly what it is, but I think it's below 150.
Isn't 120 the cutoff to where you can pretty much do any job that you want to do?
I've heard two sides of that story, but if you can just have a look at what IQ is considered to be genius.
All right, I will get that for you.
That's great, man.
That's really good.
I hope you're going to have a lot of kids.
That's all I'm saying.
If you're a rapper, that helps.
If you've got to do that, you can certainly do the rhymes.
Okay, apparently...
Above average is 115 to 129.
Gifted is 130 to 144.
Genius is 145 to 159.
I knew it!
You're a bona fide genius, man.
Just telling you.
Yeah, it's cool.
That's very cool.
Very cool.
And I'd say good for you, but it's like saying to a tall guy, good height.
Hopefully we'll use it for all the right things.
Okay.
So, what is it that the...
The leaders, right, the leaders in your community, what is it that they want you to do?
I mean, if they give you sort of like the project list or the action plan, what is on that?
See, that's the thing.
There is never like a list of things or like help in this area.
And that's why I mentioned that I want to go into health politics because most of the time it's just I have to be an advocate for, you know, like racism and white supremacy.
I think you mean an advocate for anti-racism and anti-white supremacy because otherwise that might be an entirely different kind of show.
So because you're brilliant and because you're ambitious and you're obviously going to end up very accomplished in your life, they feel that you have to use those abilities to work against white racism.
Is that right?
Basically.
And the white racism, I assume, is It's just like gravity.
It doesn't have to be proven.
It's just a fact of nature.
I would be a racist or any other...
We would say it's institutional or unconscious or whatever it is.
But the white people in this view, just racists pretty much no matter what, right?
I shouldn't say.
Is that the approach?
I guess it'd be more accurate to say white privilege instead and just like being the guy who makes sure that black people aren't discriminated against and have the same equal opportunities like that.
Okay, so how do you do that?
I have no idea.
Okay.
Because you could, of course, and a lot of black politicians do this, right?
A lot of black people do this.
I don't have any particular issue with it.
It's just a basic fact that a lot of successful black people will go out and like the back politicians will appoint black people to positions of power and black business owners will probably try to hire some will certainly try to hire more blacks and so on.
And you know, it can show up in more subtle ways.
I guess before his recent challenges in PR, like Bill Cosby and his show.
You know all of this, right?
All of this stuff in the background was all black artists and his sweaters were knitted by black grandmothers or something like that.
So is it that you're supposed to become successful and then hire or encourage people to hire blacks?
Or I'm trying to sort of...
Again, I know you don't know.
I'm just like if we can guess.
I feel like an archaeologist or something trying to figure out hieroglyphics.
But what is supposed to happen?
Man, I really just think it's...
I don't know.
I think it's just...
I think maybe it's more like...
They're looking at the problems with black youth now and knowing there needs to be some type of change to where more black kids in college or more black kids with better jobs and they want someone like a leader or mentor to be able to push those kids further.
And so they're like, if you're smart, then you can help other people be smart too.
Right.
Just before, a thought just struck me, and I don't want to imply I wasn't listening, it just like literally, you know, again, I get gassy, I get thoughts.
Was your IQ, sorry, was your SAT score adjusted?
Adjusted for race?
Yeah.
No, I think it was just straight SAT score.
Okay, good.
Okay, fair enough.
And listen, I mean, I can...
I mean, we come across like I really know the black experience, but I can really, really understand, of course, if you've got a community wherein the young men are not doing well, and of course a lot of the young women are not doing that well, then, of course, and of course, if the answer is...
White racism, white privilege, whatever it is, right?
Then I can, you know, if the blacks are the same as the whites, but the blacks are doing badly, then, and if the whites are in charge, so to speak, then it must be the fault of the whites and there must be some way of equalizing.
Like, with all of those assumptions, I can sort of understand, I can really understand where they're coming from and that they want to hold you up and say, look, this is what a young black man can be like and you're going to break some stereotypes, you're going to I don't want to say icebreaker because that's a pretty white metaphor, but you're going to blaze the trail, you're going to catch your way through an undergrowth, and then you're going to clear a path, and other people are going to be able to follow, and you're going to be an example.
Again, am I sort of in the ballpark for this kind of stuff?
I think that's exactly it.
Okay, okay.
But that's why in my question I said obligation, because I understand that.
Even though I'm going into health politics, I could see myself having a strong political viewpoint on certain matters, but It seems like from the outside, that's why I said obligations.
It feels like this is what you need to do because we need help.
Say I wanted to be an accountant and just handle money and that's it.
I'd be ridiculed for not contributing to my race.
That's why I wanted your opinion on, do you think it's an obligation?
Well, no, we'll get to that.
I just, well, but I don't know if you've, you're a young guy, right?
I mean, what does O.J. mean to you other than a tasty drink in the morning, right?
But I watched this series, I think it's on FX, The People vs.
O.J. Simpson.
And, you know, O.J., of course, was this incredible black athlete and a movie actor and a spokesman or a pitchman for a bunch of different companies and all that, Hertz in particular.
And, you know, of course he was accused of this double murder.
And the jurors in the murder trial were going to go to his house.
And, you know, according to the documentary, and I think it's pretty, not according to the series, which is dramatized, but with some, the guy who plays Johnny Cochran is fantastic.
Anyway, the acting is top notch.
But anyway, they take the jurors over and But before they come over, Johnny Cochran, who's the black lawyer, who's one of the stable of top-notch lawyers, who I think he spent $10 million on defending himself or whatever, he goes over to O.J. Simpson's mansion.
Of course, O.J. Simpson was married to a white blonde woman.
And he had pictures of himself with his white golfing buddies.
And he had like all this, it was white people everywhere.
And Johnny Cochran is like, no, no, no.
Because they had a lot of black women and I think a black man or two on the jury.
And so he basically had O.J. Simpson's house scrubbed.
And he brought in all this African art.
And where there was a picture of a naked white woman over his bed, he put up a picture of his mother.
He had to really redo O.J. Simpson's house from top to bottom.
Everything about it.
So that he wouldn't look...
White-ish?
Or that he just went off and had his career and wasn't sort of tied into going back and mentoring the black community and so on?
And again, there is that aspect, right?
And again, it's a very, very different experience.
For me, like, you know, nobody said to me, okay, Steph, go off and be successful, but make sure you circle back and pick up the disadvantaged white kids in your trail.
I never had that particular ethic, but I can completely see where people are coming from where you are, right?
And now, they want you to go into politics, right?
Is that right?
Yeah, yeah, politics.
And like run for office and all of that.
And what do they...
I think I know the answer to this one, but let me know.
What do they think you can do in politics?
Because you could be prominent in six million different fields, right?
But if they're choosing politics in particular, why...
Why do they want that?
Like, they don't say, listen, you know, go be a prominent businessman.
Go be, you know, a great actor or whatever it is, right?
I mean, politics, that's the thing.
Why?
Like I said before, I don't know.
There's, like, no list, but I just know some of the things that...
It's more just, like, as long as black people are bad at things, we need somebody to help them be good at it.
And, like...
No, I get that, but why is the good thing politics?
I think because politics deals a lot with race relations and, you know, how rules are made and things like that.
Yeah, but I mean, as far as I know it, I mean, there are no racist laws in America left, right?
So it's not like there's, you know, you gotta overturn Jim Crow the sequel or something, right?
So, I have a theory, and maybe I should just stop being coy, you know, swinging my purse and just, you know, rip off my blouse.
As people were disappointed I didn't do at the end of the Hulk Hogan video, but maybe he'll do something else I can do.
But my guess would be that politics is redistributionist, right?
I mean, politics is where you take, politics is the power to take money from one group and give it to another, right?
Yeah.
And maybe they feel that you can get a lot more money to the black community through politics than you can through any other field.
So, but when you say money, do you mean just, like, straightforward redistribution, like, you guys are poor, we need to get you to middle class, or...?
Well, what I mean is you could get preferential laws passed, like affirmative action laws and so on.
You could get those extended.
You could get rules passed that a certain amount or more, government spending has to go to black-owned businesses.
You could get more resources going to particular schools and so on.
Because if you go into business, then the money that you create will be yours, and they have to go and ask you for it.
But if you go into politics, then you get...
This massive power of the state to redistribute money.
And I'm guessing that, you know, these guys are pretty smart at what they're doing.
I'm guessing that what they think is that if you go into politics, Mark, you'll be able to get more resources to the black community than any other single field.
Yeah, I agree.
Alright.
So, I think that's using you.
I think that's using you.
I think that's basically treating you as a beast of burden.
I hesitate to use another term, but I think that's kind of using you.
Like, hey, you've got these great abilities, so you need to go to the government to go and get us money and advantages.
I don't think that's for you.
I think that's for them.
I don't think that's right.
The one thing is it's different when it comes from other black people that have already been successful or are in politics themselves and then it's still the same message.
Our people need help.
Since you're good at it, since you're smart, you have to be the one to help them.
It's like, from people that need help, that's kind of like expected.
But they're asking you, sorry to interrupt, but they're asking you to think of race first and foremost and to guide your life entirely on principles of race.
And they're also asking you to put black people first at the expense of Of non-blacks, right?
Because, you know, obviously they're not putting you in to push diversity programs for Pacific Islanders or Inuit or whatever it is.
They're not saying, listen, go there and get more casino grants for Native Americans, right?
Yeah.
They want you to go in to shovel government money at the black community.
So they're saying, think of race.
Always and forever, go and get advantages for black people using the power of the state.
That's...
I want to say exactly racist, but let's just say it's pretty heavily race-focused.
Is that fair to say?
Yeah, definitely.
And I don't know how...
Fundamentally, I don't know how we're supposed to move into this idea, which, you know, everybody kind of wants, you know, this idea of let's...
I know this is the Morgan Freeman line, not to play a brother, but, you know, can we just stop talking about it?
Can we stop thinking about race all the time?
I mean, do you want to spend the rest of your life focusing on racial advantage and disadvantage and racism and privilege and...
No.
I'm sorry?
No.
Okay.
I mean, that's a bit of a leading question.
I could ask it another way, but I don't.
As you know, race is really, really boring.
It's just that it keeps coming up all the time in society, so we've got to get some facts out there.
But what do you want?
Let me ask you a stupid question.
As usual, it's a stupid question.
So Mark, if you were white and you didn't have this...
I hate to say the old thing about the white man's burden, right?
This sort of idea.
But if you didn't have the black man's burden, and particularly the genius, brilliant, talented black man's burden, if you didn't have that, in other words, if you were white in a white country and you didn't have this obligation, you didn't have this collectivist...
Got to circle back like you're a doctor with the last cures for people dying or something.
Why would you want to go and play golf?
Go save some life.
If you were white and you could choose what to do with your life regardless of racial politics or racial advantage, what would you do?
Right now, I think I want to be like Director of Health and Human Services or Surgeon General or something like that.
Where I start off as a doctor, you know, graduate medical school, and then move on to leadership positions and change health clinics and do health politics around the world.
You're right.
Bring back DDT. No, I'm just kidding.
It's another bugaboo of mine.
If you really care about black people, let them use DDT to stop the spread of malaria.
Anyway.
Okay, so that's what you want to do, and there's nothing about race fundamentally in that.
Now, of course, the stuff that you're doing will help black people and will help other races.
So you want to help people or you want to promote health as a whole.
Is that fair to say?
Yeah.
Okay, but it's not specifically racially driven, right?
Not really at all.
More money, yeah.
Right.
When...
The black leaders come to you and say, you've got to do this and that.
Do you ever feel tempted to say something like...
I don't know.
I feel tempted to say something like this.
You know, you could do a lot of good for the black community by really encouraging women to marry the father of their children.
That's a lot more than I can do as a politician because if I give people more resources, you know, a lot of times they, you know, in the black community, they're going to use it to have a whole bunch more kids without the dads around, which is going to raise a dysfunctional whatever, whatever, right?
I mean, is there a pushback that says, look, I don't know that more black geniuses going into politics is going to solve these problems.
This is a cultural problem.
Internal problems that were much less prevalent in the black community, right?
You know this great quote from the economist Walter Williams, which says, the welfare state has done what slavery could not do, what segregation could not do, what Jim Crow could not do.
The welfare state has done what all of these racist measures could not do, which is to destroy the black family.
Now you going into politics, I don't think it's going to heal the significant challenges in the black family.
But these leaders could go, And start inculcating, promoting the three things you need to do to get into the middle class.
Finish high school, get and keep a job for at least a year, and wait to have kids until you're married.
You don't need a genius politician in office to bring that message to the black community, right?
I do think the underlying problem is just They don't want to, as a whole, you usually just don't want to internalize it and look at what the problem is within.
We want to say, oh, they don't want us to succeed, or there aren't enough people hiring black people.
So that's usually where it starts.
And listen, I don't mean to laugh, because these are very, very serious issues, so I apologize for that.
I don't know.
I mean, I've known some white people in my day.
Hey, sometimes I look in the mirror and see one myself, particularly in wintertime, where it's basically albinoism and Casper the Friendly Ghost.
But I wake up in the morning, I'm like, am I hungry?
I wonder what the news was overnight.
Oh, I hate brushing my teeth.
Oh, I gotta shave my little half-pirate beard here.
What a drag.
Hope I don't cut myself, because that'll show up on the video.
Hey, it's snowing.
You know, that's my sort of morning thoughts.
And nowhere in any of my morning thoughts is there, I wake up and I'm like, okay, how can I best oppress black people today?
What, you know, who could I not hire?
Who could I do bad things to?
And I've never, I mean...
I've had this conversation before with people.
I've never known.
I mean, of course, there are white racists, there are black racists.
I think that they're not a huge...
I mean, it's just not...
If there's systemic racism and unconscious racism, it's so unconscious that, you know, I don't know, dated a black girl, hired black people.
It's really, boy, that's hard for me to see.
But the theory is, of course, that And I think, also, I think that if I were a black leader, I would be sort of concerned that if I started criticizing the black community, that that might give fuel to who I would perceive as the white racists.
Is that, like, if we start criticizing ourselves, aren't we kind of legitimizing the criticism that the people have about us?
Yeah, I think so.
Especially when, like, stereotypes are such a big problem, but, you know, even if they are true, people don't want to hear it, you know, they don't want to They don't want to add to it.
It's like, when does it become a fact and not a stereotype?
Yeah, I mean, you know, black criminality is a big problem.
Right?
I mean, I don't have to tell you that.
I mean, you probably had more thoughts about that than I'll ever have.
But it's a big problem.
But of course, if black leaders were to say, listen, we've got a big problem with black criminality, aren't they concerned that then People are going to say, aha, you know, my stereotypes are right and I'm right to think badly and all that.
Is that, like, they just got to continue externalizing it because the internal stuff could give fuel to it.
Yeah.
Right?
Like, I mean, this is a concern, too, when talking about sort of some of the race and IQ stuff is people say, well, you know, if you publicize it, it could justify negative feelings that people have about blacks and all that.
And it's like, yeah, but we still kind of need to figure out facts.
I mean, What people do with facts is not really the concern.
I think we need to have facts.
And look, if there is...
I don't know.
I mean, if there's genetic basis to IQ differences among the races, Mark, you going into politics isn't going to change that.
You know, it's like going into politics to make Chinese people taller.
And again, I don't know...
This is an up-in-the-air question.
I mean, there's evidence, but it's not conclusive.
But given that we don't know, I mean...
I certainly don't think that more money to the black community is going to solve the problem.
Just as I don't think that more money to any poor community is going to solve them.
More money to poor white people doesn't solve the problem.
More people to, I guess, the one poor Asian person in America is not going to solve the problem.
It just doesn't work.
And If your community wants you to go into politics so that you can send resources their way or to the black community, A, I don't think you'll be helping them because government redistribution of wealth, and I don't care about the damn race, government redistribution of wealth is a terrible idea.
You know, communities can help the poor because communities can tell the difference between somebody who's poor By accident.
And somebody who's poor because they make a series of staggeringly bad decisions, right?
And the government can never tell those two different...
The deserving and the undeserving poor.
People deserving of charity and people to whom charity will only make things worse.
Like it's one thing to give morphine to somebody who's in genuine pain temporarily and it's another thing to give morphine to a drug addict, right?
I mean it's...
One person should get the morphine and the other person should get treatment or something else, right?
So I think if you're going to go into politics with the idea of...
Getting money or benefits or preferential legislation or better contracts or more contracts or some sort of monopoly towards blacks, I think that is actually harming the community.
I don't think it's any accident that outcomes for a lot of blacks have gotten worse and worse when they were getting better.
Over the first half of our first, almost three quarters of the 20th century, outcomes for a lot of blacks, and please, I apologize for lecturing you on black history, it's more for the audience than for you, of course, right?
But the outcomes for blacks were getting much, much better.
More blacks were getting into the middle class, more blacks were getting educated, more blacks were becoming professionals, and the black family, which had survived slavery, was surviving, holding on, and strengthening.
The welfare state comes along, and boom!
It all begins to unravel.
And so I think going to the government, if that's the goal of the community leaders sending you into the government to go and get more government cheddar for the community, I think that you'll be serving those leaders, because they can then go and say, ah, we sent this guy to the...
You'll be serving the government who always likes to take more money and redistribute more money and buy more votes.
I don't think that you'll be helping the black community.
In fact, I think you'll be harming it, just as a white person going into government to get more money for white people would be hurting that community.
Yes, I think you're right.
But the problem is...
No, there's no problem.
I've solved it all.
That's it.
We're...
The whole race thing has been completely solved just in this one conversation.
Go ahead, sorry.
So, yeah.
So, whenever I... When you asked me before, do I give any bite back to the leaders?
But it's like whenever I argue that the problem isn't always white privilege and racism and Anything else?
Like, I think one of the biggest problems right now for me personally is, oh, you're an Uncle Tom, you know, you're apologetic and you don't care about black people.
And it's like, I can't tell them, well, you know, stop killing each other and stop doing this and stop doing that.
And it's like...
I'm on their side and that's like a big problem I've dealt with and you were talking about before how, you know, we're scared of left comments But it's like it's kind of different when it's like your friends your family It's like it's hard to handle when you're called an Uncle Tom and you don't care about black people because you want to go into health politics Well, and I don't know if this is still the case but I don't know if Oreo is still a...
Is that like too dated now?
Is that like bling now?
Black on the outside, but white on the inside.
Yeah.
Yeah, and that is...
And that is an insult to both of our races.
You know, because you're like a white person.
Oh, I'm sorry, is that so bad?
You know, it's like the worst insult that...
A black person can throw at another black person is, you're acting white.
It's like, hey, as a white person, I don't know that it's that bad to act white.
There is some civilizational benefits that have accrued from the white people nonetheless anyway.
But it's also an insult to you, which is to say that we are going to insult you unless you conform to what we want.
Unless you do what we want.
Unless you do what benefits us and get us more free government money.
Or free government advantages.
We're going to just insult you.
And yeah, you're absolutely right.
I mean, it is...
I haven't thought of it in this way, but...
You know, that's a good 150 IQ observation there.
But...
Of course, you know, the blacks calling you...
The Uncle Tom is the same as the social justice warriors calling me a racist.
Yeah.
Get what we want.
And it's not like they're going to make the case, right?
They're just...
Immediately start escalating the insults if you don't do what they want.
Is that a fair way to put it?
Yeah, pretty much.
But I mean, to be fair, most of it comes from people who really don't know how racial politics work.
It's like people my age type of thing.
The insults come from younger people who actually believe and were taught that the whites are out to get us and everybody's racist.
So I think it's a little different than like, you know, the leaders don't actually say that.
It's more just my generation and people around me.
But Obama said he was going to fix all that.
So I'm glad that that's all been fixed.
You must have not noticed that Obama was going to fix all that.
Right.
Now, if white people, I guess like myself, are so racist...
Why is it that Asians do so well in white societies?
Is that ever mentioned or questioned or anything like that?
Because, you know, if you say someone's racist, then that's a general term, right?
Anti-black would be, I guess, racist against blacks.
But racist just means, if it's not of your race, that's bad.
But then, you know, the Jews and the East Asians, right, the Japanese, the Chinese, South Koreans, and so on, they do better than whites in white societies.
really incompetent racism.
White people are very bad at being consistently racist because these other non-white groups do better than whites in white societies.
Does that ever bubble up?
It's almost like because of slavery in America, black and white are the only races that exist, and Asians and Hispanics are just on the side watching.
Right.
Right.
So that doesn't like...
Because that is, you know, a...
That's a challenge towards the general concept of white racism.
It's the fact that there are non-white races who do better than whites in white societies.
And, you know, the argument which I've used before is that that follows the IQ lines, right?
That Jews, Ashkenazi Jews have the highest IQs, they make the most money.
And then East Asians have higher IQs, they make the most money.
Whites are in the middle, they make the middle.
Then Hispanics and then blacks as a whole.
So, my thought...
You can inspire your community.
You can do good things for your community.
I have no doubt that there are wicked smart black kids out there who, if you become Surgeon General Head of Medical Politics.
I don't know what the hell that means.
But you become the top of your field.
You're prominent and so on.
Then they look at you and they say, wow, you know, that's fantastic.
That is, you know, that's inspiring for me.
Because all these people are saying, oh, why is white society so racist?
But here's a guy who's, you know, got to the top and all that, right?
So, I don't think it's a false dichotomy to say, I think it is a false dichotomy to say, look, Mark, if you pursue what's important to you, you're not benefiting the black community.
I think that's entirely the opposite of the truth.
I think if you pursue what's important to you, and you live a life, you know, can we ever completely forget about race?
I don't know.
When I was growing up, I never really thought about it.
And it wasn't because I didn't grow up in a multicultural society.
I certainly did.
My best friend when I was younger for a long time was an Indian fellow.
Anyway, it doesn't really matter.
This is all white-splaining that's sort of pointless.
But if you pursue the life that you want that is not centered or founded upon racial injustice and redressing racial imbalances and race, race, race and fighting against white racism and promoting black interests and getting government money for black communities and like if they see you grow up and flourish and have a great life not founded upon racial obsessions I
gotta think that that is a lot more freeing for a black youth than what your community leaders want you to do.
I get what you're saying, but I don't know.
I think when Obama became president, I don't think kids were like, Maybe for a little bit.
They were like, okay, we have a black president.
Black people can strive and strive for great things.
But then the next month, it was like, look what the white Supreme Court won't let our black president do.
There's still racism in America.
That's the vibe I got from my peers and people around me.
I don't think just...
Doing what I want to do and being successful, it doesn't seem like that has much of an effect on black youth today.
Well, look, I mean, if you think that you becoming successful on your own terms according to your own desires is going to scrub all irrationality from the planet, I mean, that may be a bit of a high standard to have, you know?
I mean...
There are people, of course, and this is not just for blacks, there are people who are always going to view things through a racial lens.
And, you know, like the only reason that Republicans might oppose the replacement of a Republican Supreme Court judge with a Democrat Supreme Court judge, the only reason that they would oppose that is because they hate Obama's skin color.
There are people who are going to see that, and that is not the truth.
There's lots of reasons why Republicans want a Republican, or at least not a Democratic, Supreme Court nominee.
Which has nothing to do with race.
There's this old Eddie Murphy movie, where a waiter comes up and says to Eddie Murphy and his black friends at the table, would you like some artichokes with your meal?
Right?
And the guy gets all angry.
One of Eddie Murphy's friends is like, artichoke.
He's artichoke because artichokes, they call artichokes spears and he's calling a spear chakras.
Like there are people who are going to just like everything you know and feminists do this like everything just becomes about race and sorry gender and oppression and and all of that and communists everything's about class and there are people who just like no matter what information you give them it's going to go through their particular mental structure to match whatever it is that they want to hear and and whether you go into government or you go into politics or you go into your passion of becoming a leader in the medical field It's not magically going to erase
that tendency from people.
There are lots of people who are just going to have that tendency no matter what you do.
And you going into government isn't going to solve it.
And you going into doing what you want to do is not going to solve it.
I mean, I think it's going to be a benefit to it.
But if you're going to be inhibited in what you want to do because there are irrational people in the world, you will never get to do what you want to do because there are always going to be irrational people in the world.
Okay, yeah, I get it.
So, what do you think, um, like, actually doing something?
I know you said, um, talk to them about, like, you know, husbands marry wives, and, like, besides just saying what I think needs to happen, because, like, I don't think that works.
What actually can be done?
That's the thing I struggle with the most.
Right.
Well, let me ask you something first, because you said something earlier that I meant to circle back on and I forgot, so sorry.
I'm getting old.
But you said something, you've got to give back to the community, right?
Do you remember that?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, okay.
So what has the community given to you that you're supposed to give back?
I couldn't tell you.
Really?
That seemed like a pretty quick answer.
I guess you've thought about this before.
Yeah.
Okay, but tell me, I mean, break that out for me a little bit as somebody not black.
What does it mean?
Because they say you give back to the community, and I say, what's the community?
You say nothing.
Help me explain.
Help me understand that a little better if you can.
I actually have thought about this a lot, because get back is like, give back, those are the two most words I hear the absolute most.
It's like, I've never been on welfare or anything, and I didn't go to a public school.
Technically, the high school was a charter school, actually, so it wasn't even in my area.
So I really couldn't think of how to actually give back.
Does it just mean wherever I lived, help that community do better?
Well, look, I mean, if your community, like people in your community that helped you study and got up at dawn to, you know, help go over stuff to help you with your tests and, you know, making stuff up.
I mean, it's not like my community did shit all for me when I was growing up.
So I'm making stuff up out of nothing because I got no experience of the community given to me.
But I could certainly imagine where you can say, look at all of the Great things your community did for you growing up, but are you saying that there wasn't really any of that?
Yeah, that's just it.
So even where I lived, From preschool to eighth grade, I went to a private school in a predominantly white area where it was like, you know, two black kids in the class and like 20 white kids.
And so there's really been nothing done in my community, you know, nothing like that, these examples you just gave.
But even outside of school, right, your community could have said, listen, you know, this is your heritage, or I don't know, whatever, right, this is your history that you may not be getting as much of in that Eurocentric white school or whatever.
They could have done a whole bunch of stuff to sit you down and give you maybe a richer sense of where you came from, like lots of things that they could have done even outside of school.
Yeah, they could have.
I can't think of, you know, anything like that.
Okay, so they did nothing for you, according to what you say, and now they want you to do a whole bunch of stuff for them.
Yeah, pretty much.
But I don't know if it's just community, because when they say give back, I'm just left dumbfounded.
Like, what do you mean?
Oh, you know what they mean.
You're a smart guy.
You know what they mean.
They mean that they want to create an obligation in you that they did nothing to earn so that you'll go and get them free stuff.
But I mean, like...
You know what they mean.
Like, where I was born or, like...
You know, like, who am I giving back to?
That's what I mean.
Not...
Right.
So, I don't know, because...
Well, you're not giving back to anyone, because they didn't give stuff to you.
Yes.
You know, I mean, I use the Amish example, because I'm really white.
I use the Amish example, like, you know, because they have no technology, right?
So, to make a barn in the Amish community, everybody's got to chip in, right?
Because they've got no tractors or the, I don't know, the weird caterpillar things with claws that lift stuff.
I'm not in construction, but...
But everybody's got to go help out that barn, right?
Now, if you go and help 10 people to raise their barns, then you can legitimately say to them, come help me raise my barn.
But if you didn't help anyone raise their barns, and then you want some people to come and help you, then of course what you want to do is create in them an obligation that you haven't earned, because you don't want to go help them raise their barn, but you want them to come help raise your barn.
So this, I mean, this is not racial specific.
I mean, white people get this all the time.
Give back to your community and you got to give back to your society.
Okay, so you just want my money at gunpoint through taxes.
I get it.
Just don't give me the fairy tale.
Just say, you know, hand it over because you've got money and I want some.
That's the government, right?
So I don't, you know, this give back stuff.
It's like, it's programming you to feel that you are unjust in not repaying a debt Or not repaying money that was never lent to you in the first place.
That's why they do it.
I really don't know how to respond to that.
Usually when people say that, I just smile and nod my head.
I'm just thinking, I don't know who I'm giving back to or why.
But I'm just like, okay.
I can definitely see family.
That's a given.
Give back family, especially close family.
Yeah, I mean, if your family is being great to you, I think that they have created a good obligation that, you know, hopefully it doesn't feel like a horrible obligation.
I hope when I get old, my daughter's not like, oh, I gotta go see dad because it's father.
Like, I hope it's gonna be fun for her and enjoyable for her.
That's the goal, assuming I'm not drooling an eyeball on myself or something.
So, yeah, where you have been given great stuff, Then people don't usually need to tell you that, oh, you've got to remember to give back.
It's like, yeah, I know, Mom.
I love you.
But it's the people who haven't given you stuff who will usually use that kind of language.
And they want you to do free stuff by pretending that they did stuff for you in the past.
I mean, that's natural.
I mean, if you can get people to believe that, then it's a lot easier than actually going to help kids in the neighborhood.
Become who they are or who they could be, right?
I mean, if people had done a lot to help you be the great guy that you are, then you would feel that.
And they wouldn't need to, say, give back because you would have that natural sense of reciprocity, right?
But, like, I don't...
So, what do you think about when...
People who don't know, you know, who aren't in my community say, you need to give back to your community.
It's like, do I just sit there and list off the things that they haven't done to me or, like, done for me?
Or do I, like, you know...
I don't know.
How about you with confrontation?
Because, listen, high IQ people are not always that great with confrontation.
I try to avoid it as much as I can.
You try to avoid it?
Okay.
And that actually is not a bad high IQ strategy because, you know...
A lot of times high IQ people, you know, they grow the brain, but the body doesn't quite follow as big.
Anyway, it doesn't really matter.
So it depends.
If you don't like confrontation, then you don't even owe them the truth.
You know, they say, you got to give back to your community.
And it's like, yeah, let me, you know, I'll think about that.
And if they keep pestering you, you can just not be available.
You know what I mean?
Like, I mean...
I try not to engage with people who I perceive as being directly manipulative, right?
I mean, you can't win because they'll never admit to it.
And they're usually so good at being manipulative that they get all kinds of haughty and offended and you can never prove anything anyway because, you know, they're very good at it.
So I don't see any particular profit.
You know, if certain leaders or certain people in your community have adapted themselves to using government power or sending the smartest and the best and the brightest into government, which is a huge loss.
A huge loss to everyone.
Listen, I had cancer.
I really want you in the medical field.
I don't want you in politics.
Go find a cure if it comes back.
I want you to personally hand me the cure.
Was it a better use of Ben Carson's talents being in politics or as a pioneering neurosurgeon?
Yeah, think of all those twins who are really getting on each other's nerves because this guy wanted to go and make speeches.
And for yourself, Mark, yeah, you don't owe big explanations to people, but for yourself, and do you want to have kids?
Right now, no.
Right now?
Not during this call, but at some point in the future.
Plan on having kids right now.
Sorry, you do or don't?
I don't.
You don't?
Yeah.
Okay, that's kind of tragic.
I'm sorry.
Again, if there's genetic stuff, for God's sakes, man, go have some kids.
But anyway, it's the same thing I said to the woman from Romania the other night.
But anyway, smart people, you know, just go have kids.
But anyway, if you can imagine, if you did have kids, or just for your own life, what percentage of your life do you want to devote to To issues of race and equality or egalitarianism or the community or giving back or fighting white racism or promoting black race issues or whatever.
You know, 1 to 100, what percentage...
Sorry, you know that it's a percentage.
What percentage of your life do you want to devote to that?
Like career-wise?
Your life.
Career, non-career, whatever it is.
Maybe like 10 to 20.
10 to 20.
Okay.
All right.
And, you know, given the tragedies in the black community, I can certainly understand that.
Okay.
So, if you go into politics, that's going to be 100%, right?
Yeah.
I mean, if you go into politics with the specific goal of somehow gaining resources for the black community or whatever it is, promoting black interests, it's going to be That's going to be your thing.
You're going to be like race guy, right?
Yeah.
And again, I think that's people using you and using your talents and abilities for their own benefit to get things that they can't get themselves while they have never provided a lot of resources and benefits to you.
I think that's using you.
And if you want it to be 10 to 20%, which again, I can completely understand, Then going into politics is not the way to do it.
And if you go and pursue your own life and dreams, pursuing your own life and dreams without centering your whole life on fighting racial injustice, which again, if there's some genetic basis to it, is not going to work.
You will have wasted your life.
Then it won't have worked.
Then you'll have harmed your community by providing it resources that it should go out and earn on its own.
Imagine if you go into politics and you get a million dollars for some community.
Again, I know it doesn't exactly work this way, but you get a million dollars for some black community and they spread it around and that means that black women can have more kids without a father.
That would be a pretty terrible way to use your talents because it would be harming the community that you're not even sure did much for you as a kid.
So if you go into medicine, you can still do some racially positive stuff, but if you go into politics, you can't do any medicine.
Is that a fair way to put it?
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Yeah, so I'm a big one for blended stuff.
You know, like, I mean, if you're interested in racial issues and you go into politics, sorry, if you're interested in racial issues but 10% to 20%, You go into medicine, you can still do that, but if you love medicine and you go into politics, it's 100% race issues and 0% medicine.
I'm for diversifying your happiness portfolio, if that makes any sense.
That's why I try to offend everyone.
Diversify your happiness portfolio and try and do stuff that you can mix and match.
Also, if you find out that you're actually not that interested in racial issues or if you sort of accept my argument over time, That the best way you can help black youths is to live your life following your own passions and dreams to the very best of your ability and not getting sucked into the quagmire of American racial politics, which nobody seems to come out unscathed and honorable.
If you do find out that you're much more interested in medicine than you are in racial politics and you're in medicine, then you can keep doing the medicine.
But if you find out that racial politics isn't your thing and you've gone into politics rather than going into medicine, there's no plan B then, right?
Yeah.
So I think there's lots of decent arguments as to what might be best.
Anyway, I'm going to shut up now and let you talk because I've been doing all my yammering.
What do you think of what we're talking about?
Yeah, I definitely agree with most of your points.
Well, I don't want to say most, but almost all of your points.
But I still just...
We're talking a lot about what won't work.
I honestly don't know the answers to most of the questions.
And it's like...
I don't really want to go in a race at all, but I definitely want to have some type of leadership or help the black community just because they need help.
That's just what I want to do.
I don't really know what to do.
That's just it.
Well, and you've got this thing where to help the black community must be against your interests in some manner.
Yeah.
And my argument is I don't think so.
I think the best way you can help the black community is to pursue your goals and your dreams free of racial politics.
And that is going to invite, just by your example, a lot of smart black youths or youths of any race to follow in your footsteps.
I think that pursuing your own happiness is is the most inspiring thing because then what you're promoting is do these smart things and you can be as happy as I am so yeah my argument would be that pursuing your particular dreams and desires without sacrificing your interests for people who cannot make a convincing case As to the worthiness of your sacrifice or the positive effects of your sacrifice,
again, if you get a bunch of government money or resources or advantages to particular black people, then those black people are gonna make out like bandits because of your skills and abilities, right?
So they benefit, but I don't think that you benefit, and I also don't think that the people of any race who you can help with your medical skills will benefit either.
So it's a false dichotomy to say, well, I want to pursue my dreams, but I also want to help my community.
I'm pursuing my dreams.
I talk about the stuff, you know, at least in the solo shows, I talk about the stuff that's important to me.
In the PowerPoint shows, I talk about the stuff that's important to Mike.
And I think that in the pursuit of my intellectual passions and curiosities, I think I'm helping people more than if I said, okay, well, what do other people need me to talk about?
I think that the enthusiasm would kind of go out of what it is that I'm doing if I started doing it.
For the sake of other people.
And I think then it would be...
Because what I want is for people not to do what I do or not to think what I think.
I want just people to think.
If you think, you're not thinking like someone else.
You're thinking.
And I also do want people to think more selfishly.
I think that the lack of...
It's a pejorative word, right?
I sort of mean it in the objectivist sense, but I do want people to ask, okay, what's the benefit to me?
Because when you...
And it's not the only thing that you ask, but it has to be an important part of the question about what it is that you do with your life.
Okay, what's in it for me?
How does this benefit me?
What's good for me in this area?
And...
I think we want more people doing that and fewer people being manipulated by sophists to provide resources that the sophists haven't earned.
That's my sort of basic point.
Is there anything else you wanted to ask or mention or have I given you enough to chew on, so to speak, for a while?
So I guess you kind of answered my question through, you know, like talking about it.
So you just, you don't think there's an obligation, right?
I don't believe in what I call positive, unchosen positive obligations.
So what I mean by that is that if you, stupid example, but if you, if you say I want to go rent a car, okay, then you've, you've got to pay for the car, right?
But if somebody comes along and says, I want you to pay for the car you never rented, well, right, that's, that's, There are no unchosen positive obligations.
We shouldn't kill and steal and cheat each other.
There are no unchosen positive obligations.
The fact that you've been born doesn't create an obligation.
The fact that you've lived in a community does not create an obligation because you didn't choose any of these things.
If you choose to enter into a contract, then you have a chosen positive obligation.
Negative obligations are thou shalt not.
Don't steal, don't kill.
But there are no unchosen positive obligations because any unchosen positive obligation logically can just be nullified by someone else.
Like if I say, hey, man, you've got an unchosen positive obligation to pay me $1,000.
Then you can just say, okay, you have an obligation to pay me $1,000 and it just canceled.
Like if one person can create unchosen positive obligations, because I'm a philosopher, which means universalization is kind of my gig, then everyone can create positive obligations.
Unchosen obligations.
Then they can all cancel each other out and nothing happens.
So there are no positive...
There are no unchosen positive obligations.
So the idea that you owe something to your community for the very existence of breathing is a fallacy.
It is false.
And like all false things that are believed, it leads you very much open to being exploited.
So I guess my last question would be, given that I know we talked about this a little bit before.
What do you think – or what's some advice on what I should say to people?
Because I think from listening to you a lot and other people, I'm definitely getting more into politics and trying to actually inform people and have good discussions.
But what should I say to people who think otherwise and who think there is an obligation?
Well, it depends if you think that they're open to reasonable arguments.
So, I've already said, for the people who are just, you know, maybe trying to manipulate you to benefit themselves, you can just be polite and say, you'll think about it, and if they bother you too much, just make yourself unavailable.
And if they finally corner you, you can say, look, I'm going to help my community In the way that I see fit.
And I have an IQ of 150 and you don't, so sucks to be you, sorry.
Right?
Because if other people can convince you that obeying what they want is the only way you can do a positive action, then they control you.
They own you.
So when people say, well, you've got to give back to your community, you say, oh, I am going to give back to my community.
I have a different idea of how to do it than you, and it's my life.
So, if this is how you want to give back to your community, I invite you to do it.
Obviously, it's your life.
But I am going to give back to my community in my own way.
And in my own way is to go and, you know, be the best doctor, the best administrator, discover the most cures, help and heal the most people of all races, and that is going to do a lot more.
Like you say, oh, we've got to have positive images of black men.
It's like, great!
I don't know that...
Being another race-baiting, black-shoveling politician is really going to help people's stereotypes about black people's in-group preferences and endless obsessions with racism.
I think you're feeding the negative stereotype if you go and do that.
If you go and become a great surgeon, a great doctor, a great administrator, you know, oh yeah, he happens to be black like he happens to be tall or short or whatever, then that is the best way to break people's stereotypes.
Right?
I mean, if people say, well, you know, a lot of blacks in America, they seem to have a lot of really heavy racial grievances and they seem to want to continually turn to politics, to use the government, to get money from people, to give to their own community.
And if you go into that, that's reinforcing that whole stereotype.
But if you go and are a fantastic black man, or a fantastic man who just happens to be black, But it has no more particular relevance than, you know, me saying I've got to go and fight the good fight for bald guys or something, you know?
I mean, it's not.
The best way to break these stereotypes is to pursue that which is greatest and most valuable for you in the service of excellence in the world.
And will that help black kids?
Yeah!
You know, who helps more black kids?
Al Sharpton or Ben Carson, for God's sakes?
Okay.
Yeah, I get it.
I get it.
Makes sense.
You're allowed to disagree with the people who tell you how you should be of service to the world.
And if you do feel like a confrontation, you ready?
You may never do this.
But if you do feel like you really want a confrontation, you could say, well, black leaders have been focusing on political action for the past 50 years.
How's the black community doing?
Politics will save us.
Money from the government will save us.
Preferential legislation from the...
Affirmative action will save us.
And preferential, like, granting more government contracts to black business owners will save us.
It's like, okay, that's been the approach for 50 years.
How's it working?
That's not the approach that the Japanese took and how are the Japanese doing.
It's not the approach that the Jews took and how are the Jews doing.
It's not the approach that the Chinese took and how are the Chinese doing.
It's not the...
Right.
It's the Irish...
It's not a black thing, but the Irish, when they first came to America, they went into the priesthood and they went into government work.
And they really tried to use politics to benefit the Irish community and...
God, it was terrible!
It was just, I mean, it was terrible what happened.
And then eventually they broke out of that and just started doing non-governmental, non-priesthood and police stuff and things got much better.
And the communities that reject government action and politics as the means of advancing their economic interest generally do a lot better.
Because government money makes people lazy independent.
In every class, I mean this is rich white people and rich Jews, they get lazy independent on government money.
And poor white people and poor black people get lazy independent on government money.
So the idea that you could go out and get government money that's going to help your community...
No, no, a thousand times no, I would say.
So you can just say, look, I disagree.
You, my black leader, do not have A monopoly on everything that is best for helping the black community.
Nobody does.
We need a diversity of solutions.
If you want to run into politics, I don't agree.
I'm going to go do something different.
You do not have a monopoly on how to best help the black community.
That is still open to debate.
Because if you had a monopoly, the black community, if you had a monopoly and you were totally right and everything, then the black community would be doing a hell of a lot better than it is.
So I have different ideas and I'm going to strike out a new ground and no one alive can tell me that they know exactly the best way that everyone has to act to help a community that's in trouble.
If they knew, the community would no longer be in trouble and it is, right?
It's funny.
I definitely agree with what you're saying, but I just couldn't imagine myself That's why I said, if you want to be confrontational, I think that that would be enormously confrontational.
So, you know, I tell you what, man, this is what you need to do.
If you're into one of those conversations, just call me.
I'll tell them.
Because then they could just get mad at me instead.
And it's easier, right?
Because I'm a bigot, according to some theory.
Right?
Yeah, yeah.
I don't know.
I'll be your white standing.
He's white.
He doesn't know.
He's white.
He doesn't know.
That's right.
And it's funny, you know, because I got this comment.
How can you possibly, if you haven't walked about, it's like...
But I get told all the time what it's like to be white.
You know, apparently I'm racist and privileged and all that.
And, you know, I get told this by non-white people all the time.
And then I'm told that I can't understand another race if I'm not part of that race.
It's like, well, they seem to have a lot of say about what it's like to be white.
And they're not white.
So I think I can.
Being born white is like being born with a million dollars in your bank account.
Yeah, I certainly felt that when I was a kid and we were getting evicted.
Just that million.
You know, we just lost the number, you know.
It's too bad.
Sorry, was that, I mean, useful or is there something else you wanted to add?
Yeah, it was useful.
I think right now I just need to get better at disagreeing and, you know, actually letting the person know that I disagree.
And I love, listen, man, I love the fact that you care about your community so much.
Like, it's beautiful.
It is a beautiful thing.
I mean, I don't like the fact that sometimes this gets hijacked for other people's agendas, maybe, but I think it's beautiful that you, I mean, I get it, right?
This is not pretending that you really do care about your community, right?
Yeah, I think it's even more than just race.
It's just, I like to help people and, you know, seeing a group of people that need help, I just, you know, but I just don't want it to turn into, this is what you have to do and here's how you have to do it.
That's where, yeah.
Right.
Right.
No, and so, yeah, wanting to help your community, wanting to help the disadvantaged and the underprivileged, you know, it's funny, you know, because I'm a capitalist and, or at least I'm pro-capitalism and, um, I really care about people who can't afford to go and get a great education.
That's why all of this stuff is...
I don't charge for it.
I want people to be able to get access to quality thinking, to good instruction.
You know, the number of messages we get where it's like, wow, I sure wish my teachers had been as interesting as you.
Then I might have stayed awake during the Crusades, the story of the Crusades or whatever, right?
And...
I really care about disadvantaged people.
I really care about people who have great potential but have just not been exposed to methodologies or ways of thinking that can really help them achieve success.
I come from a disadvantaged community in terms of single moms and all that.
You come from a community that's disadvantaged in many ways.
I don't want to go forward I'm out!
There were several other people unjustly imprisoned with me, but I managed to tunnel out, so I'm heading off to the Turks and Caicos and never thinking twice about them.
You always drag your history with you.
You can't not be where you came from.
You know that a lot of the kids in your community We're going to be tempted to go off the rails, to put it mildly, right?
And I know what it's like where I came from and there were people who reached out and helped me.
And I want to give back as much as I can to other people.
So, you know, I hugely respect and think it's wonderful the degree to which you are very sensitive to the good that you can do.
And that's a beautiful thing.
Just make it your own.
Make it your own, the gift that you give.
Don't let your sympathy be hijacked for the advantage, particularly the unjust or unfair advantages of others.
Don't let them use your sympathy.
Find ways to positively influence the world you want to influence without your desire to help other people being controlled by other people's agendas.
Okay, yeah, I understand.
How was the, you know, I mean, we're two guys talking about race and all of that.
How was the conversation for you?
Did it go relatively well?
Was it helpful?
Was it useful?
Yeah, definitely.
Yeah?
Okay, good.
Will you call back in?
Let us know how it's going?
I mean, what your decision is, it's going to be a lifelong decision, right?
I mean, it's not like you're going to make a decision.
It's going to go probably back and forth quite a bit, but I'd love to know how it's going and what you're thinking of.
Okay.
Yeah, that sounds good.
Okay.
Great.
Well, thanks, Mark, for calling in.
It was a real pleasure to chat.
And listen, man, go.
If you want to become an oncologist, you certainly have my support.
I didn't tell you that.
Thanks, man.
Thank you.
All the best.
Great to chat.
See you.
And I thank everyone, of course, who calls into this show, as I do every week.
I really want you guys to know just how much it means to me.
And freedomainradio.com slash donate to help out the show and continue to have these kinds of amazing conversations floating around the world forever.
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Thank you, everybody, so much.
Thanks again to Mike, as always, for lining up the best callers in the known universe.
