3291 The Multicultural Melting Pot - Call In Show - May 13th, 2016
Question 1: [1:48] - “I'm from the island of Puerto Rico. Lately in the local news and media, the hottest subject is ‘The Mental Health of the Puerto Rican people.’ This arises because professionals attribute the ailments of our society: crime, rape, murder and recently the amount of pedophilia, to our low standards on the subject of Mental Health. The governments solution has been to spend millions of dollars, even with the islands non-existent economy, into public Mental Health services. Are mental health issues the cause of the problems in Puerto Rico?”Question 2: [52:12] - “I don't understand how you can diagnose cultural neuroses as a function of ‘innate biological limits’ prevalent in ‘low IQ populations,’ rather than to the childhood trauma that those populations endured, while at the same time recognizing the correlation between adult war and childhood trauma, per your advocacy of Lloyd deMause's book. Surely, if you recognize a correlation between trauma (aka, child abuse) and war (aka, a low IQ cultural neurosis), then mustn't you recognize a correlation between "cultural IQ limits" and the experiential trauma that the children of those cultures endured?”“What I observe you doing here is selectively applying the rational principle that cultural neuroses originates from trauma (not biology, per se), thus depriving this important and sensitive rationalization to certain cultures' neurotic behavior. Upon what rational basis can you explain why you selectively apply this rational principle to some human populations but not to others?”Question 3: [1:44:04] - “I'm in my late 20's and have been dating a single mother with two children for a year and a half. We met at work and began dating for pleasure. She has many qualities in a woman that I like. She is attractive, able to hold a professional job, and is able to raise children in a relatively healthy way. She has also become receptive to some of the things you talk about in your show, such as problems with welfare programs and immigration. However, as someone who looks forward to having a child or two of my own someday, I am uncertain if it makes sense to settle down with her or if it would be best to move on and start fresh.”Question 4: [2:46:33] - "Stefan, I agree with many of Donald Trump’s stated policies, though I may not agree with many of his characterizations of immigrants. That aside, I find his foreign policy most concerning. I understand that secrecy is necessary as a part of military strategy, but then why hasn't Trump had independent and respected military strategists review his plans behind closed doors and then give public endorsements? Knowing that you had to keep secrets ahead of time, but then failing to mitigate the impact this has on the public seems like a major misstep. Moreover, his statements about killing the families of terrorists, seems to me irreconcilable with the NAP. How, for instance, can you justify the killing of terrorist's grandparents?"Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
Bunch of interesting callers tonight.
The first, a smashing young genius from Puerto Rico, stuck on the island as it sinks into the Sargasso Sea of Excessive Socialism, wanted to talk about what's going on from the ground's eye view, the history, the culture, and everything that is going wrong with its economy.
And the second caller came into the show because of the fact that I read Lloyd DeMoss' The Origins of War in Child Abuse, As an audiobook, you can get that at freedomainradio.com slash free.
And he wanted to know what is the relationship between child abuse and genetics in the outcome of a human being?
And to what degree is it possible to change people with words?
The third caller, what can I say?
He's dating a single mom, and we took it from there.
And all I can say is, just have a listen.
Now, the fourth caller, at the moment, the West, is in such dire straits that it is very, very important to get the information that you pass along to others to get it straight.
And this caller, I guess I had some questions as to the degree to which he had worked to get his information straight.
And my basic argument was, in times of crisis in particular, when it comes to communicating information about ideas, principles, peoples, you have got to up your game.
And that is in fact how the show ended, which you'll see why when you listen to the conversation.
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Alright, up first today is Dante.
Dante wrote in and said, I'm from the island of Puerto Rico.
Lately in the news and local media, the hottest subject is the mental health of the Puerto Rican people.
This arises because professionals attribute the ailments of our society, crime, rape, murder, and recently the amount of pedophilia, to our low standards on the subject of mental health.
So the government's solution has been to spend millions of dollars, even with the island's non-existent economy, putting it into public mental health services.
So far to my knowledge, the funds have gone to mental health institutes and hospitals, and the medication is also being paid for.
Are mental health issues the cause of the problems in Puerto Rico?
That's from Dante.
No!
Hey Dante, how you doing?
I'm pretty good, you?
Well, thanks.
Yeah, that's a resounding no, but I haven't heard much about the pedophilia in Puerto Rico.
What's going on with that?
Yeah, well, that's been recently in the past, like, three months.
Honestly, I think it's just another excuse to get more funding, and I think it works.
It did work.
But yeah, it's been really worrisome, the amount of pedophilia that's been going on in the news, and I've met some victims myself, and sadly I've been committed several times to mental hospitals, and I got to meet some of them and hear their stories out, and how it seems to happen a lot from my understanding.
Were the stories the usual horror shows that you'd expect of relatives or friends or something like that, raping or molesting children?
Yeah, usually the loving grandfather, the eccentric uncle, the stepfather.
Yeah.
Right, okay.
Do you know if the new pedophilia thing is more reporting of it?
Or do you think that the prevalence is increasing?
And I understand that's a really tough question because, you know, you may not have the data.
Neither do I. But just in your opinion.
Well, from what I've read, I didn't read too much into it.
But from the news article, I didn't go into more specific statistics.
But apparently it has increased in just what's been going on in 2016.
It's increased 17% the amount of reporting.
Right.
And that means either of the increase...
Like, the rate of reporting is the same and it's gone up, or the rate of reporting has gone up?
Yeah.
Right.
The only thing I'm worried about is just the amount of reporting has increased.
It's been non-stop for the past...
I'm going to go since February.
It's been non-stop on newspapers, you know, just local media.
I'm going to assume that it's mostly male perpetrators who are being reported?
I don't know.
Just last week...
A school teacher was accused, federally, I believe, for having a relationship with a 14-year-old.
Oh, like a female teacher?
Yes.
And she's pretty, by the way.
Right.
Right.
That's why people don't give me sexual agency or anyone at 14, because not always the best decision that you'd make.
And the only reason they knew about it was because apparently the boy, he was showing off to his friends, you know, like, That's how they caught on.
And he didn't report it as a rape.
He was showing off about it and somebody else reported it.
Yeah, like I'm in a Van Halen song, right?
- Yeah. - Now, have you grown up there?
Yeah, born and raised.
And what are your thoughts about the culture?
Personally, I don't Well, I didn't have a...
I don't think I have the best background to describe it.
But...
I think most people are pretty nice.
I mean, if you ask for help in anywhere, people are willing to help you out.
And depending on where you go, there's a good sense of community.
But...
If you let yourself go just by the media, this place is horrible.
Right.
What about the intelligence of the people around you when you were growing up?
I think the best way to describe it is, I don't know, since I was a kid I felt like I've been surrounded by idiots.
I don't know.
Maybe it's my own problem.
I don't know.
Statistically, it's not Dante, but keep going and we'll get to the numbers in a sec.
Yeah, but I don't know.
I've always, I don't know, from my parents who told me or family, I've always been a bit unique.
I got tested as an IQ. Apparently, I have an IQ of 154.
I don't know.
That's good.
So feel free to dumb it down for me, whatever you're talking about.
Use some hand puppets and that will be very helpful.
Yeah.
Yeah, 154, that's, you know, I think the technical term for that in Greek is smoking.
I don't think I'm that smart, honestly, but I don't think I'm that smart, honestly.
I've made a lot of bad decisions in my life.
Right.
Well, you know, there's intelligence and then there's wisdom, right?
I agree.
According to my Dungeons and Dragons rulebook, which, you know, is what I base everything on.
And statistically, you are quite correct.
Just here's some numbers, if it helps.
So there is 30 studies that have been done on intelligence in Puerto Rico, or Puerto Rico Americans.
The average IQ, would you like to take a swing?
I'm going to go with an average of 85.
Well, see, you have an IQ of what, 154?
Apparently, yes.
Yeah, see, now if you had an IQ of 155, Dante, you wouldn't have been off by 0.3.
See, you said 85.
It's actually 84.7.
So...
Now, the average has gone up a little bit.
So the median IQ of 19 samples from the 1930s to the 1970s, 83.7.
The median IQ of 14 samples from the 1980s to 2000s is 87.4 now.
So it's, you know, floating around the mid to medium high 80s.
And that's, well, that's bad.
I can speak from personal experience.
I've seen it in action.
I've worked as a teacher and a part-time university professor.
I'm hesitant to say it's a lack of intelligence.
I'm going to say that it's more of a lack of interest in learning.
Because I like to think that when I tutor some troubled youths, if you can call them that, I like to think I've been able to get to them by finding out what they're interested in.
I've actually bought them books on what they're interested in, whether it be something mechanical or...
Yeah, like that.
I find something they're interested in and I can see their eyes glowing, but then they hate school, they hate their teachers.
Nobody has asked them, what do you like?
What do you want to do when you grow up?
So they just get frustrated.
Right, right.
And...
Have you noticed...
Well, I mean, so I assume that there's quite a brain drain going on in Puerto Rico.
Like, a lot of the smarter people are getting out, right?
I can...
I think one of the best examples about that is that English is a required course here.
Like, you take English here since you're in kindergarten, basically.
Yeah.
And you take it until your high school.
You take it when you go to college.
And...
I think only like 19% of Puerto Ricans speak English.
Right.
According to Gene Simmons, speaking English is quite important.
So, you know, if the guy from KISS says it, it's something to think about.
I just got some numbers in front of me, so I'll throw them out.
The average annual migration of Puerto Ricans to the mainland United States in 1980 to 1990, it was 13,000 annually.
And 1990 to 2000, it was 11,000 annually.
And in 2010 to 2013, it is 49,000 annually.
So lots of people are leaving Puerto Rico.
Yes, and it's only going to get worse.
I saw a report in the news recently that it's estimated that in this summer, approximately 100,000 are going to the mainland.
Basically, they're just waiting for their children to finish the school year.
Right.
And not many of them speak English.
Excellent.
Well, here are some more numbers.
Why do Puerto Ricans move to mainland United States?
Here's a survey.
Household and family, 38%.
Job-related, 42%.
Housing, 7%.
Retired, 7%.
Other, 6%.
So it's all job-related.
It's all economic, opportunity-related primarily.
Yes.
And also in the local news, it was discussed how many of...
Of the ones that moved to the mainland, they actually end up in worse living conditions than when they were here, because many of the ones that are moving...
Yes, many, I do believe, have many skills, like doctors, college graduates, but many also do not.
They think that they can just go to the mainland, they're automatically going to find this awesome job and live the American dream.
Well, in Puerto Rico, interesting thing about Puerto Rico, and sorry to jump in here, but they have to adhere to the United States federal minimum wage standards.
So a household of three can receive $1,734 per month on welfare compared to $1,159 on minimum wage.
So it pays to sit at home, collect welfare, as opposed to working.
I can...
I can also speak from that experience.
I actually had a good business going.
I got frustrated.
I closed it down.
Now I live on welfare and I actually live better now.
Yeah, without all that pesky getting up and going to work, right?
Yeah, I still wake up at 5 in the morning just because I like learning, I like reading.
I still work, it's just I don't report anything to the government.
Right.
Well, and Puerto Rico did have a bit of a fling with some free market reforms.
2009, new governor, new administration.
2009, that was Fortuno?
Yeah, so more than 20,000 public employees were laid off.
Government spending was reduced by 10%.
Ah, yes.
La Leicia.
Corporate tax rates were flattened and reduced.
Tall roads and the island's biggest international airport were privatized.
And so they tried to boost foreign investment by reducing almost to zero income taxes on returns in real estate and passive income.
So there was some reforms.
And how did that go?
I... I think it's a long story, but basically what happened was, I don't know if the 936 or the laws 936 or propositions 936, I don't know exactly.
But basically what they did is what they made having businesses in Puerto Rico extremely profitable.
And then that's when Puerto Rico became a pharmaceutical powerhouse where basically everybody worked in pharmaceuticals.
You graduate in chemistry or pharmaceuticals, you have a great job, you have a great living guaranteed.
They eliminated those laws, the 936, and pharmaceutical companies started moving to Ecuador and Mexico, and a lot of people lost their jobs.
So, I think Fortunio, what he tried to do was replace that lost revenue.
But the problem was that, yeah, you laid off thousands of public employees trying to cut costs, But here's the thing.
They still had a lot of expensive, I'm going to say, not very functional private contracts.
And the spending didn't stop in any way.
They fired up a bunch of public employees, but they gave contracts to private enterprise.
So where's the savings here?
In fact, they actually started spending more.
The spending increased despite firing all those people.
That's why so many people got mad.
Well, I mean, there's usually lots of severance packages you have to buy out people.
And the cost savings of moving from public to private sector employees shows up in a while, and it's more expensive in the short run.
because what happens is you have more flexibility to fire people in the future if they're subcontracted out through private agencies, plus you're not directly responsible for massive pensions, and you can actually make them come to work, you know, like the amount of public holidays and days off and all that the government workers have.
So it's like, you know, it's called a write-down sometimes, People call it a one-time extraordinary cost in business.
It's more pain in the short run, but it's, you know, it's better in the long run.
But basically, these free market reforms didn't work out very long because people got really upset and just kind of went back to the nonsense, right?
Well, it's a little tough to call it a free market reform in one sense considering looking at the numbers of private versus government employees.
You know where I'm going here, don't you?
Yeah, I'm gonna go on a limb and say I think Puerto Rico is pretty socialist.
Okay, so for 2014, there was 673,000 private employees and 234,000 government employees.
So a significant chunk is government employees, and that has decreased somewhat, but it's also decreased in a greater percentage from the private sector.
So the ratio of government employees to private employees has increased.
Yeah, it's actually the public employees, they're actually hiring right now.
Well, it's election year, so yeah, they're obviously going to hire.
So, yeah, the government is like Everybody depends on the government here.
The government is a deity.
Right.
And of course, there aren't probably enough smart people out there yelling at the population to stop being stupid.
I mean, that's kind of the job of smart people is to survey across the landscape, look at all the self-destructive policies that are drooled over by stupid people and say, stop, stop, stop it.
You're destroying your future.
You're destroying your children's future.
You may think that it's fun right now, but you need to stop it.
And you need very confident and intelligent people out there who are able to push back and to some degree shame or even blame the people who just want more government jobs.
Like, no, we cannot have an entire island economy that relies on Massive transfers from the federal government of the United States.
We've got to actually make stuff, not just push paper around for no purpose at high wages.
Yes.
I think it was...
I think this proves a point you made in a video.
I think it was questions for a libertarian from...
I don't remember exactly.
It was one of those comedians that they make fun of the news.
I think it was Jon Stewart, 19 questions for a libertarian.
And I think you made a point about how really smart people, they don't go into government, they go into finance and get rich.
But in Puerto Rico, if you really want to get rich, you go to the government.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
In Puerto Rico, only 40% of the adult population is employed and looking for work.
The rest are economically dormant, I guess, in your case, or working in the gray economy, maybe also your case as well.
Now, it's pretty bad in the United States as well at 63%.
But that's still, what, 50% better than what's going on in Puerto Rico.
I mean, it's brutal, right?
Yeah, too many people do what I do.
I still work.
I just don't report anything I do, and I still get welfare, which is called here los cupones, and people are referred to as cuponeros because they live off the government.
I have a government healthcare.
It covers all my costs.
It's actually pretty passable.
And the way I get the attention I need, but it's in ruins, basically.
They just keep getting loan after loan.
I don't know what else to say.
I mean, the...
Well, so Puerto Rico, they issue all these bonds, right?
This is one of the big problems.
Yes.
Ridiculously high yields, right?
So general obligations bonds issued in 2014 had a yield of 8.7%.
Yes.
8.7%.
And, you know, they'll give you a foot rub and a happy ending.
This is compared to 10-year U.S. Treasury notes hovered around 2% and 3%, right?
So they put out these general obligation bonds with a massive yield.
And also, interest payments are exempt from federal, state, and local income taxes in all 50 states.
It's a unique tax advantage.
So they're exempting the yields from taxes, and they are putting out these massive returns.
And that's retarded.
I mean, I get that they get money in the here and now, but this is why, I mean, in any rational universe, Puerto Rico would have gone bankrupt and tits up years ago, but it doesn't really have that flexibility, to put it mildly.
So this is the usual, you know, Central South American garbage where the population gets lazy and complacent and state-dependent, and no one sounds the alarm bells because, I don't know, it's sunny out.
Who knows, right?
And what happens is people who may not be that inclined to a huge amount of intelligence to begin with get stupider and stupider because they don't even get up and have the path of, well, if I study, I'll get ahead in my job.
And then what happens is it becomes cool, right?
You know, then working becomes a sucker's game and, you know, it's cool to just hang out.
And of course, when there's a critical mass of people who are out of work or not working, then it's not so bad.
You know, like if you have a bunch of friends and family and all that, I was just talking about this dinner with my daughter.
Like, so you have friends and family, you win the lottery and we're like, woohoo, I won the lottery.
But if your friends and family all still have to work, well, what are you going to do?
Everyone's working.
But it's the same thing, too.
If everyone on your block is working or everyone you know is working, being unemployed kind of sucks.
But if lots of people are unemployed, then the culture tends to adapt itself to that and make whatever a lot of people are doing cool.
You know, it's sort of like...
We had this guy on who enjoyed drugs.
And, you know, he'd made it cool, like a doorway to perception and so on.
And this is, to me, the fundamental basis of addiction is the cool factor.
You know, like I take this cool stuff and you're a square if you don't.
And, you know, I sleep around and you're a prude if you don't.
And I have drinks and you're a square and a party pooper.
And, you know, if you don't, you don't have to have any fun if you don't, right?
And so the whole culture adapts to this.
But human beings, we have these pulls, and these pulls are in two directions.
And this is sort of foundational to society and our relationship to it, is that we want to not work a lot of people.
Especially people who aren't that intelligent, they usually don't have jobs that are that much fun.
And so, particularly less intelligent people, they don't want to work because work is not that much fun.
If you're a bus driver or a garbage man or a janitor, you know, there's nothing wrong with these jobs, you know, but there's nothing wrong with people who have them, but, you know, they're not a lot of fun.
I worked with a lot of people like that, and they didn't like their jobs.
They came and did their jobs, and they didn't hugely complain about it, but, you know, if they'd have won the lottery, they'd have been out of there.
And so a lot of people don't want to work.
But the problem is, if they end up not working...
Well, they get depressed.
They get depressed because it's a long day to do nothing.
It's a long day to do nothing.
And I don't know if this is true just for sort of myself or the people that I know, but if you have no purpose in life, don't you start to feel a bit A bit like a useless eater, a consumer of resources and providing nothing to your society, to the world.
I remember reading an essay by Malcolm Gladwell talking about the people he grew up with and how smart a lot of them were.
And I was pretty lucky, I would say, in talking more with people that a lot of the people that I grew up with, both in England and Canada, though more so in Canada than in England after I got out of junior high, A really, really smart group of friends.
They've all gone on to be professors and intellectuals of one kind or another.
And we had great conversations.
It was just a kind of cluster of brain-itude.
And I think that we were all pretty competitive.
And the fact that we were all pretty smart and pretty verbal helped sharpen all of those skills, all those many moons ago.
And the people in Puerto Rico, well, they...
They have a lot of welfare.
And they have a lot of free stuff.
And the government has a lot of debt.
And it's all completely unsustainable.
And so what happens is you get the two things that I think are the most toxic combination of states in the human mind.
One is depression and the other is anxiety.
The two together are, I think, really paralyzing.
Like if you're depressed, okay, well, you can maybe turn that around.
If you're anxious, well, it stimulates you to do stuff.
But if you're depressed and anxious, I think that's really hard.
To turn around.
Because you're, I think, sapped of just about every ounce of psychological energy, in my opinion.
And I think that combination is tough.
And I think this is happening to a lot of people in the West.
You know, we know that we're on this utterly unsustainable course.
And we don't think that we have any power to change it.
So we're depressed because our lives are pretty empty and we're just consuming without producing and we don't have any purpose larger than I don't know what people do all day who have no jobs.
I've never been in that situation so I don't know what people do to wake up in the morning and you have your breakfast and you look at the 16 hours until you go back to bed and what do you do?
I mean so I don't know.
But I think what happens is people feel depressed because their lives have no purpose and they feel anxious because they know it's unsustainable.
And that creates a paralysis wherein they don't even swerve to avoid disaster.
Well, yeah, I agree.
I agree.
But to answer your question, you said you don't know what people do all day when they don't really have anything to do.
Help me, Dante.
What do you do all day?
I actually do work.
I just don't report any of my earnings to the government and I read.
But in the general population, before I have my...
I like to call it the change.
I like to think I started living when I was 25.
Many people, what they do is Puerto Rico You know what the two pastimes of Puerto Rico is?
Just to answer your question.
No, no.
I want to talk about your life.
Hang on, before we get to Puerto Rico as a whole, but bookmark that.
Okay.
So, how many hours a day do you spend working?
I'm a doc trainer, and I work with computers.
And I'm a tutor, and I'm also a professor.
Okay.
That's a bit of an end-dimensional resume, but all right.
And how much of your day does that take up on average or during the week?
My days start, I wake up at 4.30 in the morning and my day pretty much ends like at 7, 7 at night.
Right.
I'm not looking for your awake and asleep habits.
I'm looking at how many hours a week do you spend working.
Every day, except Sunday.
And Sunday, that's pretty much when I take to, I don't know, tend to the house, clean it or...
Okay, no, I'm not sure why I'm not getting this across.
How many hours a week do you spend...
Not when do you wake up, not how many days a week.
How many hours a week do you spend working?
Spend working hours a week.
I'm going to go with a good 40 to 60.
Okay, so you're employed, basically.
I... Yes, but not in the legal sense.
No, no, I understand that.
You've said that a bunch of times.
I get that.
All right.
So you have a job and you read because you're a tutor and you tutor and you are a professor and you are a dog trainer and other things.
But what do other people do?
You were saying that there are these two pastimes in Puerto Rico.
Yes.
Soccer and child molesting?
I don't know.
What do we got here?
I wish it was soccer.
No, the two pastimes.
You know what the national sport is in Puerto Rico?
I don't.
Politics.
It's the national pastime here.
Politics.
Politics.
I would never have guessed that.
What do you mean?
Well, every show, like the most popular shows here, you know, like local television, the most watched shows, the most heard, and it's all politics.
I mean, you'd think it'd be like cartoons or some sort of telenovela, but no, it's shows about, they get these two senators from the opposing tribes, which is the Los Populares or Los PNP, which is basically the PNPs are the Republicans.
The popularists are basically, vote for us, you get free stuff.
You know, Democrats.
And basically they have debates every day on national television.
Debates every day.
They just get two representatives or two senators, legislators, maybe the governor or the guy who's challenging him, and they have debates every day on television.
And then the most popular show, which I believe is Dando Candela, which is the same thing.
Politics.
Politics every day.
You go to the bar, people are talking politics.
Well, I guess if you're all dependent upon the health of the state and the choices of politicians, I can see why that might be of interest to you.
You know, the lion notices the movement of the tiger a lot more than vice versa, unless the tiger is hungry.
Sorry, go on.
Yeah, but the frustration...
I think to me is that, you know, basically the only thing you have to do to win is be able to give the most free stuff.
I'm talking about there's a...
Well, you even did a video about this, how basically the economy is non-existential.
But it's election year, and they're building a new park close to my house.
And it's pretty.
It's a beautiful park.
That thing was untouched for the past three years.
Now it's election year.
They fix that thing up.
It's beautiful.
Right.
Well, I guess people have time and they certainly have the inclination to follow it.
But as far as mental health issues go, you know, there's two things that Freud said are necessary for mental health.
They're worth discussing.
And number one is love.
And number two is productive work.
I didn't get any of those.
I didn't get any of those working up.
Growing up.
Growing up.
Right.
Right.
And what is the state of the families in Puerto Rico that you've seen?
Like...
Like black people in the US, like 70% of moms are single.
Well, it's the same IQ, right?
85, 87 kind of thing, right?
Yes.
On average.
So why do you stay there?
I mean, how did the brain drain skip you over there, my friend?
I'm a little confused.
I have no idea.
I'd go nuts.
Come on.
No, you don't get that.
You may get that with other people.
You don't get that with me.
Okay.
I don't know.
I'm just trying to be humble.
But I'm going to go with my grabs.
He was a real inspiration to me.
That is such a non-answer, I don't even know what to say.
Why do you stay?
My grandfather was inspiring.
That's easy.
The reason I'm staying, I'm waiting for my wife to finish her master's degree.
Then we're leaving.
Because education is cheap here.
Education is very cheap here.
This is Bernie Sanders' paradise.
College is free.
Healthcare is free.
You get free money.
Even if you don't do anything all day.
Well, you know it's not free, right?
I know.
I mean, the American taxpayers are paying for it, right?
I mean, the welfare that you're collecting, the welfare that you're collecting being paid for by other people, right?
Yeah, but nobody cares, so it's free.
No, but you're not everybody.
I'm over here weeping, thinking of my tax bill.
Tell me how you justify taking the welfare if you don't need it to survive.
No, there's no justifying it.
I'll be honest and say there's no justifying.
No, but you must say something to yourself because you're doing it.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm going to call it my excuse.
I had a business.
I had a successful dog training business.
I was making at least approximately $5,000 a month, and I was working really hard.
I woke up at 5 in the morning, took care of dogs, and I stayed up, and I had to travel around looking for clients, going, you know, advertising, hey, I'm a dog trainer, hey, you know, being an entrepreneur in that field.
But taxes are so high, and just on the electric bill and the water bill, because when you When you're going to open a business, you get a different water bill.
Water and utilities are more expensive if it's a business.
But none of that is the fault of the American taxpayer, whose money you're taking.
Yeah, well, long story short, if I was making $5,000 a month, you know, sacrifices and working hard, and then I ended up seeing out of it like $1,200.
Because after expenses and taxes.
So I got mad and I got angry.
Well, hang on, hang on.
Of that 1,200, sorry, I guess of the 3,200, wait, 3,800 that you lost, how much of that was to taxes and how much of that was to overhead?
Taxes?
I'm going to go around 60%.
60% and utilities...
Just a water bill alone was $1,000.
Your water bill for the dog training business was $1,000.
Were you training them to swim in a giant tank with Leonardo DiCaprio?
That's wild.
I am not kidding.
I wish I was.
I wish I was exaggerating.
And many businesses, restaurants specifically, I have a friend that has a restaurant, and his water bill is $1,200 a month.
Is water very hard to get a hold of in Puerto Rico?
I mean, I know it's surrounded by water, but not a drop to drink because it's also salty.
But is it that hard to get there?
No springs?
No rain?
I mean, how does everything is run by the government public enterprises?
Yes.
OK.
Every single thing.
Artificial scarcity.
Yeah.
Just I have electricity.
It's like electricity in South Africa.
Well, electricity in Puerto Rico.
It costs average retail price of electricity cents per kilowatt hour stuff.
Hold yourself.
I know electricity is a bit of a challenge.
I should stop listening to this.
I have terrible dreams about people leaving the lights on in Puerto Rico.
It's 25 cents in Puerto Rico.
The average for U.S. states is 9.84.
And to put it in the context of an island, Hawaii is 34.
But a place like Alaska, 16.3, Connecticut, 15.5, New York, 15.2.
So it is an island, so it is going to cost a bit more, but at the same time, it's all government public enterprises running it, so the costs are highly elevated even in comparison to what it would cost on a free market island.
Yeah.
And they shift it to businesses so that the costs are bundled in and IQ 85 people say, hey, look, the business is paying all the tax and I'm paying none of it.
Score!
And it gets even worse because now that I... Yeah, I live with the government.
Basically, I live with the government in that way.
They pay my electric bill.
No, come on, man.
You've got to be frank about this.
You live off the taxpayers.
The government doesn't have a penny.
You live off the taxpayers and you're also taking money from the next generation of Puerto Ricans.
Because of these bonds, right?
Yep.
And you feel that is justified because you got taxed a lot?
No, I'm not justified at all.
I'm not going to make excuses about it.
Well, you did talk about how much you were taxed.
Oh, that's the reason I closed the business.
I got frustrated and then I did the math.
It was actually an article in the newspaper and then I looked into it a bit more where, hey, If I'm working hard and I make $1,200, but then if I stop working hard, I can actually, in a sense, make $1,800.
No, I get that, but this is a moral element to the calculation, right?
It's not just dollars, right?
Yeah.
It's not...
I mean, because if people...
Make the choice just based on the dollars, then the system can't possibly work, right?
I mean, it probably can't anyway, but this is one of the reasons why.
Because for you, it's like, well, the government has this money, I can either take the money from the government or I can get up and work for it.
Yes.
Right.
So, I guess you're helping to bring the system down in a kind of way, right?
Because by taking the money, you are accelerating its inevitable end, right?
Yeah.
I tried.
I tried for like two years.
Actually, I tried for like two years to get people motivated.
I work at a college and I teach courses and I try to get people motivated and stuff.
I give up.
Honestly, I gave up.
This is one of the great challenges, which is that you gave up because there was a soft place to land called welfare.
If there was no soft place to land, you'd have figured out how to add value until you just added value.
You'd figure out how to make money until you just made enough money.
You'd figure out how to be excellent at what you did to the point where it was worthwhile doing it for you.
And this is one of the great challenges of...
Of the welfare state.
Yes.
Is that it saps motivation even among the motivated smart people, right?
Because you are, you know, a young man, very smart.
You could move to the U.S. or could have moved to the U.S. years ago and applied yourself that way.
But you got stuck in this sticky socialist spider trap, right?
Of good climate and...
Free money!
And, you know, but, you know, I mean, if I sort of had, when starting this show, well, I could just go on welfare, really.
I mean, I wouldn't have been grinding my gear so hard to try and provide value.
That's probably not a good way to put it.
But I wouldn't have been working so feverishly hard to try and provide value and to really listen and to challenge people and continue to...
You know, be in competition with all the other, you know, the people's attention is like one worm and there are 10 billion baby bird beaks squawking away trying to get their attention.
So how do I get people to watch me?
Well, I have to keep figuring out how to add more and more and more value and play the current events versus historical events versus abstract philosophy versus practical philosophy versus the here and now versus the ancient past.
And it's a real juggle.
And I enjoy that.
But that's because I don't have a plan B. If you don't have a plan B, you would be surprised, if not downright shocked at everything you could achieve, but your intelligence is blunted because you've got the plan B called the welfare state.
Yep.
And so you can get up and read because other people don't do that.
Mike, you wanted to mention something?
Yeah, it's a little tough to be on the other end of this line, Dante, as someone who, you know, works.
I think 12 hours is a light day, and, you know, essentially, when Paul Ryan's bailout that's not a bailout, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, goes through for Puerto Rico, me and my children are going to be paying for you to sit home and read, which, boy, I'd like to just sit back and read.
That would be fun, but I'm worth it.
I sincerely apologize.
So, you apologize, but is that going to change your behavior moving forward?
I mean, you're 28.
If you've got 154 IQ, you're capable of lots and lots of jobs.
You can move to the U.S. tomorrow.
Yeah, as I said, I'm just waiting for my wife to finish because the college is free here.
I'm waiting for my wife to finish.
And we are moving.
Yes.
So you apologize for using lots of resources that are coming from me and my children and my children's children's children.
And you just want to wait to finish using more resources so you can stop using the resources.
And you're apologizing.
Wait, wait, hang on.
What is your wife's degree in?
Medical technology?
Wait, is that a question?
I don't know how to say it in English.
Okay.
So you work in the medical field?
Yeah.
Parasites.
Sorry, what?
Parasites.
You know, parasites.
You know, like she's studying, she's in a lab all day basically studying parasites and how to fight them.
Oh!
I thought this was a joke about a mirror.
Okay.
I got it.
I got it.
All right.
So she's going to go and contribute to the healthcare fields in the United States.
Is that right?
Yes.
She's pretty smart too.
Yeah, I would assume so.
All right.
Well, I appreciate the update.
I would say that it seems unlikely that the behavior is going to change.
No, not at all.
Not yours, but the behavior of the island as a whole is not going to change.
And because it doesn't sound like there is anyone out there who cares enough about these poor people to tell them the truth.
You know, and this is, you know, there's no politicians, and you're certainly not taking up the case, right?
You're not writing a blog or making YouTube videos or writing articles or taking the streets to the megaphone.
To help the poor people make better decisions.
And this to me is the greatest cruelty, and I don't mean you in particular, but I mean just as a whole, the greatest cruelty to the poor is not giving them the basic facts that in general they're unable to comprehend because they're usually not that smart.
And finding a way to translate the wisdom of intelligence to the practical short-sightedness of the poor.
And the less intelligent is, I think, a pretty foundational responsibility for intellectuals.
And if intellectuals deny that responsibility, well, the poor will take all of us down.
And to help the poor, you have to tell them the truths that they're unable to come to on their own.
Right?
I mean, a poor person...
A less intelligent person doesn't have the skill set, the intelligence, and the ability to figure out whether smoking is bad for you or not.
You know, that takes a lab that takes double-blind experiments and statistics and all that kind of stuff.
But once that information is garnered, there's not much point publishing it in really complex peer-reviewed journals with a whole bunch of molecular information.
Font cannon fired at the page, right?
I mean, you have to put a picture of a diseased lung on the cigarette pack.
You have to, like that old picture, you know, the little video, this is your brain, and then there's cutting the wires, this is your brain on drugs, or when I was growing up, there were these wear-your-seat-belt things where people who got awfully got mashed up in tiny, short trips in a car were just, you know.
You have to find some way of translating The disastrous that are over the horizon to the short-sighted so that they can actually see them.
And that of course is what hell is about.
Hell is a way of translating UPB to people who can't follow the arguments that easily, the abstract arguments of UPB. And so finding a way to translate the oncoming disastrous To that which motivates the less intelligent and the less able is foundational to intellectuals.
Now intellectuals have largely been severed from conversation with the world as a whole because they get snagged into academia and end up circle-jerking to the next group of people who want to stay In academia, it's like ookie cookie with Latin.
And that is a real shame.
And of course, I'm trying to break that mold by bringing direct philosophical conversations in a fairly easily understandable, if not digestible, format to the average person.
And we get lots of letters in from this show, or people say, well, you know, I work on a plant.
I never had any interest in philosophy.
I listen to your show during the day, or when I'm at work, or I'm driving, and so on.
And we've got a way of getting philosophy across to people as a whole, which is why we're cooking close to 200 million downloads.
But Dante, if you want to be happier, my argument would be, take your significantly off the charts, particularly for local conditions intellect, and help people, help people who can't themselves see this disaster that's coming.
You know, your intellect might be a little bit better served avoiding the inevitable human disasters of low IQ, low intelligence, low intelligence, In fact, people thinking in the here and now and not noticing the canyon they're opening up in the future,
it could be argued that your 154 IQ might be put to a slightly better use, helping avert the human catastrophe of low-information voters destroying their futures than dog training.
It's just my thought that if you wanted to mull that over, I think that would be an interesting approach.
Yeah.
Help them!
You happen to be very smart.
Help these people.
They're all walking blindfolded by low IQ towards the edge of a canyon wherein there's a long, bloody, bumpy, stained with brains rock series all the way down.
We've seen it happen so many times in history.
Step in front of them.
Teach them.
Lead them back.
Help them avoid the disaster that comes unless smarter people intervene.
Love people.
Help people.
And create the kind of world that you'll want to bring kids into.
Uh...
Yeah, I tried, but I gave up, honestly.
I tried making a blog.
Well, then your brain is a waste.
Your brain is a waste on your shoulders, man.
What do you mean you tried and you gave up?
Of course you gave up.
And of course you failed.
Of course you failed.
Everyone fails all the time.
So what?
Think every single one of my videos is the story of your enslavement?
No!
Everyone fails all the time.
Well, Mike and I kick around so many ideas for shows and we have to try and whittle it down to things we can actually achieve that we think people will be interested in, that we think will be of value to people.
Who cares if you're failing?
Well, I failed so I gave up.
Well, that's a waste.
It's a waste.
You have been genetically gifted with enormous intelligence.
I'm not sure you have the right to fail.
Because you know what happens if those of us who can understand what the short-term decisions of the future are and where they lead to, and we say nothing, are we not somewhat responsible for the disasters that ensue?
And if you say, well, I tried and I failed.
I don't, like I've never understood that.
You try again and you try again.
And you try again.
I don't know this thing that when I was a kid, if at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again.
If you fall off the horse, get right back up on the horse and try again.
I guess you've got this soft, sticky spiderweb of welfare to hang out in and do your reading and practice your dog whistles or whatever the hell's going on.
But I don't know that if you have the fingers of Jesus and you are in a town of lepers and you can heal them with a touch...
Do you get to stay home and do finger knitting?
I don't know.
I don't think you do.
You've been blessed accidentally, as have I, with extraordinary intelligence.
And to me, that creates an obligation.
Now, it doesn't really create an obligation in a totally free society, although it doesn't hurt to help people out.
But there are people, you know, if you see a kid playing like a two-year-old playing on the street where there's traffic, what do you do?
What do you do?
Yeah, I've encountered...
You go help the kid out of the traffic.
You go save the kid, because the kid doesn't know that the big trucks are not friendly dinosaurs.
Right?
So before that kid gets squished into the tire tracks of an 18-wheeler, you go and you get that.
And you say, well, I'm not obligated to.
Okay.
I guess technically, but man, there's a giant skylacer of douchery landing on your head if you don't.
And if you have the ability to do it and great intelligence is great power and with great power comes great responsibility and with great responsibility comes deep obligations.
And if you have the power to inform and enlighten the people around you, to save them from their own inabilities to understand the consequences of their actions, I think you have an obligation.
I'm not saying you're evil if you don't, in the same way you're not evil if you don't step off your hammock to save the two-year-old on the street.
But I have an opinion about you if you don't.
Cut the welfare, stare into the abyss, and grow.
Alright, I'm going to move on to the next caller, but thank you very much for your chat.
Take care.
Alright, up next is Nathan.
I don't understand how you can diagnose cultural neuroses as a function of innate biological limits prevalent in low IQ populations, rather than to the childhood trauma that those populations endured, while at the same time recognizing the correlation between adult war and childhood trauma, per your advocacy of Lloyd DeMoss' book, That's the Origins of War and Child Abuse.
Surely, if you recognize a correlation between trauma, aka child abuse, and war, aka a low IQ cultural neurosis, then mustn't you recognize a correlation between cultural IQ limits and the trauma that the children of those cultures endured?
What I observe you doing here is selectively applying the rational principle that cultural neuroses originates from trauma, not biology per se, thus depriving this important and sensitive rationalization to certain cultures' neurotic behavior.
Upon what rational basis can you explain why you selectively apply this rational principle to some human populations, but not to others?
That's from Nathan.
Well, hello Nathan, how you doing tonight?
Good, how you doing?
I'm doing well, thanks.
All right, so for those who don't know, with Lloyd DeMoss' kind permission, I read his book, The Origins of War in Child Abuse, as an audiobook, and you can get it, I think, through iTunes.
You can also get it at freedomainradio.com slash free, and it's important to read and to listen to it.
And so if I understand, Nathan, your criticism of me, it is that I'm saying that...
Experiential trauma leads to a reproduction of that trauma in the form of a cycle of child abuse or even escalating to larger situations of war.
And that somehow collides with the fact that there do seem to be IQ differences between ethnicities.
Well, where do you draw the line in determining What is the source of a culture's adult neurosis?
I mean, how do you...
But hang on, you've got a...
I mean, certainly, I'm no psychologist or therapist, so neurosis has a lot of different meanings to a lot of different people.
So can you help me understand what you mean?
Hang on.
If you can wait till I finish my question, that would be excellent for us both.
If you can just tell me what you mean by neurosis and its definition, that would help.
Generally speaking, let's say, a behavior that acts against the health of the organism.
Something that's destructive to the self or to the community.
Sorry, I can't hang much on that.
So a behavior that's destructive to the self or to the environment around the self?
Something that's...
I don't know what destructive to the self means.
The reason being that, you know, I hate to be sort of pedantic, but I'm genuinely trying to understand.
So, you know, the decisions you're going to make about health when you're 20 may not be the same decisions you're going to make about health when you're 80.
And what does it mean to be self-destructive or not self-destructive?
Well, you know, every time you sit on the couch rather than go for a walk, is that destructive?
I'm just not sure exactly how to quantify that.
Well, I mean, that's my question to you, is more about where you're scaling things.
I mean, I... Oh, no, no.
Sorry, Nate.
This is your definition.
You can't throw it back to me.
I'm talking about...
Well, let's get back to the premise for a second, just why I contacted you.
So I first heard about you when you read his book.
That's how I... Because I like psychoanalysis and psychohistory.
And I thought it was wonderful that you read the book.
And the premise of the book...
I thought is correct that, you know, as you said, humans can reenact their trauma unconsciously.
And that's the basis of a lot of, at least in the book, focused on war.
As an example of a neurosis, something very destructive.
And that a lot of, you know, a lot of war can be traced back to the trauma, the psychological trauma that these kids endure.
Which I think we both are in agreement of.
Right.
So, given that you hold that principle, which I think, in my own sensibility, is sensitive and correct, I guess the question, I'm not really critical of you, I'm just asking you to clarify, and this is something that I'm actually exploring myself, is where can you say, okay, A particular culture's neurosis, as we're hopefully agreeing on at least the practical use of the definition now.
Like an example would be war, I don't know, like mass shootings.
Well, addictions, I would have seen a promiscuity and drug addiction, alcoholism and so on.
All of these are tied to ACE. And people can go to bombinthebrain.com for more on this, the degree to which adverse childhood experiences produce adult dysfunction is very linear and very dose-dependent and pretty clear.
Yeah.
Okay, sorry, go ahead.
So I guess to sum up, I guess my question is, where do you depart from that principle to say, okay, well, this culture or this group and its unacceptable behavior, synonym for neurotic, unacceptable, let's say, unwise behavior?
Is not a function of how they were oriented into their existential experience in life.
In other words, their experience as children, forming their existential assumptions.
And say, no, no, no, it's not that.
It's kind of happening in their biology.
That's where the problems happen.
I'm sorry.
I'm genuinely trying to follow Nathan.
I apologize if I'm moving too slowly.
But I... I'm trying to figure out where I ever may have said it's either or.
Like it's either a childhood trauma...
Well, okay, that's a good...
Hang on.
Nathan, Nathan.
Sorry, sorry, sorry.
Yeah, go ahead.
Cool your jets, man.
We're either going to have a conversation or we're both going to get really annoyed with each other for talking over.
You do this more than me.
We're more trained to the pacing.
I'm adapting as quick as I can.
All right.
So I don't know that I've ever said either or.
So for instance, one of my most popular videos is The Truth About George Martin.
Sorry, the truth about George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin.
George Martin would be an entirely different kind of video.
Wasn't he the manager of the Beatles?
Anyway.
And in that, I put out a very specific and compelling, I believe, plea to the black community to treat their children better, right?
For the fact that there does seem to be a genetic susceptibility towards aggression within the black community.
And this has to do with the...
The warrior gene, right?
MAOA2R, which has been significantly linked with aggression.
5.5% of blacks carry this gene compared to 0.1% of whites and 0.0007% of Asians.
And the warrior gene is also activated by childhood trauma.
And so if you look at the black community, childhood trauma, beatings and neglect and so on is more likely.
Again, this is not...
All a set of dominoes, but the associations seem to be somewhat clear.
That aggression against black children is most likely to lead to more aggression than aggression against other children.
And so I didn't sort of sit there and say, well, I'm going to do this video and there's no point talking to blacks about spanking or aggression against children because X, right?
I mean, I don't see how you've gotten an either or out of something.
Well, I think that you bring up the either, first of all, yeah, you didn't deny that population that diagnostic rationalization.
It wasn't deprived of them.
I agree with you in that video.
And I think it's interesting that you bring up the either-or question, because that's a good place to go.
I guess that's the question I'm posing to you, is where do you think the boundary is between biology and experience?
And how do you navigate...
How on earth...
I mean, how can I possibly answer that question?
There's nobody alive who knows that, and it probably won't be the case for at least a generation.
And even then, there's free will.
So it's sort of saying, well, where exactly is the demarcation between nature and nurture?
It's like, I don't know.
I mean, there's a lot of nature, and there's some nurture.
And so if you're asking me where do I draw that line, I don't know how to answer that other than to say...
I generally try to assume that we should focus on nurture as much as humanly possible because nature is beyond our control.
And I'm in complete agreement on that.
And to be honest, you may have just answered the question.
I was never criticizing you.
I was asking for a clarification on how you were part of the ship.
And you just clarified it in nine minutes.
It was a little critical.
You say what I observe you doing here is selectively applying the rational principle.
Well, right.
That's not complementary.
It's not damning or anything, but it's not wildly complementary.
Yeah, but you clarified it right away by bringing up the either or issue.
And more so, I think you actually really just clarified it when you said you err in favor of nurture.
Yeah, but having awareness of the nature aspect is important as well.
Having awareness of the nature aspect is important as well.
But, you know, once the kid is around, it's not like you can go back and rewire its nature.
And so that's where we can focus on the nurture.
And there is, you know, there's an argument that I'm going to probably badly rephrase that comes out of certain people who are studying this relationship between nature versus nurture.
And, you know, with regards to ethnicities or races in IQ. And the argument very briefly goes something like this.
Well, it doesn't matter if it's nature or nurture because we don't know how to change either.
Yeah, I don't.
I personally have not, I don't believe that that argument is valid because nurture, I think, can be deconstructed significantly.
Much of, as you know, you're a philosopher, much of nurture are the assumptions that you take on.
I don't think assumptions can shift.
Insights, I think, are the way to do that.
Developing deconstructive insights in terms of a psyche that's been populated with negative assumptions.
Like if there's been an abandonment.
Okay, okay.
Sorry to interrupt you after just saying don't interrupt me.
Oh, I thought you made your point.
No, I apologize for that.
The reason I'm interrupting you and apologizing for it, Nate, is...
If you get a chance to listen back to this, and I hope that you do, I want you to listen to that part as if you have an IQ of 85.
So give to me the explanation as if I had an IQ of 85.
Because that's a challenge, right?
For some groups.
You want me to try to pitch that back a softball?
You want me to try that again and just rephrase that lower?
IQ or something?
Yeah.
Okay.
I would say that as far as nurture, you said that some people make the argument that...
That it's not worth studying because you can't change either?
There's no way to influence either?
No, I didn't say not worth studying.
They just say that, well, let's say it's 100% culture.
Well, nobody knows how to change that from the outside either, right?
Let's say that the differences between black and Asian IQs are entirely culture-based.
Well, nobody knows how to go in and change that culture.
So even if it's not genetic, but it's in fact all cultural, it doesn't mean that there's still some big magic wand that we can use to change stuff.
Just so I'm clear on what you're saying, culture.
Isn't culture, I mean I guess my view of culture is, or a lot of it is learned.
Much of it is learned.
Yes, but how do you change the transmission of culture from parent to child?
Like how do we as outsiders go into that household and change the culture that is being transmitted?
Well, I hear two things in what you're saying.
I hear one is how do you change the culture, and then I hear how do you change it from within the household.
I mean, from within the household, bigger problem I'd have to think about, but as far as how to change the culture, I think that happens when someone who has been influenced by a particular culture is exposed to Other cultures, for instance, you know, a lot of people who come to the United States have over several decades and a couple hundred years.
Their culture that they started with six generations later is much different than it was.
The children of that culture.
So that culture is a change.
You see cultural change there.
So culture does change.
There are obviously much more, you know, that's one example.
Are you saying that every group assimilates?
No, and I'm not saying that every group assimilates as easily as others, and that's a spectrum.
Okay, okay, so hang, so if we look at a group that doesn't assimilate.
Right.
Like, so we just had a guy from Brazil in the last show, and we were talking about when there was one of these endless natural disasters, I'm sure it was an earthquake or, I don't know, fist of God or something that struck Haiti.
Brazil took 130,000, although some people think a lot more, 130,000 Haitians Who have an average IQ of 67 and still believe in the power of voodoo.
Right.
Now, will you expect them to integrate anytime soon?
No, but I wouldn't.
But what I would expect is that as a whole, when tackling the problem of that arrested development at that level, that cultural example, I wouldn't say that the reason they believe in voodoo I guess, and this is a question I'm exploring, but my sense is, it's not because of a biological problem that they're suffering from.
It's not that their intelligence is incapable.
It's just that they're not, that's just not the osmosis of the generational modeling that they're getting.
I'm sorry, osmosis of the generational modeling?
I'm afraid you got all Pomo on me.
I don't know what that means.
I'm sorry, bud.
Parental teachings?
Yeah, exactly.
It's just not what they're getting into their filter in their generational teachings.
Exactly.
And so I agree it's a problem when a culture gets sort of developed along certain assumptions like voodoo.
I just don't...
Okay, and how do you break that?
Insight.
Deconstructive...
Well, like, for instance...
A series of questions can start the psyche off in unlearning something that it has unconsciously learned.
And how would you phrase that to IQ 67 voodoo person?
How would you deconstruct them?
Well, that's a really good question.
The answer that comes to me sort of off the cuff is I think when we're talking about a low IQ organism, human being, One of the things I think that that human being will respond to very easily are the five senses, what they see.
I would say that if it's not just something you can get through to them on a level of high logic, you might be able to use something observable in the environment to make a comparison.
I feel like grandpa's Teach their grandsons in a mythic sense of how to read the North Star.
And you learn a big lesson on science by identifying where the North Star is.
So there's something to be said in kids.
I mean, you're a father.
I imagine you've watched your daughter's IQ evolve as she's getting older.
And so I would ask you the same question as to how did you teach her when she was four?
Getting through to teaching someone Whose IQ hasn't matured yet is, I'm sure you know, it's an art and a craft.
Well, my daughter was always very smart, though.
I mean, she was doing two-syllable words when she was six months old and all that.
So IQ doesn't really evolve.
What you're thinking about is sort of...
IQ remains remarkably stable throughout life.
For age-appropriate IQ, right?
I mean, so IQ is not...
It doesn't really change.
Now, there are things that you can do to inhibit it.
Like trauma.
Well, like hitting kids.
And actually, the studies now.
God, I hate being right sometimes.
But the studies now show, Nathan, that...
Spanking your children is almost indistinguishable in its traumatic effects as beating your children.
You say, well, I only hit them.
I don't beat them.
It's like, well, body doesn't matter.
Body doesn't matter.
Mind doesn't matter.
And you can also hold off from breastfeeding, which does seem to have...
So, you know, it's like height, right?
If the child doesn't get enough to eat, they won't grow up tall enough, but the extra food doesn't make them taller.
So there doesn't seem to be...
Much that can be done to extend IQ beyond that which occurs naturally.
And so I still think better parenting, particularly early on, is very important.
But I don't know any way or any magical words.
And, you know, the reason that I'm sort of pushing back on this is because I'm concerned that you have magic.
You know, I mean, we're talking about these Haitians, like, oh man, these Haitians, can you believe...
They believe in voodoo.
But Nathan, I'm a bit concerned that you also believe that there are magic words out there that can change IQ and change genetics.
And that, I don't think that there's a lot to support that.
Well, I wouldn't say genetics.
I didn't say that.
And as far as IQ, I would say neurotic behavior.
There is language and dialogue that can deconstruct neurotic behavior.
Would you agree with that?
I mean, do you...
Well, no, it depends what you mean.
There's nothing that I can go and say to people that is going to make them not be neurotic, right?
Now, if someone is neurotic, and they're sick and tired of it, and they want to change it, then I guess they can go to a therapist, they can go to a psychologist, and they can go through the work.
But it's sort of like saying there are diet books that can make people thin.
No.
Diet book just sits on a shelf.
Doesn't do anything to anyone.
And there's words, don't, you know, it's not like a mosquito transmitting some god-awful virus.
They don't come flying out of your mouth and then go sting people with droplets of wisdom and Zika.
And so there is no external intervention that I can think of that can change someone's mind unless they're thirsty for that intervention and willing to do the enormously hard work That it takes.
And one of the challenges, of course, and this is one of the reasons why therapy tends to be an elite occupation, particularly long-term therapy.
It's not just the cost, but it's also the fact that in order to get the rewards of therapy, you have to...
I mean, I spent two years and $20,000 back.
Like, it was...
And my life didn't get better right away.
I mean, it took a long time.
And this is one of the reasons I said to people at the beginning of this entire series of podcasts, I said, this is going to make your life really bad.
And there's no short or even medium term case to make for getting involved in this conversation.
And the reason I said that was, A, it's true, and B, it filters out people who, let's say, have a slightly different time preference than the smarter people in society.
And so I'm just concerned that you have this magic set of words that can get in and motivate people to change when the motivation is not coming from within themselves.
And again, I don't mean that it's impossible to help people or whatever.
I think putting out information, but it doesn't...
You know, you put out the honey and the bears will come and take it.
But there's no way to magically put the honey...
In the bellies of the bear through words, if that makes sense.
Unless they want it, as you're saying.
Unless they're willing to submit to the work.
Unless they desire it.
Right.
And then that takes a very long term time preference.
And it used to be, you know, and this is, I just very briefly just put this side rant in, but it used to be, like, I'm old enough to remember when people deferred to experts.
I'm old enough to remember when people who weren't that smart knew that they weren't that smart and were willing to listen to smart people and just do what they said.
Now, you know, everyone's an expert.
Everyone's smart.
And, you know, I mean, I'm not putting you in this category, but, you know, the number of people who've just called me up to lecture me about what's what or tell me that I'm wrong.
And it's like, you haven't studied philosophy for 30 years.
You know, you don't know what you're talking about.
It doesn't mean I'm always right.
But it means that the learning should be given some consideration, you know, in terms of the arrogance that some people call in and some people in my life in the past when I still have people like this in my life.
I mean, it used to be the case when the average man on the street would not go up.
And lecture Bertrand Russell on logic or mathematics.
You know, if Bertrand Russell started talking, people would be like, oh, okay, it's Bertrand Russell.
This guy's really studied.
He knows his stuff.
And, you know, we really got to listen to the guy.
And that was a very helpful and positive world in many ways.
And there were some problems with it.
It got a bit sclerotic and a bit old Oriental Mandarin-style sedimentary layers frozen in time stuff.
But...
One of the things that has happened is that less intelligent people no longer recognize the authority or intelligence of smarter people.
And that's because people have forgotten all about IQ, right?
Because we're in this leftist paradise where we're all these completely interchangeable silver Buck Rogers suits that everyone's the same and the only thing is environment and so on.
But let me give you this.
Let me give you this.
If we're talking about...
If we're talking about changing cultures.
Now, people who work for the New York Times are very smart people, right?
Good writers, good communicators, and so on.
You know, you have to be really smart to be that deep in the pocket of Carlos Slim.
But if you wanted to go into the New York Times and change that culture to a free market, like a The free market and was pro-Donald Trump or whatever, anti-immigrant, whatever it was going to be, right?
If you wanted to go in and these very smart people who would more deeply appreciate the subtlety of your arguments, how would you do that and do you think that would be possible?
Well, no, because of what you said, that they don't want it.
Their desire is actually perhaps pointing in a different direction.
So if you can't get past the desire element, It may be difficult.
At that point, you have to manipulate them to want it before they ask how to do it.
Okay, and how would you manipulate them to want it?
I have never thought of that problem particularly.
But it's important because if you're going to say that language is going to change people's minds, then those who are better with language should have minds easier to change.
The question as far as how do you make them want it?
How do you convey the importance of the goal?
It kind of reminds me of what you said to the last caller.
There's almost an impulse in us, some of us, to help.
And if something in our psyche says, gosh, this needs to change, we need to help, And then there's almost a kind of like, you know, you've got to get out of the burning house kind of a thing.
You've got to get through to the person.
Now, I don't think that I have any magic or, you know, you've got a YouTube channel that's pretty magical with tons of views.
But, you know, the question is, you know, how far can getting through to someone go?
And I guess my answer is kind of like, my sense is your answer would be go as far as you can.
And then I actually remember you said on one podcast something like, and then if you go that far and they're still like, no, I'm not having it, then you're like, all right, I have no remorse in your perishing at that point.
Well, in whatever disaster follows from that.
But I'm just, and here's why, right?
So if you go, let's say that you're advising the Brazilian government, right?
And the Brazilian government is saying, well, I think we're going to take in 130,000 people from Haiti with an IQ of 67 who believe in voodoo, right?
Now, you would be like, yeah, bring them in, because we can patch them right up with our language.
I mean, you wouldn't say it that bluntly, but that would be your perspective.
And they have brought these people in, and they're not even remotely assimilating.
Well, I agree with the fact that assimilation isn't as easy as putting your feet in your shoes.
I think that there is a much greater challenge, and there might be some...
What's the phrase?
In some cases, there might be a virtual, seemingly impossible task in certain examples.
But even that's an extreme claim, and I'm saying there might be.
And I'm saying it might seem like it's impossible in certain cases.
So I'm conceding that, that it might be.
I'm also saying that it's extremely hard and perhaps harder than a lot of people might naively claim that it is.
My sense is I'm on the same page with you in terms of not being naive about how easy it is.
Let the alligator in the house.
It's going to be a great pet.
Actually, there are people who have alligators as pets.
It seems to be more possible.
Fair enough.
So I agree that it's extremely challenging and naivete could be a Trojan horse kind of a thing.
Do you think that the Muslims are going to integrate in Europe?
I think that there is a degree of assimilation that does work.
I think that the way in which the Muslims are coming into Europe is so extremely traumatic, frankly for both cultures, in a way, that the issue is extremely difficult.
Not only the trauma of the assimilation, but the trauma of the past associations, the subconscious coming from.
In this case, the immigrating culture.
Not to mention Europe's culture, too.
They're sensitive.
They're humans.
They have a collective, perhaps, subconscious.
They feel.
They worry.
They have concerns.
So, you know, shit's getting triggered.
I don't know if I can say that on the air.
But, yeah, it's bad.
And triggers are going off left and right.
And, you know, tribalism is going off left and right.
Boundaries and us and them.
I think that the idea of, oh, it's going to be great and wonderful and easy, I would never make that claim.
So it's a real problem, and I think that it's a problem that is messy and sloppy.
The question is, I suppose, what's the response?
I guess to answer your question, though, is there's some assimilation, and then there's a lot of terrible...
Stagnancy and neurosis happening in the immigration process there.
Destruction.
Destructiveness to the self.
It's not in their favor to piss off the people potentially that they're trying to live with.
It hurts them.
It's masochistic in a way, but there's a sadistic element.
There's a lot of contempt and hatred for the other side that's coming out as well.
So, do I think that they will?
You know, I hope.
I mean, I hope that something...
I hope...
My sense is that some degree of peace will ultimately come out of the chaos.
I don't know what that's going to look like, and I'm not naive in saying it's going to happen easily.
But I guess my mind is kind of thinking at the ultimate level of what's constructive.
And, you know, I... I suppose, and this goes back to my email to you, is when thinking about what's the best way to handle the solution, what's the best way to solve this problem?
What are the dynamics of that?
No, it's not, I mean, as far as assimilation goes, it's not a problem unless you think it's solvable, right?
In other words, if a particular group, like let's look at Jews, right?
And just to take an extreme example, right?
Let's just say with a whole bunch of Nazis who wanted to move to Israel, right?
Well, Israel would say, well, no, that's not compatible.
And so we're not going to have you in.
So they wouldn't have to worry about assimilating.
If you say no to people coming to your country, then you don't have a problem with assimilation.
Right, I agree.
And that's especially in a scenario like the one you just said, where the group that wants to be assimilated is openly intent on causing destruction in the place they want to go.
Yeah, so if, say, this group that would be going to Israel has a doctrine which says that the Israelis are the enemy and that the right moral thing to do is to take them over and subjugate them, That would be bad, right?
Yeah, that would be incompatible.
Right.
Well, you just need to study a little bit more about Islam and realize why I said all that.
Well, first of all, I'm not denying that there is an impulse in that dogma that is all about contempt for the other.
And in their case, the other is the Western culture.
No, no.
The other in Islam is non-Muslims.
That's a better, that's a more correct answer than mine.
But pointing in the same direction.
In this case, that's the West for now.
And it does go beyond that.
I agree.
Non-Muslims.
And that's toxic.
That's extremely toxic.
That's a very toxic assumption.
That's, to me, ripe for deconstruction.
And no, that's not compatible.
I would not let that into my house.
Heck no.
Okay, okay.
So there are limits, of course.
I mean, this is my question, and it doesn't have anything to do with Islam in particular.
It's, you know, and I've said this for many years.
Like, if you can't go in and talk the New York Times, the people who work there who share your culture, share your language, share your history, race in the same public schools, share a lot of the same values.
If you can't go in and talk them into becoming Fox News or vice versa, then I think we should recognize the limits of Of language to fundamentally change people's view.
And now you could say to the New York Times, look at the popularity of Donald Trump.
There's a huge market out there for a small government, more free market, close borders kinds of people.
You just have to shift over to them and it might take a couple of years and you'll have to go into debt and it's going to cost you a bunch of subscribers.
But your existing business model is so bad that you ended up needing a $400 million bailout from the King of wireless in Mexico.
So you could go in and make that case, but I think if you can imagine the resistance you'd get, they would never, ever, I don't think they would ever, ever take that on.
Sorry to interrupt.
Go ahead.
No, go ahead.
I agree with the phenomenon of resistance is, I think, kind of what we're describing.
And it's, yeah, if the resistance is impenetrable, there's nothing that language can do.
It reminds me of some of my readings on Freud and the invention of psychoanalysis.
Obviously, patients back then in Austria, there were no private practices in the neighborhood.
It didn't even exist.
It was all at the hospital, and the only people getting treatment were people who were committed to the hospital.
They didn't want to be there.
Well, I shouldn't.
It's an assumption.
Perhaps some, frankly, did.
But there was a lot that didn't want to be there.
So, you know, initial psychoanalytic theory was going up against hardcore heavy resistances from inpatient in their inpatient sessions.
High levels of defiance, off-the-chart psychosis.
And this is an unfair comparison for a lot of reasons, but the idea of getting through resistance, and my final point on that was the idea of getting through resistance is that There was a phrase called therapy-resistant patients,
who no matter how much therapy they got, or you found a therapist where the right transference and countertransference was working well enough so the patient felt that their dad was in the therapist enough for the therapist to resolve the issue on some associative level or whatever.
But if you couldn't get through the resistance, they would send you to get the lobotomy.
If you couldn't get through the talk part of it, if the resistance couldn't be deconstructed, you essentially got a lobotomy back then or whatever the brutal things were, but you had to remove the aggressive part of the nervous system at that point.
And so I agree.
I think that if the resistance is that high, there's no desire to do it.
Language has limits.
But given that you're someone who pushes the...
You seem to me as someone who is willing to look at how far language can go.
Right, and I want to help people to understand that language cannot overcome biology.
And knowing the limits of language is really, really important.
And we both agree with that.
You don't want to...
You don't want to try and talk the sun into rising earlier.
And I'm not saying you are, right?
But I mean, you don't want to think that language has these magical properties.
And this is what people are saying when they say, well, whether it's genetics or culture, we can't change either one.
And that's not saying that culture never changes.
Of course it does.
Often the...
Government programs will change culture, right?
I mean, we look at the black community, as I've mentioned on the show before, we look at the black community decades ago and illegitimacy was at 20% and high degrees of responsibility and family stability and rising up into the middle class.
The welfare state comes in and boom, you have a collapse of the black family and you have illegitimacy rates approaching 75%.
And so culture changes based upon incentives.
But incentives are not the same as language.
And language generally has negative incentives, right?
So the reason why there's a migrant crisis is not that complicated.
Average salary in the Middle East is 60 euros a month.
It's about 700 euros a year.
Now, if you get to Germany, you get aid money from the government, 700 euros a month.
So you get a year's salary in one month without having to work.
One year unemployed in Germany is 12 years salary working in Iraq.
Two years unemployment is a whole career, and five years is the price of a house.
So, you know, if some government around the world, I don't know, some Siberian or Russian government, I'm getting this from a user comment, some Siberian or Russian government said to Germans, hey, We're going to pay you 20,000 euros a month or 240,000 a year, give you citizenship over time, and you won't have to work for it.
Well, a lot of Germans would leave and go.
And Denmark lowers its refugee aid money.
The refugees immediately avoid Denmark.
And when Italy gives only 1% of the asylum seekers' asylum, then they avoid Denmark.
So...
If you don't pay refugees what lottery winners get, refugee tide turns.
So there's a huge cultural change in that people are coming to Europe because Europe is a staggering amount of free money and freedom to a large degree.
But it's like, I mean, if you can spend one year unemployed in Germany, going to a cafe and enjoying your life and all that, as opposed to working for 12 years straight in Iraq, well, it's pretty easy to...
I mean, we look at the last caller, the guy from Puerto Rico, right?
I mean, he's hanging around.
Why?
Because his girlfriend is getting a, quote, free, his wife, sorry, he's getting a, quote, free education for her master's and he can get up and read by the dawn's early light and listen to the seagulls and all that because he gets all this free money.
My sense...
Sorry, go ahead.
No, no, no, I'm sorry.
You want to make your point?
Well, people respond to incentives.
They respond to positive incentives.
But trying to get people to change their culture is a highly negative incentive.
Culture exists because it's incredibly resistant to change.
Culture exists because it is self-sealed and self-repelling agents of change.
Philosophy and its conflict with culture exists because...
Culture is like this diamond-hard biosphere, and all philosophy has is reason, evidence, and pain.
My sense from your last caller, my sense, didn't ask him, don't know, was that he gave up, quote-unquote, he sounds like the guy had a lot of trauma in his life.
Sounded like he even said he had a lot of trauma in his life, and I just wonder...
How much of his dopamine deficit in applying himself has to do with discouraging limits that he's still feeling from past trauma?
I'm not sure it's all because of the economic thing.
When did I say it was all...
You've got these false dichotomies going on.
I'm not accusing...
I said people respond to incentives.
I never said it's every...
We were 100% economically determined human beings.
I'm not accusing you of that.
Yeah, you said it's not all economic, as if that was my argument.
No, I wasn't suggesting that was your argument.
We already cleared that up.
Whose argument was that?
No, no, no.
At least for me, that was cleared up in the beginning when you already said this, not an either-or thing.
So I guess you don't seem like an either-or thinker, I mean, critical thinker that you are.
Okay, so then let's not bring up the either-or examples, because if we've already disposed of them, you don't need to bring them up.
So, I guess my, okay, so my sense is that, let me rephrase that, in addition to potentially the economic incentive to be less productive, my sense is that maybe in addition to that, there's also potentially a trauma residue in there.
It's just a speculation, probably not worth going to.
Sure, sure, no, and I don't think it's, I think that's very important, and let's assume that there is, right?
The guy had said that he had been institutionalized.
Right.
And that's, God awful, right?
I would assume.
And so let's assume that there is significant trauma in the young man's life, which of course I have massive amounts of sympathy for, and as I'm sure you do as well.
Well, is putting him on welfare helping him to resolve that trauma?
Is it giving him the necessary feedback and incentives to work through that trauma?
No.
No.
I wouldn't say that that's the answer to human trauma.
Money.
Let's say when he went to the institution to get treated, in a way, when he's in there doing his impatient stint, that's essentially a socialist experience.
He's getting fed, he's got a bed, da-da-da-da-da-da.
But the point of going to the institution is not to give him a bed and food.
It's to give him group therapy for six hours a day while he's in between that other stuff.
So I guess for me, to be transparent, I do think that psychotherapy, deconstructive psychotherapy, psychoanalytic therapy that looks at not just what are you experiencing consciously but what are your experiences from the past doing to you subconsciously, I think that that does have a lot of power.
I wish that it was out there more as an intervention as far as the human species in terms of deconstructing a lot of the triggers that are just chronically getting set off between people and cultures and this, that or the other thing.
That would be kind of a takeaway as far as you want to know exactly where I'm coming from.
But I agree that it's not that easy.
I mean, there's a lot of resistance.
If someone doesn't want therapy, most likely it's not going to work on them.
And even if they do, it takes a lot of work.
And not all therapy works.
Some practitioners don't know what the heck they're doing.
Well, if there's a takeaway for me, which may be of help, you have a lot of theories.
About the degree to which outside language can interrupt the cycle of dysfunction.
And my suggestion would be take it for a spin.
I'm an empiricist, right?
You don't want to go through life with untested theories, right?
I mean, that's highly irresponsible.
That's like putting out medicine that you've not put through any tests, right?
It's being a snake oil salesman.
And so I try to talk about things that I've done in my life or tried in my life and so on.
And it will teach you a lot to put your principles and your theories into practice, right?
Because we are physicists, not mathematicians, right?
Or engineers, not mathematicians.
So my suggestion would be, and this is just putting it out there, is that if you are overestimating the degree to which language can change people, then you're dangerous, in my opinion, because you're going to help people...
I mean, I'm not putting you in this position, but let's take an extreme example.
And please, I'm not, again, I don't want to be clear.
Let me just give you a theoretical, right?
So there's some guy with a shaved head and tattoos and, you know, biceps the size of my thighs and whatever it is, right?
And, you know, he drinks and he's just gotten out of jail and he wants to date your sister, right?
I mean, it's a ridiculous example, maybe.
Maybe not.
And...
She's like, well, you know, he's been traumatized, and I'm, you know, pretty good at listening, and I know some principles of NVC or whatever, and so I'm going to date him, because I find beer belly sexy.
The hairier, the better.
Basically, shaggy Tom Jones and his prime-style beluga whales are my greatest fetish.
So, and you say, well, you know, I mean, you can listen to the guy and, you know, he's going to be helped by your listening and your sympathy and your empathy and so on.
And if he turns out to just be some complete nutbag and beats her up or whatever, then you've not, like, you've not recognized the limit of what her language is capable of and you've put her in a dangerous, or you've helped to put her in a dangerous situation.
I completely agree.
Language has the capacity to talk IQ 67 Haitians out of their voodoo, then you should try that.
And you should give it a shot and try and find dysfunctional people and have a chat with them.
I know it doesn't mean you have to become a therapist.
You can talk to people about thoughts and feelings without a degree.
And so give it a try and take your theories out.
And put them to the test.
Because untested theories can be extraordinarily dangerous.
I mean, you think about communism and stuff.
Okay, go ahead.
The basis of delusion right there, untested theory.
I believe that language can deconstruct neurosis under certain conditions, like the individual wants to deconstruct their neurosis.
So, if I were to put my theory to a test, I would essentially just say, Well, my theory only stands under certain conditions.
A, the person wants it.
B, if they don't want it but they're forced to submit to it, the talk therapy has to work at a certain point before they're considered patient-resistant or therapy-resistant or not.
So I'm not saying that right now we should send a bunch of therapists to Europe.
Or anywhere and, you know, try to deconstruct.
Or even in America, like, send them all, like, have every kid go see a therapist because then we won't have any more mass shootings.
I mean, it's not that simple to me.
It's more that under certain conditions, language works.
It's not under no conditions or all conditions.
Okay.
So, sorry to interrupt you, but what I'm getting for you from this is that you're not going to go out and try and put your theories into practice.
You're going to stay in the realm of the theoretical, right?
Well, if you must know, I have put my theories into practice.
I'm in my fifth year of having a private practice, cognitive behavioral therapy based.
I have about 20 patients a week.
Fantastic.
And we could talk about the type of patients I see and why it doesn't represent The whole spectrum of, you know, the human population, it's a pretty...
Yeah, I mean, you're talking to people, and I'm very glad you're doing what you're doing, but you're talking to people who have a strong motivation to change for whatever reason.
Either they see something better or they're avoiding something worse.
So you're seeing people who have a strong motivation to change.
I mean, like the people who call into this show, it's not therapy or anything, but, you know, they're usually quite interested, as you are, in trying to figure out what the limits of change are.
But, yeah, it is a very self-selecting group of people who are very strongly motivated to the point where often, I mean, if they're paying privately, then they're even costing, right, resources to do that.
And so, but what I mean is that the people who aren't coming to therapy, and of course, I'm not saying, you know, pull a Lucy from Charlie Brown and set up your five-cent psychiatry or psychology chair.
No intention.
No, no, and I don't think you're actually allowed.
I got you, I got you.
But that's the challenge is, you know, obviously you know this, but just for the others, right?
The people who you're seeing, a very self-selected group.
I have some skepticism about the degree to which We've got a presentation called The Death of Reason, which people should check out, where we talk about and provide significant empirical evidence to the degree to which people can simply madly resist reason and evidence.
There are significant limitations, and that should liberate us, right?
I mean, you know that when you give up delusions of grandeur, and I don't mean you, but when one gives up delusions of grandeur, one gains a huge amount of power thereby.
When one recognizes that If I recognize that my words don't have the magical power to make people rational, I stop beating my head against the wall.
And a lot of progress in my life, massive progress in my life that occurred mostly before I got into the show, but has occurred to some degree afterwards, has been recognizing that I have no power to change people's minds.
I have no power to do it whatsoever.
I have no amount of charisma or jokes or Compassion or rhetoric or anything.
I have no capacity to change people's minds.
That's been a hugely relaxing and focusing experience.
And I am more skeptical about anybody's capacity to change anyone's mind now than I was when I started.
And that I think is important for us when we look at compatible cultures.
If we assume that there's going to be some sort of blending over time, then We are going to make decisions that might be absolutely tragic.
And that, I guess, is my only concern.
And, you know, we share that concern.
You know, we don't want people wasting their time and energy on things that only turn out to be counterproductive.
And whether you overestimate it or I underestimate it, you know, it's really been a great conversation about that and I think very helpful to a lot of people.
Maybe.
And my sense is it's somewhere right in the middle.
I'm not going to say it's in the middle, because I then would be admitting that my position is too extreme, and I think I've got enough data to say that I think my position is where the right position is.
Doesn't mean it's 100%, and Lord knows it's a fuzzy area to be in anyway, but I'm afraid I can't meet you in the middle.
I need more data about how people can talk the New York Times into being capitalists.
Well, that was never my theory.
The conditions were always that, again, they wanted it, or the resistance could be gotten through.
So I do know there's a boundary as far as what it can do when those conditions aren't met.
And that's a big question mark to me.
I don't have any conclusion on that.
And so, yeah, that's as far as I can go as well.
Well, thanks, Nate.
I really, really appreciate the work that you're doing with the people that you see.
And I've really, really enjoyed this conversation.
Thank you so much for calling.
Thanks for being honest about your stuff as well.
My pleasure.
Take care.
Alright, up next is Luke.
Luke wrote in and said, I'm in my late 20s, and I've been dating a single mother with two children for a year and a half.
We met at work and began dating for pleasure.
She has many qualities in a woman that I like.
She's attractive, able to hold a professional job, and is able to raise children in a relatively healthy way.
She has also been receptive to some of the things you talk about on your show, such as problems with welfare programs and immigration.
However, as someone who looks forward to having a child of my own or two someday, I am uncertain if it makes sense to settle down with her or if it would be best to move on and start fresh.
That's from Luke.
Hello, Luke.
Can you hear me?
Yes, Stefan.
Can you hear me?
I can.
How are you doing, brother?
I'm very well, my friend.
How are you?
I am very well.
I am very well.
Is there any more kind of background you want to give me to this scenario?
Sure.
I was working at a second job doing personal care work, and she was my manager, or sort of a supervisor, who worked in the office while I was out in the homes.
She'd only been working there for a couple of months before she decided it wasn't the kind of career she wanted.
She decided to move along, but we kept in touch, and we texted back and forth.
It was really kind of flirty in the beginning.
Hang on, hang on, man.
Are you saying you bagged a hot bus?
Seriously, yeah, I did.
Okay, I got to put on the Tommy Sotomayor background disco for this story because it's just a great story.
Dear Penthouse, I was working for this woman.
Anyway, go on.
So yeah, but when she first started as our manager, we all sat down in a room together and I was like, whoa, this woman is killer.
She's like an 11.
And she looked really put together.
That's a 10 with an erect penis next to it, just in case anybody doesn't know what the 11 is, but go on.
Right.
Just kind of like, what kind of a guy could have a woman like this?
That's the first thing that went through my mind.
And then at some point we got talking one-on-one and I started asking her more personal questions and I could kind of see that she was sort of maybe getting a little nervous or engaged in the way that I was interacting with her.
But anyways, she moved on and got a different job and we kept in touch and we started dating.
She does have a kid.
She's got a four-year-old daughter.
We didn't see each other a whole lot.
It was like once a week, and we mostly just basically have sex once a week for an hour.
Sorry, youth.
But anyway, go ahead.
But we would communicate a lot in between, you know, with the telephone and with text messages and we'd fill each other in on what's going on in each other's lives.
And as time went on, it kind of snowballed and we really started to really care for each other.
We did have a few arguments here and there and a lot of it was because I started listening to your show and I started bringing up some of these things I was hearing about and thinking about.
And she had a hard time with some of it at first.
And some of these arguments led to us breaking up.
And then a week or two would go by and we'd kind of text and say, hey, I miss you.
How are you doing?
So it just kind of felt like it was hard for us to stay apart.
And when we were broken apart, I really felt disheveled.
I felt like I'd lost a best friend.
Maybe I was missing out on a great opportunity.
That's kind of where I'm going.
Do you want me to go any further with that?
Hey, I'm happy to listen until you give me the big picture.
She adopted another baby girl six months ago.
And so I've sort of seen this kid come into our lives, or her life, but our lives, because I've spent time with this kid, you know, every week or so, too.
And not during the sex, of course, but...
Okay, let's just take that for granted.
Right, right.
So I'm kind of seeing these kids grow up a little bit, and they know who I am, and they come over to my house.
And sometimes we go to the park, and we might go to a parade.
And they're kind of growing on me, and I'm growing on them, I think, a little bit too.
And so it's kind of like...
When I first met her, I kind of thought, you know, I want to get into this and this is going to be for fun.
And I was sort of a MGTOW guy because of some previous experiences with women that I'd had.
I'd kind of given up on the whole thing.
And I was like, well, I'm just going to get involved with a woman, but I'm not going to let it get too serious because I want to do my… Keep your own addresses.
Keep your own addresses.
Right.
Right.
And so, yeah, time's gone by and… Now I'm kind of thinking, now my mind has changed so much.
I've grown.
I grow every year and I started listening to your show and I've thought about a lot of different things and now I kind of want some kids of my own.
Maybe her kids are rubbing off on me a little bit.
I want to make a change in the world.
I want to make a stamp, make a mark on this earth and And I did have a child from a previous relationship and that went horribly wrong and I failed at that miserably and I learned a lot from it and now I kind of want to try again and it's like should I take these kids and start and go run with them and then have some more kids and then kind of have a whole big happy family thing or should I sort of move on and start from scratch?
All right.
All right.
Well, listen, great, great explanation.
I appreciate that.
My mind is a bees hive of questions, so I'll try and narrow it down.
But one thing, Luke, you mentioned kind of there at the end that you already have a kid?
Yes, sir.
And what's the story there?
I was 21.
I was 20 years old.
I was in college, and I met a really pretty young woman who was not in college but was visiting a friend.
I think we may have well determined that you have a type.
She was hot!
Anyway, go on.
Definitely, especially at that time.
Oh yeah, no, I get it.
I get it.
Yep, yep.
So if I could go back and tell myself, you know, red flag, red flag, I totally would.
Anyways, I was dating this girl in college for six months and it was just great.
We got really close, really involved.
We had lots and lots of sex with a fan every two days or every day.
We kept talking about the future and maybe having kids someday.
Then I was like, I haven't had my period.
I took a test.
I'm pregnant.
I totally freaked out.
You were talking with her.
I always hate to ask this question if the woman's not here, because usually you just get the secondhand slide by story, but how does she get pregnant there, Luke?
Was she not on protection?
Well, she was on the birth control pill, and she eventually...
I kept asking her, like, how could this happen?
How could this happen if she's on the birth control pill?
And she had Crohn's disease, and she talked to her doctor, and according to her, the Crohn's disease had sort of made the pill ineffective or less effective.
Well, so this is the doctor who diagnosed her Crohn's and who she also got the birth control pill from, right?
So he would have told her that, because that would be his responsibility as a healthcare provider, he would have told her that this is not an effective form of birth control because you have Crohn's disease.
Right.
So this is not something she figured out later, right?
It is something she figured out later.
She didn't know, apparently she didn't know when she was taking the pill that her Crohn's would be affected at all.
So her doctor didn't tell her that the Crohn's disease would interfere with the efficacy of the birth control pill, and that's her story?
Yes, sir.
And she didn't look it up?
So, okay, I mean, she's not here, and even if she was, she could just stick by her story, so I am somewhat skeptical, but that's what she says.
Oh, it was the Crohn's!
Okay, it's always something.
So...
So she got pregnant and then she decided to keep the kid, obviously.
Is that fair to say?
Well, we actually had a discussion about what to do.
She didn't want to adopt the kid.
We talked about abortion and I definitely really wanted that at the time.
I was all for that.
She didn't want to do that, but she was willing to do it for me.
But her Crohn's prevented her from getting the okay from her doctor to do so.
I stuck it out.
It was really hard.
Kind of like the conversation you had with two callers ago, I had a combination of depression and anxiety, and I was just crushed.
That's horrible, right?
I didn't know what to do.
I was halfway through college and I was already 50k in debt.
I got this kid coming along and I didn't know what my parents would think and my grandmother would think.
It was just a disaster in my mind.
I was like shattered glass and I had to slowly put the pieces back together again.
Right.
You were how much in debt?
I was 50 grand in debt.
From school?
Yep.
At 21?
Yeah, actually I was 20.
Yeah, I was 20 years old at the time.
What?!
Yes, sir.
I went to school for aviation.
I wanted to be a pilot, so I was going into debt real quickly, like 20k per year for flight lessons, particularly.
Wow.
Wow, okay.
And how long was it going to take to become a pilot?
Actually, it only takes a couple of years.
I mean, if you want to do it, you can probably do it in a year.
If you really just put your nose to the grindstone and get all your hours and requirements in, yeah, you can get in there pretty quickly.
And how long was you...
It's the flight time, right?
That's really expensive.
And how long was it going to take for you to do it?
I could have been done in another year, but I decided to give up on that and go for Plan B, which is much cheaper, and go for the GIS certificate, Geographic Information Systems.
I'd kind of lost motivation and I didn't want to keep putting money into that.
By that time, I just wanted to get out of school.
Because of the pregnancy and all?
Because of that and because of the financial problems that I was causing by staying in the aviation management program, I did have a private pilot's license, so that kind of like satisfied me to some degree.
I kind of thought, you know what?
I always wanted a pilot's license.
I got that.
I'm going too far into debt.
I kind of just want to get a degree now and get out of school and get out of here and start making some money.
That was my goal at that time.
Right.
Okay.
Okay.
And so you got out and you were licensed.
And then what happened?
Well, I wasn't licensed to be a commercial pilot.
I was just licensed to be a private pilot.
I got out of school and just like most people, I really didn't have any skills or any value as far as a career.
So I ended up working for $10 an hour at an auto parts store for a year and a half.
I was making $9.50 an hour.
Ouch.
Oh man, that's rough.
And I mean, were you able to defer debt payments on the 50k?
I mean, that's a bit of a sideways jagged pill to swallow every month, isn't it?
I did defer the payments for two or three years, yes.
And with the interest, it was racking up pretty quickly, like two or three thousand dollars a year.
Oh man, that's rough.
Okay, I won't go down that rabbit hole because that's about money and all that, but did you think of marrying your girlfriend?
I mean, what did you do for that?
Well, I did my best.
It was really hard, but I consider myself a strong person, so I did everything I could.
I moved To her town and I moved.
We got an apartment together and I told her I wouldn't marry her.
My dad told me, he said, whatever you do, don't get married.
And that kind of stuck with me.
So I didn't marry her.
And I actually only...
Why did your dad say that?
I mean, holy, pass down the MGTOW from the elder tree, but why did your dad say don't get married?
I don't know.
I mean, maybe he had his own experiences that he didn't share with me.
You don't know?
Your dad gives you massive advice like, don't marry the mother of your child and you don't know why he said it?
That's true.
Was there a sports game on?
Was he distracted?
I mean, that seems like pretty big advice to be getting from Pops.
Yeah, it's pretty disappointing.
Wow.
Well, I mean, I don't know what his reasons were any more than you, but I'm sort of surprised that...
Don't get married!
Alright, let's see what's on Netflix.
I mean, that's the big deal, right?
Yeah, that's how I learned by wisdom.
You might want to ask him a few more questions about that, you know, given that you're thinking about getting married again, right?
Well, that's the thing.
I mean, it's hard to have conversations with my own family.
They've always been sort of emotionally very distant, and it's always been...
They've never talked to me about personal or emotional things.
It's always just like, do things this way or do things that way.
Or just they don't talk about it at all.
And I just have to kind of live by experience and make my own mistakes.
And maybe this whole situation could have been prevented if they'd been more straightforward.
Right, right, right.
You said there were red flags with the mother of your child.
What were they?
You know, just for the advocation of the other young men out there who are going to get dicknapped, as it sounds like you were a little bit.
Right.
She's pretty.
Lots of sex.
Funnily enough, I'm not making good decisions.
Right?
We've all been there.
Yeah.
Well, she wore lots and lots of makeup.
She was very, very shy and quiet.
She had some tattoos.
And she had been raped once or twice in her life.
Once or twice?
Yep.
Is that what she said?
Yeah.
Just hadn't narrowed it down?
I just don't know.
I don't remember correctly.
She either had been raped once or twice by my memory.
Oh, she didn't say, I don't know, it was once or twice, something like that.
Yeah, I do definitely.
She either said once or twice, but you can't remember, is that right?
Correct.
Okay, was she raped as a child or as an adult?
I think it was in her mid-teens.
Yeah.
Right.
Right.
Now, I have, as the audience does not have the enormous pleasure of looking at your Skype picture, do you think that, I mean, you're a very good-looking guy, do you think that the girls were also bowled over by your Well, thank you, and I think so.
Okay.
Yeah, because it could have been two tens crashing at each other to produce sparks and disaster, right?
Yeah, I definitely didn't have the mental maturity or the assets to attract these women, so I'm assuming that's what it was.
Right.
And you seem to have a lot of charisma just looking at, I mean, obviously chatting with you and the confidence and charisma and all that, right?
To some degree.
I'm a private person, but I don't know.
I feel like I listen to you enough to where I feel comfortable talking to you, so maybe that's part of it, too.
Were these interracial relationships, or were you...?
Staying local.
I'm biracial.
My mother is a white Midwestern woman.
My father's from Kenya.
So anybody I date is pretty much an interracial relationship.
But the woman that I dated and had a child with was a white woman and so is this woman that I'm dating now.
Right.
As far as I understand it from Barack Obama, your ears should be bigger.
But anyway, that's a topic for another time.
So the white woman that you were dating When you were 20, 21, who had the kid, you moved to the town that she was in, and you didn't marry her.
Was that partly because of your dad, or was there some other reason?
It was partly because- Or did you not want to at all?
I didn't really want to.
The whole situation was a huge mistake in my mind, and I had failed miserably, and I was just angry and bitter, and I just was always sort of Thinking in my mind what I could have done differently, and I wasn't content at all, and I was pretty much getting ready to leave.
And I only stayed, we lived together for like nine months.
So through about half of our pregnancy and four months after the child was born.
And then I decided to bail.
Okay.
Tell me a little bit about that moment. - I was so frustrated and upset and angry with what my life had become that I sort of just dumped them and left.
And I sort of blamed her for everything.
Everything was her fault in my mind and my life would have been better and I still would have been having fun back in college with my friends.
And that's just the thought process that I had at the time.
And what were your feelings about that?
I mean, mother of your child plus baby.
Well, at the time, I felt like a huge sense of relief.
I felt great.
I did move back to my college town, and I was hanging out with my old buddies again, and I sort of pretended like it never happened.
I would go and visit my child every week or two, and that was nice.
But then I found out she was dating somebody else eventually, and that's kind of when I realized, like, holy shit.
I lost my family here.
But it didn't, you know...
What do you mean, hang on, hang on.
Don't give me that.
Luke, you lost your family.
You walked out.
That's right.
I mean, it wasn't like you lost them.
I mean, you left them.
I'm not trying to make you feel bad.
I'm just, you know, I think we got to characterize things correctly, right?
I mean, you walked out on your family.
You went and hung out with your friends and you had fun.
And you became a yo-yo dad, like the bungee dad.
I'm here.
I'm gone, right?
And, yeah, of course she's at some point probably not going to sit and stare at your picture, however pretty it is, right?
She's not going to sit and stare at your picture.
She's going to start dating someone else.
But that's not you losing your family, right?
You left your family.
Yeah, yeah, but maybe...
Well, right or wrong, it's just that those are the facts, right?
Yes.
All right.
And what about, did she want child support, or how was she surviving?
She ended up moving in with her parents, and she did file for child support pretty quickly after that.
And I was pretty upset about that.
Why were you upset about that?
I mean, I get that you didn't want to give her money, but you did have a kid, right?
Well, I was sending her money.
I was sending her, I think, like $300, $400 a month on my own without anybody telling me to do it.
And then she goes and signs up for child support anyways, which kind of upsets me because it's like sending the dogs to come after me and take something by force.
Yeah, there may be tax reasons.
I mean, who knows, right?
Or whatever her family was telling her to do.
But it sort of broke the trust between us and it just sort of made us more enemies, at least in my mind, when that happened.
Well, also, I mean, to put it in...
Terms that are probably not overly sensitive, but may have some validity.
Because she's a single mom, so she comes with a huge expense.
And if you're sending money voluntarily, her sexual market value could decline because any man who commits to her, if she can't rely on your income, he's going to have to cover that.
So she probably wanted also to get a more secure pipeline of money from you so that her sexual market value wouldn't be declined if you decided to stop paying, right?
Right.
And what is your relationship like with your child now?
Well you know in the beginning I was able to see him like every two or three weeks and then we started having disagreements as far as like where and when we could meet and when she would bring him over to see me and when I would go down and see him but it seemed like she always wanted me to do things around her way and her schedule and I ended up taking her to court over to try and get custody.
And then she made a whole list of all these things I had to do before I could see him.
And so I started feeling like the court was more in control of my kid than I was.
And it seemed like she was putting up as many barriers as she could so that I couldn't see him.
And that upset me even more.
So then I just sort of stopped seeing him as much.
It started going from like three weeks to three months.
To a year, and then she got married, and then I sent her an email like, hey, how are you doing?
Can you send me some photos?
And then she responds by saying, I'm getting married now, and we don't want you to talk to us anymore.
And that sort of broke me more than anything else I've ever had in my life.
And how long had it been since you'd seen your son Luke at that point?
Probably a year.
So it was more a confirmation of what was already happening than something completely different, right?
What do you mean?
Well, you already weren't a dad for a year, I mean, effectively in terms of seeing your son.
So it wasn't like you were seeing him every week or, you know, you had half custody and then it changed.
I mean, you hadn't seen him for a year and then she says, it's over.
And so it wasn't like a huge change from the last year other than it was the end of hope that it could continue or change at some point in the future, right?
Right.
I mean, if I haven't seen some girl for a year and then she breaks up with me, it's not like she's moving out.
Do you know what I mean?
Yep.
And I guess you don't know how he's doing, right?
I have no idea.
I don't even know where they are.
I see kids like him that could look like him when I'm out in public, and I think, man, I wonder what he looks like.
I wonder what he's into.
I've grown so much.
I know that I could be such a great force in this person's life if I were allowed to be, and my family, if my family were involved.
Some of them could also have really good positive effects on him and make him a good person for this world, but it really hurts me that I can't participate in that.
Are you still on the hook for the child support?
No, actually she asked me if her husband, if I could sign adoption papers so that he would legally become her husband's And in turn, I would not have to pay child support.
And at the time, I was paying back, so this was like three years ago, and I was still paying back these bills for this $50,000 loan that I'd taken for school, which was like $600 or $700 a month.
My monthly income might have been like $2,000 a month or something like that.
So I ended up signing for it.
Partly to not be legally liable for him anymore, and also just to help pay the bills.
Do you know anything about her husband?
I really don't know anything about him.
Oh, they're not?
I don't know if you can see him on Facebook or...
No, I can't.
My mom did go to one of my son's birthday parties, which I was invited to go to, but I declined to go to because it was a big public event and there was going to be all her family there and friends.
And I said, I thank you for inviting me, but I'm not going to be able to make it.
I'm sorry, this was for your son's?
For my son's birthday party, yes, yes.
And when was this?
Probably four years ago or something.
Right.
And your mom went?
My mom went and she did meet this guy and said that he seems to be a really nice guy.
Is he black?
A white guy.
A white guy?
Yeah.
I'm glad to hear that he's a really nice guy, from what it sounds like, but I'm also very envious and jealous of this guy now.
Well, you did leave.
That's true.
You did leave.
So you have a kid with the white girl, and the white guy ends up adopting your kid.
Yeah.
All right.
And the new girl, well, not girl, she's the new mom, the new girlfriend, she knows all of this history, right?
Yes.
And she is fine with this.
Not fine, but I mean, she's okay with it.
Yeah, she understands.
I think she kind of has a good idea of what happened and how I might have been then, and she sees who I am now, and I think maybe she's pretty confident that I'm a decent person.
Right.
And when you say that she's able to raise children in a relatively healthy way, what do you mean?
Well, she is very good when it comes to, like, disciplining her kids.
Like, she doesn't yell at them.
She doesn't hit them.
She's very caring and emotional and she wants to listen to them.
She makes sure they have good food and she makes sure they're loved.
And she's sort of everything that I'd want in a woman that would be raising my kids someday.
And who takes care of, you said she's got a professional job, who takes care of her kids when she's working?
So this is the interesting part.
One of her kids goes to a private school for kindergartners, and then during the day, she's separated.
During the day, her husband, legal husband, who lives with her, is watching the six-month-old.
Okay, so does he not work?
He works part-time.
Okay.
Is he a white guy?
Yeah.
Okay.
Got it.
And what were the issues that had you break up?
You said it had something to do with some of the stuff I talk about and other things.
Oh, I think, like, I don't know, I was trying to come up with facts and I ended up saying, like, I was trying to come up with some facts about some topic and I don't remember what topic it was.
But during the conversation I said, you know, every time it seems like I talk to women about this stuff, they always get really upset and angry.
And then she says, well, you're a sexist and blah, blah, blah.
And I said, I'm not a sexist.
You got to prove that.
So we ended up hanging up and breaking up.
And then we called back, you know, we started talking again a few weeks later, and I asked her, like, do you really think I'm sexist?
And she's like, no, I was just getting emotional.
And she sort of admitted that she was wrong, and she understood why that was wrong.
And did she apologize?
She did apologize after I demanded an apology, several times.
Ah, okay.
So she's separated but not divorced.
Her husband, who she's still legally married to, lives with her and takes care of the kid during the day.
Yes.
I gotta tell you, man, I feel like I'm on a different planet sometimes.
Like, you're a lot younger than me, obviously, right?
I don't know what the hell's going on in the dating world these days.
But, you know, I met my wife.
We were both single.
We got married and had kids.
Like, what the fuck?
Like, Jesus H. Christ.
You got a kid with a white girl who's now adopted by the white husband, and now there's this white couple, and you're around, but they're separated, but the guy's still living there, and it's like, man, alive.
Things are getting kind of complicated.
I mean, just with you, I don't know, but things seem to be getting kind of complicated out there.
Man.
Man.
Does that seem, I mean, is it just me?
No, you're exactly right.
It is kind of crazy.
Are there no single girls that you can find that is not, oh, hi, here's my ex-husband.
He'll be sleeping next door.
My current husband I'm separated from.
No nice girls who are single out there?
I don't know if there's a lot of them that would get me or get the kind of stuff that you talk about on the show, but that's the way I'm calling you.
Should I start to look for one of those women, or should I stay where I am and try to make the best out of what I have?
Well, obviously, I can't answer that, but it's complicated, right?
I mean, she adopted a baby girl after she separated from her husband, who's still living there.
Right, and that's kind of how she was able to adopt that baby, because she was able to say, hey, I am married, and this is how we live.
Wait a minute.
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
Are you saying that she stretched the truth a little bit when getting this adoption going?
That's right.
No.
No, she didn't.
Did she really?
Yeah.
Why?
Well, she wanted to adopt a baby.
And she found a way to...
No, I get that.
I get that.
You know, I want a Maserati.
That doesn't mean I'm going to go steal one.
And why...
Why did she want a baby?
She has a boyfriend, which would be you.
I mean, if I was dating a girl...
And I wanted kids at some point, and it sounds like you want kids that you're going to stick around with at some point.
If I was dating a girl, and she knew I wanted kids, and she decided to adopt while we'd been going out for a year, I'd take that a little personally.
Like what, I'm not good enough to be the father of your child?
You've got to take some stranger's kid?
Right.
I don't know if that popped into your head, but that's what just popped into mine.
Yeah, well, I don't know.
I think earlier I might have mentioned that I was sort of MGTOW and I wasn't planning, not that long ago, I was planning on kind of going on the rest of my life without having children or getting married.
But now, this kind of idea of having children is sort of new to me or recent.
So she probably didn't expect me to ever give her any children.
In fact, last year I was talking about getting a vasectomy.
I'm 29 years old.
But that's not how I think anymore.
I think you may have an ex-girlfriend who'll give you one for free, but it just might not be that pretty.
Listen, I gotta tell you, to me it's enormously disturbing that she would have falsified her marital situation with regards to the adoption.
I mean, she had...
The first child is not adopted, right?
No, and that child was not by her legal husband either.
Oh, seriously, man?
Oh my god.
Where am I? What planet have I landed on?
Everybody's in a big giant vat of intertwining tentacles.
Okay.
Alright.
Crash helmet.
I've assumed crash position.
So this woman was married and she had a child but not by the husband she was married to.
Right.
After she was separated from her legal husband, she met a man.
Her friends set her up with a man, and they were at a bar, and she ended up sleeping with him that night.
She doesn't recall it.
She doesn't know.
I don't know if she was too drunk or if she was drugged.
Oh, her excuse is she was blackout drunk, right?
That's what she says.
She says she doesn't remember it at all.
I've had one of those on this show before, too.
I couldn't remember a thing.
This man had just gotten out of prison a week before, and she didn't know that.
Oh no, no, no.
You're trolling me now, right?
No, no.
You're shitting me, right?
No, seriously.
You're like reading a synopsis of a Mexican soap opera from hell, right?
I mean, you're not.
He just got out of prison?
I wish I was that good of a writer, Stefan, or I wish I was that creative.
Seriously?
I mean, tell me there's a water buffalo involved here somewhere, and I'll just like my life.
My circle will become complete.
All right.
Okay.
Guy gets...
Okay, because I'm losing the timeline here.
So the kid is four, right?
Her daughter?
The daughter is four now, yes.
Okay, so she was married for how long?
Probably two or three years.
Yeah, why would you need to know that?
Okay, so she was married for two to three years.
She separated from her husband.
She got set up by a friend of hers with a guy who just got out of prison.
She got blackout drunk, got pregnant, and then got back together with her husband?
Well, she was still separated from her husband, and she ended up dating this guy that impregnated her for about a year.
And this guy was a jerk.
He treated her bad.
He had like six or seven other children with other women already, and he would steal stuff from her, and Hang on, I'm enjoying the tsunami-like rise of the gene pool here.
Ah, what a wonderful height we can see from this idiocracy reproduction system.
Okay, go on.
So they've been together for about a year.
This guy had six or seven kids with other...
Yeah, he didn't work very much.
He sort of mooched off her.
He took advantage of her.
They split up.
I don't know if she was in a desperate situation and that's why she stayed and tried to work it out with him.
But she ended up leaving him and moving back in with her separated Husband because it just worked better that way as far as taking care of the kids.
The separated husband is the one that ended up signing the legal papers for this child that was born out of wedlock with the other guy.
Okay, Muslims come and take over.
We don't know what the fuck we're doing anymore.
Like, come on in.
Come on in and take over because I don't know how Sharia law is worse than this shit.
Alright, so if I understand, Whitey McCuckerson is spending his days tending to the daughter of the ex-prison convict who drunk-fucked his wife, and now he's raising her.
That's right.
Dude.
Are you kidding me?
What the fuck are you doing?
Me?
Seriously, what are you doing?
What kind of people are these?
Well, you know, this woman is not sort of the trailer trash, permanent underclass woman you might be imagining.
No, I get it.
She's hot, and she's got a professional...
I get that.
I don't care.
See, I don't want to have sex with her, so I'm able to slap you with your own penis and try and wake you up.
I mean, come on, man.
What kind of mess is all this?
What are you walking into here?
I don't really know.
Yeah, you do.
I mean, when you tell this story, what do you think of it?
Well, she messed up.
I messed up.
And we've changed.
She's changed a lot.
I've changed a lot.
She just lied to get a baby!
Come on!
Come on!
Is this situation this whatever it is I don't even know.
I mean the words that are floating around in my head I'll just keep to myself.
Do you think this is the best you can do?
Some woman who's got her ex-husband or who's still married to her, who's lying about getting babies, who got...
Basically, if she's right about being...
He had sex with her when she was blackout, drunk, or passed out.
Basically, the rape spawn of a prison...
Like, I mean, God Almighty!
Seriously?
Well, that's the thing, Stefan.
Like, I know I can do well.
Um...
But, you know, when you're with somebody for a while, you already have a lot invested in them.
You kind of know each other really well, and you have to start...
That's why you don't have sex with them until you get to know them!
You guys jumped into bed, right?
It was probably a month or two after we started dating.
And did you know all of this stuff about her life when you decided to have sex with her?
Yes, I did.
And you still felt this was a good use of penis time?
I did at the time, yeah.
Right.
Well, I'm just telling you from the outside, there seems to be some dysfunction involved in this situation.
I'm sorry, I don't know how to put it in a way that you're going to hear.
Can you not find a nice young girl who's Not in this family tree that's like a Mobius strip of conveyor belts of dysfunction?
I mean, do you not think that you could, like some young girl who doesn't have all this complicated history and who just is a nice person and a responsible person and is interested in you and you can settle down without this stuff?
This mess?
Well, Stefan, I'm confident that I could have a lot of girls if I wanted them, but it's hard to find one that's not a complete leftist.
It's just hard to find one that I think is good for me.
Maybe online dating would probably help, but just being Doing the day-to-day where I go out in public and go to work, I don't see myself meeting anybody that way.
I could get with a woman someday, but it would be hard to find what I'm looking for or somebody who can understand some of the things you're talking about on this show.
Well, of course, unless you decided to do something public, right?
If you started a YouTube channel or something like that, good-looking, articulate people seem to not have much trouble finding listeners, right?
It seems like they have a better chance.
Yeah.
So, I mean, you could do something public and just see who knocks on your door, so to speak.
And I mean, I obviously can't tell you what to do.
It's your life.
But this is some convoluted stuff.
Right, and I understand that it's crazy, but the reason I called you today is because I really, I want your opinion on how crazy it really is.
Because, you know, you can look at some things from your own perspective, but it's the perspective of others that's really helpful sometimes.
So I really appreciate you.
Well, here's, you know, if I were a woman, Luke, this is, there are a couple of things that I would be concerned about.
With you.
When you talked about your son...
You only really talked about how hard it was for you.
And you did try and give yourself a bit of victim halo with regards to all of this, right?
Yes, I did.
And there wasn't much of what it did to your son.
But I did mention how much I wanted to make an impact on his life.
After I started to realize how much I messed up.
I get all of that.
I get all of that.
But for some reason, your ex-girlfriend really, really wanted you out of his life.
That would be a red flag for me as a woman.
Right?
Because you're like, well, you know, she just wanted me to have nothing to do and I hadn't talked to him for a year and then I tried to get in contact and she's like, don't come around, don't write.
I'd be like, well, why?
Right?
What happened?
What did you do?
That the mother of your child doesn't want you anywhere near her son.
And that the man she married is like, well, we don't want that guy anywhere near the kid and I want to adopt him and we'll let him off child support.
We'll just completely cut contact with the biological father of the child.
I'm just, you know, maybe there's fantastic answers for all of this and we don't have to get into what they may or may not be, but I'm just telling you that would be a red flag for me, a huge one.
Like you have a kid, you abandoned the kid, you didn't see the kid much, and right now you've legally signed away rights to the kid, you're not paying child support, so you're able to do that as a human being.
And, you know, I get that it's complicated and I get that she had her decisions as well.
But you did try and make it go with it, with the mother, and the end result of you trying to be a father is that you, other than biologically, not a father at all.
Now, if you were to tell, like if you, let's say you don't date this single mom with two kids, one she falsified for and the other one she was too drunk to remember the interaction, if I heard that you were dating someone like that, come on, man.
A quality woman hearing this story, what the hell do you think she's going to say?
Right.
I don't do trailer park boys, I'm sorry.
Right?
Yeah.
Now, you're either going to sort of figure out how you ended up in this environment, in this situation, Or not.
Now, if you don't, right, then you can just keep doing what you're doing and...
I mean, sorry, I don't mean to laugh, right?
But what do you think your MGTOW brothers in spirit would say to this story?
I don't know.
What do you think?
Oh, come on!
Of course you do!
What do you think?
If you...
If Sandman got this letter and read it, what would he say?
Honestly, Stefan, I'm drawing blanks here.
I'd say that he'd probably have something to say about the woman's side and the man's side for sure, but he'd have something to say about how it's a shame that a man can't participate in his son's life, even if he turns his ways around and decides that he can do good.
Would he say that this is a stable and healthy now-walt to get involved with?
Absolutely not.
All right.
So there's the certainty.
Right.
If you have your head on straight from the beginning and you get involved...
Well, if you had your head on straight from the beginning, you wouldn't get involved with something like this.
But if you're sort of picking up the pieces and you fall into this...
After you have so much invested in this person, in this relationship, how can you turn it around?
No.
Do not go rubber bones on me, brother.
Do not give me this victim.
Well, you know, if this just happens to you, come on.
You found this woman sexually attractive.
I don't believe you waited a month or two, but I'm going to accept that you said that.
You found this woman sexually attractive.
She found you sexually attractive.
There was sexual tension from the very beginning.
And you made very specific and particular choices, right?
You cannot go all...
You know, I don't let people go rubber bones on this show, right?
Where you just kind of go limp and stuff happens to you.
Right.
You are making very particular and specific choices about the women you get involved in, about the red flags you ignore, about abandoning your son, about signing him over for another man to raise, and you have no idea whether this is a good or bad man.
You have no idea if he's hitting your kid.
You have no idea if he's yelling at your kid.
No idea whatsoever.
But you do know that two white people are raising a non-all-white kid and that that non-all-white kid isn't going to have access to your history and experience of biracial upbringings to help him navigate some of the trickiness of not being part of an easily identifiable tribe, right?
Right.
And...
You don't seem to feel that to me.
Your voice never caught.
You've been jovial and pleasant throughout the conversation, Luke, but the fact that you abandoned your son, saw him very sporadically, and now have signed him over to be raised By another man you've never even met.
It doesn't seem to strike your heart.
Do you know what I mean?
Well, it does.
It's the most painful thing I deal with.
I even dream about him sometimes.
Or I dream about both of them, like him and his mother.
And then sometimes I'll see this...
Sort of silhouette of his new father.
I don't know what he looks like, so he's sort of like this blank character.
And sometimes I think I get him back, or I think I get a chance to see him, and then I wake up from the dream, and it's like, oh shit, that was all not real.
It really does.
I really do feel it every day.
When did you sign away your son?
How long ago?
About three years ago.
Did you have relationships between signing away your son and meeting this new woman?
Yes, I was.
In between these two women, I dated a woman for five years and we lived together on and off.
So, you haven't had a lot of alone time to process the stuff you've done and that has happened to you, right?
No, it's always, every time one relationship doesn't work out, it's within a week.
I move into a different one, and that person becomes my best friend each time.
Yeah, it's called fusion.
I mean, you just merge, and you have a lot of sex, and you bond, and then life catches up with you, right?
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Why did the five-year relationship end?
I... I think I was being selfish again.
I thought about myself and where I would have to move for my career.
So I moved a couple hours away from her and we saw each other every couple of weeks.
And I think the distance just sort of killed our bond.
She was a 10 or 11 as well.
And so, you know, there's going to be a lot of other guys surrounding her and keeping up.
So listen, I mean, there's a lot of vanity fucking, right?
I mean, they look great, you look great, and you're like the Ken and Barbie dolls of shallow envy from others, right?
I mean, you've got to start looking for quality over hotness, right?
Right.
But then you have to start bringing quality to the table rather than hotness too, right?
Yes.
So, you know, I think when people jump from relationship to relationship, particularly when there are disasters in those relationships, you know, like kids you don't see anymore, whatever, I think that junk just accumulates inside us.
And rather than deal with that junk, we jump into a new relationship because we're addicted to the dopamine and the endorphins of new romance and sexuality and all that kind of stuff.
And the validation that you're still attractive and all of that.
But the junk continues to accumulate, and I think we need some time, whether it's alone time or down time or self-reflection time or therapy time or whatever, we need some time to process all the stuff that happens to us, otherwise life becomes this blur.
You know, it's like trying to read a book by just flipping the pages quickly, you know.
It just becomes a blur, and we don't know where we are, and we don't know who we're with, and we don't know what's going to happen, and we're living just in the concentrated moment of avoiding All that we have accumulated.
And you, Luke, have accumulated a lot.
We haven't even talked about your childhood.
But you have accumulated a lot in your life.
And I don't know that it's had a chance to integrate, to be processed, to settle down, to inform you, to make you wise.
And I think that would be A useful thing to pursue.
You know, I'm a big fan of therapy, as you know, and if you're dreaming about your son, but I don't get any emotional sense when you talk about him, there may be a disconnect there.
But I think you need to slow down, and I think you need to cast off the curse of the pretty.
You know, what is it Plato said?
Everyone envies.
Money, youth, beauty, power.
You are Always going to attract people for your looks, right?
You got a good body?
I'm a little slim, but I'm really healthy and the ladies seem to like it.
Yeah, a little slim.
Cry me a river, brother.
I'm just, I'm too lean.
Too many six-packs.
I could open a beer store down there.
So could I, but it's all keg.
Um...
So it's the curse of the pretties.
You know, I read a science fiction story.
And please, somebody in the comments below, let me know what it is.
I read a science fiction story years ago about a pretty guy who lost his looks or gave up his looks.
And what have you lost?
You lost a pretty face.
And of course, it's just a metaphor for time, right?
Because, you know, you're going to get old.
Late 20s, right?
Early 30s, mid 30s, late 30s.
You're going to get grizzled.
You know, it's like that Eddie, I think it's Eddie Murphy or Chris Rock, you know, you don't want to be that guy in the club, you know, who's like kind of grizzled and looks like he's about to break into a gap tooth version of Stand By Me or something, right?
I mean, so you're going to get old and your sexual market value is high right now.
But the problem is that it's going to diminish over time, particularly if you're not accumulating a lot of resources, right?
And you've got to plan for that.
And to be pretty and wise, I like to think that they're not opposites.
Maybe they are.
But to be pretty and wise is a very powerful combination.
And I think that you're coasting on looks and also you're coasting on desire.
Right?
You are driven a lot by Sexuality, by attractiveness, by prettiness, by hotness, by whatever, right?
I mean, clearly, if this woman were 200 pounds, this relationship wouldn't be happening, right?
Right, but also if she was a hood rat or if she was really stupid, it wouldn't be happening either.
Absolutely, absolutely.
But as we already established, smart doesn't mean wise, right?
Right.
I think that...
It is a difficult situation.
It's a complicated situation.
If you get married, I assume that you're going to end up, what, I don't know if this guy is going to stay living, her ex-husband with everyone, but you're going to end up, what, adopting two kids or co-parenting two kids, one of whom you weren't around for the beginning of.
You may have new kids, and that would be Three kids, let's say you have a kid with this woman, you then have three kids in a marriage from three different fathers.
Is that what you want?
Don't you want your own kids?
Yes, I do.
I mean, there is something...
Biological.
Like, I know that there's this whole, I love these kids like they were my own kind of thing, or what's that old Red Fox line?
I love kids.
I got my own kids out there somewhere.
Got kids of my own somewhere.
But you don't, like, you got a connection with your own kid.
She's your blood.
She's your flesh.
There's a lot of propaganda from this gynocentric planet we inhabit about, you know, well, you got to love these kids like they're your own.
That's for men, right?
Because it's convenient, right?
For women who chose the wrong guy.
Right.
For their kids, right?
Yep.
It's convenient.
But the connection you're going to have with the kid who's yours, sorry nature, sorry feminism, this is evolution, this is biology.
It's deeper.
It's deeper.
That doesn't mean people can't be good kids to adopt kids, can be good kids to Other people's kids can be good parents to other people's kids, but...
Sorry, I care about my own kid more because she's my kid.
Women understand that.
Women will always know it's their kid.
Men, well...
But...
My plea to you would be to...
If you have the option, if you believe that you're worthy and have the option of getting a woman of quality and wisdom and depth, Look, maybe you'll have to sacrifice something in the looks department.
Who cares?
Everyone's going to get old anyway.
You know, and it struck me when you were saying, well, four months after the birth of my kid, I left this woman, right?
Right.
Am I going to guess that you weren't having a lot of sex during those four months?
Oh, with the birth mother?
Yeah.
Uh, yeah.
Had plenty.
Oh, you had plenty right after the birth of the kid?
Nah, well, I guess two or three months afterwards, started having a lot of sex again.
Alright.
Wow.
So...
If you can look for qualities of the soul or the spirit rather than qualities of the body or the mere intellect, right?
I mean, I get this woman is smart, but I think that you want to try...
I mean, if I were to give you a prescription for happiness and I can't tell anyone what to do, I will tell you that, you know, if you want to be in a relationship with a woman for your life, looks ain't going to cut it.
You know, there's an old coarse saying, I think it comes out of Hollywood, it doesn't matter how hot the woman is, someone, somewhere in the world, there's some guy who's tired of fucking her.
Or it doesn't matter, pretty women walking around your house, prettiness wears off pretty quickly.
And...
I think we all know that sexuality exists for the creation of children and genitals are compatible for the creation not of orgasms but of parents.
But our sex organs are designed to turn us from men into fathers and our sex organs are designed to turn us from women into mothers.
It is not a personal playground of selfish gratification.
It is what nature does to make more of us.
And I think that if you start to think of sexuality not as release, but union.
Not as relief, but as the building blocks of a stable family structure.
I think you'll go a long way towards building the kind of family and having the kind of connection and the kind of stability that is going to be really great for these kids.
Because I'll tell you this, Luke.
Oh, man.
How do you think these kids are going to turn out in this situation?
I think these two kids might turn out okay.
Even better so if I'm with them.
If I decided to do so, of course.
How intelligent was the kid who got out of prison?
Was the guy who got out of prison?
He, from what I hear from my girlfriend, is a very, very intelligent guy who makes really, really bad decisions and had his own terrible upbringing.
He's Asian.
But it sounds like if he had...
Isn't this a melting pot?
Yeah, it is.
But it sounds like...
Like Chinese?
Like Vietnamese.
Like half Vietnamese and half white, I think.
But it sounds like if he'd had a decent upbringing, he would be a really, really sharp dude.
So that's the Asian guy who's in prison.
I knew there was one!
And now we know.
Well...
Alright.
I think that's about all that I have to say.
Is there anything else you wanted to mention?
No, Stefan.
I just want to say thanks so much for giving me the time today, and I really appreciate it.
And your work means a lot to me.
Well, thanks, Luke.
I mean, obviously, you know, I grit my teeth and don't tell people what to do.
Was it helpful to get this kind of perspective at all?
Absolutely.
It's very, very valuable.
Thank you very much.
Alright, well thanks man, and I certainly wish you the best.
Alright, take care.
Take care.
Oh, right up next is Ben.
Ben wrote in and said, Stefan, I agree with many of Trump's stated policies, although I may not agree with many of his characterizations of immigrants.
That aside, I find his foreign policy most concerning.
I understand that secrecy is necessary as part of a military strategy, but then why hasn't Trump had independent and respected military strategists review his plans behind closed doors and then give public endorsements?
Knowing that you had to keep secrets ahead of time, but then failing to mitigate the impact this has on the public seems like a major misstep.
Moreover, his statements about killing the families of terrorists seems to me irreconcilable with the non-aggression principle.
How, for instance, can you justify the killing of terrorist grandparents?
That is from Ben.
Hello, Ben.
How are you?
I'm well, Stefan.
How are you?
Recovering from the callers.
But yes, I'm well.
Thank you.
Okay, where do you want to...
Let's start with this...
The treatment of terrorists.
Okay.
Okay.
Let me ask you this, just as a principle of justice.
Let's say there's a man named Bob.
And Bob tells his family he's going to blow something up.
His family's aware of it, and they take him seriously.
And then Bob goes and blows something up.
And the police, or whoever it's going to be, find out that Bob's family knew all the time and alerted no one.
Do you think that the family, Bob's family, should be subject to any repercussions?
Subject to any repercussions.
That sounds reasonable.
Subject to some repercussions sounds reasonable.
Right, so if they knew that a criminal action was about to take place, they would have a duty to report that criminal action in order to prevent it, and if they did not do so, they would be considered enablers or accomplices of that criminal action, right?
Yes, to some extent.
Well, no, I want to...
I won't qualify that.
I'll say, yeah, that's absolutely true.
I don't think what they should be subject to is death by Hellfire Missile, but yes, criminal punishment, probably.
Well, hang on.
So, if you're talking about Hellfire Missile, I don't think you're talking about the Sheriff of Mayberry or anything, right?
I mean, that's a situation of war, right?
Right, which, I mean, maybe you'd say we're not at, but The military engagements we are engaging in, to be redundant, they seem pretty warlike to me.
Okay, so with regards to Donald Trump, he's never said, kill the relatives of terrorists.
He just said we need to go after them.
Now, of course, terrorists are not protected by the Geneva Convention.
The Geneva Convention covers conventional military under the control of a state.
And in order to be...
Look, I'm no expert, and people can look this up for themselves.
But one of the things that you need in order to gain the protection of the Geneva Convention is you need to wear a uniform.
You need to distinguish yourself from the civilians.
And so the Geneva Convention, as far as I understand it, does not cover terrorists.
And so whatever steps leaders take against terrorists, the idea that it would be somehow comparable to the steps that you would take with regards to somebody in a uniform being run by a state in a formal military situation, that's not an equivalency.
Okay.
Okay.
Was I drawing equivalency?
I'm sorry?
Was I drawing that equivalency?
No, no.
I'm just clarifying this for people as a whole.
Oh, okay.
I'm sorry.
Go on.
But if somebody commits an act of terrorism, and people in his vicinity, his family or his friends, know or have good reason to believe he's going to commit this act of terrorism, Then they themselves become terrorists, as far as I understand the logic.
In the same way that if somebody is going to commit a criminal act, tells people around him they have good reason to believe he's going to do it and they don't alert anyone, then the fact that he commits a criminal act makes them criminals, right?
Or at least...
After, you know, it makes them arrestable, right?
I mean, because his criminal action has blood spattered onto their conscience because they had good reason to believe he was going to commit a criminal action, did nothing to stop it.
Therefore, they have become criminals in the act of him becoming a criminal.
Does that make sense?
Correct.
Okay.
And so that is in the same way.
So if a criminal It contaminates those who know of his impending criminal action with criminality than a terrorist contaminates those who know of his impending terrorist activity with terrorism, right?
And this is, I think, the rationale behind the situations.
Trump has said you have to take out their families, but that doesn't mean kill everyone.
Take out could mean disable, it could mean arrest, take them out of circulation, take them out of the picture.
It doesn't necessarily mean kill them all.
Right.
Okay.
And I did see that there was a video, I believe, where he clarified this point.
I didn't actually, unfortunately, I was looking this up right before the call, and I didn't get a chance to watch it.
So I'm sure these details, these relevant details, might have come out in that Anderson Cooper interview.
So he's a statement issued by his campaign.
It says, I will use every legal power that I have to stop these terrorist enemies.
I do, however, says Trump, understand that the United States is bound by laws and treaties, and I will not order our military or other officials to violate those laws and will seek their advice on such matters.
I will not order a military officer to disobey the law.
It is clear that as president, I will be bound by laws just like all Americans, and I will meet those responsibilities.
And that, of course, sounds reasonable. - Okay.
Now, you may have heard of one Vladimir Putin.
Yes, I've heard of him.
He's come up.
So he has, I guess, a couple of years ago, signed into law a bill that forces relatives of terrorists to pay for damages caused by their attacks.
It also boosts penalties for launching, participating in, or financing militant or terrorist groups.
And that, of course, is partly to Create an incentive for people to report criminal activities.
So, where does Trump's idea of taking out terrorist families come from?
Well, it comes from the KGB, right, which of course was the nesting ground of Vladimir Putin.
The New York Times has reported, it is the signature though officially unacknowledged policy behind Moscow's counterinsurgency and counterterrorism strategies in the conflict that began in Chechnya and has since metastasized into a loosely organized Islamic rebellion throughout the Caucasus region.
Russian security services routinely arrest, torture and kill relatives.
Rights groups say, the Russian approach, enough to make supporters of waterboarding winds, has by some accounts been grimly effective.
Abductions of family members Unwound the rebel leadership in Chechnya, for example.
In the Russian view, the family is the thread that needs to be pulled to unravel the terrorist groups.
He should understand his relatives would be treated as accomplices.
Kirill V. Kabanov, a member of President Putin's Human Rights Council, said of a potential suicide attacker.
In Chechnya neighborhood Dagestan, whole extended families are rounded up in high-profile cases and are often held until the militant either gives up or is killed.
Religious were used as hooks to lure in militants.
If the militant did not switch sides, the family members disappeared.
Chechnya had about 3,000 to 5,000 unresolved disappearances from 2000 to 2005 or so.
The Los Angeles Times reported, this is from 86, the KGB has adopted novel, brutal, and apparently effective methods of dealing with terrorists who attack Soviet interests in the Middle East.
An Israel newspaper reported, the Jerusalem Post said, the Soviet secret police last year secured the release of three kidnapped Soviet diplomats in Beirut by castrating a relative of a radical Lebanese Shia Muslim leader, sending him the severed organs and then shooting the relative in the head.
The incident began when four Soviet diplomats were kidnapped last September by Muslim extremists who demanded that Moscow pressure the Syrian government to stop pro-Syrian militiamen from shelling rival Muslim positions in a northeastern Lebanese city of Tripoli.
The KGB then apparently kidnapped and killed a relative of an unnamed leader of the Shias Hezbollah Party of God group, a radical pro-Iranian group that has been suspected of various terrorist activities against Western targets in Lebanon.
Parts of the man's body, the paper said, were then sent to the Hezbollah leader with a warning that he would lose other relatives in similar fashion if the three remaining Soviet diplomats were not immediately released.
They were quickly freed.
And look, I mean, the ethics of all of this I don't even want to comment on because this is like state actions and terrorism and mysticism and like all kinds of nonsense, to put it mildly.
But these are...
Have you heard a lot about Islamic uprisings in Russia?
Actually, no.
No, I haven't heard a whole lot about it.
I should probably...
Well, but that's why.
That's why.
Because this is how they're...
If these stories are true, and this is reported, right?
But if these stories are true, well, it seems to work.
They got their people released.
Okay.
You know, I mean, there are certain terrorist groups in the world, as we all know.
They behead people, they throw gays off buildings, they drown children in cages, they set fire to people in cages.
I recently read one crazy group butchered a kid and mailed the body parts to the parents.
This is brutal stuff that's going on out there in the world.
I am no military strategist and I'm not going to comment on the ethics, but as far as effectiveness goes, It has seemed to put some significant breaks on the tactics used by some terrorists.
The bottom line being that incentives or disincentives, as they may be, do work.
Yeah, Mike, if you can look up how the Russians dealt with the people who took the cinema or the theater hostage, if you could look that up.
I read that a little while back ago.
Basically, my entire job is just reading everything and then trying to remember what I read.
But, Mike, if you can look that up, there was a bunch of rebels, Chechnya rebels, I think they were, who took a bunch of hostages in a theater or a cinema.
And what the Russians did...
With all of that is...
Now, please understand, Donald Trump is not talking about castrating it.
Like, please understand, this is like not what he is talking about at all.
And so I don't want to sort of combine this.
I'm just pointing out some particularly extreme examples that Russia has used.
And it is...
It is some pretty strong stuff.
Nothing to do with what Donald Trump...
I mean, this is not even remotely legal in America, but here we go.
So Moscow theater hostage crisis.
So, seizure of a crowded theater by 40 to 50 armed Chechens, 23rd October 2002.
850 hostages, and it ended with the death of at least 170 people.
People, the attackers led by blah, blah, claimed allegiance to the Islamist militant separatist movement in Chechnya.
Oh, look, Islamists.
They demanded the withdrawal of Russian forces from Chechnya and an end to the Second Chechen War.
And, you know, that's kind of a challenge, right?
They took 850 hostages in a crowded theater and made very specific military requests.
What do you think should have been done?
What do I think that should have been done?
I don't think the terrorist family should have been credibly threatened at gunpoint.
But should they have been used as leverage?
I'm not necessarily against that.
When it comes to levying I mean, I have to say that I don't support, you know, the dismemberment of their family and the mailing of those body parts to them.
I don't think you are saying that either, right?
Oh, God, no.
No, but do you think that the parents of a terrorist have no responsibility in that child growing up that way?
No, of course they share in some responsibility, but to the extent that they share in that responsibility, I don't know how...
I don't know exactly the specifics, how that plays out as far as how we treat them in this very tense and very volatile situation.
What are your thoughts on the subject?
Well, let's just go through what happened.
So the first night, the attackers released 150 to 200 people.
Who did they release?
Children, pregnant women, some foreign-born theatergoers, people requiring health treatment, and who else did the Muslims release?
Well, that would be Muslims.
And the Russian government did offer the hostage takers the opportunity to leave for any third country.
And that was not valid.
Next day, 39 hostages set free.
They repeated via one of the hostages an earlier threat to start shooting their captives if Russia failed to take their demands seriously.
A hot water pipe had burst overnight and was flooding the ground floor.
The hostage takers called the flooding a provocation and no agreement had been reached on having the pipe repaired.
It later turned out the sewer system was used by the Russian special forces for listening purposes.
On day three, guerrillas, militants, agreed to release 75 foreign citizens.
And there was an interview with one of them.
He said, we have nothing to lose.
We have already covered 2,000 kilometers by coming here.
There is no way back.
We have come to die.
Our motto is freedom and paradise.
We already have freedom as we come to Moscow.
Now we want to be in paradise.
And...
I can understand the urge to help that process along and let's just see here so early Saturday morning special forces surrounded and stormed the theater heavily armed and masked that there was panic among the captives due to the execution of two female hostages early in the morning They
pumped gas into the theater.
A mysterious gas had been pumped into the building.
It was an aerosol anesthetic, apparently.
And of course, everyone panicked and freaked out.
And the Chechens, some of whom were equipped with gas masks, responded by firing blindly at the Russian positions outside after 30 minutes when the gas had taken effect.
A physical assault on the building commenced.
The combined forces entered through numerous building openings, including the roof, the basement, and finally the front door.
When the shooting began, the terrorists told their hostages to lean forward in the theater seats and cover their heads behind the seats.
After nearly one and a half hours of sporadic gun battles, the Russian special forces blew open the doors to the main hall and poured into the auditorium.
In the fierce firefight, the Federals killed most of the guerrillas, both those still awake and those who had succumbed to the gas.
According to the Russian government, fighting between the troops and the still-conscious Chechen fighters continued in other parts of the building for another 30 minutes to one hour.
Three terrorists were captured alive, and two of them managed to escape.
Later, the government claimed that all hostage-takers had been killed at that point.
I mean, I remember when I was a kid, there was a movie called The Raid on Entebbe, which was how I think it was the...
The Israeli government dealt with a hijacking and so on.
Yeah.
And, yeah, so they pumped a bunch of gas in and they went in and shot the hell out of people and, I mean, it was a mess.
Now, that's not specific to targeting family members, but it is, you know, to me it's not a simple situation.
Now, I will say this, just with regards to torture, my, admittedly, Not in-depth browsing of the topic.
There are some significant questions about the degree to which torture, even if we accept any moral legitimacy, which is a whole other question.
But I think, you know, to me, if you're in a situation as a society where...
You are seriously debating torture.
Man, you've taken a wrong turn somewhere.
You took that wrong turn at Albuquerque, and you're now in a situation where you have to deal with questions of torture.
I think that's...
And, you know, does it really work?
I don't know.
I assume that if you're torturing someone, they're going to tell you a whole bunch of stuff, and then by the time you've validated it, it may be too late.
They're just going to tell you whatever they think you want to hear, or they'll make something up, or maybe they want to die.
I don't know.
But you can probably break people.
Yeah.
But I don't know if you get the truth out of them then.
And so my question to any society that's saying, well, we've got to have a big debate about torture is like, why?
What are you doing in the world that this has become a very big issue for you?
Who are you letting into your country or which other countries are you going into?
And where do you have your troops all over the damn world that this is even becoming a question or an issue?
And that, to me, is the bigger philosophical question.
Because philosophy is not...
Like, philosophy, I don't think, helps with the question of, what do we do when the Chechen rebels have taken over the theater?
Philosophy is for before that, right?
Philosophy is nutrition.
It's not the emergency room cutting open someone to try and save their life.
And so...
America is in the situation right now where there is problems with terrorism.
And the causes for all of that, we've gone into a whole bunch of times into the show.
I mean, this is a very aggressive foreign policy, this nation building, this imperialism, this...
There's 720 plus military bases all over the world, this world's biggest military sailing all over the place, this constant destabilization of other governments, particularly in the Middle East, this funding of various groups, the fact that ISIS has come out of US funding and is using some US weapons.
I mean, this is...
After destabilizing the Middle East, I mean, there's a whole bunch of god-awful, horrendous, blind, stupid, CIA, sociopathic decisions that have produced these kinds of situations.
And when these situations arrive, the philosophers step back and say, hey man, I told you not to eat all those burgers and fries every day for 20 years.
Now you're having a heart attack.
I'm a nutritionist.
I can't help you.
I can't help you with the heart attack.
You know, you've got to talk to someone else.
So as far as...
That goes.
I don't have anything in particular to say about what happens with torture or what happens with terrorist family.
That's just way past anything because it's all about prevention, not cure.
You know, that having been said, there are very expansionist ideologies in the world.
Communism is one.
Arguably, Islam is another.
There are very expansionist ideologies in the world that don't require foreign policy in order to expand.
Foreign policy, bad decisions, doesn't help.
But it wasn't like the Crusades came about because of Christian expansionism in the Middle East.
The Crusades came about because of Islamic expansionism into Europe.
Well, into the Middle East and then into Europe.
And so we've got the truth about the Crusades as a video that people should watch.
So, you know, what does Donald Trump say?
He says, we have spent trillions of dollars Over time, on planes, missiles, ships, equipment, building up our military to provide a strong defense for Europe and Asia.
The countries we are defending must pay for the cost of this defense.
And if not, the US must be prepared to let these countries defend themselves.
God, don't you love it when a businessman hits foreign policy?
He says, Get out!
Trump's comments on terrorism, how to deal with it.
You know, I can't judge them because this is not a philosophical question.
When you have terrorism, it's because people haven't listened to philosophers already.
So it's not something I can...
Now, he didn't cause the problem.
If the, you know, what's derisively called isolationism.
Yeah, guy doesn't go out and rape women.
He's an isolationist.
It's like, no, he's just not out raping.
And so, yeah, America should stay home.
yeah, America should stop meddling in all these other countries' affairs, and it should stop causing the death of close to half a million Iraqis, and it should stop using depleted uranium shells to genetically fuck up the entire city of Fallujah to the point where their population is largely genetically destroyed, even more so than cousin inbreeding does.
So if this mad charge to run the world, almost entirely driven by fiat currency and central banking, because if the taxes had to be raised for all of these murderous adventure fests overseas, then people would have resisted it, But fiat currency going off the gold standard, all this kind of crap where you get, hey, let's have the welfare state and the war in Vietnam.
That's not going to be a problem because we can just go off the gold standard and effectively default on our debt.
Hey, we borrowed gold.
We're going to pay you back with paper, which happened in 74.
So...
If Trump had been in power, or if this philosophy, the neocon let's go change the world philosophy had not been in power, but if the original warnings of the founding fathers had been heeded to not get involved in all these foreign entangling wars, if America had stayed the fuck home, which is what it should have done, I mean, you got friendly neighbors to the north and south for the most part, giant oceans on either side, if you can't find a way to be peaceful, well, that's why I'm an anarchist.
But anyway, if America had stayed home, This conversation wouldn't even be happening.
And Trump is saying, let's stay home.
Now, does he say he's going to deal with ISIS? He says he's going to deal with ISIS. How he's going to deal with ISIS? My understanding is that he is going to take the oil that is the source of their funding.
That's what they're living on.
And what, you know, how you take the oil?
Well, I don't even want to hazard a guess.
Look, warfare is becoming so ridiculously complicated these days.
It's not like...
That's way back in time.
Now it's...
Man, look at the bioweapon that Turkey is threatening the EU with regarding the migrants.
Turkey is now threatening the EU, the 72 demands that the previous head of Turkey agreed to.
The new head of Turkey is not agreeing to, and he's saying, well, Europe, you've got to let us join the EU and give 79 million of our citizens, mostly Muslims, free range throughout Europe.
Or are we going to release our three million migrants on Europe?
Well, that's a form of, I would argue, is a form of aggression.
Significant aggression.
So what does that mean?
What is warfare these days?
Right.
And like you said to the last caller, there used to be a time where we would defer to experts.
And that's where my question comes out of.
Obviously, secrecy is important.
And obviously, the intricacies of war are beyond, well, they're definitely beyond me, but you seem to be saying they're somewhat beyond you.
Oh no, I'm not a military expert.
I can talk by a couple of general principles, but the really interesting stuff that's happening militarily these days, I bet nobody outside of a handful of people know about.
So my question is, why wouldn't Donald Trump, knowing that these issues are complicated and yet a degree of secrecy is necessary, and yet still a degree of transparency is necessary for at least campaigning on something, Why wouldn't he take these ideas,
or at least whatever strategies he does have, and take them to someone who has a winning record, we'll say, as far as military intervention or military...
Oh, you mean somebody who's never been run by Democrats?
Because Democrats are completely shitty at war.
And Democrats generally get more...
Americans killed by fucking up wars that they're involved.
Anyway, that's another story.
But anyway, so first of all, just a point, the family of the San Bernardino terrorists, their families have been arrested, right?
So that's the reality.
Now, this is an issue of trust.
This is an issue of trust.
So I directed plays and was the producer of a movie.
And we would hire the people by putting out auditions, right?
I mean, this is a silly example, but I hope that it will make some sense to you.
So we hired the actors, we had auditions, and the people who did well in the auditions, we hired them.
And then we put them in front of cameras, and I guess some of them did a pretty decent job, and some of them did a great job, and some of them were just okay.
And so you put out an audition, and then you just have to hire someone It's the same when you hire anyone.
You give them an interview, you call their references, you make a decision, and then you hire them, and then you give them the job, right?
And of course, you circle back and so on, and there's a process in American democracy for doing that, impeachment processes, removal from office processes, and midterm election processes, and every four-year presidential processes, and so on.
But you just find the most competent person You put them through an audition process and you trust them.
Because you're going to have to trust someone, right?
I mean, if you're willing to trust these unnamed military experts, why not just trust the guy who's going to hire them or who's going to listen to them?
Well, I don't have to vote for the...
I can choose not to listen to those experts and I can also choose not to vote for anyone, right?
I mean...
No, no, you're asking how would we trust Trump?
We look at somebody who is competent and intelligent.
And, of course, competence and intelligence has a lot to do with knowing what you can do and knowing what you can't do, which is sort of back to the caller that we had regarding changing other people through words.
Now, I think it's fair to say that Donald Trump...
He's remarkably competent in a very wide variety of fields, right?
As far as business goes, I'd say yes.
No, not just business.
Not just business.
He also writes books, which are bestsellers, right?
His Art of the Deal is arguably the best-selling or most influential business book of all time.
So as an author, he is staggeringly competent, right?
I mean, I know you author your works, but does he ghostwrite his?
It is possible, of course, that he dictates in other people's shape or whatever, but he's responsible for the books, right?
Yeah, I wouldn't fault him for having an editor.
Yeah, or maybe he, you know, puts a whole bunch of stuff together and people, you know, polish it or assemble it or whatever it is, right?
Right.
But as far as the...
The books have his name on it, and...
You know, as far as I know, he's not splitting royalties with other people, so...
You know, but he, you know, maybe he's got some people who help him, right?
But see, here's the thing, right?
Let's say he has ghostwriters.
Ooh, alright, so he's ghostwriters.
Well, he's got to choose those ghostwriters, right?
So, if the book's a bestseller, it's because he chose the best ghostwriters, whatever, right?
Right, he's the least confident at that.
Okay.
He doesn't have ghost Donald Trumps playing him on reality television shows, right?
Right.
And The Apprentice...
It's been one of the most successful television shows, let alone reality television shows of all time.
And they have tried that same formula with a whole bunch of other people.
Martha Stewart had one, a bunch of other people, and they don't work.
So as far as being an entertainer goes, and as far as being the star of a reality TV show goes, and I believe he's a producer as well, I'm sure he is, he's remarkably competent at that too, right?
Yes.
And all of these things, his business career, if he has people help him with his books, if he's got to choose producers and distributors and all of that and people who market The Apprentice and so on, he's choosing people To help him to run his business empire, to help him to run his books, create his books, to help him to distribute and produce his television shows and so on.
So he's very good at finding quality people, knowing when to delegate, knowing when to own things himself, and creating sustainable business models through competent delegation, right?
Right.
And then, last summer, he strolled into the realm of politics, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, talk about starting at the top.
You know, my karaoke sing-off is with Freddie Mercury, who's back from the dead.
I wonder who'll win.
And he had 16 competitors who all of themselves had hundreds of millions of dollars worth of funding, right?
Right.
And he won.
Yeah.
He was a natural.
No, come on.
And he won.
He won by defying every conceivable bit of perceived political wisdom that existed in America.
I mean, come on.
If you were a political candidate and you said, I think I'm going to talk about banning Muslim immigration to the United States, everybody would go mental.
Or build a wall, deporting however many millions of people and so on.
I mean, people would say, you can't do that.
You'll lose.
And everybody did say that.
Well, not everybody.
Most people did.
Except you, Anne.
But most people said, it's a complete disaster.
He doesn't know what he's doing.
He's incompetent.
He's out of touch.
He's proposing things that are illegal, immoral, wrong, against the wishes of the American people.
He's a joke candidate.
He's just doing it for vanity.
Right?
Yeah.
And...
He fucking what?
I mean, that is, he's more competent wandering into politics than people who've been doing it for 30 or 40 years.
I mean, he was more competent than Jed Bush, who's one of the Bushes, for God's sakes.
Do you don't think he's got some advice from pops and brother?
Yeah.
Two ex-presidents of the United States and your family and you can't even get into the top three?
Are you fucking kidding me?
This guy is a god of competence.
I'm telling you.
I mean, I'm good at some shit, man.
I know competence when I see it.
You know, this ice rink in New York City?
You know this, right?
That the city was just fighting around with it forever, right?
Yeah.
So he called a friend with the Montreal Canadiens and he said...
Hey, do you have a good ice guy?
And he talked to their top ice guy, the guy told him what to do, and like nine minutes later it was all done.
I mean, he is a force of nature when it comes to competence.
You know, if the Bible had started with Donald Trump, day and a half.
I'm telling you, I worship at the altar of competence.
Like, I can't tell you, right?
I went to a store today.
I had to pick up a charger for my phone in the car.
Because I have like two or three of these in a row and they last a couple of months.
And I went into this tech store and talked to this woman.
And I said, okay, it's a weird question.
But, you know, this, this, this.
And she's like, oh, well, the problem is you need a flat cable, rather round cables.
When you close the lid, it gets squished.
And here's a flat cable.
Here's what you need to buy.
Here's what you need to buy.
I'm like, I got her name.
Talked to the manager.
This woman, give her a raise.
Like, competence.
Like, I kissed the hem of her garment.
Competence, competence, competence.
Because I'm telling you, Sometimes on this planet, competence seems a little bit rarer than diamonds.
Diamonds, they're all over the place.
Competent people, man.
I mean, sometimes it feels like there are 12 or 13 really competent people in the world and everybody else is just taking up space.
So...
So if Donald Trump's extraordinary levels of competence...
And look, he goes out and gives his first major foreign policy speech...
And kills it.
Like, nails it.
Like, people are like, the moment he said, we will no longer surrender this country or its people to the false song of globalism?
I mean, a collective anti-wargasm shuddered through the entire body politic.
Finally, somebody who's going to put America's interests first and not sacrifice the entire population to destabilize the world To dismantle countries and have migrants spill out of the broken countries like blood from an arterial wound.
In my opinion, it was the most important foreign policy speech since Genesis.
And that takes a lot of balls.
Because he's telling all of the established military people and all of the established military industrial complex that they have fucked up for a couple of generations minimum.
They failed.
They have destroyed.
They have undone.
They have unraveled.
They have broken the world with their insane, narcissistic, megalomaniacal policies wherein they believe that they can wave their wand and change the hearts and minds of people.
Through bombs.
Bomb them into the reason.
Bomb them into the enlightenment.
Bomb them into progress.
Bomb them into the modern world.
He's coming out and he's saying that the entire foreign policy direction of the post-Second World War United States and arguably some of the pre-Second World War, but the entire foreign policy meddling and imperialism has been a complete disaster.
And that everybody who's given these people advice and everything that they've executed has not only been wrong, but civilization-threatening, catastrophic.
It's one thing to lose a war.
It's another thing to lose a war and destroy Europe as well.
And so, that is Donald Trump giving a foreign policy speech.
I gotta tell you, I trust the guy to pick up my laundry.
I trust the guy to pick up my dry cleaning.
I trust the guy to do some really smart, intelligent things that have not been seen in American politics probably since the days of the Founding Fathers.
Now, you may not trust him, but I would argue, and I'm sorry if this sounds condescending, and I mean this in all positivity, but I would argue that you don't trust him because you don't recognize competence when you see it.
And you don't recognize a trustworthy man When you see him, is he going to be perfect?
Well, that's no standard of trust.
Well, I'm not perfect.
I trust myself.
And Hillary?
Hillary, with her name recognition, with her $200 million that comes from questionable sources, with her husband, with having already been in the White House, with her record as Secretary of State, With the massive amount of donor funding that she's getting, she can't even beat one electrified-haired socialist from Vermont.
I mean, the guy still keeps coming back.
Now, I mean, certainly the black vote is a bit of a challenge for Hillary because Hillary's husband signed very tough crime bills into law, which actually were demanded to some degree by the black community.
But a lot of the young kids there are saying, well, your husband got my dad locked up in jail for five years, so we're not a big fan.
I mean, Hillary can't beat Bernie Sanders.
How's she going to do with ISIS? And I'm not even convinced America should be going in to deal with ISIS. I don't know.
Because I don't have access to all the information.
God help me, I never will have access to all the information these people have.
I'm so skeptical.
I'm sorry?
I said I'm similarly skeptical.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I mean, maybe there's just been enough meddling.
And remember how Saddam Hussein was the worst guy ever.
And boy, when they got rid of him, everything was going to be great.
Now ISIS, they're the worst people ever.
But boy, when we get rid of them, everything's going to be great.
It's like, don't you get that every time you kill these demons, they split in five and get stronger?
Anyway, that's not a philosophical question either because it's all about prevention.
But he is, you know, he is a ridiculously competent person in an unbelievably desperate time.
And he certainly called the Middle East, didn't he?
I mean, he said that this was going to be a mess, and he was.
Right.
He was wrong.
I don't doubt his confidence.
I doubt how trustworthy he is.
And I say that in all...
Compared to who, though?
Sorry to interrupt.
Because are you saying that he's going to go to military advisors, all of whom seem to have been down with invading Iraq?
And destabilizing Syria and destabilizing Libya?
They're all down for that?
They weren't quitting in protest?
They weren't saying this is a disaster?
Who are these military advisors that you trust?
They've all been running this shit for the past 20 years.
You trust them?
Seriously?
Well, was it a complete and total disaster when...
Bush's father stepped in and when Saddam invaded, was it Kuwait?
Yes!
That was a complete and utter disaster, total loss for America?
Absolutely!
Because Saddam Hussein put the message through saying, I'm going to go get some stuff from Kuwait.
Is that okay?
And the Americans said, go for it!
And then they invaded him.
And then disaster after disaster after disaster.
Yes, they should.
I mean, why on earth would America get involved in a border dispute between Iraq and the next door neighbor?
What the hell does the average American soldier have to do with border disputes and horizontal oil drilling between Iraq and Kuwait?
Not very much.
Nothing!
Would you die for it?
No.
Would you send your child to die for it?
No, and I wouldn't send other people's children to die for it.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
No.
And of course, according to all reports, George W. Bush went into Iraq because a voice in his head told him to.
Right, God.
Good job, God!
You know, I think that voice might have been coming from the pointy-tailed guy who lives underground, because it sure as hell wasn't coming from any benevolent deity.
Right.
But arguably, not even arguably, Donald Trump, like you said, he said, I've had enough with these guys who have failed us.
These people have repeatedly failed us over and over again.
It's time for a changing of the guard.
It's time for something new.
I mean, does he not have anyone in mind yet?
It would seem, if you want to not unfold, but if you want to employ a radical new policy, some sort of Some sort of secondary verification that this isn't just the math of Bernie Sanders' economic plans working out or the math of how we're going to have free healthcare for everybody.
It would be very, very consoling if there was something solid to his military very consoling if there was something solid to his military claims, especially when, and to be honest, especially when, and to be honest, I voted for, this is, I mean, my political views have changed radically,
but I voted for Obama at the time, the first time, thinking that he was the peace candidate.
Foolishly, uninformed, Thinking that he was the peace candidate.
Looking back...
Okay, Ben, sorry, just before we get into you revealing your Obama fetish, or whatever, right?
Your complaint, as far as I understand it, is that...
The shortest video, I think one of the shortest videos I ever produced was when Obama, and this was way before he started declaring all these wars, but Obama got the peace prize, and it was a three and a half second video where I just facepalmed.
I don't get credit.
I don't get enough credit.
I'll never get enough credit.
Well, maybe in the future.
All right.
So your concern, Ben, is that you don't know who Donald Trump is getting his advice from?
Not even just getting his...
Well, yeah, getting his advice.
You don't know who his team is, right?
Yeah, who his team is and whether his...
Okay.
Have you looked it up?
I'm sorry, what's that?
Okay.
I'm going to give you some names here.
Keith Kellogg, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Waleed Fares, Joseph Schmitz, Gary Harrell, Chuck Kubik, Bert Misusawa.
And we'll put a link to this in the show.
This is a link from the Los Angeles Times from April 7th, 2016.
And the title of this, Here's Who Donald Trump is Taking Foreign Policy Advice From.
So this has been out for over a month, I guess five weeks or so.
And I'm a little confused as to why you don't know this, if this is a very important issue for you.
Do you think there are other people he's not telling you about?
Do you think there may be your hand puppets or Sesame Street characters that...
I'm sorry for being snarky, but...
I mean, it seems if you have concerns, shouldn't you go and look them up before jumping to the conclusion that you have no idea who he's taking advice from?
Or who his team is going to be?
So, I did actually before...
Well, okay, so...
A few things happened.
I submitted my question and you came out with your video disparaging the reaction of the liberal media post-Trump's speech.
The second thing is, I dug a bit into his policies, looking for, like, specifics.
Looking for specifics.
No, Ben, Ben, you just told me that you didn't know who he was taking his advice from.
You'd like to know what his team was.
Right, and I did try and look.
In this call.
Right, yeah, I did try and look.
So I don't care what you did earlier.
I'm talking about in this call.
I'm not trying to be a dick.
I'm just trying to be efficient here.
Maybe the two are the same.
I don't know.
Okay, in this call.
So, look, and this is frustration I have as a whole, as people say, well, what's Donald?
He's got no positions.
And it's like, Have you looked them up?
Have you gone to his website?
Have you read his books?
Actually, I've gone to his website.
I've looked at all of his videos.
I've read all of the posts there and, um, yeah, they're, they're, they're a bit that, that information isn't posted on his website.
Or if it is, it's not posted under where his videos and his written policy are.
No, but you would look at Trump Forum Policy Team.
Just Google it.
I mean, just see if this is important stuff for you, right?
Because otherwise you're going to be out there spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt, which is false.
This is a dangerous thing to do in such a dangerous time.
Right?
You have to be responsible with the communication you're putting into the world at the moment, right?
Yeah.
You know, these are all the people who say, oh, he called all Mexicans rapists!
Right?
I mean, it's like, that's irresponsible shit to be talking about.
Right.
You know, these are desperate times in the West.
We need to get our facts straight.
And we need to not be spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt at the moment.
They used to say, loose lips sink ships, and now it's like, loose brains destroy Western civilization.
I'm sorry?
Let me just say real quick, he announced his foreign policy team on March 21st.
That's when it was announced.
Oh, so it was just written up in the LA Times in April, but March 21st he announced his foreign policy team?
Yeah, there's a bunch of articles from March 22nd.
Stefan, I really did try and look into this.
I'm not just BS-ing you for the sake of the show.
What can I tell you?
You could have looked a little harder.
If he announced his foreign policy team almost two months ago and you can't find him, then you shouldn't be talking about this stuff much at all with people, right?
I mean, I would be blunt, right?
I mean, look at this stuff.
I often say, look, I don't know much about this.
I mean, I'm no expert.
I've just said it a bunch of times during this call.
I am not qualified to speak on this.
This is not a topic philosophy can handle.
You know, if you have trouble finding Trump's foreign policy team after he announced it two months ago, then maybe just, you know, talking about politics isn't your thing.
Or maybe you just should try harder.
Because if you have these big concerns...
Wait, how many results did you get there, Mike?
When you Google Donald Trump foreign policy team, how many results did you get?
1.9 million.
That's not quite true.
1.99 million.
Yes.
So, maybe if it was 2 million.
And again, I'm sorry to be a dick, Ben, but frankly, it doesn't seem very credible that if you get Donald Trump foreign policy team...
Gets you almost two million hits and you say, I honestly couldn't find them?
Come on.
It's not buried in Sanskrit in a PDF file somewhere.
I probably stopped short of the word team, but I did search around with various terms.
Can you remember one of those terms?
Let's see what we get.
Off the top of my head, from a month ago?
No, I don't remember any of those terms.
All right, let me see.
Trump.
Let's see.
Foreign policy.
It would be Trump foreign policy, right?
I mean, that would be...
Trump foreign policy.
Now you're mostly getting his speech with Trump foreign policy since the speech happened recently.
I got a lot of that.
Yeah.
Donald Trump has a coherent, realistic foreign policy.
That's from Foreign Policy, the magazine.
The Miss Universe foreign policy.
Okay, that's probably not particularly helpful.
So that's first page.
Oh, look here.
Wait, hang on a sec here.
So I do, let's see here, I do Trump foreign policy.
There's a bunch of stuff up top.
I don't know what the hell Google is doing these days.
Just give me some results!
Don't give me any cards.
Then down at the bottom, searches related to Trump foreign policy, right below the words foreign policy are Trump foreign policy team.
So it's actually suggesting to you on the very first page, Trump foreign policy team.
And you think that might have changed a bit since he announced his team, Stefan?
I'm sorry?
Do you think that the way Google suggests things and the way that particular result came out now might be a little bit different than the way it came out when I was looking before he announced his team officially?
You mean, do I know how Google runs its algorithms?
No, because if I did, I'd be in jail.
No, I'm not asking if you know the specifics of their algorithm.
I'm asking if you think that since he announced his team, the results have changed.
You mean in the last two months, has Google searches changed?
I assume they have.
Yeah.
Okay.
So I don't think that came up when I searched.
But you also haven't...
Have you not searched since he gave his foreign policy speech?
No, I have.
Actually, very...
It was very briefly after...
He gave that speech, two or three days, and then I kind of got consumed with finals.
Okay, well, so here's the thing, right?
I mean, if he gives a foreign policy speech, do you think that he came up with all of that on his own?
I mean, it's just a logical thinking question, right?
And I'm just giving you this challenge because I want to give everyone this challenge.
Because we all want to raise our game, right, as far as what we're doing in the world at the moment.
So did you think when Donald Trump gave a pivotal foreign policy speech, one of the most important foreign policy speeches of his entire run for the nomination, do you think that he did that entirely on himself, by himself?
No.
He just sat down and wrote some stuff, right?
I'm sure he's sought the advice of many advisors and probably speechwriters.
Of course.
Because he's not an idiot, right?
He's a hugely competent guy.
So he's not just going to go up there and say a bunch of stupid shit that he thought of on the way to the podium, right?
Right.
Right?
I mean, he gave the speech April 27th.
He announced his team on March 21st.
So he had almost a month to work with them.
And of course, he's thought about foreign policy and read a bunch of stuff because he's been interested in politics since, I don't know, probably four days out of nappies.
But...
So when he gives a foreign policy speech, which was now, what, two, two and a half weeks ago, he obviously has a team of advisors.
I mean, that we know, right?
Yeah.
It's like saying he also doesn't do his own taxes.
You know, you see that 10-foot-high stack of tax papers or whatever, right?
He has accountants, and he has people he defers to, and he synthesizes their advice, puts it into his own words and his own approach, and gives a speech, right?
Yeah.
A foreign policy speech, he had to have foreign policy advisors.
So it would not be unreasonable.
I don't know.
Did you watch his speech?
I did.
I did.
I watched it in its entirety.
Okay.
As did I a couple of times.
So if he's giving a foreign policy speech and you're curious about his advisors, it would make sense to search for his team or his advisors.
And given that he announced them on March 21st and it was over a month later they gave the speech, I can guarantee you Google would have had that by then.
And I'm annoyingly, gad-flyingly demanding that you up your game.
You know, and listen, if it's any consolation, I, you know, Mike, how many times after a show do I say, I really want to do it better, I really want to improve?
Constantly.
Constantly.
And I'm like, oh, I should have gone further with this.
I'm going to commit more to this.
I'm going to get more involved in this.
I'm going to try and censor myself less about this.
I mean, like, I just, I'm constantly pushing myself.
Ben, and you need to be, if you're going to be out there talking with people, and I don't care if it's on YouTube, I don't care if it's at your JCPenney's.
Like, if you're going to be out there, if it's with your family, if it's with friends, if it's at a coffee shop, if you're going to be out there talking about politics in this crucial time, you have to up your game.
You have to get the facts.
You can't just rely on prejudice, or I just couldn't find it, or like you have to up your game.
These are important times.
If we fuck this up, things could get extremely bad in the world.
And I'm just being really annoying and saying this to you, but just to everyone out there.
You know, like Donald Trump, don't like Donald Trump, support him, don't support him, be pro-Donald Trump, be anti-Donald Trump, be whoever you want, but work to get it right.
And push yourself in these crucial times to get as many competent facts as you can.
It's a good practice to do it anyway.
The more competent you get at examining Donald Trump, I'm guessing the more competent Donald Trump is going to seem.
Because assuming that Donald Trump is lacking something because you can't be bothered to find it on Google is not responsible.
Don't assume he's incompetent.
Hey, I've criticized the guy.
I think he's missed the boat on a couple of things.
So what?
So do I. But don't assume that Donald Trump is not competent because you can't be asked to find the information that's out there.
Or you search for the wrong thing.
Like, don't just jump to, well, I couldn't find it in a two-second Google search.
Therefore, Donald Trump has, you know, whatever, no team.
Like, that's not responsible.
And it's also not respectful to the obvious competence the guy has.
Well, in good faith, can you take for the benefit of the doubt that I put more than an hour into looking into this specific topic?
Can you take that in good faith?
Not a bit.
Good Lord, no.
You're an intelligent guy.
Come on, are you seriously telling me that you recently searched for Donald Trump's foreign policy team and couldn't find them?
Recently.
You spent an hour?
No, not recently.
Okay, but you're coming on this show to tell me he's deficient in publicizing his team.
Is that because you looked a month ago and couldn't find it and you think nothing's changed?
This is what I'm talking about, upping your game.
And as I've said, I think many things have changed since submitting the question.
Right, and one of the things that could have changed is you could have tried searching again.
Like, let me tell you something, man.
You're asking me a question about combat, warfare, military policy, and so on, right?
So for over an hour today, I sat down and listened to Next Generation Warfare panel on YouTube.
And that's just one of the things that I do to prepare for a show like this.
Right?
And so if I'm going to put time into preparing for one part of one question of your call...
Can you not run that search again so we don't have to go through this?
Why am I the only one who's preparing for this conversation?
Well, Stefan, I would say I did prepare.
If you noticed that earlier I said I had a problem trusting him, that's because in what I did find, I did find that Over the course of not too many years, his policies have changed or his stated policies have changed radically, at least according to Real Clear Politics, who take direct quotes from Donald Trump.
And he's evolved from what would be a more classically libertarian stance, I was surprised to see, to a bit more of a Reserve stance as far as when it comes to federal policy.
And that seems oddly, shall we say, suspicious in that it times up with his bid for candidacy for the president.
Do you remember when you...
We'll get to that in a sec.
Do you remember when you emailed us to be on the show?
Quite frankly, no, I don't.
But I can click and look immediately.
No, it was just a little under two weeks ago.
So it was...
Five or six or seven days.
I can't remember.
But it was five or so days after Donald Trump gave his foreign policy speech and five weeks plus since he announced his team.
Okay.
And I'm just pointing out that if you say you spend an hour looking for this kind of information five weeks after he announced his team and that was a pretty big deal and, you know, five days after he gave his foreign policy speech, I'm just saying that's not particularly credible to me.
I'll just be honest with you.
And I'm not trying to nag you about this.
I'm just, again, striving you to get you to up your game.
Well, let me be clear, though.
No, I don't want to go over that anymore.
I just make my point, right?
And I'm sorry to not give you the right response, but you've already said you looked thoroughly and you couldn't find it.
I don't know what to say to that, but okay.
So what is it about Donald Trump?
His position changed on something?
What was it?
Specifically, his change on the war on drugs has changed quite radically from what used to be a libertarian policy to now pretty much, like I say, not pretty much, a far less Let's end the war on drugs now.
He said it's failed.
He said, you know, many things recently, but he hasn't said, let's end the war on drugs.
Let's decriminalize.
And I think that's, that's an important, I mean, it's not the only issue.
It's not even the most pressing issue, but it's indicative of him gearing up for the selection, which, okay, you want to say he wants to make himself more marketable.
Fine.
But that detracts from my, my The amount I trust him.
Is that incredibly irresponsible of me?
Is that lacking foresight?
So when did he say that he wanted to end the war on drugs?
I believe...
You know what?
I'm not even going to say I believe...
Some time within the last 10 years, probably.
Oh, seriously, dude, come on.
This is what I mean by up your game.
Some time over the past 10 years?
That's a bit broad of a brush, don't you think?
Yeah, because I'm trying not to be...
Detailed?
Looks like in 1990 there was a speech where he talked about losing the war on drugs.
You have to legalize drugs to win that war.
You have to take the profit away from these drug czars.
Would that be 26 years ago or a quarter century?
Yes.
Okay, so you weren't even close when you said within the last 10 years.
No, that's what Mike found.
So I'm not going to say specifically that's what I'm referring to.
I'm referring to, I believe it was a real clear politics article that breaks down each of the policies.
Okay, okay, okay.
So, I see, 26 years ago, I was 24 years old.
Would you like me to go through a list of the things I no longer believe that I believed very strongly when I was 24 years old?
Does this mean that I'm completely untrustworthy or somewhat untrustworthy because I have changed my opinions based upon more information?
Look, I agree with Trump's earlier stance.
I'm just saying that there's lots that I believed in a state.
Go back another 10 years, I was a socialist.
Go back another 5 years, I was a Christian.
I mean, you've not...
You can't tell me you've held the same opinions consistently for a quarter century.
Throughout the course of this show, I've said that's not the case.
That I haven't.
That I haven't.
You're correct.
Right.
Now, Iowa...
He was talking with Iowa.
There is a terrible situation...
With regards to drugs in Iowa, right?
I mean, they have a ridiculous, horrifying drug problems and so on.
And...
I still have the same opinion about the war on drugs that I've always had, which is that it's terrible and destructive, but...
Let me ask you this.
How do you think legalizing drugs will go while they're still a very strong welfare state?
Probably not well.
Well, not well.
Why?
I don't mean why, like why, but...
But I mean, just tell me, tell me, like step me through your thinking on that.
I mean, the way you're loading the question.
Okay, but why would it go badly to legalize drugs while you still have a very generous welfare state?
Thank you.
Or why could it go badly?
Why could it go badly?
You said it would, right?
Or it could.
The welfare state would facilitate further use, greater use of drugs, in fact make the problem worse, and result in disastrous Endgame for families, children, drug users, etc.
It's certainly a possibility that Because, you know, here's what happens.
I mean, if you have a genuine free market, then you don't have a welfare state.
But what's going to happen if drugs are legalized, they will be sold and stamped and licensed by the government.
There'll be massive markups, right?
Because it'll be given to monopoly donors or whatever it is, right?
So if you legalize drugs, there'll be these massive markups.
There'll still be a welfare state and the drugs will be sold so expensively and perhaps of so low a potency that the black market will still exist anyway.
And people will take their welfare and they will spend money on the black market of drugs that is occurring.
And, you know, will it be better that they don't go to jail?
Well, they may go to jail if they buy it from the black market, right?
Because, you know, all of that stuff will still be going on.
Now, to genuinely, if there was a genuine free market in drugs and there was no welfare state as there was in the 19th century, well, you know, I'm sure you're aware that the original, one of the original ingredients in Coca-Cola was cocaine, right?
And you could buy heroin and cocaine.
Kids could buy it for pennies across a drugstore counter and so on.
But there's probably some work to be done before we get to a truly free society.
I'm no politician.
I'm not entirely convinced that immediately ending the drug prohibition prior to other things being done would be my first step.
I'm also not sure given the And disastrous that are going on with immigration and the porous border and European migrant crises and so on, that would be where I'd take my first battle.
And those are just, you know, politics, as you know, is the art of the possible.
You know, it's fine for you and I. To theorize about things.
And it's important that we do so.
And it's important that we talk about the harmful effects of the war on drugs, which I've been talking about for many years.
It's a war on people, not on drugs.
And it's fine that we talk about these things and theorize about how things should be ideally.
And we can afford to do that because we don't actually have to enact them in practice, in politics, in Congress.
Now, again, this is just a matter of competency.
If...
Donald Trump is not focused on it, if he's changed his mind on it for whatever reason, for me to immediately jump and say, well, he's untrustworthy, well, you know, they have legalized marijuana in Colorado.
Do you think that got rid of the black market?
No, I'm sure it put quite a dampening in it, especially considering the extent to which you can now grow it at home.
Well, no, the argument could be fair.
They're changing crops in Mexico.
A lot of farmers have had to change crops in Mexico with the amount of domestic production in the U.S. of marijuana.
That's a real effect.
That's a measurable effect.
Well, it also may have, of course, it may have not harmed the black market at all.
Hundreds of Craigslist ads where you can buy just about anything under the sun, and according to the state, only 60% of the marijuana is In Colorado, it's sold legally.
And, of course, a lot of people have gone to Colorado, which has increased demand within the black market.
And so it may not have harmed the black market at all.
In fact, it may have increased it because the demand may have gone up considerably.
A lot more people may have tried marijuana because it's legal and therefore may have started using it, which, again, may have enhanced the black market from there.
Okay.
And by the way, I did find it.
It's legalized drugs and use tax revenue to fund drug education.
And that was April 2011.
So that was about five years ago.
So it wasn't a quarter.
Can you give us a link in Skype?
Yeah.
I'm not doubting you.
I just want to make sure we get that for the show notes.
No problem.
It's from ontheissues.org.
And I will copy and paste that into, is there like a bubble?
Oh, I see it.
Just sent it there.
Alright, thank you.
No problem.
I found this website though, I mean, it does take brief snippets, very informative as far as the Concise statements of policy, which I do appreciate.
Which quote are you talking about here, Ben?
Which quote is it that you're talking about here?
2011 quote under Donald Trump on drugs, about maybe a fifth of the way down the page, and it says...
Yeah, that's...
It's an article, it's quoting a Mother Jones article from 2011, referencing his position in 1990.
Okay, so the source is Tim Murphy in Mother Jones magazine.
The Mother Jones magazine was published April 20th, 2011.
But the reference...
Trump argued in 1990 that the only way to win the war on drugs was to legalize drugs and use the tax revenue to fund drug education programs.
As he puts it, you have to take the profit away from these drug czars.
In his 2000 book, The America We Deserve, Trump stated that he'd never tried drugs of any kind.
So when you say that Trump said this in 2011, you're absolutely wrong.
You're actually off by 21 years.
Because he was quoted in a 2011 article About what he said in 1990.
And this is what I mean by upping your damn game.
Now maybe he did say it in 2011, but this is not it.
Because you just said confidently, well he said in 2011 this, and it's one click, man.
One extra click.
That's what I'm talking about.
Get your facts straight.
These are crucial, important times.
One extra click.
One extra click, man.
Get your facts straight.
Do not be spreading disinformation in these crucial times.
Hey, you find something that he's messed up on, say it loud, say it proud.
But don't spread disinfo, man.
Come on.
Up your game.
Well, I'm going to close down the show.
I really, really thank everyone for calling in tonight.
It was very illuminating, very instructive.
And I repeat my invitation to our Muslim overlords to come and save us from these ungodly, shattered families.
But thanks everyone so much for calling in.
A real pleasure.
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