3305 Lead, Follow or GET OUT OF THE WAY! - Call In Show - May 27th, 2016
Introduction: [1:39] - Ferguson Effect FactsQuestion 1: [7:09] - “I am a Police Officer working in the United States…”Question 2: [1:00:32] - “As the regulatory affairs manager for a small company I’m acutely aware of how regulations can place ever-increasing burdens on small businesses. Do you think that regulators generally act with good intentions, but are simply ignorant of the market effects? Or, to what extent do you think that regulations are passed to deliberately advantage large corporations at the expense of small businesses?”Question 3: [1:45:27] - “Since the current political state of affairs facilitating the 'refugee' crisis in Europe is only made possible by the underlying populations subconsciously relying on the "status-quo" being the oversupply of daily essentials - what happens when the financial system supporting the status-quo collapses? What happens to these ‘newcomers’ when the assumption (i.e., the infinite supply of necessities) that Northern European populations based their egalitarian immigration policy on no longer exists - and the domestic population have to compete with the ‘new arrivals’ for resources if/when the becomes scarce?“Question 4: [2:23:53] - “I am an atheist/agnostic but I find atheism insufficient as an ideology, it lacks most of the beneficial aspects of religion, but I can't see myself believing in any religion that I know of. Do you think an organized secular ideology that would incorporate the beneficial aspects of atheism, religion and philosophy would be possible and maybe even beneficial as an alternative?”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.
Please remember to support this show, this philosophy, this conversation at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
With four callers tonight, the first was a police officer who wanted to talk about the Ferguson effect.
And I'll get into what that is in a brief intro to the show.
But the police officer had a lot to say about policing in America which I think you'll find extremely illuminating.
Now, the second caller is the regulatory affairs manager for a small company talking about the crushing regulatory burden that is descending upon small to medium-sized companies.
You know, bigger companies can help write the legislation, a phenomenon known as regulatory capture, and they have the legal departments to be able to survive the onslaught of endless bureaucratic red tape, but his frustration was palpable, and I think we can all understand that.
Third caller wanted to know, with regards to the European migrant crisis, what is going to happen when the imagined infinite supply of resources and necessities goes away?
Hmm, I wonder.
Fourth caller finds atheism insufficient as an ideology, and we had a very good exploration of the strengths and limitations of the atheist position, so I really appreciate that caller as well.
Please follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
You can use our affiliate link, FDRURL.com slash Amazon.
Thank you everyone so much, as always, for your very kind support.
Let's start with some facts before we get on to our first caller.
A study published this year in the Journal of Criminal Justice found that homicides in the 12 months after the Michael Brown shooting...
Now, of course, it's not the Michael Brown shooting that caused these problems, but the fact that the officer was considered guilty and then finally was cleared, but the gentle giant shot down, hands up, don't shoot, execution style, all of the lies that were told about it.
A study of gun violence in Baltimore by crime analyst Jeff Asher showed an inverse correlation with proactive drug arrests when Baltimore cops virtually stopped making drug arrests last year after the rioting that followed the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody shootings soared.
Isn't that shocking?
Comparing the murder rates of 2014 to the rates of 2015, the following increases were seen.
New York City, 5%.
Los Angeles, 10%.
Houston, 23%. Philadelphia, 12%.
Baltimore, 63%.
Washington, D.C., 54%.
Milwaukee, 65%.
In 2015, there was a 17% overall rise in homicides in the 56 biggest U.S. cities with 10 heavily black cities showing motor spikes above 60%.
Isn't it ironic?
The government program called Black Lives Matter...
It has some causality in causing more blacks to get murdered.
In Chicago, where pedestrian stops have fallen nearly 90%, homicides are up 60% in 2016 compared with the same period last year.
Compared with the first four and a half months of 2014, homicides in Chicago are up 95%, according to the police department.
Ah, until 2010, Chicago published The Race of Criminals, but after Mayor Rahm Emanuel was elected, Democrat, I believe.
That stopped.
The 2010 report shows that in Chicago a black person was 24 times more likely than a white person to be arrested for murder, with Hispanics being 6.7 times more likely.
This month, FBI director and official witch slayer James Comey called attention to the rising violence in urban areas.
Homicides increased 9% from the already horrific 2015 figures in the largest 63 cities in the first quarter of 2016.
Non-fatal shootings were up 21% according to a major city's chief's association report.
Survey.
Survey.
FBI Director James Comey, quote, There's a perception that police are less likely to do the marginal additional policing that suppresses crime.
The getting out of your car at two in the morning and saying to a group of guys, what are you doing here?
White House spokesman Josh Earnest immediately accused the FBI director of being, quote, irresponsible and ultimately counterproductive by drawing conclusions based on anecdotal evidence.
Yeah, you go ahead, spokesboy.
You go ahead, Obama sock puppet.
You lecture the director of the FBI about crime.
I'll just be over here lecturing surgeon on how to cut properly.
In the absence of government data, the Washington Post investigated every reported case of a fatal shooting by the police during 2015.
It found 990 cases with the following racial distribution of victims.
Whites, 50 percent.
Blacks, 26.1 percent.
Hispanics, 17.4 percent.
The always generally invisible Asians, 1.4 percent.
And other unknown, 5.2 percent.
It's tough if you lose track of the number of tentacles you're counting.
So, given their proportions in the population, a black person was 2.45 times more likely than a white person to be shot and killed by police.
A Hispanic was 1.24 times more likely and an Asian was only one-third as likely.
Huh, I wonder if here we have another pattern of race and IQ. Asians on top, and then whites, and then Hispanics, and then blacks.
The number of coincidences is truly becoming staggering.
Now, there's no national data, but a five-year study of non-felony arrests in San Francisco found that blacks were 9.6 times more likely than whites, including Hispanics, to be charged with resisting arrest.
See, blacks do get shot more by the police, two and a half times more on average, but they're close to 10 times more likely to be charged with resisting arrest.
And whites were 8.6 times more likely than Asians to be so charged.
So it ain't racism, folks.
In Chicago, from September 2014, too, September 2015, blacks accounted for 77% of arrests for obstruction of justice and resisting arrest, meaning they were 6.8 times more likely than non-blacks to be arrested on those charges.
About 12% of police officers in the United States were black.
Between 2005 and 2015, 16.6% of the 54 officers criminally charged for fatally shooting someone while on duty We're black.
Well, at least their numbers are up somewhere.
So that's a precursor, just a general background to the ongoing tragedy of leftist race-baiting resulting in mounting piles of black corpses.
With that in mind, thank you for your patience, Charlie.
We are talking to you now.
Hello.
Hello.
How are you doing?
Doing good, sir.
How's your day?
It's good.
So, sorry for the data dump at the beginning.
No, no, no.
It's fine.
It's fine.
Does this accord with your experience?
Well, I... Where I live, it's not predominantly black at all.
And that is predominantly Republican.
It's...
It's not too heavily black.
It's more heavily in Hispanics and Latinos.
We can clearly see, or I can clearly see the distaste and animosity towards us.
I mean...
Okay, so sorry, and I forgot to mention...
Charlie's a cop.
So I should have probably mentioned that at the beginning.
Yeah, and sorry if I'm a little distracted right now.
I just, I got an email.
I'm with, I don't know if I can talk about other websites, but there's a law enforcement website that puts out news that talks about all kinds of things.
And it's kind of an emotional thing for me, but there's a picture that just got put out and it says, the quote underneath the photo is, Daddy, please don't be a police officer anymore.
And what happens is there's a small child that attended a funeral of an officer that was killed in the line of duty.
And his father was working the event, and his father was actually at the event part of the motorcade.
And the child recognized the fallen officer and saw him as a family friend.
And once he realized...
And in the photo, it looks like the kid is maybe five or six, seven, around there.
But once the kid realized that, you know, this is what his...
His dad and his friends, or his dad's friend, are doing the same exact jobs.
And when he looked at this, the kid sees, well, he died.
That means my dad can die from the same exact thing.
And I see that just as a result of this...
Artificial hatred towards police.
Because, honestly, if you look...
The way I looked at it, if you look back like 40, 50 years, it wasn't like this.
And I feel like there has been...
There's been people that have pushed a certain agenda and a certain way to always using police as a scapegoat for whenever a policy has failed in its place.
Or using any emergency service because they are the lowest tier of that government's institution.
We are literally as bottom of the ladder as you can be.
So they will use—I feel like it's been used greatly to its advantage of you can blame them.
You know, it's not, hey, our society has problems.
It's these officers are the problem.
This department is the problem.
Well, you're the visible face of state power to people, right?
Not only that, but we are the enforcing class.
And it's alright if I cuss on the show, right?
That doesn't matter?
It is perfectly alright if you cuss on the show.
If we can't cuss about this issue, we can't cuss about much.
Because sometimes I get emotionally charged in an issue and I just go full out.
I want you to not self-censor.
If there's anything you want us to edit afterwards, you can talk to us, but just let rip and we'll pick up the pieces after.
Okay.
So when...
When policies are created, here's the very, very, very unfortunate circumstance of a government policy that is complete crap.
It shouldn't even exist, but it is enforced.
It gets created through special interests or whatever.
Whatever money gets funneled into this giant pool, boom, the law gets created.
It's an ugly thing.
That's not even the worst part.
The worst part is now this bill becomes a law, and now this law is official, and it has to be enforced.
And then we have too many people that I personally work with and that I've seen, and not only are...
You know, just starting out, but are high leadership positions within law enforcement.
Those people are enforcing terrible policies and terrible laws, and it just, all it does is ruin relationships with that individual, or with the department.
And it doesn't matter what my uniform looks like and what a uniform on the East Coast look like.
None of that matters.
If my actions do anything to hinder the public's view of law enforcement, then it affects every single officer that they might come in contact with.
When you see that YouTube video of that officer pulling his gun because he got scared for whatever reason, and most of the time you don't know what's going on in the officer's mind, you don't know the circumstances of what's going on, but I've seen plenty of videos out there where it's very bad situations and officers that probably but I've seen plenty of videos out there where it's very bad situations and officers that probably shouldn't be doing what they're doing morally, but the way it's written into law, they And that hurts us.
That hurts the view.
That makes the public not want to be around us and dislike us.
And then all that adds is this massive cycle of hatred that just comes right back in because it means that the officers hate serving the community because the community hates them and it just becomes this massive circle that in the end makes everything crumble and light on fire.
What are some of the laws that if you had the magic wand, you would relinquish?
Well, my state is one of the best states to live in to be a firearms owner in.
And I wish almost every state would...
I actually wish that every state would adopt that because...
There's already laws that are on the books that make it so that felons can't get guns, certain people can't get guns, that's perfectly fine.
Once you commit a murder, and you are convicted of that crime, and you have gone to jail, you've gone to prison, and you've done your time, you have forfeited your right, you have given that right up, based off of what the society says, even in a free society.
In a free society...
I would still be okay with, listen, you've committed a murder and it wasn't justified.
It wasn't self-defense.
It wasn't anything.
You just cold blood killed somebody.
We're taking away your freedom of you having a second amendment of you having a firearm.
But I wish that...
Anyone could have any type of firearm that they could legally purchase.
There's some states, and especially, I don't know if you've heard about it yet, but in California, the stuff that they're doing in California right now, they're gutting that state.
They're going to drive so many people away, and they're going to just...
The stuff they're doing, they're making it so that...
There's grandfathering something in, and they're removing that.
They're saying no more grandfathering in things.
So, weapons that used to be...
You're not allowed to have them, but if you did and they were grandfathered in, those are no longer going to exist.
It's get that thing out of the state or destroy it, one of the two.
They're doing that.
They're going to be doing background checks on ammunition, which is another...
Very unfortunate thing.
There's so many things that they're doing just to target firearms.
And if I had a choice, I would say, listen, why is it that we have to take...
Take a freedom that's in the Bill of Rights, it's in the Constitution, why do we have to take that away from people that have never done anything wrong in their life?
Or why do we have to put restrictions on those people?
Because it's not that it's being banned away from them, it's that the loopholes they have to go to in order to reach that, it's too strenuous, it takes too much money, there's too much stuff involved in order to exercise a freedom.
Well, and even if you jump through all those hoops, there may be some other restriction tomorrow that makes it all worthless.
Yep, exactly.
A new law can be created every single day that you don't even know exists that can make you a criminal.
That's another thing that I have a problem with is we have...
We have a way in which—or the country is ran in which you could be free one day and then—or you could be a law-abiding citizen one day and then be a felon the next just because a certain law was created that you don't even know about as an individual, something you most likely didn't even agree on and you were not notified of.
And, you know, I guess it's the individual's responsibility to go seek out that knowledge and seek out that information.
But in your day-to-day life of you living, trying to survive, trying to go about your life with everything going on, do you really have the time to look up every single law that's been created that day?
It's completely absurd.
You can.
I mean, when I was a kid, the phrase was, ignorance of the law is no excuse.
Yeah.
But then when you look at the Tower of Babel, I mean, it's not just laws.
It's tax laws, it's regulations, you name it.
As zoning, I mean, we are surrounded by this strangling spiderweb of infinite regulations.
No human being knows them all.
There's no possible way that there's any single human being that could ever know all of these laws.
So the idea that ignorance of the law is no excuse, okay, that's fine if you have like the Ten Commandments.
It's a little bit different when you have the 10 billion bureaucratic strangleholds.
Why do we have to have a hundred different types of lawyers?
Because there's so many types of laws.
There's so much involved in that that there's no possible way...
That a free individual can go about and live their life without committing a felony.
And you know what?
That statistic where it's all like the average American commits four felonies a day?
Completely true.
There's so many times where I've done a traffic stop or I've approached an individual and I've seen them commit like five traffic violations, three different felonies, something like that.
And we're talking, this is stuff that wasn't a felony 20 years ago, but now all of a sudden it is.
And the problem that I have is that when I go and approach that person, most of the time I'm going up to them, and I do not like to write tickets.
I don't like doing any of that stuff.
I already am funded by taxpayers, which I'm not fond of at all.
Actually, I have a severe distaste for it.
I do not like...
Having money given to me by default because there's no...
I've not done anything to validate that.
Like the person at McDonald's creates an item, gives it to the individual.
The individual gives them money based off of how much value they have.
If people think the food is bad, they don't go there anymore.
We've seen massive sales drops in a lot of different businesses because people just don't like the product or the service that they're putting out.
Government, you don't have that.
We are...
They're required by law to give us their money.
And actually, it's not they're required by law to give us their money.
They're required by law to allow us to take their money.
And if they don't, then we'll come after them.
And having that, why would anybody under that circumstance want to Charge them even more money.
Why would I want to write them a ticket for whatever?
The way I operate is I go up to the individual and I talk to them.
I try to educate more than anything of, hey, you were speeding.
You were going this fast over the speed limit.
And then I get all their information.
I look them up, make sure they don't have anything.
Because listen, if the person has like five speeding tickets and I'm number six, then Unfortunately, I'm gonna have to write them a ticket.
Well, listen, I mean, you're preaching to the choir when it comes to, I don't like speeders.
Yeah.
You know, especially when you become a parent, you don't like speeders.
Oh, yeah.
Because, you know, you have kids on the road, you've got kids in your car, I just, you know, okay, everyone coasts a little bit over sometimes, you know, but the people who are like way over...
That is some dangerous stuff.
There are people weaving in and out of traffic at 30 clicks or 40 clicks over the speed limit.
Yeah, those guys, I'm happy that they get sanctioned because they can cause some real harm.
And that actually is almost like a form of aggression that they're creating.
Driving that fast, it's reckless, it's dangerous behavior.
I'm sorry.
Speeding, I guess, wasn't a good one.
A better one would be driving in the carpool lane.
Yeah, or maybe not coming to a complete stop at a stop line.
There's excessive acceleration from a complete stop.
So let's say you're at a stop light or a stop sign.
If the officer feels like you accelerated too fast, then you can get pulled over from that.
That law was obviously created for street racing and stuff like that, but it can be abused, which I'm assuming it has been.
Can't they all, right?
All laws have a sort of seemingly sensible, well, we want to do this for street racing, and next thing you know.
And another way I've always looked at laws is...
Whenever there's a law or whenever the government has a ruling over something, whenever you as a citizen have the government do something, what essentially is being done is the government, or you are saying, I'm too dumb to handle this, or the government...
Is the only smart person that can complete this duty?
I mean, you want to talk about something really simple.
Let's talk about United States Postal Service compared to FedEx-UPS. I mean, the degree of the efficiency of how that all works.
The federal government, the only reason why they have the United States Postal Service and the only reason why it still exists is because it's been there and it's like, well, might as well keep it around kind of thing.
It's not like it...
I believe that FedEx and UPS could send your mail faster and more efficiently and more cost-effective than those other guys, or than United States Postal Service.
I'm a strong proponent of privatization and taking a government and bringing it down to an extremely small local level.
If that, but mostly privatizing almost every possible aspect of what the government can issue, or what the government can do.
Because, I mean, one of the chief examples that backs this is you can go to government-ran DMV and wait three hours, or you can pay a little bit extra money and go to a private DMV and be there for 15 minutes.
And you can get the exact stuff done at each one.
So it's which one you want to do.
Right.
It's stuff like that.
One of my big things is I care deeply about having children, starting a family.
I'm engaged and I've been with her for multiple years.
I have this inherent desire, and I watched one of your videos previously that talked about when times get really tough, we have a biological kind of network in us that is telling us, hey, we need to start pumping kids out really, really quick because times are getting really tough.
And the more kids we have, the better success we have at one of the kids being successful or one of the kids being able to make it through these tough times and pursue on.
And for me, I look at that and it's all like, I have this need and this desire and want of having kids and starting that family.
But at the same time, I feel like I live in such a hostile world right now.
And especially with what I do and everything that's going on, I just, I'm really worried about taking that step and bringing that child into this world.
Because I can clearly see how things are going and I don't want that child to be brainwashed in and taught all these things about how the state is great and how the state does all this stuff for you and it's an amazing thing to have as well as With all the other people that are in the city,
I'm worried about all of them and what they'll do to influence the minds of my young.
It's not that I want to take them away from all of it and I want to go live in the mountains somewhere, secluded, and homeschool them.
No, you can have a lot of influence over how your kids develop.
And of course, you don't want your kids to be at the age of four or five when they see another cop funeral, they'll be asking you, please don't be a cop anymore.
Let me ask you something, though, if you don't mind.
In the cop shop, right, in the police force that you work in, my sense is that a lot of people get into policing because they want to bring order, they want to They want to promote virtue, they want to fight the bad guys, you know, kind of like a superhero, right?
And I think then when you cross over into the actual work, I think it's a little bit different than people imagine.
Do you think that's a fairly common experience, that actually being a cop as opposed to thinking about being a cop or what you see on TV and so on, that it's different in the execution than it is in the imagination?
Yeah, that's a good question.
When I was talking to Michael earlier, I said the best way I can explain all of it, of doing the job and being involved in it, is like an Oreo, where laws are supposed to be black and white, but the thing is you're taking in the black and white at all times, so unfortunately you can't differentiate which one is which.
And, you know, when you're looking at it, you look at it and you're like, oh, that looks so good.
I want to do it.
You know, you want to eat that Oreo.
You want to get into law enforcement.
You want to do that.
And then once you're finally in and you're in it for so long, you're like, oh, man, I haven't eaten these Oreos, constantly having them.
I'm dying.
I have diabetes.
I'm...
Overweight now.
These things are slowly killing me.
Yeah, they taste great.
And, you know, it's...
Oh, you get your lifetime supply of Oreos, but it's just...
The long run, it's so damaging.
I mean, the traumas that I've seen...
I can't believe what some people do to children.
That's one of the things that I'll never be able to get over is the stuff that I've seen happen to kids and animals...
What sort of stuff have you seen?
I mean, just one of the best examples I can give you of how far of a de-evolution I've seen within the city is a fire department is responding to a, I think he was four, but a four-year-old that was unconscious, not breathing anything like that.
And they responded to him.
He was upstairs in a bedroom or something like that.
The parents were downstairs.
And the fire department was responding to that.
They called us out because, unfortunately, any time emergency services are seen in the ghettos, people come out everywhere.
People really do hinder...
That's one of the things I don't understand is people will hinder fire department.
They'll hinder EMTs.
They'll target them.
They'll throw stuff at them.
I mean, that's more of like in a rioting situation.
But in these, I've seen fire department where they don't feel safe about going into this apartment complex without police going in there first.
They don't want to knock on the wrong door.
To go respond to this call and in this instance they responded to the call and we got called out there after fire had already showed up and was inside the house and we came in because the mother was yelling and the mother wanted to go to her child and see her child and be around the child and When I was talking to Fire,
and I didn't have to cut the paper on that one, but when we took the child to the ER, the doctor did state that based off of how long the coloration of the skin and based off of how long All the effects have kind of settled in.
The child has already been dead for five hours.
And I'm saying, five hours for a four-year-old to be neglected?
So obviously it's an ME case, or I'm sorry, medical examiner case.
And, you know, the county is going to come in and look at everything.
But something like that...
It's just like the parents not caring and then the worst part about it all is the male figure.
I'm going to say he's the male figure because no way he's a dad.
He wasn't a biological father.
He was just dating the mom.
But...
He didn't want to be there.
Because the second we showed up, he's like, oh, you know, that's not my kid.
I just...
I got places to go.
I got things to do.
I got people to see.
We're like, well, do you live here?
He's like, yeah, this is my house.
This is my apartment.
And we're like, why do you want to leave now that we're here?
I mean, if you're quote-unquote going to be the stepfather in this situation, you should care about the life of anyone under your household.
Yeah.
And the fact that he just wanted to leave, he wanted to go, and the mother was beginning to get violent with us because she wanted to see her baby.
It's all like, you had five hours to go see your kid.
You had five hours to go up to this room to see the four-year-old.
And the best thing, and here's the best part about all this, which is terrible to say, but when CPS came, because they had three other children, when CPS came, we talked to the other kids.
And the other kids told, like, children have no filter when it comes to truth and honesty.
They told us everything.
They said that, you know, the four-year-old went up to his parents about having trouble breathing.
He has asthma.
And the parents just dismissed it.
These people, they have a child.
You have to care for this human being until they're able to survive on their own and they just dismiss anything that's wrong with this child.
The problem I have is that when we have the law-abiding citizens that live in our society, that pay the taxes, they do everything right in their life, and they still get screwed over, something happens to them.
And, I mean, if we want to talk about something big, I mean, the war on drugs is probably one of the biggest things that I can't support.
If it's not for distribution or sale, which you can clearly tell, certain amounts are for distribution and sale, which is still a felony, and I have to handle that a different way.
If it's just like some college kids that I've They got a joint in their pocket kind of thing, right?
Exactly, exactly.
Or I smell it in the car.
It's just like, hey, listen, I was in college once.
I know what it's like.
All right, this is beyond me.
Why would I tie up valuable resources when I can be responding to other calls?
Some of the calls that officers do not care about, but I find extremely important, or that I personally find important, are like...
Welfare checks, and that's somebody hasn't heard from their grandma in a week.
So they call whichever municipality is closest to where she lives, and they say, hey, she lives at this address, can you guys go check on her?
I take those as often as I can and whenever they're up in our bank.
Bank is like all the calls that are kind of pending.
So whenever they're in there, whenever I have that, I try to take those because that's somebody that is requesting us to do a service for them and that's them.
If I take that welfare check, I'm not only going to validate, hey, this person's perfectly fine, you know, this is what's going on, but I'm going to...
Sorry, I was a little confused there.
Welfare check, I thought you mean cashing a welfare check.
You mean go and check on someone who...
Okay, I got it.
Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
I should change it.
I go to that house.
I take that welfare check.
I go pass it.
A welfare check is when somebody, like a family member, hasn't heard from somebody in a long time or in a while and they're worried about them and they want us to make sure that that person's okay.
I've only had it happen once where I've gone there and it actually has resulted in a fatality of some sorts.
But most of the time it's just like the little old lady doesn't realize that her phone got unplugged by her dog or something like that.
But I do those because it eases somebody's mind.
It's like they were really worried about their mom or their grandma or something like that and now they're good because I've done something.
And that's when you're going to have somebody that...
They've asked us to do something.
We've done it, and we've made sure there's basically no victims.
Well, it's a win-win.
It's not like you're going to bust down Granny's door and find that she's running some interdimensional math lab or something.
It's just, oh, it's nice.
There's a lot of guys that they look at that and it's like busy work.
They don't care about it.
It's not priority.
They want to be out there busting up crack houses and stuff like that, which I'm behind that.
I like putting criminals in the back of my vehicle as well, but what I don't like is I don't like making that my sole focus where all I want to do is go out there and just start cuffing up people for...
You know, all these drug crimes in which this substance is illegal because this paper says so.
So therefore, you must not do it, and if you do, you're going to be put in a cell.
I don't like that.
And do you have a sense, Charlie, of there's a standard argument that says that it's not just the arrest of people who have drugs or who are using drugs that is the problem, but a lot of the criminality stems from the fact that the drugs are already legal, that they're wildly expensive, that you've got to steal like 10 that they're wildly expensive, that you've got to steal like 10 times the value of the drug just to fence it on the black market to get your
So if you want, you know, $3,000 worth of drugs a month, you've got to steal $30,000 worth of stuff like this, this domino escalation effect that comes from the war on drugs and that so many other crimes are tied to the very fact that they're illegal.
Yeah.
I don't like any of it.
I wish that you could literally just go to your Circle K and same as cigarettes and alcohol.
I mean, if we just regulated all the same stuff just like that, it would be a lot simpler.
Our society, I think, would move a lot better into the right direction.
It's a funny thing.
Up here in Canada, Justin Trudeau, the new prime minister, he ran on the platform, I think, of legalizing marijuana.
And then he found that Canada had signed like three international treaties that said they'd never do that.
But everyone who voted for him was like, woohoo, he got in.
Now it's all legal.
And now the cops are like completely messed up because everyone's just smoking and toking.
And what are we going to do?
Everyone thinks it's legal, but it's not.
It's just like in Colorado when they're like, oh yeah, we can start selling weed and it's perfectly allowed.
We can have it now.
And people were like smoking at parks and that's illegal.
You can do it inside your home.
That's it.
You can't do it at the dispensary.
You can't do it in your own car because that's considered a DWI. And I don't have any problem with that either.
I think that's perfectly right.
Yeah, and that's perfectly logical, right?
But a lot of people were just chilling right outside their house, but chilling on the sidewalk, just smoking a joint.
It's like, but that's illegal.
And...
When you just leave things up to the free market, it always just fixes itself.
You don't have to push to have any real change done with anything through government because if you just throw it out in the free market, it's going to solve the problem.
I mean, with cigarettes, yeah, cigarettes are regulated.
You can buy them almost anywhere.
Or not almost anywhere.
You can buy them at, you know, where you normally buy cigarettes.
But here's the thing.
There's all these websites online.
There's all these ads, everything that's saying, like, let's be the generation that stops smoking.
Smoking's terrible for you.
Don't do it.
And it's just like the free market is basically saying, okay, cigarettes are out there.
You can buy them if you're of age.
But we highly recommend that you don't because they are terrible for you.
And when you have government regulation, it's just saying like, let's say if cigarettes were completely banned, people would just be smoking it because it's like, oh, they're banned.
Oh, it's this forbidden fruit.
And people just want it more because of that.
And then you have a crime element now because all these cigarettes are...
this extra crime element is going to go in there that's going to utilize selling it.
Just like what's happening in Canada where you have people that I believe they purchase in Canada and then they export down here illegally and sell it here illegally.
Yeah, I'm sure that happens.
Yeah, I'm not too sure if that is exactly what's happening, but I do believe that that is one of the things that's happening.
I mean, if you just make it so that there's completely free trade and we have no regulation on that product, then it won't matter.
Then you won't have this crime element inserted into anything.
Well, and people who genuinely...
Like, there are people who use drugs and use it, I dare say, in a somewhat responsible manner.
I mean, I'm a big fan of no drugs at all, but, you know, I like The Doors.
So, I'm not getting Pink Floyd, yeah?
So, Sgt.
Pepper's a great album.
So, there are some people who use it and still are able to function.
Okay, maybe Jim Morrison's not the best example, but there are other people who use it, still able to function.
But the people who really spiral down into addiction, it would be really nice to...
To have them legal so that they could get the help that they need.
Now, I'm curious, I'm really curious about, I've sort of wanted to be on a fly on the wall at the cops locker room or the cops area.
Which is where, like with the Ferguson effect stuff, like with the fact that, you know, Officer Slager, Darren Wilson, now with Freddie Gray, I mean, I know the cop just got exonerated, the first one who's up.
I mean, what do you guys think of all of this stuff?
I mean, there's got to be a pretty big topic of conversation.
I wish I could tell you that we all have extremely strong opinions on it and that this is something that we get outraged about and we talk about all the time, but it's not.
We have what's called a roll call.
And beginning to shift...
You start at a certain time, you hit the streets at a certain time.
Between starting the shift and hitting the streets, you're in roll call.
That's when your sergeant comes in or any supervisor comes in, gives you any information that they need to about the day.
That's when training will come in and run you through a PowerPoint of whatever crap they need to shove down your throat that day.
And then...
And that's also when, once all that's done, that's when all the guys can, we all just kind of sit around in there until it's time to hit the streets and talk about whatever it is that we want, and we screw around.
And I'll tell you this, the best way to compare what happens in there to anything in the real world is like a high school locker room, where we are just talking crap to each other, we are having fun, it's just like the...
I would say the best part about work is roll call.
There's nothing that beats it.
It's the best part.
And the guys that you work with are some of the most amazing people you've ever met.
I mean, it's a true brotherhood.
There are times that we do talk on a more personal level about some of the issues.
When we were having to talk about...
Or when the stuff with Ferguson was going on...
When we had the stuff with Baltimore and the Ferguson stuff...
We really didn't have anything going on here, but we were ready and we were kind of talking about it.
And we were all talking about it.
The mentality and the way I strongly feel about this is the career is a gamble.
You don't know when your day in court will come, but someday it probably will come.
And when it does, will the media...
Have an open cross for you.
It's either, is that cross filled at the moment or is it open for you?
Because...
Sorry, what do you mean by an open cross?
Oh, media crucifixions.
Oh, okay.
Okay, got it.
Yeah, so, I mean, when we're talking about that, it doesn't matter what the law states or what the government does, you know, whether you're going to prison or whether you're completely free, none of that matters.
The evidence doesn't matter.
It's all thrown out the window.
It all matters who's sending the message and how they're sending the message.
What is that message?
And the message is that these guys are pure evil.
That they...
for whatever reason, they targeted that person, or this was just a gentle soul that has never done anything wrong in their life.
Is it an election year?
Do we need to get a Democrat elected?
Precisely.
Is there another hoax that they're being consumed by?
Does it serve someone's political agenda?
I mean, that's terrifying stuff to realize that the vast majority of, in these incidents, the vast majority of influence occurs not in the law, but in the media.
That's a terrifying amount of power to hand to a pretty irresponsible group of people.
That is mob mentality at its finest.
And that is the most terrifying thing that I have seen is mob mentality.
People that would normally never do anything, but hey, everybody's doing it, how are they going to catch us all?
So they join in.
Oh, you mean like if there's a riot or there's a dead snowball effect?
Not even if there's a riot, just like, oh, okay, so everybody can say that we hate cops and we hate you all for doing this one action or because this man on the East Coast did this.
That means everyone on the West Coast is the exact same.
We just hate you all equally.
And it allows people that would never say anything like that, they can speak freely about it.
But then, when I come along and I say, hey, I have a problem with this, or I don't agree with that, then I'm destroyed.
One of the biggest things that I find extremely gut-wrenching is when I see the officers that have been reprimanded and actually Either had to resign or taken some sort of penalties at work.
Something that's affected their job just because they were on Facebook and they said, I don't agree with this.
Or, hey, that guy committed a crime, clearly.
They'll be saying to the rioters, All those writers are violent.
They can literally say to the writers in Ferguson, rioters are violent.
And that person would have been destroyed, probably had to resign all this stuff.
You know, it's just...
It's media manipulation of a group that...
Reef or response to everything on a emotional level not a logical level because me I I look at I I have to remove emotions from everything I mean there's some times where some of the stuff you see you want to break down and cry because you feel so bad about it or it's all like that person is that's that's just like my cousin or that's just like my mom something like that you It wants to break you down, but you can't.
You have to be objective.
You cannot take anything personally.
You just have to go straight at it and be as professional as possible.
And unfortunately, when we want to speak out, we want to say, no, that's wrong.
You shouldn't be saying things like that.
Or, no, they were in the right because of this and this.
And they try to produce facts.
And it's just like this hate train comes along and just plows right through you.
Oh man, I mean, you're preaching to the converted as far as that goes.
I mean, I put out, you know, I come from a libertarian background and some libertarians are like, cops equal automatic bad.
And, you know, I put out lots of videos trying to get to the bottom of various police citizen encounters, Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman and others, and just trying to get to the facts, just trying to get at the facts.
And people just lose their shit.
They lose their minds.
And it's like, look, I'm interested in the facts.
I don't have a particular narrative.
I don't think cops are good.
I don't think cops are bad.
The Ferguson fact is teaching me that cops are pretty damn necessary at the moment.
So, you know, that's just a basic fact.
But I'm just trying to get to the facts here.
Then people, you're defending cops.
It's like, how is, if it's factual, how can it be partisan?
That's sort of fundamental aspect of philosophy.
It's just a fact.
But you stop bringing out facts, and if it cracks people's particular bigoted narrative, and anti-cop is a big bigoted narrative in a lot of places these days, they just assume that you're as partisan as they are.
Yeah, and it's...
I wish I could say stuff to that, but it's accurate and it's...
It's just...
One of the things that I've actually asked some of the very veteran guys that are, you know, 20-plus years, they're like two to three years from retirement, or some of the guys that have been there for 10 years, you know...
As far as I've seen from the movies, that's when you've really got to be careful.
One day from retirement!
Yeah.
But I've talked to those guys, and...
With those guys, I've asked them, you know, is it worth it?
Is this job that you do worth it?
Do you think that it's worth serving this city or doing whatever it is that we do to benefit them?
And honestly, like 9 out of 10 times, they say, no, it's not worth it, but I do it because...
You know, this is what my family's done for years.
This is a generation thing.
So it's like, I might as well do it.
This is the only thing that I could do.
Or, this is my city.
You know, I want to help the people in my city.
But no, it's not worth it.
Because...
Sorry, but what does it mean to say it's worth it?
I'm not sure what that means.
How would they know it was worth it or what would have to change?
Do you mean in terms of it getting better?
No, what I mean by worth it is doing the job and taking on the risk that someday you might be the criminal.
If whatever it is that you do is justified or not, you might have done something that you felt is justified and your other people feel it is justified, but you might get charged with a crime.
Or, yeah, if people have...
Weeks to pour over a decision you have to make in half a second.
Yep, exactly.
And if they have all the facts of afterwards, and they have all the facts of beforehand, and with the limited facts that you have in the split-second moment that could be the decision between life and death, other people have all the luxury in the world to say, oh yes, but he was driving from here, and he was going there, and this was happening before, and this was going to happen afterwards, and this is where...
It's like, you don't have that information in the moment.
Yeah.
And then the other worth it is, is my life worth it?
Is helping the people of this city, helping the society, is that worth putting my life on the line every day?
And I think that's the bigger one, is it worth risking my life for?
And a lot of guys are saying, no, it's not, but someone's got to do the job, and that's why we're still here.
Well, of course, I feel this, obviously.
I feel this as a philosopher that If I'm not doing it, who's doing it?
Like, what's going to happen if I don't do it?
And you guys are the thin blue line, as we can see from the Ferguson effect.
If you guys stop doing what you're doing, a lot more people get killed.
That's a pretty tough job to quit.
You know, you quit a restaurant, it's like, eh, someone else can come be the waiter.
But you quit being a cop, I can really understand that some of those ghosts might fall at you.
Yeah, I had an opportunity to work for a high school, a public high school.
And while I was doing my mentoring, during my degree process, while I was doing my mentoring, I kind of was like, oh man, I don't know about this now.
I know I'm four years in, but I really don't know about going through with this and making this a career.
And then once I got a job offer And it was to a pretty bad school.
I thought I could go in there and help the youth and do my thing to better society.
And the problem was, you as an individual can only do so much, but the The real thing is then you have all the other teachers there that are pushing the opposite of your teachings, what you're trying to show these kids.
You have all these teachers that are on the complete opposite that will shun you in ways and target you.
You're the misfit because you believe these kids should think on their own and not ask questions to the state like, hey, If you want this, why do you want this?
What is behind that?
You know, a lot of the things I saw from the education system and from teachers was of just like, you just follow along.
You know what?
This is the big education book that they want you to push on to these kids.
These are the lessons they want you to teach.
This is what you're going to teach.
And I couldn't get behind that because, I mean, what they were teaching was a lot of the stuff that was completely opposed to anything I believed in.
And then not only do you have that, but then I'm trying to tell parents, you know, hey, this is what was going on with this student, you know, you should be very careful about this, you should keep your eye on this.
Like, telling parents that Hey, I saw this kid getting in with the drug crowd at school and calling that parent directly and saying that I think you should watch your child because I think that they might end up doing drugs because they're hanging around with these kids.
They're starting to act more and more like them.
They're doing a lot of stuff like that.
And the parents just get mad at me and then call and complain about me.
And it's just like, sorry for caring about your child.
Oh yeah, this is totally different.
Like when I was a kid, Parents were very respectful towards teachers and now they view them as like maids to some imperious rich woman.
Alright, gotta move on to the next caller, but I just wanted to give you the chance.
What is it that you want people to know about being a cop?
What is it that you want them to understand that a lot of times they're not getting from other places?
I mean, there's the terrible cliche of I don't make the law, I just enforce it.
And everyone knows about that.
I mean, it is the truth, but an officer can decide if they want to enforce something or not.
I guess the biggest thing is...
Something that I personally, and I don't know how other people feel about it, but I personally don't like it when I have people come up and, you know, say like, oh, thank you so much for what you do and I'm not even doing anything in that current moment.
Now, if I've responded to a call and I've assisted that person in some way or I've helped them out and they tell me thank you and thank you for everything I do, then I feel appreciated.
But when I just stand there And I haven't done anything.
It troubles me whenever I hear that because I'm like, I'm paying.
My income is just being stolen from you and you're thanking me for it.
Well, I mean, to be fair though, it could be that they see what life is like without a cop standing there.
They see the bad guys moving away when you're standing there.
So you don't actually have to do anything.
You just have to be there and a lot of people's lives are going to feel more secure.
I guess you're right.
And then the other flip of the coin from that is there are the people that I don't have to say anything to or do anything to.
And they'll just flip me off or tell me to go die or something like that.
While I'm working traffic, I'm at an intersection where the light went out and people are flipping me off because the light went out.
Whatever reason they're doing it for.
So in situations like that, I guess I want people to understand, and most people know, especially ones that watch your show, understand that everyone's just a human being, and it doesn't matter what they do for work or all this stuff.
In the end, we're all just human beings, and let's just try to treat each other like human beings.
The big thing is...
Never jump to conclusions.
Always have facts and evidence to back anything.
Too many times do I have people arguing with me when they don't even know the laws, they don't even know the facts, and they're just in the wrong because they don't have anything supporting their arguments.
Yeah, and I mean, if we would all, I think, those of us more interested in long-term goals of freedom, we would like a different system.
But the reality is that you have what you have.
And you have the welfare state that you have.
You have the drug laws.
You have the society that you have.
And if people want to say, oh, you know, the cops are just automatically bad.
Okay, well, if you want to push back, as the focus in effect has shown, you've got blood on your hands.
Like, if you want the cops to not act...
Hundreds and hundreds of people, in addition, are going to get murdered.
You know what?
And that's important for people to understand.
Push back on the cops, hate on the cops.
Okay.
Then you have to accept the blood that's on your hands from the cops' fear of activity, from the inhibition for assertive policing, from, as I said, the little policing that can help prevent the bigger crimes.
You can push back and hate on the cops all you want.
You just have to accept the fact that you are going to get hundreds of people killed as the result of that.
And those people are going to be fatherless.
And mothers and children.
And people are going to miss them and it's going to destroy people's lives.
And it's not just murder.
There's going to be rapes.
There's going to be assaults.
There's going to be thefts.
If you're going to push back and paralyze the cops with the system that we have at the moment, you are going to have blood on your hands.
I don't want that blood on my hands.
I'm pretty sensitive to that kind of stuff.
I'm like Lady Macbeth at night rather than during the day.
It bothers me.
So I can't I can't take a stand that I know is going to get people killed.
I'm just concerned that other people do.
I feel terrible for Europe right now.
I can't tell you how bad I feel for police in Europe.
It's just...
I don't know how they do it.
I mean, for me...
That's a whole new ballgame, and I really do feel compassion.
I should say, so the stuff I was saying earlier, to conclude with, that was all just cliches.
The one thing I actually do want everyone or at least want you to know, which I assume you already do, is do not push at law enforcement to make change.
The individual is the one that can make change because we will enforce and do anything that need it or do anything as a result of that change.
But if you push up against us, we're not the ones that go around.
You're not Congress.
You can't change the law.
Yeah, we can't.
We're not the ones that are just like, listen, we're all going to stop enforcing the law.
And then that means that.
I wish we could just do that, but barely any of the guys are on that page, on the page of this law is unconstitutional, I'm not going to enforce it.
But I wish that people as a whole really saw it and just said, you know what?
Pushing at the police is not going to solve any problems.
The thing that will solve problems is if we push against the politicians, if we push against the laws, if we force change on that end, and we force change from the very, very, very top, it will slowly trickle down in the right directions.
Because, like I said, we're the bottom rung of the ladder.
You can't push anything to us.
We can't solve any problems.
I mean, I can be as nice as I want on duty.
I can do all this stuff.
And you know what's going to happen?
I'm going to go to work tomorrow and some thug is going to shoot me.
And then it doesn't matter all the work I did.
I mean, yeah, it's going to impact some people's lives, but it's only going to do so much at just a very small position.
If they want change and they want the best possible change, it starts at the very, very top and it has to work itself down.
It's the only way.
All right.
Well, thanks for your call.
I really, really appreciate it.
Keep us posted about how you're doing.
And I really hope that people listen to this kind of perspective.
You know, and I fall and pray to this too.
It's easy to condemn people unless you take a walk in their shoes.
So I really appreciate that call.
Alright, up next we have Chris.
Chris wrote in and said, That's from Chris.
Well, hey, Chris.
It's a great question.
And a stat that I use regularly, which people really need to get, is that if regulations had stayed at post-Second World War levels in the United States, the gross domestic product would not be 15 trillion, but 52 or 53 trillion dollars.
That's how much of a drag increasing regulations has been.
And then we'd have more than enough money to deal with things like poverty and abuse and so on.
So the question comes up a lot.
With regards to do politicians or lawmakers regularly, do they have good intentions or not?
And I guess my question would be, how could you possibly test for that?
Well, I... Hello?
Yeah.
I don't know.
I imagine there's some lobby groups that you could look into what kind of influence they have.
No, but what I mean is, of course regulators are going to say they have good intentions.
They're not going to say, you know, we're foggy, sadistic bastards who really enjoy making people dance to our bureaucratic tune, right?
I mean, they're not going to say that they're They really get off on controlling people and it gives them a dopamine of sadistic satisfaction.
They're going to say, well, you know, we're trying to keep things organized, we're trying to keep people safe, we're trying to do the right thing, which is exactly what a sadist would do, right?
Because then they'd get to torture you with their good intentions.
So I guess my question is, how would we ever know if somebody has good intentions or is just pretending to?
To be honest, I guess there really isn't any.
I'd like to think that people do generally have good intentions.
We all live together in the same society.
I'm sorry to keep interrupting, but what evidence do you have that people generally have good intentions?
Well, I guess I believe as I think you've expressed before that people do respond to incentives and we do have an incentive to To live in the society that we do.
That's barely anything.
To live in the society that we do?
That's not even nothing, right?
I mean, my argument that people exist in society doesn't speak at all to motives, right?
Right.
Well, I do think that...
You have good intentions about people's good intentions, but I'm suspicious of yours now, too.
Right, right.
Well, I mean...
The way that a lot of these regulations come up, I should let you know, the industry that I'm in is medical, right?
Oh yeah, so you guys got some regulations.
Yeah, yeah.
And it seems very easy to pass these regulations whenever something comes up.
And this is the frustration I experience when I see the way that this sort of relentless Train of increased regulations comes up is that often it's due to one incident or one company and that gets publicized a lot.
And when people see this, it almost seems like an inevitable progress.
Well, it's a problem-reaction-solution, right?
I had Dr.
Mary Ruart, R-W-A-R-T, on the show a while back ago, a couple of times, I think, and she pointed out that the thalidomide scare was what, thalidomide was a drug supposedly given to women for solving queasiness or nausea during pregnancy, and unfortunately, it produced some deformities.
And as a result of this, The FDA was created and now, like, she's calculated millions and millions of deaths because of drugs withheld from the American public by the FDA that are perfectly legal in Europe and other places.
And so, yeah, you have a couple of hundred mutations and birth defects, which is terrible.
And the solution is to inflict hundreds of, sorry, to inflict millions of deaths on the American public as a whole through hyperregulation.
This is just the way That people are trained.
If there's a problem, you run to the government, the government passes a law, and bingo bango bongo, the problem magically flies away, and it's never seen from again.
There are no unintended consequences of your legislation.
There's never any such thing as regulatory capture, where big corporations Team up with governments and politicians in order to write legislation that is supposed to be regulatory, but in fact benefits large corporations at the expense of small to medium-sized corporations who don't have the legal resources necessary for compliance.
Yes, I'm looking at you in particular, the finance industry.
And so people just have this, it's a religion.
And it's worse than a religion, because at least a religion is just you and God.
This is a religion where everyone has to go to church and get beaten up.
In the past, when people didn't know where species came from, where the world came from, why there was lightning, well, they just made up these answers and called those answers religion.
And that gave them an immediate kind of emotional, ah, I've answered the question.
The sea is stormy because Poseidon is angry because somebody was doing a dance.
So no more dancing!
At least not that way, and Poseidon will be happy, there'll be no more storms and no more tsunamis.
So they get this short-term relief.
By imagining an answer that makes the problem go away in their minds.
The problem is, of course, that answer then calcifies, becomes dogma, becomes faith, and then what happens is it becomes wrong to look for a true answer because you have a false answer.
And this is what's happened in the realm of religion, in the realm of the state.
We've got a problem.
You run the government, you fax government, you email government, you yell at government, you have protests, and the government does something, and then everyone assumes the problem has been solved.
Nobody follows up, nobody figures things out.
You know, there was a terrible problem called apartheid in South Africa.
See?
White people were in charge.
That was terrible.
And so, through a variety of trade sanctions and boring concerts, The whites were chased out of power, and now things are falling apart.
Does anybody circle back?
No.
Because they just, whites in power, that's bad.
Whites in charge, bad.
You know, okay, well, you've got a black IQ sub-Saharan population with an average IQ of 70 to 80, and if they're in charge, things aren't going to go very well.
Doesn't matter.
Get the whites out of power.
Magic.
Everything is better.
Get the government to pass the law.
Magic.
Everything is better.
And this religion has to run its course.
You know, it seems that, you know, you can't talk people out of faith in the power of the state.
It doesn't matter how much empirical evidence accumulates to the contrary.
They just have this belief.
One more law and, you know, boy, it's going to be all perfect.
And...
You know, do the intentions of the...
I don't care.
I don't...
Like, who cares?
I mean, to take an extreme...
Like, nobody goes back to the 1920s or the 1930s and say, well, what were the intentions of the Nazi voters?
Did they have good intentions or bad intentions?
Or did the original Bolsheviks in 1917 who took over the government in Russia and murdered...
Did they have good intentions or bad intentions?
Hitler, did he have good intentions or bad...
Like, who cares?
Who cares?
People's intentions never show up.
They're un-empirical.
Asking for people's intentions is like asking, is a ghost that lives within them responsible for everything?
You can't prove it.
It's a ghost.
It's non-empirical.
It is undiscoverable.
You can't see intentions even on an MRI scan, even if you could hook everyone up who you can't.
You can't see intentions.
They are a wish of yours.
And you said, I like to believe.
The moment that you say to yourself or to me or to anyone on this planet, Chris, the moment you say to yourself, I like to believe, boom!
That's why you've got to push back against yourself.
I want to believe this.
Then don't push back against it because that's going to lead you astray.
People want to believe in various deities.
People want to believe that the government is good.
People want to believe the bureaucrats have good intentions.
Who cares?
It doesn't matter.
The only thing that matters is This is what they say they want.
They want the public to be safe, okay?
So the FDA says, well, we want the public to be safe.
The empirical data seems pretty clear that it's responsible for the deaths of millions of Americans without an equivalent or greater number of lives saved.
And so you'd go to the FDA with this information, and they'd say, well, our goal, you see, was to keep Americans safe.
The empirical data is pretty clear that we're not doing that, so we'd better change.
But they don't do that, right?
The moment that negative effects come out of the bureaucracies and the regulations, the moment that there's regulatory capture, the moment that the inevitable ironclad law of unintended consequences takes over and destroys lives and destroys people and destroys communities and destroys industries and destroys the economy as a whole, do they stop?
No.
They just say, well, more!
More regulations!
They're addicts.
And I don't care about the good intentions of people addicted to power over others.
And power over others is a physical addiction in almost all civilian species, especially the baldest ones.
Power over others is a great addiction, which is one of the reasons why I never tell people what to do as much as I possibly can.
So I don't want that dopamine.
I don't want that addiction.
I don't want that.
That's the ring, right?
And so when you say, well, do they have good intentions or bad intentions?
A, There's no null hypothesis.
It's not falsifiable.
It's not provable.
It's just noise.
And secondly, the only way we could possibly test for the effect of it would be good intentions means, you know, it's the old thing.
I say, Chris, I really, really want to head north.
And I start walking south, right?
I'm really desperate to get north.
North is where my heart is.
And some lights are here.
And then you say to me, and you got your little, I don't know, I guess you can get a compass on an iPod now.
So you go there and you got a little iPod and you say, actually, Steph, you're heading south.
Now, if I keep heading south, clearly I didn't want to go north.
I just want to go in that direction.
I'm just claiming I want to go north.
If I turn around and go north, then you can believe me empirically that I want to go north.
So if they say we have these good intentions, we want to make things better, then the moment they consistently see that they're making things worse, they should change their course, but they don't.
And that's all I need to know about their intentions.
They have no Interest in actually achieving good.
They have interest in protecting their power, in controlling others, in expanding their careers, in getting a raise, in not ever being fireable.
And they have no interest whatsoever in the ultimate negative effects of what they're doing because they're selfish, power-hungry, bureaucratic bastards.
Right.
I agree with all of that.
I guess part of my initial question was just the frustration and helplessness, I feel, because I believe in our company and our products, and we really struggle with these increased regulations.
It's a huge burden on our company.
This is all R&D you can't do.
This is all expansions you can't have.
These are all people you can't hire.
This is all advertising you can't pay for.
It's a huge drain.
Right.
Maybe I'll give you an anecdote of what sparked this initial inquiry.
We're presently trying to enter the European market.
And the EU, historically, before, I think it was around 2010 or so, had pretty lax regulations, or pretty open regulations.
I don't know, lax sounds bad.
Yeah, lax sounds bad.
It wasn't too onerous to enter the market, let's just say.
And then there was a breast implant scandal from a single company in France that sort of sparked...
The whole train events, like you'd imagine, that the public was really concerned for the safety.
The regulators and politicians came in and said, okay, we can help this.
It's a problem with the current regulations we have.
They're not strong enough.
And so in the last, I think it's four or five years, they've been working towards having a model that's just an overhaul of what they had presently.
Regardless of the fact that the company itself went bankrupt, the guy who founded it went to jail, You know, they sort of use that as a way to punish the entire industry.
And now we can't even get in there because in light of all these increased regulations, the certification bodies that we deal with there are overloaded.
A lot of them have had to close their doors because these increased regulations mean like They've got to retrain their auditors.
They have to do more regular inspections by certain protocols.
So they're just like, okay, we can't accept new business right now.
And so in the meantime, we have customers there that have expressed interest in what we have to sell at trade shows and stuff like that.
And we simply can't penetrate that.
At the moment and there's really no timeline given, no opening there.
We really want to sell there to people who want to buy from us.
But there's this big blockade and it's unfortunate that it covers the entirety of the EU. It's not like You know, we could just go into this one market in one country and start there.
It's this giant kind of regulatory wall over the entirety of the EU, and it's very frustrating.
And so when I ask about the intentions, I guess underlying that is, I guess, by knowing the way these regulations come about, maybe I feel like I can do something to stop this relentless expansion of regulations because otherwise I got bad prospects for small businesses like ours.
Well, and look, I mean, it's bad enough when there's hyperregulation in the medical community.
When it comes around as the result of breast implants, that's just adding insult to injury.
Now, none of what I'm about to say has to do with women who are getting breast implants as the result of mastectomies or cancer or breast cancer or something like that.
But that's, you know, because it's not all the breast implants that do that.
But ladies, your tits are big enough.
They're fine.
Honestly, they're big enough.
You know, we don't need flotation devices We don't need to ever say, your nipples were on time, but you were five minutes late.
And they're gross.
They're absolutely gross.
It looks like a basketball in a plastic bag.
It is not a good look.
Yes, Tara Reid, I'm talking to you.
It is a terrible look.
The side boob, it looks like something's about to emerge and eat someone.
It is not good.
If your boobs can't go together in a natural way, Then if it looks like you're one of those castanet knocky things going back and forth in some executive's desks, that is not the way to go.
If it looks like a child is going to recoil from breastfeeding from one of those giant basketballs in the way that a cartoon rabbit might recoil from a fire hydrant that it accidentally kicks over...
You know, if it looks like you could put out fire in a large building with your breast milk, that is not a good look.
And it's also not a good look, you know, okay, who doesn't like putting your head between them and going, but when it sounds like a gonging sound because these weird giant silicon robot boobs are clanging back and forth, that's not good.
That's not good at all.
It's not good if they don't change their shape when you bend over it.
It's not really good at all.
Give me puppy dog tails.
Give me teeny tiny handfuls.
Just don't give me those big giant cyborg boobs of doom.
I just wanted to mention that because that's a bad way for people to not get healthcare.
Spend your money on therapy.
Become a better person.
All right.
Yeah, I guess...
Working for a small business is a really great experience for me.
I hesitate to even call it a business.
We're a team.
It's less than 10 people.
We live in a time when the opportunities for small business...
Basically, this company started with the The founder, basically looking around at the doctor's office and people who are wearing these medical technologies, is like, We can make that better.
We can miniaturize it.
We can make the interface better.
And you can assemble these small teams of people and design things on computers with a single piece of software.
There's forums and communities out there of people who are willing to give you advice and help you out.
You can reach out to suppliers and And markets, just by emails and websites.
I mean, we're living in a time when small businesses should be just thriving, right?
And it just seems a tragedy to me that the beauty of this time we live in is really being stifled by these regulations.
Part of being part of this small business and the whole process of developing something from scratch and reaching out to the markets, it's an empowering thing, right?
You feel that you've got control, you're building something, you're making something that people want.
And now having experience with dealing with regulatory agencies, it's taken that empowerment away.
I feel really helpless to do anything about it.
Like I say, we want to reach out to these Willing customers in the EU, but just cannot do anything about it.
We're in a queue for these inspections.
Just put a bunch of stuff out to help convince the UK to vote for the Brexit, and then at least you'll have one market that's slightly more sensible.
Yeah, yeah, I guess.
And I don't know that the...
There's really, at any level, I express these concerns to a lot of people.
And the lay people, you know, there's...
The opinion is just like, well, you know, it's my safety, and I support these regulations if it's going to guarantee my safety.
And of course...
No, no, no.
No, don't.
This is the opinion of most lay people.
No, no, no.
That's what they feed off, is your fantasy.
Your fantasy that if you surrender your power to these insane, megalomaniacal arsecraps, That is going to keep you safe.
They're not interested in your safety.
They're not interested in making the world a better place.
They're interested in money and power.
Well, if evil and violence and the initiation of force could achieve wonderful things, I'd support it.
It's like, yes!
And if playing Russian roulette was equivalent to brain surgery, I guess I wouldn't invest in hospitals.
But it's never going to be.
And to even make that connection is dangerous.
The frustration I feel is that I just don't see where the pushback to these kind of ever-increasing regulations can come from.
No, the pushback comes from the collapse.
It's like saying, what's the pushback to communism?
The pushback to communism is it collapses.
I mean, the extension of credit to governments from central banks runs out.
Mathematically, that which cannot continue will not continue.
And, you know, it's like the old Simpsons character who called in recently and was like, you got a duty!
Society gave you all these great things, you got a duty!
It's like, well, if society gave me all these great things, why was I born into massive national debt?
Right?
So, what ends is it collapses.
I mean, it's completely unsustainable.
I mean, you don't need to You don't need to build a battering ram to knock down a house of cards.
It's going to happen the moment somebody opens the door.
But surely there's a way to slow it down.
Why do you want to slow it down?
It's like saying, well, let's push back the fall of communism.
Let's slow it down.
Let's find some way to make communism more efficient so it lasts longer.
Really?
Really?
Why?
Well, the flip side to that would be wanting to speed it up and accelerate the process.
And I guess in that case...
Well, as an individual, what can you do?
We could support more regulations.
Now, as an individual, I don't think you can speed it up.
I don't think you can slow it down.
There's things that you can do, right?
I mean, I think that England should vote to get the hell out of the EU, right?
So, you know, I'll make a case for that.
You can go and make cases for what you think is sensible.
That doesn't mean England isn't going to face its own challenges.
It's just going to face its own challenges in a way that it can more locally respond to.
But, you know, I'm sorry to say this.
This is the basic reality of where we are.
And this is a 10 long, hard, slogging, challenging, exciting...
Work in the public sphere of the intellectual life of the planet.
I have a fairly unique view.
Sorry, friends.
It's popcorn time.
It's popcorn time.
You know how they say it's an old internet cliche, right?
You know, ooh, this is going to be good.
Grabs popcorn.
I used to hate those guys.
It's like, oh, you passive mother.
You chair-sitting mother.
I'm going to get the popcorn.
I'm just going to watch the show.
Well, I think it's popcorn time.
And there are going to be big changes, and there's going to be a lot of complaining, and there's going to be some rioting, and there's going to be some unpleasantness.
And because people haven't listened for the last 50 years, the last 100 years, for the last 150 years, people haven't listened to small market people, to classical liberals, to objectivists, to libertarians.
They have not listened.
And they just keep piling more and more power.
In the heart, minds, and guns of their good friend state, ladies.
Well, now it's popcorn time.
And it'll drive you crazy if you can't see some karma in it.
You know, the people who fall for the temptation of easy money, of easy things, Of the government taking all the responsibility away from them.
Oh, don't worry.
We'll do it all for you.
We'll take care of everything for you.
Just hand us all the power and you can be back in the amniotic sack of early infancy and we'll pretend to run everything for you just fine.
You won't have to worry about a thing.
And at this point, yeah, there's going to be a rise of the right.
Nature abhors a vacuum.
And the left has had it far too easy for far too long.
Ever since I was a kid, the left has been undisputed king of academia and the media and the movies.
And, you know, I guess they were pushed back a little bit from video games, but only because people know how to properly use the SJW BFG 9000.
But the left has had it.
The left is done.
And now you're getting...
The rise of the right, of nationalists, of people who are race realists, of people who know the facts and the details that all of the leftists deny.
And the left is going to scream and the left is going to squeal and the left is going to get upset and...
Yeah, well, you know, come on, you had a good run.
Stop whining.
You know, the pendulum swings.
You know, you did the usual thing.
You went too far.
You know, the writers done it at times as well.
You went too far.
You got cocky.
You got to be too much of a transparent bunch of neurotic bullies.
And now, I'm sorry, you're Trigglypuff versus Conan.
It just, you know, the cool kids are on the right now.
Maybe even the old.
And...
There's going to be complaints.
There are far-right politicians or medium-right politicians.
Again, it's a silly term because they're all socialists.
They're just vague nationalists.
But they're all rising across Europe, and there's going to be a massive pushback against the social justice warriors.
Finally, the right and the conservatives have the economic weapon that has been in the hands of the socialists for so long.
Milo gave a speech at a Catholic university.
Where he was screamed down, heckled down, threatened with violence.
And the security did nothing, according to some reports on stand-down orders from the administration.
And what's happening?
Well, I mean, the rating of the university is going through the toilet.
They've got an average rating of 1.1 out of 5 now, because everyone's going in there and complaining about it.
And if you look at the amount of economic damage that was done to the University of Missouri, after all of the social justice warrior hysteria that went on there...
To the tune of $25 million, well, they've run their course, they've gone too far, and the Great Correction is underway.
Yes, I was a little bit ahead of my time, but people are doing a fantastic job.
And so, the old conservative companies that tried colluding with the left rather than outwardly fighting with the left, they're all going out of business.
They're all running out of money.
Because, you know, you had your chance and you tried to compromise with the left.
And it's a great temptation.
The great anarcho-capitalist economist Murray Rothbard also talked about, let's unite with the left.
Because strapping yourself to crazy people is always going to lead you someplace sane.
And now it's just an open fight.
You know, as the people on the right say, come at me, you're going to lose.
They're organized.
They're resolute.
They're fixed.
They're firm.
They're assertive.
They're even aggressive.
Honorably and legally where need be.
And they are taken over.
That is where the cool kids are.
That's where the energetic kids are.
That's where the purpose is.
The left's only purpose is to hang on to its power.
The right's purpose is to right the world.
And that's what they should be doing, in my humble opinion.
And...
It's popcorn time.
Go ahead.
I don't know that that necessarily entails a collapse, like you say.
If you're thinking of it like a left-right thing, do you think right in power would somehow repeal regulations and cut back on regulations?
Yes.
Yes, but in order for that to happen...
Two things need to happen first.
First and foremost, the audience which desperately and hysterically consumes all of the anti-freedom, anti-capitalist propaganda spewed out by the media, they've got to go away.
Now, I don't know what that means.
It just means that there can't be as massive a market.
Now, the fact that there may be the deportation of 10 or more million illegal immigrants from America, that is certainly going to reduce the market for leftist propaganda because, of course, the people from Mexico, Hispanics, are overwhelmingly voting on the left and so on, right?
And so that's going to happen.
What also is going to happen is leftist think tanks, leftist universities...
Leftist institutions are being revealed by the assertiveness of the new right.
And they are going to feel the economic pain and the economic sting of the horrifying ways in which they behave, being exposed to the general public.
There's always a great deal of common sense left in the general American public.
I'm not sure about Europe, but I think I'm getting there.
They have that.
But the American public has a deep reservoir of common sense.
And the only reason the left has been able to get away with all this crazy indoctrination and hysteria and, you know, as I've argued for, I guess, a year or two.
And as Richard Dawkins recently pointed out, all this anti-free speech stuff in colleges is just because they collapse their standards and let morons in.
They lower their standards like crazy, they let idiots in, and idiots can't handle free speech.
It's like putting blind people in charge of a Formula One racer and putting a brick on the accelerator and expecting them to steer well.
I mean, they just can't handle it, can't handle it.
And so...
You have to reduce the population that's going to consume all this leftist crap.
You have to start hitting hard the universities that promote a dictatorial about this leftist crap.
And you have to start boycotting, boycott leftist crap that you find.
If it's a leftist movie, don't go see it.
Don't rent it.
Don't pay for it.
You've got to start voting with your dollars.
There is a dollar democracy out there.
And the fact that a lot of leftist stuff seems to be failing now, whereas a lot of stuff that the leftist likes, like the Angry Birds movie, seems to be doing pretty well.
Well, people just got to start voting with their dollars.
And, you know, people say, oh, you possibly deport 10 or more million people.
It happens all the time.
It happens all the time.
10 million Germans were deported during the time of the East German split.
It happens all the time.
And so...
Does this mean a general social collapse and we're all eating each other's pets and livestock?
No, I don't think so.
I don't think so at all.
But there is a collapse of the dominant narrative, which is played out.
I mean, the empirical evidence for the success of the left is so ridiculous.
It's so ridiculously absent that they simply can't continue.
I mean, the left has been claiming for 50 years that they're out to help minorities.
How are those minorities doing?
Pretty damn badly.
So they're just running out.
And it'll all come down to whether Ghostbusters succeeds or not, right?
This new...
When I went to go see the Angry Birds movie, there was a trailer for the Ghostbusters movie.
Now, I like comedians.
I'm not like the Christopher Hitchens of Women Aren't Funny.
I like comedians.
I think they can be very funny.
And there are some very competent comedians in the movie.
And by God, that movie looks terrible.
I mean, it looks just terrible.
It's got nothing to do with gender.
I don't know if they feel like if they've got a cool twist, like there's an all-female lead in the cast, that they don't need to work as hard on the script, but it just looks horrible.
Like, I'm looking through the previews, and man, if I can't even crack half a smile during a preview when they're supposed to accumulate all the funniest bits together...
That just looks like an interminably lame, lame, stupid movie.
And, you know, hopefully they'll learn something from it, which is don't cast for gender, cast for quality.
It could potentially backfire and become one of those cult hits of worst movie ever, too.
Yeah, I don't think people make a lot of money off the cult hits.
But, you know, I... I kind of disagree that this is a left-right thing.
The sort of train of events, at least with respect to my industry, sort of seems inevitable whether or not it's a left or right government in power.
In that you have an incident that gets widely publicized and people scrounge around for how are we going to prevent this from happening in the future.
The politicians capitulate.
Capitalize on that sentiment and sell it as, you know, I'm looking out for public safety.
I'm going to protect you.
But you're talking about the alt-right.
Do you know the new right?
I don't know what to call it because the alt-right has more specific meanings.
You can just call it the new right.
And maybe there's better terms for it as well.
But if you're talking about Republicans or traditional conservatives like the National Review types, useless is tits on a ball.
They're constantly colluding with the leftists because they're afraid of being called racist.
You have an entire new generation of people who's willing to talk frankly about race.
And yes, I've helped them with that a little bit.
And I've seen the very, very kind comments that have been floating around about that.
Which is, there are people like myself and other people out there who speak openly about race differences.
And I'm not afraid of being called a racist because nothing that is factual can be racist.
Now, if I say things derogatory to a particular race or negative towards a particular race simply on the basis of prejudice, of course that would make me a racist.
But if you follow the facts, you can't be a racist.
And racist is one of these terms that, when it's used to begin with, And it's used on obvious racists, then it's a term you don't want to be associated with.
But it's become such a tired term.
It's so boring.
It's so boring.
It's so dull.
To be called a racist now is simply to, what, not conform to the 1% lunacy of the leftist egalitarian line.
But the new right is very, very different.
The new right is very aggressive.
It does not want to collude Is willing to economically punish people who are negative or destructive towards them.
And they are thirsty and hungry and willing to fight intellectually with the left.
There's none of this collusion and none of this, like, bipartisanship with the left is incomprehensible to the new right.
In fact, it would be revolting.
And anybody who suggests...
Bipartisanship with the left and the new right is considered to be a complete cuck, which is a word that just says basically betrayal of everything that is real and conformity to girly standards of nonsense for the sake of just wanting to get along with someone for the next five minutes.
So there's a whole bunch of people who've grown up with no respect for the left.
They've grown up post all of the disasters of the left.
They've grown up seeing black ghettos, hysterical crime rates, massive amounts of illegitimacy, single motherhood, broken down families, and they've listened to the black economists and the white economists and the white social thinkers say, this is a disaster, as Walter E. Williams notably said, that the welfare state has done what slavery could not do, what Jim Crow could not do, which is to destroy the black family.
They've grown up after all of this.
Now, I grew up, and you're younger than me, but maybe not that much younger than me.
But when I grew up, all of these were promises yet to be fulfilled.
Now, the younger people growing up see that these are all disasters that have manifested.
They have no respect for the left whatsoever.
No respect for the left.
Not only because the left has been so spectacularly wrong on so many issues.
Destruction of the family, national debt, hyper-regulation.
Endless and intrusive government expansions and race relations.
Unbelievably terrible.
Unbelievably terrible at maintaining the military victories that America's forces have all the way from Vietnam forward.
The left has been terrible at maintaining those victories and has handed over country after country, hard won by American imperialism, to the enemies of the United States.
So they have no respect for the left because they are looking in the rubble of after the promises not only weren't fulfilled but were The opposite of what was promised was what was manifested and not only do they disrespect the left for that, but they literally hate the left for refusing to change course.
The evidence has piled up so much about how hideously destructive the left is to women's happiness, to the happiness of minorities, to the rule of law, to the regular policing of society.
The left has been so unbelievably destructive to all of these things.
That is enough for contempt, but the rage comes from the fact that the left is doubling down.
On all of the bullshit that has produced so much disaster and dysfunction in society.
And now, in particular, with the migrant crisis and the hysteria of the left, the radical egalitarianism and love of a wildly challenging ideology, to put it mildly, it's open hatred and it's open warfare.
And that is not part of traditional conservatism.
Yeah, and I think the alt-right, as you call it, may have some traction on those issues, but in terms of rolling back regulations, again, in particular to my industry, it's going to be a really tough sell to people.
Oh, dude.
Oh, dude.
No, I can't.
I know.
No.
I'm sorry.
I love you to death.
I can't let you just pour sort of foggy treacle of difficulty onto everything that's going to happen.
I mean, yeah, it's going to be tough.
But you just sitting there saying, well, you know, it's going to be really challenging.
Like, I mean, God, you talk about taking the motivation out of people's balls.
You know, yeah, it's going to be tough.
So like that it's tough.
Like it.
Like that it's a hard fight.
Like that it's going to be tough.
Like that.
That it's going to be challenging.
But you're like rolling over with the difficulty of it all before the fight has even begun.
Yeah.
Where's your energy?
This is your life.
This is your career.
This is your company.
These are your friends.
These are medical technologies that will save lives that you want to get into the hands of people.
And there are assholes in the way.
So, you know, get your elbows out, get your knees down, put your helmet on and charge.
Well, I have to admit, it's probably sort of the conditioning of being in the industry.
I mean, if you entertain me for a second, I'll just tell you about my interaction with the FDA several years back.
No, I don't want to hear about your interaction with the FDA, because that's going to be another one of these, oh, it's impossible to regulate.
Okay, so for instance, right?
Donald Trump.
Yeah, he wants to cut regulations, but the biggest regulation that is faced by the average American is an insanely complicated tax code, right?
So he's going to do his very best to try and simplify this insanely complicated tax code.
Is he going to succeed?
I don't know.
But isn't it worth a try?
So, I mean, that's going to be one thing that's fantastic.
If the tax code gets complicated and people say, wow, this is really great, then, you know, I mean, he can't do everything at once.
He's not going to deal with the regulations in the EU affecting your company.
But...
He is going to try.
And now you can, if you believe that he's got a decent chance of trying and a decent chance of winning, then get behind him.
Try and get him elected, if that's something you believe.
As I've always said, if you have a belief in something, pursue it all the way.
And God, I can't even imagine how God-awful it is to deal with the FDA. I get that.
I get that.
And you can't fight the FDA as an individual.
So don't fight the FDA as an individual.
Try to create a mindset wherein the FDA, as an institution, becomes suspect.
Broadcast the disasters of the FDA. Write a blog.
Do a video.
Do it anonymously.
I don't care.
Do something.
Of course you can't fight the FDA directly, but you can create a mental environment where people say, okay, wait, what?
They're supposed to be protecting us, but how many deaths have they cost?
Because, you know, everything that's good that happens, the FDA claims...
It's the result of its regulations and everything that's bad that's happened never gets publicized.
So work against that narrative.
Right.
But do you think you can actually repeal the...
I mean, for example, the...
Dude, they repealed communism!
Yeah.
I mean, Nazism was repealed rather bloodily and so on, right?
But yes, the government shrinks from time to time.
There are things, look, I mean, you're talking to the wrong guy, because if you're saying to me, oh, Steph, Steph, is there any way that you can do anything to reduce the size and power of the state?
It's like, if not, I've been lying to everyone for 10 years and wasting my life when I could have been out there making a fortune as an entrepreneur in the software field, which, as far as I read, is still doing quite well.
So yes, of course you can.
Of course you can.
Slavery, the eternal human institution of human ownership, lasted for tens of thousands of years, was largely eliminated in about 70 years.
Or less, depending on how you count it.
So, yes, there can be enormous progress in human society.
Oh, I don't doubt that.
But with regards to these establishments like the FDA, as long as they exist as an entity whose supposed mandate is to protect public safety, then to change something like the onus of clinical investigative trials for new products is...
I just don't see them relinquishing that.
Okay, then you'll leave the fight to others.
My fire is hitting your water.
I'm not boiling away your water, and sure shit, I'm putting out my fire, so I've got to move on to the next caller, but thanks for the call.
Alright, thanks, Seth.
Alright, up next is Eric.
Eric wrote in and said, Because the current political state of affairs facilitating the refugee crisis in Europe is only made possible by the underlying populations subconsciously relying on the quote-unquote status quo being the oversupply of daily essentials, such as food, clean water, safe environment, affordable housing, etc., etc., What happens when the financial system supporting the status quo collapses?
Said perhaps a better way, what happens to these newcomers when the assumption, i.e.
the infinite supply of necessities, that northern European populations base their egalitarian immigration policies on no longer exists, and the domestic population have to compete with the new arrivals for resources if and when they become scarce?
That's from Eric.
Well, hello, Eric.
How are you doing, brother?
Living the dream.
I can't complain.
Yourself, sir.
Good.
How's your level of enthusiasm?
I'm still trying to recover from the Chinese water torture drip of the last caller.
It was a really interesting topic, a really interesting conversation.
But like my question...
Like my question asserts, you know, he's kind of stuck in the status quo bias.
He can't imagine a world without the current set of regulations and affairs, and I don't blame him.
That's 99% of society.
And at the end of the day, you know, the status quo bias, you know, today was like yesterday, and tomorrow will be like today.
That's accurate, 99.99999% of the time.
But when it's not is when you have these societal changes.
It's when you have the collapse of communism.
It's when you have the German reunification.
It's when you have all these huge, world-changing events.
And so I'm quite optimistic, actually, for the future.
Good.
Yeah, because my general theory and my general approach is if you don't have any hope, shut up.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
You know, because all you're doing is just dripping on everybody else's momentum.
And it's like, lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way.
We are at a time in history where we need positive energy to break through to a free future.
And if it was like, well, but this, we can't do this, and this, and people can't imagine, get out the way!
If you can't get behind us, get out of the way!
Yeah, no, I hear you.
No, but it's interesting, because if you remember when the refugee crisis really flared up in Europe, August, September, October of last year, especially here in Germany, where I am, You had all these photos of these stupid people at train stations handing out teddy bears to 30-year-old men, and they were affectionately labeled.
You mean the women?
Yeah.
Yeah, the women.
The women who voted to keep the Austrian nationalists out of power, as I explicitly predicted over a year ago.
Exactly.
So these 18-, 19-year-old women, or in many cases, mid-40s, you know, desperate housewives, they're handing out teddy bears to 30-year-old men with these refugees' welcome signs.
But at the end of the day, when they're done with their self-flagellation, they get back in their Porsche and they drive home and they can go to Aldi and they can buy all the groceries they need because they assume that tomorrow will be like today because today was like yesterday.
But when you're thinking about a status quo bias, especially at an intellectual level, there's something a lot of people don't ever address and that's the timeline you're looking at.
So what I just told you, you know, tomorrow will be like today because today was like yesterday.
It's a very short time.
We're talking about three days.
But if I was to tell you, if I was to give you the phrase, this century in Europe will be like last century in Europe because last century in Europe was like the century before that, you'd say, okay, that's pretty accurate, you know?
But, you know, in the States, because I'm an American, we have this thing called American exceptionalism.
It's this idea that We Americans were the greatest people to ever walk the face of the earth, ever, and everyone wants to be just like us.
Oh no, come on.
I'm going to school you on American exceptionalism.
American exceptionalism isn't, well, we Americans are just so great.
American exceptionalism, as far as I understand the term, It's because America was the first explicitly philosophically designed country that didn't just arise out of historical momentum and blind tribalism and ancient wars and people running from disease.
It was an explicitly designed, constitutionally limited, classical, liberal, enlightenment-based society.
That is the exception of America.
Everybody says we are the greatest, but the American exceptionalism was the fact that it was designed by geniuses To minimize government.
And given that I don't think I'm smarter than the founding fathers, we've got to try another experiment next time.
But that's my end.
It's not just chest-thumping nationalism because everybody, every group has that.
Well, sure.
I mean, I agree with you that that's how it started off.
But when you talk to people, next time you go south of the border, you know, ask some of the local Americans why America is exceptional.
They'll say stuff like freedom and God knows what.
But, you know, this is my experience when I go home.
But in Europe, they have this European exceptionalism, which is, in my opinion, equally as absurd, where You talk to Europeans, when I say Europeans, I'm talking about people in the geographic sense of the word, not the political sense of the word.
So people that live on the continent of Europe, if you talk to them, they have this sense of, harketh, we've risen above the past three millennia, and we'll never ever have a war here ever again, and we have...
We've attained a new level of humanity.
It's just ridiculous.
And what does pride go with before, if I remember my Bible correctly?
And so, if you look at the people that are handing out teddy bears at the train station, they're basing this assumption on they can go home and get all the groceries they need.
It's safe where they live.
And they assume that things are going to keep going like that.
But if you look at European history, it's filled with times of scarce resources.
I mean, I'm marrying a cute little German girl next month, and she has never known hunger.
I have never known hunger.
Her parents, who grew up in the former East Germany, they have never known hunger.
If you go back to her grandparents, they know hunger firsthand, just like my grandparents in the States do.
This time of abundant resources, it's fairly new for humanity.
For people to assume it's going to last forever without an eruption, I think, is a bit naive.
When these people, even though there might be good meaning, at the end of the day, you talked about it earlier, intent is completely irrelevant.
But even though these people, they might have the best of intentions, their opinions will change when there's no more groceries at the grocery store.
And the people they just welcomed in two years before, there's a thousand of them in line waiting for food.
Well, what about if your kid needs healthcare?
Well, sure.
I mean, it's not just food.
I mean, it's roads, healthcare, housing, schools, educational resources.
I mean, yeah.
No, it's madness.
It's beyond madness.
But one thing I wanted to mention...
Sorry, go ahead.
No, it's completely nuts.
The only thing that keeps the current lifestyle in Europe going is the current financial system.
I know you've spoken about it many, many times.
I work in macro finance here in Frankfurt.
The largest banks in the world are my clients.
I can tell you that we're on borrowed time.
Everyone in the office knows it.
It's one of these things that you're not really supposed to talk about, kind of like who the secretary is sleeping with.
Everyone knows about it, but you're not supposed to talk about it.
And so after you feed your boss a couple drinks, he'll kind of open up about this stuff.
Everyone knows we're in borrowed time.
They know we're quarters or years away from another massive financial crisis.
You kind of have to think, okay, well, what is the population here in Europe going to do when the money dries up, when the banking system does fail because it's horribly insolvent?
All these people have just shown up from – they've grown up in war zones from a completely different culture.
Do we honestly think that they're going to wait patiently in line for their daily ration of bread, like has happened in Europe for the past few hundred years?
No, of course not.
It's a ridiculous thing to presuppose.
The reason I wrote you is because I would love to hear what your opinion is.
When the proverbial shit hits the fan, which you were talking about collapse with your previous caller, when this does happen, In Europe, they've been traditionally homogenous for thousands of years, and now they're not all of a sudden.
How are the domestic populations going to react?
Well, I'm not sure what you mean.
I mean, do you mean, like, all across Europe, how is everyone—I don't know.
I don't know how everyone's going to react, because it depends whether they have the right information or not.
You know, it's like when the guy in the woods thinks he's lost, how is he going to react?
Well, it depends if he has a compass.
Depends if he knows where he could go.
Depends if he has a map.
Depends if he has GPS, right?
I mean, if he gets lost in the woods and he's got a GPS-strong phone signal, then he can get back to civilization, right?
If he doesn't, and B, stung him in the eyeballs and he's blind, then he's going to stumble off a cliff.
It depends on the information and the technology and the knowledge and the facts and the data that people have.
That's going to determine how they react, which is why I'm so interested in getting this information out to people.
Well, sure.
I mean, perhaps in a better way, I mean, if you look through European history, whenever you have a huge foreign group of people show up and expect to be able to take resources from Europe...
And the European population, the domestic European populations, are expected to share these resources with this new group of people.
How has it always ended previously?
Every time.
It ends more.
A huge, huge mountains of bodies.
And so I feel really bad for a lot of these refugees, immigrants, whatever you'd like to call them, because I think at the end of the day, a lot of these people are coming to their graves.
Because at the end of the day, When you do have a – Europeans lack the abundant resources which they enjoy right now, the thought process in the minds of everyone is going to change.
It's no longer going to be egalitarianism.
It's no longer going to be, oh, we have to help these people.
It's screw them.
I have to pay attention to my family and myself.
Well, but what are they going to do?
That most people in Europe, I mean outside of Switzerland, a few other places, most people in Europe...
But they're so disdainful, you see, of the Second Amendment.
How can this barbaric country called America actually allow people to have any guns?
What are they going to do?
What are they going to do?
Well, I don't think you're going to have like a civil war.
I mean, the most common form of...
I think that this mass deportation, mass execution in European history has not been traditional genocide.
Genocide is one group of people exterminating another group of people.
Traditionally it's been democide where a government exterminates its own people.
This has always resulted in the largest European body counts.
Like you've seen in Austria, like you see in France with Marie Le Pen, you have these right-of-center parties.
And, you know, a lot of people here, they talk about how, for example, the Alternative for Deutschland, they're a very, very right-wing, so right-wing extremism.
And it's like, no, like, these people are not right-wing extremists.
I can show you political parties in Hungary and Ukraine.
Those are right-wing extremists.
And so...
If you do have this scenario, which I think is likely, you have a financial, not apocalypse, but a depression in Europe, resources become scarce, you're going to have a lot of people voting for more and more and more fringe parties.
This has more or less been repeated in Europe over and over and over again.
Different groups of people are always the victim, but it always ends the same way.
When this does eventually happen, the idea is that You'll have people, the domestic populations who are eligible to vote, voting for governments that say, we're going to send all these people home.
Now, I mean, imagine you're from the Congo.
You've shown up.
You now live in Berlin.
Your quality of life has gone up exponentially.
Someone comes to power and they say, okay, you're going back to the Congo tomorrow.
Are you just going to show up to the airport and go, okay, send me home?
No.
No, but I mean, I hope it doesn't come to that.
But if it does come to that, it all comes down to the media and it all comes down to the general population.
So if there is, because of course, refugees, right?
And this is my sort of understanding of how this all works.
So it may be correct.
It may not be.
And please, everyone, look it up for yourself.
But refugees can get temporary sanctuary in a country, but then they're supposed to go home when the war stops, right?
So let's say that there's some way to end the civil war in Syria tomorrow, well then the Syrians have to go home.
Sure.
That's as far as, because they're refugees, they're not immigrants.
Sure, absolutely.
And so my question then is, okay, so are they going to go back?
Well, it depends.
And it depends on if the media, you know, portrays these, you know, maybe there's resistance in the no-go zones or in the ghettos or wherever it is and people don't want to go and they have to be dragged out.
And if the media is then playing this with terribly sad music and anytime there's conflict and there's a drop of blood, they focus on it and everybody's weeping and wailing.
Well, then it will be...
It would be sentimentally provoking of enough women and enough cockish men that'd be like, oh, we've got to stop this.
It's so terrible.
But if people have a different view of it, if the media has a different view of it and the people have a different view of it, then the willpower to repatriate people back to their homelands will be there.
Sure.
So, and again, this is just around giving people the facts that they need in order to be able to make better decisions.
Sure.
Absolutely.
But no, listen, I mean, Europe, Europe's been ruled by Muslims before.
I mean, Europe has been ruled.
I mean, Greece was ruled by the Ottoman Turks for 500 years.
They had to pay the Muslim tax.
There was something called the tribute of children.
Every Christian community was required to give one son in five to be raised as a Muslim and enrolled in the core of Janissaries, the elite units of the Ottoman army.
Bye.
And sometimes the Greek folklore says that moms would cripple their sons to avoid their abduction.
Crazy.
I had no idea.
So, Europe has been ruled by the Ottomans in the past, and, you know, they'll obviously want to do it again, and so on.
But...
My, you know, my guess, my guess is that the benefits are going to dry up.
And if the benefits dry up, what's going to happen?
Well, either people will self-deport, as they have done when, look, in America, when there was a financial crash and the construction industry collapsed in 07-08, there was a lot of self-deportation among Mexicans and so on, right?
And there was self-deportation in the 19th century, so to speak, in America, when a third of people who moved to America didn't like it and went back home.
And, you know, the migrants came.
And if the benefits run out, the migrants may go back, especially if there's more peace in the Middle East.
Some will, some won't.
Right.
But and I imagined it's going to be a combination.
And some people may play may make a play for autonomy in a region.
They make it make a play for government power.
Who knows?
Right.
I mean, I.
But we can't tell the future.
No, but if the benefits dry up, then a lot of the refugees will leave.
In a free society, like in a non-welfare-based society, moving from, I don't know, someplace in North Africa to Germany, when you don't speak the language, when you don't know the culture, when you have no economic reason, wouldn't happen.
Plus, of course, people would be free to not rent to you, which they're not allowed to.
I mean, they're forced to rent to people.
They're forced to put people up.
So, I mean, this would be taken care of in a free society.
This is all one big, giant government program.
But let me tell you one last thing about this, which I think is really important.
I've been thinking about all this all week, so I hope this is not...
I don't think I'm shoehorning it in because it is about immigrants.
The question is, with regards to politicians...
They don't have enough of a tax base, nearly enough of a tax base, to pay for the upcoming giant black hole of retirement benefits, healthcare costs, and so on, right, of this aging population.
I mean, you've got countries in Europe with, I think it's Italy, with like a 1.2 per couple fertility rate.
Like, insanely low.
Yeah, it's crazy.
Like, Japanese-style fertility.
Low.
Germany's actually the worst right now.
Worse than Japan, worse than Italy.
What is?
Germany.
They have the lowest birth rate in the whole Western world.
Right!
So this is another reason why you've got these middle-aged women handing out teddy bears.
It's because they don't have children!
Yeah.
So they want to mother the migrants.
That's true.
Abdul might not be quite so cuddly as a baby.
You know, women are designed to have babies.
Yeah, no, you're right.
They don't have to, of course, right?
But, I don't know, in my experience, the women who haven't go a little crazy.
That's just my experience, right?
And they get wildly sentimental, and then they think that they either go crazy with cats, especially if they're not married, right?
They just want to mother everything, and they get hysterical, because they don't have the foundation of a family.
Anyway, so...
If you're a politician and you're facing this demographic winter and you have nowhere near enough money to pay for this baby boomer retirement nightmare, which of course governments have only known about for about 50 years, so how could they possibly expect to plan for it?
Well, what are you going to do?
Well, the fantasy, I think, a lot of the fantasy is we'll bring in immigrants and they'll start paying taxes immediately.
See, here's the problem.
If you're in power, you know, it takes a long time to grow a human being into a taxpayer.
We're not the most rapid of crops.
We're not like oysters or tadpoles or lizards, you know.
It takes us quite a long time to become taxpayers, right?
So, especially if you go to college, you know, let's say that some politician says, I know, we'll just have, people have a lot more babies in our local country and it will be fine.
It's like, okay, well, What is that going to do to your budget?
Well, babies are a cost long before they are a benefit.
Because you've got to pay for the mother's maternity leave.
You've got to pay for healthcare for the kids.
You've got to pay for education for the kids.
You've got to pay for college for the kids.
I mean, you're in the hole.
Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Until those kids become taxpayers by the time they reach the ripe old age of a quarter century.
Hang on, let me finish.
So trying to solve the demographic winter by promoting childbirth is insane.
Tragically, tragically, it's completely insane.
What they're trying to do is bring in people they think can pay taxes quicker.
That's why they're all described as doctors and engineers and all these kinds of great things.
They're going to bring in all these laborers and all these workers and they're going to start paying taxes immediately.
Because some other country paid for their education as children and now they'll just come over here and they'll be paying all these taxes.
And there's no way to solve the demographic winter problem by promoting childbirth because that buys you a quarter century of significant additional spending before they start paying off in terms of becoming taxpayers.
So there's no conceivable way that politicians can promote.
Like, they don't have enough money.
They don't have enough taxpayers to pay for the old.
They sure as shit don't have enough taxpayers to pay for the young as well.
So they need to import all of these people they fantasize and imagine are somehow going to start producing taxes immediately, even though it's even worse because they're consuming more resources than I think babies do.
And so I think this is one of the fundamental fantasies that this problem has been left so long that there's no possibility for native births to do anything other at the moment than exacerbate the problem that they face, which is they simply don't have enough money.
So I think that these surface...
The argument is something like, well, you know, we'll bring in these taxpayers and then these taxpayers will contribute money, which we can then use to pay for old age pensions and we can use to pay for healthcare for the old and so on.
It's way too late.
I mean, they should have done it like a quarter century ago.
They should have removed barriers to fertility or paid people to have kids.
I don't know what the hell they'd do, right?
I mean, they're trying this in Russia now, paying people to have babies and, I don't know, probably trying it in Japan as well.
But this idea...
So the surface story is we need the taxpayers.
I think the more darker an underlying story is if we can provoke an emergency, people will accept privation.
And I've made this argument for years.
So when the government runs out of money, it provokes an emergency.
Now, usually that's war.
But in this case, war is not feasible among the European powers and all nuclear powers and all that, right?
So they're provoking this kind of conflict so that people will accept privation, which allows them to not get their pensions and not get their health care.
But they're all pulled together because of some emergency.
Because the idea that the migrants or the immigrants are going to pay taxes is lunatic.
So from April 2014 to March 2015, Migration Watch UK calculated that immigrants in the United Kingdom from other European economic area countries...
So these aren't migrants from the Third World.
These aren't economic refugees or war refugees.
These are immigrants...
From other European area countries cost 1.2 billion pounds annually, over 3 million pounds a day.
So that's bad.
They're already a net loss.
Immigrants to the United Kingdom from outside the European economic area cost 15.6 billion dollars annually or almost 43 million pounds every single day.
That's net.
Their economic contributions.
In total, immigration is costing native UK residents nearly 17 billion pounds annually.
That's because they contribute 89.7 billion in taxes but receive 106.7 billion dollars in public spending.
And so it's not working the way that there's no way for them to work it.
The only way for them to work it right now is to collapse the welfare state, cut regulations, simplify the tax code.
And say, sorry, taxpayers, you all knew the numbers.
You listened to a bunch of assholes who promised you something for nothing, but there's no such thing as a free lunch.
This is called actions have consequences.
You know how you nag your kids?
You don't study for that test, you're going to get an F. Well, if you don't study for reality, reality gives you an F. Yeah, absolutely.
Completely correct.
I agree with what you're saying.
A couple things I'd like to kind of caveat there.
When you talk about collapsing the welfare state, I agree this is what needs to happen.
It has to happen.
The problem is collapsing the welfare state would cause politicians to actually lose power, lose influence.
This is the exact opposite of what they want to do.
And so their incentive is to actually make the state larger because this is what benefits them personally, just human nature.
Oh, of course.
Yeah, of course.
And of course they don't want the social unrest that's going to come from that.
Sure, of course not.
Because there will be, like, unbelievable riots, and I don't think that they actually have the martial force in the country to deal with those riots.
No, they don't.
Not in Germany.
There's no good answer here.
I mean, this is why we should work as hard as possible to avoid these kinds of situations, is there are no good answers at the moment.
Well, I mean, this is the thing.
For Germany, there is good answers, because at the end of the day, growing up in the States, the United States has a very high quality of life.
I assume it's fairly comparable to Canada, but Germany is the only country I've ever visited, including the United Kingdom, where I can say the quality of life here is higher than in the United States.
So the Germans know how to live.
It's not like we're trying to import people to freaking Chechnya.
And so the Germans know how to live.
They have a great quality of life here.
I am.
What are you talking about?
It is.
Like how many ridiculous numbers of migrants are coming into Germany?
Before, before this, before this.
Before, before they had the huge disaster.
They were great.
Yes, yes, yes.
Thank you for that caveat.
But so the point that I'm trying to make is when you're trying to bring in migrants to pay taxes, if you're trying to support the welfare state, which is an asinine proposition.
But let's say they tried it.
Right.
The politicians at the end of the day, I don't think they're stupid.
I think they're greedy, but they're not stupid.
And so if they're trying to support the welfare state and they're trying to keep themselves in power another decade or two, why in God's name are they bringing millions of people with low IQ that are completely unskilled and the skills they have don't apply to an industrial Western economy?
No, no, no, no.
Listen, listen.
The reason, sorry to interrupt, I'll be brief, but the reason why they're bringing in the migrants It's because the elites have spent the last few generations convincing everyone that the only differences between the races results from white racism.
All the races are fundamentally identical.
Everyone's exactly the same.
And the only discrepancy is the result of racism.
Now, having set up that leftist, egalitarian, anti-biological, anti-fact, anti-data, anti-IQ testing...
Pseudo-imaginary nonsense.
Having set all that up, how can they say no to migrants?
If they say no to migrants, then they have to say why?
Now, are they going to say, well, you know, they have cultural values that may not be wildly compatible with the West and so on.
Well, then they have to say that Western culture is superior or at least better for Westerners.
They also have to explain why they've let lots of non-Westerners, particularly in Germany, among the Turks in, for many decades without ever mentioning this one basic fact that there may be some level of incompatibility and then people have to say well wait a minute Do you just not want these people to come in because they're brown?
Or whatever it is, right?
And then what are they going to say?
Are they going to say, well, you know, the reality is that there are differences between the races and black.
Like, they can't say that.
Because they've spent this last 50 years covering all those facts up and attacking Charles Murray and Linda Gottfriedson and Helmut Newberg and all these people who've been talking about this stuff.
They've set it up perfectly so that they now can't say no.
How can they say no?
I agree they can't say no, but at the same time, they are not only not even attempting to bring in other More culturally compatible, high IQ individuals into Germany, they're actually actively fighting against it.
For example, you have the civil war in Syria going on right now.
Horrible, horrible loss of life.
I feel so sorry for the people there.
However, you also have a civil war going on in Ukraine right now.
People are getting shelled in their homes.
It's quieter right now, but it's still hot.
You still have two sides shooting at each other on a daily basis.
And so Ukraine is considered a safe country in Germany.
So if you come from Syria or let's say you come from Pakistan but you say you're from Syria and you don't speak any Assyrian and you come to Germany and say, I'm Syrian.
I'm seeking asylum.
You get to stay here ad infinitum for free.
If you come from Ukraine and say, I'm from Ukraine and I'm fleeing a civil war, the German government will send you home.
In the German constitution, there is something called the right of return, and it invited all Germans from the Soviet Union, now the former Soviet Union, to come back and resettle in Germany.
You can get your passport, you can vote, and you can integrate back into society.
You have three million Germans in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile.
They still speak German as their native language at home.
You have three million Germans in the United States still speak German at home, but they have an American passport.
And so the idea is, if the German government Couldn't say no to these people.
You would think that at least at a minimum these people would be coming in and you'd also have a huge flow of Germans coming back in to Germany.
The BBC, they did a great documentary on this where they went to Argentina, Brazil and Chile and they met with all these Germans.
Some of them have been there for a few hundred years but a good majority of them are the great grandkids of SS officers or God knows what.
But anyway, there's a law here that says if any of your wealth was – Taken by the spoils of the Second World War, the government will confiscate it.
And so the BBC did interviews with all these people and said, we would love to come back to Germany, but my great-great-grandfather, you know, he was there and he came here and he had money and we started this business and it's been in our family for four generations.
And if we go back to Germany, the government takes it all from us.
And so there are basic, simple laws the German government could change, which would encourage high intellectual people, highly educated, wealthy people coming back.
Even if they didn't want the Germans from South America, you have the ones from the United States.
You have the ones from Ukraine.
You have the Volkdeutsche, which are the Germans in Russia.
Yes, but that would be for the German government to say, we want white Germans to come back instead of people from Syria.
That we prefer white Germans who speak Germans, who have the same culture, have the same history, who speak German.
We want those people to come back.
We don't want the migrants to come in as much.
In which case, you have to say, well...
Western culture is better than Middle Eastern culture.
Christian culture is better than Arabic culture.
But the whole point of the last 50 years has been to take one giant leftist dump on all of Western civilization.
They can't reverse course, these people.
That's why it had to change us to come from outside.
Well, this is what I'm saying, and this is kind of why my question is based off of a great financial depression, is these kinds of changes that you've been talking about that I try to I can impart into people here as much as I can.
They only come when You have what I talked about earlier, these tail risks.
The best thing for Germany, the best thing for Europe, the best thing for the United States is this financial collapse because as long as people can keep living their lives and they have their television at home and they can watch Kim Kardashian shake her ass, nothing is going to change.
You have to get people and put people in a very uncomfortable position which forces them to really, really reevaluate what's important to them.
Is their leftist ideology more important than their children eating or getting medical care?
And this is what you have to push to people.
Because until it gets to that point, nothing's going to change.
Yeah, no, I get it.
I mean, there's an old Dr.
Phil episode I watched years ago, and it all sort of stuck with me.
And this woman was, like, smoking and overweight and drinking too much.
And...
She said, but I'm not sick.
And he's like, yeah, you're not sick until you're sick.
It's true.
You can do all the crazy shit you want.
You're not sick until you're sick.
And then you are.
So right now, because there's the fantasy of infinite resources, everybody's are selected.
There's no in-group preferences.
There's no borders.
Everyone's the same.
It doesn't matter.
There are selected Except because of birth control, they're not having kids in an R-selected way.
It's like rabbit sex porn with birth control.
It's like the tiniest condom outside of Japan.
So we have this R-selected environment of infinite resources, which means why on earth would you need a nation?
Why on earth would you need borders?
Why on earth would you need in-group preferences?
It's like one tribe of rabbits fighting to drive another tribe of rabbits off the field when there's enough grass for six billion rabbits.
Right?
I mean, so because of central banking and birth control, we have the worst combination, which is our selected behavior without our selected reproduction.
Yep.
Sterility plus promiscuity is the worst combination.
It destabilizes the family without creating the next generation.
So, what happens is, There is a certain set of behaviors that are promoted through excessive resources, infinite resources, so to speak, through central banking, borrowing, printing, whatever, right?
And everyone starts inhabiting those behaviors and self-restraint looks stupid because there's no winter.
You don't need to store nuts for the winter.
What are you doing?
You know, it's like the ant in the grasshopper where the grasshopper's just lazing around playing guitar.
It was in my kid's book.
Grasshopper's just laying around playing guitar saying to the ant, hey man, why are you storing up all those nuts for the winter?
It makes no sense.
You gotta just have fun.
You're too uptight.
You gotta loosen up.
So, as you know, when the excessive resource environment dries up when winter comes along, everybody's behavior changes.
And so we'll go back to the case-selected behavior.
We'll go back to people actually investing in their kids.
We'll go back to people having kids.
Because, you know, our selected behavior is fine as long as you're having the kids.
If you're not having the kids, then our selected behavior is just being a complete asshole to the next generation.
Because it's like, well, we want to live like there's infinite resources.
The infinite resources that we want require having children.
If we're not going to have children, then we're just going to prey off the next generation.
The next generation comes along, and the young and the old, who are both drains on society, it's fine, you know, it's natural, right?
I'm not doing podcasts while I'm sleeping.
I'm dreaming of doing podcasts, right?
So the old and the young...
They are drains on society and it requires a big chunk of people in the middle who are all working to provide for them.
That's as true in a free society as it is in a status society.
It just generally tends to be a little bit more fair in a free society.
So the case-selected behaviors will come back.
And with the case-selected behaviors, there will be limited resources, there will be in-group preferences, there will be the re-establishment of borders, and there will be a recognition that...
The mixing of incompatible belief systems is not something that can be economically well-sustained, is the nicest way of putting it as possible.
And, you know, the K-switch that occurs very rapidly in the population.
I mean, I did a whole novel on...
German and English families from World War I to World War II. And in my research on this, it was just fascinating to see how terrified the British people were of war.
In the 1930s, one of the reasons they postponed the war and tried to appease and so on was everyone thought, because there were these giant bombers, that basically the bombers in the 1930s were the equivalent of nuclear war for us today.
They thought that would be the end of civilization, the end of everything.
It was an unthinkable war.
And so they appeased, appeased, appeased, and everyone was completely terrified of war until they weren't.
And then they just went to war, and the K switch had occurred, and off they went to go and do what they felt they had to do.
So that switch is going to occur, and it is going to be ugly.
And I'm hoping, of course, that it can be resolved as peacefully as humanly possible, which is, you know, of course, I hope, I'd love to be wrong, I just don't think I am, right?
So my goal is to make it as peaceful as possible.
And...
Because, you know, the longer it's left and the worse it gets, the uglier it's going to be should it go in that direction at all.
Which, again, I could be wrong about, but I think the facts are getting fairly incontrovertible.
So, yeah, we'll just go back to case-selected behavior.
And if the work that I'm doing and the work that others are doing is compelling enough, then people will learn the lessons and Europe will have its never-again and the West will have its never-again moment.
And...
Sort of reminds me of Spinal Tap.
I don't know if you ever saw that movie.
There was this woman in it.
Dresses like an Australian nightmare.
There was this woman in it, and it's a pretty funny film if you haven't seen it.
Yeah, I've never seen it.
Oh man, it's really, really funny.
It's about this cheesy rock band.
It's like, this woman says to them, well, we find your cover is sexist.
What's wrong with being sexy?
No, no, no, sexist, sexist.
They say, well, what's sexist about the cover?
It's like, well, you have a woman oiled, chained on her knees with a giant hairy man's arm stuffing a glove into her mouth.
You don't think that's sexist?
And the manager says, well, you should have seen what they wanted to put on the album cover.
It wasn't a glove, I can assure you.
But it's a pretty funny...
You've got to see it's a very funny film.
It's a classic.
It's great.
It's like...
Yeah, it's great.
But...
In it, there's this—I won't get into any details—but in it, there is this Yoko Ono-style figure of this woman who busts up the band and so on.
And at the end of it, the manager comes back and he's looking at her and he's got a cricket bat going back and forth like, don't get out of the line, honey.
And hopefully, you know, if disaster does occur, then Europe after— A long period of struggle.
We'll hopefully look back and look at leftism that way, and the lesson will be learned.
We always hope to avoid the unpleasantness that teaches harsh lessons, but all you can do is try and convince people, and then if they don't listen and they continue to pursue disaster, sorry, it's popcorn time.
The reason I work so hard to try and convince people is that if they don't listen, I don't have to feel bad when disaster strikes them.
You've absolved your conscience, as have I. Yep.
Yep.
All right.
Move on.
Do we have another caller, Mike?
Thank you, sir.
Cheers.
Bye.
Thank you.
We do.
Good luck.
Stay safe.
And by the way, I don't think America's coming back this time.
I don't think it's going to be third time lucky for Europe.
But anyway.
Alright, up next on the show today we have Johan.
He wrote in and said, I'm an atheist slash agnostic, but find atheism insufficient as an ideology.
It lacks most of the beneficial aspects of religion, but I can't see myself believing in any religion that I know of.
Do you think an organized secular ideology that would incorporate the beneficial aspects of atheism, religion, and philosophy would be possible and maybe even beneficial as an alternative?
That's from Johan.
Hi, Johan.
How you doing?
Hey, I'm doing good.
How are you?
Yeah, I guess you don't know much about my show, right?
Is that fair to say?
Uh, no, no.
Well, I've been watching for...
I'm not criticizing.
I just want to know where we're starting off from here.
Yeah, I've been watching for maybe like a couple months.
Okay.
Yeah, because basically you're calling me up saying, Steph, I've got a great idea.
We should get some bald guy to go to his studio and talk about philosophy to the world in a way that's engaging and responsive to the people.
What do you think of that idea?
It's like, I guess you don't know much about the show.
Because that's been the goal of my show for the last 10 years.
It's been the goal of my life.
Yeah.
To provide just that.
I have a book, which I will continue to pump for people.
You've got to listen to it.
It's a great, great book.
It's called Universally Preferable Behavior, a Rational Proof of Secular Ethics.
You can get it for free at freedomainradio.com slash free.
And you can read it on PDF. You can read it on HTML. You can buy a hard copy.
You can listen to it on audiobook read by yours truly.
And that, of course, is the goal of giving people a set of ethics that does not require The supernatural punishments of religion, nor the secular punishments of the state.
And so that's one of the, you know, people say, why do you fight so hard for all of this stuff?
I've got something to fight for.
And it's not for, let's try the state again.
And it's not for, let's just go back to religion.
It is to move on to put philosophy at the center of ethics, which is where it always should have been.
But it was a tough problem to solve, coming up with the rational proof of secular ethics so that ethics is not subjectivist.
Ethics is not relativistic.
It's not cultural.
It's not religious.
It's not the laws of the state.
All right.
Fair enough.
Yeah, like...
What we've been seeing with the decline of Christianity and all that in the Western world is that it's kind of left a void of purpose and I think it's being filled by these pseudo-religious ideologies like feminism and social justice and environmentalism and stuff like that.
Yeah, as I said, atheism by itself is not sufficient to provide that because it's just about questioning belief in religion.
Yeah, if I say I don't believe in the existence of Zeus, what does that make me?
Yeah, an atheist.
Well, no, it just makes me, I could believe in all the other gods, I just don't believe in Zeus.
But if all I hear is, if somebody just knows about me, well, I don't believe in the existence of Zeus, what does that tell people?
I could be a Nazi, I could be a communist, I could be an anarchist, I could be an atheist, I could be a Christian.
It doesn't tell you anything, because it's a mere negation of a false proposition regarding the existence of Zeus.
Yeah.
And additionally, it doesn't provide the same kind of certainty and belief that some religious people have.
For example, there was this survey of 25 Italian students in a secondary school Regarding whether or not they would convert to Islam if ISIS took over their town.
And there was only two students who said that they would not convert.
And both of those were from devout Catholic families.
I'm sorry, say again?
Yeah, so there was a survey of a class of Italian students in a secondary school.
Regarding whether or not they would convert to Islam if ISIS, you know, invaded and took over their town.
And there was only two students who said that they would not convert and those were like devout Catholic from devout Catholic families who practiced the religion and stuff like that.
So they definitely have more Like, a stronger belief than, like, secular...
Yeah, and so the girls...
Were the women voted yes to?
Sorry, what?
The girls or the women?
I think this was...
Voted yes to?
I think this was, like, a...
A boys' school.
Okay, okay, I got it.
Right.
Well, you know, as I said before...
Choosing between Islamic beliefs and radical feminism, it's a challenge, to put it mildly.
So you do need a belief, or at least you need pride.
You need to have an in-group preference.
And one of the ways in which European civilization has been pillaged and exploited is Over the past half century is by making Europeans hate their own history, by making Americans hate their own history.
Slavery, genocide of the natives, and colonialism, and wars, and you've got to hate your own history, and you're just bad people.
It's like, okay, well then you've got nothing to defend.
And to defend that which you've been taught to hate is irrational.
It's like somebody asking, hey, I just survived cancer.
Can I get some cancer with my non-cancer so I can get cancer again?
No.
I mean...
To defend European civilization.
This is why when Trump said Western civilization has glory or has value, it's shocking to people.
They've never heard anything like this before because the leftist monsters have been pouring this Iago-style poison into the ears of the youth for generations, getting them to hate their own history, getting them to hate their own culture, getting them to hate everything that's been achieved by their ancestors.
And, yeah, the payoff is that there's nothing to defend.
Yeah, it's true, and it's sad.
And, yeah, go ahead.
Well, no, you go ahead.
I just had my speech, so go ahead.
Okay, yeah.
Well, I was just going to add that we've also seen, like, Christianity take, like, a A bit of a turn as well.
It's become like a lot more spineless as well.
Well, I don't know.
The Pope is all Christianity.
Well, yeah, the Pope, but then there's also the, you know, the Lutherans and Protestants and all these, at least in my country, they've been the ones, like, promoting this, you know, refugee, like, taking in refugees and stuff.
The fucked up thing about all of this is there are lots of Christians still in the Middle East who need a place to go because they're being persecuted!
Jesus, God, oh, Christ Almighty!
Cuck Pope is cuckish!
It's like there are Christians out there being persecuted.
And they're dying to get into Europe, which is still largely Christian.
And the Europeans are like, no!
Why would we want Christians in Christianity with Christendom?
No!
God, it's mental.
I mean, a Christian's not even allowed to have...
In-group preferences for Christians?
I mean, I know they say love your enemy.
That doesn't mean fillet him till he passes out with joy.
God!
I'd feel a lot more comfortable Christians coming in, in my opinion.
Well, there's also been, like, I read an article a couple days ago where it said that there's been a lot of Muslims who have come from, like, Pakistan and Afghanistan and And those kind of places who have been actually converting to Christianity.
But, you know...
Well, yeah, and of course the Pope has been praying for God to change the hearts of terrorists.
Good!
Good job!
Thank you for bringing magic tea-cozy sorcery to challenging questions of cultural integration.
Good job!
You've got a spell which is going to solve everything.
Excellent!
Oh...
It's like the final scene of the Andy Kaufman movie.
But anyway, yeah, it's crazy.
Yeah, and so have you heard about like Atheism Plus?
I have heard that.
Do you want to sort of break that out for people?
Yeah, that's like the cringiest thing.
They've kind of tried to make atheism into something more than just, you know, disbelief in God or whatever.
And that's actually, I think it's like at the core, well, not at the core, but it's related to this whole social justice thing.
And that's kind of Where it went into a really bad way, in my opinion.
And that's why it's also difficult for me to identify as an atheist, because atheism seems to be really dominated by the leftists.
So if I say I'm an atheist, then people will kind of assume I have a certain Political leanings, if you know what I mean?
Yeah.
And so I'm really looking for some kind of secular type of ideology that would be more to the right, a bit more conservative.
I definitely have to read your book or listen to it.
Atheism plus results from the inconsistent application of philosophy.
Right?
So, atheists are very good at dismantling the existence of a deity.
Alright.
Okay, then when an anarchist like myself comes along and brings forward arguments that are really, really close to the dismantling of A belief in God and say, well, the government falls into the same category as a deity.
The government does not exist any more than a God exists.
Belief in government exists.
Belief in God exists.
Churches exist.
Government buildings exist.
In the past, there was enforcement of religious edicts.
Now, currently, there is enforcement of state edicts.
The church now punishes you with supernatural punishment.
The state punishes you with secular punishment.
The church used to indoctrinate youths about the value of the church.
Now the state indoctrinates youths about the value of the state.
And the arguments are very similar.
Very similar.
Except that, now that there's been a separation of church and state, You face far less danger from a religious person than you do from a statist.
Because a religious person will live and let live, a statist will have your ass thrown in jail or shot if you disobey his edicts.
The state has become everything that atheists feared about religion.
The state is to freedom as Sharia law is to atheism.
And they don't see it.
They don't see that they're fundamentalists as surely as the most extreme religious groups you could imagine in their faith and belief in the non-existent agency of coercion known as the state.
And this is why it always strikes me as kind of precious when atheists take on Christianity or and they take on Christianity because Christians are nice.
That's why they don't go for other religions as much.
But They consider the peaceful belief systems of Christians to be some significant enemy without pointing out or revealing that their much more coercive religion of statism is far more dangerous than anything Christianity has been able to execute for the last few hundred years.
If there was a death toll Laid at the feet of Christianity in 100 single years, which was a quarter of a billion people.
In other words, if Christians had been out there in the 20th century murdering a quarter of a billion people, atheists would rightly be horrified.
But no, they have to bring up Galileo and they have to bring up the Inquisition, which was not that many deaths.
But the state, just in the 20th century alone, outside of war, Murdered a quarter of a billion people, 250 million people.
250 million of its own citizens were murdered by the state in the 20th century alone.
And the atheists just, Angry Birds style, catapult over that giant sky darkening mountain of human flesh.
And they say, well, you know, they burned some people at the stake 700 years ago.
The church, that was bad.
Just terrible.
What about the quarter billion bodies behind the entity that you worship?
What?
Don't be silly.
Let's talk more about the Inquisition.
Madness.
Madness.
And atheists, by removing the moral authority of religion...
And fetishistically blowing the endless giant bloody cock of the state are exacerbating the role of coercion in the world.
Yeah, I know.
There's no alt and there's no alt.
Not all atheists are like that.
I get that.
I get that.
But I've already done the data on that.
And when you have 70 times more atheists being on the left and on the right...
I think we have a little bit more than a randomized trend.
So yeah, it is incumbent upon atheists to be as critical of themselves as they are of religious people.
And I have no problem with atheist criticisms of religious people.
And atheist criticisms, you know, I enjoy a good Sam Harris, I enjoy a good Richard Dawkins, I enjoy Dennett, I enjoy Hitchens, I've read their stuff.
Great.
Now, if the goddamn Catholic Church had invaded Iraq, causing between half a million and a million deaths, if the onward Christian soldiers had carved their bloody way through an ancient empire and destroyed The infrastructure that kept people alive and destroyed the state structure that kept people safe and unleashed the demonic hordes of ISIS on the general population.
If the Catholic Church had done that, I think atheists would have a little something to say about it.
If the Catholic Church was calling down drone strikes on people and ordering mafia-style extrajudicial murders of enemies of the church around the world, If the Catholic Church had taken genetically destroying weapons into Fallujah,
causing massive spikes in leukemia and cancers and birth defects, I think atheists would have a little something to say about it, don't you?
I mean, listen to atheists talking about the fact that the Pope is not a big fan of condoms in AIDS-ravaged South Africa.
Yeah, they got something to say about that, and they should.
If the Catholic Church was selling off the future and life and assets of the unborn in order to bribe people in the here and now for compliance, if they were able to create some giant debt that the next generation had to pay off, I think that the atheists would have something to say about that.
But when you take the Catholic Church out of the equation and you put the state In to a much more destructive center role in the horrendous dismantling of domestic and external societies.
Silence!
Atheists are struck dumb.
They cannot speak.
They cannot see.
They blindly defend the most murderous agency the world has ever seen, the modern state.
They cannot even see its crimes.
They cannot even see its non-existence.
And atheists, leftist atheists in general, and atheists in general, given the statistics, have far less self-criticism of their gods than Christianity has ever had.
Christianity has had theologians argue about particular aspects of the religion for centuries.
There have been reformations in Christendom.
There has been the Unitarian Church.
Where is the reformation in atheism?
Where is the self-criticism within atheism?
Where is the atheist recognizing that the greater danger is not the remnants of Christendom?
But the state, where is there a discussion of this?
Well, statheism, which is the state, the atheist worship of the state, statheism is a relatively new and young, ambitious, muscular, energetic faith.
And it shares in common with some other faiths in the world, That are relatively young and relatively not overly self-critical.
And it will be potentially the death of countless people if this religion of statheism doesn't learn to criticize its own foundational deity.
And they will have no excuse.
No excuse.
A Christian who believes in the state at least has the excuse of already believing in Christianity and not having the rigorous intellectual tools by which you can disprove false and irrational entities.
The atheist has no excuse because the atheist already has the tools by which he has dismantled false authorities and imaginary oligarchies.
The atheist already claims the epistemological knowledge to know what is and what is not and how to prove it and how to disprove that which does not exist.
The atheist already has an acceptance of the reality that faith proves nothing.
The conceptual entities do not exist in reality and one's belief in conceptual entities makes them no more real.
A stronger belief in God is not proof of God.
This All these and more are already accepted and energetically pursued by atheists.
They already accept all of this, which means that that failure to take on the most dangerous religion of the state is a crime beyond any excusing.
Yeah.
All right.
I don't think I'm going to do any better than that.
If you want to have the last word for the show, please help yourself.
Yeah, no, I just, I definitely think atheists should consider criticizing the state a bit more and also Islam.
No, no, no, no.
You missed what I said.
Not criticize the state a bit more.
They need to figure out whether the state exists.
They need to figure out whether the state is moral.
They need to take the same skepticism they have towards religion and apply it to their god of the state, not criticize a little bit more.
Yeah, well, you have to start somewhere, right?
No.
Incrementalism in theory is perpetuity in practice.
You don't start somewhere.
You challenge people to attack.
Look, atheists didn't circle around Christians nibbling at the edges, did they?
No, they went directly in and challenged the core of religious belief.
There's no God.
Faith is a fantasy.
Yeah, fair enough.
Right?
I mean, so, if atheists are content to attack the core of other people's beliefs, Why should they be accorded all the gentleness that they deny to others?
Well, they shouldn't.
They shouldn't.
They can't be tough on Christians and then beg for mercy and delicacy themselves, right?
Yeah, that would be hypocritical.
Yes, yes.
And I, you know, there's a lot I can stand.
There's a lot I'm patient with.
Hypocrisy is not one of those things.
If that's a weakness, that's a weakness.
Yep.
I have to agree there.
Alright.
Well, thanks very much for your call.
I appreciate it.
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