June 23, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:16:52
3327 America’s Foreign Policy of Destruction - Call In Show - June 22nd, 2016
Question 1: [1:39] - “I have been listening to the discussions with single moms lately and am amazed at their stories - I find many similarities with their histories and my own. The blaring difference being I have never gotten pregnant. I love that the single mothers have been calling to get input on how to give their kids the best lives they can, despite the choice to become a single mother. My question is somewhat similar - how can I improve myself and strengthen my ability to detect and avoid low-quality men to ensure a good future for the children I want to eventually have with a healthy husband?”Question 2: [54:29] - “I just finished a research project on U.S. War crimes and came across things such as Abu Ghraib, Iraqi Water Treatment Vulnerabilities, Collateral Murder, My Lai Massacre, etc. and I was wondering if Stefan thought all people were capable of such actions; but just avoided being at the wrong place and time. Am I just a few situations away from being capable of doing what these others people did?”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
Hello everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
Two callers tonight, a bit of a shorter show, but deep and long in content.
The first was a young woman who's trying to figure out how she can make better decisions about the men she's dating.
And we dipped into a little bit of her history, which is a little bit on the breaking bad side, and tried to figure out how she could make better decisions.
And, you know, we don't want to do all these things in isolation.
You need to have a good crew around you to help you make better decisions.
And we talked about how to achieve that.
Now the second caller was asking a question I think we've all asked ourselves at one time or another.
And that question is, Are people willing to commit atrocities if they're ordered to?
And how many people would do that?
And we talked about Stanley Milgram's famous experiment, and we talked about a wide variety of other thoughts and considerations about our own capacity for atrocity, and in particular talked about US foreign policy in the Middle East, which is horrifying and is emotional for me for a variety of reasons.
I hope you enjoy the show.
Please, please help out what we're doing here.
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Alright, up first today is Kayann.
Kayann wrote in and said, I've been listening to the discussions with single moms lately, and I'm amazed at their stories.
I find many similarities with their histories and my own.
The blaring difference being, I have never gotten pregnant.
I love that the single mothers have been calling in to get input on how to give their kids the best lives that they can, despite the choice to become a single mother.
My question is somewhat similar.
How can I improve myself and strengthen my ability to detect and avoid low-quality men to ensure a good future for the children I want to eventually have with a healthy husband?
That's from Kayanne.
Hi, Kayanne.
How are you doing tonight?
Doing well, thanks, Stefan.
How are you?
Doing well and hopefully doing good, too.
And that's a great question.
You know, it's really funny to me, you know, like when I talk sort of openly about single motherhood and, you know, with some criticism and so on, then people want to call in and talk about it.
We talk openly about race and people want to come in and talk about it.
And so it's just interesting.
And I'm glad that you are calling in.
Now, you say that you're amazed at their stories, Cayenne.
What is it that you find amazing?
I think it's a lot of what they've done and the kind of partners they've chosen because I've kind of maybe not chosen the best quality of men myself and easily could have ended up a single mother.
And the similarities there were really shocking to me when I first heard some of those interviews with them.
Alright, so what is...
Give me a portrait if you're a bad boy, Cayenne.
Who's the guy who you know is bad news, but you can't resist opening the envelope anyway?
Yeah, so I can resist it now.
That's the good news, is I'm a bit of a recovered addict, one could say, to the bad boys.
The guy though, the worst one that I was with, he was living with another woman when he started pursuing me.
He already had a two-year-old daughter at the time.
He had impregnated yet another woman prior to that daughter, but she had gotten an abortion.
He, I found out later, was selling drugs without telling me, illegally, obviously.
Wait, he was a drug dealer, a deadbeat dad, and he told lies?
Shocker, right?
Yeah.
Well, that's a trifecta.
How often do those planets line up?
Yeah, that was pretty much the brunt of it.
I found out later talking to a therapist that he was most definitely a sociopath and a pathological liar on top of...
Are you still there?
But just all of those pieces together and listening to the types of fathers that the single moms have chosen in their pasts, I was like, oh my god, that's this guy that totally could have happened.
Right.
Right.
So, I guess my only question now is, how pretty was he?
Funny story, Stefan.
Not.
He was probably...
No!
Like, at least eight pounds overweight.
Yeah, I don't know.
How much was he overweight?
At least 80 pounds.
He was morbidly obese.
He really wasn't an out-on-the-street-walk-around kind of drug dealer then, right?
No.
Okay.
So, he's 80 pounds.
He's obese.
Mm-hmm.
What are we talking here?
I mean, I can see your picture, other people can't.
I can see, I assume that's you on Skype.
You're young, you're very pretty, a fine head of swirly, brave style hair, and obviously intelligent and so far, so far, very eloquent and in pursuit of self-knowledge.
So what bizarre voodoo hypnosis did he have over you?
He was incredibly confident, or at least he came off that way.
So he totally conned me from the beginning.
And I like to think that I just didn't have the tools at the time to realize what was going on there.
I was being swept off my feet by this guy who didn't really fit any of the physical attributes that I really like.
But he had other pieces.
He came across really intelligent.
He came across like he really loved his daughter and took good care of her.
There were a lot of positive traits that he was trying to show me when he was first courting me.
And I fell for all of it.
I had never dealt with a pathological liar before.
I'd never dealt with a sociopath before.
So I had no idea that he might be dishonest.
Like I was naive.
I think there was probably some willing naivete there as well.
I'm sure I made choices on purpose that I shouldn't have made.
But mostly I think I got pretty swindled because I was really young when we met.
I think I was like 19 or 20.
Right.
And he was much older.
Right.
Kayem, would you like me to tell you something about women?
I would love for you to tell me something.
And I'm aware that I'm out on a limb here.
But I will tell you something about women, if you like.
And particularly young women, but women are like hypnotized by bizarre levels of self-confidence.
Sounds about right.
It's like a snake.
It's like, you know, trust in me.
I mean, it's because you're like, man, if he's that self-confident...
He's got to have something, right?
Yeah.
Oh yeah, that's definitely what I was thinking.
So that is, and trying to find out what that something is.
Now women, it's a good biological reason why, evolutionary reason why women are hypnotized by self-confidence.
Do you know what that might be?
Does it have anything to do with hypergamy?
Well, yes, certainly.
But the question is, why is it hypergamy?
Why is it evolutionarily helpful to be attracted to a man with significant degrees of self-confidence?
I would think that the more self-confident a man is, the more likely he is to be an alpha and be able to acquire the resources necessary to take care of you and your offspring.
Right.
So, evolutionarily speaking, everything was win-lose.
Throughout most of human history.
I did this presentation on the truth about the Native American genocide.
And in it, I found that the carrying capacity of the hunter-gatherer society is pretty damn low.
I mean, it's really low.
And it's very, very hard to increase your...
Population.
You know, a couple of million after like thousands and thousands of years.
There were a couple of million in sort of North America, a couple of million natives or indigenous people, as some people like to call.
So everything was like win-lose.
And so the more aggressive, the more self-confident the man was, the more likely he was going to be to bring you the piece of the buffalo that he wrestled from someone else while beating them on the head with a shovel or something, right?
Mm-hmm.
So that level of self-confidence, which, you know, I guess for a young man who doesn't exactly have a lot going for him, that level of self-confidence blends into, I guess, what you described as sociopathy, right?
Where you have confidence because you have no fear, you have no empathy.
That makes a lot of sense.
And so from your eggs are like, okay, no fear, no empathy.
For a hunter-gatherer, that's good.
Oh, please, you have some.
You know, that typical Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral, the stuttering, stammering British guy who's very deferential and so on.
But that's wonderful if you're actually in a sort of modern society.
But in your old society, you want like brute force Stanley Kowalski dude.
To make sure that your children are going to survive, whereas the woman who had children with the stuttering, nice guy, he won't.
Those kids are going to have less of a chance to survive.
So where there's no free market, like with hunter-gatherer and so on, there's a little bit of trading, but where there's no free market, no technology, Then, brute dominance, lack of fear, lack of empathy, well, they don't make the best fathers, but they're not bad at being providers.
And remember, of course, for most of our evolution, you didn't need to get the kids through college, right?
For most of our evolution, it's like, they've made it to five!
Good!
Now they can go and do their own thing, and they can go get some nuts and berries, and I don't know, find some...
Baby bunnies to down or something like that.
So there wasn't this eternal adolescence, eternal childhood, you know, where it's like, I don't know, some ridiculous, like a third of people are now living with their parents into their late 20s and early 30s.
So it was just like, you get them cranked out, get them to the age of five or six, and then they can at least start fending for themselves or join in on at least on picking fruit or nuts or berries or whatever.
So it was a much more short-term investment.
You didn't actually need a great father, but you really, really needed someone who was going to bring you food.
During the time that you were pregnant, giving birth and breastfeeding.
So you didn't need them for a quarter century, you needed them for a couple of years.
And that level of confidence is hypnotic to a lot of women and that may have had something to do with what was going on.
That makes a lot of sense.
I feel like it makes me feel a little bit better about making such a terrible choice.
Well, it's a good choice just 5,000 years ago.
It's an oldie, but not a goodie in the here and now.
Have you ever seen the movie...
It's a bit old for you, probably.
Have you ever seen the movie American Beauty with Kevin Spacey?
I've only seen a few bits and pieces of it.
Because there is a drug dealer in the movie.
And the girl remarks, he's a young guy, lives next door.
I'm not going to give any spoilers here.
He's a drug dealer.
This is established pretty early.
He's a drug dealer.
And the girl says he's got this eerie confidence to him.
And then later, during a time of great stress, she says, are you scared?
He says, I don't get scared.
And you might want to watch it and...
He's not, you know, he's sort of portrayed as, I think somebody makes a joke, like, why does he dress like a Bible salesman, right?
But the actor I think is very good in getting that sort of lizard-like, weirdly confident stare.
And you can sort of see some of the genesis of it when you get glimpses of his childhood with his military father and all that kind of stuff.
But anyway, for those who haven't seen it, it's on Netflix if you want to check it out.
It's an interesting film.
I should do a review of it at some point.
But there is that hypnotic confidence and no fear.
So, yeah, the fact that you were attracted to somebody who had a lot of confidence is not at all surprising.
I mean, men are attracted to really hot women, although they know, they know how disastrous it is going to be nine times out of ten.
They happily run into the estrogen blender.
That's all they can tell you.
And this guy had, like, he had bad news written all over him, right?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
So here's the question, right?
This is where we come to the meat of the matter.
Which is this.
We all fall into the giant pit of sexual attraction, right?
This guy got your rotors rotating in some hypnotic way.
And we all have that.
We all Our hormones are pointing us towards someone who is like, let's merrily sail off a cliff together and enjoy the ride down and then the splat.
So that happens to us all, which is why we all need to watch each other's backs when it comes to that, right?
So the question is, was there anyone trying to stop you?
And if there was, why didn't you listen?
And if there wasn't, why not?
Yeah, good question.
So as far as people trying to stop me, my friends didn't really say anything.
In a way, he kind of bought them off.
Anytime we hung out together, he would insist on buying anyone's drinks, food, anywhere we were at the time.
My parents, though, partway through the relationship, eventually started voicing concerns.
And at that point...
I don't know why I didn't listen.
I don't know if it's just because...
Well, hang on, hang on.
Started voicing concerns.
What are you?
So they met him, obviously.
I assume they met him shortly after you started dating or something like that?
Yeah.
And what did they say?
They didn't say much at first, so we had...
Already, we have a problem, Houston.
I mean, I assume that they would find out pretty quickly that he is of no particular fixed job.
That he's got a kid by another woman.
They may find out at some point.
I guess they could ask you after you found out or you could go and tell them that another woman, he got pregnant but she had an abortion.
So these things you would want to find out if you're the parent fairly quickly.
Do you know how long it took for them to find that out?
They knew pretty early because when I first met him, I was really taken by him and started talking about him to my parents.
Just as like, I met this guy.
He's so amazing.
He's confident.
It's as big as his belly.
Bigger even.
Don't know how, but it was.
And they didn't really say anything.
They didn't speak up very much.
My dad, he kind of mentioned that the guy sounded like bad news, but that's all he said for a really long time.
My mom and my stepdad didn't say anything at all until months into the relationship before my personality started changing according to them, which I think when they started voicing their concerns, but especially my mom really tiptoed around the subject because she didn't want to be completely honest and end up driving me away from her and destroying our relationship.
Okay, right.
There's a lot in what you said there.
So your father recognized that he was bad news, but your father only mentioned it in passing?
Yeah, just once.
The first time I ever talked about him, he said, this guy sounds like bad news, and that's pretty much all we talked about on that subject for almost a year.
But why?
Couldn't say.
Why?
See, can I just give a shout out to parents as a whole?
I'm still in the conversation with you, Kyan, but I just want to...
Okay.
Parents, parents, let me tell you something.
You remember when your kids were little, you know, in the death magnet toddler phase?
And you remember how, like, you're walking through a parking lot, you've always got them by the hand, and you're always keeping them close, and you're constantly scanning for the big giant...
Toddler combine harvesters of cars coming around the corner.
And remember how you wanted to build a fence in the front yard?
Remember how you wouldn't let them play anywhere near the road?
And remember how when you taught them how to ride a bike, they were all freaking out?
Remember all of that?
Okay, that level of fear, concern, and anxiety with regards to your children, you need to have when they start dating because they're wandering out into traffic.
They are young, fresh, fragile flowers, boys or girls, wandering out into traffic.
You know, if you were four and you were wandering towards the road, would your dad murmur, I don't really think that's such a good idea, Cayenne, but you know, if you want to, I can't do anything to stop you.
No, right?
He would have put himself between you and the road and said, nope, turn around, young lady.
No going out into the conveyor belt of doom.
Right.
So I just want to say this to parents.
Get involved.
Stay involved.
And your children are new to dating, just like your toddlers were new to the road.
And you know more about dating just as you know more about the road.
Help them.
Protect them.
Guard them.
Doesn't mean smother them.
Doesn't mean don't let them date.
Of course, right?
But it means be involved.
Find out what's going on.
And be the parent, which means you have authority because you know more.
If your father could look at this guy, and really it doesn't take a Dr.
Phil to look at this guy and say, hmm, I wonder if this is going to end well or not.
Um...
So it doesn't take a huge amount of insight.
You say, oh, well, he had me fooled.
It's like, well, no, you were just delirious with sexual desire, right?
It's fun.
A little dangerous if you're not protected, right?
And the parents need to be involved in their children's dating lives.
At the beginning, 30 or 40, whatever, right?
But at the beginning, because lust is such a foundational force for young people, right?
I mean, a year...
I mean, my God!
I mean, that's a long time to date someone who's this kind of bad news, but that's what lust or self-deception or, you know, just whatever you get the hots for, that's how long it can mess you up for, or more.
And so, given that you invested a year of your life into this guy or more, your personality changed and...
There's a wide variety of other things we don't have to get into, but basically it's still the parent's job when you're young to guard the eggs.
Guard the eggs!
Circle the eggs.
Moats, alligators, lakes of fire, airstrikes, doesn't matter what it is, but it is the parent's job to guard the eggs and guard the balls.
Not to put too fine a point on it, because I'd like this to be equal opportunity offensive.
Boys and girls need to be protected.
So that was my question.
Now what about your friends?
Or were they all like, he buys me free stuff.
He's great.
Yeah, while we were dating, they loved him just because he would totally buy them free stuff all the time.
After we broke up, all of them would say the exact same thing.
What the heck were you doing with that guy?
There was no match up there.
Oh, they didn't.
Never made any sense.
Oh, they did.
They didn't.
They did.
No.
No.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah, they did.
Now that he's no longer buying me three things, I always thought he was really bad for you, Diane.
Yep.
No.
Yep.
Yeah, exactly like that.
Friends of friends would come up to me and be like, are you still with that guy?
And I would tell them that I wasn't.
And they'd be like, oh, good.
Yeah, he didn't seem good for you at all.
That didn't make any sense.
You're too good for him.
Just all of those terrible, terrible things that I should have been hearing day one.
You know that there's lots of nice betas around you who are sticking your voodoo doll with pins, right?
I don't doubt it.
Okay.
Can you tell me what I mean by that?
Because I want to make sure we're on the same page.
I'm thinking that you mean that I chose an alpha and suffered the consequences and overlooked betas when I probably would have been much better off with someone like that.
Probably not.
Probably.
I most certainly.
There's a slight possibility that you might have been slightly better off with someone who wasn't a sociopathic, overweight drug dealer who bribed your friends.
Yeah, I guess, you know.
Chances are.
Chances are, yeah.
Because I'll tell you, I mean, when, and by beta, listen, I don't mean, I personally, I wouldn't categorize this guy as an alpha myself.
I mean, not even close.
But he was, he's like in the car category, hypnotic snakes or whatever.
But there are nice guys who are looking at you saying, wow, she's really nice, she's smart, she's pretty, she's funny, and she's dating this guy.
And she won't give me the time of day.
If so...
In my defense, no other guys were approaching me.
He was one of the first guys to ever give me any attention.
So I figured, oh, he must actually be interested.
No one else is.
I'll give this a shot.
Okay, hang on.
You look like you do.
You got to 19.
And no guys had paid you attention?
Not really.
I had one boyfriend prior to that.
And it didn't go very well.
And he was really sweet.
We just weren't a good match for each other.
And we were way too young to know what we were doing.
Why weren't you a good match with someone who was sweet?
I gotta tell you, I'm very sorry to interrupt after I just asked a question, Kayanne.
I find the word sweet coming from women is, I experience it as an insult.
Oh, you're so sweet.
You're a beta orbiter.
You're a rose petal.
Can you go clean my car?
Oh, listen, I need some books dropped off at the library.
Would you mind going to do that for me?
Just be a sweetheart.
Oh, you're so sweet.
You got me.
You made me a pencil case.
How sweet.
You drew me a picture.
You wrote me a poem.
How sweet.
No, I don't disagree.
Okay, okay.
So basically, it has all the manliness of a poodle puppy.
Right.
Oh, it's so cute.
Right.
Yeah, so the thing is, like, with him, for someone else, he would have been totally perfect.
I am a really neat, like, tidy person, and he was a total slob, like, just a hoarder and really messy and dirty and gross, and that was fundamental to him.
You're dating Pigpen from Charlie Brown.
Anyway.
Sorry, there's another reference then.
I got that one, though.
Oh, you did?
Okay, good.
I was trying to downshift it to people who don't need glasses, but anyway.
So this guy, there was some incompatibility through the sweet guy.
No nice guys around?
No nice guys?
I'm sure there were nice guys around.
None of them made it clear that they were interested in me.
So that could have just been me being an airhead and socially awkward and not realizing it.
I don't feel like I was ever approached by anyone who was interested.
Really, this guy was the first one who showed me that he wanted something more than friendship from me after that initial relationship.
What would you take, and this is very instructive to men out there, I think, what would you take, Kayanne, as an indication that a guy was interested in you?
I like you as more than a friend.
Can I take you on a date?
Does that happen these days?
I've heard it does.
Rumor has it, there are cave paintings in Albuquerque of this very thing happening.
So since the overweight drug dealer, I have had really nice guys approach me with something similar to understand if someone's interested in me, or else I'll never know.
Right.
I mean...
The courtship ritual, again, this may sound kind of Victorian to you, but not quite that old.
But the dating ritual is a lot of not-directness.
Right?
I mean, it is a lot of not-directness.
I think that's kind of the fun part.
And, you know, somebody saying, I'm romantically interested in you, let's go on a date, that may be more direct than most people do.
I'm guessing this is what the drug dealer did.
It is, yeah.
Something similar.
Yeah, because, you know, he's got no fear, no questions.
And guess what?
Might turn out to be emotionally unavailable.
Was he a neat guy, by the way?
Tiny?
He was better than the first guy, but not neat to my standards.
Right, okay.
Well, he's a guy, so...
Right, yeah.
Okay, so...
Obviously, if you meet a guy...
Who's a drug dealer?
If you get a guy who's got, you know, kids and abortions with other people and so on, that is not, that's not good.
Right?
I mean, none of those things are good.
Even if he doesn't have kids, but he's a drug dealer, probably not going to be that great, right?
If he's not a drug dealer, but he still has a kid with someone else, well, if you want to get married and have kids, why would you want to choose someone who already has a child?
I mean, it's just less resources for your kid, right?
Right.
Oh, yeah.
No, those thoughts went through my head.
And in my defense a little bit, I didn't know that he was dealing drugs until about nine months into the relationship.
I got really, really angry about it, and he promised he would stop.
And then I found out again later that he hadn't.
Yeah, odd.
Go ahead.
There were no signs?
Not...
Did you just say he had a trust fund?
No, so he did have jobs.
He worked...
No, I don't want any details.
Just he had jobs.
All right.
Yeah.
Low quality jobs.
Kind of blue collar jobs.
But he would job hop a lot.
So there should have been red flags that I should have caught.
Right.
But I didn't.
Right.
Okay.
Hmm.
So are you dating someone right now?
The short version of that is no.
So I just moved back to my hometown after moving across the country to be with a guy for three months.
We'd tried dating really over the course of the past two years and the long distance just didn't work for me.
And I had left my place of employment for reasons not having anything to do with this and thought it would be the perfect time to try something big and bold like this.
And it didn't go well.
Obviously, I'm back.
So we're no longer seeing each other.
But there is someone, actually, the guy who introduced me to your show.
We're approaching the option of maybe starting a relationship, if that makes sense.
Approaching the option of starting a relationship.
Boy, that sounds like a really torrid Harlequin novel of romance.
Doesn't it?
To choose a relationship, please turn to page 34.
Actually, maybe page 69.
I don't know.
Anyway.
Okay, so...
And he's not there, is he?
He's not, no.
Okay.
Well, we won't get into him because he's not able to talk about it.
Why don't your parents feel that they can talk to you about reservations they have about a boyfriend?
I don't know.
What have you done to these poor people?
No, I'm kidding.
Why?
Why can't they say something?
Because you said your mom was afraid that it might wreck the relationship if she told you something you didn't want to get, right?
Right.
So later in my life, after that bad relationship kind of ended and fell off, I ended up having to get a restraining order up against him.
It got really messy.
I asked my parents why they didn't express their concerns sooner and Not necessarily more forcefully, but in a way that I could see where they were coming from and realize how dangerous of a situation I was in.
And that was her only answer.
Her only answer was she didn't want to drive me away.
She requested that my stepdad didn't talk to me about it for the same reason.
You ended up in a dangerous situation, right?
Yes, yeah.
Well, I got a restraining...
Yeah, no, I don't want to...
Please, Scott, don't get into details.
And I'm sorry to keep cutting you off.
I just, you know, we have to keep it anonymous.
But you got into a very dangerous situation because your mother was concerned about some negative repercussions.
And then, this is what I'm saying.
It's like letting your kids wander into traffic.
I couldn't agree more.
I do want children someday and there's a lot of things that I'm going to do very, very differently than my parents did because of the things that I've wandered into, I guess, without their guidance.
Let me go out on another limb here, Cayenne.
I'm going to guess that, in general, the principle goes something like this.
People who are not confident advising other people about dating choices themselves have made pretty bad dating choices.
Yeah, I'd say that's accurate.
Right.
So she's protecting her own bad choices and basically letting you wander into traffic rather than say, listen, this is the stuff I've learned and it was hard by lessons, so let's not have you go down that same road.
Yeah, I would have given anything if she could have had that conversation with me a decade ago.
Right.
Right.
So what, again, with that specifics, what were the bad choices that your mother made when it came to dating?
So as far as just dating, she hasn't told me very much about it.
It seems like she was actually pretty good dating.
She married my father, and they ended up getting a divorce when I was about two years old.
Okay, okay.
I've got to stop you right now.
Your mother made good decisions about dating.
Or at least not necessarily equal once.
She made good decisions about dating and divorced your dad when you were two.
Which is it?
Sorry, this is like that meme with the two buttons.
You can't have both.
So I think, let me try to rephrase this a little bit.
I don't know the specifically bad choices she made.
I should have married my dad, obviously, because they got a divorce.
She...
Well, no, no.
I don't mean to interrupt you much, but there's no...
You say, well, they shouldn't have got married because they had a divorce.
No.
No, they chose a divorce.
They chose a divorce.
I don't think she ever planned on the relationship lasting personally because she took her career more seriously than being a mother.
And if she had just decided to be a mother and not focus on her career, she would have been dependent on my dad and would have never been able to leave him.
So I'm not convinced that she thought the relationship was ever going to work.
So she got pregnant with a guy she knew she couldn't live with.
Could be.
She got married and got pregnant with a guy she knew she couldn't live with.
What's better yet is she actually blackmailed him into getting her pregnant.
She never wanted kids.
I'm sorry about now.
She did what?
He was out of town when she decided, screw it, we'll just have kids.
It's what you want.
And she told him it was now or never.
He had to show up.
I was going to say, if he was out of town when she decided to get pregnant, that's a whole different level of Maury.
But anyway.
Yeah.
So it was with your dad.
It was with my dad, yeah.
That was only up and up.
So then she said, she knew that it wasn't going to last.
And she said, hey, you know, it's a great decision when you know a relationship isn't going to last.
Let's have a baby.
And I don't know if she knew it wasn't going to last at that point.
I don't know the details there.
But my guess is something along those lines.
Wow.
So then, who left who?
My mom left my dad.
Yeah.
They tried to go through a bunch of therapy first.
He was, according to my mom, he wasn't very receptive to it.
But I don't know how much I trust her word on that.
What does your dad say?
My dad says that he tried really hard to make the relationship work.
And I have brief snippets of memories of the aftermath.
And he was really torn up.
But he doesn't really talk about it with me.
He doesn't like to talk about it at all.
Okay.
Another little shout out for parents.
Just my thoughts.
I'm not an expert.
But if you get divorced, you really should talk to your kids about why when they're adults so that they don't make the same mistakes.
Just my thought.
All right.
And your mom remarried?
She did, yeah, when I was about eight.
When you were about eight.
And did she date much in between?
I think she did.
She was really, really picky about the partners that she would introduce me to.
I only ever knew one other boyfriend until my current stepfather.
And we got along really well, and they eventually decided to cut it off because of differences in parenting styles.
I think he was okay with spanking and stuff, and my mom was really, really strongly anti-spanking and certain other small things.
I found something I like.
That's nice.
It was nice when that happens.
A bit of a desert, now we've got an anti-spanking oasis.
Good.
Sorry, go ahead.
No, that was all.
So I know she did date other men in that time, but that was the only person that I met before my current stepdad.
Because she was really picky about who she would introduce with me.
Alright.
And your dad with dating?
More so than my mom and not nearly as picky who he would introduce me to.
He has had another marriage and divorce since then and is going to be getting married again soon.
I don't think he makes very good choices with women, but we, like I said, we don't really talk about that kind of stuff.
He doesn't like having those conversations with me, and he gets pretty mad when I try to have those conversations.
No kidding!
Dad, I'd like to bring up something that may have a slightly negative impact on your moral authority over me.
Don't want to talk about it!
So he's getting married again for the third time.
How do you think that's going to go?
I don't think it's going to go super well.
The woman that he's with Broke his heart like a year ago, and he just pined after her until she pretty much took him back, and he's totally a sugar daddy to her, so I don't see it going very well.
You know, unless he's Mark Zuckerberg, I fail to see how he's a sugar daddy after two divorces.
I'm pretty impressed by it, but I... Oh, come back.
Can you hear me?
Yeah, can you hear me?
Yeah, sorry, you've got this occasional cutout.
Okay.
All right, so it's not wildly unclear to me why your parents might not be very assertive in helping you make better dating choices.
Do you think that's just because they don't feel like they've made very good choices, so they can't give up?
No, no, listen, it's fine if you've not made very good choices.
I mean, in fact, that's very helpful, right?
Don't do what I did is hard won by wisdom that parents should honorably transfer to their children, right?
Mm-hmm.
And, you know, when my daughter grows up, I will tell her to not make the mistakes that I made when I was younger.
But that's because I've accepted that I've made those choices.
I'm perfectly comfortable to talk about them.
And I'm not defensive about having them brought up.
Because I've made better choices now.
That is, it's not that they've made bad choices, it's that they've made bad choices and it doesn't seem to have been integrated into their own worldview, their sense of who they are, things that they can comfortably talk about so that you can learn from their mistakes.
Sorry, you cut out out there just a bit.
Oh yeah, just, it's not that they've made bad choices, it's that they won't talk about their bad choices, that's the problem.
Right.
And to some degree, that means that you're flying blind in a confusing dating world, right?
Listen, for most of human society, it was recognized that young people are idiots when it comes to making decisions about romance.
Yeah, I think that's common knowledge.
So, that doesn't mean that, you know, we all have arranged marriages or anything like that, but, you know, read a couple of 18th and 19th century novels, and...
It's all about the parents trying to figure out who's the best person for their kids.
Doesn't mean they can force the choice, but, you know, it's recognized that toddlers and roads don't mix and young people and dating on their own to their own recognizance is not really the best thing.
Again, I'm not talking about going back to arranged marriages, but parents, I think, should get more involved in their kids' dating choices because it can have very negative effects, right?
Oh, most definitely.
I think I'm walking proof of that.
Yeah.
And you got off lucky?
Yeah.
I think so, definitely.
Could have been a lot worse.
Could have been a bit of a one-sided conversation.
Yeah.
So as far as good things to look for, well, of course, listening to this show, aces.
But there may be more to it than that.
I just can't think of anything.
But, you know, somebody who's got a reasonable degree of self-knowledge, somebody who's going to ask you Sensible, obvious questions about your history, right?
I mean, these are, you know, questions like I'm asking about your history.
Somebody who's going to ask you obvious questions about your family and who's going to look at your family, you know, if they want to date you and get married to you, they got to look at your family and say, okay, well, how am I going to do with 50 years with these people, right?
Because, you know, you get married or 40 years or whatever it's going to be.
And You know, parents are around, especially when you have kids.
So he's going to want to have a good relationship with your family.
He's going to want you to have a good relationship with your family.
And he's not, I hope, not going to be willing to put up with all of this avoidance and stuff because it's kind of a boring way to spend your life is going over to people's houses and not talking about things that are on your mind, right?
Right.
So yeah, somebody who's got open communication, somebody who's got good self-knowledge, and some sense of purpose, some sense of a goal, some sense of what they want to do with their lives.
I think those are all very helpful things to do.
Somebody who talks about the future, somebody who has goals, and of course, you know, a good heart and a good head, ethics and a conscience.
These are all things that are important.
Very important.
But basically, just somebody who's curious and honest.
I think those are the two big combinations.
Curious about you and honest about their responses to what you hear.
You know, we spend a lot of time, as you know, tiptoeing around each other.
I mean, not you and I. Not today, right?
Today, no tiptoeing, as is the case with this show as a whole.
But, you know, you sit down and listen to people.
I used to do this when I was younger.
I'd sit back at the dinner table, sit down at the party or whatever.
I'd just listen to people.
I'd just listen to people.
And it's really fascinating.
Really fascinating.
And there are two things that I constantly heard.
One was status-seeking, and the other was avoidance.
The status seeking, of course, was an attempt to show yourself as cool and hip and neat and, you know, you spent last summer in Paris, you know, whatever it is, like you just do all this, you just came back from rock climbing and all that.
So there's all of this status stuff that goes on and people will drop their education, people will drop their careers, they will, you know, I mean, drop into the conversation.
So there's a lot of status seeking.
There's a lot of avoidance.
And if you can get those two things out of your social vocabulary, do not try to achieve a status, and do not avoid topics.
If you're curious, just ask.
Those two things, I think, will stand you in good stead.
Because when you get married, if you get married based on status seeking, or you're in a relationship based on status seeking, There's not that much to talk about because status seeking is to achieve an end.
It's like going back to the car dealership over and over after you bought the car.
Why are you here?
And so this is curiosity, wanting to know more about the other person.
That's a lifelong conversation.
Honesty, that's a lifelong conversation because there's always stuff that you learn that's new that you can be honest about.
There's always stuff the other person's going through that you can be honest about.
So honesty plus curiosity is the foundation of a lifelong conversation.
But status seeking and avoidance, avoidance by definition, is not having a conversation, dancing around stuff.
And those kinds of relationships, if you can even call them relationships, I think get pretty monotonous, pretty dull, and pretty empty.
And that, you know, when you hit that emptiness, when you hit that, what am I doing here?
Why am I with this person?
That's it.
I mean, that's really, really tough to come back from.
And that's because there's nothing else to extract from someone you've already extracted your status and avoidance from.
So, does that make any sense?
Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
Absolutely.
Alright, alright.
Okay.
I do have, unless you, sorry, go ahead.
No, no, go ahead.
I have kind of another question related to this subject, if you have another minute or two.
I do.
I was wondering, so I know I definitely want to have a family someday, and because of listening to your show, I know that it's best for my kids that I be a stay-at-home mom, so that is a really big goal for me, if not the ultimate goal.
And best for you.
And best for you.
You'll be happier, statistically.
Yeah, I think so too.
I think you're absolutely right.
But with that knowledge, knowing that the goal is to be a stay-at-home mom in a society and a culture where that's not exactly cheered for, one, how do I find a partner who's going to be really on board with something like that?
And also, what do I do in the interim with myself as far as work?
You know, like, it doesn't make much sense to me to try to pursue a pretty crazy career or anything, knowing that that's my goal is to leave a job eventually.
Well, I thank you for that as a taxpayer.
Because it bothers me.
Like, all these women are like, oh, yeah, I wanted to become a doctor.
And then I thought, hey, you know, I'm just happy staying home with my kids.
It's like, so now we're down one doctor or somebody else could have done it who was going to stay.
Anyway, so...
So, for the first question, that's not that tough.
You just make a business case.
Right?
You make a business case.
And you can whip out the handy-dandy spreadsheet, or you can just do it on a whiteboard, right?
Once you're comfortable with the guy and you're talking about it, say, okay, well...
Let's say I get a job making $50,000 a year.
Well, maybe that's only going to be $30,000, $35,000 a year after taxes.
That's three grand a month after taxes and all that kind of stuff.
And if we have two kids and they're in daycare, well, there's $1,500 to $2,000 right there.
We'll need a second car.
We'll need extra gas.
I'll need better clothes.
I'll need to get my hair done more often and blah, blah, blah.
Right?
Mm-hmm.
And it's, you know, so basically it's very easy, unless you're making six figures, it's very easy to make a very strong business case that it makes more sense for you to be home.
That's really good.
Because otherwise, you're working to pay people to take care of your children, which makes no sense at all.
Right?
That's like dating someone and then paying someone else to have sex with them.
While you watch in horror, right?
I mean, so if you want to have kids, of course you should stay home with them.
Because, or someone should, and it should be the person with the feedbacks, if I remember correctly.
It's quite important for the kids to get their breast milk.
So, as far as you can say to the guy, look, if I go to work, our lives are going to be way more stressful, way more problematic.
We're not going to have more money, really.
In fact, we may even end up with less.
We're not going to have flexibility when it comes to vacations because, you know, when you have two people working, it's hard to get the same time off sometimes.
And it's not the life that I want.
You know, I don't become a parent.
I don't want to get married to see my wife once a week, and I don't want to become a parent to see my kids for two hours a day.
And only 45 minutes or half an hour of that is unstructured playtime.
The rest of it is feeding and bathing and all that kind of stuff and getting ready for bed and So, if you want to have kids, then you stay home and you have kids.
And the man's life is going to be so much better.
And all you have to do is do this.
Are you ready for the big sales pitch?
Yes.
All right.
Here you go, Kayanne.
Are you ready?
This is not only a sales pitch that you can make, but my imitation of a Hillary Clinton speech.
Are you ready?
I'm ready.
Do that and the man will be sold.
I'm sorry, I don't understand the connection.
Oh, Hillary Clinton is not well.
Wait, the other connection?
The other connection.
Okay, the other connection.
So the other connection is kids get sick a lot.
Did you know that?
Okay.
And if you're both working, what happens when the kid gets sick?
You can't take him to daycare because most daycares don't want something whose lungs are coming out their nose, right?
Kids are going to get sick a lot.
Kids are going to have bad night's sleep and they're not going to want to wake up in the morning.
And if you stay home, you have all that flexibility.
You do not need to worry about kind of stuff.
And that's just one of six million better benefits.
The bills will be paid.
The groceries will be done.
The cooking will be done.
The house will be cleaned.
It will be a paradise.
The man will be living in a hotel.
Five-star hotel full of family.
And his life will be much better.
And let me make one other case as well.
There's an old saying that says behind...
Every great man is a good woman.
There's a theory which says, why do feminists want women in the workplace?
Because if women are in the workplace, they're not at home supporting the men that they have to compete with, the feminists have to compete with.
Your family income, I don't have studies for this, this is my intuition, but your family income as a whole will go up considerably if the man is working and you're supporting him than if you're both working.
Because let's say he's making 60 and you're making 50 or you're both making 50 or whatever, so there's your 100K, right?
But if he has a stress-free life, if he can occasionally work late if he needs to, if he can go on business trips and he can build his career that way with you supporting and taking care of the household, he's going to get to six figures pretty easily.
Or more, maybe he can start his own business because you're there as the bedrock, the support for his family and his household.
And so a woman supporting the man, I believe the man, and it could be the other way around, but let's just go with your situation since you would want to stay home.
The woman supporting the man can help drive the man's income to a higher stratosphere than otherwise would be the case if they were both working.
Because when you're both working, you're both hobbled in your careers.
You've got to leave.
You've got to go.
You've got to pick the kids up.
You've got to stay home because they're sick.
Whatever, right?
You're tired because you've been up half the night because your kid was unwell or had a bad dream or something like that, right?
So you're both kind of hobbled in your careers.
And so you're not really moving that far ahead.
But if one is you home and one is you out working, boom!
The one who's out working has the support, has the flexibility, has the stability, has the capacity to fully commit because someone has taken care of the kids.
And I think not only is the family income going to improve, the family quality of life is really going to improve.
What man would say no to such a deal?
Wow.
Yeah, those are excellent arguments to have in my arsenal.
Thank you, Stefan.
Thank you.
All right.
All right.
I'm going to move on to the next caller, but feel free to call in with your boy toy if you guys think about getting serious.
I'm sorry?
The second part of that question was what I should do as far as work goes until I do find that partner and start having kids.
Well, I mean, it seems fine to have a job, but I think that you should be clear with whoever you're dating that you're interested in marrying kids.
Okay.
And I would assume sooner rather than later.
You know, I mean, do you want to win the lottery five years from now or now?
And having kids when you're young means that if you do want to have a career when they get older, you've got tons of time for that, right?
Yeah.
This idea that you go have a career, you interrupt right in the middle for five or ten years to have and raise kids, and then you go back to your career is about the most retarded thing that you could possibly imagine.
Yeah.
It really is.
I mean, it is completely...
You couldn't...
Of course, governments want you to do it because you're out there paying taxes.
Governments don't want stay-at-home moms because that's just good for children.
It's not good for the tax coffers.
But no, I mean, my view is, you know, you have kids when you're young, when you've got lots of energy and you can sleep on the ground if you have to.
And you can get by on two or three hours sleep a night for a week if you need to.
And then, you know, when your kids are older, you can dig into having a career and then you don't have to have the big giant interruption.
And the people who are hiring you also know that you say, oh yeah, my kids are in school now and I'm looking to have a career and all that.
Okay, then they know that you're not, you know, if there's some woman who's 29 or 34 or whatever, just got married and, you know, I think all the employers deep down are like, okay, well, tick, tick, tick, bomb, you know, it comes to kid and by goes the employee for an indefinite period of time.
So, yeah, have a job, but I mean, your job, your job, Is to get married and have kids.
That's your career.
You can have a job before that.
I'm going to say this to young women as a whole.
Your job is to...
If you want to have kids, your job is to find a guy, get married, and have those kids.
If you're not working, your job is to look for a job.
You've got to spend seven, eight hours a day looking for work.
That's your job, is to try and find a job.
If you want to be a wife and have kids, your job is to find the guy you can get married, settle down with, and have the kids.
What's the point of putting it off?
Is it something you want now?
That makes perfect sense.
And what that means is that you're not going to be tempted to waste time with the guys who aren't going to make it.
Because my job is...
Anyone can go and get a job at a donut shop, but if you want a job that's complex and challenging, well, then that's going to be harder to get.
So you're not going to take the job in the donut shop because it means you can't spend all that time looking for a better job.
And so your job...
You know, there was this old joke about women go to college to get their MRS degree.
Yeah.
Ladies, if you're in college, find a good guy.
It's perfect.
You're around guys who are motivated, who are educated, who are hopefully smart, and work on getting, if you want to have kids, then your job in school is to find a guy who you can settle down with and have kids.
And if you want to have a career, have a career.
If you don't want to have kids, none of this applies to you.
Whatever you want, right?
Mm-hmm.
But yeah, so when you say, okay, my job right now is to find a husband, settle down, have kids, be a mom, that's going to condition who you date, right?
And what you're going to look for in who you date.
You're going to look for father and husband quality rather than sexy, dangerous quality, right?
Yeah.
So make that your job if that's what you want.
Make that your career.
Awesome.
Thank you so much.
Say that's what you want and make the case.
Make the case.
When you're proposing something in a relationship, you're making an offer and you're making a demand.
In the same way that when you go for a job interview, you're making an offer in employment and a demand for wages and benefits.
So you're making an offer and you're making a demand.
So you make an offer like, I want to get married and have kids and here's how great it can be for you.
And you make a demand.
Oh, and you'll have to support your family.
Right?
And we'll all do better thereby.
And our lives will be happier thereby and better thereby.
And women who stay home are happier than women who go to work.
Of course.
Of course.
If they have kids, right?
So yeah, make the offer and make the demand.
Don't be passive.
Don't wait for things to happen.
This is what you want.
Go out and make it happen.
And if you scare off a pretty guy by saying you want to get married and have kids, good.
Because he's a fly-by-night dandelion fluff who's just going to blow his way through life like a tumbleweed off a cliff.
Who cares?
You want the guy who's like, oh, All right.
Let's talk.
Awesome.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
Thank you so much.
And do it topless.
All right.
Thank you very much.
That was my way of doing it by that time.
So thanks so much, Kay, and keep us posted about how things are going.
And I certainly wish you the very best in your procreational future.
Thanks, Stefan.
Take care.
Thanks for the call.
Alright, up next is Keith.
Keith wrote in and said, Am I just a few situations away from being capable of doing what these other people did?
That's from Keith.
Hi, Keith.
How are you doing?
I'm doing terrific, Steph.
Thank you for having me.
My pleasure.
My pleasure, brother.
All right.
What do you think?
What do you think would your response be if such a situation...
And it doesn't happen right away, right?
Nobody just sits there with a pair of pliers and says, you know, go pull this guy's balls off, right?
It steps up, right?
I mean, so when they want you to torture someone, they have you guard the facility and then they have you guard the end of the hallway.
Then they have you guard you outside and then inside the hallway.
And then they say, hold these implements and then wipe him clean and then give him something to drink and then hold this and then do that.
It's a step-by-step process.
And that step-by-step process is the old myth.
About the frog, right?
You put a frog in boiling water, it'll jump right out.
But if you put him in cold water and then heat it up slowly, he won't and he'll die.
I don't know if it's a myth.
I think it's a myth, but it's a really good allegory for how these things occur in the world.
So it is one of these step-by-step processes that they don't throw you in at the deep end.
They lead you down that passageway fairly slowly.
Sure.
And one thing that would make me question that is the Milgram experiments.
I mean, within minutes, they're able to get these people to continuously push a button to cause this actor pain.
They don't know it's an actor.
And people push the button until the victim or the person who got the answer wrong was dead.
Sorry, let me just explain that for people who don't know about this.
Not only is it a fine Peter Gabriel song, but there is an experiment.
This was done by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram back in the day.
And the way that it worked was it was supposed to be a learning exercise, and you were supposed to administer very mild electrical shocks, and you could see the actor through a window in another room who would receive the shocks if he got something wrong.
And what would happen is the man in white coat would tell you to continue to turn up The voltage or the electrical current on the shocks that you were giving to the point where it was clearly labeled could be fatal.
And this started in 1961.
And this was, of course, quite interestingly, three months after the start of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, a German Nazi war criminal.
And what happened was, and this has been done many times around the globe with pretty consistent, somewhat consistent results, somewhat inconsistent, which we can get into another time.
And the subject, like the person who didn't know he was part of an experiment, it was just an actor.
It was just an actor.
And you could hear the screams or whatever, right?
And if the person administering the shocks said he wanted to stop and not go on, he was given a succession.
This is from Wikipedia.
He was given a succession of verbal prods by the experimenter in this order.
Please continue.
The experiment requires that you continue.
It is absolutely essential that you continue.
You have no other choice.
You must go on.
If the subject still wanted to stop after these four successive verbal prods, the experiment was halted.
Otherwise, it was halted after the subject had given the maximum 450 volt shock three times in succession.
And if the subject, like the teacher who was supposed to be teaching with these shocks, asked whether the learner might suffer permanent physical harm, the experimenter replied, Although the shocks may be painful, there is no permanent tissue damage, so please go on.
If the teacher said that the learner clearly wants to stop, the experimenter replied, whether the learner likes it or not, you must go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly, so please go on.
If the teacher asks who is responsible for any negative effects, the experimenter replied, I will take responsibility.
Now before conducting the experiment, Milgram asked 14 different Yale University senior year psychology majors to predict the behavior of 100 hypothetical teachers.
These people who were in the experiment.
And all the poll respondents thought that maybe 0 to 3 out of 100 with an average of 1.
So they thought that only 1 person out of 100 on average would be prepared to inflict the maximum damage.
So this was the prediction.
And so he also polled Milgram polled 40 psychiatrists from a medical school.
And they believe that by the 10th shock when the victim demands to be free most subjects would stop the experiment.
They predicted by the 300 volt shock when the victim refused to answer only 3.73% of the subjects would continue.
And they believed that only a little over one-tenth of one percent of the subjects would administer the highest shock on the board, right?
So the one-tenth of one percent for the experts and for the grad students, it was 1.2 percent of people would do it.
In his first set of experiments, it was not one-tenth of one percent.
It was not 1.2 percent.
It was 65 percent of experiment participants administered the massive 450-volts Now, they did say they were uncomfortable doing so and so on, but that was the surprise.
And there's been a lot of repeats of all of this.
Percentage of participants who are prepared to inflict fatal voltages go from 28% to 91%.
There was no significant trend over time.
The average percentage for U.S. studies, 61%, was close to the one for non-U.S. studies.
So it's a fairly universal phenomenon.
And, you know, you couldn't do it now, right?
I mean, ethics would be, you'd never get it past the ethics community, but that is some pretty horrifying stuff.
65% of people are willing to administer potentially fatal electrical shocks if they're told to.
So yeah, a lot of people will do it.
Thank you.
I don't know if they've done much work on why people don't.
That to me is one of the more interesting things.
Because why?
What is the 35% or 34%?
I don't know.
But it's a, yeah, it is a chilling experiment.
And these were young people, so it wasn't like they were soldiers.
You know, if you had a bunch of soldiers who may be more used to obeying orders and so on, but I think these were mostly young students.
So in 61, they would have been too old to be in the war, or too young, sorry, too young to be in the war.
So, yeah.
And sorry, I just wanted to clarify something.
There was a wall.
I said you could see them.
That's actually a wall.
So you could hear.
The actors would start to bang on the wall and complaining about a heart condition and all of that.
After several times banging on the wall and complaining about his heart condition, all responses by the learner would cease.
So yeah, this is the power of words.
Now, this should be a giant wake-up call for society as a whole.
And any society, a sort of humane, civilized, conscience-based society, when finding that up to 91% of people are willing to kill a stranger because someone in a white coat tells them to, this should be like a foundational ice-to-the-brain shock for any civilized society and say, what the hell are we doing that we end up with these kinds of people?
That this is Where society is at.
But to my knowledge, I don't think a huge amount of work has been done to try and figure out why this is the case.
You know, does it have something to do with corporal punishment?
Hitting children to teach them, right?
Causing pain to teach them.
If people have gone through a lot of spankings or beatings, maybe they feel, well, using physical punishment is right and proper.
Is it school where something is taken away from their conscience in school?
Was there any level of religiosity that made people more resistant to these kinds of commandments?
I don't know.
But to me, a civilized society would stop at nothing to find out.
So yeah, a lot of people will do it.
And this is just in a white coat in a respectable university and In a war zone or in a time of emergency, in a time of emergency, when people feel that who they are is being threatened, yeah, people will cheer on the killers.
I mean, 2003, Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9-11, had not threatened the US in any particular way.
The U.S. invaded and caused the deaths of about a million people, like 5% of the population.
That's like 15 million people in the U.S. People cheered.
And even the left only fought until 2008 when Barack Obama caught in, then poof, missing since 2008 the leftist anti-war movement.
So these are very important questions to answer, but I'm not sure that our current society as a whole Really wants to get those answers because too much would have to change for a lot of people to feel comfortable.
Well, can I offer a few thoughts?
Of course.
Oh, okay.
So I'm thinking that the reason that the person, you know, felt like it was legitimate or that it was okay is simply because of the, I'm just doing my job, I'm just taking orders.
Whereas even kids that I used to babysit, Whenever they would do something bad, and they would say, Joey told me to do it.
And I'd say, so if he told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?
And the kid would go, no.
As in, the little kid knows that someone telling you to do something doesn't make it okay.
But there's something about growing up and then someone in a white coat, in a politician's suit, someone wearing a badge, then it's okay to take orders from them.
There's like just this invisible morality shield that just deflects all the immorality off of their behavior.
So, in other words, I think that the illusion of authority allows people to...
To delegate their sense of morality.
Do you have any thoughts on that?
Well, of course, that's very beneficial for people in authority.
Sure.
Right?
I mean, it's very beneficial for people in authority who may not have a conscience for other people to say, you'll take the moral responsibility?
Sure, I don't have a conscience.
I'll take the moral—I'm not saying Milgram, right?
But what's really shocking to me is that what people got really upset about with Milgram— It was the ethics of the experiment.
Not the fact that they found out that most people were willing to kill other people on the say-so of someone on authority.
84% of former participants surveyed later said they were glad or very glad to have participated.
15% chose neutral responses.
Many later wrote expressing thanks.
Milgram repeatedly received offers of assistance and requests to join his staff from former participants.
Six years later, at the height of the Vietnam War, one of the participants in the experiment sent correspondence to Milgram explaining why he was glad to have participated despite the stress.
And he wrote,"...while I was a subject in 1964, though I believed that I was hurting someone, I was totally unaware of why I was doing so.
Few people ever realize when they're acting according to their own beliefs and when they are meekly submitting to authority.
To permit myself to be drafted with the understanding that I am submitting to authority's demand to do something very wrong would make me frightened of myself.
I am fully prepared to go to jail if I am not granted conscientious objector status.
Indeed, it's the only course I could take to be faithful to what I believe.
My only hope is that members of my board act equally according to their conscience.
So, people were thankful to have found this moral weakness within themselves which gave them strength to resist commands from authority to do things against their conscience in the future.
Thank you.
And everyone was like, oh, this experiment was really bad, very unethical.
Which means revealing and inconvenient to those in power.
And useful to those they wish to exploit.
And the amazing thing is it's not just those in power, but somehow they've gotten the populace to defend them on their behalf.
So, for instance, one of the things I researched was called Iraqi Water Treatment Vulnerabilities, was a paper from the Pentagon in 1991 that said if we were to put an embargo on the chlorine going into Iraq— It would basically turn their water system into a sewer,
and this would get Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait and allow us to inspect his WMD program.
Madeline Albright, on 60 Minutes, admitted that roughly around 500,000 Iraqi children died as a causal result.
Of them putting these embargoes on.
So none of the soldiers even had to move.
They just had to have the promise of enforcing the words of authority.
And then they hate us for our freedom.
I mean it's so sick that I'm just having trouble wrapping my mind around something like this.
So yeah, I could use your help.
Now what is it that you're having trouble wrapping your mind around?
In other words, what is the difference?
In other words, I was talking to a guy who was in the military, and I try to go out of my way to communicate to these guys the non-aggression principle, libertarianism.
And I had talked to him for ten minutes without him mentioning he was in the military, and I'm like, it's funny, me and this guy are so alike.
He then reveals to me, hey, I was a Marine.
And I'm thinking, I'm so similar on the outside to this guy.
What is the real difference between him and I? Because he's taken the oath.
He promises to go into any country they tell him to.
He promises to fire when they say fire.
Is it just that maybe I... Is it because I've seen too many movies?
Or is it something inherent in other individuals who don't participate in evil?
I don't know.
I mean, it's hard to...
I have a hard time really fathoming what it would be like to live without empathy.
Empathy has a lot to do with imagination.
And there are dull, concrete-based kind of people who seem to plot through life not really understanding their effect on others.
Like you, Keith, in your mind's eye, you can see...
The children dying.
The children with diarrhea because they've got dysentery or throwing up because the water is polluted and the parents frantic and trying to help but not being able to help and being helpless and watching their children, their babies, die in their arms.
Right?
Sure.
You could see that and it would torture you, I would assume, if you could do something about it to stop that.
You would say, Even if there was a war, it's not the fault of the babies.
Exactly.
It's not the fault of the children.
Mike, could you just have a quick look up and see if Madeleine Albright herself has children?
But if she does, then as a parent you would have to have no connection or compassion To the children whose lives you were ending.
She has three children, according to Wikipedia.
She has three children.
Okay.
So she obviously cares about her children, but has no connection to the children that she can't see.
And this is a failure of imagination.
Empathy and imagination, I think, can sometimes go hand in hand, which is why a lot of artists tend to be on the left, because the left is almost a pathological level of empathy, where you can't let people suffer because...
It's too painful for you, and so you take away.
Everyone gets a ribbon and nobody fails, right?
But if you can't see it in your mind's eye, the effects of what it is that you're doing to others, you know, it's like, I don't know where it shows up.
Like, there are a lot of drone operators who have post-traumatic stress disorder.
And they're flying these little drones and boom, right?
It's like a video game, I guess, right?
right?
But some part of them, of course, understands that they're disassembling human beings from the air.
And I'm just, I'm at the moment working on a whole presentation on the Middle East and the brutality of the intervention by Western powers.
It's It's appalling, appalling stuff.
And You know, the people who say, I want to help the poor, and then they put these programs in place, which make things worse for the poor, and they just keep going, they don't really want to help the poor.
Of course they don't.
They're using the poor as an excuse to gain power, to gain control, to gain votes, to gain authority, to gain resources, which they can then redistribute, like thieving kings.
And it's the same thing With the war on terror.
There's a book called Spiral, Trapped in the Forever War.
And it's by Mark Danner.
And he's pointing things out that are really important for people to understand.
9-11.
War on terror.
Alright?
After nearly 15 years of war, After ground invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and even if we just count the presidency of Barack Obama, repeated endless nightmarish bombings in at least seven other mostly Muslim countries, after 15 years of war, there are now many more terrorists than there were in 2001.
And those terrorists are killing more people.
So in the book, this is US government figures, 32,727 people were killed by terrorists worldwide in 2014.
Question, Keith.
What percentage increase do you think that was from the previous year?
250.
No, it's 80% increase in one year.
Now, from 2001, the number of people killed by terrorists around the world Since 2001 has gone up 4,500%.
The war on terror has vastly increased terrorism.
Or at least it's coincided with it, if you don't want to go with correlation doesn't equal causality.
At the beginning of the war on terror, Al-Qaeda was in Afghanistan, mostly.
Now, Al-Qaeda and ISIS are either in or have affiliates in more than 15 countries.
And what has happened to U.S. freedoms?
What has happened to the discussion of torture in America?
At least on the Republican side, let's bring it back!
Even though it doesn't work, Top conclusion of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Torture says, the CIA's use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.
Obama.
One of my shortest videos, when Obama got the Peace Prize, I just gave myself a forehead slap.
Face palm.
Obama.
Obama.
The Jughead Beanpole Prince of Peace claims that he has the legal authority to kill anyone anywhere in the world with a drone.
And he does.
American citizens and non-US citizens, doesn't matter.
Today, the US Senate, and they'll try again, one vote short of giving The government access to your browser history with no warrant.
And your searches.
NSA, the Patriot Act.
They're creating more terrorists overseas and more tyranny at home.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Now, with the exception of Donald Trump, who's saying, shit, We really fucked this up, didn't we?
We are achieving the exact opposite of what we claimed.
There are more terrorists now, killing many more people, 4,500% increase since 2001.
After, what, $7 trillion in short-term costs, more in long-term costs, 15 years of endless war, we are much worse off now than when we first started.
Fewer freedoms at home, greater debt, and...
And I find this very...
Incredibly, it's painful.
And I mean, it's nothing that is painful for me.
But the bodies of innocent Muslims are piled to the sky.
I mean, I have my issues with Muslim countries, but it is not the fault of the people who are subjected to these authoritarian regimes and the bodies of the Muslims.
And the Coptic Christians and the others in the region.
They are piled to the sky.
It's estimated that US interventions in wars since the Second World War have killed seven million people.
Seven million people and killed them in the most brutal of ways.
Radiation, poisoning from depleted uranium shells.
White phosphorus, Agent Orange, bunker busters, cluster bombs.
U.S. is the biggest arms dealer in the world.
And then says, we need a powerful military because it's a dangerous world.
No shit, Sherlock.
You armed it, and you say it's dangerous.
Funny.
If the police give a lot of weapons to the mafia, they can then claim that they need to clamp down on the population because there's a really dangerous mafia out there, don't you know?
Omar Martin, in Orlando, a brutal murderer, a terrorist, said, I'm doing it because you're bombing my country.
I can't imagine.
They dropped more bombs in North Korea and Cambodia than were dropped all throughout the Second World War.
The bombings That go on in the Middle East are...
I have a good imagination.
They are beyond what I can conceive of.
Just what is going on over there in the bombing.
And what does this do to the conscience?
What does this do to our capacity to process horror and to tell the truth?
According to some calculations, since the United States was founded in 1776, there have only been 21 calendar years in which the US was not involved in any wars.
Out of what, 240 years, there's only 21.
It's 5% of the time.
5% of the time, America's not involved in a war.
And five of those years were 1935 to 1940 when there was isolationism and a Great Depression.
And Iran, see Iran, Iran is the big enemy.
Iran apparently is very, very dangerous.
I'm going to give you an impossible question, Keith.
When do you think the last time Iran invaded another country was?
Six-Day War, 1967?
No, 1795.
Oh, God.
221 years ago, Iran invaded another country.
And Iran is the big danger, apparently.
Thank you.
And the number of dead, you know, even if we count that a lot of the U.S. troops exited from Iraq in 2011,
that means that America had been invading or bombing Iraq for 20 years, for four presidencies.
They have been bombing or invading Iraq.
Or, as you say, corrupting the water supply and causing the deaths of half a million Iraqi children.
Which Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who we referred to, said, I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it.
Because you're not paying, you cold-blooded, blood-soaked witch.
And then in 2010, Obama awarded her with the Freedom Prize.
And now she's coming out and saying, there's a special place in hell for women who don't back up other women politically.
Well, I think The Special Place in Hell is certainly something I've thought about with regards to that woman.
It's incredible.
And you mentioned that more bombs were dropped on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia than all of World War II combined.
And then Henry Kissinger wins the Nobel Peace Prize back then.
Oh, yeah.
What is this?
I mean, are we...
Facing people that are...
In other words, do you and I know this?
And the CIA know this?
And they're too stubborn or stupid?
Or are we dealing with conspirators?
People who are intentionally attempting to live...
I don't know.
I'm sorry to interrupt, Keith.
All we can do is speak the truth.
I don't care to descend into motives because I can't conceive of it.
You know, so...
There are seven developing Islamic countries, which the US military recently has intact or invaded, at least since 9-11.
Or funded attacks there in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Yemen.
And in Pakistan and Somalia, pretty unstable.
Now, those seven countries, five huge setbacks.
It's madness.
Do you know, when the head of Egypt in the mid-19th century first went to Europe, he loved it.
He loved European civilization.
He wanted to bring it back and grow his country into a quasi-European power.
Why?
Why did it have to be like this?
Why?
Attacks and blowbacks.
And I tell you this, man, the U.S. is really good at having allies and then decapitating them.
Hey, who was allied with America and the allies in the Second World War?
Who took the greatest losses on the Eastern Front?
Soviet Union.
Soviet Union.
Allies.
Allies.
And then, what?
Cold War.
Boom!
Decades and decades.
They went from allies to enemies.
Mortal enemies.
Now, question.
Who was an ally in the Middle East against the Soviet Union?
Iraq?
Radical Muslims.
Afghanistan?
No, radical Muslims.
The Mujahideen.
Trained by the CIA. CIA helped lure...
Russia, into the graveyard of empires known as Afghanistan, trained the Mujahideen to fight against the Russians, took down all their airplanes with the Stinger missiles.
You take down a $20 million plane with a $15,000 missile, well, you're going to run out of money on the plane side pretty quickly.
They were friends and allies against the Soviets.
These Soviets were allies, then they were the enemies.
Saddam Hussein was an ally, then he was the enemy.
Osama bin Laden was an ally.
Then he was the enemy.
It's madness.
It's madness.
The body count between the West and the Middle East, there's no comparison.
There's no comparison.
The invasion of Iraq alone caused the deaths equivalent to 3,911s.
3,911s.
Wow.
The death count in the Middle East, primarily Muslims, is unbelievably staggering.
I... I don't know.
I mean, there's horror all over the world, but I think this one, because it is so unspoken and unacknowledged...
I remember seeing, and I've mentioned this on the show before, but I remember seeing a picture of a Muslim man crawling into the ground to hug the tiny coffin of his child.
He couldn't get out of the grave.
The people at the top are unbelievably dangerous.
unbelievably dangerous.
They say Syria is involved in a civil war that...
That's bullshit.
Syria has Western-backed insurgents invading the country.
After the Paris attack, they said acts of they said acts of revenge for France's involvement in the bombing.
Of militants in Iraq and Syria.
Thank you.
It's a coalition, but it's led by the US. The cost of airstrikes in Iraq alone is $8 million a day.
$8 million a day.
A single soldier in Iraq to deployment for one year costs $775,000.
For one year.
Listen, this is why it's so messed up to talk about this stuff, because I don't like...
Obviously, it's horrifying that people get shot in concerts and people get shot in bars.
But the death count is not even close to proportional.
And this is just people in the Middle East killed by Western powers.
The destruction of these societies, which is not new.
It's not, it didn't just happen.
It's been going on since the 19th century.
It's artificially drawing these lines around these cultures and these tribes, some of whom are friendly, some of whom are warring.
The fall of the Ottoman Empire, the end of the Second World War, it all got redrawn.
Because to win a war, you need oil.
Can't win a war without oil.
Can't run your tanks, can't run your planes, can't run shit.
And so, when the Allies, the Germans, the British, the French, and others, when the Allies all got decimated in the Second World War, I think some people in the Middle East said, oh my God, maybe these Westerners are going to leave.
No.
Who moved in?
The United States.
The United States.
And then you get a nationalist coming to power in Iran in the early 1950s.
And he says, well, the British and the British oil companies have taken all the revenue out of the country.
We're not keeping any of it.
It's not staying here.
So he nationalizes.
I know, it's stealing.
He nationalizes or threatens to nationalize the oil industries.
And the British don't like that, but they're a little weak, so they go to the Americans to get the resources through the CIA to overthrow this guy.
And they install the Shah.
The Shah rules for 26 years.
Pretty brutal.
A lot of torture.
A lot of disappearances.
Late 70s.
Revolution.
Ayatollah comes in.
Sharia law takes over.
Thank you.
And that's it.
Do you know that in the 70s, the US government tried to come up with a definition of terrorism that they could apply in terms of understanding it from a standpoint of international law.
law, they could not find any definition of terrorism that didn't almost perfectly describe their foreign policy.
And if you want to know, this is not to excuse anything, it's not to forgive anything, but it's to understand that the anger that the Americans felt on 9-11, but it's to understand that the anger that the Americans felt on 9-11, picture that multiplied thousands of times in Thank you.
Thank you.
That was one terrible day.
In Iraq, it was 10 fucking years.
And what did they do?
What did they do?
Ooh, the Muslim world has been radicalized.
Really?
Funny that.
Funny how watching your children die in your arms can radicalize you.
Funny how every time an airplane sound is heard in the sky, you wonder if it's going to be your last 10 seconds on Earth.
Wonder if you're afraid to congregate for a wedding.
Wonder if you're trapped in a society where the best and the brightest of all fled.
There's no infrastructure and there's no jobs.
There's no stability.
There's no sewers.
There's no medicine.
Funny that.
And one of the One of the people who was the chief architects of some of this stuff, particularly against Libya, is now running for president and getting a lot of support.
Gaddafi was an imperfect ruler of an imperfect region and part of that imperfection is cultural and part of it is religious and part of it is the West.
I don't even want to know, I can't even like imagine how to assign percentages But it's there.
I can't imagine that this is a presidential candidate.
The emails are bad.
And the emails have potentially some blood on them.
People may have been found.
I'm with her!
You know who's saying that?
The grim fucking reaper.
Oh, I'm with her.
And I'm taking my sight through the Middle East and cutting down Muslims and others by the hundreds of thousands.
And who's aware of it?
Thank you.
You know how much trouble Bill Clinton got into for leaving a little stain on Monica's blue dress?
Yeah, well, lying about it got him impeached.
They voted for impeachment.
Right.
Now, can you imagine being in the Middle East during this time frame?
I guess by this time...
Certainly the bombings and sanctions against Iraq have been going on for some time.
Can you imagine them at least reading American newspapers and saying, that's the stain you're concerned about?
There are some more significant Lady Macbeth-style stains.
Yeah.
What Macbeth says about King Duncan, who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him?
Who would have thought that the Middle East had so much blood in it?
I hate that we don't even see it.
I want a better life for everyone in the world.
It's a crazy dream.
But We need to look clearly at what has been done.
Now, I haven't done it.
You haven't done it.
But are we talking about it?
Are we spreading the information?
Are we helping people to understand what has been done?
And it's in our name!
Because we vote!
So people, I mean, I know people, they all, we like the Americans, we don't like the government, but it is still a democracy.
And the amount of distraction and the amount of nonsense and the amount of blood and bread and circuses that delude the population.
Terrible things are being done in the night.
Terrible things are being done without a sound reaching our shores.
Terrible things are being done with no flicker of light over the horizon.
Hundreds of thousands of human beings are being disassembled.
And the people who survive have barely the strength to bury them.
And who will pay?
Who is being held accountable?
Who is being held responsible?
Who is even aware of these things?
There will be no reform.
When people are fighting for their lives, there will be a coalition and coalescing of hatred and fear and rage.
And where will it end?
Thank you.
Where will it end?
Well, speaking of it ending, I mean, there's only so much, you know, as much as you want to take action, it's like, well, it's going to be hard for my actions to withdraw the U.S. from the Middle East.
But as far as what I can do, in other words, it's not...
It's not the elites or the Hillary Clintons, the Henry Kissingers that are doing this.
These are the people in uniform, and that's why I wanted to ask, am I just like them, or is it something that I don't want to say?
I don't want to strip them of their moral culpability.
But here's a quote by Mark Passio.
He said, Because the order follower is the only one who actually performed the action and in taking such action actually brought the resultant harm into physical manifestation.
Order following is the pathway to every form of evil and chaos in our world.
And if my moral support, my friendship, With people who are in police and military are doing this?
Am I... I mean, I'm not robbing the bank, but I feel like I'm driving the getaway car.
I don't know, Keith.
I don't have any particularly...
I've cornered the market on how to solve this problem.
I don't.
That's part of the horror, right?
Part of the horror is this stuff.
This shit should stop.
And how?
How?
I do know that we need to grit our teeth and tell the truth.
We need to grit our teeth and tell the truth and we need to make people uncomfortable with their blindness.
We need to make people uncomfortable with their not knowing.
Like the ancient Greek philosopher said, we need to value the truth more than we value our friends.
You can't have friends without the truth.
You can only have co-conspirators.
And we need to...
I mean, this 1984 stuff where there are enemies, there are friends, there are enemies.
I mean...
We need to just ask some basic questions.
And I don't know how to hold people accountable for these kinds of crimes.
I believe that in international law, the most serious crime is the crime of aggression.
The invasion of a sovereign nation that has not threatened you.
Or maybe the overthrowing of a government that does not...
I mean, how...
How do we hold people accountable?
And I, this is why I'm a voluntarist, because I don't believe you ever really can.
And what can we do?
There's two things that I think Are important and number one is just share.
Just share the...
Just share the facts and the information.
This stuff doesn't come out of nowhere.
I mean...
Has Switzerland ever been attacked?
By terrorists?
No.
Why?
Because they're not attacking the Middle East.
They're not participating.
They have the good sense to not join the Euro.
Last ticket on the Titanic!
get on board.
If, you know, there are examples where America there are examples where America has pulled back from certain situations and
And it has been for the better.
I mean, there have been easings of tensions with regards to this stuff.
So in Lebanon, this was under Reagan.
An Iran-supported Hezbollah group blew up a marine barracks and killed 241 American military personnel.
And sending troops to Lebanon to help Israel and all that, I mean, God.
But after Reagan withdrew U.S. forces from Lebanon, Hezbollah stopped or slowed down its attacks and attenuated its attacks on U.S. targets.
They're not...
There's a lot of adjectives you can throw at these people, and a lot of pejoratives you can throw at these people, and I'd agree with a lot of them too, but they're not random.
You know, when, well, mission accomplished, remember?
George Bush saying, well, they hate us for our freedoms.
I mean, that incensed Bin Laden so much, he said, no!
No!
We do not hate you for your freedoms.
We hate the fact that you have countless troops stationed in Saudi Arabia.
How much did America like having British troops stationed all over the place?
Not much.
And they were the same religion, the same culture, the same language, the same history, the same background.
In many surveys in non-Western countries, people are asked, what is the number one threat to world peace today?
Do you know what they answer?
U.S. Western imperialism?
America.
These people are very dangerous.
Thank you.
The people in charge in the West, they are very dangerous.
And we don't like to look at these facts.
I don't.
As I've said before, I hate...
I hate that someday I'm going to have to tell my daughter about the world that is.
It's alright.
I am moving every heart and mind muscle I have to make it better.
But...
At least my daughter is going to grow up to be told.
Which is more than we can say for countless children in the Middle East.
You know, prior to, I don't know what, prior to 1990, almost all of the deaths of U.S. troops happened outside the Middle East since 1990.
Almost all the deaths of U.S. troops have happened in the Middle East.
And for what?
What has it got us?
What has it gained us?
Well, it's made a lot of daddy war bucks and their friends exceedingly rich.
The military-industrial complex, the satanic feasting on innocent blood, is doing pretty fucking well.
I'm sorry for the swearing.
And while referencing deaths, I think as a causal result of those wars, we also have the veterans committing suicides at incredible rates.
Yeah.
What, 16 a day, myself?
They literally could get people, I mean, they could get us all killed.
These people, and I don't know why.
I feel like I've got a different species on the planet, like a predator species on the planet.
I don't know.
I don't know what they think they're doing.
I don't know what the plan is.
I don't know what the goal is.
I don't know.
Like, there's this weird inability to just say, Okay, we're going home.
You know, I mean, when you've just trained Bin Laden on how to take down an empire, on how to take down a giant military power through wars of attrition, economic warfare, when you've just done that and he says, hey, you know, it'd be really great if you guys took your troops out of Saudi Arabia.
I don't know.
Is it crazy for me to say you might want to listen to that?
No!
He's not going to tell us what to do.
You're safe!
You're not out there with a gun!
You're not out there with lasers on your forehead!
As the song says, General sat and the lines on the map moved from side to side.
I don't know.
I don't know how you lie people into a war.
I don't know how insane it is.
Love Donald Trump or hate him, at least he brought up the fact that there were some significant misrepresentations leading up to the war in Iraq.
When do they stop?
When do they stop doubling down?
Iraq didn't work.
I don't know.
Let's destabilize Libya.
Let's destabilize Syria.
Let's destabilize everything we can get our hands on.
Maybe the next destabilization will really work.
No, because they provoke blowback.
And then they say, well, sorry about your rights, people, but you know, you're in danger now, so we better take away some more of your rights.
And we're caught between foreign aggression and blowback.
Thank you.
And we worry about losing our rights.
And we should.
But people in the Middle East worry about losing their lives, which is a little more serious.
So, Keith, I don't know.
Number one, tell people the truth about what is going on.
Number two, Boycott the mainstream media, for God's sakes.
For the love of all that's holy.
Do not feed the genuine beast.
The genuine beast is not the gun, it's the propaganda that hides it.
Ooh, can you believe Donald Trump said something to a woman in a bikini?
God almighty.
We will trivialize ourselves into nuclear shadows.
And until the media starts talking about the stuff that matters, don't give them a penny.
Use whatever, I mean, just don't go to their sites.
Go to where it's reposted, use ad blockers, whatever's legal, whatever you can do.
Starve them of their funds.
We can do that much.
Accelerate the decline.
Manipulation delays the cover-ups.
All who aren't telling the truth about the dangers of the world are accomplices to the potential ending of the world.
So, Steph, to your first point, you said tell the truth.
It's very easy for me to talk to you.
It's rough when I'm talking to friends who have either lost someone, an American soldier in the Middle East, or they are heavily invested in it.
Could we do a role play of you telling me the truth about the Middle East and me playing the part of someone who has a vested interest in Keeping the illusion alive of we're spreading freedom and democracy?
Well, okay, I don't mind doing that at all, Keith, and I think it's a good idea, but I just wanted to point out that, I mean, I've had some conversations with soldiers, both publicly and not publicly.
They're not really under a lot of illusions about what they were doing.
I mean, they're following what's going on.
They know.
They know.
I mean, I know it's a self-selecting group of people who talk to me, but nonetheless.
So, the people who've lost a soldier, like the people who've lost a son or lost a daughter in this never-ending, never-escalating war on an adjective, the war on terror, I don't know.
I mean, that is a tough road to hoe, to put it mildly.
I mean, I can't imagine, but I've got to imagine one of the things that would give you some comfort is the idea that your son or daughter died doing something Noble, something good.
I would not make that my first port of call when it came to bringing the truth to people.
They're not all going to flip like Cindy Sheehan, right?
Right.
Sure.
That's a volatile thing to talk about.
Yeah, and that was my motivation behind emailing Mike.
I mentioned that in my I'm close friends with a family who lost someone overseas, and it was right before Memorial Day.
Even Obama, I sent Mike the link, even Obama came out and mentioned him by name and spoke a few nice words about him, and I just don't know how to react to When I'm in the company of those people, do I say, hey, you know what?
No, I mean, I'm sorry to interrupt.
I would not start there.
I mean, it's a remarkable thing.
The thought that struck me when you were talking, Keith, was that, isn't it remarkable that the disproportionate bodies means that the U.S. ones can still be named?
Can you imagine how long it would take to name on the other side?
Why is it even another side?
Sure.
Well, you can just go to the Vietnam Memorial Wall.
58,300 Americans and between two and three million Vietnamese.
It's sick.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Do you want to try someone who's just...
Do you want to try being someone who's just gung-ho for this stuff?
Yes.
Yes.
Okay, so would you start or would I start?
I'll start.
Okay.
Steph, did I—I don't know if I told you the good news.
Joe finally got—decided to do something with his life.
He joined the Marines, man.
Do you believe it?
Now, see—now hang on, hang on.
I thought we were going to have more of a political discussion.
Now, if you're going to say Joe's thinking of joining the Marines, afterwards it's a little tough, right?
Because after someone's joined the Marines, let's say it's their friend or best friend or whatever, after someone's joined the Marines, it's going to be pretty tough because you can't back out, right?
You can't sort of, like, if he's thinking of doing it, that's one thing.
But I'm not sure I'd have a long conversation with someone whose best friend just joined the Marines.
Because That's, you know, you've got to expend your energies where you can do the most good, and I'm not sure of that.
So I'm sorry to interrupt at the beginning.
Can we just say Joe's thinking of joining the Marines?
Absolutely.
So, Steph, Joe is thinking about finally doing something with his life and thinking of joining the Marines.
And that's a good thing, you think?
I mean, it's incredible.
I mean, imagine the bravery going overseas to risk your life for the freedoms of the people here.
God, I just think that would be incredible.
So the freedoms of the people here, I mean, since the majority of the conflicts are going on in the Middle East, I think you're making the case, I just want to be sure I understand, you're making the case that...
Joe going overseas, going over to the Middle East to fight, to do something, is going to enhance our freedoms here?
Well, not enhance, but the big infringers of freedom are in the Middle East, as we saw on 9-11.
So by Joe's going there, he's stopping that from happening again, absolutely.
So Joe should go and fight in the Middle East because people, some people from the Middle East Did 9-11?
Well, they did it in the name of their ideology.
I mean...
Sure.
I'm willing to accept that.
I mean, I'm not saying I believe that, but I'm willing to accept it at this point in the conversation.
So the principle is that if you are attacked, you should attack back.
Because we've got to have a principle here, right?
It can't just be whoever American Marines attack is good, because that's not a moral principle.
That's just a, we're tough, right?
We're strong.
We're Marines.
So the principle by which Joe going to the Middle East to attack people is justified is because of 9-11, right?
Well, not just that.
Invasion is also justified if they're a potential threat.
Well, hang on.
Let's go with the one you said, right?
We just do one at a time, right?
Okay.
Now, this is in no way to justify 9-11, but why do you think Bin Laden and his group attacked on 9-11?
Well, I think they see footage of our girls going to school, our girls not wearing turbans, and I think it makes them sick.
And I think their hatred for our freedoms is so deep-seated that they're willing to attack us for it.
Okay, I appreciate that.
Do you know what bin Laden said as to why he was attacking?
He didn't say it's because you all aren't wearing burqas in New York or something like that.
I mean, do you know...
Like, you're saying, here's an answer, here's why they attacked.
Bin Laden repeatedly and insistently said why he was attacking.
Do you know what he said?
I don't know if I would trust Bin Laden to tell me the time in a room full of clocks, so I don't know what he said, but what did he say?
Well, he said a couple of things, but most importantly it had to do with the stationing of thousands of American troops in...
Saudi Arabia, because he considered that a foreign occupation.
And of course, he was devout and religious, and he considered it a holy place.
And so it is...
It is because of...
And, you know, I mean, we can sort of understand that at least to some degree insofar as if thousands of Iranian troops were stationed in New York or in Washington, we would probably want them not to be there either, right?
Okay.
Okay.
And of course, Bin Laden is dead.
So if it was about 9-11, well, that's, as the British say, done and dusted, right?
So why would Joe want to go or need to go to the Middle East if it was, you know, let's get the guys who did 9-11.
Well, okay, you got them.
So what now?
What's he doing there?
Well, he's getting the source of the hatred of America.
In other words, the people who did 9-11 died the day of 9-11.
The problem was we didn't get the tree at its root.
And Joe is going over there to get the root of the problem solved.
Which is how?
How do you get the root of the problem solved?
By getting them...
Before they get us and fighting it now before we have to fight it later Okay So this has been going on now for 15 years right because it was a within a month or two of 9-11 that the invasion of Afghanistan occurred and then in 2003 there was the invasion of Iraq which had nothing to do with 9-11 but nonetheless and then A bunch of other interventions which you don't really have to get into,
but basically this war on terror has been being fought for 15 years with hundreds of thousands of bodies in the Middle East and certainly thousands and thousands of bodies in the West, in America.
How do you think it's going?
Well, I think there hasn't been a 9-11 every day, so I think it's a success.
It's a success.
Okay.
Do you know that terrorist attacks around the world have gone up 4,500% since 9-11?
Well, imagine if we hadn't been over there.
Then they'd be up, you know, 20,000%.
No.
No, that's simply not true.
Because we can look at the example of Switzerland, which has not decided to invade the Middle East and is receiving precisely zero terrorist attacks.
So if your theory is, well, if you don't fight, then you get even more.
There's an example of a country that didn't fight.
And, of course, America was a far more free place in the 19th century than it is at the moment, right?
I mean, taxes were infinitely lower.
There was no income tax.
There was no central banking.
There was freedom of movement, freedom of licensure for business.
There was freedom of trade.
That was far more significant than it is now.
Certainly up until the late 19th century, most kids went to private school and you weren't forced to pay for government schools and all of that.
So America was far more free in the 19th century and It was very easy to get in, right?
I mean, there was basically, if you weren't coughing up a lung when you stepped off at Atlas Island, you could join America, right?
You could come and live in America.
You didn't need a green card, you didn't need paperwork, you didn't need e-verify, right?
So given that America was far more free in the 19th century, and it was far easier to get into America, why do you think there were no attacks from the Muslim world into America in the 19th century?
Well, invading a country is very costly compared to a single attack.
And because the access to airplanes didn't exist, they've been able to do it now, whereas I'm sure they would have wished to invade daily back then when we were more free.
But...
No, but we're talking...
No, hang on.
We're talking terrorism.
We're not talking invasions, right?
Terrorism was, you could do terrorism in the 19th century.
You could put poison in the water supply.
You could set bombs.
You could do lots of things, right?
And so when America was far more free, why weren't Muslims coming over to try and commit terrorist acts against, if freedom is what bothers them, why?
Why not?
It's a lot easier to come over.
You could still do your terrorism.
You're harder to be caught, I'm sure.
And America was even more full of this freedom that you say they hate so much.
Well, I'm not an expert on what all the Muslims in the Middle East think, but it sounds to me like you're saying Joe is going over there for nothing, or he's wrong for doing it.
Is that what you're saying?
No, I mean, you're changing the subject.
You put forward a theory which says that America is hated in the Middle East for its freedoms.
I mean America was more free in the first half of the 20th century.
Were there a lot of Muslim attacks in America in the first half?
Why did it only seem to happen after America began bombing countries in the Middle East?
Why did anti-American sentiment only start When America began toppling regimes in the Middle East, when it began starving people in the Middle East, when it began causing disruptions to the water supply that caused the death of half a million Middle East and children.
Why do you think, if it's just, you know, freedoms that they hate so much, why did they wait for 200 years after the founding of America to begin hating America?
And why did it only happen after America began to do incredibly destructive things in the Middle East first?
Obviously, you've studied this.
I don't have the answer to all those questions.
What I do know is that America is the freest place in the world, and Islam absolutely hates freedom.
So, I fully support Joe joining the military, and the fact that you're questioning me, I think you're questioning his motives or his morals.
No, no, no.
Listen, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry if I even implied that.
We've not talked about his motives or his morals.
Now, as far as America being the freest place in the world, well...
You can look up the Economic Freedom Index or other things.
You may be a little surprised, but I don't want to sort of go down that road in particular.
Here's my suggestion.
And listen, man, I really, really appreciate having this conversation with you.
I don't have any final answers.
These are things that trouble me.
I'm not going to tell you it's this or it's that, right?
But these are questions that I have.
Because, you know, when it comes to Pulling triggers, which is, you know, his job.
His job is going to be to break things and kill people.
I mean, that's what the army does.
And when it comes to deciding to put your life into the hands of people who are going to tell you who to shoot, I think we can really understand that that's a very serious moral business where you wouldn't want to make a mistake.
Right?
I mean, I'm not comparing these things, but if you're like, wow, I'd really like to join the Wehrmacht in 1939 or something, that would not be a very good decision, right?
And again, I'm not directly comparing.
I'm just saying that when it comes to, I'm going to sign up to these people, they're going to have the legal right to tell me what to do or throw me in jail.
They're going to have to tell me who to kill or throw me in jail.
That is a very serious moral business, and we should be very careful about making those decisions, because Because once you go into the army, they own you, right?
I mean, you can try and get out and conscientious object or whatever it is.
But it's tough, to put it mildly.
And it's a very difficult thing.
And we'd rather not have that happen.
And I appreciate even just being able to raise these questions with you.
I get that it's troubling.
I get that it's confusing.
And it may be enraging, for sure.
And my only suggestion is, I don't know.
All of the causes behind everything that's happening, you don't know either.
I don't know if anyone does, but there are important questions to be asked, and I appreciate you allowing me to ask these questions.
My only suggestion is, and I'd like to talk about this stuff with Joe if he's available at some point before he signs, but I appreciate being able to talk about this stuff.
My suggestion would be in, maybe I can send you a couple of links, but just look into...
What some of the causes were.
You can diagnose a cause without excusing the manifestation, right?
Like if you say, lung cancer is mostly caused by smoking, you're not saying, that means lung cancer is okay, right?
You determine the causes because you don't like the manifestation, not because you do, right?
So if...
God-awful US foreign policy has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Muslims and then they get angry at the United States and they fight back and in their mind they're like Luke Skywalker and America's the Death Star or whatever.
When you say, okay, there's some causality here, you're not saying it's okay.
You're saying, it's so not okay, I want to stop the cause.
I hate lung cancer so much, I want to describe the cause to minimize it.
Does that make any sense?
I guess.
Yeah, as far as talking to Joe, you can call him anytime and thank him for you having the right to say this, that he's going there to protect.
You have this right simply because there are people defending your freedom to have it.
Well, and listen, I understand that the rights need some defense.
And I want us to spend the lives that we need to spend to defend our freedoms, or may need to spend to defend our freedoms.
I want to spend them as wisely as possible.
I'm not entirely positive that going around the world sticking something in hornets' nests and then having to run away from the wasps, that is not hornets.
That's not what I want.
If this man is willing to lay down his life for freedoms, I really, really appreciate that.
But it would be a genuine tragedy if he risked his life and we ended up with less freedoms.
We certainly have fewer freedoms now than we did before 9-11, right?
And there's a lot of people have been killed.
Americans and many, many more people in the Middle East have been killed.
Or have died as the result of the invasions.
And now there are, what, 65 million people on the move around the world, to some degree as a result of these kinds of disruptions.
And I would sure hate for him to spend or risk his life on something that wasn't actually adding to my freedoms, but instead increasing my risk, and which would not be necessary.
So I will certainly call him.
And again, I'm not saying I have any final answers.
These are questions that trouble me.
The worst that can happen is he proves me wrong.
I end up wiser and he ends up finding out he's making a great decision.
And the best that can happen is maybe I save him from a decision that he might regret.
As, of course, a lot of veterans have.
Not all, but some have certainly regretted the risks that they took.
And especially, you know, they fought hard to take Fallujah and then Fallujah just...
Anyway, so I will give him a call.
I appreciate you even listening to this kind of stuff.
And maybe we can talk about it again sometime.
That was horrific.
Yeah?
How's that?
Well, I don't know if it's because you have a background in theater, but you were just very calm.
You didn't sort of have a tone behind each of the questions, whereas it's difficult not to when you're passionate about something.
So it seemed like you really approached it from the point of being curious, and you weren't just making up questions, you were choosing the questions at As I gave you my answers.
So you were walking me through my own reasoning.
I try not to let...
Sure.
You know, it is such a challenge for people.
And you know, in my youth, I would probably have been a little bit more punchy, but it is such an enormous emotional challenge for people to question these basics that they have been taught for, you know, statism is a kind of religion for a lot of people, as is the military, kind of priesthood.
And so, yeah, I recognize that it's a big, big challenge for people to start questioning this stuff, which is why, you know, sort of patience, humility, and water wears away stone can, I think, be a good approach.
And that's if it was a one-on-one conversation.
If we were doing sort of public debate, it would probably be a little different, but I'm glad it was helpful.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Thank you so much.
You're welcome.
So yeah, keep us posted on how the conversations go, and I hope that they go well.
Thank you so much for your time and the emotion you put into every episode.
There's one thing I wanted to mention to you.
The other day I was watching a Walter Block interview, and he said, I met Murray Rothbard in 1966, and I said, how many libertarians are there?
Like, how many real non-state anarcho-capitalist libertarians are there?
And he said that Murray Rothbard said, um, probably 25%.
And then a few days later, you put out a video called 100 Million.
And it just almost brought me to tears.
I mean, I just wanted to thank you directly for giving a voice to the moral side of things, the libertarian arguments.
That just stood out to me so much.
I wanted to let you know about it.
Oh, thank you.
And...
1966, if there was 25.
If I was born one, then there was 26 after September.
Well, thank you.
I appreciate that, Keith.
And you're certainly welcome back anytime.
And I appreciate all of the questions and the passion and commitment that you bring to these topics.
Take care, Stefan.
Thank you, Mike.
All right.
Thanks, everyone, so much for calling in tonight.
as always.
It's a great joy, pleasure, honor, and privilege to chat with you about these very important issues in the world.
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