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July 9, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:44:55

3341 Why Leftists Hate Democracy - Call In Show - July 8th, 2016

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	Oh, you want a show?
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	Thank you very much for listening to freedomainradio.com, show number infinity minus one.
	And yes, it was a show tonight, my friends.
	But first, remember, please, please, please help us out.
	Help us continue to do the work so necessary for the world.
	And it's freedom at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
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	I'll just wait here while you go to Nate when I come back.
	Some great, great callers tonight and a very, very exciting and, I guess, particularly contentious show.
	But the first caller was a husband and wife who have a child and are thinking that maybe they want to adopt and what are the arguments for and against that particular perspective.
	And I hope it's not going to shock too many people, but I went pretty hard on, I think, the reason and evidence behind that decision.
	Now, the second caller called in about Brexit, the referendum vote in the UK, and the political left, and is it starting to reveal its actual hatred and contempt for democracy and the working class that it was originally supposed to represent?
	That was a full-on rant fest.
	I basically feel entirely de-venomed, but of course, leftist venom refills fairly quickly in my jugular, but I hope you'll forgive me for going off full-tilt boogie on that one.
	And the next caller was very interesting.
	The kind of calls that I just love, which was around epistemology.
	Like, what is reality?
	What is the study of knowledge and how do we get it?
	And can we trust the senses?
	And is it possible that we're matrix style like a brain in a tank?
	Sounds very abstract, gets very personal as you move forward in the conversation.
	So I really appreciated that call.
	And the last call was taking me to task for my criticism of U.S. foreign policy.
	How on earth can I blame the U.S. for Iraqi deaths because it was Saddam Hussein who didn't obey the rules and it was his fault they all got killed?
	And we had a pretty broad and far-ranging discussion of U.S. foreign policy, the Cold War cause and effect, and I think it was great.
	So freedomainradio.com slash donate to help us out.
	Remember to follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
	FDRURL.com slash Amazon to use our affiliate link and sit down, strap in, we're off.
	Alright, well at first today we have a couple, Diane and Trevor.
	Diane originally wrote in and said, I'm 24 and just had my first child.
	Her birth has prompted my husband and I to discuss children more thoroughly and we had both agreed that eventually we would like to adopt a child into our family.
	However, I've been troubled by some of your videos regarding IQ, genetics, emotional, and social potential based on child slash parent relationships in the first few years of a child's life.
	My husband and I now both wonder, is adopting a child, not an infant, the best use of our time and resources when it seems to be compelling data to suggest that disruptions in a child's early home life are difficult, if not impossible, to overcome?
	That's from Diane and Trevor.
	Oh, hi guys.
	How are you doing tonight?
	Good.
	Doing well, thanks.
	All right.
	So, if you've just had your first child, if you fall asleep during the conversation, I promise not to be offended.
	Just so you know.
	It won't bother me at all.
	I've been there.
	I understand.
	I will take it to mean that you've been up late being good parents.
	How's it going, by the way, the baby?
	Amazing.
	It's best fact.
	Anyway, it's fun.
	She's wonderful.
	Yeah.
	And how old is she?
	She's almost 11 months now.
	Oh, wow.
	Is she staggering from couch to couch like a dawn drunkard?
	That is a perfect explanation.
	She walks pretty well.
	Good stuff.
	I started my daughter off with the soft chew, but, you know, everybody makes their own different choices.
	A little bit of tap.
	That's great to hear.
	Now, are you thinking of siblings or having someone else around for your daughter?
	And would that be sooner rather than later?
	Well, we're thinking about having another child between the two of us within the next two years, hopefully.
	Adoption was something that we had put on for a little bit later.
	Since we wanted to adopt a school-age child around five or six, I can't exactly tell you why, but we had both determined we would prefer the adopted child to be the younger of the three, assuming the next time we have a kid I only have one and not twins or something.
	But we wanted them to be around that age and to be younger, so it would be several years in the future from now.
	But we're listening to your videos now, and so that's prompted some of the discussion between he and I about whether or not it's the best use of our time and resources, and obviously it's a...
	No!
	Next!
	No, it's not.
	Listen, I'm going to put the caveats out there, which is that there are kids who are adopted who are wonderful, and there, of course, are biological kids.
	The parents are not great, and the kids don't turn out great.
	So these are just generalities.
	But we have to make our decisions with the scarce resources that we have in this life.
	We have to make our decisions about...
	How are we going to best apply those resources?
	So, I've put the caveats out there and now I'm going to speak as if I haven't spoken them because I already have.
	So, kids who are put up for adoption In my opinion, and I think there's some facts behind this, but kids who are put up for adoption are put up for adoption because of a variety of reasons.
	It could be that they were taken from the mother because the mother was an unfit mother.
	Now, if you had a child raised by an unfit mother until the age of five, It seems to me unlikely that you'll be able to have much of a positive effect on the further development of that child's personality.
	You know, kids who go through a lot of chaos, disruption, abuse, neglect, whatever, for the first five years, there's no magic out there to make them better.
	Nobody knows how to fix that.
	It may be unfixable.
	So, the first five years tend to be, as far as I understand it, pretty crucial in the development of a child's personality.
	And if there's any time that you want to have control over the variables as a parent, it's over the first five years.
	Now, why else might a child be put up for adoption?
	Well, it could be that the Because a child being put up for adoption means not only that the parents don't want the child, or at least...
	It's hard to say they don't, like it's some sort of absolute, but clearly they don't want the child more than they want the child, because otherwise they wouldn't put the child up for adoption.
	But it also means that there's no extended family to take over, right?
	There are no grandparents who want to do it.
	It's a chaotic gene pool as a whole, I would argue, on average, for kids who are put up for adoption.
	It could be that it was a, you know, maybe this is less common now with the welfare state, but, you know, a teenage mom who had a kid and, you know.
	But then you already have somebody who doesn't use birth control, isn't being responsible with procreation and with sexual activities and so on.
	Which, you know, if I had to put money on it, would indicate a lower IQ.
	And now, of course, we know that IQ starts off a little bit less ascribable to genetics.
	But over time, as we age, IQ becomes more and more genetic and deterministic to the point where later in life, about 80% of the variance seems to be based on genetics.
	In other words, the environment tends to fall away and the genetics assert themselves for IQ over time.
	And so, yeah, it could be, I mean, people don't make good decisions and then end up giving up a kid for adoption.
	Giving up a kid for adoption Is the result of a series of bad decisions.
	And you are going to inherit the genetics of those bad decisions.
	And you are also going to inherit the trauma or the chaos that were the dominoes slamming into the child's capabilities throughout those first five years.
	And this doesn't mean that you can't help a child.
	Maybe you could.
	But if you have the choice to have your own child and to take care of that child in the womb, because, you know, maybe there was chaos, maybe there was drug use or alcoholism or something while the child was in the womb.
	So you can control the environment when you're pregnant.
	You can control the environment in terms of breastfeeding, right?
	Maybe you'll get a kid who was never breastfed.
	Maybe you'll get a kid who was spanked a lot.
	Both of those are going to take significant numbers of...
	IQ points off the kid.
	Just not breastfeeding and spanking is going to take mid to high single digits IQ off.
	And you can't just love that back into existence.
	If you have a kid who's missing a finger, you can't kiss that finger until it regrows.
	And I think that with regards to personality and IQ and so on, those are the challenges.
	And if people want to know more about this, Charles Murray has been on the show talking about it, Kevin Beaver, Helmuth Nyborg, and Jason Richwine, and we've got a lot of talk about IQ on the show.
	And I know you guys have probably heard some of that, but just For others to be aware of this, I'm not trying to say that adoption is always a bad idea.
	I'm just saying that if your question is, is this the best possible use of your resources as parents, I would say absolutely not.
	If you are committed to peaceful parenting, if you're smart enough to listen to this show, if you're concerned enough to call in about a decision half a decade into the future, You need to have babies with each other.
	You need to control the environment.
	You need to reap the rewards of being great parents in the early years.
	And you need not...
	I don't think it's a good use of your resources to risk, to have a much higher risk of chasing around somebody else's disaster for the rest of your lives.
	And if you do have a kid, you know, series of bad decisions, maybe from a lower IQ environment...
	Then, is that fair for your existing children?
	Because you're rolling the dice with their childhood as well, right?
	Because they're the ones who are going to have to play with this kid.
	They're the ones who are going to have to grow up with this kid.
	And after you guys are dead and buried, they're going to be the ones who are going to be siblings with this kid.
	Now, there's already enough variability when it comes to siblings.
	Like, there's an eight-point IQ variation between siblings often and so on.
	So...
	I don't think you have the right to make a decision that may or has a significant chance of negatively impacting the quality of your biological children's childhood as well.
	So that's my sort of very brief thought about it, and I'm certainly happy to hear what you guys think.
	Well, I guess there's not a whole lot to say since you're a pretty definitive person.
	But a question I didn't include that's on the same topic, because this question was really more so mine.
	It was one that my husband and I were having a conversation about, but what he was particularly interested in getting your opinion on, which you touched on briefly, and I don't know if there's any...
	Data that you have that can help shed light on this, but...
	Wait, is this where you tell me that one of you is adopted and I'm a complete jerk?
	No.
	Could be.
	That would be hilarious, but no.
	It would be...
	Good one, guys!
	No.
	Okay, go on.
	It's about the actual impact of having an adopted sibling on the biological children.
	That was more my husband's question.
	So since you've kind of...
	Sealed up the first one.
	If you have anything, I guess, data-wise, maybe, to add on that, he and I both would be interested in.
	Well, if I may, you kind of touched on it right at the very end, and that was, which is kind of fitting the male and female role of this whole thing, is my first thought when we were discussing this, is how will that affect our family, like, external forces coming in, you know?
	Affecting our family.
	And my question was more about nurturing the coming in threat, obviously.
	But I, you know, for a little while scoured the internet trying to find anything of like, you know, reversal of like a kid coming in and the family kind of helping reverse those things at you.
	And what we kind of already understand to be not true is almost not possible to Like you called it magic earlier, is to reverse the effects.
	And so, which then got me kind of afraid of, okay, I have this beautiful 11-month-old daughter that I'm just like now, I'm, you know, hovering over kind of, no pun intended, hovering over kind of going, okay, nothing in the world is going to hurt her.
	And then we discuss about adoption and thinking, okay, is that Some of the videos that you have of immigration, of IQ and parenting and all of those things kind of all coming together basically starting to shift my opinion at least of, okay, this possible adopted child being, oh, a beautiful thing, which is most of the internet saying, oh, it's a beautiful thing.
	And my original opinion was, oh, it's a beautiful thing to come and bring a kid into your family and help them and all that stuff.
	But now...
	Looking into, you know, kind of taking all the information that you usually, you know, come up with IQ and all that fun stuff and seeing my family and going, okay, maybe that perception was wrong.
	Or am I, you know, and then so calling into the show basically saying, am I making a bad correlation or is that a real thing is to look at the IQ, the parenting, the early life, all that kind of stuff, you know, Me calling in was basically me saying, am I being crazy to take all of that into account, or is that a fair thing?
	I have, listen, I have, I'm going to be perfectly frank, and I always hate to say it, here's where I'm going to be honest, because it sounds like I haven't been up front, but I think adoption is a lot of virtue signaling.
	I think people think it's a good thing to do.
	I think they think it's a nice thing to do.
	I think they think it's a helpful thing to do.
	And, you know, there's still echoes of the old overpopulation thing.
	You know, there are so many kids out there who don't have a home.
	Who are we to make a new one when there's so many kids out there who need a home?
	And it's...
	Like this weird hyper altruism responsibility for the terrible mistakes of other people.
	No.
	Listen.
	We're all going to make our own mistakes.
	I don't need to also incorporate into my life other people's mistakes as well.
	But there's just a lot of...
	I'm not saying you guys necessarily are in this.
	But there's a lot of like...
	You get a lot of positive feedback.
	Like, here are our children.
	And here's the child we adopt.
	Oh, how lovely.
	How great.
	And you get a lot of sentimentality.
	And there's a certain amount of, you know, just...
	It seems very nice, if that makes sense.
	Right, and that's whenever you look up any books or any information, it always sounds exactly like that, which kind of got me a little worried.
	You've got the internet in every book basically saying, you've done an amazing thing and here's a whole book of why.
	Right, right.
	And so I'm a big fan of there being more adoption in this world.
	Because I would much rather that women who have, who get pregnant, who don't, not in a situation where they can raise the children or unwilling or unable to raise, then they should have those children and put those kids up for adoption.
	But to me, adoption, you know, 10 to 15% of couples have significant or permanent fertility problems.
	I guess you're not one of them.
	But, you know, as a friend of mine said, oh, I share a A cup of coffee with my husband and I get pregnant.
	But there's a lot of couples, you know, they get out there, they get married, and they have significant miscarriages or premature ovarian failure or just whatever it's going to be, right?
	High FSH levels and crap like that.
	And they are going to be...
	Those kids, to me, those people could benefit from adopting.
	And the earlier you can adopt, the more control you have over the variables, right?
	Right.
	I mean, you want a newer used car, so to speak, right?
	I mean, the earlier you adopt, the more control you have over the variable.
	So I think that's important.
	But you guys can make kids.
	So, you know, if you can make kids, why would you need to get a kid?
	I just wanted to mention as well, I did an interview for others with Nancy Siegel, S-E-G-A-L, and it's called Born Together, Reared Apart, the Landmark Minnesota Twin Study, and that's the best sort of outcome stuff that is the case.
	So I'll just mention two other things.
	So be careful about this virtue signaling.
	You know, there's a lot of people who are like, oh, I adopted this hamana hamana from hamana hamana and, you know, everyone thinks how wonderful it is and how great it is and it's a conversation piece and so on.
	That's more vanity than, I think, rationality.
	And again, I'm not saying it's your case with you guys, but just keep your eye out for that.
	But there's two things.
	One is an anecdote.
	One is an anecdote.
	And...
	I knew a guy years ago.
	He adopted, he and his wife adopted two kids.
	And one of the kids, I met them both, one of the kids was, you know, pretty nice kid, liked playing his Xbox and did fairly well in school and, you know, nice, nice kid and all that.
	And the other was this, like, skateboarding nihilistic hellion.
	And they couldn't I mean, I literally cannot tell you how many resources this guy poured into his skater boy kid, you know, tried to keep him off drugs, tried to get him into rehab.
	It's just a giant mess.
	And that is a mess that this guy is going to have to live with for the rest of his life.
	Do you know what age?
	I don't know the details, so I'm just hypothesizing here.
	But if the kid becomes a drug addict, then you've got rehab, you've got stealing, you might have self-harm, you've got dangerous friends, you've got people coming into your house every time you leave, you're freaking out.
	I mean, it's like living in a weird kind of adoption prison forever.
	And it's like having your heart broken every single morning, like eggs in a cup.
	And look, I understand.
	But one of the kids was great.
	They rolled the dice.
	They got two adopted kids, I think, from two different families.
	One of the kids was great.
	The other one was not.
	And there just didn't seem to be anything to do to...
	To fix it.
	And you really are rolling the dice when it comes to adoption because, as I say, you don't have control of the vast majority of the variables.
	But here is the fundamental question which hopefully will clinch the deal.
	If your daughter could speak to you about these issues and you could say to her in some reasonable way, Would you like to have a full-blood, fully-related sibling, or would you like us to go out and basically grab some random kid where we don't have any control over the variables, how that kid has been treated?
	There'll be no biological relation to you whatsoever, and we're just going to jam him in here and cross our fingers.
	Yeah.
	What would your daughter say?
	Well, I mean, I'm sure the answers kind of answers itself, or the question kind of answers.
	Obviously, it'd be, oh, well, I'd like a real brother, or not a real brother, but, you know, a relative.
	A related.
	A blood-related.
	Yeah, a blood-related.
	You know, the plants that come, like, you can get plants, and you can cut them from the same parent plant, and they'll share Nicely, the soil.
	They won't fight each other for the soil.
	You get plants from different plants and put them in the same soil, they're battling to the death.
	You know, biological affinity, cooperation that occurs at a very deep, unconscious biological level is not something to be sneezed at.
	And again, it doesn't mean that people can't have adopted families and have decent times and all that.
	But the only reason we exist is because of Biological proximity preference.
	And I don't know that we can just shrug that off, if that makes sense.
	You know, we all know, fundamentally deep down, we all get that if you have to choose between saving your child and some stranger's child, it's not a coin toss, right?
	If you have to choose between saving some stranger or your wife, it's not even close to a coin toss.
	You know, and I would expect no different from the other husband or the other parent.
	And biological proximity preference, which is, you know, not a very exciting term, is so foundational.
	It's so powerful that messing with that is risky.
	And last but not least, your daughter or your son or whoever it's going to be, they're the ones who are going to have to live with the choice longer than you have to.
	Because they're going to outlive you, right?
	Hopefully by...
	40 or 50 years or more.
	Well, let's see.
	40 years.
	So you're making a decision not only to bring a child Who's not biologically related.
	You don't really know much about the history.
	You don't really know much about the circumstances.
	You don't know what the pregnancy was like.
	You don't know what traumas have been experienced.
	Because everyone, you know, it's like the single mom pretending to have all the time in the world.
	When people want to put a kid up for adoption, the kid's on its best behavior.
	The parents, if they're still around, are on their best behavior.
	And everyone's painting roses, right?
	To try and get you to adopt the kid, right?
	It's not a realistic thing.
	View of what's happened.
	And I know this was the case with, I mentioned this before on the show, a bunch of French parents under Ceaușescu.
	Abortion was outlawed, I think, and there were like 100,000 kids in these Romanian orphanages who'd, you know, been taken care of in terms of like they've had food, but they basically spent all their time sitting in their cribs watching The Lion King and grainy VHS or whatever, because they didn't really have much interaction and so on.
	And these French parents adopted all these kids, and it was a nightmare.
	Kids were like throwing cats out of windows.
	They were getting involved in fistfights.
	They were just like a complete man.
	They had to give these kids rooms where they could just go in and destroy things or hit the walls and so on.
	And there was nothing breakable, nothing glass and so on.
	And it's like, okay, welcome to the rest of your life.
	And there are, of course, all these tragedies in the world.
	But I don't know that you have, in a sense, like I kind of want to almost abstract the decision away from you because...
	I don't think that you generally or fundamentally, if you have the capacity to create your own kids, that you have the right to make that decision for your kids, because they're the ones who are going to have to live with it more intimately than you, because kids play with each other often more than they play with parents, and they're going to have to live with it for 40 to 50 years longer than you're going to have to live with that decision.
	And I just don't know that you can, in a sense, make that decision for them.
	You know what I'm going to say?
	Yeah.
	There really isn't anything to say.
	The only, I guess, the final, my final thought on this whole thing is I found some of the parallels to immigration very interesting, you know, and people are always, and I've heard you say it many times, is, oh, it doesn't make sense, because a lot of it is,
	well, even if we don't take in kids with which Everything that you've said is very like, okay, this seems like a very bad idea, especially when, which was my first thing, was considering, you know, our daughter and her next few years and stuff like that.
	But still, these people are, or these children or toddlers or infants or whatever are still here or on this planet somewhere, and you can't help but want to help them somehow.
	Or at least, you know, it's my emotions talking, I guess.
	When you talk about immigration and other people talk about immigration, they say things like, oh, well, it's better to help them where they are, to make as good of a life for themselves where they live instead of trying to bring them in and then just kind of messing everything up and spending way too much money.
	You spend ten times more money when they're here than you would if they were there, and then you can help ten people there, that kind of stuff.
	Is that a fair option, or are you, or at least in your opinion, Or are you kind of like, oh, well, just use those resources in a different way?
	Why or why not?
	Because that's kind of my, when looking at adoption and or just helping an infant, or not infant, orphan, trying to help in some way.
	You know, is that, are you, in your opinion, do you think that that's pointless to try and help in some way, even if you're not adopted?
	No, I mean, listen, I mean, pointlessness and so on, I'm going to assume that you guys are a whiter shade of pale.
	Is that fair to say?
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	So as white people, you suffer from pathological altruism.
	I'm sorry, it's just the way it is.
	And it's something that has provided great benefits to the world.
	But there's also great challenges.
	Like in your mind's eye, you see all these kids at the orphanage and you want to scoop them all up and make them all better, right?
	I understand that.
	I understand that.
	And I appreciate that.
	It's a lovely thing.
	I do charity and I send food and money and I think it's important.
	So, you know, people, if you've got some reasonable degree of success and excess resources more than you need to live, then I think it's important to help others.
	But that doesn't mean that you have to chain them to you.
	You understand?
	You need to, like, until we can figure out how to heal early trauma and its effects, you can't do it.
	Because, again, you could, you'll really be rolling the dice.
	And maybe it'll come up 12, you know, 2d6.
	Maybe it'll come up snake eyes.
	I don't know.
	But you're really rolling the dice and you can't exactly, you know, I don't think there's a return envelope, right?
	So there are lots of tragedies in the world.
	And white people have this desire to fix it all.
	And that desire doesn't fix it all.
	You know, white people, oh, you know, there are poor people and we've got a wealthy society.
	Let's have a welfare state.
	Oh, there are people who are taking drugs.
	We think that taking drugs is bad.
	Let's have a war on drugs.
	Oh, there are some kids who might not be that well educated.
	Let's have the government take over education.
	Oh, there are these poor countries around the world.
	Let's have giant foreign aid that corrupts their entire democratic or pseudo-democratic political process and removes the responsibility of the rulers to the people because the rulers get all their money from the West.
	Right?
	So when it comes, we have this desire, this yearning to help the world, to make it better.
	And we end up doing things to make ourselves feel better in the moment.
	Right?
	And this is all over.
	White, Western European, North American civilizations.
	We are going to go fix the world.
	It is the white man's burden to go and help the races of the world and the ethnicities of the world to develop and to grow and to become better.
	We'll take all the migrants.
	Don't worry, Saudi Arabia, even though you've got 100,000 air-conditioned tents, we'll take them all.
	We got it!
	We got it!
	We're like this desperately insecure friend who always has to pay everyone's bar bill so they'll go out with him or let him tag along.
	We don't think it through.
	As an ethnicity, we don't think it through.
	We act rashly because we want to feel better about our moral choices in the moment.
	And then generally other people have to pick up the crap.
	Like Angela Merkel can let a million plus migrants into the country and she feels better.
	And people praise her.
	And Bono says, you're a wonderful lady.
	But she doesn't have to live with it.
	She doesn't have to live among the migrants.
	I think it was Mike Cernovich who's put out $100,000 for Hermione, the actress who plays Hermione in Harry Potter.
	Emma Watson to go and live in a migrant camp for a week with no bodyguards.
	Show everyone how safe it is.
	Think she's going to take him up on it?
	$100,000 to the charity of her choice for one week of living in a migrant camp.
	How's that going to go?
	Is she going to take it?
	No, of course she's not.
	Because she's virtue signaling.
	She wants to be praised.
	She wants everyone to think she's a lovely lady and very kind and open-hearted and warm-hearted and this and that and the other.
	And does she have to live with the consequences?
	No!
	She lives in some giant gated mansion.
	She has 24-7 security.
	She's jetting off around the world.
	She just wants to feel good about herself.
	To hell with the consequences.
	It's extraordinarily selfish.
	Because there is this perception that it's selfless.
	But it's not.
	It's selfish.
	It's a desire to either avoid feeling like a bad person.
	In other words, well, there are these kids.
	They need adoption.
	We've got resources.
	We don't have to have another kid.
	We could take in one of these kids and make that kid's life better and blah, blah, blah, right?
	And all of that may be true and it might work.
	But it really might not.
	So you either want to avoid feeling like you're being selfish, or you wish to pursue a feeling of self-righteousness, of moral signaling to yourself.
	You have to think it through.
	You're also going to end up with a kid you don't know the genetic history.
	Especially if it's a blind adoption, you don't know.
	You know, did everyone in the family drop dead of a heart attack at the age of 45?
	You don't know.
	So, I would say, take care of your own.
	Let those who have fewer options take care of others.
	In other words, the families who may be kind, the parents, sorry, the husband and wife who can't have kids.
	Let them adopt if they want.
	But, it's a heartbreaking thing to have to say.
	But, I think...
	We've got to figure this out.
	That it's time to grow and take care of our own.
	Because us out there trying to fix the whole world has not only not helped the world very much, but it's tearing our own societies down as well.
	Now that's a lot, I understand, to pivot on your decision.
	But that's, I think, the scope of where it might be helpful to look.
	Yeah, and that The road you went down is very similar to the type of road I went down when discussing and thinking about this.
	But the reason for calling was because we discuss about stuff and then we'll pull up one of your videos and there's a whole bunch of new information that we just never even ended up in, so...
	Yeah.
	Do you have anything to say?
	Well...
	Thank you.
	I think we've also, you know, can say, you've kind of more or less just kind of reiterated the hard-to-come-to realities, I think.
	At least for me.
	It's not nice, but it's true.
	It is nice.
	It is nice.
	Listen, we have to redefine what it means to be nice.
	You want to raise the happiest children that you can.
	You want to raise the most secure children that you can.
	Because those will be the strongest and bravest children who are out there, right?
	And we are going to need strong, brave, secure, intelligent people to solve the world's problems.
	If you end up traumatizing your kid by adopting some kid who's got emotional damage or some sort of deficiency because of something in the womb or something in the genetics or something in the environment or whatever, your kids are going to be traumatized to one degree or another.
	They're going to find their life very difficult.
	And they're going to have to live with that forever.
	So it has a significant potential of weakening your children.
	And we need strong people in the world to make the world better.
	Strict people in the world, not sentimental people, not people who just want to feel good in the moment and damn the consequences.
	We need strong, stern, independent, courageous people.
	You raising your children, let's say you have three kids, you making the world a better, stronger place with three children of your own who are going to grow up as secure and strong, as happy as possible.
	Those are the children who, when they grow, are going to do the most good in the world.
	If you introduce some foreign ailment into your family and it traumatizes your kids, they're not going to do that kind of good in the world.
	It is nice.
	To have your own family where you control the variables.
	Because you produce the best and strongest people who can do the most good for the world.
	And maybe your kids, the good they're going to do in the world, is telling other people to stop virtue signaling, to stop indulging in this pathological altruism, and to start taking care of their own.
	It is not a sacrifice.
	I'm not asking you guys to do something that is less good for the world.
	world, I'm asking you to do something that is more good for the world.
	Yeah.
	Well, thank you for having us.
	And the big picture stuff is, let's say that European societies start to really fall apart at the seams because of this pathological altruism with regards to everyone on the planet wanting to go to Europe.
	Is that really helping the world?
	No.
	No, because people are going to say, oh, the free market, oh, limited government, oh yeah, I remember how that ended up.
	What a disaster.
	We can't ever go there.
	That's suicide.
	How on earth is that helping the world?
	Anyway, I just talked about this with my conversation with Jared Taylor.
	I called it an honest conversation about race, so you can get into more of that there, but will you guys let us know what you decide?
	Yeah, I can.
	I guess like an email or the email that we have from you guys.
	Yeah, if you could.
	I never want people to sail off into the digital void and never know what the heck happens after that.
	Well, yeah.
	You've kind of got us hooked in with all your videos and stuff.
	So we donate and join the forum and all that fun stuff.
	And congratulations and praise on your peaceful parenting.
	Your daughter is a lucky lady.
	Thank you for having us.
	All right.
	Thanks, man.
	Take care, guys, and I appreciate you trusting me with this very important, well, for feedback on this important question, and I look forward to hearing what your decision is.
	Yeah.
	Thank you.
	All right.
	Thanks, man.
	Alright, well up next is Robert.
	Robert wrote in and said, That's from Robert.
	Hey Robert, how you doing?
	Tell me what you think about the reaction of the left to things like Brexit, which apparently is like, well, let's just keep voting until we get the result we want.
	It's been pretty much how I expected it to be, to be honest.
	I always thought that if the vote was successful, and I thought it would be that we wouldn't actually leave the European Union and they would try everything in their power to stop it from going through, which with the Conservative Party's current direction is probably going to happen.
	At the very least it seems to have triggered other votes in the European Union.
	Watching the news has been kind of hilarious because it's just been a constant barrage of hatred and insults against people who voted to leave and especially the democratic process as well.
	The BBC particularly has been quite funny.
	I've seen Brexit has leaded to racism, which is quite a funny one.
	Basically, every racist attack that's happened after Brexit has been as a result of the referendum and the thought of the people.
	And there's also been a lot of hatred towards the people who voted to leave, which has apparently just been all the working class and poor, especially strange to see that from the Labour Party, which is pretty much set up to represent those people.
	And now they've kind of taken the position of telling them how stupid they are for voting in their own interest, because after all, people voted this because the current situation we're in has just been completely destructive to the working class.
	Poor people in the United Kingdom have never been in the worst position.
	Especially poor white people in North England.
	They're just getting destroyed.
	Cost of living is huge compared to the wages.
	Houses nowadays, I think, last time I checked in my area of the United Kingdom, to purchase a house now is 250% more expensive than it was 20 years ago.
	Sure, you know, it's kind of weird when Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people come crashing into a relatively small island where it's really difficult to build new housing.
	It's kind of weird how the supply and demand curve works so inexorably in that situation.
	Exactly.
	And this is why I made this question so broad, because the causes of this, I think, are quite numerous.
	Immigration is one of them.
	Sorry, the causes of what?
	This kind of lash against democracy that we've seen, and kind of the failings of the political parties to represent the people that vote them in.
	Especially in the United Kingdom, I know it's an issue in the United States as well and across all of Europe, but immigration is pretty much polled to be the hottest topic among all the voting bases in pretty much every country.
	It's in the European Union and I assume it's the same in the United States as well, I haven't particularly checked, but I know it's important given the current people running for election in the United States.
	Particularly in the UK, it's something like 80% of people list it as their most important topic, immigration.
	And the conservatives who came into power now actually pledged to reduce it and have seen an increase in their time in office, which is something we've seen, a trend we've seen repeatedly, that these parties get voted in saying they're going to reduce immigration and it goes up, I think it was about 350,000 recently.
	But that's obviously not accounting for the United Kingdom people who leave.
	Which puts it up to about 700,000, which is a huge change in the population of the United Kingdom every year in terms of demographics as well.
	Because obviously those people leaving are UK citizens and they're off to Europe or to Australia or New Zealand and then basically getting replaced by European Union citizens and non-European Union citizens.
	But do you want to know why the left is so angry?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Okay, I'll tell you why.
	Politicians gain power by benefiting people, by promising them stuff, promising them stuff, right?
	And the way that in an ideal minarchist small government society, the way that the politicians benefit people is by staying the hell out of their way.
	Laissez nous faire, leave us alone, let us be.
	And certainly the sort of first half of the Roman Empire was separation of state and economics.
	God, do what you want.
	Just don't beat each other up and keep your contracts, right?
	And so the way that politicians benefit society ideally is by not picking sides.
	You know, they'll have a law court.
	They'll have law courts.
	They'll maybe have some police and some military and maybe some prisons and so on.
	But it's just small, right?
	Stay out of my way.
	Stay out of my way.
	Now, as governments grow bigger and bigger, everybody gets that they're not adding to people's standard of living, right?
	When was the last time the middle class or even the poor outside of welfare saw a significant raise?
	In America, or in Europe for that matter, certainly in America it's been decades, right?
	Sorry?
	It must have been about the 80s and 70s, really, the last time the middle class and lower classes saw any kind of economic increase.
	Right.
	So what happens is, first of all, governments stay out of your way, and then you get this growth in wealth.
	And then what happens is governments start moving that wealth around to buy votes, right?
	And take from you and give to you and lend from, borrow from so-and-so and pay off so-and-so.
	They start doing this shell game.
	And so for the first, I mean, just taking America as an example, sort of for the first 100, 150 years, There was, we stay out of your way, and our benefit is, you know, we leave you free to make your own wealth.
	And then, certainly during the two world wars, in Europe in particular, in America to a smaller degree, well, we're going to provide value by winning this war.
	And then afterwards, they start, with all this wealth, they start buying votes and borrowing, taxing, as I said, right?
	And printing, money printing, money printing, always with the money printing.
	But what happens is that's got an arc, right?
	That's got a boo, it goes up, then it goes down.
	And so people are like, well, the politicians aren't doing us any good because now we've got growing debt, we've got stagnant incomes or declining incomes, we've got additional regulations, we've got higher taxes.
	It's not working, right?
	So politicians always have to find someone to benefit because otherwise, why would you bother going to a politician?
	You know, this is what lobbyists all do in the K Street in Washington and all over the capitals where the governments are.
	You get this giant set of lobbyists, right?
	And they want to go and talk to the politicians.
	They want to whine and die on the politicians.
	They want to buy them tickets to Cirque du Soleil so everyone can suck their stomach in when they go to the concession stand and pretend that they're just as lean as people who are circus performers for a living.
	Maybe that's just me.
	But actually, I've never been to Cirque du Soleil.
	Here, it's nice.
	So, the politicians always got to have someone to benefit.
	And now, they can't benefit the poor in the middle class.
	They're moving to more identity politics.
	No, no, it's not that.
	Now, what are they selling?
	Well, they can't sell wealth and improvement to British people, because British people, like native sort of British people, they're getting poorer.
	So, what are they selling now to get votes?
	What they're selling is citizenship.
	That's what they're selling, and it's the same thing with the left, with the Democrats in America, and it's the same thing with the liberals in Canada, and it's all over, all over the place.
	What are you selling?
	You can't sell anything to the domestic population because they're just getting poorer and they kind of hate your guts, but you can sell citizenship.
	To others outside your country.
	That's what they're doing.
	Selling citizenship.
	This is why they keep saying, oh yeah, we're going to shut down immigration.
	Oh yeah, absolutely.
	And then they get in, and they don't want to do it.
	The same thing's true with the rhinos, right?
	The Republicans in name only.
	Mitch McConnell's on all the people in And the gang of eight, right?
	They want to sell citizenship because people are clamoring to get into Europe.
	They're clamoring to get into the United Kingdom.
	How many millions of Turks want to get into the UK? They're clamoring to get into America.
	They're clamoring to get into Canada.
	It's this big giant sea of reaching arms.
	Let me in!
	And the politicians can't sell shit to the domestic population, but they can go and say, oh, I'll let you in.
	But you gotta vote for me.
	Boom!
	They're selling the Carcass of Freedom to the vultures from outside.
	Well, it died, but there's still some scraps.
	In they come.
	Peck, peck, peck.
	No, no, no.
	Soon it'll be down to the bones and everyone will turn on each other, but that is what is going on now.
	Brexit and other things like that Well, that might cut off some of the massive flows of immigration to Great Britain, right?
	To the United Kingdom.
	And so, if the politicians can't sell the still meaty carcass of the former freedoms called citizenship, what the hell are they going to do?
	They're going to have to find some way to actually provide value to the people in the country.
	Rather than selling off the tax base to let in citizens.
	Right?
	We have this domesticated livestock.
	They are trapped.
	We can tax them.
	It is delicious.
	We will also print money and borrow.
	We will let you in so that you can feed on the bodies of the trapped livestock in our country.
	In you come!
	Here's your knife, here's your fork, get cutting!
	Oh, and vote for us, for letting you in.
	Because they have so little to offer the domestic population, they have to go all over the world to people poorer than the domestic population and offer them the carcasses and remains of the freedoms of the domestic population.
	That's how they're providing value, by selling off!
	Selling off!
	The remnants of freedom, the scraps of liberty that somehow managed to escape the jackal pecking of socialism over the 20th century.
	Oh, there's a few entrails.
	We've got some tendons.
	We don't have the meat, but we've got the string that the meat was tied around.
	Maybe you could chew on that.
	That's still got some flavor.
	Not a lot of nutrition, just a little bit of flavor.
	They have nothing to offer the domestic situation, nothing to offer the domestic livestock who are crowded and jammed and not having kids.
	But they can go to really poor people and say, we'll let you in.
	You can feed on our captive tax livestock.
	We got them tied down.
	Here's some HP sauce.
	Mmm.
	Tasty.
	And...
	If countries set up their borders again, politicians are going to actually have to start providing some kind of value to the domestic population.
	Right?
	And how are they going to do that?
	The only way that they're going to be able to do that, the only way that they're going to be able to provide some value to the domestic population is what?
	Get out of the way!
	Go away!
	Let us trade!
	Let us build!
	Let us have our own charities!
	Let us educate our own children!
	Get out of the way!
	But you see, what's happened is, because over the past 40 or 50 years, so much emphasis has been placed on politicians providing value by selling off the Caucus of Citizenship, There are so many politicians there that their numbers will have to be significantly reduced if they can't feed off the caucus of citizenship anymore.
	So, the number of politicians will have to shrink if they have to provide value to the local population, which means getting out of their way.
	Fewer regulations, lower taxes, stronger borders.
	Shrinking of the state.
	And, each politician is looking in the mirror and saying, well, fundamentally deep down I get it.
	If I can't be selling off the caucus of citizenship anymore, and the only way I can provide value to the domestic population is firing myself, well, I don't want to do that!
	Because if I fire myself and government shrinks as a whole, I can't even be a lobbyist.
	See, that's how you get politicians out of politics, is you promise them even more money as lobbyists.
	But if the government shrinks, if the government collapses in size, because it's no longer able to steroid and pump itself up because it's selling off the caucus of citizenship, what happens?
	Fewer politicians.
	Now, does any politician want to fire himself?
	When he can't even become a lobbyist afterwards?
	What's he gonna do?
	Let me tell you a secret here, man.
	You probably know this.
	Politicians as a whole are really, really, really bad at the free market.
	As a whole.
	They're terrible.
	They get money, status, and power through the state.
	If they've got to go out And open up a pizza joint and try and win some business.
	It stings their vanity.
	It collapses their megalomaniacal narcissism.
	It is emotionally eviscerating for them to have to go and ask rather than command.
	Because they are vicious verbal bullies.
	And for them to actually have to set up shop, take out advertising, do some marketing, and submit themselves to the free will of the market, to the voluntary choices of others, is repulsive to them.
	It's like a fat sultan, used to raping his harem, has to go out, do some sit-ups, and get on Tinder.
	I am 400 pounds of sultan-ness.
	Would you like to come and rub the ruby on my forehead?
	Uh, no.
	Gross.
	Doesn't want that.
	They're terrible at the free market.
	They view exiting government like you would view exiting a spaceship with no spacesuit.
	I can't survive out there.
	There's no air for me out there.
	How many politicians leave the government and create awesome entrepreneurial companies?
	What do they do?
	They float around.
	They're lobbyists.
	They float around and maybe sit on a board or two, which is just designed to help get preferential legislation, government grants and loans and contracts.
	I mean, look at Clinton and Tony Blair.
	They basically made an entire career of doing exactly that.
	Yeah, they're not out there trying to create awesome businesses and Tony Blair's house of cell phone excellence.
	It's not going to happen.
	They suck at the free market.
	They suck at the free market.
	And so when you talk about shrinking government, these guys look like sharks when you take all the seals out of the ocean.
	This is my primary food source.
	At least the sharks can live on something else.
	They can snap on the pilot fish or whatever the hell.
	Stripey things float around looking for the scraps.
	So if they can't sell your citizenship profits off to the poor, to the excluded, Well, they have to provide value to you, which means they've got to fire themselves, or they will be fired.
	And for these people who feast on the body politic, shrinking the state feels like death.
	You understand?
	It feels like death to them.
	It feels like death.
	You know, many years ago, I was in a business meeting.
	And...
	The guy was on his third company.
	And we were chatting.
	He was an interesting guy to chat with.
	Course!
	But he had that kind of focused, runaway train kind of positive energy that sometimes comes from course people.
	And he was, I won't get into the whole story, but he was like, oh yeah, you know, started off broke, built a company.
	It did well.
	Blew up.
	I ended up with less than when I started.
	Because I was in debt.
	Started another company.
	Grew it fairly well.
	Legislation changed.
	Regulations changed.
	Boom!
	Used to get tax credits for exploration in the mining sector and I think they changed or diminished.
	Boom!
	Gone.
	And he said, you know, I said to my wife, I was looking across the bed, we had less than nothing.
	I said, well, we started off with nothing, we're back to nothing, so what?
	What have we lost?
	We've...
	Experience something cool.
	We built a company.
	Boom!
	It blew up in our faces.
	We're back to nothing.
	At least we had a ride.
	So those guys, they can survive.
	You just built another company and did well.
	Scott Adams talks about this.
	If you have a fear of failure, you actually have a fear of success.
	Because most of success is composed of lessons learned by repeated failures.
	How many of my podcasts go over half a million views on YouTube, right?
	Doesn't matter.
	Just keep doing the best shows you can.
	But politicians can't do that.
	For the most part.
	They can't do that.
	They can't fire themselves.
	The whole point of being an entrepreneur is to fire yourself.
	If you ever want to move up in an organization, the whole point is to make yourself...
	Because if you're irreplaceable, nobody will promote you.
	If you're the foreman of some road crew gang, you want to find someone in that road crew gang who can become foreman so you can move up to something else.
	If you never find and develop anyone to replace yourself, if you don't mentor people, that's why people mentor.
	It's partly kindness, but it's also, I want to jetpack my way out of here.
	You mentor people so that they can replace you.
	So that you can go and move up.
	You know, I was originally the only coder in my company and hired a bunch of people, found the best coders, and found ways to make them do even better than I did so I could go and do other things.
	Learn marketing, learn the business side, learn the sales side, learn the design side.
	Network, God help me!
	It's never been my favorite thing to do, to put it mildly.
	I'd rather cold call than network.
	Fake conversations, not my specialty, but anyway.
	That's probably because I think they're fake, but anyway.
	So, to make yourself irrelevant is the whole point of success.
	I certainly want to grow a whole bunch of philosophers out there, so when I die, people are like, ah, it's fine.
	We'll be okay.
	We got 10,000 steps, so it's good the old guy's gone.
	So that's the point.
	If you're an entrepreneur, you understand fundamentally how essential it is that you be fireable from your current position because otherwise you can't grow, you can't move up.
	Well, if your entrepreneur wants to leave their business and start a new one and keep on earning more money.
	Well, even if it's in the same business.
	Even if you're not an entrepreneur.
	If you are really good at some particular job in a big company, you want to train your replacement so you can move up.
	So the whole point is to make yourself, as they call it in England, make yourself redundant, right?
	Make yourself completely replaceable.
	So you can move up to something better.
	It's one of the issues in democracy.
	Well, I originally said, what problem do they have with democracy?
	But one of the issues we have in democracy in the UK is what you've said, is that the politicians don't really have anything they can appeal to the indigenous population with.
	So they go out and try and import votes.
	Because in their terms, all they care about is in the four-year term, that they look back and they don't look like a failure because they increased GDP 3% or 2%.
	Even if the average person is far worse off.
	I could go for hours on how incompetent local councils are.
	A funny one.
	Well, this is what Nigel Farage said, right, in his grand speech to the European Union.
	Right?
	He said, and I paraphrase here, he said, all you bureaucrats sitting around here, you've never had a real job and you sure as hell have never created a job.
	They don't know.
	For them, clinging to power is essential.
	Making themselves redundant is anathema.
	It's the opposite of what they want because they're not in the free market.
	In the free market, you're supposed to make yourself replaceable.
	You're supposed to put yourself out of a job in the free market.
	But in government, you must always be creating new and new and new jobs, expanding your power base.
	In the free market...
	If you can do more with less, you win.
	In government, if you can do less with more, you win.
	Because in government, if you fail, you get more money.
	In the free market, if you fail, you get nothing.
	There was a common problem with a lot of the nationalised business in the UK. There was no kind of carrot to become more successful, to push the boundaries, to be more profitable, to be better.
	A lot of employees would take weeks upon weeks of holiday, they'd be off sick.
	They had a lot of endemic problems as a result of being a nationalised, no-risk organisation.
	In Spain, recently, turned out there were two government workers who hadn't shown up for work in 15 years.
	Yeah, it's common in English.
	They were getting paid.
	Now, you try that in a small restaurant.
	Listen, I mean, so I went, I took my daughter and some friends to go to Canada's Wonderland, which is a park.
	Up here in Canada.
	Of course.
	And you can do this anywhere.
	Do this anywhere where you're in some vaguely free market environment.
	Just look around and say, okay, imagine nobody made any money from this.
	The whole energy, the whole physics, the whole buoyancy of the place would collapse.
	The food would be crap if it was even there.
	The streets would be dirty.
	The riots would be dangerous.
	Everybody would just be going through the motions resentfully rather than eagerly trying to make your experience the best possible.
	Just look at any situation, any situation in the world where there's a fragment of the free market.
	Go to your cell phone store.
	Go to a mall.
	Go to a movie theater and imagine nobody made any money from doing better.
	What would happen?
	I don't care about this business, I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing.
	Because I get the same people regardless.
	Yeah, I mean, yeah, as they say in Soviet Russia, we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.
	I mean, that's one of the things as well.
	I watched a video of yours where someone said, communism works in theory, and you said that's a stupid thing that stupid people say.
	And I agree, because communism works in theory if you completely disregard human nature.
	Which, if you're making a political system, you kind of have to concentrate on the human nature.
	No, it's not human nature, because that sounds like human beings aren't good enough for communism.
	Well, no, it's the way around, isn't it?
	No, it doesn't matter what human nature is.
	And just for those who don't know, and Robert, I know you understand this, but just for those who are listening on this and didn't hear the one, before, if I said, my medicine works really well in theory, it just kills everyone who takes it.
	What would people say?
	I don't know what you mean by theory, but it doesn't work well in theory.
	Well, my medicine would work fantastic in theory if human beings were silicon-based rather than carbon-based.
	Then it would be great.
	It doesn't make any sense.
	But no, it's not human nature.
	I mean, I think what von Mises talked about in the 20s, this calculation problem.
	It says nobody has any clue how to apply scarce resources to the problems of production and consumption without The price system without supply and demand.
	Human beings would have to be omniscient and omnipotent, in which case they wouldn't even need a market because they could wish everything they wanted into existence.
	But enough about the Venus Project.
	So it is because there's simply no way to figure out where resources should be applied, who should get what, how things should be aggregated and consumed without the price system.
	And there's no way to get a price system without the free market.
	So it's not like, well, if human beings were less selfish or differently constituted, Then somehow communism would work.
	Communism can never.
	Right?
	And we see this, oh my god, we see this going on all the time.
	But just before we move on from Nigel Farage, you know, one of the reasons why Nigel Farage quit is because of death threats.
	He was suffering from injuries as well.
	He's already quit before.
	This is one of the ridiculous things.
	One of the big stories is that all the politicians supporting Brexit have basically abandoned the country.
	Well, no.
	Boris Johnson went for prime minister and got backstabbed.
	Fair enough.
	Nigel Farage was not in the political system.
	17 years he's been working on it.
	When you've got When you've got rappers threatening to rape his daughter and he's getting endless death threats, I could see that would wear you down a little bit.
	But I understand that driving people out of politics because of death threats is turning England into a banana republic.
	This is the hilarious thing as well.
	This is one thing I was going to bring up.
	It was on my mind to bring up.
	It's the kind of attack on free speech and Twitter police.
	You can get the police knocking on your door in England for what you say on Twitter and you can go to jail.
	For things you say on Facebook, of course Facebook's monitored.
	Angela Merkel has made a deal with Zuckerberg to censor and report any kind of anti-immigrant sentiment or disagreements against the EU's policies and a lot of those policies are It's kind of bad in terms of destroying national identity, to kind of facilitate the European Union on the political side.
	And these are things that I'm considering myself pretty liberal in terms of I'm for free speech, for freedom of expression, but that means you have to support the freedom of speech for things you don't like.
	But when it comes to these Twitter threats, you see people threatening to rape Nigel Farage's daughter, they don't go to jail, they don't get told off, and then the same thing happens in reverse to Labour politicians, and the people get arrested and thrown in jail.
	Oh yeah, no, absolutely.
	Anything the left disagrees with is hate speech, and all of the violence that the left approves of is a legitimate response of aggrieved parties to oppression.
	I mean, just look at it.
	There was this terrible shooting in Dallas last night, right?
	I mean, five officers shot dead.
	I think there's been another one as well.
	I think another police officer has been shot in a different city.
	Oh, it's going on all over the U.S. There was someone this afternoon called in.
	He said, there's a robber in my house when the cop came to check on him and he shot him.
	Oh yeah, no, we are heading into...
	I mean, that's a whole other thing.
	Anyway, but of course there's massive people celebrating and cheering and talking about how wonderful it is that all these cops are killed and how they want to...
	Is this being censored?
	No, of course not.
	Of course not.
	Because leftist violence is free speech and rightist free speech is violence.
	Look at how the news articles portrayed it as well.
	I mean, the guy literally said, I'm going out to kill white people, specifically.
	And when you see the white murderers who have gone out and said specifically they're going to kill black people, you know, it's racist.
	And it's just as a terrorist act as is a black man going out specifically to kill white people.
	That's a terroristic act.
	But the difference in reporting on the BBC and every news place between the two is ridiculous.
	I mean, before Brexit, when the man in Leeds killed Joe Cox, it was like a torrent of news articles about what he'd said, what political beliefs he had before anyone even really knew, and they quietly kind of shoved that one under the rug.
	I think we're good to go.
	This is a person who's gone out and specifically done a racially motivated attack in reverse, and the news have gone pretty quiet on it.
	Right.
	Well, and there is...
	This thing that's happening in art, finally the left is eating itself artistically.
	Emma Watson's new movie opened up to a grand total of $62 in the theaters.
	Mmm!
	Love it!
	He for she, but not for you.
	And...
	The Guardian is e-begging for money from its readers.
	And Gork is down for the count.
	And the new Ghostbusters, right?
	They wanted to put women.
	First of all, why remake a classic this way?
	But they wanted to put women, right?
	It's virtue signaling.
	And what is it?
	The new Hermione is black, and there's some new Marvel comic hero who's a black woman.
	It was like someone who was, you know, fine, have a black woman as a superhero, but it was something that didn't seem to be quite in that vein.
	Did you read or hear about any of that?
	Yeah, Iron Man got made into a 15-year-old black girl.
	Iron Man got made into a 15-year-old black girl.
	Yeah.
	What I can't wait for is since now your gender is something you choose, I can't wait for men to simply say, I feel like a girl, and then go into Wimbledon.
	As a hairy-legged woman and just win against the women, right?
	And, you know, because the genders are segregated because apparently we're all the same.
	But that's going to happen for sure.
	So there's this virtue signaling that goes on now.
	And I haven't watched the movie, but apparently Neighbors 2, the guy made it because he wanted to empower his daughter into her and just turned out to be like, not funny.
	Not that Seth Rogen's that funny in the best of days, but...
	This virtue signaling rather than market signaling, it is a dying empire of leftist indoctrination, which is just delightful.
	I still have to remind myself periodically just how irrelevant the mainstream media has become for most people who get their news online from very specialized sources that they have grown to trust and respect and so on.
	It is the end of a paradigm.
	So people are now virtue signaling rather than market signaling, and they're really going to get hurt in the wallet and the feels.
	Because I've got to tell you, I mean, that new Ghostbusters, you know, if it's supposed to be a comedy, and I don't even, and I wasn't in any particular hostility towards it.
	A lot of these women who, comedians and so on, they've done some good work.
	But in the entire preview, like I didn't even crack one smile.
	And that's not a good sign.
	It just doesn't look...
	It doesn't look good.
	It was cringy.
	More than smiling.
	Yeah.
	Oh, it's just like, oh, lame.
	Lame!
	And lame is like the worst thing.
	It's like a teenage word or whatever, but lame is the worst thing.
	And the one thing I promise this show will never be lame.
	It may be scary, may be exciting, may be terrifying.
	It will never, ever be lame.
	So, yeah.
	So, the last thing I wanted to mention, Robert, was that this idea that the left has something to do with the working class.
	It's like...
	It's like saying that the farmer is really interested in the welfare of his cows.
	It's like, well, sure, but not their freedom.
	Because the left, I mean, if the left was at all interested in the working class and the working class doing well, they would have been very pro-capitalism, which raises the standards of living of the working class more than any other system.
	And they would have been viciously opposed to communism.
	I mean, how did the working classes do under Stalin, under Lenin, under Khrushchev, under Brezhnev?
	Terribly.
	Like, beyond terribly.
	They were all thrown into gulags or beaten or, I mean, it was just horrendous.
	Killed en masse.
	How did the working classes do under Chairman Mao?
	Tens of millions of people starving to death because the farms got collectivized.
	The same thing that happened in the Ukraine.
	Ukraine, apparently.
	So, if they cared about the working classes, they would want to keep central planning, tax redistribution, and mass immigration as far away from their precious working classes as possible, and they don't.
	They're just virtue signaling by saying, I care about the poor.
	What that means is, I wish to buy the votes of the poor with your money.
	And when they run out of poor they can sell their shit to, they've got to import the poor from overseas who are still grateful to get the scraps of freedom and the leftovers of liberty.
	I mean, there's also other problems as well.
	I mean, just the scariest one I've seen is that one in five men are unemployed since the economic collapse of 2008.
	And I mean, right now...
	I'm sorry, the number of men who are unemployed?
	It's one in five, so 20% since the economic collapse of 2008, and that hasn't changed.
	And in terms of university graduation as well, I think it's around about last year, 600,000 men graduated from university in the United States and about 930,000 women.
	That's because men can count.
	Degree in gender studies.
	What's the ROI on that?
	It's kind of funny because Title IX was introduced because about 17% fewer women were graduating from university.
	And then Obama said it was a great success that more women than men were graduating when the number of women graduating is far more than 17% more than men.
	And that same imbalance that was considered severe enough to bring in a huge title Which destroyed sort of male athletic teams, universities and a lot of other things because basically what they did was just destroy the things that were good to men rather than actually improve women.
	He's now saying that it's good when it happens to men in reverse.
	I mean, it's just ridiculous.
	How do people not read that and see that it's complete hypocrisy?
	Well, look, it's, I mean, blocking men from getting education by making it so ridiculously social justice, warrior friendly, that anyone with even half a testicle is repelled from that, like some sort of reverse leftist black hole.
	I mean, if you prevent men from getting educated, men will tune out of society.
	And also, if you take away the jobs that men have, like manufacturing in particular, the U.S. has lost 50,000 manufacturing jobs a month for years and years and years.
	So what that means is that men can't be as good of providers and men can't be as well educated.
	And what that means is the family gets destroyed.
	Because of hypergamy, women want men who are superior to themselves.
	That's what women are programmed for, to scale up the values of men.
	And if men are less educated and unemployed, then women won't form families.
	But they'll still have children, which means they'll be reliable leftist voters for the welfare state from here to eternity.
	And by eternity, I mean when the government runs out of money and we end up eating rats in the sewers.
	But that's just another way to disrupt and destroy the earning potential and educational attainment of men is just another way of destroying the family, which is the leftist ideal.
	Because when you destroy the family, you create a power vacuum that the state steps in to pretend to solve.
	I mean, that's the hilarious thing as well is this.
	One of the arguments I've seen for immigration is that we're running out of workers, but we have the highest amount of people in the workforce in history because now, of course, women and men are working in equal numbers.
	People are healthier and working to a later age than ever.
	There's more workers than there's ever been in history, and as a result, obviously, wages are depressed, and it takes just All that's happened is it takes two people to provide for a household rather than one, as it did in history.
	Now you need both the male and the female to work, which means you have no family because you're too busy working, so you don't have children, so you have to import people.
	And even that I don't agree with.
	Obviously, people complain about an aging population, but that was obviously going to happen when we had the baby boomers.
	So a huge amount of people were born in a short period of time.
	You can't base a society off Maintaining that level of growth because it's just unsustainable.
	You mean that level of economic growth?
	No, no, population growth.
	Oh, population?
	Yeah, when we had baby boomers, we had a huge, sudden-spurt population, and that created an elderly cohort, which has continued into one times.
	The number one argument made by politicians in the EU, for example, is with countries with extremely low birth rate, like Germany, which I think is one of the lowest in the world, is, well, we have this huge elderly population that we need to bring in people to support it, so we have to immigrate people in.
	Well, no, no.
	I mean, no, no.
	Come on.
	I mean, but that's all nonsense.
	And that's because the baby boomers got taxed for a retirement plan that doesn't exist, right?
	So the government said, oh, we'll take all this money from you, and we'll save it for your retirement.
	But of course, they didn't.
	They took the money, they spent it on buying votes and the bribery and the bridges to nowhere and all that, propping up the ruble for another half hour, as the late, great Harry Brown used to say.
	And there's no money left over.
	So rather than say to people, hey, sorry about that.
	Hey, you know how we took all that money from you all your life for retirement benefits?
	There aren't any.
	Sorry about that.
	Well, those people would be voted out because the elderly vote in particular.
	And it's funny how everyone gets mad at the old people for voting for Brexit.
	It's like, well, if the young people could put down their Xbox and get the hell out and vote, even though it was raining, they might have.
	Anyway.
	But no, rather than tell the truth to old people, they...
	Pretend they're going to import people that's going to solve the problem.
	It's nonsense.
	They don't want to import people to solve the problem.
	They want to import people to create social conflict so that the government can expand its power and people will be willing to make sacrifices.
	If there's enough social conflict, people will be willing to make sacrifices without being told the truth, just as they do in war.
	They'll accept coupons and ration books and diminished circumstances and so on.
	But no, they have no interest in this.
	The other thing, too...
	As I mentioned before, the need to convert people into taxable livestock is foundational to the history of the West over the past 50 or 60 years, right?
	It can do with women's happiness.
	Women are unhappier now than they've ever been.
	Women who stay home and raise kids are far happier than women who go out to work statistically.
	And the happiness of women has been going down ever since feminism arose in the 60s and 70s.
	Every single decade, the happiness of women goes down and down and down and down.
	It's got nothing to do with making women equal or happy.
	It's simply a way of converting non-taxable housewives into taxable workers.
	It's got nothing to do with anything else.
	It's just a way of grafting...
	New udders onto cows who weren't producing milk so the cows can produce more milk.
	Plus, when the women go to work, there are more people who then end up working in daycare to take care of the kids and you can tax those too.
	So it's like a double whammy taxation plus.
	And so this idea that feminism has anything to do with trying to make women happy or equal is nonsense.
	It's just something that the state loves to fund because it converts women into taxable resources from non-taxable housewives.
	It's the same thing with the migrants, right?
	I mean, migrants or immigrants come into a country They've been paid to be educated in some other country, and they will start contributing taxes to some degree.
	I mean, I know that it's like, what, $6,500 consumption in taxes for $4,500 paid in taxes, but at least they're paying something in taxes.
	No politician is ever going to expand his power by saying to the population, well, have kids.
	We can lower your taxes, you can have kids.
	Why?
	Because that drives up government's costs in the short run.
	Because you've got to have more doctors.
	You've got to have more hospitals.
	You've got to have more childcare.
	You've got to have schools.
	It drives up the cost.
	It can take a quarter century to go from birth to taxpayer.
	What the hell politician cares about what happens a quarter century from now?
	Because the people who are at the top are all in their 60s and 70s.
	What the hell do they care when they're 90 or dead?
	They don't care.
	So immigrants is a way of adding to your tax base.
	Yeah, it adds to your expense, but not as much as kids who add to your expense without adding to your tax base until long after your political career is over.
	So the migrants have none of this stuff.
	Multiculturalism is just a way of bringing taxpayers in rather than having people have babies.
	Feminism is just a way of converting women from non-taxable housewives into taxable workers.
	And with the added bonus of daycare workers who you can tax and unionize as well, All of these supposed intellectual movements of multiculturalism and feminism, nothing to do with anything.
	All it is is about fattening the cattle so that more meat and milk can be delivered to the farmer in the here and now.
	It's got nothing to do with anything else.
	The same thing with Brexit.
	One of the funniest relations I've seen is that wealth and equality tends to correlate pretty accurately with the number of women in the workforce.
	So basically as feminism takes hold, you see the rich tend to get richer as labour just gets devalued and more money and savings get passed on to the people at the very top of the chain.
	Yeah, there's been two massive waves of increased productivity in the West.
	Number one, women come crashing into the workforce, converting themselves from non-workers to workers.
	That should have added, theoretically, to massive wealth, right?
	Number two, computers, which have replaced massive amounts of jobs.
	You've got robots.
	Nobody needs a secretary anymore, to put it mildly, right?
	Postal office service requirements have gone down.
	So these two massive waves of supposed productivity that come crashing into the modern economy should have made us vastly wealthier.
	But what's happened?
	Nothing.
	Na-thing.
	Nada.
	Babkiss, bagel, goose egg.
	Nothing has happened to make us any richer despite these two enormous crashes of massive productivity increases into the workforce.
	Hasn't made us any richer.
	So basically, women used to be able to stay home and raise their kids, which they enjoyed a lot more than going to work on average.
	Now, they don't get to raise their kids, and they're not any wealthier because they went to work.
	Because all that's happened is two things.
	Number one, taxes have gone up to accommodate all the extra pay that women are making.
	And number two, the money that women are making has been used as collateral for additional national debt.
	So the women going to work has made them shitty moms.
	It has made them worse workers than men on average because they've got to take time off for parenting duties.
	And their labor has been used as collateral to sell their children off for parts to foreign Chinese banksters.
	And this is why women, like, they're on antidepressants and eating them like fat kids on smarty boxes.
	Miserable existence.
	These two things should have given us a combined household income of a quarter million dollars a year or more.
	Instead, we have less money than before women went into the workforce and before they were computers.
	And this is the Atlas Shrugged thesis, right?
	That if you create something wonderful, the government will use it to screw you over even more.
	And this is what people get deep down.
	This is what men certainly get deep down, because men in general are on the paying side of the equation.
	And this is why men are going galt and saying, thanks, but no.
	Alright, listen man, I've got to move on to the next caller, but I really, really appreciate the question.
	I hope it's been helpful.
	Thank you for extracting some nuggets out of the rants, and I really, really enjoyed the conversation.
	Yeah, it was interesting to talk to you, Stefan.
	Thanks, man.
	Thanks.
	Alright, up next is Marshall.
	Marshall wrote in and said, I can understand why your Intro to Philosophy series takes the path of empiricism and bringing philosophy to beginners.
	But as someone at a more adept level, I feel a strictly empirical methodology has its limits.
	For one thing, the scientific method itself relies on faith in the veracity of the senses and the consistency of its rules, things we are often taking for granted.
	It also doesn't help in the case of something that is both true and unfalsifiable.
	Being unable to prove you dreamed of a sparrow doesn't mean it didn't happen.
	I feel that such a dilemma has far-reaching consequences, particularly in talking about existentialism, metaphysics, justice, free will, and even basic human interactions.
	If the senses are unreliable, if we can only experience a portion of what's actually there, then can anything be said to be truly objective?
	How can we know whether one person is hallucinating or if the other is simply blind?
	That's from Marshall.
	Hey Marshall, how are you doing?
	Good, how are you?
	I'm well, thank you.
	I'm well.
	So, do you want to start with thoughts or emotions?
	Let me give you a little bit of background on where I was coming from with the question, if that's alright.
	So that's neither.
	Okay, go ahead.
	Okay.
	Well, I originally sent in the question to Mike prior to your Truth About Aristotle video, which I really liked a lot.
	You touched on a couple of the things that I thought were relevant to this, particularly the ship of Theseus problem.
	My question really came in response...
	Okay, well, hang on.
	We don't want to make a reference...
	And then not explain it.
	So very briefly, the ship of Theseus is an old ancient Greek philosophy.
	It was reformulated by Adam Smith and a few other people in the more modern era.
	And the idea is sort of something like this, that if you replace every piece of wood and elements of a ship, is it still the same ship?
	And the way that Adam Smith reformulated it was he said, okay, you got a sock, gets a hole in it, you put a patch on it, is it still the same sock?
	What if you get a second hole and a third hole?
	And what if eventually the sock is nothing but patches, there's no original material anymore?
	Can you replace everything which constitutes an object and still have it be the same object?
	I just wanted to mention that so people knew what the heck we were talking about.
	That's wonderful that you were able to expand on that.
	Going back to what I was saying, I originally thought up the question in response to another YouTuber, CGP Grey, who did a piece on Star Trek teleporters, and I know that you're a Trekkie, and I'm sure you've probably thought about that concept as well, of, you know, what constitutes identity and where, like, Where do we come from and what actually are we and things of that nature?
	And as a Cartesian skeptic myself, you know, I find that sort of thing very fascinating.
	I was wondering if maybe you could give your thoughts on some solutions to those kinds of problems.
	Which problems in particular?
	Just general concepts of identity and how can we necessarily objectively prove something when all the evidence that we use for it is Maybe not the most stable, I guess.
	Again, I tend to be sort of a Cartesian skeptic, the idea that the senses are fallible and so if our senses are fallible then empiricism itself stands on shaky ground and thus anything that we could prove as a result of empiricism is also shaky and necessarily subjective.
	How do we know that the senses are fallible?
	Well, from our own personal experience, I'm sure you can think of examples every day where maybe you saw something that you had an idea of what it was, and then it turned out that that was not correct.
	So in that particular moment, your senses were fallible.
	Well, but the only reason or the only way that I know my senses are fallible is because I've proven them incorrect, right?
	So the example is you and I, Marshall, we're standing in a desert.
	We look out across the sand dunes and I say, hey, Marshall, look over there.
	It's the most, I'm so thirsty.
	I'm like so hot.
	My head is like a spotty tomato.
	Let's you and I rip off our shirts and run in slow, top-gun, volleyball-style motion over the sand dunes and dive into that glorious, cool-looking, lovely lake where we can drink and swim to our heart's content.
	And you turn to me and you say, Steph, you crazy sun-drunk bastard.
	That is a mirage, right?
	And I convince you to give it a shot.
	We go over the next two sand dunes and there's no lake, right?
	So there's an example that I perceived that there was a lake, but there was no lake.
	Would you say that that means the senses are...
	Is that what you mean by sort of the fallibility of the senses?
	I would say that's one example.
	Going back to the original question, at the end there, I talked about the concept of, well, how do we know whether two people viewing the same thing...
	No, no, no, no.
	We've got to do one at a time.
	I can't skip around, right?
	So that's one example of...
	What you would call the infallibility of the senses.
	Right, and the example that you provided of somebody else verifying it objectively, I think that would be one way to test for that.
	Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	How have my senses failed if my mind interprets the evidence of the senses to be a lake?
	Because it's not my eyes that are saying it's a lake.
	My eyes Are processing things perfectly correctly.
	In other words, the light waves that are bouncing between differently heated layers of air and there's water out there somewhere, my eyes are processing that correctly.
	My senses are not fallible.
	They're not seeing something that isn't there because the light waves are actually there that make it look like water.
	It is my mind that says that is a lake.
	My eyes do not say that is a lake.
	My eyes are merely giving me the visual cues.
	It is my brain that interprets it.
	So it's not that the senses are fallible in there.
	The conclusion that my mind jumps to, based upon the evidence of one sense in this case, right?
	In one sense, the one sense is my eyes.
	Now, the way that we would verify whether my eyes, whether my interpretation of my eyes information is correct, is if we climb over the two sand dunes and we jump in and we're swimming around and we're splashing, it wouldn't make any sense to say, It's still a mirage because we're drinking it, we're swimming in it.
	It conforms to all of our senses, right?
	Or similarly, if at nighttime, like there was a moon or whatever, if at nighttime I saw a lake, it would be less likely for it to be a mirage because the air is not so hot.
	So it's not, you say the senses are fallible, and I'm not trying to trick you.
	I'm sort of trying to point out that in this case, my eyes are working perfectly fine.
	It is my mind.
	That is interpreting that as a lake.
	If we go there and none of the other senses that we have validate the existence of the lake, then clearly I misinterpreted the evidence of my senses to think that there's a lake when there wasn't a lake.
	On the other hand, if we go there and we can swim in it, then all of the senses that we have conform to the idea that it's a lake.
	But what has been...
	Correct or incorrect is not the senses, but my interpretation of the evidence of the senses.
	My eyes are functioning perfectly.
	And the reason why this is important is if we say, well, the senses are fallible, but we are actually talking about the interpretation of the evidence of the senses that's going on in our mind, those are two different things.
	Okay.
	Can I give a different example then?
	I'd like you to respond to what I say.
	We can't just high-five each other as two trains go in the opposite way.
	Respond to what I'm saying if you can.
	Okay.
	Well, you were asking for an example of the senses being fallible, and maybe that wasn't particularly the best example that I could have given.
	Because in that situation, you're using corroborating evidence from the other senses.
	Is that correct?
	Right.
	Or, sorry, you could also use independent corroborating evidence, such as you could throw a rock and listen to see if there's a sploosh or just a thud as it hits the sand.
	You could, of course, put up a drone, fly it over, and see if you can actually see it.
	Like, there's other things that you could do, which would be an extension of the census, but go ahead.
	Okay, so we acknowledge that there exists the possibility that the person who's seeing the mirage, they could have faulty senses though, is that correct?
	That it's not strictly the interpretation that maybe the person has some sort of biological deficiency in their eyes that's causing them to see things that aren't there.
	I don't know that that's a biological, I guess it could have cataracts and they could see things I guess blurry or something, is that what you mean?
	Like they think it's foggy, but they have cataracts.
	I don't know.
	I've never had cataracts or anything, so I don't know what that means.
	But you mean if they have...
	So in the example I gave, the senses are working correctly.
	Are you saying that there are situations, of course, if somebody's blind, then their eyes are not functioning and they have to use their other senses, the touch and sound and so on to navigate?
	Right.
	Well, I don't want to lose sight of the core of the question here, which is really how do we distinguish between whether one person's senses or their interpretation thereof is fallible versus whether the other person's interpretation is fallible or not.
	Well, we do that through reference to the other senses.
	That's why we have five senses.
	We do that through reference with the other senses.
	But I'm sure you're familiar with, again, the Cartesian skepticism, how we can never really prove 100% whether the senses are reliable or the interpretation is reliable.
	For all we know.
	All right.
	So let me just, sorry, to break out.
	I hate to keep interrupting, but I just want to make sure everyone's up to speed so we're not, you know, inside baseballing our way through the conversation.
	But the Cartesian, this kind of thing from Discourses on Second Meditations by Rene Descartes, and his argument is basically, OK, look, when I'm dreaming at night, I think I'm flying over mountains and I'm jumping on the moon and so on.
	but I'm not.
	I'm just lying in my bed.
	Could it not also be that there's a second layer of dreaming called my waking life?
	Where I seem to have the impression that I'm a brain in a body moving in a more objective world, but could I not just be a brain in a tank with kind of wires going into it, being completely manipulated by some demon into believing that there is some world that is out there when I'm not actually moving.
	I am as stuck inside this little tank as I am stuck inside my bed when I'm sleeping.
	And the entire...
	Quote, objective sense experience, sense data, and inner experience of my existence, my history, my memories, my dreams, everything, everyone around me might not exist, could all be some neural net stimulation inflicted upon me by some demon for some nefarious purpose.
	And he said, well, it could always be the case that this could be true.
	However, And this is where Kogito Urgo Sam, I think therefore I am, he said, the only thing that I can know for certain is that I am being fooled, or not.
	I exist in that the demon is doing something to me.
	So I have to, the only thing I can be certain of is that I exist.
	And that's the only thing I can fundamentally be certain of.
	Everything after that becomes more supposition.
	Yeah, and I think some more modern examples of that that people would readily understand would be things like The Matrix or Inception, where the entire world that they're in is really just this elaborate illusion.
	Right, but the question around this...
	Philosophy can only deal with questions where there is a null hypothesis.
	Science is the same way.
	If there's no possibility of a null hypothesis, it has nothing to do with philosophy.
	And the problem with the Cartesian demon thesis, and I remember first learning about this way back in my first philosophy class at the age of 19 or 20 at Glendon College of York University in Toronto.
	I remember having this out with the teacher way back.
	It's like, okay.
	Compared to what?
	So let's say that there's a thesis put forward that I'm a brain in a tank and this conversation and my studio and my camera and my microphone and my earpiece and everything, all of this, my body, everything, is being manipulated by a demon to appear perfectly consistent and The question then becomes, how could this possibly be proven or disproven?
	And the answer of course has to be that there's no way to prove or disprove this proposition.
	However, it does require a significant amount of complication in existence, right?
	There's an old Occam's razor theory that entities should not be needlessly multiplied, right?
	It is simpler And more coherent to believe that I have a body, I have a studio, I have a camera, I have a conversation, I have an earpiece, we have a computer connection, and so on, right?
	Because that conforms with all existence and conforms with all evidence and does not require that I'm actually a brain in a tank being manipulated by a demon, right?
	And it also accords with certain facts in the universe.
	So, for instance, if I'm watching a television series...
	I don't know what the story is that is about to happen, right?
	The next, right?
	Okay, fair enough.
	If it's law and order SVU, I pretty much know the plot that the white guy is going to be bad, the minority is going to be good, and the women are all powerful.
	But anyway, I don't know what's going to be said next.
	Is it easier to...
	So given that I am constantly encountering information in the world that I did not have prior, it is, according to Arkham's razor, simpler to think that...
	There's information out there that I don't possess which I come across.
	In other words, that there are other consciousnesses out there creating information, writing shows and shooting shows and producing shows and so on, or producing books that I haven't read before and so on.
	It is the very simplest and most rational explanation that I exist as an agent in an objective universe populated by other people, other ideas, other writing and history and the accumulated works of Shakespeare and so on.
	That is the one that makes the most sense because it's the simplest explanation.
	The idea that for some obscure reason some mindlessly complicated supernatural being is doing some vast experiment on my brain in a tank, that is a not rational explanation as to what is going on in the universe.
	And...
	So I think as far as the fact that it's a non-falsifiable hypothesis means it has nothing to do with philosophy, but Occam's razor would indicate that it is simple objective empiricism in the universe that we inhabit that is the answer to these questions because it's the only one that obeys Occam's razor and explains the vast phenomena that we always have, that we start off ignorant and become more knowledgeable as we are exposed to new information, which is a non-soluptistic way of looking at epistemology or reality.
	Well, I think your reliance on inductive reasoning, just the idea that we're going with what's most likely rather than what is necessarily true, is a very practical way to live your life.
	But again, this being a philosophy show, we're more concerned, I think, with the truth than what is necessarily practical.
	Can I ask you, are you familiar with the double-slit experience?
	Oh no, hang on, hang on.
	You just gave me a pushback, so I don't want to pretend you didn't, right?
	So you're saying you were concerned with what is true, right?
	But truth requires falsifiability.
	We can't claim that anything is true or not true if there's no falsifiability.
	And the Cartesian theory, the Cartesian demon theory, the brain in a tank theory, has no falsifiability and therefore cannot be considered true in any way, shape, or form because there's no way to prove or disprove it, right?
	You would agree with that, right?
	I would disagree with that.
	I would say that there are certain things that we experience all the time that we can't necessarily replicate in a lab or prove to another person.
	And it doesn't change the fact that those things happen.
	Like your original example from your philosophy series about you having a dream, you can't prove to me that you had a dream.
	I have to take it essentially on faith.
	And corroborate with other evidence that says, well, it's likely that Steph is telling me the truth, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you are.
	Well, okay, so hang on a sec.
	So let's just go back for a sec.
	So one theory, thesis, is that we're all brains, oh, I'm a brain in a tank.
	Now, of course, if I genuinely believed that I was a brain in a tank, I would not be having this conversation any more than I have in-depth philosophical conversations with hand puppets.
	I would disagree with that.
	Well, no, I recognize that you don't exist, that you're just a fiction being pumped into my brain by a set of wiring, right?
	Part of going through Descartes' reasoning, when I was going through it myself and sort of deconstructing in my own mind how he arrived at that conclusion, once you arrive at the point of nothingness, you can start to rebuild up The world, and that's what Descartes did.
	I don't necessarily agree with the way that he did it.
	I have my own sort of cosmology on how I think that works.
	But no, sorry, sorry.
	I just put out a sort of argument which said that if I believed in the Cartesian demon hypothesis, I would not be having this conversation because I would be recognizing that I'm not actually talking with someone who exists, right?
	I don't think that's necessarily true.
	I'll give you a perfect example of that.
	In the movie Castaway, what's his name?
	Tom Hanks was essentially alone on the island talking to a beach ball or volleyball.
	He knew for a fact that it wasn't a human being, but either because he was insane or to preserve his own sanity, he was willing to suspend disbelief and pretend...
	I don't know that you want to go with movies, though, as philosophical proof.
	I mean, you could say under extreme situations of loneliness, people might anthropomorphize a ball, but I don't know that you really want to start hanging your epistemological arguments on scripted Hollywood movies.
	Can you think of a more real-world example where people know that someone doesn't exist, but want to talk to them anyway?
	People talk to their ancestors, people that have died, Sure, but they know that they're not—well, sorry, number one, I would assume that they're doing that because they believe that they do exist in some manner, right?
	They have a spirit or a soul that they can actually converse with.
	Okay, so the question then relies on whether they genuinely believe that the person does not exist.
	Well, sure.
	So let me give you an example, right?
	It's going to sound kind of silly, but give me for a sec, right?
	So have you ever been to sports games and you've seen those, like they have those mascots that are dressed up in like funny suits, right?
	Okay, now imagine your girlfriend was in one of these, she regularly got into one of these funny suits, right?
	And let's say that you went down to cheer her on and you saw the funny suit standing up against the wall and you went and chatted with her as your girlfriend right before she went in, right?
	And you were telling your girlfriend in the suit about your day and what happened and how much you're looking forward to going out for drinks afterwards and going to a disco or whatever it is, right?
	Now imagine then that your girlfriend comes walking down through the corridor and she says, oh, I'll be right back.
	I just have to hit the washroom and then I'll put the suit on.
	In other words, you thought that you were talking to your girlfriend in the suit, but it turns out that your girlfriend was not in the suit but was somewhere else and is not in the suit now and is not coming back for another little while.
	Would you continue that conversation with the suit?
	So if I was talking to a mascot and I believed that it was my girlfriend and it turns out that it wasn't my girlfriend and I have I see her walking down the aisle or whatever.
	Would I continue talking to that mascot as if it were my girlfriend?
	Okay, probably not.
	No, come on, man.
	Don't give me this probability.
	You wouldn't.
	I mean, we need to be frank about this stuff because otherwise we're going to hedge everything and it's never going to get anywhere, right?
	Of course you wouldn't because somebody who would continue talking to the suit as if it contained his girlfriend when he knew it didn't contain his girlfriend would be insane.
	You'd feel embarrassed, right?
	Like, how silly.
	I just had a five-minute conversation with a giant beaver suit with no one in it, right?
	That would be kind of silly.
	You would stop.
	You'd say, okay.
	And then you say later, you say, man, I had this five-minute conversation.
	I thought you were in the suit.
	You weren't in the suit.
	I felt like an idiot.
	And of course, you'd stop talking with the empty suit because it doesn't actually have your girlfriend in it.
	So if you think someone's there, you'll have a conversation.
	But when you accept that they're not there, you'll stop having that conversation.
	I would say the brain in the jar scenario is a bit different from the mascot scenario in a very fundamental way.
	Namely that in the brain in the jar scenario there is nothing external of you other than maybe the computer providing the stimulus.
	But essentially the entire universe, the entire experience is something that you yourself create.
	No, no, no.
	Hang on.
	No, no.
	The demon is manipulating you.
	Because if I'm creating it, there's no explanation as to why things exist in the world that I did not invent.
	I mean, unless I accidentally wrote all of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, then woke up and didn't know that, right?
	I mean, somebody else had to write those.
	Someone else had to create all of Shakespeare's plays.
	All of the knowledge and all of the equipment.
	I don't know how to make a cell phone from scratch, but there's a cell phone in the world.
	So someone else has to be creating all the stuff that I'm not aware of, which is the vast majority of things in the world I have no clue, no idea, no understanding of and did not create myself.
	So I cannot be creating my own experience because logically that would mean that I would not encounter anything I had not already created, which is the exact opposite of what happens in the world.
	I think that's where I take a different...
	My view from the classical Cartesian skeptic is that I think it is possible that in that scenario you can be the only thing that exists.
	Essentially, you're like the god of a void.
	And you create the entire universe because there's nothing else to do other than create illusions in your own mind.
	Oh, fantastic.
	Okay.
	First of all, you must have had a very lonely childhood.
	But secondly, then what you can do to test this thesis is to create what I'm going to say next.
	Right?
	It's a testable thesis, right?
	And we want to test these hypotheses out.
	I mean...
	If I can do flat earth, I can do solipsistic, navel-gazing universe planet.
	So the way that we would test this, Marshall, is that you would then create the next thing that I'm going to say.
	Not necessarily true.
	No, necessarily true.
	If you're saying that I am like a ventriloquist's puppet on your knee, that, you know, the ventriloquist we know, he's just pretending that the little puppet is saying something, and if you pay the ventriloquist a million dollars to sing Eidlweiss, I
	can't think of anything off the top of my head.
	I'll have to think more.
	I'll have to think more on that response.
	But this is a theory that you've had for a while.
	Isn't this a pretty obvious test?
	If I think that I can create...
	If I think that I'm actually creating my own experience, then I would test that, right?
	And I would say, well, if I can create my own experience, let's say I want a million dollars.
	Let's say I want abs.
	Whatever it is, right?
	Then I can test that, right?
	Like, I remember when I was a kid.
	When I was a kid, this...
	I actually got in the newspaper for spoon-bending stuff, right?
	So when I was a kid...
	In the 70s and 80s, early 80s, there was a lot of this telekinesis, uregella, spoon-bending stuff going around, right?
	This idea that you could move things with your mind was a big deal.
	And, you know, I'm open-minded.
	I'm not lazy-minded, but open-minded.
	And so when people put forward to me startling things like you can move things with your mind, I would give it a try.
	And so I remember once, I don't know, I was like 12 or 13, I had my first record, oh, back when these things existed, my very first album.
	It wasn't an album.
	It was something called The 45, which was like one song that you loved and then some god-awful song that they found stuck to the bottom of the studio chair or something.
	Bohemian Rhapsody and I'm In Love With My Car.
	Ah!
	Amazing Grace by Crystal Gale and I Pity the Poor Immigrant.
	10cc was my first album and it was called The Things We Do For Love.
	It's actually a pretty good song, although not as good as Cry.
	You do 10cc, Cry, go listen to that.
	It's a great video and just a beautiful song.
	Incredibly well sung.
	But anyway.
	So, I put the album on.
	Too many broken hearts are falling down the river.
	And I would listen to it and I was just kind of dozing.
	I used to have a bed underneath...
	My train set, right?
	I had a train set that I labored over ridiculously hard and painted all the little figurines and made the mountains and all that.
	And I slept underneath it because of a small room.
	And the stereo was in the next room.
	I was kind of half dozing.
	I was listening to the song.
	And it's got this repeat and fade thing that just goes on way too long.
	The things we do.
	Anyway, so at the end of it, back in the day, when you had record needles, It would get to the end and it would go, because it would just keep clicking a little bit as it would go to the end and then come back a little bit.
	And I remember thinking, okay, telekinesis, what people say is possible.
	I'm going to try and lift the needle with my brain.
	I'm going to lift it.
	And I must have sat there, I don't know how long, 20 minutes, half an hour, really concentrating, feeling, you know, I can't remember, the Star Wars I think had come out at this point.
	The Force, lift this, find a way to do it.
	Never happened.
	Of course it never happened, because the brain can't move things without the body.
	And I may have tried it a couple of other times and so on, just as I tried, I think as most people who are curious do, telepathy and, you know, can I guess the card ahead of time, even slightly above.
	I mean, when I talk about mental phenomenon, it's not because I've never tried it or I've always been skeptical.
	I mean, skeptical is good, because skeptical means that you'll submit it to an empirical test.
	But, you know, mind reading, telekinesis, and so on, clairvoyance.
	I mean, I gave most of these things a try.
	And I don't know if I just wasn't yoded enough, but basically I just came to the fact that it was all just nonsense.
	But, you know, it's worth giving it a try.
	And if you've had this potential hypothesis of you're creating your own experience as a brain in a tank, you get that if you're wrong, you're kind of crazy, right?
	I mean, this is very dangerous for your brain.
	Very, very bad.
	For your brain, to believe in something that has the capacity to be falsified, but you're avoiding falsifying it.
	It means that there's something about this thesis that is emotionally resonant for you, resonant, it resonates for you emotionally, but you're not willing to subject it to the empirical test.
	And that's Of concern, I think, because if you are believing in this hypothesis but avoiding an empirical test, and it is a very serious hypothesis, right, Marshall?
	I mean, this has very profound ramifications for everything in your life.
	Your relationship to yourself, your relationship to objective reality, which would not be objective reality according to your thesis.
	The very existence of other human beings you can connect with if you genuinely believe at any level.
	That you're a brain in a tank manufacturing your own experience, that is an unbelievably isolated hypothesis to have.
	You can't connect with anyone any more than I can marry my girlfriend's mascot suit after she leaves me and think I'm having any kind of relationship or kids.
	It's profoundly isolating.
	And so it's not like when I talk about how you can check this whether it's true or not.
	By commanding the other person to say what you want them to say next, that would be a way of testing the hypothesis.
	The fact that you haven't done that is of significant concern to me at an emotional level because I think it's a very isolating hypothesis and the fact that you don't want to test it I think makes it even more isolating.
	Somehow I knew even before calling in here we would get to the psychoanalysis of why I think I think what I do and I would have to say in some ways you're wrong.
	I have tried this out in much the same way that you described you trying to perform telekinesis.
	I know I spent a whole year back in college trying to go through this sort of thing and I think part of the reason why We're unable to do this sort of thing.
	It really is because we're not, as you put it, quote-unquote, Yoda-ed enough.
	But I think another reason is it really goes back to, well, if this hypothesis is true, then why does anything else exist outside of ourselves?
	And I think a lot of it has to do with the idea that if this hypothesis is correct and we are just a brain in a jar, then...
	Everything else exists because it's essentially an illusion, a deception that we're trying to create for ourselves, either to have experiences or to make life more interesting or less lonely.
	And if you were to try and convince somebody of that, that would essentially break the illusion.
	Like you've said numerous times on your show, well, if I really did think this, I wouldn't have that conversation with that person, right?
	I'm sorry, I'm not sure exactly what we're talking about.
	Alright, so you're essentially asking why, if this theory is correct, why I'm unable to predict what it is you're going to say next, right?
	Not predict, control.
	Prediction would be determinism.
	The narcissism of I'm creating my own experiences, which would only be narcissism if it were false, would mean not that you could predict, but you could control what I was going to say next.
	Because I would be nothing more than a figment of your imagination or, in a sense, I would be the ventriloquist hand puppet on your knee.
	So you would be able to say what it is that I would...
	I mean, a ventriloquist would not be sane if he was genuinely believed he was having a conversation with his dummy, right?
	Right.
	And so if you're having a conversation with me, despite the fact that you believe to some degree in this, you're creating your own experience, then you have as much sanity In this realm, I'm not saying in general, but in this particular belief system, you would have as much sanity as somebody, a ventriloquist having a violent argument, or not that we're having a violent argument, a significant disagreement and an emphatic disagreement with his hand puppet that he's controlling.
	That would be kind of nuts, right?
	Can I give you an analogy to sort of explain what I think is going on in that situation?
	You're tech-savvy.
	I'm sure you're familiar with the idea of a partitioned hard drive?
	Mm-hmm.
	Okay, so a hard drive exists as a single unit, but when you partition it, you're essentially cutting off one part of the hard drive from another part of the hard drive, such that the two can't interfere with each other, and this has very practical applications.
	For instance, if one gets corrupted, then the other is not affected.
	I think the mind works in a similar way, where the external entities that we create The sort of projections that we create are not solely within our mind, but they're actually a separate partition with their own pseudo-consciousness that's a piece of the whole, but not entirely the whole itself, of which I and you would each be a partition of that.
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah, that makes no sense to me at all.
	So what you're saying is that you're having an argument with your ventriloquist dummy because you're schizophrenic and have more than one personality that is distinct from each other?
	Do you think that's a step towards coherence and sanity?
	I think that's a step towards understanding the nature of reality, not necessarily...
	No, no, no, no, no, it's not.
	No, it's not.
	No, it's a way of explaining something that you like in a way that makes it sound even crazier, but it is not a step towards reality.
	Like if a guy's arguing with his ventriloquist dummy, and he says, well, that's because my personality is split into two incompatible parts, and one of them is in the hand that's controlling the dummy, and he says, that's a step towards sanity, I'd say, it's really not.
	To modify that analogy, I would say it's similar to if you cut out a piece of your brain and put it in the dummy, rather than you having total control over the dummy.
	Does that make sense?
	So you think that if you cut a part of your brain out and stuff it into a wooden head of a dummy, that this is another step towards sanity?
	I think you're reading too much into that.
	I'm simply repeating your analogy back to you.
	I'm trying to find an analogy that describes...
	What I'm thinking here.
	I admit I may not be doing the best job of this.
	Alright.
	Would you tolerate another analogy?
	Sure.
	Okay.
	Think of a tree, okay?
	Tree, we understand, is a single, holistic entity.
	But it has many parts, many different roots, many different branches.
	Each of the tips of the root views every other tip as a separate individual, but we understand that at some deeper level, maybe not necessarily visible to each individual root tip, but it sort of feels deep down that it is connected to everything else there.
	So it appears separate on some kind of surface level, but it is really connected at some higher plane of existence.
	Does that make sense?
	I understand that a tree is a coherent and unified, to some degree at least, biological hole and the leaves are using the trunks ability to carry water up as a way of making more leaves genetically, but I don't know what that has to do with you being a brain in a tank.
	Okay, so the brain in the tank is the tree, whereas each individual person is the tip of a root or a branch.
	Okay, good.
	So how would we...
	Because, you know, analogies are not proof, right?
	So how would we prove that?
	How would we prove what?
	What you say.
	That we're all part of a tree.
	How would we prove...
	We're not literally part of a tree.
	Again, you understand...
	No, I get that.
	But how would we prove your analogy that we're all part of some...
	That we're all connected in some way?
	Collective conscious or something like that.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	Are you familiar with quantum entanglement?
	I'm a...
	I'm afraid I'm about to be, so go ahead.
	Okay, quantum entanglement is the notion that you have two particles, and they could be on completely opposite sides of the universe, and if you affect one, it has the same effect of being applied to one that's on the opposite end of the universe.
	So in that sense, they're all connected.
	This is something that's recently coming out in science, is stuff with superposition and quantum entanglement.
	I asked you before about the double slit experiment and you didn't want to talk about that, you wanted to talk about something else.
	I think those sorts of experiments would go a long way to proving the sort of interconnectivity of all beings, all matter in the universe.
	Okay, so how would quantum entanglement prove your thesis?
	The thesis that all minds are connected?
	We're all part of the same whole.
	Okay.
	I'm not sure yet.
	That's still in development.
	Oh, so you're like one of these guys who's kind of got a crazy theory but thinks that the magical word quantum somehow makes it scientific.
	I mean, I assume that you've not studied quantum mechanics or quantum physics in any particularly deep way, right?
	So you've got something that doesn't make any rational sense, but you use the magical word quantum to pretend that it's scientific or rational, right?
	I admit I'm not.
	Because I said, how would you prove it?
	You said, well, there's something called quantum entanglement.
	I said, well, how would that prove it?
	You say, well, I don't know.
	Well, then why the hell are we talking about it?
	I have to think on this a second.
	I'm saying this because I care.
	I do.
	I care.
	I think that what you're believing is incredibly dangerous.
	That's so condescending, man.
	That's so condescending.
	You want to start talking about condescending?
	Okay, let's start talking about condescending.
	Because, Marshall, you originally called me up and I said, can we talk about feelings or can we talk about philosophy?
	And you went off on something else.
	And I said, neither.
	Do you remember that at all?
	Yeah.
	All right.
	So here we talk about condescending.
	You say, I can understand why your intro to philosophy series takes the path of empiricism in bringing philosophy to beginners.
	But as someone at a more adept level, I feel a strictly empirical methodology has its limits.
	Do you think that's condescending?
	That I'm only appealing to amateurs and fools and people who don't really know anything about philosophy, but you, with your more adept level, recognizes that my philosophy or my explanation of philosophy is only for beginners and not for people who've got any particular knowledge of philosophy.
	Does it sound condescending to you at all?
	That wasn't my intention.
	Does it sound condescending to you at all as I describe it?
	I didn't ask for your intention.
	No, I would say it doesn't.
	I would say it's acknowledging the fact that you specifically designed that course to cater to people who maybe haven't thought about these topics before and you specifically set aside the platonic ideal and the brain in the jar in order to focus on empiricism and my intent when I originally wrote the question was that I wanted to talk about those other two aspects.
	Okay, but if I'm doing a course in philosophy or an online series, actually it's not a formal course, if I'm doing an online series on philosophy and I say an introduction to philosophy, I don't say an introduction to philosophy for beginners.
	And I don't ever at that time say, well, I'm leaving the more complicated questions of brain in a tank talking to your ventriloquist puppet.
	I'm leaving that to later.
	But I say that this is generally a complete introduction to philosophy and And never talk about anything else.
	And never say it's an introduction just for beginners and I'm leaving the more complicated topics aside.
	Then either I am falsifying what I'm doing and pretending it's some more comprehensive introduction to philosophy.
	In which case I'm lying in my introduction to philosophy.
	Or withholding essential information.
	Or I don't even know that there's more complicated questions around philosophy.
	I'm not trying to answer them in this.
	So either I'm false or I'm incompetent.
	That's the only rational way that this could be understood, right?
	Because the whole point of that 17-part introduction to philosophy is to answer these questions and reject them.
	So the fact that you say, well, it's just for beginners and you're avoiding the complicated topics is condescending.
	I mean, it is.
	Maybe good reason, right?
	If I'm bad at what I'm doing, then you could have good reason to be condescending, but I'm telling you it is.
	Okay, well, I'm sorry if you felt I was being condescending in that regard.
	Ah, now we have the bullshit non-apology.
	I'm sorry you felt it was condescending, which is saying that the only thing that's going on is my feelings, right?
	Huh.
	But it's okay, because it doesn't really matter, because according to your philosophy, I don't even exist anyway, so there's no point in me getting upset.
	As a hand puppet, as a ventriloquist dummy, there's no point in me getting upset.
	So I think I'm just going to move on to the next caller.
	But I do appreciate an interesting conversation about epistemology and I strongly would suggest this is not meant to be condescending.
	This is meant to be helping you out of a well of solipsism and narcissism that you might just want to throw this stuff aside and recognize that you are a glorious participant in a wonderfully objective universe.
	You can do amazing and wonderful things but you have to let go of this idea that you're a brain in the tank creating your own experience which is pretty narcissistic and is going to stymie and cripple and isolate you in ways that can't even be described in this short conversation as I think.
	But thanks very much for the conversation.
	I appreciate it.
	And let's move on to the next caller.
	All right.
	Well, up next is Ben.
	Ben wrote in and said, Why do you blame the United States for Iraqi deaths instead of Saddam Hussein?
	He invaded Kuwait and illegally removed WMD inspectors.
	That is from Ben.
	Hello, Ben.
	Can you hear me?
	I can, Ben.
	How are you doing?
	I'm doing great.
	Hey, I have...
	I just want you to know that I think you're doing a super job, and I really, really like your stuff.
	I am a member.
	I think you're doing some really great stuff, and I hope you, no matter if we agree or disagree at the end of this conversation, I'm still going to be a big Stefan fan, I can tell you that.
	I'm sure I'm going to be a big Stefan fan, so thank you very much for your kind words.
	Okay, well, I just think you're kind of giving us, you're not really, you don't tell the whole story.
	I think when I saw your video, you were pretty skewed.
	Most of the day was never elected.
	I mean, I can go on and on, but let's start off with Saddam Hussein.
	I mean, he invaded Kuwait, which is, you know, an aggressive move.
	We'd all have to agree with that.
	And people thought this guy was going to keep going.
	I mean, he could have just blowed right through and took over Saudi Arabia.
	No problem.
	But what I mean, you're blaming the United States for all these deaths.
	I mean, Saddam Hussein obviously did not give a damn about anybody in Iraq but Saddam Hussein.
	And I blame him a lot more.
	I really get tired of having to care more about the enemy's women and children than the enemy themselves.
	I mean, that's all the...
	I actually don't even like the word terrorist.
	I think war criminal is a more accurate word because if you look at the Geneva Conventions, that's how they conduct their military operations is with war crimes.
	It's not terrorism.
	It's actually a war criminal.
	They're supposed to be completely distinguishable from the non-combatants.
	They're supposed to be in uniform, and they don't do any of those things.
	But I just think you kind of gave us a pretty unfair shake on that.
	I think Saddam Hussein is 99.999% responsible for every single death in Iraq.
	Okay, then make the case.
	I mean, he obviously didn't bomb.
	He didn't invade.
	He didn't destroy the infrastructure.
	He didn't use uranium-tipped weapons.
	He didn't destroy the water purification plants, which resulted in massive diseases and running their way rampant through the Iraqi population.
	So clearly, he didn't do those things directly, right?
	No, not directly, but he was responsible for them to be blown up because all he had to do was comply with the ceasefire agreement that he signed.
	And he was supposed to completely disarm in front of international weapons inspectors after he invaded Kuwait, after he was removed.
	He agreed to do those things, and he didn't do them.
	And after we invaded and took over the country, we spent a whole bunch of money rebuilding the country.
	They had more pure water Yeah, it didn't bring anyone back to life, though, did it, right?
	Well, that's Saddam's problem.
	That's his fault.
	He should have known what he's supposed to do.
	Okay, so what you're saying is that one country can demand that another country disarm, and if that country doesn't disarm, all the resulting deaths are the result of those leaders who don't disarm.
	So Russia could go to America and say, America, you need to disarm, and if America doesn't disarm, then Russia can drop nuclear bombs on American cities, and it's all the fault of the American government.
	Well, if we agreed to a ceasefire agreement, that saved our butt.
	Yeah, it would be our number one.
	And Saddam Hussein should have just done what he was supposed to do.
	He agreed to these things.
	That's the only reason why he was able to stay in power.
	No, but what gives the American government the right to demand that Iraq disarm?
	He invaded Kuwait.
	Because he invaded Kuwait and showed he was an aggressor.
	So what?
	Do you know how many countries America has invaded?
	Sure, give me one.
	One, I don't know.
	How about Korea?
	How about Vietnam?
	How about Iraq?
	How about Afghanistan?
	Let's go through it all, because you're blaming the United States.
	Let's go to Korea.
	North Korea invaded South Korea.
	The United Nations actually approved a military action to go in and to remove the communists.
	I mean, that's how it gets done.
	I'm glad that we went over there.
	And MacArthur was proven right in the end.
	That we should have made it just one Korea.
	We have a lot more problems.
	In fact, if you really want to talk about a United States screw-up, here's where things get, because I can understand how someone like yourself probably gets very frustrated with American foreign policy, because it seems inconsistent, doesn't it?
	Hang on, hang on.
	We're just jumping all over the place here, right?
	We've got to slow down and work through things one by one.
	But you just got to remember one thing.
	When the Democrats get into power, they're trying to destroy this country.
	That's why all of a sudden everything that the Republicans did that's helping make things move, the Democrats always want to make sure the United States is on the short end of the stick.
	That's why Obama did what he did.
	Anybody with a brain knew that if he pulled out those troops in Iraq, that ISIS, something like an ISIS was going to take over.
	He had to know that.
	He couldn't be that stupid.
	I mean, I'm just a heating and air conditioning service technician, and I knew this was going to happen, and he does it anyway.
	I mean, I just want you to remember, every time you see the United States do something that's really stupid, and there's a Democrat in there, they're doing it because they're trying to take this country down.
	That's what they're trying to do for 50 years.
	No, and it is Treason is the book, which if people want to read more about this theory.
	I read that book.
	Yeah, so that's Ann Coulter's Treason is a very interesting book where basically she says that Republicans who start wars, it's the Democrats who lose them.
	Well, you know what the real bad thing is, is that with the Democrats, because the country, they were completely infiltrated, the communist FDR's government.
	That's the reason why Mao Zedong ended up taking over China, was our State Department did that.
	I read some stuff about what our State Department did.
	Basically, they made sure that Mao Zedong was going to be the communist leader of China.
	Can you imagine how much better the world would be today if that didn't happen?
	That's because of the Democrats that were taken over by the commies.
	FDR's government was completely infiltrated by communists.
	Oh no, that's a very important and underappreciated aspect of American history.
	And the degree to which a third of the world's population was dumped into a communist hellhole because of communist infiltration of the American government should never be under-anticipated.
	And that's very, very important.
	And that's why we end up with the Koreas and the Vietnams and all this other...
	I mean, the Shah of Iran, that was...
	Well, no, hang on, hang on.
	The fact that, let's say the thesis is correct, that Democrats lose wars, that doesn't mean that America has to be in those wars to begin with.
	Well, I think Obama, what's happened in the Middle East with Islamic terrorism, that's going out of control and it proves that that's really not a viable option that the United States just sit on its hands.
	Why does America, like, okay...
	The United States in 1776 has invaded 70 different nations.
	Now, we can say, well, there was this circumstance and that circumstance and so on.
	But my question is, why?
	Why?
	Switzerland hasn't invaded 70 different nations.
	Hell, Iran hasn't invaded a sovereign country since the 18th century.
	Why has America, when it's got peaceful neighbors to the north and south and giant oceans to the east and west, why has America invaded 70 different countries around the world since its inception?
	I mean, we talk about each one individually.
	I mean, that's a pretty broad statement.
	But, you know, I mean, just think how much better Canada would be if we could have won the War of 1812.
	It would be...
	You'd be a nuclear power.
	You know, that's arguable to put mildly.
	But no, the question is, the question is, why?
	Why?
	I mean, let's say, well, America went into South Korea to save it from totalitarianism or communism.
	And America went into Vietnam to save the Vietnamese from communism and so on.
	It's like, okay, well, let's say that that thesis is true.
	It's debatable, but let's say it's true.
	Okay, but the fact that the American government had all of this foreign meddling going on was also partly why the fact that they ended up supporting the wrong side in the Chinese Civil War delivered a billion people into communism.
	So American foreign policy, well, you know, we saved a couple of million Vietnamese from communism.
	Well, sadly, it's a billion Chinese we lost.
	So, you know, you win some, you lose some.
	So I don't know that we can say that American foreign policy has really been able to achieve its stated goals, to put it mildly.
	Well, because the Democrats...
	I mean, Vietnam was a war that was lost purposely by Ted Kennedy and the Democrats.
	That's why.
	I mean, that's like we were saying before.
	I mean, the Democrat Party by the 19th century...
	So then stop invading!
	Sorry to interrupt, but then stop invading.
	Because if the Republicans understand, let's say that that thesis is totally true, that the Democrats lose the wars, then the Republicans, by starting wars, know that they're going to hand a giant loss when the Democrats get in power, so stop starting wars.
	Well, when we say start, well, Vietnam wasn't really started by the United States.
	I mean, South Vietnam was a UN-recognized sovereign country that was invaded by the North.
	By the way, the North Vietnamese was completely backed up by the Chinese and the Soviets, or Soviet Union.
	That's why they had weapons.
	So we really didn't start that war.
	We were asked to help out a fledgling democracy, but it's really too bad because...
	Like I said, when I hear you talk about it, I hear a lot of frustration with the United States.
	And I can understand that.
	No, no, no.
	The government.
	We're talking about government.
	That's fine.
	And you're not the only person that I've talked to about these things that's not an American citizen that puts out your frustration with the United States foreign policy.
	Well, it's because every time the Democrats get in there, We're good to go.
	Doing what the Democrats should have been doing a long time ago, and he's calling them out, and he's not backing down.
	It's time to...
	I mean, the Democrats will call us racist, sexist, homophobe, whatever-phobe.
	Any dirty name in the book to try to get past, you know, on election day.
	Okay, listen, I mean, we've got to stop wondering topics, right?
	Sure.
	So, because there was this domino theory, right, that went on the post-Second World War and the Cold War, where the idea was that the communists were going to take over country after country after country, and then, you know, America was going to be isolated and lose or whatever, right?
	Well, first of all, there was not going to be any invasion of America.
	That wasn't going to happen.
	Secondly...
	The argument could be very strongly made that one of the reasons that the Soviet Union collapsed was because it was expansionistic.
	Hey, expansionistic countries tend to collapse, right?
	Because it's like all the way from Persia and ancient Rome and the Yuan and the dynasty in China, they expand and they expand and then they collapse.
	Because expansion requires the loss of economic freedoms, massive taxation, a bribery of the mercenaries and a devaluation of the currency and massive debt and all of the stuff that we see going on in all of the empires throughout history.
	So the best way to bring down an empire is to cause it to expand.
	So if you wanted to bring down the communist system, allow them to expand and they'll collapse even faster.
	Like if they hadn't taken Eastern Europe, which is where the beginning of the collapse of the Iron Curtain began, if Russia hadn't taken over Eastern Europe, it probably would have lasted a lot longer because it's so ridiculous.
	The communism and totalitarianism and empire in general, which is not free market based, is so ridiculously inefficient, the bigger it gets, the harder and the quicker.
	It falls.
	So this idea that America had to go in and fight and push back and blow up millions of Vietnamese and Koreans and Cambodians and so on in order to make sure that Russia fell, it's like, let them take the countries, Russia will fall even faster, and then those countries will be inoculated against socialism.
	Whereas what happens is when America comes in and blows the shit out of these places, what happens is people get inoculated against what they perceive as the Western way of life, the free market, a limited government, and so on.
	Whereas, boy, you know who's really not keen on socialism these days?
	Eastern Europe.
	And they're also not that keen on Muslim immigration because they've got history with the Ottomans and all that.
	So they remember.
	When things go really badly for a country, they tend to remember who screwed them over the most.
	And it's just, I mean, just as a hypothetical, I can't prove this, right?
	But although there's lots of historical evidence, but why not let communism expand so that communism can collapse even faster?
	And then you don't end up with this semi-socialist warfare warfare state in America designed to fight communism.
	And all of the countries that were taken over by communism, which caused it to collapse decades sooner, really hate communism and socialism and are much more likely to transition into a true free market, the example of which they can see in America.
	Well, I don't agree with that because I think what brought the Soviet Union down was that Ronald Reagan was finally doing the opposite of Carter and Nixon.
	And not doing the detente.
	They wanted to spend money.
	He was going to spend money, too.
	And we opposed them, and Africa opposed them greatly in South America.
	And they just...
	I know you know this, but the Soviet Union had plenty of people here in academia singing their praises, how great their economy was.
	Oh, they still do?
	Yeah.
	Well, probably.
	I read this book called Reagan's War, and it was an awesome book.
	And, I mean, it was amazing all these academics that are just, you know, Soviet Union's economy is just so great.
	Only a fool would think that they're on the brink of a collapse.
	I mean, it was just amazing.
	Oh, the CIA had no idea.
	I remember Jake DiLiberto and I had a debate years ago where I was talking.
	He was, ah, the intelligence.
	Intelligence had no idea the fragility of the Soviet Empire.
	They had no idea 9-11 was coming.
	They had no, I mean, no idea about any of this stuff.
	And, um...
	So, but, you know, socialism collapses in and of itself.
	And, you know, one of the things that could have helped socialism collapse a little sooner was to stop funding it, right?
	Because I remember being, as a kid, this is when I came to Canada, there was this ferocious rivalry, of course, between the West and communism.
	And it all came down to some Canadian...
	It's like, that's how sad it is.
	It came down to a hockey game.
	That's how pitifully we've been betrayed by intellectuals.
	But I remember reading about how the Canadian government was sending, you know, billions of dollars of wheat and resources over to Russia.
	And it's like, what?
	Oh, yeah.
	It happened under Kennedy, too.
	What the hell sense does that make?
	John Kennedy signed a waiver for a whole bunch of technological...
	Technology waivers and to help the Soviet agriculture system, too.
	Yeah, there's an argument that says that if the US and Western governments had not propped up the Soviet Union so much, it would have failed decades earlier.
	There's a book called East minus West equals zero, which just describes the amount of espionage and secret sharing and outright secret that went on.
	Secret sharing and just outright secret giving and technology given and processing given that went from the West to It kept them going.
	Whereas a policy of non-intervention and non-support would have caused the Soviet Union, I believe, to collapse years earlier.
	It would have retained freedoms in the West that were compromised and degraded in order to fight the Cold War.
	And it would have, as I mentioned, rendered the countries permanently hostile to communism and socialism that the communists had taken over.
	Well, that's why Reagan's presidency was so important, because he walked into a situation where the Soviet Union was actually quite strong.
	And from the things that you've mentioned, and also from just Jimmy Carter being...
	Well, Jimmy Carter did his human rights campaign, and that was all American allies that weren't exactly perfect were now the enemy.
	And basically, flipping it on, I said, that's why we don't have the Shah of Miranda anymore, who was...
	The Shah was the most pro-Western leader by far.
	He was scared shitless of the Soviet Union because the Soviet Union occupied Northern Iran until 1946 or 47.
	And they had to finally leave because the UN put the pressure on them.
	And, of course, he gets the rug bolt out of him from James Earl Carter.
	And the media also, of course, very liberal at the time, was slandering, hardcore, the Shah.
	So what would you, sorry to interrupt, and I just want to make sure we don't just jump through the history hoops, but what would you have done in Iraq if you had taken over from Bush?
	Well, from Bush?
	I would have kept our troops there.
	I would have wanted to make it a Western democracy, but...
	For how?
	Well, as long as it takes.
	We are all over the world.
	If you really think about it, I hear this stuff, but we haven't had a world war since we've been a global power at the end of World War II. That's nukes, though.
	That's because it's mutually assured destruction, I believe.
	Well, to a point, but I think that if we just sat on our hands like...
	See, I think the left wanted us to do that when the Soviet Union was around because they wanted to see the Soviet Union get strong and expand.
	That's why they wanted the Shah to go down.
	Anything that goes against the United States is what they want.
	I mean, you hear the BS that Mosaday was democratically elected, which he wasn't.
	He was appointed by the parliament, which he tried to dissolve, which had to be approved by the Shah, which it was.
	And then when Mosaday was removed...
	The Khomeini led a day of prayer that he was glad to see him gone.
	But see, the left is always trying to, whatever they got to do at the time to hurt the United States, they do it.
	And that's why a lot of people get very...
	Sorry, let me interrupt.
	I just don't want you to keep repeating the thesis.
	We get it.
	You think that the left are treasonous and I think there's strong arguments to be made for that.
	Hang on, hang on.
	Here's the problem.
	You cannot have a democracy, at least no functional democracy has been observed, where people have an IQ on average below 90.
	Well...
	You can't.
	I saw your thing about South Africa.
	I've shown my friends.
	Nobody has to listen to every show, but Helmuth Nyberg and I had a conversation about this, and he's got lots of data on this.
	And as far as I understand it, the average IQ in the Middle East is in the low 80s.
	So the idea that America should go in there and commit troops and control the society until there's an emergence of some Western-style democracy I think is biologically a challenging thesis, to put it mildly.
	Well, I think we'd have a lot better world if the Shah of Iran never went down in the first place because those people weren't under...
	they actually had a lot of capitalism and a lot of things were going good that were happening in Iran in the 70s that Jimmy Carter put an end to.
	And I mean, the only thing that we're finding out is that it doesn't take a whole lot of IQ to be an Islamic jihadist and And I think the reason why we're able to enjoy some peace a little bit under Obama in the first few years is because George Bush did the hard work.
	He took the fight to them.
	And now they don't have to worry about that.
	Now they can plan.
	But I understand what you're saying, but I hate to just say it's completely hopeless, but yeah, you might have to change the culture.
	Let me give you an example.
	Just in my own personal experience, I have nothing to back this up, but here's what I've experienced in my life doing HVAC. I have to work with custodians.
	I work with a school district.
	If they're born in the United States, it doesn't matter if they're black or white or whatever their race.
	If they're born in the United States and I have to explain mechanical things to them, they can understand it.
	But if they come from a third world country, forget it.
	It's totally impossible.
	Even if it's the same race, I think it's because they never saw a big wheel.
	They never worked on a bicycle or anything.
	I think it's like mechanical things, things like that.
	You kind of have to get your mind used to doing those things.
	You just can't pop out of bed and all of a sudden you're just able to fix any car.
	You have to kind of Develop it.
	Even like they say, when you're retired, a lot of times people make a mistake of not really exercising their brain and they start to lose a little IQ that way.
	I've read stuff about that.
	I don't know if you have, but I think it's a lot more cultural than genetic.
	Part of it, anyways, the culture aspect of a little IQ. Yeah, but okay, but let's say it's 100% cultural and not at all genetic.
	That doesn't really solve the problem because nobody knows how to change culture in other ways.
	I mean, certainly the army, what is it good for?
	Killing people and breaking things.
	That's not how you build a culture.
	So I'm just sort of pointing out that the dominoes that have fallen because of Western involvement in the Middle East.
	And of course, I get there was Soviet involvement in the Middle East.
	I get there was a lot of socialism among the countries in the Middle East, a lot of nationalizing of Western oil fields.
	And I blame environmentalists a lot for the problems in the Middle East because, of course, America Actually has larger oil reserves in Saudi Arabia, but the environmentalists have paralyzed America from getting access to it, which means massive amounts of resources flow from the West to the Middle East, and in particular to the oil-rich countries in the Middle East.
	And it means that there's constant desire for meddling over there.
	If the environmentalists had gotten out of the way...
	The human race would be a lot better off because there'd be drill baby drill going on in the West, and there would be, well, the kind of resources in the more totalitarian countries that they generally accumulate, which is not many at all.
	And so those kinds of solutions, I think, are just really important.
	How about we just push back hard against environmentalism, allow for the oil to be...
	Drilled for in the West, which takes away resources from those countries, which with the absence of oil subsidies, so to speak, from the West, they might actually reform for the better.
	There's lots of ways to get other cultures to improve other than going in and blowing the shit out of their population and infrastructure.
	And knowing that there's a democracy and that Republicans and Democrats are going to cycle in and out means that, of course, George Bush knew that.
	He knew he was a two-term president and the idea that it was going to just stay Republican for the next 50 years until Iraq miraculously transformed into a Western democracy.
	Starting that, knowing that the Democrats are waiting in the wings according to the thesis and going to betray the country is another reason why, given the inconstancy of leadership that's going to occur in America, getting involved in these foreign entanglements is not a great idea.
	I don't think it's going to – us sitting on the sidelines isn't going to make things better.
	I just gave you three or four arguments as to why, so you can't just say no.
	You have to respond to the arguments, right?
	Well, Islamic terrorism is going to grow for sure if we just sit around.
	I mean it's been growing for 25, 30 years.
	And do you know why Islamic terrorism started to a large degree?
	Because America funded radical madrasas in Pakistan in order to generate the mujahideen, which they could use against the Soviets, in Afghanistan.
	And it's not to say that it's the sole reason, but it's pretty significant.
	And since, hang on, hang on, since the war on terror started, terrorism, radical terrorism has increased enormously around the world.
	So if you've got a government program called Control Terrorism, Well, no, the increase started even under Bush.
	In 2009, there was hardly anything happening.
	It's because we took it to him hard.
	And it's grown exponentially under the Peace Prize winning Obama.
	Because he did the surrender.
	That's what he ran on.
	He ran on that.
	And see, this here is why Hillary Clinton is I know it shouldn't be, but Hillary voted for the war in Iraq, and then she shows she has no character, couldn't see it through.
	But Obama ran on surrender, and now this is the price that we're paying.
	The ISIS and more ISIS wannabes.
	You have to take the fight to them.
	But the thing is, when you're trying to run a war politically correct and trying to be nice about it, and we're supposed to cry over women and children, well, you're not going to win a war.
	You have to kill them and not cry about it, and you do what you got to do.
	So how many, sorry to interrupt, what sort of death count do you think would achieve your goals in Iraq, right?
	So between half a million and a million Iraqis have died as a result of the US-led invasion.
	And so how many people do you think would be necessary to kill in order to achieve what you think would be beneficial?
	I don't know.
	But I don't really care.
	The thing is that the people killed in Iraq, most of them were killed by insurgents with their war crimes.
	The way they would, you know, their car bombs and, you know, they...
	Well, no.
	To be fair, I mean, according to Madeleine Albright, there were half a million Iraqi children who died as a direct result of the UK and US embargoes and the no-fly zones and so on.
	So, you know, half a million kids, that's not inconsiderable in a population of 20 or 30 million.
	That's quite a lot.
	That would be the equivalent of 5 million American children dying as the result of some embargo or some Toxicity in the American environment as a result of foreigners and I think I'm pretty sure that if five million American children died in the arms of their parents there would be some I think it's important and it's instructive to recognize that you can't put a ceiling on the death count you're willing to inflict to produce what you would consider to be a better society on
	the other side of the world.
	I mean, dear God, if Washington is so damn great at creating great societies, why does Washington, D.C. have just about the highest murder rate in the entire country?
	Why don't they start fixing the ghettos and the cultures and the problems in Washington, D.C. before they think they can go and bomb the shit out of the Middle East and turn it into a paradise?
	Isn't it a little easier to already fix a country where you have the legal control, where people speak the language, they've got a common history, you can get together, you can work things out, but they can't.
	Can they fix Detroit?
	No.
	Can they fix Baltimore?
	No.
	Can they fix Los Angeles?
	No.
	Can they fix government schools?
	No.
	Can they fix the food supply when it gets disrupted?
	No.
	Can they fix anything?
	Can they stop drugs from coming into the country?
	Can they make people literate?
	Have they solved the problem of poverty?
	No.
	You understand the incompetence And counter productivity, to put it as mildly as possible, that the government is constantly displaying in every field of endeavor it touches.
	It is the death hand of decay.
	Everything the government touches turns to crap.
	But you think somehow, where they have the least power, the longest supply chains, the least understanding of the foreign culture, the foreign religion, the foreign language, that they're going to be able to fix Iraq when they can't even fix what's outside and inside of the windows of the Capitol.
	Well, we were fixing Iraq, but we were being too politically correct about it.
	We weren't politically correct.
	We fixed Japan and Germany.
	They're very successful.
	But we wrote their constitution.
	We told them what they were going to get.
	We didn't let them tell us what they wanted.
	And with Iraq, we were like, oh, geez, it's their country.
	We should give it back to them.
	I don't think it was Saddam's country.
	And I think we really rushed this democratic nonsense way too soon.
	And I was hoping I would be wrong about Islam and democracy.
	But I think we could have had some friends there.
	Things weren't turning around under George Bush in Iraq to say it wasn't.
	It wasn't true at all.
	Their economy was the best in like 30 years thanks to George Bush.
	They were pumping more oil than ever, and they had more clean water than they ever had.
	We're helping them build power stations, and Barack Obama decided to put an end to all that.
	And everybody that had an IQ of above 70 knew what would happen once Obama did what he did.
	But we have successes.
	Germany and Japan are successes.
	We kick their ass, we blow up their cities, and then they turn it around.
	But we told them what they were going to have.
	We didn't ask for their input.
	And this is what's wrong with this whole war, the way it's being conducted now.
	We're being politically correct.
	It's not just a matter...
	The difference between Germany and Japan...
	It's not, well, we just bombed them more and therefore they became better.
	Japan is significantly irreligious in many ways and has an average IQ of 105 or 106.
	Germany is a Judeo-Christian country and has an average IQ of a little over 100.
	And in the Middle East, you have significantly challenging religious beliefs, to put it mildly, And an IQ currently in the low 80s.
	So you have to understand that you can't make a bridge out of balsa wood.
	And without this sort of fundamental understanding of the capacities within the region, the idea that you're going to graft on some Western democracy is not valid.
	It's not valid.
	I think what's happened in Iraq has been particularly tragic.
	And you can say, well, but you know, if the Republicans had been in power for the next 50 years, magic would have happened and great things would have happened and it all would have become peaceful and wonderful.
	But the reality is the Republicans are never in power.
	For 50 years, you're always going to get the Democrats.
	So even by your own thesis, they shouldn't be going in anyway.
	So that's the reality.
	And saying, oh, there's the Democrats.
	Okay, well, let's say that's entirely correct.
	Let's say entirely correct.
	Let's say that you and I want to do a 10-week road trip, and I map out this road, and I say, hey, man, every mile on the road, there's going to be a big carpet of tacks and nails that is going to blow the wheels off our car, right?
	Would you say, that sounds great.
	Let's go.
	Well, you'd say no, because we can't get from here to there reliably because all these tacks on the road.
	And so you can't wish away the tax.
	The fact is the Democrats are going to get in power from time to time.
	And according to the thesis that you and others and Coulter and so on have put forward, which again I think is a reasonable thesis, say the Democrats are going to betray everything and everyone.
	Okay, well that's a reality you have to take into account when thinking about going to invade other countries.
	So the Democrats are going to come along and screw it up.
	In which case, don't go.
	Because expecting the Democrats to do differently is irrational.
	Expecting the Democrats never to get in power is irrational.
	So you're setting yourself up for failure by setting events in motion where the Democrats are going to end up in charge.
	Well, I think George Bush did the right thing at the right time.
	And I think that's me, myself, I would do what I believe was the right thing at the right time.
	I wouldn't be worried.
	You can't think like that.
	Do you think it's worth it now?
	Do you think all that sacrifice and bloodshed and destruction is worth it now?
	Well, of course not, but we're going to have to end up going back anyway, just like I predicted.
	We're going to end up going back.
	We're going to have to go back.
	I mean, Obama's going to...
	Obama...
	The good news is that the Democrats have lost 1,000 seats nationwide in all levels of government since Obama's been elected, and I think people have seen what these Democrats are like.
	I'm hoping that they don't forget, but the only thing I don't trust in the future is some of the Republicans because they seem like they care more about cheap labor Are you going back?
	Me?
	No, I went back.
	I'd just be telling them to drop as many bombs as necessary.
	So you're not risking anything yourself?
	No, I don't think I'm not.
	If you had a son, would you tell him to go and risk his life and limb to liberate Fallujah for the 20th time?
	I would be, the only thing I would be upset with is if I believed, like if he joined the military, because right now it's 100% volunteer force.
	No, it's not, because the money to pay for it is drafted by other people unwillingly, but I know what you mean.
	It's not drafted.
	Well, I believe, most Americans believe in having a military and are willing to pay for it.
	And the thing is, is that I'd only be upset, like I think, one thing I thought was kind of, which I wasn't happy with, is like, again, being politically correct.
	That we would be willing to lose American troops to save civilians.
	And, of course, the media at that time was counting every day how many people were killed under Bush that were troops.
	They're not counting any of them right now in the United States.
	I don't know if they're not with Obama.
	He's got about 2,000 corpses on his watch, but the media don't care about him anymore.
	But they will again once Trump's our president.
	But they need to stop worrying so much about their civilian losses and worry first about our guys.
	Because, I mean, we're there because...
	Okay, listen, I mean, look, dude, you're an armchair warrior.
	You've got no skin in the game.
	You're just talking about stuff that's going to happen to other people.
	You've got no risk going on.
	You've got no kids who are going to go into the military.
	You've got no kids who are going to be drafted.
	It's just nonsense to me.
	I mean, you're not...
	What's your risk, you know?
	And is this worth the dissolution of borders around Europe?
	Is this worth it for you that this is what happened?
	Yeah.
	Well, look at France.
	They decided to poke a finger in our eye.
	How did that work out for them?
	They were out there as anti-war as anything else, and the Muslims want to kill them anyway.
	So sitting on the sideline, calling people chicken hockey.
	France is not anti-war, and France has been messing about in the Middle East forever.
	Canada's going to get it too.
	You guys are on their bullseye list.
	I know, because Canada's got troops out there as well.
	As does France.
	In fact, one of the recent bombings in France was a direct response to a massive French bombing in the Middle East.
	But anyway, listen, we're obviously not going to get to a common ground here, but I appreciate your perspective coming on the show.
	I think that the idea that – dude, still talking.
	I think that the idea that the governments are going to be able to magically fix foreign cultures on the other side of the world is ridiculous.
	The fact that America is one of the big – is the biggest arms dealer in the world, making sure that governments around the world, both relatively peaceful and relatively totalitarian, are all well-stocked with weapons.
	The fact that ISIS was trained by the U.S.
	The fact that ISIS is using weapons delivered by the U.S.
	The fact that al-Qaeda was originally trained by the U.S.
	The fact that Saddam Hussein was originally an ally of the U.S. and was partially installed by the U.S.
	You understand there's just crazy.
	It's a bull in a china shop and it's getting people killed.
	America, in my opinion, needs to come the hell home and start fixing its own country rather than imagining the We're good to go.
	I appreciate you calling in.
	I appreciate everyone's conversation during this exciting time in the world.
	And please help out the conversation.
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