Aug. 27, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:58:12
3394 Global Marxist Society - Call In Show - August 26th, 2016
Question 1: [2:03] - “As a 23-year-old residing in suburban America, I have to endure pressures from the far left in my everyday life. I see Western civilization scolded in class rooms and have concerns where their movement is going. I consistently see the top 1% of wealthy people being attacked over the large amount of capital that they managed to acquire.” “Considering the fact that Americans who earn over 32k a year are in the global 1%, where do you see this movement going? Am I going to be hearing how Ethiopians make 5 cents on the American dollar? Can an argument be made that Western politicians and institutions, are moving us towards a global Marxist society?” Question 2: [59:33] - “I am a biracial independent who leans to the right, having been a democrat before I went to college. I am in a happy relationship with my liberal, Bernie loving girlfriend. I’ve dated so many other types of girls during my college days, that I’m at a point where I’ve learned what I want in a woman and am convinced my current girlfriend is perfect for me, regardless of our political affiliations.”“I’m an engineer who just wants to live a happy, successful life without having politics needlessly forced into my day-to-day thinking. Despite that, I find that every now and then, there are instances where my girlfriend and I disagree on a matter, which is perfectly fine. However, I find that she’ll say something with a level of inaccuracy that vexes me, and I’ll give a not-so-eloquent response. Is there a way to best handle these isolated incidents where we can avoid an awkward situation?”Question 3: [1:29:00] - "With increasing regulations in the US, such as minimum wage increases in many cities and states, the cost of labor is rising higher and higher. At the same time the free market is making the cost of automation of many processes lower and lower. It seems we are on the cusp of an automation revolution as a way of the free market trying to compensate for this hyper-regulatory climate we are living in.”“There are some people that are talking about this leading to increased social unrest as more and more people lose their jobs, especially in the tertiary fields like customer service where much of America's work force currently resides. There is even talk from the tech giants of automation replacing much of the programming field eventually. Some people are going so far as to propose a Universal Base Income to try and head off this potentially looming societal disaster. I try to hold out that like the agricultural and industrial revolutions, this revolution will simply empower us to find new ways of creating wealth with less physical labor but it is so hard to see what the unseen hand of the market has in store for us.”“The only definitive positive I can see so far from this is that the cost of many goods will drop precipitously which will certainly help those on the lowest rung of the economic ladder. Certainly decreasing regulations could stave of this uncertainty for longer but that is a hard pill to sell to the American people at this moment."“What do you think the consequences of this revolution will have in store for the human species, good or bad? How do you think it will affect first world nations versus second and third world nations? Do you think this will finally help us jump the last hurdles to becoming a type I civilization which could create possible new opportunities to fulfill our needs to be productive members of the species or do you think it could lead to even more nihilistic hedonism?"Question 4: [1:54:57] - “I have been in the US Army reserve for 7 years. I joined in 2009 after graduating high school. After my initial training, I spent three years at a Senior Military College studying to become an Army Officer.”“What I experienced during these last 7 years was a Military hamstrung by bureaucracy and political correctness. Obesity in the military is an epidemic from the generals to the privates. Drill Sergeants can't stress out a trainee, corrective training for unacceptable behavior cannot be more than 10 unaltered push-ups. Drill Sergeants cannot control the diets of grossly overweight soldiers, meanwhile these same drill sergeants are expected to prepare young men and women for combat.”“Most of my officer training was equal parts land navigation, physical training, and sexual harassment prevention. I honestly look back on my experiences there as a joke, and I am glad that I did not complete the program.”“This last year I have obtained a decent job that provides a decent living and I am currently trying to leave the military. I informed my unit of my decision in June. I was told just this month, that the process takes months, and my paperwork has not even been started. This is a Military that is not only expected to defend its own country, but many other countries around the world.”“Is the majority of the US military not meant to fight anymore? Is it a backdoor way of getting more people on a form of welfare state control?”Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Bunch of great, great callers tonight, but first, as usual, please, please let me remind you to go to freedomainradio.com slash donate to help us continue to do the great work we are doing in the world, dans le monde.
So the first caller, we talked about are we inevitably slip-sliding away toward the global Marxist society?
What are the motivations behind the Marxists?
What's their thought process?
How do they end up where they are?
It was a really, really great conversation.
The second caller has a girlfriend that he likes and she likes Bernie Sanders.
He, not so much feeling the burn.
And how can he reconcile his love for his girlfriend with her love for Bernie Sanders?
And we kind of went into the motivations as to why people might like Bernie Sanders while putting as positive a spin as possible on the question.
Now, the third caller had questions around minimum wage and the increasing automation of low-skilled jobs.
What does this do for people a little bit on the left of the bell curve of intelligence?
How can society accommodate them?
Should we have some sort of minimum income for people whose jobs are being replaced?
And we had a great conversation about that.
I talked about how things would work in a free society, and I think it's definitely something we can work towards.
Now, the fourth caller, an army man.
And you'd think the army, of course, the last bastion of the alpha male.
But apparently he was saying that the army has been kind of taken over by wicked amounts of political correctness.
And I believe the phrase bunch of pussies might have been invoked somewhere or other.
And we also talked about the fact, at least in the American military, trillions of dollars seem to...
Remain relatively unaccounted for from time to time.
So it was a really, really great conversation about the army, and I talked about some of my thoughts about national defense.
All right, up first today we have Robert.
Robert wrote in and said, As a 23-year-old residing in suburban America, I have to endure pressures from the far left in my everyday life.
I see Western civilizations scolded in classrooms and have concerns where their movement is going.
I consistently see the top 1% of wealthy people being attacked over the large amount of capital they have managed to acquire.
Considering the fact that Americans who earn over $32,000 a year are in the global 1%, where do you see this movement going?
Am I going to be hearing how Ethiopians make five cents on the American dollar?
Can an argument be made that Western politicians and institutions are moving us towards a global Marxist society?
That's from Robert.
Well, hello, Robert.
How are you doing tonight?
Doing well, Stefan.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well, and hopefully doing good.
At the same time, co-joined, like two fingers, having sex with each other.
So, yeah, that's...
Global Marxist society, that certainly is the dream of some, although the nightmare, I'm sure, for people like you and I. What do you think the end game or the end goal is of these kinds of belief systems?
Well, to be honest with you, it seems like it's two groups of people in cahoots with each other that naturally wouldn't get along.
It seems like there's the typical Marxist that blames Western civilization for all the problems in the other remote areas of the world.
And it seems like they're kind of in cahoots with big corporations and business that want to use Right.
And where do you think they want to take the world as a whole?
Individually, I feel like the capitalists are focusing short-term on their own wealth and enhancing that.
I feel like the Marxists, which are probably a bigger group of people, especially among my generation, have a more long-sight goal in mind, and they're willing to ride the wave in order to get it, if you know what I'm saying.
Right.
And have you noticed anything in common in the belief systems of people who have these perspectives?
Yes, it seems a lot of them are not well informed on history beyond America.
They don't realize that whites have been enslaved in Eastern European countries for thousands of years.
They don't understand what happened to the Irish.
My sociology teacher in particular, I see her lecturing African-American students straight to their face how systemic racism has them destined to fail.
They're more likely to be in jail.
There's a bigger wealth gap.
It's just a lot to think about.
Yeah, and that is rough stuff for people to hear, right?
Because, man, if it's true, aren't we all doomed?
And if it's not true, aren't we all doomed if people believe it anyway?
Yeah, but the worst aspect of it is one of the great things that came out of Enlightenment is we can discuss things like this.
And because of the whole racial undertone, we can't discuss culture, we can't discuss genetics or any other possibilities.
It has to be white systemic racism is the root.
Yeah, it doesn't turn out that there's much of a conversation going on, right?
No.
In that class, there's a few students that would interact with her.
They kind of look exactly how Milo Yiannopoulos would describe them.
And dialogue was not promoted for the rest of the class, unless you were agreeing with what she had to say.
And what's your goal and purpose in subjecting yourself to this kind of stuff?
It's a required class.
Right.
And there's a bigger picture that you're trying to get a hold of through this process?
Uh, yeah.
I mean, the process of what I want to get out of the college, I want to own my own business and start my own business after I get my degree.
But out of that whole class, I love hearing her perspective, and it just scares me more and more the more I learn.
Why do you need a college degree to start your own business?
If I was to go back...
And I'm almost done.
I probably wouldn't get the degree because it turns out most of the classes I find are left-wing propaganda.
My business class pushes myths such as the wage gap and ethics instead of actually focusing on how to acquire money.
It's very ridiculous.
But at this point, I might as well finish the degree for credit purposes.
Oh yeah, no, if you're close to ending.
Why not, right?
That'd be a bit of a shame.
Otherwise, okay.
Okay, I understand that.
One of the key things does seem to be resentment.
Resentment.
You know, resentment is one of these emotions that can have enormous value in society.
It gets, obviously, kind of a negative rap, but It does have some real positive values in society.
And that's something that we really can value when it comes to understanding where some of this stuff comes from.
Resentment can be other people have something and I want it.
I resent that I don't have it.
When I was a kid, I'm trying to think what grade it was.
I don't know, maybe I was in grade 8 for a while and then moved schools and they gave me a test and put me back and I was like into sort of the age appropriate.
It was one of these schools where you had to kind of go with your age rather than your skills.
But I think it was, I don't know, maybe grade 7 or grade 8.
So sort of in my late tweens, early teens.
And there was a school trip to Russia.
And I think back in the day it was...
Maybe $2,000.
I mean, it might as well have been $2 million for all the money that I had access to or my family had access to, but I really wanted to go.
I was curious.
I thought of these dark, blustery, wintry Moscow nights.
Moscow?
Moscow?
Moscow.
Moscow, probably.
Moscow nights.
And I just wanted to go.
And I yearned for it.
I couldn't go.
And I resented that I couldn't go.
And then when I was...
A little older, taking theater classes in high school, I think it was.
I'd go over to these, you know, I wrote a play and we all did this play and I went over, we went over to rehearse at one of these guys' houses, one of the guys who was in the play.
Man, the man had some living spaces.
I mean, oh my God.
Huge, huge place.
And very well appointed, very well maintained, very well put together.
And I wanted it.
It was unfair.
I resented the disparity.
But I didn't...
Resent the people who had it, if that makes sense.
Like I resented that there was a disparity.
They happened to be born in this area or this income bracket and I happened to be born in this area or this income bracket and I resented that disparity.
But I did not resent the people who had that and I also never felt or thought and this is long before I was into objectivism or the free market or anything like that.
It was just an emotional thing I guess.
I never really thought that they had taken it from me.
So resenting the difference without resenting the people I think has some really positive aspects to it.
But if you resent the difference and the people, I think that is a different matter.
And that's a lot harder to end up in a positive frame of mind to close that gap.
I remember when I was a kid, I would think about, like we all did back then, think about the year 2000.
The year 2000, I was turning 34.
And when I was a kid, I said, oh, the year 2000, it seemed, of course, like ultimate science fiction, Futurama timescape.
But I thought, oh, you know, I'll probably be In a tie, in an office doing something, you know, professional something.
And I did.
That's sort of how it ended up.
And so I never thought that I couldn't get it, but I didn't like that I didn't have it.
It being just, you know, I never wanted to be super rich or anything, but just having resources to be comfortable or something like that.
So I think if you resent the difference, you get ambition.
But I think that if you resent the people, that's a different thing.
Resenting the difference motivates you to close the gap, or at least motivated me to close the gap.
But resenting the people It's different.
If I resent the difference, then I can work to gain resources and I don't feel like I'm becoming a bad person.
But if I resent the people who have money and I work to gain money, I'm working to become a bad person.
Does that make any sense?
No.
Well, absolutely.
And as part of the foundation...
No!
Let me start that.
Does that make any sense?
No!
It absolutely makes sense because it's the foundation of America and what we're all raised essentially, or at least people that associate with American culture, is...
We have the opportunity to achieve that.
In other countries in the world, you look at that and you can't get it.
In America, as long as you could get to the ladder, you can climb it and achieve that goal yourself.
So you could channel that energy into something positive.
And I'm not so sure that we're going to be able to do that forever as long as we keep up at this rate.
We're not going to be able to provide people with the opportunities to see someone more wealthy and go out and grab it themselves and create their own wealth, per se, because of regulations, affirmative action, all these things created that are going to slow down the free market process that would naturally happen on its own.
I mean, for an example, I already see my generation, millennials, at a huge disadvantage to the baby boomers because they could get retail-level jobs and have pensions.
We're unlikely going to get Social Security, let alone pensions, from a private organization.
Yes.
I mean, that sucks.
On the other hand, you will likely be inheriting More money, more real estate, bigger houses than your parents did.
Again, not that that makes everything okay, but there is a bit of a yin and a yang to some of the disadvantages.
No, yeah, correct.
We have a pretty big death tax in New Jersey, so that's only going to...
Oh.
So you get your parents' place, but also four tax collectors get to live with you.
That's a bummer.
Correct.
That's a bummer.
I hear they don't shower much.
And...
When we see someone who has something that we want, there's a pain involved in that.
There's a discomfort.
There's a distance between what they have and what we have.
I was working on a video today, and while I was compiling it, I was listening to it.
It's a great Coldplay song.
I'm not a huge fan of the band as a whole, but the song The Scientist is lovely, and there's a very nice version.
Lee, I was listening to that, and you listen to some of these voices.
I think Lea Michele is the one who's got that No Prisoners, also a soprano, that is just an amazing singing voice.
It's like, wow, that'd be nice to have.
Of course, you have the singing voice you have.
You can do some training or whatever, but it doesn't turn William Hung into Freddie Mercury.
And then it switched to, they do a version of a Katy Perry song, I've Got the Eye of a Tiger, or whatever it is, right?
And Roar.
And the guys are all in their, I guess, early 20s, and they're all swinging around, shaved bodies and abs, right?
And I say, wow, abs!
I wonder what that would be like.
I guess I had abs...
Many years ago when I was on a swim team and didn't have enough to eat because I was poor and, you know, then I was able to borrow down and get an ab or two.
But, you know, it's been a while.
And I said, well, you know, can't have abs because, you know, I'm going to be turning 50.
It's like, well, no.
Douglas Adams, sorry, Scott Adams, who was on the show recently, the creative Dilbert and a bunch of other entrepreneurial stuff, he has abs and he's in his, I think, early 60s.
So, yeah, you know, lots of guys are like, I remember talking to a friend of mine once about high school, everyone has a fantasy, they sort of go away for the summer, they work out like crazy, they come back totally buff, and no one recognizes them because they're so damn sexy.
And if you want that, of course, you can resent the people who have abs for provoking the discomfort in you if you don't have abs and want them.
You can resent the people for provoking that discomfort.
If no one had abs, I wouldn't feel like I wanted abs.
Or you can say, well, it's their choice.
I have different choices and I'm not going for abs.
Or you can just go for abs.
But when you see something that other people have that you want, it creates a discomfort.
And we can either close the gap of that discomfort by working to achieve what other people have.
Or we can just say, well, that's just a gap I'm going to have to live with.
Or we can just resent people.
I'm big-boned and they're genetically gifted.
Or whatever, right?
And I think that that difference, whether resentment of the gap or resentment of the people who have what you want, that is very tough.
And the fact that for a lot of places in the world, the Western experiment has not been transplantable.
Not being able to take the Western experiment and move it to other places In the world.
You know, so to say, well, the Western experiment started 250 odd years ago, maybe with this agricultural revolution that led to the industrial revolution that led to all of the other positive things about the Western experiment, the Western history.
And the problem is it's been very hard to transplant that to other cultures, to other countries.
And that is really difficult.
I mean, boy, just imagine how wealthy the world would be if, at some point over the last couple of centuries, the Western experiment had been transferable to other cultures in other countries.
And it's really, it's incredibly frustrating, of course, because you know just how amazing these countries could be, these cultures could be, if, you know, they did the things that I talked about in a recent video on the attack on the American University in Kabul.
Separation of church and state, free markets, equality before the law, lots of peaceful parenting to a large degree.
If other cultures adopted these things, we'd all be incredibly happier, incredibly wealthier.
And why is it so hard to transfer good values?
You can say Western values.
The good values, why is it so damn hard?
To transplant.
It's like there's this fragile western hibiscus and the moment you take it out of the western greenhouse it like bursts into flames and goes and kills a cat or something.
It turns from something that produces wonderful fragrances to something that swallows and replicates feral cats or something.
And there have been some examples of slightly more successful cross-pollination of western ideas.
You know the Japan and Germany after the Second World War did some pretty decent free market stuff.
There have been free market reforms in India, free market reforms in China that have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
But they're not going with the freedom of speech stuff quite as much.
And so if we knew how to transfer...
Good philosophical values, the non-aggression principle, which is really the free market and separation of church and state.
Small government is a maximization of the non-aggression principle, at least so far.
The smallest government is the greatest maximization of the non-aggression principle.
The free market is the non-aggression principle because it's self-ownership, property rights, trade, non-initiation of force based on market exchanges.
So if we only knew how to transfer these philosophical values from one area to another, I think that would take the resentment down between cultures enormously.
But how the hell do we do that?
Now, I say how the hell do we do that despite the fact that I've been doing it now for 10 years in the public sphere with this podcast, with books, with shows, with Appearances and all that kind of stuff.
So I've been working very hard to do it.
And I have been, I think, very successful as far as things can be done.
There are both more opportunities and more limitations than I first thought, which is good.
It keeps me interested.
But I think some of the leftist resentment is The difficulty in transferring values from one culture to another is absolutely enormous.
And this is true for bad values as well as good values.
You know, communism takes over, what, a third of the world?
And then communism fails and everyone, boink, they kind of pop back to where they were before.
Religiosity in Russia, despite 70 years of atheistic communism, brutally suppressing churches and prosecuting priests and throwing nuns in gulags or whatever the hell they did.
It's like you, through force you can hold the balloon of culture underwater, you let go, up it comes again.
And there are a wide variety of explanations as to why the hell it is so difficult To transfer values from one place to another.
I don't mean cultural values, but moral values, fundamentally.
Why is it so difficult?
Now, the answer to that, I don't know.
I mean, there are lots of different theories, and we've explored a lot of theories about why it's difficult to transfer.
Is it biology?
Is it parenting?
Is it history?
Is it religion?
Is culture just a massively self-defensive mental map?
Lots of different possibilities.
But if we could transfer the non-aggression principle from one geographical area to another, then the disparities Between countries, between the wealth, between the opportunities, the economies, the incomes, would substantially diminish.
Billions of people would be lifted into the middle class.
But nobody knows how to do it.
And people get incredibly frustrated because they look at cultures that have good values, that flourish relatively flourishing, and they look at cultures that aren't flourishing, And rather than face the daunting task of figuring out how to transfer values from one culture to another, they say, well, the good culture, the rich culture has stolen from the poor culture, and we must use force to transfer the wealth, and boom!
And it doesn't work.
I mean, it works for a few people at the top of the more impoverished culture, but it doesn't work in the long run.
If you look at the wealth that the West has, that wealth did not exist in 1500.
It wasn't like everyone was middle class by Western standards in 1500 and then the West just ended up super rich and then everyone else.
It wasn't a big trend.
It was created.
The creation of wealth.
It's a solution to poverty, but that requires the free market, that requires individualism, that requires self-ownership, that requires a dedication to rationality, that requires a subjugation of emotion to reason and evidence, all of the things that took so many thousands of years to develop in the West and are still hella shaky.
And I think that leftism, to a large degree, is a recoiling From the difficulty of transplanting moral values from one culture to another.
Because if the leftists said, okay, let's just say it's the free market, then we have to figure out how to transfer the values of the free market from one country to another, from one culture to another.
And then they'd go out and they'd say, hey, country X, I have the solution to your poverty problem.
It's going to be great.
You have to.
End corruption.
Shrink the state.
Create a rational and objective legal system for settling disputes.
You have to honor contracts.
You have to fire a lot of government workers.
I mean, for all of its godforsaken, Bruce Coburn-inspired hellaciousness, the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, has been trying to do that Badly or well, I'm no expert, but they certainly have been, you know, you've borrowed enough money, now you need to cut the public sector, you need to privatize industries, you need to cut pensions, you need to, you know, the austerity program.
And everyone goes crazy.
And it's considered terrible.
A hardship beyond one's capacity to bear.
So, how do we help other cultures Become rich.
One answer has been to transfer money and foreign aid and charity, and it doesn't work.
The other answer is to try and transfer values, and that is the big question.
And until we answer that, I think we're going to be stuck with a lot of leftist resentment.
Sorry, you were about to say something.
I heard a breath in my ear.
Well, I would agree with what you just said.
And we did try to implement American values in my lifetime, and it led to the Iraq War.
And we see how that turned out, making the problem pretty significant, like you mentioned.
And I feel like there's no solution because most of the people on the left refused to even do Compare cultures because they don't want to be ethnocentric.
They're too worried about judgment that they can't even analyze the problem through a similar lens of the people trying to solve it.
They rather just blame...
They rather resort to what they already know, I feel.
Oh, no, but to be fair, I mean, leftists are very comfortable judging cultures.
Only one culture, the West, as...
Immoral and exploitive and colonialistic and sexist and racist and misogynistic.
They just don't want to go to any other cultures and judge them negatively.
It's okay to bash your own culture, yeah.
And I feel like most of them don't even have a grasp on what our culture is because they're so far out there.
But they claim to, so it's okay for them to bash.
Sorry to interrupt, but here's the funny thing about this leftist hate-on for the West.
It should be going down.
It should be diminishing.
Why?
Because the left has taken over the culture in the West in general.
You look at movies and mainstream media and academia and also childhood education.
The left has taken over the culture of the West.
So shouldn't the left be more positive about the culture in the West Since they've taken it over.
They've been in charge for the last, I would say, generation or two, at least.
They've been in charge of the culture in the West.
Well, Stefan, I have the impression that they want to double down on what they're already thinking because they feel that their policy's not working right now, so the only way to fix it is to completely tear it down and to rebuild it.
And they're unwilling to acknowledge their own mistakes for that reason because the system's just flawed to begin with.
Yeah, I mean, if socialism works, well, government education has been socialized for 140 years, 150 years, depending on where you look.
So, these problems should all have been fixed.
So, this is how you know it is not a solution-oriented approach to the world.
If...
You know, if I say, this company, company X, is really inefficient and corrupt, and then I buy up enough stock to put me in control of 90% of the company, and I appoint my own board, and I appoint myself as the CEO, and then after 20 years of that process, I have pretty much unquestioned and total control over the company, and I say, damn, this place is even more corrupt than when I first started trying to gain control of it.
What the hell does that mean then?
If it's more corrupt when I have more control over it...
I mean, how the hell can there still be a rape culture, as they call it, in American universities when the left has been in charge of American universities almost exclusively for 40 or 50 years?
There wasn't a rape culture that was talked about much in the 80s when I was in college, but now there's this big, giant rape culture.
So, by the time these kids...
Get to the schools, the colleges.
They have been in control of largely leftist educators since they were probably weeks or months old with daycare and kindergarten and government schools.
So mostly leftists have been in charge of raising these kids and there seems to be more of a problem with rape culture now than there was 30 years ago.
So what the hell does this even mean?
It's just a weird kind of scam where nobody's supposed to notice these things.
After 50 years of putting the left in charge of blacks, or leftist policies or programs in charge of blacks, blacks, the black family is far worse off than it was when they started.
Not so great society.
It's terrible.
Yeah, it's terrible.
Which means that we can all understand that the goal is not the stated goal.
As I said before, if I want to go north, and I say I'm desperate to go north, and I'm headed south, and then you grab the compass and say, hey, you're heading south, and I keep going, then clearly I never meant to go north.
I'm just saying stuff.
The goal is power.
Knots.
Success for the stated goals, right?
Correct.
Well, Lyndon Johnson said, when you put in the Great Society and put in welfare, we'll have them voting for them for 200 years.
And so far, it's lived up to the expectations.
Yeah, hopefully the internet can start to help and change that.
But, you know, where are we headed?
I mean, if I knew that for sure, I'd be a determinist, right?
I don't know for sure.
I know if good people don't do and say anything, then yeah, I know where we're headed.
But of course, the goal is for good people to do and say stuff that makes the world a better place.
I try to encourage people all the time in this show to go out and get things done, make things happen.
It's not going to be me who fixes it single-handedly, good lord.
Right?
That would be too easy.
I mean, too opposed, right?
It's one person.
Yep.
So, it's up to you.
Where do we go?
Well, that's up to you.
It's up to everyone who's listening to this.
As the old saying goes, we either hang together...
Or we hang separately.
Does that give at least some context for you to work with the question?
It does.
I just want to know, and I identify as a libertarian as well, how is protectionism We're incorporated in maintaining our own society without breaking down these other societies that they would argue we're doing at the same time.
Sorry, I don't even know what this question means.
Can you take another run at it from a different direction?
With trade tariffs.
Yeah, trade tariffs.
What about them?
Would they argue, by they I mean far-left Marxists argue trade tariffs are essentially hurting the other countries with the labor that we're exploiting at the same time as helping us?
You're asking me what Marxists would say about tariffs?
I don't know.
I don't spend a lot of time studying Marxist thought any more than I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to learn Klingon.
I'm sorry.
Let me reiterate.
People in these exploited countries can see firsthand what the exploiters have.
And I feel like a lot of libertarians and Republicans are digging their own grave with a free market argument.
Oh, you mean like how libertarians say any mention of tariffs is bad?
Yeah, that totally came out wrong.
Because I really don't see myself having the ability to sway Marxists at this point.
It's Republicans and libertarians that I actually see myself having to have some influence over.
Yeah, well, that's sort of a false dichotomy.
Of course tariffs are an interference with free trade.
Of that, there's no question.
I mean, that's praxeologically true, right?
You're tacking a tax onto a voluntary transaction that's going to interfere with that transaction.
So if in sort of abstract libertarian land we say, are tariffs good?
We would say, well, no.
Correct.
Because they're in interference with free trade.
Correct.
But if we look at the real world, which is where you have...
Not just a shining city on the hill that you can inhabit mentally, but you have to actually build a damn road to get there.
We have to ask yourself, are tariffs good?
Well, compared to what?
Compared to what?
Compared to the income tax, they're angelic.
They are fantastic.
Because the income tax can't be evaded.
Can't be avoided.
I guess evaded sounds like you're illegally doing it.
It can't be avoided, right?
Income tax, you can't avoid it.
But a tariff you can avoid.
If they put a tariff on brown sugar, you can use white sugar.
If they put a tariff on white sugar and brown sugar, you can use maple syrup or honey.
Or you can not use sugar or whatever it is.
You can avoid legally and easily a tariff.
You cannot avoid an income tax unless you don't earn any money or whatever.
And that very avoidability means that there's a downward pressure on tariffs.
Because they can be easily avoided.
I mean, just look at, you know, it's not an optimum health solution, but just look at what happened when the government in America slapped massive tariffs on sugar.
Well, the price of sugar went through the roof.
And then, hello, high fructose corn syrup, or whatever godforsaken Satan sweat they use to sweeten things these days, right?
Hello, aspartame, I don't know, whatever, right?
And so, the income tax you can't avoid, except by living in the woods, or I guess you could move to another country, but that's not really very practical for most people, and it's hard to move to other countries, and very expensive, right?
So, the tariff, though, it's easy to avoid.
And generally, as far as I understand it, a tariff is usually on foreign goods.
So, buy locally, right?
Now, of course, when there's a tariff on foreign goods, the local price is going to rise because the competition has diminished from overseas.
But you still have lots of choices.
With tariffs that you don't have with income taxes.
And so if we say, is a tariff bad?
Well, sure, but compared to what?
Compared to the income tax, I would say it's much better.
Plus it's a tax on consumption rather than on production, rather than on income.
That's what I like about it.
Yeah, so you can just not consume that thing.
Whereas not making any money tends to leave you a little lean and hungry.
So, yeah, it's sort of a trick that people say, which is, are these things good or bad?
And in the abstract, we can say, well, they're good or bad, but in the real world, we often have to choose between the lesser of two evils.
And right now, Let's just talk about America.
It could be, I think, any Western country.
But right now, America has a gigantic problem, which is there are too many people dependent on the state.
Whether that's welfare, or whether that's disability benefits, or any of the other billion means and non-means tested programs of government spending.
And so America needs some jobs.
America needs some jobs.
Now, income taxes aren't going to create jobs.
They're not going to stimulate domestic consumption.
However, tariffs have the potential to create local jobs.
Now, the question is, if you put tariffs on goods coming into a country and that helps get people off the welfare state, off welfare consumption and into jobs, what is the net cost or gain to society?
Well, the net gain to society will be enormous, I would imagine.
You don't have to pay for the welfare.
You are instead generating income.
You don't have to pay for the administration.
And human capital doesn't decay the way it does in the welfare state.
You know how when people go into space Like, the moment they hit zero g, their bones start to deteriorate, right?
Because their bones strengthen through resistance to gravity.
And, you know, there's exercises that astronauts can do, but I think it's still a fairly intractical problem in the long run.
But to me, and I think there's a good argument to be made, it's fairly incontrovertible, I think, that When people are in the welfare state, their human capital declines enormously.
They get out of the habit of working.
They get out of the habit of negotiating with bosses.
And they get out of the habit of getting out of bed at a reasonable hour.
They get out of the habit of navigating the complex hierarchies in almost every business.
And they get out of the habit of thinking in terms of economic value.
I mean, I remember when I was, ooh, apparently this is tales from the Steph Historical Crypt tonight.
But I remember when I was, I don't know, 13 or 14 or so, I got a job in a hardware store.
And I was, I noticed that it was a bit messy and dusty.
And I was lifting up the bolt baskets and cleaning under them and making everything look spick and span and all that.
My boss came over and said, what are you doing?
I said, I'm tidying.
He's like, how am I going to pay your salary if you don't do something that makes me money?
And the lights went on in Steph's brain.
This is before the free market thing.
Again, I was 16 or...
17 when I was starting to read about the free market.
Guy said, how can I pay your salary if you're not doing something that makes me money?
It's a great question.
It's a very, very important question because I thought he was paying me to work and he wasn't paying me to work.
He was paying me to make him money.
Now, I did have to work to make him money, but that's not the same.
That's a subset of working called making him money.
So, he took me downstairs to the basement of the hardware store, and he said, look, there's a whole stack of people who want their screen doors fixed.
They brought them in.
Go fix them.
So, yeah.
Figured out how to pop out the screens, put in new screens, put in all the little rubbery things around the end, sealed them all up.
It wasn't that complicated.
And he said, now I can pay your salary.
Because he would sell screen door fixes for a bunch of money and then he'd take some subset of that money and pay my salary with it.
But he wasn't selling, look, the shelf under the basket of bolts is dust free.
He couldn't sell that.
And isn't it sad that we have an educational system where this is not discussed?
This is not talked about.
People don't understand this.
That you don't get paid because someone likes you.
You don't get paid because you work.
You don't get paid because you show up.
You don't get paid because you have a nice suit on.
You don't get paid because you can type.
You get paid because you make money for people.
And if people understood that, the world would be a wiser Friendlier, happier place.
Because we would look at a movie, we'd see Brad Pitt getting paid 10 million bucks, and we'd see some guy in the extra making six bucks an hour.
And we wouldn't say, well, that's unfair.
We'd say, well, that's because people will spend a lot more money to come and see Brad Pitt than they will to come and see some extra standing in the background.
And We would understand that in general, if somebody is not being paid very much, it's because they can't make someone much money.
But where that would lead is we'd say, wait a minute.
Kids 18 years old or 17 years old coming out of high school, they're not even worth minimum wage.
In other words, the government's had them for 12 years or more if it's prior to that.
The government's had them for 12 years and they have virtually no economic value.
Well, that's one of the reasons why teachers don't want to teach that stuff.
They don't want to teach that kind of economics.
And we would go to a poor person and we'd say, what you need is not money, what you need is value.
You don't need to be given money.
You need to be taught how to create more value.
Maybe that can be transferred.
Maybe it can't.
I don't know.
I know it can with some people.
You know, I kissed the ring of that guy who close on 40 years ago told me, how am I going to pay your salary if you're not making me money?
If Marxists understood that, they would understand that poverty largely results from a deficiency in human capital.
It's not a very good slogan, but it's true.
Low human capital is low wages.
And then we'd say, okay, well, if we want people to become wealthier, what we need to do is we need to find a way to increase The value, the economic value they can offer to others.
And one of the first things to do about that is to have them understand that their wages are a reflection of the value they can offer.
So, that's actionable, but those kinds of actions would result in a diminishment of state power.
Teaching the free market puts you right up against the combine harvester of state power.
Whereas if you say, well, you know, the government needs to raise minimum wage.
Okay, well, the government says, oh, is your plan going to give me more power?
More control?
Yeah, sounds great.
The actual solutions generally put you on a collision course with existing power structures.
And that is not a gig that many people want.
That's all I had to say on that.
I know, I go on for so long, it's like, how does anybody know when I'm done?
No, that was a great analysis and very helpful in particular.
I not only agree with everything you had to say, I can see how I could try and implement it in my message to other people that I talk to.
Because we're all essentially investments in ourselves.
And the fact that people come out of 12 years out of school and they're not worth minimum wage, it just goes to show you how poor the investment process is.
And I wish schools taught philosophy and critical thinking in grammar school.
Well, they used to.
And when they used to, people's IQs were a lot higher, number one.
And number two, we had a giant-ass industrial revolution that remade the entire planet.
So, are we ruining our own knowledge of what we have?
Oh, God, yes.
Oh, my God, yes.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, man, don't even get me started on that topic.
Are we ruining our own knowledge?
I mean, I get it.
We are shredding and decimating our human capital.
There are entire generations of people who've grown up in the West and, of course, around the world.
We'll just talk about in the West.
Had no exposure to the working world.
No exposure to the working world.
One of the things that...
You know who should have told me that to pay my salary I had to make him money?
My father.
Maybe my mother too, but let's be honest.
Probably would be my dad, right?
But that's where I should have got that lesson.
Now, failing that, I should have got that from school.
But I didn't.
Now, I happened to meet a guy who told me that, which was a hugely influential moment in my life.
Wait, it's not just me moving my arms around that makes me worth paying?
No.
Gotta make some money for the guy.
I mean, he's probably dead now.
Well, no, maybe not.
40, 40 could be 80.
Thank you.
If you ever hear this, thank you, thank you, thank you, you really saved my bacon.
And, um...
No, we're actively destroying all of the social capital.
I mean, not just debt and all of that, but we're actively destroying the intellectual and social capital.
We inherited a world of the rule of reason and evidence, and we have changed that world of reason and evidence into a world of entitlement and coercion and resentment.
Ain't that the truth?
Yeah.
We have taken and we inherited a world of freedom of speech and now we're turning it into hate speech laws and trigger spaces and safe spaces and hysteria and I can't handle the truth.
We've become this almost like a parody of a free society.
We inherited a free market and we layered it down with taxes and regulations and controls and money transfers.
We inherited a beautiful charitable system that was really helping the poor.
You can Google the term friendly societies, and we inherited this incredible, well-defined and refined system of helping the poor, and then we replaced it with state coercive welfare, which is about keeping the poor dependent on the state so they'll vote for more government.
And we inherited this tradition of critical thinking.
We just released this Call-in show called Justice.
I went through with a listener of the Socratic method.
I'm not the definition of the Socratic method, but an approach that's similar to the Socratic method of just asking a bunch of common sense questions, trying to figure out a topic.
And people are like, wow, that's great.
Wonderful hearing this kind of conversation.
You know, one of the reasons why we do these, why I do these listener calls, you know, I spend a lot of time on these listener calls, preparing for them, thinking through them, trying to come up with a solution.
I don't know.
I'm just come off cold here.
This is like, there's a warm up.
And, you know, Mike, of course, spends a long time getting the right topics and setting it all up.
And then I do shows like tonight.
I didn't even turn on the video camera.
I have a pimple!
No, I don't.
I've just been sitting around all day.
I need to walk around a bit.
But we spend a lot of time on these call-in shows.
And one of the reasons for that is that one of the greatest arts that is lost in the West is the art of conversation.
Why do people want to listen to you and I discuss this topic?
Because this is like an oasis in the desert for people.
People let me know if this is true or not.
This is just my thought.
But I think most people can go for months or years in their lives without having an important conversation, an illuminating conversation, a deep conversation, a powerful conversation, a mind-altering conversation.
And part of that is TV.
You know, people used to chat at dinner, and now in the past, they used to sell these TV trays.
TV trays!
Oh God, how sad!
And people would set up their hungry man dinners on a TV tray and watch TV rather than talk to each other.
Now, of course, it's tablets.
And I was in a coffee shop the other day.
Literally every single person was on a phone.
Even people sitting across from each other.
Even four...
No, there was one group in the back that was chatting.
But there was a group of four people sitting across.
And it's natural to...
Oh, the kids these days.
I mean, I understand that.
It's a different kind of culture and all that.
And I have no problem with technology, obviously, right?
But...
The call-in shows...
Are staggeringly popular in podcast form.
You know, some of them are pretty popular in video form.
But the podcast downloads are through the roof.
And I think that's because people want to know, they want to experience what it's like to listen to people, have a meaningful conversation without blowing up at each other.
Without things getting weird.
Because, don't they?
A lot of times you try and have a deep conversation with, it just gets weird.
Especially when you've got your social justice warrior brigade around, right?
Yeah, and conversations seem to be harder and harder to have because in addition to what you're saying with technology and phones, I feel like it gives people a false sense of knowledge in many circumstances where people feel like they're qualified to comment on just about anything that crosses their mind and the severity is irrelevant.
Of whatever issue it is they're talking about.
Right.
Right.
Well, yeah, and I remember having debates.
I remember we had debates when I was in my early teens.
Well, again, I've praised Dungeons& Dragons before, and I will do so again.
The Dungeons& Dragons, while not a direct conversation, in other words, you're not discussing philosophy, but there's a huge amount of philosophy in Dungeons& Dragons, which I've talked about in podcasts before.
So we had conversational...
Games when I was a kid.
Dungeons and Dragons is great because you spend a couple of bucks on books and you can get hundreds or thousands of hours of entertainment without spending a dime more.
Which is kind of important.
I may have mentioned I did grow up too rich.
I'm not trying to beat the same drum, but it's helpful that way.
I remember having two ferocious debates with people.
One about the death penalty, one about abortion.
And frankly, we were all talking out of our asses.
We're all talking out of our asses because we didn't have any foundational principles.
Now, it's not like when you have foundational principles, these problems, these debates, these arguments suddenly become crystal clear.
I mean, these are still challenging conversations to have.
But you clear away a lot of rubble with the non-aggression principle.
How should we deal with the death penalty?
Well, it shouldn't be dealt with by the state.
It should be dealt with in the free market through dispute resolution organizations and these are all things I've talked about before.
Sorry if I'm jumping new terms on listeners relatively new to the conversation.
The private contracting agencies, I don't believe that the death penalty would be something pursued by a free society because I think that if you put the person to work and some of the money goes to the victims of that person's productivity and so on, lots of other options and solutions.
Same thing with abortion.
How should abortion be handled?
I don't know.
And that fundamental I don't know is why we say the state shouldn't handle it.
Sure as hell shouldn't subsidize it.
People opposed to the death penalty should not be forced to subsidize it and people opposed to abortion should not be forced to subsidize it.
That at least puts us in the direction of solving the problem.
But we didn't have those principles to work with because nobody had taught us about the non-aggression principle.
I would say for the pretty damn obvious reason that our entire education was funded by violations of the non-aggression principle.
I guess except for my time in boarding school, which is more private.
So I hope that these help.
Absolutely.
I always love the origins of things.
Getting right down to the base.
I'm always curious why someone is a Marxist.
There must be, I mean, either there, I don't know, it's some R-selected biological imperative, which I'm hesitant to put forward, even as a hypothesis, it would be so impossible to test, I think.
But maybe there were particular life experiences that led them in that direction.
So instead of getting into debates about abstracts, Get into questions about history.
And I think that can be pretty helpful.
All right, listen, I'm going to move on to the next caller, but I really, really appreciated the conversation.
It sounds like it was, and I hope that it was of some value to you, too.
It was great.
I appreciate it.
Take care.
Alright, up next is Torin.
Torin wrote in and said, I'm a biracial independent who leans to the right, having been a democrat before I went to college.
I'm in a happy relationship with my liberal, Bernie Sanders-loving girlfriend.
I've dated so many other types of girls during my college days that I'm at a point where I've learned what I want in a woman, and I'm convinced my current girlfriend is perfect for me, regardless of our political affiliations.
I am an engineer who just wants to have a happy, successful life without having politics needlessly forced into my day-to-day thinking.
Despite that, I find that every now and again there are instances where my girlfriend and I disagree on a matter, which is perfectly fine.
However, I find that she'll say something with a level of inaccuracy that vexes me, and I'll give a not-so-eloquent response.
Is there a way to best handle these isolated incidents where we can avoid an awkward situation?
That's from Torrin.
Take off your shirt.
Take off your shirt!
Assuming you have a sexy set of pecs.
Well, hello.
Good evening.
Nice to meet you.
Hi there, Stefan.
Nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you, too.
Couple of questions, if you don't mind.
Of course.
And this sounds confrontational.
I don't mean it that way.
Okay.
What do you like about your Bernie Loving girlfriend?
Give me the lowdown on your infatuation with the fine young lady.
What's good about her?
I mean, she's attractive on the outside, but I would say what really drew me in and kept me with her all this time was what's on the inside.
She makes me feel so happy about myself, makes me feel confident, just kind of makes everything feel alright, if that's helpful.
Yeah.
So, she's a de-stressor?
Yes.
That's good.
I think that there are some men who may not feel that way about their girlfriends.
That's good to hear.
That's good to hear.
And what else?
We love food.
That's a fun thing we both like taking in.
We have similar interests other than politics.
We love food.
We like movies.
Kind of the same genre.
Comedies and action.
And another thing that kind of makes us perfect for each other is the fact that we get each other involved in things that normally we wouldn't be into.
For example, I'm a comic book geek, and I love getting her into that stuff.
She likes reading them.
I think you just have to say comic book person.
I think the geek thing is kind of implied.
It's like saying I'm a Dungeons and Dragons geek.
It's just kind of implied.
Sorry, go on.
You got it.
She got me into Phillies baseball.
I wasn't really much of a baseball fan before I met her.
She got you into baseball?
Yeah.
Well, okay.
Kind of unorthodox, I know, but yeah.
What was that?
I'm sorry?
You mean like watching baseball?
Yeah, watching baseball.
Cool.
All right.
All right.
So, is this a woman, how long have you guys been together for?
We've been dating since last September.
Last September, okay.
And what kind of future do you see with this woman?
I can definitely see myself living with her, being with her.
I don't want to say too much because I'm sure I'm going to share this with her later after the episode.
But yeah, I can definitely see myself with her for a very long time.
Just me and her together.
Our relationship is kind of like we're two peers in a partnership, I guess you would say.
Not a...
One person isn't the boss of the other.
We're two peers, and I guess that's why we work well together.
I know it's early days, so I guess not that early if you've been together almost a year, but could you see getting married or staying together forever?
In all honesty, yes I do.
And have you guys had conversations around things like whether you want to have kids, how many kids, so when you might want to have kids in your life arc or anything?
We actually have.
We've had two separate conversations about that.
The first one was way back, I think, when we were three months in.
She was like, what are your thoughts on kids?
I was actually still in college at the time.
This was like my last couple of months before graduation, and I was like...
I can't even think past graduation, let alone kids and whatnot.
I mean, I guess I could have a kid or two, but I just don't want to think about that until then.
And then after I graduated, I graduated in June.
She's a little bit ahead of me.
She already graduated a while back.
And I graduated.
I got a job.
I had a couple job offers, and I went with the one I really liked the most.
And then we had a conversation again about it.
About a month ago.
Nobody instigated the conversation.
It was just that a kid ran behind the car when I was driving, and I was like, what an idiot.
And she was like, yeah, I guess you had an issue with kids.
And I'm like, no, no, no, it's just that particular kid.
But I do like kids, and I can definitely see myself having a kid.
I'll just raise my kid how to be better than this kid.
I guess.
And she was like, oh, so you are in the kids.
Right.
Right.
Okay.
And what does she do for a living?
She works in education with special ed.
Right.
Right.
And if she wants to have kids, would she go back to work when the kids are young?
Would she stay home for a while?
We never talked about that.
That's important.
Again, if you've been together for a year, a lifetime is just A whole series of days you spent together, right?
And so I think that is an important thing because, as you know, I'm a huge fan of at least one parent, and usually it's the one with the feed bags, staying home with the kids for the first couple of years, and these are things that shouldn't be a big surprise when you sort of get into things.
It's not something you want to try and figure out later.
I gotcha, yeah.
Now, would you say, and this is with all due respect to the fine young lady, and I mean that with all sincerity, but would you say that you have a lot of respect for her political perspectives?
Yes, I do.
I personally don't like Bernie Sanders, but I got nothing against him where I would say, oh, you're stupid for thinking he'd make a good president.
If that's who she believes in, that's fine by me.
It doesn't bother me.
No, that's...
That's not respect.
Toleration is not respect.
Respect is, I appreciate and like and hold in high esteem the process by which she came to her political conclusions.
Right.
I'm not trying to corner you.
I'm just trying to point this out.
And look, that's fine.
There are people in my life who aren't crazy about Freddie Mercury.
And once I find them and hunt them down, I'll know who they are and I'll be able to deal with them appropriately.
But this question of respect is important.
And the reason I'm saying this is, look, I'm not saying you have to somehow disrespect your girlfriend as a whole.
But, let's say that she was raised with balalaika music, or whatever it is, right?
And, you know, I don't know, or Chinese opera.
I don't know a lot of people, I'm sure there are some, but I don't know a lot of people who are into balalaika music who weren't raised with balalaika music.
So, if I had a girlfriend who was into this music, I wouldn't say, wow, that's really exquisite taste she has there.
It's like, well, it's what she was raised with.
It's what she knows.
It's what she's comfortable with.
It's not a problem.
But I wouldn't have a huge amount of respect for that.
Now, if she got into Bala Laki music after growing up in Thailand or something, making stuff up here, that would be a kind of different process.
So people can have particular perspectives in your life.
You don't have to have respect for them.
That doesn't mean that that's a problem that needs to be fixed.
Does that make sense?
Yes.
Now, if she was into balalaika music because she thought it watered away evil spirits, that would be a different kind of situation, right?
So if she's not particularly well informed in politics, but if she has this, you know, and I assume she works for a government school, is that right?
Yeah, she does work for a public school.
Okay, so she's a government employee and she's dealing with disabled children.
Did I remember that right?
That is correct.
Special Ed.
Okay.
So she obviously has a big heart, and she probably assumes that Bernie Saunders wants to help people, just like she does.
He wants to take care of people, just like she does.
And part of her, and it's not a bad part of her or anything, but part of her probably feels that if it was a free market, who would pay to take care of the somewhat expensive needs of these children?
Well...
And that's not a bad question at all.
I mean, if government money is paying her salary and paying for the school and paying for the equipment and paying for everything that makes these kids' lives comfortable, then she has a perfectly legitimate question, which is, okay, well, if there's some free market and the government's not paying for all these things and the parents can't afford to, What will happen to these children?
And I'm sure she has a great deal of affection and care for the children, and it speaks well to her big-heartedness that she would have these kinds of questions.
Does that make sense?
Yes, it does.
Now, if she goes with Bernie, then her kids are going to be taken care of, right?
Bernie ain't cutting the budget for underprivileged children's resources, right?
Or for disabled kids' resources.
So she cares about the kids.
She knows that they need these resources.
The parents probably can't afford them.
And this is a certain way that these children's resources needs are going to be met, right?
Yes.
Which is exactly what single moms feel.
And I don't blame them for that.
I don't blame them for that at all.
In an amoral resource maximizing standpoint, a single mom is far better off Going with the state than with the free market.
Because the state, and she's actually better off going with the state than getting married.
This is why this is displacing marriage, single motherhood.
Because the state is the ultimate nirvana for a woman with children, which is guaranteed resources.
It's even more guaranteed resource acquisition than, I don't know, say, marrying Johnny Depp.
So, from your girlfriend's perspective, she's not deeply versed in political theory.
It's not an insult.
It's just a fact.
And so your girlfriend cares for these children and knows that the state is going to continue to provide for it and can't imagine an alternative.
Therefore, Bernie Sanders.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's no criticism.
You understand?
I'm looking at the dominoes here, right?
Because we need to understand where people are coming from.
She's not like, well, you know what?
It's great.
It's that Bernie Sanders will violate the non-aggression principle and cause the eventual destruction of the very security system that keeps these kids going because it's going to run out of money and debt and it's going to turn into Venezuela and then they will all be eating pigeons.
This is not her thought process, right?
Yes.
And, at least I hope not.
I'm just making these kids like me so that, right?
So, she doesn't know much about how politics works, how the non-aggression principle works.
She doesn't understand the nature of the state.
And, you know, the old saying.
Well, I don't know.
People don't seem to have old sayings anymore.
I don't know why.
Maybe because you look everything up.
But when I was a kid, like I had, I'll someday do a show on all of these.
But, you know, I had all of these sayings.
A stitch in time saves nine.
Better to solve a problem early rather than later.
Don't cry over spilt milk.
It's happened and you can't do anything about it.
At least to prevent...
After it's already done, there's no point crying about it.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, which is kind of like a stitch in time saves nine.
Haste makes waste.
If you're in a big hurry...
Anyway, I won't...
So these things, this is like before you had Google, you had these little pinball bumpers that try and keep you on the right path.
Oh, I remember a stitch in time saves nine.
And all of these kinds of...
Clichés are around, and the one that's probably most important to people who are on the left, if they're on the left because of good-hearted reasons, which I fully accept, uninformed, but good-hearted, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
I don't know if you've ever heard that one before.
Is that completely fallen by the wayside?
I've heard that a couple times.
I've never personally used that saying.
You've never used it now, because you've got Google.
What does that mean to you?
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
I'm not really sure, to be honest.
So what it means is that, let's say you want to catch a bird.
And you've caught one bird, and you've got it in your hand.
But there's two in a bush right over there.
Do you let go of the bird that you have and try and catch the two that are in the bush, because there's twice as many?
No.
You don't.
Because if you let go of the bird you have, because there's two in the bush, you may well end up with none.
Right.
Better the devil you know than the devil you don't.
Which is like the mantra of people who choose bad partners or something like that.
Well, the next one could be even worse.
But, yeah, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
People who are dependent on the state, and your girlfriend is dependent on the state, right?
The state pays her bills.
The state pays her salary.
So, what incentive?
And you know, she's relatively comfortable.
What incentive would she have, not just for herself, but for her children, what incentive would she have to change?
See, one thing that is hard for people to understand is the degree to which women, particularly single moms, are very, very conservative.
And they have to be.
You can't take big risks when you have children to feed.
Right.
Like, you can choose to go without food.
As an adult, you say, well, you know, I'm going to save my money like crazy.
I'm going to eat, you know, one heaping of ramen noodles a day and then whatever I can dig out of the garbage box behind the pizza place or whatever.
But you can't do that with kids.
You know, kids need their food.
They need their clothing.
They need their dentist visits.
They need all this stuff.
Right.
So, women with kids, and men with kids, but I think a little bit more so women, very conservative.
That's why revolutionaries tend to be men.
Because revolutionaries or people who want to shake up the social order, well, men can hugely benefit from shaking up the social order.
But for women, who have mouths to feed, don't like a lot of disruption.
So, for your girlfriend, Bernie Sanders represents a continuation of policies that benefit her and benefit her children, or the children that she is in charge of and takes care of, right?
Right.
I can completely understand that perspective, and I can completely understand how compelling that is.
You go to your...
Girlfriend and say, hey, you know what would be great?
Let's privatize all this stuff.
You could end up with more resources, better working conditions.
Your kids could be happier.
Or, if you're not good in the new structure, you could be fired.
She's got a bird in the hand.
Offering two in the bush.
Well, does that make sense?
Yes, it does, yeah.
It really puts that...
Old saying, bird in the hand, into perspective as well.
I like that.
Other than the sexism of using the word bush, I think it's a fine saying.
Right?
But, better the troubles you know.
Right.
That's out of Hamlet, too.
So, nothing wrong with this perspective of hers.
The challenge, of course, is helping people who have emotional thinking.
I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but emotional perspectives.
Right.
Having people understand that they don't know what they're talking about is tricky.
Right.
Right?
And it looks like I understand that.
Nobody likes to be told that they don't know what they're talking about.
Especially when they feel very strongly about something emotionally.
So...
If she ever wants to call in, if she ever wants to have a chat, I'd be happy to step her through stuff.
You're a smart guy.
She's, I'm sure, a smart woman.
We'll be able to sort it out relatively quickly, but that's because I've got a dinosaur to a ton worth of experience in these kinds of things and having these kinds of conversations.
The Bernie Sanders thing, it's the state thing.
It seems nice because you don't have to Use the force yourself.
Your girlfriend thinks that the Bernie Sanders stuff is nice and caring and all that because she doesn't have to go out and collect the money by force herself.
She's not going to join some Bonnie and Clyde gang or go around taking money from people by force.
The government's going to do all of that messy stuff for her And it's just going to deliver her the goodies with which she can take care of her children.
Look, women...
I mean, just think evolutionarily.
Women who were overly fastidious about the source of the resources they provided to their children would probably not do that well.
Your kids are hungry.
Your husband comes home.
And it turns out That he has three juicy rabbits that you could whip up into a nice stew or broth.
Lickety-split.
And then he says, I couldn't find any rabbits all day.
I poached these.
Now the woman who said, get these stolen rabbits away from me.
I can't touch them.
They horrify me beyond words.
Faint, right?
I cannot partake in ill-gotten gains.
Children remain hungry.
Well, you do that often enough.
Your kids are going to be at a slight disadvantage relative to the neighbor who's like, I don't care where they came from, we're hungry.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
Now, the men who are out there doing the poaching and stealing from other tribes or other lands or other whatever, right, they can face some real conflict.
They could get poached back.
People could catch them.
They might get into a fight.
They might have to fight a duel.
They might get stabbed in the head.
So they're concerned about where all this stuff comes from because they take the risks themselves, historically or evolutionarily.
But women don't.
If a man comes home with poached rabbit, sounds like the worst egg dish ever, but if a man comes home with stolen Goods and stolen food and then the wife cooks it up and feeds it to the kids.
He gets in trouble, she doesn't.
Generally.
So, I would say, or I would argue, that women have wonderful and tender consciences about a lot of things, but the origins of the food they give to their children is probably not one of them.
And again, it's not a judgment, it's just What aids in evolutionarily?
Kids gotta eat.
There's no stolen rabbit and non-stolen rabbit has the same nutritional value and tastes the same, right?
So, for your girlfriend, the source of the resources she's providing to the children she's in charge of, I don't think it matters that much.
Which is why Tax protests generally come from men.
And why it's hard, I think, to get some women to more easily understand the non-aggression principle and why libertarians tend to be men.
Women have the practical matter of feeding children, or the children die, or the children get sick, or whatever.
Or the children...
My brother and I, when we were kids, there was a thing called a pusher, which sounds very sinister, but it's not.
It was like this weird thing.
It kind of looked like a single arm razor.
And you'd use it to push food.
You'd push food onto your fork, your scrambled eggs or whatever.
The pusher.
Man!
The fights we had over the pusher.
Because there was only one.
God forbid you had the last yellow Lego when somebody was building a yellow Lego wall and you wouldn't share it, right?
So when you're low on resources, there's a lot of conflict among siblings.
And remember, women would have like half a dozen or more kids in the past.
So even if there's enough food kinder to go around, there's still going to be a lot of conflict if there's not enough for everyone.
Or as a friend of mine who had kids, siblings would say, I need two ice creams.
I need an atomic weigh scale to make sure there's not one atom more of ice cream on one of them than on the other.
Because otherwise, you're nothing but about that until the end of time.
So I think women, this is all generalizations, but I think there's some value in it nonetheless.
I think that women have evolved to be less fastidious about the source of the resources they need for their kids.
The sort of the cliche of this, you know, the Sopranos.
Was it Lorraine Bracco played Tony Soprano's wife?
Yeah, he's in construction!
I don't know if you've ever watched it.
I've seen a couple episodes, yeah.
It's kind of like a cliche, you know, like the sort of vaguely clueless mall, right?
The gangster's wife or whatever.
He's in construction!
He's doing very well!
You know, he comes home in the middle of the night with a guy rolled up in the carpet and she just looks the other way.
It's kind of a cliche.
I think there's probably a bit of a grain of truth in it in some circumstances.
So does that help sort of have...
Give you some approach to understanding where she may be coming from.
And again, you know, if she disagrees with me or anything, she's certainly welcome to call in and we can chat about it.
Yeah, it definitely gives me insight.
I particularly like the part at the beginning where you said tolerating this is not the same as respect.
That really hit me.
That's something I definitely need to think about.
I feel like we...
Oh, listen, man.
You know, I don't know if you guys live together or not.
If you get married and live together, you're going to have to tolerate some things about the fairer sex and they're going to have to tolerate some things about you.
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
I'm still working on why I need a placemat, and my wife is still working on why I need another headphone set.
And that's fine, you know?
You're not perfect, she's not perfect, and men and women are complementary and different.
Now, I mean, listen, don't get me wrong.
You can go full hog if you want to, right?
If you want full consistency in your relationship, you can go full hog and you can give her the against me argument.
Do you support the use of force against me for disagreeing with your politics?
You can do that.
I'm not saying you should or shouldn't.
That's everybody's personal choice.
Right.
But, you know, depending on...
You've got to look down through the tunnel of time and you've got to say, you know, how much inconsistency am I willing to live with?
How much of a deviation in values...
Am I willing to live with?
That's not something I think that can be dictated from outside, like philosophy as a whole.
Right.
All right.
Yeah, thank you, Stefan.
That was helpful.
You are very welcome.
You are very welcome.
And I appreciate the call.
It was very interesting.
Thank you.
It was enlightening.
I appreciate it.
All right.
Thanks very much.
And sorry, the last thing I want to mention as well is that when you – if this is your girlfriend's perspective, when you get married, there will be a lot of people like this in your life.
Birds of a feather flock together.
That came from Muhammad Ali, I think.
And also it's an old brother.
So, I mean, it's because she'll have other people in her life who are like this.
And they'll reinforce each other and it has the potential to drive you a little batty.
So these are just things that, you know, when you're early dating, there's this kind of isolation, right?
Not isolation from each, but you know, you don't usually have, it's not like the fourth date you say, let's go visit my grandmother in the old age home because she needs something rubbed into her feet, right?
I mean, the sort of, the detritus of life complexities tend to be later.
Right.
You know, John Edwards, I guess he was a Democrat contender for something or other, had this affair with a woman named Rial Hunter, I think her name was, as opposed to Reality Hunter, which is my rap name.
But his wife would go crazy.
Because it would be like, oh, so you go out with this woman, you hole up in a hotel and you just have sex.
Yeah.
There's no birthday cards.
There's no kids throwing up.
There's no bills.
There's no reality.
And that is...
As you get along in this relationship, just be aware that you'll have a lot of people in your life who are this way inclined.
And that's neither here nor there.
Just something to be aware of.
All right.
I really appreciate the call.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Stefan.
Let us move on to the next.
You too.
Alright, up next is Chris.
Chris wrote in and said, With increasing regulations in the United States, such as minimum wage increases in many cities and states, the cost of labor is rising higher and higher.
At the same time, the free market is making the cost of automation of many processes lower and lower.
It seems we are on the cusp of an automation revolution.
As a way of the free market trying to compensate for this hyper-regulatory climate we are currently living in.
There are some people that are talking about this leading to increased social unrest as more and more people lose their jobs, especially in fields like customer service where much of America's workforce currently resides.
There's even talk from the tech giants of automation replacing much of the programming field eventually.
Some people are going so far as to propose a universal basic income to try and head off this potentially looming societal disaster.
I try to hold out that like the agricultural and industrial revolutions, this revolution will simply empower us to find new ways of creating wealth with less physical labor, but it is so hard to see what the unseen hand of the market has in store for us.
The only definitive positive I can see so far from this is that the cost of many goods will drop precipitously, which will certainly help those on the lowest rung of the economic ladder.
Certainly decreasing regulations could stave off this uncertainty for longer, but that is a hard pill to sell to the American people at this moment.
What do you think the consequences of this revolution will have in store for the human species, both good or bad?
Do you think it will affect First World Nations versus Second and Third World Nations?
Do you think this will finally help us jump the last hurdles to become a Type 1 civilization which could create possible new opportunities to fulfill our needs to be productive members of the species, or do you think that it could lead to even more nihilistic hedonism?
That's from Chris.
Okay, Chris, we only have four days, so let's get started.
Because these are some big-ass questions. - Yes.
Yeah.
All right.
Okay, now, do you mind if I just give you a little rant at the beginning here, and then we'll take it from there?
Please, by all means.
I love your rant.
All right.
Well, there'll be a lot to love in this one, because I've been thinking this over for quite a while, so I appreciate you bringing up the question.
Let us...
Picture, since we know that intelligence has a significant genetic basis, let us picture how all of these forces would work in a free society, all of these trends would work in a free society.
In a free society, smarter people gather more resources, and if they are so inclined, can generally afford to have more children, right?
What that means is you have...
A positive feedback loop when it comes to improving at least the genetic basis of human intelligence, right?
And so in the free market, human intelligence will tend to rise.
And so I had a guy on a couple of months ago, maybe a year or so ago, who was talking about Ashkenazi Jews who have on average a sort of 15-point IQ advantage over whites.
And he said, you know, this is a third of an IQ point over a generation, you know, a couple of hundred years, bingo, bango, mongo, you have a 15-point IQ gain.
And he gave a sort of variety of reasons for this, that the rabbis, who tend to be the smartest, would tend to have the most kids.
The richer people tended to have more kids in the Jewish community.
This is all fairly well borne out, and it's an important and interesting case study to look at.
So, in a free market, It's not, and people, the moment you say anything like this, and I'm sorry to head this off, I try not to anticipate negative reactions because oftentimes it distorts the conversation and you tend to create what you fear.
This is not a fear thing, it's just that the moment you start talking about breeding patterns, dysgenics, eugenics, you're going to sterilize the poor.
No, no, no.
Nothing to do with that at all.
It's just the basic reality that IQ and income are highly correlated.
And the more income you have the more children in general you can afford.
And so in a free market environment human intelligence will tend to improve over time.
So what that means is that more people will be able to have more complex jobs.
What that means is that by the time you get around to automating a lot of stuff You are replacing fewer people who can't do better.
So let's say you build some robot maid.
Well, after a couple of generations in a free society, there are fewer people whose only capacity is to be a maid.
Now, when there are fewer people who want to be maids because people are generally getting smarter, and no, I don't mean that all maids are dumb, just in general, right?
Yeah.
So what's going to happen is, as generations go by in a free market environment, fewer and fewer people are going to want to be maids.
What does that mean?
What happens to the price of maids?
It goes up.
It goes up, right?
Because demand is down, right?
Correct.
So when the price of maids goes up, it means that there's an incentive to Automate the process, right?
Because the price is going up.
That would be correct, yeah.
Sorry.
Supply is down.
Demand is the same.
Supply is down because few people want to be maids.
Now, it takes a while to automate things properly.
Something like being a maid is ridiculously complex.
You know, dusting the top shelf, you know what I mean?
Like it's lifting things up, dusting underneath, cleaning toilets.
It's very complex.
So it will take a while.
And I think that in a free market, there's kind of a soft landing.
People want to have their houses cleaned.
A lot of people don't want to do it themselves.
Hire maids.
And so as there are fewer and fewer maids, there's a soft incentive to automate the process.
And then it takes at least a generation for the automation usually to get really great.
Like think of how long it took for computers To go into mainstream use to the point where I can sit in a coffee shop being horrified that no one's talking to each other, right?
The computers first came around in sort of the post-war period.
The first one was as big as a basement, relied on vacuum tubes and could multiply numbers together.
And now, like it's just like smartphones are just like truly mental.
Insane.
Insane devices in terms of what they can do.
I'm listening to an old Bill Bryson book about his travels across America.
Man...
Just listening to him try and navigate America without a GPS, oh man, does it ever.
I appreciate it.
I'm really great in the woods.
I'm terrible in a city.
That's, I think, kind of a common thing for men.
But women are better at navigating known areas.
Men are better at navigating unknown areas for obviously hunter-gatherer reasons and all that.
So in a free society, people are getting smarter over time.
Which raises the price of less intellectual labor, lower intellect labor, which slowly drives a demand for automation.
Now, I say slowly because in a free market, the economy is growing like 10% or 15% or more every year.
So while it's true that the price of maids is going up, one's income is probably going up a lot faster than that.
In fact, for sure it would be.
So there's kind of like a soft landing in terms of easing people out of less intellectually demanding jobs or occupations.
Now at the same time, of course, people have a huge amount of income and one thing, I talked about this with Scott Adams recently, but one thing that's pretty well known is that when people achieve a certain amount of material comfort, their thoughts turn to philanthropy.
And that's this very strong evolutionary reasons for all of that.
You couldn't hoard things in the past.
Your meat would go rotten or whatever it is.
So there was a lot of philanthropy.
You know, when we have enough to eat, we offer things to our neighbors.
It creates mutual social bonds.
It's like an insurance system for the inevitable hardships of life, or at least as we were evolving.
So you've got a wealthier society.
You have a society that's getting smarter as a whole.
And eventually you'll end up in a society where most people are smart.
And there will be a few people, just based on the bell curve, who aren't.
But they'll be perfectly well taken care of by charity because everyone will recognize that intelligence, in general, is not an earned attribute.
Intelligence, in general, is not an earned attribute.
It's like height.
Or like, I remember when I was younger, I guess I really, I first started noticing that I was going to, I guess, lose my hair in my late teens, right?
Started to get the widow's peak and all.
Looked at a picture of my dad, I'm like, okay.
Destination, chrome.
And there were guys who were proud of their hair.
Proud of their hair.
Can you imagine?
Like you earned it.
I'm 31, still have a nice full head of hair, and probably will have it late in life if my dad's any indication.
You've got the bulletproof follicles, right?
Oh, yeah.
Basically, you're going to go white, but you ain't going to go skin, right?
It'll probably take me a while to go white, even.
Okay, well, that's...
You haven't earned that, right?
It's not like you just did extra push-ups or something or concentrated.
Or like the Prince, the singer who died this year.
Prince had this theory that it was his electric guitar that kept his hair thick.
Because all that electricity going through his body kept his hair thick.
Nope.
Nope.
Good genetics.
It's just genetics, right?
It's just genetics.
You can't be proud of that.
You can't be proud of your height.
Now, you can work with your weight.
Some things you can do.
You can be proud of exercising.
You can be proud of eating well.
These are things that you have choices about.
But you can't be proud of having a full head of hair.
You can't be proud of being tall.
I mean, we all know this, right?
Deep down.
Although, you know, it's like being proud of inheriting money.
Whatever, right?
It's just luck of the draw, right?
And intelligence...
is not an earned attribute.
Now because it's not an earned attribute I think that there's...
because people get confused like when I talk about if you're smart you have some obligations to society.
Look, I did not earn being smart.
There's things that I've done to Make my native intelligence more productive, more useful.
Philosophy, of course, in particular, and what I can do to help spread that to the world is a great thing, I think.
But I did not earn my brain.
That happened to me.
I can be as proud of my brain as you can be of your hair.
Maybe you gel it up a little.
Maybe you throw a couple of flecks in it.
Maybe you style it nicely.
But, you know, it's not an earned attribute.
Now, I can be proud of philosophy, of the degree to which I have focused on philosophy.
I can be proud of the courage and integrity that I put into my work in this philosophical conversation and in the shows.
I can be proud of many, many things.
But I can't be proud of the raw ability.
If you have a great singing voice, you can be proud of lessons and of career choices and of sitting down and writing songs, but you can't be proud of having a great singing voice.
You're just born with that.
Again, you can work with it, but you can't be proud of it.
I mean, you can be, but you're wrong.
Intelligence is not an earned attribute, and once we understand that, then We would no more look down on someone for being less intelligent than we would look down upon them for being short.
Now, we could look down on that sort of Jack Nicholson five easy pieces thing where somebody has a lot of brains, a lot of ability and squander it.
Yes, we could look down at someone, but we would not look down on them because they're intelligent, but we would look down because they're intelligent and unwise.
They're wasting their potential.
Which is kind of selfish.
And so as far as sort of automation and all of that goes, in a free society, I think it would be taken care of very nicely.
People getting smarter, automation would slowly displace the less intelligent, but there'd be fewer less intelligent people and they'd be taken care of by charity because everyone would understand it's not their fault.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, yeah.
Now, now we have to do the flip side of that, which is what's going on now.
Right?
What's going on now is the idiocracy scenario.
And if you haven't seen the intro to that movie, Idiocracy, you can find it on YouTube.
I think it's still there.
And it's a depressingly brilliant introduction to this issue, which is that the welfare state is...
Paying people with, let's just say, relatively short time horizons of calculation to have more kids.
And smarter people are saying, ooh, I don't know, boy, it's a risky world out there.
I don't know if I'm going to get my old age pension and the Fed sure is putting a lot of money into the economy and maybe I'll just hold off for a little while and all that kind of stuff, right?
Oh yeah, the good old case election conundrum.
Right.
Right.
So, right now what's happening is that IQ is going down.
And it's not just immigration and it's not small.
The IQ is going down.
In the same way that if the government only paid short people to have children, height would go down, right?
Especially if they taxed tall people, right?
Again, it's a bell curve and geniuses can be born to less intelligent parents and vice versa, but, you know, the trend is pretty clear.
And I've seen some, it's off the top of my head, so forgive me if the numbers are a little off, but I've seen some estimates that we're down half a standard deviation to up to a standard deviation from 100, 150 years ago.
Oh yeah, I've heard you talking about that in the past.
So right now, we have fewer and fewer really smart people and more and more people I'm below average intelligence, statistically, and we have worse education.
I mean, I think that if I had to choose between being smart and knowing philosophy, I would choose knowing philosophy.
In the same way, if somebody said to me, would you rather be a genius in the 14th century or somebody of average intelligence in the 21st century, I'd say the second.
Would you rather be super smart under communism or of average intelligence in a free market?
I would rather be of average intelligence in a free market, and I would rather have more wisdom than intelligence.
And so, one of the reasons I talk about philosophy in the way that I do, in an accessible way, in a way that works for the majority of people who aren't trained in philosophy, is because it's the greatest gift.
gift.
I can't transfer brain cells, but I can transfer principles.
Wisdom.
Hopefully.
And ... ...
Right now, we have intelligent people who aren't very wise.
We have less intelligent people who aren't very wise.
And that is the society that we live in.
And it's mostly the result of socialism.
Socialism is not just an economic system.
Socialism is not just an economic theory.
Socialism is...
Eugenics.
It's dysgenics, fundamentally.
Because socialism, by transferring resources from the more able and the more intelligent to the less able and the less intelligent, fundamentally changes the gene pool over time.
We say we should not play God with nature.
Stem cell research is terrible.
We should not mess with nature.
Well, that's what socialism does.
It puts a coercive redistributionist system which fundamentally alters human genetics into place.
Now, it makes perfect sense to me because less intelligent genes want to survive just as much as more intelligent genes do, so less intelligent genes being pro-socialism makes perfect sense because they get free resources and More children, which is sort of the point of biology, is to have as many kids as possible to try and spread.
The genes want to have as much reproduction as possible, right?
Yeah.
And this is why when you have a state, things will always decay.
We're not just talking intellectually.
We're talking biologically, genetically.
Taking from the able and giving to the less able is immoral.
And it is dysgenic.
And these are not prescriptions for action.
They are merely descriptions of reality.
This is how biology works.
So, as far as automation goes, we're now in a situation where the government is artificially raising the price of labor because the way it would work in a free society is If you weren't that smart, you wouldn't be able to make that much money, which means you wouldn't be able to have too many kids.
But now, with welfare and the minimum wage and all of the massive wealth transfers to the poor, we're in a situation where the drive for automation is very high at a time when you have an ever-expanding base of less intelligent people.
That's not good.
These are not two things you want to have happening at the same time.
My goal, of course, since remember, let's always bring it back to me, but why I'm doing what I'm doing is that my show is a gift to less intelligent people so that they can end up wiser than smarter people who've never heard the show.
I'm always designing this show to be consumable by people of average to above average intelligence.
And they can.
We know that.
We get the feedback.
And so, by giving the gift of philosophy to people who are not as smart, it makes them smarter than the smart people.
Because they have wisdom.
And if you have to choose between intelligence and wisdom, it's generally preferable to choose wisdom.
Intelligence might make you money, but wisdom will make you happy.
So I think these kinds of considerations are at least important to me.
I can't dismantle the welfare state, however immoral it is, but I can at least give to the world the kind of wisdom that when the welfare state runs out of money will hopefully point people In a more sustainable, more moral, more compassionate, and kinder direction.
Does that help at all?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, I'm definitely on board with that idea in the first place, but...
Yeah, it's just...
I don't know.
The whole case-selected scared of the future thing, I guess, is part of the reason I'm asking these type of questions is...
It's more personal for you, right?
You're trying to figure out whether to have kids or not?
I've already decided to have kids, but I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to be most stable in being able to support said kids.
Right.
Trying to figure out which industry isn't going to get automated first, basically, on me.
Philosophical podcasting seems to be a pretty safe bet.
I messed around with YouTube a little bit, uh...
A few months ago, but I haven't had much time lately with my current job.
Well, I mean, I don't know exactly, but certainly the less that things can be done by machines, I mean, that's almost a tautology, right?
But the less that things can be done by machines, the more likely you are to be able to continue to do what you're doing.
I am glad that I got out of the software business when I did, because as you point out, there's a lot of automation that's going on these days, and a lot of outsourcing as well.
I was thinking very heavily about going into that industry, because I do have a knack for it.
I was taught at the age of nine by my dad how to do some basic programming stuff, and I've been building computers since I was seven and all that.
I've been out of Any kind of tech stuff for a while.
I'm actually more in the construction field.
Inspection specifically, but I guess I won't get too much more personal details.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, obviously if I knew what the economy of the future was going to look like, it would have a huge advantage.
Mike and I went to McDonald's the other day.
Mike, that was your first experience with that, right?
It was my first McDonald's touchscreen experience.
And Mike, what were your thoughts about it?
It's a whole lot better than dealing with a person more often than not.
Well, you get to check it, right?
I mean, you know that old Joe Pesci thing?
They always fuck you in the drive-thru.
Oh, because you're gone.
You're already out there.
You've driven away.
You're not going to go back.
Oh, I'm no pickles, no onions, no mustard, all of that, and they always screw it up.
Oh yeah, my daughter is so fussy, it's like, here's volume one, and I'm going through this whole list of what she wants, and all they hear is, and they just basically, I don't know, throw something in a bag and hopefully they'll drive off.
But yeah, that was the first of what I'm sure will be many experiences in the very near future as minimum wages continue to creep upwards.
Yeah, I mean, they don't call in sick.
They don't quit.
You don't have to train them.
They don't have a union.
They don't sue you if they slip and fall.
As far as touchscreen goes, there's a lot to be said for it.
Don't get in fights with customers in the lobby.
That's right.
Don't steal.
That too.
So yeah, it's tough to compete with the machines.
Indeed, indeed.
All right.
Well, listen, let me move on to the next caller, but I appreciate the question.
Listen, I'm also fully aware we didn't get through all the ramifications of your question.
So, you know, have a listen back to this and the other stuff that we didn't get to.
Please call back in about.
But I do want to move on to the next caller at the moment.
Yeah, no problem.
Have a good day.
Thanks, man.
Take care.
Alright, up next is Creed.
Creed wrote in and said, I have been in the U.S. Army Reserve for seven years.
I joined in 2009 after graduating high school.
After my initial training, I spent three years at a senior military college studying to become an Army officer.
What I experienced during these last seven years was a military hamstrung by bureaucracy and political correctness.
Obesity in the military is an epidemic, from the generals to the privates.
Drill sergeants can't stress out a trainee.
Corrective training for unacceptable behavior cannot be more than 10 unalterated push-ups.
Drill sergeants cannot control the diets of grossly overweight soldiers.
Meanwhile, these same drill sergeants are expected to prepare young men and women for combat.
Most of my officer training was equal parts land navigation, physical training, and sexual harassment prevention.
I honestly look back at my experiences there as a joke, and I'm glad that I did not complete the program.
This last year, I have obtained a decent job that provides a decent living, and I am currently trying to leave the military.
I informed my unit of my decision in June, and I was told just this month that the process takes several months, and that my paperwork has not even been started.
This is a military that is not only expected to defend its own country, but many other countries around the world.
Is the majority of the United States military not meant to fight anymore?
Is it a backdoor way of getting more people on a form of welfare state control?
That's from Creed.
Well, hello, and how are you doing tonight?
Doing well, Stefan.
How are you?
Can you hear me?
I'm very well.
Very well, thank you.
Yeah, you know, this...
The military stuff is really, really fascinating.
Listen, did you mind going into a little bit more of some of the politically correct stuff that you observed?
Yeah, I mean, lots of my experience in the military has been briefings most of the time.
Anytime I've gone to a new base with my unit, anytime we go to do just some specific training across state lines, there is a night where they will take you for about 12 hours and just go over briefings that you've had before.
Most of them sexual harassment training that is so specific and so detailed that it'll be like okay well this is the gesture that you cannot use around this group and this is a gesture you can't use around that group and I mean I can go into detail of that if you want but it gets to a point when you're spending sometimes days even weeks just going over just learning about the military over and over As an example,
in the officer training at college, they took all the cadets.
A senior military college is basically a military lifestyle with a civilian side of the college where it's just like a regular college for everyone else that's not a cadet.
And they took all the cadets into an auditorium and they gave us a three-hour just sexual harassment and A training course and things such as no hazing, you can't train you on how much you can correct somebody on their behavior.
Things such as if they're acting up in line, if they're uniforms out of, you know, not correct.
You can only make them do, you know, ten push-ups or five push-ups since it was the college.
And that's it.
That's all you're allowed to do.
And that's just my experience.
I think in the military as a whole, When it comes down to training the actual soldiers, not just cadets, when drill sergeants are training the soldiers, they can't do anything.
I know when I was just starting my basic training, they had just phased out stress cards.
And what a stress card is, Is when you're being yelled at by your drill sergeant for whatever the drill sergeant wants to yell at you for.
You pull out this card and it says, I'm stressed, and then the drill sergeant is not allowed to talk to you anymore for a certain specified amount of time.
time.
They were just phasing that out, but they're trying to find new ways to get something like that in.
And I'm just thinking, okay, well, you're the...
Sorry to interrupt, Creed, but to be fair, in combat, doesn't it also work the same way?
Like if someone's shooting at you and you find it stressful, don't you get to hold up a card and then they'll stop shooting at you for a certain amount of time until you hold up another card that say, I'm ready to re-engage?
I mean, again, I'm no military historian, but I think that's how it worked at Agincourt, isn't it?
I mean, if it's a white flag, maybe, if they...
Well, then things are over, right?
Right.
But this is the kind of military we're raising, and then that...
My generation of soldiers is going to raise the next generation of soldiers.
I don't see how that kind of military, the quote-unquote...
Nicer kinder army is expected to fight wars.
I mean, I just don't see it.
Right.
Now, you've obviously had much more experience than I have in this, but the general, quote, sort of asshole drill instructor, What is the general theory behind why that is important?
It's to train you for high-stress situations.
They don't do things just to be a jerk.
They're not going to make you do push-ups just because they want to make you do push-ups.
They're doing it because they care.
They want you to be in the best physical condition you possibly can, the best physical condition you can possibly be in.
They want you to be able to be Right, right.
And I do know, historically...
One of the reasons that the more extreme sort of form of break you down and build you back up again came in was because Vietnam got really crazy.
As far as discipline within the unit went, you got people fragging their own I mean, one of the reasons that the Vietnam War ended was because the army was about to completely collapse.
Right.
I mean, it was such ugly fighting conditions, such a lack of purpose that I think a lot of the soldiers were experiencing.
Drug addiction was very high, and it just got kind of nutty, right?
Oh, speaking of drug addiction, shortly after I joined and actually got to my unit, I think I want to say it was around 2010 when the military started to shrink down.
They started doing random drug tests every month, and within the first drug test, about 30 out of the 150 in my unit were gone the next day.
They tested positive, they melted the cup.
30 out of 150?
Yes, out of my unit alone.
Wow.
So, I mean, they got rid of the drug users, but, I mean, you still have overweight soldiers.
And it's not just, like, specialists or privates.
It's...
It's the sergeants and the officers that are coming down expecting the lower ranking sergeants to reprimand their soldiers for being overweight or not being able to run their two miles in the allotted amount of time.
The higher echelons of the military seem to have become this boys club.
If you're in, you can do whatever you want, but you have to make sure the standards are kept below you.
Right.
One person I would highly recommend you to watch and listen to is John Burke.
On YouTube, he calls himself the Soldier of Steel.
He's an ex-drill sergeant.
He's excellent.
He talks about this a lot on his videos about the military, and I just wanted to talk to you about it because I don't see the military being able to fight a war, and I kind of had this feeling that it's Kind of another way of just getting people dependent on the government, because that is a paycheck at the end of the day, and you get things such as housing allowances, gas allowances, food allowances, and it's just welfare that you work for in a strange way.
Right.
Look, morale is, to me, the most important weapon that any army has.
To be passionate about the mission, to trust your fellow soldiers, to trust the chain of command, to know that your lives are not going to be put at risk for any but the most important reasons.
This to me is foundational to any fighting force.
And if you have that, almost anything is possible.
And to me, if you don't have that, not much is possible.
And this, I guess it was under the Clintons where this political correctness really came in, right?
And, you know, with the R versus K selection, we'd sort of understand that that's sort of how it would go.
And this debate has been going on forever, but it's a pretty foundational debate.
Look, if I'm in combat and I get shot, I damn well want someone who could drag me to safety.
I don't care about any feminist theories of equality.
I want some Big, beefy MF who's going to drag my ass to safety and get me out of harm's way.
You know, just in case I can live, it would be nice.
Right.
And for that, there are some women who can do that, but not many.
You know, because traditionally, of course, the Army has the biggest, burliest specimens around, right?
Guys who are, you know, packing 220, 240, and it's mostly muscle, right?
I mean, the Marines might have an argument, but yes, essentially, we have more of them.
Right.
Well, I mean, relative to the general population, I mean.
Yes, of course, of course.
And, of course, bigger guys who are trained like hell, right?
I mean, a lot of the PT is extremely intense, right?
Or at least it used to be.
It definitely used to be.
Now it's also hamstrung by quite a lot of rules.
You're not allowed to do so many of the kicks or so many of the push-ups, so many sit-ups in a certain morning.
You're only allowed to run certain distances.
And it's different for every base.
But for the most part, it's also limited as a group.
Well, and I think that that has to do with two particular areas.
One is politically correct, the other is not necessarily.
One, of course, is that the inclusion of women that came in the 90s into direct combat roles has meant that the standards have to be changed.
Yes, the standards were changed, but specifically for women.
Women have a different set of standards they have to abide by to pass their physical training tests.
Right.
Right.
Although, in combat, that doesn't matter, because you're not doing different tests for men and women.
The bullets are the same, the bombs are the same, the need to drag to safety is the same, so it's a fantasy that all of this can somehow work out.
And the second thing, of course, is that I think, in general, the population is much less fit than it used to be.
And I can't remember, there was some percentage I read recently about Some general was saying, well look, the general population, we can only take a certain percentage of people because the rest of them are just completely physically unfit for any kind of, like even starting out.
And I think that as obesity has grown in America and as general lethargy and inactivity has grown in America, then you have to lower the standards because you don't want to give your 19-year-old recruit a heart attack on his second day, right?
Because he's spent the last four years wearing out a hole in his couch.
Well, I gotta say, though, there was a few guys I did go through training with who started off a couple hundred pounds overweight that they lost it quick in two months.
I mean...
The military can take their most unfit and make them fit, but they have to unhandcuff their drill sergeants to allow them to do the job.
The military is discussing extending how long you have the drill sergeant with you when you first start training.
To me, that's just extending the same problem.
If you don't allow your drill sergeants to do certain things, such as rough them up, try and get them into the sand, make them run miles and miles longer than you really should make them run, If you don't allow your drill sergeants to do that, the problem is just can continue for as long as you have the drill sergeant with them.
It could be six months.
It could be two years.
It doesn't matter.
The training is going to be the same and it's not going to make them any better.
The other thing I think is true is that when men are around other men, there's a camaraderie that's not the case when they're around women.
This is a very big statement.
So, you know, obviously your experience versus my theories.
I'm an empiricist.
Your experience creed definitely wins out.
But in my experience, men have a certain amount of camaraderie and cooperation when they're around other men.
But when a woman comes along, in general, the men will start angling for competition for the woman's attention and will be willing to short-shank the other guy, so to speak, in order to raise his status with the woman.
I mean, no, you're right.
You're absolutely right.
When there's a group at the college that I went to, I am wary about saying their name, but I'm going to do it anyway.
The aggressors, they were a group of cadets that trained specifically in infantry combat tactics.
They trained themselves, they had some supervision, but they were entirely men when I first got there.
And around my second year, they got the first woman in there.
And they used to have this really, really fraternity-style mentality, and they tried to be the best of the best, but once they got a female in there, they kind of all just left.
They just left the group.
The guys that were there when I was initially there just kind of drifted off.
I don't know what happened.
I wasn't a part of the group.
But normally, when a guy goes into that, he stays in it until he graduates college.
But those guys just kind of say, ah, wrestlers have become something else.
They started talking about all these other things that are going on without actually addressing her.
I don't know if she had anything to do with it.
I can't tell you I wasn't a part of that group.
But it is oddly coincidental.
No, men compete for female attention.
That's, I mean, that's as old as, I mean, that's not a human being thing alone.
alone, of course, that's as a whole.
And there's a reason why I can't think of any successful military in history that has females on the front lines.
It lowers morale because the white knight in the military soul is pretty big, right?
I mean, women are one of the reasons people go to the military to protect women and children.
And so knowing that someone, a woman in general, cannot do what the man can do means that you kind of have to cover up for her.
You kind of have to do her part as well to some degree, right?
Right.
And men are more concerned when a woman is under fire than when another man is under fire.
Again, this is just natural protect the eggs, base of the brain stuff that happens.
And it creates an inequality in the ranks and a different focus in the ranks that I think does not do great things for team spirit and cohesiveness.
You're right.
You're absolutely right.
I mean, I've been so just disgruntled by the military.
I feel like it's mostly cosmetic now.
I feel like it's just kind of kept there.
I mean, because really all the military ever uses is its best soldiers, the special forces, and drone strikes, and occasionally the Navy, from what I understand.
Right.
They don't use the bulk of the military anymore, and if they did, I worry about what would actually happen with the obesity problem, with the unit cohesion problems.
I don't know what we will do as the United States in the future if we are faced with a real, large, conventional threat.
I think the answer is lose, but I could be wrong because technology, right?
So here's what I was going to mention.
I did put a bookmark to it and I found the article.
Boy, shocking, shocking stuff.
So the Pentagon recently estimated what percentage of America's 17 to 24-year-old population would fail to qualify for enlistment.
That means they can't even get in.
You know what that means.
I'm just for other people.
What percentage of the 34 million 70 to 24 year old population do you think would fail to qualify for enlistment according to the Pentagon?
I would say roughly anywhere between 95 and 99 percent would fail to qualify.
It's 71 percent.
So, yeah, a little more pessimistic than I would have been.
But, of course, of those eligible for service, only 1% even have an interest.
Right, so just for those who are interested, I think this is from September 28, 2015, so relatively recent.
I assume it's close to or still accurate.
Right.
The U.S. Army's major enlistment requirements include ages between 17 and 34 years old, must be U.S. citizen or legal foreign national, must have high school diploma or equivalent, minimum of 33 score on armed forces qualification test, no tattoos on fingers, neck, or face, no ear gauges.
I don't know what those are, but I assume they're bad.
No ADHD tests.
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, I think.
No ADHD medication within the last 12 months.
No felony convictions.
No persistent illegal drug use.
I think persistent.
Do not shoot up while applying.
No insulin-dependent diabetes, and you must meet height and weight requirements.
The biggest single reason for failing to meet the requirements is obesity.
So some generals said, the obesity issue is the most troubling because the trend is going in the wrong direction.
By 2020, only two in ten would qualify to join the army.
He said it's a sad testament to who we are as a society right now.
So yeah, if 71% of young people won't qualify and only 1% of anybody who would be interested at all, it seems like that would not be particularly great.
And this is all the way back from 2009.
550 retired admirals, generals, and other retired senior military leaders formed Mission Readiness, a non-profit advocacy group, to urge lawmakers to expand high-quality early childhood education programs, increased access to healthier food at school, and improved quality and quantity of physical education.
Of course, running to the state to fix the problem, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And...
That's not particularly great.
And so some of it is mental and some of it is physical, of course.
The number of people who've...
Particularly boys, right?
Boys would be more interested in the military and boys get disproportionately diagnosed with mental health disorders and this kind of stuff.
And that is...
That's a big...
A big problem.
And, you know, what happens?
You know, it's funny to think that Michelle Obama's horrible lunch program or whatever is partly to do with national security, right?
It is terrifying to think that they're related.
Yeah.
And as far as the politically correct stuff goes, I mean, this is just one of these crazy ideological diseases.
It feels like that almost now just has to kind of run its course.
You know, if it's taken over the military, I guess we can forgive the French Literature Department, right?
I guess.
And I think this is the amazing power of politically correct police and the media and so on that they can cow people who are willing to face bullets into doing things that I would think are not particularly great for national security.
And that's just the amazing thing, that these guys can boss around four-star generals.
Well, they're looking out for their own careers, is what it is.
I mean, no single drill sergeant is going to go out of his way and risk his job to make sure one soldier might be ready for combat.
I mean, one soldier being ready when all the rest still need that same kind of treatment It's not worth losing your job, possibly being unhirable later, all over just bureaucratic rules that some general thought was really nice on a PowerPoint one day.
I heard the term nicer, kinder army a whole lot in 2009 and 2010.
I haven't heard it in a while since, but this is what you get with a nicer, kinder army.
You get an obese military that is afraid to tell people the truth of what you need to do.
They're afraid to tell their fatter soldiers, hey, you need to be running more.
Hey, you need to not go out, you need to be not allowed to go buy stuff from Dunkin Donuts because you're overweight and I gotta take you to combat, you might get me killed.
You're gonna be eating salads for the next two months and you're gonna be running with me every day.
They're not allowed to do that.
Right.
Right.
I mean, a kind of gentler army.
I gotta tell you, I don't think that's coming from the dudes.
No, I don't imagine it is.
I just don't think that's coming from the dudes.
And so, I mean, the answer, of course, is to have standards independent of anyone.
And that, of course, would result in very few women being on the front lines.
And then when people say sexism, say, no, no, the standards are the same for everyone.
This is the opposite of sexism.
Now, if people say, well, we need lower standards for women, it's like, okay, well, that's sexism then.
Which has been implemented.
Oh, yeah, I know, of course, because they're looking for the numbers.
Right.
They want to say, we have this many more women, combat ready, right?
Doesn't matter how they get there.
Doesn't matter what the results are that might occur in an actual war.
They just gotta get those numbers, right?
Right.
And what is the result of that in the long run?
Well, when the army becomes about something other than combat readiness, when the army becomes about social engineering, Then it's not the army.
It's just a bunch of socialists LARPing.
Right.
And I also think it's just become, like I said earlier, it's a boys club.
It's about the higher echelon's careers.
You can look it up.
I'm sure you'll find plenty of PowerPoints from the military, from officers, about the dangers of Pokemon Go.
They just want to get PowerPoints out there.
They just want to, you know, do presentations and make themselves look good.
This is why a lot of higher commanders were trying to go to Iraq and trying to go to Afghanistan a lot back in 2009, 2011, because the combat wasn't too terribly bad back then.
And they could go downrange and come back without a single casualty.
They had a higher likeliness of it, at least, and that's what they wanted to do, so their unit started deploying more often.
My unit almost deployed until they were told to come back home, thankfully, and I got to go back to college, but it was, I really just think the military's become almost like the Italian military in World War II. Just, the officers are looking out for themselves, not for their soldiers.
Well, and I mean, I hate to say it, but this because this is, you know, bitching at the boss's stuff, but I think there's probably some truth in it.
Tell me what you think.
The people who are into implementing the diversity policies aren't the people who are out on the battlefield where the risks are great because of their policies.
Right.
Absolutely.
It's And that's, boy, that, sorry to interrupt, but that drives morale and, like, augers into the ground.
Because if, like, well, I'm part of some giant, ridiculous social engineering experiment that could get me fucking killed by a bunch of people who are sitting safe in their PowerPoint offices, ooh, man, I mean, the morale of the frontline soldier, to me, as I said before, that's all the army is.
Once it's gone, it's gone.
You can't get it back easily.
It takes a couple generations to get that kind of morale back.
Well, or just be taken over.
Or lose.
Or whatever, right?
Yeah, or just losing.
And it is amazing that America has had the greatest military power that the world has ever seen.
For good or for ill.
Some of it's been used wisely.
Some of it has been used disastrously.
But America has had the greatest military prowess and capacity in the history of the world.
And that it should be taken over by a bunch of spectacle nerds with PowerPoints and snarky comments is just to me an astounding thing.
It's like bringing down a dragon with a pillow from a safe room or a safe space.
That is amazing, just how much language can overcome even military might.
Well, I mean, going back to your presentation on Rome, I mean, that's really how you bring down something that big.
It has to bring itself down.
You can't fight it.
You have to wait till it suffers under its own weight.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's the power of the media, too.
And the funny thing is that, of course, it fundamentally...
The great strength of the military is its desire to protect those who cannot protect themselves.
I mean, I'm sure like all military guys, you've watched a few good men more than a few times.
You know that Jack Nicholson character?
Colonel Jessup, I think his name was?
Who's going to stand on that wall?
You?
Me?
Well...
The military has the desire to protect those who are unwilling or unable to protect themselves.
And that white knighting which is the essence of the military makes it very susceptible to women who want to join.
Because we want to protect women.
We want to make women feel good.
We want to make women feel safe.
So when women are in the army, we'll bend standards to make women feel safe and protected.
That's kind of why there's an army in the first place, is to protect women and children.
Can't have children in the military, but when women come in, that same white knighting undoes the very effectiveness of the military.
That's my two-bit analysis, if that makes sense.
No, it does.
It makes sense, and I... What you're saying, I'm looking back in my experience and I can see it.
I can absolutely see it.
Just when in situations where they've bent over backwards for certain soldiers and other soldiers, not so much because of Those arbitrary things such as gender and on occasion race.
That doesn't happen so much in the military though.
I've noticed that the military has actually been pretty good about keeping things equal between races.
We're all brothers in the military.
It is refreshing to go to drill for at least that.
But for everything else, it's...
It's very slow to react.
It's very bureaucratic.
I mean, you hear about the VA all the time, and just getting your pay fixed if you don't get paid one month can take a very long time, just if there was a mistake, a clerical error.
Yeah, and the military doesn't seem to be very good at...
I mean, they're pretty good at keeping track of paperclips, but, you know, the odd hundred billion dollars or so just seems to go missing fairly regularly.
I don't know if you've heard about any of these sort of scandals.
Oh, I've heard about plenty of scandals.
The one that I focus mostly on is the F-35.
I haven't paid attention to it much recently, but I really like Bill Whittle's presentation on the F-35.
He released it, I think, like a year ago.
Yeah, I remember that.
Yeah, that was...
It's disgusting how much...
And that's why I called it the welfare military in my email.
Because it just feels like it's not really designed to fight.
It's designed to get money.
It is designed as a reason to tax people, move money, and then put it somewhere.
Just like welfare is.
And that kind of gets the other demographic that isn't on welfare to vote for a certain group.
It's just a military demographic voting for...
I guess...
I mean, they're mostly Republicans, so I guess they would be stuck under the Republican vote.
But...
That's just what I thought, and I thought...
That's why I brought the question to you.
I just wanted to know what you thought of that.
Is the military just another welfare machine?
Well, I think it has become that way.
I don't know that it was, of course, originally...
I mean, there's a bunch of decisions that were made.
Having a permanent army rather than a draft.
I mean, there always was a permanent army, but once they decided to get rid of the draft after Vietnam, then of course...
You needed a larger standing army because you couldn't augment it with the draft at will.
I know the draft was always there in reserve, but Bonsi basically switched to what is euphemistically called an all-volunteer army, which is not true because the taxpayers aren't voluntarily paying for it, so it's not volunteer that way.
But that has changed things considerably.
And once you have a larger standing army, then you have a greater temptation to use it overseas.
And...
America didn't get involved in a whole lot of useless conflicts in the Middle East in the 1920s.
Certainly not as much in the 19th century.
America has been at war a lot over its history, of course, but...
I think that America has peaceful neighbors largely to the north and south, has giant oceans to the east and west, and has a limited government philosophy, a constitutional republic.
Of all the countries in the world and throughout history, it should be the country that's best able to not be at war.
And it seems to be very bad at not being at war.
And I think that it has become...
I mean, when was the last time the U.S. soil was attacked or invaded?
Yeah.
1814, maybe?
Well, you could count Pull Harbor, I guess.
You could also count 9-11, although I know that wasn't an official army.
But, yeah, it's been a while.
So the question then would be, well, what kind of army should there be in a more limited government kind of society?
And that's a big sort of question, which we don't have to get into right now.
But I think we can safely say that the army is way too big for the domestic needs of the American population.
Way too big for the domestic needs of the American population.
And as far as the welfare goes, this is from this month, August 2016.
Reuters has revealed that the army's finances are so jumbled that it had to make trillions of dollars of improper accounting adjustments to create an illusion that its books are balanced.
That's not billions.
That's trillions.
The Defense Department Inspector General in a June report said the Army made $2.8 trillion in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 2015.
Just three months.
That's a quarter, right?
$2.8 trillion in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 2015 and $6.5 trillion for the year.
Yet the Army lacked receipts and invoices to support those numbers or simply made them up.
As a result, the Army's financial statements for 2015 were, quote, materially misstated, the report concluded.
The forced adjustments rendered the statements useless because, quote, DOD and Army managers could not rely on the data in their accounting systems when making management and resource decisions.
This is not the first time the DOD has fudged its books.
The disclosure of the Army's manipulation of numbers is the latest example of the severe accounting problems plaguing the Defense Department for decades.
The report affirms how a 2013 Reuters series revealing how the Defense Department falsified accounting on a large scale as it scrambled to close its books.
As a result, there has been no way to know how the Defense Department, far and away the biggest chunk of Congress's annual budget, spends the public's money.
The Army lost or didn't keep required data, and much of the data it had was inaccurate.
The IG said.
In other words, it is effectively impossible to account how the U.S. government has spent trillions of dollars of taxpayer funds over the years.
It also means that since the money cannot be accounted for, a substantial part of it may have been embezzled.
Where is the money going?
Nobody knows, said Franklin Spinney, a retired military analyst for the Pentagon and critic of Defense Department planning cited by Reuters.
And again, we can put a link to this.
This is from Zero Hedge, and it's...
I was completely mad.
Just trillions and trillions of dollars unaccounted for.
You know, you lose a toothbrush, you've got to fill out five forms, right?
But the army can lose trillions and trillions of dollars or misplace or mismanage or whatever, right?
No one's held accountable.
Well, yeah, why bother?
So it seems to me it's a giant and well-funded Ponzi scheme or slush fund or something like that.
The DFAS is studying the report and, quote, has no comment at this time.
I'm guessing you don't.
I mean, no one's ever going to find out.
This money, trillions of dollars.
Trillions of dollars.
Imagine what that could have done if left in the hands of taxpayers to build businesses to grow jobs to.
Trillions of dollars.
Unaccounted for.
And the majority of our military is not even in the United States.
Well, I wouldn't say the majority, but a lot of the military isn't even in the United States.
It's in Germany.
It's in Korea.
It's in the Middle East.
It's in Africa.
It's all over the world, not on American soil.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
Losing money, not even defending the land that it's supposed to be defending.
Like you said, it's more of a Ponzi scheme, more of a just trying to move funds somewhere to some elitist than an actual military.
there.
Right.
And because it's all government programs, there's no efficiency, which is why the army is still 720-plus military bases around the world, why it's still in Okinawa, because you never know when those kamikazes are coming back.
And why it's still in Germany, 60 plus years after the end of the Second World War.
I mean, yeah, it's why it's still in NATO, decades after the end of the Soviet Union, which NATO was, this is Donald Trump's point, NATO was created to defend against the Soviet Union.
So why do we still have it?
Because there's the inertia to government stuff.
There's none of that efficiency stuff that the free market entities always have to.
There's no hatchet man.
There's no hiring of a man to come down and get rid of the fat, get rid of the guy that just picks up paper from the copier and moves it.
There's no way of getting rid of that.
Right.
And so, you know, I mean, the way it would work in a free market is defense agencies would end up making bids saying we're going to be able to protect you and they'd have to prove their worth.
You know, through tests, through simulated battles, through whatever it was going to be, paintball tournaments, I don't care.
And if women could hack it, then women would be fine to be in that.
But the people who could provide the best defense at the cheapest cost would be the ones who would end up with the contract.
And that, of course, is not at all how it works at the moment.
And, of course, we all know this nonsense, you know, like the hugely expensive...
Military equipment that is ordered and found to be obsolete by the time it's delivered and it's way over budget.
It's crazy.
I can tell you, at my unit alone, I think about half our vehicles are probably deadlined and deadline means you can't use it.
It's missing wheels or something's wrong with the engine.
It won't even turn on.
No gas.
Something.
I mean, of course, we're just a reserve unit so we're only there two days a month, but It's just a lot of equipment sitting there for a unit that's only there two days a month.
Why do we have so much equipment?
Yeah.
Well, so the Department of Defense recently purchased $16 billion worth of ammunition that it didn't actually need.
Found much of the ammo was obsolete or unusable, or their use is banned by an international treaty.
So it spent $16 billion buying this ammo, found out it couldn't use it, and then spent a billion dollars destroying it.
Now, if that's not an example of digging a hole and filling it in, I don't know what is.
$300 million a year, a year is unaccounted for in Afghanistan.
Just can't find it.
In Yemen, you know, not a place where you want to lose a lot of expensive military equipment, U.S. weapons worth half a billion dollars, $500 million, just vanished.
Pentagon officials cannot track the whereabouts of $500 million worth of military equipment the U.S. donated to Yemen since 2007.
Might have ended up with Al-Qaeda or Iranian-backed Rebels.
I mean, it's completely mad.
And there were 16 planes worth $500 million.
They spent nearly half a billion dollars on 20 planes to outfit the Afghan Air Force.
And the Defense Department finally turned around and scrapped 16 of these aircraft for 6 cents on the pound.
In other words, they spent half a billion dollars to make them.
And then they got $32,000 back for junking them.
I mean, you can basically talk yourself into a crazy fiscal depression just reading this kind of stuff.
It makes me so sad.
It's ridiculous.
It is ridiculous and it's inevitable.
And so, yeah, when you've got this kind of money, why not just do all this social justice warrior crap, right?
Why not?
I mean...
Yeah, I guess when you're looking at it like that, you've got really nothing to lose.
Let's go ahead and try it.
I mean, really the only person that's going to suffer are the people that have to deal with it if and when combat happens, especially as far-reaching as the United States is.
It's going to be more of a when rather than an if.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so, I mean...
I have significant respect for people who are willing to lay their lives on the line to defend those who cannot or will not defend themselves.
And I think the degree to which soldiers are misused for the sake of war profiteering, for the sake of embezzlement, for the sake of slush funds, for the sake of the appearance of security, I think it's absolutely tragic.
And tragic is not, I mean, it can be civilization ending.
Once you lose the support of the troops, once the troops become disgusted, once the troops are demoralized, what have you got?
No line of defense.
Whatever the people want to defend with, which your best fighters have all left.
Right.
So, yeah, I think a lot of blood has been spent Poorly.
And counter-productively.
And that's a really terrible way to put it.
But you know what I mean.
Like a lot of blood has been spilled for profit.
For money.
For grandiosity.
For people who like to play with maps and chess pieces.
And the blood of soldiers in the modern world is one of the greatest resources a country has.
And it should be preserved spiritually.
Virtually at all costs.
I think that soldiers are willing to go into battle with their morale high if they genuinely believe and accept that every alternative to war was explored, that the country is not complicit in the start of the war, that they're being told the truth, and that the objectives are clear.
How to We know.
If we're soldiers, how the hell do we know if we've won in Afghanistan?
How the hell do we know if we've won in Iraq?
Well, you know when you've won in Germany in 1945.
But it has become, because now it's nation building, right?
It's not defeat the foreign army and go home.
It's not repel the army from your shores and go home.
It's carved Jeffersonian democracy out of warring tribes in the Middle East.
Yeah, okay.
You can't do that with guns and bombs.
They're for breaking, not building, right?
You know the old saying, right?
The army is for killing people and breaking things.
Not creating brand spanking new societies which have no historical precedent in the region.
That's a job for philosophers.
Well, I think so.
I would hope so.
I think so.
And it is unconscionable the degree to which honorable men and women have been roped into the service of empire and to the service of money shuffling.
You know?
This...
Over six trillion dollars?
That's insane!
Trillion dollars!
That's like half the GDP of the entire country!
A little less than half the GDP of the entire country.
Gone!
I mean, these are people using An honorable Green Gang is cover for staggering levels of theft.
The consequences of which are...
It is appalling.
Absolutely appalling.
And I say this, I mean, my family has a military history.
And...
I've got a whole presentation, more than one in fact, on the First World War, which people should check out.
There was a beginning, there was a brutality, and there was an end.
And then the end became another beginning 20 years later, as Marshal Fox predicted in 1919 when he said, this is not peace, this is ceasefire for 20 years.
He was right almost to the day.
What is the end goal of the American military?
What is the purpose of the American military?
I mean, you've been in it.
What do they say?
Well, we have a lot of PR stuff that we say, you know, protect and defend from all enemies, foreign and domestic, but it's like we're trying to find an enemy and then stay at war with them for who knows how long, and then there's just another bad guy after another bad guy.
I mean, I understand...
You know, I understand...
We went to war in Afghanistan because we got attacked.
But then there was another bad guy.
And then there was...
Now there's ISIS. It's just we're always going to be finding someone else to fight.
And there's no real goal.
I mean, I don't...
I wouldn't be...
I don't think any soldier would be able to tell you what the point of the war was.
Some might say they would like to go back to it because to them it made sense.
I mean, some guys just kind of love that sort of thing, strangely enough.
Yeah, I get it.
But the point of the wars to them, I mean, to me in particular, I mean, especially for me, I see no reason why we should be over there spending our own blood.
The enemy's You know, they're more than found.
They're made.
They're more than found.
They're made.
America helped Saddam Hussein get into power.
Ah, now he's the enemy.
We must take him out.
Al-Qaeda was originally an ally.
Osama bin Laden was an ally.
Him and the Mujahideen were used in Afghanistan to take down the Soviet Empire, to lure it into the graveyard of empires.
Ah, then he became an enemy.
A lot of the arms that ISIS has came from America.
Because they were, back when they were al-Qaeda, they were armed and funded as a way of fighting a ruler in the Middle East.
So it's not just that they're found.
Sometimes they're actually courted and created.
And To spend blood and optimism, hope and treasure.
In the pursuit of these often self-created monsters, the end to that process is collapse.
As it always has been throughout history.
And it always will be.
Until we find some other way to structure society than having an agency of coercion at the center of it all.
Brennan, I think his name was, after the invasion of Iraq, he thought what a great idea it would be to completely disband the Iraqi military.
Where are they going to go?
What are they going to do?
It wasn't like they were getting a lot of pension money.
It wasn't like there was a big economic opportunity for them.
You need to have a place.
If you're going to disband the military, you need to have a place for people to go.
Just what are the consequences for these decisions?
Who pays for any of these decisions?
Who's responsible for six and a half trillion dollars?
Missing!
Missing!
Try putting...
A personal purchase on your army credit card.
Good luck!
You're gonna be in all kinds of trouble, all kinds of quickly, right?
Oh yeah, I'd probably lose rank over it.
Right.
Right.
Try setting up your own personal server for email!
For security.
Nope.
Nah.
That would be jail time.
Yeah.
Guy just went to jail for a year for taking a couple of photographs of the sub he was serving in so he could show his family what he did.
No evidence it ever went anywhere, as far as I know.
So, he tried the Clinton defense.
Didn't work.
Why?
Not a Clinton.
Shouldn't laugh.
It's tragic.
And I don't know How any of this can be solved when you have a state.
Because the state can print, the state can compel, the state can borrow, create money at whim.
And some of that money goes for terribly destructive things like the welfare state, for terribly indoctrinating things like student loans to higher education and government schools as a whole.
And those are relatively peaceful and innocuous ways That the government harms its population.
But the army...
The army is a different breed.
And by the army, I'm not talking about the enlisted men.
I'm not talking about the frontline soldiers.
I'm not talking about the people who believe to their heart that they're serving with honor and distinction for a good and noble cause.
I'm talking about the politics, the currency, the graft, the corruption, the missing funds, the pallets of money flying all over the place in unmarked planes.
That money disassembles people.
That money disassembles societies.
That money disassembles regions.
That money disassembles the future.
That money Throws, like confetti, the landmines that blow back into the fields of the future.
And what is the solution?
How can the citizenry gain any control over the military?
The military is supposed to be subjugated to the citizenry, which is why you have a non-military commander of the U.S. forces, the president.
Control over the military is the essence of civilization for both the military and the civilian population.
If the civilian population has no control over the military, you have no civilization.
You may have the pretense of one for a while, but you have no civilization.
And the military, the people...
Who will end up risking their lives, like yourself, should want civilian control over the military.
And by that I don't mean that the President gives orders.
I mean that the people must want to pay for the military.
They must want to fund the military.
They must recognize the need of the military.
And the military must prove its worth and its need to the population.
Must do it!
Because that's the only way to keep the frontline men and women safe Who are the first and last line of defense against, as you say, enemies foreign and domestic.
The military must prove its value.
Here's how we're keeping you safe.
Here's how it is efficient.
Here's how we are minimizing the poking of the hornets' nests overseas that might lead to blowback.
He is, hey, hey, America, how do you feel about this?
We're going to go and we're going to arm a whole bunch of radical jihadis over in Afghanistan because we think that might help take down the Soviet Union.
Nothing can go wrong.
There's no such thing as the law of unintended consequences.
There's no such thing as blowback.
It's all a mystery.
That's all voodoo.
That's all made up.
That's all a fairy tale.
So, Mr.
and Mrs.
America, I would like you to write me a check each for $1,000 so we can go and put a whole bunch of stinger missiles into the hands of Osama bin Laden.
I think it would be safe to say that the average Mr.
and Mrs.
of America would say, no thanks.
That seems a little outlandish to me.
And that is how you would keep the soldiers safe.
It's also how, by the way, you would keep the people who live and work or who work in the Twin Towers safe.
September 11th, 2001.
I want the military to come to me with a begging bowl.
I want the military to make to me a case as to why I should fund this, that, or the other.
I want them to take out commercials.
I want them to make PowerPoints, not about how the military can be a kinder and more gentle place to bake muffins.
I want them to make a PowerPoint About why they need my money at this time for this purpose and I want to never be forced to pay for it.
I want a free market relationship with my military because I care about the soldiers and I never want them and their blood to be spent in vain.
I want a military that is going to prevent war, whether that's through superior firepower, as the saying goes, or through some other methodology.
I want a military that is not out there kicking over a bunch of hornets' nests.
I want a military and a government that is not out there pulling up governments and pulling down governments and throwing these people into power and removing these people from power and funding this military group and taking money away from that military group and I don't want this infinite three-dimensional blood chest, loosely termed foreign policy.
Because no one can ever come to me or to anyone else in God's green acre and show with any reasonable degree of certainty how it all makes sense, how it all is profitable, for the taxpayers, not for the military-industrial complex.
Who the hell can come and make that case If the army had gone to Mr.
and Mrs.
America in the early 1940s before Pearl Harbor and said, hey, why don't you write us a check for $1,000?
You know, each of you.
We've got four people in the family.
Again, it's $4,000.
Because it's really, really important that we blockade Japan, a country completely dependent on imports of foreign oil.
See, if we blockade Japan and prevent their economy from functioning, great things will happen.
Like fireworks.
In Pearl Harbor.
I think they'd say, I'm sorry, what now?
I got a thousand bucks sitting in the bank account, which is a lot of money, and you want me to give it to you so you can go and blockade Japan on the other side of the world?
What the hell does that have to do with national defense?
Pass.
I think I'll pass.
No.
To keep the men and women of the military safe, To keep the taxpayers safe.
To keep foreigners safe.
I don't want to be told what's happened.
I want to be asked if it can happen.
I want the army to be an exceedingly well-armed charity that can prove to me the value of the money I provided.
Now, it's true.
This will eliminate a lot of social engineering.
It will eliminate a lot of social justice worrying.
It will eliminate a lot of missing money and made-up receipts and irreconcilable ledgers.
And there will be a lot of people who get a lot of money from the existing military who might actually have to go out and get real jobs doing something other than fomenting strife and bloodshed around the world.
So for those people, it will not be a fantastic day.
But for humanity as a whole, it will be a glorious dawn of potential peace.
And there endeth the rant.
Well...
It's not...
What you refer to as trying to convince you to pay...
Persuade you to pay them.
That's not war bonds or anything, right?
That's just...
Donate will defend you, correct?
Yeah, and I won competition.
I don't know if that sounds...
That doesn't sound like a good idea.
Competition between militaries doesn't sound too good to me.
Do you like having more than one cell phone provider?
No.
Well, I mean, I like that they're around, but if militaries tend to just fight each other...
Which is what they do.
Well, listen, I've got a book called Practical Anarchy.
Everyday Anarchy is more the theory or introduction to practical anarchy.
I go into how all of this stuff could work in a free market.
So listen, I completely understand where you're coming from.
Let's have competing militaries.
Let's have them fight it out and we'll pick the winner from the bloody pile.
No, I don't mean any of that.
So, you know, without having to go into all of those arguments and also without saying that The book that I've written and the answers that I have is automatically true or valid.
Go have a read of that.
It's free at freedomainradio.com slash free.
And you've got obviously infinitely more experience in military matters than I do.
So if you find something woefully wrong or even somewhat wrong in what I've written, please, please call back in and let's talk about it further.
But there are ways of doing it that I think would be to the benefit of everyone.
I'll absolutely give that a read.
I was looking at that earlier.
I was like, this looks interesting, because I hadn't picked up any of your free books yet.
I've been listening to you for a long time, just kind of playing you on YouTube or podcasts while I clean.
But yeah, I'll give that book a read.
Absolutely.
Yeah, it's audiobook.
You can get it on PDF. You can get it.
I mean, there's lots of different ways you can consume it.
And I think you'll enjoy it.
You know, I mean, I am still a voluntarist or an anarchist, but that hasn't changed because it's not up to me.
It's up to the arguments.
And I think as far as national defense goes, there are ways of doing it that will be productive.
I don't imagine that they're imminent, right?
So this is...
Very much a future-based conversation, but that's, you know, I still remember and I'm very much emotionally wedded to and intellectually wedded to all of the stuff that I wrote in the past.
Until better arguments come along, that's all I have to go on.
But yeah, give Practical Anarchy a try and see what you think of the areas in which I talk about, you know, police and national defense and so on.
And let me know if I'm YF-based according to what you think and I'd like to get your feedback on it.
Oh, absolutely.
Thank you.
You're very welcome.
Well, with that, thank you.
Thank you, everyone.
Thanks again, Creed.
Great chat.
And I look forward to talking again.
Thank you, everyone, so much for calling in a wonderful set of conversations tonight.
As always, a great and deep and abiding pleasure to have these wonderful conversations with y'all.
And please remember to go by freedomainradio.com slash donate.
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