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Sept. 6, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

03:16:25

3403 An Honest Conversation About Segregation - Call in Show - September 2nd, 2016

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	Hello, everybody.
	Hope you're doing well.
	Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	A couple of great callers.
	I know, I know, maybe I say that every week, but every week, I really believe that that's the case.
	The first caller wanted to know, Steph, why, oh why, were you a socialist in your youth?
	What was your thinking?
	How did you come about it?
	And what changed?
	And we also did have a quick sprint through the history of socialism and communism and cultural Marxism and all that kind of stuff, culminating in the somewhat hysterical political correctness climate that we live under, such as it is now.
	The second caller wanted to know why we turn to athletes and sports media personalities and so on for inspiration or guidance in moral or philosophical arenas.
	And it's a great question.
	So we talked about the role of sports and thinking and leadership and all that kind of stuff with some reference to recent activities or I guess inactivities with regards to the national anthem by Colin Kaepernick.
	The third caller wanted to know whether I accepted that human beings were injecting more CO2 into the atmosphere and whether that had an effect on climate.
	And we went through a good deal of my perspectives on this.
	Some things that I think could be done environmentally that are a little bit more manageable than getting all governments around the world to try and limit their economic growth.
	So it's a great call on climate change.
	It's been a while since we've talked about it, so I really, really appreciated that.
	The fourth caller was a black guy.
	The reason that's important is he wanted to talk about whether blacks benefited from segregation way back in the day, of course.
	I guess I had to give my perspective or opinion on that.
	And then we had a very wide-ranging discussion.
	About a variety of topics that I think you'll find very interesting.
	Everything from the economic incentives for babies in Japan to just about everything else that you could think of under Sun or Moon.
	It was a really, really great call.
	We're the great caller and I appreciated it enormously.
	Just as I appreciate you, hopefully, thinking about dropping by freedomainradio.com slash donate to help out the show.
	And don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
	And use our affiliate link, please, if you don't mind.
	You've got some shopping to do.
	All right, up first today is John.
	John wrote in and said, I've been frequenting your videos for the last several months now and really enjoying the discourses you've had about global politics, political correctness, economics, and feminism.
	You've mentioned several times you used to be a socialist when you were in college.
	What were some of the things you've been told or read that made you believe for a brief period of time that such a system could work?
	Did it by chance originate from the Marxist rantings of a disgruntled economics professor who bore a personal grudge against the so-called evils of capitalism?
	Or did you at a certain point develop any personal gripes about the free market capitalism yourself?
	Well, hey, John, how are you doing tonight?
	How are you, Stephen?
	I'm well.
	That's two things wrong.
	It's Stephen, not Stephen, which is fine, of course.
	But also, it wasn't college.
	By the time I got to college...
	I was a capitalist, but when I was in my teens, sort of early to mid-teens, I wasn't sort of an ideologically aware and well-read socialist, but I do remember very clearly saying to someone that what Canada needs is a healthy dose of additional socialism or more socialism.
	I just had a goopy, huggy bear kind of positive view.
	Of socialism and could not really have told you much about all of the theoretical underpinnings behind it.
	But it was definitely, it had a sort of rosy glow to it, if that makes any sense.
	Right.
	Did you happen to live in Quebec by any chance?
	No, I lived in Quebec for a couple of years.
	Two years when I was at the National Theatre School.
	Yeah.
	And then two years when I was at McGill.
	So I lived in Montreal for a couple of years.
	But, you know, it's pretty Anglo.
	Yeah, because I was asking you that because from what I heard, the welfare state over there is pretty large and unemployment is also, like, Slightly higher than, let's say, California.
	It's like infrastructure is crumbling.
	It's not well maintained.
	A lot of people, they don't have jobs.
	They're actually just living on handouts.
	So, yeah, that's why I ask.
	Because if you were a socialist in your earlier years, there has to be some kind of Some kind of environmental factor to it.
	You were surrounded by all this...
	Oh no, man.
	You don't need to go to Quebec for that.
	You just need to be raised by a single mom.
	Yeah, pretty much, pretty much.
	Raised by a single mom?
	What do single moms think about government redistribution on average?
	I don't know if anyone's actually run the numbers, but it would be interesting to know if they have.
	If anybody out there knows of a study like this, let me know.
	But I don't think anyone's run those numbers.
	But if you are raised by people who are significantly dependent on the state, then...
	And, you know, single moms, you know, because every time we talk about this, you know, I hear...
	And it's fair to say.
	It's a fair point to make.
	People say, well, my mom was a single mom and she...
	Well, here's a couple of things.
	Let me just sort of clarify.
	First of all, people say, my husband died and I'm a single mom.
	Now, technically, that's not what single mom means.
	If your husband died...
	Very sympathetic, of course, but the term is widow, not single mom.
	Single mom is somebody who the father is not around to some degree by choice.
	You chose the wrong man or you drove away the right man or something like that.
	The father is not around at some level or to some degree of choice.
	So I just sort of want to make that point.
	Other people say, well, but my mom was a single mom and She worked two jobs, and she never took a dime of government money, and she taught us the work ethic and all these kinds of good things.
	I understand and appreciate that perspective as well, but that's obviously a rarity.
	And secondly, if she is working two jobs, who the hell is raising you?
	She may be single.
	She may even be a mom, but putting those two together.
	It's kind of tough, right?
	Because you just don't have as many resources.
	You don't have as much time.
	You don't have as much, you know, all these kinds of things.
	So I sort of wanted to mention that aspect of things as well and say, well, I never took a dime of government money.
	Well, the question with regards to single moms, single parents, is this.
	Are they net contributors or net withdrawals from the social pool of tax dollars?
	Right.
	Yeah.
	And say, well, I never took a dime in government money.
	Well, you do if your tax bill doesn't cover your kid's public school education.
	Right?
	Then you are taking government money.
	And that's just math.
	That's not single motherhood in particular.
	That's just math.
	If you're taking out more than you put in, Then you're more likely to be pro-socialist, pro-redistribution of wealth.
	Well, of course.
	Some single mothers might take it if they have rich parents, rich father or someone like that.
	Maybe they'll get a large bulk of their support from that source.
	But either way, from what I've seen is that single motherhood tends to be someone else's burden in the long run.
	Well, that is still somebody else's burden if your parents are...
	Fitting the bills.
	Right.
	You're still taking out of society more than you're putting in.
	It's just this, in this case, it happens to be voluntary.
	So, and that, you know, it's a very rare, it's a very rare circumstance.
	But, so, you know, being raised by a single mom and being around single moms, as you tend to be in that kind of environment, you know, not a lot of single moms pitch and tent in the Hamptons.
	Right.
	And so what happens?
	Well, you grow up with a vaguely positive sense of socialism because the state is your daddy, right?
	Right, yeah.
	And so, yeah, where did I get it from?
	Well, I got it from government schools, of course, right?
	The church, various churches that I attended when I was younger didn't tend to do a lot of economics, but there is a sort of blurring in a lot of people's minds about taking care of the poor And the welfare state.
	The welfare state is a violation of free will.
	It's a violation of voluntary association.
	It's a violation of property rights.
	And I don't think any of those...
	I think all of those violations pretty much go against basic tenets of Christianity, for sure.
	Other religions, I'm sure, as well.
	So I think it just generally came from...
	You know what it's like with kids' stories.
	Who's the bad guy?
	In a lot of kids' stories.
	Yeah, the rich guy.
	It's the capitalist, the Scrooge, the evil land developer who wants to, I don't know, set fire to baby bunnies to build his evil mall.
	But whatever.
	It's also kind of funny that you see those movies in a theater built by an evil land developer who wants to please children by building movie theaters.
	But anyway...
	So it's just a general, you know, then you get into video games.
	Leandry Corporation has pitted human beings against cyborgs for 4,000 years of infinite bloodshed of gladiatorial evil.
	Will you join them?
	It's all this kind of stuff, right?
	I mean, even...
	You can literally create a story about the protagonist being some really poor guy who hasn't really been keeping up with his rent and is living on welfare, and his evil landlord is at least three days away from kicking him out.
	You can create this whole scenario and make a movie out of it.
	Paint a broad brush about how evil all those plantation owners and job creators really are.
	They're the ones who call the shots.
	They're also the ones who are getting paid to provide you something of value, in which case a space to live in or something else.
	Yeah, a lot of people's heartache and heartbreak is concentrated on economic structures that they barely understand.
	Right.
	And I think that's...
	So it wasn't the fault of the university professors, although I'm sure they would have liked to contribute to it.
	Many of them would have liked to if they could.
	Right.
	But by then I was well-graded for combat.
	So did you question your university professors if that ever came...
	Did I question my university?
	Oh, yeah.
	I was full-tilt combat in university.
	You raised your hand and kind of come across as this smug, know-it-all nerd.
	Well, yeah, maybe I did.
	And I remember one professor who, it was the last day in class, and he'd made his case throughout the year.
	And I made a passionate case at the end.
	And he basically just looked at me and shrugged and says, well, if that's what you believe, I guess we have to agree to disagree.
	And I don't really think that's the point of education.
	Just to say, well, you say one thing, I say the opposite.
	And the other thing, too, is that, and as I pointed out, when he said that, I said, well, being allowed to disagree is the essence of freedom, which is not socialism.
	I mean, am I allowed to disagree with socialist policies?
	No.
	I don't know.
	Drones that deliver things through your plumbing.
	Do not order the jetpack through the toilet.
	But yeah, there's tons of things that people can do if they disagree.
	Agree to disagree is the essence of freedom.
	It's the essence of free speech.
	So it was just kind of funny to me that this guy who was, you know, I think a pretty hardcore lefty was saying, well, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.
	It's like that's kind of not the point of your system as far as I understand it.
	Yeah.
	Isn't the professor's job to give you facts rather than conjecture and tirades and whatever else?
	Yeah, I mean, I remember reading a book.
	Some of this, I don't know, there's something, I don't know how to put it very well, but...
	This is just a personal observation.
	There's no philosophy in it.
	But I've always found something very sleep-inducing about socialist texts.
	I mean, I've read a lot of them.
	And for one thing, they're supremely unfunny.
	I know.
	I like Ayn Rand.
	But they're supremely unfunny.
	You know, they're not leavened by the Ann Coulter-style open-mouthed wit that can occur.
	And so it's turgid, it's boring, and worse, the greatest sin.
	It's predictable.
	You know what the stance is going to be on every single issue before you read it.
	And then if you start really following the footnotes, which was kind of tough back in the day.
	When I was back in college, there was no internet.
	And so now you want to follow the footnotes and find the source study and get the data.
	I mean, it's not a huge deal.
	But back then, you had to write pen and paper to the researchers and hope that they cared about anything you had to say and were willing to respond, which some were.
	But I remember reading there was a book talking about how large corporations use the power of the state to further their own economic interests.
	They get lobbyists.
	And, you know, when he would sort of resolutely glare away from me and ask if anybody had any comments on the book, I put my hand up until it was like a statue.
	And I said, well, of course.
	Of course they do.
	This is why There should be a separation of state and economics, which I actually thought was a very common term back then.
	Maybe it's not.
	You know, you say separation of church and state, you know, but anyway, separation of state and economics.
	Yeah, the government should not have the power to provide benefits to corporations in an economic sense.
	And of course, his solution, of course, was that they should, I don't know, I'm conjecturing, it's probably something like there should be no corporations and the government should run anything, run everything.
	And it's like, I don't think, that doesn't magically erase incentives for Economic advantage.
	Government!
	Magic!
	Or the government that represents the people, which rarely ever comes to fruition.
	It's always going to deviate from that original goal.
	But what I found kind of bizarre was that you're an atheist who kind of seems to lean towards being a traditionalist in terms of relationships and marriage and the nuclear family.
	So, can you tell me a little bit about how that came about?
	Before that, were you...
	I just got so tired of orgies, as you can imagine.
	I'm just kidding.
	Well, I mean, I don't know what to say, traditionalist.
	The question for me is, where do things settle when we have freedom?
	That is always the big question for me, and it's going to be a bit of a theme this evening.
	But where do things settle when we actually have some freedom?
	Right.
	Well, if you want to raise children, is one person better or is two people better?
	That's not a rhetorical question.
	I'm curious what you think.
	It's a team effort.
	In equal parts, you know.
	Right.
	No, that's...
	But which is better, one or two?
	Two.
	Two.
	I mean, that's just a basic fact.
	Now, you could say three are better, but then you run afoul of evolution.
	Because if there's two people, then assuming that there's no orbiting of the Jupiter-sized cuck planet that seems to inhabit the modern world, then you both have mixed your genetic material together to make a baby.
	And so you both have an equal incentive from a biological standpoint to Raise that child in a positive way.
	Ensure that child's survival.
	And if you have three, well, one person is out of the loop.
	One person is most likely, let's hope so, is sort of out of the loop.
	And they're just not going to have the same incentives and the biological imperative is going to reassert itself and there's going to be problems.
	So you want stability.
	So the two parent...
	Household is economically for the best.
	It is evolutionarily for the best.
	And I'm not a big one for rewriting human nature.
	That is the great sadistic fantasy of the utopians.
	Which is, you know, Marxism says you need a new Soviet man.
	You need a new economic man.
	You need human beings to be free of drastically impulsors towards Selfishness.
	They must be selfless.
	They must sacrifice.
	They must not care whether other people are working hard or not.
	They must contribute to the maximum no matter what.
	And so you need a new type of human being.
	You need someone who is not going to have preferential feelings for his or her own children as opposed to just put him as wards of the state to be raised by everyone and the destruction of the nuclear family.
	And so you need And you know, this is scientific.
	I mean, this is the thing with scientific.
	Marxism, I mean, it's all nonsense because it ignores the most important science in these areas of evolution.
	That we are finely tuned instruments that have developed over at least hundreds of thousands of years and certainly going all the way back a lot further.
	And you can't just change that.
	You can't just say, well...
	Let's make a non-organic human being.
	Let's make a human being with the opposite characteristics of all of evolutionary impulses towards in-group preferences, towards a preference for your own children as opposed to other children, for all these things.
	And I've never been a big one for, okay, well, let's start from scratch.
	Let's just wipe the slate clean and assume that we can create exactly the kind of human being that we want for our economic or political system to flourish.
	And because I am an evolutionary realist, if that makes sense, it doesn't work.
	And of course, if it did work, you wouldn't need a whole new system.
	If you had some magic way...
	To change human beings, you wouldn't need a whole new system.
	You'd just walk around with your magic wand and change them.
	You know, like the guys in Men in Black who can zap your memory.
	You just, boom!
	There you go.
	I touched you with the hair of Marx's beard and now you have no preference for your own children and you are willing to work for the good of the common and submit to a strangely non-flattened hierarchy of an economic cigarette.
	So, I... Just accept that.
	And, you know, there is that old prayer, God grant me the courage to change the things I can, the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference.
	And that is very important.
	And to me, the culmination of this recognition that human beings are not Not like Diebold machines to be reprogrammed on a whim, but we have a dense biological, psychological, sociological, genetic heritage that has evolved, and it's still in the process of evolving, of course, and we can't just throw that out and imagine we're starting with some other kind of thing.
	And recognizing that, the ultimate recognition that human beings...
	We'll always tend to seek power at the expense of others.
	Not because there's anything bad or wrong.
	It's just because we're animals.
	We are very cool animals.
	And we will always, always try to seek power over others.
	Because the purpose of evolution is not virtue, but success.
	Reproductive success.
	And human beings, as I said many years ago in the story of your enslavement, are the most profitable livestock for human beings to own.
	And you can't have that kind of profit availability and not have people use it.
	And so as long as human beings have the power to control other human beings, significant proportions will inevitably be drawn to do so.
	It's just too profitable.
	It's too profitable.
	And given that that's not going to change, and that's not specific to human beings, Thank you.
	That is all.
	Animals will attempt to exploit their environment for maximum resources and minimum effort.
	That's perfectly natural, and this is not bad.
	But recognizing that when you have a state, then people...
	The state is like power-seeking on steroids.
	Because people will forever...
	Use the power of the state to gain control over other human beings' resources without the personal risk of confronting them directly, right?
	That's the big problem with the state, is the state abstracts the pillaging of group by group, individual by individual, and it is enforced a long way away, and you get a nice bland check in the mail, or you get a nice apartment, or whatever.
	You get magic money bits deposited into your bank account, and There's no personal risk, right?
	What used to minimize violence was the personal risk of, I want to go take something from this guy.
	Well, he might be a ninja, right?
	He might be someone who has significant pushback, let's say.
	And with the state, that just goes through the roof.
	And so I just recognize that a voluntary society, in the long run, a stateless society, It's the only thing that is in accordance with what we know about everything that is organic, which is the will to power, the strive for dominance, and the strive to reproduce.
	And the sad thing is it doesn't even work with the state for very long because, I mean, as you can see, the desire to control others and gain their resources for reproductive fitness, the increases in socialism and state control of the economy and education in the increases in socialism and state control of the economy and education in the West has led to a catastrophic decline, a cratering And power without responsibility always turns to hedonism.
	So sorry for that long ramble, but I hope that makes some sense about at least where I'm coming from.
	Yeah, totally, totally.
	You know, when I noticed that...
	When I found the connection between, let's say, single motherhood, this growing rate of single motherhood and socialism and the need for the interventions of the state, that's when I realized,
	you know, maybe these Christians, these conservatives are on to something when they talk about the death of the family, when they talk about the The complete disappearance of these traditional family values.
	And the more people descend into hedonism and become more self-centered, we see these patterns repeating themselves over and over.
	Nuclear family tends to produce Families tend to produce more productive members of society, and then you get the single moms who raise their kids to become government-dependent.
	And you see these two...
	It's like two sides of a coin that's like a dying currency.
	Well, it's important to remember, too, that Christianity has already gone through a number of societal collapses.
	Right.
	Right, so...
	The wisdom that is contained within certain aspects of pro-family, pro-responsibility, pro-free market Christianity, well, those are hard-won lessons.
	And so, having gone through a wide variety of social collapses in its history, it has accumulated some lessons that nobody wants to listen to anymore.
	And, you know, there is a...
	I don't know.
	I have an answer for this.
	I'm still sort of mulling it over, but looking across the world, if you look at societies in decline or societies in expansion, and you say, the societies that defer the most to women, are they expanding or declining?
	And the societies that defer the least to women, are they expanding or declining?
	And that is, it could be causal, it could be coincidental, But it is an important aspect because, you know, the great promise was, you know, we give all of these wonderful rights to women and in many ways now they have more rights than men and society is going to be just plain old wonderful.
	And I'm obviously for equality before the law because I'm a universalist, but I'm not sure it's panning out quite as the brochure said it would.
	I mean, I think I lost my train of thought.
	Hold on.
	Going back to the universities, how long was this whole debacle with cultural Marxism and The social justice and all these different things.
	How long has this phenomenon been taking place?
	Where does it start?
	Where do you think it came from?
	How was it allowed to grow to such a point that we have things like these protests and these kids blocking entrances to To these conservative speakers like Ben Shapiro and Milo Yiannopoulos.
	A lot of that has been happening in my hometown.
	So it's kind of sad.
	It's a really sad thing to see.
	How long do you think this has been culminating for?
	Is there a particular starting point?
	Or was it just...
	Maybe was it always there?
	Well, I mean, I'm no big expert on the history of cultural Marxism.
	So I'm just going to give you a couple of very broad strokes that may be subject to future revision, but this is the same virus that hit Europe in the 1920s and the 1930s.
	And it is the same virus that contributed significantly to the huge decline in Western society in Europe.
	And then, you know, the communists, and since we're talking about Marxism, we're the communists that took over a third of the globe in the first half of the 20th century.
	I mean, it was an astonishingly successful movement.
	Astonishingly successful movement.
	Almost without precedent in human history.
	A third of the globe in 30, 40 years.
	30 or 40 years.
	Well, that's because they were committed.
	And that's why I point out the value of commitment to your particular causes.
	Hopefully for virtue, and don't be committed if you're a bad guy, but they generally tend to be.
	And so, in Europe, they kind of mess things up.
	And, you know, this is to a much smaller degree, but...
	The danger of, I mean, Europe feeling that it was in danger of succumbing to communism in the 1920s and in particular in the 1930s.
	The fear of the Red Scare really originated in the 1930s because there was, of course, the perception, and well promulgated by those on the left, that capitalism had failed because of the Great Depression, because you had 25% unemployment grinding on year after year, massive amounts of business failures, bank runs, a worse than moribund economy.
	And so the Marxists, of course, seized upon all of this, as they would be wont to do, and said, well, you see, this is exactly what we predicted, that we've reached the end of capitalism, and now we must have communism in order to make everything better, in order to fix everything.
	And this was, of course, in full accordance with Marxist theory, which is that to gain a communist society, you have to go from feudalism through to capitalism, feudalism, industrialization, capitalism, and then you get communism.
	And they had a bit of a kink in the theory in that the two biggest countries that went communist, Russia and China, had not gone through the capitalist phase first.
	But that's neither here nor there at the moment.
	And so there was this desperate fear in Europe after they saw what happened in Russia in particular.
	Of course, China didn't go communist until after the Second World War, but in Russia they saw the communists come into power and slaughter.
	Millions and millions of citizens.
	And it was terrifying to people in Europe in the 1930s.
	And they could not, you know, they had lost the basic premise of the free market.
	And they didn't have enough strong intellectuals pushing back against the collectivism of all of these New Deal policies that were not just in America but other places in Europe.
	As all the governments that were bereft of small market people or free market people, small government people, they attempted to struggle with this catastrophic depression by layering in more layers of government bureaucracy and higher taxes and more government redistribution because the ideological battle had been won by the Fabian socialists at the early part of the 20th century where they had made a very strong case.
	This is H.G. Wells, I think, George Bernard Shaw and others, and they basically made a Socialism, through plays and through art and poetry, novels, lots of, you know, in the way that now, of course, the leftists are trying to win the art wars and not, I think, succeeding as much anymore.
	So this desperate terror of communism provoked fascism.
	And fascism, of course, was in other areas as well.
	But there's a little bit of that, definitely that sort of Tendency going on, the pendulum swing.
	And fascism is a topic for another time, but is a sort of vaguely primitive form of in-group preference that is not about freedom.
	It is about solidarity, usually to a nation or a race or some other kind of group.
	And it is in direct contrast to the Globalism 1.0, which was communism.
	Communism was a system which, to be perfected, to be right, to achieve its full flower and fruition, had to be worldwide.
	And so, whenever you try to gather and grab all of these disparate human groups and jam them into one category, things go badly.
	You can appeal to out-group preferences for a while, But then when the in-group starts to feel threatened, there's usually a backlash.
	And the globalism 1.0 was communism.
	And globalism 2.0 is what's being referred to back and forth in the current American election.
	And it is the same thing.
	You say to everyone, well, everyone should get jammed together and we should all live in the same area.
	And you have a very powerful state.
	See, again, I'm I'm all for multiculturalism as long as you don't have this all-powerful state, because I just can't be bothered to police who lives where.
	But I do think that with an all-powerful state, when you have large groups of different ideologies moving in that have some win-lose interactions baked into the mix, then it's indistinguishable from religions.
	And we all know from the history of Europe that when there was a powerful state that controlled religious expression, then all the religions were trying to gain control of that state apparatus to impose their will on the other religions.
	And you had centuries of religious warfare finally solved by the separation of church and state.
	Hopefully we won't need centuries of warfare to separate state and economics.
	But that globalism of communism made people feel very small because they were portrayed and viewed as cogs in a giant economic determinism machine.
	And when people feel very small, after a while, they get kind of pissed off.
	And then they want to feel big again.
	And then you get some sort of fascist or national socialist leader who screams that they are the greatest thing since sliced bread.
	And everyone's like, well, that's better because I was just feeling like a tiny cog in a socialist machine.
	So now, but then of course they swing to the other extreme.
	And instead of wishing to destroy their own nation, they then wish to expand their nation and dominate others.
	dudes, somewhere in the middle is fine for now and So then when the war started, you know, the ideologues, not so good with the guns, right?
	They're not fighters.
	They're academics, right?
	And so when the war started, and throughout the war, and certainly at the end of the war, they all left for America, these guys.
	And then they took their positions because of the GI Bill.
	It vastly swelled American university roles.
	The GI Bill was like a sort of, in a way, a souped-up version of the student loan guarantees and student loan subsidies that the federal government is giving.
	It allows academia to expand too quickly.
	And when you expand too quickly, you end up with much lower quality.
	That's inevitable, right?
	And...
	Like, if you've got a week...
	If you've got a month to hire one person, you're probably going to get the best person.
	If you've got a week to hire a thousand people, well...
	Can you breathe?
	Okay, in you go, right?
	And so the European lefties and all that, they all came to America, and because there was such a huge expansion, state-funded expansion of the university system, they had to hire people,
	and there weren't enough native academics, so they hired a bunch of these Europeans who then got into their tenured positions and started spewing the same crap in the post-war period, which then flowered into The lefty, collectivism, hippie stuff of the 60s.
	And, of course, in that you had the giant bomb of the birth control pill, which I'll go into another time.
	I've got a bunch of notes about what I want to...
	You know, it's like this...
	I've used the analogy before, like that big giant ball that almost crushes Indiana Jones in the first movie in terms of its impact on society.
	And the birth control bill's impact...
	Would not have been, I think, so substantially negative had there not also been a welfare state.
	But the birth control pill, in a sense, almost necessitated the welfare state.
	Because it unleashed sexuality or it uncoupled sexuality from monogamy.
	And when you uncouple sexuality from monogamy, you end up with a lot of single moms.
	And when you have a lot of single moms, you have to have a welfare state.
	So, there was a bit of a retrenchment that occurred in the 80s with the rise of neoconservatism and Reagan and Thatcher.
	There was a pushback against this rising tide of leftism.
	And I think it bought us another generation, which is great.
	In the same way Joseph McCarthy bought America a generation from being basically almost taken over by...
	Soviet spies in the State Department.
	But there was a bit of a pushback.
	And I was sort of fortunate in a way to be riding some of the wave of that pushback when I was in college.
	It wasn't so wildly outlandish.
	I mean, I was a little more so because I was an objectivist, but it wasn't so crazy to have the positions that I was in.
	And that did not last.
	That did not last for a variety of reasons, which I won't get into here.
	But there has been, of course, a redoubling down of this leftist imperative.
	This is judging people by categories.
	A group is not individualistic at all.
	All egalitarianism is collectivist because it posits the lie that we're all somehow fundamentally equal.
	We're all the same deep down.
	It's like, well, I guess we all have spines, except for Republicans.
	But it's the mental configuration that counts.
	So, right now, there has been a big push for hiring, a big expansion of college.
	And again, when big expansions occur, in general, quality of people go down.
	And whenever anything is uncoupled from being Rules by the discipline of the market, it just goes haywire.
	The market is the great discipline that keeps you focused.
	People say, because YouTube has begun...
	The policy's been around for a while, but Paul Joseph Watson was just writing about that some of his videos have been demonetized because they're too controversial and so on.
	That is inevitable in many ways.
	I don't have any particular problem with it.
	YouTube can do whatever it wants, and it's certainly not obligated.
	You know, if you have a product, you don't necessarily want it next to a very controversial video, which is something I've said many times over the years when people say, why don't you just monetize your videos?
	Because I'm not an idiot.
	I mean, not that people who do are idiots, it's just that if that's your sole source of income, you're putting all your eggs in one basket, which as an entrepreneur, I don't like to do.
	So, this...
	Focus now is that there's this giant collectivism, there's this group everyone by category, and there are, I think, there has been a general dumbing down of the curriculum over the past 50 years for a variety of reasons.
	And you have people now who I think are in college, a lot of whom don't know how to formulate a response to a challenging argument.
	And because of that, Inability or unwillingness or whatever it is, there then is a market for censorship or repression or not being exposed to these opposite arguments.
	And it's in many ways the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is people think they're a lot better at things than they are.
	And, you know, for some 18 or 19-year-old or 20-year-old to say, I know that what...
	So-and-so has to say is irredeemably wrong and bad and evil and this and that and the other, and therefore we should ban that person from coming to talk to people, is the height of arrogance that wise people would recoil from.
	I am extremely tentative when it comes to coming to conclusions about things because the amount of data, the amount of specialty, the amount of information is...
	Enormous in the world.
	Other than the basics like UPB and self-ownership and property rights and all that kind of stuff, I have a really tough time coming to any conclusions.
	I really, of course, believe that the best cure for bad speech is more speech, not exclusion.
	But if you are unable or unwilling to make an argument against something you disagree with, Which was the training.
	I don't know if it is anymore, but it was certainly the training I got in high school.
	We had Model UN. We had debate societies.
	I was vice president of a debate society in college and did a lot of debating.
	And so opposite arguments, shocking opinions don't frighten me.
	I sometimes don't like them.
	Which is why I pour effort into hopefully debunking in a valuable way.
	But if somebody comes to me and says, I think that we should have, the proletariat should own the means of production.
	Like, okay, well, tell me.
	Tell me more.
	I'm not going to get offended because you say that.
	I may get offended if you try to impose it using a giant state apparatus.
	But I'm not going to get offended if this is the case that you want to make.
	Let's just chat it out.
	But I read a report recently that said that in some places in America, the average grade 12 student is reading at a grade five and a half level.
	Wow, really?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, and you know, we struggled through Shakespeare.
	I remember, I think it was in junior high, being in a production of A Long Day's Journey Into Night.
	Not like a big production, like a But a little production of A Long Day's Journey into Night.
	Did a couple of scene studies with my partner.
	Was it that?
	No, I'm sorry.
	Let me correct myself.
	That may have been a bit too dark for the kiddies.
	It was Tennessee Williams' Glass Menagerie.
	Not that, sorry.
	I still remember that it was a foreign exchange student who I was working with, a really nice young girl, and she had just the funniest accent when she was trying to do a southern accent with her blend of wherever she'd come from.
	It was really quite...
	Quite funny, but she's actually a pretty good actress.
	But anyway, so I think that people have been sort of cruelly robbed of the intellectual tools that they need to have conversations that are win-win.
	So now you end up with these conversations in colleges that are perceived as win-lose.
	Like if this person gets to speak Terrible, awful, disastrous, bad things will happen.
	You know, this sort of trickly puff, arm shaking, screaming, racist, and all this sort of stuff.
	Sexist, homophobic, and so on.
	Well, in my opinion, it's sort of a confession that you don't really know what college is for.
	College, I think, ideally, there should be fewer, and it should be more elite.
	But it is for learning how to debate and having the sharpest minds with the best evidence bringing the best case forward because society needs to make decisions and we need to have as open a set of warring perspectives as we can to make sure that we get the best answers in the long run.
	I hope that helps.
	It's a little bit of a sprint but I think that's my sort of analysis of where it came from.
	Oh, that's a mouthful.
	But, usually, I've engaged, actually, I've engaged, I think a couple seemingly well-read socialists.
	One of them was a fellow student in a college that I used to go to, and the other seemed to be Much more, I would say, much more well-read on things like free trade, the TPP, the Federal Reserve, all these different things, all these different topics.
	Usually, all the cases that I made on behalf of a much more liberated market, the response I'd get is that, oh well, It was the trickle-down economics from the Reagan era that culminated to our economic crash.
	Somewhere in the 2000s or so.
	That's proof that capitalism is flawed.
	It doesn't work and should be replaced with socialism.
	There's also this excuse that there's income inequality and that women are paid less because they don't have maternity leave.
	Or that parents, in general, don't have paternity leave.
	Okay, hang on.
	We've got to just take these one at a time.
	Because, I mean, oh my god.
	And look, this is true not just on the left, but since we happen to be picking on the left, let me at least just make the case that they're usually not very good at debating.
	Yeah.
	They're just not.
	Because you have this thing where the Laffer curve doesn't work, trickle-down economics doesn't work.
	This particular policy enacted 10 years before led inexorably to this particular highly negative outcome.
	And therefore, anything associated with that policy, like lowering taxes or liberalizing trade or whatever, is automatically bad.
	That is really, really bad reasoning.
	It's not even reasoning.
	It's just ooga booga.
	Bad thing happened.
	I'm blaming capitalism.
	It's just a name that they give out.
	Like, yeah, trickle-down economics, supply-side economics, Reaganomics.
	Voodoo economics.
	Yeah.
	I mean, it's terrible.
	It's terrible.
	Don't define it.
	And so I'm just left there, you know, kind of dumbfounded.
	You know, like, how do I respond to that?
	Because what are they trying to tell me?
	Like, what point are they trying to make?
	You know, okay, trickle-down economics.
	What about it?
	Well, and if you ask them to explain what it is, they would probably say, well, it's the idea that if we let the rich get rich, the money will somehow trickle down to the poor.
	And it's not really what it is.
	But anyway, it's all terrible stuff because there's no clear causality, number one.
	Number two, it goes against the things that they claim that they know.
	Is the problem with trickle-down economics or is the problem with the Federal Reserve?
	Right.
	Which one is more influential?
	Actually, one of them told me...
	On the marketplace.
	Outright told me that the Federal Reserve is privately owned and therefore capitalism is bad.
	Oh, God.
	Oh, yeah.
	No, if I had a dime for every single time that I heard this comment, it's privately owned.
	It's like, okay.
	But it's a...
	I mean, things are privately owned in fascism.
	Who cares?
	It's still not the free market.
	And...
	The government grants it a monopoly.
	So how is that part of the free market?
	It's privately owned.
	But that's like saying, well, the government is not the government because people put their government paychecks in private bank accounts, therefore it's privately owned.
	I mean, it's just, come on.
	I mean, if it's a government monopoly, it's a government monopoly.
	I don't care who owns it fundamentally.
	But, yeah, and the other thing, which is where these people are in exceedingly thin ice, is because If negative consequences are reason to reject an entire system, then what about the 94 million killed under communism in the 20th century alone?
	All these people died under communism.
	This doesn't even count all the people who half died in the gulags or struggled through the various state-engineered collectivist farming famines and all that.
	I mean, holy God.
	I mean, if you're going to – which is worse, trickle-down economics leading to a crash?
	Even if we say that's true, it's still a hell of a lot better than communism leading to the deaths of 94 million goddamn people.
	Anyway.
	I have a friend, a Norwegian friend living in China with his wife, and he actually told me he mentioned something about Mao being responsible for those several millions of deaths under communism.
	And most of the people who hear that would laugh and go, no, you've been misled, that you've been misinformed.
	Mao was actually a really great guy.
	This is all just Western propaganda.
	That's like the typical response he gets from the average Chinese person over there, and he lives there.
	So he's kind of sort of dumbfounded by that.
	Well, why?
	I mean, why?
	I mean, do they have a particular view of the benevolence of disastrous leaders, but then you go to people in the West and you say, well, there's this leader and there's that leader, and they're like, oh no, they were good.
	They're just, you know...
	Right?
	Yeah.
	It's all right-wing or left-wing propaganda that you have a negative view of this person.
	They're really wonderful.
	Anyway, so I'm going to move on to the next caller, but I'd really appreciate the call.
	And thanks for giving me the chance to wander down memory lane and recall the intellectual battles of my youth that turned me into the hardened, sharp, and terminated mind warrior that I am today.
	So thanks.
	A really, really enjoyable chat.
	Feel free to call back.
	Take care.
	Alright, up next we have Evan.
	Evan wrote in and said, I listened to your other videos regarding climate change and agree that there is less total pollution today, but I would like to add that there is a much higher carbon output.
	Do you believe that our carbon output hurts the environment?
	That's from Evan.
	Ryan wrote in and said, why have athletics and the sports media in particular become a pulpit for the left and social justice warriors to advance their agenda?
	Is moral courage an accurate term to describe speaking the truth despite the social consequences?
	What are the possible long-term risks of having the word courage and its true meaning diluted by athletes and pundits in the sports media?
	That's from Ryan.
	Hey Ryan, how you doing?
	Doing alright.
	Well, you know, it's funny, and I forgot to mention this in the video we did on Colin Kaepernick, the black athlete, I guess the half-black athlete who didn't want to stand for the national anthem.
	Yes, that makes this very topical.
	I wasn't intended that way, but it is now.
	I just wanted to mention, because there's an argument that floats around that says, well, he's rich, therefore he shouldn't do that.
	He can't claim that he wants to talk about oppression because he's rich.
	That, I think, is not a good...
	I'm not saying that's your argument, of course, but it's not a very good argument, because...
	If you do have money, then you can still talk about the oppression of other people.
	I mean, he's not saying I'm oppressed.
	He's saying blacks are oppressed or, you know, there's a group.
	And so, yeah, I mean, what do we say?
	Well, what is the cutoff?
	You know, is it still like donation levels for political campaigns?
	You can only go to 25.
	Once you make more than $2,500 a month, you can't talk about oppression.
	It's like, well, that means that basically the only people who are allowed to talk about oppression are people who are never going to have much of a national or public voice.
	So I don't agree with...
	That he shouldn't talk about oppression just because he's very well paid.
	That, I think, is not fair and not valid.
	Well, what's obvious to me is if the goal was to create change and to, you know, advance whatever agenda or stop the injustice that he believes is going on, that's obviously not the most effective way to go about that.
	It's to get attention or...
	I'm not exactly sure.
	Well, I don't know.
	I mean, I wouldn't speculate as to his motives.
	He may be entirely sincere.
	He may not be.
	But I will say this, that he didn't have to do it, and he's taking some heat, right?
	Oh, no.
	There are quite a few people that are speaking out against it, and the coverage of that has been, I mean, I'd say pretty fair, just because there are multiple sides to it, and I think people are a little bit more likely to Stand up for the country as a whole rather than one specific agenda because I think people on the left could be against him in this just because they're more in favor of just the country as a whole.
	It's not like by going against Kaepernick sitting down during the national anthem, they're not becoming pro-Trump.
	They're just Sustaining by the country and the troops and that's all mixed into it too.
	It's just, you know, this insane nationalism.
	Well, look, I mean, he wants to talk about the fact that certain segments of the black community are not doing well.
	Now, I mean, I don't know what his particular belief system is as far as I haven't read if he's got a manifesto or whatever it is, but...
	I think that this is something that America does need to keep talking about until there is some progress that is made.
	Now, if Colin Kaepernick had gotten up and said, I think it's extraordinarily tragic that black men like my own father seem to have less than perfect commitment to their children on average, then that to me would be a pretty powerful And if you were to say,
	well, back in the day, in the late 1800s, in the 1920s, in the 1940s, in the 1950s, the black family was very stable.
	And I was fortunate to grow up in a stable family, and look where it got me, a $114 million contract.
	So I would like to talk about how best To encourage and remind black women to choose better black men and for black men to be better fathers.
	I mean, that would be a powerful statement to make.
	And he would not obviously be the first black person.
	There's a whole movement called the Sister I'm Sorry movement, which is black men apologizing to...
	I don't know if it's still around, but black men apologizing to black women.
	And that would have been a very powerful thing.
	And to me...
	As far as I understand it, I think his general approach is that there's racism, you know, and that explains everything.
	Yeah, it's a very unsophisticated way of saying exactly that, that there is racism that we need to be aware of.
	Right, right.
	And that is...
	I don't find that particularly courageous.
	Oh, I would say not, no.
	I mean, it's courageous for him to, you know, he is going to risk some endorsements, and he is going to risk some negative feedback, and I don't follow football, but, you know, certainly some people were writing in to say, well, you know, he's a fading star, or whatever it is, right?
	But look, he wants to do good things for, I don't know what I mean, say, his community, because, again, he's half black, raised by white people, right?
	I don't know what to say, but he wants...
	He wants the black community to do better.
	And dear God, don't we all?
	Don't we all?
	And, I mean, a lot of my effort and focus is trying to raise awareness of issues that are often obscured or brushed over that I think would be a benefit to various communities.
	And if he had taken a stand that was more surprising or startling to people...
	That, to me, would have taken more courage.
	Because what he did, he knew he would have the backing of the left-wing media.
	Oh, absolutely.
	And anybody who says, well, okay, let me make sure the media is on my side, and now I'm going.
	Well, I just don't find that particularly courageous.
	I'm not saying it's not courageous, but it would be a lot more courageous to, I think, to have taken a stand...
	With some important facts that a lot of black activists are trying to get across to the black community, but the mainstream media won't let them, I think.
	To take a stand that does involve explaining a little bit from both sides of whatever arguments could be had for either side.
	That there are racism that's being directed at black people from law enforcement, from just white people in general.
	That is going on, obviously, somewhere in the country and in the world.
	Also explain that a lot of that is down to problems that are in whatever the black community is, but there's problems that are from within that, not 100% from this systemic racism in the world.
	Mike, did you want to jump in?
	Because I think you've fleshed out fine young Mr.
	Kaepernick's perspectives a little bit more.
	Yeah, if you look at his Twitter account, it's all police are automatically guilty type stuff he was railing against.
	The police in Baltimore that were acquitted and are now, I believe, going after the city for being prosecuted for practically no reason other than just trumped up, cops are racist, so we have to prosecute them so people don't burn down the city charges.
	I'm not getting the, you know, I want the black community to do better vibe.
	I'm getting the, I want, you know, white people and police to change because they're holding us down, which is a completely different thing.
	On average, if he was talking about the rate of illegitimacy in the black community or things as a role model and as a public sports figure of some notoriety, he could have some sway in bringing attention to these issues.
	If he was talking about those, I'd feel more sympathetic to his cause.
	And you can be on the left and do that.
	You certainly can.
	I mean, Bill Cosby with his famous sort of pound cake speech, or putting...
	Pound cake speech, I think it was called, and people should look that up on YouTube.
	I mean, I think he was a pretty regular donor to the Democrats, and he was...
	I think pretty scathing towards certain elements of black culture.
	So you can be on the left and still do that, but that's obviously not the approach that he wanted to take, and I think that's a real shame.
	And there's also talk as well that the fading star element, that he may have been cut from the team this year.
	And if he is cut from the team, he was cut from the team because he did this, so therefore he's the ultimate victim, setting up the next career.
	Oh, man.
	Or maybe he can eke out another year by, we don't want to cut this guy, because now a lot of people are going to pay us.
	He's saying, you can't cut me now, right?
	Because now it'll look like retaliation for this, right?
	It's awfully interesting that as his career is going through the floor, now is when he decides to take a stand, as opposed to...
	No, I'm sorry if I'm pushing your football knowledge.
	It's not like we're talking about hockey, but when it comes to his career going through the floor, I mean, he's still a pretty young guy, right?
	I mean...
	Quarterbacks can last into their 30s and 40s, assuming the guards of knee injuries don't strike them down from above.
	Not if you're not playing well.
	I'm understanding he was going to be the backup this year, or he's set to be the backup as it currently stands.
	And he's getting paid a whole lot of money to be the backup, which there's all types of problems with salary cap, if you can cut people and how much still goes toward your cap.
	And again, football is not exactly my wheelhouse.
	And I think there's more going on than just he wants to help the black community.
	Well, the other thing too, you know, and this is maybe a too charitable way of looking at it, and guys let me know what you think, but I can sort of see, like, he's used to being part of a team.
	I mean, to get to that level of athletic excellence, he's got to have been playing since he was in the single digits, you know, mid-single digits as far as...
	other team sports go.
	So he's always used to being part of a team.
	I just wonder the degree to which if he's going to get cut, that he's like, okay, well now I have a new team.
	Like I need a new team.
	I can't be without a team.
	So now he's sort of making a play for his new team, social justice warriors or whatever the hell is going to come next.
	It's one possibility.
	Certainly makes sense to me.
	As to what it means, well, you know, standing or sitting to a piece of music is not an argument.
	That's, you know, and, and, you know, you, you can get attention for these things.
	And then the question is, what are you going to say when you have that attention?
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	And, you know, I think we're past...
	I think we're past this sort of peak social justice warrior stuff, and I just think it seems a little retro to me to sort of climb off the...
	To climb on the sort of, everyone's a racist.
	What a new novel thought that no one's ever heard before.
	Thank you for opening your mouth, otherwise we'd be completely lost in the wilderness.
	How do you spell that?
	R, A, and then what?
	Is that an S in the middle?
	Racism?
	I've never heard that word before.
	It's like, okay, yeah.
	Thanks, Mr.
	Trotsky.
	We find that this is just working hunky-dory.
	And, you know, that, of course, is the big...
	In a sense, gift of clarity, which got at least a half-black president and a black attorney general.
	If you look at all the black-controlled Democrat cities and so on, it's one of these things that is only compelling until you start looking at pictures and reading numbers around America.
	I have no problem With people obviously getting up and speaking, if he doesn't want to stand for the national anthem, don't stand for the national anthem.
	Yeah, I mean, he can say whatever he wants, but, you know, he should be evaluated not relative to his fame, but he should be evaluated relative to the quality of his arguments.
	And wasn't he the guy who wore police pig socks?
	Oh, yes.
	That's the latest thing that has happened as well.
	not an argument.
	Socks are not an argument.
	The things I have to say on this show, Mike, help me, help me out here.
	Socks are not an argument.
	So I just, I don't know.
	It's, um...
	Raise awareness all you want.
	I mean it's really, really important that Leonardo DiCaprio fly airplanes across the country to make sure he gets to his yacht on time so he can tell us all about how bad it is that we overconsume things.
	So the only thing he's conserving is Gillette razors apparently these days.
	But yeah, I mean if he wants to not stand, if he wants to raise awareness to an issue, that's fine.
	And if he's got anything intelligent to say, I mean I'd be the first to listen and applaud him.
	But it seems like he's just been handed a bunch of talking points and the complexity of these topics is enormous.
	And I don't know.
	Am I going to take advice from somebody who's potentially been exposed to a lot of head injuries?
	I don't know.
	It's hard to say.
	It's hard to say.
	Well, there's an element to this, too, that no one is talking about that I find particularly curious.
	There's a loyalty element to your team and the organization.
	At least there would be for me.
	And this is putting not only the organization but all of his teammates in very, very strange positions.
	And it's going to completely divide the team.
	I can imagine the locker room is completely divided over what he's done.
	Oh, I've seen some interviews with his teammates where they're like, uh, I guess he has the right to do so.
	I'm not sure what to think.
	Like, it's pretty awkward.
	Oh, yeah.
	You know, don't get mad at me.
	I'd like to play football.
	Can you not get mad at me?
	I don't want to make a political statement.
	So the team's completely divided.
	And just from a sheer loyalty standpoint, especially given the amount of money he's being paid...
	I understand if you have political statements, and there's a time and a place for that, I do think.
	But this is kind of a dick move when it comes to the team and his occupation as a whole.
	It's a challenge, of course, because if he is cut from the team, nobody cares whether he sits or stands for the national anthem.
	This is true.
	So if he's going to get the kind of publicity that he wants for his, let's just loosely call them arguments or socks or whatever they are, then he kind of has to do it in a way that is going to dick up the team, right?
	Because if he waits until he's not part of the team, he's not going to have that platform anymore.
	That's true.
	That's certainly true.
	But, you know, there's plenty of past sports stars of notoriety, and I think he would classify in that group that even after their playing career is over, they certainly get attention if they were to make political statements.
	I mean, Shaq gets pulled up every five seconds, and he's on a star of the level of Shaq.
	But, you know, we're always, what's Charles Barkley got to say about this?
	Okay, let's find out.
	You know, if you reach a certain level of notoriety, especially in your local community, you can certainly make an impact long after your playing days are behind you.
	Yeah, I mean, listen, I have the world's biggest philosophy show after my 10-year career as a junior violinist in the church orchestra.
	So I pretty much know exactly where you're coming from and where he's coming from, and obviously pretty much the same level.
	You're very pretty, Steph.
	Very good point.
	Very good point.
	You're so pretty.
	I'll do some sit-ups, not so much with the violin.
	Okay, so does that help?
	Well, I'd be a little more interested on the broader scope of just sports media as opposed to news media or You know, political or something like that, or certainly social media, if you can call that media.
	But just the way that...
	Wait, hang on.
	You're just totally dissing social media here?
	Yes.
	I might be the only one, I guess.
	I might be the only one.
	Yeah, you...
	Compared to what?
	Compared to the mainstream media?
	Anyway.
	Sorry, go on.
	It's the lesser of two evils, or three evils, however many there are.
	Well, it's...
	And I understand where they're coming from.
	ESPN is owned by Disney, and they have an interest in keeping things, I guess, not controversial, you could say.
	I mean, you don't want to have a political argument breaking out in the middle of the pregame show for whatever game is going on.
	Hang on, hang on.
	If you think Disney is not radical, I think you need to think again.
	I think Disney is an extremely radical organization, just in terms of the social messages they put into their movies.
	But anyway, I get sort of where you're coming from.
	People don't want their sports stuff necessarily interrupted with political monologues.
	That's the thing.
	Disney is absolutely, I mean, like you said, radical in the views that they're, you know, the angles that they're pushing.
	But it's almost as if sports media gets to choose what they believe is going to be controversial and what is not.
	I don't follow that.
	Well...
	If you dig into the arguments that they're making, that Disney would be pushing, that Kaepernick is pushing, or whatever the left-side argument would be, I guess if you could say, if you dig into that, I feel like that's a whole lot more controversial than the opposition could be.
	But they choose to censor arguments that they believe don't interest their financial agenda in the end, I believe.
	Sure.
	Sure.
	Yeah, and look, it is sad that there is this conflation in people's minds with money and competence.
	He's famous, and therefore what he has to say must be important.
	Uh, and I mean the, the people who the public figures who people look up as sort of intellectual or moral heroes these days, um, I, I would not say is quite cut from the same class as they were in the past.
	And it could just be me sort of painting the past in, in golden shot through a honey brand muffin Hughes.
	But, uh, I just think that, uh, this guy ain't no Thomas Moore and, uh, he ain't no Martin Luther King Jr.
	And, uh, I just think that, uh, uh, I don't know.
	Where people get their inspiration from these days is from larger-than-life figures in one area, but that doesn't translate into other areas.
	Maybe he'll write a book.
	Maybe he'll go on a speaking tour.
	Maybe he'll do some really cool stuff, and maybe this is just the beginning.
	If he can come up with some good arguments that actually have some substance to them, then that would be great if he could help.
	If he could help the black community in an actual way rather than, you know, some type of posturing, that would be preferable.
	Yes, and I think he would be in a unique position to say to the black community, given how much he was helped by whites, to say, look, white people are not your enemy.
	I mean, it was my black father who abandoned me, my white White birth mother who decided to give me up for adoption because she was, I think, 19 or 20.
	And, you know, a white family who raised me and they seem like wonderful parents in many ways.
	And so maybe there's something he could say about, look, I mean, I can't say that white people are my enemy because white people have done me enormously great services and raised me well and so on.
	And maybe he could do something to heal divides, to lower levels of animosity.
	Maybe he could say, look, white families stay together more than black families, and Asian families stay together even more than white families, so let's go down to Chinatown and figure out how they're doing it.
	You know, whatever could happen.
	And the idea that we can learn...
	From one another.
	Different ethnicities, different groups, different races, that we can learn from one another.
	We're all in this thing together.
	We can find some positive things to get from each community.
	And that's not to sort of aggregate every community, but you know what I mean.
	And why couldn't he be someone who says, look, I'm half black, I'm half white.
	I, you know, I get the black culture.
	I assume he's got some familiarity with it because he's talking a lot about the black cultural issues or certain issues.
	And he also really gets the white culture because he grew up in Wisconsin, raised by a white family.
	And so couldn't he be like a bridge across the waters kind of guy helping to close the gap, helping to close the divide?
	And that's not...
	What he seems to be choosing at this time.
	And I think that's a real shame.
	I absolutely agree.
	Let me just read something real quick.
	A woman beaten to death with a lamp in an act of domestic violence.
	A man fatally stabbed during an argument outside a tavern.
	A man shot and killed while returning from a funeral for his grandfather.
	Those are just three of the 24 homicides recorded in August.
	Milwaukee police have termed the deadliest month in 25 years.
	This kind of stuff is happening in lots of predominantly black major cities across the United States.
	Lots of people are dying.
	There are bodies piling up.
	And the people that are continuing to fan the flames of this anti-police rhetoric, they have black blood on their hands.
	So when he wants to wear socks that say police are pigs, and he wants to continue to inflame hostilities against the police between the black community and the people that are often getting called to prevent these types of issues, he's got blood on his hands.
	I can't look at it as anything but that.
	If you want to fan the flames of anti-police sediment in the black community, you have blood on your hands.
	And those numbers and those bodies continue to pile up.
	Well, and there does seem to be a correlation, to further Mike's point, there's a correlation between the rise of the Ferguson effect, which is named after, of course, the riots in Ferguson and the eruption of additional tensions between police and the black community, certain elements within the black community.
	Yeah.
	There are statistically probably quite countable additional bodies as a result of all of this rhetoric.
	And it does have deadly consequences.
	And I think you'd have to be pretty ideologically...
	You'd have to have your ideological blinders on pretty damn hard to miss it.
	Well, one of the things that I think is more dangerous about getting politics or...
	Something like that involved in sports in the first place.
	Like you said, you have to have your blinders on to not notice it, but people's defenses are down, certainly, just because you turn on ESPN or whatever it may be, you're vegging out.
	You're not hoping to get into some in-depth political discussion, but a lot of times it does turn that way, at least subliminally.
	Right.
	Well, we'll have to see.
	You know, I mean, I think that America is at a real crossroads coming up in November.
	And we'll see.
	There are a wide variety of perspectives and opinions in the black community.
	And right now, there's a bit of picky choosy stuff going on in the media, to put it mildly.
	And the full spectrum is not being broadcast.
	And...
	It's my hope, of course, that a wider and richer discussion of issues within the black community and other communities may be possible at some point.
	The fact that Donald Trump is talking about the negative effects that uncontrolled immigration is having on black employment and Hispanic employment, you would never, I think, really have seen that perspective coming out of the mainstream media.
	And These kinds of approaches and these kinds of arguments need to be added to the mix so that we can all continue to bend our brains to solve some of these problems and bring more peace and stability to various communities.
	So hopefully the discussion tent is going to get a little wider, a little more open, and things will improve from there because I think it's pretty clear to say that the left repeatedly banging on the drum of racism is not solving the problem.
	At least.
	All right.
	Well, thanks very much for the call.
	I appreciate it.
	And let's move on to the next caller.
	All right.
	Up next, we have Evan.
	Evan wrote in and said, I listened to your other videos regarding climate change and agree that there is less total pollution today, but I would like to add that there is a much higher carbon output.
	Do you believe that our carbon output hurts the environment?
	That's from Evan.
	Hello, Evan.
	How are you doing?
	I'm doing great, Steph.
	I'm honored to be here.
	Well, thank you very much.
	That's very, very kind of you.
	Do I believe that CO2 harms the environment?
	Do you believe that, you know, since the Industrial Revolution, the changes in technology and carbon output and everything that we're basically doing, do you think that it has a negative side effect?
	Because some of the people say, you know, CO2 is causing global warming, climate change, whatever you want to call it.
	Well, CO2 has certainly risen since industrialization, and I think it's sort of basically the big push has sort of been mid-last century.
	That's sort of my understanding.
	Temperatures were rising before that.
	There's actually some data which you can find out, which is that sort of the first couple of decades of the 20th century mirror in many ways some of the warming that has occurred in the last couple of decades of the 20th century.
	So, without a doubt, human beings are contributing to Okay, so you're not denying that we put out CO2? Well, no, that would be to deny physics.
	Thank you.
	That's how I know that you're rational.
	Yeah, the internal combustion engine...
	We don't do anything.
	We don't produce any CO2, is what some people say.
	Well, you know, given that I breathe out, it would be very tough for me to say I don't produce any CO2 and I eat Indian.
	But anyway, so no, there's no question that human beings are in the process of converting...
	Well, I guess re-releasing CO2 back into the atmosphere that formerly was trapped in fossil fuels and unavailable to plants as food.
	So yeah, no question that human beings are liberating CO2 from its historical prison and releasing it into the atmosphere.
	And there's no question that that has an effect on the environment.
	I don't see how that could possibly be disputed.
	I think that the numbers are pretty clear.
	That's good to hear, because now let me ask you a bigger question of, so overall you agree that there is climate change then, man-made climate change, would you put yourself in that camp?
	Well again, the terms are very...
	Very challenging.
	Yeah, very loaded.
	Yeah, the terms are very challenging.
	But of course, when you increase CO2 in the atmosphere, it is going to have an effect on the environment.
	Now, whether that is climate change as a whole, whether it's catastrophic climate change and so on, well, I'm open to arguments, but I don't have a firm position on that as yet.
	Okay.
	I remain a skeptic for a variety of reasons, which we can get into.
	But, yeah, of course, yeah, CO2 is going out.
	And, I mean, we know, for instance, that crop yields are up enormously, or significantly, around the world.
	That's good to hear that you're on the rational quying field, because, you know, that stuff on the...
	Yeah, forest cover is up.
	Basically, as you know, we breathe in oxygen, breathe out CO2, and plants breathe in CO2 and breathe out oxygen.
	So we're in a reciprocal exchange relationship, oxygen and CO2, with our friendly sunlight-based cousins in the ground.
	And so we know that, at least I think it's fairly clear, that human beings are, through our production of CO2 into the atmosphere, are helping to trigger significant Increases in plant growth around the world.
	And that has some positive aspects in terms of, hey, food!
	Nice!
	Excellent!
	It has negative aspects, I assume, in terms of algae growth and certain things that are going to change some of the ecologies of water-based environments and so on.
	But whether this is some sort of massive change in the climate of the planet as a whole, I think that's tricky because if we were simply Pumping CO2 into a closed system.
	Like, for instance, if you had a greenhouse that was perfectly, well, let's not get crazy with the details, but if you had a greenhouse that was sealed and had no plants in it and you kept pumping CO2 into that greenhouse, it would very quickly become uninhabitable for human beings.
	Right?
	I mean, so, because, you know, we need a little bit of the O2 along with the CO2. But if you put a whole bunch of plants in there, which is kind of the way the greenhouses work, right?
	The horticulturalists, they will pump CO2 into the greenhouse to help the plants grow.
	So, we are in a reciprocal relationship, so we put CO2 into the air and the plants take it out.
	So, I don't know.
	I mean, does it have an effect?
	Of course.
	What is the long-term effect?
	Is it scalable and so on?
	Well, I do know this, that a lot of the estimates of what was going to happen have not panned out.
	And that simply indicates that some factor is not being taken into account.
	If the estimates of where the temperature was going to be by now are significantly diverging from what the temperature that's being recorded is now, then...
	We can talk about all that, and I'd like to say a few things first before we get into the details.
	I'm a free market guy all the way.
	I actually work in finance.
	I'm a huge econ guy.
	I consider myself a libertarian.
	But something that always struck me when I was studying free markets...
	Efficiency can come with a price.
	I don't need to explain to you what a negative externality is.
	What I'm worried about, and I started out as a climate change denier.
	I'm like, oh, these hippies just want to make the economy grow slower or something like that.
	I watch a lot of your videos, and I agree with you on the philosophy, but you've got to look at the facts and take emotion out of it and I started looking at the facts and I eventually became a climate change believer and I keep looking at the facts and I'm very worried about what's happening in Russia right now how the Russian tundra the permafrost is starting to melt and I
	won't give you too much information, but the last time the Russian permafrost melted, it was because of a volcano.
	It triggered a massive extinction that killed 95% of the species on Earth.
	And people were linking the updated CO2, the output that we're producing as humans, which is massive compared to what it was before the Industrial Revolution.
	People are comparing that CO2 to the Russian permafrost melting, among other things.
	And if that melts, it could trigger a chain reaction that would acidify our oceans.
	And so I'm very worried that, I mean, climate change, man-made or not, we need to recognize that stuff is going down and the permafrost is melting.
	Right.
	And I don't have any particular information on that.
	But is it fair to say that other than the mass extinction of 95% of all life forms on the planet, you're not worried?
	Well, I mean, that was millions and millions of years ago.
	And so what I'm worried about, I mean, there's many things that climate change could do.
	Shortage of water, just to name one.
	But What I'm very worried about is I look at trends and I look at history.
	The last time a massive extinction happened, it was because the ocean was acidified.
	That's not the correct word, but you know what I mean.
	What I'm worried is it might happen again if this permafrost melts and people are tying it to climate change.
	And now with all these reports that 2016 or 2015 was the hottest year ever and the trend keeps going up...
	Sorry to interrupt, but technically it was not the hottest year ever.
	That's only if you count the land-based temperature measuring stations.
	By satellite it was not the hottest year ever.
	But can we agree it was a very hot year?
	Sure, absolutely.
	And what I'm worried about is the CO2 output compared to the Yeah, what I said, you know, how the ocean is becoming more and more acidic.
	And if an ocean life dies, like what happened, I think it was called the Great Dying.
	It happened, I think, 200 million years ago.
	If that permafrost melts again, which it's already starting to melt, It proved disastrous.
	And there was just a report out two weeks ago that some reindeer in Canada, actually, I think it was Canada, that some reindeer were uncovered.
	And they had anthrax.
	And it spread and it killed more reindeer.
	I think someone went to the hospital.
	What, the rain?
	Sorry, I don't understand the reindeer thing.
	Reindeer had anthrax?
	Yeah, it was a reindeer that died, I think, at least 60 years ago or 70 years ago.
	They were buried, because this is in northern Canada, where I'm assuming there's a lot of permafrost, a lot of cold, a lot of snow.
	And as it warms, the carcasses were exposed, and I guess it infected other reindeer that are still living, and it killed the live reindeer.
	And so there's a worry that some of these infectious diseases, like anthrax, and I think even smallpox, was quoted that smallpox could possibly come back.
	Oh, like re-emerge from frozen carcasses from the past?
	Exactly, but Amprax is the only one that has emerged so far, so that's going to be what I talk about.
	Right, right.
	So, I'm very worried about this whole ordeal, and we have a lot of people in America, at least, who I consider myself conservative, but I don't join the conservative tribe.
	And there's a lot of people who say they're conservative, but they go more off the tribalistic mentality than anything.
	And since, you know, the Republicans say climate change is a hoax, they say, oh, it must be a hoax.
	They don't even do research.
	Right, right.
	Well, listen, I mean, if people are talking about smallpox being released from frozen corpses of reindeer or anthrax, and if people are talking about 95% Yeah,
	and I just want to get to the bottom of it, and we have a political party in the U.S. that doesn't even acknowledge it, and when you try to talk to them about or someone about the CO2 release, there tends to be some kind of, I don't know what you would call it, cognitive bias?
	Why would you assume that the people who believe...
	See, when people say...
	Climate change is a hoax.
	There's lots of layers to that.
	Now, some people, I assume, this is why your initial question to me was around CO2. Some people are saying that there's no additional CO2 in the air.
	I think that's pretty easy to disprove, just to measure it, right?
	Some people are saying that there is CO2 in the air, but it's not going to have catastrophic effects on the climate.
	And other people are saying that there is CO2 in the air, but that the models that are put forward by the scientists have not proven accurate enough to base massive policy decisions upon.
	Some people are saying that there is CO2 in the air produced by men, which has negative effects or even catastrophic effects on the climate.
	And but I don't believe that the solution is more government control, more government policies, more government programs, more government treaties, more like that.
	That's the last thing that you want to get involved in.
	How would you deal with the negative externalities?
	Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	This stuff was old when I was young.
	The fear that human beings have broken some covenant with the planet because...
	We have comfort.
	It's an old idea.
	And this doesn't mean it's false.
	I'm just saying that when I was a kid, as you know, there was this big panic about global cooling.
	And this was the big anxiety.
	And I'm sure Lloyd DeMoss would psychologically pin it down to growth anxiety or something like that.
	But anyway.
	There's this idea that pride goes before a fall, that Icarus flies too close to the sun, that we've gotten too comfortable, that things are too good and bad things are just about to happen.
	And that is...
	I mean, basically, I think it's an old psychological mechanism where if you're doing really well in the past, you would invite attack.
	Oh, look at this big, peaceful, rich country or this big, peaceful, rich tribe.
	We're going to attack them because they've got stuff that we want.
	Anyway, so it doesn't disprove anything.
	I'm just saying that there is this repetitive doom is nice stuff, which is out there.
	So, as far, like, I'm willing to accept the possibility of everything you're saying.
	I'm not a scientist.
	You can read this stuff until you're blue in the face.
	And I don't know.
	I don't have the source data.
	I'm not going to sit there and evaluate everybody's approach to the data and how that all works.
	I just think it's something that needs to be brought up more.
	And I see you as kind of a pioneer of...
	Well, no, no, hang on.
	Let me finish my point.
	I'm sorry.
	I paused.
	I paused, so it's perfectly fine for you to say.
	No, go ahead.
	Yeah, this is what it all comes down to for me.
	There are a few things that we could do that would be the greatest things that we could do to solve climate change.
	If we assume Catastrophic, anthropogenic climate change that needs to be dealt with immediately or we're all underwater or the oceans die off and we die off with them and whatever it is, right?
	I mean, if we accept all of the disaster scenarios that are occurring, then there are a few things that we could do that would have the most effect on the problem.
	And I'll just lay a few of them out for you and then you can tell me what you think.
	So, number one.
	No national debt, no national deficits, no unfunded liabilities.
	Immediately.
	Immediately.
	America is, at the moment, about $20 trillion in debt.
	And what that means, of course, is that America has consumed $20 trillion worth of goods and services in the present and not the future.
	Now, excessive consumption in the present is not great for the environment.
	Right?
	So, that would be number one.
	That All environmentalists should be focusing like crazy on reducing government debts and deficits.
	But they don't.
	So clearly they don't give much of a shit about 20 trillion dollars of excessive consumption, of excess consumption just in America over the past couple of decades.
	They should be going insane on Obama saying, wait a minute, you inherited a debt of $10 trillion, now the debt is $20 trillion in only eight years.
	Yeah.
	You've got to be kidding.
	Do you know the amount of environmental damage that extra $10 trillion spending in eight years has cost the planet?
	Yeah.
	Right, so that would be enormous, number one.
	Number two, they should be focusing on minimizing divorce.
	Okay.
	Yeah, I've heard all your...
	Yeah, no, but it's okay.
	It's not just for you.
	It's not just you and me, right?
	And then other people listening too.
	So you want to work on minimizing divorce because when there's a divorce, then you go from living in one household to living in two households.
	And there's a lot of driving back and forth between these two households and everybody needs double furniture and double toys and double clothes and everything.
	And so divorce, you know, environmentalists who care about the planet should be working very hard to get marriage counseling and strongly oppose divorce.
	There was the argument that Donald Trump used in his immigration speech that for the price of settling one person from the Middle East in America, you could settle 12 in the Middle East.
	And environmentalists should be focusing very hard on making sure that refugees from the Middle East are settled in the Middle East.
	Where their overall resource consumption will be far lower, and they won't need to be flown to America, which has a huge carbon imprint.
	And the culture is similar.
	Well, I get all of that, but we're just talking about the environmental side of things.
	Also, environmentalists should be promoting homeschooling.
	I mean, think of the amount of resources that are poured into government schools.
	And think of the amount of busing of students that occurs.
	Think of the amount of carbon that occurs with regards to government schools.
	Should be homeschooling or at least have neighborhood schools or at least have voucher systems so that people can choose the best schools that are the closest to them.
	Yeah, I agree.
	Transfer something online or, you know, you can access it through a computer now.
	Right.
	They should be enormously positive towards Uber.
	And they should be enormously negative towards taxi license plate expenses, right?
	You can spend $100,000, $150,000 to get a license plate, which raises the price of taxis to the point where people say, to hell with it, I'm buying a car.
	They should also be very, very much opposed to central banking.
	Central banking, central banks are the greatest disaster for the economy and therefore the environment that can possibly be imagined.
	I totally agree.
	And they don't talk about central banking at all.
	Yeah.
	I don't know why.
	Is it because you don't get to hug a panda?
	It's related to the national debt.
	It is.
	But it's not just related to the national debt.
	The manipulation...
	Of interest rates.
	You know, I know it's not a sexy subject.
	You can't show a skinny polar bear on a tiny iceberg, but this is where if you really want to solve problems, you use your goddamn brains.
	Not you, I mean the environmentalists.
	If you really want to solve a problem, you would understand that central banking manipulation of interest rates causes massive and catastrophic misallocations of Earth's precious and scarce resources into economically unproductive ends.
	Which is another way of saying That you might as well truss up all the polar bears on the planet and set fire to them in front of the Fed.
	Because that's what's happening.
	That is what's happening with central banking.
	I mean, if you look at the degree to which central banking and other government policies were responsible for a massive overbuilding of American housing throughout the 2000s and then 2007, 2008, you saw a giant housing crash, left 10% of the U.S. housing market uninhabited.
	Uninhabited.
	Look at Detroit.
	Look at Philadelphia.
	Look at these cities.
	Where a significant, like block after block of housing.
	Empty.
	Empty.
	How much effort was put into creating those houses and now they've been abandoned and people have moved to other houses or other apartments which had to be built as well.
	This is all the result.
	Of various socialist policies, various leftist policies.
	And you say, and I take a bit of umbrage at this, but you say, oh, we see the Republicans, blah, blah, blah.
	They deny this, they deny that.
	Well, first of all, you might want to read some of the more potent literature of skepticism.
	I started out as a skeptic.
	I know, but you may want to stay current.
	I am.
	Let me just mention this and I'll give you the platform.
	Let's say that the Republicans are anti-science voodoo monsters.
	They don't get it.
	They don't get it.
	They don't understand.
	Let's say that that's true.
	I don't think it's anything.
	I understand.
	It's a thought experiment, man.
	Just go with me here.
	It is...
	Let's say that the left has it down cold on the science.
	Catastrophic, anthropogenic, global warming, disaster, we're all underwater, the oceans turn to fire, and it's all a biosphere-ending mess.
	So, let's say that the leftists are all completely down on the science, and the Republicans are fundamentalist, anti-science lunatics.
	Well, I don't care.
	What do I care about?
	I care about what policies these people might want to put into place.
	Now, theoretically, who do you think is going to be better on reducing government spending?
	Republicans or Democrats?
	That's a great question.
	I can't say either.
	No, theoretically.
	Theoretically, I would say conservatives, but some Republicans are not conservative.
	I get that.
	I get that.
	And we're just talking about the platforms, right?
	So in that case, it would be Republicans.
	So Republicans will be better for the environment than Democrats because Republicans will cut government spending, which means fewer consumption of earth-scarce resources in the present.
	That's assuming they will cut total resources.
	I know.
	That's just why I put all the caveats in.
	Dude, just go with me here.
	That's why I said it.
	All theoretical, just based on the platforms.
	I understand all of that.
	When Donald Trump talks about resettling refugees in the Middle East rather than in America, is that going to be better or worse for the environment if they're resettled in the Middle East?
	That would be better.
	I believe it would be better for the environment.
	Yeah.
	If they talk about passing a no-deficit resolution or if they talk about cutting all of these government programs and so on and...
	Cutting welfare, right?
	Because human migration is hard on the environment, right?
	Yeah.
	It doesn't mean that there shouldn't be human migration.
	I'm just saying that it is a problem.
	And to, you know, look at it from a coldly calculating resource consumption standpoint, do people in Mexico, if they stay in Mexico, do people in Mexico consume more or fewer resources than if they move to the States?
	Less.
	They consume less.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	And so if people are moving from Mexico to America, legally, or illegally, let's just say illegally, it's really the only important part that matters as far as that speech went.
	But if people are moving from Mexico to America, then they are moving from a low resource to a high resource consumption state.
	Now, please understand, I have all the sympathy for the poverty in Mexico.
	I'm simply talking about There are environmentalists out there willing to contemplate radical human depopulation, so not having a second iPhone shouldn't be the end of the world, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	No, I agree with you, and I really enjoyed the thought experiment.
	What I would like to add, though, is at the beginning...
	It's not that the Republicans are stupid or dumb or voodoo, science, whatever.
	It's that there's been traces.
	And again, I encourage all the listeners to look it up and Google it themselves.
	You know, don't take my word for it.
	But then there's been traces that back in, I think it was the 80s, ExxonMobil knew about climate change.
	And they started to spend millions of dollars on PR firms, hiring the same people that confused us about smoking, the same people that said smoking doesn't cause cancer, they hired them to start confusing us about climate change.
	And then the oil companies and ExxonMobil, and I'm not trying to demonize anyone, you know, they're corporations, they're not people.
	Then they would go and they would fund politicians.
	And it's very documented.
	You can go to OpenSecrets and you can see that ExxonMobil donates to politicians.
	And so my concern is, these Republicans who say climate change doesn't exist, when I go to OpenSecrets and type in their name, I see that they get millions of dollars from oil companies.
	Yeah, but, I mean, you're getting buried in the propaganda wars.
	I'm talking about the practical realities of how this problem is going to be solved.
	If we accept that you're anxious about this problem, and I fully accept that you are, and I sympathize with that anxiety, I don't want 95% of life on the planet to die off either.
	Then the question is, what is the solution?
	The solution has to be that we consume less.
	And the best way to get us to consume less is for governments to stop running deficits and for money to be returned to the hands of the people, sound money principles, gold standard, you name it, that is the way that we stop the excessive consumption of resources.
	I agree with you on that, but now let's take a step back and get super practical.
	The ideas you and I have are not common, unfortunately, and we have to do everything that we can to reach people, but What can be done now?
	My question is, as we try to achieve all of those, should we consider targeting, for example, maybe a carbon tax or something to target climate change?
	Maybe not a carbon tax, but something, maybe allocating subsidies away from oil companies, because subsidies are not free market anyway.
	Yeah, I mean, look, one of the main reasons why there are big problems with CO2 is because governments built all these giant roads everywhere and didn't pay for them, by the way, and in many ways they're not even paid for now.
	So the government has pursued policies that promote divorce.
	The government has pursued policies that destroy massive amounts of environmental resources through, like, Jiggering up businesses so that they build and then collapse and jiggering up the housing market.
	So millions of houses are built that then are uninhabitable.
	And the government borrows and stimulates demand in the here and now and destroys resources that way by excessive consumption in the here and now.
	All those resources will not be available in the future for people who want to build stuff or live in places.
	And this is just the tip of the iceberg, right?
	Yeah.
	Now you're saying, well, the government has done all of these things, which has massively contributed to the problem, but let's give them one more power to have a carbon tax, and maybe that will help.
	I mean, the idea that government can never do anything good, I disagree with that, too.
	I mean, I think overwhelmingly, like, when you talk about states, yeah, states in general, you could argue do cause more harm than good, but when it comes to something as catastrophic as climate change, I want some action now while we try to do what you have been saying.
	Right, right.
	Then you should work to get people into power who are going to cut government spending as much as possible.
	Yeah, but that will not do enough when there's other states besides the United States.
	Oh, so you want all governments around the world, you feel it's feasible to convince all governments around the world to impose a carbon tax to your liking?
	No, but I feel like...
	Okay, so then start with something that's more actionable and closer to home.
	Because you see, understand, this is what governments do.
	And this is what propaganda does.
	It fills you full of so much fear that you just run to the nearest master and hand over more of your rights?
	Yeah.
	Listen, you might want some big carbon tax.
	You might want some big carbon tax that's going to save the world.
	But if you advocate for some carbon tax, you know what's going to happen.
	The government's going to say, oh, okay, great.
	So everybody's for this big carbon tax.
	Well, I like that as the government, right?
	So what's the government going to do?
	Well, the government is going to start floating around the idea of a carbon tax.
	And what do you think all of the businesses that have these kinds of emissions, what are they going to do?
	They're going to start lobbying.
	And they're going to start buying off the politicians.
	And they're going to start creating policy think groups.
	And they're going to start influencing scientists.
	And they're going to start...
	They're going to have control over the legislation, not you.
	It already happens today.
	That's where we are today.
	And I'll tell you something else.
	Let's say the government raises...
	They raise $500 billion from the carbon tax, right?
	Okay.
	What do you think they're going to do with that money?
	You're trying to disincentivize CO2. No, no.
	I know what the tax is for.
	What is the government going to do when it collects that tax?
	That's a great question.
	I would like to say they'd spend it well, but if you look at history...
	No, you don't understand.
	You don't understand.
	Let's say they spend it well.
	It would still add to consumption, which would then put out more CO2. Yeah.
	I agree with that.
	Let's say that they spend all of that half a billion dollars, or half a trillion dollars, let's say they spend all of that money completely renovating all of the schools and all of the infrastructure and all of the roads and all of the bridges, right?
	Well, all of that is going to massively consume resources.
	And it's going to make roads better, and it's going to make schools friendlier, and it's going to make bridges safer, and so people are going to want to drive more.
	I'd like to put that 500 mil to the national debt.
	Well, that's not going to happen.
	I know.
	And the other thing, but that's the best scenario.
	The best scenario, my friend, is that they spend the money in the here and now.
	Do you know what the most likely scenario is?
	What?
	The most likely scenario is they say, whoa, we just got $500 billion.
	We can use that as collateral to borrow $5 trillion.
	Yep.
	So now we've got $5 trillion of additional spending we can do.
	Ooh, that's great.
	And so collecting the money from the companies is going to concentrate it.
	It's going to allow them to spend more money, which is going to be even worse than if they never collected the tax in the first place as far as carbon emissions go.
	Yeah, I mean, that's definitely an argument.
	Do you know, this is kind of, this is on topic, do you know what the key, the center of finance is?
	The one, the most important security?
	I'm sorry, I didn't quite understand the question.
	The most important security in all of finance is a U.S. bond.
	And so there's an idea that the central bank buys U.S. bonds to help stabilize the economy and crop up stock prices.
	That's what quantitative easing is.
	And so, there's a lot of people who say that the stock market is booming right now, it's at all-time highs.
	A lot of people are saying that's because of QE, and that's because the Fed is buying all the bonds from the US government.
	And so, there's some people who believe that banks, and again, this is somewhat conspiratorial, so people should do their own research, That banks encourage government debt so that they can buy the bonds that the government issues.
	Oh, yeah.
	No, it's a big game of parcel up there at the top.
	I have no doubt about that.
	But look, I mean...
	But you agree that CO2 exists.
	You agree that there's facts and you can look at...
	So right now, what's your view if you had to take a step back?
	Do you believe that Mad Meg, climate change, if we can use that term, do you believe that it's a threat right now?
	Do you believe it could be a threat?
	Or do you just need to do more research?
	No, statistically, it is not a threat.
	Statistically, number-wise, it's a huge boon.
	Right now or in the future?
	I don't know about the future.
	I mean, the future, an asteroid could hit the planet.
	I'm just talking about what's happening right now.
	So right now, in the last 80 years, CO2 emissions...
	Have gone up considerably.
	Hang on, hang on.
	You've got to let me finish my sentences, right?
	Go ahead.
	In the last 80 years, CO2 emissions have gone up considerably, but climate-related deaths have declined by 98%.
	Okay.
	There's more food in the world now because of CO2 emissions.
	So, and I won't get into all of this.
	You can read The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels by Alex Epstein, who's been on the show.
	I read it.
	It was his big book.
	Okay.
	And you can also, we've had one of the founders of Greenpeace on the show who's talking about the fact that we're releasing CO2 back in the atmosphere is great because plants were starving to death.
	Yeah.
	And so I don't know as far as, you know, what the future holds.
	I do, you know, I think where you and I can very much agree is that we would all like to see wasteful consumption minimized in the here and now.
	I totally agree.
	Like wasteful, destructive consumption.
	When I look at, you know, look at China and these, like, ghost cities that they're building, right?
	They're building these giant cities so the politicians have big, fat contracts to hand out to construction companies.
	And they get to say their GDP is going up, which attracts investment.
	And they build these big, giant cities in the middle of nowhere.
	And barely anybody lives there.
	Yeah.
	That to me is horrible.
	So the answer is always freedom.
	Less government, less power, less control, less management.
	Central planning.
	You know, Soviet Russia had reams and reams of environmental legislation and was one of the filthiest places on the planet.
	The way that you protect the environment is you privatize it.
	People shovel their own roads.
	They don't shovel their own driveways.
	They don't shovel the road.
	People take care of their own cars.
	They don't change the oil on a rental car.
	If you want people to take care of something, you privatize it.
	You give it to people.
	And this has been shown over and over again.
	When you give property in ghettos to local communities, they work hard to make it pretty.
	Yeah.
	They work hard to make it positive.
	They work hard to get rid of the graffiti, and they work hard to put swings in, and they work hard to take out the hyperdemic needles, and they work hard to keep the bums away.
	You just give things to people, and they'll take care of it.
	But the fact that the government owns so much, and the fact that the government has no particular economic incentive, or people in the government, no particular economic incentive to beautify it, to protect it, to secure it.
	Just one tiny example.
	There's been some crazy amount of money.
	The reason Congress hasn't passed a budget in eight years is because they want to just keep spending that one-time budget surplus and they get to keep spending it if they don't actually pass a budget where it's supposed to be removed.
	Of course, there's no incentive for them to not spend that money.
	I would love for there to be less excessive consumption of our precious resources in the present.
	But the idea that giving government the power to take more resources from us, which will use as collateral to borrow more money and destroy more resources.
	No, no.
	That's assuming that they would, you know, based off their history, that's assuming they would use any money gained to buy more resources.
	But yeah, I agree.
	Of course they would.
	What does government do with money that it gets?
	Doesn't put it under the mattress.
	Yeah, I'm fine.
	Unfortunately.
	I mean, the government has no incentive to save for future generations because the government doesn't exist.
	It's just a bunch of people pillaging the public purse.
	That's the biggest problem.
	I'm very worried about...
	I think we have a lot of common ground, which is good.
	I'm just very worried about what I'm seeing in the future.
	The drought in California is an example.
	Droughts happen, but people predict droughts will get worse.
	And water wars, people think that wars are going to happen in the Middle East over water.
	Again, this is speculation.
	But what I'm really worried about is the tundra in Russia, which is melting now.
	And if that melts, the last time that melted, 250 million years ago, it really killed a lot of stuff.
	And a lot of people think we're somehow immune to a mass extinction.
	I wouldn't really say what if our food dies?
	Right.
	And it might not happen for 500, 600 years, 700 years, but again, I expect humanity to be here in 700 years, bothering nuclear war.
	Yeah, I mean, I get that you have worry and you have concern about these things, and you should Work as best you can to spread the information that you think is important.
	But there are, I would argue, more immediate and positive issues that could be dealt with.
	You can't control industrial production around the world, right?
	You can't control government policy of borrowing and spending and all that, right?
	You can definitely affect it.
	And the question is, will the effect be good or bad?
	Well, I don't know.
	You know, for example...
	We did videos on the California drought.
	You can check this out.
	But listen, I can't...
	You know, you've made your case that there's stuff that you're really scared of.
	I've made the case about the best things that I can do.
	I think we're in agreement on both cases.
	Yeah, so I don't want to sort of end up with going back to the sort of really...
	The stuff that really scares you, you know, you called and you asked me sort of my perspective on these things and I provided them and I provided my solutions.
	Peaceful parenting.
	Peaceful parenting is a fantastic way to conserve resources.
	Because when you have peacefully raised children, you have children that you negotiate with and you don't aggress against, you don't hit, you don't yell at.
	When you have peacefully raised children, wonderful things happen.
	They don't get addicted to things, which is economically and environmentally destructive.
	Because it's consumption, especially addicts, right?
	It's consumption without production.
	Peacefully raised children tend not to be smokers.
	Smoking, of course, not good for the environment, let alone your own environment, your personal environment, not good for the environment as a whole for six million different reasons.
	They will tend to pair bond, have stable relationships, be gainfully employed, and they will tend not to get divorced.
	And if they don't get divorced, then you don't have the two homes, two cars, two Sets of everything, double driving, and all that kind of stuff.
	And they tend not to be...
	The people who are peacefully raised and content and philosophical tend not to be status consumers.
	In other words, they don't tend to consume material goods for the sake of status.
	Like a...
	A sort of healthy, rational person does not need necessarily a Maserati to feel good about themselves or, you know, a 10,000 square foot house or swimming pools with waterfalls from the second balcony or whatever, right?
	I mean, they're content with their own company, they love the people that they're with, and they have a positive self-esteem, which means that they don't need to impress other people.
	And so, peaceful parenting is, I think, going to have an enormous impact on On conserving the Earth's precious resources.
	And of course, peacefully parented children, what do they need the state for?
	And so if they don't need the state, it diminishes the demand for the state, which reduces the power of the state, which diminishes its power, which means it has less capacity to destroy Earth's precious resources with bad policies.
	So I hope that helps.
	Thank you very, very much for the call.
	Always an interesting topic.
	And let's move on.
	Thank you.
	It was a pleasure.
	Oh, right up next is Jack.
	Jack wrote in and said, Is segregation a good thing?
	Stefan has pointed out that the black community had lower rates of illegitimacy under Jim Crow than after the Civil Rights Movement.
	Given the large number of blacks that feel victimized and oppressed by white society, is there not a compelling argument for returning to segregated communities?
	When we look around the world, do we not see that culturally homogenous societies are more stable than peaceful ones?
	Well, hello Jack.
	How are you doing tonight?
	Hi.
	Can you hear me?
	Yep.
	I can hear you fine.
	Yeah, I'm doing alright.
	You're actually a little muffled.
	Can you get any closer to the mic at all?
	Yes, I can.
	How's that?
	That's good.
	That's good.
	I assume you're going through a vocoder.
	Otherwise, I'm just going to say I'm sorry if you're extremely bad cold or blues singing career.
	So, nice to chat with you.
	Yes, it's one of those, and it's nice to talk to you as well.
	I've been watching your videos for a while, and this is a topic that I've been thinking about for a little bit.
	Thank you, Satan.
	Sorry, you sound like my evil conscience, but all right.
	So you say sort of the black family was stronger under segregation.
	I would not put that causality together.
	I think that the black family survived segregation, just as it in many ways survived the evils of slavery and Jim Crow and so on.
	I think that the black family was stronger because there was no welfare state, or at least the charity was privately administered and so on.
	So I wouldn't say that it was causal.
	I think it was coincidental, but I would say that if there hadn't been a welfare state, The leaps forward in the black community would have been enormous.
	As I've pointed out in the show before, the number of blacks who were moving into the middle class, who were getting into the professional occupations and so on in the post-Second World War period in America was enormous.
	Who knows where that could have ended?
	Who knows where that could have ended?
	I think it's one of these great tragedies that the welfare state came along.
	Maybe it's not a coincidental tragedy.
	One of the things that's really tragic is Yeah.
	out of poverty that threatens state power.
	And so the state usually has two solutions, which is to put economic incentives in for poor people who are escaping poverty to slide back into poverty and remain poor.
	And also it likes to import poor people so that it can offer them goodies.
	You know, like if everyone's middle class and above and the state says, well, I want to raise your taxes.
	Well, if the state says, I want to raise your taxes, I mean, to the poor, it's like, well, I don't pay taxes anyway, so go ahead and raise taxes.
	It creates oppositional groups in society taxation, right?
	And yeah.
	If the state says I can give you all this free stuff...
	Well, for people who the state says, I can give you free stuff, but I've got to...
	Like, here, I'll give you $1,000 credit, but I've got to tax you $2,000 to pay for it.
	It's immediate that that's a bad deal.
	Immediately obvious.
	But for poor people, it's like, okay, well, I get a free $1,000.
	I'm not really paying taxes anyway, so that's great.
	So the government really likes poor people because they're the most bribable of the classes.
	And so the government's relationship to poor people is really tragic.
	If they run out of poor people, we'll quickly run out of government.
	So I hope that helps.
	Mm-hmm.
	Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.
	It should probably sound...
	Hang on, you just lost your vocoder, is that okay?
	No, no, actually I switched mics a second ago.
	It should be fine.
	Okay, good.
	So anyway, I was thinking about this question because of a lot of what you'd said about the Milwaukee protests from a while ago.
	And the thing that interests me...
	Is sort of the trend of the black community throughout the 20th century until the civil rights movement and whether or not the efforts to try to improve the black community Whether it was known in advance that those efforts would have the effect that they did.
	Because it's not that I support segregation.
	Just to say a little bit about myself.
	I am black and I grew up in a suburban white community and I never really had any issues with what you would call majority white culture.
	But my sense is that A lot of the solutions, as you've pointed out, have kind of backfired.
	And I'm wondering if, it's not so much that segregation was a good thing, but is it possible that the efforts by the white community to do things such as affirmative action and welfare and all that, is it possible that those things are causing backlash?
	are causing blacks to feel even more oppressed.
	If you look at someone like Kaepernick, who you talked about a second ago, it seems like the mixed-race blacks who grew up in nice white families are the most bitter, you know, are the ones that are the most angry at times.
	And I could think of other examples of this around the world.
	I've traveled a lot.
	I'm kind of a digital nomad.
	And this is a phenomenon I've seen with other communities in other countries.
	Right.
	I appreciate what you're saying.
	There's a lot in what you've said.
	Is there something you'd like me to focus on first?
	Why do you think it is that now, in 2016, after trillions in welfare and affirmative action and cultural efforts on the parts of whites to try to build up blacks in all these different ways, why is it that so many blacks today feel even more oppressed in spite of all the efforts that have been made in their benefit?
	Yeah, that's a big question.
	And I obviously don't have any particularly, you know, the answer is this, right?
	Because it's a big question.
	You know, there's this theory.
	I've read it and I've done some research on it, but I can't obviously confirm it.
	But there's a theory that goes something like this, that the communists wanted to destroy the West.
	And one of the things that they wanted to do was to foment racial strife, right?
	To have whites and blacks at each other's throats and so on.
	Create resentment and all of that.
	We've talked about this in the presentation before.
	That's certainly part of some of the notes from the Communist International from the 1920s.
	That was sort of the plan.
	I do think that there's a lot of communism in the left.
	It's not the only thing, but there's a lot of communism in the left.
	And so I think that had something to do with it.
	Now, if you are a communist and if you wish to use the poverty and plight of black America to undermine stability and cohesion and nationalism within America, then, of course, if the black community starts doing well, or at least better, that sort of scotches the plan a little bit, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	That makes sense.
	And so, yeah, so, you know, again, I sort of try not to over-idealize it, but it's one of these sort of tortuous missed opportunities in American history or Western history as a whole, which was, as I mentioned, blacks doing really well after the Second World War.
	And, you know, there were, of course, this is not to say everything was solved, everything was fine.
	I mean, there was still exclusion of blacks from the GI Bill and, you know, some terrible stuff that happened.
	But there was this improvement.
	And as the blacks started to improve, as black communities started to go, the income started to go up.
	As more and more blacks were joining the middle class, right?
	Well, what happens is they don't need the state as much.
	They don't want the state as much.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	So if this is your constituency, then they're getting away.
	Like, they're getting away.
	And so I think...
	One of the things that happened was, well, let's give them welfare.
	Let's give them welfare.
	Now, welfare is not that tempting for the middle class, right?
	Because it's like, you know, okay, you get a little bit of money now, but what about five years now?
	What about ten years from now, right?
	But if you've got a large section of society which is only starting to come out of poverty, well, then welfare looks a lot more appealing.
	Because it's a step up, right?
	I mean, there's not a lot of Germans who want to go on welfare, but if you're someone from Iraq and you get like five times the national income in Iraq by going to Germany and getting on welfare, it's a different group, right?
	It's a different set of motives.
	Sure.
	So I do I do think that there was a kind of interference in the progress of the black community.
	And it wouldn't be the first time that the Democrats have been involved in that.
	But listen, I know you're jumping at the bit to say stuff.
	And let me stop explaining the black experience to you and get by you.
	Go ahead.
	Yeah, no, no, it's it's fine.
	I think you said a lot of good stuff there.
	And I think, you know, I don't...
	I try not to delve too much into conspiracy theories, unless there's real evidence, but you wonder about, you know, was the destruction of the black family throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s, how deliberate was that?
	Who benefited from that?
	And I think the political argument, whether it's the left or the Democrats or whoever, there's some sense to it.
	What I am kind of interested in discussing is solutions.
	The whole theme of the show is the limits of freedom and what are the solutions in a free society to try to fix that community?
	What should other communities do to try to help, if anything?
	Because it doesn't seem like All of the welfare state solutions, all of the affirmative action type things, or even just trying to buy goodwill.
	Constantly talking about racism, constantly having protests, Black Lives Matter, and also little things in culture, changing characters to make them black for more inclusion.
	In movies and TV shows, you see a lot of that.
	It doesn't seem like any of these things have the result of blacks as a group feeling more appreciated or feeling like they're a bigger part of American culture.
	It always seems to have the opposite result.
	I could give you another example of this in another community.
	I've traveled a good bit and in Japan, for example, You have the Korean community in Japan, where they passed a hate speech law a while ago that was meant to protect them from, you know, anti-Korean protests.
	And that law...
	Sorry, protect the Japanese from...
	No, protect the Koreans from anti-Korean protests.
	Protect Koreans.
	Yeah, protect Koreans.
	Yeah, that's correct.
	And what's interesting about that law is that it had the effect of making both sides a lot angrier at each other.
	It had the effect of making Koreans feel like, yeah, all these Japanese people hate us, and we need more, stronger laws.
	They were mad because the law wasn't strong enough.
	And then it had the effect of making a lot of Japanese people feel like, well, that's kind of BS, because why should they have a special law protecting them?
	Why are we being marginalized in our own country?
	So on and so forth.
	And so that's a pattern I've noticed, that when you make an overture to a group that feels oppressed, the consequence seems to be that they feel more oppressed.
	So, it's like a catch-22.
	If you try to acknowledge the problems and make efforts to solve it, then they take it as evidence of how bad things are and dig in even more.
	I think Colin Kaepernick's an example of that.
	So, I mean, that's my question.
	How do we bridge the gap?
	How do we actually move forward and have more racial unity?
	No pressure, Steph.
	That's right.
	Well, let me just back up, and sorry, I just wanted to make sure, because when I was talking about the communist stuff, if people haven't heard it before, in 1922, the Comintern held its sixth...
	Sorry, let me start that again.
	In 1922, the Comintern, Communist International, held its fourth international congress and put the topic of African Americans on its agenda.
	The following goal was established after discussions ended, and I quote, the fourth congress considers it essential to support all forms of the black movement, Right.
	That's an important sentence, right?
	Yeah.
	Support all forms of the black movement, all those forms, which aim to either undermine or weaken capitalism and imperialism or to prevent their future expansion.
	So using the black movement as a tool against capitalism is not the same as helping blacks, right?
	The CPUSA, communist party of the USA, received a $300,000 subsidy.
	You know, this is back when that kind of money meant something.
	This is from the Comintern for the purpose of spreading Soviet propaganda amongst black Americans.
	In the following years, the CPUSA recruited and trained black communists and organized protests against the U.S. government.
	Many black leaders were sent to Moscow for further education.
	The party's subversive activities quickly attracted the eyes of the government and the newly formed FBI.
	The Communist Party USA also publicly advocated for civil rights and immigration reform, and alongside the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, it was one of the most powerful driving forces behind the civil rights movement.
	So I just really wanted to sort of point that out.
	So, I mean, these were people who were very interested in the black movement and helped and funded.
	So naturally, of course, blacks viewed that positively, who were involved in those movements.
	I mean, who wouldn't, right?
	That makes perfect sense to me.
	Sure.
	So, but your point about, you know, you're so oppressed, we're going to protect you, you're so hard done by, we're going to try and advance you and so on.
	Yeah, it doesn't really seem to strengthen things.
	And as far as certain affirmative action goes, that is, I think that's fairly well documented.
	I mean, just to take one example I've talked about in this show before, Jack, I mean, affirmative action for blacks in colleges is, It means that underqualified blacks will get college degrees.
	That's just natural, right?
	I mean, because if you lower the standards, right, then you're going to get less qualified people graduating with a degree.
	Now, the problem is, of course, there are many talented, brilliant, competent blacks who sail through those degrees, no problem, but the employer has no idea which of the blacks who graduated are there because of natural talents and abilities or they're because of affirmative action.
	Yeah, that is actually a very big problem.
	I work in technology and on my resume and on my LinkedIn, I don't put any picture of myself because you get treated very differently if people make assumptions.
	I won't say which company.
	I know you know a little bit about the startup world, but I interviewed at a company where they basically said to me, oh, well, because you're black, you'll really like working in this department because there's not many white people there.
	Yes, they said that to me.
	It was the most awkward, creepy thing ever.
	Can you imagine them saying that to me about black people?
	Yeah, I know.
	As a white person, you'll really like this department because, oh my god, that's terrible.
	Silicon Valley is kind of a mess these days with racial politics, and I don't mind doing coding tests and technology interviews.
	I like doing all that stuff.
	I don't like the politics behind it.
	And affirmative action, it's just frustrating to me.
	I don't want to be judged based on my skin color.
	I want to be judged on my work.
	And it's another thing that has had the opposite effect.
	It has not led to more racial harmony.
	It's led to animosity.
	It's led to blacks feeling like they're owed more and whites feeling like it's unfair and it's racist against them.
	Well, and it's led to people like you being annoyed at the whole system because then you're going to get judged by things other than your competence.
	The other thing, too, of course, is that if you hire a black who turns out not to be great at the job, let's just say because of affirmative action, well, then you have to fire the black.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	And for some people, I'm sure that's a little tense, right?
	That's sort of a bit of a tense scenario, right?
	So it is pretty tragic, you know, what's happened.
	I mean, if it was all just merit-based, then, you know, whoever sees your resume, I mean, they don't care what color you are because you graduated from the degree and you went through the same standards as everyone else and so on.
	So the problem is, of course, as you know, that if you get affirmative action people coming out of a college, what happens is...
	It becomes less valuable to get a degree for all blacks, right?
	Because the degree has less value.
	And then what happens is you say, well, listen, I can't put my face on my resume.
	It's not because, at least tell me if I'm wrong here, but it's not because you say, well, there are all these racist people out there that won't hire me if I'm black.
	It's because you want to be judged on your text, not your gif, right?
	You want to be judged on your experience, your references, your education, and so on.
	And it's not because your face is black, it would provoke racism.
	It's because your face being black might provoke racism.
	Concerns about affirmative action and quality of application or applicant.
	Is that where you're coming from?
	Yeah, I mean, that's pretty accurate.
	And it's interesting because I don't deny that discrimination exists.
	There was a study a while ago about how people with resumes that have black-sounding names don't get called back as often from employers.
	So there is discrimination.
	But at least my experience has always been that I've been treated weirder when people knew that I was black and they made certain assumptions about what I would want to do, how I felt, politics.
	And I'm happy.
	My preference is just to show people my GitHub and say, okay, here's stuff I've built.
	Here's where I've worked.
	You don't need to know anything else about me.
	Show people your what?
	Do you know GitHub?
	I didn't say anything obscene.
	It's a place where you just post.
	No, I didn't assume that.
	I didn't know what that meant.
	GitHub, what is that?
	No, it's a code hosting site.
	I actually use GitLab as well.
	Oh, so your code repository, so people can just review the stuff you've done.
	Yeah, basically, that's about it.
	I haven't been in the biz for a while.
	Yeah, clearly.
	Now, ageism, man.
	I knew I was going to come down to ageism.
	That's another issue in Silicon Valley, definitely.
	But these days, I've done a lot of interviewing, too.
	You can learn a lot about someone just from their code repository, their GitHub profile.
	It gives you...
	Usually most of what you need and then you do an interview.
	So I like that aspect of tech that it's supposed to be meritocratic, but it's become so political now.
	And part of it, you know, Google, they have a page about diversity where they talk about all the percentages of people, the percentages of women, the percentages of this minority and that.
	And it kind of creeps me out a little bit.
	You know, all of this bean counting and tracking of people, I feel like it's counterproductive to the goal of a racially harmonious, inclusive society.
	Wasn't it supposed to not matter?
	Wasn't it supposed to not matter?
	I mean, that was the big, oh yeah, I'll follow that.
	Can we just live in a world where it doesn't matter?
	Yeah!
	No!
	Now we must count you!
	And now it's got Google Analytics behind it and now it's, you know, very carefully monitored and publicized and it feels kind of creepy.
	So that's sort of why I started off by talking a little bit about segregation.
	I have this thought about cultural homogeneity and cultural diversity and having traveled a lot, you know, this was another question I'd wanted to pose is, is there a general Point or a value of having a society that's more culturally homogenous because the United States is is a very diverse country and you have black culture you have You know SJW whatever culture you have conservative Christian culture of all
	these cultures competing you compare that to like a Say, South Korea or China, where I've been a few times, where it's less homogenous, is it something...
	No, more homogenous.
	More homogenous.
	Sorry, more homogenous.
	And should we be trying to work toward a society in America that's more homogenous, where we try to get blacks to join with the majority culture?
	Or should we segregate and say, okay, this is your community, that's your community, and have just good fences?
	I mean, that's a very interesting question, and...
	I was studying South Korea with my daughter and, you know, very low crime rate and very high per capita income and very strong economic growth and all of that.
	And, yeah, 99 point whatever percent homogenous, like all the same.
	Yeah, and very high IQ, as you talked about.
	Well, yeah, that's a whole other interesting factor.
	And, you know, the welfare state and its systemic effects on all sectors of society is, I think, part of the issue as well.
	But, I mean, for me, let's just assume.
	Let's just sort of play this out and let me know what you think.
	But let's assume that the smarter blacks were the ones quicker to break into the middle class right after.
	I mean, just as any group.
	Smarter whites, smarter whoever, right?
	Smarter Scots people.
	And now, one thing I love about the free market is it tends to accumulate resources in the hands of the most intelligent, right?
	Because your income and your IQ is pretty strongly correlated.
	Now, just imagine.
	Just imagine.
	And the black IQ was moving up.
	Yeah.
	Moving up.
	Because, you know, the smartest blacks were having the most babies.
	Let's just go, you know, straight genetics, right?
	And imagine if that process had been allowed to continue.
	And this process, by the way, not exactly confined to the black community, right?
	I mean, it's not like welfare does a whole lot to positively affect intelligence in any community, right?
	But imagine if that process had continued where we might have ended up.
	It's just, anyway, it's wonderful.
	Yeah.
	That's a thought experiment I have too about the 20th century.
	I think as you've characterized it, the road not taken.
	It's kind of sad to think about.
	What I try to do is think about ways to go forward.
	Just to give a little bit more about myself, when I was in college, I was very libertarian.
	I was very into objectivism and Rand and all that stuff, and I was very much in that mold of thinking.
	But traveling around the world throughout my 20s made me think a little differently about You know, the sort of the end road of libertarianism in societies with different cultures.
	And I think of a country like Singapore, for example, which is very peaceful and extremely wealthy and pretty homogenous.
	I believe it's mostly ethnic Chinese with some other South Asians.
	But as a consequence of that, they have a very authoritarian government.
	I mean, they have, you know, sedition laws.
	They have, you know, you can get executed for dealing drugs, you know.
	And it begs the question of, how do you fix a culture if your solution is just the free market or libertarianism?
	Is it possible that there are sometimes bad incentives that get built up over time?
	I see that in the black community.
	What makes people money are things that are destructive to the culture.
	And it's something that concerns me.
	Right.
	Well, I think that I tell you just from my own personal perspective, Jack, and I have affinity not for race or culture, but values, right?
	So let's say I'm living on a street and a group of people come to buy the house next door to me, right?
	And let's say there's a bunch of white people who are I know they've got a big flag or the moving van is pulled by the evil black hearts of capitalists or something.
	And there's a bunch of communists or maybe a bunch of social justice warriors or maybe a bunch of, well, whoever, right?
	People that I would have significant value discrepancies with.
	Or maybe they're just white people or Asian people or whoever who are really harsh with their kids.
	Yeah, which I know is a thing for you.
	Right.
	Well, yeah.
	A little bit.
	Right?
	And now let's say that your sunny smile comes strolling down the street, right?
	And, you know, let's say you and I exchange some words.
	We chat and all that.
	And, you know, I find out about you and whatever we're going to chat about, I'm pretty good at, I think, assessing people.
	And I can tell you who I'd be rooting for to move in.
	Yeah.
	You.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	I see where you're coming from.
	You see what I mean?
	Like, because...
	Let's say there's just some white jerks who are, you know, they're going to be like screaming at their kid and, you know, hitting them over the head with a wet towel or whatever it is, right?
	I don't want that over my, you know, fence.
	Or I don't want people coming over and, you know, telling me that I'm bad because I have whatever X, Y, and Z belief system or whatever.
	Yeah.
	And, you know, with you and I, you know, crack a beer on the back porch and talk about the world, it would be a delightful thing, right?
	Yeah.
	Right.
	And people want that.
	They want a shared sense of values.
	That's why people vote with their feet.
	And I can say this on behalf of a lot of other higher status black people.
	They don't want to live in the ghetto.
	You don't see Will Smith and Jay-Z living in predominantly black neighborhoods.
	They get out, right?
	And that's true of all races, of all people around the world.
	It's kind of ironic.
	I'm a big believer in diversity, but I think if you believe in diversity, you have to believe in the right of discrimination.
	You have to believe in the right of people to prefer their own and keep to their own.
	What's the own?
	That's the question.
	For me, I would feel like if you were going to move in next door, I'd be like, Can I subsidize?
	Actually, no, that's affirmative action again.
	Yeah, I wouldn't like that at all.
	No, but you know what I mean?
	It would be like, yay, fantastic.
	Because that's a value thing, right?
	I think that we wouldn't share all the same conclusions, but I think we would share the same methodology and we both have strong verbal skills and probably like to debate and all of that.
	And we'd have ways of resolving disputes that would be rational and probably enrich our relationship, like all these kinds of good stuff, right?
	Sure.
	So, as far as, you know, segregation and all of that goes, you know, you had a phrase earlier that, you know, gave me kind of the popsicle jimmies down my spine, which was, you know, how can we design a society that?
	Or it was something like that.
	I may not have it down exactly.
	But I, you know, I just, it's just all about the freedom.
	Yeah.
	It's all about the freedom.
	I think that there will always be, or at least for the foreseeable future, what is called the lunchroom test.
	You know that, right?
	How are people going to self-segregate?
	Well, a lot of times it's going to be by ethnicity or by race.
	Well, it's a shortcut because you can't test people's values in one quick conversation.
	You can't know that.
	Right, right, right.
	And there's also, what is it, like 90% of churches or 90% either Korean or Asian or black or white.
	They just generally are.
	I don't fault people for that if they have that preference.
	Well, as I said before, diversity is a lot of fun when you're young, but once you've got to raise your kids with values, it's kind of confusing.
	Yes.
	You get a multiplicity of...
	Just imagine taking your kids to one different religious institution every week and then saying, I want you to be a good religious person.
	It'd be like...
	You need more homogeneity when you're raising kids.
	I think a lot of people feel that way, which is why there tends to be this kind of clustering.
	So I think in a free society...
	No, sorry, you were going to say?
	Well, yeah, and to challenge that a bit, I think the problem is the sustainability of a free society.
	If freedom leads to, for example, look at what's happening in Europe.
	If you have too much open borders, if you have too many migrants or whoever...
	Oh, that's not freedom!
	Come on, that's the welfare state incentives, right?
	I mean, how would these...
	I mean, just talk about the economic migrants, right?
	This is very briefly, right?
	I want to get you on track, but...
	But the economic migrants, you know, they're coming because they get five times the income with no work.
	Okay, but let's say in the United States, right, there are supposedly on the books laws that make it difficult for illegal immigrants to get welfare.
	I've read a little bit about this.
	And a lot of what illegal immigrants in the United States do is they work very low-wage jobs.
	So it isn't necessarily the case that all or, you know, the bulk of Migrants or immigrants are coming in to get the welfare state.
	They're coming because there are economic opportunities in these countries.
	So if you have open borders or you have a very liberal society, how sustainable is it over the long term?
	And there's another example I actually want to ask you about, China specifically.
	Okay, let's bookmark that one.
	There is significant consumption of welfare among illegal immigrants.
	I can't remember the exact number, but it's high.
	Yeah, you did a video about it.
	I saw it a while ago.
	Yeah, it's high.
	62%.
	62%, thank you.
	Okay, so 62% of illegal immigrants are consuming welfare, which...
	It's a statistic that blows my mind, but like on so many levels.
	So there is a problem that it's not freedom of association in America with regards to resource transfers.
	But the other thing, of course, is that the problem still remains a problem of a lack of freedom, Jack, because it's a lack of freedom in Mexico that is bringing people to the United States in many ways, right?
	So now as far as sustainability in the long run, I think that a society that is...
	Truly free.
	And now we're talking like pie in the sky generations from now.
	Truly free, stateless society, whatever we want to call it, but a free society.
	Well, first of all, it's going to have to be a fairly bright population as a whole.
	And I think that bright people have the most in common.
	Yeah.
	So I think that there will be a sense of solidarity among bright people.
	And...
	So, now, as far as it's sort of long-term sustainability, yeah, that's, you know, let's figure it out after we get there, which will be long after I'm dead and buried, but I think it is sustainable because I think that smart people are going to have the most in common, and however it is that we're going to work towards getting smarter people, you know, the stuff that I've talked about, you know, no corporal punishment and breastfeeding and all of this kind of stuff, which is going to, you know, I think has the greatest possibility to raise IQ across the board for everyone...
	I think by the time you get a really super smart group of people who really understand the value of freedom, I think they'll work pretty hard to keep it secure.
	Yeah, so that really smart group of people, I mean, do they go the Trump route and build a wall?
	Because if they build a really great society, there's going to be a lot of dumber people from other countries that are going to want to go there and that are going to possibly have different values and are going to affect the political system over generations and gradually undermine what they built.
	Wouldn't that be the concern?
	Well, first of all, political systems, hopefully not, right?
	But I don't know.
	I mean, as far as what technology or what approach would be used to secure a free geographical environment in 300 years, you know, it's sort of like going to the Founding Fathers and saying, will there be drones?
	I don't know.
	I mean, I would leave it to the genius of people smarter than me in 300 years to figure that one out.
	But But the other thing, too, you know, there's a possibility, and it is a vague possibility, and it's way outside anything I'm competent at, but I do sort of have an idea that there could be a possibility that the world could just get smarter overall, whether that's philosophy.
	I mean, obviously, I think that what I do in terms of bringing principles out for people and helping people make better decisions and all that kind of good stuff I think that what I do helps people harness their intelligence in a better way.
	In the same way that, you know, when I think of my sort of intellectual life before I got into philosophy and it was just a kind of chaotic mess and all that just random impulses and vague preferences and then strong preferences that didn't sustain and, you know, a lot of bouncing around like a pinball.
	And so I think we can make people, we can help people make better use of their native abilities with philosophy and I think that's going to make things better in the world.
	It's sort of my big Plan and goal and gig.
	Yeah.
	And, you know, maybe better parenting will make people smarter.
	You know, hopefully there's a soft landing to the welfare state and not a sort of sudden cutoff.
	And, you know, that will slowly change things for the better over time.
	So, yeah.
	I mean, if the world gets dumber, this all becomes kind of moot.
	And if the world gets smarter...
	And in some ways it is.
	In some ways it is.
	Something I mentioned, I'd emailed back and forth with...
	Colin, sorry, I forget your assistant's name.
	The question I wanted to ask, this could be a whole other tangent, is about dysgenic trends in the world.
	The higher IQ societies have lower birth rates than the lower IQ societies.
	Where does that lead over a few generations?
	East Asia is a great example of that.
	South Korea, Japan, they all have very low birth rates.
	I don't know if philosophy or technology is going to fix that or reverse the trends, the overall level of human intelligence in the world over time.
	But it is something that I think about and concerned about.
	How do we get higher IQ people to have More babies and lower IQ people to have fewer.
	There's no nice solution.
	Well, again, I think the market takes care of that on its own.
	And, you know, just so everyone understands, I mean, I'm sure we both have an agreement on this.
	Nobody's talking about banning people from having kids or paying people to have kids.
	Naturally, resources are going to accrue to the smartest people.
	And then if those smarter people want more kids, they'll be able to afford them.
	And this is something that I talked about with a researcher on Jewish intelligence some time back that the statistics are pretty clear that the richer Jews had more children.
	Sure, sure.
	And we associate that the rich with the smart or whatever, right?
	That the rabbis who generally were the smartest were the ones who had the most kids and all that.
	And the poorer Jews had fewer kids.
	That's just the nature of the beast, right?
	If you can't afford, you don't generally have.
	And so in a free society, I think that there would be a positive...
	I don't know.
	I'm still a little skeptical of that because, you know, if the wealthier societies...
	And this is funny.
	It's something I've heard in Japan that they're trying to give out government benefits to people to have kids.
	They're basically giving out checks to...
	To people for having kids because their birth rate is so low.
	And when you talk to Japanese people about it, they'll say, you know, oh, the reason people don't have kids is because the economy is less certain.
	You don't have as much lifetime employment.
	It's expensive.
	And you think about it.
	This is, I think, the second or third wealthiest country in the world.
	If people with that level of comfort Feel anxious about having kids compared to people in the third world who barely have enough to eat are having four or five kids.
	Can we really assume that a freer market and more wealth is going to reverse that trend?
	Or is there some other cause of the lower birth rate?
	That's what I wonder.
	Right, right.
	And with regards to Japan, their concerns about the economy is...
	It's very significant, right?
	I mean, the Japanese economy has been this zombie disaster for, what is it, three decades now or something like that?
	Yeah, but I think a lot of that's overplayed.
	A lot of that what?
	I think a lot of that's overplayed, to be honest, as someone who's been there a good bit.
	You know, what's happened is not...
	Well, no, but it's debt!
	It's debt!
	I mean, what if they have the highest GDP ratio in the world?
	They do have a lot of public debt, that's true.
	230% was the last time I checked or something like that.
	Like, it's completely mental.
	Like, way over what America is in terms of national debt.
	Or society.
	I mean, it's a very well-off, high standard of living, longest lifespan society.
	Oh, but not if you count the debt.
	I mean, everybody's fine until the credit card bill comes due, right?
	I mean, the debt is staggering in Japan.
	And, you know, they're good at math, right?
	As far as I understand it.
	So they're going to look at that and say, well, this is not sustainable.
	And of course, whatever the culture was that produced this karoshi, this sort of death from overwork thing, a lot of the young men in particular looked at their father's lives in the 80s and 90s and so on and said, well, this is no way to live.
	Why would I want that?
	I've got to work all day, work all night, go out to karaoke bars, try and get some sleep on the subway home, get up and do it all again the next day.
	And That's no fun.
	They've been influenced a lot by Western culture, some of that.
	I don't know.
	And there is less stability.
	There's certainly less lifetime employment.
	But I'm having...
	You know, been there for a while.
	I'm very skeptical that it's purely an economic problem that's keeping people from having children.
	I think that there is a cultural and spiritual component to it that has changed people's values over time.
	And what is the component, do you think?
	What are the factors?
	I think there's a few things.
	You know, I think there was a lot of pride after, believe it or not, after World War II, when the country had to rebuild, had to come back from nothing.
	And there was a lot of pride about, you know, recreating the country.
	And then because the United States rewrote their constitution, they had much more liberal markets.
	They had lower taxes.
	They had allowed women to vote.
	They changed a lot of things.
	Thanks to that.
	And the economy just blew up for decades.
	That's a positive thing, just for those who don't know the lingo.
	If we're talking about post-war Japan and blowing things up, it's just positive, right?
	We're not talking about anything horrible.
	I'm saying blew up in such a good way that all 80s sci-fi movies show Japan dominating everything, if you remember Blade Runner.
	So, you know, they...
	Oh, in fact, there was a movie with George Wendt.
	I can't remember what it was called, but it was basically about how Americans' workers were going to somehow find a way to survive under new Japanese management and the Japanese Borg was taken over the planet and so on.
	Like, you know, like the way the Saudis would end up owning everything in New York in the 70s.
	Yeah, we saw how that worked out, right?
	Yeah.
	There was a lot of anxiety on the part of the West.
	But I think what happened is that there was an expectation that that would just continue forever.
	And if you look at the way real estate markets were in Japan in the 80s, it was insane the way people were trading houses.
	And when that blew up in the late 80s, I think here is where you have a strong argument in terms of government intervention and all of the spending and deficit spending that they tried to sustain this unsustainable market.
	It created this lost generation of people who kind of don't have a sense Of any cultural values beyond, you know, day-to-day living.
	And you combine that with the influence of Western culture, the influence of Western cultural Marxism and values.
	I'm sorry to interrupt you, Jack.
	I just missed that part.
	About how they lost their own culture before we get into how the West, you know dominated like in yeah What's the last bit about how they lost their own culture?
	I think that a lot of their sense of pride was tied to their economic success of the 60s 70s and 80s and when that was lost It was a key component of their sense of identity as being this that the great Asian tiger dominating the world through economics a lot of that was lost and And then was replaced with some of Western cultural values, which was more individualistic and more about just, you know, day-to-day, do your own thing, you know, don't worry about society.
	And that leads to, as I said before, there's a question I wanted to ask your opinion of about China, which is sort of related to that.
	But that's my...
	Wait, hang on.
	Should we finish Japan first?
	Of course.
	I mean, a lot of their growth was real, and a lot of their growth was debt.
	Yes.
	And I think that had a big problem.
	With debt, of course, comes hedonism because debt is like free stuff.
	And when you get a bunch of free stuff, so back to the welfare state, whether it's free stuff for the middle class in Japan or free stuff for poor people in America, when you get free stuff, you get decadence, right?
	You get hedonism.
	You get, you know, why defer gratification?
	And having children...
	Is a big giant deferral of gratification.
	I think that's probably where it manifested more than anything else.
	I don't think Japan is a very hedonistic society, in spite of what you might have seen with some of their anime.
	People save like crazy there to such an extent that the government is a negative interest right now just to try to force people to spend.
	People live in very small houses.
	Most young people don't even buy cars now.
	So it isn't so much a materialistic society, but there is a sense among a lot of young people that Kids are going to ruin the party.
	They're just going to be a burden.
	And there isn't a belief as much in a family as something to be pursued as a high value.
	That's my sense of it.
	And there's a lot of that in South Korea, too, and other countries.
	And I would assume, just based upon some of the stuff that I sort of looked at in our case election or whatever, I would also assume that the They would be somewhat more prone to anxiety and all of that kind of stuff as well.
	And, you know, when you sort of say, like I'm saying, well, it's a little hedonistic, I don't mean materialistic.
	I mean hedonistic insofar as like when you say, well, kids will spoil the party.
	That's sort of what I'm talking about.
	I mean, you know, the sort of dry fish ladies and the grass-eating men, like they just, they don't have significant proportions with young Japanese, you know?
	They have no interest in a relationship, let alone sex, let alone marriage, let alone families.
	Yeah, and there's a kind of cultural malaise.
	And I guess all I'm saying is that I don't know that that's primarily or solely an economic problem at this point.
	I think that the government made a lot of bad mistakes in the 90s trying to spend its way out of the recession.
	But given the standard of living, given the level of technology and infrastructure and lifespans, I'm hesitant to believe that Japan is too poor to have kids.
	I think it's something else.
	If you want to add to that, that's fine.
	But there's one other thing I wanted to ask you.
	I don't, yeah, again, I'm certainly no expert in Japan, and you've been there, which gives you the advantage of anecdotes and the disadvantage of anecdotes, right?
	So it's like the, so it's a challenge.
	As far as, yeah, it's a culturally homogenous, high IQ society.
	And, you know, it's selling more adult diapers than child diapers.
	Correct.
	What was there some Japanese minister who's like, I just wish the old people would die off already?
	Yeah, because you know, it's a huge problem.
	And the problem is that there is a degree of Westernization happening around the idea of marriage and relationships.
	There was a teacher a while ago who made a statement at a school something to the effect to the girls saying that girls should try to prioritize marriage and And children while they're younger and maybe focus on their careers later.
	I forget exactly what he said, but after he said that he had some crazy backlash against him.
	He took a lot of heat for it.
	And so I would not say that it's a feminist society, but there's definitely some components of Western values that are taking hold.
	And I don't think that that is going to help things.
	Including hysterical, not an argument stuff too, right?
	Yes.
	Sure, sure, absolutely.
	Well, of course, the big challenge, as I've mentioned on the show before, is that if women decide to have children rather than go to work, that's disastrous for government finances.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	Because they're not out there paying taxes.
	Instead, they're creating babies which consume resources and don't pay taxes, right?
	Right.
	So then you have not only a woman who's not contributing taxes, but you have a woman who's having babies that is going to require resources.
	So a lot of which some of which at least will be provided by the states, of course, some by her husband.
	Yeah.
	you know, governments have an active immediate incentive to have children defer childbirth and instead go to work.
	Yeah.
	I'm sorry?
	Yeah, I think you said had children defer childbirth.
	I'm sorry.
	Governments have an incentive to encourage women to defer childbirth because they get more taxes and all that.
	But not to cancel childbirth.
	Governments want women to have children, right?
	They need future taxpayers.
	No, but not politicians.
	There's no government, right?
	There's just a politician.
	There's no politician alive who would say...
	That, um, my plan is to encourage childbirth now so that in 25 years there'll be more taxes because in 25 years he's long retired or dead, right?
	He just, he's not going to be part of his plan.
	Yeah.
	That's a huge problem is how do you try to get people to do things that are good for the future 25, 50 years out?
	Very, very, very difficult to structure societies to care about that.
	Um, yeah.
	And if you look at the, uh, You know, Japan, the two biggest GDP, debt-to-GDP ratio is Japan at 230% and Greece at 177%.
	Italy, 132%.
	Portugal, 130%.
	And there's Lebanon and Jamaica in there for reasons I can't quite fathom.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Certainly, the Western countries and Japanese countries, these countries, is low birth rates.
	Yeah.
	I think it's all just about...
	I sort of talk about my contempt for Marxist economic determinism, but that doesn't mean that I abandon the idea, of course, Jack, that people respond to incentives.
	And I think if the economic incentives are returned to the free market, then I think that many more sensible decisions will be made.
	Sure, sure.
	Okay, so we go to China?
	Let's continue our show.
	Sure, right.
	So I'm kind of piggybacking on the idea of cultural Marxism and it affecting a society, or Westernization, as you might want to call it.
	I was thinking about this the other day, that the startup Uber was having a lot of trouble getting traction in China.
	Actually, a lot of Western startups have had trouble getting traction in China.
	Partly because the government puts a lot of red tape in front of them and looks the other way on copyright infringement and intellectual property theft and basically wants to encourage domestic companies to copy Western companies and have their own domestic versions of all of them.
	And, you know, I had an argument with a co-worker about this who was, you know, really upset about this.
	And, you know, it's like, how are Western companies going to someday, you know, conquer the Chinese market?
	And just thinking about it from the perspective of nationalism, I thought about it and said, you know, actually, in a way, what China is doing makes sense.
	Because...
	It makes sense if they're looking out for their own people and their concern is not allowing Western Internet companies to dominate their markets.
	And there's two potential issues there.
	The first is that those companies are often in bed with the United States government, the State Department and the NSA, and they might not want a billion Chinese citizens to have all their data on servers that have back doors to the FBI or whoever.
	Which makes sense.
	And then the second argument is the argument of Westernization.
	The fact that every other day if you, you know, click on Google or Microsoft or whatever, there's a rainbow flag, there's videos on YouTube pushing politics, and they may not want that being foisted on their people.
	You know, you could argue that in a free society they should say whatever, but, you know, China obviously has no compunction about being a free society, a firewall to block off all internet traffic.
	But just playing devil's advocate, you know, I think I understand the logic behind not allowing Western tech giants to, you know, take over.
	What are your thoughts on that?
	Yeah, I mean, I have a little bit more experience in this area and that the company that I co-founded, we worked hard to break into China and spent some time there in a business capacity.
	Yeah.
	And the view...
	Of America from inside, as I've argued before, is very different from the view of America from outside.
	Sure.
	And from outside, America looks to many people and many, I think, heads of government, looks like a big, giant, dangerous, dying beast of doom.
	Yeah.
	And the, you know, because America, you know, America has its own nationalism and all that, and America is...
	You know, well, of course they'd want us.
	We're great, right?
	And, you know, it's sort of like my belief in my 20s and early 30s.
	Like, if a woman didn't want to go out with me, I was like, you're kidding, right?
	I'm great, right?
	And so, obviously, the women's view wasn't always in accordance with that, you know, which was their loss.
	So, from Chinese standpoints, They, you know, look at America and they see a lot of problems.
	And they would ascribe a lot of those problems to American culture.
	And again, I know that's a big sort of blob to say American culture, but, you know, it's not outside the bounds completely because there are certain aspects of American culture that are common.
	And I think they'd look at America and say, man, what are you doing?
	I mean, it's a crazy situation, you know, in the same way some people, you know, look at Europe and say at the moment, what the hell are you doing and all of that.
	And so for them to say, well, we have some reservations about the degree to which we want American influences in our society, I, you know, I, you know, it's like if you're a parent, you know, you've got a kid and there's some seedy other kid around, some seedy teenager, you know, the Eddie Haskell.
	Yeah.
	You're like, well, I don't know that that's going to be such a positive influence.
	So I can certainly see that they would look at America and they would say, well, there's a country that has had some great stuff and there's stuff that we like about it.
	But certainly the government stuff is pretty bad.
	And I think it's pretty fair to look at that and say that's pretty bad.
	And, of course, the government stuff, as you point out, the tech companies are not exactly at arm's length from the state as a whole in America.
	And there would be concerns about that too, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	I just think that it's interesting.
	It's sort of a dilemma that the libertarian in me likes to think about, that you'd think that the right You know, moral thing for China to do would be to open its markets and to allow its people to, you know, freedom of association.
	If they want to use Google and Uber and whatever, they should be allowed to do it.
	But is it not possible that it is in the longer-term interests of those citizens for the government to encourage other companies to develop alternatives?
	It's the same logic behind all tariffs and, you know, trade wars.
	In the case of information technology, it's a unique problem because there's this security issue.
	I don't think every country needs to form its own Version of every car company and every, you know, product.
	Obviously trade is good, but I don't know that there's an easy resolution to the problem China is trying to solve by saying, you know, we don't necessarily want Apple and Google and Facebook to run all of our people's data.
	They're shady, their cultural values are crap, and they are going to give the American government all this access to every person and every bit of data in our society, and we don't want that either.
	So again, the problem is not the free market.
	The problem is that All of this relationship between the tech giants and the state, right?
	So it's not, I would assume, it's not just the cultural values.
	I mean, that's certainly part of it.
	But again, the cultural values in America, where do they come from?
	Well, a lot of them come from heavily government-subsidized and sometimes controlled media.
	And it comes from government schools, which give a huge transmission of values.
	There's no...
	No value-neutral education, right?
	So government schools and governments, not dictated, but, you know, government-influenced media and government-influenced tech companies and so on.
	And so if you let these sort of, quote, American values into China, you are letting a lot of American government propaganda to come in and alter the minds of your citizens.
	Yeah, I guess.
	So is China doing the right thing?
	Or do we have a right to criticize them for it?
	Oh, yeah.
	I don't know that America's got a lot of right to criticize a lot of what goes on in the world as a whole.
	But I would say, I mean, this is a question that I was chatting about with Fox Day the other day when we were talking about the alt-right and this issue around tariffs, this issue that Trump is raising.
	Yeah.
	Mike, you were talking about Trump is like the uncle, right?
	The uncle that you Yeah, he brought to rise a lot of the things that, you know, everyone has that uncle that's very concerned about NAFTA, Thanksgiving, that, you know, has to talk about jobs going overseas and, you know, the whole made in America spree in the United States.
	You know, Trump's giving voice to a lot of those concerns, which are seen by the monster vote and the immense popularity that he's on the receiving end of currently.
	Yeah, people want jobs domestically.
	And so, with regards to tariffs and border controls over goods and services and all of that, yeah, of course, I get it.
	I mean, the libertarian in everyone and the free market economist in everyone is like, throw the doors wide.
	And I get all of those arguments and I'm always open to learning new or different arguments.
	But, you know, a lot of this stuff is tougher When you get the IQ stuff.
	And by IQ, I'm just talking about the bell curve for the population as a whole, not sort of any ethnicity breakdown.
	But, you know, some guy who's got an IQ of 90, well, you can say to him, sorry, we're shipping your manufacturing job, which he was competent at and good at and gave him purpose and pride and allowed him to raise his family and, you know, nothing wrong.
	Perfectly fine fellow.
	And you say, well, you know, we're taking this...
	It's Java and it's going to go overseas because there's a guy in Mexico who worked for half the price.
	Now, the economist, of course, says, well, you know, there's always going to be these transitions, there's always going to be these changes, and he's going to end up better off in the long run and so on.
	But that may not be true.
	If the guy is 50, the retraining possibilities, are they enormous?
	Is he going to go and become some C-sharp or Java programmer?
	Possible.
	IQ 90?
	Eh, you know, maybe not so much.
	Maybe not.
	And now, of course, for the people who aren't this guy, or people like him, it's a pretty good deal.
	Because whatever gets manufactured in Mexico, if you still have that job, then your goods are going to get cheaper, right?
	I mean, this is the big thing in China and Japan, right?
	I mean, the fact that Jobs get outsourced to China.
	Well, they come back.
	And the reason why there hasn't been a big dislocation in America is that America borrows money or prints money, pays welfare, pays unemployment insurance, and then people say, well, I can survive because the price of goods is going down because jobs got outsourced to cheaper wage jurisdictions, right?
	Right.
	And that's not – I don't think that's a very sustainable model when you've got like what, 94 million Americans of working age outside the workforce now?
	I mean that's not a very sustainable model.
	That's the long-term problem with the dysgenic crisis that I bring up.
	If you have a world with an increasingly high proportion of people that are lower IQ, yet technology is also increasing.
	Everything is getting automated.
	In 10, 20 years, there's going to be no truck drivers.
	There's going to be no a lot of jobs.
	How do you deal with those people?
	Especially if we're going to make a god of democracy and we're going to say that the highest value is Diversity and tolerance and democracy, then those people have power.
	And we saw that this year, both with Trump and with Brexit.
	We're seeing a lot of the backlash against the traditional globalist vision of society, the neocon Fukuyama dream of, you know, this type of Western democracy being the final end-all-be-all form of government.
	People are moving back toward nationalism and tribalism out of security.
	And so what I wonder then...
	Again, this is just kind of the libertarian in me screaming out.
	Is the free market really the solution for all of this?
	If you think about it...
	Wait, wait, wait.
	Hang on.
	Sorry to interrupt, Jack.
	And it's a great question, but let me just back off for a second because, again, we're sort of throwing the free market in where I think we could make a case that it's not there.
	So let me sort of give you an alternative scenario where we're talking about a genuine free market, right?
	So let's say that there's a bunch of stuff...
	That happens.
	Listen to me getting all technical.
	Very general.
	Gotcha.
	Okay, Jack, just go with me.
	A bunch of stuff happens, and then a bunch of other stuff happens, and then I'm right.
	Gotcha.
	So, let's say that there's all this outsourcing that's going out there, right?
	But let's say that there is a free market, which means no welfare state, right?
	Right.
	So, you outsource a bunch of jobs from America to Mexico.
	However...
	The purchasing power within America goes down significantly because people are out of work, right?
	And there's no welfare state or unemployment insurance that's pumping up their purchasing power by borrowed and printed money, right?
	Sure.
	So what happens is the jobs get outsourced or the jobs, it doesn't all happen at once, right?
	But a bunch of jobs get outsourced and they want to sell back to America.
	But they find that they can't really do as much as they wanted.
	Because they said, well, the demand in America is going to be X. So then we take a whole bunch of jobs out of America.
	But then the demand in America is X minus all those jobs that got taken out of America.
	So the demand has gone down.
	Right.
	So what that means is that the incentive to outsource goes down because you've outsourced the market for what you outsource to sell back into is also diminished because the purchasing power is down.
	So I think there would be a balancing aspect without the welfare state, without government-run unemployment insurance, without all of the other things that prop up demand in the US artificially, like even disability and all that kind of stuff and supplemental social security payments and you name it, right?
	Sure.
	And so I think that there would be a natural equilibrium that would be met.
	That some jobs would be outsourced, but if too many jobs got outsourced, there would be no market, at least in America, to sell back into for what you'd outsourced.
	And I think that would diminish the outsourcing.
	But that doesn't happen when the purchasing power gets maintained with all this government financial skullduggery.
	Yes, yes.
	I think there's a lot that's accurate there.
	I think kind of the X factor is the behavior of other countries, that the United States isn't the only market, and that even if you have a whole lot of government spending propping things up, that money has to come from somewhere as well.
	It can't sustain itself on artificial money forever.
	Eventually, things just collapse.
	Yeah, so people could say, sorry, sort of in trouble, people could say, well, we'll outsource from America to Mexico, but then what does Mexico care about?
	The purchasing power in America, we'll just sell to China, or whatever, right?
	And to the next person is the next person, and you have a race to the bottom.
	And if that's happening at the same time as you have...
	Massive automation I think that the ideal scenario if you have a real free market is things balancing out But the more realistic scenario is people taking to the political process or even worse to the streets to try to find some sort of recompense and It getting really ugly really fast.
	I think I think that's more likely unfortunately Well, that's gonna happen anyway though.
	I mean the welfare state's gonna run out of money and that's right the automation thing I you know, I mean I don't have a big answer.
	I go back and forth on it because, you know, I just went to McDonald's the other day and big, big giant screen.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Have you seen this?
	Yeah, I've seen it.
	I've seen it.
	Yeah.
	Sure makes my tablet look terrible.
	But yeah, big, big giant screen, right?
	And I remember back in the day...
	You had to go inside a bank.
	It was weird.
	People don't know what that is anymore.
	People don't even know going to an ATM now.
	I do it online and stuff.
	The automation thing, I think the automation in conjunction with the dysgenic nature of the welfare state and other subsidies to less responsible reproduction, I think those two are kind of on a collision course.
	Because when you've got the dysgenics of the welfare state going on, then there are fewer people who are able to do better jobs.
	And the other thing too is that with the welfare state and with unemployment insurance, there's fewer people who are willing to work for less money.
	And so when you have fewer people willing to work for less money, then the price you have to pay for people to do low-rent jobs goes up.
	And therefore your incentive to automate goes up.
	And of course when you start to have things like Well, you're going to have to pay these people Obamacare, you know, and pay for these people's healthcare, and oh, and by the way, they might unionize, or maybe they are unionized, and it's going to be really, really tough to fire people.
	Oh, and you've got to have a diversity coordinator and produce charts and graphs.
	And it's like – and not to mention just the usual vagaries of the labor market like they call in sick or they've got a headache or they're bad-tempered or they're mean to customers or they quit to go pick grapes in Queensland or whatever they're going to do.
	The normal turnover annoyances, you automate and that stuff just poof magically vanishes and you don't have to worry about a sexual harassment lawsuit from a robot at least yet.
	Not yet.
	Not yet.
	Yeah, not yet.
	Not yet.
	So I think that there is – I think the automation stuff is being significantly accelerated by a variety of non-market factors.
	And it is a collision course.
	Because people who are out of the workforce for quite some time and dysgenic incentives going on and automation going on.
	And then what?
	Where do they go?
	Where do they flourish?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, it's hard to say.
	There are a few other...
	Sort of related question.
	I know this is kind of a weird conversation.
	It started with segregation.
	It's gotten a lot broader.
	But I did want to circle back to one other thought, if you don't mind.
	No, please do.
	Which was about China or any country.
	And you are moving in next door, right?
	We've already established that.
	No, no, no.
	No, thanks.
	I'm on the road.
	I go to different countries.
	Oh, that's right.
	Digital Nomad, right?
	I go to different countries every year, basically.
	So, you know, just trying to learn as much as I can before settling.
	But I think that what I wanted to circle back to is the idea of countries avoiding westernization, trying to preserve their cultures.
	I think about China, South Korea, or whatever, and the degree to which they've become westernized.
	I wonder about that, about trying to maintain a specific culture.
	Because you had a caller a while ago who asked you about traditionalism and what type of culture works.
	Oh, just tonight, right?
	Yeah, just today, yeah.
	About two parents versus one.
	And I think that it's kind of difficult to do that in, for example, the United States in a multicultural society where you have this strong belief that the highest value is Diversity and liberty and tolerance and everyone just does whatever they want and I've thought about that compared to the the cultural values in Asian societies Which is really that's really not their belief system at all that you don't you don't hear Chinese or Korean people say that that the biggest thing is liberty and diversity
	What you hear is very opposite that they have very normative specific values and it seems to me that in America Or in the West, generally, in other parts of Western Europe, when you make a monument of diversity and tolerance and say that those are your highest values, it's almost a confession that you don't really have any other values.
	And what ends up happening is that the progressive or regressive, whatever you want to call them, elements in your society, the SJWs we talk about now, use that belief As a way to continue to change the culture in negative ways.
	So you can't criticize, you know, the problems of urban black culture.
	You can't criticize feminism.
	You can't criticize Islam.
	You can't criticize any of these things because you'll be lectured about how, well, freedom is the most important thing.
	You know, people should just do whatever.
	And it's almost as though, like the burkini ban in France, right?
	You can't stop people from wearing burkinis.
	People have to be left alone.
	It's almost as though that belief in freedom and tolerance is being used against those societies.
	That was another question I had.
	I think that's right.
	I think that's very astute.
	The left has no interest in diversity.
	That's to complete my hair.
	Because, I mean, if they were interested in diversity, then Ben Shapiro would be welcome on college campuses, and so would Milo and Coulter, because they'd be like, wow, this is really diverse.
	These are people on the right, or people who identify as conservatives or Republicans or whatever, and people on the left would be going to Donald Trump rallies and interviewing people sympathetically, saying, well, you guys have very different viewpoints, and let's have more diversity.
	And they'd say, well, let's make sure we get more Yeah, go ahead.
	One point to that is it's not just about politics, it's about culture around the world and that leftism is a very globalist movement and that part of it you can see that they don't believe in diversity.
	I'll give you an example of it.
	In East Asian countries, I've met multiple times white foreigners who criticize those countries for not having gay marriage or for not accepting more immigrants or for not doing things that Western countries do.
	I always say to those people, if you really believe in diversity, you would respect the right of countries to have their own cultures and their own values.
	The fact that you want China or Singapore to do the same thing France does means that you have this white man's burden idea that you have to go around and fix.
	No, and that's a very good way of putting it.
	Shit, what was the point that we were getting at?
	The idea that freedom is being used against Western countries to undermine what we used to have, traditional societies.
	Right, right.
	Well, it's a complicated thing insofar as...
	I don't want gay people to be discriminated against.
	That's not fun for them.
	At the same time, I understand that some religious people have issues with it.
	Again, to me, this stuff is all solved by let's just be free.
	What the hell is the government doing in the business of marriage at all?
	So you're against the burkini ban in France?
	The burkini ban in France I consider to be a tragic condemnation of Western culture.
	If that's where you're getting to, if this is where we're at, let's ban bathing suit.
	We've lost something pretty damn important if that's where we're at as a culture.
	That this is our big solution.
	This is what we're doing.
	The problem is a bathing suit.
	But what is the solution if you have millions of immigrants or people coming into your society that don't share your values?
	That are burning cars, that are rioting, that are causing terrorist attacks.
	I'm not saying that I support a bikini ban, but it's not surprising that there would be some backlash, that there would be some...
	No, again, that's not surprising, but the Again, the solution is freedom.
	I mean, the solution is freedom and freedom of association.
	And as I've talked about before, the migrant crisis is driven by the economic incentives of the welfare state and all of that.
	And if people had freedom of association, then it would be a relatively easy – well, it would sort of be a non-problem.
	Do you think that getting rid of the welfare state in France would stop migrants from coming there or would solve the problem of the millions of Muslims that already live there and have a much higher birth rate than the native population?
	Well, yeah.
	As far as that problem goes, I don't know how that problem is going to be solved.
	But as far as how the problem originated, I think it's because of a lack of freedom of association and coercive redistribution of wealth and so on.
	How it's going to get solved, I think it's beyond philosophy at the moment.
	I think so, too.
	That's the thing that concerns me, and I'm particularly concerned about this with all of the speech bans that we're seeing from the UN and from Western countries.
	In Canada, there was a guy who was arrested for a Twitter comment.
	I think this is actually something I think Rand actually wrote in a book about how when When is it time to stop trying to advocate for change?
	And she said, when there's censorship.
	And once you have outright censorship, once there is no ability to use the political process for recourse, then you're in a very dangerous situation.
	Then you're in a situation where it can only end In either violence or complete domination.
	So I don't know about France.
	I don't know about Western Europe generally.
	I don't know what their solution is.
	I'm just, you know, posing the dilemma to you about the burkini ban.
	I agree it's tragic, but there is a sense of a need to do something to preserve or to defend what's left of their culture.
	Yeah, yeah, but it's, I mean, again, I've said everything that I could possibly say about the...
	Situations in Europe, I don't know where words are going to solve the problem anymore.
	As far as all that goes, philosophy is about preventing these sorts of extreme situations.
	I don't know what happens from here with Europe.
	A lot of people, of course, have a lot of different ideas.
	Hopefully it will be a peaceful and positive resolution for as many people as possible.
	I'm not optimistic.
	We'll have to see about that, I suppose.
	I suppose so.
	I'm really grateful.
	I got to ask the three major questions, and I could drill in more and more, but I've enjoyed speaking with you, so thanks for answering everything.
	Well, thanks, Jack.
	A real pleasure.
	Feel free to call back next time you're in another country, or sooner if you like.
	It was a great pleasure to chat.
	And thanks everyone so much for your time, your care, your attention, your curiosity, your conversation in this great engagement that we are all involved in to bring truth and reason and evidence to the world.
	Please remember to drop by freedominradio.com slash donate to help out the show.
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	So, so much for all of your attention and support.
	Have a wonderful, wonderful night.

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