Sept. 30, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:28:11
3434 The Case For Donald Trump - Call In Show - September 28th, 2016
Question 1: [1:38] - “After watching your video titled ‘Evidence for God?’, I reached a dilemma that I cannot solve. I am considering the possibly that there are some truths that are better left unknown. I have come to believe that atheism by itself is legitimate, however I fear for a world full of atheists because vanity and arrogance can so easily take over when one rejects the notion of a divine supervisor. With the liability inherent in atheism, how do I reconcile truth with morality?”Question 2: [20:28] – “When protesting doesn’t work, what might some alternative methods for catalyzing change in the short term be? Secondarily, what can you do to, or should you, persuade someone to abandon their political views when they hold your opinion in high regard?”Question 3: [1:05:54] - “What makes you so confident that Donald Trump isn't suffering from the same psychopathic, self-serving bacteria plaguing the rest of Washington? Can you describe a time when you thought you found ‘the one’ only to discover that you've contracted political herpes?”Question 4: [2:04:19] - “How do you think healthcare should be paid for? Advancements in medical technology only serve to increase the overall demand and cost of healthcare. It thus seems to me that countries like the UK where healthcare is funded through general taxation are on a collision path.”Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Should I, in fact, give you my thoughts about the calls before you actually experience the calls?
Let's just say that a limber man wrestling a statue comes to mind.
You'll see what I mean as we go forward.
The first caller was concerned about what happens if he stops believing in God and if society stops believing in God as a whole.
So I talked...
Quite personally about my journey away from God, what happened and why, and hopefully it was quite emotional for me, but hopefully it will be helpful or useful for you and give you a sense of some of the dangers that do await an atheistic society which doesn't have a rational set of ethics to replace the absence of God.
Now, the second caller is a fine young woman who's called in before, and she's an atheist, and she wants to know how far should we go, in fact, in changing other people's minds?
When do we end up being kind of too much in people's faces?
What is the balance?
And it was a great call.
The third caller...
Well, he had a conversation with Mike.
And Mike is totally off the reservation, baby.
He's gone native.
He made his case for Trump and revealed something that has not been revealed before on the show, which I think you will find very interesting.
It's a break with protocol, but he makes a good case for it.
The fourth caller wanted to know, how on earth are we going to pay for healthcare if there's no government?
Do sick people die in the streets?
It's an old question, but I've had a chance to concentrate a lot of arguments into one particularly focused, laser-like place, and I hope you'll find that valuable.
Please, of course, speaking of paying for things, freedomainradio.com slash donate to help out the show.
Please, please, please come and help us do the great work that we're doing.
And don't forget to follow me on Twitter, at Stefan Molyneux.
Alright, up first today we have Matt.
Matt wrote in and said, I've come to believe that atheism by itself is legitimate.
However, I fear for a world full of atheists because vanity and arrogance can so easily take over when one rejects the notion of a divine supervisor.
With the liability inherent in atheism, how do I reconcile truth with morality?
That's from Matt.
Hey Matt, how you doing?
Great question.
Hello.
Hi, can you hear me?
Yes, can you hear me?
Yes.
Okay, good.
Alright, so now it's a great question.
And there's two things that have struck me about this question.
I'll share them and then get your thoughts.
Okay.
Number one is that we cannot avoid the truths because we fear the consequences of those truths.
We cannot.
I'm going to repress the truth.
I'm going to withhold the truth.
I'm going to avoid the truth.
I'm going to work in opposition to the truth.
Because I fear the consequences of the truth.
Because that is a hole with no bottom.
And that is fundamentally...
It's an argument from consequences that is, interestingly enough, also used by dictatorships.
Well, we can't allow this idea to come out because it would destabilize the existing social order and structure and so on.
So it is a kind of censorship.
It's a self-censorship because you fear the consequences of certain beliefs and therefore you work against them or you ignore them.
And that is not a position of integrity, to the truth.
Now, that having been said, I also think that we need to bring more than one truth to bear.
So when I was reading your question, Matt, I was thinking to myself, why did I become an atheist?
I mean, I could say, and part of me would believe it, and maybe other people would believe it, I could say, well, I became an atheist because of a dispassionate evaluation of the arguments, the reasons, The evidence.
But that is not true.
I gave up on God as a concept because I felt that God had given up on me.
I felt as a child because I was raised with God and I believed In God.
So strongly.
One of my very early memories is being maybe three or four years old, playing with a friend.
We were in an attic.
I was playing with a friend.
And a Cliff Richard song called Power to All Our Friends to the Music That Never Ends.
Cliff Richard song.
He's very religious.
And I remember thinking that there was a sort of cold and evaluating eye in the sky up around the rafters.
Of the attic, where the cobwebs were, I don't know why, I don't know if the insulation, where all of that was.
There was a cold and evaluating eye that looked down and almost glared at me for liking the Cliff Richard song rather than thinking about divinity, the afterlife, my soul, and so on.
Now that didn't make me dislike God.
That just seemed like a prioritization thing.
Don't go for this secular, happy, joy-juice stuff.
Go for the eternal, the big picture, the long-term, the road to heaven.
And as I grew, I still remember being six or seven and believing in a God.
But having some doubts.
You know, one of the great challenges, of course, of a belief in God is it is specifically not reinforced, to put it as nicely as possible, it is specifically not reinforced by objective reality.
You know, the reality that you live in.
The reality that you inhabit.
The reality you have to work with.
God does not show up there.
And God, I know, shows up for some people emotionally.
Maybe he shows up in dreams.
Maybe they have visions.
This did not happen to me.
I was bare senses facing reality and saw nothing of the divine in anything I experienced.
And I also experienced as a child That as power increaseth, so doth corruption increase.
As power increased, so I saw did corruption increase.
So when I was in boarding school, there was a headmaster, and I was caned.
Whack, whack, whack!
Caned, because he had power.
I saw the adults, I saw parents, I saw people who had power.
Train conductors, you know, I used to take the train to boarding school when I was like six.
On, well, with a relative, but a kid.
And even the train instructors, everyone who had a uniform, were, get your hands off the window.
Your bag is going to tip over.
It's in the wrong place.
No jumping.
No running.
Boom, boom, boom.
Control, control, control.
Everyone who had power seemed to me to become kind of like a bully.
And some were outright violent.
And I... I think, you know, when I was thinking about this today and really sort of looking into my heart of hearts, I think, Matt, that what happened to me...
Was that I looked up that ladder, that staircase, that escalator to infinity, up to a deity.
And I thought, okay, well, if more power corrupts people, and God is all-powerful, then God must be an enormous exception to the general trend that power tends to corrupt.
And of course, when I was a kid, there was a lot of bombings from the Irish Republican Army.
I was told to be very careful and watch out for plastic bags unattended, luggage or backpacks unattended at a bus stop, at a shop, in a train.
And there were bombings, sometimes three a day.
And I didn't really understand the conflict, but I knew it had something to do with religion.
And I thought, okay, well, so God organizes the world so that people have power over others.
Or he says that people should have power over others.
That governments are legitimized by God.
Authority is legitimized by God.
The priest who taught us was legitimized.
He was a really old guy who had this habit of droning and then barking.
And an odd affinity for reading off all the baguettes in the known universe.
But he had this...
I was in the choir, and so I was sort of sitting up at the front and the side.
And he would drone, and then he would bark.
So it was kind of like lulling you into sleep.
And then, boom!
It startled you awake with something, like a roller coaster of bouncingness that left you kind of jittery.
And there was one young guy who came in.
I've said this before.
There was one young guy who came in who was pretty entertaining and engaging.
And he said, and God threw Satan into a big river and put up a sign saying, no fishing!
That was kind of cute.
But he didn't last very long.
I don't know if he was just passing through.
We went back to Mr.
Droney Blary.
It was like alternating between Nat King Cole and Sid Vicious.
Mona Lisa, men have made you.
God save the Queen!
And I think that the lack of direct evidence for any sort of God combined with the general unpleasantness of the world as it stood as I was growing up.
I was hungry and thirsty a lot during those years because there was a water shortage and there was a food shortage, certainly in boarding school there was.
And we'd get this little, little cup of water, one of these little plastic cups of water.
And I'd always have that choice.
I'd sit down with my food because we were out running around all the time as kids.
And you'd come in and you'd be thirsty and hungry and really thirsty.
And I don't know if you've ever done this when I got older and there was more water.
I'd actually clean a sink, fill up a sink with cold water, stick my whole head in it and just gulp, just gulp it down.
And then you get this little tiny cup of water and you'd be dying to.
I remember when I was in Morocco for Y2K, I had a Muslim driver.
It was going through Ramadan and he was saying to me, you look at this water like it is a woman by the end of the day.
And I remember looking at that little cup saying, oh, if I drink it really fast, I'll get the shivery little body thrill of quenching your thirst.
But then I won't have anything else to drink and I'll have to choke down these Dried mashed potatoes and all that with no water.
Or you could sort of sip it, which didn't give you any satisfaction, but at least would make it last out.
So things just seem to not work.
And I remember also being at boarding school with like two other kids and one very lonely teacher over a Christmas break and over New Year's.
I don't remember why.
I just remember being there sitting in a little corner of a giant cafeteria.
Everybody just kind of heartbroken and lonely, no presents.
Well, at least there was some water.
It seemed like enough at the time.
So I sort of fell away from the idea of a deity because the world seems so disorganized and the world seems so constituted by a deity that those in authority would have power over others and be corrupted by that power thereby.
And I wasn't comforted by, you know, the meek shall inherit the earth, then it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.
And I'm just like, why is there all this wrong to begin with?
Why am I worried about bombs blowing up?
When I'm waiting for a bus, why am I thirsty?
Why am I hungry?
Why am I cold?
And we had to feed coins into a heater in our flat.
Why am I cold?
Why is the world such a mess?
And why either the worst gain power or those who gain power become worst?
And why would that be set up in our constitution, like our emotional constitution or in society as a whole?
And then being subjected to a lot of violence, it became emotionally repulsive for me to believe that the world I experienced was divinely organized by a just creator.
I resented it.
And as a child, of course, I had no power to change it.
Now as an adult, I do.
But as a child, I had no power to change it.
And so to be At the bottom of the pyramid of power, to be subject to violence, coercion, control, bullying, restrictions.
Not just from the adults, but from the older kids.
Boarding school, we know the score.
You can just read George Orwell on this.
But I couldn't do anything about it.
I was helpless.
And I also knew that trying to do something about it would only make it worse.
So I think that the idea of a divinely ordered and organized universe...
Did not fit.
Originally it was a round peg into a round hole and it just got more and more square.
And it didn't fit.
So that was my sort of emotional experience of God.
Where, you know, I was told to love my enemies, but if I disobeyed the rules, I got caned.
Well, where is the love in that?
All the love that was commanded and demanded in the Bible seemed conspicuously absent from the world.
And that's the funny thing.
As I said before, now I get some lovely positivity and warmth from Christians, which I admire enormously and respect enormously.
But as a child, that wasn't happening.
And so it all sort of fell away from me, and then I pursued arguments against the existence of a deity as part of a confirmation bias for the emotional nihilism I felt with regards to a deity.
I had a confirmation bias that I was in hot pursuit of, and the arguments were good and I couldn't rebut them, and the arguments for the existence of a deity, which I encountered as a student in college and in My graduate degree, ontological proofs and other Augustinian proofs and so on.
They weren't satisfying to me, but I also will say that I didn't really want to believe them.
I didn't pursue them to the nth degree.
I found rebuttals and accepted them.
So the reason I'm saying all of this is that When I look at an atheist, and this is not, I'm not sort of trying to project, right?
I just, I know the facts that people have emotional preferences for arguments, and then they find those arguments, and they believe those arguments, and they reject counterarguments.
I've been subject to it as well.
I mean, when I first started reading Ayn Rand, I felt a wonderful gravity well push and flowering within my heart and mind about the arguments and the perspectives.
Because I had been starved of heroism as a concept that wasn't subjugation to the women of the state or the collective or defensive women or white knighting or whatever.
In other words, the idea of heroism as a self-service rather than a sacrifice for others was incredibly compelling to me.
And so I found those perspectives and arguments and objectivism with Brandon and Picoff and the others very compelling.
And that means that my guard was down and my confirmation bias was up.
Now, of course, over the years I've pushed back on some of those arguments and I've put those videos and audio out in this show because it takes a while to get off your first romance philosophy contact high and begin to evaluate things more critically.
And so the reason being that atheism, if you're raised originally in a religious context, atheism I think comes out Of some levels or sense of disappointment and anger.
And I think that is a big problem for a lot of atheists.
So what we need to do, at least what I think we need to do, is not have arguments that address only the existence of God, but have arguments that address the necessity of emotional self-understanding, of self-knowledge, of honesty with yourself, of a recognition of confirmation bias.
Because as I've argued before, if you rip God out of people's hearts or God absconds or is driven out through disappointment and anger and nihilism, it creates a power vacuum.
And into that power vacuum rushes the state which is a far more dangerous God than anything beyond the clouds.
That's in your face.
So we need to bring more truths than God does not exist, which is why the show has touched on atheism and has actually argued atheism quite strongly, but also argues significantly for self-knowledge, for virtue, for statelessness, for peaceful parenting.
Because I think if you put all these things together, then you don't end up playing whack-a-mole with your trauma.
You end up resolving it to the betterment of yourself and the world.
So that's the sort of two major thoughts that I had, Matt.
What are your thoughts?
Well, your part of this dialogue really actually helped me a lot understand, you know, sort of what you were saying, that our ability to reason, our ability to behave virtuously,
our ability to understand each other emotionally at a psychological level, Those abilities act independent from whether or not we are atheists or Christian.
It's just, at the same time, there's always a power vacuum between whether we see Jesus as this vacuum of power or whether we see the state as this vacuum of power.
And I think you really cleared up a lot of my confusion on that point.
I don't really have much more to add.
I came into this conversation with a lot of confusion and really I think you served your purpose well of shedding light on my confusion.
Good.
Well, I'll try and quit when I'm ahead then.
Thanks, man.
I appreciate it.
It's a great question.
And simply pulling God out of the fabric of the universe for people does not result in a new tapestry of reason.
Often there's quite an unraveling, so that's why I continue to sort of push reason and evidence forward in a variety of contexts to hopefully drive out the power vacuum that leads people to Wish to find a new master when they have displaced the prior master.
But thanks so much, Matt.
It was a great question.
I'm glad the answer was helpful.
And let's move on to the next caller.
All right, up next is B. B wrote in and said, When protesting doesn't work, what might some alternative methods for catalyzing change in the short term be?
Secondarily, what can you do to, or should you, persuade someone to abandon their political views when they hold your opinion in high regard?
That's from Bea.
Hello Bea, how you doing?
Hi Stefan, I'm doing well.
How are you?
Good.
It is nice to chat with you again.
I know.
You too.
It's been a long time, but I'm glad to be back.
I was telling Michael I felt like it was sort of a sign from the heavens because so many things sort of kept pointing me back to getting on the horn with you.
You know you've actually been talking to my cousin Tori quite a bit and then all this stuff sort of broke out with the Charlotte situation and that's where I reside so I didn't know if I could weigh in on that as well a little bit.
Yes, please do.
And I'm sorry for your town, your city, but yeah, please, please weigh in.
You know, the on-the-ground stuff is more important than my abstractions at the moment.
No, no, no.
And I'm not even on the ground, and that's kind of where my question stems from.
It's actually really saddening to me to see the reaction.
As soon as it happened, the mayor called for peace.
And I was, I don't know why, but I was kind of hoping that, you know, maybe we'd be the city that actually has this positive response where we all come together and, you know, come up with some actual effective methods for addressing the situation.
So it was just a little unusual that the level of Violence broke out, the level of response broke out that did.
So I guess, you know, in just my general everyday life, talking to friends and talking to family members, it actually happened right up the street from my mom.
You know, one of the things that I wanted to know was, okay, well, you know, you're out here protesting, which inevitably leads to Opening the door for violence, for looting, for people who aren't having the same intent in mind coming in to take advantage of the situation.
So, again, my question to you is maybe what are some other things that could be done to catalyze the change that the movements in question are seeking?
Do you mean the protest movement?
Yes, exactly.
What sort of changes do you think they are looking for be?
What would be the ideal for them in terms of an outcome?
Like, how would they know?
In other words, if we got what we wanted, we've succeeded.
And I guess that's the hard part.
For me, it's so esoteric.
I just had a conversation with my friend, Brett, who I think you actually know as well.
But we were just talking about that.
Like, well, you know, when you look at the different groups involved in AACP, Black Lives Matter...
Generally just people who are concerned about race relations.
It seems that the overall objective is to change the perspective of others to not be one that comes to a judgment based on the color of someone's skin.
Which is very fair and an admirable I guess request of anyone but ultimately it just feels like that's to me the solution is is this the solution is is discussion the solution is Reality logic reasoning but you know even going back to parenting and and You know raising children to to not see violence
as an answer that you know, but those are the long-term solutions.
That's the long con I guess so and Ultimately, it's just a question for me of, okay, well, when I'm saying, hey, to my friends, I don't agree with you going out here and picketing and doing whatever, and they're like, okay, well, that's great, but what else can we do?
Or what else would you suggest?
The long game doesn't really apply.
It's very difficult to have a response for that.
Right.
Well, I mean, like everyone...
People want things to change right away.
And the fact that these problems seem to be entrenched and difficult to change is frustrating for everyone, right?
Sure.
And so I understand, you know, the sort of frustration.
But of course, there is a repetitive narrative that is being put forward that, you know, when Keith Scott was shot, as you know, the story was he's a disabled guy sitting peacefully, reading a book, waiting for his son to get off the school bus.
He's tasered and then shot.
For nothing.
And, you know, this sort of escalation occurred.
You know, he's shot for reading, just like slaves were in the South and who weren't allowed to read.
I mean, this kind of winding up of people, the way that this narrative flashes across and is just accepted.
It's just considered to be true.
And this frustrating aspect of things, you know, like you were saying, well, The NAACP, Black Lives Matter, or whatever they say, well, we shouldn't judge someone on the color of their skin.
But the problem is that if people say, well, we shouldn't rush to judgment regarding people, well, I agree.
That's been my whole point every time I've talked about these things.
Let's not rush to judgment.
Let's not just assume that this guy was sitting there reading a book and was shot for no reason.
Right?
Let's withhold judgment until the facts come in.
And that's what blacks want, and that's what whites want, and that's what Asians want, and that's what, you name it, that's what people want.
Nobody wants to be on the receiving end of a mob who is not waiting for the data, for the facts to come in, right?
Because we all want the mob to stop and to slow.
No matter what ethnic composition that mob is, we all want And that's why we have a system of law, of justice, of investigation, of evidence.
And now we have cell phone footage and DNA and, I mean, all kinds of great stuff.
And it's just a matter of a couple of days.
A couple of days.
Now, sometimes it's longer.
You know, in the case of Rodney King, right?
There was a whole process that had to go through with Freddie Gray.
There was a whole process that has to go through with Michael Slaker.
There was a process that had to go through and all of that, right?
But just wait a couple of days.
But when you see people, and this is not just blacks, this is a wide variety of people, just swallowing the same narrative over and over and over again, without reference to the previous stuff that was proven wrong.
Like, let's not rush to judgment.
Let's wait till the facts come in.
And that takes a certain amount of willpower and integrity.
Look, everyone...
Wants to wade into these kinds of situations and make it...
Not everyone.
There is a certain element in all societies, in all groups, in all ethnicities, in all races.
They wish to wade into these kinds of situations and inflame divisions and inflame problems.
Right.
Right?
I mean, that happens on the white side.
It happens on the black side with certain groups who say, well, he was a victim and this and that and the other.
And it happens on the white side where people are like, oh, this is, you know, they're just going to burn down the city again and they can't be trusted and, right, they're just so impulsive and blah, blah, blah, right?
And every side needs to say, whoa, haste makes waste.
Slow the F down until the facts come in.
And I don't know, there seems to be such a divide at the moment that I don't know if blacks are going to listen to whites say that.
I don't know if whites are going to listen to blacks to say that.
So I'm going to say, just for the sake of argument at the moment, that there are people in the black community who need To stand up to these mobs.
I don't know if they need to link arms.
I don't know if they need to unfriend people on Facebook.
I don't know if they need to ostracize people.
I don't need to know if they need to turn people in.
I don't know.
I don't know what the answer is.
But I do know that there needs to be a human shield of blacks between the rioters and the communities.
And certainly the blacks are going to do a lot better if there is that, right?
And what that means is if that sort of human line between the rioters and the community...
If that doesn't exist, then the view from outside is either A, well, I guess they agree with them because they don't seem to be doing much to stop them, or B, they're completely terrified of this element within their own community and are too terrified to talk about it and are too terrified to stand up against it and are too terrified to call it out, even later, even whatever, in between these incidents, right?
Neither of those is particularly comforting to people outside the community, right?
Sure, sure.
So, as far as what the answer is, well, for goddamn sure, B, the answer is not burn down the neighborhood, try and set people on fire, shoot people and loot.
I mean, I'm not an expert, but I'm 100% sure that is not the answer.
But the fact that that answer seems to be erupting over and over again means that it is not The solution, right?
I mean, the solution, as I sort of argued, is really long-term.
The solution is stronger families, peaceful parenting, better schools, you know, if those are voucher programs or privatized or whatever is going to happen, or maybe some other alternate form of education completely.
But, you know, I don't want to speak for Americans, of course, as a whole.
I mean, but after 50-plus years of massive transfers of wealth, To the black communities of affirmative action, of, you know, every kind of advantage that can be thought of and has been demanded has largely been supplied.
This is the result.
Well, of course, race relations is just another government program and goes about as well as every other government program, which is it aims to heal and ends up wounding.
So I think we've all got to back away from the state as a solution to these problems.
And by that, I mean sort of welfare and Section 8 housing and food stamps and government schools and zoning and God knows what, right?
I mean, all of this stuff is just wretched.
And if we can all back away from the state as a methodology for solving these problems, then I think we can actually start to have a dialogue about solving them.
But if it's basically every time this stuff erupts that there's this demand for more and more state power, and this is true of just about every dimension, And ethnicity in America, more state power, more wealth transfer, more, I don't know, youth basketball, whatever it's going to be, right?
I mean, it always just seems to come back to state power.
And the amount of state power that has been trying to manipulate race relations into a better place for the last 50 years, and before that, the state power was used, of course, for things like Jim Crow, segregation, and slavery.
At some point, you know, after 400 years of using the state to manage and control race relations, I just wonder if it might not be possible that we look for an alternative.
Indeed.
Actually, it was funny because I saw your video on the situation.
And that was something that Not to ding you or anything, but when you lay out the facts very clearly as to what we knew so far and whatnot, and then it seemed like a bit of a jump to then say, oh, well, isn't that what Obama was supposed to do?
Wasn't he supposed to come together or bring black people together?
And that seemed like a bit of a leap to me, but what you just said as far as The timeline or the instances of where the government has tried to, I guess, put their hand in the pot or stir the pot or try to smooth things over just to rumble it up some more.
That kind of bridged that gap for me.
So I understand what you're saying.
And it's interesting, though, that the idea of doing something With the intention of helping, but only hurting, is even on this microcosmic scale of just having a protest, it's still the same thing.
I mean, that's not anything other than people, you know, lashing out or having an emotion and trying to expend that emotion.
They're angry, they don't want to be angry anymore, so they have to do something.
And what that action is, you know, currently is protesting, picketing, Sitting in, dying in, you know, wearing black, whatever the case is.
But it's just, you know, in their intent to help what they perceive as a problem, you know, it just opens up the door in the same manner, you know, for the violence or for the thievery or for the other negatives that kind of come along with those things.
But it's funny that we have that evidence.
You know, we can look at welfare and see that that doesn't work or affirmative action and see that that doesn't work.
Even outside of African-American issues, if you look at, you know, minimum wage and things like that, it just doesn't work.
But, you know, would it be helpful to then look at the history of protest even and say, okay, well, in the past, you know, even five years, we don't have to go back 30, 40 years, you know, every single time there's been a protest, what exactly has that accomplished other than bringing in or opening the door for a violent Um, segment to come and take advantage of that.
So if anything, it's funny, this conversation is, it's helping me to develop maybe a response.
Um, cause, cause it's not fair to say, Hey, this isn't working, this isn't working, but to not come with something, um, you know, that's helpful.
I have a friend who's always saying, you know, don't be a, uh, uh, don't be a drain, be a faucet or something like that.
If you have a problem, come with a solution.
Um, So that's really more, I guess, my objective.
And it's, you know, this has definitely helped me to sort of think about ways to maybe formulate, you know, my response to people in a more compassionate way, in a more empathetic way, but also one that maybe offers something that's actually feasible in the short term.
But I totally agree with you as far as, you know, we're just gonna have to buckle down and change.
And Oh, am I still on?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
There you go.
But yeah, you know, so I definitely feel you on that one.
Yeah.
No, go ahead.
You were about to say something else?
Well, that's really, I think it's getting my wheels turning a lot on this particular topic.
I did have a second question.
Is it okay to jump to that or did you have any other comments on that?
No, that's great.
Go on.
Well, thank you again.
But the second question was, you had my cousin, again, Tori, a student at Chapel Hill, on.
And he was the African-American gentleman who's very pro-Trump.
And he's just a sweetie pie.
But it's funny because we got into a really, not heated by any means, but a kind of in-depth conversation about it.
And I'm not necessarily...
I'm not political.
I really don't give a shit what the government does or who's in office or whatever's going on to the degree that whoever it is, it's not really going to make that big of a difference on the level that I'm on as a citizen.
So when he's, you know, saying, well, I'm pro-Trump and let's build a wall and this and that, you know, I feel as though I can talk to him.
We're very close.
I feel like I can talk to him about my views on it and maybe even like swing him around to just maybe have an apathy about it that I do.
But I'm not sure if that's appropriate.
So the general question was, you know, when somebody respects your opinion or you have an influence on someone, whether it be political or anything, you know, When do we know as human beings that it's appropriate to try to bring them around to what you feel is the truth?
Maybe when, I don't know, especially if we don't have it clearly laid out.
What the truth actually is in the sense of what other people might say or what reality might say that the truth is.
Because, I mean, I don't know if Trump's the best thing or not.
It's just my opinion that, you know, he really shouldn't be too concerned with what politics say or politicians say at all.
But that's always just kind of been a struggle for me.
I don't feel like I really give him my full self when we talk because I'm not trying to argue, if that makes any sense.
No, that's a good question.
Now, certainly, if it's just something you feel is the truth, then it's not the truth.
You have to have some objective or valid arguments.
You can't impose your opinions on other people, but you certainly can impose facts on them if that's what they're looking for.
Right?
So, I like the color blue.
Well, that's not something I can impose on other people.
That's objectively the best color.
But, you know, two and two make four.
If somebody says they want the correct math answer, then I'm not imposing.
I'm sort of informing them of the reality of the situation.
Now, with regards to Trump, well, there are a number of issues that he's going to try and deal with that could have some significantly positive effects for the poor.
And, of course, as you know, blacks are statistically overrepresented among the poor.
in America and certainly without a doubt that if more people have jobs and fewer people are on welfare That's a plus.
You know, I hope I don't need to make a big case for that, that producing value rather than consuming tax dollars is a net positive, not just for society as a whole, but for having job skills, showing your kids you're getting up and going to work, being able to transfer all of those skills around getting and keeping a job to your kids and all of that kind of stuff.
It's hugely important that there are more jobs and less welfare for everyone, but of course it clusters around the poor, which tend to cluster more around blacks and Hispanics.
So the two things that, I guess three things, that Trump is going to try and work on that are going to help this.
Number one, Sort of going from least to most important.
Sort of cut regulations and try and find ways to bring the trillions of dollars that are stuck in overseas banks because people don't want to bring them to America for various tax and regulatory reasons.
Try and get that money to come back in, which is going to be available then for job creation, investment and starting businesses and so on, which is going to raise the demand for workers, which will bring up wages and hopefully bring some people at least out of welfare and into the job market.
That's number one.
Number two is to negotiate better trade deals so that jobs are not continually draining.
You know, manufacturing jobs, lower skilled jobs, you know, jobs that don't need your typical grad degree or whatever.
Lower skilled jobs.
And this, it sounds like a pejorative, but it's not.
Of course, these jobs can be very high skilled, but it's not sort of abstract intellectual capacities that are needed.
Those jobs draining off overseas.
So Bill Clinton sort of overlooked a lot of China's human rights abuses in order to give it better trading relations with America.
And that caused a lot of jobs to drain overseas.
Jobs are going to Mexico.
They're going to other places.
And the U.S. for the past, I don't know, 10 years or so has lost 50,000 manufacturing jobs every single month.
Every single month.
And he's going to try and find ways to reverse that through negotiating better trade deals, through putting punitive tariffs on it.
And I know, I know for the free market people, like tariffs are terrible, but they're better than welfare.
You know, we have to choose between the lesser of two evils at this point of extremity within our civilization.
The chance for purity?
Purity is long gone.
The chance for purity sort of vanished around the turn of the last century with the Fed, with the income tax, with the welfare warfare state that developed over the last 50 years, longer than that for the warfare state.
So purity is out the window.
And we have to look and say, okay, well, it's a 10% tariff, say, on automobiles coming in from Mexico.
Well, that's a violation of property rights, but is it going to move people off the welfare rolls and into productive labor?
And all of the beneficial effects that has not just on themselves and their income, but their families, their sexual market value to help restructure the families of poor people to be more solid, and reductions in the cost of government and just simple basic pride.
You know, people after a while on welfare Lose their souls, I think, and just become very passive and very dependent.
And it corrupts their entire political decision-making process because they're voting for benefits rather than for freedom.
So this idea that, oh, well, there's tariffs.
It's going to be the worst thing ever.
Well, yeah, I'd agree with you if everything else was free.
We wouldn't want to slap tariffs on, but tariffs are better than the welfare state for so many different reasons.
So that's number two.
Number three, though, I would say most important, and even Charles Murray has come around to recognizing this, who was formerly pretty much a free immigration kind of guy, is that this constant influx of low-skilled immigrants into America is destroying job opportunities, career opportunities, family opportunities, home ownership opportunities, financial opportunities family opportunities, home ownership opportunities, financial opportunities for poor people.
And that disproportionately, as we talked about, affects blacks and Hispanics a little bit more so than Chinese and Japanese people for reasons we've gone into this show many times before.
So if we put together a lot of this kind of stuff, we're looking at trying to find ways that lower skilled people can get jobs that are better than the welfare state.
And cutting regulations and stemming immigration and better trade deals and bringing money back to the U.S. so it can be used for investment and all of this kind of stuff.
And simplifying taxes and lowering corporate taxes, right?
If you can lower corporate taxes enormously, then there's more money available for expansion, for growth, for hiring people, and all of this kind of stuff.
And we need to take care of people who don't have a lot of skills in society.
You know, not everyone's going to wake up tomorrow and say, well, you know, I think I'm just going to become a neurosurgeon.
I mean, I'm not.
I don't like blood that much.
You hand me a blood orange, I'm halfway to fainting.
We know there's a bell curve.
We've talked about this before.
There are people who aren't that smart, but they're still human beings.
They need to function in society.
They need to have value.
They need to have purpose.
They're just as honorable and decent and necessary to society as the ranked geniuses at the far end of every on the right side of the bell curve.
We've got a society where these people have been cast by the wayside and made dependent on the state.
And that is brutal.
And that is creating the kind of class divisions that, you know, used to be when I was growing up in England, there were all these class divisions.
Oh, what kind of accent did you have?
Oh, you see, I had an accent.
I went to boarding school.
Right?
I mean, are you related to the aristocracy?
I think I was in junior high.
And a friend of mine, friend, he had an uncle who worked in a printing shop that was able to get official Buckingham Palace paper.
And I got an invite to some summer gala.
And I was like thrilled.
I mean, it took me like, I don't know, half a day to realize that I was being had.
But I was like, oh, how lovely.
I'll be going hobnobbing with the queen and peeing on her corgis.
You know, it was just one of these things that was exciting because that's how I was growing up.
You're close to the aristocracy.
It's a good thing.
And this kind of class stuff is really kicking in.
And this is why you see the middle class is diminishing.
The rich are getting richer.
The poor are getting poorer.
We're starting to get this really destructive South American style widening of the gap between rich and poor.
And that's because decisions have been made that benefit the rich at the expense of the poor.
You know, the rich people love untrammeled immigration because it drives the prices of their gardeners and their maids down.
I'm stealing from Ann Coulter, as usual.
And they love the H-1B visas because they can bring people into jobs who can't negotiate, who can't leave, and you can basically treat them like chattel.
And so for rich people and for the powerful people, they love all of this stuff.
But for the middle class, it's horrendous.
And for the poor, it's absolutely brutal.
Because at least the middle class has the right to panic.
The poor just get drugged.
With this welfare and state dependence and single motherhood and all the other mess that is going on.
So I think that there is a case to be made that Trump is the way to go.
I mean, Louis Farrakhan, I think, basically said to Obama, no, you had your chance and you blew it.
You had eight years.
And we're worse off now than we were when you started.
So you had your chance and you blew it.
And I think that Donald Trump, because he has spent his life around people who work with their hands, you know, people who work in the trades, people who work on buildings, those are who he feels most comfortable with.
He doesn't go to a lot of highfalutin parties.
He doesn't hobnob with the billionaires and so on.
He feels more comfortable.
And you can see this.
This is why people come to his rallies.
He's got this earthiness to him that is really quite remarkable for somebody raised with this kind of privilege and, frankly, this kind of height.
So and this vaguely orangutan-y candy floss hair, which, you know, I'm still allowed to envy because he has more at 70 than I had at 17.
But anyway, he he has this capacity to connect with people because he's been a builder his whole life.
And you can't be a builder and a hyper intellectual who doesn't like rubbing noses with the the the working classes, so to speak.
And this is why he's considered a class traitor by the rich.
This is why the rich sort of hate him, because he has this capacity to connect with people who've built his wealth, literally.
I mean, brick by brick, they have built his wealth.
And he really cares about the people who need jobs.
And he notices, you know, he's old enough to have really noticed the transition from the 70s until now.
The destruction of the sort of lower middle class jobs that people who were poor, they could reach that bottom rung, you know, with a decent high school education.
You can sort of look at old economy Steve, you know, graduate from high school, crosses the street, gets a job.
Old economy, Steve, is just a great meme.
He's old enough to really, really get how much America has lost in the evisceration of lower middle class jobs.
And now it's, of course, altering to middle class jobs.
So he is aiming fundamentally to raise the demand for American workers.
And whatever he needs to do, and he's got a lot of really interesting ideas on how to do it, that is going to create demand.
And that demand is going to pull people off welfare and put them back into the working world, which is going to be enormously beneficial for everyone.
You know, you can't help but notice, and I think everyone who's watched the riots, whether it's in Ferguson or Charlotte or Los Angeles back in the day or other places, you know, B, you look at these people and part of you thinks like, wow, it's really getting late.
I mean, aren't they going to have a tough time getting up to go to work?
You know, how are they able to do all of this?
You know, I remember when I – because I got my first job when I was like 9 or 10.
And I got my first job where I had to travel when I was 11.
And, you know, you couldn't really stay up very late because you had to get to work.
And it will change such an enormous amount.
When lower class and lower middle class people have access and opportunities to stable employment, it is going to create a true, not just an economic or a political, but a cultural revolution, right?
So some of the thug culture, the nihilism, the up all night, the not exactly job interview friendly outfits, I mean the tatting, the heavy sort of misogynistic rap stuff.
That is all a function of the welfare state.
That's a function of people who just don't frankly have to get up and go to work and deal with customers and produce value and all of the discipline that helps people become better human beings because of that.
So there's going to be a massive cultural change, which ain't going to happen under Hillary for sure.
In fact, I think it's going to go the other way.
She wants to bring in more immigrants.
More jobs are going to be outsourced.
And I think that that nihilism involved in the welfare state is only going to spread.
And I hear you.
And I hear him when he says these things.
But to me, it just comes down to the simple fact of when you invest yourself behind someone and you take the time and energy to really, you know, to Hype them up and think about all this and look at what their platform is and try to, you know, imagine a future with whatever policies that are going to enact are going to do for you or going to do for society.
You know, it still boils down to the fact that you are one vote that doesn't even matter, especially in a presidential election.
You know, so it's so to me, it just seems a little fruitless.
So here's the nihilism I was talking about, right?
Because I made a pretty passionate case, right?
Sure, yeah.
And what's coming from you is this giant cosmic, eh, meh, this shrug, right?
You know, hey, white votes matter.
No, I'm kidding.
But you've got this shrug, which is like, you're neither agreeing with me nor disagreeing with me.
You're saying, but what can we as mere mortals do?
To hell with that.
You don't just have one vote.
You have as many votes as you can convince people to make.
You have as many adherents.
Look, I have philosophy.
I have philosophical ideas.
And I can just sit there and say, well, I'm just one guy with one idea.
And there's millions of people out there or billions with different ideas and so on.
Well, to hell with that.
I'm going to go and take to the airwaves.
I'm going to take to my mic.
I'm going to make the case as passionately as possible and change people's minds.
So it's kind of one of these things that if you think you're helpless and it's fruitless, I think you're right.
But if you don't think that...
You're also right, because you could, if you accept these ideas, be a powerful change agent, whether it's getting people to vote or just getting people to understand these ideas.
It doesn't hugely matter fundamentally in the end.
But if you're going to give the sort of meh shrug, what can we do kind of stuff, you're just taking yourself out of the conversation that is so necessary to humanity.
And I think it's not always better people who are going to step into your place.
And I would definitely go with the latter.
I don't feel...
That you should shut up at all about it.
Everything you said are things that need to happen, are things that I hope happens.
But I just don't, I guess the meh comes in with the avenue for doing so.
And, you know, it's funny because it kind of goes back to the first question of protest.
I mean, that's literally what That equates to for me is, you know, there's a lot of people who want to change people's mind or have them change their behavior or change something.
And so they get together and hopefully their voices in unison can, you know, can change.
Tell people what they're trying to say and people will actually listen because there's that weight behind it of the crowd coming together.
And so it feels like that to me.
And I guess that's the issue I take with protests is that, you know, that's the intent for sure, but it just opens up the door for people to take advantage of that.
And I guess that's my issue with voting is sort of like, okay, you're very invested in this person And then you vote, and that's great.
Or you convince people to vote, and that's great.
But then I guess I feel like the intent is lost.
I feel like the idea of, hey, let's discuss how we can help the economy or how we can get together and make actual change with race relations or with whatever the case may be, with the way we see our class systems.
I feel like that's what gets lost when the focus It starts to be on one particular person.
And I mean, I'll even say like one of the things that with the immigration that Tori sort of gets into, you know, I get it.
And I guess to me, it still feels like the long term solution is the one that would work, not necessarily worrying about who's You know, in the White House for four to eight years, it's just more so, you know, raising your kids, right?
You know, making sure they don't have disillusions about imaginary people in the sky and, you know, treating people kindly because that's, you know, UPB. It's not, you know, it's not something that a book told them to do.
You know, so to me, peaceful parenting, not saying violence is The first resort.
Those to me seem like the solutions and those are what I'd rather my cousin or anyone, you know, focus on as opposed to focusing on, you know, again, going to to cast your ballot towards something that's, you know, temporary, I'd say.
So I do hear you.
And it's given me a lot to think about.
Because I'm very much...
Don't pander to me, woman.
No, because I'm not...
Don't patronize me.
I'm not...
I didn't plan on voting.
Two little cases here.
Let me make two...
Now, before I make these cases, I'm just going to make the sound of a truck backing up.
Beep, beep, beep, beep.
Just so everyone knows, I'm aware that this is new information for people about my thought process, so I'm aware of this.
But when it comes to peaceful parenting, do you think peaceful parenting...
Is enhanced by people having productive work or by being on welfare?
Definitely the former.
Right.
So peaceful parenting and state policy are not completely disconnected.
And listen, I mean, I hate having to say this because I'm like, to hell with political action.
It's all about peaceful parenting, which it could have been, except that people aren't getting on board as fast as I like and time is running out demographically and blah, blah, blah.
So if we can get people off welfare and into productive jobs and Their parenting is going to improve enormously.
And that's because families are going to become more stable.
Kids are going to see parents who are getting up and who are organized.
You can't be a heavy dope smoker easily and have a demanding job.
I mean, I guess some people can.
They're immune to it or whatever, right?
But in general, it would diminish drug use.
It would diminish alcoholism.
It would create a more sort of organized life for people.
None of this sort of going to bed at 3 o'clock in the morning and rolling out of bed at noon.
It's more structured.
It's more organized.
And it's healthier.
You've got a sense of productivity.
Plus, if you have a productive life and you're not a sort of parasite, then you're a happier person, less depressed.
and less depressed people tend to be nicer to be around, less aggressive, less violent, less neglectful and so on, right?
So there is a lot to be said for if you could just move about, like if you could say, well, I could drop a pamphlet of peaceful parenting on every household or I could get those households to go from welfare to work, which would be better for the kids?
I think the latter would be better for the kids because you can ignore a pamphlet, but you can't ignore the demands or requirements of actually having a job, I guess, if you want to keep that job.
So peaceful parenting and whether there are jobs available for people, I don't think are entirely unrelated.
You know, it's a false dichotomy, like the either-or way.
Either we do this or we do that.
Why not do both?
If they complement each other.
That's sort of the first thought.
The second thought is...
I guess I'll go Battlestar Galactica on this one.
Frack protesting.
Frack it.
Frack it completely.
Frack it up the yin-yang.
Frack protesting.
Because protesting implicitly is a demand that somebody else get off their ass and solve your problem.
Right?
I'm going to stand here and I'm going to wave a sign and I'm going to chant and I'm going to yell until some damn person, usually the state, comes along and solves my problem, which usually means giving me or people I like money.
That's taken from other people by force, or the unborn, or the bar dead, whatever.
So, to heck with protesting, frack protesting with a black and decker.
Because it is not proactive, it is reactive.
You yell, it's like having a tantrum.
You can't buy the candy yourself, but you can have a tantrum until mom caves and buys you the candy.
Having a protest is a A manifestation of a sense of helplessness.
Now, I'm not saying protesting is never appropriate.
It is.
There are times when you need to get the publicity out and need to get the message out.
But protesting as, well, how do we solve this problem?
Let's protest.
That's a last resort if there's nothing you can do, right?
Like I just did a video about the ICANN transfer to the UN or wherever it's going to be, right?
Mm-hmm.
Now, I'm saying to people for the first time ever, I'm saying contact your political representative.
Never said that before.
I may never say it again.
But, you know, you can't do anything about it yourself.
When you protest, you're saying there are no answers that we can possibly enact within our own community, within our own society, within our own ethnicity, our own neighborhood.
We can't do anything.
Therefore, we have to protest.
But when you have the possibility of changing things, I'm not going to do it.
I'm going to completely externalize the problem.
I'm going to protest so other people, often white people, are going to ride in on their generally white horses and save the day because there's nothing we can do about these things ourselves.
Can't fix it, can't solve it.
And I do not for one split Star Trek second imagine that there's absolutely nothing that the black community can do or any community can do to fix problems within that community other than shake their fists at the sky and demand that...
White people drop government money on them.
You know like I just I can't for imagine for a moment to me that would be incredibly disrespectful to the vitality and creativity within the black community That these problems can be approached.
And I'm not alone in this, right?
Years ago, there was a Sister I'm Sorry movement where blacks men were sort of instructed on how to be nicer to the women folk or whatever.
And there's lots of things that have gone on within the black community saying, look, every time we run to the government, we get the temporary high of cash, which usually goes to not the most honest people on the planet.
And then we get the crash of dependence.
Let's stop doing that.
Let's do things...
Within our own community that we know statistically are going to end up with better things.
Let's reinforce the strength of marriage.
Let's pace for parents.
Let's try and combat the nihilism of the young.
Let's stop committing as many crimes.
You know, that would be a big plus.
You know, again, I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure if you commit fewer crimes, you're going to end up with a better community as a whole.
And it's not...
Outsiders, it's not white people, forcing black people to commit all of these crimes.
Now, again, having said that, there are effects that the state has on criminality within the black community, the welfare state, dissolution of the family, father absence, all of this kind of stuff which I've gone into before.
But the moments that you protest, you've lost your power and you're in a supplicating pose saying, please help me.
We can't do anything else other than beg for justice.
Solutions to come from outside.
And so I have a big problem with the very concept of protest when you have alternatives.
Like, I'll give you a two-second sort of example just so people can get at least my perspective on these things.
So when I was in college and graduate school, there were quite a few lefties.
Quite a few lefties.
And it became sort of like a salmon going upstream, you know, like getting that...
Pink Lives Matter.
Getting up that waterfall, just like, oh, you know, it's like, yeah, it's a rivulet, and then it's a bigger one, and then it's a bigger one, and finally it just feels like you need a jetpack to get up the Niagara of the last one.
And I could have protested.
You know, I could have said, well, the government's got to go in and make sure that objectivists are objectively represented in proportional numbers, and people who are pro-market are objectively represented, and I could have protested and protested and protested.
Instead, I went into the business world and started a podcast that became the biggest philosophy show in the world.
You know, because...
Protesting is a confession of impotence.
And if there's true impotence, I think it's perfectly valid.
I don't think that that's the case.
Interesting.
Interesting.
And I hear you on that.
I guess for me, it goes back to the It really comes full circle because, I mean, you know, as a community or, you know, as a person, it's very difficult to change the mental.
It's like you said, the photocopier, you know, so we're seeing the photocopy of, you know, the people, Martin Luther King, people, you know, protesting and marching on Washington and Selma.
And we're, you know, and so it's like we pick that up.
As African Americans, and, you know, that's what we do, because that's what we've always done, you know?
And so maybe there's a bit of that where it just can't be held.
I feel as though I got extraordinarily lucky, you know, to be able to be an African American, but to be able to kind of look on the outside end of that.
But at the same time, I'm really having to kind of put myself in check as a whole right now because what it sounds like and what's kind of becoming a realization for me is that I'm in my head, in my own world, living in, you know, in Captopia and anarcho-capitalist utopia or whatever.
And that's Where I am.
So I'm already in a place where I'm like, oh, you know, it doesn't matter what they say, because I'm living my life, you know, by the standards in which I, you know, adhere to and with truth and logic and reason as my guides.
And that's where I am right now.
But, you know, so it's interesting that I kind of have to reel back and say, okay, well, the reality is that I'm in a situation where I live in a country as a black woman, you know, with certain, I guess, consequences for just those facts, even though I can't help those things.
I really do hear you and it's really given me a lot to chew on as far as like we were talking about short-term actions or short-term solutions and it sounds like that's something that you've embraced and I really respect your thoughts and opinions so for you to have I guess taken a look into The political scene and to feel so strongly about making
a difference in that or trying to make a difference in that realm for a short-term solution in order to get to the long game.
That means a lot to me and that has given me quite a bit to think about.
So I really do appreciate that.
Yeah, all right.
I mean, and I appreciate you saying that, Bea, but part of me thinks that when you say, I hear you, you're actually saying, I stopped listening.
But I'm willing to, if you're going to go, will you go away, put this on the back burner, mull it over and come back?
I will, yeah.
Okay, that, you know, hopefully a little sooner than the last time we chatted, because I do want to know what you think when you mull this stuff over, because...
I sometimes feel when people say, well, I hear you, but it's like, well, I've just discarded everything that you've said.
No, no, no.
I would like to hear what you think.
Please be assured that's not the case.
When I say that, I mean, I've really sat here and listened.
I make it a point to not try to formulate what my next thought's going to be.
I'm really trying to understand.
And I do hear you quite loud.
There's no but.
I hear you and I'm going to think about it.
All right.
I'm coming over if I don't hear from you soon.
No, you're welcome.
And it will not be at a convenient time of day.
Just so you know.
Just as you've fallen asleep.
Hey!
Hey!
Remember that thing we were talking about?
You're welcome.
Hey, can I shout out my fight real quick before we go?
Yeah, please do.
Hey, everybody, go to thatatheistplace.com.
We're hoping to keep these types of conversations going with monthly Sunday brunches.
If you want to start a chapter in your city, fill out the form.
Let us know.
You'll get an application.
We really hope to build this up as a way to continue this type of conversation.
Thank you so much, Stefan.
I really appreciate your help.
Thanks, Bea.
Always a pleasure.
And let's move on to the next caller.
Alright, well up next is Andre, and Andre's got a question that I might have something to say about.
He says, That's from Andre.
Oh, hey, Andre.
How are you doing?
Hi, Steph.
How are you?
I'm well, thanks.
But the person you really should be talking to is Mike on this one, because he's had a few thoughts over the time that we've been together about this very topic.
So I'm going to cede to Mike.
Absolutely.
Well, is there anything you want to add first, Andre?
Before I just throw a bunch of arguments in?
Yeah, for sure.
So, you know, first I want to say thank you very much for having me on the show.
I've been listening for a long time, and I'm pretty excited about this.
So, you know, I had been pretty excited about the idea of a Trump presidency, I think, because of a lot of the reasons that a lot of other people I think are excited and him being an outsider and a businessman and having that sort of background that a lot of the seasoned politicians don't have.
And I initially wrote in right after I attended a Trump rally here in Austin And I was kind of enthusiastic about seeing this rally.
I wanted to see the protest.
I wanted to see if it was everything that the TV says it is.
And I actually left there feeling pretty disgruntled, pretty disappointed, and just a little bit jaded, right?
That was kind of what prompted me to reach out and just kind of have this conversation.
So I guess just a little bit of background.
I certainly had a ticket for the Trump train, but I was not on it.
And now I decided to walk.
Well, what about the rally?
What made you feel jaded?
So during that time, he had just started to latch on to more of the teleprompter Trump and reaching out to, you know, to the black community.
And so when I was there, you know, I had never been to a political rally before.
It was a huge, you know, huge crowd.
I think it was seven, eight thousand people.
Everyone was incredibly excited.
And there's a lot of really great speakers beforehand, and I found myself kind of nodding along like, yeah, that's all very good points.
And whenever he took the stage, it felt very...
It wasn't authentic at all.
It was very canned, his responses.
It seemed like people weren't even really listening.
He would, you know, he would say things, you know, he had these keywords that he was throwing out, right?
Like, we're going to build a wall.
And, you know, he'd talk about Hillary Clinton and people would chant, you know, lock her up.
You know, everyone was pretty enthusiastic, but, you know, it didn't...
You know, he just, you know, he had these keywords, right?
And he's just throwing out these one-liners and people are going nuts.
And so I'm looking around and, you know, I don't really know that it matters what the hell that guy would have said, right?
I think everyone was just so excited and in the moment, you know, those rallies are like pep rallies, right?
For old people.
And it really doesn't matter what he would have said because everyone would have just kind of, you know, been really, really excited about it.
So is your argument that people that have catchphrases have no substance?
Is that kind of the theory behind it?
No.
I guess I wanted a little bit more from Trump.
And I didn't get it, right?
I think another really great example was what happened on Monday night, right?
I think you guys even did a video that I watched, and I've listened to a couple of shows, and everyone, even people that support Trump, they wanted a whole lot more, right?
There are so many opportunities that he could have really nailed it.
And he just, like, laid an egg, right?
And I feel that that was my, you know, so when I was at that rally, that was my impression, is that he was just kind of throwing out these one-liners.
People were really excited, and it really didn't matter what the hell he said, again, because I think people just would have been totally, you know, enthusiastic about it.
Okay.
All right.
Well, Why do you think people are attending Donald Trump rallies as opposed to, say, Hillary Clinton rallies?
I think because, you know, there are a lot of things that he says that are fantastic.
I agree with, you know, a lot of the issues with immigration.
I totally agree with, you know, that there's, you know, corruption.
You know, he's saying...
So people are there because of the things that he's saying in the stands that he's taken?
That's certainly a reason why people are there.
Yeah, people are there because...
Doesn't that contrast what you said earlier wouldn't matter what he said?
I mean, if Donald Trump came out tomorrow and said, you know, this whole thing about building a wall and this whole thing about immigration and terrorism and security and all that?
Nah, I changed my mind.
I changed my mind.
Much like Bernie Sanders when he stood up there and said, we gotta fight back against, you know, wealthy special interests in politics.
And then he gives the exact same speech today while Hillary Clinton is sitting behind him.
And everyone looks at him and goes, oh, Bernie, something's wrong here.
Something's wrong here.
Why was Bernie able to previously draw 5,000, 6,000, 7,000, 8,000 people to see him speak?
It was because of the principles that he stood with.
Principles that most of which I firmly disagree with, or ideas that I firmly disagree with.
And it's the same thing with Trump, in that people are there because he is taking stands that they fervently believe in.
I don't know that because he has a catchphrase or two, like, build the wall.
I just look at that as smart marketing.
And if you make your rallies and things fun for people to go to, you're probably going to get more people that do get caught up in it.
And I'm sure not everyone there has a firm understanding of immigration policy and the implications thereof.
There's probably some people there that want to be part of the cool thing.
Any movement of any size is going to have people like that that get swept up.
You don't get a movement of that size without those types of people.
And I don't necessarily look at that as an immediate bad thing.
Sure, I wish people immediately applied to reason and evidence to every decision and thought that they had, but that's not the world in which we live.
So I'm not going to discount...
Maybe there's people that get caught up because they like hearing Steph say not an argument occasionally, and they think it's a fun internet meme.
I'm not going to discount what he says because some people like the meme.
People like the catchphrase.
So I don't know that...
I mean, maybe he gave a terrible speech that day, and that was your initial impression of it, but maybe the guy had a bad day giving his speech.
Maybe...
I don't know, but I'm not going to discount...
Someone who, I mean, is completely unprecedented in American history, to my knowledge.
If anyone has any exceptions to what I'm saying, please do let me know.
That is taking more bullets and taking a bigger stand than anyone in human history, in some ways, to the degree that he is being attacked on all sides.
And he is being attacked on all sides because he's threatening a lot of very strong, wealthy corporate interests.
You know, the battle between nationalism and globalism is here, and Donald Trump is the face of the movement fighting against globalism.
And I'll tell you, as a principled non-voting anarchist, the last thing I ever thought I'd be doing is talking about a political candidate and talking about him very positively.
I did not expect that was going to happen.
Into your original question, you know, how do we know Donald Trump isn't suffering from the same, you know, psychopathic, self-serving bacteria plaguing the rest of Washington?
Well, first off, I will say maybe he's the exact same as everyone else.
That is certainly a possibility.
Maybe Donald Trump, if elected, gets in.
Maybe nothing will change.
Maybe he'll flip the script tomorrow and not do a damn thing that he said he was going to do.
Maybe he won't be able to do anything that he said he's going to do.
That is certainly possible.
He's one guy.
He's got a movement that's a lot of power there.
You can send out a tweet in your Twitter account and jostle a couple of senators or representatives pretty easily with that.
But maybe you won't be able to get anything done.
That is certainly a possibility.
Without question, it's a possibility.
I mean, that's the argument that's been made, and Steph's made this for years, just about every politician, period.
You don't get on the debate stage, you don't get to a high-profile position until you're already bought and paid for with donations.
Otherwise, you don't have enough of a name, you don't have the recognition, you don't get a place at the table.
And you can look at Ron Paul as a comparison that people make all the time.
People talk about Ron Paul.
And no one knew who Ron Paul was at the time.
No one had any idea who he was.
And Ron Paul got a little criticism.
He got racist thrown at him a little bit.
But he was mostly just ignored.
And he had no chance to win because of that.
He didn't have the money and because he wasn't going to immediately sell himself off to the highest bidder, there was no incentive for people to donate money to Ron Paul outside of the grassroots.
So he could be ignored.
He didn't have the money to make himself an impact.
He didn't have the name to make an impact and his ideas were ignored and he didn't get a seat at the table.
That's how politics has worked.
And occasionally you'll get someone like Ross Perot that comes along and he has the money and he's got some ideas.
But he doesn't have the charisma.
He doesn't...
Even Ross Perot, most people didn't know who Ross Perot was before he was...
And he didn't have the internet.
That's very different compared to Donald Trump.
And he didn't have the internet.
That's a big, big, big part of it.
So when the media made fun of Ross Perot pulling out charts and, you know, the funny way that he said certain words and all that, they could turn him into a clown.
And, you know, lots of people don't want to join and sign on to vote for a clown.
Now that we have the Internet and the fact that Trump is.
He completely and totally breaks all the rules of what I thought was possible in a candidate.
He walked in the door and everyone knew exactly who he was from the start.
They knew Donald Trump.
Most people, I won't say most people, but a lot of people vote for the guy whose name they know on the ballot when they go there.
That matters.
It's a shame that that matters, that people aren't interested in ideas and principles more.
but that's the thing knowing who someone is it's a big step and you know There's worldwide businesses that Trump is on.
Worldwide television distribution.
People knew who Donald Trump was the second he said, I'm getting in this thing.
Money.
Didn't have to solicit wealthy corporate donors, and he didn't.
He didn't.
He didn't take massive amounts of money in the primary or even the general.
For a second there, it was like, oh, look, he's going to do some fundraisers and all that for the Republican Party, and he's going to solicit lots of money.
Well, if you look at the charts as far as where the big money corporate interest dollars are going, it's not towards Donald Trump.
It's all going towards Hillary.
So even in this massive, massive campaign, The general election campaign has not taken lots of money.
The argument would be, if he was taking lots of money, why are people donating to Donald Trump?
You know, if someone donates a million dollars to your political action committee, why?
Well, they probably want something for that.
And Trump hasn't done that nearly to the extent of any candidate that's had a chance of winning any type of election for a serious political office in the United States.
I didn't think that was possible.
Part of which is because he's got 10 billion dollars, or maybe it's a little less, whatever, he's got a lot of money.
And he's spending a lot of his own money.
So, he's got the name, he walks in the door, they can't ignore him, and good lord, they didn't want to ignore him, because look at this clown running for president, look at, oh, our ratings went up, we talked about this guy running for president.
Let's keep putting him on, isn't he a joke?
Oh shit, he just won the primary.
Oh boy, that's not too good.
He couldn't ignore him and they didn't want to ignore him because he brought eyeballs, he brought viewers, he raised their ratings, raised their advertising revenue.
And now here he is and he's not bought and paid for because he's not taking anyone's money.
So now you see, I mean in her primary you saw this as well, especially as it got down to the later stages and things got serious.
Everyone is attacking this guy.
You got the political establishment from the Republican side tearing him down.
You got the political establishment on the Democratic side tearing him down.
You got all kinds of third parties tearing him down.
You got the mainstream media as a cohesive block.
Doesn't matter if they're on the left or the right, if they're conservative, if they're liberal, they're all attacking this guy.
The amount of people that didn't just go crazy on Donald Trump in the media, or even alternative media, you can count them on like one hand.
This guy threatens so many interests and scares so many people because he actually is a template that could change things, which is completely unprecedented, again, in the history of American politics, at least in modern times.
So, the question then, okay, he's not bought and paid for.
He got in the door because people knew who he was and couldn't ignore him because he means ratings, he means eyeballs, all that kind of stuff.
He's got all these people attending his rallies.
You know, it's...
The silent movement is silent no more.
There's all these people coming.
So now the question is, okay, if he wins this thing, and I think he's going to win this thing, Will he change anything?
Well, God, I don't know.
Like I said, he could be exactly the same as anyone else, but he's the only person that's ever fit the template required to possibly not be completely corrupt, bought, and paid for.
And just one other thing I wanted to mention.
This is how good a businessman Donald Trump is.
I don't know how much of his own money he's going to end up spending on this.
I don't know if anyone's estimated.
We may never know.
But if Hillary gets in, He stands to lose billions of dollars in her inheritance tax.
So the fact that he's willing to spend however much he's going to spend on becoming president, he's still saving way more than he's spending because he's not going to enact a 65% inheritance tax.
That's how good a businessman it is.
That even his investment in becoming the president is going to save him many, many, many dozens of times what it would have cost him if Hillary had gotten in.
That's an amazing thing.
Well, people joke as well that he's the only candidate that's been able to get the media to essentially pay for his campaign by giving him all this free airtime.
Part of which, and this is another tool that he's got in his kit, is Donald Trump, as Scott Adams has talked about, and if you're not reading Scott Adams' blog, you're behind the political times.
He is an incredibly gifted salesman and persuader.
And all these, you know, these stories that flare up, Donald Trump said this tremendously controversial thing and now everyone's mad at him.
A lot of these, and if you look back, Ann Coulter talks about this quite a bit, if you look back at the terrible thing Donald Trump said and, you know, the controversy, and you look back a month later, it winds up benefiting him more often than not.
So, you know, this buffoon, he's out there just saying this crazy stuff, and I can't believe he's still getting away with it.
Turns out it's benefiting him.
Maybe he's not a crazy buffoon.
Maybe he's just a brilliant guy that's playing the media and the political apparatus like a damn fiddle.
Now, I can understand people being concerned about that.
You got a guy with money, you got a guy with a name, you got a guy with charisma, you got a guy who's very strong.
You get this talk about, oh, strong man politicians, you know, it's going to be the rise of Hitler, Hitler 2.0, one more time.
Here is another important difference that nobody talks about.
Donald Trump had these skills, had this money, had this toolkit for a long, long, long time.
And he didn't run for president.
If he was a power-mad, I-just-want-to-control-the-world kind of guy, why wouldn't he have run for political office previously?
He flirted with it before and then said, eh, nah.
You know, he's had Roger Stone and a bunch of other people going, Donald, you should get into the race.
You should do this for a long, long time.
And he, again, flirted with it for a bit and, you know, thought of running.
And no, he didn't because he likes his business.
Here's a guy that for 40-plus years has been pleasing customers in the free market.
Maybe there's a contractor that he didn't pay because the contractor didn't fulfill the terms of the contract.
But he's been satisfying people in the free market for decades and pleasing them to the degree that he's accumulated a whole ton of money.
Whether it's $10 billion or less, he's accumulated a whole bunch of money and that's not in dispute.
So he's made a whole lot of people happy.
He's put mints on pillows while other politicians were blowing up countries and destabilizing the Middle East.
So if this guy was a power-mad sociopath, Why didn't he run for office earlier?
How come it didn't happen earlier?
How come he didn't use his name value, his money, his charisma to run against Obama years previous?
This guy's been talked about in political circles as a possibility for decades.
So the fact that he, I like my business, I want to run my business, That tells me right there, this is not a guy that's running for political office because I would like some power, please.
Give me some power because, you know, I'm just mad with a desire to control other people.
He put this off literally until the last moment of his life that he possibly could.
He's 70 years old.
He's not gonna run when he's 74.
That ain't gonna happen.
He put it off as long as he could, and I don't know if there's gonna be much of a country left to run for the presidency if he doesn't get elected in four years from now.
So he put it off as long as he could.
He's been satisfying people in the free market for 40 years, and he's been remarkably consistent on a lot of his signature issues, such as concern about trade deals and stuff.
It's creepy!
It's creepy looking back at just how consistent Trump has been on his major policy positions going back forever.
It was Paul Joseph Watson just pulled an old newspaper clipping from decades ago where Trump was talking about NAFTA and the dangers of NAFTA and trade deals.
So it's not exactly as if he whipped this up five seconds ago and said, hey, I'm just going to give the people something shiny that they want and run on it.
Most of his stuff is pretty consistent.
He was talking to Oprah decades ago about pretty much the same thing.
And she's like, oh, are you going to run for president?
And he's like...
I don't know.
I don't know.
You know, it's a big sacrifice.
Because, you know, the guy likes what he's doing, satisfying people in the free market, running his business.
And, you know, that to me, that to me, the people that want the power, The people that want to run for office, the people that are running for Congress and stuff at 40 years old, hey, maybe there's some people with good intentions in there.
I'm sure there probably are.
There's a guy like Paul Nealon who was running against Paul Ryan in the primary trying to usurp him.
I totally believe Paul Nealon had nothing but the best intentions.
Thumbs up to that guy.
But the people that want to run to politics square away as their career without doing anything prior in the free market of substance and I'm not talking about you hide behind a government union or monopoly for years and years and years and you know are in that kind of lobbyist corporate sphere where you go into government and back to the private sector and into the government and back to the private sector completely working within the political apparatus to make your living.
I'm talking about people that actually did something with their damn life actually provided a service or a good that people wanted And, you know, did a little living before they tried to grab a ring of power.
And, you know, he's someone who put it off for a long, long, long time, and his life was pretty good, you gotta admit.
70 years old, lots of money in the bank, television show, you should go back and watch...
How he was treated on mainstream talk shows before he decided to run.
Oh my god, he's like a king.
Everyone loves him.
Children, women are throwing babies in the air at the greatness of Donald Trump.
Here he is talking about things.
Look, he's fantastic.
And now he runs.
And you know what?
His great life went to not so great pretty quick.
Now he's got the entire media calling him a racist, a misogynist.
There's even an article calling him a rapist.
They threw out every piece of bullshit that they could to smear this guy.
He had an interaction with a hot dog vendor when he was 14 and blah blah blah.
Every possible thing that could be thrown at him, whether true or not, and mostly not, has.
So this guy who had a great life, his life went to nothing.
Well, I shouldn't say nothing because he's doing pretty great and he's got a movement behind him.
But it was a huge risk, a huge gamble.
That first speech where he talked about immigration policy.
Again, the only reason he's talking about immigration policy and the other politicians aren't is because he isn't getting paid to not talk about immigration policy.
You know, all the Republican corporate interests, they benefit from that cheap labor.
They love it.
The Democrats, they love it.
George Soros loves it because these people are going to come in and vote Democrat.
They're going to vote for Hillary.
Yay!
So everyone on the top loves open borders.
They love people pouring in.
They don't care if they go on welfare.
They don't care if it's good for the lower-skilled workers in the United States, which, you know, if they got an IQ of 80 or lower, they might not be able to retrain immediately and become doctors.
It might not happen.
Sorry, that's just the way it is.
Unfortunately, this is a problem when it comes to lots of low-skilled people coming in and taking jobs.
So, he was talking about it because he wasn't paid for, and you saw the price he paid immediately for that.
So this guy's great life, boom, overnight.
This was before he was leading in the polls.
This was before he was the nominee.
This was before he's standing on stage with Hillary Clinton with a hundred, or I think it was 80 million that they could track viewers and a whole lot other on electronic devices watching him at the debate.
He didn't know how this was going to pan out.
He didn't know.
I mean, I think he had some pretty good ideas that it would pan out well, otherwise he wouldn't take the risk, you know, the smart businessman and planner that he is.
But this was a huge risk and a step down.
He could have disgraced his company's name.
He could have disgraced his children's names.
And I'm sure there's people out there on the liberal side of things, the social justice warriors, that think he's done exactly that.
But he took that risk.
And again, you know, people joke about this.
Donald Trump moving to the White House is actually a step down in terms of accommodations.
That's right.
So it's not like some guy who's never done fuck all in his life running for political office because, oh look, now I have power.
People think I'm important.
They're asking me for things.
I could say yes or no.
Boy, I've never had any kind of power in my life.
Trump's had lots of power his entire life.
But power in a market environment satisfying customers' wants and needs.
So it's a different kind of power.
He's had power.
He's had earned power, which is a power you can respect.
You know, I respect my dentist.
My dentist's power over me when I'm sitting in that chair because I trust he's going to do a good job because a review on Yelp said he's fantastic.
You know, earned power I have no problem with, but the political power that most people crave is unearned and they just want to boss people around and make a fancy living.
Trump's had power.
I don't think he's reaching for that brass ring because he's got this insatiable drive within him to control other people.
Because his entire life has been set up to do the exact opposite.
So, again, these are all traits and things that are unprecedented in any kind of politician.
And, again, I never thought that I would be interested in voting for someone in my life.
In my life!
Watch Steph's The Truth About Voting video.
Are you gonna get down on your knees and beg?
Fuck no, I'm not.
I'm not gonna get down on my knees and beg.
All the arguments from that video, they still hold true.
They still hold true.
No one gets on that stage unless they're bought and paid for.
Asterix.
Unless you got 10 billion dollars, everyone knows who you are, you can't be ignored, you're social justice warrior proof, you got balls of steel, and you just happen to be someone that's been accustomed to power your whole damn life since you've reached adulthood, and now just want to maybe give back and do something for the rest of the population.
It's a different scenario that no one saw coming, I didn't see it coming, Steph didn't see it coming, but it's different variables.
That's the reality of it.
It's different variables.
And again, what do I say at the start?
Maybe if he gets elected, he'll be terrible.
Certainly a possibility.
Certainly a possibility.
But you know what?
There's a chance he might not.
And I've never said that about a politician before.
Sir, there's some where it's like...
There are varying degrees of terrible, but maybe this one is slightly less terrible.
There's an argument that Trump might be absolutely fantastic for the United States and the world.
And the world.
Because people that care about individualism, you know, all the Ayn Rand fans, all the people that read Atlas Shrugged, all the libertarians, all the anarcho-capitalists, you know, one of the things that minarchists talk about all the time is like, you want a government close to you.
You want a government so small that you can drown in the bathtub.
Nationalism is preferable to globalism.
The government that's closest to you is preferable to a government that's far away that you have no chance of controlling whatsoever.
So that's why people talk about states' rights.
You know, let's give rights to the states because it's easier to effect change on a state level than a federal level, much less than a global level.
You know, that's why people talk about local politics.
Get involved in local politics.
So Trump represents nationalism as opposed to globalism.
Is it a perfect free anarchy society, even in the best of cases?
Hell no, it's not.
We don't get what we want, anarcho-capitalists.
Steph doesn't get what he wants.
I don't get what I want.
It's just the reality of the situation.
It'd be great if we could snap our fingers, press a button, and everyone was living in a free society.
There was no violence.
There were no riots because some guy got shot because he...
You know, fought back with policemen or had a gun or whatever the deal may be.
It'd be fantastic if we could snap our fingers tomorrow and have that free society.
But guess what?
It ain't happening.
And guess what?
There's also all this information about the genetic basis of IQ, which is heritable to some extent.
The number, all the scientists will go back and forth and go, is it 60?
Is it 80?
Is it 20?
Where is it going to be?
We know it's somewhere.
So this is also a factor as well.
You look at voting patterns, and there are certain groups and certain cultures that just, you know, they're not voting libertarian folks, and they're very child-hostile cultures.
There's lots of cultures that are very hostile towards your children.
And folks, you can dig up these stats.
If peaceful parenting...
Is the way to a free society, and Steph has made that case many, many times, and I think it's damn well bulletproof, and all the science and data that has come out since then has only further backed it up.
Go listen to the Elizabeth Gershoff interview we just did to prove that point.
Bringing in lots of child hostile cultures is not going to help you get to a free society.
I understand it's uncomfortable for someone to maybe call you a racist.
I understand that.
I understand that.
But if you want a virtue signal by going, well, Donald Trump isn't perfect and we don't have a free society, you can virtue signal and say that.
You can.
But if Hillary Clinton gets elected, it's game over, folks.
You're not having a free society now.
You're not having a free society in four years.
You're not going to have it in 10 years, 20 years, 50 years, 100 years.
Things are going to get really, really, really bad in the United States.
Really bad.
How's it going to work when, you know, the money runs out and you have lots of third world immigrants in the United States that now aren't getting welfare checks.
Now you don't even have the low skilled jobs.
How's that going to work?
Is society going to spring up and become a marvelous, you know, situation where everyone is happy?
Freedom will come out of that, you know, spontaneous combustion of the state.
Hell no, folks.
Look at Venezuela.
How's that working out?
It's not working out too good.
I don't want that to be in the United States.
And I know, I know without question, that if Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton or any of these people got elected president, that's where we're going.
Anyone that wasn't talking about immigration as a serious issue and actually talking about securing the border in the United States, that's where we would be going.
Trump is a maybe it's going to be different.
I think it's going to be different if he gets in and he's going to try to do something.
Maybe he won't be able to.
Maybe he's a total sociopath, completely corrupt.
He's got me fooled and, you know, it's going to wind up being terrible.
Well, it's going to be terrible if Hillary gets in.
That we know.
It's going to be completely terrible if Hillary gets in.
So I, at the very least, want the new information.
If political action can work at all, one iota, in a perfect scenario where you have a candidate...
Who is $10 billion.
Everyone knows who he is.
For some reason, he doesn't mind stepping into the fire and being called a racist and the whole rest of the matter.
You know, he's got the internet to fact check him.
Lord knows you're trying to shut that down.
Stuff just put out the video on the whole ICANN UN transfer situation.
We might not have that in four years.
So you have the perfect situation right now with a candidate who, yeah, folks, he ain't perfect.
When he talks about Edward Snowden being a traitor and you know what we used to do to traitors, guess what?
I hate that.
I absolutely hate that.
But there's a whole litany of things that he says that I like.
The whole lit things that I believe him on.
And he's someone who seems to actually respond when people go, hold on there!
Hold on there!
What you're talking about now doesn't make sense.
You know, we put out a video about his comments on the whole Apple iPhone unlocking encryption thing.
And, you know, he never talked about that again.
That's kind of interesting.
He never talked about that again after we put out that video.
I wonder if there's any...
Not going to be.
Okay, so...
So here you have a guy who's open to feedback from people on the outside.
He's been in the free market.
He's got all these unique traits that make him unlike any politician ever.
You know what, folks?
I am going to crawl on broken glass, if need be, on election day, to go to the poll and pull the lever for Donald Trump.
A principled non-voting anarchist is going to do whatever it takes, fight through hell if necessary, to make my way to the polls to vote for this guy, because he is literally the last chance and hope That the United States has unless we're going to go through, I don't know, the Dark Ages, something really, really, really, really bad for a long, long, long, long, long time, and maybe at the end of it we'll have a hope of getting something decent again.
He is the last hope, and I'll tell you what.
I'm going to go, and I'm going to vote for him, and I suggest you do too, because if he doesn't get in, we know it's going to be hell, and if he gets in, it might be better, and I think there's a pretty good chance that it will be.
That's my case for Donald Trump.
If you've got any questions...
Wait, wait, let me just throw in one additional thought, which is that even if we say Donald Trump can't do what he says he wants to do, The important thing is what he's not going to do.
He's not going to go after the Second Amendment.
He's not going to try and bring in a lot more Third World people, refugees or whatever you want to call them.
He is Not going to put more Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court.
That's right.
He is not going to try and get more leftists on the Supreme Court.
So he's not going to – he may not be able to hit the brakes, but he sure as hell isn't going to hit the gas when it comes to driving America off a cliff.
And if we need time and we need time to get reason and evidence across, it's a multi-generational change, as I've said, for many, many years.
We need time.
Can Donald Trump buy more time?
Compared to Clinton.
Well, of course.
There's no doubt.
Even if he doesn't achieve anything he wants to achieve, the important thing is what he's not going to achieve that Hillary Clinton is going to try to achieve, which is stuffing the lefties on the Supreme Court, maybe going after the Second Amendment, bringing in more migrants, opening the borders, all of the stuff that she's talked about, legalizing the illegal immigrants who are there.
Not because she cares about them, because they're going to vote left and swamp out any possible small government votes in the future.
So the important thing is, forget what he says, oh, I don't know if he's going to do.
What is he not going to do that Hillary Clinton has already committed to?
that should be enough.
And no one can make the case that Trump isn't a maybe as far as making improvements and not making things worse.
Even the most staunch anti-Trump person on the planet can't make the case that he's not at least a maybe compared to Hillary Clinton, which is a guarantee.
And when it's talking about the survival and the future of Western civilization, I'll take my maybe over a guaranteed you're screwed any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
Right. .
Yeah, and, you know, please don't misunderstand.
I want Trump to be that guy, right?
I definitely agree with you that he is the perfect template of what we would want and should want for leadership in this country.
If you built a candidate in a lab that could possibly change things for the better, it would be Donald Trump, as weird as it is to say.
Yeah, he would probably be at least one of the top five experiments.
I don't know if number one.
But yeah, I totally agree that he is what we should want from a candidate.
Right?
And I also agree that Hillary Clinton is a bullet for this country.
I think that she is a hot mess, and I don't think there's anything positive that's going to come from a Clinton presidency.
But where I guess we differ is that I feel a little less enthusiastic about him.
Than you do, only because I feel as though I've been burned in the past, right?
I'll go to that, which goes to the second part, or the second question, right?
But before I get to that one real quick, I just want to mention, in the video that you guys did post the debate on Monday, you kind of ended...
And, Steph, you had a little speech about it where the moderator—his name escapes me at the moment—asked Lester Holt.
Lester Holt.
The esteemed and honorable Lester Holt.
Okay, go on.
Lester asked Trump if Clinton was elected, would he support her?
And he was asked, I think, twice.
And at the end, he said, yes, I would.
Which was a terrible, terrible answer.
And I think, Steph, you had made a really good rebuttal to that.
And I'm paraphrasing.
And it was, hell no.
I'll do everything I can in my power legally.
Um, to fight every single policy that you're trying to enact.
And, um, you know, that's the answer that I think that's the answer I wanted.
And, um, and I'm sure millions of other people wanted as well.
Right.
And he didn't give that right.
His, his initial impulse was to say, sure.
Right.
And, and just based on, you know, some of the terrible, um, And just the terrible performance that he gave on Monday night, that also makes me question his business.
All right, Andre, I gotta jump in.
I'm sorry, man, I gotta jump in.
How do you know his debate performance was terrible on Monday?
How do you know?
My impression.
I mean, I'm with you when it comes to the answer to that last question.
I'm completely with you.
Emotionally, I would have loved for him to lay it all out there and be like, hell no!
I would have loved that.
I don't know that that would have been the right thing to do.
That may have been the complete wrong thing to do, given the audience he was trying to play to.
Okay.
This guy has done so many things that people in the moment go, I can't believe he did that.
That's a gaffe.
That's a problem.
And then it winds up, as I said, a month later, you look back and go, well, that seemed to work out really well for him.
At this point, given how successful he's been, I am not going to say that he did a bad job or screwed things up.
Things may have gone completely according to plan.
He may have accomplished his objectives.
And Scott Adams talks about going into that debate and trying to seem presidential and not fly off the hinges and very respectful.
All the talk of Hillary Clinton called Trump a racist, a bigot, and all that stuff.
And Trump called her Secretary Clinton.
Maybe he was appealing to the people that have been He's non-stop fed this propaganda that if he gets the nuclear codes, you know, because someone's going to send him a tweet that's mad and he's going to target their house with a rocket, you know, like whatever the case may be, maybe he had a different goal going into that the answers that I emotionally would have felt more satisfied in the moment hearing would have been terrible for his objective of getting to the White House.
And you know, at this point, I am trusting his competence.
Steph has talked about Donald Trump as being a god of competence.
And looking at what he's achieved, hell, not just what he's achieved over the course of the last year in politics, but in his life, the man is very, very competent.
And I trust that he's not an idiot.
Absolutely.
I mean, you don't get to...
Your name being an international brand without having some confidence, right?
And to be fair...
More than some.
Dudes have got a confidence.
And to be fair, the politicians in this country They're not exactly setting a very high standard.
When you ask, how do I know he did a bad job?
I think, to some extent, you guys don't think he did a great job.
You know, and there's a lot of other people.
I don't know.
No, come on.
I don't know.
You don't know.
Of course you know, right?
Because otherwise you would have, you guys would have created a video that was like, damn, he just killed it, right?
No, no, no.
See, listen, he has, look, Donald Trump has access to information that we don't have.
It's not my job to run for office.
This has been his sole focus for more than a year.
He's withdrawn from his other commitments.
He's not running his business.
He's not doing TV. And the guy sleeps like three minutes a night.
And so this has been one of the most intelligent people around, a true genius.
It has been his sole focus for over a year.
Not my focus.
And it sure as hell hasn't been your focus either.
No disrespect intended, right?
This is like something you check in from time to time, as do I, right?
I mean, it's not my...
So if a stone genius has been solely focused on a particular objective and has gotten further than most people, again, other than the great Hank Colter, would ever have given him a possibility of doing...
Than saying, well, he just made a mistake or he did something wrong or he did something bad when it's a very sort of vague part-time thing for us, but his entire legacy.
It's not just the money he spent on running for president.
It's the money he's foregone.
What did he earn?
Like $220 million the year before he, like that money's all foregone.
It's the opportunity cost as well.
So, to say, well, he just did a bad job or he made a mistake and so on, he's got access to information, to internal polls.
He's got the best political minds floating around him giving lots of advice.
So, I don't know.
You know, it's the old thing, could be crazy, crazy like a fox.
You know, like, it could be that our outside judgments without the information that he has, without the big goal plan that he has, without the instincts that he has, It's really, really tough.
Now, if he completely bombs out and fails, well, okay, then maybe, right?
But we don't know what he's going to do over the next two debates, right?
I mean, he appeared to be faltering earlier this year and came back much more presidential, and he's in it to win it.
I mean, this guy, he is definitely a winner all around.
I mean, there's very little that he puts his hand to that he doesn't succeed at.
He is in it to win it after all of the abuse that he's taken, after the struggles and danger, right?
I mean, the guy wears a bulletproof vest because he gets so many death threats.
His family, I'm sure, get death threats.
His grandkids probably get death threats.
This guy is in it to win it.
And he has won a lot in the past.
And so I just, I'm not saying, you know, well, everything he does is perfect and so on.
But to me, at this point in his life, having had the successful career as an author, as a businessman, as a real estate developer, as a television personality, I mean, as a producer, as, you know, running the Miss Universe, like at this point, he is competent until significantly proven otherwise. he is competent until significantly proven otherwise.
Because that's got to be the respect and the integrity and the honor that we grant to people who've shown their competence many, many times in many, many different fields.
He's competent until proven otherwise.
And I say this because...
I sort of ask this from my audience as well.
You know, I don't demand it and you don't owe it to me in some abstract, honorable sense, but I've been pretty right about a lot of things.
I've been honest about where I've changed my mind.
I don't try and sneak it past people.
And the people are like, well, the next video is crazy.
It's like, no, I think I've earned enough credibility that people can give me the benefit of the doubt until significant evidence otherwise.
Now, okay, you've been burned before, but not by Donald Trump, right?
That's the important thing.
We can't take the disappointments from our past relationships and always apply them to our new relationships because that's allowing bad people in history to dominate the future and possibility.
You've been burned in the past, but not by Donald Trump.
So, you know, And did these candidates that you were burned by in the past meet all the standards that I laid out earlier that would specify them being different and being able to even have the possibility of being different?
Right, no.
And they didn't.
And, you know, whenever I think back...
So, you know, I typically don't...
So, you know, in 2008, right, when Obama was running, I didn't vote for him.
But he was romancing me, as well as many other people in the country.
And it was obviously a big thing.
And for me, I kind of kept him at arm's length, but I was like, I like what he's saying.
He's saying good things.
I like transparency in the government, especially after years of Bush and all the tinfoil hat sort of ideas that were floating around, which, true or not, whatever.
You know, and not only that, you know, he's brown like me, right?
So that's a good thing.
So, you know, and so whenever I, you know, as when Obama's running and, you know, and I'm thinking to myself, and again, I didn't vote for him because I was still a bit skeptical, but a lot of people did, right?
And he was saying a lot of really good things.
And so I, at one point, am like, you know, and I'm thinking, you know, this guy's actually gonna, you know, he's gonna be, you know, this hope and change and all of that.
And look where we're at, right?
Look where we're at.
I mean, this is the scariest.
And I don't know if maybe I'm just old enough to recognize it now that I, you know, have my own family and, you know, a little bit more responsibility.
But this is a truly terrifying time.
And, you You know, I don't want to be- Sorry, you voted for Obama because he's brown like you?
No, no, I didn't.
I did not vote for Obama.
Oh, you were interested in him because he was brown like you.
Sorry, you said you didn't vote for him.
No, no, I was interested in him.
No, no, let me be clear.
I was interested in him because he was saying a lot of the good things that Trump is saying now, right?
Transparency in government, right?
Accountability and No, I don't think we want to try and overlap Obama and Trump in terms of what they're taking.
No, no, no, Steph, I'm not comparing them.
I'm not comparing them.
What I'm saying is that Obama's meshes— Obama talked a really good game.
And I'll tell you, I've listened to some of those speeches.
I wanted to believe them, too.
It's like, oh, man, hope and change, and this is wonderful, and, you know, hey, races, everyone's going to be happy.
This is fantastic.
I wanted to believe it, too.
But here's the thing.
Here's the thing.
If you go back and watch the video Steph did years ago prior to that election talking about Obama, pretty much nailed it.
Pretty much nailed how bad he was going to be and what was going to happen.
Because that's the template of everyone.
I mean, for someone like Obama, he got all the donations.
He got all the money.
He was bought and paid for before he got on stage.
Great charismatic guy.
Didn't have any power.
You know, community organizer.
Oh, look at my power.
I can organize my local community.
He wanted that brass ring.
Senator.
Oh, look, I'm a senator now.
Okay.
He wanted that brass ring.
He didn't have power before in the free market, so he went to politics, and it was a step up in his life.
There's all these things that I went through previous that would make Donald Trump different, and Obama failed every single one of those tests before he even got in office, which is why Steph was so accurately able to predict how it was going to work out, and it wound up being a damn disaster.
And the reason, I mean, I think some credibility needs to be thrown Steph's way for pretty much saying how terrible Obama was going to be, and it's not exactly as if you were singing the praises of Romney or McCain or any of these other people that ran against him.
You were saying they were going to be equally terrible probably for different reasons.
Yeah, absolutely.
There's credibility there, and being able to see why he was going to be terrible, and it winds up coming true, and for the same reasons why Steph knew Obama was going to be terrible, those reasons do not apply to Trump.
Which makes him a maybe.
Which makes him a possibility.
And you know what?
Maybe, just maybe, like I said, he gets in there and stuff isn't great and the wall doesn't get built and immigration, whatever, and maybe he's in it for some ego trip.
Maybe.
That's a maybe.
Maybe.
I'm open.
I'm a pretty strong proponent of the positive change I think he can do for this country.
And I'm saying there's a maybe in there.
There absolutely is.
But it's new information.
He doesn't fit the previous templates that all the other politicians fit.
It's completely different and it's unprecedented.
And that's why he may be different.
I want the information.
Either way.
I want the information.
If you can have someone with this money, with this charisma, if there is a possibility in a voting republic or democracy where you can have someone that actually comes in well-intentioned and wants to make positive change for the place that he lives, I want to know if that's possible.
I want to know if it's possible.
Listen, if Trump gets in, nothing changes, it's a mess, it's a disaster, things get worse, all that, then we know that voting will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever work to solve social problems.
We know that democracy is the god that completely and totally failed, even in the best possible conditions, when you have someone not dependent on outside money or media exposure, people calling him nice.
This is a maybe.
This is information to see if it's even possible.
This isn't hope in the political process.
This isn't hope for the next politician down the line.
This is a lightning strike.
This is a very different, unique entity.
And we have a chance.
And that chance is.
It's coming along at a time where the United States and the rest of the world are in significant trouble.
The idea that the dollar is going to collapse and we'll pick up the pieces and freedom is going to come out of that, it's not going to come out of that when you have third world immigrants in the country and hostile cultures and religions.
It's not going to happen.
It's not going to be nice.
There's going to be a lot of bloodshed.
We see what's happening in Charlotte with riots.
I mean...
That's a taste, folks.
That's a taste of what's to come.
Mike, he's going to build the wall.
Mike, I know you want to hedge and I know you want to sound more.
He's going to build the wall and he has the constitutional authority to control immigration.
He's going to build the wall.
He's going to change the incentives.
Millions of people are going to self-deport and he's going to control immigration because these are things he can do.
So I have no doubt whatsoever.
Maybe you're hedging.
I'm not hedging.
He's going to do these things.
I'm going to stake my reputation on it.
Well, Steph, this is why I'm quote-unquote hedging in this.
I want people to try and make the case to me, and this is an open invitation to call into the show, email, whatever the case may be.
I want people to try and make the case that Trump is not a maybe.
Well...
That all the stuff we talked about, you know, this is why he will absolutely guarantee no different than Hillary and that bought and paid for.
I want people to try and make that case.
I don't think it's possible.
I don't think it's logically possible.
And I want people to try and make that case.
I don't even think the most anti-Trump proponent could make the case that he's not a maybe compared to the guarantee of Hillary.
So I absolutely think he's going to build the wall.
If people go, he's a narcissist, egomaniac, blah, blah, blah, do you think he wants to fail at his primary objectives?
If you think negative things of him, that he's all in it for Trump and this is some mad power grab, do you think he wants to go down in history as a guy that talked a big game and then didn't get the job done?
If you're gonna use the ego argument, I think that's actually to the benefit of those that want the wall built and the idea that it's gonna be built and that he's gonna implement some of the policies that he's talked about.
So, yeah, I think he's going to get this stuff done once he gets in office.
I really, truly, honestly do.
But I want people to try and make the case that it's not at least a maybe compared to the guarantee of Hillary and the rest of the politicians that don't meet all the criteria that make Trump different.
That's a bit of an impossible request.
I want the information.
Because there's always a maybe, right?
I think it is, but maybe I missed something.
Again, I'm not grandiose enough to say that Donald Trump fucked up the debate.
I'm not grandiose to say that Donald Trump completely messed up that debate and did a terrible deal.
I don't know.
Maybe I'm missing something.
Maybe I'm missing something in my analysis of Trump and why he's different.
Maybe I'm missing something.
So that's why I'm putting out the challenge, because if I'm wrong, I want to be corrected.
I want to be corrected.
Tell me I am wrong and why.
But he's a maybe, and if you can't prove that he's not, Well, I want the information.
I want to see if political action is possible to elect someone that's actually going to affect political change.
Well, I mean, it certainly...
Listen, I wish I were as enthusiastic as you.
And it is.
It's an impossible request because, of course, he's a maybe, right?
A maybe is anything.
Maybe, you know, maybe a little drop out of the sky.
Well, no, Obama wasn't a maybe.
Obama wasn't a maybe.
Well...
All these other politicians are not maybe.
They don't meet the criteria.
They're all bought and paid for before they get on stage.
All the arguments and the truth about voting, that stuff is made for years and years and years, all apply to these people.
That's why, oh, they get in office, and look, they're doing the exact opposite of what they said they're going to do.
Paul Ryan, a guy that read Ayn Rand, look, he's terrible.
He's...
The Tea Party.
Terrible.
Yeah, the Tea Party.
All these people with their principles.
Oh, look, they get in government and just stick their nose in the trough.
All the same principles applied that made that boringly predictable.
Oh, and here's the last thing, too.
Last point I want to make.
It's not just about Trump and the government.
It's not about Trump and the voters.
It's Trump and the media.
The mainstream media.
That counts.
My case has been for at least a year.
More.
More.
That Trump is waking people the hell up to the manipulations of the mainstream media.
Because they see what he says, or rather they hear what he says from the mainstream media, then they go and see what he says in context, and they finally, finally recognize they're being lied to.
They're being manipulated.
They're being controlled.
They're being programmed.
It's all propaganda.
And that was hidden before by Democrat alliances and Republican compliances.
But now you've got someone who's coming along who is not backing down in the face of media opposition, so they're escalating these manipulations.
So it is waking people the hell up to the matrix of the mainstream media.
And I could do four more years of that.
I could do eight more years of that.
Because I think that once the power of the mainstream media is restricted or maybe even broken, then we can start having honest conversations about things without people fearing that their lives are going to be destroyed by being called racist or sexist or homophobes or whatever it's going to be, right?
So he's already done a lot to crack the power of the mainstream media.
And you can see people's trust in the mainstream media declining during the The candidacy of Donald Trump.
Because they're seeing it.
They see Donald Trump.
They see the media.
They see the discrepancy.
They see the consistency.
And that is waking people the hell up.
Now, that's good business for me, but that's not primarily why I'm interested in it.
It's just because People have a chance to think if they doubt.
Without doubt, there is no thought.
I don't doubt gravity tomorrow.
Without doubt, there is no thought.
And once people see the discrepancy between Trump and the media, it starts to provoke their thinking.
Why are they misrepresenting him?
Why are they so in the bag for the Democrats?
Democrats, what is going on? - And let me reiterate again, 'cause I said it and I think some people will be surprised that I said it, but I'm voting for Donald Trump and I'd crawl over broken glass to do it.
You know, I wish I shared your enthusiasm.
Wait, your what?
No, I'm just kidding.
Wait, what?
What?
Just kidding.
I know, I know.
You know, I do.
I wish I shared your enthusiasm.
I just, you know, I don't want to be...
I don't want to be romanced into these sorts of things because he says a lot of good things, right?
All politicians say a lot of good things, especially every four years.
He's not a politician.
Come on, man.
He's not a politician.
He's running for office.
No, no, no.
Compared to everyone else who's been in the gig for decades.
This is the first time he's ever done it.
He's not a politician.
And you say, well, the debate performance wasn't great.
What the hell does debating have to do with being a president?
You don't get up there...
Do you see?
Do you think there's going to be a lot of debates that are public and moderated by people friendly to America between Putin and Trump?
There's not going to be debates.
Debates are fun and they're interesting and they're like watching sports.
There's nothing to do with actually being the president and what you do when you're president.
You know, when he wants to go build a building somewhere, do you think he just goes and debates with his competition in front of a crowd and then has them vote for it?
No.
No.
No, but I think...
No, so the debate is fine.
I don't care.
I mean, the debate is fine.
You know, I hope it gets some undecideds to think about his candidacy in a more serious way, but it's got nothing to do with the presidency.
No, no, no.
Sorry, go ahead.
No, it does.
Listen, I mean, it's got, you know, it demonstrates his ability to be sharp, right?
So, you know, you ran a business.
Do you think that Donald Trump is not sharp in business?
The guy's written the number one business book.
He has one of the largest business empires in history.
Do you really think that he's not sharp in business?
And I made arguments as to why the debate wasn't necessarily a fail, why he may have accomplished everything that he wanted in that.
And you can go read some more Scott Adams on that because he lays it out pretty well.
So, I mean, if you're going to say that the debate, start with the debate was a terrible performance and he failed in that, I don't agree with you and I've made arguments.
So unless you can rebut those arguments, we need to succeed that point there.
Well, I think that that's subjective, right?
I think it's subjective whether or not he did a good job, okay?
Because I'll tell you, you know, he was being...
Listen, I don't want to get into the details of the debate because, again, I think it's subjective.
I think what the debate demonstrated is his ability to be sharp and think on his feet.
What does that have to do with the presidency?
Well, he's going to be sitting across the table, I would think, from another world leader.
And I would hate...
Right?
For a situation that, you know, whoever that world leader is, to be sharper and knock him off his game.
Dude!
Oh my god!
Hillary Clinton has sat across from world leaders, from leaders of countries, the way that Han Solo sits across from that creepy Greedo fellow in the cantina scene in Star Wars.
I'm not disagreeing with you on that.
Right?
There's smoking craters where at least one world leader that I think of, Gaddafi, we came, we saw, he died.
Oh!
Right, so you really worried about Trump?
Sure, why not?
Maybe.
Well, I just told you why not.
Okay, I'm going to move on to the next caller, but thanks very much for your call, and I appreciate that.
But you're unmovable when it comes to reason and evidence, so we're going to save our reason and evidence for other people.
But thanks very much for your call.
Let's move on to the next caller.
Alright, up next we have Evan.
Evan wrote in and said, That's from Ivan.
Hi, Ivan.
I'm just shaking off a caller and a little bit of another caller that...
Yeah, that was amazing.
...in any way, shape, or form, so I'm just going to let that out of my system, do a little reason dance, shake it off, because, you know, when you passionately put reason and arguments together and people are like, meh, I don't buy it, meh, not really, meh, I don't know.
It's like, oh, forget it.
I mean, you don't want my flowers, we're going to someone who is.
Find that annoying?
Yeah.
I do, in fact.
It's because it's like trying to wrestle with a statue.
I mean, it's like, no one's moving, nothing's happening.
Doesn't matter what I say.
Oh, my God.
That was amazing.
The rant by Mike was absolutely amazing.
Amazing call.
I'm going to go run a marathon right now.
Be back.
Oh, I think you did.
On a treadmill.
To nowhere.
With him.
But anyway, go on.
I'm glad to be on the show.
I'm very delighted.
There are so many things I wanted to ask you.
I had to pick one.
I spend my days, a lot of my days, in constant frustration at the left.
There are just so many things that bug me.
I just had to pick one.
I think healthcare hasn't actually been discussed that much on the show.
It's a really biggie.
So, I live in the UK, and my wife is a doctor for the NHS, and the other day she told me a story.
So, what happens in the UK? Like, most people in hospitals are like, a very substantial proportion of them are like, they're over 80.
Like, 70 is very young, right?
So, most hospital beds are filled with very elderly people.
And they're obviously able to lead to that old age because of the advancement in healthcare, which were not there when the NHS was originally designed and envisaged, right?
And so she told me a story where, and because it's all funded through the general taxation, right, they had an elderly gentleman who was completely fine.
They sorted whatever minor problem he had, but He couldn't go to a care home because there wasn't one sorted for him and he couldn't be sent back home because he wasn't mobile enough to go up and down the stairs and his son was too busy to move his bed from upstairs to the downstairs and basically they had to wait for like two weeks for his
son to move his bed From upstairs, downstairs, in his house, so that he can move back to his home.
All this time he was obviously in the hospital.
Maybe a thousand pounds is the cost of a hospital bed in the UK. At that point I thought, well, if in your life you haven't invested enough in your children and you haven't spent enough time with them that they are They treat you like this in your old age and...
And, you know, well, maybe, you know, one child can turn out, you know, not so nice, but, you know, at least then you have to have several children, right?
You divisify your voices.
Okay, dude, I'm sorry to interrupt you.
You've got to compress this into some kind of question.
Sorry, sorry, sorry.
You're going to listen back to this and you're going to say, why am I so disorganized in my conversation?
You've got to boil it down, give me a question so we can have a conversation because I'm beginning to zone out and I'm trying not to, but really got to accordion that mother down, right?
Sorry.
My question is, how do you pay for this?
The cost is going to increase.
How do you pay for healthcare?
Exactly.
Well, the whole purpose of healthcare is to not pay for healthcare.
And that sounds all kinds of zen, but the whole purpose of healthcare is to avoid problems.
Is to avoid problems.
So the question is, how do you set up or what kind of system would emerge in a free market and a free environment that would minimize people's spending on healthcare?
Well, right now...
The healthcare system, I mean, in the UK and other places where there's socialized medicine, how much money does the healthcare system make if you stay healthy?
Right.
But the thing is...
No, no, no.
Answer the question.
This is how conversations work.
Please answer the question.
How much money does your doctor make if you're healthy?
None.
Right.
If you get sick, how much does your doctor make?
X. X. And so here we have a fundamental problem that you have a healthcare system that is making money off people getting sick, which means it has no incentive for prevention.
Correct.
Right now, if you have an insurance-based healthcare system, the insurance companies make money if you're healthy and they lose money when you're sick.
If you don't go with an insurance but just save up your money for a rainy day in a hospital, then you get to keep your money if you're healthy and you have to spend it if you're sick.
You need a system that makes money when people are healthy and it costs or they lose money when you're sick because then what happens is they are heavily invested in prevention rather than cure.
And a lot of times, like, what is it?
Six or seven out of ten healthcare problems are lifestyle related.
It's not just bad luck.
It's because you were doing stuff that was dangerous.
Now, if you're doing stuff that is dangerous, you know, like smoking or extreme sports or too much couch surfing or whatever it is, right?
Then all of that will be reflected in the premiums you'll pay For your insurance.
Because the insurance is very finely calibrated to say, oh, you're doing this risky stuff, therefore we're going to have to charge you more.
And then you can make choices about the risky stuff that you do.
You can say, well, maybe skydiving at 70 is not really the thing to do, or maybe I'll go do some exercise, or maybe I'll quit smoking, or whatever it is, right?
True.
And so you need to have a system that makes money from prevention rather than cure.
You need to have not a healthcare system, but a well-care system.
In other words, a system that makes it optimally Profitable when you're doing well rather than when you're doing badly so that people have an incentive to keep you healthy rather than making money after you get sick.
Now even in America this has all been changed because you're not really allowed to assess people intelligently and change their premiums based upon their habits and so on.
So that's the first thing.
Now the second thing is most people, like here's just a sort of simple example.
What do you have?
You have like a urinary tract infection.
So you have to go and deal with the doctor Who then is going to write you a requisition to go and get your blood taken by a lab.
And your lab sends it somewhere else.
It comes back to the doctor.
You go back into the doctor.
You get a prescription for whatever antibiotics you need.
You go to the pharmacist to get the, like it's ridiculous.
It's like in those old family circle, that old cartoons where they're dot, dot, dot running around the backyard doing all those different crazy things.
That is insane.
You want to put your finger into a vending machine.
It's going to prick your finger, take your blood and analyze it and give you the medicine right there.
I mean, however that would be taken care of.
Please stop talking in my ear while I'm trying to explain stuff because I keep thinking you're trying to talk over me and that's really annoying.
I'll let you know when I'm done and then you can go on with it, okay?
So, things need to be more efficient.
Right now, in countries in general, certainly in the West, they limit the supply of doctors because they'll only allow a certain number of people to get into medical school.
They will also force People who could otherwise easily provide doctor services, they're not allowed to provide them.
The whole licensing thing was because doctors didn't feel like they were making enough money.
There were too many other people, like nurses and midwives and nurse practitioners and so on, who were providing healthcare services more efficiently than doctors were.
Doctors wanted to keep their money, so they put licensing in to restrict people from providing medical services.
Well, hey, guess what?
It's a big shock.
When you restrict the supply of something...
The cost of it, the price of it, goes up.
The value doesn't, but the price of it goes up.
So we have governments restricting entry into the healthcare field.
We have ridiculously inefficient ways of actually getting your healthcare provided.
To the point where, see, the doctors make the most money if they just, like, it's like Lucille Ball with the chocolates and that old I'd Love Lucy thing.
You can see that on YouTube.
If you're just ferrying people through your office, boom, boom, boom.
Ferry them through, ferry them through, ferry them through.
That's how you make the most money, which is really providing, in a sense, the worst service, right?
There's studies that show that doctors listen for an average of 18 seconds to people's complaints before they start offering up their opinions or making diagnoses.
That is terrible, terrible stuff.
So if you come in and you say, oh, I have an infection, boom, here are your antibiotics, off you go, right?
And now we're getting incredibly antibiotic-resistant diseases.
Gonorrhea is occurring and other diseases are occurring that they can't really treat very well with antibiotics because there's been such a massive, I would say, over-prescription of antibiotics, but that's how it works.
If they can just cycle you through, oh, you're not happy, boom, you go see a psychiatrist, a psychiatrist, oh, you're not happy, boom, here's some medication, come back and we'll tweak it, and boom, boom, boom.
Right?
Are people interested in talk therapy and actually dealing with your problems, going to the roots, self-knowledge, counselling?
No!
Boom, boom, keep it moving, keep it moving!
Which is why there's so many drugs being used and so little effective intervention and prevention.
It's become reactive, pom-bom full of drugs, people are on ridiculous amounts of medicines when they could, in fact, have just maybe changed their diet and exercised with depression, with obesity and all this kind of stuff.
It is insane just how badly mismanaged, in my humble amateur opinion, all of this stuff is because the financial incentives are all wrong.
If you pay doctors by the number of patients they see every day, then you're going to get doctors who just funnel you through, funnel you through, funnel you through.
And people say, well, we can't get hold of healthcare, you see.
We can't get a hold of healthcare if we don't have enough money.
But socializing it and putting the government in control of it makes it even worse.
Makes it even worse.
As I had this little ear problem, go to the States, see the specialist one day, the next day I'm in an MRI. In Canada...
It would take me two to three months to even see an ITER specialist, and then the average is 102 days or something to get an MRI. So, and I could have had a tumor in there, an acoustic neuroma, right?
At which point it might have spread a brain tumor, I could be fucking dead.
So at least if you can pay for it, and it really wasn't that expensive, but if you can pay for it, you can go and borrow the money.
You can go and whatever.
It's going to go around to your friends and your family and say, listen, I need 2,000 bucks or whatever.
And then at least you can get it.
But if you have to wait for the socialized stuff, it's months and months and months and months and months that you have to wait.
And I feel passionately about this because I had a lump in my neck that was originally non-cancerous.
And then by the time I finally got it diagnosed after I ran to the States.
A year after it was first noticed, guess what?
It was cancerous.
I had to go through chemo and radiation therapy.
I don't even know if I'd have had to do that if I'd have had a goddamn halfway decent healthcare system that would have taken care of me, which for the taxes I've paid in my life, I think I have a right to ask for.
Sorry, it's not you I'm mad at, but it's just the whole situation.
So, healthcare is not that expensive.
If you take all of the paperwork out of it, if you take the bureaucracy out of it, if you take some of the legal risk out of it, I mean, you know, there are bad doctors who need to get sued, but I think we can all understand that in tort-happy America, things have got a little bit crazy.
I mean, just a little, a little bit crazy.
Like 15 million lawsuits launched in America every single year.
I think 90 to 95 percent of them against rich people, coincidentally enough.
And so you've got, you know, this kind of, oh, you know, something went wrong.
We've got to sue the doctor and you can get crazy amounts of money.
Maybe that's justified sometimes.
I think it's a little bit over the top.
So we are in a situation where people have enough food.
They have generally enough shelter.
They have access to fresh fruits and vegetables and all this kind of stuff.
So we should be a hell of a lot healthier.
White people in America, for instance, are dying off sooner.
Life expectancy is declining for white people in America.
Case selected, it's a stressful environment.
That's a whole other situation.
I think that obesity is partly rising because people are not in stable long-term relationships.
If you're married to the state, you don't have to stay thin, so the state won't leave you.
Anyway, it's a whole other sort of situation that is occurring.
But how do people pay for healthcare?
Well, first of all, nobody has a right to it.
Nobody has a right to healthcare.
So save your money, be healthy, buy insurance before you even have a kid, right?
So that if your kid is born with something congenital, it's dealt with.
Insurance is the way to go.
It's not that expensive.
And technology is driving the price down.
You say, oh, we got to spend a lot more because there's all this new technology.
It's like, nope.
Nope, nope, nope.
That's like saying I have to spend more on secretaries because there's email and Outlook for scheduling things.
Or, well, you see, I have to spend a lot more on my farm because I have a combine harvester, which is different from 50 people out there for days trying to pick up my corn through their teeth.
So...
It's not technology.
It's simply the government restricting supply.
It is the complete wrong financial incentives that are driving people to make bad decisions about their health.
And they're driving doctors, I think, to not spend enough time with their patients to work on prevention.
And you've got all of these lawsuits that, you know, for medical reasons that may be just a little bit over the top.
And all of this is sort of combining to create this perfect storm.
Where healthcare costs are going up and people say, well, how can I afford all these crazy healthcare costs?
It's like, well, you could if the government wasn't taxing you and controlling supply and if all the bad incentives weren't there, then you could certainly afford all of this stuff.
Like in the States, you used to have to buy insurance before you got sick.
No kidding, right?
Of course, the whole point of insurance.
You can't buy fire insurance when your house is currently on fire.
That negates the whole point of the damn thing.
But what happened is in America years ago, they said, well, you can't Refuse insurance for people who have pre-existing conditions.
You have to take insurance for people that...
And then what do people do?
They said, okay, well, I guess I'll cancel my insurance.
I'll wait till I get sick and then I'll apply for insurance.
And the next thing you know, well, we've got to force people to buy insurance because mysteriously they stopped buying insurance.
It's like, well, of course they did.
Because you rewarded them for not buying insurance by...
Forcing companies to take them even when they were sick.
Oh, wait till I get sick.
I mean, if I have to, you know, if I can buy fire insurance only when my house is on fire, guess what?
It's not going to work.
And then the government's got to force people.
Anyway, so just take the force out of the equation.
Things are going to be enormously affordable.
People will get sick far less and be able to afford much better health care than they're getting now because that's how the free market does it, baby.
Okay, I'm done.
Okay, I absolutely agree with you with regards to People will get sick less and they will have insurance and everything.
But my original argument was people will die eventually.
Everyone dies eventually.
What do you think is the main cause of death overall?
Life.
I mean, I'm not sure.
What is the biggest statistic?
I think heart disease.
Heart disease and cancer.
Heart disease and cancer.
My point was with the advancement of technology and doctors do see it, it prolongs life Longer and longer to the point where you're almost treating old age.
That's what my wife tells me all the time.
We're not treating illnesses.
We're treating old age.
So it's basically prolonging life for as long as, you know, and you have those old patients who are, you know, their family are very happy that they are in the hospital, right?
They don't have to pay for them.
The government pays for them and Because you are coming from a position where you think, oh, the biggest cost is actually people getting fat, people being ill.
But it's not.
The biggest cost is treating old age.
And with more technology, people are going to live longer and longer and longer.
And they will have a very poor health, but they have 20, 30, 40 years of being very poorly, very bad quality of life.
I just...
How would I... I'm sure that the free market would sort this out as well.
I just, you know, maybe you have a mechanism for that as well.
Well, look, half of the healthcare costs of your entire life are going to be consumed in the last few months of your life.
Of course, you don't necessarily know that it's the last few months of your life.
It could be years.
I'm still talking.
Half of the costs that you pay for your entire life are going to be consumed in the last sort of six months or a couple of months of your life.
Is that a good investment?
I don't know.
If you've got lots of money and you want to eke it out for another couple of months, I say go for it.
If you're going to say, well, you know, this is going to cost millions of dollars to extend my life for another couple of months, I guess I'd rather leave that money to my grandkids or something.
That's also a choice that you could make.
But of course, if the government's paying for it, then you're just going to want everything that you could possibly get.
There's no sort of rational allocation of these kinds of resources.
But the point is, of course, that insurance companies will know what your health care costs are going to be in the last couple of months of your life.
Because they're going to know that statistically it's going to be half you ever pay.
So they may give you a deal and they may say, well, you only have to pay half your insurance if we don't have to pay for your end of life care.
Or, you know, here's your full insurance and we guarantee you we're going to cover you for your end of life care or whatever.
So these are just choices that people make.
Now, you know, I'm young and relatively healthy, so for me, you know, the idea that, oh, you know, deathbed, you know, I'm sure if I'm on my deathbed, I'll want to eat you out another couple of months for sure, right?
But I certainly wouldn't want to force other people to pay for that because, I mean, that's pretty gross.
It's like pulling out someone's kidney through their ass.
Yeah, sure, sure.
Completely agree.
And my original point was also that government sponsoring this also drives a wedge in family relationships, just as it does with welfare, right?
Because in my example before, you know, government keeping this old patient in the hospital, it wasn't very productive for his relationship with his son, right?
It's not how that would work out.
In the real economy, right?
Right.
Right.
So is the answers I've given you some particular level of utility or give you some arguments to work with people?
Sure, yes.
Yes, but probably through the second part of the question, I see it as being on the collision path.
I also don't see how it can be changed because With lots of people who haven't had the insurance for years and years and years, how do you suddenly go in and try to change that?
Because that's why I always warn people that socialism is really bad.
It's really dangerous.
It's like a drug.
Once you start it, it's really difficult to get off it.
And like with healthcare, how do you suddenly switch to a different kind of economy?
Well, I mean, it's not going to happen democratically.
See, the government has already taken people's money to, quote, pay for their healthcare, but they haven't used it to buy healthcare.
They've used it as collateral for debt and bonds and all that kind of stuff.
So there is no chance of changing this democratically.
Like, I mean, I don't think that England is going to wake up or the UK is going to wake up tomorrow and say, let's privatize healthcare.
I mean, the doctors will fight it because they want their monopoly privilege, and the hospitals want it because they want their monopoly privilege.
People who are sick are not going to want it because they're going to have a tough time getting insurance.
People who are healthy are going to be manipulated by compassion for the sick.
So it's not going to happen in a democracy.
And again, socialized health care, which generally comes in pretty quickly after women get the vote because women consume a lot more health care resources than men do and end up living longer considerably.
So, you know, it's just another one of these transfers.
Like the welfare state, it's transfers from men to women because women outvote men and all the stuff I've talked about before.
So, you know, the idea of how are we going to change it?
Like it's some manageable process.
You know, it's like how does Sully land the plane on the Hudson?
Well, as best he can, given that he's got no engines.
So the way it's going to change is the government runs out of money and then we figure out what Or there's some catastrophe, some war, some civil war, some whatever catastrophe.
Still talking, still talking.
And then we'll just have to figure out what to do after that.
But it's not going to be a managed change.
It's not going to be a proactive soft landing.
I doubt the wheels will even be down.
Go ahead.
Yeah, I actually very much agree with you.
Yeah.
It's not going to be a manageable process.
Even privatizing is not going to work because whenever a government tries to privatize something, it usually ends up in a worse situation because it doesn't privatize it to actual businessmen.
It usually just gives away chunks of state-owned business to friends of the government.
Usually you end up with a worse situation than you started.
Once the The state has been inflated to that huge level, right?
It's very difficult to wind it down.
Yeah, so, I mean, we get the information out to people so that when the crash hits, we'll know which better direction to turn.
But as far as I'm concerned, the idea that we're going to change people's minds, they're going to vote for something, I just don't think that's going to be particularly reasonable as far as something as big as, you know, the welfare state as a whole or socialized medicine as a whole.
You know, just stay as healthy as you can and recognize that we're probably going to have to wait for a considerable bump in the road to change anything.
Yeah.
Well, thanks very much for your call.
I really, really do appreciate it.
Is that it for tonight, Mike?
We got to the end in less than four days.
So thanks everyone so much for listening and for watching.
And I invite you to put your comments below this video or to let us know what you think of the fact that Mike has, in a brave, very Caitlyn Jenner-style way, come out as a potential voter.
So that's all going to be very exciting.
Thank you so much for listening and for watching.
I'm sorry, Mike, this is something you wanted to add to that.
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