Oct. 10, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
03:03:56
3444 You Don't Get To Sleep, Until You Wake Up - Call In Show - October 5th, 2016
Question 1: [2:09] - “Due to the evolution of technology, half of the current jobs are planned to disappear within the next decade or two, and nearly 9 out of 10 of current jobs could potentially disappear by 2050-2100. New markets will emerge and create new jobs, but we’re moving from away from an area of blue collar workers, more tasks and goods production could be done by less people. Therefore, do you think only a very small percentage of the population will have a chance for a decent living in a very near future?”Question 2: [1:02:08] - “In your recent video, ‘Evidence for God?’ you wonder aloud, ‘I would have loved the idea of saying 'I am doing God's work... I am on a mission from God.’ I know what it is like to know in my heart mind and soul that I am on one. What evidence do you need to prove to you that you are on a mission from God?”Question 3: [1:24:52] - “What makes Trump’s value as a bastion of freedom and western values so in-obvious to people who share fairly similar values? I see the extremes like the Never Trump Republicans, but also many in between. How can we break through that seemingly pathological virtue with these good people?”Question 4: [2:12:00] - “Would veteran benefits be considered a form of welfare? It is often talked about on the show how welfare effects those who participate in collecting it and the dangers to society as a whole, such as dependency on the system. Veteran benefits include easy housing loans, education compensation, monthly disability payments and much, much more funded by the government.”“As a US Marine veteran, I have benefited immensely from these programs. However, I feel that my treatment of this government money and other veterans’ treatment of government money is more positive than other groups who receive government assistance. Still, as a self-described patriot, I want to support what is best for my country even if that means less money for me. Sometimes I feel guilty for taking veteran benefit money and want to hear your thoughts.“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
Okay, there are some shows you just have to listen to, and this would be one of them.
Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
Please, please remember to come help us out at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
So automation, apparently 99.9% of workers are going to be automated within the next 12 seconds, or it could be 13, I can't remember exactly, but there are significant concerns over what happens to people when their jobs get automated.
Where do they go?
Do we give them a guaranteed minimum annual income?
What do we do?
Well, it goes a little deeper than that, my friends.
And automation and the intelligence of the species as a whole is just another government program, and I break it down for you brick by brick.
You may never be the same after you hear this part.
Secondly, maybe I am a blues brother.
Maybe I am on a mission from God.
This was the thesis of the next caller who wished to convince me that I was a putty in the hands of the divine.
Well, you know, there's not a lot that doesn't appeal to my vanity, but I had to push back a little bit on that one.
We had a great conversation about it anyway.
The third caller...
Wanted to know, what are the motivations behind those on the right who are the never-Trumpers?
Anyone but Trump.
And we talked about it quite a bit, the caller, myself, Mike, about the motivations, the psychology, and the follow-the-money trail that leads to their layers.
And the fourth caller, that's a very interesting conversation.
We get a lot of, I get a lot of these kinds of questions, like, I have this government benefit.
If I take it, am I a bad person?
And so on.
I took a very new approach to it this time with this caller.
He's a veteran who's getting benefits.
And I think it will clear up an enormous amount for you, not just with regards to benefits, but other things that might come along in your life that appear to be free.
So I hope you'll find that very helpful.
Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio, looking forward to bringing you this show because you go to freedomainradio.com and help us out.
Don't forget to follow me.
Alright, up first today we have Phil.
Phil wrote in and said,"...due to the evolution of technology, half of the current jobs are planned to disappear within the next decade or two, and nearly 9 out of 10 current jobs could potentially disappear by 2015-2100." New markets will emerge and create new jobs, but we're moving away from an area of blue-collar workers.
More tasks and good production could be done by less people.
Therefore, do you think only a very small percentage of the population will have a chance for a decent living in the very near future?
That is from Phil.
Hello, Phil.
How are you doing?
Hi, Stefan.
How are you doing?
I'm well, thanks.
What interests you in this line of thinking, just out of curiosity?
Well, actually, first of all, I have to apologize for my thick accent and my broken English.
I know it could be kind of annoying for some native English people.
It's fine to me.
Honestly, it's fine with me.
Okay.
Well, why this kind of thinking?
Actually, I've always been kind of a geek person.
I'm always looking for technologies and stuff like that.
I don't exactly know when or why it started.
Probably back a few years ago, I was watching, you know, a video.
The first time I actually saw a video with you, it was a debate you had with Peter Joseph, you know, for the Zeitgeist stuff.
And at the time, I was watching, you know, the Zeitgeist because the movie was pretty well done, but I didn't really agree with everything.
And sometimes it didn't make sense.
But sometimes it was interesting to look, you know, from the Technology point of view.
And when I saw the first debate you had with Peter, and I said, oh, I don't know this guy, but he sounds good and pretty interesting, makes sense, you know, for once.
So I did start, you know, to look to your video, and luckily I have to admit, you know, it was making more sense for me.
So, and You know, I come from a background, you know, I would say probably a little bit lefty, you know, when I was younger.
You know, the saying, you know, if you're 20 and you're not liberal, you don't have a heart.
And if you're 40 and you're liberal, you don't have a brain.
And I should add, if you're 60 and you're still liberal, you don't have a soul.
But that's mine.
Actually, if you're 60 and you're still liberal, you're probably liberal again because you want your retirement benefits.
I just turned 40 this year, so I'm trying to have a brain.
I know it's not an easy task and probably I'm not on a good path for that.
I still have a lot of work.
I'm starting to look at the whole economics.
I'm surely not as Brilliant, as you know, about all economics.
And I was looking, you know, how the whole jobs and works just evolved because of Internet, of technologies and AI and all this stuff.
And I was just trying to project myself, what can be in the future.
And I think it was in In 2013, I read a study, a so-called superior study from Oxford, I think, that probably half of the current job in the US will disappear from one decade or two decades from now.
I don't know.
If it's true, because some city, like climate change and stuff like that, I'm very skeptical.
So I don't exactly know if it's true.
I want to claim that this is the true numbers.
But I would love to know, you know, how do you think the future could be with all technology evolving regarding, you know, economics and jobs and jobs creation?
Yeah, if it makes sense.
Yeah, no, it's a great question.
It's a great question.
And I've given it some long and deep thought.
And I will...
I will share with you my thoughts.
It's not going to be much of a dialogue, just because I've got a lot of thoughts to get out, if that's alright.
Oh, it's okay.
It's okay.
So, to understand where we are, where the economy is going, we need to understand that there's a war between the dumb genes and the smart genes.
See, we think that the dumb genes are inefficient, and by that, I simply mean the genes that Don't contribute to high IQ. And they want to survive as much as the smart genes want to survive.
So there are the smart genes and the dumb genes.
I wish I could come up with better, you know, sort of words for them.
But this is the war that goes on biologically.
Now, there's the R versus K, and we've talked about that before, but just to sort of boil it down to the smart genes and the dumb genes.
Now, in a free society, generally, more resources accumulate to the smart genes, and therefore the smart genes can have more children, can afford to pay for more children.
And so the smart genes will spread, will become more prevalent.
And they will outbreed the dumb genes.
And the dumb genes will get fewer and fewer resources.
And so the dumb genes are in danger of becoming extinct.
Or less successful.
I mean, genes don't care about extinct or non-extinct.
They only care about successful reproduction in the next generation.
Now, smart genes tend to become wealthy by creating wealth, by creating value, by manipulating the real world in objective ways, in creative ways, to produce more out of the same goods and materials.
Like Henry Ford comes along and says, hey, instead of having everyone swarm around one car, let's have the car go down an assembly line and everybody does one job.
And he was able to produce a crazy number of cars.
He was able to double or triple the wages of the workers and the assembly line was born.
And then you got a bunch of people saying, well, they used to be craftspeople.
Now they're just turning one bolt and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But of course, it's the choice of the workers.
If they'd rather do something that's interesting for more money, isn't that their choice?
So the smart genes in a free society gather more resources than the dumb genes, outbreed the dumb genes, and the dumb genes don't like it.
Of course not.
So what do the dumb genes do in society?
Well, they can't outcompete the smart genes.
When it comes to manipulating resources to provide value because they're dumb.
So what do they do?
Well, they're very smart in a way.
You see, when you're less intelligent, you have to become manipulative and cunning.
You have to become an expert in controlling people rather than manipulating things in the real world.
You have to become sly like a fox.
And that's how you do it.
So there are a couple of things that you do when you're in danger of being outbred by these smart genes.
So the first thing that you want to do is you want to create systems of thought that make smart people guilty for having children.
Oh, that's a very, very good one.
If you can make smart people feel like they're doing something wrong by having children, then you have effectively prevented the outbreeding of the dumb genes by the smart genes.
So there are a couple of ways that you do this.
You can talk about overpopulation.
Too many people.
Now, dumb genes, they don't care about overpopulation.
Go try lecturing a rabbit about overpopulation, I don't know, in Australia when they got rid of the dingoes, ate my baby.
They don't care.
They don't care at all.
The dumb genes, breed, breed, breed, breed, breed.
That's our selected mindset.
So, you start to talk about, oh, you know, there's a lot of people in this world and boy, we're using a lot of resources and, you know, I don't know if we can really survive and you start talking about zero population growth.
Now, smart people are innately thinking about long-term consequences, big picture stuff, they have longer planning horizons, they have longer deferral of gratification and if you can create an ideology Which tells the tale of overpopulation, the destruction of the earth.
The beautiful thing is that it only snips the balls of the smart jeans.
You know, your average trailer park lady is not sitting there thinking, well, you know, we only have a certain supply of oil.
And she's just like, oh, I guess the condom tore.
Cheat.
Or, woohoo, welfare, here we come.
Right, so you start to talk about overpopulation.
And that's a beautiful thing.
Because it ties the tubes and snips the vast difference of the smart people who worry about overpopulation and the dumb people don't.
So automatically, you are minimizing the breeding.
It's a counterbalance to the free market giving more resources or allowing more resources or encouraging more resources to accumulate to the smart genes.
You counterbalance that with fears about overpopulation.
Now, combined with overpopulation, if you can talk about environmental degradation, Environmental predation.
We're using too many resources.
We're going to run out of resources.
Well, smart genes worry about that stuff.
Dumb genes don't.
So overpopulation, environmentalism, you know, we could do a whole show on each one of these, but you kind of get the idea.
And that's another one.
Now, another great one is to say that wealth is not a sign of intelligence.
Wealth It's a sign of badness.
Ooh.
Ooh, badness.
Because, you see, the more intelligent you are, in general, the more moral you are.
I know.
Lex Luthor.
Lots of exceptions.
I know that.
I understand that.
But in general, the more intelligent you are, the more moral you tend to be.
There's a sweet spot, as we know it, for criminality.
We've got this in The Truth About Crime.
There's a sweet spot for criminality that floats around 85.
Lower than that, you can't Figure out which way to open the door of the getaway car and smarter than that, you realize that working is smarter than stealing.
So the smarter you are, the more moral you are.
So if you're more intelligent, you're more concerned about being called immoral.
You know, like a real racist doesn't care about being called a racist because he's a racist.
It's only people who aren't racist or who oppose racism that care about being called racist.
So what you do is you say...
The market says...
Wealth is a sign of competence and intelligence and service to your community and the provision of goods and services that they like.
But you can redefine that, you see.
You can redefine that so that wealth is a sign of immorality.
You've exploited the workers.
You have preyed upon the environment.
You have done all these terrible things.
Now, dumb people don't care about it.
Smart people are sensitive to it.
So that's another way that you can Undercut the moral authority and self-confidence of smart people.
Another thing you can do is smart people tend to be more empathetic.
There's a reason why there's that sweet spot of 85 for criminality because the less intelligent you are, in general, lots of exceptions, but the less intelligent you are, the less empathetic you tend to be.
Since smart people are more empathetic than dumb people, Dumb people's best bet is to prey upon the empathy and the sympathy of smart people so that smart people will give them resources.
And that is really, really important because you see the free market is moving resources that are created to the smart people.
Smart people are getting richer.
So you have to find a way to reverse that so that you can have enough resources to breed your dumb genes because the dumb genes want to survive and want to flourish.
I mean this is not a moral judgment.
It's just biology, right?
It's what the DNA wants to do.
Replicate, replicate, replicate.
And so what you do is, in combination with saying wealth is the result of immorality, you say poverty is the result of circumstances.
Poverty is never a choice.
Poverty is never bad decisions.
Poverty is never the fault of poor people.
It's just...
Bad luck, man.
Rolled snake eyes at the game of life, and here I am in a poor neighborhood.
I'm poor.
My mom has no husband, and we're broke, and big, round, teary anime eyes.
I wasn't dissing anime in the previous one.
It was just an analogy.
Oh, sensitive Japanese people.
But anyway, you prey upon the sympathy of the smart genes, and you make them feel guilty.
And that way, the resources that the market is accumulating to the smart people, the smart people will then hand over to you.
Now, the other thing you want to do is you want to talk democracy.
Oh yeah!
Democracy is the ultimate feeding trough for the dumb genes because in a free market, a truly free society, like a stateless society, more and more resources accumulate to the most competent people.
And so they get a bigger say in the way things go, right?
Which is a meritocracy and kind of what you want.
It's all voluntary, you understand, but...
Steve Jobs had more say on the direction of Apple than some homeless guy.
So what you want to do is you want to set up a system where it's one person, one vote.
Because of the bell curve, there are equal numbers of dumb people and smart people, particularly among men it tends to be flatter.
Women tend to be more bulged in the middle.
Not just American women, but...
If you can get democracy along with the welfare state guilting, then you can use the state.
The state can be your mechanism, your big giant lever to remove resources from the smart gene pool and give resources to the dumb gene pool.
So you prey upon the empathy, you prey upon the sympathy.
You pretend that nothing...
It's your fault.
And you see, I understand it's completely manipulative, right?
Because if it's nobody's fault that you're poor, then it's also nobody's fault that you're rich.
If you can't be blamed for being poor, no one can have any guilt for being rich because it's all economic determinism.
But of course, that's not how it works.
I mean, that's how it would work logically.
Somebody comes along and says, well, you're a bad person because you're rich.
They say, well, aren't you a bad person because you're poor?
No, that's just circumstance, accident, economic determinism.
It wasn't my fault.
Well, then it's not my fault I'm rich, so get lost.
Make me feel guilty for economic circumstances when you have no responsibility for economic circumstances.
How can only the rich people have responsibility for economic circumstances?
So it makes no sense logically, but that's not the point.
The point is to make you feel guilty.
People who have a lot of resources tend to like cooperation and are used to dealing with reasonable people, and they don't know what happens when they hit the feral dumb gene.
They don't know how feral the dumb gene How ceaselessly aggressive and manipulative and bullying and abusive and like it's just trying to get resources, right?
And again, from an amoral standpoint, it's a perfectly valid biological strategy.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with it.
Morally, it's toe fungus.
But from the standpoint of biology, you know, hey, toe fungus gets to survive.
And so there's a million other ways that – you can identify the group that has the most money, white males, right?
They have the most money.
And so you work them over.
You put the shivs of guilt and irresponsibility and environmentalism and overpopulation and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
And that's the point.
This has nothing to do with anything, right?
I mean there's nothing real about it.
I mean if people were really concerned about environmental predation – They'd want there to be no government debt because government debt is the consumption of future resources for the sake of ridiculously conspicuous consumption in the present.
So the first thing that a real environmentalist would do is say, well, we've got to ban government debt because that's crazy bad for the environment.
The world is $150 trillion in debt.
That means there's $150 trillion worth of resources that are consumed in the here and now, most of which shouldn't ever have been consumed in the here and now.
That's incredibly destructive environmentally.
But the purpose of the environmental movement is to move resources from the smart genes to the dumb genes.
I mean, that's the entire fundamental purpose of it.
It's the same thing with climate change.
I mean, the truth or falsehood of the science is irrelevant.
I mean, we're just talking about the political manifestation of the ideology.
So, I mean, I sort of could go on.
The welfare state, you know, is a great way to transfer resources from the smart genes to the dumb genes.
And, you know, you could look at the first 10 minutes of the movie Idiocracy for more on this.
This is scarcely any kind of original thought for me.
Feminism.
Feminism is fantastic for this.
Feminism is a wonderful way, wonderful way to shift resources from the smart genes to the dumb genes.
Because with feminism...
You say that being a mother, you sort of vaguely imply that motherhood is a...
A poor use of your wonderful feminine potential and intelligence and capacity.
Motherhood is low rent.
Motherhood is crazy.
It's silly.
What did Hillary Clinton say?
Well, I guess I could have just stayed home and baked cookies.
Yeah, that's what moms do.
They bake cookies.
They don't raise the next generation of moral human beings.
They're not the foundation of society.
They don't have one of the most challenging jobs in the world, which is to shape a human mind with positivity and courage and integrity and virtue.
No, they just bake cookies.
They just bake cookies.
So, feminism, in a wide variety of ways, just basically tries to convince women to delay motherhood and get educated.
Well, dumb genes, they don't do that.
I mean, I remember going out with a girl when I was a teenager.
Of course I was going to college.
She's like, nah, it's not for me.
It was a nice girl.
It was kind of like everyone I knew was going to college.
We all hung out.
And, you know, she wasn't dumb or anything, but she just, you know, wasn't going to be here with me.
So you say to women, oh yeah, you've got to go to college.
You've got this wonderful potential.
You can maybe have kids down the road.
Get them to postpone it.
Get them to delay it.
Again, to over-stereotype, right?
Your average trailer park girl working as a waitress, if she's working at all.
For her, motherhood plus welfare state, well, she's doing pretty damn well, right?
I've got this presentation called The Welfare Cliff or The Truth About Welfare and point out that if you get welfare, you get in the US $65,000 worth of benefits if you've got a couple of kids.
So you've got to earn a hell of a lot to compete with that.
So feminists saying go to school and fulfill your potential, that's like – there used to be this thing called the Will of the Wisp.
Will of the Wisp is actually a D&D monster too and it's just this dancing light that draws you further and further into the swamp where you die.
So you say to smart – or you say to women, go to college, fulfill your potential.
You've got wonderful things ahead of you.
Don't worry about motherhood.
Well, dumb genes don't fall for that, right?
But smart genes do.
And therefore, you get women to postpone motherhood.
You also get them to be so well-educated and so accomplished that their hypogamic desires to have a more successful man than themselves ends up with a shrinking pool of applicants.
And then they sleep around because there are more women chasing fewer men at that level of competence.
They sleep around and they get depressed and they get anxious and you end up with significant proportions or significant portions of women on antidepressants in the US and other places and women are progressively getting more miserable because the smart genes fall for that lure, that trap.
Go to college, postpone motherhood.
You can do it later.
And then by the time the letter comes, you're smashed up emotionally from sleeping around.
You might have an STD or five.
The pool of available men has shrunk to virtually nothing.
But you get a cat!
Everybody gets a cat!
Even though they're not that environmentally friendly either.
So, all of this is the war between The smart genes and the dumb genes.
And this war is being fought all over the world.
It's been fought all throughout history.
We're in the closing stages of it right now and it all hangs in the balance.
Smart genes versus the dumb genes.
This is why certain political parties are putting forth long-term programs of environmental protection and economic growth where other people are saying, you said mean things.
That's a bad signal, right?
Because smart people look at those, quote, debating tactics and say, how can this possibly work?
Well, because smart people need to work harder to understand the dumb gene and its danger to their way of life.
And in a free society, we wouldn't have to worry about half the population's jobs going away.
Because in a free society, people who were less intelligent...
would get fewer resources and therefore would have fewer children and so the dumb gene would go into remission whether it ever goes away completely I don't know I'm not a geneticist but it would go into remission it would be so small that it would be mostly accidents of genetics that would produce less intelligent people so we wouldn't need to worry about it because as the number of less intelligent people declined as the dumb gene began To vanish from the face of the earth
or at least from the face of a particular society, the fact that jobs were being automated wouldn't be a problem because there'd be so many smart people around and it's really tough to automate the jobs of smart people.
So, you'd end up with fewer dumb people, which means that – well, actually, there'd be a sort of phase where with fewer dumb people, the price of people who do dumb jobs goes up, right?
Because there's less supply.
And so, in a free society, there'd be a soft landing, right?
Fewer dumb people, a bit of a flare-up, but then eventually people would say, well, the price of hiring dumb people is too much.
So again, dumb people would have fewer jobs, less pay.
I mean, they still survive, right?
Fewer jobs, less pay, and they'd have fewer kids.
And so, the dumb genes would go into remission.
So, that's not, of course, what's happening right now.
What's happening is...
Dumb people are breeding like crazy and smart people are not.
And that is really what the dumb genes wanted.
And again, who can blame them, right?
If I were the dumb genes, that's exactly what I would want as well.
And this, of course, is a great challenge.
You know, you've got dumb genes flooding into society from every direction.
From overseas, from – I mean, again, just look at source country IQ. Source country average IQ. It's not the full story.
There's obviously environmental factors.
But it's the first thing.
If I've taught you nothing, the only thing that I need to teach you is when you're looking at things, you're looking at cultures, looking at countries, looking at religions, looking at immigration, just go to average IQ in country X. Average IQ in country X. And you can listen to me for thousands of hours.
If you don't get that, you've heard nothing.
If you only listen to that and nothing else, I'm happy.
Source country, average IQ. It's not the full story.
It's a pretty essential place to start.
And right now, of course, we have so many dumb genes floating around.
And such a giant welfare state that's feeding and breeding them that there aren't enough jobs available for them.
And so because there's a welfare state, people don't have to work.
If there was no welfare – the welfare state is so much at the center of all of this because if there was no welfare state, then immigration would have been pushed back a long time ago.
Control over immigration would have been instituted a long time ago.
Because people would have become desperate, right?
The welfare state, unemployment insurance, all of this stuff, I mean even to some degree social security, it's all this big giant drug designed to have society feel no pain until it's terminal.
Right?
Because with endless waves...
Of immigration, low-skilled immigration pouring into the West.
In a free society, should that occur, the wages would have been driven down to the point where people would have become desperate and they would have protested and they would have – I'm talking about a society that's relatively free where there's no welfare state but still the government.
They would have protested and they would have voted people into office.
They would have had – Massive, massive voter revolt saying, stop, stop it.
We can't survive.
My wages have gone down again.
But the immigration can come in and the wages can decline and people can just jump onto unemployment insurance and they can jump onto welfare and there's no riots.
There's no protests.
Not that I want riots, you understand.
I'm just saying that there would be significant protests.
Let's put it that way.
It wouldn't get to riots.
They'd do it.
The politicians would listen, but this all happens.
This all has gone down with the narcotic of the welfare state preventing any pain signals from reaching society as a whole.
So right now we do have a situation where people are automating because it's too difficult to hire people.
It's too difficult to fire people.
There are too many risks of lawsuits.
There are too many risks of sexual harassment claims.
There are too many risks of you name it.
Unfair termination, slip and fall claims, unions.
I mean, it's insane, right?
It's just become so difficult.
So it's raised the demand for automation significantly high.
What happens in the future?
Well, we're either going to have a free society or we're going to have a tyranny.
There's no middle ground.
There's no third way.
It doesn't work that way in reality.
Government either expands or it contracts.
It never stays the same.
Never stays the same.
So, as far as automation goes, yeah, stuff is getting automated.
Stuff is getting automated.
And the reasons for that are almost all to do with government programs.
Now, of course, truly dumb people in the future In a free society, there'd be very few very dumb people in the future.
They'd be taken care of.
There'd be charities and all of that kind of stuff.
They would have no issues.
They wouldn't probably be encouraged to have a whole mess of kids.
That's the job of the welfare state, right?
But in the future, that's how it would work.
Right now, of course, there's a huge number.
Of dumb people.
And this is the great thing.
The dumb genes are like the vampire, right?
You know, a vampire looks in the mirror, can't see itself.
That's the dumb genes.
Dumb genes look in the mirror and see Albert Einstein.
Smart genes look in the mirror and see dumb people, right?
That's what it is for me because I'm so acutely aware of just how ridiculously limited I am in terms of my knowledge and understanding of things.
You know, having achieved competence in one or two realms, I am fully conscious, you know, this is the Dunning-Kruger effect, D-U-N-N-I-N-G. I think K-R-U-G-E-R, something like that.
You'll find it if you type that.
It'll say, do you mean?
But I'm acutely aware of how ridiculously limited my understanding is in just about everything but a few topics.
Whereas dumb people look in the mirror and just see a stone genius for all time, and so dumb thinks it's smart, and smart thinks it's dumb.
This is one of the weaknesses that smart has.
Smart has humility, and dumb has arrogance, and there's no arrogance like ignorance, right?
And it's really, really tough to break the arrogance of ignorance.
It takes a pretty strict school system, which of course The dumb genes don't want to have.
Dumb genes want to skate through.
They want social promotion.
They don't embarrass me.
Lower the standards.
But enough about modern college.
So how it's going to work out in the future?
Well, because the dumb genes are arrogant, they think that they can do a better job than the smart genes.
And so what happens is they rise up and they vote out and they vote their people in.
And all of the society and all of the structure that was built by the smart people gets taken over by the dumb people either directly or indirectly through their representatives who have to pretend to be dumb to get votes.
Well, all of the wealth and all of the freedoms, it all begins to fall apart.
It all begins to fall apart.
And then, quite often, There's a catastrophic event.
It's a war, a plague, a famine, pestilence, some kind of disaster, a drought.
Something happens.
Something happens and...
It takes that to impress upon the dumb genes that they're dumb or helpless and then they run to the smart genes for help.
And the smart genes, this is sort of the Atlas Shrug thing, say, okay, but let's not go back to where we were.
So, yeah, automation is a problem.
But it's only a problem because of the welfare state and other forms of income redistribution that have become part and parcel of Western society, which have encouraged the dumb genes to spread like a cancer, like a wildfire.
And the smart genes are being rapidly outbred by the dumb genes.
And the society that we have inherited was built by very, very smart people.
The West was built by geniuses, stone geniuses.
And as we talked about with Helmuth Nyborg, NYBORG, you can find him on the channel, you can't have a democracy, you can't have a Western society where the average IQ is 90 or below.
Well, already it's dropping in the West for a variety of reasons we've talked about already.
So we've inherited this incredible society, this free society, relatively, built by incredible geniuses and maintained by super smart people.
But the dumb genes got their way.
And the dumb genes are outbreeding the smart genes, and the dumb genes are displacing the smart genes at the top of society.
And it's like there's a car, you know, this wonderful classic car, a beautiful car.
It takes a lot of love and it takes a lot of care to keep it running.
It takes a lot of specialized knowledge.
You know, you've got to hunt through the scrap heap looking for the right parts, just like in that old movie, My Bodyguard.
Smoking will stun your growth, man!
Well, we've inherited this beautiful car.
Drives like a lion, purrs like a kitten.
But, you know, takes an afternoon a week just to keep the damn thing running.
But because it's been running for so long and we don't appreciate the work, what have we done?
Well, we just pull it out of the driveway and we don't care if it's hailing or muddy or raining or windy or what.
We just drive it.
Drive it like crazy.
We don't even know how to change the oil.
We don't even know that it needs new parts.
We don't even know.
We need to check the air pressure on the tires.
We don't know any of this stuff.
Hell, we don't even know how to open the car to look at the engine.
And so we drive it and for a while it's like, well, this is great.
I can't believe that idiot used to waste an afternoon every week keeping this thing running.
It's running like a dream.
Yeah.
Until the engine turns into one solid chunk of metal and you got nothing left.
At which point the dumb jeans kick the car and blame the circumstances because remember the dumb jeans look in the mirror they don't see anything.
They're vampires.
Without that cool George Hamilton hair.
So I'm not particularly worried about automation.
I'm not particularly worried about people Not having jobs in the future.
You can't solve that in a socialist way.
You can't solve that in an income redistributionist way.
Because if the dumb people get a guaranteed minimum income, then people will just flub their IQ tests or flub their tests just to get that – if you say, oh, well, the bottom 10% of people should get free money or whatever, it's okay.
Well, now you've just got the bottom 25% or 30%.
So you've got to spend a lot more money, which means you've got to tax more people, which means it's less fun to be smart and more fun to be dumb.
So you've got 40%, 50%, 60%.
Now 60% of Americans are dependent upon the government for their income, for the most part.
So you've got to keep taxing more and you've got to be subsidizing more, which means it's less fun to be smart and more fun to be dumb.
So you can't solve it through some government redistributionist scheme because everything you touch, you change.
Society is not a portrait of an ecosystem.
You touch one thing, the butterfly effect.
Everything else changes.
That's public choice theory.
You can look it up if you like.
So, you know, we're way beyond that.
The dumb genes have the arrogance of having inherited the wealth of the smart genes, the smart society genes.
And they don't know what it takes to maintain it.
They have no humility because they can't see themselves in the mirror and they think they're excellent at everything because...
They get to vote and watch reality television.
And, you know, it's too late to, I think, fix it politically.
And what's going to happen is there's going to be...
I mean, either we're going to get a more free society, which we're building philosophically, but we have to push back.
You have to be very aggressive or assertive with the dumb genes.
You have to.
You know, the dumb genes reaching for power is like a toddler reaching for a pot of boiling water.
No, no.
Move you back.
Not for you.
Not for you.
Go play with the blocks.
Here.
Here's some Play-Doh.
Ooh, look how squishy it is.
Here's some reality television.
Over there's a big bucket of Jell-O. Go have fun.
But stay out of the kitchen because this is where the adults have to be.
You've got to build little gates to the stairs of power so the dumb people can't get in.
And the free market does that very well.
Dumb people don't accumulate many resources and therefore don't have much of a say in where society goes.
And that's exactly how it should be.
There's nothing wrong with that.
I have garnered precious little of the top 40 pop songs and that's exactly right because I'm not a songwriter and not much of a singer.
So...
It's totally fine.
I'm totally fine with having zero gold medals in Eddie D. Eagle style downhill jumping.
Ski jumping.
No problem with that.
No problem with that.
But because I look in the mirror and I see who I am.
I don't look in the mirror and either see nothing or some distorted fantasy of competence that the dumb genes see.
Dumb genes can't be reasoned with.
That's really one of the definitions, right?
Reason and evidence, dumb genes don't care.
Don't care.
It's all about the feels.
It's all about the arrogance.
It's all about the entitlement.
They're too dumb to know where things come from, so they think everything should be free.
They never contribute everything.
They never contribute anything in particular of wealth or competence or excellence or beauty to the world, so they're fine taking because they're never going to be giving, right?
Oh yeah, let's tax the rich.
I'm a dumb gene.
I'm never going to be rich.
I just want enough to pump out another eight kids by seven different fathers.
So, we are not the human race, us, a society.
We are not all in it together, people.
I mean, I hate to break it to everyone, and I'm sure it's no shock to long-term listeners.
We are not all in it together.
There's R, there's K, there's dumb genes, there's smart genes, there's manipulative, there's producers, there's consumers, there's political wealth, there's market wealth, there's those who benefit from coercion, those who benefit from covering up the coercion, and those who fail and fall apart in the face of coercion.
We are not All in this together.
Not everyone is your friend.
Not everyone is like you.
Humanity, humanity is a jungle.
It is a jungle of predators and prey and winners and losers and it is a fight!
A battle!
For dominance of particular gene sets.
It is not kumbaya.
It is not live and let live.
It is not a circle jerk firelight of Huggytown.
It is a war.
A battle for dominance.
White people used to know this.
But we've been talked out of it.
This used to be understood.
This used to be understood.
There are the psychopaths.
There are the sociopaths.
They're a pretty small percentage of the population.
And they don't have a huge amount of power without a state.
But we are not all in this together.
Not everyone is going to assimilate.
Not everyone shares your values.
Not everyone wants to be like you.
We live in the human jungle.
And it is win-lose.
It is survive by your wits.
It is fight or fail.
It is loudly proclaim the truths that you value or be buried under by those who proclaim theirs.
It is farmers and livestock, master and servant, lord and serf, king and slave.
If they get what they want, you lose everything.
If you get what you want, they lose everything.
That is how people perceive it.
We are tribes.
Tribes can be racial, they can be ethnic, they can be political, they can be economic self-interest.
Hell, they can be artistic.
There's an apple tribe.
But we are not all friends in this species.
And we have been battling it out for 150,000 years.
And finally, finally, we came up with a system that allowed for the battle to be productive to the species, to the world.
We came up with a free market where people battled each other.
And instead of it being a war, where as the saying goes, you make a desert and call it peace.
Instead of it being Religious domination, instead of it being kill or be killed, do or die, bloodthirsty, disassembled human beings for fun and profit, bloodshed and warfare, it was the market where people get to play out their win-lose dominance instincts in ways they're harnessed for the productivity and wealth and security and safety and health of society.
The alternative to the market Is war.
There is no alternative to the market except war.
Now that war may be a war of economic interests.
It may be the soft civil war of competing lobby groups for the government purse.
It may be a war of debt.
But it's a war.
It's theft.
It's predation.
It's exploitation.
You have a choice.
You have the free market or you have civil war.
And the degree to which the free market is displaced by government coercion is the degree to which you march step by step closer to either civil war or war itself.
Not that there's anything better with either scenario.
600,000 souls died in the civil war in America, which is a massive proportion of the population.
So we found a system, we invented a system, we discovered, we created a system where The dominance instincts, the win-lose instincts, the tribal instincts of humanity could finally be harnessed.
It's like there were these demon horses that kept riding through your town, your village, your mud huts, setting fire to everything with the sparks coming off their flinty hooves, knocking everything over, eating your crops, farting in your general direction.
Then they're gone and they come back three months later, just after you've rebuilt.
Boom!
Knock it all over again.
More fire.
More eaten crops.
More starvation.
And then someone came along, snapped his fingers, and they became docile, domesticated animals that would pull a plow to plant your crops.
You see, the free market domesticated the tribal dominant instincts of the species and turned them From evil to good.
You can't get rid of those instincts.
You know, you didn't get to the top of the food chain by hugging everything.
Humanity got to the top of the food chain through brutality, through dominance, through subjugation of nature, of other tribes, of everything.
We are a brutally dominance-based species.
And we can either sublimate that, means to redirect things to a more productive end.
We can sublimate our brutal dominance streak to the market where you really, really want to win that contract rather than behead your enemy.
Because when the dominance instinct is denied the market, it turns a city into a pile of bricks.
When the dominance, thirst of humanity is harnessed with the market, it turns a pile of bricks into a shining city.
We wish, we thirst, we lust for dominance.
This is not my theory.
This is not abstract.
This is well established.
I think it's among baboons, as I've mentioned before.
When they climb up the political hierarchy of their tribe, they get additional dopamine hits.
We are addicted to dominance.
We are addicted to power.
We are addicted to winning.
We are addicted to subjugation of others.
And you're either going to get it in a free market, where the power lust of the entrepreneur brings you better, faster cell phones, or you get the other kind.
Chopper scimitars!
More accurate loosing of crossbows from the back of a charging horse.
Instead of a production line in a factory, you get a rape line in a field.
And there's not another choice.
We dominate each other productively in the free market to the benefit of almost all Or we dominate each other through coercion.
But you cannot pull the dominance desire out of the human heart.
You cannot.
You cannot.
And those in the West who are trying to steer people back to the free market, who are trying to limit government, control government, reduce government, why are we doing that?
Because we know.
Oh, oh we know.
We know what happens to society when the will to power is denied its expression in the free market.
It doesn't vanish.
It doesn't disappear.
It sharpens its teeth and hones its blades and wakes up before dawn to practice Slashing a dummy full of sand into its component parts in preparation for the real thing.
We say we want less government because we want less war.
We say we want a free market because we want the powerless of humanity to serve people voluntarily rather than control them coercively.
Because it's one or the other.
It's one or the other.
And the fantasy that has come about because we've had the free market and so we see people cooperating.
We see it generally.
And so we think everyone's cooperative.
We get along.
Yeah, there's conflict.
Some business people don't like each other, but it's fine.
We get along.
We're nice people.
You drive down a Suburban street and you see kids playing.
You see guys with no shirts washing their Camaras.
Girls sneaking smokes out the back porch.
Ice cream trucks.
It's a sunny day.
It's a distant chalk line of an airplane contrail going by above the clouds.
Freebird is playing on the radio.
Always sounds tinny.
Oh no!
Bluetooth now.
Probably sounds better.
And you think, well, this is civilization.
It's all very peaceful.
It's all very nice.
What dominance instincts?
This is not nature red in tooth and claw.
Human beings are not feral.
They all get along well.
Yes, they do.
Because they are free.
Because they can compete in the market.
Because they can accumulate resources not through conquest.
Subjugation, rape and murder but through winning a contract.
All of this is hidden from people because we have a free market or had a free market.
And of course people say well people are nice and peaceful so We can have a government that redistributes and softens things up and makes things nicer.
You know, it takes a little bit from here, gives to the poor.
Everything's going to be better because of that.
You know, people are peaceful.
We can give people power and it won't corrupt them because my neighbors are all nice.
Well, lend me sugar, eggs, watch each other's kids.
Everyone's nice.
Yes.
Yes, they are.
Because they have sublimated their power lust into competition in the market.
When you take that away, which you inevitably do when you grow government power, you create another market, the market of force rather than the market of productivity, the market of coercion rather than the market of volunteerism, well, you awaken the ancient demons of the human heart.
And where before you had entrepreneurs, now you have lobbyists.
And before, where you had honest bankers, Now you have bailout happy Wall Street banksters.
And before where you had mostly placid and reactionary police, now you have proactive and invasive police.
And things begin to shift like a shadow lengthening at sunset like a black snake extending its reach through the grass.
Things begin to shift.
That's where we are now.
The market of force is displacing the market of choice.
And all of the ugliest and darkest aspects of human nature are emerging.
I mean, they're emerging.
They've always been there, but they were supplemented by the market.
But now they're turning to coercion.
And you see base manipulative lying in politics.
You see endless smear campaigns, not an argument, nonsense.
That's a precursor.
It's still in the transition to open savagery.
It's still occurring.
Is there time to turn it back?
I sure as hell hope so.
I sure as hell hope so.
But to do that, we have to tell the dumb genes, get out of the kitchen.
We're trying to bake a civilization.
You're just going to get everyone hurt.
So I hope that helps, at least explain my perspective.
Is there anything you wanted to add before we move on to the next caller?
No, actually, it's just...
It explains a lot and it even scared me a little bit because it's something I was thinking for so long and I was not sure.
And now it explains everything, like everything we see.
The whole society in decline, more and more dumb gene, like you say, and all politics pushing for all liberal, you know, agendas, you know, like even in Europe, I can see it, you know, it's very difficult to be an entrepreneur in Europe because the whole, you know, socialist and taxes and government, you know, limits and it's crazy.
It's not crazy.
It's not crazy.
Seriously.
It's just the dumb genes trying to get resources they can't earn.
Yeah, and now they're pushing for the...
Ugly guys want arranged marriages.
I don't mean ugly physically, but people who no one would marry want arranged marriages.
People who can't compete want force.
Again, I don't want to say it's crazy.
I know you meant that sort of like just a saying.
It's perfectly rational.
When you're an entrepreneur and you try to do something, you try to create and do business, it's all day long paperwork and craziness.
Be all crazy, I call it.
I don't mean it's crazy as a...
You know, I understand.
And just to be sure, I'm not against, I'm off-scale about, you know, automatism and automation, whatever.
I actually like it.
I think it's a good thing for the future.
Call me crazy.
Because, like you said, I like the idea just for the strong gene, the smart gene, just to come creative and just do something better in future and create new jobs by doing something new that doesn't exist.
The smart genes, if left free to function in the free market, produce wonderful things for the dumb genes.
But the dumb genes are too dumb to know that.
So the dumb genes are like, well, I want stuff now because they don't have the deferral of gratification.
They don't have a long time horizon because they're dumb and it's just a reality.
It's not a criticism.
It's just reality.
If the smart genes are left free to operate in the free market, the dumb genes get fantastic stuff.
They get amazing things.
They've got cell phones.
They get the internet for now.
They'll get teleportation.
They'll get space travel for 50 cents.
I mean they'll get all this cool stuff but they just want stuff now.
They want to consume resources now because they're dumb.
And they don't know about the deferral of gratification.
They don't know how to trust smart people because they think they're smart and they think the smart people are bad.
I talked about some of this.
Ann Coulter was a guest on the show just yesterday.
It's going to, I think, go out tomorrow.
So, yeah, please check out.
In Trump We Trust, which is the conversation that I had with Ann Coulter.
C-O-U-L-T-E-R. AnnCoulter.com is a great place to go and just read her books.
She's incredibly entertaining and a fascinating writer.
But...
So yeah, I mean it's – the reason why we don't let dumb people have a lot of power in society is they'll screw it up.
It's the same reason we don't let seven-year-olds drive.
As a seven-year-old might want to drive, they might want to eat candy all day, but you've got to say no because it's bad for them.
And so yeah, dumb people want a lot of power and authority and they want a lot of resources and like, sorry, can't help you out.
You're too dumb to know how bad this is for you.
And the free market does that on its own accord, but politicians, of course, when you get one person, one vote – Then my vote and your vote is exactly the same as the vote of someone who's got an IQ of 80.
So it's not a meritocracy.
It's an idiocracy.
That's why the push for the UBI, the universal basic income now in Europe, so you don't even have to work.
It's just a welfare state on steroids.
For me, when I see that, the only issue I can imagine, because I don't believe we can stop technologies and geniuses to invent new stuff.
So, the only thing I can imagine for the future is just, like you said, a very bad, sad event just to do the shift and just to remove all the bad genes, to kind of speak.
Yeah, I mean, there's a theory that one of the great leap forwards in Western civilization It was the Black Death, right?
I mean the Black Death which went for a couple of centuries, I think starting in the 13th century, it wiped out the people who were Heavily congregated and jammed together in cities who were generally the less intelligent people and the people who had the money and therefore usually the IQ to have country estates to be isolated from.
So it wiped out a bunch of dumb people and the literature quality, the artistic quality, the quality of philosophy and even theology and so on went up remarkably quickly.
And so we of course, I don't want any of these things to happen but The good news and the bad news is it's not up to me and it's not up to you.
It's just nature doing its thing, but at least we can be aware of the factors.
Yeah, exactly.
I don't want it.
It's just when I think about the future, I don't see a lot of ways to happen.
Alright, well listen, I'm going to move on to the next caller, but I appreciate your question, and thank you for your patience during my hopefully useful rant.
Thank you for having me in the show.
I really appreciate your answer.
Really, thank you.
Alright, up next is Steven.
Steven wrote in and said, That's from Steven.
Well, hello, Stephen.
How are you doing?
Thank you very much for taking the call.
Well, you wanted to answer the question?
Perhaps.
I have the benefit of having defined the mission that I'm on through prayer and response to the prayer.
So I have, you know, my mission is well defined and confirmed to me over and over.
So I'm trying to figure out what it is that you need to know.
I mean, I look at you and I can tell you're on a mission from God, whether you know it or not.
I am the third flu's brother.
What is it that you need to know to help you realize that?
What are you missing?
No, and Ann Coulter, it seems that I almost must be influenced by powerful intellectual women whose first names have three letters and start with A and end with N. Ann Coulter, I'll call her.
But Ann Coulter, of course, is very religious and takes a lot of solace in her mission and I believe gains a lot of strength through her relationship with God.
And a lot of the people that I admire intellectually have a connection with the divine that is, I think, powerfully informs what they do, and of course makes the opprobrium of the mob, the hostility of the mob, much less consequential.
That's not an answer.
Sorry.
The answer would be, well, I'd need some empirical evidence.
You say you had prayers and received answers.
Well, I'll tell you this.
If there's a God, He's not making it very easy for me because I prayed throughout my life and did not receive an answer.
Now, people could, of course, say, well, Steph, but your mission and your abilities and your effect on the world, that's your answer.
But it's like, that's not an answer.
Okay.
So, you say something empirical.
You're looking...
Yeah, you said you had an answer, right?
I do.
Well, no, but no, so you had an answer to your prayer.
Absolutely.
Which I have never received.
Uh-huh.
Well...
So, you know, the peekaboo with the divine gets a little annoying after a while for me.
You know...
Hello!
Echo!
Echo!
Right, I mean...
Have you prayed for an answer for something and not received it?
Yeah.
Yeah, I was raised Christian, man.
I mean, I was in the choir.
I went to church three times a week.
I mean, I was like...
I was in the bosom of the divine.
Yeah, I started out that way, too.
But then when I hit, you know, teenage years, rebellion, and so forth...
I became, I think by the time I was 17, I was an arrogant, atheistic anarchist.
I wouldn't have anything to do with any institution of man.
And it wasn't until several years later, when I had cause to take an objective look at the Bible, trying to find a historical answer, that I discovered something in the Bible that I'd never seen before.
And it was just a puzzle.
that was obvious to me and I couldn't solve it and I realized that I had judged God and the Bible and everything by the words and actions of men and not by studying the Bible myself so I asked for God I asked God for the wisdom and understanding to solve this puzzle that I couldn't solve and It didn't take very long before the answer started coming,
and it got to the point where this is the biggest thing ever.
And I promised God in my prayer that I would tell the world.
I made that mistake.
So once I told him I'd tell the world, and he started giving me the answers to my questions, it was like, I'm locked in.
I'm committed.
I have no choice.
Right.
We just completely fell apart in terms of conversation there.
Oh!
Right, and I'll sort of tell you why.
I mean, it's not anything negative towards you, but I've noticed this sort of pattern when I talk about my sort of early experience with God and religion and so on, that you're Christian, is that fair to say?
Mm-hmm.
Okay, so Christians will then say, well, you know, I went through that phase too, and here's what I did, and it got better, which is sort of a way of trying to—it's not a conscious mental trick, but it's kind of like a mental trick, which sort of invites me to substitute your experience for mine, or to say, well, you know, Steph, like you, I had turned away from God, and then I found a way to turn back to God, and so on.
Not an argument, and also not— Connecting to me, right?
Telling me, like when you're sort of asking me about, had I prayed, right?
And I sort of said, well, yeah, I prayed and I didn't get an answer.
Instead of asking me more about that, what you did was tell me all about your experience, which is not something that connects us, right?
Because if you're asking me a question about my experience and then you do a soliloquy about your experience, I feel like, okay, so you're really not that interested in my experience.
You want to tell me about your experience, even though you started asking me about my experience.
I apologize for that.
I was trying to...
Well, expecting that perhaps maybe you had just missed your answer, that it was there right in front of you all along, that God has...
No, but the way you get to know someone is to ask them questions, not to tell them your experience, right?
Indeed, you're correct.
All right.
Again, my apologies.
No, it's fine.
I'm just pointing it out.
I don't think that's what God wanted you to do right there.
So, you need something more empirical, something less faith-based?
I need an answer.
Like, how do I know I'm not...
I mean, I had to have some way of knowing I wasn't just talking to myself, right?
I mean, that's a reasonable thing, right?
Because when people say there's an invisible guy listening to you, and I'm sorry, I don't mean to diminish, right?
But, you know, when people say there's a God who's listening to you, at some point, it does cross everyone's mind that they might just be talking to themselves, right?
Of course.
I mean it would be crazy to never think that because it's obviously an empirical possibility and it wasn't like I had some sort of big plan or anything but I'm like, okay, I'm throwing a ball off a cliff and at some point it's supposed to come back, right?
And it never came back.
And so at some point I'm like, okay, then there's no one out there catching the ball and throwing it back.
Because, yeah, I would ask for answers.
I would ask for this.
I would ask for that.
Not like, you know, give me candy or anything, but, you know, I would ask for peace in the house.
I would ask for some compassion from those in authority.
I would ask for, you know, various things that, you know, weren't terribly selfish or anything and didn't...
Nothing occurred.
Neither the peace to deal with the trials, nor a cessation of the trials, nor the strength to oppose them.
And so, at some point, it just became indistinguishable from talking to myself.
And I didn't have any standard by which I could tell the difference.
Does that make sense?
I think so.
I just wish there was some way that I could help you to see that What I'm sure many of your listeners know is that you are on a mission from God.
You are...
Well, I sure would like that.
I mean, that would be a great thing.
Honestly, that would be a wonderful thing.
I mean, I don't know if I need to be more cocky.
I don't know if that would be the right thing for me to be doing, but it would be...
I mean, to have the support of infinite shoulders, to have the strength of divinity and omniscience and omnipotence on my side, You know, that's a pretty tall guy to have on your basketball team.
So I think it gives you some strength.
But, you know, I was just writing about this today.
I'm working on an essay, Why I Was Wrong About Libertarians.
I was just writing about this today.
I mean, empiricism is my gig.
That is my game.
Empiricism, empiricism.
And absent empirical evidence, you know, I've got this wonderful, I think, A largely unappreciated chapter in one of my free books, Against the Gods, question mark against the gods, against the gods, like a valley girl would say it as a statement, against the gods, and it's at freedomainradio.com slash free,
and I talk about the subconscious is God, and I won't go into all of the arguments, but I was not able to distinguish Between things that could come from my unconscious and things that could come from God.
It's been a while since I've told this story, so I might as well tell it again, but I'll keep it fairly brief.
I'm trying to think how long ago this was now.
Oh man, time stretching away.
I believe this would be...
Yeah, okay.
Seventeen years.
Man alive.
Wow, my distance from these events can drive a car now.
So, 17 or so years ago, I ceased being able to sleep.
I ceased being able to sleep.
I've always been a bit of a light sleeper.
It's utterly better now than it was when I was a kid.
It was bad.
But I've been a light sleeper.
One of the things that you have to deal with if you're very smart, you just, you know, your brain is active.
And it's not unpleasant a lot of times.
I do like mulling over things.
And a lot of the great thoughts that I have come from lying in bed sort of maybe early in the morning before I usually get another hour or two right before I get up of sleep.
But it just stopped.
I couldn't sleep.
Couldn't sleep.
I'd never had anything like that before.
And I didn't take any pills.
Thanks.
I've never taken a sleeping pill.
I mean, I exercised and I tried everything I could to sleep.
Once I got a cold and I was like, oh, thank heavens, now I can take one of those cold knock-you-out-at-night things.
Which helped.
And then the next morning I woke up.
Cold was mostly better.
Couldn't sleep again.
Now this went on.
For almost 18 months.
Maybe it's because I played Macbeth when I was younger.
Macbeth shall sleep no more.
And by the end of these 18 months, Stephen, my life was completely different.
I mean, this is why I went to therapy.
I no longer saw my mother.
My personal relationships vastly changed.
And I experienced what would be called in religious circles, being born again.
It's a great line from an old John Denver song.
He was born in the winter of his 27th year or something like that.
Rocky Mountain High.
And it was being born again.
I had a life before, sleeplessness, where, ironically, I was mostly asleep.
I was asleep to integrity, to living virtue, to the quality of my relationships, to whether I was loved, to whether I was exploited.
I mean, I've always been an idea hamster and sort of a workaholic.
I would guess that there were people, or I know now that there were people who found that a useful resource to pillage.
And I was not assertive.
I was not strong.
I was not committed.
I was not dedicated.
I was sleepwalking.
Until I fell off a cliff called, you don't get to sleep until you wake the hell up.
And so I did.
I went to therapy for hours and hours a week for a long time.
And I kept thinking, okay, I've made a big change.
This is going to be it.
Nope, still can't sleep.
Okay, and I make a big change.
Okay, this has got to be it.
Nope, still can't sleep.
And then I was in China, of all things, and day and night reversed after an 18-hour plane ride.
Day and night reversed, I could sleep.
I went from Morocco to China.
I think my body felt that it was like interstellar space or something like that.
It just got to another planet.
And I was able to sleep And I existed really for the first time in my life.
Not as a reaction to the past.
Not as a conformity to other people's expectations.
Not as a shadow cast by the past.
Or something formless.
Something too eager to please.
Something begging for existence through approval.
But I existed as myself, as who I was supposed to be if I hadn't been broken as a child.
And that means born again and I think that in religious terms that would mean that I regained my soul, my essence, my identity.
Individuation or authenticity Self-actualization is another way of putting it.
I think those terms are all kind of clinical.
I like born again.
I like finding your soul because the depth and power of the experience is mystical and powerful.
And it wasn't long afterwards that I met my wife.
The love of my life.
And half the life that I have now.
Which is a blessed and treasured existence of service to the world, utility to the future, and inspiration to everyone.
And that process of coming to life Also a great Pink Floyd song.
The live version, the guitar, the beginning of the Pulse tour.
Sublime.
And that process of being born as an adult, of coming into being as if I had not been harmed.
It's literally like losing your legs in some terrible accident.
And then slowly and painfully regrowing them.
It is a remarkable thing.
And they regrow to the point where you even forget the accident.
And it is a way of treasuring identity in a way that I don't think you get to treasure it if it hasn't been taken from you.
I mean, you really, really appreciate your legs if they regrow, right?
I mean, you really enjoy your running.
And...
That process...
It occurred through an exploration of the unconscious.
I made a list of it once.
Oddly enough, I think it was the same as the number of months that I couldn't sleep.
Those are the number of characters that I met inside myself who had incredibly powerful things to say about my life.
and my possibilities and they were both patient and encouraging short-tempered impatient aggressive assertive affectionate loving encouraging and exasperated with me in equal measures from different times at different sites and I wrote down lots of conversations debates with these alters they would be called I think alter egos within myself some male some female some old some young And
this pantheon, this Greek mountain full of mythological beings, of things that lived in my brain.
And none of them had angel wings or devil wings.
And none of them were divine that I knew of, and they all existed within my unconscious, and they all had things to say that were very surprising to me, but were not outside the bounds of what I could have known.
And that process, I wrote when I was 17 years old, sometimes we must bury ourselves in order to be resurrected.
Partly because I thought it was true, partly because I thought it was cool.
Be careful what you write, it just might happen.
Of course, you know, it's fine.
If you know, like if you think the grave is just wet earth at the bottom, you don't want to go in.
And it goes down, you can't see the bottom.
You don't want to jump in because you feel you're going to fall into earth and worms are going to eat your eyeballs and that's it for you.
Or you feel you're going to fall forever and you know when you fall into the earth, you slowly stop until you're in the middle.
But who would have guessed?
I wouldn't have guessed.
That if you let go and fall into the grave, it's this giant ass-kicking trampoline that puts you into the stars.
It's an incredible experience.
And it did not occur, to my knowledge, with any help of divinity.
And given the power and Highly populated nature of my subconscious, that's sort of where I got a sense of the unconscious as the divine, if that makes sense.
I do understand what you're saying, and I appreciate the answer.
I just wish you could see it from my perspective.
I think you'd be very satisfied.
I'm sorry to interrupt after I just said so much, but Steve, if I saw it from your perspective, and I do, you have experienced things that are compelling enough for you to accept the existence of a deity.
So what would help me is to not experience it from your perspective.
Absolutely.
What would help me is to be contacted by the divine.
And I'm not talking about a billboard in my basement.
I'm not talking about anything like that.
But to be contacted by the divine, to have things outside the bounds of probability on a regular enough basis that the odds would get pretty small that they were self-generated phenomenon, that would be something.
And I'm not, you know, say, open your heart and so on.
Well, okay.
I don't reject evidence.
I mean, there's evidence out there.
Like, I don't like the evidence that's out there, but if you're an empiricist, you've got to grit your teeth and follow it.
You know, I wish intelligence were evenly distributed across the globe.
That would be a beautiful thing.
But it ain't the case.
And so I am open.
I am open to the evidence.
And, you know, when I die, God may come to me.
And he may say, dude, look at your life.
You think you did all that?
We'll see.
I don't think so.
No evidence for it.
But I think it's going to be the infinite dirt nap.
Yeah.
I was dead for a long time before I was born.
It didn't bother me at all.
Oh, well.
But I remain open to the experience, and I certainly appreciate the question, and I hope at least sort of my perspective of where I'm coming from with the subconscious as God is somewhat helpful.
But if it's all right with you, I'm going to move on to the next caller, but thank you very much for the conversation.
Certainly.
One last question, Stefan.
Sure.
Can I send you something that I think you're looking for that would provide you with some evidence?
All right, but you know, that's going to make me think of that U2 song.
But I still...
Anyway, okay.
Thanks.
I appreciate that, Steve.
I will look forward to it.
And who's up next?
Alright, up next is Matt.
Matt wrote in and said, That is from Matt.
Okay, technically I'm not sure that inobvious is a word, but I get what it means, so we'll promote it to honorary word for the sake of the conversation.
Well, I thank you, your graciousness.
But no, I was...
Now that's a word!
There you go.
I was trying to figure out...
I'm like, that's probably not a word, but I think Stefan will get what I mean.
Is it unobvious, inobvious?
I don't know.
There's some grammar Nazi on the internet that'll send me a message someday.
Right.
So, what virtues?
Is this a personal thing, like you have trouble getting some virtues across to people?
So, basically, this is kind of brought on by a recent...
I got let into an honors class recently.
I finally got myself going back to school, finally chased the VA down enough to...
In what?
What are you taking?
I am working on a degree in computer engineering.
But I had a friend on the inside who was able to, because my GPA was not high enough back from before I was in the military, to get into honors classes.
However, I had an in and I was able to get into an honors class.
I've had this opportunity to write a research paper.
And the first portion of it is I need to take an issue from the world that's not one of the...
He doesn't want a generic issue is how he puts it.
So he doesn't want abortion, doesn't want gun control, anything like that.
So I was thinking back to one of the videos that you did on pathological altruism where that was the...
Overkill of kindness, I guess, was how I thought of it, where kindness ended up committing suicide because it wasn't put in context with what was really happening in the world.
I kind of saw an external version of that where...
You've touched on this kind of situation before where the libertarian ideal of open borders in the society where everyone gets an equal vote.
So when we import a certain society that has...
Let me start over.
So if you import a group of people that are pro-big government...
And the reason why you're importing them is because you're pro-small government.
You don't want to tell people what they need to do.
You end up undoing your own virtue, if that makes sense.
Yeah.
Why are some people here?
Some people are in the West because of welfare benefits.
True.
They're not coming for the freedom.
They're not coming for the values.
True.
They're not coming because they respect the separation of church and state and want freedom.
They're coming because there's free stuff.
And, of course, to some degree, the Western government has worked very hard to screw up and disassemble the Middle East.
But it's not of value.
If you pay someone to be your friend, they're not there because they love you.
They're there because...
You're going to buy them some Dom Perignon and buy them a lap dance or something.
That's an entourage.
That's not friendship.
So the idea is to kind of find a way to articulate that if you don't examine your own virtue or your own principle enough to realize that If you do it in the wrong context, you might end up undoing it, if that makes sense.
Yeah.
And so, what's your question?
My question is, what's the best way to articulate that to the people that we need to speak to when we talk to the people who are never Trump?
It's obvious that they don't like him because of his personality.
They're just like, oh, pearl clutching and all that.
Wait, wait, wait.
Sorry, why do you think it's obvious that they don't like him because of his personality?
That's what they say, maybe.
Maybe.
Do you think that's their real motive?
I think that's not what they say and that the real motive where they will bring out, well, he's a liar.
A lot of times what I run into is, oh, he's a liar.
And I say, well, what reasons do you have to believe that he's a liar?
And they can never quite articulate a good argument.
And actually, half the time I find myself trying to help them form their argument in the discussion.
Has Donald Trump's lies got America into an unwinnable 15-year war that's destroyed huge sections of the Middle East?
Exactly.
I had a front row seat to that.
I was a military intelligence analyst when the Syrian Civil War broke out.
That wasn't fun to watch.
I'd ask you questions if it wouldn't get us both put in jail.
Exactly.
Your last name isn't Clinton, but okay.
That's why I didn't ask that question.
Yeah, no, no, I get it.
So, okay, what do you think?
So the Never Trumpers, just for those who don't know, and Mike, you studied this more than I do, correct me if I go astray, but the Never Trumpers are a group of Republicans.
I mean, of course, we know that the Democrats are never Trumpers, but they're a group of Republicans of low to middling importance who seem to have – they're trying to create a wall between the presidency and Donald Trump because Donald Trump wants to build a wall and that's really bad.
So anyone can go everywhere in the West except Donald Trump can't go to the White House.
Mexicans can come to America, but Donald Trump can't go to the White House because there should be a wall.
But they are – anyone but Trump, never Trump.
They're very hostile to Trump.
So why would Republicans be hostile?
To Trump, do you think it's because they share the same values but just don't like his personality?
That's a very odd thing.
Thank you.
To, you know, expecting that you have to like everyone who shares your values, first of all, there's never going to be 100% sharing of values.
I think we should have more affection for people who share our values than people who are opposed to our values, but that doesn't mean we have to like everything about them.
But what do you think the Never Trumpers, what do you think their real issue is?
Well, I don't want to...
Chalk up never-Trumpers to people who are like Mitt Romney and the public figures who are never-Trumpers.
I'm talking about the average guy on the street that has – and see, this is where my thought process kind of hits a wall.
I mean I think we keep coming back to that kind of concept, a wall.
So this is kind of the muddiness of the thought process that I'm trying to put together.
And maybe this isn't a good idea for research paper, but I think if I can pull it off, it'll be fantastic.
So I'm trying to get across to the average Joe that this guy doesn't need to win your heart to be the best that we have to pick from.
This guy doesn't have to correlate with all of your issues directly.
I would at least want to articulate in some way that if he's not exactly what you want out of a president, he's a big move in the right direction.
I'm having a hard time seeing why some people don't see that.
I think that to say to someone you don't have to like everything about someone in order for that person to be of value to you I don't – I mean does that really need – almost to explain that is kind of insulting to people.
It is.
As when it comes to politics, yeah, like of course, of course no politician is going to do everything you want.
And even – the promises aren't going to be everything that you want.
Listen, there are six million things that Donald Trump wants to do or wants to maintain or wants to save or wants to continue.
That I do not agree with.
I do not agree with.
I think everyone understands.
I'm not a big fan of the welfare state, got big government redistribution and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
They're all working to preserve and save that.
I get that.
But saying that in order to vote for someone, they have to 100% agree with every one of your issues is simply to demand that no one ever get elected to power.
Which would be nice.
Because there's no possibility, right?
Right.
Well, I mean, no one in power.
That would be kind of nice, too.
Well, no, but you know what I mean.
Yeah, so it's… So it's not that.
I mean, no person with an IQ above 80 thinks that it has to be perfect.
True.
There has to be some perfect alignment.
I mean, as I've talked about, one of the reasons that I find Donald Trump interesting is that I would really like to continue a philosophy conversation in the world.
In order to do that, there are certain things that need to be maintained, things like freedom of speech, things like recently high average IQ in a nation, a commitment to the marketplace of ideas, the internet.
There are things that need to continue in order for me to have a conversation with the world about Virtue, reason, truth, evidence, and all that kind of stuff.
So, I mean, that has to do with immigration.
And demographically, it seems unlikely that that conversation is going to be able to continue in the future if the demographics change to the point where they appear to be heading.
Now, again, as I said at the beginning, research source country, average IQ, that's all you need to know.
Read Adios America.
That also helps.
Read Adios America?
That will not do you any harm.
Yeah, that will not do you any harm.
So as far as all that goes, does that mean I have to agree with everything that Donald Trump agrees with?
Well, no.
But basically...
If I'm in a burning building, I don't care if the fireman is a socialist.
You know, just put out the damn fire.
Because this is, you know, people...
I keep saying strategic and tactical.
I mean, the people who are upset about my course at the moment, I mean, I understand it.
I mean, I'd love to live in the platonic world of forms where we could all act with purity and perfection and so on.
But in order to get there, we've got a couple of steps to get over first.
But...
You know, in the past, I'm like, hey, here's the 10-year plan for our business.
Here's my big PowerPoint.
I got charts.
I got dancers.
I got glitter cannons.
I got tear-away assless chaps.
I got the whole deal.
Here's a 10-year plan for where we're going as a company.
Someone comes in and says, hey, boss, the factory's on fire.
What do I do?
Can't do it now.
I'm talking about the 10-year plan for the company.
Glitter cannons are all here.
My pants are half off.
The factory's on fire.
What do you do?
You want to go put out the fire.
Put out the fire.
Because if you don't put out the fire, your 10-year plan doesn't mean squat, right?
Exactly.
Well, Ron Paul was going to put out the fire.
No, he wasn't.
He didn't have a fire to start with.
Well, he couldn't get elected.
I mean, I could count.
I'm not a mathematical genius, but I can count.
Yeah, Rand Paul was my favorite pick when the Republican race started.
Open borders.
Open borders, amnesty.
No worky.
Yeah, no worky.
No worky.
No worky would state.
Look, and these guys, they don't know how to Google source country average IQ. Look up the average IQ in Mexico.
Read Jason Richwine's thesis on Mexican immigrants.
Average IQ in the high 80s.
Sorry, you ain't met the democracy threshold.
And you ain't going to be any defender of free speech or the separation of church and state or the free market.
These are all high IQ things and I'm sorry.
I'm sorry about it.
I'm not responsible for human biodiversity.
I'm not responsible for the effects of separate evolution over 50 or 100,000 years.
It's not my fault.
Don't shoot the messenger.
Yeah, someone tried to pull – when I got into a discussion about this with someone, they tried to – I, of course, just ad nauseum repeated the phrase, not an argument, but they tried to tell me, oh, that's social eugenics.
I said, okay, great.
Yeah, at the moment, the moment you start talking about genetics, people just jump in with eugenics.
Eugenics!
Eugenics!
Yeah, okay, well, eugenics is government-controlled breeding, right?
So welfare state is eugenics.
Exactly.
By being a voluntarist, by being for a stateless society, I'm the opposite of eugenics.
Breeding these days is a goddamn government program.
We might as well be in enclosed walled tents with 24-7 porn.
It is a breeding pen.
We're all in this breeding pen.
I'm surprised we're not wearing catalytic converter suits so that we don't exhale CO2. Right, right.
So, yeah, of course I'm against forced sterilization and forced breeding.
I mean, of course, absolutely.
Absolutely.
So stop paying people to have children.
I mean the government should not be paying people to have children because that's eugenics and it's a hell of a lot more dangerous than other forms of eugenics in the past.
So yeah, resolutely against eugenics.
But people just love throwing eugenics in because – or that IQ tests are racist or all this kind of stuff.
And it's funny because you get the guy that says, oh, that's social eugenics and then they're pro-abortion.
Right, right.
Well, and pro-abortion is one thing.
Pro-abortion paid for by the government, now that's even more radical eugenics now, isn't it?
There you go.
So no, this is just – and look, it is with all due sensitivity, right?
I mean, Matt, it is – this biodiversity stuff, like the fact that IQ is not evenly distributed among ethnicities, at least at the moment, is horrible stuff.
It is heartbreaking stuff.
It puts – You know, I was thinking about this the other day.
Just not a long rant, but I'll put it in here.
Go for it.
Because I'm feeling foolhardy.
But do you know how the Iraq War could have been prevented?
The invasion of Iraq.
How's that?
Google.
Iraq.
Average IQ. That's it.
Three words in Google.
Read the first answer that shows up that has some statistical validity.
Now, I know these are not perfect in the Middle East.
I understand all of that.
But Iraq.
Average IQ. Now, if people had done that, then they would have found out that the average IQ in Iraq is too low to sustain a democracy.
Right?
Correct.
I mean, don't even get me started on Afghanistan, but that's the reality.
And the people over here don't really care about it.
Like, oh, this is great, and America's helping us build a house.
We're going to go burn down the other guy's house now because we have a house.
They don't have that Ability to go too much farther.
Average IQ in Iraq is 87.
Wow.
Average IQ in Iraq is 87.
The cutoff for even a bare-bones democracy is at least 90.
Average IQ, Iraq.
Should we go nation-built in Iraq?
No!
Now, maybe in the future this can change.
Maybe it can be different.
Maybe there's an environmental thing.
Maybe there's genetic treatments.
I hope so.
I desperately hope so.
But that's how the Iraq War could have been completely prevented.
We're going to go and make a democracy out of that place.
No, you're not!
You can also go that...
Well, it worked in Germany, yes, because Germany has an average IQ of 102.
Well, it worked in Japan, yes, because Japan has an average IQ of 106.
You can also trigger some people by telling them that Iraq didn't do 9-11.
It was Saudi Arabia.
Well, that's all stuff believed by people in America who have an average IQ of 87.
It's kind of a synergy there.
But no, it's a conspiracy because how on earth would we expect a group of people to work together towards an end?
I mean, really, that's just ridiculous.
I mean, the whole Middle East thing, if people knew ethnicity and IQ, or at least country and IQ, and again, I know it's not perfect, but it's not way off.
It's not off by a standard deviation or 15 points, right?
Right.
And IQ tends to solidify over time.
It's more flexible when you're young.
When you're young, it's less.
By the time you're in your 50s or 60s or 70s, it's like 80% of your IQ is genetic.
And so these are the people in power.
These are the people who vote.
These are most, right?
I mean, so you've got this problem.
I don't know what the solution is.
But I'll tell you this, it sure as hell isn't invading and destroying the country.
Absolutely.
And it's more of a crime to these people to not admit the problem either.
I see so many people who shy away from IQ. Well, I don't want to call that person stupid.
Well, if somebody doesn't have an arm and you think that maybe they won't be good at baseball, that's not an unkind thing to tell them that, hey, you don't have an arm, you may not be the greatest at baseball.
Well, the thing is, though, we can avoid these topics all we want, but we don't make the suffering go away.
We just shift it.
So we cannot talk about race and IQ or ethnicity and IQ, but that just means white people get blamed for it.
It doesn't go away.
It doesn't vanish because the problems are there.
It just means that white people get called racist for things that are utterly beyond the control of white people.
It doesn't make...
It's not kind.
It just shifts the blame to people whose fault it isn't.
And not that there is anyone whose fault it is.
It's just, what is?
So, back to the Never Trumpers.
I just wanted to point out, you can think of world problems that are going on, and as soon as you start looking through this country IQ stuff, it doesn't solve everything in the known universe, but It's a very important metric to try and figure the world out by and it could have solved so many ungodly disasters that have occurred in the world and are continuing to occur in the world.
The resistance to this human biodiversity comes out of two areas.
It comes out of number one, the socialist or communist idea that we're all environmentally determined.
It's all environment.
It's communism.
You're born into the bourgeois, you're bourgeois.
You have a bourgeois mentality.
You're born into the proletariat, proletariat mentality.
It's all environmental.
So then if you start talking about human biodiversity, well, that's not environmental.
That's genetic.
And so the socialists, the communists, they're pissed off because they believe human beings can be engineered into whatever you want simply by changing the environment.
So you bring democracy to Iraq, then they'll adapt to democracy because they're just like water poured into whatever container is around.
It's like, nope.
Number two is the idea of the soul, right?
If human beings or mammals have evolved with different capacities according to the demands of different environments, and I've talked about this before.
Interviews with Kevin Beaver, with Linda Gottfriedsen, with Jared Taylor, with a bunch of other people about this issue.
Winter is a big thing, right?
I mean, if you don't defer gratification in winter, you eat your seed crop, you don't survive.
And so thousands of years of winters in Europe and particularly in Siberia where a lot of the East Asians evolved.
You've got winter and you're going to weed out people with a short amount.
Short windows of planning and all of that.
You need intelligence to be able to defer gratification.
It's one of the things that's necessary.
The idea of the soul, though, is that we're all equal under the skin and we're not determined by our biology.
One is environmental determinism and the other one is egalitarianism through the concept of the universal soul, that God doesn't make souls better or worse.
I'm sorry, but with the soul concept, I think I haven't heard it put that way before.
From my understanding, and I have a Catholic upbringing, so from my understanding of the idea of the soul was not that everybody is exactly the same, but that each human has an intrinsic value.
And so it's very often taught that we have different talents, different abilities.
People are going to be smarter or dumber than others.
Some people are going to be better at this.
Some people are going to be worse at that.
And so the metric of the soul is not everybody's exact and build exactly the same as a lot of times the created in the image of God is taken out of context into that.
Whereas it's everybody's created with an intrinsic value of a human being.
Alright.
I will certainly accept that.
I will defer to your knowledge of Catholic theology.
I do think that the idea of the soul that is independent, that is divine and independent of the body creates a kind of egalitarianism that a mere look at biology...
Would not necessarily support.
But I certainly accept that it doesn't – yeah, it doesn't mean that everyone has got the same intelligence deep down or at least in the brain.
Yeah, and I could see that.
I could see your way of putting it too.
It's just from my Catholic experience that it's not presented in that way.
There may be other religions that it is, but I wouldn't be aware of that.
But I agree with your point.
But I think that the Catholics would say that you need to be virtuous in order to get into heaven, but intelligence and virtue are somewhat correlated and therefore less intelligent people but have less capacity for virtue.
Like if you're born with your IQ in the 85 sweet spot, you're much more susceptible to crime than if you're born with 120 IQ. Right, but then we also know from IQ studies that just because it means that you're more likely to commit crime doesn't necessarily mean that you personally will.
Yeah, but God...
It's not fair to handicap people when it comes to virtue then, right?
I mean, if everyone has to...
Unless God's going to have different standards for IQ 85 people than IQ 120 people.
I don't pretend to know that answer.
I don't either.
I'm just saying that this is one of the challenges, and I don't know how it would be handled in a free society either, but I'm just saying that these are...
I think that there's both on the left and...
I don't want to say the right is religious, but on the socialist side and on the religious side, there is this drive towards egalitarianism that comes for various reasons that...
Both, I think, somewhat unite to oppose this concept of that human biodiversity and we've all adapted to different environments.
The desert is not the same as the Arctic, is not the same as the tundra, is not the same as Siberia, is not the same as Africa.
And after tens and tens of thousands of years, it's an entirely separate evolution.
We've got differences and they're more than skin deep and we can accept this or not, but as long as we don't accept it, we're just going to continue to make...
The stakes are a little high, but anyway, I've mentioned all this stuff before, so I just wanted to bring it up here.
So yeah, as far as the never-Trumpers go, I would assume – I don't know all the details, but cue bono, right?
Who benefits?
Follow the money.
Why are they so upset with Trump?
Well, we know why the media is upset with Trump because Hillary Clinton buys many, many times more ads than Trump does.
It's a ridiculous number of ads that Hillary Clinton buys.
So are they pro-Hillary?
Sure.
Because Hillary gives them a lot more money than Donald Trump does.
And because they're businesses, they – I think second only to sports is political spend on ads for the media.
So the media loves – they don't like Trump because he's not buying ads.
I mean it's not the only reason but obviously that's – They should mention that.
They should mention that conflict of interest.
Oh, by the way, Hillary Clinton has spent this amount of money.
Give yourself a big graph going through the top of the screen.
And Donald Trump has sent us this amount of money.
It's a tiny little sliver down at the bottom.
We'll leave you to judge whether that has any effect on how we report on these people.
And so that's one thing.
Donald Trump doesn't hire pollsters.
He doesn't do polls.
As far as I understand it, there are very few.
And so polling companies are dealing with half the money that they used to deal with.
These guys wait for this presidential.
Four years, it's like a long winter.
Finally, spring has come and the food is here and we can make merry.
And it's like, nope.
Sorry, half the money because Donald Trump ain't spending money on polls.
Because he's not a poll-driven guy.
He's a principle-driven guy.
I had to do polls, right?
I do principles.
Use one or the other.
And so polling people don't like him.
Does that have any effect on whether they pick what's called D-plus districts?
Do they poll more women than men?
Well, you're going to get higher numbers for Hillary.
Do they poll more Democrat districts than Republican districts?
Well, then you're going to get more pro-Hillary stuff and all of that, right?
And he's still winning in the polls.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it depends who you ask and what you do.
But so, you know, is polling, you know, one of the ways that the business could, quote, work, I don't know anything about it, but, you know, just following the money.
One of the reasons that you might buy polls is so that the polling people will give you the numbers you want, which they can do if they want, right?
Oh, easy.
If you want to get numbers that show a particular candidate doing well, you can pick the districts, you can pick the time of day, right?
And you can pick the demographics and you'll get what you want.
So if you've got candidate X and you want the polls to say candidate X is doing well, well, if you spend a lot of money on polling data, maybe they can just get you that result.
Again, I don't know.
This is one possibility, right?
So maybe he's not doing polls.
He's not doing ads.
He's not hiring political consultants.
Because he's got principles.
So he doesn't need people to tell him what he should say because he's got principles.
You know, I don't do a lot of opinion polling before I dive into a new topic.
Hey, I wonder what people will think of me talking about single motherhood.
Hey, I wonder what people will think about me talking about race and IQ. Hey, I wonder what people will think about me talking about whatever, right?
I mean, I've got principles.
Yeah, your method's more like, let's kick in this door and see what happens.
Well, yeah.
I mean, I've got to stay interesting.
Not just for you, but for me, too.
Like, I can't.
I can't do the same topics over and over again.
I have the attention of a squirrel.
Actually, no, a squirrel has more attention.
So he's not – and lobbyists, they will charge companies huge amounts of money, huge amounts, like staggering amounts of money to give them political access in order to have them swing the government To the way they want, right?
We all know about this.
This is the old thing for me.
This is back in 57 when Ayn Rand was writing Atlas Shrugged.
He was talking about Reardon grudgingly had a man in Washington or whatever, right?
And it's just what you got to do, right?
And, you know, people say, well, Google is doing this or Google, you know, there's some articles I've read that Google is favoring Hillary Clinton, you know, by keeping things out of her searches or whatever.
And it's like, you know, okay.
But, or Facebook, you know, they're cooperating with Facebook is Zuckerberg sits down with Angela Merkel and says, yeah, we're going to help you root out hate speech, or as they're also known, facts.
Well, okay, and easy to say from the outside, but you can get hit with an antitrust suit pretty hard.
I mean, again, this is back to Ayn Rand.
I think it was in The Capitalist and the Unknown Ideal where she talks about the Sherman Antitrust Act.
There's no law there.
There's nothing objective.
They can just say, oh, we think you're a monopoly.
Boom!
You're toast.
You want to know why Microsoft took over from IBM? Because IBM was investigated for 13 damn years for being a monopoly.
Do you want to know how much that cost them, how much morale it cost them, how many good people left because they just got tired of all these endless subpoenas and paperwork and shit?
I mean, it crippled them as a company.
If you're Google, you have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize the value of that company to your shareholders and to your employees and to your customers and to everyone involved, all your stakeholders.
And if the government can drop the hammer of doom on you at any time they want with no law that can protect you and no objective standard for compliance or rejection, Angela Merkel says she wants a little bit of help.
Well, let's just say She's going to have your attention.
This doesn't mean I think that Google is perfect.
I'm just – it's important to understand that there's a gun in the room, people, right?
And the gun is the power of the state, particularly this murky world of antitrust stuff.
And yeah, when the government calls – I was just reading today.
Was it today?
Yeah, today.
That – Yahoo!
This story goes something like this.
So Yahoo was contacted by the NSA that they wanted to scan for particular phrases in the emails.
And it was US intelligence that wanted it.
And so they built a custom software program.
To search all of its customers.
This is from Breitbart, right?
Yahoo last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers' incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials according to people familiar with the matter.
They complied with the classified U.S. government demand, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said three former employees and a fourth person apprised of the events.
Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a US internet company agreeing to an intelligence agency's request by searching all arriving messages as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time.
That actually explains a lot because back around that time, I had some issues with my Yahoo account where there were some foreign countries logging into my account.
Because when you go on Yahoo, you can actually look up a record based on IP address of – or at least the last IP address that comes through where things were.
And I'm like, huh, I recognize these countries as typical routing countries.
I'm like, all right, so somebody is trying to look at my emails.
And that explains a lot.
Yeah.
It is not known what information intelligence officials were looking for, only that they wanted Yahoo to search for a set of characters.
I mean, actually, I think when they first found this program in Yahoo, they thought they'd been hacked.
Yeah, you kind of have been.
It's just the hacking is coming from inside the country.
So anyway, it's – Yahoo could probably get hit with something, right?
It's – I mean I have some sympathy for the tech companies and it's easy to just crap at them but – I'm not living under threat of monopoly prosecution that could go on for 13 years and destroy my company.
I've been an entrepreneur.
You care about the people who work for you.
You don't want to do things that's going to jeopardize.
So-and-so down the hall just had a kid.
So-and-so just bought a house.
So-and-so needs money for surgery or whatever.
You care.
You care about these things.
If it means a little do-si-do with government, I don't know.
I can understand it.
I know that people are going to get crabby about it, but I'm just saying I can understand it.
But Mike, if you wanted to – you've looked up a little bit more of the Never Trump people because, of course, you were thinking of joining them.
No, I'm kidding.
Yeah, I have something to say about Never Trump, and I'll try and keep it short, because it's pretty simple in reality.
This election is all about demographics.
Ann Coulter has detailed this extensively in Adios America.
Steph just had a great conversation with Paul Joseph Watson about this very topic.
It's about demographics.
Because we are reaching the tipping point in the United States right now where I don't even know if there's enough people in the country that would ever vote Republican or conservative.
Pretty much vote for freedom.
Vote for smaller government.
Now, I'm not saying that Republican in general is smaller government.
We all know that's not the case.
The establishment Republicans are terrible.
They're not too different from the establishment Democrats or liberals.
They're not.
They're pretty much the same thing.
Normally they go for open borders because...
The rich establishment Republicans, they like the cheap labor, and the rich establishment Democrats, they like the people that are going to vote for the left.
They like the people that are going to be dependent on welfare, the people in low-skilled jobs that can be sold the bill of goods that, hey, vote for giant collectivist government, because otherwise you won't get a fair shake.
So we have the unique situation where we have Donald Trump this year who is quite a bit different.
He's not an establishment Republican.
Sometimes it's hard to call him a Republican at all.
This is an insurgency on the Republican Party, folks.
And Donald Trump is leading the charge.
He is going to determine, here and now, we're going to see if it's possible to get a smaller government nationalist figure elected in this country if it hasn't already slid so far to the left.
So far to the left, if the scale hasn't been rigged to the degree that it's impossible for someone that's not touting open borders, big government, here's a bunch of handouts, if it's possible for someone like that to get elected, we're right on the brink.
It may not even be possible to elect someone that is not big government, big government, big government all the way.
We're gonna find out.
But I certainly know four years from now that it's going to be too much.
I mean, you have Hillary Clinton who's promising amnesty, who wants to bring in all kinds of immigrants.
She's very clearly for open borders in many ways, although she, you know, says, oh no, I'm not, of course not, no, but she's for open borders.
Here's the deal.
It's all about demographics.
So, these arguments are not hard to understand.
Adios America was a very well-selling book.
Anyone interested in immigration policy, anyone interested in the election cycle, should have read...
Adios America.
Been exposed to the argument.
Steph has done tons of presentations on it.
It's all there in black and white, and it's not hard to understand.
These groups vote here!
Look at a chart.
Okay, here's a chart.
Okay, now you've looked at the chart.
Good for you.
So once you've been exposed to the argument, you fall into two camps.
There's the people that don't get it.
They don't understand the argument.
Now, either they don't understand the argument because they're incompetent, or they don't understand the argument because they're overwhelmed by their emotions.
They're the type of people that need a safe space because somebody with a penis talked for a really long time, and you know that's mansplaining.
They need a safe space.
They need a hug room.
Blah, blah, blah.
So either...
You're just dumb.
Like, intellectually, you need to go sit at the kiddies' table because it's a very basic argument.
Or, you're just overwhelmed by your emotions to the point where you can't have intellectual discussions, you can't understand an intellectual argument because you're overwhelmed by your feels!
Your feels!
If you're not smart enough to understand what you're talking about, don't talk about it.
And if you're so overwhelmed with your feels that you can't make coherent arguments and can't rebut those that are making coherent arguments, well, well, well, well.
Please just go sit at the kiddie table and leave me alone.
And then there's the other camp.
There's a camp that do get it.
And for whatever reason, they are anti-Trump and anti the idea of putting a stop to mass third-world immigration.
And they just like it because it helps their interests.
They just like it because maybe the people that fund their think tank Are, you know, big fans of this cheap labor, big fan of this open borders because it benefits them and helps their bottom line.
Hey, maybe that could be the case.
Hey, maybe they like it because a Never Trump political action committee just, you know, for no reason whatsoever bought 20,000 copies of their book.
Maybe, maybe it's because they like getting large speaking fees, despite the fact they're only able to draw a crowd of maybe like 100 people, but yet they get tens of thousands of dollars in speaking fees.
I'm sure that's because they're just great public speakers and not because they're being paid to talk about something.
Oh, wait, no, I shouldn't say that.
Oh, gee, who knows?
Who knows?
But, yeah, if someone is saying that, you know, hey, I'm for these principles, I'm for a small government, I'm for this and that, and they're taking such as a never-Trump position, which makes no sense whatsoever, given the demographic winter and realities that we are facing...
Maybe it's time to accept that the things that they've said in the past and are currently stating to be their stated principles and important things aren't actually their stated principles and things that are important to them, folks.
Maybe, maybe, just maybe, they care more about the interests of the people that are funding them and keeping that gravy train going than anything they actually give lip service to from a public standpoint.
Wait, did that actually happen?
No, Steph, that doesn't happen at all!
Wait, are you saying that if I ditch Trump, someone would buy 20,000 copies of my books?
Why didn't you tell me?
What's the number?
Who do I call?
Soul for sale!
Soul for sale!
Send out the squid symbol.
Sorry, go ahead.
Steph, your books are free.
So, I'm sorry.
Damn it.
Because his principle's on freedom.
I'm terrible at this!
You're a terrible sellout, Steph.
You really, really are.
I'm terrible at this.
Come on.
Somebody give me a good price.
So, I would give something to the...
The emotional group that you were talking about, and I completely agree with your point there, but from...
Oh, I know how much you hate that phrase.
I agree with you, but...
In this paper writing class, I'm learning how powerful the antidotal evidence argument is to persuade people.
And especially because, well, we're emotional...
We're emotional creatures.
You mean anecdotal?
Sorry, you said antidotal.
You mean anecdotal?
Anecdotal, thank you.
Anecdotal.
Okay, sorry.
I just wanted to make sure that wasn't a category.
I didn't know it.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yes.
And so when you...
When you reach that wall of people where, alright, we've convinced all these people with the data, now we've got all these other people who aren't being convinced by the data.
Is it fair to use the tool?
You know, you've already presented the data, so after you make the incidental argument, they can come back and go, well, see, here's all the data that backs that up, because you've broken through the emotional barrier.
Because I would compare the likeness...
Wait, sorry, are you saying that is it okay to use compelling arguments that aren't totally reason and evidence-based?
Of course.
So for those emotional people, why don't we do that?
Yeah, I mean, why do you think I'm ranting half the time?
Because I'm passionate about things.
Why do you think I use personal anecdotes?
You know, why am I talking about not sleeping for 18?
Because people connect to people.
And most people don't function in the realm of reason and evidence.
Otherwise the show would be a chart.
Yeah, otherwise, you know, this show would be a bunch of syllogisms and I'd be done in 20 minutes.
Problem solved!
World saved!
Moving on!
I have given you the facts.
You're welcome, planet.
I'll be off enjoying paradise, which will be created by tomorrow morning.
Yeah, because, you know, when I go to libertarians and I say, listen, spanking is a violation of the non-aggression principle, what do they say?
Well, I was spanked.
That's what they say.
I turned out fine!
Yeah.
Kids who aren't spanked turned out to be brats.
Spanking is essential.
Spanking is parenting.
Spanking is good.
It's like, do you have any counterarguments to the expressly and exquisitely laid out syllogisms about how spanking is a violation of the non-aggression principle?
How about all the experts who say spanking is really, really bad for children?
How about the fact that you don't like the word taxes because you actually mean theft but you use the word spanking when you mean hitting because you don't like the word hitting because it's too obvious, right?
So, I mean, this is one of the big things for me.
Please, it's making me uncomfortable.
Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, okay, so spanking is a violation of the non-aggression principle, hitting children, of course.
It's not self-defense.
I mean, kids who are getting hit three-year-olds, they're not coming at you with a chainsaw, or if it is, it's a little cute one that doesn't do you any harm.
Your toddler's got a gun!
Right, you say, well, you know, we hit them because their brains aren't well-developed.
It's like, oh, really?
So do you hit old people who have Alzheimer's when they forget their keys?
Well, no, that would be...
Their brains aren't well developed, so they can't logically understand why you're hitting them, so therefore we need to hit them more.
Okay.
All right.
And, you know, I mean, it's one thing to talk about the Federal Reserve, which no one can do anything about, at least in libertarian circles, but we can do a lot about And I've sort of made the very clear case that if you want a free society, if you want a small government society or a no government society, you need to raise children peacefully.
I've made the case very exquisitely with at least a dozen experts and at least a dozen presentations, bombinthebrain.com.
I mean, it's all very, very clear.
It is an unassailable case.
And you know what, Steph?
That reminds me of an epiphany I had about you.
Okay, but don't interrupt me with your epiphany because I'm right in the middle of my story.
Then you can have your epiphany.
Got it.
Wait for the end of the story.
So that's an airtight case.
If I was a lawyer, that prosecution, I mean, they're frying.
They're going to the chair.
And so that is – and these are people who say the non-aggression principle is the sacred heart of libertarianism.
I made an airtight case as banking is a violation of the non-aggression principle.
And what happened?
It's like I didn't say anything.
Like, nothing was ever said, right?
And these are the people who say, I can't believe how difficult it is to convince people about the virtues of the non-aggression principle.
It's like, hello!
Hello!
I was trying to do that for years with you guys in something that you can actually do something about, and you were basically exactly the same as a welfare whore who didn't want her benefits cut off.
So – or his for the matter – gender is a gender-neutral term.
So it's in every group.
It's in every group.
The majority of people are there for emotional reasons.
They've got all of these ex post facto justifications for why they like – for why it's good for them to like what they like, but it's not a rational process.
And you can't reason people out of opinions they haven't been reasoned into, so you use whatever – Tricks and tools of the trade, you can.
I mean, you use sophistry.
You use humor.
You use personal stories.
You use anecdotal evidence.
Now, if it's all in the service of that which has been validated by reason and evidence, good.
More power to you.
People are going in the right direction.
I'm happy.
If you tell a guy to quit smoking because he thinks his cigarettes are possessed by the devil, well, at least you saved his lungs.
So, yeah, I, you know, validate with reason and evidence, but once you've done that, you know, I don't play Queensbury rules when it comes to convincing the world not to self-immolate.
And the guy's kids, the guy's kids seem pretty cool.
Don't they?
Oh god, Eric Trump was on CNN last night after the debate and was taking on three people, including Wolf Blitzer, for about 12 minutes.
And they were throwing all the pejorative nonsense at him that you'd imagine that they would.
And he was fending him off like an expert swordsman slash politician.
It's like, oh man, you are wickedly impressive, sir.
His kids, you know, I mean...
They move in next door, you're not having a problem.
They seem like great people.
They seem like together people.
They seem like passionate people.
They support their father.
Their father loves them.
They clearly keep their hair gel industry above water.
That's important because a lot of people work in that industry.
I'm just saying that out of envy, of course.
No, they seem like really together people compared to a lot of I think that's very admirable.
And this is when Trump was, of course, a self-professed workaholic and didn't spend as much time with his kids sometimes, I think, as he wanted.
But they always had dinner together.
He always talked about it.
And he gave his kids sort of very inspiring things to think about and gave them very important lessons.
And as far as I know it, his kids have all turned out to be pretty great people.
And that's not unimportant to me at all.
Yeah, that's a totem pole for a secret.
I told you so, see?
Just look!
So listen, the only thing I'd suggest as well, Matt, is you've got to be careful about this topic because this is a volatile topic.
It's my job, but it might be your undoing.
So just be aware that, as I talked about with the first caller, we're talking about – when it comes down to genetic survival for particular gene sets, things can get kind of ugly.
Well, things get ugly and very ugly.
And the left – It has no standards that they will not violate in order to get their way.
It's nice to see that with Trump and to some degree with certain elements of the alt-right that the right is finally taken off the gloves.
It's about time, people, because you don't play by the Queensbury boxing rules with someone who's got a bazooka.
It's street fighting.
It's door to door.
And just be aware of that.
I mean there may be – it may be intellectually satisfying, but it might be academically challenging for you to do this, and you might want to just think about that.
And maybe if you can find something that's going to be a little less volatile, that's also satisfying, it might be worth considering.
I will take that advice.
A thesis on why Trump is Hitler?
Hitler, that will probably get an A.
Just go out on a limb.
Something about pathological altruism and why Trump is not possibly Hitler, that's going to be tougher.
And remember, facts don't matter for most people.
Alright, thanks Matt.
Appreciate that.
Let's move on to the next one.
Alright, up next is Jeremy.
Jeremy wrote in and said, Would veteran benefits be considered a form of welfare?
It is often talked about on the show how welfare affects those who participate in collecting it and the dangers to society as a whole, such as dependency on the system.
Veterans benefits include easy housing loans, education compensation, monthly disability payments, and much, much more funded by the government.
As a U.S. Marine veteran, I've benefited immensely from these programs.
However, I feel my treatment of this government money and other veterans' treatment of government money is more positive than other groups who receive government assistance.
Still, as a self-described patriot, I want to support what is best for my country, even if it means less money for me.
Sometimes I feel guilty for taking veteran benefit money and want to hear your thoughts.
That's from Jeremy.
Oh, hey Jeremy, how you doing?
Still good, how are you?
I'm all right.
I'm all right.
Now, you said that you've got disability payments, right?
Yes, I do.
Now, you don't have to get into any details, of course, but you mind giving me some sort of sense of what they're for?
Well, I wasn't wounded or anything like that.
I worked on big trucks and I got up and down and up and down these big trucks with a lot of weight on my body.
It hurt my back and it hurt my knee and my hip and some other things like that.
That's probably the bulk of what they're for.
Is it you in continual pain?
How is that for you physically?
No, it's manageable.
There are times, you know, I'll hurt, but I did physical therapy through private means, through group health, and they taught me some tricks to mitigate it, and so I do the stretching, and as long as I, you know, I'm doing some crunches and I'm running and things like that, I can prevent myself from being in pain, for the most part.
Okay, so you could work.
Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely.
Okay, okay.
In fact, I do work.
Do you work?
You do work?
Yes, I do.
Yeah.
So if you work, how do you get to...
I mean, I don't know how any of this works, but how...
Oh, okay.
I wasn't sure.
So essentially, when you serve in the military, anything that happened to you physically, say you hurt your knee or you hurt your arm, and obviously in extreme cases, if you were wounded or even PTSD, things like that, No matter what it is, you can claim benefits.
And so, on one end of the spectrum, you've got people who, like I said, were all wounded, they're missing limbs, or maybe they're suffering psychologically, who are getting benefits.
But on the other end of the spectrum, if you got a scar, or a scar is worth 10% disability, which is a payment, it's not much, it's a Roughly $150 a month for the rest of your life, which is not exactly going to pay off your yacht, but it is pretty money.
That's if you have a scar.
Right, that's if you have a scar.
And it has to be a scar of a certain diameter and a certain color, and they've got it all spelled out.
And the scar doesn't necessarily have to be from direct military action.
It can be...
Yeah, if you're actively in the military and you're playing soccer with your buddies and you fall down and hurt yourself, you go see medical, you could potentially get disability for that.
Again, the disability would be a 10% rating of like $150.
And then on the other end of the spectrum, like a severe 100% disability, you're getting like $3,300 a month, all tax-free.
So it's even more than that if you compare it to, say, having an income.
But yeah, and so that's kind of what compelled me to the question.
It's because if I'm playing soccer, like I said, I hurt my knee, I get a scar, and on my way out of the military I happen to mention it to a doctor, I can get money for the rest of my life.
Right.
Tax-free?
Yeah.
And also on top of that, and so this kind of creates this incentive for people that, you know, as I was getting out of the military, lots and lots of people, well-intentioned, well-meaning, would say, hey, you should mention that you snore at night because that's worth so many percentages.
Or you should say, like when I got that, when I left the Middle East, I had severe allergies.
I was allergic to everything.
And it never occurred to me to say anything.
But had I said something, I could have gotten disability for that.
I think it's 10 or maybe 20%.
So it could be another $150 a month tax-free for life, right?
Yeah, exactly.
On top of anything else.
Because it compounds.
So they have this big calculator that figures it all out.
You've got 10% for this, and 20% for that, and 10% for this, and so on and so forth.
And all of a sudden, you've got 50% or 60%, which is over $1,000.
Right.
So, again, not a lot, but I mean, it's a fair amount.
So, yeah, that was kind of my...
I was going with that.
And then, of course, you know about the GI Bill, and that's for education, as well as not just they pay your tuition, but they also pay you to go.
That's been great.
Well, because you get room...
Basically, they pay you to cover your expenses while you're going and your tuition, so...
True.
You don't really spend a penny to go, right?
No, you don't.
And when I say you're paying you to go, I worked full-time, I went to school full-time, and I got my disability.
So, it was all that GI Bill money I put on top of my actual working money.
So, that's kind of how I feel.
There's this incentive to lie, and there's pressure to lie about Things that have happened to you while you're in the military so that you can get money out of the military.
This is how it feels to me, like it could be like welfare, where you're incentivized to get as much as possible from the government.
I know you've done some shows about how you feel about welfare and how it affects, and I couldn't name any point-ups on my head, but it's very similar.
But on the other hand, it does feel different, because it's not free, exactly.
You do have to sign a contract and give up your life for, I think it's four years to really maximize your benefits, or more.
You have to go where they tell you to go, and you have to do what they tell you to do, and so on and so forth.
I was thinking about that old Dire Straits song, you know, Money for Nothing.
I want my busted knee!
Technically, it depends how you want to define these things, but technically it's not the same as welfare because it's somewhat means-tested.
Of course, you have to have been in the military.
You have to have had some negative experience or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof.
So it's not welfare because...
It's not means tested that way, right?
So technically, is it the transfer of money through the government to you?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I would argue in your situation, understanding that I'm new to your situation.
This is just thoughts off the top of my head.
Let me know what you think.
My sort of concern is that it costs you more than you make, right?
Let's just invent Bobby X, right?
Some soldier, right?
Let's say he's found some way to get $800 a month or $1,000 a month.
Maybe they're real, maybe they're not.
It doesn't fundamentally matter because you get the money either way, right?
Yeah, okay.
And of course, because it's the government, it's not like people are coming out and checking, right?
I mean, insurance companies might check on you, right?
You seem to be doing a lot of tennis for a guy with a busted knee or whatever, but it's not like the government is going to do that, right?
And so, let's say you get sort of 800 or 1,000, let's say 1,000 bucks a month, right?
And now, but you get a pension too, right?
If you're in for 20 years, you get a pretty solid pension, right?
Right, yeah.
But if you're in for shorter, do you get that pension?
No, unless...
I mean, if you were hurt bad enough or something like that, you could be...
No, no, that's not a pension, that's a disability.
Oh, true.
That's true.
But if they pull it out of the pension, so...
You get zero pension until 20 years, is that right?
Right.
After 20 years, you get a pension for...
You get zero pension up until 20, and then after that, if you stay in even longer, it gets bigger and whatnot.
But yeah, you get a pension like that.
Right.
And it's a pension and free healthcare, basically, until you're dead.
Correct.
Okay.
So let's say Bobby X gets $1,000 a month from the military.
Tax-free, right?
Mm-hmm.
Well, here's the thing, right?
I mean, so what's his yearning-burning passion going to be?
Because he doesn't actually have to work that hard...
Let's just say he's a young guy.
So if he gets a job for two grand a month, he's doing all right.
You know, he's got three grand a month, one grand it's tax-free, you know, it's 36,000 a year, you know, 12 grand of it's tax-free.
So, of course, he's only paying tax on 24,000, which isn't really much.
He's got his Obamacare, he's got, you know, whatever, right?
And so, his ambition, it's not like you get the money in your life plus the thousand dollars.
Because what happens is having the thousand dollars a month diminishes your incentive Usually, by more than $1,000, especially if it's tax-free.
So a lot of people say, well, I have my income and then I have this additional income if it's not enough for you to live on.
But I don't think that's the case.
I don't think that's the case.
What I think is that that deflates your ambitions so that you end up with less than you would have otherwise.
So maybe Bobby X, you know, he likes to party.
You know, I've heard that that's not way outside the bounds of military men.
He likes to go out and he likes to have a good day.
Maybe he doesn't like getting up that early.
So he doesn't want a job too early in the morning.
So, you know, maybe he becomes a bartender, does stuff at night.
And maybe he just kind of works part time because, you know, with Obamacare, more than 30 hours or whatever is a big problem.
If you're more than part time, it's a big problem.
So maybe he just ends up kind of part time and, you know, he's got a pretty good life, you know, for a young guy, right?
I mean, he goes out to parties, doesn't have to get up early, he's in a bar environment, which is fun for him, meets a lot of girls, shows them his scar.
That's a $1,000 scar right there, baby.
Doesn't interfere with the equivalent.
Don't you sweat it, little mama.
So what happens is the $1,000 a month has done him a lot of harm because let's just say he got nothing.
Let's just say he got nothing.
Okay.
Now he has to get a job which pays well.
He has to get a job which has got a future.
He has to get up early in the morning.
He can't be out partying and drinking all night.
And so he buckles down and he gets a job.
And that job has a future.
And in a couple of years, he's making way more than $36,000 a year.
Whereas with the $1,000 a month base, he may never get out of that part-time job.
Or it kind of cripples him because maybe he just works at that for five years or whatever and then maybe he wants another job but he's done a lot of drinking and his schedule is way off and he hasn't gone to school or he hasn't learned how to handle the corporate world or anything and all that kind of stuff, right?
So his friends are all in that because the ambitions you have kind of define the people who surround you.
So he's got a bunch of people who are kind of half trudging along and layabouts and up all night and half drunks.
So his entire social circle and everything.
So that thousand a month has really cost him a lot more than it's given him.
Because it's blunted his ambition.
It's kind of defined his job.
It's kind of defined his social circle.
It's kind of defined his lifestyle.
And I think you know this from the military, right?
I mean, how many guys in the military are like whip thin and super fit?
They get out of the military and they turn into like pear-shaped monstrosities who have to rock themselves three times to get off the couch because discipline is like a muscle.
Discipline is a muscle.
We all know these guys in high school, right?
They were like, The wrestlers, right?
Like Emilio Estevez at the breakfast club, the wrestlers, you can't even see them, their lunches are so big, right?
I mean, because they're burning 5,000 calories a day because they're high school athletes.
And then they leave high school and it's like, I should keep eating like this.
No, you shouldn't.
Right?
I mean, suddenly, you know, when you lay around the house, you really lay around the house, right?
Because discipline is a muscle.
You've got to keep exercising it.
And the thousand bucks a month, It degrades the muscle called discipline.
And so I would argue that it's not free money.
I mean we all know technically it's not free.
It's coerced.
But it's costly.
It's costly.
It's the same thing with the GI Bill.
The GI Bill, I made this case before and very briefly, but the GI Bill infected a lot of soldiers who just came home from fighting Nazism.
It infected them with communism or socialism.
A bunch of socialist professors, right?
Ooh, bad job.
Well, we beat them over here, but they won over here.
Next stop, Obamacare, right?
So, that GI Bill, you know, how many guys are going and spending a couple of years getting some degree that they're only kind of interested in?
Which maybe they don't ever end up putting to particularly good use just because it's free, and what else are you going to do?
And it's, you know, more fun than getting a job.
Well, that's, you know, funny you mention that because I think it's like less than...
Less than 5% or something of vets that start on the GI Bill actually finish it to a degree.
They just kind of...
Not really?
Yeah.
I think it's even less.
I think it's almost like 1% actually get a degree using the GI Bill.
And how many of them end up working full-time in that field?
Yeah.
Who knows, right?
Who knows?
That's a good question, yeah.
They probably get it.
Yeah, here there was a program called the Ontario...
Scholarship Assistant Program, OSAP. But it was known colloquially as the Ontario Stereo Acquisition Plan.
Because, you know, people would get the check and woohoo!
A-Track!
Here we come, right?
I mean, it was not always used for the highest educational purposes, is my point.
So, you know, the free stuff, it's irresistible to us.
I mean, the free stuff is like candy to a toddler.
It is irresistible.
And it tastes real good in the moment.
But there's a price to be paid.
And by the time the price is paid, it may be too late to turn back.
So I'm not trying to say that people who've been in combat and who've been wounded should not receive assistance.
Of course they should.
Of course they should.
I do sometimes wonder if the assistance was...
Not so generous whether people might be a little bit more concerned about going to war as a whole.
You would know this a lot more than I would.
I'm just talking about bare financial incentives.
It's almost impossible to say no to free stuff.
You can talk yourself in and out of it.
It's just our nature.
It's almost impossible to say no to free stuff.
But I wonder if you can think about saying no to free stuff.
What happens to your motivation if it's like, okay, if I don't get a job?
I've mentioned this story before, but it's been a while, so we'll consider it new.
But after university, man, it was a tough economic environment.
I was sort of patching things together to get work here and there.
I was a hustler.
I could always find something to do that would make me some money no matter how unglamorous it was.
But then, man, whew, did I ever hit the wall one month.
I'm like, holy crap.
I have nothing.
I have less than nothing.
And, you know, I couldn't.
Like, I just – I literally – I'm like, wow, I've got to pay rent at the end of the month.
I have nothing.
You know, I'm phoning around.
It's like I could scrape a little here, scrape a little there.
It's like I've got nothing.
Nothing.
And I'm hungry.
It's not a good combo.
And so I phoned up.
I still remember her name.
Lovely lady.
I phoned this woman up and I said, lady, that wasn't her name.
Lady, I said, I mean, I need a job.
I'd love it to be something to do with computers because I'm great with computers.
I'd love it to be something to do with computers.
I know how to program computers and I know how to fix computers and I know how to network computers.
But I don't care.
At this point, I'm so desperate for work.
I need it.
I'll move computers.
I'll dust computers.
I'll clean the keyboards of computers.
I'll suck out cigarette ash with my nose if I have to.
I really, really need a job.
I was really, really urgent about it.
It's one of the few times in my life where I've really thrown myself on the mercy of others and expressed naked, bald, hungry need to someone.
Outside of the dating arena.
And it works.
And she got it.
And she got me an interview.
And I got my first job.
Programming computers.
And it was a well-paying job.
I mean, you know, when you're out of school and you get your first well-paying, you'll never be that rich again because you've got the students' living expenses and you've got your first professional job.
So I'd bike to work and I'd MML suit on and go up and I'd program in tandem in COBOL-85.
COBOL-74 at the beginning, then 85.
We upgraded.
This was in the 90s.
But anyway, I mean, and because I hit the wall...
I got a career.
And that's kind of hitting the wall stuff.
There have been – I do great work under pressure.
I almost need to scare myself before I do shows.
I need to have Kato from the old Pink Panther.
I think it was Kato, right?
That guy who Peter Sellers' character had live with him and just attack him randomly out of nowhere.
I need that.
I do really, really well under pressure.
I think that if you keep pressure away from people or that sort of hitting the wall stuff, I don't know.
I mean, I was a young single guy.
I didn't have mouths to feed.
I didn't have kids.
So it's different.
But I just wonder if it's keeping excellence and need and focus and clarity and ambition and hunger away from people by giving them all of this soft, gooey, easy stuff.
I don't know if this makes any sense to you, but that's sort of my opinion.
No, entirely.
It's an interesting point.
When I was thinking of this conversation, my mind didn't even go anywhere near down this road.
But it's a very interesting point, especially when you're talking about – I think of myself when I was in the military.
And, God, I really worked well under pressure.
You know, that's...
It's kind of necessary, but in a way, I almost enjoyed it.
Even in Garrison, you had deadlines, and you had things.
You were required to produce 20.
You were required to give 20 trucks, and you only had 10.
If you mentioned that, they'd say, well, adapt and overcome.
Okay, but when it was timed, there were going to be 20 trucks.
Don't ask questions, but there are 20 trucks right there.
That's what you ask for.
And I think about that motivation, the pressure, and actually, in a lot of ways, I enjoyed that.
I enjoyed trying to figure out, giving that same example, okay, I literally don't have what they're asking for.
How am I going to produce it?
Because there is no...
Way I can say I don't have it.
That's just not an answer.
I actually enjoyed that in a way.
But I haven't felt pressure like that since the military.
And it's really stimulating.
And I think most of...
Yeah, I think if I talk about most, they'd remember that pressure.
They'd probably say there's nothing quite like it in the free world.
In the civilian world...
And yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
If you're getting, even if you're getting, even if you have a full-time job and you're a manager or something, if you lose that job, you still do have your benefits.
I mean, your actual at-work motivation, I'm not saying that mine isn't that great at-work motivation, but your actual at-work motivation may be less because in the back of your head, you're not going to starve.
Right.
That's really interesting.
The military is incredible for that.
It's like, if you don't hand me those bullets, we're dead.
There's not a lot of room for...
Screw ups, right?
Mike, you had a thought you wanted to mention to this fine young man?
It's an interesting question, Jeremy.
I asked, what would I do in this situation?
The first thing I came up with was just taking the checks, getting a separate bank account, cashing the checks, putting them in a separate bank account, and just living like it didn't exist.
I mean, that's as close to, I don't have it, it's not coming in, I can't rely on it, as you can get without.
I don't know, can you absolve yourself of veterans' benefits?
Is that even something you can do in totality?
Oh man, it's almost a lot.
Actually, you know what, you can, and I do know guys that have done it, because your veteran benefits can prevent you from serving the military in the future.
Ah.
I've known people who go through the process of trying to get rid of them so that they can serve again.
They miss it or whatnot.
It's interesting that you describe it as a process.
Please, I don't want money!
No, no, no!
It really is.
I think they're like, are you sure you don't want money?
Okay, well, how about more money?
You want more money?
Let's do that.
Sounds like a typical government program.
There you go.
It really is.
And it almost takes longer to get out than it does to get in, as far as the benefits.
Of course, it depends on when you file and all that.
But actually, it's funny you mentioned the money.
The way I kind of treat them is I have a mortgage, and the mortgage is the same every month, and I have these benefits, and they're the same every month.
So it just comes in, pays that, and Not the whole thing, but it takes a chunk of it.
But if your concern is that having these benefits is holding you back in a way, and that maybe over the course of a month or six months or a year, you're not going to really notice how much it's holding you back, but if you look on a long enough timeline, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, that can add up pretty considerably if this is something that's making you less ambitious, play it safe, just, oh, I don't have to work as hard, whatever it may be.
If you were to just take it, put it in a bank account, live like it didn't exist, and then, you know, maybe have a set timeline, like after a year, you'd look at it and go, okay, where am I? Do I really objectively need this?
And if the answer to that is no, then maybe take that money and donate it to a charity that actually does some good, or something like that.
I mean, like, I'm thinking if I was on the receiving end of these kind of benefits and concerned about motivation, that's certainly a strategy that could be employed to offset Any concerns about, you know, motivation?
Go ahead.
Yeah.
I wasn't so much concerned about motivation until now.
It never even really occurred to me about the motivation.
Well, as far as myself is concerned, but it just, it's, you know, when you're sitting next to somebody who doesn't have any legs and you're waiting for a disability rating, it's kind of weird.
It's an odd place to, you know what I mean?
Like, it's, When I look at that guy, I'm like, I don't feel like I did that.
Well, I certainly know there's traumatic brain injury centers.
Those continue to be a very popular thing, especially with all the research in the concussions and pro sports and that type of thing.
I mean, maybe you could donate the money to that.
Just saying it's an option, it's something to put out there.
If it's not money that you yourself need and you feel some guilt by taking it, I mean, sending it back to the government, they're just going to hand it out in equally non-useful ways.
But if you could give it to people that actually are going to directly benefit from it, find a charity that really pays it forward and doesn't send 90% of their bucks of travel expenses like certain foundations of political politicians that we know.
That's certainly something you could do.
I appreciate that.
I appreciate the thoughts.
I apologize for now putting this thought in your head and giving you the option that you didn't think of previously.
Because now you have to make a choice.
Yeah, we always should apologize for giving people choice.
I mean, that's nothing for a philosophy show to do.
Right.
It's an interesting...
It's a very interesting consideration.
I wonder.
Because even then, you couldn't necessarily...
Even then, hypothetically, and I'm not talking about me, I'm talking in general, you could always stop donating that money.
You could always stop.
You know what I mean?
So even the motivation doesn't necessarily return just because you're donating it.
Because as soon as you made the money, you just stopped donating it.
Well, you know, the argument would be that if you didn't need it after a certain time frame, then you'd go through whatever process you need to go through to cut that cord and not get the veteran's benefits.
But, you know, if you try and do it and you can't and say, you know, that knee that you were getting benefits for before, the hypothetical knee.
You know, like, oh man, your knee goes out, you need surgery, and it's like, oh man, you know, I need those benefits to live, otherwise I'm in real, real trouble.
My family's in real, real trouble.
Well, you can make that decision and determination based on the new information you get over the course of the time period.
Oh, yeah.
Well, you know what's funny is, when I was originally getting these, I was very happy, because when you get...
A rating for something like your knee, then my understanding is the government has to cover that knee just forever.
So if it does go out, then the VA will do the surgery.
I own a piece of your knee, Jeremy.
As a taxpayer, I'm taking one of those ligaments if I want it.
Just putting that out there.
Right.
But then that's part of the problem.
If my knee, boy, if I had to wait for the VA to do my knee, you know what?
You might as well take it because it'll be useless by the time it's fixed.
Now, all these people are waiting, waiting, waiting to see the VA for all these medical things.
Like I said, I did my physical therapy in the private sector because I wanted it.
I needed it now.
Who knows when?
The government didn't pay for it.
That's interesting.
It's the general thing in life, right, Jeremy?
We all want a life of ease, but we do well with a life of challenge.
And I don't know sort of any magical way to change that.
That's kind of like a human condition kind of thing, if that makes sense.
So that's kind of a human condition kind of thing.
It's like when you're at the gym, right?
Do your muscles want to push?
No.
Usually they don't, right?
Because we're about conserving energy.
We evolved as a species to use as little energy as possible to get what we want.
All organisms do, right?
And, I mean, you're young, so you don't remember this, but back in the day, there was no remote control for televisions.
You want to change the channel?
You get up and you change the channel.
Ah, didn't advertisers love that?
Oh, no.
I didn't have a remote.
And I had a beta.
I'm not that old.
I'm not that old.
So we have civilization because we're lazy.
But we only have civilization because we worked hard to be lazy.
Somebody had to work very hard.
Some entrepreneur was up like three days straight getting the first prototype of the remote control ready.
So some guy worked insanely hard so that other people didn't have to get off the couch.
And we all want that life of ease.
But what happens is – it's that old saying, be careful what you wish for.
You just might get it.
We all want this life of ease.
But if we get that life of ease – We're not happy.
I mean, I can't tell you how many times.
I fantasize.
Oh, wouldn't it be great?
I just have a day.
I can just get a pile of books.
I can sit in a beanbag.
I can have some hot chocolate.
And I can just read.
And maybe, you know, I'll read a chapter and have a 10-minute nap.
And then, you know, like, I have that fantasy.
I think, you know, like a lot of people do, you know, I mean, vacations.
And I like, you know, sitting on a beach.
I remember once going on vacation being so tired, I basically slept for the first two days of the vacation.
Oh, yeah.
That's good.
I shouldn't have had to come here.
I bet it's sunny outside.
That's annoying because it's waking me up.
But every now and then – and it's long – but maybe I'll get a couple of hours where I'm – and it's like, you know what?
It's kind of fun but I'm – I'm getting kind of bored.
The number of people I knew when I was younger, oh yeah, I retired and after three months my wife's like, please God, get a job.
You're driving me crazy because you're just restless, pacing around, bored.
If you're not Obama, there's only so many golf vacations you can take.
Apparently that man's capacity for golf vacations is unfillable.
It cannot be filled.
So we naturally want To do as little as possible, and that's a good part of our nature, but the reality is we do our best work when we're really challenged.
You know, why is this show?
I mean, 10 years.
10 freaking years.
That is a lot of shows.
We got, I don't know, probably close to 4,000 shows.
I mean, not all of them have been released, and some of them are in the donor section, which you can get by donating at free-domain-radio.com slash donate.
How on earth is it still growing?
How on earth is it still fun?
How on earth is it still challenging?
Because we're doing new stuff.
New stuff.
New stuff.
New people.
New challenges.
I mean, if you'd have told me a year and a half ago that I've been really focused on politics, I'd be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, pull the other one, right?
But I'm an empiricist.
I follow the data, so that's where we are.
And, you know, we are continually introducing new topics.
I could do the same old shows.
Hey, let's talk about how price allocates things in a free market.
Hey, let's talk about the Austrian cycle of boom and bust.
Let's talk about the Federal Reserve.
Let's talk about, you know, anarchism.
I mean, atheism.
I could do, right?
And, you know, some people like that.
I mean, there are a lot of prominent people out there who have shows, both in terrestrial radio and And on the internet.
And Mike listens to more of them than I do.
And Mike, what's your tolerance for the same kind of show?
I can listen to someone for about three weeks.
And then normally it's like I know everything you're going to say on every subject.
You're inside the easy box and I get it.
Whereas working with me, Mike has no clue what the hell is coming out of my mouth next.
Not a clue!
How Steph can answer this question?
I don't know.
But I hope you can blame single moms somewhere.
Right?
So, and I don't either.
Like, I do prep for these kinds of shows, but, you know, you've got to let it go and wing it.
But there are people out there, we're not going to name any names, but, you know, I think, you know, most people have experienced him.
It's like, yeah, this guy's really great.
Hey, I've heard that story before.
Oh, yeah, I've heard, he just made that same analogy a little while ago.
Oh, you know, oh, wow, he had almost that exact same answer three weeks ago, and you're done.
Isn't that a broken record thing?
Right?
Whereas I have to tell you to repeat stuff because you're so opposed to doing it.
Steph, there's new people that are listening.
There's new people.
I hate the repetition thing.
Mike's like, it's okay to say the same story again.
No!
It is not okay to tell the same story.
It's okay if I acknowledge it.
I've got a two or three year thing.
If I haven't told a story in two or three years, I don't mind it.
I still don't like it, but I don't mind it.
But yeah, I can't stand the idea of...
I loved Harry Brown, the late Harry Brown.
But yeah, that man could milk a story till the cow turned into dust.
So I have to keep challenged.
There's stuff that I could do in my sleep.
Stories I know that work and answers that I know that work and ding, ding, ding.
There's the applause button and all that.
But I can't stay interested with that.
So yeah, I mean we want to be lazy but We're only really alive when we're challenged, and I think that's really at the core of where your question is, if that makes sense.
Yes, actually it does.
It's not so much about how you categorize the benefits of wealth or not, but what they do.
Right, and if you're a hunter-gatherer, and let's just say some tasty partridge Just flies into a tree and falls at your feet?
Do you keep walking?
No.
Hell no!
If nature gives you something free, are you kidding me?
I don't have to be a hunter-gatherer for that.
So this is why the dangling money in front of you for the rest of your life is like, no, I don't want the stunned partridge that fell at my feet.
I'd rather go hunt a grizzly bear because I enjoy a challenge.
That's not how we evolved.
If there's something free...
Those genes got weeded out pretty quickly, to put it mildly.
Yeah.
No free partridge for me.
I'm going after the saber-toothed tiger because I'm macho.
Because one of us is going to eat.
Oh, turns out it was the saber-toothed tiger.
Sorry about your genes there, buddy, but that's the way it happens.
So we don't ever...
When nature, who is a scurvy, sociopathic bitch who just likes to kill as soon as she'll look at you...
If she offers you something up for free, you're taking that and you won't ever say no.
So that's kind of what the free stuff that comes in from the government, that's how primitive the part of our lizard brain is that's being activated.
I remember being at a gator farm years ago and they had kids in there feeding gators.
Like, feeding gators!
And I was like, But why wouldn't they ever go for the kids?
And he's like, because the kids are giving them free food, man.
Do you go hunting when there's a McDonald's handing out free food?
I'm like, oh, yeah, okay.
So when I say the lizard brain, I'm literally talking about gators.
Like alligators have exactly the same principle.
They won't – like there's some plump little kid's leg, like three feet, and they're not going to go get it because the kid's throwing food in their gullet.
That's easier, right?
So the lizard, like all organizations, you get them free stuff, boom!
And they're yours for life.
But we're kind of different in that when we get overly domesticated, we get pretty restless.
And we get kind of depressed.
And we get kind of anxious.
And we feel that our life is slipping us by.
And we feel that we're not achieving our potential.
And we feel that we're not contributing to the world.
And we feel like we're not having a life that we look in the mirror and we're proud of.
And we're ecstatic about.
And we're thrilled about it.
And it just kind of decays us slowly.
It's a slow rot.
But by the time it sets in enough, it's like osteoporosis.
If you exercise, I think you can prevent some of that osteo – like the porous bones crap.
But if your bones get too porous, guess what?
You probably can't exercise that much anymore and you kind of miss the boat.
That's the kind of slow rot that I'm sort of concerned about that the life of ease turns into a glass cushy coffin.
By the time you sort of wake up to it, it can be a little bit too late or a lot too late.
For you to shake off your stupor and have a life of power.
And that's sort of my concern.
And it's a hard thing to fight.
It's a hard thing to fight.
I've had people over the years offer me some coin for what I do.
Oh man.
Some coin.
I'm not going to get into figures and I'm sure as hell not going to talk about who.
But over the years people have at times said, Steph, love what you do.
How about X? And I'm like, Sorry, I've got to say no because the glass coffin thing is not for me.
I'm going to go with the listeners.
I'm going to go with the donors.
This is part of the temptation earlier when people said, Steph, you get this many views on YouTube.
Do you know how much money you could make if you monetized your videos?
Nope.
I've got to stay with the listeners.
I've got to grit my teeth.
I'm going to give my books away for free, reduce the cynicism, and get the ideas out there.
Am I giving up money?
Yes, I'm giving up money, but it matters for the world and it matters in the long run.
So, I mean, I have the same temptations.
I have been offered, quote, free stuff for what it is that I do, and offered various opportunities for what it is that I do, and I've had to grit my teeth and say no, and I know for a fact that the show is not much better because of it.
If I may, let me ask, but you are working, you know, and Forgive me if I'm ignorant, but you are working.
So if you were to take the money from YouTube clicks or whatever, isn't that part of your work?
Does that conflict?
No, but it would be a base.
Let's say that there were no strings attached.
There is, right?
Because YouTube can demonetize or whatever, and it would have an effect on what I do.
It doesn't matter right now.
But what it would be, it would be a base, right?
So there would be a certain amount of money coming in.
That would be sort of guaranteed more or less, right?
I mean, I have some idea of the number of views and all of that.
So there's some base that's coming in that is dependent upon prior work.
Is that going to make me as hungry to produce great new material?
Because, you know, Mike can correct me where I'm wrong, but when we do a great show, when we do a great show, people get it and they reward us, right?
People seem to like the Fall of Rome presentation pretty much.
Thank you, everyone.
And thank you, Steph.
Yes.
Yeah, so when I like melt my brain to the breaking point for like two months to come up with a great presentation and the fact that it's close to three hours and I power through it and keep people engaged, they're like, damn, that was great, Steph.
Here's some money, right?
So if I'm taking money from monetized clicks, then that's – a lot of it is prior stuff.
Why do artists – why is the greatest hits the last great album that artists ever produce?
Because they don't need to anymore.
They got nothing to prove.
They got the money.
They do their thing, right?
Why did George Carlin continue touring, refining his comedy to genius levels?
Because he owed the IRS pretty much the entire continent of Asia and he had to pay it up.
Why is John Cleese back out on the road?
Because of alimony, right?
Because they need to and so they do and they produce great work.
And they produce great work.
So for me, if I've got some guaranteed, oh, there's money coming in, well, am I going to be that hungry?
Right now, my income depends on producing great material in the here and now.
If I think about my back catalog, I'll just cry.
I mean, I'll just cry.
It's all about tomorrow and the day after and the day after.
It's all about this conversation I'm having with you right now.
I've got to give you something new because God knows you've probably listened to a bunch of shows before.
If I'm not giving you something new, what's the point of calling in?
People want to hear Freebird.
They don't want to hear me tell the same stories and give the same thoughts over and over again.
So with donations, I'm like the dolphin at the front riding the prow, right?
Like the front of the cruise ships, the dolphins sometimes get – in between dolphins are pretty rapey.
So in between being the underwater bottlenose rape culture, they're off there jumping off these wakes at the prow.
Wave.
The hell is that called?
I don't know.
Anyway, and that's where I want to be because I want to be about this show right now, right here, right now, and the next show and tomorrow.
And I want to continue to provide even more value, even better value, even a better way of communicating things, more emotional spread.
More vulnerability.
More honesty.
More integrity.
More curiosity.
More power.
Whatever.
More startling things.
More things that make people uncomfortable but keep them titillated.
You know, like, hey, great stripper.
Thurdenable?
Really?
Okay.
I mean, I just want to keep that kind of stuff going.
Because if I am not the dolphin at the front looking, getting the propulsion and all that and looking for the next wave, where am I? Well, I'm collecting money from the back catalog.
Or I've got a steady paycheck because somebody invested or somebody – I mean, what would that do for me?
Well, it would blunten my teeth.
It would weaken my muscles.
That's just the way we are.
When you've brought down the animal, you stop hunting.
I don't want to bring down the animal.
I want to be in pursuit of the animal because that's where I do the best work.
And doing the best work is important for the world.
Like it's not just – I mean part of me would love to.
Someone comes along and asks me X amount of dollars to do what I do and it's like, oh, that would be great.
None of this chasing donation stuff.
It would be magnificent, right?
But the problem is that I would do less good work not because I don't care, not because I'm not motivated, but because I'm a mammal.
I would do less good work.
And me doing less good work means that the world isn't as good a place and the world really needs to be a good place, a strong place, a committed place, a passionate place, a reason and evidence philosophy place now more than ever I think in history given what we're facing as a country, as a culture, as the West, as a species.
So I don't have – I don't feel I have in a sense the luxury.
I've been able to rest on my laurels and enjoy the revenue of ten years of accumulated thousands of shows.
What I need to do is continually challenge myself to do a better show, a different show, a startling show and an interesting show.
I mean people have been listening for ten years and we get messages like, that's new.
I am thrilled.
I'm thrilled at that.
I mean if you can come up with new stuff after ten years of doing five shows or seven shows or ten shows a week, Yeah, that's where I want to be.
Dolphin at the front, not guy in a hammock in the back.
And that's where I want you to be in your life.
Wow.
Nothing will cost you more than free, man.
Nothing will cost you more than free.
That's interesting.
You're welcome for my question, making such a great show.
That is a very good way of putting it.
I like that.
I give you great advice, but you say you're welcome.
I appreciate that perspective.
I really do.
I think that's great.
It's funny.
I found your show through the untruth about Donald Trump, the first one.
And I've been watching it ever since.
And to your point, each of those series is different than the last.
It doesn't cover the same materials you need to.
Can I bring up an interesting fact that plays into our story here?
Well, we don't monetize any of the videos on the YouTube channel, but we can still see which ones are available for monetization.
If we did want to do that, you can go back and monetize old videos.
That is an option.
But interestingly enough, the latest untruth about Donald Trump, and I don't know about the previous ones because I haven't looked, but the latest untruth about Donald Trump that we just put out, part three, not available for monetization.
Interesting how that works.
Apparently facts are controversial, people.
Now, it probably has to do with the talk.
We covered the Iraq War in that one, which anything war or terrorism or shooting, all that stuff gets demonetized, which, oddly enough, is some of the most important stuff to talk about these days.
So right there, if Steph took the YouTube advertising revenue, you'd be disincentivized from talking about the most important things that need to be talked about present day.
Right.
And if we put a lot of effort into, let's say that that was the first one and we talked about it, would we want to do another one if we didn't know exactly what the metric was or why it had happened or anything like that?
It would impact my motivation.
I can tell you that.
Yeah.
Yeah, we'd be cautious.
We'd be self-censoring.
Well, let's do this topic, not that topic because we don't know.
And, you know, all of that stuff is rough.
In terms of the audience...
Right.
So – and just so people know, like the people who donate, I mean they're not just – it's not just the show that they keep going.
Sorry.
It's not just the show that the people who donate are keeping going in terms of, oh, there's another show.
It's the content that they liberate us to proceed with, right?
I mean – Mike, you've got Think Tank, right?
You've looked at people's think tanks and their positions.
You found a little bit of a pattern.
It seems that lots of these people that are funded by big think tanks, you know, who has money to give to a big think tank?
Why, it might be someone that benefits from cheap labor.
Maybe it is.
A lot of the think tank people don't seem to be fans of Donald Trump and like calling him Hitler.
It's funny how that works out.
There might be a connection there.
Who could think?
Yeah.
Oh, gosh.
That's why I couldn't listen to the...
You know, in fact, I left...
I couldn't listen to the American talk shows, even conservative ones, liberal or conservative.
It was just this obsession with Donald Trump, and honestly, they were all saying the same crap.
I had to leave America for it.
I love this election because it has really rooted out people that aren't able to think.
And they're not quiet about it either.
Hey, I can't think!
And let me keep telling you I can't think.
Let me create a hashtag.
I can't think.
I can't make an argument.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, I've loved it.
So, yeah, I mean, so, sorry to interrupt.
Go ahead.
I just really want to – the donors, right?
The people who are financially supporting the show, you give us the freedom to talk about what's important without a fear or a concern of demonetization, which would mean that the show couldn't continue.
So it's not just that you get another show.
It's the kind of show that you get for supporting the show at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
That I've always been very cognizant of and that's why I say like I literally love the people who support the show to that degree.
I love everyone who listens to the show, the lovers and the haters of the show.
Because that's part of the yin and the yang of a good, rousing, deep conversation.
But I really do appreciate and thank and love the people who have supported the show to give us the independence to pursue the most important topics rather than the topics that are going to get us in the least trouble with advertisers, which are really not the same thing at all.
Sorry, Jeremy, go ahead.
Oh, no, I don't remember what it was.
I was probably going to make a joke.
I don't remember.
Okay, good.
Nothing crucial then.
Alright, does that give you enough to work with us, some possibilities about things?
Yeah, no, that really does.
I actually love the fact that it went in a completely different direction than what I was thinking.
Isn't that great?
That's exactly what I'm talking about.
Isn't that great?
Yeah, it's your point, yeah.
Because I just figured we were talking about that.
Otherwise you could have just listened to the last show, a previous show, or whatever, right?
I thought this was a good place to ask.
Jeremy, keep us posted about how things go, and I really appreciate you calling in.
I'm glad that you got some value out of it, and thanks everyone so much.
Of course, I won't necessarily massively repeat my thanks, but I think it really can't be said too often.
Thank you everyone so much for supporting this amazing, amazing conversation, for participating, for liking, for sharing, for supporting, for hating, for criticizing, for giving us the feedback that we so desperately need.
Keep us on course to wherever the hell we're going.
We'll find out next show.
But thanks, everyone.
If you want to help support the show, freedomainradio.com slash donate to help us out.
You can follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
You can use our affiliate link if you've got some shopping to do.
Just set it up as a homepage bookmark or one of the tabs that open if you go to Amazon a lot.
FDRURL.com slash Amazon.
And of course, FDRURL.
Sorry, FDRURL.
FDRpodcast.com to consume the shows.
It's a good portal for listening to what it is that we are up to.
Don't forget to check out!
Interview with Ann Coulter was really enjoyable.
She's just had a huge impact on me, and it was a genuine thrill to have a chat with her.
It's just wild, let me tell you.
And I thank you, everyone, for giving me the prominence and the opportunity to have those kinds of conversations.
I hope you find it helpful and enjoyable.
She is an extraordinarily charming person and a great conversationalist, you know, Algonquin roundtable style, but with principles.
