Oct. 29, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:57:11
3472 Ancient Bearded Prophecy - Call In Show - October 26th, 2016
Question 1: [1:59] - “How do you see the prediction of Nostradamus for World War 3 coming true? Does it appear that it will happen in 2017 considering the current conditions with nuclear discussion today?”Question 2: [1:12:32] - “I’ve been watching a bit of the Trump saga on Tabloid TV. They seem to be very focused on demeaning Trump in the eyes of women. However, I also see lots of push back. A lot of what I see there comes from women making videos, being on alternative media shows, etc. I’ve dedicated my latest podcast episode to it as well. Is it my confirmation bias that mostly women are pushing back? What are your thoughts on how much support Trump has with women? And are men pretty much forced into silence on this issue because, you know, patriarchy?”Question 3: [1:57:08] - “As amateur philosophers and concerned citizens, how do we begin to bring society back towards standing on principles instead of allowing our collective morals to wither away. As a clerk for an Election Bureau of a heavily contested suburban County in a key swing state, I have been exposed to shameless abuse of election laws, almost to the point of outright fraud. The most disheartening thing to see is that despite the election workers having good intentions, when presented the choice to stand against a questionable ballot and methods of gathering absentee votes with solid legal footing, the path of least resistance is taken to avoid conflict and swathes of votes are allowed. As a simple cog in a vast and rotting machine, where do I begin?”Question 4: [2:26:59] - “Historically international free trade and immigration of people has been a net benefit for humanity. Yet in the modern era it seems immigration largely imports people from nations fostering cultures incompatible with the west, and free trade has created economic strife for the traditional western populations that lead to community and family deterioration and therefore greater reliance on the state. My question is, does protecting western culture come at the price of the west sacrificing its vain materialistic goals of economic growth at any cost (via trade and immigration) in order to protect its hard fought for intellectual ideals?"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
Hey everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
Hey, have you ever wondered if people hundreds of years in the past had any kind of window or tunnel through time to figure out what was going on in the present or the future?
Well, if you have, you've probably heard the word Nostradamus, and you will hear it a few times in my conversation with the first caller who wanted to tell me how Nostradamus had predicted the rise of Hitler and Napoleon and 9-11 and the...
Atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima and so on, and we had a good old conversation about the dangers of mysticism and the sense of inevitability that comes from this kind of thinking, determinism and so on.
And then we had the most amazing emotional breakthrough, which will...
Well, you'll hear it when we talk about it, and I think you'll really like it.
The second caller was a woman who said, well...
Why is it that women tend to be negative towards Donald Trump in America, and not just in America, but elsewhere as well, and what can be done about it?
The third caller works in an election bureau, and he counts votes, and he gave us the inside scoop on all of the nefarious stuff that can go down to change the outcome of particular elections, and that's kind of eye-opening, to say the least.
The fourth caller wanted to know what my thoughts were with regards to free trade and immigration.
The free movement of goods and people, and how does that fit into a free society?
And of course, how do we get there from where we are at the moment?
So, thanks everyone, of course, for this fantastic set of calls.
Really, really enjoyed it.
And I look forward to hearing your feedback on this show, as I do for other shows as well.
And please don't forget...
To drop by freedomainradio.com slash donate to help out the show.
Massively, massively appreciated.
And also, of course, you can follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
And you can use our affiliate link at fdurl.com slash Amazon.
Alright, up first today we have Chris.
Chris wrote in and said, How does Stefan see the predictions of Nostradamus for World War III coming true?
Does it appear that it will happen before 2017, considering the current conditions with nuclear discussion today?
That's from Chris.
Hello Chris, how are you doing tonight?
Hey Stefan, how are you doing?
I'm well, how are you doing?
I'm doing well.
You can't be doing that well.
Seriously, I mean, if it's Third World War imminent by ancient bearded prophecy, that can't be super great.
Well, I just, you know, when I was young, I just remember, you know, probably around 21, I just got out a few months before the Twin Towers falling and there was all this talk that this is the future of the World War III that we almost talked about and all this other stuff.
And then it turned out to be kind of a flop by many people's opinion.
And so it's like, oh, it's still yet to come.
So I'm like, okay, now we're going back to war with Russia again.
Russia's pulling all those people back.
And now I just saw this morning that...
I'm sorry, in Japan, it's evening for you guys.
That they're dusting off the fallout shelters in Russia.
And they're upgrading them.
And they're going through drills.
So this must be serious enough that we could actually have what...
Nostradamus may have predicted it to be World War III. Okay.
Now, I agree with you about the seriousness of stuff with Russia, and I think 600 troops have just moved over into Eastern Europe from Western Europe, so there's stuff going down, and I've got a whole war with Russia thing.
A vote for Hillary is a vote for war with Russia, which unfortunately won't just take out those who voted for Hillary.
So I agree with you.
Things are serious.
Things are important.
Things are dire.
And I think that's enough.
You know, the geopolitical indicators, the economic, the political indicators are all clear enough.
I'm not sure where Nostradamus comes in, but why don't you step me through the story?
He's a guy who lived a couple hundred years ago, wrote down a bunch of esoteric stuff that people have red tea leaves into, believing is predicting current or modern events.
Is that right?
And so give me a sense of the dude himself, what the story is, and what his predictions are.
Sorry to interrupt.
I just asked you.
Sorry.
The truth about World War III, that's the name of the video.
People want to check it out.
It's very, very important.
Like, subscribe, and share for that video alone.
But sorry.
Go ahead, Chris.
Well, the philosopher, his name was, I think, Michael de Nostradamus, but they transferred it and Latinized it or something as Nostradamus.
He died in, I think it was 1566.
Yeah.
So he had a lot of...
Controversial thoughts or statements, observations, foresight.
And at that time, they were going through religious persecution and things like that.
The purge, basically, what was going on.
And so he had to, in order, kind of like what you were saying with...
Aristotle, he had to write things in such a way that would not draw so much controversial attention to bring about his death prematurely.
So if you want to look at the full onslaught of his foreseeing knowledge, you can go to nostradamus.org and it has all the quatrains completely listed.
So from what I've observed, and trying to stay away from some of the far-reaching stuff where a lot of the emotionally religious people throughout their stuff, he predicted the rise of Napoleon and Hitler being the first two Antichrist.
He says that there's going to be a third and final Antichrist, and someone named Mab is kind of...
It's part of this, whether it's a catalyst or not, or maybe the Antichrist himself or herself is unknown.
He also predicted Hiroshima, Nakasaki, and the Apollo moon landing.
So he's predicted a lot.
A lot of it's come true, especially for King Henry.
Well, no, hang on, hang on.
Oh, sorry.
I mean...
He was an apothecary and an occultist, not a philosopher.
I mean, he was trained in the Trivium, but he had to leave his university because of the plague and so on.
So when you say he's predicted these things accurately, that is an astounding claim, just from my standpoint.
And, you know, I'm not hostile to wild ideas, and I've got an open tent, but not An infinite tent, if that makes any sense.
So if you're going to come on the show, and I don't mind that you do, I'm happy that you do, and say, you know, he predicted the rise of Napoleon, he predicted the rise of Hitler, he predicted Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you're going to have to step me through that, because that's an astounding claim, right?
I'll step off that then, because I was taking this with accepted knowledge over 400 or 500 years, so my apologies on that.
And the prediction thing as a whole, he would have to be very specific, obviously, and he wasn't.
But philosophically speaking, sorry, just philosophically speaking, the idea that a tunnel through time would open up to somebody hundreds and hundreds of years ago and give that person accurate visions of how the world was going to be in the 20th century, maybe even the 21st century, if you're talking about the third Antichrist, That's an astounding statement because that means that time is not linear.
It means that certain visions are granted to certain people.
It also means that the world is deterministic.
It is no free will.
If you can predict things hundreds of years ahead of time, it means there's no free will.
You know, time is not linear.
Visions are granted to a few.
Everything is predetermined.
We have no free will.
These are astounding claims.
And as you know, as the old saying goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
So if you're going to make these claims, you've got to step me through how these are true beyond reasonable doubt.
Okay, well, how about if I, we could say, and maybe you being a historian might actually agree with this, history tends to repeat itself.
Is that correct?
Well, you know, there's that old saying, which doesn't mean much.
It's kind of a deepity.
History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.
I think that if I thought history would repeat itself, I would be an observer, not a participant, right?
Because I am trying to prevent history from repeating itself with all the work that I'm doing.
So I think that in the absence of hard work by good people, yes, history is going to repeat itself, but...
We can will that wheel to stop, especially with the modern technology that we have now.
Like right now, history is striving to repeat itself, but the giant millstone that is going to grind out the future and turn it back into the past, that millstone is being jammed up by all of the incredible communications technology that allows us to have and to share this conversation to millions of people around the world.
So, history is striving to repeat itself, In the same way that nature is striving to kill human beings before the age of 40, but we can fight back with technology through medicine or through this.
So history repeats itself Yeah, okay.
It's sort of like saying trauma in a family.
Trauma repeats itself until someone says no, until someone gets the self-knowledge, gets the therapy, gets the help, gets whatever they need to stop that cycle of abuse.
And so, no.
I think in the absence of communication and self-knowledge and virtue and hard work by good people, sure, history repeats itself, but I don't think it does it of its own accord, regardless of anything that we do, because that would be back to determinism.
Well, I was thinking of your...
Your point that you brought up about that you're more of an observer than a participant.
Am I correct?
No, no, no, no.
Oh, the opposite, right?
A participant, not a...
Yeah, that's the cue of what I was saying, yes.
Well, it kind of brought me up to the thinking that Shakespeare said that, you know, all the world is a play.
You know, we're just active participants.
So, you know, that is true.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, I misquoted him.
No, that's important because if the world is a play, our lines are prescripted.
If the world is a stage, then we can improv, right?
I'm sorry.
I'm more of a math and science guy.
That's why I came to you.
Sure.
So...
The reason why I was looking at this is, if we look back at the time that Xerxes and the Ottoman Empire had raided, you could say that that came from a predominantly Muslim region who invaded the US. Or not the US, I'm sorry.
Just like the US. Europe, right?
So now you're kind of seeing the same thing.
Where...
Now, again, you've got Muslims coming in, but this is in a different form.
It's kind of like with the refugees instead, but then we're having a lot of people pop up and all this terrorism inside, but in a different form.
And so that's where I'm kind of looking at.
It may not happen the exact same way, but you could use pre-existing information to a certain degree.
And if we look back a thousand years, a lot of the record's been destroyed.
So maybe Nostradamus saw a lot of things through what he knew back then, before things got destroyed, to help us predict and understand what's going to happen here in the future.
And so maybe...
Okay, and I'm sorry to interrupt you, but what I asked for were the specific quotes that predicted, say, 9-11.
Do you know what those are?
Um...
It's not a trick question.
I mean, I have them if you don't, so I can read them.
Oh, no, I don't.
See, the thing is that...
Okay, no, that's fine.
So here it is, right?
So this is...
Let's see here.
Uh...
There's a quote from Nostradamus.
He wrote over, I think it was close to 9,000 predictions.
And I tell you what, if I use a lot of poetic language to predict 9,000 things, I'm pretty sure a few of them will come quite coincidentally true.
But he said, Earth-shaking fire from the center of the earth will cause tremors around the new city.
Two great rocks will war for a long time.
Then Arethusa will redden a new river.
If I may ask, what century and quatrain is it?
Let's see.
This is from nostradamus.org slash 911.html.
That is, sorry, that is, what have we got here?
Sentry 1, quatrain 87.
Sentry 6, quatrain 97.
At 45 degrees, the sky will burn.
Fire to approach the great new city.
In an instant, a great scattered flame will leap up when one will want to demand proof of the Normans.
All right.
This is from century 10, quatrain 72.
The year 1999, seventh month.
From the sky will come a great king of terror to bring back to life the great king of the Mongols before and after Mars to reign by good luck.
Here's another one.
In the city of God, there will be a great thunder.
Two brothers torn apart by chaos while the fortress endures.
The great leader will succumb.
The third big war will begin when the big city is burning.
Okay.
You understand, that's kind of vague.
I mean, if it only makes sense in hindsight, it's really not much of a prediction, right?
Yeah.
It's not like they could say, well, wait a second, Nostradamus said this, so scramble the fighter jets!
Well, I guess they tried that anyway.
So this is not very specific stuff, right?
I mean, this is of 8,000 or close to 9,000 predictions.
Yeah.
You can find this stuff and apply it in hindsight, but the prophecy, the value of a prediction is not in hindsight.
The value of the prediction is to know ahead of time, right?
That's true, but if these things were written beforehand, and they were written in a coded way, in such a way to avoid persecution during a purge, that does not really...
Sorry to interrupt, but why would he be persecuted for making predictions...
Hundreds and hundreds of years in the future.
Is it because predictions are considered to be the work of the devil?
But then he wouldn't write any, right?
Well, I'm sorry.
It's been a week since I looked up some of the stuff, so I apologize.
And I'm studying for a really intense exam.
But yeah, that was basic understanding of someone's interpretation.
And so in order to avoid persecution of something that maybe he was talking about, you know, the devil or The references they talk about is Antichrist.
Now, I've got two quotes here, and unfortunately the century and quatrants were not provided, but one that was talked about was, He will enter wicked, unpleasant, and infamous, tyrannicizing over Mesopotamia, all friends made by the adulterous lady, land dreadful and black of respect.
That was kind of pointing to the fact that This was involved with ISIS, ISIS being the third Antichrist.
I'm going to put out a prediction for you, Chris, that in the Middle East, there shall be a great conflict regarding religion.
In the Middle East, there shall be a great conflict between the Western powers and the Muslims.
In the Middle East, there will be the murder of innocent Muslims, and then there will be blowback.
You don't understand?
Predicting conflict in the Middle East...
I don't know.
It's like...
And lo, when the men who like to kiss other men shall make a parade down the street, there shall be buttocks naked to the sun.
Well, that's not a truly wild prediction, if that makes sense.
That's a lot more specific than the quadrants, that's for sure.
Well, no, but here's the thing, right?
So if...
If he could predict something enough, like clearly enough, his prediction would fail, right?
So let me give you an example.
If I said, Chris, for absolute certain, tomorrow at 10 a.m., when you cross the street, you're going to get hit by an ice cream truck, would you want to cross the street tomorrow at 10 a.m.?
I do like to disprove things, so...
Probably.
I would probably cross the street and see if it happens.
I would be observant.
Well, you might stand by the street at 10 o'clock and see if there's an ice cream truck coming by at all, right?
If there isn't, then clearly you may get hit by something else, but you won't get hit by an ice cream truck.
So my point is that if the predictions are specific enough and clear enough, then actions are taken...
In order to avoid them.
So if he said, you know, on the morning of September 11th, 2001, lo, the skybirds of metal shall fly through the sky and into buildings and blah, blah, blah, whatever it is, and these shall be their names, and the names of the hijackers and so on, well, those people wouldn't be let on the airplane.
There would be fighter jets scrambled, the buildings would have been evacuated.
Like, if the prediction was specific enough and if he'd built up enough credibility, The predictions, by definition, would fail to come true because preventive action would be taken, right?
I agree.
In other words, they can only come true if they're useless.
In other words, they can only come true if you can layer stuff in in hindsight rather than use them as a forward-looking approach.
So, I guess, in conclusion, what is your opinion of the idea of paying attention to the Nostradamus quatrains?
I think it's incredibly destructive and corrosive and harmful.
Okay.
Because I think it gives one a sense of inevitability.
Now, you know, I get that there's a kind of cool aspect to it, like, whoa, this guy hundreds of years ago wrote down this stuff and might have predicted.
But the lure of mysticism, the lure of the occult, and this is what this is.
I mean, this is magic.
This is voodoo.
And it's not hard if you know principles, right?
So...
Gosh, didn't you know it?
Years ago, I predicted Obamacare was going to fail.
I predicted that the rates weren't going to go down.
In fact, they were going to go up.
You know, there are some people who predict that the murder rate in Sweden will rise significantly when they take in a lot of migrants.
And lo and behold, their murder rate in Sweden has gone up 80% in two years.
And it's not because all the blondes just got all kinds of Swedish psycho on everyone.
I predicted that one of the reasons the FBI wasn't going to be able to investigate Hillary Clinton was that the trail would lead directly to Obama in the White House.
Lo and behold, as it turns out, Obama was using a pseudonym and emailed back and forth with Hillary a bunch of times and everybody scrambled to cover it up so that the trail wouldn't lead back to him.
So and you know, six million, like I did a facepalm when Obama got the Peace Prize because I knew he wasn't going to be a peaceful president.
As soon as Obama said it was going to be a transparent organization, it's like, well, it's going to be the opposite of a transparent organization.
In terms of predictions, I'm batting way better than Nostradamus, and my stuff is very specific.
Now, are people going to say, ooh...
That guy, he has opened up a hole in the space-time continuum.
He is moving through the tunnel of time and bringing back the labeled bottles of future prognostication.
And it's like, no, socialism is going to fail.
Communism is murderous.
Fascism is self-destructive.
Government programs achieve the opposite of their stated goals.
These are predictions.
And they're entirely verifiable.
They're very specific and measurable and true.
Now, that doesn't mean I have any occult powers.
It just means that I sort of understand principles.
So my concern with looking into these past prophecies is that how does it not make you feel like a cog in a machine you can't control?
Because if someone can look forward 450 years or whatever it is, If you look forward 450 years and predict very specific things, then it means that everything between his writing of the prophecy and the enactment of the prophecy is all foreordained.
There's no free will.
None whatsoever.
And dipping your toe into this kind of cool river of mysticism, it's exciting.
You know, in the beginning for a little while.
Ooh, it's cool.
But it does harm to one's capacity to feel like a powerful moral agent for change in the world.
Unless you say, well, the prediction is that I'm going to be a moral agent for change.
You know what I mean?
Then you just have to act as if you have free will.
Then why bother believing in all this determinism?
But there's a lot.
Sorry, go ahead.
That's because I don't believe in full determinism.
I think it's a mixture between the two.
Now, I mean, I'm sure someone's definition, and probably your definition is going to be completely different, but the way I look at it is there's fate and destiny, right?
Fate is what happens to you, things that are beyond your control.
So say, for example, you're driving that ice cream truck.
But it's my destiny that I will eventually die, but how it happens depends on the mixture of things that are uncontrollable and other things that I can control.
So it's a mixture between the two.
But at least looking at a repeated history of things that have happened before will help educate us.
It's the reason why we look at history, so that we can try not to repeat the same things.
You know, that's the reason why it's kind of like an increasing sawtooth waveform on why we have this increase in civilization and knowledge, and then it drops down every once in a while.
It happened with the Greeks, it happened with the Romans, it's probably going to happen here again soon, where, you know, things will just carry on and they'll drop down for a while, and then we build ourselves back up again.
That's why it's important to pay attention to history so we can choose not to repeat it, but there are certain things that are part of preordained things that will happen that will put us in that fork in the road to make the decision to change a direction.
Okay, but what you said, while interesting, completely contradicts your interest in Nostradamus.
Because Nostradamus didn't say, there shall come a time where there is a fork in the road and the stars and stripes power will decide whether to drop the atomic bombs on the land of the rising sun or whatever, right?
He said, no, the bombs are going to drop.
The bombs are going to drop.
Now, what that means, just I'm not going to go into all the details, but what that means, just from like, what was it, 1555 or something like that?
So from 1555 to 1945, right?
Well, that's a long time, what, 390 years?
That's a long time.
And for the bombs to drop, just you take the tape and wind it backwards, right?
For the bombs to drop, then the Enola Gay would have to be built, right?
And would have to be painted with that thing on the side.
And FDR would have had to decide to drop the bomb, as the argument goes, to show the Russians what a powerful weapon the Americans had.
And further back, they would have had to won the war.
And then the Japanese would have said, well, we won't accept unconditional surrender, but we want to keep our emperor.
And the United States would have said, no, it has to be unconditional surrender.
Here's a bunch of bombs.
Oh, well, you can keep your emperor anyway.
We'd have to go further back.
The rise of Hitler would have had to occur.
The Americans would have had to wait until 1941, until, sorry, until Pearl Harbor to get into the war, go.
Going further back, there would have had to be a Great Depression.
Going further back, there would have had to be a boom.
There would have had to be a Spanish influenza epidemic.
There would have had to be a mini-boom in 1920 to 21.
There would have had to be the First World War.
Going further back, there would have had to be the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Going further back, there would have had to be government education.
The Industrial Revolution would have to rewind backwards.
You'd have to have the Age of Reason.
You'd have to have the...
The Enlightenment, you'd have to go all the way further back.
Every single person, right?
Whoever the ancestor was of the guy who flew the Enola Gay, the airplane that dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, his parents would have had to meet.
The right sperm would have had to meet the right egg going back for 10 generations or 12 generations or whatever it would be.
And so there could be no choice in any of this because if there was any choice in any of this, One tiny butterfly effect, right?
One person blinks.
One person decides to scratch this side of the nose instead of that side of the nose and whatever, right?
There would have had to been...
And just think of all the people who worked on the Enola Gay, who got it fueled, who got it tuned and oiled it and all of that.
All of that would have had to occur.
The fact that it was a sunny day, which helped the bombings, if I remember correctly...
All of that would have had to occur, not just among human beings, but among the entire universe, because his predictions require the entire universe to be in a particular phase or state for things to happen.
So he doesn't end up pointing you towards a fork in the road.
He ends up pointing to conclusive events, which erase the possibility of a fork in the road, because if you're going to predict close to 400 years forward in time, There can't be any free will in any of that.
You understand?
I mean, there can't be any free will.
And even in the absence of free will, it's impossible to predict all that stuff.
It's like predicting the weather 390 years ahead.
And we all know it's only the IPC that can do that.
IPCC can do that because magic and government money.
So you can't have a combination of free will and determinism and also say you can predict things close to 400 years ahead of time with any specificity because you're predicting events, not choices.
I think that there's a lot of people that take it way, way too literal as far as these being predictions.
Okay, you're not responding to my argument.
You're saying there are people who take it way too literally.
That's not my point.
The point is not way too literally or way too non-literally.
The point is that you can't predict these things at all and it's all a bunch of nonsense.
Sorry, go ahead.
I'm reacting to the point that you want more specifics.
Okay?
Now, all the predictions that you've made...
Have all been within a very short amount of time.
You could say past 20 years, past 30 years.
The shorter the amount of time that you take your observations, you can be more specific, especially in your prediction.
And you can point out citing examples.
And it's very easy because it's within someone's lifespan.
But if you're looking at things that are much more broad, based on things that you know about, but not specifics in generality, Then it's much more difficult to make...
I'm probably missaying here.
All right, well, thank you for your opinion.
I appreciate it.
You're bailing, right?
Yeah.
I mean, there's not much of a point if there's no flexibility in saying, okay, some things are determined whether you like it or not based on how things are set up.
And that you do have...
Free will and the rest of it.
I mean, there are certain things that are set up and puts you on a path.
Now, I don't think it's completely chaotic like what you're saying, that it's all free will.
I don't think that's completely true.
And this is from an atheist point of view.
I'm not religious.
But I don't think that it's all, you have all complete free will.
And I don't think it's all predetermined.
And I don't think that's what Nostradamus was trying to say.
Okay, you said a lot there.
I'm not sure what it means if there's no flexibility.
Do you mean there's no flexibility on my side?
No, it was just more of a general statement.
Well, I kind of see that you're leaning that way, that there's no flexibility.
No, dude, I'm making an argument.
Now, if you disagree with my argument, then you can tell me where I'm incorrect, right?
But saying, well, you're inflexible or saying, well, it's all free will or all determinism.
I mean, this is not addressing any of the arguments that I've made, right?
I mean, just think of it like you say you're studying math and science, right?
So if I put forward a mathematical proposition or put forward a mathematical equation or put forward a scientific theory or a hypothesis or whatever, right?
Then saying, well, the question is one of flexibility.
The question is one of either or absolute or non-absolute.
Like, none of that has anything to do with what I'm saying.
I'm making an argument that says, so the first thing I said was he can't predict the future.
And then you said, well, Steph, it's okay because you can predict stuff in your lifetime.
It's like, well, nope.
I'm predicting things based on principles.
I can't say the day that Obamacare is going to fail.
I can't say how much it's going to be in the hole when it fails down to the last dollar.
But I can certainly say that...
That's got to fail.
It's collectivism, it's coercion, and so on, right?
That's also capitalism, too.
That makes a big difference between it's capitalism or not, because understanding the theories behind capitalism versus socialism, it's much easier to predict.
Now, predicting things as over 500 years, how things kind of with any type of degree of accuracy is difficult enough.
I don't – do you know what in history – What accuracy is there?
Do you know that in history, is there any person who has ever kind of made a prediction that would fit into what your thinking is?
Sure.
Ayn Rand made predictions about the outcome of creeping socialism.
And she made predictions that Europe was going to accelerate faster than North America, faster than America, on the road towards socialism.
And she predicted that it was going to result in disaster.
She predicted that the Soviet Union was going to fail and was going to fall.
And none of these things occurred until after her death.
So, absolutely, the predictions of knowledgeable philosophers who understand principles can go very far and very deep.
But...
You're kind of begging the question, because the question is, did Nostradamus predict anything, or did he just write down thousands and thousands and thousands of esoterically worded predictions, which people can then project events into and try and make them fit in some manner?
And of course, the answer is, of course, he made a bunch of wild speculative statements about the future.
And like anything, right, I mean, if you create enough ambiguous statements at some point, someone's going to be able to say, aha, you know, he predicted this, he predicted that, he predicted the other.
But if he didn't use the word Napoleon, and he didn't use the word Hitler, but rather said, I don't know, some warlord is going to arise at some point in the future, and he shall come from Central Europe and the...
Okay, well, the question is not how many did he get right, even if we accept that they are right.
The question is, how many did he get wrong?
And how many things...
And people say, ah, yes, well, you know, we haven't figured those ones out.
It's like, well, that just becomes a...
It's a non-falsifiable situation, right?
How would we know that Nostradamus was either crazy or a bullshit artist or, you know, somebody who just enjoyed messing with people by writing down predictions?
How would we know that...
He was wrong.
Like, you know from math and science, science in particular, if it's not falsifiable, it has nothing to do with truth or knowledge or reality or anything like that.
So tell me, what would be enough to convince you that Nostradamus was a bullshit artist?
I mean, what standard would you accept for that to be the case?
That he was...
I'm sorry, say that again?
What standard would you accept For, like, to say, okay, I get it.
Nostradamus was just a bullshit artist.
He just wrote down a whole bunch of nonsense and people have picked and chosen these things for their own emotional needs or their own emotional reasons.
Or maybe they enjoy the sense of helplessness or maybe they enjoy that goosebump, ooh, wow, he predicted this, that, and the other.
And so my question is, what evidence or what arguments would you accept to help you to say that?
Okay, Nostradamus was not predicting anything.
He just wrote down a whole bunch of stuff.
Like, if I write down all my dreams, right?
That was a while I did this in therapy, right?
If I write down all my dreams, at some point, and we've all had this happen, at some point, something's going to happen in my day that reminds me of the dream I had the night before.
Wow, in my dream, I was scared by a black cat.
And in reality, I just got scared by a black cat.
In my dream, I stood in front of a man who was painting a sign over a deli.
He was on a ladder, and I was trying to decide whether to walk under the ladder or walk around it.
Oh my goodness, here's a ladder.
Now it's not a deli, but there's a ladder.
This is going to happen, because dreams are what they are, and every now and then there's going to be a coincidental intersection between your dreams and your waking life.
And if I write down close to 9,000 esoterically worded, metaphorical-laden statements, at some point someone's going to be able to fit some current event into those.
You understand that?
Statistically, that's going to be inevitable.
So what standard would you accept to accept that Nostradamus was full of shit?
All right.
So how about you do me a favor?
I don't know if you've done one yet.
How about you do a historical revelation of, you know, whatever you can get together, an evaluation of what Nostradamus was like.
Because I think in order to agree with your statement, okay, what would it take is to find out if he was a completely egotistical asshole.
Because this would be severely sadistic.
No, he could have been mentally ill, right?
He might have thought he had the power of divination, and it was a very superstitious and primitive time.
He might have thought he had the power of divination.
He might have thought he could see the future.
He might have just been mentally ill.
I mean, it was a very stressful time.
It was a very crazy time.
People dropping dead at the Plague.
You've got religious warfare.
You've got starvation, rampant.
I mean, very little control.
You get one cut or one toothache and you're dead in three days, right?
I mean, you get one urinary tract infection and you're dead in a week, right?
So it was a very stressful and difficult time.
And he might have just gone kind of crazy and might have just written down a whole bunch of stuff.
Maybe he thought he had the power to see the future.
You know, there are people in asylums all over the world who think they have the power to see the future.
And What's, you know, we don't accept what they've got to say is true.
So again, I come back to this question, which is, what standard would you accept to accept that Nostradamus was not predicting the future, but rather just a maybe crazy guy writing down a whole bunch of stuff?
You know, I don't know.
I really don't know.
I want to at least think that there's some kind of understanding that as many people...
Are able to see things like you yourself that maybe someone a long time ago could have told us certain things were going to happen.
What does it take for me to think he's full of shit?
Honestly, I don't know.
But that's important.
Because that's your gullibility.
That's a weakness.
It is a weakness.
But like I said, I'm a math and science guy.
You're a lot like my brother.
So this is like, you're like throwing a lot of things at me in 15 different directions.
I'm like, dude, I'm trying to track down this one.
And then I'm trying not to interrupt you to rebuttal.
And I'm like, okay, you know what?
He's full of shit.
I mean, is the fight worth it?
But no, I'm not trying to fight you.
I'm trying to help you.
I'm trying to fight you.
Look, if you have – so basically what you have is a religion.
You say you're an atheist, but you're not.
You have a religion called Nostradamus, which is non-falsifiable and carries with it profound metaphysical, psychological, emotional, and moral – Ramifications.
Because if you were going to accept that someone can see the future hundreds of years ahead of time, you've ditched free will.
Because he's not saying there'll be a choice.
He's saying this is going to be the outcome of that choice.
The bombs are going to drop on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The planes are going to fly into the buildings on 9-11.
Hitler is going to rise.
Not there will be a choice.
Napoleon is going to rise.
All of these things carry with them profound personality-changing ramifications.
In terms of we're all just rocks sliding down a hill.
There's no choice.
There's no free will.
If there's no choice, there's no free will.
You have no power over your life.
If there's no choice, there's no free will.
You have no capacity for virtue.
There's no such thing as evil.
There's no such thing as love.
There's no such thing as respect.
There's nothing to get angry about.
There's nothing to be scared of.
There's nothing to be hopeful for.
There's no reason to act on anything because everything you do is preordained.
So what I'm saying is that if you're going to swallow...
This jagged little pill of Nostradamus, it's important to know what it's going to do to your system, Chris, because you're a young man and you've got a long way to go in life.
And I'm concerned that if you accept, let me finish, then you can have the floor.
I'm concerned that if you swallow this pill, cold, everything's inevitable, things can be predicted ahead of time, there's no free will.
And you can say, oh yes, well no, I'm going to reserve a little corner of my Mind for free will?
You can't.
You can't accept anything that Nostradamus says as even remotely true and keep even a tiny corner of free will in your mind.
You may think you can for a while, but what I'm trying to do from the ripe old age of 50 is look back through the tunnel of time to you as a young man and say, do not dabble in these things.
They are incredibly dangerous.
They are incredibly dangerous.
Now you can juggle these things in your mind for a little while.
You can say, well, I'm going to accept that human events, not human choices, human events can be predicted hundreds of years in advance and all the dominoes that require for those events to come true will all happen without anyone's choice because at the moment there's a choice.
These things can't be predicted.
So you're a young man and it's sort of like a young man saying, okay, well, I can smoke half a pack a day and I'm fine.
It's like, okay, yes, you are fine because you're a young man.
And when your brain is young and you're developing and you've got youthful energy and you've got neuroplasticity, your brain is not going to finish growing as a young man until you're in your late 20s, early 30s.
I'm concerned that you are bringing a kind of poison into your mind that feels kind of good at the moment.
You know, it's like cocaine.
It feels kind of good in the moment.
It's fun in the moment.
But it is going to mess you up.
And it is going to mess up the people around you.
And it is going to undermine you.
Your capacity to live any kind of effective, happy, joyful, powerful kind of life.
Because your locus of control is now some bearded guy from the 16th century who predicts things.
And you can say, well, I'm going to carve off a little bit of free will for myself.
Bullshit, you can.
Maybe you can keep it going for a little while, but not in the long run.
In the long run, Nostradamus is going to win and you and your future will win.
Are going to lose.
And all that is wonderful and ripe and perfect and excellent and inspiring and motivating in life is going to slowly drain away down this 16th century sewer of bullshit.
And I'm concerned about that.
This is why I'm not trying to fight you like...
Like I'm trying to fight you like...
It's like, hey man, you're mean.
It's like, yeah, okay, maybe, but you'll thank me later if I'm blunt about this.
I would say that I'm trying to compromise a little bit, except some of his points of view, without all of it.
You know, not try to make it black and white.
That's all I'm saying.
And I understand...
No, no, listen.
I'm sorry to interrupt you, but you keep coming up with these insulting terms.
Lack of flexibility.
Black and white thinking and so on.
No.
Bullshit.
Bullshit.
This is not black and white thinking.
This is craziness.
It's insane to think that a guy hundreds and hundreds of years ago could predict specific human events in the here and now.
There's no compromise with that.
You can't just sort of say, well, it's kind of half true that there's such a thing as perfect determinism and that a window of time opens up 400, 500 years in the past and people can see through it and write things down.
There's no compromise with that.
You know, like if I say, no, Chris, I'm Napoleon.
Where do we meet in the middle?
Do you say to me, okay, well, maybe your left arm is Napoleon.
Maybe your eyebrow is Napoleon.
Maybe your left nutsack hanging is Napoleon.
I don't know.
I guess it couldn't be both for Hitler, right?
There's no meeting in the middle for this kind of stuff.
Like either human life is perfectly determined.
In which case, all of the god-awful complications and destruction that is going to follow that particular domino going down.
And look, I'm going to be annoying and just pull the age card here.
I've seen this play out, man.
I've seen this play.
The people who accept determinism.
The people who get interested in mysticism.
Oh, man, I'm just going to dabble in it.
I'm just going to think that maybe I can read other people's minds.
I'm going to just think that maybe I can move things with my mind.
I'm going to think that maybe I can see the future.
I'm going to think that maybe...
And it's a little dabble.
But that's what the devil does.
The devil will give you a little dab and say...
It's kind of cool.
It makes you a little special.
It makes you a little different.
It makes things kind of fun.
It's kind of neat.
But let me finish.
So what happens then is that it begins to eat away at them.
And I've seen this play out.
I've seen women in their 40s.
I'm going to turn you off here so I can finish because you keep yelling in my ear.
And I will shut up and let you have it.
But I won't have to turn you off.
But I just need to be able to concentrate on what I'm saying.
So it's really important.
I'm not just talking to you.
You might hang up, call me the biggest asshole in the world and go about dabbling in this ancient mysticism.
But I'm not just talking to you.
Like Bob Marley says, I'm playing for mankind.
So I've seen women in their 40s who in their 20s were dabbling with Maybe I can read minds.
Maybe I seem to have this instinct.
I seem to have this sixth sense.
I seem to have this ability to do things.
And it eats them up.
You can't compromise with them because they've got this out called mysticism.
They can't make rational, limited decisions.
They can't find ways to be virtuous.
And they can't find ways to be special in the real world because they're special in the world of insanity.
They're special in the world of I've got powers!
They're not special in the real world.
They're not powerful in the real world because they're powerful in this fantasy world of mysticism.
I've seen it undo people's lives.
I've seen people fail to achieve even 1% of their potential because they think they have magic unicorns of magical powers of predestination and foresight and telekinesis and spoon-bending shit and all that.
They think they have all of these wonderful powers.
Magic destroys physics.
Fantasy destroys achievement.
And the reason I'm telling you this is that you were just at the beginning of this road and you're like, well, you know, I could compromise a little bit here, a little bit there.
Don't do it.
You may not listen to me and God, I hope you do.
And then when you get to my age, you'll look back and maybe you'll re-listen to this conversation and you'll say, God, that guy was right.
How the hell did I piss away 30 years?
Oh, I can talk now?
That's what the pause means.
Because I've had – I mean during a lot of your long conversations, you've made a lot of points that I wanted to rebuttal and I'm trying to remain respectful but I can't and then I just kind of – Don't.
Be honest with me.
If you think I'm a jerk, tell me I'm a jerk.
I'm not going to fall apart.
No, I don't think you're a jerk.
I just think that – You and I have different points of view.
I've had so many bad things happen to me.
I joined the Army after having such a crappy life growing up.
A lot of people are going to be like, wah, cry about it, and prove yourself.
I have.
I got a technician degree.
I worked for a defense contractor.
They got me security clearance, and that's one reason why I voted for Trump instead of Hillary.
And then when I realized that I was not living up to my potential, I went back to college, incurred a bunch of debt, Got an electrical engineering degree, and then went to go work for, well, who?
I ended up working for the US government because why?
I need my federal loans forgiven, the economy is in the toilet, and I can't live within 140 miles of my family.
I would have to pick up and move my family again.
So every time I try to make a free will decision to improve my life, something else is crapped on me.
So that's where I get this idea.
And I'm sure a lot of people are out like this.
I appreciate and agree with the fact that people take this way too seriously.
I agree with that.
But that's why I kind of think that as much as I try to improve myself, as much debt and all this effort, all this time I put in, and I'm not much younger than you, just a little over a decade.
As much as I try to improve myself, I keep getting held down in some way or another.
And so while I hope that Trump wins, There's so many reasons why, and you did a fantastic job of explaining it.
What is the reason that I keep having all these issues?
All these issues.
I found out I got poisoned by Camp Lejeune.
I've had cancer twice.
My heart goes off to you.
You've actually had worse off cancer than I did.
I had my left testicle removed.
I've got all these things going on, and as much as I try to improve myself, it's one thing after another after another.
And is it something that's beyond my control that prevents me from succeeding in life as hard as I go?
I mean, damn.
It can't be free will that I keep getting shit on in my life, Stefan.
It can't be.
I agree.
I would like to know your opinion on that.
I mean, you're older and wiser, and yes, I yield to people that are older and wiser and experience more in my life.
But it's like, you know, I'm 37, and as much as I try, as much as I try, I am more successful helping other people succeed than I am myself.
And that is pathetically sad.
Right.
Now, I appreciate that.
Very honest.
I appreciate that.
Thank you.
There is nothing...
I can't speak to the medical issues and all of that, but as far as professional life goes, Chris, there's nothing inevitable as to why things aren't working out for you.
I'm going to assume that you've done a lot of good and right things.
You got educated, you got yourself into a career, into a profession, and so on.
And I want to believe that the karma will pay off.
No, see, but the system...
is not interested in helping you the system is interested in exploiting you the system being the status system the semi-socialist system the exploitation system is all interested in harvesting your time your money your children your organs whatever whatever can get its hands on to buy votes from people who don't want to work a real job right so there is a system that has been set up that It's promoting failure among people who do the right thing,
right?
And Michael Moore just had a great speech.
Somebody turned it into sort of a semi-Trump ad where he basically is saying that for all the people who lost their jobs, who lost their livelihoods, who fell out of the middle class and ended up dirt poor, living under bridges, hand-to-mouth welfare shelters, Trump is the biggest fuck you.
To the system that is ever in recorded history.
So what I want to point out to you, Chris, is that the difficulties that you've had in your life, to a large degree, are the result of evil people serving their self-interest at your expense.
There's nothing inevitable about it.
There's nothing foreordained about it.
There's nothing predetermined about it.
It is something to fight.
It is something to fight.
You have the choice and you say, okay, well, either it's all my fault or there's something that is happening that's inevitable, right?
Either I'm exercising free will in such a terrible way that my life is going to shit or these are just dominoes falling.
But there's a third choice.
And the third choice is My life is shitty because that's the way the system works for evil people.
That's the way the system serves evil people, is to make my life shitty.
And that gives you some anger, and that gives you some focus, and that gives you some fight.
It's not Nostradamus.
It's not inevitable.
It's a result of a system set up by evil people to exploit good, hardworking, decent people.
And it sucks, and it is wrong, and it is immoral, and it needs to change.
And to escape from self-attack, oh, I've exercised free will badly, to say, well, there's determinism, and no, there's another choice.
Which is you have the free will to see what the system is, what it's designed for.
It's not designed to serve you.
It's not designed to serve me.
It's designed to serve the needs of those in power at our expense.
See, if they wanted to do things to make money in the free market, then they'd have to find some way to appeal to us, right?
They'd have to find some way to give us a good or a service that we would want to voluntarily partake of, right?
They'd have to drive the dangerous ice cream truck at a bare minimum that we were talking about earlier.
But they don't want to do that.
They're so vainglorious.
They're so narcissistic.
They're so megalomaniacal.
They're so high on themselves that they simply refuse to submit themselves to the test of freedom.
They simply refuse to test their highly imagined glories of intellect and willpower and virtue to the simple test of voluntarism.
Right.
I mean, if people say, oh, you know, I've got this wonderful way to provide health care, then shut up about it.
Go start your healthcare company and show us how it's done.
And then, step by step, people will either imitate you or you can buy them out and take them over and you can end up running the entire healthcare system with your wonderful ideas.
Now, that's what people should do if they think, you know, like Jonathan Gruber and Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton and all of these people who think they just know so much about how to make a wonderful healthcare system for everyone.
Go do it, but do it voluntarily.
Don't you dare.
Take the howitzers of the state out, point it at people and say, well, my idea is so great, you'll go to jail if you don't obey me.
It's like, I don't think, you know, you're going to love me so much, I have to have a knife to your throat so you'll kiss me.
I don't think that means they like you that much.
And so this system where people do not wish to submit themselves to the test of the free market, to the test of voluntarism, they just have the vainglorious vanity to believe that It's all designed to serve them.
It's not designed to serve you or me.
And that's the system that we all labor under and we all struggle under.
And so the fact that your life has gone south in many ways, maybe you've made a couple of bad decisions.
We all make bad decisions.
But the fact that it snowballs and your big complaint, right, that, I mean, you were in the army, you're working for the state, you can't be near your family.
If you don't work for the state, the economy's in the crapper.
Of course, it's designed to be.
It's designed to be.
Because they'll keep us free, relatively, and healthy, relatively.
In the same way that vampires will keep you locked up in the basement.
Not because they care about you.
They just want an endless supply of blood.
Here's some tomato juice.
Drink up!
Because we're all getting thirsty up here and we need to come down and feed.
And of course the people down there are saying, well this system is terrible.
I'm just being kept in a basement by vampires and fed upon nightly and barely kept alive.
Well, that's not the result of free will.
That's the result of the vampires.
And seeing them for what they are gives you at least the focus to say, my choices are constrained by what seems like the omnipotence of evil that surrounds me.
But I'm not going to mistake my adaptation to an evil environment as a pure exercise of free will.
Right?
Any more than if a lion's charging at me and I climb a tree, that's a pure exercise of untrammeled free will.
It's like, nope, there's a lion, so I'm going up the tree.
And you don't have to run back to Nostradamus to find relief from the challenges of your life.
Because going back to Nostradamus is going to drug you of the anger that you need to help to work to fight to change the system.
The system of the state.
What I'm looking at was that if we look at the fact that no matter what I do, I'm still getting the end result.
Does it make sense on why I would try to connect my idea where it's part free will and part...
I mean, this is a does-it-make-sense question, why I would try leaning towards Nostradamus.
It's the sanity check question.
It makes perfect sense to me.
Okay.
It makes perfect sense to me.
And that's why I said that there's, determinism serves emotional needs, right?
And you have had a frustrating, I want to say, I don't want to say a frustrating life, but you said your childhood was bad and decisions you've made as an adult has not, have not worked out.
Now, when things don't work out, responsible people, who do they blame?
They blame themselves.
It's natural.
It's natural.
When something doesn't work out, the first thing we want to do is say, because we wish to retain control of our life, the first thing we want to do is say, what should I have done differently so that things didn't work out this way?
And that's what we want to say.
It's perfectly natural.
Well, it's probably reaching.
I was hoping, and thank you for clarifying all this for me, what I was hoping and what I was reaching for Notre Dame is like, okay, as much bad shit has happened in my life, If there's even a remote possibility this guy could possibly see in the future, things that I cannot control are going to get better, and then I finally get what's coming to me.
And that's what I was hoping for.
That's what I was hoping for.
All this effort that I put in, there's going to be some reward that I can actually have worthwhile.
They say that nothing that yields anything good...
I'm probably butchering this because I'm terrible at memorizing these things.
In order to get anything good, you have to put the work in.
That's what I've been doing, but I've really yet to see any results.
And so that's where I'm kind of like looking at, okay, well, one of the reasons why I'm not religious, you know, the values I have align closest with Buddhism, but I don't think that there's really a God's plan or anything.
It's because...
When is God going to pay me back for all these good things I'm doing for myself, my family, and other people?
You know, and it's just like, okay, well, let's go see if Nostradamus has anything, because apparently he's predicted King Henry's, you know, of France's death when he got the spear through the eye and the brain, and I'm like, well, that makes sense, but like you said, that's an afterthought.
Okay, well, that was probably a little too vague, and people are applying it a different way, and it's like...
So am I just supposed to wait and see every day?
I mean, knowing, working in the government, this is what I get.
Wait and see every day.
It's frustrating.
What do you mean by that, wait and see?
Well, you know, is my life going to get better?
For all these free will decisions that I make and improving myself, taking on debt.
My wife getting a 3.53 GPA in electrical engineering online at Arizona State University while living in Japan, and you get separated from those classmates, that's the effort I'm putting in too.
I'm tutoring her.
Is the debt that she's putting in, the debt I'm trying to get forgiven and sacrificing myself for working for the damn government, is it going to pay off?
That's what I'm looking at.
Is it just a wait-and-see game?
And that's where the frustration goes in.
I'm at a loss for words on what to say next.
No, listen, I mean, I appreciate what you're saying, Chris.
It's powerful stuff.
It really is.
I mean, I appreciate this kind of honesty.
And I appreciate the following callers for the patience.
This call went on a lot longer than I had hoped.
No, that's good.
That's good.
Now, we got past the surface stuff, and now we're talking about the real stuff, and that's good, right?
I'm glad we did.
It's a lot more personal than I wanted to get on your show.
Right.
And I'm sorry for that.
Part of you, maybe.
So, here's the thing, Chris.
You want there to be predictability in your life and you're very frustrated that there isn't, right?
And there's so many people in the world like this.
And I understand it.
I mean, I've got that inclination as well.
Like, I did the right things.
I didn't get the reward.
I worked hard.
I went to school.
I sacrificed.
I took on debt.
I did this.
I did that.
I did the other.
I did all the right things.
And I'm not getting...
What's fair?
I'm not getting the right reward.
I'm not getting the right outcome based upon what everyone told me I had to do and what made sense to do.
do.
Is that somewhat close to what you think or is it different?
Oh, those are questions for me.
I thought it was a statement.
No, see you.
Uh-oh.
You're right.
I mean, so, you know, I kind of see that when you were talking about some of your other videos that you start off as a historian and then you started a business and it turns out this is what you're doing instead.
And I think you're applying your own, you know, even though I think that there's a little bit of a deterministic thing where you say it's completely free will, my point of view says that maybe this is what you were meant to do from a certain circumstance, even though, you know, you believe completely in free will.
And I think this is your way of helping other people.
Maybe...
I hope that me helping a lot of other people, I can actually yield something because right now I am...
I don't know.
I'm barely getting by.
I don't know what to say.
Well...
You want there to be a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow of all the promises that you were given.
And I'm here to tell you that most of the promises you were given by society were lies to control you.
You know, why people said you got to go to college?
Why are people told you got to go to college?
Well, there's two reasons people go to college.
Number one is because they need a piece of paper to practice the profession they want.
That's all government invented nonsense.
And number two, they go there because they think it's going to lead them to a good job, to a good future, to respectability, to the middle class, and so on.
But none of this has been true for years.
I mean, other than you have to jump through the hoops to do, if you want to be an engineer or a doctor, you've got to go through the hoops that the government sets up, which are all artificial and all...
Very counterproductive.
I agree with that.
Yeah, the world was built by people without an engineering degree, for God's sakes.
And the computer science revolution was built by people without PhDs in computer science.
Anyway, all this kind of stuff, right?
But going for college for me was to gain the knowledge that was not locally available.
So there's kind of another side for this, at least for me.
That, you know, my dad was a Marine, high school graduate, very smart guy, never looked up to his potential.
So for me going to college, that was a way to be able to at least obtain the knowledge I needed that was not readily available to make better decisions in life.
Why wasn't the knowledge readily available?
Well, at the time, the internet wasn't available, or barely available.
I mean, I didn't even get a computer.
There was a primitive paper internet called the library.
Yeah.
Yeah, but when you're 16 years old and you just now get your driver's license right before your permit expires and your mom won't let you borrow the car, it's 10 miles away and you usually have to watch your baby brothers.
It kind of makes it not readily available.
Wait, are we going back 21 years here?
Yeah.
Like I said, I lived in a really poor, poor family.
So, you know, there were certain circumstances, at least in my particular situation, that were not really available, or at least nobody on my street really had a college degree at all.
So, you know, for me, while I do completely agree with you, the system is set up to where it's mandatory that you've got to go to college to get anywhere in life, and that is absolutely wrong.
For me, the knowledge that I wanted to gain, I had to go to college.
And the sad thing is, the system comes back in.
Even when I get my laser degree, I had someone over me that had a high school diploma who had worked in the same program for seven years on a laser and only knew the names and where they were but didn't know what the hell they did.
I was fighting the system again because our factory manager was telling me, I'm not an engineer, that's not my job, and I should go back and build fucking lasers.
And it's like, what...
You know, you're not listening to me.
I'm trained in this stuff.
The lady that you're defending, you know, doesn't even know what the hell she's talking about.
And at the same time, this is a laser system that's owned by the government that the defense contractor is rebuilding, and the government's paying for it.
And I'm a veteran.
These other warfighters are using these things.
So it's...
The system, yes, you're absolutely right, that the system is corrupt and needs to be changed.
And I think Trump can do that.
But here's the thing, in the stories that you say, there's a lot of, I don't want to say excuses, because that's, I don't want you to sort of go into self-attack.
But what you're saying, though, is that, well, I knew more than these people, but they weren't listening to me, right?
Yeah.
But you have this idea, Chris, that people should listen to you.
Or that people owe you because you have more education or because you have more knowledge, that people owe you their ears.
You know, well, we've got to go listen to Chris because he's a veteran, he's experienced, he's got the education and so on.
But come on, man.
How many people are like that?
How many people don't have what's called the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is idiots who think that they know something, refusing to listen to experts who do?
Right?
This is the way of the world.
It's the way of the world that there's a couple of things that are important, right?
There's called the FUMU, fuck up, move up, problem, which is that people get promoted beyond their level of competence, and then they don't go any further.
So they're just at the place where they can do the most damage, right?
I mean, so, and they don't listen to reason, they don't listen to evidence, and they don't respect knowledge.
But it would be sort of like me saying, well, you know, I have a master's degree in history and I did the history of philosophy of my thesis and so on.
But it's like, well, you know, I really believe that all of the philosophical academics should listen to my theories on ethics and should listen to my theories on metaphysics and epistemology and they should all respect me because I've worked really hard and I've got some great arguments and it's really innovative and so on, right?
Why?
Why would they bother listening to me?
And expecting them to would make no sense.
Or it's like, wow, you know, I should wake up every morning with 20 messages from television stations for me to do a show.
And it's like, okay, well, a couple, all right.
But why?
Why would they be interested?
Why would they want that?
Steph, you should be on TV. That is the last place I should ever, ever be on, you know?
It's like asking the mammal to evolve into being a...
No, no, no.
We've moved far beyond that.
What about you doing university tours like Milo?
I'm sure you could at least help a lot of people with philosophy.
I could, absolutely.
However, I like being a parent.
I mean, I guess I could bring my daughter along.
But, I mean, how many shows would I not get done?
Because I'm doing university tours.
It could be a seasonal thing.
No, I understand.
I've got two young kids, too.
So that was part of the reasons on why I made the decisions I made.
Right.
I mean, so I, you know, I spent a long time writing books and taking courses and I had an agent and I tried to get my books published and so on.
Nobody was interested.
And now my books are downloaded and viewed 150,000 times a month.
Huh.
It looks like I do have some sales presence after all, but just not in the generally lefty Canadian publishing tiny tent of inconsequentiality and government addiction.
Hey, a lot of subsidies from the government.
Don't really like people who criticize the government.
I wonder if that could possibly be related.
No, no, no.
Of course, the government simply provides subsidies because it loves the arts.
Not to get artists dependent upon the state and therefore uncritical of the system that lives.
Anyway, so you want other people to do things.
You want the system to be better.
You want to get more rewards for the things that you've done.
You want idiots to listen to you and so on.
None of that's ever going to happen.
None of that is ever going to happen.
Once you accept that in life, that other people aren't going to do sensible things, that other people aren't going to do...
I wrote a novel called The God of Atheists that was reviewed by a guy who's got a PhD in literature who called it the great Canadian novel.
It's the one we've all been waiting for.
It is the most passionate and powerful and moral novel I've ever read coming out of the modern genre and so on.
And I was like, woohoo, that's quite a review.
I guess I'll just go to work, sit by the phone and wait for the movie offer to pour in.
I'll play the plant.
And It didn't happen.
Right?
I mean, it didn't happen.
Hang on, hang on.
So the important thing is, okay, like at some point you say, the world is lying to me about what it says it wants.
The world says, well, you know, do this, do this, do this, and you'll be successful.
No, no, no.
Do this, do this, do this, and we own your ass.
Go to school, go to college, we propagandize you, and we own your ass through debt.
Right?
That's what it's for.
It's for control of you, of your mind and your future through debt.
Not to enlighten you, not to...
I mean, the best knowledge that's out there is like this show.
It's free!
That's why I say, you know, people say, well, I've got to go to college to get the knowledge.
It's like, all those lectures are available online.
You know, it's that great movie...
Goodwill hunting.
You know, you just spent $150,000 on an education you could have got for $1.50 in late fines at your local public library.
This is before the internet, I guess.
And so you keep waiting, as I did.
I spent many, many years waiting for people to do the sensible thing, waiting for people to recognize the value of what I had to offer.
Waiting for people to say, wow, you know, this guy has really got something, you know, he's really got an amazing capacity to clarify, to communicate, to get in depth, to translate esoteric ideas to the mainstream intelligent audience and so on.
We've really got a ha, something, something, right?
And at some point, at some point, you just say, fuck it, I am tired of waiting.
I am not going to wait for the world to become sensible.
I am not going to wait for the world to recognize my value.
I'm going to go out and make it happen.
Whatever that takes, whatever that looks like, whatever that is, I am just going to go and make it happen.
I'm tired of broken promises.
I'm tired of the roads to nowhere.
I'm tired of what looks like a glorious Ansel Adams Creek that turns out to be a shit sandwich.
I'm tired of misleading menus.
I'm tired of false advertising.
I'm tired of all the funny jokes in a movie being in the trailer.
I'm tired of it all.
I'm going to go out and make stuff and stop waiting for people to make it happen for me or let me do it or give me support or anything like that.
I'm just going to go out and make shit happen because I know my value.
And, you know, shout out to my friend Dan Carlin who has been on the show a couple of times.
He's very happy to have reached 100 million downloads.
I think that's great.
We're at 270 million downloads or whatever it is now, right?
So, and views on YouTube.
I mean, it's a different kind of show and here's much longer, although given how this show is going, maybe not tonight.
But at some point, there is a kind of determinism in waiting for other people to recognize your value.
And there is a kind of determinism in waiting for other people to give you a platform.
And at some point, you have to just step out of that Domino falling and waiting and hoping and crossing your fingers and it's an incredibly frustrating place to be.
And people dangle you stuff.
You're not an idiot, right?
It's not like no one's ever offered, I mean, as it was with me.
I mean, I got a lot of interest, but it always like would vanish or evaporate.
You know, wow, you're really like a squirrel.
I mean, so at some point you just, and the fact that I have done so enormously well with such challenging material, you know, atheism and anarchism and voluntarism and voluntary family and self-knowledge and therapy, I mean, all of this stuff is really, really volatile.
Plus, you know, it's like, hey, and now I'm fairly pro-Trump.
Which is always great for my existing audiences to work with.
So all of this is a great challenge.
And Chris, at some point, this is why I'm sort of beating back against this Nostradamus stuff, is that that's a way for you to forgive the people around you.
Forgive them.
They know not what they do.
No, no.
They know what they're doing.
And you can know what you're doing.
Step off the merry-go-round and carve your own path.
And then you'll understand that when it comes to free will, there is no compromise.
Alright, thanks.
Very enlightening.
I am very interested in listening to your next caller, so I'm going to drop off.
I'll just mute.
Thanks, man.
I appreciate the call.
I thank the other callers for their time and patience.
I really do.
Alright, take care.
Bye.
Right up next we have Melanie.
Melanie wrote in and said, I've been watching a bit of the Trump saga on tabloid TV. They seem to be very focused on demeaning Trump in the eyes of women.
However, I also see lots of pushback.
A lot of what I see comes from women making videos, being on alternative media shows, etc.
I've dedicated my latest podcast episode to it as well.
Is it my confirmation bias that it's mostly women pushing back?
What are your thoughts on how much support Trump has with women?
And are men pretty much forced into silence on this issue because, well, you know, patriarchy.
That's from Melanie.
I like how it's just become one giant argument.
Patriarchy!
Because.
How are you doing, Melanie?
I'm doing very well.
How are you?
Oh, now that's a podcaster's vocal setup.
That's nice.
Are you my conscience?
Melanie, do you want to tell the audience where and how to get hold of your material?
Sure.
My podcast is called The Village Wisdom Podcast.
My website is villagewisdompodcast.com.
The latest episode that is called Women for Trump, you can find it at VWP055. It's episode 55.
Right.
And that's good, because as far as I remember, Trump does like to go around grabbing women by the podcast.
I think that's what he said.
So that's important to remember.
Well, I just read the study.
Was it 91 or 92% of coverage of Trump has been negative?
It seems to be.
And I'm looking at my question and seeing they've kind of moved on now to, hey, it's all over and forget all of that.
I think there are still women occasionally coming out.
The porn star.
Or ex-porn star.
Who came out and said, now when the porn star says you touched her inappropriately, you know...
You are in another universe.
And she was just launching her sex ed or like dildos or us website or something like that.
So she had it, I think, on her neck, the website.
And so, yeah.
Yeah.
When the porn star calls you inappropriate, you were either the very best person in the world or the very worst person in the world.
And I think I know which way you and I would lean with regards to Trump for that.
But...
Well, it's because these attacks didn't work, right?
So the despair trolls are like the last.
It's when you're out of, you know, it's when you're out of ammo, you're just throwing stuff at people.
Here's a pillow, here's a bed, right?
They're out of, the attacks didn't work with the women.
And so now all they have left is the despair troll.
Plus, of course, they're fighting back against these James O'Keefe videos that are dropping.
The fourth one just came out today.
With this $20,000 routed to Democrat operatives through Belize, which then was returned once they found out that there may have been hidden cameras and so on.
So the despair troll stuff is great, and the pulse stuff is great too, because it means that they're out of ammo.
They don't have anything in reserve.
Yeah, I missed that latest Project Veritas video.
I mean, let me just do a tiny rant here because, I mean, what James O'Keefe has done is astounding and miraculous and requires the willpower of, you know, a wolf peck on its last legs.
I mean, chasing after the last rabbit.
It's fantastic.
And they've been working on this stuff for over a year.
They've got people embedded in various Democrat organizations, even in the campaign itself.
And what they've done is nothing short of amazing.
It does frustrate me that the narrative of what is coming out is confusing.
And I don't know if it's because they've been so close to the story for so long, they really need to A-B test this stuff with outsiders so that it makes sense.
Because I sort of feel like you have to know What the story is in order to follow the story.
And I need them.
I want like a law and order.
You know that law and order?
Right?
That law and order sound that comes out.
I want that with something flashing up on the screen every time somebody breaks a law or skirts close to the edge of breaking a law just because, you know, you want to try and hit IQ 90 to 95 people because smarter people generally understand this stuff about the Democrats already.
And it's just like, I always feel like I'm sort of joining Downton Abbey halfway through a season.
It's like, okay, well, the Pretty people in nice dresses seem to be upset about something.
I'm sure I'll figure it out as we go along.
And I just don't know that the story is built up well enough.
And sorry for those who've seen it.
That may make a little bit more sense.
But for you who haven't, Melanie, thank you for the capacity to make that point.
You're very welcome.
Yeah, so they do have a challenge.
They don't have anything left in reserve.
And this is why all they have left is it's all over.
It's like, well, if it really was all over, you probably wouldn't be telling me.
Right.
And I just want to say, too, the drip, drip, drip with the WikiLeaks, it catches me the same way.
It's like for someone who's not, especially like the liberals who are not really interested in wanting to know that stuff anyway, it doesn't really hit them hard because it's very disconnected to, you know, well, why is this wrong?
You know, so you need that gong.
Here's what it is.
Here's why it's wrong.
Yeah, and even the larger picture.
And James O'Keefe, again, a media genius and a brave and intrepid and noble soul, A lot of people don't even really know or realize why a lot of these laws are in place to begin with, right?
You're not allowed to donate more than, what is it, $2,500 to a campaign because they don't want you to have overt influence.
But at the same time, you could be some guy who spends $10 million promoting a particular candidate because that's your right under the First Amendment for freedom of speech.
But if you coordinate with the campaign, it's considered a campaign contribution, which violates the $2,500 rule.
I think that just a little bit of introduction to people way outside the The Beltway and way outside the understanding of this kind of stuff would be a little bit more helpful.
But he's doing great work.
Don't get me wrong.
This is like a minor, minor point that I would like to see, and I could be totally wrong about it.
But he's a fantastic guy.
He's doing unbelievable stuff.
This is what real journalism looks like.
I mean, this is what the media should be doing instead of accusing Newt Gingrich of having anger.
Problems because he disagrees with you, which is the actions of a peroxided two-year-old, but anyway.
That's my rant.
Oh, please, please, God, please, Lord above!
Melanie, you take it home, because if I start on this, I may not stop until I'm ancient, so go ahead.
Well, you know, I mean, my focus right now is trying to, you actually inspired me to do the podcast, to do a podcast on my own, because your podcast is very focused around men, men's issues, and so on.
And I got a lot out of it.
I had to kind of – it's more difficult sometimes for a woman to relate to it.
And so I thought, well, if it's difficult for me, it's difficult for others.
Let me look at it from the women's perspective.
And so as I got farther and farther into it, and I see these bubble-headed bleach blondes on the TV spouting this – I mean, Newt Green is just like, you know, say it.
Bill Clinton, sexual predator.
Just say it.
Say it.
Bill Clinton, sexual predator.
She would not say it.
Clinton issues.
And it's just like, oh, but you're objective.
Anyway, I put stuff all over Twitter, all over Facebook.
I was just all over it today.
We can't know if these women are telling the truth.
Actually, you can at least to some degree with some of them because there's facts that seem to contradict what they're saying.
But anyway, go ahead.
I had this extensive conversation later on this afternoon with a co-worker of mine.
And I don't really know what her political thoughts are, but we were basically just talking about being women, raising children, and she's just really extremely intelligent and very strong in herself and a go-getter and all of this.
And so I started talking to her because she kept coming out with things like discrimination, female discrimination.
And so in Wait, discrimination against females?
Yeah, yeah.
And this is the thing, the connection there is that when I see people on there that are pushing this feminist agenda, and it just makes women weaker.
It makes them weaker.
So here's this strong woman, and then all of a sudden she'll turn to, well, I have had, you know, been in this job where yada yada, and they, you know, and Whatever.
They were stabbing her in the back or whatever.
And I said, you know what?
People are just assholes.
It's not because you're a woman.
I mean, and sometimes it is.
Occasionally it is.
But most of the time, it's just because people are assholes and they're looking out for themselves.
And so they're, you know, not...
And, well, they were going to try and give me less money than I know the job is worth.
And it's like, it's not because you're a woman.
Then negotiate.
Exactly.
Do what men do.
You know, just...
And here's the exciting thing about her and people that I know like her.
She's like me and Ivanka Trump, which is just like, you know what?
See you later, buddy.
And I said that to her.
Do you really want to work at a place like that?
I mean, just...
Let them be who they are.
Go on, find somebody else who's got a little bit more sense of self-respect about themselves, has a vision for their company, and respects people.
So we had a long, long discussion on things, and I'm not sure...
This is another thing that I kind of wanted to ask about, because when I'm talking with people, and I'm bringing my ideas out, I... I seem to have a kind of personality way of expressing whatever people listen to what I have to say.
And I can kind of ease into and bring out some pretty radical – they're not radical to me, but they're radical to the mainstream ideas.
Startling to people, right?
Yeah, startling.
That's a good word.
And they seem to listen to me, and it's like I feel this connection with them, and I see them, like, shifting and moving towards what I'm saying.
And I just wonder, though, as we finished our conversation, and I explained to her exactly why I thought that Megyn Kelly was just like, you know, she's nobody.
Just don't even go there.
Don't even watch her.
And she seemed to kind of go along that I think she's actually a Democrat, probably, but...
When she's just talking to me one-on-one, we can come to this agreement, or she seems to agree with me.
Now, here's the problem that I have.
I have a very kind of forceful, aggressive personality.
My husband has said I kind of bulldoze people at times, and so I can't really tell.
Am I just bulldozing her over?
Does she walk away?
Is she just like nodding her head?
And then when she walks away, like, oh man, she was off her rocker.
It doesn't feel like that to me, but I don't really know.
Well, can you check back later?
Can you have a friend ask her?
I mean, is there any way to verify if she's like, you know, like you push in a balloon and you're like, woohoo, I changed the shape of the balloon.
And you walk away, the balloon goes...
Back out to where it was before.
Yeah.
That's a good thing.
In her case in particular, because I work with her, I can check back in a little while and maybe just ask her some questions.
Yeah, I can just ask her some questions.
Okay, but tell me what you mean when you say that you have a forceful or aggressive, bulldozy kind of personality.
I'm not sure.
I mean, you have a solidity and a certainty behind what it is that you say, which I like.
You know, I don't want to play tennis with somebody who's got spaghetti on their strings.
You know, you can never get a game going.
So you have a sort of weighty certainty behind what it is that you say, which is, to me, good.
But it's only, I imagine, around frail, insecure conformists that you would appear overbearing.
I mean, I don't think you could bulldoze me.
I wouldn't want to bulldoze you either.
We'd have an exchange of ideas, and maybe it would get feisty, maybe not.
But it's sort of like...
Weak people look at people who have more certainty and more strength and say, you're too aggressive.
It's like, no, you're too weak.
You know, I mean, that's not my fault.
It's not my fault that there are people out there who are fragile and weak and so on.
And it's maybe not their fault initially either.
Maybe there's things they could do about it as an adult.
I always find that it's sort of a passive-aggressive thing that weak people do.
And I'm not including your husband in this.
Obviously, he loves you.
He married you.
But the weak people say to strong people, you're just overbearing.
You're just too much.
You're too aggressive.
You're too this.
You're too that.
And it's like, so I'm supposed to walk because you can't run?
I'm supposed to not have certainty because you are...
Neurotically insecure and uncertain.
I don't know...
How to really solve that problem, but the language that you have seems like it comes from people who are easily intimidated.
It's like the people on the internet who are like, that's so cringeworthy, I'm embarrassed for you, and it's like, wow, you are really embarrassed easily.
It's a video on the internet, and the fragility of people is often used as a weapon to undercut the strength of more certain souls.
Yeah.
Well, it's something that I am becoming more comfortable with because I do talk a lot about in my podcast about personal responsibility.
And so I want to be personally responsible for what I say to other people, too.
And I don't want to override them.
But I do also want to inspire them.
And that means coming across with a lot of emotion, with a lot of vision, with a lot of positive, you know, here's what you can do.
And I have changed.
I mean, there were times I think that I did.
I have used it abusively.
Let me say that.
I have used it abusively.
The kind of confidence that I have and I know who I am.
I know what I'm doing.
Can you give me an example of when you've used it abusively?
Before listening to Free Domain Radio...
BFDR. Yeah, yeah.
So a few years back, just at times if I would get frustrated, I mean, my husband and I have had some real ups and downs.
We're coming up on 11 years, married November the 11th.
It's an easy anniversary to remember, but hey, why is everyone so sad?
Oh, right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so, there is an element of passive aggressiveness there that he is now, you know, addressing and working with.
And I had it too.
I mean, I can still have that.
And when you...
If you can imagine someone who has passive aggressive, when the aggressive comes out, it can be pretty forceful.
And so, in the way that I use it now...
When it is in a positive way.
As I said, I want to use it to inspire, to uplift, to motivate.
But there has been in the past that using it to tear down and to intentionally harm.
Do you mean sort of nasty words, vicious intentions, ugly language?
Is that what you mean?
Yeah, yeah.
Right.
Okay.
I just wanted to know what it meant, but go ahead.
Yeah, so it's something that I have to watch out for.
But it has also, I mean, a lot of the things that I've learned, just, you know, listening to you and bringing things together from, I mean, I have so many things that I've learned in my life, so many learning experiences that I have.
That just needed to be brought together.
And I also want to take this opportunity to say, I don't want to get into the details of it, but you brought me back together with my children who I'd been estranged from for 25 years.
You're such a tease, Melody.
Come on.
Give me a little bit.
Come on.
Throw daddy a bone here.
Well, I mean, I... Because that's great.
That's great to hear.
It is.
And...
In a more indirect way with my dad.
With my kids, I'm still kind of working on that, so I don't really want to talk about that.
I'll just say that that's still a tenuous relationship, as you might imagine.
25 years, that's a long healing piece to happen there.
But with my dad, that was just awesome.
I kind of did it backwards from your recommendation, which was he should apologize to me.
I tried that and it made our relationship really bad when it hadn't really been that bad before.
And it just hurt him.
And we're talking like he was elderly.
He died almost a year ago now, just coming up on a year.
But what happened was, in the middle of last year, I turned around and I said to him, one day I just said to him, I'm sorry for everything.
I apologize to him.
I apologize to him for not following his instructions.
And immediately, immediately, immediately, He turned around and apologized, just softened his voice and apologized to me and said, you know what, baby, if I had it to do over again, there's some things that I would have done differently.
And our relationship from that moment forward just completely switched to the point where he actually came and lived with me the last three months of his life.
I kind of caught him when he fell.
And it was just the most incredible last three months of his life, for me anyway.
I still have, what do I want to say, insecurity.
Did I do it right?
Did I do everything?
Did I make it good for him?
Because even though I had...
I don't want to I go back and forth with that.
I know I had a bad childhood because when I launched, it was horrible for years.
I spent a lot of years looking for myself, searching for myself, like the previous caller, doing a lot of that stuff.
But I will say that there is one piece of the whole esoteric kind of stuff that helped me, because there's a lot of garbage out there.
I was a prominent student and teacher in the School of Metaphysics where we approached the mind and how the mind works from a scientific perspective.
Even though at the time I got way off into the esoteric part of that, 10-15 years later, the solid foundation that I built was Aside from all of the other distractions, started to come together.
The practice of mental concentration, practicing memory, practicing actually developing mental skills.
That all kind of came back together.
And then, you know, there have been other pieces.
And then there's FDR. And so there's all these pieces in my life that come together to solidify this and bring all of this together.
And so it's...
I don't know.
I'm just really loving my life these days.
And, you know, some of the great changes that I've been able to make over the last three or four years are just amazing.
I kind of got rambling there a little bit.
No, that's fine.
I just want to clarify.
I mean, if you have something to apologize to your parents for, be honest, right?
I mean, it doesn't have to be.
Like, if you bring up, let's say that they had some significant dysfunction, meanness or cruelty or abuse when you were growing up.
Well, yeah, I mean, I think if people have done you wrong, then you should apologize to them.
But if you've done other people wrong, you should apologize to them as well.
I mean, I apologize to my daughter sometimes, and sometimes she'll apologize to me.
And it's great.
I mean, it keeps things on an even keel, helps us navigate and negotiate how to be even better with each other and so on.
So, you know, if there are things that you felt you honestly needed to apologize to your father for...
Be honest about that, right?
It's not withholding until, right?
And if that takes the first step and it then reciprocates with apologies coming back, so much the better.
So good.
I'm glad to hear that.
And it sounds like you did a very brave and noble thing.
And yeah, we want to be honest with people around us.
And I think if you felt you needed to apologize for something, it was brave and right for you to do it.
So I'm glad to hear that.
Let's Make sure we get to your question.
Fascinating, though, the other stuff you're talking about is mostly women, you said, are pushing back.
Do you mean sort of mostly women are pushing back against Trump?
Mostly women are pushing back against the narrative of these so virtuous women that are coming forward to accuse him.
And it's just like, you know what?
This is just media propaganda.
That's all it is.
And so that's what I see is that There are a lot of women that's like, you know what?
For instance, in the podcast that I publish, Women for Trump, and there was another one too that I think that I put out, maybe some things on Facebook, whatever, where it's like, some things that people don't talk about.
When I was growing up, my mother told me that men talked like that.
It's like, I didn't know specifically that they could go that low.
But to me, yes, it was offensive to my ears.
And you know why it was offensive to my ears?
Because my mother taught me and my son, my dad taught my brothers.
And I grew up with Southern parents, even though it was in the North.
But you don't speak like that in front of women.
So even though we know they will talk dirty about women or they will objectify women, blah, blah, blah, whatever, they never, ever said it in front of the women.
Right.
And he didn't.
And he didn't.
He didn't.
He steps out of that bus.
He's a perfect gentleman.
He was.
That is exactly what I said in my podcast.
When he stepped out of that bus...
He was a perfect gentleman.
And what I also talked about was like, how dare you media expose women to that kind of language when I was growing up, you never said that.
If a man said something like that to you or in front of you, you were just like, you know what?
You need to go away.
You know, and your brothers might go over there and just pound them into the ground.
Come on, Melanie.
Let's not make it a guy thing.
I mean, I've been inadvertently party to listening to women talking when they think there aren't men around.
And it's pretty hair-raising stuff.
I mean, I was watching this show called The Island with Bear Grylls, and it's these women on an island, and, you know, it seems like every night they get together, it's just sex talk, and it's really coarse.
And, you know, I think if I remember, they're talking about how the little muscles that they're eating, it tastes like sperm and stuff.
It's like...
It's earthy and that's part of life.
We're not here because a beam of light made contact with a flower.
We're here because people in dark rooms made exceedingly squishy noises and there was goop and there was mess and somebody had to flip a coin to see who sleeps in the wet spot.
We come about from a very earthy and messy process and having been up close to the birth of my daughter, it's You know, it's poetic in the abstract, but it's like watching a sausage come out in the moment.
So, you know, the earthy talk.
Now him talking about, you know, grabbing pussies.
I mean, yeah, that's pretty coarse, but, you know, I didn't take it very seriously.
To me, this is braggadocio.
And the fact that, you know, a high-status alpha male has that aspect to him.
I mean, I assume that he has, you know, more testosterone in him Then, you know, my entire theater class of men put together, maybe myself excluded, but that's, you know, this shocked and appalled stuff, yeah, okay, it got out and, you know, it didn't look good and didn't sound that great, but...
It matters how you behave in public.
You know, the private talk, everybody's got stuff.
It's like, oh, well, if that had been taped and sent out to the public, I mean, taken out of context.
We don't know the beginning of that conversation.
Anyway, so I've talked about this stuff before.
I think with women, too, like as far as these female accusers go, and you tell me, I mean, I've had this conversation with a number of women, but I wanted to get your thoughts on it, Melanie, which is, Men don't have much exposure to, as adults, unless they're going through a divorce or something, they don't have a lot of exposure to women's falsehood, manipulation, viciousness, capriciousness, you know, all of the stuff that can happen when women get really, really angry.
We've all heard stories, you know, like there were these women who were plotting to bring down John Gomeshi in Canada, this broadcaster.
We're going to get him.
We're going to screw him up.
They colluded and went to the cops and all of these stories came up and they repressed information and were severely chastised by the judge for not pointing out that one of them had sent a picture of herself in a string bikini to the guy to try and titillate him after the supposed attacks and all this.
I mean, it just went on and on.
We've all heard stories of female duplicity particularly in the realm of sexual accusations and I find it hard to imagine that Women who have, of course, suffered a lot from, usually, the words of other women, you know, gossip and backstabbing and spreading tall tales or trying to destroy people's reputation and so on, all the junior high and high school stuff.
I find it hard to imagine that women are like, well, we've always got to believe women because they always act with the most noble of intentions.
It's like, have you heard women talk about other women?
And have you heard about women's experiences with other women?
It's not always that sunny, right?
It's not.
I do want to kind of back up just a little bit and kind of just push back just a little bit on, I understand what you're saying about men and them needing to be taught about the viciousness of women, but I want to address the idea that women naturally, when they're alone, talk about sex in a vulgar way.
And I want to say that they do today.
They do today.
That's a good point.
But when I was growing up, it's more...
What's the woman's thing?
About the status, the money, the...
Oh, he's going to college.
I don't want to get too old school.
I'm not that old.
But it was the sexual revolution starting in the 60s and the 70s.
And this is the thing with women that I'm trying to push back on.
That there is this idea that...
Feminism means that you have to go out there and you can do anything a man can do and you can be just as good as a man.
And sure, you can do that.
But does that make you a better woman?
And what does it even mean to be a woman?
And this is where I'm really strongly moving towards trying to bring this message out a little bit stronger.
That from the very beginning when...
Even the first wave of feminism, second wave of feminism, third wave of feminism, each one of those was this idea that women wanted to enter into the man's world and have an influence on it.
And women have always been trying to influence their men.
And as you say, many times it's very manipulative and it can be cruel at times.
But from the woman's perspective...
This need to enter the man's world, and I'm still working on this, so it's not a completely rudimentary idea, but it's just barely taking shape.
What really needed to happen, and can still happen, is that women need to learn more about what it means to be a woman.
You're not a better woman because you go out and get this You become CEO of a company.
Not to say that you can't or you wouldn't want to do that, but that's not what it means to be a woman.
It's having the children, the home.
And if it's not children in the home, maybe it's...
Caring for the community.
The primary role for the women was caring for the children, yes, the elderly, the sick, the poor, making sure the resources come in, but the women as a group, and this is another thing that didn't develop, I think, the way that it could have once we got better communication and ways to talk with each other.
Women need to work in groups and band together and use that, but There's so much still to be learned about being a woman instead of just throwing this out and going out into the man's world and trying to be a man.
It just, it has been counterproductive each and every time that it, the first wave, the second wave, the third wave.
And so this is, as I said, still pretty rudimentary in my mind about what that is and how it needs to change and coming up with ideas about how women can come together again, focus on the community, focus on your communities.
You know, it's like taking the liberal view of wanting to take care of everybody, but stop getting the money from the government.
It's like you be the one in charge.
You want to do that, then start a company that raises money and does things for the poor or whatever your particular thing is.
And to develop that as a feminine strength.
Right.
No, I mean, and the generations, you know, pass along and, you know, I think things are reaching a pretty ferocious pitch of horrifying stuff.
Miley Cyrus, the ex-Disney star, was on Hannah Montana, I think.
She was...
She was performing a concert.
And I'm sorry to share this, but I just sort of wanted to point out that, you know, I mean, it is to me just getting way out of bounds.
So she was having a concert and she was having, she went, I guess, to the front of the stage and was having her fans rub her vagina and stick fingers in her butt.
And, I mean, this is a woman who's knocking on doors for Hillary and shilling for Hillary.
She was in this spandex leotard and she's asking for people to grope her.
And, of course, her fans are like, uh, uh, what?
What?
And she's like, no, go for it, you know?
And, uh...
I guess, you know, given that she wanted people to grab her pussy, I guess that they're all guilty of sexual assault, and they're all sexual predators, because that's exactly what Trump was talking about, that women wanted him to do this.
But this is, yeah, I mean, it is a descent into almost hell itself, I think, as far as propriety goes, because, of course, this is a woman who has a special place in the hearts of young women who grew up with her in their, I guess, early teenage years when she had her Her show on television, it is pretty horrendous.
Now, this question of be just like a man, well, is there anyone who takes that seriously at all anymore?
I mean, I remember when I got out of high school and I went to work gold panning and prospecting, and there was a guy, a friend of mine I was working with, and he made $100 more a month than I did.
And...
I was upset about it.
I'm like, I'm out here busting my hump in the freezing cold weather just like you are, so why are you getting $100 a month?
By the way, this is back when that actually meant some real money.
And so the idea that I would run to the government and say a law ought to be passed and take it out of my hand, like I went to the...
And I said, this guy's making more than me.
And he explained, you know, it's every year of college, you get an extra $100.
And I just didn't have that.
And that's their policy.
And he showed it me in writing.
I'm like, okay, I don't like it, but I understand it.
At least it's not unfair.
He was just older and had more college.
And that to me, like, but the idea was run to the government, run to the government if there's a problem.
And this to me is where the claims of feminism are just ring extraordinarily hollow.
You know, if you want Equal pay for work of equal value, go negotiate it, because that's what men did.
There's nothing out there for men before the 60s and equal pay and all that came along.
There was nothing out there for men to say, well, we have to have the government negotiate on our behalf with all their weaponry, and people should be fined or thrown in jail or their businesses are destroyed if they don't give us what we want.
That's...
Kind of economic terrorism in a way, right?
So if you want to be like men, I don't think that's particularly healthy.
I mean, men and women are different and complementary.
But if you want to be like men, then, you know, come out and compete in the marketplace.
But then if you don't get what you want, running to the government and having them force people to give it to you, that's not really acting like men, you know?
And this relationship, men have always been, historically men have been subject to the draft by the state, which is why men have been very often skeptical of state power, because the state can do some very nasty things to you if you're a man.
But for women, after they got the vote, the relationship with state power has been very It's positive and benevolent in a way.
You know, oh, do you want a divorce, a fault-free divorce?
Here you go.
Want some alimony?
Here you go.
Want some child support?
Here you go.
Want some old-age pensions?
Here you go.
Want some free healthcare?
Here you go.
You know, I mean, want unemployment insurance for your men, which didn't really come around until women got the vote?
Here you go.
And this different relationship between men and women and the state, I think, is what is going on with the Trump thing.
Because the men are saying...
The state is getting dangerous.
It's getting too big.
We're going to be subject to the draft.
And people say to me, oh, yes, well, you know, the law has been passed that women are now subject to the draft.
Give me a break.
It's never going to happen.
It's never, ever, ever going to happen.
I'm going to go very confidently down that road.
It doesn't mean that women, I mean, they may be drafted, but they sure as hell aren't going to be drafted into the front lines.
I mean, they're just not going to happen.
They can't physically do it.
And it's just not even remotely plausible.
So, I think that men are looking at the state and saying, whoa, way out of control, way too big, way too much debt, way too much interference, and it really is in the way of us achieving our dreams.
You know, I can't start a factory because there's 12 million regulations I have to comply with, and I can't start this business because I need a license, and I can't start that business because of this, and men are just blocked.
And because men can't be as good of providers as they used to be, women are increasingly turning to the state, and the increasing power of the state is making it even harder for men.
To be providers in the way that they used to be and so on.
So it is a huge incompatibility between men and single women, right?
Married women tend to be more in alignment with men because they're, you know, in the same way if you're both in a canoe and you're both heading in the same direction, you tend to row together, right?
It means that you're gonna have some similarities.
But the single women are definitely not pro-Trump as an aggregate.
And please, dear God, Don't leave comments about, well, I'm a single woman and I vote for Trump.
I get it.
I get it.
Everybody does this.
Well, so-and-so tend to be anti-Trump.
Well, I'm so-and-so and I'm pro-Trump.
It's like, tend to be on average, in aggregate.
I get it.
You can't individuate yourself by bucking a statistical trend and thinking you've become perfectly unique.
Anyway, so I think this aspect of things where men are becoming more skeptical of the state, and by men I mean white men in general, right?
I mean minority men tend to still be very pro-state.
And it just falls along the divides.
Who has the resources and who wants the resources?
Well, married white men and women have the resources, and minorities and single women want those resources.
So the minorities and the single women are voting for Hillary Clinton, who's going to go and get those resources and hand them out.
And the people who want to protect their own resources, in other words, whose votes can't be bought with anything other than less government...
Those people want to hang on to those resources, and they tend to be more pro-Trump.
It is a war of resources.
The freedom is definitely involved in that, and it's very important.
But what's happened, I think, in general, is that that kind of wasp, pathological altruism, has run out.
I mean, it's dry, it's done.
This idea, well, you know, just give a little bit more money to the welfare state, and everything's going to be great.
Just pour a little bit more money into inner cities, and everything's going to be great.
A little bit more money in education, and everything's going to be great.
That's all done.
Like, that paradigm is completely over, and I've been saying this for years.
There's no one with any sense at all who thinks that giving more money to the government is going to make the world a better place.
And now it's just become about naked resource reallocation.
You know, government sanctioned theft and vote buying, and it's coming down to that kind of raw contradiction or that kind of raw combat.
And, you know, my argument is, well, We need to stop the government giving so much stuff to single women because it's bad for them because that way they don't if they want to have kids and they don't have to have a husband.
They don't have to have a father for their children because the government's gonna come in and do it for them.
In which case, that's really bad for the kids and bad for them.
And we just need to stop them from doing it because it's bad for everyone.
And finding a way to get single women and single moms to unmarry the state and start looking for actual guys, it's gonna be a big challenge.
It's gonna be a big transition.
A lot of them seem to have got quite a bit overweight, and that's going to be a challenge, but, you know, they'll lose the weight and be healthier for it.
So I think that's kind of the divide that's going on.
I try not to put women into one category, of course, as you would fully understand, but the statistics are pretty clear, that women without husbands want to marry the state and get resources from politicians, and women with husbands want their lives and their husbands' lives to be free of state interference, and they sure as hell Don't wanna go to war.
Single women, I mean, their fathers probably aren't gonna be drafted, their sons are too young, and they don't have a husband.
So if there's war, it just doesn't hit them as viscerally.
But if you're a man, you know, 20 to 50, Yeah, it's kind of got your attention.
And if you're married to a man 20 to 50, or you have, you know, maybe you're older and your sons are, you know, getting into their mid to late teens, well, yeah, the question of war, which Hillary seems all fired up to start with Russia, if not other places, war has a particularly...
Powerful meaning to you and I think that probably is where the biggest divide is and I don't know exactly how to reach across the aisle I'm racking my brain in these last two weeks and I'm sure I'll come up with something but how to sell Trump to people who are not going to immediately benefit from him materially that is a big challenge because it's asking deferral of gratification from a group not very good at deferring gratification so I'll figure it out but that's as far as I've gotten so far there's a There are
women that I know who are actually married and still in the Clinton camp.
And this is one of the things that motivates me, I guess.
And it's like I need to get these thoughts out.
I need to get it out.
We as women, women as a group, need to push back against the Megyn Kellys.
I was watching Michaela today.
We need to get more women in executive positions.
And I was like, why?
Why?
Are they really going to be happy with that?
And so even married women a lot of times, they buy this stuff, they watch that, and they're, oh yeah, I'm a woman.
If I wanted that, then I would want that for myself.
And so then they think they're standing up for their fellow women, and they're just not.
And again, I have no problem with that.
Just...
Then stop having this pink ghetto HR department that negotiates on behalf of women.
I mean, was there really an HR department before women went into the workforce and needed other people to do the negotiating for them?
You know, man up, put your big girl panties on and go negotiate for yourself.
That's what men have been doing for thousands of years.
And if you want to be like a man...
That's what comes with the territory.
But of course, I mean, who would want that, right?
If you can get all the benefits of being a man and none of the drawbacks, I mean, yeah, I can understand why you'd want that.
It's just, let's not pretend that it's about anything ideological.
Right, right.
And yeah, it's just pushing back against this whole narrative.
And yeah, I mean, that's what I do anyway, is just try to educate women that it's not in their best interests.
And it's not easy.
And I, I just, man, just some of the things like the roast of Ann Coulter, the other, I'm just like, I don't think I could.
I mean, I'm just not sure I could deal with that because being ostracized.
Just so for those who don't know, sorry, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but this, you know, people may not be up on this.
This was a roast of Rob Lowe that somehow—well, Ann Coulter was there and she kind of got dragged into the conversation.
And they called her the See You Next Tuesday word 17 times or something like that.
And of course, where with all the leftists?
Well, they don't care because she's on the right side.
It was horrendous.
I didn't see all of that.
I mean, what I saw making fun of her that she was so thin and that she wasn't married and she just sat there with this stone kind of grin on her face.
What can you say?
And I just think for women, fear of being ostracized is really huge for women.
It is for me, and so I'm sometimes careful about what I say because I don't want the backlash in the comments.
I don't know how she does it.
I don't know.
I know it's really huge for me, and I'm working through that, just banding together with others like her that would think alike.
As you were talking about the viciousness of women to women, there were men there as well.
It was just like everybody was ganging up on her.
I don't know where she gets that kind of strength.
Yeah, she says she was just born without the gene that cares what other people think.
So, you know, good for her.
It's a powerful place to be.
I'm going to move on to the next caller, but I really appreciate your call.
Very, very interesting topic.
And congratulations on starting your podcast.
You have a delightful voice for it.
So thanks again so much for your time today, Melanie.
It was a great pleasure.
All right.
Thank you.
All right.
Take care.
Alright, up next we have John.
John wrote in and said, The most disheartening thing to see is that despite the election workers having good intentions when presented with the choice to stand against a questionable ballot and methods of
gathering absentee votes with solid legal footing, the path of least resistance is taken to avoid conflict and swaths of votes are allowed.
As a simple cog in a vast and rotting machine, where do I begin?
That's from John.
Hey, John.
Do you want to say any of the stuff that you've seen?
Obviously, keep your privacy as tight as possible, but is there anything you can share with us?
Yeah, absolutely, Stefan.
Just to say it's an honor to be on the program.
Thank you so much for having me.
I hope I can contribute in some small way to the conversation you guys have had.
Contribute in a huge way.
Why not?
Aim big.
So, a little bit about me before we jump into it.
I'm 22 years old.
I'm a student.
I work for the Bureau of Elections.
It's my 9 to 5.
I'm a Knight student.
This is my first presidential election.
And I'm not a lawyer.
I'm not that intelligent.
I'm just doing my best because through FDR, through your program, I've...
I've really gotten so involved and I've been so interested in these national level politics and no one is having the conversation about these absentee voting statutes and laws and where they're being abused and how they're being abused and I think that maybe I could help shed some light on it.
I appreciate you doing that and I'll let you, I don't even know the questions to ask so feel free to just give us your thoughts and what you've seen.
Okay, great.
So there's two big points we'll start off with.
So from state to state, there's different absentee voting laws.
So Pennsylvania has different laws in Ohio than Florida.
So one of the only unifying things across the different states is something called the federal postcard application.
So if I'm an overseas voter who...
Well, let me start there.
So the federal postcard application counts as your voter registration...
As well as it entitles you to an official ballot.
So you can be Joe from Germany, who has never voted in an American election before.
You lived in the United States for a couple weeks when you were born, and then your parents moved you to Germany, and you've never lived here before.
So I could file an FPCA into this election through the registered address of your parents that you lived here for a week when you were born, and you would now be entitled to vote in this election right now.
There is no ID requirement on that.
So right now, you could file that application, sign your name, sign your parents' registered address from when they were here, and you would be registered and entitled to an official ballot.
Now, I don't know how no one talks about this because Pennsylvania doesn't do early voting, but this absentee voting, we're going to process in my county alone almost 20,000 votes for this election.
And that puts it, I would say, pretty comfortably within the margin of being able to swing my county at least from one side to the other because it's that closely contested.
And again, there's no paperwork required.
Well, there is paperwork required.
I mean, sorry, ID or formal stuff.
Exactly.
The only ID requirement, there's no ID requirement for that because you're a federal voter.
It's easy to get lost in the wording of this, but if you go to fvap.gov, you can read all this for yourself.
I know it sounds a little crazy, but spend 10 minutes and go read all about this for yourself.
Like I said, I'm not a lawyer.
I'm not even that intelligent, but this is something I was shocked to read about.
You could have never contributed a cent of tax money in your life.
You could have lived overseas for the entirety of your life.
And because your parents were natural born citizens and you were born into that, you're entitled to vote in a federal election.
Well, the idea that you'd have to pay taxes to vote would be really startling to people, but that's kind of how it used to be a long time ago.
And the idea being, of course, that if you didn't pay taxes, you would simply vote to take tax money from those who did, through the government.
And that's, of course, how it used to be.
And, well, it hasn't been that way for many, many years.
So that's not necessarily an abusive election law.
laws.
That's just an odd election law that could have significant ramifications and doesn't have a lot of checks and balances as far as filtering out legitimate from illegitimate voters.
And by that, I don't mean legally legitimate.
I mean, just people who actually have a stake and who pay taxes and who understand on the ground what's going on.
Right.
It was initially for, you know, 30, 40 years ago where, you know, people still had postcards, you know, people still did that stuff.
So it's literally called the federal postcard application.
So it's so outdated that it should be irrelevant.
It should have been re-engineered.
And, you know, right, it's not abuse, it's not illegal, but, my God, how can that still be the law?
Right, and George Soros has spent a lot of money trying to get people registered online.
In that way, right?
And there are illegal immigrants going door to door, campaigning for Hillary and all that.
I mean, there's a lot of very, to me at least, logically fishy stuff that's going on.
Right, of course.
So to go to, well, I started on the innocent stuff.
So now let's start working our way deeper into the rabbit hole.
So this is where I start thinking that, I mean, this is abuse.
So nursing homes are So they're drilled and they're mined for votes.
So as a social worker in a nursing home, you have access to all these poor people who don't have the capacity to really think or defend themselves anymore.
These social workers, the activists, will go to these nursing homes, they'll have conversations with the people living there, and they'll send applications for absentee ballots in.
The ballots will be photocopied, so the writing will all be the same.
We'll get a packet full of 100 votes from the same building, and it'll be the same handwriting across almost all of them, except for the signatures at the bottom.
So these poor people, I mean, we've had kids of parents who've been in homes who've called and said, hey, my mother's not voting in this election, is she?
Because she's not capable, and We were worried about it, so we'll go to check on their parents' status, and sure enough, they'll have votes registered.
So people go in and register them, and then basically, what, put their hand on the paper and say, sign this, it's very important, and they're like, okay, that kind of stuff?
Exactly, exactly.
Wow.
Well, I'm sure that's what Jefferson intended.
Yeah, I mean, anecdotally, it's almost three-quarters of the ballots that come in that way are just – they're almost all registered Democrats.
So I obviously don't get to see the votes until voting time, but I can see that they're registered Democrats, and you can infer from that what you will.
Oh, I'm inferring.
Thank you very much.
And I'm inferring what I think everyone will.
All right.
Please take away my hope in the process.
What else, John?
Go ahead.
All right.
So today, just today, because of between Project Veritas and other things that have come out in places like the Donald and another poll even, I got five phone calls today from people asking me if I knew the relationship between George Soros and the voting machines that my county has, which was shocking to me.
Now, I mean, I'm a guy who's existed in alt-right circles, and I keep my ear to the ground, and I've been in part of these conversations.
And it's a weird position for me to be in because I'm not allowed to have that conversation.
I can't say, hey, I agree with you, you know?
But I have to try to defend this system where, yeah, I mean, some of these machines are 13 years old.
So I have a 13-year-old machine that weighs like 85 pounds to lug it around.
And it runs on systems that are essentially floppy disks.
So the votes exist on functionally floppy disks.
Oh boy.
Which is insane.
A 13-year-old...
Still more secure than a Hillary server.
Anyway, go on.
I mean, so just for a little...
Information about the machines.
And there's four different voting systems in Pennsylvania alone.
Four different independent electronic voting systems.
So the system that I'm familiar with is called the Danahern system.
It's D-A-N-A-H-E-R-N. So it's a closed loop system.
You basically punch your vote in.
It gets saved on floppy disk.
And then we punch it into the computers at the end of the night.
So it's a closed system.
It's not online.
So it's secure in that sense, but the software that gets put onto the computer, I mean, that gets pulled down from the manufacturer of the actual machine.
So we don't know what goes into that.
We have no control.
We're not programmers.
And just at the end of the night, we have to trust what goes onto our report when we put the floppy disk in.
Right.
Well, and I've seen those little videos on Twitter of people trying to select a Republican and the only checkbox that they can select is a Democrat.
They say, oh, it's a calibration error.
It's like, you know, this election's been coming for four years.
There's one job that these touchscreens have to do.
Have you not got around to calibrating them over the last four years?
Because that seems like that's the whole point.
Well, I mean, yeah, I can appreciate how horrifying that looks, but I gotta say, like I said, 13-year-old machines.
The most common error with these is power failure.
So, I mean, for the wrong light to light up, I mean, it's a small miracle that they're lighting up in the first place.
It's like the space shuttle where they had to load these modules because the code had been written so long ago and they didn't have enough memory in the computer and they had to load these things.
I mean, man, I used to get pissed off when Galaga went out of power when I was trying to get a high score as a kid.
This just seems slightly more important.
Can't they update these machines?
Because my understanding is, John, that there's a lot of companies that have donated to Hillary Clinton's campaign that are very, very keen to provide voting machines as well, which...
Which seems to me, as an amateur outsider, just a little bit of a conflict of interest, but seems to be quite a common situation.
Well, to take a step away from it, and just to think from their standpoint, how much business can a company that manufactures a voting machine possibly do?
I mean, how many clients can they possibly have at the end of the day?
So the system that I work on, Danahern, is...
A competitor of the Dominion voting systems that was linked to George Soros through the different sellings and stock and all that.
So, I mean, the company that we bought from isn't directly implicated in that leak.
But, you know, there's like three manufacturers of repute that do these.
So, I mean, at the end of the day, we'll probably end up buying one from Dominion at some point.
Right, right.
What else have you seen?
Tell me tales of skullduggery and immolation of freedoms.
So every application for an absentee, you have to file an application for an absentee ballot as a domestic voter.
So as a domestic voter in Pennsylvania, you are required to show ID. So different from the overseas voters, which have no ID obligation.
You have an ID obligation in Pennsylvania as a domestic voter.
So when we see the different IDs, you can submit a pay stub as an ID. So you could get away with all kinds of nonsense.
We get student IDs that aren't government issue.
We get People's paychecks, that can satisfy the requirement.
So if you, I mean, in the Project Veritas link, in the Project Veritas, I think it was video two, the guys were, when they were trying to catch them going along with the scheme, that's exactly what they said, you know?
We'll hire them for a week to a Pennsylvania address, and then that'll be their pay stub, and that'll be their, that'll satisfy the ID requirement for them to vote in that state.
And I've never quite understood why is it, I think, Do you have to complete some sort of weird Lara Croft-style quest with headless monkeys and blood-drinking bats to get a government ID? Because, you know, that just seems to be one of these things like, okay, well, I have to have a government ID to drive a car.
I have to have a government ID up here to get healthcare.
I have to have a government ID for XY to buy alcohol or whatever.
Why is it so impossible for people to get government IDs or that you just want these kind of loopholes to remain?
I don't know.
I thought it was hilarious that you have to have a government ID to walk in the building that you would vote from.
Like, to walk into the Bureau of Elections building, you have to have an ID. So, yeah, I agree with you there.
So, also, a requirement of the application for an absentee ballot is a reason for absence.
So, I know it's awful of me, but when I see someone who put on their application that they were born in 1916 and that they said they had a stroke...
But they're going on vacation to Disney as the reason for absence.
I can't help but wonder if that's legitimate.
I can't help but wonder if that's legitimate.
You have a very, very positive way of raising things, John.
Very, very careful.
Very cautious.
Like I said, I may not be the smartest guy, but I'm doing my best here.
Well, 1916 to 2016 is not exactly functions and relations or vector calculus.
That's like, 100 years old, going to Disney World.
Well...
It's possible, but I wouldn't put a lot of money on it.
At the end of the day, I think where the broad strokes of bad votes, in quotations, because you can't pin this on anything.
There's no smoking gun.
There's no fraud to be proven.
But at the end of the day, there's 10 people in this office who are processing 20,000.
20,000 applications.
For absentee ballots.
And then the ballots.
So at the end of the day, for this election cycle, we'll touch 35,000 documents that we'll need to process.
And that's going 10 ways.
And you have to, like, every single form has to have eyes on it.
Every single form has to be run against the state system.
So if you're willing to accept 99% accuracy for every form that comes in, how many get through?
You know?
Yeah.
And that's in a perfect scenario.
And with that being said, the office I work in, they're conservative, hardworking people with very good morals.
I mean, they're good people.
This is about the perfect situation.
I mean, I can't say that every office is going to be as upstanding and virtuous as the office I work in.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, there just seem to be so many opportunities for problems to arise.
I mean, is the hanging chats, I remember that being a big thing in 2000, is the hanging chats still a, I mean, I guess you're a young guy and all, but you must hear tales from the wizarding people in the back, but has that sort of punch stuff been more or less taken care of?
My experience has only been with the electronic systems, and so I can't speak to it.
Right.
One other thing I think is relevant that needs to be brought up in this conversation is the role of third-party organizations in bringing these applications to us and also bringing the voter registration documents to that office.
I'm a student right now.
As a student right now, when I walk onto campus, standing in the parking lot is a guy prompting me to get my vote in.
I mean, there's so many activist organizations out there that are trying to collect these votes and these registrations, which is a good initiative.
It's important to exercise the vote, right?
But where it starts getting fishy is when people are targeted, like the overseas voters.
So there's organizations that will canvas addresses in Pennsylvania and And then they will have listed addresses online.
So if I was the Joe from Germany earlier, as an example, and I didn't have an address in Pennsylvania, and I said, oh, I used to live in this neighborhood.
These organizations are linking people with addresses to register from in Pennsylvania.
So there's people who own a home, are paying all their taxes, and there could be more than one family registered out of their address because somebody gave them that address to register from.
Yeah.
So despite owning the property, they don't have any link to it.
Right.
Well, and if I were of a nefarious bent of mind, John and I was on a college campus and I was trying to encourage people to register to vote, I got to tell you, I think nine times out of ten, I could pick the conservative and I could pick the Democrat without even asking.
There's a look.
There's a feel.
I mean, not a lot of Republicans have blue hair and those weird kind of Nina Hagen outfits and weird black lipstick and coffins for purses and all the stuff that's like every day is Halloween because I just had a really dysfunctional childhood that I haven't dealt with, so I'm going to take it out on the world through my outfits.
And, you know, you can see the males, you know, they all seem to have these, like, high foreheads and these broad, black-rimmed glasses and, I don't know, there's just a kind of slinky, skinny, no waist, no hips kind of outfit and bendiness, like, all, like, Gumbies of spinelessness.
Like, you can, I think you can just go and find them.
It's like they have this aura of High T women and low T men just kind of floating around all the R selected people out there.
I don't think they're impossible to find.
So if I did want to get a bunch of students to vote, and I was say, a Democrat, it might not be completely impossible to get a slight edge of Democrat leaning people to end up voting.
I mean, even if you just picked women rather than men.
Assuming that these still can be told apart in modern campuses, if you just chose women rather than men, you would automatically be giving a huge boost because, you know, only married women are pro-Trump for the most part and very few married women on campus, particularly with blue hair.
So you just pick the, I don't know, the overweight women.
You pick the women with particular hairstyles.
You pick the women in very comfortable shoes, you know, whatever it is.
And you would very easily find the Democrats.
And you could...
Push the needle that way.
I think you have successfully checked off the microaggression checklist there.
Oh, you know that never ends.
I barely scratched the surface, but no, if so, I feel quite proud of myself spontaneously to do that.
So, once these get collected, they get submitted into the voter registration and the Bureau of Election offices to get processed.
So, on these forms, you put the date that you've signed it.
You put the date next to your name, obviously.
What these organizations were doing was they were holding on to thousands and thousands and thousands of these registrations, and they dumped them off on the day of the deadline.
So you've got the deadline in Pennsylvania was the 11th.
So on the 11th, there were almost like 17,000 or 18,000 new registrations for this election.
Wow.
And then they have to get turned around in the span of almost a week, a week and a half almost.
So that puts them in the situation where these registrations If there was unscrupulous people who wanted to put bad registrations through, it would get buried in the amount of volume they could put in through the last day.
Right.
One last thing I wanted to mention about college.
You go up to people and say, do you know who Foucault and Derrida are?
Yes?
Okay, I really want to register you.
But this is important too, and I don't mean to jump out of the details, but the big picture thing, John, that I think about is if you are – The gatekeeper for a legitimate vote.
If you let an illegitimate vote through, I can't imagine there are really any negative consequences.
However, if you oppose a vote or you hold it up or registration or whatever, or you deny somebody their right to vote in the moment, you let someone through who maybe shouldn't be there, no negative consequences.
But if you don't let someone through who really wants to go and vote, Well, you could experience some significant negative consequences, either in the moment or thereafter.
And so just from that standpoint, you know, like if you were offered $1,000 for every illegitimate vote or voter that you kept out of the building, that might balance things out a little bit.
But the way things are set up, it just – the rational calculation, sort of the – I know there's good people and all that.
But the rational calculation is, okay, just let people through because if I stop someone who wants to go in, they'll make a big stink.
But if I let someone in who maybe or maybe shouldn't be there, what happens?
I mean, other than, you know, the end of democracy, which is a bit abstract, you know, when you've got people who want to yell at your face at the moment.
Does that kind of influence, do you think, things at all?
I mean, just this very skewed incentive system?
Oh, absolutely.
Because you have to think, we live in such a litigious society that, I mean, anytime you have to get in contact with somebody who didn't clearly write the address, and you send them an email saying, Could you please clarify your address on this application?
You'll get an angry email back saying, I can't believe you're trying to disenfranchise my vote.
It's like, let's take a step back here.
I mean, you didn't complete the form.
We're entirely unable to process you.
We're going out of our way to try to ensure your vote.
If we wanted to throw it out because you didn't write the thing on there, we'd send you a rejection letter.
Yeah.
Our main process...
We're trying to help you vote, right?
You're trying to help this person vote.
Exactly.
But, you know, people get so contentious over it, I guess, for good reason.
So, yes.
No, no.
To go back to what you said.
No, no.
Not good reason.
If you don't know how to fill out your address...
I don't know that you're the very most informed voter around.
And if you get angry at someone who says, hey, you didn't fill out your address, you're trying to disenfranchise.
Oh, come on.
Come on.
I mean, I don't know.
The thing to get upset over is making sure you can vote.
I mean, misguided, I entirely agree with you.
But, you know, there's worse things people get upset about nowadays.
But yes, to bring up the big picture stuff, he said, our main operating principle is that everything that comes into our office has to be postmarked.
Everything that comes into our office has to be filed properly.
Because if we do miss that vote and someone was to press it on us, we would be up the river with no paddle.
So what happens if someone is not in the system or is not registered or whatever, and they show up and they have ID or they really, really want to vote?
I mean, do you...
Do you just turn them away?
Do you have security?
I mean how does that work?
We'll keep the vote.
And if your information clears at the end of this process, because we can't do it immediately, then the vote will count.
So it's provisional.
You can have a beer.
You can't drink it until your mom shows up at your ID. Exactly.
Got it.
All right.
Okay.
And is there any other ways, I'm sure there are, but ways that you've sort of seen or know of that things can happen that may not be what people expect might be happening?
The prevailing thought we get a lot of is that these mail-in ballots, they're not counted seriously or they're counted after the election.
So much energy goes into making sure these go through properly.
People, election workers all over the country right now are swamped.
People are working really hard to get this right.
They're working within a flawed system and they're doing their best.
I would have to say what people don't expect is these election workers are good people that are working really hard.
So in their defense, they're working under imperfect situations and doing really well.
So I'd have to say in their defense, people don't expect them to be working as well as they are, but they're doing good with what they have.
Yeah, obviously some would be partisan hacks in there to maybe swing things one way or the other.
But yeah, I mean, it's not the boots on the ground.
It's the system that matters as a whole.
Do you have a wish list of things that you would love to have differently?
I mean, obviously more resources, more time and so on.
But how would you change things if you could?
It has to be modernized.
The state system that I work with every day, it looks like Windows 98.0.
It has the same gray color scheme and awkward corners on the windows from, like, Windows 98.
Right.
So that's the system.
It's so inefficient.
It's so clunky.
I'm sorry to interrupt.
Like, I can't even remember how many years ago they dropped support from that because they couldn't guarantee it was going to be secure anymore.
But that perhaps is a topic for another time when I have more will to plow through this stuff.
But sorry, go on.
No, you're fine.
I just...
I mean, to...
It would take an entire overhaul of this system because there's been no money pumped into it for so long because it's not sexy funding.
People don't want to put money into counting votes.
It's like infrastructure.
People don't want to put the money into it because it doesn't look good on their reports.
If you want a system that can be manipulated, why would you want to make it less manipulable?
Right.
I guess the wish list is, in modernizing the systems, there would be more security, there would be more assurance in being able to account for these systems.
Having a report on the back end of these voting machines where they could maybe pump out a paper ballot, they could pump out a report on command, but There's very little accountability on these machines, and the individual offices, we have no qualifications to touch those things.
I mean, we don't know how to really operate them beyond the simple steps.
We don't know how to deal with the programming or anything technical with them, really.
So, I mean, modernize the system, clean it up, have more accountability in there somewhere, and, you know, that would be a huge step.
And ID. Right, well, You know, that's voter ID laws, which is a whole big, I mean, that's so far removed from what we deal with.
Like, we have, we just have to deal with it.
We, that conversation isn't something we're even allowed to talk about.
Well, I certainly don't want to get you in any trouble, but I do appreciate that view from the ground.
And it's not pretty sometimes to see what goes on from behind the scenes, but I appreciate you bringing that to our attention.
And of course, if there are any people out there who have good solutions for this kind of stuff, feel free to talk with those around you and see if you can figure out ways to improve these things.
But John, I really appreciate your time calling in tonight, and I guess I wish you the best of luck over the next couple of weeks.
Thanks so much for having me.
Thanks, man.
Great pleasure.
Well, I will say, John, clearly there is nothing to worry about when it comes to voter fraud, because Barack Obama has assured us that vote rigging and election rigging doesn't happen.
Except eight years ago, he said that elections would get stolen occasionally, especially in Chicago.
Well, Elizabeth Warren, of course, has also told Trump that the system is not rigged after saying that the system was rigged, and Jon Stewart is the one person who could help expose that, so...
Yeah, yeah.
It's so boring.
Don't you just find this stuff in politics?
The reason I'm glad that the election is almost over, I mean, it's tired, A. But B, it's just so boringly predictable.
I mean, and particularly, that's what got me so bored about politics.
What about politics as a whole was it was all just so boringly predictable.
You know, when it benefits the Democrats, it's the best thing in the world.
When it doesn't benefit the Democrats, it's the worst thing in the world.
When it benefits the Republicans, it's a good thing.
It's just, you know, these fluid morals, the expediency of the moment, and you could tell what everyone was going to say prior to Trump.
You could tell what everyone was going to say before they said it, and I don't like, you know, my daughter can read the same book 20 times, not me.
Alright, well up next we have Brick.
Brick wrote in and said, historically international free trade and immigration of people has been a net benefit for humanity.
Yet in the modern era, it seems immigration largely imports people from nations, fostering cultures incompatible with the West.
And free trade has created economic strife for the traditional Western populations that leads to community and family deterioration, and therefore greater reliance on the state.
So my question is, does protecting Western culture come at the price of the West sacrificing its vain materialistic goals of economic growth at any cost, via trade and immigration, in order to protect its hard-fought-for intellectual ideals?
That's from Brick.
Hey, Brick, how you doing?
Nice to be with you.
Nice to chat with you, too.
It's a great, great question.
Net benefit for humanity.
International free trade and immigration of people.
So, international free trade and immigration of people, I want to sort of deal with them separately.
Okay.
I agree with you, and this is a point going back to Friedrich Bastiat, but...
Anyway, for sure, Bastiat's the last name.
He was pointing out that free trade tends to unite...
Cultures together.
It tends to make interactions with other countries and cultures and even languages a win-win.
And I don't know if it was he or somebody fairly close to him in time who said that when goods cease to cross borders, soldiers will start crossing borders.
That you have trade or you have war when you have proximate cultures and countries.
So I think, yeah, free trade I think has been a net benefit for humanity.
Prior to massive government involvement in the economy, once you have massive government involvement in the economy, nothing is free trade.
There's no such...
Like people who talk about, oh, we want free trade now, it's like...
TPP, North American Free Trade, these thousands and thousands of pages of text that somehow have something to do with free trade.
Now, if you want to have free trade, stop government subsidies, stop government controls, get government out of industries, stop licensures, stop all of this stuff, and then you might have free trade.
But free trade is about the dismantling of government, not additional thousands of pages of regulations, got nothing to do with it.
So true free trade, I agree with you.
Free immigration of people has been a net benefit for humanity.
It's hard to say.
I'm of two minds about that because, as I talked about in my presentation on the fall of Rome, there were some challenges in terms of, you know, the old equation, diversity.
Plus proximity equals war.
Immigration of people is not always a net benefit for a particular local group.
That having been said, I would have far less problem with the immigration of people when There's no welfare state.
There's no subsidized food stamps.
There's no free education for everybody who drops by.
That is a problem.
There was, I think, an immigrant family in Germany, a Middle Eastern immigrant family in Germany.
The guy's got like four wives and 22 kids, and he's currently picking up $390,000 US a year in welfare payments.
I mean, that's clearly deranged, right?
And that is not anything that remotely is sustainable.
You know, it's one thing to build question.
It's the one thing to bring questionably compatible cultures into your country.
It's quite another thing to also pay them to breed like crazy.
I mean, Lord above.
I mean, they'll look back in the future and have no idea what the hell we were smoking to come up with these policies.
So, the question is, let's say, Why, let's just sort of pick a group, the aboriginals in Australia.
Why weren't they moving to America in the 19th century?
I think that's sort of very, there's a lot to be gained out of just sort of asking that basic question.
I know it's putting you on the spot, but do you have any thoughts about that?
Why weren't the aboriginals moving?
I don't know.
They didn't have the resources, the education, any of the, like, means to get to America, if they even knew about it.
Yeah, I mean, they could have.
I mean, some people did sort of, you know, they work their passage over, and then they agree to work for a certain amount of time to pay it back.
It wasn't impossible.
Lots of, I mean, Irish came across, and Irish usually didn't have two potatoes to rub together, because if they did, they'd make another Irish person.
Yeah.
So, the question is, why weren't, I don't know, Zoroastrians or Buddhists and so on coming over to America in the 19th century?
I mean, I don't know all the answers to it.
I have a couple of thoughts.
But the question is, why was it almost all Europeans who were coming over?
Was it illegal to be not European and come over?
I don't think so.
I mean, there were, of course, some restrictions.
Some Asians came over and there were Asians restrictions and so on.
But it's...
It's tough to go and make it in a country where the culture and the traditions and all are very, very far away, if not antithetical to your own country and culture.
I mean, even in Europe, a third of the people who came over to America in the 19th century ended up moving back home.
It just didn't work out for them.
And so, if you have a free society, I think the people who are going to want to immigrate to where you are are people from similar cultural backgrounds.
And by that, I sort of mean European, mostly Western European, some Central European, but...
I think that cultural compatibility to a large degree has a lot to do with how immigration works and how it works successfully.
Now once you bring in things like the welfare state and just massive transfers to immigrants from the state and Obamacare, which has a lot to do with being able to provide health care to Immigrants, recent immigrants from Mexico and other places that are poor, can't afford the healthcare.
That's the big question.
Then you don't know if people are coming because they like your values and they want the freedom.
Like if you came from, I don't know, Poland or Ireland to America in the 19th century, you were coming because it was the land of opportunity and you wanted To be able to exercise your wits and abilities in the free market that existed, which is unimaginably free relative to now.
Good Lord, you could put cocaine in Coca-Cola and sell it to children.
Of course, there were no addicts because it's a different matter.
When you've got a welfare state, though, are people from the Middle East coming to Europe because they love...
Europe, and they love Christianity, and they love the European tradition, and they're desperate for the separation of church and state, and they're desperate for secularism, and they want all of their women to wear bikinis and have the freedom to do all of that.
No, of course not.
They're coming because there's a welfare state, for the most part.
And we know that because of the million migrants that Germany took in.
53 of them ended up getting jobs.
The vast majority of those were at the post office.
So, when you've got the welfare state, this transfer of population, Of course it's a huge negative because you've got lots of people coming in who are going to consume the welfare state who never paid a penny in To create it.
And of course, that's a net loss for the wealth and for the general population.
And so, yeah, free trade, immigration of people, I think it's fine.
But not when the government controls significant portions of the economy.
Then everything, everything is a government program these days.
Because it's either run by the government, controlled by the government, influenced by the government, or in reaction to the government.
So, I just wanted to give you that sort of little bit of an intro thing because people...
Get a little bit confused about my thoughts in this area.
No, that was great.
And I think I'm pretty much on the same page.
When I meant that immigration was a net benefit over time, I was primarily thinking of similar cultures, immigrating to areas with another similar culture like Europe to America.
So I don't think we really disagree on that by any means.
It was...
More when it comes to the trade and with a lot of modern libertarianism.
I mean people that I see in the libertarian movement where especially trying to think like For immigration, people, if you have Mexicans or someone from Central America coming in and they can undercut the wages of people that are here, the traditional population, and they think, oh, that's a net benefit overall because you're saving $10 and that $10 could go to spending it on something else and that's a net benefit.
Well, no, sorry.
And sorry to interrupt, but the reason why the libertarians don't get that right is that the person who can't get a job in America goes on welfare, right, goes on unemployment insurance, gets food stamps, gets all other kind of benefits and may end up on disability.
So, okay, you might save a few bucks when you buy your Roto-Rooter, but the problem is you're paying, you know, a hundred bucks in taxes to support the people who are thrown out of work.
Now, if there isn't a welfare state, then if there is a lowering of demand in a particular industry, then the wages will go down, which will encourage people to go into some other industry.
If there's an increase in demand, then wages will go up, which will encourage people to go into that industry.
So there'll be a fluid movement back and forth of people in the domestic economy.
But once you have a welfare state, the money you save by having low-rent immigrants flood in, well, the low-rent immigrants are going to use a lot of government resources, and they're not going to pay nearly as much Yes,
yeah.
I go across with that.
And then the other aspects, though, for an economy when it comes to manufacturing and stuff, a lot of these leave to go to China or wherever because of lower costs.
And I see that.
My economics professor all the time uses, well, you get your bag and you save $10 or whatever.
And if it was in America made, it would be $20 more.
And I mean, I ask that.
I mean, My question is, saving $20 on a book bag, is that worth deteriorating?
Because a lot of these jobs that leave for manufacturing, like if you look at the American Rust Belt, it used to be thriving in their families and communities, but you take away these jobs, and nothing came into those areas to really replace them, and so there's all this deterioration of the family.
And as the family deteriorates, it makes more reliance on the state.
So I say, is it really saving $20 on that bag because now it's made in China?
Is that really somewhere that we want to go sacrificing our families and our culture to create a bigger government overall?
Well, it's to me particularly contemptible.
Mm-hmm.
When professors start to talk about labor flexibility and market flexibility, and it's like, you assholes.
Yeah.
You all have tenure.
Yes.
You all have government monopolies.
Nobody, people coming over from Mexico aren't taking your damn job.
Yeah.
And you're protected from the marketplace.
I mean, as soon as the professors got into power, they're like, hey, how can we shield ourselves from the marketplace as much as humanly possible?
I mean, who the hell is driving down the wages of this guy?
Not Felipe, who's mowing someone's lawn?
Yeah.
So the idea that, well, you know, you got to be adaptable.
You got to adapt to market conditions and people can retrain and, you know, market requires flexibility.
And it's like, you all have, like, you can't be fired.
I know.
And then they're asking that of like, I get if you're a 20 year old that just got off college, but they're asking like, I mean, do they not think outside of the theoretical world is a 50 year old man that's been working in a factory really going to all of a sudden go back and he's going to become an engineer in his life or something, which that's just going to get outsourced too.
I mean, I don't think they practically look at the applications of the things they're saying.
Anybody can grant degrees.
All of the state-granted monopolistic powers that you enjoy and possess are all going to be taken away.
And guys like Steph can come in and compete with you and grant exactly the same degrees as you.
And now you're subject to free market competition.
Can you imagine the howls of outrage and the strikes and the screams and the wounded pig noises that these assholes would make?
If you started to introduce a market competition to them, no, no, no.
You see, market competition is for other people.
The economics professors, they don't want to have anything to do with it themselves.
And if you actually try to impose upon them the same market discipline they demand for other people, oh, you would hear this very whiny cuck voice crying out to the very heavens about the injustice and immorality of the entire situation.
Of course.
I can't tell you the bottomless well of contempt I have for intellectuals who demand sacrifices and flexibility from others while resolutely denying it for themselves.
Yeah.
Every asshole on the planet wants the free market for everyone but him.
Oh, yes, I really want a free market for the cell phone companies because that way I get cool new cell phone features.
But for me, I don't have any free market at all because that's competition I might lose.
It's terrible.
They're so weak.
They're so weak-minded, weak-spirited, weak-willed.
They should be leading the charge.
Economics professors of all people should be leading the charge and saying, listen, we talk about the free market and we hide behind our government protections and our government monopolies and our tenure.
We take a huge amount of government money and we dare to talk about the free market.
We should lead by example and completely remove ourselves from the situation or remove all the government largesse controls and protection from our situation because it's really, really horrible and horrifying and disgusting For us to demand that some 50-year-old guy with a grade 12 education retool his life and deal with all the flexibility and vagaries of the free market while we, with our 130 IQs and PhDs, hide behind all of the walls of state power we can erect to protect ourselves from the market we claim to love.
It's vile.
It's disgusting.
It's predatory.
And I just can't imagine how soulless you'd have to be to actually make that case in front of people without putting your head into a pencil sharpener and crank it for all you were worth.
Okay, off my chest.
Please continue.
I mean, I couldn't say it any better than that, to be honest.
But then there's another aspect, too, where, well, even if they said all that and they agreed to it, well, they'll be like, oh, well, through international free trade, it helps spread free market values to other, like, third world countries or rising countries like China.
China or something.
I said with China, I mean, they think that capitalism is comparable with all cultures.
I'll bring democracy and freedom.
But you look at China, and they're moving into like, they have a market economy in a sense, but yet the government, people aren't protesting, not since Tiananmen Square, have they been protesting for some other form of government?
They are fine with the communist political system as long as they can have their cell phones and their laptops and all their material goods.
So it's not helping us by exporting all these jobs.
It's not helping the Chinese or anything.
They're not having a revolution for a more free society.
I don't know.
I just wanted to point that out.
But they're like, oh, this spreads values.
And I'm like, I don't see this spreading free market values to China or anything.
No, but they've got a lot more free market reforms than occurs or exists in the West.
And they don't have to deal with multiculturalism.
They don't have to deal with the social and economic cost of diversity and all of that.
Yeah.
But here's the thing for me, Brick, which is, I think, important.
And not that what I've said before isn't, but this is the important thing.
What the hell does Western culture even mean anymore?
Yeah.
I mean, Western culture is like lefty, social justice warrior, hug rooms, rape culture, hysteria, bullshit.
Yeah.
That's what it has devolved into.
Western culture, you know, we can look back at the Renaissance, and we can look back at the Age of Reason, and we can look back at the birth of classical liberalism, and we can look back at all the cathedrals in the Parthenon.
None of that shit exists today in any real or tangible way.
In fact, it only exists as something to be opposed and attacked by the left.
There is nothing to save in Western culture as it stands now, as what it has devolved into over the past hundred years, since really I think the fruits and benefits of Western culture were first destroyed in the First World War and then further destroyed in the Second World War and have been artistically and culturally since really I think the fruits and benefits of Western culture were first destroyed in the First World There's nothing left.
Like saying let's save Western culture is like saying let's rewind the end of the movie Titanic and see if we can do something differently.
I mean, because Western culture has turned entirely suicidal.
I mean, it is a non-functioning, non-productive, self-destructive culture.
It can't possibly sustain itself.
Austria, the government, has just released a 70-year bond.
Oh, yeah!
Give us the money now.
We'll be sure to pay it back in 70 years.
Yeah, right.
Like, they'll be in Austria in 70 years, let alone seven.
But, I mean, this is how pitiful and how pathetic it has become.
Western culture...
Western culture is dead.
Western culture cannot be revived.
Western culture, as it stands, if this is the end result of Western culture, Western culture deserves to die and to fade out and to end and to join the ash bin of history, just like every other culture that refused to focus on reason and evidence.
It is dead and gone.
There is no Western culture to save at all because Western culture refuses to save itself.
In fact, Western culture is steadfastly and dedicatedly Driven to self-destruction at the moment.
Pathological altruism, protection of women, emotions over reason, fear over courage.
All of the vices that Western culture traditionally despised and condemned have become the virtues which we're now all supposed to practice.
Feminization has overcome masculinity, feels have overcome thinking, and insults have overcome arguments, and we have nothing left to save.
Western culture needs to be swept away.
Now, you could say we need to return to the roots of Western culture, you know, reason and evidence and all of this kind of stuff.
That's what I was trying to get at, hopefully.
And that's important, but that was never achieved.
Western culture must reinvent itself using the best of its ancient elements and discarding the worst of its modern manifestations.
And Western culture needs to remake itself in the ideal of philosophy for the first time.
And once it reinvents itself in the image of philosophy...
For the first time, it won't need to reinvent itself again because there's nothing superior to philosophy.
There's nothing that works better than philosophy when it comes to understanding the world, to organizing society, to promoting liberty, to promoting genuine equality of opportunity rather than this tyrannical fascistic opportunity of outcome.
And some people will love it, and some people will hate it, and some people will flourish, and other people will not flourish.
And I don't give a goddamn either way, because we do write, though the skies fall.
Western culture, as it stands, is not standing.
Western culture is in its death rattle.
Now, whether it gets overrun with another culture, which seems highly likely, or there is a true renaissance, which is Western culture advanced not by looking too much at the past, but by Destroying corruption, tyranny, and anti-rationality in the present and blowing and blasting past it.
Western culture is a forward-moving thing.
The moment we become too conservative or too historical or too trying to drive into the future by staring only in the rear view, we're doomed and we're going to go straight off a cliff.
We need to reinvent.
Western culture is the process of creative destruction, the blasting a part of ossification with the steely talons of Empiricism and reason and evidence and this constant collapse of old cathedral is absolutely necessary.
You know, we destroy the old in order to build the new.
Now, we don't destroy the old in the way that the leftists do by pretending that we can just reinvent all of human nature and we can just everything old was a prejudice.
You know, we look at the old and we say, well, why was there a focus on family?
Why was there a focus on monogamy?
Why was there a focus on no sex before marriage?
Why was there a focus on ostracism as the punishment for social waywardness?
Well all of these things made sense.
Why was it that it was considered so important for a mother and a father to raise a child?
Well we can look back and we have the science and the facts to understand that now.
But Western culture as it stands right now It's like, I don't know, it's like Mowgli in the Jungle Book in Car's Embrace if nothing had come along to save it.
It's got like three breaths left and then it's food for snakes.
And this, you know, the idea we have to save Western culture, to me, if this is what Western culture evolves into or devolves into, it's not worth saving.
And in fact, it should be put out of its misery and we should recognize that we need to step on its neck to get something better and something healthier and something more robust.
And that doesn't mean that nothing in the past is of any value.
There's a lot in the past.
That is of huge value.
We need to take pride in what brought us here.
But what brought us here is the creative destruction of all that exists in the image of reason and evidence.
We need to continue that process.
And there's nothing here to save.
There are a few things, I would argue, to salvage.
But, no, I agree.
Well, that was very motivational.
But, what was I going to say?
Oh, well, I see...
In a way, I mean, isn't a way we can start with that is, I mean, at least trying to get it to a more containable, manageable way.
So by having more protectionists to where we're working within America and we have immigration not coming from outside sources, at least then can't we scale back from this whole global system that we're fighting against to try and get it back to a national level?
And even a lower level, so maybe we can get a better handle on it then, because it's easier than working than trying to fight across the globe, trying to contain it at a smaller scale and doing it.
Well, I mean, basically what needs to happen in the West is we need to understand that we're at war.
Yes.
We need to understand that we're at war, and we're at war with leftism, and it needs to be a war of words, but it needs to be a war of very strong language, to put it mildly.
Because if the words...
If the war of words fails, you get the war of swords.
Right?
It's the war of words.
If you fail, you just put an S in front of words, and you get swords.
And that's what we don't want.
The left understands it's a battle.
Right?
You listen to that guy...
On the O'Keefe videos, he says, we've been fighting you fucking assholes for 50 years.
We're not about to stop now.
They get it.
They understand that it's a war.
And no prisoners, no surrender, no compromise.
No, it's a war.
And everybody's been kind of hoping that this appeasement of the left is going to result in them, I don't know, getting some of what they want and compromise.
It's not going to happen.
It's not going to happen.
It is a battle.
And once we understand that, then we can understand that the left wants to bring people into the country as reinforcements in a battle.
Not because they care about Mexico.
I mean, if they cared about Mexico, they'd end the war on drugs.
If they cared about Mexico, they'd end welfare.
If they cared about Mexico, they'd stop sending huge amounts of foreign aid to the Mexican government and propping it up.
It's corruptness.
I mean, they don't care about Mexico.
They don't care about Islam.
They don't care about any of these things.
They want to import reinforcements in a war.
And once people understand that, then decisions can be made that are much more rational.
But as long as people think it's about niceness and kindness and diversity and this and that, as I've said before, and I'm sure I'll say again, the left is willing to tolerate and import everyone who's willing to support and fight on their behalf.
Well, of course.
Absolutely.
I mean, of course they are.
And the problem is that the left can import people who will support the left, but the right can't breed people fast enough to support the right.
Because breeding is a lot slower than importing.
And that is the advantage the left has.
And if Trump decides to do what Ann Coulter suggests and take a 10-year pause on immigration to see how this experiment works out and how this assimilation works out, That would be to cut off the inflow of troops who are willing to fight in the cultural wars of the left.
Of course, that's the sensible thing that you want to do.
If you can drive soldiers out of your enemy's camp or out of your enemy's ranks, of course you'd want to do that.
That's natural.
And so if Trump gets in and 20 million illegal immigrants leave the United States one way or another, then of course that's massively beneficial in reducing the size and power of the army of the left.
That's what they want to do.
And the end result of that is Venezuela or the Soviet Union or Cuba or some god-awful nightmare of 1% middle class and everybody else is brutally poor and hunting rats in the street.
That's the end result.
And once people see that clearly enough, I'm going to make a case for everyone to put their relationships on the line for the sake of this election.
I'm going to do that later when it's more imminent.
But that is the stakes that are going on.
At the moment.
And so immigration at the moment is not to do with welcoming other cultures.
It's to do with the left wanting to swell its foot soldiers in the culture war and to give them more votes and more power so they never actually have to debate with a Republican ever again because history has shown that their plans fail.
They have no arguments, no evidence, no history, no facts on their side, and they are standing on top of over 100 million bodies that leftism and communism have destroyed in the 20th century alone.
They've got nothing left to offer, which is why they're not making arguments.
They're just making threats.
Yes.
I don't think I don't have anything else to say to that, really.
But I mean, yeah, it's just really once this election, I don't know if this goes the way and Trump doesn't win.
I guess they just have to learn by example and the West will just have to, I don't know, have some pretty hard times ahead of it.
You know it's much worse than that, right?
Oh, well, yeah, not just hard times.
I mean, I can't...
Yeah, it's...
It's the end.
It's going to be catastrophic.
And who knows when, if ever, freedom will return.
This is not...
I don't want to panic people, but the reality is it is that serious.
Oh, no.
It's now or never.
I mean, in two weeks, it is now or never.
And I don't know what the hell my show is going to look like if Trump doesn't get in.
But the reality is that it's going to be...
The best thing we'll be able to do is tag the bodies as warning for some unforeseeable distant point in the future.
You know, I remember reading a...
I can't remember where I read it, but it really struck me.
Somebody pretended that...
looked forward from the book 1984...
Yeah, yeah.
...and said that the party was finally overthrown after 9,000 years.
Oh, God.
That the party...
Ingsoc, English socialism, that the ruling party in 1984 had a 9,000 year rule.
It's not inconceivable at all.
Yeah.
And the dysgenics of the welfare state, the war of disparately proportioned IQ populations, the amazing and terrifying amount of surveillance power that exists within the state, which, you know, we say, ooh, we've got the internet.
Yeah, so do they.
Ooh, we've got cell phones.
Yeah, so do they.
And their tracking capacities and abilities and power and control over these things vastly exceeds any private person.
So, you know, for every weapon we get, they get too.
And that is really, really important to remember.
This is why it matters.
Nothing in your life in America and throughout the world matters if you care about freedom more than the next two weeks.
And that's why I'm Working my fingers to the bone to do everything I can so that if we succeed, I take pride, and if we fail, I will take no shred of shame.
I know.
What a great time to be 19.
God, I don't know what's going to look like 50 years from now.
I sit down with these people, especially people in my college, and especially with They're like, oh, Islamophobia, and then, oh, all this Islam is fine.
It's not that.
It's us.
We're causing the problems.
I'm like, look at history.
Why do you want to bring in an oppressive religion?
The Enlightenment fought against oppressive religion for 100 years in Europe against the Catholic Church.
I'm like, history is showing you you don't need to repeat this.
I mean, we could be so far advanced if people just, I don't know, understood history instead of taking their social...
Oh, that's why the reality of history is not torn, right?
I mean, because it would give people intelligent bases for making decisions.
All right, Brock, listen, I'm going to close off the show.
A great, great conversation, but I had a little bit of an early morning, so I'm going to try and turn in at a reasonable hour, but I really, really appreciate everyone Who calls in and has these conversations.
It is literally, you are the world to me and you mean the world to me and I love you all so much for everything that you do to support this show, including these conversations where people open their hearts and minds to be recorded forever for posterity and philosophical power.
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