3483 My Girlfriend Is An Illegal Immigrant - Call In Show - November 2nd, 2016
Question 1: [1:57] - "In your video 'why I was wrong about Libertarians' you suggest that those in favor of free market economics should not seek out tenured positions in academia, suggesting that to do so is a violation of Libertarian principles, and in effect sets a bad (and hypocritical) example. Given the importance our society and media (perhaps falsely) ascribe to academia, pushing the young to go to University, do you not feel that having people who lean right in these institutions, who can actually educate students on the benefits of a free market - even if technically a violation of their principles - is a good way of fighting back against the left-wing dominance of the culture?”Question 2: [45:35] – “My daughter's mother is here illegally. We are both ardent Trump supporters, even though a Clinton presidency could remove risk of deportation while a Trump presidency could exacerbate that risk. We're focusing on the much bigger picture, however, and I was wondering if you could discuss how our lives might unfold under each administration, assuming each candidate were to succeed with their vision for dealing with immigration in America. I think it might help other families facing this risk to walk themselves through a potential Clinton America and a potential Trump America before assuming they'd be better off with Clinton.”Question 3: [1:24:54] - “I am a women who works in fashion who was red pilled over a year ago. The after effects have been hard on me socially. My work, city and gender are overwhelmingly liberal and I can’t find people who share my views. I want to come out of the political closet for Trump, in the hopes of aligning with others, but do not want to risk my business and reputation because a few fashionable elite don’t agree. How do I exists and thrive with this new mindset?”Question 4: [1:58:48] - “I would like to ask Stefan about the nature of patience. Raising my children I have found the days where I focus on being patient go much smoother and are much more enjoyable for everyone involved. When it comes to raising kids I have found that having unlimited patience to be a virtue. On the other hand I think the West has been far too patient in regards to damage caused by Marxism and globalism. With corruption being on full display on a daily basis during this election cycle I find myself asking ‘What am I waiting for?’ I know this conflict is going to escalate and yet I plod along, going to work, minding my budget and vaguely attempting to focus on school instead of acting. Is there a point where a virtue such as patience crosses a line and becomes a risk to survival?”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
Hello everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
Great set of callers tonight.
Very interesting stuff.
New approaches to some new questions and some old questions as well.
The first is a fine young man who is interested in the realm of academia and wants to know if it's a good use of his time and considerable mental abilities to pursue a career in academia or should he take to the wild west of the internet and try and make his case and stake his claim there.
Now, the second caller, interesting, new, different topic.
The mother of his child is living with him illegally in America.
She's originally from Brazil.
And they're trying to figure out what's going to happen if, of course, either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump gets into the presidency.
And we had an interesting conversation about all of that.
The third caller was a woman from the fashion industry, and she got red-pilled.
She sort of woke up to reality about a year or so ago, and she's having a really tough time in her industry because in the city she's in, in the industry that she's in, and in the gender, of course, that she's in, it's not exactly Trump-tastic followers.
So she's having trouble figuring out what she should do and what she should talk about and whether she should, quote, As somebody who has sympathies for Donald Trump.
In the fourth caller, we had a very good conversation about the nature of patience as a virtue.
What is it?
How do you achieve it?
What is the mindset that can help promote it?
And so, if you're interested in patience, and I certainly am, having been an impatient and hot-tempered person for some of my life, I think you'll find this conversation very, very interesting.
Please, please, please don't forget, FreeDomainRadio.com slash donate to help out the show.
You can follow me, of course, on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
Don't forget to use our affiliate link at FDRURL.com slash Amazon.
Alright, well up first today we have Luke.
Luke wrote in and said, In your video, Why I Was Wrong About Libertarians, you suggest that those in favor of free market economics should not seek out tenured positions in academia, suggesting that to do so is a violation of libertarian principles, and in effect, sets a bad and hypocritical example.
Given the importance our society and media, perhaps falsely, ascribe to academia, pushing the young to go to university, Do you not feel that having people who lean right in these institutions who can actually educate students on the benefits of a free market, even if technically a violation of their principles, is a good way of fighting back against the left-wing dominance of the culture?
In the same way that Andrew Breitbart suggested people on the right should invest in creating rival media to recapture some of the culture from the left, as you are so successfully doing, couldn't the existence of, for example, the growth of Freedomite slash Chicago School economics in our universities be argued to be recapturing academia, and consequently the minds of the young, from the cultural Marxist takeover?
And if this is the case, should we not be encouraging more libertarians into these positions rather than simply surrendering academia wholesale to the left?
In this regard, perhaps libertarian professors could be likened to government involvement in securing the borders.
Not an ideal situation if one's goal is a society without government, but a necessary step on the way in order to secure the future by encouraging those teaching in higher education to undo some of the brainwashing of the previous 12 years.
Not add another four.
That's from Luke.
Oh hey Luke, how's it going?
Oh, hi Stefan.
I'm well, thank you.
How are you?
I'm well, thank you.
Well, it's an essay and I guess I can ask you if you have anything more to add or whether I should dive into my response.
Well, I could elaborate around it if you would prefer, or if you've already got it.
It's fairly long already, so unless there's some really important point you missed, elaboration, I don't know, is hugely necessary.
But given that you want to, I'm suspecting you want a career in academia.
Yes, sir.
Yes, you do.
So you want to elaborate.
Okay, go ahead.
I did mention to Mike, at the bottom I am in the middle of writing my doctorate, so possibly a slight conflict of interest in this.
No, I appreciate that, honestly.
I'm not, so that's my conflict of interest, so...
Alright, brilliant.
No, really, I've heard some other people on the right, sort of libertarians and conservatives as well, discussing how the left has taken over schools and universities as well as the media, and suggesting that perhaps the best way of...
Getting ideas regarding free market economics out there would be to try and encourage people on the right to go into these institutions rather than the private sector which tends to be, for economists especially, a bit more lucrative.
And I was of the opinion, listening to a few of these voices, that this sounded like a good idea.
Because just from my personal experience, coming up fairly recently through school and then to university, I was never exposed to these ideas.
And as you've said in some of your previous videos, a lot of the culture, so TV shows like The Simpsons, they'll mock Ayn Rand and they'll This is why these ideas make sense and this is why it might be worth actually picking up one of these books that the media is constantly mocking.
I think a lot of kids are missing out on this and I know I certainly didn't discover until my very recently mid-twenties these ideas just because culturally it was a big no-no and especially coming from A country that's largely socialist, has privatized healthcare and so on.
Wait, privatized healthcare?
Nationalized, excuse me.
I was going to say, given your accent, if it's private, someone's ripping you off.
Yes, just coming from this culture and again a national state broadcaster specifically vested interests in getting across a very left-wing perspective.
So just from my personal perspective coming up through that, I think I would have benefited if I'd had some voices, professors on the right who pushed back somewhat and gave that alternative view.
And would have encouraged, no, these are actual opinions that are worth investigating.
And as you said...
Okay, I get it.
I think we've elaborated enough.
Okay.
All right.
Now, let me just ask you a couple of questions then to sort of set the stage, and we'll see if we can hash this out.
According to free market economists, is it more likely that you're going to provide a quality, good, or service?
Let's just say service, since we're talking about chatting, right?
It's conversation, right?
I mean...
Exchange of ideas.
According to free market economists, will you provide a better service on average if you are in the free market or if you are a government bureaucrat?
In the free market.
In the free market, okay.
So if you are going to be somebody who brings ideas to people, are you in general on average going to do a better job if you're in the free market or if you're a government bureaucrat?
In the free market.
Right.
So if you want to bring ideas to people, you will do a better job if you're in the free market than if you're in some sort of government-protected cartel or union or department, right?
Yes.
Okay.
Then I think that's it.
My thought was because there's very rigidly structured already this controlled cartel and we have already set in place this very left-wing dominated cartel.
Cartel that is government subsidised and that this is seen as the main institution that everyone's fed into going through schools and the media and parents and so on encourage all the students to go into and that's very much considered that's where you need to be and I agree that having Free market for everything would certainly be superior if all the universities were private and everything was a free market.
Forget the universities.
The universities are not how ideas get implanted into the mainstream anymore.
My listenership and the more than quarter of a billion views that this show has done has vastly outstripped all of the academics in all of the economics departments put together.
And I don't mean, I'm not trying to say I'm better than them or an economist, right?
But in terms of waking people up to reason, to evidence, to free market ideas and principles and so on, if I were in academia, then, I mean, especially if I was teaching at the PhD level, I mean, you know this better than I do, how many PhD students are there in your classes?
I mean, I don't even know if you're having classes anymore, but the last time you had a class, How many young people or how many students was the professor teaching?
I'm not having classes anymore, but you were very few in the last one.
Half a dozen?
Yeah, about half a dozen.
Okay, so about six people.
Now, let's say that the professor has, maybe he's, you know, he's a thesis advisor, maybe he's not seeing people directly and so on, but it's probably not more than 20 or 30 or 40 people a year at the PhD level that the professor is having interactions with.
Is that fair to say?
Yeah, that sounds about right.
Alright, so let's say that you have a 20-year career and let's be generous.
It's 40 people a year, right?
Over 20 years, what's that, 800 people that you've influenced?
Yeah.
Now, I'm not trying to say that listening to one of my shows is the equivalent of being mentored by a PhD supervisor.
But 800 people is about one second of my presence on the internet.
So you've got a 20-year career.
We can say 30-year career if we want.
Make it to 1,200 people.
That's a second and a third, whatever it is, right?
So when it comes to influencing people, when it comes to having an impact on the culture, when it comes to changing people's minds, would it be better if I were in academia or if I should stay in the free market?
Well, I agree in your case.
Certainly, the free market, you're doing a very, very good job.
And that's not just coincidence, you understand?
It's not like all the people who are good at doing it go to the free market and everyone else goes to academia.
If I were in academia, I wouldn't be doing the job that I'm doing.
And so if you decide to stay in academia, you are selling your potential short.
And this is the fundamental problem, is that you will not achieve greatness in academia.
Who does?
Who are prominent academic economists who are really influencing the culture, who are staying in academia?
Now, there are some who go and write books, more mainstream stuff, but they don't have the kind of reach and impact that a show like this has.
And why?
Because they don't have to.
Because they get paid either way.
And because when you're in academia, social approval is very strong.
The need for social approval.
There are a few academics who decide not to take that social approval and so on.
There was a Canadian academic, Philip Rushton, who got into a lot of trouble about his RK selection theory with regards to different ethnicities and so on.
He was willing to Take his stand and take his bullets.
He died a few years ago sadly.
But if you stay in the academic world, it's kind of like you're in a state cartel protected union where you don't have to compete anymore.
And when there's not competition, as all free market economists know, you get a massive deterioration in quality.
So, if I were in academia, I'd be doing a terrible job relative to what I'm doing now.
I would be, in general, more prone to avoid controversy.
See, there's this thing called tenure, and tenure, of course, was originally put in place so that people could have dangerous ideas without getting fired.
Now, that's all nonsense, and every academic knows this and feels it deep in his Withered bones.
But as you know, tenure doesn't protect people who have radical ideas.
All it does is make sure that people with radical ideas never get hired.
That's sort of number one.
And number two, just because you can't get fired doesn't mean that that's the only form of social enforcement there is.
You can be ostracized.
You can be not invited to things.
People can move you to a tiny office.
People can make your life difficult in various ways.
People can give you negative repercussions even if you're not fireable.
Don't you want the freedom that comes from being in the free market and being responsible to a voluntary audience that can come and go?
I mean, don't you want that feedback?
And don't, like people who listen to me, are you crazy?
Are you crazy listening to me?
I mean, as I've said for years, I don't make your life easier.
At all.
I mean, you're listening.
I'm not making your life easier because I'm suggesting the free market rather than academia.
Philosophy always makes people's lives more difficult.
It makes them better in the long run.
Diet and exercise is tough in the short run, good in the long run.
I would not be able to have the freedom to pursue the topics that I pursue, to challenge my audience.
And I want my audience to be here because they love philosophy, because they're excited by philosophy, because they're challenged by philosophy, because it gives them Meat with their spinach.
It gives them a gristle.
It gives them a purpose.
It gives them ethics.
It gives them power.
It gives them dominance.
Philosophy gives you dominance in your life because, you know, it's like these cheesy kung fu movies, you know, where there's a guy in the middle and, you know, the six million different waves of bad guys all coming at you.
Taking them all down like a combine harvester.
Well, that's what philosophy does, right?
I mean, It's been a long time since I've lost an argument because I'm just so well-versed and so well-practiced, so it gives you dominance in your life with those around you and all of that.
But you see, if you're in academia, why are people listening to you?
Well, you don't know if they love the topic or they love the fact that you can give them a degree.
You don't know if they're after your wisdom or your approval, right?
I mean, because especially when you're a PhD student, You've got a lot invested, right?
It's pretty hard.
You know, the old thing, if you wait five minutes to take the bus and the bus doesn't come, maybe you'll walk.
But if you wait for an hour and a half, you're less likely to walk because you already spent an hour.
And so there's a lot of investment.
And don't you want people to care about what you have to say because of the content, because it's important to them, because it's of value to them, because it challenges them and excites them, enriches them?
Well, what do I hand out?
I... I don't hand out any degrees.
What I do is I hand out self-doubt.
Good!
Excellent!
That's what we need in the beginning of wisdom is self-doubt.
Conflict, loneliness, challenges to your relationships of every kind, doubts about your career, as you perhaps may be experiencing as well.
That's not me.
That's just philosophy, right?
So I know Because not only are people not rewarded for listening, but quite often they're punished.
I know that people are here because they love knowledge and they love wisdom.
And there's no other possible reason.
It's not the excellent quality of the jokes.
Okay, it is the singing, but that's so rare.
That's a long way between those oases if that's what you're here for.
And so, if you're in academia, you'll never know.
If you have the capacity to hand out these money printing degrees, These endless job security degrees, these degrees and give people the gateway to working very little and making a lot and having sabbaticals and summers off.
How do you know anyone's there?
For you.
And knowing that you have to continue to provide value to your listeners.
I've been at this for 10 years now.
10 years!
I'm still able to provide new arguments, new insights, new information.
My listeners are constantly shocked and appalled and excited by the topics that I have next, and not because they're random, and not because I'm just always contradicting myself, but because I challenge myself.
I'm just working on The philosophical roots of Nazism, which has been a topic near and dear to my heart for more than 20 years now.
I'm able to pull some stuff from my graduate degree thesis and all that and finally get around to putting all that knowledge to work.
And people are there, or other people are here, right?
You're here.
Because you love philosophy and you want a good life.
You don't want a great life insofar as everything's great.
You want a good life, which means that you support virtue and fight evil and take the bullets and wear the red badge of courage of the disapproval of those around you who are not good people.
So, if you have the choice in terms of influence, You go to the web.
You go to the free market.
Of course.
Of course you do.
It's an unregulated medium, relatively.
You are free to set your own topics.
You can challenge people around the world forever, right?
The lectures that are given in a PhD seminar or whatever graduate degree seminar, you know those 12 people will listen to someone for an hour and it's lost to time.
Gone baby, gone.
But if you, I mean this conversation, you and I, the words that I am speaking, the words that you're hearing, the words that you will be speaking and I'm hearing, they're here forever.
So in terms of reach, in terms of permanence, in terms of reproducibility, why would you want to just speak to a bunch of people in a closed room for an hour when you could speak to the world forever?
In terms of influence, forget the universities.
They are literally medieval.
They were founded in a different time, they were founded for a different audience, and they were founded when there was no technology that we have today.
You know, let the state have the horse and buggy.
We go to the stars.
Does that make any kind of sense?
Yeah, actually, that makes a lot of sense because I was going to ask, I mentioned Friedman, obviously, in the question and was going to say, do you not think that his position and so on in prestige got him more exposure?
But as you've Mentioned with the new technology.
I think, actually, you're right about that.
If Freeman was coming up now, he wouldn't have needed to have been a professor to get his word out there.
Because, as you said, now we have a truly free market.
So, yeah, actually, I appreciate that with the new technology.
And you don't know whether you want to be in academia or For the money, the free time, and the prestige, or whether it's a sensible moral decision.
Do you know what I mean?
I mean, if the life of an academic was hard and life on the free market was easy, would you have the same perspective?
It's tempting, right?
They're holding out a temptation to you.
The state is holding out a temptation to you, right?
Yeah.
And that doesn't mean that everybody who automatically takes it is a bad person.
I'm not trying to say that.
But you do have to recognize that this is the devil taking Jesus to the rooftop of the world, waving his horny claws over all the lands, visible and invisible, and saying, all of this can be yours if you will only serve me.
And in the same way, you are being dangled a worm.
There's a big hook.
And the taste of the worm passes.
But the hook stays embedded forever.
And the state is saying to you, Ah, Luke, you are a fine, clever young man.
Nicely bearded.
I'm sure you already have tweed cokes with protectors on the elbows.
And can smell musty at a moment's notice.
And can resist the temptations of nubal young co-eds.
Luke, Luke, you have a wonderful brain.
You have facility with mathematics.
You have facility with language.
You have a conscience.
You're sensitive.
Have we got a deal for you, man?
It's great.
All you have to do is not make too many waves.
Not upset too many people.
Not speak too many truths.
And we will keep you safe.
From consequences.
Save from voluntarism.
Save from customers.
Save from choice.
Forever.
And we will pay you £100,000 a year.
And you'll only have to work maybe 5 or 10 hours a week.
And you can work on other things as you see fit.
And we'll have a bunch of people like you, all sitting around in abandoned corridors and sub-basements, all reviewing each other's papers and publishing them in journals that nobody reads.
Oh, and you'll get a couple of months off in the summer.
You know, the summer, it's a beautiful time to be outside, Luke, don't you think?
It's wonderful.
Get yourself a nice tan.
Okay.
You're British, maybe not a tan.
Maybe a little bit of summer mold, as so often grows in British people when they go out to try and enjoy the sun.
And we'll send you to conferences in exotic locations, all expenses paid.
And you'll get sabbaticals every couple of years.
You'll get a whole year off.
You can work on anything you want.
Anything you want.
And we'll put you in the middle of a room, Luke, and in that room, all around you, we'll be shining, eager, curious, intelligent, hungry faces just waiting for every syllable of wisdom that falls from your mouth.
And there'll be people clamoring to be your teacher's assistants, and there'll be people clamoring to help you grade things, and there'll be people coming to you and begging for reference letters.
Oh, do you remember me?
I took your class about three years ago, and I thought I'd try and make it in business, but it didn't really work out.
Now I'm thinking of going back to academia.
Can I take you out for a coffee and remind you of who I am so that you can write me a letter of recommendation?
Please, please, please, please, please?
And after a while, Luke, we'll also give you one of these lonely corridors and sub-basements.
You'll be at the head of that chair.
And all of these papers and these theses and these ideas and these arguments will come piling up on your desk.
Every one of them a hungry person beseeching to be published so that he can get tenure track, so he can get his.
Protection from voluntarism that only the power of the state can provide.
And these people will call you and say, hey, have you read my paper?
Is there any adjustments you want me to make?
Is there anything I can do to make it better?
Please, please, please.
All these people will be begging For the wonderful power that you have to bestow upon them all the gifts that we will rain down upon you.
And for all of this, for all that we are willing to offer you, the power, the freedom, the money, the security, the prestige, the only thing, Luke, that we ask of you, that we demand of you, and I'm not supposed to tell you this up front, but I'm gonna.
Luke, the only thing that is demanded of you It's one tiny little word.
You get money.
You get prestige.
You get people who want things from you.
You get time off.
Paid vacations.
Summer's off.
One tiny little thing we demand in return.
It's a tiny word, really.
It's a big word, but it means a tiny thing.
The only thing we ask in return, Luke, is one thing.
And that is inconsequentiality.
We will give you all of these things.
The only thing you have to give us back in return is your complete and utter inconsequentiality.
You must not make any statements that sway anybody's minds or change any elections or change any fundamental arguments or approaches within society.
You must do nothing to threaten the powers that be.
And in return, we will keep you well fed, well ventilated, well watered, with a tiny little Running wheel, calls an office, like any good domesticated pet, we will feed you as long as you never ever bite us or look at us funny.
What do you say to that deal?
No.
It'd have to be no.
I think so.
I think you want to look back on your life and say, I had a real impact.
And in academia, Look, I'm not saying academics have no impact.
They do.
They do.
But a lot of that is legacy.
I mean, look at it this way.
I mean, universities have been around for over a thousand years, right?
And they used to be way more exclusive.
And so the reason why universities are still considered important is because they used to be important.
Like the reason that American money has value is it used to have value, right?
I mean, the reason that society isn't broke is it's consuming all of its past accumulated capital.
And the accumulated respect that used to go towards universities is why universities have any value right now.
And the reason that I'm saying that, and a great mental exercise to understand that, is let's say that universities started 10 years ago, about the same time, That the internet became popular and around the same time that YouTube started and so on.
Let's say that universities and the internet, as far as educational mediums, let's say that they both started at about the same time.
And let's say that the lectures given by professors in universities also had to be put online for free.
Well, if the internet and universities started at about the same time, and everything that was available within the university was pretty much available outside the university, with the exception of exams and marking and some of the social aspects, I get all of that, but the knowledge itself is available outside the university.
And this is really true for undergraduate.
Now, in graduate school, you have half a dozen people, a dozen people, or whatever.
More interaction, more, you know, but...
I mean, one of the colleges I went to, Intro to Psych was like 1,500 people.
Yeah, because there's no way you can reproduce that by looking at YouTube.
Nobody had any chance to talk to the professors.
Some people were actually looking at a screen.
They were in overflow rooms looking at a screen, looking at a television.
Why are you paying for this?
It's a screen, it's available for free on the internet, and you're dropping $20,000 a year to look at something that's available for free on the internet.
So if universities and the internet had started at the same time, do you think the universities would still be a viable business model?
No.
They are surviving by cannibalizing the prestige of the past.
They've been increasingly co-opted by governments.
I don't know how exactly it is in England, but I know for a fact that the United States we did this whole truth about student debt.
Governments are pouring more and more money into higher education.
Why?
Well, for a variety of reasons.
But mostly, it's taxpayers' money.
The governments pour into the universities, which draws more and more people into universities, which allows more and more people to be propagandized into socialistic pro-state propaganda.
It's beautiful.
You borrow from the unborn to indoctrinate people so you can rule over them in the present.
It's beautiful.
Also, governments know, like they'll have a dumbed down population.
What's the best way to dumb down a population?
Put more and more people Into higher education.
Because, as I said before, there's this retarded thing that people think, which is, well, you know, in 1950, everyone who went to college was really smart.
So college must make people smart.
And so if we put more people in college, then they'll be smarter.
Come on!
Tall people play basketball.
Let's take the short guy, put him on the basketball team, and he'll be tall.
Let's take the short guy and put him, he'll be tall.
Doesn't make you smarter to go to college.
Smart people go to college doesn't make you smarter to go to college.
So if you want to dumb down the population as a whole, so you always have the problem with smart people.
You know, when you're in charge, the smart people can ask you questions that you can't answer because the state and all of the bullshit that rules human beings is so easy to dismantle, it's ridiculous.
Taxation is theft.
Whoo!
Five syllables, three words, done!
Easy!
So you gotta rope these smart people in.
Now people were getting smarter according to the Flynn effects.
What do you have to do?
The more you can throw smart people in with dumb people, the more you can dumb everyone down.
Because smart people go kind of crazy around dumb people after a while.
And dumb people resent the smart people.
And smart people resent the dumb people but won't say anything about it because they're nice.
And so it's a great way to indoctrinate people.
Also, when you put people in debt, when you put young people in debt, they tend not to want to rock the boat too much because they're in debt.
So they can't take too many risks.
They can't rock the boat.
They can't.
Especially when social justice warriors, right?
People are in debt and if you piss off the left, they'll attack your reputation and try and destroy your source of income.
Can you afford that?
If you're $50,000 in debt, bet you can't.
Conformity.
Conformity.
So, get more and more people to go into universities.
I'm not putting you, obviously, in this category, but get more and more people to go into universities and turn...
Also, it takes the pressure off high school teachers, right?
See, high school teachers are producing people who can barely read, who can not write at all, but it's okay.
They can go to college.
So you turn college Into high school, you turn graduate degree, you turn a master's into an undergrad, and you turn a PhD into a master's.
Nothing has been gained.
In fact, a lot has been lost because there's a lot of smart people who go to college expecting to meet other smart people and instead meet indoctrinated leftist retards who are hysterical and abrasive and volatile and immature, intellectually and emotionally, and they're like, whoa, this is pretty bad.
But where else am I going to go?
Can't get a job at just high school because now college degrees become the norm.
Don't have a college degree, what's the matter with you?
Couldn't you hack it?
Now the perception is, wow, if you can't even do a college degree, you must really not be smart because college degrees are pretty easy.
You got to show up, have a pulse and write your name correctly.
So I think that The leftists don't go into an institution to change it.
They go into an institution to destroy it.
Look at Twitter.
The leftist social justice warrior infestation of Twitter.
Twitter originally started with this idea of free speech, right?
We're not going to censor it.
Anything that's legal, you can say.
And then the social justice warriors got in there, as they did in other places, Google, Facebook.
Social justice warriors got in there, and they started Church lady, finger-wagging, censorious crap.
And censoring, let's just face it, it's anti-liberty, anti-free market, anti-right, anti-alt-right, anti-whatever.
It's not censorship.
Censorship at least would be more generic.
You can't talk about X. Well, no.
It's just they go in and they start using the platform to destroy the right.
But they're like, there's an old Sopranos episode.
Where a guy who runs a sporting goods store gets involved in gambling debts and Tony Soprano lends him some money.
The guy gets more gambling debts, lends him some more money.
And then they end up selling off all his inventory and selling his trucks and all of this stuff.
And he gets really upset.
Tony Soprano looks at him and says, what are you upset about?
We're termites.
We come in, we eat a place up, we move on.
You know that.
You're just the place we're eating up now.
Don't take it personal.
We come in, we eat something up, we move on.
And that's what it's all about.
They're not there to make Twitter better.
They're there to destroy Twitter because Twitter was harming the left.
Twitter was harming the narrative, just as Facebook was, just as Google was.
So they infiltrate to destroy it, not to change it, not to improve it.
And the social justice warriors are all over academia right now.
You say, well, let's not surrender it to them.
Why?
Why not?
Why not?
There's so many better ways to get information and arguments out in the world.
It's, who cares?
When you've got a speedboat, who cares who has the half-sunken raft that is only considered to be a value Because academia used to be populated by smart people, and now it's mostly not.
And shortly, shortly, and I think this is going to be very fast, having, and I know this is not particular to your degree, Luke, but having an arts degree will now be considered a negative.
Soon this will happen.
Because having an arts degree now for people in the business world will be considered a litigious risk.
Because you got an art degree, because you've been propagandized and all this social justice warrior lefty crap.
Ooh!
I bet you this person's going to start riling things up.
You haven't hired enough of this type.
You haven't hired enough of that gender.
Your bathrooms are not being correctly configured.
Right?
It's going to cause trouble.
They're going to cause trouble.
And it will be a negative.
And it will be understood that certainly in some disciplines, people know less after taking the courses than they knew before, particularly basic common sense.
The whole point of indoctrination is to turn you against basic common sense.
And so right now there's still a bit of fading glory from the past prestige of academia, but it's not going to last.
The market always figures things out.
And it usually figures them out sooner rather than later.
And if I were a hiring manager, thank heaven I'm not, but if I were a hiring manager again, as I have been in the past, and some social justice warrior resume came across my desk, I gotta tell ya, I would have some hesitations, and that's going to happen.
It's going to happen.
So the real prestige, the real revolution, the real influence, is out here on the internet.
All that stuff.
They own it.
And the only great thing about letting social justice warriors own stuff is that by the time they have it, it's usually pretty worthless.
Partly because they have it, and partly because society has moved on to bigger and better things.
And wouldn't you love to have the challenge of the free market?
Of trying to see if you could find a way to get people interested and excited about what you're doing in the free market?
I mean, to give them value in the free market?
To give them value in a challenging topic that's hard to explain?
Won't you want to bend your imagination and your energies and your will to Get people excited about what you're doing when you can't offer them something, when you can't bribe them with a degree?
I've been reading some Heidegger.
Lord help me.
I'll keep this brief.
Oh, mama!
I've been reading some Heidegger.
And, uh...
My God.
Mein Gott in Himmel!
Okay, so he was a Nazi.
He joined in 1933.
He didn't quit till 1945, which was of course the end of the Second World War.
And until his death in the 1970s, he never ever disavowed his Nazi past.
Just amazing.
He died in 1976.
Never expressed a word of moral condemnation of himself as a Nazi, of the Nazis, of the Holocaust.
Now this guy is called You could say along with, I don't know, one or two other people.
One of the most, if not the most influential 20th century philosopher.
And God, he's terrible.
I know, I'm going to get flack for this.
I don't care.
He's terrible.
Being in time.
Written, I think it was in the first quarter of the 20th century or somewhere around that.
Here we go.
Here's a sentence.
Imagine me saying this in my show.
What is decisive is not to get out of the circle, but to come into it the right way.
If the circle is hidden, a positive possibility of the most primordial kind of knowing.
To be sure, we genuinely take hold of this possibility only well when, in our interpretation, we have understood that our first, last, and constant task is never to allow our forehaving, foresight, and foreconception to be presented to us by fancies and popular conceptions.
But rather to make the scientific theme secure by working out these four structures in terms of the things themselves.
Yeah.
I'll get right on that, Marty.
I'm going to just...
Oh, here we go.
He also makes up his own words.
He's got one called design.
Design is ontically distinguished by the fact that in its very being, that being is an issue for it.
Okay.
Thanks.
I'll be sure to take that into my next moral dilemma so that it's all clear to me now.
What is the mode of being of that being in which the world constitutes itself?
I don't know.
Can I get some pie a la mode?
You pretentious German douchebag!
You government worker!
You non-market-facing chair-sitting mother...
His theory of being!
Being irrelevant!
Remember?
Inconsequentiality.
It's all we demand of you.
Sound smart so that dumb people think you know something, and make sure that philosophy is really abstracted and self-referencing and navel-gazing to the point when no one thinks it has anything to do with reality whatsoever.
This guy, one of the most famous philosophers of the 20th century, was facing the collapse of his society through overspending in the Weimar Republic, a massive depression, the rise of Hitler, The First World War,
which was one of the great decimating events of the 20th century, you'd think that a philosopher facing these kinds of challenges and problems might have some important things to say, might have some important things to do.
I think that he would.
I mean, I'm facing less catastrophic things, and I... I find it very important to say things that mean things to people.
You know what I'm not saying?
This is from Being In Time.
The question of being aims at ascertaining the a priori conditions, not only for the possibility of the sciences, which examine beings as beings of such and such a type, and in doing so, already operate with an understanding of being, but also for the possibility of these ontologies themselves, which are prior to the ontical sciences and which provide their foundations.
Basically, all ontology, no matter how rich and firmly compacted a system of categories it has at its disposal, remains blind and perverted from its own most aim.
If it has not first adequately clarified the meaning of being and conceived this clarification as its fundamental task.
Word salad!
Thank you for not saving Western civilization, but instead contributing to the kind of mental chaos that allows the Nazis and their brute force ideologies to take over.
Good job, Marty.
May you rot in hell forever.
Don't be one of those guys.
If you have any choice.
And you do, right?
Okay, that's the end of my rant.
Okay, yeah, I think that about sums it up.
That's very useful to hear.
Thank you, Stefan.
You're very welcome.
Will you let us know what you decide?
So that I can show up at your house at 3 o'clock in the morning and mark you, should you decide wrongly.
Okay, brilliant.
Thanks, man.
Thanks, Mike.
Alright, thank you, Luke.
I never know whether people are just like I don't want to listen to any more.
Or whether they've actually been convinced of something.
My brain was starting to rebel as you were reading those quotes.
That I can tell you.
I hate these guys so much.
I really do.
I mean, I can't tell you.
You have the responsibility as a philosopher to protect your society from the brutes and the monsters in its midst, not pave the way and invite them in and give them jetpacks and power.
Anyway, we'll get to that when I get to the presentation.
Okay, next caller!
Alright, well up next is Samuel.
He writes in and says, I'm 37, born and raised in the Midwest.
My daughter was born in the United States in March of 2012 and went back to Brazil with her Brazilian mother that summer.
I moved there shortly thereafter and the three of us returned to the United States this past May.
My daughter's mother is here illegally.
We are both ardent Trump supporters, even though a Clinton presidency would remove the risk of deportation, while a Trump presidency could exacerbate that risk.
We're focusing on the much bigger picture, however, and I was wondering if you could discuss how our lives might unfold under each administration, assuming each candidate were to succeed with their vision for dealing with immigration in America.
I think it might help other families facing this risk to walk themselves through a potential Clinton America and a potential Trump America Before assuming they'd be better off with Clinton.
That's from Samuel.
Right.
Throw me the challenging questions.
I like it.
Let's personalize these policies, right?
I mean, that's what it is for you, right?
I mean, it's very personal.
It is very personal, and I think, you know, it's that way for a lot of people.
I mean, Clinton seems to be focusing a lot on the feels as opposed to the thinks.
I mean, you've been giving a lot of reason and evidence for a lot of these things, and, you know, that's Maybe done whatever it can.
So now it's focused on feeling and the sky is falling and things are going to fall apart either way.
Clinton suggested at one of our rallies that this might be the last election if we elect Trump.
It's the last election if we render Hillary.
If you put Hillary into power, it's the last election.
Just because she's going to legalize so many illegal immigrants and bring in so many third-world immigrants, there's going to be no chance for anyone to vote Republican.
It's going to be a one-party state.
That means they'll be the pretense of elections.
Oh, look, the Republicans only got...
20%!
Well, you know, we had an election, but it's not going to be a real election.
This is the last real election.
If this is Hillary's election, there are no more elections.
You know, there were elections in Russia.
It's just that Stalin got 99% of the vote and 1% of the people went missing.
Yeah, and that's kind of two things that I thought about.
What's the worst possible scenario in In a Trump presidency, and that's what some people have been asking about.
Oh, the jackboots are going to come and drag you guys out of here and throw you back down to Brazil.
But you don't like Brazil, right?
Not compared to America.
Well, that's the thing.
If Clinton gets elected, I think we're all going to be living in Brazil if we're lucky, not Venezuela.
Number one.
And that's if we're not all consumed by some sort of wicked nuclear hellfire.
Yeah, there's an old song.
When downtown came uptown for me.
Well, when down south comes up north for you.
Yeah, I mean, if you get all of these third world people coming into your country, you end up with a third world country.
Again, there's no magic soil.
They don't touch the soil and get all the benefits of...
Western European, Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian history, philosophy.
I mean, it's just...
So, if you don't want to live in Brazil, then your choice, I think, is pretty clear.
Now, it's going to have some challenges for you as a family, but those challenges are not solved by voting for Hillary.
I'm not saying you're going to, right?
But your challenges are not going to be solved.
They're going to be inescapable.
Like, if Trump gets in...
And does something about this illegal...
I'd say illegal immigrants, but they're just...
It's illegal potential voting blocs, and sometimes real voting blocs for the Democrats.
This ballot stuffing with human beings, which is pretty vile.
They don't care about these people.
They only care about the votes.
And so if you don't want to live in Brazil, then the personal challenges of your family with whatever happens under the Trump administration, well...
It's your best shot, in my humble opinion.
Because your only other option is to take the short-term gain of maybe Hillary gets in and gives you all citizenship, but she ain't just going to be giving your wife citizenship.
She could be giving 20 million people citizenship.
She could be giving 30 million people citizenship.
Then what?
Then what?
I think when she's talking about doing it in 100 days, making the commitment or whatever it is in the first 100 days.
God almighty!
Can you imagine?
Can you imagine what is going to happen?
What is going to happen to the budget?
All these people.
Well, in the economy in general, the Trump presidency could help us in so many ways, in particular with the economy.
I'm an entrepreneur.
I Very lucky I was able to go down to Brazil and just keep doing the work that I was doing.
Otherwise, I might have been separated from my family for a long time.
But you know, that would be a lot easier if we had some freaking jobs to fall back on.
And you might have felt this way too early on when you started out and thinking, well, gee whiz, if there were stuff out there even For $10 or $12 an hour, I could go pick some lettuce and pay my bills.
And there's this old canard that these immigrants do jobs that only Americans don't want to do.
And that's such a lie and a manipulation of reality.
Because the truth is that immigrants do jobs that Americans won't do for those wages.
I would be more than happy to go and pick lettuce to feed my family if I could actually make enough to feed my family.
Oh no, but I'm sorry to interrupt you, but it's a little more than that.
Americans won't do the jobs for those wages because those wages don't have the purchasing power they used to have.
My very first job, did I get paid?
I think it was $2.45 an hour.
It was $2.45 an hour.
Now, back then, you could buy a candy bar for $0.10.
Right?
So, it was 24.5 candy bars.
Now, candy bars cost about $1.
So, just in terms of candy bar parity, if somebody offered some teenager a job for $2.45, Now, no.
We won't take it, right?
Somebody offers a teenager a job for $24.50, which measured by candy bars, the way it goes, yeah.
You could get...
I remember my brother and I going to McDonald's with $2 and leaving there stuffed to the gills with change in their pockets.
It's back when a Big Mac was $0.35.
And this isn't that long ago.
I'm not that old, right?
Right.
And...
So 35 cents, 40 cents, whatever it was, you can get a Big Mac.
I was just telling my daughter the other day, when I was in my late teens, there was this pizza place at the Don Mills Mall.
The pizza place is long gone.
The Don Mills Mall, I think, is long gone now, too.
But, yeah, I could go over, and I could have a dollar, and I could have a lunch, because a big slice of pizza was 75 cents, and a pop was a quarter.
And so if you look at this sort of 10 to 1 or whatever it is, 8 to 1, the problem is not the wages.
The problem is the purchasing power.
The purchasing power of the money has just been hideously diluted because of debt and money printing and borrowing, all the usual fiat money garbage that repetitively takes down civilizations like a guillotined metronome of economic doom, at least until now, until the internet, until we can get the message out.
It's not that they wouldn't do those jobs for those wages.
It's just that those wages have been driven down so much by dilution of the money supply and other things.
While, of course, the costs have been going up.
You know, why is there Obamacare?
Because you can't get as many illegal immigrants into the country, which is going to be your future, dangle the carrot of citizenship in front of them, voting base for the Democrats.
You can't get them to come in as quickly as you want them to.
You can't get the low-wage workers coming in as quickly as you want them to if they've got to pay $20,000 a year for a family of four for their health insurance.
Because if you make $10 an hour, that's $20,000 a year, double it, add some zeros.
Your whole wage is going just for your health care insurance.
Just in case you want food and shelter and other things, you can't do it.
So they had to have Obamacare because...
I love how they think it's working because we're subsidizing it.
Nope.
I'm a good athlete because I have a jetpack.
Nope.
No, you're not.
So I just, sorry to interrupt with all of that, but I mean, that's only going to escalate.
I mean, there are tons of Americans who want those jobs.
I mean, what about teenagers?
What about kids who are 13?
I mean, they love to get those jobs.
Like homegrown American teenagers love to get those jobs.
Well, Americans are key there, too.
I know down in Brazil, and this is a cultural thing, they don't have the same kind of work ethic.
So if you try to put a 13-year-old to work or make our daughter do chores or whatever, I mean, that's really frowned upon.
So I don't know.
I see kind of a shift culturally where we're not...
Teaching those kind of values and work ethic to our kids.
You mentioned Obamacare.
Did you hear what Mark Cuban said about Obamacare today?
He said that it's the biggest startup and Trump just doesn't understand it.
Who said that?
Mark Cuban.
Oh.
He called it like a great startup.
And I just thought...
That's the...
I don't know.
I thought...
That's the giant jawbone guy who looks a little bit like Baymax out of Big Hero 6.
I didn't know where a startup could force you with government coercion to purchase their products.
I missed that whole thing.
I got a startup going right now.
I'm going to sign up for that.
Everybody in America is obligated to buy what I'm selling.
Yeah.
You know, if you have to force someone to date you, that's called kidnapping.
If you have to force someone to have sex with you, that's called rape.
And if you have to force someone to buy your product, I guess Mark Cuban calls that entrepreneurship.
Oh, dear.
Well, I guess his last name is the essence of his political philosophy.
So, all right.
So, I mean, what's your mother-in-law's life like?
Being...
I mean, what's living in the shadows?
Is she like a mushroom?
I mean, what is it like for her?
No, it's not.
I mean, first of all, it's the difference between being in the Midwest and being in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which is a very dangerous city.
She doesn't have a driver's license, so she can't get around, but she's never had a driver's license or a car, so she's kind of learning the bus system and stuff like that.
But I assume she stays on the shadowy part of the bus.
I'm just kidding.
Sorry, go on.
No, I mean, I'm talking to you, and I'm sharing emails, and of course people are marching in the street holding up signs, you know, we're illegal and we demand free health care and stuff like that.
But we're not trying to take advantage of anything.
I mean, I think on the right and conservatives, I mean, we've all said for a long time, we never blame the immigrants for this.
And a lot of people said, and I've said for the past decade, I mean, if I were in this situation, I'd do the same thing.
I'm sorry, I don't know what you're talking about.
If you were in which situation?
In Mexico or in Central America and we had an opportunity to sneak into the U.S., we'd probably take it.
I mean, given the circumstances, we'd probably do, a lot of people would do the same thing.
We don't blame these immigrants.
We don't blame the illegal immigrants, is what I'm trying to say, as much as we blame the government policies and that sort of thing.
I mean, and the left plays on these sympathies that we have.
Donald Trump wasn't calling all these people racist or calling all Mexicans rapists, for example.
Some of them are good people.
But it's a difficult situation because when we were in Brazil, we wanted to do this legally.
I mean, that's one of the reasons that we were there for four years.
And if you call an immigration attorney, They didn't know how to help you with that.
They didn't know what to do.
Oh, to move from Brazil to the U.S.? Well, yeah, to move from anywhere to the U.S. legally, what they would tell you is, get a tourist visa, get a student visa, sneak across the border, do something to get here, and then we'll help you change your status.
That's sort of the system.
So that was really disheartening and frustrating.
Nobody could help us do that legally.
That just wasn't how it was done.
Which is interesting because that's sort of how the entire country of Brazil works.
That's how everything in South America works.
That's how dysfunctional societies work in general.
Which is the basic idea that it's easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission.
Right.
That's the bottom line.
So, I mean, we're not here.
I don't feel the need to apologize for that.
We're more than willing to move back to Brazil if that's what fixing our country means.
And I guess if Donald Trump were to get elected and be 100% successful with Everything that he said on the campaign trail, you know, he's going to build a wall, he's going to round up all these people, and he's going to ship them out.
Well, okay, first he's going to build the wall, then he's going to focus on those illegal immigrants that are committing other crimes and doing other things that hurt Americans, and maybe eventually he gets around to people like my I mean,
if he gets that far into getting illegal immigrants out of the country, great.
You have no idea how happy that would make me as an American because I believe that we'd go to Brazil And, you know, there would be sort of this shining city on the hill then that the whole world has been looking up to for so long that just it might not be there anymore.
And that's really, that scares us a lot more than having to go back to Brazil, which isn't likely to happen.
I mean, it's very unlikely that Trump Would end up getting that far into his immigration policies, where he's knocking down our door to, you know, kick out somebody who isn't causing any problems for anybody.
So, and, you know, Brazil is, if that's our future, people gotta know, my Her mother down in Brazil, and these are academics, they have a lot of status, they're educated, very well to do.
They're not getting their pension payments right now because Brazil is out of money.
They don't have money.
So their checks just aren't showing up.
And, you know, they're getting robbed in the street.
The police station and their Village has to get toilet paper from the public because they don't have any funds.
You call 911 and it doesn't go anywhere.
You get a busy signal.
It's brutal.
It's really brutal.
And I hear so many people saying, well, it can't happen to us.
It's not going to happen to us.
You know, that's Yeah, well, that's a delusion.
It absolutely will happen.
There's no question of that.
I mean, everybody thinks they're not going to be the one it's going to happen to.
Every civilization thinks they're never going to fall.
I mean, it's absolutely going to happen.
People need to sort of accept and understand that.
And if they don't want to accept and understand that, that's fine.
It doesn't change a damn thing, though.
No, no.
And I can't figure out if people really don't believe that it's going to happen or if they've just given up And they feel like, well, I'm just...
I'm not going to spend my last little bit here polishing the brass and the Titanic.
I'm going to have some fun and try to kick this...
No, they're taking a risk.
Yeah.
No, listen, listen.
Let me explain it to you.
Just sort of be annoying and we'll get back to the Brazil thing.
But let me sort of explain it to you biologically.
So if you expend too much energy as an organism, you are going to fail in the long run, right?
If it takes, like I said, two cheaters...
And one of them has to expend twice the number of calories as the one next to him to bring down the gazelle.
Well, the one that has to expend twice the calories is going to fail in the long run, evolutionarily speaking, right?
Maybe they're not the same cheetahs, but two competitive animals, right?
So you don't want to expend too much energy to achieve your goals.
At the same time, so you don't want to be...
Working too hard, because that means you need more calories, means you've got to hunt more, which is risky, and blah blah blah, right?
And at the same time, if you expend too few calories, in other words, you say, oh, I don't really feel like running out for a gazelle today because I don't feel that energetic.
Well, if you do that too much, then you don't end up with enough energy to actually pursue the gazelle, right?
So you don't want to expend too much energy, and you don't want to expend too little energy.
Now, so all organisms expend the minimum amount of energy To get what they want.
And the welfare state and all of this really screws all of that up.
I've been into that before.
But the people who are like, the cross your fingers and hope people, I can totally understand it.
It's a perfectly valid evolutionary strategy to not want to rock the boat, to not want to challenge your friends, your family, or whoever, write about truth, virtue, reason, politics, reality.
Because if you end up I don't know, like in Florida, they have all these preparations for hurricanes, right?
You've got to board up the windows and all this kind of crazy stuff, right?
Get rid of everything that's broke.
But you don't do that up here in Canada because we don't get any hurricanes, really.
So if I did all of that every night, I'd be wasting a huge amount of time.
It would be hugely inefficient.
But in Florida, if I didn't do that, it would be bad because there'd be blown glass all over the place and stuff would break and all that.
So rain would get in, ruin the house.
So...
The people who are like, oh, don't fret.
It's going to blow over.
It's a perfectly valid evolutionary strategy.
It's like the preppers, right?
The people who say, well, you've got to have some food in your basement.
You've got to have a generator.
You've got to have whatever, right?
All the stuff you need in case food supplies get.
Well, if none of that comes to pass, then those people have wasted their time and their money.
That's bad, from an evolutionary standpoint, to waste time and money.
If, on the other hand, there is an interruption in the food supply, then the people who didn't prepare are going to have a pretty bad time.
And this is something that constantly happens in human societies.
The people who store too much food for the winter, in a cold climate, like where there's winter, if you store too much food for the winter, You've wasted a lot of energy in the summer, and some of your food's going to go bad, and it's been a big waste.
If you haven't stored enough food for the winter, well, it's much worse, of course.
Better to have a little too much than a little too little.
And so there's this constant calibration in the big picture, long-term view.
And there's among the Jews and other persecuted groups in Nazi Germany, right?
There's an old saying among the Jews.
I don't know if it's a saying.
It's more of an idea.
Which is, oh, you call me paranoid?
Well, it was the paranoid Jews who survived.
Yeah.
Because they got out.
They went to America, right?
They got out of Nazi Germany.
Because Germans could leave Nazi Germany right up until the outbreak of the Second World War.
But it was all the Jews who were like, oh, he doesn't really mean it.
Mein Kampf was just a bit of propaganda.
It's going to blow over.
It's going to be fine.
It's going to readjust.
They ended up in the camps, and we all know that story.
So...
Whereas the people who, you know, if you pick up and leave and flee to a new country, which is time-consuming and expensive and difficult and maybe you don't speak English and nothing bad, like if it had all blown over, then there's this level of effort and energy that people are willing to expend.
So a lot of people are saying, Oh, you know, nothing's really, there's a big national debt, and the economy's slowing down, and it's going to be fine.
It's going to turn around.
Well, I understand where they're coming from.
I don't agree with them, right?
I understand where they're coming from.
And then what happens is, the people who weren't prepared when social dislocations hit, the people who aren't prepared suffer enormously.
And what happens then Is that for a generation or two, people are like, whoa, you better stay prepared.
Like when I was a kid, I was in Boy Scouts.
And what did they say?
It was a motto of Boy Scouts.
Be prepared.
All these badges.
That's the motto.
Be prepared.
And at the same time, there are other cultures, you know, I'm thinking sort of Caribbean cultures or whatever.
They just sort of make fun of the guy who's working all the time.
Hey, you've got to learn to relax.
You've got to chill.
All that sort of stuff, right?
And so this...
Back and forth, it just happens in society.
There's always a risk.
The people who don't store up food for the winter, well, maybe they'll hunt and it'll be fine for the winter, in which case it was a huge amount of time, wasted time and effort to store things up for the winter, or maybe it won't.
Like, I don't know if you ever, you're probably not old enough, but I guess if you're a little older than me, I guess about 10 years older than me, maybe 15 years older than me, then your parents grew up in the Depression.
Now, people who grew up in the Depression Man, they hung on to their money.
Man, they didn't squander their money.
Because that had a huge impact on them.
The people who grew up in the 50s and 60s, when money seemed infinite and eternally abundant because they just started cranking up the printing presses, went off the gold standard, I guess in the 30s and then in 71 under Nixon, they just printed all the money there.
So this is the boomers.
They grew up in a time of plenty and they just don't have that sense of restraint.
And I'm sorry for this long thing, but I kind of want people to understand this.
It's not a moral thing.
It's just an evolutionary thing.
That sometimes the cautious people are right, in which case caution gets elevated as a value for a generation or two.
And sometimes the people who aren't cautious are right, in which case...
I don't know what's the opposite of caution.
I mean, just relaxing and enjoying things is the rule for the next generation or two.
So...
I mean, people, they can evaluate the risk and take their own chances.
You know, I'll tell you this, though.
It ain't planned for the winterer.
They're not taking my food.
I don't like to interfere with these big primordial forces.
But any more than I'll ask them for theirs if I turn out to be wrong.
Anyway, sorry for that.
I just wanted to sort of mention that it's important for people to understand.
So...
Alright, so your daughter is an anchor baby, is that right?
I mean, yeah, you could call her that.
I don't know how you distinguish between, you know, in a legal sense, for example, somebody coming over for the express purpose of dropping a baby so that she's a citizen.
Her mother didn't do that.
She was a graduate student, a legitimate graduate student.
She got a master's degree.
From the University of Iowa and happened to get pregnant and have a baby while she was going through that program.
I'm sorry, just a couple of questions.
What did she get her degree in?
She was going for her MFA, Master's in Fine Arts.
She's a design student.
So she does...
And then what?
She means she happened to get pregnant.
What does that mean?
Well, I mean, she wasn't...
She didn't do it for the express purpose of having a baby.
No, no, no.
18 different forms of birth control.
And I'm sorry to have these same conversations.
No, we had...
You don't have to do that with me.
We had a baby.
We chose to have a baby.
That's what we...
Okay, so don't tell me it happened.
No, no, I... She happened to get pregnant.
If you're trying to have a baby, you know, come on.
So why would she be going to take all this education and then have a baby?
I don't quite understand.
It seems weird.
Because, you know, that's someone else's place she took in that course that could have actually been out there contributing to the economy.
So she took someone's place in the course and then she had a baby?
Why?
Well, that's what we decided to do.
I know that's what you decided to do.
And I'm sorry to be a hotass, but I'm genuinely curious.
We understand from the outside, yeah, I'm doing a master's.
I'm taking up all these educational resources.
It's costing society a lot of money.
Hey, I think I'm just going to have a baby.
Well, no, actually, we paid for that out of pocket.
I mean, I know it's probably subsidized.
I don't know to what extent with her coming from...
Well, but you displaced someone, right?
There was one less person in the course.
Because your wife is there, right?
Sure.
Okay.
Look, I'm just...
This is not a government thing.
It's just, to me, it's kind of an annoyance.
Like, I mean, if you want to have kids when you're young, I think that's great.
You know, I think that's the time to have them.
You know, you've got lots of energy.
You can stay up all night.
You know, you bounce back from things faster.
I think having kids when you're younger is a good thing.
But I just can't quite understand why, and this is not just your wife.
This is a lot of women.
I can't figure out for the life of me why women go through all this education and then have babies.
What a massive waste of social resources and what a massive waste of potential for other people.
Like, I mean, if you want to have the babies, have the babies and then get educated when they get older.
But by the time your kids are grown, is she working?
Yeah, she does a lot of stuff for our businesses.
Like I said, we're entrepreneurs, so she does a lot with our websites that we're developing and designing our marketing material and stuff like that.
We're self-employed.
And she doesn't need a monstrous to do that.
I mean, you can do that with a template, right?
Yeah, sure.
So I don't know what sort of value there was in there.
And just to be honest with you, I have a degree in sociology, probably completely worthless.
Uh, I understand that.
I did start listening to you, uh, you know, since a few years ago.
Um, so...
Oh, yeah, no, I'm not, I'm not, I'm just pointing this out more for the benefit of everyone else.
It's just, it's just annoying, you know, like, as a taxpayer, I mean, I'm not in America, but as a taxpayer, just, it bothers me when it's like, oh, yeah, you know, I went and got a Mastro's and then I had a baby, and it's like, well, what's the point of all that?
You don't need a Mastro's to have a baby.
So, um...
Yeah, and that's probably more of a problem with the whole forcing you to pay taxes so that you have to subsidize our bad decisions because we happen to change our mind about something.
Oh yeah, if it was your savings and your money.
We're going to college and I don't want to waste the taxpayer dollars so we're not going to have kids even though I met somebody that I want to have kids with.
She changed her mind, I guess, is the best way to put it.
She wasn't planning on having kids, and then she met me, and things changed.
Good for you.
I think so.
I'm not begrudging your point.
I think we need...
Push back on that because people should...
You know, if your kids grow up, hopefully you'll say to your daughters...
Exactly, exactly.
You know, there's really little point getting a degree and then staying home for five or ten years with kids.
I mean, then your degree is useless and it's just a huge waste of time and money and expensive for society and all that.
So, anyway...
Yeah, and that's...
So, sorry to interrupt, but I just want to get sort of the timeline here.
So, you met your wife while she was studying at the university?
Correct.
Right, okay.
And then you got married relatively quickly?
Yes.
Well, we're actually not legally married yet, right now.
How long have you been together?
Hence why she's an illegal immigrant.
We've been together about, our daughter's four, so about five years-ish, five-ish years.
Why didn't you get married if that solves the immigration issue?
It could solve the immigration issue.
No, in the past, why didn't you get married?
I honestly, I don't know how to answer that question.
Oh, come on.
You must have thought about it.
I mean, you've got an immigration issue.
Marriage solves that immigration issue, doesn't it?
Maybe.
There's other thing with taxes and property and other stuff.
If it wasn't for the government, Stefan...
I would know what the hell was going on with that, to be honest with you.
The property here and taxes and businesses and everything else.
I'm scared to death of even dealing with it.
I'm sorry.
I don't understand.
Are you saying your taxes would be higher if you were married?
Well, yeah.
There is a marriage penalty.
I have businesses.
I have properties.
There's Tax bills from before while I was setting up my businesses and then we moved to Brazil.
We were trying to use that to facilitate coming to the U.S. legally.
But as I mentioned, that was something that was actually discouraged by attorneys that we talked to.
They said that that would just take way too long.
Okay, I get it.
You want to keep your tax bill as low as possible, right?
That's part of it.
There's property moves that I want to make to move that around before we get married because there's other implications.
I don't even know what to make of all that stuff.
But your wife obviously is consuming public services, right?
Not really, no.
No?
Roads?
Water?
Electricity?
I mean, stuff that government subsidizes, stuff that government builds and all that?
Sure, I mean, we pay for that.
I mean, there's no welfare or anything like that.
Well, she doesn't pay for it, does she?
I do.
No, no, so don't say we, because she's not paying taxes if she's not legal, right?
Well, she wouldn't be paying taxes anyway.
She's not working.
She doesn't have a job.
No, I thought you said she was working.
She works for me.
She works for the business.
She's not an employee.
She does stuff for the business.
Oh, like for free?
Sure.
Okay, okay.
I got it.
I got it.
Okay, so what does she do for healthcare?
Does she get checkups?
She actually doesn't have any.
She doesn't have any right now.
So she hasn't seen a doctor in like four years?
No, no, no.
We just moved back to the U.S. in May, so we've only been here for a few months.
Got it, got it.
And your mother-in-law is also with you, is that right?
No, no.
It's just my daughter and her mother.
Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry.
Okay, got it.
Okay, I'm sorry about that.
I sometimes get the configure.
I have to, like, get little chess pieces to get these things straight in my head.
All right.
All right, okay.
Well, you know, get married.
I really appreciated the presentation that you made on that really big survey about sex and the decisions that people make and how family influences that and all of that.
That's something that was very enlightening and refreshing.
Kind of let me know that a lot of my natural fatherly instincts seem to be I'm more healthy than a lot of what society's pushing as far as progressive sexual attitudes are concerned.
I came from a broken home that was very, very dysfunctional.
We're doing much better than I ever did, which of course isn't saying much.
Not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but Yeah, so look, you have an option that I guess a lot of people don't have.
Now, I don't know if your wife's in the country illegally, what happens if you get married and she's been there illegally?
I don't know.
I'm no lawyer.
I don't know any about these sorts of things.
But you do have an out insofar as even if you get married in Brazil, or you go back to Brazil, get married, right, she'll still be able to come to – you'll still be able to come back to America.
You don't lose your citizenship, and she would then become a citizen through marriage to you, right?
So you have an option, which, you know, obviously isn't available to a lot of people where maybe both the parents are illegal and so on.
So you have that choice.
That's true.
It's not as dire as some people's situation.
I guess the most important thing and what I've been hearing a lot as far as a selection, and there's just so many things that are way more important than, you know, my little family unit here.
As you've been saying in your shows, I mean, the fate of Western civilization, the fate of Western civilization, and it doesn't sound like hyperbole with everything that we're doing.
No, it's not.
These are statistical facts.
It's pretty crazy.
So I thought it would be important, and I've been I'm writing a lot about this, but I don't have much of a platform, which is why I reached out to your show to suggest maybe hearing from somebody that's in this situation and isn't afraid of Donald Trump's secret SS Nazi people knocking down my door and dragging us off in handcuffs or something.
I don't think that.
He's not talked about dragging people from their homes.
That's sort of the narrative.
You have to just change the incentives.
That's all.
I mean, the left has been laying the breadcrumbs across the border for decades now.
And a lot of people, of course, are coming into America because they believe that the Democrats are going to give them citizenship.
Why?
Because the Democrats keep promising to give them citizenship.
And because the Republicans do as well.
And because Ronald Reagan did in In California, which is how Mexico took back California from America.
If you change the incentives, you change the behavior.
So, yeah, I mean, I appreciate you calling in, and I'm sorry that this whole thing is such a mess.
I mean, this is not, of course, what we want for our lives.
We don't want to have these kinds of difficult choices.
But I certainly admire your resolution in saying, okay, well, maybe Hillary would legalize my wife, but then what kind of country would we end up with for our daughter to grow up in?
That is very wise thinking and very...
A very deferral of gratification-based, and I respect and I admire that.
And you do, of course, have the option of pulling out the pin on the ring.
Just get yourselves married, and that will make things a lot easier.
But I certainly appreciate you calling in and giving us a glimpse into these kinds of decisions, which are not easy in many ways.
So thanks very much.
I appreciate your call.
Let's move on to the next caller.
Absolutely, Stefan.
Thank you, sir.
Thank you.
Alright, up next we have Sarah.
Sarah wrote in and said, I'm a woman who works in the fashion industry who was red-pilled over a year ago.
The after-effects have been hard on me socially.
My work, city, and gender are overwhelmingly liberal, and I can't find people who share my views.
I want to come out of the political closet for Donald Trump in the hopes of aligning with others, but do not want to risk my business and reputation because a few fashionable elite don't agree.
How do I exist and thrive with this new mindset?
That's from Sarah.
Hey, Sarah.
How's it going?
Hi, Stefan.
Thanks for...
I've got to get just something off my brain when we start.
Okay.
It's terrible.
You ever see the movie Leaving Las Vegas?
Of course.
I love that movie.
Yeah, well, so I got the soundtrack just because I was...
I still am a little bit, but I used to be a big Sting fan, and Sting sang some lovely songs on that soundtrack.
But the only thing I remember, every time I hear this name...
Elizabeth Shue plays the prostitute, and I'm not trying to align her with you in any way, but...
What's your name?
Sarah, with an A. S-A-R-A, Sarah.
That's how she said it.
And I just always...
It's really...
It's messed up the name for me, and I'm sorry for that, but I just wanted to get that off my chest before we continue.
It's a great movie.
Red pills in the fashion industry.
What are you, crazy?
You should stay away from all those red pills.
There's no blue pills in the fashion industry as far as they clash.
What?
It's so much information, too.
I'm on system overload, so...
What happened a year ago?
It wasn't me, was it?
No.
Well, you...
It came after, actually, but it was Trump.
I'm not usually associated with fashion in any way, shape, or form, so I'd be really confused if it was me.
So, okay, so was it Trump?
Trump did it to you?
Well, it was actually a combination of Trump and then the media, and not seeing what he said in his speeches reflected in the media, and that just...
Completely confused me and it caused me to look deeper into what was going on and searching for other voices and then I found Milo, I found Cernovich and I found you and it was just like this massive snowball, a massive red pill.
I got a great idea.
If you go to the Hillary Clinton campaign and you say to them that Donald Trump Red-pilled you without your permission?
You are getting a press conference.
You are getting a book deal.
Gloria, all reds got to move into your loft.
Anyway, sorry.
Wow.
Yeah, I think he's had an effect for a lot of people.
He is like shaking people out of their hypnosis, right?
I mean, it's kind of like a hypnosis before you get this kind of information, right?
I like how you also, you went down like a staircase of declining hairdos from Milo to Mike Cernovich to me.
After me, I don't know, what is it, a dinosaur egg?
A bowling ball?
I don't know.
All right.
And do you remember, what was the biggest thing that was like the whoa moment, the Keanu Reeves moment for you?
It was just the not seeing what he said, because I watched all his speeches on YouTube, which I just found out tonight that the YouTube station that plays all of his speeches was censored by YouTube, which is just unbelievable.
What do you mean?
It was now or in the past?
Just today, they stopped allowing them to stream, live stream.
So now they can't live stream his speeches.
And that's how I've been getting all my information because it's the source.
Really?
YouTube won't allow Donald Trump to live stream his speeches anymore?
This is right-side broadcasting.
Who's the primary streamer for a lot of the Donald Trump events.
And this just happened today, just came down.
Apparently they're on the line with someone from YouTube to try and square it away.
But they don't have any community strikes or anything like that.
Just for whatever reason, their live streaming has been disabled.
And they don't know why.
Which, considering their streaming deal was doing tens of thousands of live viewers for each Trump speech, that's a bit questionable.
Right.
It's just so convenient.
But don't they know that it's really bad to interfere with an election this close?
I mean, the Dems are really mad at Comey for this.
And I'm not saying it's the Dems, but that seems a bit odd.
Yeah, it's a bit odd.
And it certainly was something that you think would be fixed if it was just like a little technical thing.
You think it would be fixed real quick.
Or they'd give it, you know, anyway.
Wow, that's pretty bad.
So it was actually that station that I would constantly be watching his speeches on, and so I would get it from start to finish, everything he said right as if I was there.
Right, and that's your problem.
Yeah.
Yeah, your problem is that you did not allow CNN to interpret what Trump said for you.
Right.
That's a problem, because if you actually get the facts and get the source, rather than running it through the leftist filter, because then what happens is you see what Trump said, and then you hear what's reported, and it's like, what?
These things don't match at all!
Yeah, so it was just, yeah, incredibly frustrating.
And then to have everyone I work with and everyone in this fashion bubble just completely not thinking the way I'm thinking, it's just really isolating.
And I don't know, it's just caused me to, yeah, it's been very isolating and hard to talk to people about it because I just don't want to Wreck my career, but it's a real...
Well, you're in a terrible trifecta, right?
Because, as you said, and I won't ask for details, but you said it's a trifecta.
You've got city, you've got gender, and you've got profession.
Yes.
And those three are like, it's like the laser.
It's not like a flashlight.
You've got this laser that can burn through conservative rock of these three things all focusing this anti-Trump mentality, right?
Yes.
Yeah.
And I'm just so frustrated.
Oh, sorry.
I just got it.
Sorry.
Something just popped up.
Yeah.
Are they back, Mike?
I'm sorry.
I just wanted to follow that up.
Just happened.
Just tweeted out two minutes ago.
Oh, great.
Ability to live stream to YouTube has been restored.
Resume live streaming tomorrow.
What a horrible day.
Thank you for the support.
Great.
Okay.
Sorry about that.
Since we were just talking about it, I wanted to clear that up.
And okay.
So how bad is it?
It's everywhere.
It's on Instagram.
It's on Facebook.
It's to the point where I don't even go on Facebook.
I'm not even advertising on Facebook.
Not because of that, but it's very hard to want to support these companies, too, or work with these people and companies that don't share views.
And I just don't know if I'm just being inflexible.
Oh, we'll get them.
Don't worry.
Don't worry, Sarah.
We'll get them.
We'll get them.
Don't worry.
I'm feeling really positive.
The big list of boycotts is going to be prepared.
And I'm crying as I'm going over this in my brain.
Obviously, you can imagine what a Vera Wang dress does for my figure.
But I'm willing to say no to it.
I'm willing to say no to ruffles.
Yeah.
I'm willing to say no to all of the leftist designers who support Hillary Clinton, unless they make ratty bachelor t-shirts, in which case I'll have to continue.
But this, no, seriously, the boycott thing, I'm dead serious about it in my own brain.
I'm going to sit down with people and we're going to say, okay, let's get a list.
This is stuff I'm never going to consume again.
And they can't ever win me back.
And it's sad because there are a lot of very talented people whose work I genuinely have enjoyed and appreciated over the years.
Sorry, not touching it.
You're not getting a penny.
Yeah, it's a shame.
And I feel like so much of what Trump has brought out in the creative industry is so edgy and so cool.
Like some of the artists, remember that art show that happened in New York that got shut down and And then they had to find a new location and I actually bought a piece from that show because to me this is the edge of creativity and it's so risky and people have their jobs on the line and that's what really makes it cool.
But at the same time I don't know whether I have the courage to To tackle that, and it just feels like being red pill requires so much courage that I don't feel...
But tackle what?
Sorry to interrupt, but what would it mean to tackle something?
You mean, would you like to come out as, if you are, I mean, openly pro-Trump and anti-Hillary in your work environment?
Yeah, well, I just want to be able to tackle.
But there's nothing to tackle.
That's the problem.
That's the problem.
What do you mean?
It's that, in my experience, people just vanish.
They don't engage with you.
Right.
So if you were to say, I'm pro-Trump and anti-Hillary, then they'd say, oh, that's sexist because you're using his last name and her first name.
But if you were to come out and say that, there'd be this eye-rolling.
People wouldn't sit you down and say, okay, listen, Sarah, I don't know where you're getting your information.
I'd love to hear your case, but I think you might be off the mark on this one.
And let me tell you why.
Here is a list of I'll get back to you on this.
She's got wonderful, wonderful achievements.
And as far as the list of things she's done wrong, morally questionable, potentially illegal, Well, that actually is...
My entire desk is that, right?
It's just made of paper, and it's big enough to be an entire desk.
Very small font, as you can imagine, in all the printouts.
But if they actually engaged with you and sat down, we should not be scared of disagreeing with the people in our lives.
No.
Because they should...
Look, if you're wrong, then they should sit you down and be decent and caring and honorable enough human beings to set you straight.
But they don't, right?
They don't, in general, maybe your experience has been different.
But there's like, oh, I can't believe, you can't really, no.
That's, oh, I don't even know why.
And then just leave, right?
It's like, okay, so this, like, what is that?
If I'm wrong, tell me I'm wrong.
But there's, tag, you're wrong, run away.
That's like this...
And then they spread, can you believe Sarah said that she was for that orange orangutan monstrosity?
Whatever it is, right?
And it's like, she must be racist.
She must be, whatever it is.
I don't know, right?
There is no engagement.
That's the frustrating thing.
It's just running away.
Or some crazy escalation where you have to run away.
Whatever it may be.
Paid protester at a Trump rally or something paid by the Dems.
And that's the thing, right?
If there was going to be a genuine debate, I don't think that would be so problematic for you, right?
No, it's coming from, you know, I own my own brand, so I'm fearful that if I side too much with Trump, then I'll lose customers because they're just like, I can't support someone who supports Trump and That's a good voice.
Yeah.
That's a good voice.
That's a good voice.
Thank you.
My favorite is still the black woman who called in to imitate.
You're a good boy.
Anyway, but that's second.
That's good.
That's good.
Yeah, because it's got just the right amount of prissy haughtiness with no facts, with no evidence.
Right, right.
Yeah, because if you said, listen, I support Trump and...
Or, you know, then they'd say, well, I don't, but why?
Why would you?
I mean, and if you say, well, X, Y, and Z, A, B, C, or whatever, and people are like, oh, I don't agree, and here's why.
Like, if you just have some sort of civilized discussion about things, then it would be okay, right?
That's not how it goes down when you're on the right.
No.
I mean, I've never heard of it where an actor gets boycotted because he's on the left.
Or an artist or whatever, right?
I mean, up here in Canada, artists almost exclusively have made this demonic deal with the state where the state gives them money and then they never criticize the state.
We need money for the arts.
Yeah, go buy the souls of the artists for your propaganda machines.
Good job.
Good job.
And then the last line of defense between tyranny and the people is destroyed.
Um...
So, I mean, I know that in the fashion industry, there's not as much.
I don't think there is as much of this government subsidy stuff, right?
No, not as much as the arts.
No, you're relying more on business.
Even though, to me, fashion is art.
And it's a lot more visible, and it's a lot more real, and it's a lot more palpable, and it's a lot more present than things in galleries on walls.
To me, fashion is art.
Definitely.
Definitely is.
You see it a little bit with runway shows.
They can be covered by the government.
But no, passion very much is about making the sales and what people want to buy.
And that's part of what I love about it is that there's a business side to it as well.
Technically, it's about gay men making women uncomfortable physically, but that's probably a topic for another time.
Oh yeah?
Try and get your shoes in this.
You can't get your feet in these shoes, mama.
Anyway.
So what do you think the worst case scenario would be for this stuff?
A loss of business.
Like you see people like Ken Burns.
Is that his name, Ken Burns?
What, the actor with the squeaky voice?
No, just the guy that was at the debate there.
I know it has nothing to do with the arts or fashion or creativity.
Ken Bone.
Yeah, Ken Bone.
Thank you.
There's a Ken Burns who's got a hard voice, right?
He's the fashion.
There's the fashion.
Just how the left really likes to destroy anyone that disagrees with them.
That's very scary for me.
And it just requires a lot of courage to stand up to this.
Right.
So, I just don't know whether it's worth it to even say anything and just, you know, I opened a Twitter account under, and have an avatar, don't show my face, and I can engage people, but it's just nice to be with people in person, you know, and talk about your views without Feeling like you'll be shut out.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, I can tell you some thoughts.
I've been giving this some thought today, so I can tell you some thoughts.
I don't know if I have any advice, but just some perspectives.
Okay.
So the first thing is that you are under absolutely no obligation to make a case for a political candidate at work.
Right?
I mean, you can if you want.
But not to the point where you destroy your life's dream of having your own fashion brand, right?
So, people will, for your whole life, your whole life, you know this, for their whole life, people will say teeth-grittingly incorrect things right there in front of you.
With full confidence, they will say jaw-droppingly wrong things.
And one of the secrets, I think, to Any kind of equanimity or peace of mind in this life is saying, people are going to be horribly wrong right there in front of me.
I'd rather they disrobe and hit themselves on the head with a 2x4, but they're not kind enough to do that, so instead they just say things that are egregiously incorrect right there in front of me.
And resisting the urge to correct people.
You know, trolls aren't just on the internet, right?
Also people in your life may do this as well.
So this is just one of the things, it's going to happen.
It's going to happen.
I mean, you have to learn to sort of tune it out.
You know, like background noise or tinnitus.
They've got to tune it out, right?
Because...
You know, you might be sitting there having a nice dinner with someone and the person next to you is just saying the most outlandishly ridiculous and wrong things.
You know, like music in an elevator.
Just tune it out, rise above it, right?
You can't spend the rest of your life trying to correct everyone in the world, right?
It's like that old joke.
I'll be right to bed, honey.
Sorry, someone's still wrong on the internet.
So that's number one.
Number two is, as you know from sales, right?
There are people who will buy from you no matter what.
Because they love your stuff.
Gotta have it, right?
There are people who will never buy from you no matter what, for whatever reason.
And then there are people in the middle.
And the people in the middle is where you have to spend your energies as an entrepreneur.
Because the people who are going to buy from you no matter what, you don't have to lift a finger, right?
And the people who aren't going to buy from you no matter what, why waste your energy?
So where you focus your energy is on the undecideds, the potentials, right?
So if you hear someone saying something vaguely intelligent about politics, they can be a pro-Hillary supporter.
Maybe they're saying something very intelligent and insightful.
They might just not have been exposed to different information.
You can test the waters, right?
Test the waters.
And by test the waters, I mean play dumb.
One of the great life lessons I got was a boss, very smart guy, people would come up with their big complicated plans and he'd say, no, no, no, no.
Explain it to me like I'm four years old.
Explain it to me like I have no idea what you're talking about.
And he would force people to break it down to something that made some kind of concrete sense.
And this is Socrates too.
Socrates spent his whole life thinking about truth and justice and virtue and equality and all these kinds of things.
And someone would come up and Socrates would play dumb.
I don't know what you mean.
Explain it to me more simply.
Pretend I don't know anything.
Pretend I'm four years old.
Whatever it is.
So you can play them.
And you can say, I don't understand all of the issues.
And that's a true statement.
There's no one alive who understands all the issues, right?
So I don't understand all the issues, right?
And if someone says, well, you know, I can't believe what Trump says about immigration.
You say, well, what is it that Trump says about immigration?
That's, oh, he's going to ban this and rapist that.
It's like, well, what I heard was that he said some of the people coming across the border are rapists, and statistically that seems true.
I don't think he said that all the Mexicans, right?
And if they're just like, no, he did, right?
Then, okay.
Then this is somebody who's programmed, and they're like a dangerous robot.
You don't reason with a dangerous robot.
And you have to be able to differentiate people who are alive and people who are robots.
Robot is neither alive nor dead, I guess.
It's animated, but not human.
And to me, humanity is not something, oh, you're a biped.
You're human, right?
No.
Human, to me, the root is humanity.
Do you have humanity?
Do you have empathy?
Do you have curiosity?
Do you have humility?
Are you willing to correct yourself when you're wrong?
Are you willing to have a conversation with people who disagree with you without...
Becoming abusive or unpleasant or whatever it is.
And it doesn't mean you can end up that way if somebody starts off that way.
You don't have to.
So you have to scan for humanity.
Scan for humanity.
And it's tough.
It's like the rebooted Battlestar Galactica with the growing orgasm spines and all that.
You have to find the humans among the robots.
In the 70s it was pretty obvious.
Tin cans on their heads.
But now it's more subtle.
And find the humans around you, find the people around you, and avoid the robots, the determinists, the people who have no self-knowledge, no insight into themselves, who don't have that observing ego, like the third eye that looks at yourself and says, how am I doing?
Doing the right thing, who is able to multitask like you're in a conversation, you know, is the other person even interested in what I'm saying?
No!
Just keep talking!
Well, I'm on to talk, but anyway.
So, scan for signs of humanity.
Scan for a soul.
Scan for the capacity to reason.
Scan for the capacity to accept evidence.
Scan for curiosity.
And you would no more argue with a human robot than you would with your toaster.
Scan for people who you will grant the glorious privilege of conversing with you, if they earn it, through being human, rather than just being programmed robots.
And I'm not saying hate the programmed robots.
I mean, we all were there at one time or another and we've woken up and we can help other people wake up.
But trying to wake up a robot?
It's pretty dangerous.
Because, you know, they can attack!
They're not bound by Asimov's three laws, right?
So, be curious, play dumb, and just ask people what their thoughts are about these.
And if all they have is propaganda and aggression, I mean, just keep moving.
You can't argue with people who don't think.
You can't.
You'll never win.
And It actually dishonors the people who can think, if that makes sense.
Because they should be the one who get your time and attention.
And of course, thinking doesn't mean agreeing with you.
It just means that they can entertain more than one perspective without bursting into scalding, incoherent rage and revenge and all that, right?
So those are my thoughts about it.
What's your thoughts?
Yeah, that makes sense.
And I do feel like I look and scan people for...
For some sense of humanity, but it just is so rare, it seems right now.
It's really, really rare.
We're working on it, but humanity 2.0 is still unfrayed in test beta phase.
Not a lot of us out there, but you know, we're...
We're working on it.
We're outgrowing the mechanical.
Slowly, slowly.
Exactly.
The reputation part is also really difficult when you are talking to people because it seems like so many people who are high up in these elite circles Sure.
You just don't want to rock the boat, but you do.
I don't know, maybe I should have just been a writer, not a designer.
Oh no, it doesn't help.
No, it doesn't help.
Trust me, I was a writer.
It doesn't help.
I won't get into all of that.
But no, there's no magic.
If you want to do what I do, straight to the internet.
No gatekeepers, no editors, no...
Not even sensible ones.
I mean, if you want to do what I do, then that's one thing.
But you'll still get attacked.
I mean, it's natural.
But there's no magic place out there.
See, whoever knows it's a war wins.
That's the basic axiom of life for me.
Like, whoever knows it's a war wins.
And the great thing about James O'Keefe and Project Veritas is he's lifting the lid on the left.
And they know that it's a war.
You know, what did the...
The guy who was talking about the voter fraud.
You know, we've been fighting these fucking assholes for 50 years and they're not about to stop now.
Fucking assholes fighting.
They know it's a war.
The guy saying that the black Republicans are like the Jews who helped the Nazis slaughter their fellow Jews in the concentration camps.
They get it's a war.
But where do you get your courage from?
Where is this coming from?
That's what I feel I'm lacking, is the courage to just say, fuck it.
Well, I mean, that's a long story, and I don't always have it, just so you know.
I mean, I have my moments, I think, like everyone does.
But it's...
Is it...
Well, it's easier for me because, for me, the incentives are all in the right place.
See, for you, the incentives are in the wrong place.
Like, if I speak my mind, I generally do well in terms of, like, views and all that.
And if I do a really good show, we can see the effect in donations and all that.
So, for me, the incentives are all in the right place.
I lose my business if I lie.
You lose your business if you tell the truth, right?
If that makes sense.
Yes.
Yeah, it does.
And so for me, I've sort of, you know, the whole decision to give away the books for free, the whole decision to not to take advertising and so on.
And it would have been great to take advertising at the very beginning when it was like, ooh, I made 50 bucks this month.
How lovely!
You know, it would have been a lot better to take.
It would have been more tempting.
The ad rates were much better back in the day as well.
But ad rates have declined and all that.
So for me, everything's kind of in the right place.
There's no one in my life who doesn't know what I think.
There's no one I have to hide from.
And I wanted that.
I had to hide my whole childhood.
I had to hide a lot throughout the business world.
I had to hide a lot in the academic world and the art world.
Tired of it.
Tired of hiding.
Tired of it.
Tired of it.
You know, I'm gonna die either way.
I might as well die gloriously visible than curled up in a fetal position of navel-gazing Integrity that's never tested.
So for me, it is courage, I guess you could say it's courage, but it's also practicality, right?
Whereas for you, practicality is at war with honesty.
For me, practicality and honesty, they're facing the same way.
They're the same thing.
And if I were to sell out, And I know some people think I have.
Fine.
That's fine.
But if I know I haven't, right?
But if I were to sell out, then it would cost me.
And there's no amount of money, really, that would make it worthwhile.
Nobody's going to pay me a billion dollars to sell out.
And whatever money they did offer me to sell out wouldn't be worth it.
Because you want a sustainable business model.
And if I sold out, it would destroy, you know, what I'd I've spent most of my life and probably the last 10 years building up.
So it's not necessarily just courage.
And for you to do what I do might not be courage.
It might be the excess of courage that Aristotle called foolhardiness, right?
Which is a lack of necessary caution and a recognition of the reality of your incentives.
You know, we don't just have courage Independent of our circumstances.
Circumstances are very, very important.
It's one thing to take a risk with $10,000 if you have a million dollars.
It's another thing to take a risk with $10,000 if you have only $10,000, right?
That money was made from my father's blood!
I still remember that line from Raisin in the Sun, a play from, oh, I read that in Junior high, high school.
Money was made from my father's blood.
That's a great line.
Anyway.
So, I wouldn't define it in your case as, well, if you had my courage, you'd speak up and damn your business and all that.
Well, no.
Because it helps my business and it hurts yours.
So, it's not the same.
And I don't think we want to have...
It doesn't take courage to move towards a rabbit.
It takes courage to move towards a bear.
The circumstances are different for us and I wouldn't put us in the same category in terms of courage or cowardice or anything like that.
Okay, well, I guess I'll live vicariously through you.
Yeah, and listen, freedom means the freedom not to speak.
Yeah, that's true.
You can't just, I've got orders from philosophy to speak no matter what.
Even if the guy's about to remove my kidney with a rusty spoon, I must speak.
It's like, no, freedom includes the freedom to not speak.
That's absolutely true.
Be free.
Be free.
Don't let philosophy boss you around.
Don't let this mirage called courage.
It's a good virtue to have, but don't let it order you around.
Everything must be a choice.
You know that, right?
You must choose.
You can't say, well, Steph's doing it.
I should do it.
I have to do it.
And force yourself to do it.
I would hate for anyone to make a decision based upon that because it needs to be your choice that you're committed to and not something that's enforced upon you.
All That is known and chosen is allowed, in my opinion.
Now, again.
Well, I know I'm going to kill a guy to choose to kill.
I'm not talking about that stuff, right?
But all that is deeply known and freely chosen is allowed among good people.
If you don't want to speak, your ego is the important thing, not the bowing to rules, right?
Anarchy means no rulers.
And philosophy cannot be your ruler and still be philosophy.
The moment you promote it to ruler, it dies.
It is your companion.
It is your familiar.
It is your guide.
But it is not your ruler.
It cannot order you to speak or be silent.
These must be chosen.
And in the absence of choice, We don't have any life.
We can't say, or I can't say, well, I want to fight the robots and then take orders like a robot from a philosophical system.
Everything must be chosen.
Because all that is chosen is not really alive.
There's no slave ordered by a master who's really alive.
And freedom means the freedom to say no.
To whatever compulsion it is, whether it's a state, Whether it is somebody mean or abusive or whether it's your own internal standards that you feel are screaming at you and ordering you to do something.
No.
Self-knowledge and choice.
Feel free.
That's really great.
Do not speak.
That's really great insight.
I've never thought of it.
I don't tell people what to do.
No.
Imagine if people listened.
That would be the worst thing ever.
Hey, I'm really into philosophy and empowerment and you've really got to think for yourself.
Okay, here's what to do.
That would just be so terrible, right?
Right.
So now, don't take orders from anyone.
Most importantly, don't take orders from yourself.
Okay.
Awesome.
All right.
Do I get a mesh t-shirt?
I'm just kidding.
I'm just kidding.
Absolutely.
No, don't.
No, I still need my show.
I'm 50.
Mesh t-shirts are far in the rear view for me.
Not that they ever were my thing.
But thanks, Sarah.
Great conversation.
I hope you'll keep us posted on how it's going for you in the lefty industry that is highly creative.
And, you know, the price of high creativity is often left-wingy stuff, at least for now, although I think more creativity is coming up on the right as we speak.
But thanks for the call.
It was really enjoyable and I hope it was helpful for you.
It was.
Alright, up next we have Marcus.
Marcus wrote in and said, I'd like to ask Stefan about the nature of patience.
Raising my children, I have found the days where I focus on being patient go much smoother and are more enjoyable for everyone involved.
When it comes to raising kids, I have found that having unlimited patience to be a virtue.
On the other hand, I think the West has been far too patient in regards to the damage caused by Marxism and globalism.
With corruption being on full display on a daily basis during the election cycle, I find myself asking, what am I waiting for?
I know this conflict is going to escalate, and yet I plot along, going to work, minding my budget, and vaguely attempting to focus on school instead of taking action.
Is there a point where a virtue such as patience crosses a line and becomes a risk to survival?
That's from Marcus.
Hello, Marcus.
Hey, Stefan.
How's it going?
Going well.
How are you doing?
Doing well and hopefully doing good.
It's always a good combo.
Yeah, of course, patience is one of these Aristotelian virtues where a deficiency of it is a problem if you don't have any patience.
I don't know why I remember this.
It makes no sense that I do, but I do remember this nonetheless.
Three ways you can learn something about a man.
Number one, Go on vacation, it rains all the time.
Number two, his luggage gets lost at the airport.
Number three, he has to untangle Christmas lights.
I think there's some truth in that.
I think there's some truth.
How would you do with those things?
I think I'd do pretty well with them.
Just gotta sit down and focus on the task at hand.
Right.
If you can get absorbed in the task at hand, Impatience is usually when you have something you want to get to after what you're doing, and whatever it is is interfering with what you're doing.
Whereas if you're like, okay, what I'm doing now is I'm untangling the Christmas lights, as opposed to, I've got to untangle the Christmas lights so I can get the Christmas tree up, so I can get the cookie done, then you're going to be impatient, right?
If it's like you're in the middle of falling dominoes, you've got to duck and weave, right?
But if you're just, okay, well, what I'm doing right now is I'm tackling the Christmas lights.
Actually, when I went to Brazil to give a speech, my luggage got lost and ended up in Hawaii, I think it was.
So it was traveling.
But they gave me a little bag of toiletries and it was fine and sent it over in a cab.
It was no biggie.
So...
That's actually...
Sorry, you go.
Yeah, go ahead.
It's a good point.
Every time I've lost patience with my kids, it's not about the action that's currently happening.
It's me about wanting to get to the next phase.
Let's get done with the story so I can get back downstairs to pretend grad school is somehow valuable.
Grad school?
Oh, okay.
We'll get back to that.
We'll get back to that.
Don't worry about it.
Did you listen to Unlock the whole call yet?
Yeah.
Yeah, I did.
Okay, good.
We'll dip back into that.
So, oh yeah, actually, when I gave my speech at the Next Web, I lost my speech beforehand.
I had it written down.
Not detailed, just little bullet points and stuff.
And I lost it.
Where?
It's just gone.
Not in my pocket, so I just went up and winged it.
That's fine.
So, for patience, a deficiency of patience makes you choleric or irascible, and other medieval words.
And But a deficiency.
That's a deficiency.
An excess of patience makes you lethargic and unable to respond to genuine threats.
Right, so Sweden.
Sweden, two police officers are quitting every single day and 80% of the entire police force wants to quit.
I think they lost a thousand police officers over the last year and a bit.
I mean, the crime is going through the roof.
And the police presence is collapsing.
Hey, Sweden!
Now might be a good time to panic!
No!
We'll be patient.
It's going to work out.
No!
Now is a good time to freak the F out.
So, you know, an excess of patience and crossing your fingers and hoping everything's going to be fine and No, that is not a good...
That is not a virtue.
That is a desperate vice.
It's to think of somebody who wants a raise.
If you go in every day and pound at boss's desk and demand a raise, you're going to get fired, probably.
Whereas if you're just like, well, it's going to come, you know, sooner or later he'll notice that I'm working hard and doing well and he'll give me a raise.
Okay, so you don't want to be impatient, but you don't want to have an excess of patience.
You want to have something...
Right in the middle.
They're waiting for the bus thing.
If you've got a half-hour walk, it's five minutes on the bus, and if you wait for five minutes, there's no point walking.
But if you've been there for two hours, okay, now it's time to walk.
The bus is not coming.
So somewhere in the middle, I think, is good.
I think it falls a little bit along gender lines.
Men tend to be more impatient, and women tend to be a bit more lethargic and Hopeful.
In general, because women could do less to alter the outcomes of things in the past.
So they had to be accepting.
And I always sort of view this sort of Zen acceptance stuff as a vaguely feminine thing.
Rightly or wrongly.
But that's sort of my...
And, you know, kids are very impatient.
It's something you grow into.
And then you grow out of when you get older.
And hopefully you start to freak out because you're going to die and get things done.
So anyway.
Does that help at all?
Make a sort of context?
Yeah, that's good.
I'm trying to figure out where that middle point is.
What are the signs that are letting you know that you may have crossed over from virtue to not so much?
Yeah, I mean, it's not a moral virtue.
It's more of a pragmatic or efficacy virtue.
Like, if you want the raise, don't go pound and yell at your boss, but don't just sit there and cross your fingers forever, right?
I mean, in general, I don't know how it is for you, but in general...
You have to give yourself a time frame and you have to stick to it, right?
So you can say, okay, I am going to ask my boss for a raise.
Let's say he'll get back to me and I'll say, well, how long will it take?
He'll say, I'll get back to you.
Well, then give yourself, okay, I'll give him a week.
Then I'm going to go back in and I'm going to say, okay, well, what's going on with this raise, right?
You have to give yourself some kind of time frame that's reasonable and stick to it.
And the reasonableness is key, right?
I mean, if you have five kids and you're going skiing and And they're all under the age of 10, yeah, it's going to take you a little while to get there because, you know, mittens and snow pants and, you know, it's insane, right?
So having those kinds of reasonable expectations, I think, is important.
I'll tell you what works for me as well.
This is kind of a funny thing.
So if I have some place I go to repetitively, then I will time how long it takes for me to get there, right?
So if I'm going to the gym, It's 10 minutes away, say, right?
I don't want to say, well, it's roughly 10.
Like, I actually have to know.
10 minutes and 28 seconds.
10 minutes and 24 seconds.
You know, 9 minutes and 50 seconds.
That helps me make the decision.
You know, because I have a couple of weights in the basement or whatever, a bike machine.
So, do I go to the gym or do I work out downstairs?
Knowing exactly how far it is away is great for me.
Just helps me sort of, okay, it's going to be Ten minutes and a half, give or take, right?
It really helps.
As opposed to, well, I don't know, some smallish chunk of time.
For me, knowing the precise times of things is really, really helpful.
If I'm rendering a video, right?
Oh, at least it counts down, right?
And tells me how long it's got to go.
And that helps to sort of organize my mind for expectations and so on.
And so for me, knowing the time slices is really helpful when it comes to making decisions, having it in my head.
Not just some vague chunk of time, but this is it in terms of time slices.
So that stuff can be really helpful for me in terms of...
And I'm not impatient because I know how long things are going to take.
And that can be helpful for me in terms of...
Not feeling adrift in a timelessness.
And, you know, as a family man as well, it's just a basic reality of being a family man.
Sometimes, like, I feel it's easier to raise the Titanic than to get the family out of the house in any reasonable amount of time.
That's the truth.
Oh, it's a reality, right?
I mean, I don't know what happens, but things need to happen that are very complicated.
For me, I can go, like, from pajamas to sitting in the car in about 97 seconds.
Why?
I've timed it!
Right?
But...
No, one sec.
Oh, I need this.
Oh, I forgot that.
Oh, this has to be done.
Oh, I go to the washroom.
It's like, dear Lord.
I mean, like, how long does this airplane need to lumber down the runway before it gets some air?
Apparently, a long time.
And that can drive me a little batty because I'm still used to, hey, 97 seconds for me.
What the hell's wrong with everyone else?
But, you know, it is the way it is.
And it's important to not deal with it in the moment.
Like, so if I get impatient about that kind of stuff, I have to say to myself, okay, well, don't do it now because you're upset.
What you want to do is, you know, when we get back from where we're going, we'll sit down, we'll have some milk.
And I can say then, listen, I don't want to, because the thing is, we have a habit of trying to dive into, well, what happened and why was this?
And everyone's got a good excuse or a good reason as to why.
They were late for one reason or another, right?
So it's not about the moment.
It's just like, I'm frustrated because it feels like it takes us forever to get going.
So is there anything we can do to make that faster, to make that easier?
And then we can put our heads together to try and figure something out.
And that can help.
But just being, why is everyone taking so long?
That doesn't help in the moment.
And there may be perfectly good reasons.
And also having the humility...
For me, of knowing that there are times where everyone's had to wait for me.
There's times where people have been sitting in the car waiting for me.
And, you know, it's because I rendered something and the audio didn't take for some reason and I have to re-render it.
You know, I've just got to send one message and it's like, oh, problem with the internet or I'll reboot the computer.
And then you reboot the computer and it's like, oh, installing Windows updates.
Oh, great.
Not in any kind of hurry now, are we?
Thanks, Windows.
And you have the dread message update and restart.
No!
Please don't make me stare at this screen for that long.
73.
74.
It's like watching the new Doom start.
Anyway.
So, knowing that I have also delayed people for perfectly legitimate reasons.
And, you know, every now and then you reach for your phone and you can't find it.
It happens, right?
So, knowing that I do it and making it sort of a family project.
This is just one example of many.
Just make it a family project.
And trying to figure out how we can all work to make this less slow for everyone.
So those kinds of things I think can be helpful.
To me, the frustration stuff is all about proactive problem solving and reasonable expectations.
Like in other words, if something is really driving me nuts over and over again, then I have to find some way that I can solve the problem ahead of time.
If rendering is taking too long, I'll just go out and buy a faster video card or whatever is going to help me render faster.
Do what you can proactively, plan ahead and have the right mindset and recognize that there are going to be delays from time to time.
And I think that works out fairly well.
Do you have any strategies for catching yourself when you're losing patience or getting close to losing your temper?
I'm not really much of a temper-losing guy.
I've noticed.
No, yeah.
I mean, I had a temper when I was younger.
Oh, yes, let me tell you.
But no, I mean, I've worked on that for a long time.
But you know, right?
I mean, you know the physical symptoms, right?
Your breath gets a little shallower, and your muscles tighten up a little bit, and...
You feel that sort of rising Irishness.
I don't know what to call it.
A tension.
So you know that.
And you just have to say, okay, not a big deal, right?
Like being late, and I'm not perfect with this myself at all, right?
But being late when we don't have to be, that kind of drives me nuts.
But it's going to happen from time to time.
And the other thing, too, is like, okay, well, don't rush in traffic.
Nothing makes you later than an accident kind of thing and all of that.
So I think all of that stuff, just keep working on it.
Be aware of the physical state and make sure that your emotional response is somewhat proportionate to the stimulus.
And again, I'm not perfect at this, but it's something I remind myself of.
Okay, I've been sitting in the car for five minutes.
And the disaster scenario is what?
I mean, am I going to die of carbon-renoxide poisoning?
No.
I turned the car off.
So what is the problem?
And also, is it historical?
So when I was a kid, and particularly in boarding school, if you were late, bad things happened.
You'd get locked out of the classroom.
You wouldn't get any lunch.
It would just be bad, bad things.
So am I still echoing off when I was seven and bad things would happen when I was late?
If we're going to go meet friends and we're 10 minutes late, Well, if the friends come over and they're 10 minutes late, I'm fine with it.
So I'm sure they're fine with it too.
So that stuff I think is important as well.
I've also had people in my life who were really late.
Really, I don't have them anymore.
But they were really late.
They'd be like an hour late or an hour and a half late.
It would be crazy.
And so you'd be sitting there waiting.
You know, Blade was coming over and it's an hour and a half late.
And then they'd be like, oh, we don't have much time.
We've got to get to the next place.
And it's like, you're an hour and a half late and you have very little time.
Why are you even here?
Why did you bother coming over at all?
And that experience, that kind of stuff, is very much like, well, we're important and you're not.
Well, we're very important and you're just some peon.
The Lord doesn't apologize to his valet, right?
And, oh yeah, I watch Downton.
I know how to pronounce it.
So, even though French last name.
So...
I do experience the lateness when people are very, very late.
It's okay if there's something that happened or whatever.
But if people are very, very late, I view that as a power play on their part, conscious or not.
You know, we're important and you're not.
Because if it was something where the power was more equally distributed, they would be less likely to be that cavalier about being late.
So I have to sort of be aware of that kind of stuff and make my decisions about relationships accordingly if it's intractable.
Okay.
So where do you get the patients to deal with?
I've been listening to the show forever.
It's great, by the way.
Thank you.
Where do you get the patience to deal with the bad arguments that happen?
Oh, man.
When people are...
You've made this great argument.
You spend five minutes talking just...
Point after point after point, and people just say, you can see them nodding their head on the other side, and they just go with the same thing.
Where do you get the patience not to be?
I wouldn't.
No, I wouldn't have it, but for two reasons.
Number one, I'm getting paid for it.
This is my job.
So I wouldn't do it for free.
I'm not like a horny prostitute.
Well, you can pay me or I'll do it for free.
I mean, I did early on, right?
Because if you have a business, of course you have to give stuff away at the beginning to build your business, right?
But I'm getting paid, so let's not recognize that the incentives are there.
And, you know, we will often put up with things that are less pleasant because we get paid, right?
I mean, not every job is always fun all the time, enjoying this conversation.
It's pretty good, right?
So, yes, the Benjamins fly by and I'm like, yeah, I can handle this, number one.
Number two is that everything is instructive.
Everything is instructive.
So, you, as a listener to this show, you've heard People I give, you know, they ask me a question, I give a great answer, and then they pretend they haven't heard anything, right?
Because otherwise they'll have to change something in their life they don't want to change, right?
So they pretend they haven't heard anything.
Now, you hear that and you hear that or see that in your mind very clearly, right?
Yep.
Good.
Very instructive, right?
So then when someone does that to you, you'll know what it is.
Especially if I point out, wait, I just give you this great speech and you're just pretending I didn't say anything?
Well, you can disagree with me, but don't pretend I didn't say anything.
It's kind of rude, right?
So, if I'm modeling that I see it, it helps you see it and also helps you model how you might be able to deal with it in your life, right?
So, because it's public and because I'm paid, that's the reality.
And the majority of the conversations that I have in the call-in shows Are enjoyable.
And even the ones where people think I'm displaying jaw-dropping patients, like the flat-earth guy, or...
Oh, we've got some coming down the pipeline, which will probably wait until after the election.
That will be UFO guy!
Anyway, I enjoy those.
I mean, I think it's fascinating to try and get something across to someone who's resolutely wedded to ideas I think are very faulty.
Is there any way to get it across?
And I win either way, and so does the audience.
Because if I find a way to get a more rational idea across to an irrational person, or a person who's in an irrational mindset in the conversation, well, fantastic!
You know, I sunk the pot from three miles away, you know, and people are like, wow, that's really cool, maybe I can do that again.
If I try my very hardest, and I do, I do, I sweat bullets, I try my very hardest, And the other person still doesn't listen to reason?
Don't we all feel just a bit of relief?
Ah, couldn't have happened anyway.
Fun to watch you try.
Glad you failed.
Because it reminds me, there's lots of people you can't reach at all.
And if Steph couldn't reach him with all his skills and his experience and all that, great.
That means that I'm not responsible for changing everyone's mind because Steph can't manage it sometimes.
You know, if Brad Pitt can't pick up the woman, you don't feel so bad if she said no to you, right?
You can't lose.
And that to me, if I say, well, I have to change people's minds in order for this show to be successful, like if I've got to get the flat earth guy to say it's a sphere, otherwise I've failed and the show is terrible, no!
The show is wonderful no matter what he does.
Does that make sense?
And I can't control what he does.
I can control what I do.
I can't control what he does.
And the show is great no matter what.
What is that?
Is that in our top ten yet, Mike?
I get depressed every time I look it up at some point.
We shouldn't.
It's not good.
Here, let me find where it is on the video list.
You mean the Flat Earth video?
Yes.
Planet Earth video.
It is one of the most popular videos we've ever done.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
Eighth most popular video!
No!
Yeah.
No!
That's how I remember that.
Right.
Now, I knew it was a special kind of call when we had it.
And Mike and I were talking ahead of time saying, people will love this or not.
But there's not going to be anyone in the middle.
And I'm glad they like it.
And I think it's not because...
Not because I succeeded or I failed, it was a very engaging interaction of watching someone trying to reason someone into something that I think made a bit more sense.
And whether I succeed or I fail in convincing someone, and really that's not my success or failure, that's the other person's success or failure.
I'm pretty good at convincing people of stuff, I have pretty good arguments, and I'm not going to get abusive and I'm not going to yell, and it may be an exasperation, but not at the person.
But it's their failure.
If they don't listen to reason, it's not my failure, it's their failure.
And it's a great show either way because I don't have an absolute that I have to change people's minds and you shouldn't either.
That's what I was saying to this woman who was calling in from the fashion industry.
Be free.
Be free to not engage.
Be free to be quiet.
Be free to avoid discussions with people.
And so, I think, I mean, lots of people know someone in their life who has a pretty batty idea about something.
Could be any number of things.
And seeing me give it my best shot and then seeing the other person fail to respond to the reason and evidence and even to the reach out that I had about the guy working in a warehouse and you know better uses he might have for his time and all of that.
Seeing how resolutely unresponsive to outside influences he was I think gives people a sense of relief.
Okay.
Steph wasn't bothered by not convincing this guy.
Steph wasn't ego-invested, and this guy had to listen to reason, and if he didn't, there was a big problem.
No!
It's fine.
It's fine.
Because if this guy doesn't respond to reason, I don't mean to pick on this guy, I enjoyed the conversation, but if this guy doesn't listen to reason, and people see me give it a good old try and fail, or he fails to listen to reason, and I'm fine with it, well, good.
That means you can try and change people's minds, and if they don't, It's fine.
It's their failure, not yours, and you can move on.
You don't have to let it bother you or make you crazy or you've got to listen.
No, not flat, you know, even the things you...
No!
You put the evidence out there and people can do with it what they will.
and it's their integrity on the line, not yours.
That works with the flat earth guy.
Can't lose.
Yeah, can't lose.
What about this whole saving the West thing?
What about this whole Saving the West thing?
Saving the West means you're not going to change everyone's minds, so figure out when you can't change people's minds, move on to people whose minds you can change.
Saving the West doesn't mean every crazy person has to be sane.
You don't need everyone to be sane to have a sane society.
And so if people aren't listening to reason, then go find people who will.
You know, drop them like a hot potato.
Go find people who will.
That's, to me, focusing your efforts, right?
I mean, if you're in a war, you don't fight the people nine times your size, like it's a sword war or something, and you don't fight the people who are already killing themselves.
You fight for the people you can take on and win, not the people you can't win or who are going to be defeated without you, right?
You find the people in the middle, the undecideds.
And so for me, I'm getting paid.
There's massive value in whether I succeed or fail or whether the other person listens or not because it's public and people can learn from it no matter what and enjoy it.
And you can't lose.
I can't lose a debate.
And this is an old Socratic argument.
You can't lose a debate.
Because if you win, the other person has become enlightened.
But if you lose the debate, then you've become enlightened.
And isn't that good?
Even if you lose a tennis match, you've gotten a little bit better at playing tennis, right?
Yeah.
But you want to control the outcome, right?
Yeah.
No, we all are that way.
We all want to control the outcome because we place a great deal of emotional investment into whether we, quote, succeed or fail, right?
Yeah.
But you can't control the outcome of a conversation.
That's tyranny, right?
And it's also kind of imagining like the world is the matrix and everyone's part of your thinking.
You have to differentiate between yourself and other people.
You can't control yourself.
You can't control other people any more than they can digest your food for you.
You can't control them.
You can provide them information, arguments, and evidence.
How they react to that is their choice.
You can't control the outcome of a conversation.
You can't do it.
You can't control whether someone's going to listen to reason or not.
That's a choice everyone has to make.
And a lot of people make the wrong choice.
Can't control.
Can't control what other people say and do.
And once you let that go, then that's the foundation of all the tyrannical impulses that we have.
I'm not calling you a tyrant.
It's the foundation of all the tyrannical impulses is that we get ego invested in the outcome of something.
And once we get ego invested in the outcome of something, like, I'm a better person if this guy listens to reason and evidence, and I'm not as good a person, I'm going to be less happy if this guy doesn't listen to reason and evidence.
Well, no.
I am a good person if I treat the person reasonably respectfully, or treat them at least as they treat me.
If I don't initiate any kind of negative interaction, I don't mind responding to one if there's one initiated against me.
That's a basic self-defense principle.
But if I've conducted myself with decency and honor and integrity, I can't be more satisfied no matter what the other person does.
I can't be more or less satisfied by what the other person does.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, it makes sense.
And you'll find it amazing that once you give up controlling other people, Your relationships with them enormously improve.
Not always, but a lot of times.
People know when you're in it for the outcome rather than the interaction.
They know deep down that you're trying to make them do something or prevent them from doing something so you can feel better about yourself.
And they will respond usually Very negatively.
It's manipulation.
It may be unconscious.
Still, it's manipulation.
And you're using the other person as a means of controlling your own emotions, right?
Well, if that person listens to reason, then I'm going to get angry.
And if they don't, because they should, because I can feel better.
Well, no.
When you stop trying to control people, your reactions...
Sorry.
When you stop trying to control people, their reactions to you usually improve.
Because there's a freedom that you spread when you're not trying to control people, when you're just curious about what they think and say, and you provide your arguments, you provide your evidence, and you're honest with them.
You're honest with them.
Because every time we want something out of an interaction, we will always end up becoming manipulative and dishonest.
Because we can't be honest about it.
We can't say, well, I need you to accept this idea so I feel better.
Because...
We're pretending it's all reason and evidence when a lot of times, I need you to accept this idea because otherwise I'm going to get really frustrated and angry.
That's not a good reason to accept an idea, right?
So if you're not eco-invested in the outcome, it doesn't mean you can't get angry, it doesn't mean you can't, whatever, but if you're not eco-invested in the outcome, and I make my case, what you do with it is up to you.
Then other people have the freedom to look at the ideas rather than your emotions driving what you want them to do.
I don't know if this is making any sense.
It's a hard thing to kind of get across.
Oh no, it makes perfect sense for me as far as personal relationships go.
I don't really lose patience too much with individuals.
It's just more of understanding why groups behave as they do sometimes.
Why are Catholics supporting the Pope?
How come libertarians can't figure out that Trump's the closest thing to Hank Reiden they're ever going to get?
Have they read Art of the Deal?
How do you not read that book?
And be like, oh wait, this book could be titled, I'm Trump, I'm better than the government at everything, and here's how I did it.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know, because I have hung around libertarian circles in donkey's years, but my understanding is that a lot of leftists have gotten into libertarianism.
And leftists get a left, right?
I mean, just go to libertarians and start talking about race and IQ or incompatible cultures or whatever it is, right?
And, you know, if they're like, oh, that's interesting, tell me more.
Or, I've heard about this and I don't know much about it.
Or, I disagree with it and here's the reasons why.
I think it's all cultural and so on.
Okay.
But if they're like, that's racist!
Like Gary Johnson, somebody referred to, what, illegal immigrants?
Undocumented migrants!
It's offensive!
It's like, oh God, shut up.
It's offensive.
Being offended is not an argument.
That's like what needs to be written on the gateway to the 21st century.
Being offended is not an argument.
It is a confession that you are ruled by emotion.
It is a confession that you do not know how to think.
It is a confession that you are conformist.
It is a confession that That you're intellectually and way over your head in that you even think that being offended is an argument.
And if you never complained that the word patriarchy was offensive to men, I don't want to hear about you being offended because it's very selective and it's very lefty programmed.
Anyway, sorry about that slight divergence, but...
Is there anything else you wanted to add or comment on?
No, you pretty much...
You've pretty much hit all the points.
I mean, I have notes about specific groups or whatever, but really just, you know, I've got to focus on the energy of things I can change and not worry about the unthinking mass that can't.
Right.
Right.
All right.
Well, that's the important thing.
You'll find you'll actually be able to change a lot more people's minds if you give them the freedom to disagree with you and to be jerks and to not listen to you The fact that you didn't blow up at them or try to control their outcome is the best chance they have of later thinking, you know, maybe he did have a point, you know, because they can actually focus on the ideas.
When you try to control people, they focus on you, not what you're saying.
They focus on your emotional needs, positively or negatively, rather than the content of your ideas.
You need to give people as much emotional space as possible to focus on what it is that you're saying.
And the only way you can do that is to have no ego investment in the outcome.
So, appreciate that call.
Mike, is that it for tonight?
That is it for tonight.
All right.
We've made it through another one.
Good stuff.
And thanks, everyone, for calling in.
Please, please, you know what I'm going to say.
Please, just listen anyway and go do it.
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