Nov. 28, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
03:33:41
3512 The Addiction Paradox – Call In Show – November 23rd, 2016
Question 1: [2:17] – “Just as it is necessary for children to learn the consequences of bad or reckless decision making in areas of life not directly involving authority, why should they not also learn that some decisions result in consequences that are directly administered by the governing authorities? Why is it bad for children to learn about the consequences of bad behavior while they are small and the consequences are small?”Question 2: [1:04:10] – “When people talk about government corruption, I usually hear that the solution is to get money out of politics or term limits. It seems to me that these address the symptoms and not the cause. I think corruption is caused by state discrimination. Government has the power to discriminate by transferring freedom and wealth from some of its citizens to special interests. Isn't the solution to corruption really to honor the constitution's equal protection and general welfare clauses and treat all citizens equally?”Question 3: [1:24:55] – “Have you noticed the social justice agenda being promoted in children's movies and TV shows? Is this slipping under the radar of people like yourself with a platform to make the public aware of this happening? Finally, besides making parents aware of this agenda being pushed in such a harmless looking way, is there anything else that can be done about it?”Question 4: [1:42:45] – “I have a few questions concerning addiction. I am a recovering heroin addict who is having a hard time dealing with the compulsion to use again. I was curious to your stance on 12 steps programs, one of which I attend regularly. Do you think these programs are less beneficial than they seem? Does it hinder my recovery to get into a mindset that I cannot recover without the program? Furthermore, why do you think that young people are using hard drugs, and drugs in general, in higher numbers than any other time in history? Is it because of the ease of access of substances, the coddling of my generation, or a combination of both?”Question 5: [3:05:48] - "For the past decade, the left-wing agenda has poisoned the mentality of college students. Do you, Stefan, think that America is doomed to a left-wing 'utopia' or do you think there could be a national resistance to the irrationality of the liberal cause now that we are under republican rule once more?”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
Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope you're doing very, very well.
Please, please, please don't forget to drop by freedomainradio.com slash donate to help out the show.
Sure wish we had a donate request without the word slash in it, but...
I guess we're guitarists too.
So tonight we had five callers.
The first was somebody who was very pro-spanking or punishment and considered me to be enormously hypocritical in my approach to raising children.
And of course I welcome all criticisms and we had a good old tussle about it which I think you're going to find quite instructive.
The second caller wanted to know what I thought of the idea of ending government corruption by honoring the Constitution's equal protection and general welfare clauses.
Magic spells not being my specialty.
I guess we had another tussle, which I think you will also find quite instructive.
The third caller wanted to know if I've noticed a sort of social justice agenda being promoted in children's movies and TV shows.
Yes, and details.
The fourth caller, a very brave...
A young man who spent quite some time as a heroin addict and he's clean and we talked about addiction and his history and what may have led up to it and what helped him to get out of it.
An amazing call and thanks again so much to him and of course all the callers.
And the fifth caller has noticed that for the past, ooh, let's just say a little while, left-wing utopian thinking has kind of poisoned the minds of college students.
Are we doomed to have this injection of leftist nonsense forever, or is there going to be a national resistance, a pushback?
Now that Republicans, or Trump in particular, are in power.
It was a great call.
A great set of calls.
Really appreciate everyone who's called in.
Please don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
And, of course, you can use, if you've got some shopping to do, our affiliate link at FDRURL.com slash Amazon.
Alright, up first today we have Alex, and Alex has a lot of questions around parenting and corporal punishment and that kind of thing.
First of those questions is, just as it is necessary for children to learn the consequences of bad or reckless decision making in areas of life not directly involving authority, Why should they not also learn that some decisions result in consequences that are directly administered by the governing authorities?
Why is it bad for children to learn about the consequences of bad behavior while they are small and the consequences are small?
That's from Alex.
Oh hey Alex, how are you doing tonight?
Hello, can you hear me?
Yes.
That's good.
How are you doing?
I'm doing pretty well, thank you.
Good, good.
Do you have kids?
I do not.
You do not.
Are you planning on having children?
Well, yes, but I don't know.
I mean, I don't exactly have a girlfriend or anything right now, but that is something I would be very interested in doing in the future.
Yeah, no, I'm just curious what sort of level of empiricism you're working with.
It doesn't matter to me whether you do or don't have children at the moment.
I was just kind of curious of whether I could draw on your empirical experience or not.
All right.
Well, I do have a lot of experience with children, but I have been asked not to talk about that so much because...
Because people who are for spanking can sometimes get in trouble with the government.
All right.
So, your question is, why is it bad for children to learn about the consequences of bad behavior while they are small and the consequences are small?
Is it my understanding, Alex, that for you, the only way to teach children the consequences of bad behavior is hitting, spanking?
Is that right?
Um...
Not exactly.
I mean, there are plenty of other methods which I'm aware of and if I was married and me and my wife were looking at having children, I would certainly be encouraging my wife to be looking at some of the more peaceful parenting stuff just because the more stuff you have in a toolbox, the better it is for everyone.
No, my question is really...
Okay, sorry.
Because I've got seven callers tonight, we need to be concise, okay?
So you're not saying that the only negative consequence is children to learn from is spanking, right?
No.
Okay, so let's try and just boil it down to kind of, at least at the beginning, so I can get a framework.
Yes, no.
What are the negative consequences outside of spanking that you would consider acceptable for...
Providing children negative consequences.
Well, you might tell them not to do something and then you might let them do it anyway and you might let them deal with the consequences of that rather than disciplining them directly.
It's called natural justice.
Right.
So if the child...
Wants to jump from a particular height and you say, I don't think that's a good idea.
Then the child, if the child's old enough, the child can judge and maybe the child is right and it's fine for them to jump.
Or maybe it's wrong and they jump and they hurt themselves a little.
And then in which case you say, well, that's, you know, that's now you've learned something, right?
Is that sort of the argument?
I suppose so.
My point here is...
It's not so much that I'm trying to put across a particular view.
It's really that what I'm really interested in is I think that your position is hypocritical and so I don't feel that it's as necessary to talk about my position as such.
All right.
Well, if you feel that my position, or I shouldn't say you feel, but if you have an argument as to my hypocrisy, why don't you make that case and let's go from there?
Okay, Mike did ask me to put in a question and I did find it rather difficult to do so, given it was really an argument, not a question.
But the other reason it was a little bit difficult for me to do so is I'm not entirely sure exactly where your position is.
Well, no.
Hang on.
You just called me a hypocrite, which is fine.
Maybe I'm being a hypocrite and I'm not aware of it.
So you've obviously had a week or two or more to prepare for this particular conversation.
So why don't you tell me in which ways I'm being hypocritical so that I can do better?
I had some more parts to the question which Mike didn't read out.
And I'm not entirely sure whether...
All of these are going to apply.
So it's not so much that I think you're a hypocrite in a specific way.
It's more that I have a couple of ways.
Okay, let's boil this down a little bit because we're kind of beating around the bush here and I don't want to do that.
And look, you've every right to call me a hypocrite, as does everyone else.
But then, of course, I have the right for you to say or to ask you, okay, how am I being hypocritical?
So you need to answer that question Or I have to move on to another caller because I'm not going to do this like back and forth beating around the bush.
I'm perfectly fine with you calling me a hypocrite.
No problem with it whatsoever.
But just tell me how I'm a hypocrite in your view and let's go from there.
Okay, so...
Children...
It is the job of parents to teach children to be adults, is it not?
I think it's the job of parents to teach children the truth.
You know, I mean, saying that adults, I mean, that means different things to different people.
But I think that philosophically, you can't say the job of parents is to teach children how to be adults, because again, that's a pretty subjective thing.
But certainly, you owe your children the truth.
I'll put it another way then.
Is it the job of parents then to teach children about...
How to live in the real world outside parental protection.
Absolutely.
And that's because it's true, right?
I mean, it's true that when you get older, your parents care for you and provide shelter for you and give you health care and so on because they love you and they have a special connection with you.
But of course, other people out in the world don't care about you in the same way that your parents do.
And so you will forgive, of course, your child making a series of mistakes, but an employer probably wouldn't because the employer has a profit motive that is not part of the parent-child relation.
Sure.
So, the real world which people outside the parental cocoon have to deal with includes a government, doesn't it?
Yes.
And the purpose of that government is to punish people for bad behaviour, is it not?
The purpose of the government is to punish people for bad behaviour?
Is that what you mean?
Yes, yes.
I mean, if you go around stealing stuff or going around raping people, the purpose of the government is to take you and...
Well, I won't get into questions of motivation.
A function of the government is to punish you for breaking the law.
You know, whether it's to punish you for bad behavior and whether that's its sole function or even central purpose is debatable, to put it mildly.
But let's just say that for sure you do have to prepare your children to live in a state of society where they will receive punishment for breaking the law.
Okay, so to prepare children for that...
Shouldn't it be acceptable to discipline children?
I don't know what you mean by discipline.
Administer punishment, is that clearer?
Not necessarily, because punishment, of course, is a very vague phrase.
Okay.
If you're talking about sort of negative consequences, well, sure, of course.
I mean, but that's part of being honest with your children.
If your child does something that is upsetting to you, that is offensive to you, that is bothersome to you, then in an age-appropriate manner, it's important to be honest with that child.
And so you owe your children honesty.
And through that honesty, there will be some negative consequences, right?
I mean, so if you're disapproved of something your child does, and you say, well, I didn't like what you did, and this is what I feel, and here's why.
The child is going to experience it as a negative that the parent disapproves of what the child is doing.
But that, of course, is not hitting the child.
It's not putting them in a timeout.
It's not taking something away.
It's simply being honest about the negative experience that you're having of your child's behavior.
Okay, but...
The analogy I'm using with the state, the state is deliberately doing something nasty to you and so the argument I would be making would be specifically in regards to the parents deliberately and deliberately doing something which may or may not be smacking but It
is something negative.
It's not just saying I feel upset and whatever.
Like some of the things you mentioned, timeouts or other stuff.
Well, no, I don't think it's good parenting to take things away from a child.
I don't think it's good parenting to put them in time out.
And I certainly don't think it's good parenting to hit your child.
It's a failure of communicating that, which is important.
Children are very, very dependent upon the goodwill of parents, biologically speaking.
And if children are raised peacefully, they really care.
About the opinion of their parents, right?
I mean, you care about the opinion of your close friends.
You care about the opinion of your wife or your husband.
You certainly care about the opinion of your boss because your boss is giving you your income, right, which is what you're using to live on.
And, of course, parents are providing the food and shelter and security and health care and all of that that children need in order to survive.
So children are naturally very, very susceptible to negative experiences when disapproved of.
By their parents, particularly when it's the exception rather than the norm.
Like, I don't know if you've ever had a constant noise in a background.
After a while, you stop hearing it, right?
Oh, yes.
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
So if it is an exception, like I mean if you're constantly bagging on your kids and telling them that they're crap and junk and garbage and idiots and doing things wrong, they'll just stop listening and you get this sort of tune outness.
But if in general you're positive towards your children and then you say, okay, here's where I have a problem and you don't do it in a punishing way but simply in an honest way, my experience has been that they're very – that they experience that in a negative way and they will do quite a bit to figure out how not – Tune-outness.
To do these things again, whatever it is that's causing distress.
And that, of course, is preparing life in the real world.
In the real world, there are people you will be dependent upon who may have a negative experience of what you're doing.
Now, the fact that I may have a negative experience with a child doesn't mean that I'm right and the child is wrong.
The real-time relationship honesty thing that I sort of talk about in my book, Real-Time Relationships, which is available for free at freedomainradio.com slash free...
Is you say, this is my negative experience and here's why I think it.
Here's why I'm having this negative experience.
Because you don't want the child to ignore people's negative experience of the child.
Neither do you want that negative experience that other people are having to be automatically true and valid, right?
You need that balance in life.
So, for instance...
I don't want to ignore the fact that people have criticisms of me or of my arguments or my ideas because it's important to get the kind of feedback and so on, which is one of the reasons why you're on the show.
On the other hand, I don't want everyone's criticisms of me to be totally valid because I have to put them through my own reasoning because other people can sometimes criticize out of immaturity or aggression or projection or a wide variety of other things that aren't particularly valid.
So I do think that I am preparing my daughter, for instance, for the real world.
I want her to understand that people will sometimes have negative experiences of her, and that's important to process, but not that those negative experiences are automatically true.
And that has worked out very well.
Okay, so my question would obviously be then, Why is it okay for the state to act in a certain way with regards to the people under its jurisdiction, but it's not okay for parents to act in a similar way but on a lesser scale with the children under their jurisdiction in preparation for the larger world?
It's not okay for the state to initiate violence against its citizens.
Okay, so if someone's going around and, I don't know, going around to car shops and stealing all the cars or going around the neighbourhood and smashing windows or if they're a serial rapist or if they're running a sex trafficking ring or something, you don't believe that it is okay for the state to go and...
Do whatever needs to be done, which is almost always going to be in a violent manner, and to put these people behind bars.
What did I say?
What did I just say with regards to the state?
It's not okay for the state to do what?
Initiate violence.
Right.
So if somebody is raping or killing or stealing, then that person is initiating violence.
And let's just take the state as an agency that can act as a third party, as we all can, right?
Security guard can act as a third party.
You don't actually have to be the one being assaulted in order to act as a third party in self-defense or defense of the other.
So, if the state is acting against people who are initiating violence against others, there's more justification for it in that action.
You know, the taxation that's used to fund the state is the initiation of force, and that is immoral.
But to act as a third party in the defense of another who's being attacked or assaulted or to prevent somebody from doing that in the future is valid.
But of course, that's very little of what the government does.
Very little of what the government does is arrest rapists and murderers.
Mostly, it does a whole bunch of other stuff that is not quite as justifiable.
Okay.
Well, just so we're clear, when I'm thinking of the government, I'm thinking of what I would consider an ideal government, and that is a government which punishes rapists, and that's That's pretty much all it does.
I mean, I'm not sure whether I'm opposed to the government building roads occasionally or stuff, but...
Let me ask you this, because I don't want this to turn into a discussion about voluntarism or anarchism as a whole.
But Alex, would you say that somebody who is a rapist, would you think that they had had a good childhood or a bad childhood?
I don't think I've ever asked myself that question before.
but If you had to just, you know, put money on...
Do you think that they had been raised in a loving and peaceful and respectful manner and negotiated with and all of that?
Or would they have had abandonment or punishment or violence or sexual abuse or verbal abuse or neglect or things like that going on in their childhood that they would end up with the kind of mindset that would sadistically take pleasure in forcing unwanted sexual relations on others?
I certainly wouldn't conclusively say one way or the other, but I do know that divorce tends to run in families, as does child abuse and other such things.
And so I suppose I'd be inclined to think they'd probably had a bad childhood, but I wouldn't want to say one way or the other.
So you mean you wouldn't want to say 100%?
No, I wouldn't.
They're more likely to have a bad childhood but not to 100%?
No.
I probably wouldn't want to say 75% or 80% either.
It'd be less than that.
Statistically, you would be incorrect, but I've got a whole bombinthebrain.com series about that.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, people who have dysfunctional, sadistic, abusive, and so on overwhelmingly have negative and destructive and horrendously negative and destructive childhoods, as is the case with people who are addicted to significant, dangerous...
Substances, heroin, and so on.
And for more on this, you can go to bombinthebrain.com and look at my presentations on that, my interviews with Dr.
Vincent Felitti and his Adverse Childhood Experiment Study, and also Gabor Mate, M-A-T-E. He's been on the show a couple of times, so he's got a great book.
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts about the biology of addiction and how it arises out of trauma in childhood.
And also you can check out my audiobook reading of Lloyd DeMoss' The Origins of War in Child Abuse.
And look, I'm not trying to catch you out or anything like that.
This is sadly not very well known.
But the more people are raised peacefully, the more peaceful society becomes.
In fact, the modern world as a whole becomes.
It was founded out of improved childhood relationships in the 17th and 18th century, particularly the 18th century.
And so when you're talking about punishment, we need to punish children because there's a punitive world.
No, we have a punitive world because we punish children.
Because those children grow up to be power junkies or violence junkies or sadistic attackers and so on.
And this is in the realm of politics as well as in the realm of criminality, sort of two sides of the same coin.
And so in arguing for peaceful parenting methods, you could say, well, maybe it makes them slightly less prepared for a violent world.
But the only other option is to be violent or aggressive towards your children in the hopes of preparing them for a violent and aggressive world, which will only serve to ensure that that violent and aggressive world continues.
So I'm still not sure I understand how you would answer the question, how is parenting different to the state?
How is parenting different from the state?
Sorry, okay.
How is it okay for the state to punish certain crimes, but not okay for parents to address...
Do you think that parents look at their sort of three-year-old toddler and say, stop setting fire to cars and raping people?
I mean, I'm not sure what kind of family you came from, what sort of environment you come from, that like the toddler murder gang is like a big issue that you need to sort of somehow conflate with statism.
Come on.
I mean, what kind of hellish daycare did you actually go to?
No, I never went to take it.
Okay, so let's look at it this way.
I'll sort of help you out in here.
So I think what you're talking about is a child who strikes another child, hits another child, right?
I mean, as for an adult, like if I come along and hit you, that's assault, right?
If a child hits another child, generally, that's not something where, you know, you involve the police and so on.
But you obviously would want to figure out what was going on with the child hitting the other child and figure out We're good to go.
It's a complete mind frack, right?
I mean, that's just, what do you mean?
You're hitting me to tell me that hitting is wrong?
What the hell, right?
That is not a rational argument.
Because here, with children, you're trying to do prevention in the future.
Whereas with the state in general, you are interested in prevention in the future, but you're very much interested in reducing violence in the here and now.
And you're dealing in general with a much more mature brain and much more Economic and political independence than a child would ever have.
So if a child hits another child, the question is why?
Why would the child hit another child?
Now, of course, the Hobbesian answer is that we're all born Like savages, you know, like it's just brutal and, you know, the daycare red in tooth and claw, which actually is kind of true, but that we're born savage and we need to kind of be beaten like steel needs to be sort of heated and beaten with a hammer to become a sword, that we're born savage.
These sort of predatory monsters, narcissistic, sociopathic, ugly, psychopathic, vicious, violent monsters.
And we need to be beaten into becoming halfway decent human beings or adults.
And so all children will hit other children and then you hit them to beat the hitting out of them.
And I'm not saying this is your perspective, but that's a perspective that would be used to justify this kind of aggression.
The other...
It's to say that children live what they learn, they become what they see.
That if they see children being hit, if they see adults hitting each other, if they see aggression and violence in their environment...
Then they will internalize and use that aggression and violence just in the same way that if they grow up in an English-speaking household, they don't come out fluent in Swahili, right?
So whatever is in their environment is what they will incorporate, internalize, and use as a methodology.
So if they see their parents having disputes, but the parents yell at each other, intimidate each other, slam doors, withdraw, give the cold treatment, hit each other, whatever it's going to be, then they say, okay, well, So this is how you resolve disputes, is you use aggression.
Or if the siblings are hitting each other, which again I would assume is coming from the parents, or if the parents are hitting the child, then if you have a dispute, then you use your fists.
And older people, i.e.
parents, can hit younger people.
So then if the child has a disagreement or a conflict that is significant with a younger child, he's going to say, well, older gets to hit younger.
Boom!
There you go.
And so...
If a child hits another child, the big question is why?
Well, if a child is speaking English, we don't say, why?
What mysterious force has given them fluency in English?
We say, well, this must be an English-speaking household.
And that's why the child is speaking English.
And so if we see a child hitting another child, we would say, rationally, well, we have a hitting household.
And the child is doing what they have done.
Children imitate, children absorb and reproduce.
And it's not scientific, although I have some other, you know, particularly Dr.
Elizabeth Gershoff, G-E-R, S-H-O-F-F. She's been on the show a couple of times talking about spanking.
But just anecdotally, which I know is not a proof, but I only have in my life peaceful parents.
Like those who are parents who are in my life are all peaceful parents.
And you know what?
Has never been an issue between our children.
Hitting of any kind.
Aggression of any kind.
There has not been any problem with it at all in any way, shape, or form.
Which is exactly as the theory would predict and exactly what has come to pass.
I would no more expect my friend's children to hit my daughter than I would expect them to speak to her in Swahili if they had never been exposed to the language.
And this, of course, is exactly what's happened.
They're peaceful and they're assertive and they have their conflicts and so on, but they would never dream of hitting each other because that's just not the language and the context and the interactions that they have seen.
Okay, so I just want to mention this, just so you know, for full disclosure, the first perspective you were describing on why children would hit each other is certainly closer to mine.
What do you mean?
You grew up in a household with hitting?
Or aggression?
No, that's not what I meant.
I meant that...
My perspective on children is more towards the children have evil inside of them which needs to be trained out of them.
Right.
I'm just saying that so you know.
I appreciate it.
I had a sense that logically that's where you'd have to be coming from, right?
I'm not trying to voodoo magic.
It's just that you can tell the origins of people's beliefs.
But go on.
Yes, yes, of course.
Yeah, I'm just saying that just so you know.
Sorry to interrupt, but were you that child?
In other words, did you view yourself as innately immoral or violent or aggressive and are thankful that aggression was used against you in order to rid you of this demonic aggression that you were born with?
Yes, but you don't get rid of it.
You learn to control it.
Alright, and when you were being raised, were your parents aggressive towards you and towards each other, or what was the level of aggression that occurred within your household when you were growing up, Alex?
Our mum asked me to avoid that area.
But...
Do you remember...
Hang on, do you remember...
We'll just talk about you then.
So do you remember when you were a child...
a time before you believed that you were innately violent?
No, I...
Violent isn't the word I'd use.
It's not exactly a wrong way of describing it, but it's not the word of choice.
Okay, which word would you use?
Sinful.
Sinful.
And would the sin involve the desire to do harm unto others to get what you want?
Certainly.
But it's not limited to that.
Okay, so violent is not a strong enough word because it doesn't encompass all the other physical and thought crimes that might be kept under the umbrella of sin, right?
That is correct.
So innately evil?
Yes.
Okay, so do you remember a time when you were a child when you did not think of yourself as innately evil?
I'm going to have to say no, but only because I can't ever remember a time where I started thinking that.
So you have always experienced yourself as innately evil?
Yes, I suppose so.
And do you remember how your innate evilness was...
Communicated to you?
Not specifically, no.
Really?
Really.
So how was it communicated to you?
Through...
Through us learning the scriptures and the Bible and...
We were given the truth about it, and we're Christians.
The truth is scripture.
Well, okay, but I mean, that's generally for somewhat older kids.
Do you remember how old you are when you have your first memory?
Sort of.
My earliest memory I can think of would be Opening a driveway gate so Dad could drive the car in.
And that would have been when I was roundabouts four.
Four, okay.
And so by that time you had already understood original sin and that you were born evil.
Is that right?
Well, again, it's hard to say Looking back, at what particular time I understood such and such.
No, no, no.
Sorry to interrupt you.
But logically, you said you've never known a time when you didn't think that you were evil, and you gave me the age of four.
So logically, I mean, unless you want to amend your earliest statement, I'm not trying to catch you out.
We need to be efficient here, right?
So if you say, well, I've always thought of myself as immoral.
My earliest memory is four.
Then, of course, at the age of four, you must have thought of yourself as immoral, right?
I mean, this is a QED thing, right?
Well, it's like as you grow up, your thought processes get more advanced and you become aware of more stuff and some stuff you're not aware of when you become aware of it.
And the other thing is that I strongly believe that children absorb what their parents teach them.
Children absorb the worldviews of their parents Sure.
And so even if children are completely unaware of the stuff they're absorbing, they do still understand it to a large extent and it does still affect them.
Okay.
I don't want to get into abstractions.
I'm trying to ask you personal questions.
Are you asking me for...
No, it's fine.
It's fine.
We can move on.
Okay.
So do you believe that...
Your innate immorality arises because of the corruption of humanity as the result of the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, the talking snake, and so on, that the fall or separation from God occurred, which gave Satan dominion over the human soul and the temporal realm.
And the temptations of Satan are so bound up in the corruption of the human soul that that's where the immorality comes from.
And I'm sorry, I hope I'm not completely slaughtering theology, but is that the general pattern that would make sense to you?
That's the general pattern, and you're not nearly as bad at slaughtering it than most people, so that's good.
And what are the temptations that Satan puts in front of you that you feel most susceptible to?
I don't believe that temptation should be attributable directly to Satan.
And the only place I can think of in Scripture where temptation is, in general terms, a attributed to something, not a specific temptation, is when Christ says that...
No, sorry.
One of the epistles...
Ah, no one should say that.
Hang on, sorry, we're getting back into, sorry to interrupt, but we're getting back into abstract land again.
If you don't like the idea that the temptations are coming from the devil, let me just ask you then, person to person or soul to soul, you could say.
A lot of them are, but I don't like attributing them.
Okay, but what are the temptations that you are most susceptible to?
Largely impure thoughts.
Um...
Sexually impure thoughts.
Right.
Right.
And you don't believe that those come necessarily from the devil in particular?
Possibly, but not necessarily, and it shouldn't really make any difference to how we live our lives.
You mean where the thoughts come from?
Yes.
Right.
And so it's lust, I'm going to go out on a limb and say after women, so it's lusting after women or feeling lust in your loins that is the experience of sin, because of course to think the deed is the same as to do the deed, right?
So the self-policing that is necessary to keep impure thoughts away from your mind is a big challenge, right?
I suppose so.
Yes, keep going.
I was thinking about it.
So, do you believe that the thought itself is the sin, not necessarily the action?
I mean, the action is the final expression of the sin, but it's still sinful to have the thoughts, right?
Yes.
Right.
And sexual desire is something that is a sin.
Why?
I'm not...
I wouldn't say...
I'm not sure this will make a whole lot of sense, but I wouldn't say that sexual desire is a sin per se.
Immoral sexual desire is a sin per se.
And immoral sexual desire would be for a woman other than your wife, right?
And so until you get married, having sexual desire is a sin, right?
Um...
Well, there is...
From one aspect, yes, but also that is supposed to drive you towards marriage.
So if you have sexual desire for the woman who you eventually marry, then it's less of a sin as long as you don't act on it until after marriage.
Is that right?
This isn't making a whole lot of sense to me.
I'm sorry.
Well, I mean, sexual desire has something to do with marriage.
Because marriage has something to do with procreation.
And if you have sexual desire for a man, and you are a man, you don't get to procreate.
If you have sexual desire for an infertile woman, then you don't get to procreate.
If you have sexual desire for an elderly woman, Harold and Mort, notwithstanding, you don't get to procreate, right?
So, youthful Sexual fertility would be what sexual desire would primarily be pointed at.
And so there would have to be sexual desire as a component of a woman who you were going to marry.
So for instance, I don't think we would consider it a good marriage if you found a woman...
Who was compatible in some ways with you, but she was, I don't know, 600 pounds and infertile and so on, then there would be a problem with that kind of sexual desire because that sexual desire would not lead to children.
And sexual desire, as far as I understand it, in many aspects of the Christian theology, sexual desire is that which helps beget children.
And it's fine, of course, if you're in a marriage and you get older because it helps maintain the bond and so on if you're too old to have kids.
But there would have to be some component of sexual desire in your pursuit of a woman in order to ensure that the sexual markers of fertility, you know, youth and good hip-to-waist ratio, lustrous hair, clear eyes, clear skin, all that kind of stuff, even features.
There would have to be some component of sexual desire in pursuing a woman for the sake of marriage and therefore of procreation.
But it would be immoral to feel sexual desire for a woman that you weren't going to marry and And it would not be immoral to feel sexual desire for the woman you were going to marry, as long as you didn't act on that sexual desire until after you were married.
I think I see where you're coming from, and I do agree, but the specific words that we're referring to in the Sermon on the Mount, specifically...
It's more specific than just sexual desire generally.
And so I think that, yes, I do agree with what you're saying.
And do you, Alex, do you have impulses towards violence towards others?
Yes.
And can you think of an example wherein that violence would show up in your life?
Or that impulse towards violence?
I think that The impulse towards violence is a very good thing if you use it correctly.
And so, for example, if I'm walking down the corridor and there's some guy who punches some girl in the face,
particularly if it's a Christian girl, but also if it's just any girl, My instinct, I'm not saying I necessarily do this, but my instinct would be to go and break his neck.
And has this happened a lot where you've seen men punching women?
No, no, it hasn't.
Okay, so I asked you not for a theoretical, but for an example in your life of where you had a drive to violence.
Um...
Ooh, I... I'm really not sure I can give you one because I live in a pretty cohesive and fairly non-violent community.
And so, yeah, I can't...
So, hang on.
So, Alex, the reason I'm asking this, and again, I'm not trying to catch you out.
I'm genuinely curious and I'm always, you know, nothing human is alien to me.
But...
Where's all this big simmering pot of evil in your soul?
Okay, so you have a little bit of lust.
Well, you're a young man.
Guess what?
That's called being a young man.
So I'm trying to like, oh, I am full of devils.
I am full of sin and evil and it had to get beaten out of me.
What's all this evil?
I like tits.
Yeah.
And I guess if I saw somebody beaten up on a girl, I'd do something.
Where is the big bubbling cauldron of satanic evil that we've got to lay waste to childhood for to save you from?
Well, firstly, laying waste to childhood is definitely not how I would describe it.
Calling children evil, if you're not completely correct and certain of it, is pretty harsh, right?
It is harsh.
You said parents had an obligation to tell their children the truth as well.
Absolutely.
And so that's certainly not something I would ever hold against my parents.
Well, sure.
If you believe that children are innately evil, then withholding that information from a child would be immoral.
The first part of that is what I'm kind of trying to figure out.
So your question, as I understand it, is...
Where's all this evil that is so innate?
Where's all this sin?
Is there something you're not telling me?
Do you have a whole line of baby bunnies buried in your backyard?
Is there somebody currently thumping from the inside of your car trunk?
I mean, what are we talking here?
Are you currently standing on a hobo's neck?
Actually, I do have baby bunnies buried in my backyard.
I like to shoot them.
I don't think that's classified as a sin.
I think that's classified as dinner.
But anyway, go on.
It is.
Yes, we actually eat them and sometimes they have babies and we bury them.
To be honest with you, I have myself questioned how I came to believe this so strongly and so deeply about this innate evil when, for me myself, I'd Don't have that much to show for all this evil that's supposed to be in me.
Or maybe if you hadn't been told you were evil, you would be full of all that is evil.
Maybe this is the, you know, just to play the quote devil's advocate, right?
This is maybe, Alex, who you are because you were told about your capacity for satanic immorality, right?
That it's Biting the heads of seagulls?
I mean, well, in which case, sorry, and the test, sorry, but the test for that would be that you had all of these horrible urges for destructive violence and predation and sadism and all of that.
In which case, sorry, and the test for that would be that you had all of these horrible urges for destructive violence and predation and sadism and all of that.
And it was only on, you know, repeated terror of hell and repeated meditations on your immorality that you were able to combat such nefarious and dark drives in your satanic soul, right?
So if you had these intense drives or desires for violence when you were younger and then you were told, well, no, this world is run by Satan and you're evil incarnate innately, then you would find some way to terrify yourself out of acting on these impulses.
I know I'm sort of putting it in extreme forms, but if you didn't have really strong desires towards evil doing when you were younger and you don't really seem to have any now, I...
I'm sorry, even if I were some fundamentalist, I have trouble saying that lust in a young man is a sin, because being bipedal is a sin, having two nutsacks is a sin.
It's not...
You know, it's not how biology works.
So anyway, I was just sort of curious.
You say, well, children are born evil.
And it's like, well, you were a child, but you were born evil.
And it's kind of hard to get the empirical facts behind that.
Well, just by looking at my life, I can see why that line of reasoning would be valid.
I don't accept that as a legitimate line of reasoning because I don't I don't believe, I don't start with me, I start with the truth, and so if it's true that we are innately born evil, then any line of reasoning which says that my belief in that is only because of some childhood thing, no.
Well, so no, this is your axiom, right?
The axiom is like where you start from and it can't be disproven.
And since, of course, you weren't reasoned into this empirically, I don't want to say dogma like that's just automatically wrong or bad, but this was told to you as a truth without any evidence.
And of course it has to be, because it's theology.
In theology, our truths inflicted on children with no evidence.
And so when you're saying, well, I'm born innately evil, and I say, okay, well, where's your evidence for that?
And you say, well, I don't have any, it doesn't matter, right?
Because this is a theological foundation.
This is an axiom, which means something that you consider is true, which is the foundation of the entire approach to the question.
And so now that I understand that, Alex, your questions make a lot more sense to me.
Because if you say, well, children are born evil and they need to be frightened or punished into becoming less evil or even potentially good, then sure.
No, hang on.
So then it would be kind of child abuse to not punish your children into being not evil.
Sorry, go ahead.
Okay, and it is some belief widely within the Christian community that it is child abuse not to discipline your children, spare the rod and spoil a child.
- Well, you know that the word rod there meant instruction, not hitting them with a stick, right?
The rod is not a physical thing that you beat children with.
The rod is instruct your children.
In other words, if children are not loved and instructed in the ways of virtue, then they will be spoiled.
And I would agree with that as a parent as well.
That if you don't invest in your children and teach them right from wrong and model virtuous behavior to them, yes, you are going to do very bad things to them.
It is worse to harm a child's soul than it is to harm a child's body.
And so...
So I would agree with that.
But I don't think it means if you don't beat your children, they'll grow up spoiled.
That's not the original translation.
But I do think the original translation did have a specific focus on physical discipline.
And I don't think that when the scripture elsewhere talks about the rod being for the back of fools, it's talking about anything other than Physically beating them, in this case at the hands of the state.
Where were we?
Well, okay, here we go.
I will give you the source of it.
Oh, okay, go ahead.
I'll say what I was just about to say later.
All right.
Okay.
The Lord is my rod and fortress.
As mentioned in Psalm 18.2 and 31.3.
Or, he is my rod and my salvation, in Psalm 61.2 and 62.6.
So throughout Genesis in particular, the references to the rod as a scepter or a staff that is carried by royalty, pharaohs, enlightened spiritual beings, Moses, even gods like Zeus.
The staff of Moses in the King James Version of the Bible is actually called A rod.
It's used to perform miracles of profound spiritual significance, right?
The rod is used to produce water from a rock, transformed into a snake to swallow an enemy snake.
He uses the rod to part...
The Red Sea.
So the rod is symbolic and representative of strength and power and spiritual transformation.
So the real meaning of spare the rod and spoil the child is that if you spare the rod of spiritual knowledge, of insight and transformation to your child, they'll be spoiled, rotten.
Without spiritual knowledge, your children will be spoiled.
Nowhere in the Bible does it actually say, get a rod and beat your kid, or they'll be spoiled, right?
I mean, it is a...
A very clear analogy for knowledge of virtue and all of that kind of stuff.
So I just really, really want to be clear about that.
that.
Now, of course, even if the Bible did say, grab a stick and beat your children, well, we don't stone people to death anymore, right?
I mean, there have been some improvements in the way that people are dealt with as the result of advancements in ethics.
We don't put sorcerers to death.
We don't burn witches at the stake and all that kind of stuff, right?
But no, I really, really want to be clear because this is something that it's a terrible translation.
And I'm Because it makes it sound like, well, if you don't beat your kids with rods, they're going to grow up spoiled.
And it is a shame that this is considered to be something other than it is, but the rod is strength and guidance and moral wisdom.
I agree with all that within the context of those particular passages, but the whole spare the rod, spoil the child thing is from Proverbs and So, Proverbs 13, 24, it says, whoever spares the rod hates their children, but the one who loves their children is careful to discipline them.
And so the rod is equated with discipline there.
Yes, but discipline doesn't mean beating.
Would you say that a monk has discipline?
Of course, but the monk doesn't have discipline because he's beaten.
I mean, an athlete has discipline.
I have discipline.
People who work out have discipline.
People who are dieting have discipline.
That doesn't mean they get beaten.
Discipline does not mean to beat.
But that's not what it said.
How do you discipline a person, though?
How do you discipline a child?
As opposed to having discipline or self-discipline or whatever.
How do you discipline someone else?
Yes.
I mean, what does that even mean if not, well, it doesn't necessarily have to be a physical whack up the rear, but what does disciplining someone mean if not that?
Well, what it means is that you show them discipline in your own personhood.
You show them what it is like to be disciplined.
If I want my child to eat less candy, do you know what I do?
I eat less candy.
If I want my child to negotiate rather than to use violence, you know what I do?
I negotiate rather than use violence.
If I want my children to treat other people with respect, I treat them with respect.
And that way the child gets to see my discipline and that is how the discipline passes to the child, just as language passes from parent to child through exposure.
To be honest with you, I didn't prepare for this.
Sorry, and we see this with 12-step programs, right?
So people who go to 12-step programs, we're going to talk about this later in the show, but people who go to 12-step programs...
Oh, sorry, 12-step programs are...
There are meetings that people go to who are trying to become...
Non-alcoholics, right?
I guess.
So what they do is they go and they see and they talk about their challenges and they see other people who've succeeded in putting down the bottle and being sober.
Now they're not beating each other, they're exposing each other to the discipline of saying no to, right?
And a lot of it is reducing temptation, don't hang around people who are drinking and all of that kind of stuff.
How do you create a disciplined person?
Well, you can of course just beat them, but what you do is create a frightened person, right?
Because the whole point of beating a child is to frighten the child, to create pain in the child so that the child will not do certain things, right?
Well, I don't really agree.
Are you finished?
What don't you agree with?
Do you not agree that hitting a child is causing the child pain?
I agree with that, but you were saying that the purpose of that was to frighten a child.
That's not something I would necessarily agree with.
Oh, come on.
If you're causing someone pain, do you not think that you're relying on them not wanting to experience that pain?
Yes.
Okay, so you want them to be afraid of the pain.
That's why you cause people pain, is you want them to be afraid of the pain as something that will cause them to avoid the behavior that causes the pain.
When you put it like that, yes, I agree.
Okay, good.
But again...
That's not discipline.
That's fear.
That's not discipline.
That's fear.
The term I would use would be the purpose of, that is, would be to educate rather than just frighten them.
Educate.
Yes.
Educate?
What do you mean educate?
You're hitting someone.
How is that educating them?
You're punishing them and you're creating an aversive mechanism within their body to try and avoid that behavior, right?
Like, you know, you pick up something that's hot and it burns you.
Well, you don't want to pick your body.
Pain is your body's way of telling you not to do it again, right?
Yes, yes.
Okay, so it's not education because that's how you train a puppy and nobody talks about educating puppies, right?
Let's just use the word for what it is.
You're hitting someone.
You're hitting a helpless child who's a dependent child who's got no recourse, no legal recourse, no capacity to avoid you hitting, no capacity to evade your power over them.
Basically, children are prisoners in the family home and I say that even about my own child.
My own child, she's a prisoner.
She didn't get to choose me as a parent.
She can't choose to leave.
She can't choose to tap me out and sub me in for someone else who she would prefer to be her parent.
I mean, she's trapped here.
She's totally trapped here.
She's got no choice whatsoever.
And so if somebody's trapped and you're causing them pain, that's not education.
I mean, that's not.
Education is the transfer of knowledge, not the infliction of pain.
Well, listen, I'm going to move on to the next caller, but I do appreciate the call in, and I will certainly mull over what you've said.
And look, I really do get where you're coming from, and that if you believe that children have souls, and if they don't receive Jesus Christ and go to church and pray, then those souls will go to hell.
And if the only way to have those souls go to heaven is to hit the child, then it's sort of like...
I do understand the perspective.
And if it's a faith-based belief for you, then you weren't reasoned into it and you can't be reasoned out of it.
But just for everyone else, the question of whether children are born Innately evil is pretty significant.
I really don't give moral responsibility to babies and toddlers.
And I know in Christianity, of course, you don't really...
A lot of Christians don't provide the capacity to sin until the age of seven or so.
That's not the case here.
No, no, I know.
I know some.
But no, I appreciate the call.
It's very, very interesting.
And I think that you would agree, though, Alex, or tell me if you would, just at the last point, I want to get out of you if you don't mind.
If there's a way to transfer knowledge without hitting...
Or if there's a way to get the desired results without hitting the child, that would be better, right?
I mean, if the outcome is the same, one you don't have to hit, the other you do hit.
Not hitting would be better, right?
Well, I have some problems with the question.
I don't think of parentally administered discipline as necessarily being...
There are plenty of other forms which that can take which can still have the same effect.
There are children for whom spanking will be counterproductive and you do need to Oh, spanking doesn't work.
Yeah, spanking doesn't work.
I mean, it's not just for some children.
Spanking just doesn't work.
It will suppress the behavior for a short amount of time, and then it comes back with a vengeance.
And I would invite people to look into the truth about spanking as a presentation that we've done on this channel and so on.
But no, I appreciate the call.
I really, really found it interesting, and I appreciate your honesty as I sort of rooted around the origins of your being and so on.
So I appreciate that.
Thanks a lot.
I wasn't finished.
Could I stay on just a little bit more?
Make it quick, please.
Okay.
What I called in for was because I think there's a severe discrepancy between how you see the state and how you see parenting.
So to put my question another way, there's a lot of people out there who are...
Who are totally against state punishments.
They want jails to be nicer.
When they see, for example, Islamic terrorist atrocities, they blame...
They don't blame Islam.
They don't blame the third world cultures from where they come from.
They blame what are we not doing right, as if it's a thing...
As if that's an indictment against us.
Now, you would see a...
Toddler hitting someone, for example, as an indictment on the parents and as a response to that you would go full on soft approach.
Why aren't you one of those people saying that Islamic terrorism is an indictment on society or government or whatever it is?
and we need to pick up our game as opposed to we need to obliterate these scumbags and not let them into our country or whatever.
I'm just looking through your questions here.
That's not anywhere in the questions that you submitted or anywhere close.
I'm just kind of curious because it seems like you want to start a whole new conversation.
And look, that may be a worthwhile conversation.
I think it would be.
I certainly talked a lot about the origins of terrorism ahead of time.
But I'm not going to get into that now.
That's a very, very big question.
We've got seven callers tonight.
We've gone an hour and a quarter on this call.
So I'm going to move on, but I do appreciate you calling in.
In my mind, it's the same question, though.
I'm going to move on, but thank you very much for calling in.
I appreciate it.
It's a very interesting call.
And yeah, call back in.
We'll talk more about this other topic another time.
All right.
Who's next?
Alright, up next we have Gary.
Gary wrote in and said, When people talk about government corruption, I usually hear that the solution is to get money out of politics or term limits.
It seems to me that these address the symptoms and not the cause.
I think corruption is caused by state discrimination.
Government has the power to discriminate by transferring freedom and wealth from some of its citizens to special interests.
They do this with regulations, licensing, foreign aid, tariffs, unequal taxation, and outright wealth transfer.
Isn't the solution to corruption really to honor the Constitution's equal protection and general welfare clauses that treat all citizens equally?
Isn't discrimination the root cause of corruption by providing something for the state to sell?
Isn't the Supreme Court guilty of promoting corruption by not striking down laws and regulations that discriminate?
That's from Gary.
Hi, Stephen.
Hey, Gary.
How are you doing?
Pretty good.
All right.
So, if I could sort of boil it down, and I don't mean to sort of shrink what you're saying, so...
If the government has the power to tax trillions of dollars, to create trillions of dollars, and to hand out trillions of dollars, of course you're going to get corruption.
That is corruption.
The corruption isn't the handing of the money to the special interest.
The corruption is the creation or borrowing or printing of that money in the first place.
Once the government has the power to create money, to borrow money, to sell bonds, to inflate, and once it has the power to hand out trillions of dollars and provide massive favors worth trillions of dollars, so it may not be that the government's handing you a billion dollars.
It just might pass a law that benefits your organization to the tune of a billion dollars.
It might keep competitors out.
It might make it more difficult for other people to enter into your country to sell their goods and services, or it may create a high barrier to entry.
To keep people out of your business so that you can jack up your rates, like the licenses for plumbers and electricians and doctors and, you know, like a third of Americans need these damn licenses just to earn their daily bread.
So once you give government the power to provide untold economic benefits to groups or individuals or whatever, then that is the corruption.
The corruption is having that power.
The effects of it We could call corruption, but there's no way to deal with the effects of it without dealing with the cause.
As long as the government has this kind of power, there's no piece of paper, there's nothing that can ever keep that power from being exercised.
Yeah, so I guess I would boil it down to discrimination.
The government has the power to discriminate.
In other words, it doesn't have to treat all of its citizens or institutions equally.
And so that power of discrimination is what the government has to sell.
Sorry, what do you mean by discrimination, though?
I'm not sure I... So I can tax from you and give to someone else, and that's not treating you equally because I'm taking money from you and giving money to someone else?
Exactly.
Well, so then the power of taxation...
Power of taxation, of course.
But the power of taxation, if there was equality under the law, of course, there would be no government.
The moment you have a government, you're putting people above the law.
You're allowing certain people the magical power to initiate the use of force against others.
There is no such thing as equality under the law enforced by government because government itself is a violation of equality under the law because governments are always allowed to do things that are specifically illegal for everyone else.
You can't have a government protect equality under the law.
It's like putting the drunk in charge of your liquor cabinet.
You're just going to end up with a mess and vomit and headaches.
Right.
But given the fact that the government has that kind of power, how would you make the government more fair or less divisive?
Well, you have a smarter, better educated population.
Because...
We all understand that corruption may benefit me now, but it's gonna harm my children, and it's gonna harm my children's children.
So if corruption might make for me a million dollars now, But because everyone is going to have the capacity to employ whatever tactics I use to get the million dollars, you're going to get a bunch of people swarming the government, each attempting to extract a million dollars from the government for their own benefit.
And so it's going to destroy the economy.
It's going to destroy any pretense of political constraint or legitimacy.
And so I understand, okay, I'll do without the million dollars because I don't want to destroy society.
But that takes a certain amount of intelligence.
That takes a certain amount of deferral of gratification.
That takes a certain amount of intelligence.
I mean, it's really, really all it comes down to.
And so if you have a smarter population that's well-educated in the ethics and consequences of corruption...
Then you are going to have a more honest society.
Social ostracism is important for these kinds of things as well.
Something maybe perfectly legal but still strongly discouraged because of social ostracism.
So for instance, if you look around the world, you will see that the lower the IQ of a country's citizens in general...
The more it is corrupt, the higher its corruption, which is exactly what you'd expect.
Lower IQ groups tend to want to consume resources now and not save them for later, which makes perfect sense because low IQ groups generally tended to evolve in situations of natural plenty, right?
I mean, you don't need to work that hard to get something to eat in Africa, right?
I mean, there's fruit, there's game, there's like tons of stuff all over the place that you can eat.
And so there was really not much point deferring gratification because you didn't have winter, right?
Now, in the northern climates, you had a winter, and so you had to work really, really hard.
You say, where does the Protestant work ethic come from?
It comes from winter!
You had to work really, really hard, and then you had to not eat for months.
You know, I remember when I was a kid, there was Lent followed by Ash Tuesday, I think it was, and Lent is where you basically don't eat anything much for a week.
It's like the compressed Ramadan or something.
You don't eat anything.
And then you have a big giant meal of pancakes at the end of it all.
And of course, this all coincided with the end of winter, where you were basically out of food anyway, right?
I mean, and so, like, you wanted to be out of food at the end of winter, because if you still had food, it meant that you stored too much or not eaten enough during the winter and so on.
And so deferral of gratification was absolutely necessary for Climates where there's a winter.
And again, I'm talking about where you have agriculture.
If you're a hunter climate where there's lots of winter, like if you are the Inuit and so on, then you don't need to deferral of gratification because you don't have a growing season.
There's not enough of a growing season in the Arctic.
It's like, what, summer is like four minutes or something.
So what you don't want to do if you want to reduce government corruption is you don't want to import a whole bunch of people from low IQ areas Who have, in general, because it's low IQ, and whether it's genetic or environmental, it's not particularly relevant because their children are going to grow up in their environment, right?
You're not going to take the kids away from the people you bring in.
They're going to grow up in that environment, and they're going to get all the messages of that.
So whether it's transmitted genetically or culturally is not particularly relevant in the short run.
But yeah, don't bring in a bunch of people who are going to be very susceptible to driving corruption, bringing corruption into Into your society, and that will help a lot.
But in the absence of that, it doesn't really matter what you say, because if you've got a bunch of low IQ people in your society, corruption is going to increase.
Now, of course, there are a lot of smart people who are corrupt as well, right?
I mean, particularly in the sort of higher echelons of business.
But they generally tend to be legally on the right side of things, right?
And...
So, yeah, and people who've got a sort of history of the market is important as well.
So, like, Russians are notoriously involved in corruption in the West, right?
Running all sorts of scams and so on, right?
And they've got a decent IQ and they're white and so on.
It's really around the culture of what matters.
What happened, of course, in Russia was that there was...
Communism.
Communism was innately corrupt because there was no objective price and market mechanism to distribute goods.
So everything was innately corrupt and that's part of the culture that they have.
So there's culture, there's probably genetics involved somewhere as well.
But if you want to reduce corruption, you, first of all, need to have as high an IQ of population as humanly possible.
And I don't think that's a big focus in many countries in the West.
Well, I mean, given that we have the population we have, and even if we shut off immigration tomorrow, we still have a lot of not very smart people running around.
So the question I have is, well, couldn't we make government better by you know trying to enforce the Constitution in terms of equal protection you know and not discriminate you know There's all kinds of discrimination going on that doesn't involve taxation.
You've got hate crime laws.
You've got affirmative action.
You've got means-tested programs.
You've got all kinds of inequities or what I would call discrimination.
And if the Constitution were held in more esteem, You know, and government took seriously the notion of treating all of its citizens equally, then wouldn't you think that the outcome would be better?
Well, here's the thing.
And I'm not recommending any of these courses of actions, but I'm just sort of making this sort of abstract case for these things.
You don't get to vote in a company's...
Vote, like in the companies, whatever is going to be happening in the company, you have to vote on particular policies or whatever.
You don't get to vote if you don't have any shares, right?
I kind of just wander into an Apple shareholders meeting and demand a significant vote if I don't hold any shares, right?
And you don't get to vote on a condo board unless you're in the condo or whatever part of the management.
And so the idea that voting should be where you have no stake is It's pretty alien to just about every field of endeavor except government, right?
And for reasons we'll get into in a second.
So if, you know, if my family is deciding, you know, do we want to watch a movie or do we want to play Scrabble, right?
We don't phone some random person and say, what do you vote for?
Because they're not there and they won't have to live with the consequences of whatever we vote for.
And so...
For people who don't have a stake, you would never imagine that you would have them voting.
Now, what about people who have a distorted incentive?
So people who are receiving government money cannot be objective.
Cannot be objective about government policy.
People who are receiving government money cannot be objective.
About government policy.
And we know this for a simple fact.
If I buy a Lamborghini for a judge who's presiding over a case of mine, he can't be considered objective about the outcome of the case if he accepts that money, right?
If he accepts that gift, right?
Laws against bribery innately say if you have a financial incentive in the outcome of Of a particular dispute or question, you cannot be objective about it.
We know that, we know that, we know that.
And there are countless laws internationally, domestically, all over the place against this kind of stuff.
Asterisk, Clinton Foundation accepted.
Well, maybe not forever.
I wonder how her speaking fees are going to go now that she doesn't have quite as much to offer.
You know, she's a more experienced speaker.
She ran a whole presidential.
Anyway, we all know the answer to that.
So, The question of people who are on the receiving end of government money, can they be objective about government policy?
Well, of course not.
Of course not.
Because if we say that financial incentives have no impact on judgment, then we have to legalize all bribery.
All bribery must be legalized.
You can hand $10,000 to a policeman who's pulled you over for a DUI and that's perfectly legal.
You can buy A judge, a Lamborghini.
Because we say, look, it doesn't matter.
Financial incentives have no capacity to interfere with people's objective judgment.
But we don't do that.
We would consider that heinous.
But that's exactly how late-stage democracies pretend to work.
So people getting money are going to vote for more money.
Now, people who are paying for it, well, should they not have money?
A little bit more of a say in what's going on.
Just a possibility.
Like, you try to arrange the birthday party at a place with the birthday boy or girl where they like it, right?
Where they like it.
Because it's their interest that's what the benefit.
If I'm taking everyone out for dinner, I might have a slightly bigger say in where we go for dinner, right?
Because I'm the one who's paying, right?
We would assume that the people who are paying should have a little bit more of a say, and we also know that people who are being bribed, who are receiving money as a result of a decision, have no objectivity.
The logical outcome for that would be to have it as the way it used to be in America, which is that you had to be A property owner in order to vote.
You had to have some stake in the protection of property rights in order to vote on government policy.
Because if you're just being paid by the government, if you're receiving money from government taxation and redistribution, you can't be objective.
And people can say, well, that's wrong.
It's like, okay, well, then let's get rid of all bribery laws.
Because that's exactly the same principle, that if you're on the receiving end of goods and services, you can't be objective about the question in front of you.
And see, we don't like a judge to be bribed, and the judge is simply deciding someone else's.
Like somebody else's case, right?
And what they decide doesn't have any particular impact on their pay.
But people directly being paid by the government?
Go try and bribe a juror.
I'm not recommending it, it's illegal, but go and try and bribe a juror.
Oh, that's a corruption of the justice.
It's like, well, yeah, yeah.
This is the mess that you get into when the government has the power to redistribute income.
So yeah, if you could find a magic wand to make people respect the Constitution, yeah, but they won't right now because they've adapted.
This is why it's going to get violent.
It's going to get violent if the state shrinks.
It has to because you've got millions and millions and millions of people who've adapted themselves to government largesse.
Not all of them feel like they're going to be able to adapt to something else.
So, yeah, I mean, I just don't want you to have this magic word called, well, just get people to respect the Constitution.
It's like, well, only if you believe incentives don't matter.
Well, but, I mean, just the examples that you gave, though, right, where people can vote to take away other people's money, right?
Well, that, to me, is a violation of the Constitution because it...
It shows favoritism to the people who are receiving money as opposed to the people that are having to pay it.
That's a discrimination.
What's your solution?
Is your solution that people should voluntarily give up income?
Well, if you believe that's the case, then we all know that people who cash in checks where they've won the lottery, they cash in their winning lottery tickets, that's going to add to people's taxation.
Well, but good luck convincing them not to, right?
I don't think I have a solution, but I think if the courts would strike down laws that allow discrimination, then it would seem to me that things could get better.
Yes, but...
The reason they don't strike down those laws is that nobody wants to preside over the flaming wreckage of civil war called a post-welfare America at the moment, right?
If Trump gets in and gets his way, when Trump gets in and if he gets his way and creates more jobs, there's more opportunity, you might have people easing off.
But while the elite easing off welfare and easing into...
Employment, in which case, but there's still, it's going to be a hell of a rocky transition.
A hell of a rocky transition.
So, if you were to cut off the welfare spigot at the moment, I mean, cities would be in flames.
In flames!
I mean, it sounds like you're old enough to remember what happened after Rodney King's, the police who were attempting to subdue Rodney King, after they were acquitted, I mean, Los Angeles and other countries, other cities went up in flames.
And so, this There has to be some transition.
There has to be some transition where there's more and more jobs, then less and less welfare, and then you can start to talk about respecting the...
Right, but the transition, to me, could be one thing at a time, right?
You could have a transition where, first of all, you stop making new discriminatory laws.
If the meme got out there that this is actually discrimination and that we start to avoid Creating more discrimination, then that would at least slow things down, right?
And then we could slowly get the notion out in front of people that, hey, yeah, this is really being unfair, and as time progressed, maybe we could start to right the ship.
Alright.
Well, I certainly would like to see more equality under the law, and I appreciate your call in.
I mean, keep making the case.
Keep making the case, and we'll see how it works out.
And now is the time to do it, because there are particular changes going on in the political realm in America, and I think throughout Europe, where now is the case to start to make the case for equality under I mean, in the 90s, Canada did reduce welfare spending and so on, but it was during an economic boom and pretty high IQ population in Canada.
Canada's immigration is very strict.
It means very strict and is constantly...
Combing for the highest IQ people that it can find to get in.
So it's a little bit different with a high IQ population.
But yeah, that would be my suggestion.
Keep making the case.
You know, if you could get people to respect the Constitution, we wouldn't need, as I am, to be looking for alternatives.
So thanks.
If you were talking about, you know, things going down in flames at some point.
Which may very well happen, you know, something's going to rise from the ashes, right?
And if you instill the notion that a good government treats all of its citizens equally, then maybe the new constitution would emphasize that more.
Right, right.
Okay.
Well, thanks so much for your call.
I appreciate it.
Let's move on to the next caller.
Alright, up next we have Dave.
Dave wrote in and said, Have you noticed the social justice agenda being promoted in children's movies and TV shows?
Is this slipping under the radar of people like yourself with a platform to make the public aware of this happening?
Finally, besides making parents aware of this agenda being pushed in such a harmless looking way, is there anything else that can be done about it?
And that's from Dave.
Burn Disney!
So Dave, how are you doing?
Hi, how are you doing?
Well, thanks.
What have you noticed?
Well, I'm a father and now a new grandfather.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
And I am concerned in what I'm seeing, like you said, in Disney, but also other companies, I suppose, out of Hollywood that are projecting an agenda that Although it's subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, it denies biology.
It does a lot of things that I think is harmful.
Right.
Well, I mean, I've done reviews of kids' movies, Frozen, and Angry Birds, and maybe one or two others that I can't recall off the top of my head.
But, yeah, no, I mean, there is a very, very clear...
Prejudice or programming, really, programming.
And to me, the programming all boils down to one thing, which is that parents are terrible and kids are brilliant.
Parents are wrong and kids are right.
Parents are dumb and kids are smart.
Oh yeah, Maleficent, Rio 2, Zootopia.
Yeah, I knew there was a couple others.
Zootopia, Zootopia.
Yeah, so the young are smart and the old are incompetent.
This is the foundational drive in Children's programming these days.
See, this is part of what social justice warrior stuff is all about, is that you fill children with such insane leftist madness that their parents are like, well, that's stupid.
And then, of course, they're programmed to ignore their parents.
And the new ideas, like the left, all they do is troll.
They have nothing positive of value to offer.
Why are they pro-choice?
Because they care.
About women's reproductive choices?
No, of course not.
They're pro-choice because it pisses off the religious right.
And why are they pro-immigrant?
Well, because it pisses off the religious right and they get to call everyone who opposes it a Nazi and a white nationalist and a racist.
Everything they do is for trolling.
It's got nothing to do with anything else.
So social justice warrior stuff...
I mean, oh, they really care about the protection of gays?
No, of course not.
Otherwise, they'd be all over the Islamic countries that are tossing them off buildings.
No, of course not.
I don't care about any of that.
They pro-homosexuality because it annoys the religious rights.
And they get to call everyone who pushes back on it a homophobe.
All it is, they're just trolls.
Once you understand that they're just trolls that are just baiting all the time, you understand, okay, well, why do they want children...
To think that they're experts at everything and brilliant and forward-thinking and correct, and their parents are just stodgy old idiots who get everything wrong.
I'll let you answer that one if you want to take a swing at it.
Why is this so common all over the place?
And isn't it in movies, TV shows everywhere?
Well, you know, the left.
The West Coast, they call it the left coast for a reason.
I mean, they've got...
The majority of what I've seen come out of Hollywood is pushing this agenda.
And who did they back?
Well, they backed Hillary Clinton, which would have been the worst thing that could have happened, in my opinion, anyway.
But they're also, you know, like the movie you mentioned, like Zootopia.
I mean, it's ludicrous.
But it follows the same thing, right?
The little bunny wants to do great things, and the parents are like, oh, and she's right, and they're wrong.
Our parents are always wrong, and kids are always right.
Well, also, you've got to look at, too, the...
What was the other one?
Transylvania, the Hotel Transylvania one where the white family was shown as these bigoted, closed-minded people for the majority of the movie that weren't closed-minded people for the majority of the movie that weren't going to accept what their son's choice was in marriage.
Oh, and the vampire is paranoid about his daughter's safety, and he's wrong, and she's right.
Yeah.
Right?
And doesn't he set up this whole, it's right in the beginning, but he sets up this whole scare scenario to try and keep her at home.
Right.
And, you know, she's totally cool, and she's hip, and she's with it, and she's right, and And he's just paranoid and wrong and crazy, right?
Yeah.
Oh, it's the same thing with...
Ah, shoot.
What's it called?
Oh, gosh.
You've probably seen it.
It's the movie where the girl gets shrunk down...
flying around with all these fairies in a garden.
And her dad is like this crazy guy who's – it turns out at the end he's kind of with it.
But, you know, for most of the movie he's just crazy and out of it and wrong.
And she's right and sensible and solid and all that kind of stuff.
And that is epic.
That's the name of it.
And of course, oh, I got another one.
Tangled, right?
The mom is crazy and wrong and bad, and the daughter is wonderful and kind and good and correct.
So the question is, why does the media want to drive this wedge between children and their parents?
Why do they want to indoctrinate children interviewing their parents as wrong, as silly, as foolish, as bigoted, as wrongheaded, as archaic, as conservative, whatever, right?
Well, because...
In order to influence someone who's being influenced by someone else, you have to drive a wedge between whoever's influencing the person you want to influence and them, right?
So if I want to go out with a girl who's dating a guy, and she won't have an affair, or maybe I don't want an affair, what have I got to do?
I've got to break him up.
If I want her to date me, I've got to break her up with her boyfriend.
And I'm talking about little kids, right?
Like, I'm not talking about adults like their parents are screaming at them and beating them up.
And that's a different thing, right?
But if you can get your children away from their parents, get them into daycare.
Ooh, look, we're going to tax the hell out of you, so you've got to work more and more.
But don't worry.
We'll take some of that tax money.
We'll create nice daycare for your kids.
Oh, and then we'll have those kids eight or ten hours a day.
And we'll just be indoctrinating them and indoctrinating and indoctrinating them.
And now, if there's a conflict between the indoctrination of the state and the preferences of the parents, the children have to be programmed to reject the parents in favor of the state.
And the way they do that is they constantly portray parents as wrong.
So if there's any conflict between what the parents say and what the state says or what the daycare or what the media says, same thing.
All, you know, one side of the same hellish disco ball or different sides.
If there's a conflict, there has to be a conflict between what the government wants and what the parents are saying.
There has to be.
Otherwise, what's the point?
And so when there's a conflict, the children have to be programmed to reject their own parents in favor of the state.
And you do that by continually portraying parents as incompetent.
Sorry, go ahead.
No, you're right.
I am agreeing with you.
But it started, I believe, when they started showing the dad is this moron in the house who was this moron.
Basically, his only purpose was to go to work and give money to everybody.
And be wrong.
And be wrong all the time.
Right.
Well, look, if you want to bang teenagers, you have to portray the girls' parents, the dads.
Dads are the protectors of the young girls, right?
And so if you want to have sex with teenagers, you have to show that all parental or all fatherly concern over chastity is wrong and creepy and weird and bad, right?
Right.
Which is why the Dracula in Hotel Transylvania who wants to protect his daughter is silly and foolish and paranoid.
And like, of course, when you want to separate the teenage girls from their fathers so that the teenage girls are easier prey.
teenage girls are easier prey.
And you, you know, you have to do that for the few remaining teenage girls who actually have fathers these days.
And, you know, you have to do that for the few remaining teenage girls who actually have fathers these days.
And you've got to separate them, right?
You've got to separate them.
Right.
And the other thing too, I think this came out of a kind of white knighting as well, because once you've got a critical mass, and often it is quite a bit of mass, but when you've got a critical mass of single moms in society, and you say, well, children really need their fathers, and it's really, really terrible for children not to have fathers.
Well, what happens is all the single moms get really upset.
And they won't watch your show, and their children won't watch your show, and they get really upset.
And they've, Lord knows, a lot of them seem to have a lot of time on their hands, not overly consumed with, say, running a household well, or having a job, right?
It's So they've got lots of time to organize boycotts and get upset and rouse trouble and all this kind of stuff.
There's a fundamental difference, right?
The people who are rioting don't have to worry about getting up for work in the morning.
So, yeah, once you've got a bunch of single moms, then you have a market for fathers that are irrelevant.
Because if you say fathers are essential, well, the single moms are going to feel bad and get mad.
I can say it.
I don't have any advertisers.
One of the reasons why.
But yeah, once you get enough single moms, then you have to start describing fathers as useless and negative.
Because otherwise, what you're doing is you're saying to the children of the single moms, you're fucked.
You're toast.
You're screwed because your mom either drove a good man away or married or had sex with a bad man.
Either way, she's not a competent mother.
And look at all the great things all these other kids have who've got a two-parent household.
You don't have any of those.
You're screwed.
And then that, of course, causes a lot of trouble because you wouldn't want to give people accurate representations of their own parents' choices, right?
Right.
And they want to keep showing that as the norm.
They do, and of course they want more single moms because single moms, the people on the left want more single moms because single moms almost always vote for the state, right?
Almost vote for bigger government because they depended on the state.
Well, they need welfare and food stamps and medical and all of the stuff that comes with that.
Yeah, people don't know the degree to which single motherhood is an engineered social phenomenon, right?
In that...
When the welfare state came in, if you had a father or a husband or a man in the house, you couldn't get welfare.
He had to go.
He had to be gone.
They were paying single mothers to drive away the fathers.
And so single mothers, it's not even just a response to welfare.
It's a response to specific things within welfare around keep the man away.
And that way we're going to raise a bunch of dysfunctional kids who are going to need more government.
Yeah, it's a financial incentive for the single mother.
Absolutely.
And it's driven by the agenda from the left.
It says, we'll take care of you.
We're the stage.
We can help you.
And it's driving me nuts because I'm worried about my, at this point, my grandkids.
You know, I watch these shows with my kids.
I didn't I didn't just turn them loose on the TV. No, and you've got to balance this stuff.
When I'm driving through town with my daughter and we see construction going on, like road construction going on, I say, hey, let's count the women.
Let's count the women.
How's that going?
Oh, zero again!
Wait a minute, where's the equality?
I thought women could do everything.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So, I mean, you know, I think it's okay.
They're going to get these messages sooner or later.
But I think it's perfectly fine, of course, right, to watch these movies and all of that.
But you've got to help break the programming.
I mean, they're entertaining and they're a lot of fun and they're colorful and all of that.
But it is kind of important to remember that it's mostly fantasy.
Like, women's movies have as much to do with femininity as James Bond has with masculinity.
It's like three steps down from a cartoon character, right?
Oh, yeah.
And you play this with your kids.
Play this with your kids.
You know, when you go past, you know, oh, look, here's a bunch of men.
Sorry, here's a bunch of people who are repairing the power lines.
Let's play Count the Women.
Ah, do you see any?
Oh, wait, there's one.
Oh, but she's holding the sign.
Oh, slow.
Go!
Slow!
Go!
Great job, lady!
I can see your upper body strength is really helping sustain civilization.
You know, bring out pictures of construction sites.
Hey, let's play Count the Women.
You know, and it's just a place to start having a conversation from.
But it's important because I don't want, you know, kids are going to get a lot of the references from Movies and shows.
And that's why I kind of gravitate towards documentaries and shave off the last 15 seconds of Enviroguilt.
Or 15 minutes of Enviroguilt.
Ah, Attenborough, you sadistic bastard.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I mean, just counteract it as much as you can.
I loved your conversation with Lord Moncton.
That was terrific.
Yeah, I guess we could call that a conversation.
But thank you.
I appreciate it.
It was great to...
We got a professor from Princeton coming up next on the same topic.
Oh, that's awesome.
Because that's another topic I brought up to my kids.
Not to believe all this stuff that comes out about global warming.
Because at one point, they were scared out of their mind.
I was like, why?
What's wrong?
And they're talking to me all this, and I'm like, Hold it.
Wait a minute.
Science doesn't even back this up.
Look.
And I had to talk to them about it.
Right.
And then they have the great fun of when global warming comes up in their school with their friends.
What are they going to talk about?
Oh, no.
Be quiet.
Yeah.
Well, now they're out.
My kids are adults now.
I've got my grandkid to worry about.
Right, right.
That's something that I hope that I've already instilled in my kids to say, okay.
But look, there's pluses too, right?
Because we have the internet for better information or at least counter propaganda information.
And at least kids aren't being programmed on how to be great killers for the state.
Right.
Right.
So, you know, I'd rather have this fight than the ones that came before.
At least we've got good counter weapons and it's a little bit less...
Volatile.
And a little bit easier to deprogram or to counteract some of these narratives, right?
And so I would recommend being of good cheer with these kinds of things.
Good.
Yeah, because I have not been hearing a lot about the deal with the cartoons.
And the children, targeting children, it's just, that one got me in the video games, you target the video games, and you gotta watch what your kids are playing, and you gotta, you know, comic books.
I grew up with comic books.
Quite frankly, I don't remember all this stuff in comic books that they got now.
Right.
No, and the comic books have been, uh, uh, Completely taken over by the social justice warrior phenomenon.
And again, people think they're doing it for justice.
No, they're just doing it about it to destroy the entire field.
Yeah, they're ruining comic books.
Completely ruining them.
Yes, of course.
I mean, that's what they do.
Unfortunate.
Let me just see if I can...
Milo Yiannopoulos has a podcast, and he had a very interesting one with a fellow, Chuck Dixon.
Yeah, yeah.
So this is from August of 2016.
Chuck Dixon, comic book author for Marvel and DC and so on.
I think he did the Clinton Cash comic book.
But check out Chuck Dixon on the Milo Yiannopoulos show.
You can find him at Breitbart.com or, you know, Podcast One or whatever.
He's very interesting.
Chuck Dixon, very engaging and entertaining guy.
And they did a great show together about comic book culture and social justice warrior and all that kind of stuff.
So I just wanted to recommend that.
So, yeah, listen, I appreciate your vigilance in trying to keep your kids alert to all of the stuff that's going on.
But yeah, there is really, really strong programming that's going on.
And it is, you know, it is important, right?
And, you know, I certainly don't want to give my daughter any kind of indication that she's fundamentally limited in any kind of way.
But I also don't want to end up with this narcissistic vanity of, you know, the genders are completely equal and all discrepancies are due to prejudice and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
It's not fair, right?
Yeah, that's not fair to somebody.
All right.
All right.
but thanks very much for your call.
I appreciate it.
All right, thanks.
Alright, up next is Corey.
Corey wrote in and said, I have a few questions concerning addiction.
I'm a recovering heroin addict who is having a hard time dealing with the compulsion to use again.
I was curious to your stance on 12-step programs, one of which I attend regularly.
Do you think these programs are less beneficial than they seem?
Does it hinder my recovery to get into a mindset that I cannot recover without using this program?
This is a widely held mindset in many of the 12-step programs.
Furthermore, why do you think that young people are using hard drugs, and drugs in general, in higher numbers than any other time in history?
That's from Cody.
Well, hey Cody, how you doing?
Doing well, how are you?
Are you feeling solid and stable?
You feeling okay?
You feeling solid?
I mean, how frank can I be here?
You can be as frank as you need to be, sir.
All right, all right.
How long have you been off the horse, so to speak?
Six months and a week, I think.
Yeah, six months and a week.
Well, good for you.
And how long were you on?
I was on heroin for about a year, and I was on opiates in general for about six years.
How good are they?
Honestly...
Come on.
You know, people give up a lot for this stuff.
I just got to know.
How good are they?
They are...
They're seemingly good.
No, but like the first time, it's got to be pretty great, right?
It's exquisite.
Yeah, yeah.
Is it like, you know, that, what is it?
Trainspotting, take your best orgasm, multiply it by a thousand?
Is it like that?
I don't want to be like a sales pitch here or something, but it's got to be pretty good.
It's something, especially when you have issues that you refuse to deal with, especially as like a young man.
I started using when I was 14.
And I remember the first time I took an opiate and it was like, I don't have to deal with reality anymore.
The feeling isn't...
Of course, there's extreme euphoria, but it goes beyond that.
It's like, I can be anything I want to be.
I can put on a mask when I have this.
It doesn't get rid of your cancer, but it gets rid of your knowledge that you have cancer.
I'm sure you've combed back and forth along these areas fairly consistently, but what was going on at 14 in your life that this seemed like a tangible plan.
I mean, I'm a child that comes from a divorced family.
My mother and father got divorced when I was an infant.
I don't know.
I can't tell you exactly what led to I think it was peer pressure the first time that I used.
My cousin, who was abused as a child, he actually gave me and my friend some of his pills that he had, and that was the first time I used, and the first time I realized my generalized anxiety went away, and it was just, like I said, it was a relief.
How was your cousin abuse?
What kind of abuse?
Physical and verbal.
Right.
Um...
You know, having a cousin offering you opiates, not ideal.
I mean, that's a very dysfunctional family.
I mean, what they were even doing in your orbit.
Well, I have a big pharma to blame partially for it.
You know, I accept the responsibility of my actions, of course, and I expect my cousin to take responsibility for what he did as well.
The narcotic, the pills we were taking when we were young actually wasn't even a narcotic until like two or three years ago.
My grandmother, her doctor actually told her that it was no more than aspirin when he gave it to her.
And that's how she described it to us.
His grandmother or your grandmother?
It's our grandmother, both of our grandmother.
And I'm pretty sure he took them from her, as I would later do.
He stole them.
Right.
Right.
Well, yeah, I mean, at 14, I wouldn't assign you primary moral responsibility for taking drugs.
I mean, you're just trying to survive in a challenging environment, right?
Right.
And you said you generalized anxiety.
Did you have much contact with your dad, Cody, growing up?
Oh yeah, I had a lot of contact with both of my parents.
Actually, it's kind of complicated.
How do I put it?
My dad's side of the family all lives on the same road, on the same plot of land, all around each other.
I can throw a football and hit my dad's house.
I actually stay with my grandmother.
Throw a football and hit my uncle's house and throw a football and hit my aunt's house.
Like, we're all right here together.
Um, and my mom lives 20 minutes away and it was, uh, I had like split time with them.
Right.
And, um, why did your parents get divorced?
Um, you know, to be honest with you, I have not been given that information.
You're curious?
I, um, I am curious.
Um, It's a pretty big thing, right?
If there's a habit that's negative about relationships, it would be kind of good to know for you, right?
It would be.
But part of me has just grown.
I grew to accept it, especially going through what I've been through the past six months or so.
I'm not going to ask right now, just because I don't really want to...
Light the fire so quickly after I'm starting to stabilize, if you know what I mean.
No, yeah, it makes sense to me.
Yeah, it's only so many things you can carry at once, right?
Right.
So you said you were an infant, right?
So you don't remember your parents being married at all?
No.
This isn't a memory, but my dad had a video of him and my mom living together in his house.
And she was holding me and he was videotaping it.
And I saw that.
I don't think he showed it to me.
But I saw that as a child.
I think I found it and put it in the VCR or something.
And that's the only time I've ever seen the two of them together like that.
Right.
But I mean, they all live pretty close, right?
Yeah, I mean, they live in the same county.
Right, okay.
Did you shuttle back and forth between your parents?
So how was the custody sorted out?
When I was very young, when I was a child, it was like I stayed at my dad's until the weekend, and then I would have a long weekend like Friday through Sunday with my mom, and then the next weekend I would have a short weekend which would be Friday and Saturday with my mom.
And it was like that for a long time.
Right, right.
They didn't really have any contact with each other?
Did they sort of sit down and try and organize things so that there was some kind of consistency or anything like that?
Not that I remember.
Especially when I was very young, they were bitter towards each other, I would say.
At the very least, they were better.
I never saw any of that, but kids aren't stupid.
When I would bring up my mother to my father or my father to my mother, you could tell in their tone of voice or the short, snappy way that they would reply to my question or whatever.
I could tell as a child that these people have serious issues with each other.
Did they get into other relationships?
Yes.
My mother has been married to my stepfather since I was four.
So 17 years now, I guess.
And my father remarried, and he divorced that woman when I was eight.
And he just got remarried a few months ago, actually.
And how are things with your stepdad?
They're good now.
They weren't back then.
They weren't good back then.
Why not?
When I was...
I can give you an example.
I can't really say why.
I'm not sure why, but when I was very young, Christmas has always been hard.
All my friends are pretty much kids that are out of divorced homes.
Christmas and Thanksgiving, all holidays are hard because you have to...
As a child, you're You spend half the day here and half the day there or whatever.
And I remember there was a Christmas where I went to my mom's.
And my stepfather, I was only going to stay for like two days.
And that wasn't my choice.
That was just what my dad told my mom was going to happen.
He was like, hey, he's going to come.
He's going to stay for two days and he's going to come home.
And so my stepfather, like, I was like seven or eight.
He didn't attack me.
He didn't hit me or anything like that.
But he said, you know, he came in there and he was like, why the hell are you treating your mother like this?
You need to spend some time with your mother on the holidays.
It doesn't make sense.
Like, you're just greedy and you want to go play with your new toys at your dad's house and blah, blah, blah.
And that was like an ongoing thing where he wanted me to stand up and be a man to him when I was a child.
Because that's the way he was raised.
And I was never able to do that.
And that...
That's one of the things that really hindered my confidence as a teenager in my early years.
And did your parents, Cody, did your parents...
how are they with admitting faults?
Not...
I want to say not very good, but they're also very responsible people at the same time.
No, no, no, that's different, right?
That's different things, different things.
I understand that completely.
Good defensive mix-up, but no, we've got to separate these things.
Man, that's hard.
No, I mean, empirically, and I'm not trying to say it's easy emotionally, but empirically, it's pretty easy.
Like, how many times have they apologized for messing up?
Oh, they've both apologized to me, especially lately.
No, no, no.
When you were a kid, though.
Oh, when I was a kid?
Yeah.
I don't really remember them apologizing, actually, as a child.
Right.
So, in your formative years, they were bad at admitting when they had messed up and apologizing, right?
I would say that's fair.
Okay.
Right.
Right.
Do you mind if I just share a little personal stuff?
No, go ahead.
I mean, like you, my parents divorced when I was a baby.
I don't remember my father being around at all, and he was on the other side of the world for most of my childhood, and I saw him very rarely.
And my mom would bitch about my dad.
My dad, not so much about my mom.
Although, again, I didn't see him much at all, but my dad, my mom would constantly complain about my dad.
And, you know, one of the great heartbreaks, I don't know if it's just divorce or other things as well, but one of the great heartbreaks for me was just recognizing that this, not a competent person, Not competent people as far as parenting and family goes.
The clue is that they're divorced, right?
I mean, that's not a big mark of competence, but sort of fundamentally, it's a bigger thing, right?
Because you can mess up hugely.
And divorce is a giant mess up with kids involved.
It's bad enough no matter what.
With kids involved, it's a giant cuck up.
And it's hard to understand, I think, as a parent, you kind of have to ignore the effect on your children in order to do it and to sort of plow on, right?
Things have to be really bad to inflict a divorce on your kids because divorce is so negative for children.
And this is a great smoking scar crater wound in society, just all of these broken hearts of shattered families and...
And it's just, you know, we were talking with Last Caller about how the media wants to portray your parents as incompetent.
Well, a lot of parents do that job themselves.
I don't need any media help for it.
And it's really heartbreaking.
I remember looking at my mom just thinking like, wow, you're like not a competent human being.
And I don't mean like she wasn't good at cross-stitching or changing a tire or repairing a roof.
I mean, just fundamentally...
Make bad decisions, bad decisions, bad decisions, and then refuse to refer to those bad decisions, and if they're brought up, get angry.
No ownership, no empathy, right?
To divorce, you have to cut out your empathy for your children to do it, because the children don't want it, right?
Right.
I mean, unless the partners are regularly setting fire to each other, in general, the children do not want the divorce.
And the divorce is a sign, as I said, of terrible incompetency.
And no matter what the outcome of the divorce, it's really tough to respect the parents who have the divorce.
Because, you know, you end up with the mom usually, right?
And the mom either says, well, you know, your dad was a great guy, but I was such a bitch, I drove him away.
In which case, it's like, oh, great.
I can't wait to take some life lessons from this treasure.
Or...
Oh, no, he was a terrible guy.
He was like the worst guy ever.
It's like, well, why did you marry him?
Why did you have children with him?
No ownership.
Just mysteriously.
I was assigned by the cosmos this dysfunctional male model.
And...
When you lose respect for the parental units, I shouldn't say you, because I'm just talking about myself here, but when I lost respect for the parental units, it's really heartbreaking.
It's really, because you look at the future, you look down the line, you look down the road, and you say, damn, I've got to figure this shit out myself now.
I can't take advice, I can't take...
Imprinting.
I can't take as an example these people who are messing up big time.
All over the place.
And won't admit it.
It's one thing to mess up.
It's another thing to not admit it.
To get angry if it's ever brought up.
And when you look at your family, when I look at my family of origin, and I sort of say, oh my god.
I can't follow these people at all.
The only thing that they're providing to me is a do not enter sign.
Don't go this way.
Whatever you do, don't go this way.
What am I going to do?
I'm going to have to say, wow, you're really into philosophy.
It's like, yeah.
You know, the guy who's thrown off the Titanic is really into holding on to the broken bit of barrel that's keeping him afloat.
Yeah, of course.
I mean, you have to think originally when all of your examples are catastrophic.
You have to figure things out for yourself when every answer you're offered is destructive.
To you or to others.
When people around you are just justifying their terrible mistakes and doubling down and reinforcing and attacking anyone who questions them, you either follow them down this slimy pit to nowhere, to nothing, to hell, or you say, I gotta start from scratch.
I gotta start with a blank slate.
I gotta figure things out from the very bottom all the way to the top.
And that is a terrible situation.
A terrible situation to be in.
For me, it was a terrible situation.
I can say now, oh, look at all these wonderful things that I was able to create out of this, this, I don't know, this riptide.
Yeah, that's the closest problem.
It's like the riptide, like don't swim too near this part of the beach because there's a tide that pulls you way out to sea.
Right.
Well, you've got this riptide of like bad examples and bad examples and negative and self-destructive behavior and defensiveness and aggression and magical thinking and all this garbage and junk and irrational bullshit.
And that's your riptide.
I'm like crazy.
I don't want to end up that far out at sea and to drown.
Drown in history.
There's a line in my novel, The God of Atheists, a young man is trying to write a rap song, and he says, I am what remains when history wins.
And that was always a powerful line for me.
They are what remains when history wins, and I was damned if I was going to let history win.
When history wins, I lose, and I guess the world would have lost as well.
But having to be So exhaustingly original.
Because every example that you provided, every easy answer that you provided is a bad answer, is a wrong answer, is a destructive answer.
Having to be so relentlessly original is tiring and stressful.
And the reason, like, I don't want to tell you your experience, obviously, Cody, but the reason that that sort of all popped into my mind was that you sort of said about your general anxiety.
Did you want your parents' life?
I mean, no.
No?
No, absolutely not.
How the hell do you not end up with your parents' life?
I didn't know.
I knew I would rather die than have that life, literally rather die than have that life.
How the hell do you not end up with your parents' lives?
And not just a complete reaction to it, you know?
Well, they ran this way.
I'm running the complete 180.
I'm going the complete opposite way.
That's not freedom.
You know, that's like running away from a lion is not the same as exploring the jungle.
Right.
How the hell do you end up neither with your parents' lives nor a 180 reaction to your parents' lives?
How are you yourself when your examples are bad and And reactions to those examples are inauthentic.
I'm not saying I have any big great answer other than philosophy as a whole and self-knowledge, but that's what was going through my mind.
What do you think?
Well, I do have to say that there was like a saving grace for me as a child, and that was living with my grandparents.
There came a point when...
And since my dad lived so close by, I saw him every day anyway, and I still saw my mother, but I can't tell you what happened or why I started living with my grandparents, but I did.
And they were married for...
But when my grandfather died, they were married for like 58 years.
They got married when my grandmother was 15 and he was like 20.
And...
I spent a lot of time with my grandfather, and he was one of the wisest men.
Fifteen?
Yeah, she was married when she was fifteen.
All right.
And they were together their whole lives.
Had three kids, and he was a businessman.
He started his own business in like 1976, 1972.
I can't remember the exact year, but he built our family.
And he was a religious man, but he was a kind man, and he was a wise man.
And I learned a lot from him.
The biggest thing I took away from him was seek wisdom.
Seek wisdom for yourself and become your own man.
That was kind of how he lived.
I was able to, through everything I've been through, that's kind of why I was attracted to your channel and people People like you in general.
People trying to, you know, break through the typical narrative of society and of establishment and of what are these social norms?
What is this and what is that?
I'm going to see if there's something better for me.
Something that makes more sense.
Something that's logical and reasonable.
And I tried to follow that.
Because like you said, I didn't want to be like my mother or my father.
But I also didn't want to just rebel.
And just rebel for the sake of rebelling, just because I was angry.
I've never been that kind of person.
Not right out front anyway, if that makes any sense.
Right, right.
So where do you think your anxiety came from that the opiates were, as you said, at 14 a relief from?
Is it a demand for originality to avoid disaster?
Something else?
I think it was just...
Maybe this is the same thing, but it was pressure.
I guess that would be the same thing as the demand for originality.
Pressure from...
I'm an only child.
I always felt like, since I was an only child, I had to be as great as my grandfather was.
And I always thought he was a really great man.
I'm the...
I'm the only man in the family who carries the family name anymore.
I'm the only one who can reproduce.
You know, I always wanted to be great, and I was always in the shadow of people who were either great or had hurt me.
And I feel like that was a lot of pressure as a young man who was finally figuring out the world somewhat.
Right.
And the people around me were very anxious people as well.
I'm sure that as good of people as some of the people in my family are, you know, they're very uptight and codependent and anxious.
And I feel like some of that did rub off on me as a child.
How did your grandparents raise?
Was it your father's side?
Mm-hmm.
Yes.
So how did they raise him to be how he was?
Or what influence did they have on that?
That's a question I've thought about quite a bit.
And my father is the youngest child.
My uncle had a substance, well not a substance, I'll just say it was a substance abuse problem.
And my aunt is a raging codependent.
So they raised some somewhat dysfunctional kids, right?
I would say so, but you wouldn't tell unless you were part of the family.
Okay, so that's even more dysfunctional in that they hide it, right?
They know enough to keep it hidden.
I think also it has a lot to do with the culture where I'm from.
I'm from the South, and...
Around here, our community is small.
It's kind of like a good old boys kind of thing.
Old school religious culture where everybody knows everybody and you go to church on Sunday and there's closet drunks, but everybody's so happy and nice.
And as a child, I remember going to church.
You don't air your dirty laundry, right?
Right.
And I remember going to church and Sitting in the pew and looking at everybody shaking hands and smiling and laughing and being like, I know you people because I've been to your houses and I've been around your children and I see how you act when you're not here and you're all fake.
And I don't know if...
I think that's something that, you know, kind of was imprinted on my dad and his siblings.
Perhaps.
I mean, I'm not sure.
Right.
Right.
When you were younger, obviously below 14, what was your happiness level like?
Your sense of security and trust and being loved and all that?
Well, I felt like I was very loved.
I also felt like maybe I was a little bit too loved.
What do you mean?
I don't think I felt like that at the time.
But looking back at it now, I was listening to, I think it was you and Mike Cernovich had a video a couple weeks ago, and he was talking about that you shouldn't, there's been studies done, and I looked this up for myself, that you should never tell a child that they're special.
You should tell them that they have the potential to be great, but they have to seek it for themselves, they have to chase it, they have to strive for it, they have to work for it.
Yeah, I mean, sorry, just the show we did together was Why Mindset Matters.
To be more precise, you should praise a child's work rather than their talent.
Because if you praise their talent, they'll think they'll be able to get results because of their innate abilities rather than the hard work which even the most talented people need to pursue.
In order to maintain their excellence.
So I just wanted to sort of give a little bit more precision.
You don't just say, oh, that drawing is absolutely wonderful.
It's just such a great draw, you know, because then the kid's going to think, oh, why the hell?
But I need lessons.
I'm already great, right?
As opposed to, wow, I really like the focus you did on that.
This part that you copied, you worked really hard on.
I can tell that.
It really pays off.
It really shows.
Which is true.
This is all the facts, right?
There's no talent in the world that will bring you success without massive amounts of effort.
Right.
And I felt like...
I wasn't a victim of that, but that was...
For example, I've played the piano since I was seven years old.
And I'm pretty good at it.
And I remember they used to tell me how great I was at it.
And there came a point when I didn't want to go to lessons or practice anymore because of what I need it for.
I can already play all this stuff, and I'm apparently so great at it, what I need it.
I was a straight-A student in high school.
I was in the top portion of my class or whatever, in the top 50 of my class graduating.
And I remember saying, in high school, I could have easily been in the top 10 of my class.
I felt like that was within me, but I was like, why should I work that hard?
What's the point?
If I'm already this great, I don't need to work that hard.
Those people are try-hards.
Those people...
I'm special, and I don't need to prove that I'm special, if that makes sense.
No, it does.
It does.
Do you think that came from one parent more than the other, that you're great, you're special kind of stuff?
More from my father's side, and it wasn't just one person.
It was a group of people.
And why do you think they did that?
Let's see.
I feel like...
I don't know.
I don't know why they thought that I was so great.
I don't know of a better way to put that, and I'm sorry about that.
I'm not sure, to be honest with you.
I don't know if it's like a codependency thing or a problem of like, I was an only child, so I was like their shining light, and I was everything.
No, no, it's vanity.
They get to be special if you're special.
Hmm.
Right.
Hmm.
I mean, if you're...
Yeah, if your kids...
And I'm not trying to sort of tell you, again, your experience is the same as mine.
Like, I was taking advanced computer science courses when I was in grade 8.
I was taking a language course that was...
Five or six years ahead.
It was a writing course for grade 13 students when I was in grade 8.
So yes, five or six years ahead in some stuff and adult computer science programming classes when I was in my early to mid-teens.
And my mom was like so proud of this stuff.
Like she'd done something.
Right.
Like, all you did was squeeze out a pop and damage it.
You know, it wasn't like...
But she was, like, holding on to this, like...
She would tell everyone, oh, he's doing this, he's doing that.
It's, you know, it's like...
So she could feel special.
"Oh, Josh, what does it have to do with me?" So she could feel like she'd done something without actually having to do something.
So do you think that I mean, do you think that that is...
How do I say this?
I mean, all parents...
Do you think that all parents that are like that with their children are just doing that because they need to feel accomplished in some way?
Or do you think that, like, you can be legitimately proud of your child without being like that?
No, no, no.
That's a false dichotomy because you're back into thinking of it as pride.
Pride and vanity are very different things.
Pride is asking for legitimate payment for an achievement that I have provided.
So when I say to people, donate to this show, it's because I've damn well earned it.
I work harder than anyone else around to keep the show original and exciting and new and innovative.
This is the greatest show in the world, and I work really hard, and Mike works really hard, and the listeners like yourself, we work really hard to keep it that way.
So when I say I'm proud of this show, and when I say donate to this show, I think I've earned it.
I think we've all earned it.
On the other hand, though, if I feel that people should just give me money because I want it, that's vanity, right?
Okay.
Right?
So, if you...
If you think, like, if you're saying to your child, oh, you're just great for breathing, you're just talented, you've got all this innate, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you are, of course, paralyzing them.
Lots of people are smart, lots of people are verbal, lots of people are musical, lots of people are poetic, lots of people have great math skills.
It matters how much you work.
It doesn't matter what you, you know, you need the basic capacity.
Absolutely.
But, you know, I mean, you need to be able to sing before you can be a singer, but then are you going to sit down and And write great songs and keep writing songs for the 10 years it takes for you to really become original.
Are you going to do that?
Well, that's how much you're going to work or not.
And so can you feel proud of your child?
Well, sure.
If your child is doing the legitimate work to maximize the abilities that they have inherently got.
You cannot be proud of Of that which is innate.
You can only be proud of what you have earned.
You cannot be proud of what is inherited.
Like if I earn money, okay, I can be proud of that.
If my rich father, this is the theory, right?
If my rich father died and left me a bunch of money, do I get to be proud of that?
No.
Of course not.
I didn't earn it.
I didn't earn it.
So, when it comes...
Yeah, of course parents should be proud of their children if their children are working hard to maximize the gifts that they have inherited.
Great.
You know, your kid's into dance and they get up and they practice and then they go out and they practice and then they do their pliés at home and they practice.
Yes, and then they win.
Be proud of it.
They earned, right?
But if your kid goes to, you know, Palladium and...
Pushes a button and gets 500 tickets.
Are you proud of them?
No, they're lucky.
Good job being lucky!
And so praise for that which is innate is designed to stimulate vanity.
And it's a way...
I'm not going to talk about your parents here.
I'm just going to talk about my general theory.
Losers praise...
Ability.
They praise talent.
Do you know why?
Because they've lost.
And they like to think, well, I just didn't have that magic ingredient called talent.
I just didn't have that magical, wonderful, special, invisible source called talent, and that's why I failed.
No.
You failed because you didn't work.
If you want to know how to succeed, you get out of bed and you work.
And then you grab a little bite to lunch and you work.
And then you grab another little bite to eat, and you work.
And this is true of parenting, of marriage, of whatever it is.
You know, my day, I woke up this morning, and I mean, I am reading messages, and I'm brushing my teeth at the computer reading stuff.
And I worked on a presentation about Thanksgiving.
And I recorded it and I put it out and I chatted with Mike about politics and what it is that we want to do with regards to Trump's administration picks and choices and we talked about Pizzagate and we talked about just a bunch of stuff to do with the show.
And then I grabbed a bite to eat and then I recorded my Thanksgiving show and I uploaded it and then I reviewed the questions for tonight.
And now I'm doing a show and have been doing it for two and a half hours and probably have another hour and a half to go.
So, where's the talent?
You know, this isn't every day, right?
But this is what I'm focusing on today.
And am I proud of what I'm producing?
Yeah.
But there's no one alive who can say to me, well, it's just some kind of innate talent.
And making sure that my integrity and my motivations for what I'm doing are all clean and pure.
Because if they're not, it's going to be terrible for everyone.
So it is a...
I'm proud of that.
Do I have innate intelligence?
Yeah, I do.
I'm very smart.
And do I have innate language skills?
I think so.
I mean, I started writing my first short stories when I was in Africa when I was six years old.
And I have the noblesse oblige that comes from great abilities, or great talents, great innate abilities, and I can't be proud of those, but I sure as hell can be proud of the amount of work I'm putting into things.
So, sure, parents can be proud of their children, but not for whatever's innate in them, but only for how hard they work.
I guess I've just never really thought about it like that before.
Never really put a lot of thought.
Would you consider your parents to be successful?
Yeah.
You mean business-wise?
No, just in life in general?
It's life as a whole.
They get to the end of their life on their deathbed and they look back and say, yeah, you did a good job.
I think so.
I mean, they've had their fair share of Mess ups, but I think they've done well for themselves.
They're happy now.
I mean, they're happy.
No, no, no.
Well for themselves.
Well for themselves.
You were a heroin addict.
Well, that's true.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Kind of a trick question, right?
If you're asking the ex-heroin addict if his parents should be proud of their parenting, not of you, right?
Of their parenting.
Well, a longer pause might be helpful, right?
You really got me there, Stefan.
Yeah.
What do you think?
What are you feeling about that?
Man, I really...
I guess...
I don't know, man.
Wow.
Maybe not.
Thank you.
Because...
Here's the thing.
If they succeeded because they worked hard, then they should have praised you for working hard, not for any innate abilities, right?
And if they didn't succeed because they didn't work hard, then they should have learned that lesson and taught you how to work hard.
I'm not saying you didn't work hard, but as you said, you didn't fulfill your potential because you felt that you had already get there.
You know, if I'm driving home and I get home, I stop driving because I'm already home, right?
Sorry, go on.
I mean...
My parents, especially my father, my father is a very hard-working individual.
And he has tried very hard every day.
I mean, the dude blows up my phone.
He wants to stay in contact with me.
He wants to spend time with me.
He tries very hard.
And sometimes it may be that he's making up for...
For his past mistakes.
Sometimes I do feel like that.
He does try very hard to be a good father.
And, you know, he always, I mean, he's built a business for himself as well.
And he says that I'll never have to worry about anything.
And I don't know if that's harmful or not.
You mean he's going to give you lots of money?
No, he doesn't, especially not now, because I stole lots of money from him.
There's potential for me to have my own business someday.
Because he worked hard.
I don't know what that means.
If you have your own business, how are you not going to worry?
Having your own business is worrying.
What I mean is everything that he has will be mine and nobody else's when he dies.
How much did you steal from him?
I... I'd say no less than $5,000.
No less.
Probably more in a couple months' time.
How?
Is that kind of cash around the house?
Yes.
Okay.
If you're right, Cody, and your father feels guilty about...
What happened when you were a child?
And he's staying close, staying in contact, as you say, blowing up your phone because he feels guilty.
My first thought, and it's just my thought, is, well, that's still about him.
He feels guilty.
He's good, right?
Right.
I mean, I've considered that that's Yes, I would agree with that to a certain extent, that that is part of his motivation.
Do your parents have a theory as to how you ended up as a heroin addict?
I mean, I was a victim of a sexual assault in college.
That was when things got, like, super crazy with my opiate addiction.
But, I mean, my family's rife with alcoholics and addicts on both sides.
It's, you know, science has, you know, the studies have shown that it is genetics to some extent.
And, I mean, between, you know, some of the experiences I've had in life and...
The stress and trauma I've been through and the genetics.
I mean, that's pretty much how it happened.
However...
Go ahead.
Sorry.
Don't talk about anything you don't want to, but I'm just curious.
A sexual assault in college.
Was that a female rape or a male rape or something else?
A male rape.
I'm sorry.
I'm very sorry.
It's something I've spent a lot of time working through.
And it's not like it used to be.
Was it something that your drug use kind of put you in a compromised situation?
Was it kind of out of nowhere?
Yes.
I have to take partial responsibility, in a sense.
I was not where I should have been and not what I should have been on.
Right.
Because, I mean, this is the other big problem with drugs, I mean, is that you also have to hang around people who use and abuse and deal drugs.
Absolutely.
It's not just the toxin in the system, it's the social toxin around, right?
Absolutely.
Right.
I mean, it does something to you.
You know, it does something to you when you have to steal from people, especially people that love you.
Because people that love you are naive about what's happening with you.
They don't want to believe that...
They can see very well that something is twisted with you.
But they don't want to believe it.
And you can push and push that line of what things are okay and what's not okay for a very long time.
In my experience, anyway.
And it did something to me.
I became...
You know, I don't know if you can be both a compulsive and a pathological liar, but I was, I guess.
And I stole from everybody.
I mean, I did things that I never thought, you know, as a young man, as like an innocent child that I would do.
And looking back at it now, the person that I'm becoming, trying to walk a different path, is...
I don't know.
It's pretty insane.
And that's why I wanted to bring it up to you because, I mean, the number of people my age that are going through the same thing and dying because of it is extraordinary in the United States right now.
I mean, it's an epidemic.
Yes, there is an epidemic, right?
Yeah, it's an epidemic.
And I see it everywhere.
I mean, especially if you've been on that side of it, right?
If you've done a drug deal before, then you know what a drug deal looks like.
You know what a high person looks like.
If you've been drunk before, you know when somebody's drunk.
And so, you know, everywhere I go in my town, I mean, it's been blowing up around here since the 90s, from what I've heard from people.
Especially heroin and man it's just like there's not I mean all the young people seem to be suffering from it.
Suffering from everybody is just like distraught and they want to escape reality it seems like and so they turn to these substances to do that.
Right.
I just want to ask one other question and we'll get on to the next topic.
Was it an interracial rape?
I'm fairly certain, yes.
I don't remember a lot.
Right.
All right.
I mean, I've got a bunch of questions.
I can give you my thoughts on why I think that this is...
An epidemic these days, and obviously this is just amateur guy on the internet hour as usual, but I just wanted to give you my thoughts about it.
Absolutely.
Earlier, when I was talking to the religious fellow about childhood, I said that if a child is aggressive, we look at the actions of the parents, right?
Right.
So, Cody, let me tell you this.
I was going to take my earpiece out while I talk about this.
When we look at addictive people, children, young people in society in America, the first place we look is the parents.
And we say, do the parents or the parents' generation, does the culture of the elders, Show any signs of addictive behavior.
Well, what is addictive behavior?
I don't know what the technical definition is.
For me, it's self-destructive behavior in opposition to reality that causes anxiety and escalates when anxiety escalates and becomes a self-feeding system.
It's a form of self-medication, of delusion, Since it doesn't cure the delusion, but rather makes it worse, it tends to escalate, right?
Right.
So, when I look at the parents' generation, I look at the boomers' generation and say, do they exhibit any characteristics of addiction?
And the answer, of course, is hell yes.
Hell yes.
Do the boomers exhibit as a generation of All the characteristics of a rampant addiction.
And that addiction is to state power, is to free money.
That addiction is the virtue signaling that comes from imagining that state power replaces private charity and makes the world better thereby.
The addict is looking to increase happiness or to achieve happiness that didn't exist before for a while.
And then, as the addiction sets in, the addict is no longer trying to increase happiness, but to decrease unhappiness.
It's no longer chasing the high, it's avoiding the low.
It's avoiding the crash, it's avoiding the withdrawal.
That's what the addict is trying.
All four.
Now, if you look at what's going on in the media, and the media, the mainstream media, it's important to look at because it's older people in charge of the mainstream media and their audience is generally older, right?
50s, 60s, and so on.
So the mainstream media is where you want to look at the general societal influences that were affecting society.
People like yourself, Cody, when you were little and when you were growing up.
If you look at the mainstream media, what do you see?
And when you look at government power and people's support for it, well, you have a completely unsustainable situation.
Well, addiction is by definition unsustainable.
Can't be continued.
Particularly when it escalates.
You say, oh, you're an alcoholic if you have one drink a day.
Okay, you have one light beer a day.
You can sustain that.
But if you have a beer a day, then two, then four, then six, boom!
Eight, ten, twelve.
If it's ever escalating, unsustainable, then you know it's addiction.
If it's unreal, and if you must lie about everything, and if you must steal, and if you must cheat, and if you must misrepresent, and if you must defraud people to maintain your addiction.
It's another classic hallmark of addiction.
So if you look at sort of 1960s to the present, the boomers and sort of the hippies and beyond, right?
I guess hippies 50 years ago would have been 20, now they're 70 or whatever, right?
So what were they all about?
Well, they wanted to alleviate the discomfort of looking at poverty, right?
But rather than go and help the poor become better parents and train and educate them and teach them useful things and improve education and all that, they ran to the government and they got the government to print and print and print and print, which caused Nixon to have to go off the gold standard, the remnants of the gold standard in 1971.
They wanted the warfare welfare state.
I didn't want the warfare state, but as the result of wanting the welfare state without raising taxes, they gave the government the money to print, the right to print money, which fueled the war in Vietnam.
And, of course, other places ever since.
Immediate gratification at the expense of future success or survivability.
Government's cranking out more money.
Government's building more debt.
Schools are getting worse.
Unfunded liabilities.
The government owes close to $200 trillion that it can't afford.
$200 trillion.
Tell me how that is not Rampantly addictive behavior.
Rampantly addictive behavior.
I mean, the U.S. GDP is only 15 trillion dollars a year.
It owes more than 10 times.
It owes more than 10 times its entire income, let alone the portion that goes to the government.
Probably 20 times or more.
Right?
So...
If you have an income of $100,000 a year, and you owe a million dollars, and your after-tax income is only $50,000 a year, you're addicted.
Whatever you've done to end up with that million dollar debt.
And I'm not talking about a house.
Real debt.
So...
If you look at the boomers, the anxiety management of, oh, I don't want to be called a racist, I don't want to be called a sexist, I don't want to be called this, that, or the other, so I'm just going to hand away all of Western civilization so I don't get called any negative names.
That's fear, that's guilt, and that's what addicts in the later stages of the dysfunction are all just managing.
Initially, they were like, well, I care about the poor people, so let's have a welfare state.
And I care about education, so let's give more money to the government.
And I care about that everyone's safe in healthcare, so let's restrict entry to the healthcare system.
And I care about this.
And I care about people getting healthcare if they're unwell, so let's make sure that insurance companies can't deny people for pre-existing conditions.
Therefore, people will get sick before they die.
Get health care insurance, which is, of course, the exact opposite of what could possibly be sustainable in health care.
So, it was all about virtue signaling and feeling good about themselves.
You know, just like you get the high.
Rather than do the work, you get the high.
Rather than do the work to actually deal with problems of poverty and the causes, you just run to the government and they make you feel good.
And they did that with environmentalism.
They did that with feminism.
They did that with just everything you could conceive of.
And now, it's all such a disaster.
You've got a permanent underclass of poverty, you've got massive debt, you've got unfunded liabilities, you've got declining middle class incomes, you've got the death of opportunities for the poor, and you have an increasing tumor of massive wealth at the top of society that's increasingly disconnected from the people and addicted to state power.
So now, Just as we talked about before, initially you're chasing the high and then afterwards you're just avoiding the crash.
Well, it's all they're doing.
They're no longer pursuing and supporting and defending these government programs because they want the high of sweet virtue signaling.
Now they're just avoiding the negatives of guilt, of being labeled a racist, sexist, whatever crap they're coming up with this hour.
It's no longer about chasing the high.
It's now just avoiding the crash and avoiding the truth and avoiding reality.
Doubling down.
This is what addicts always do until they are cured or die.
They double down.
Ever escalate, ever increase.
And you see this with government spending.
Ever escalating, ever increasing, refusing to admit the nature of the addiction.
Refusing to admit the nature of the addiction.
We are addicted to government power.
Hi, I'm Bob.
I'm a self-destructive statist, also known as a statist.
I just started toying around with government power when I was, I guess in my teens.
A friend of mine had a subscription to the National Review.
Started flipping through it.
Guy's like, wow, you should really start getting into politics.
You know, government could do some great stuff.
Government could do some fantastic stuff.
Another friend of mine was a socialist.
Another friend of mine was a Democrat.
Actually, no, it was the same guy, come to think of it.
Another guy was a communist.
No, wait, actually, that was the same guy, too.
And they're all like, you know how we solve problems?
We just hold up signs, we protest, we write letters, we fax, we email.
We set up a blog.
You should do it too.
You should get involved in politics.
It's the way to solve the problems, man.
You don't have to actually talk to anyone you're affecting.
You know, you want to help poor people, you don't actually have to go and talk to poor people or anything like that.
You can just, like, talk about poor people to other people who aren't poor.
And you can just pressure people.
You don't have to get your hands dirty.
You don't actually have to go in and figure out what makes people poor.
You just have to use this magic word, injustice!
They're poor because injustice!
And then you solve that justice with the moral superhero of windbaggery at politicians.
And the media's going to love you.
Media's going to laud you.
It's going to be fantastic.
You get all this virtue signal.
Everyone's going to think you're a great guy.
You're going to feel great about yourself and meet some cool people, have a lot of power.
And you know, I'm not sure I even saw it as a fork in the road.
Like I bit.
I just, I bit.
I took that hit.
I took that injection.
Politics.
Oh!
State power.
This can be used to solve everything.
And everyone loved me, and I thought it was the greatest thing in the world.
Now at the end of it, I can see what a complete disaster.
All this massive increase in government power was, national debt.
I was played.
I was played.
The addict, the guy who...
The dealer.
Goddamn, the pusher man.
The dealer.
He said it was going to be fun and cool and solve problems.
Now I got more problems than when I started.
My health is shot.
I'm broke.
Nobody trusts me.
That's my story.
It's tragic.
I know a lot of people around this table.
I got the same story.
We fucked up.
How many of us can admit it?
How many of us can look at the next generation and say, you're addicted because we're addicted.
We were addicted to money.
We were addicted to power.
We were addicted to control.
We were addicted to being thought well off by bad people.
And because we were addicted to material things.
You know, both your parents had to work.
And because both your parents had to work, we had to put you in daycare.
And because we put you in daycare, you don't have any trust.
You've got anxiety.
You feel that the world is dangerous and feral.
Because it is!
When you put a bunch of children together, With no blood relative in the room.
Of course it's feral.
It's Lord of the Flies.
It's a war of all against all and everyone gets dragged down to the lowest common denominator.
The shittiest kids in the room have the most power over everyone.
We didn't want to stay home.
Your mom didn't want to stay home because everyone told her that that was beneath her.
She should go and run that department store.
Because that's what really matters.
Happy customers all lie in your deathbed to wish you well as you slip into the great beyond.
So we handed you over to strangers to be raised.
And we bought a whole bunch of stuff.
We got divorced.
We praised your talent because we thought everything was supposed to be easy.
Because the way we solved social problems was running to the government and selling off your freedom for the sake of our virginity, selling off your future, your opportunities, running everything into debt so we could feel good about ourselves.
We snorted debt to avoid the anxiety of knowing we weren't solving a goddamn thing.
We weren't interested in solving a goddamn thing.
We were only interested in looking good to ourselves.
Fuck your future.
Too bad.
You weren't around.
You don't vote.
And we can't admit it now.
We know we're still addicts because how many of us can admit what we did?
How many?
Tell the truth.
We fucked up.
We messed up.
We cost you everything and we can't even admit it.
That's the addiction of the boomers.
An addiction to social status, virtue signaling, Endless government debt.
Massive expansions in state power.
A lack of questioning of authority, which is always stressful.
But I think that it's not to me particularly shocking, Cody, why so many young people are addicted given the environment they grew up in, cultural, political, economic, social.
What's amazing to me is that it's not, the number is not higher.
That's my little rant if that helps.
No, that was incredible.
You're so right.
I...
I'm not even sure what to say.
How did you get clean?
What happened?
I was going to kill myself.
Well, that'll do it one way or the other.
You're going to end up not doing drugs, right?
And I was too much of a coward to eat a bullet, which I easily could have done because we're gun-owning Americans here.
And I was too scared to overdose.
I was two days clean when I decided I was going to kill myself.
I just couldn't do it by myself.
I didn't want to use anymore.
I was tired of living the way I was living.
But I couldn't not use.
I don't know if that makes sense, but I just like...
No, no, I get it.
Yeah.
And so I had this plan that I was going to drive my car into this brick sign going really fast, and I was not going to wear a seatbelt.
And I was like, yeah, I'm going to fly through the window and die.
And I had stopped to get a pack of smokes before I was going to do this.
I wanted to have a cigarette.
My mom called me, and she had found all my using materials.
in my room and um i kind of was given a choice it was like you can turn left out of this gas station and you know what'll happen to you um you you might kill yourself you might chicken out but you're still going to use either way and you might die anyway if you use again but if you turn right and go admit what you've done maybe there's like a different way maybe you can I don't know,
maybe you can find forgiveness and find a new life for yourself, and that's what I did.
And I ended up in detox like 45 minutes after that.
Wow.
Yeah, I spent seven days in detox and 28 days in rehab.
How was that?
It was...
It was an incredible experience.
Something I'll never forget.
It was something that taught me a lot about myself.
You asked me about the 12-step programs.
I'm no expert.
I did, obviously, some reading on it today, and I'll tell you what the data seems to suggest.
Okay.
So, this is just reading.
This is an article.
We'll put a link to it below.
In 2006, a study in the Journal of Clinical Psychology found that out of 628 people, the ones who went to AA for 27 weeks or more had better 16-year outcomes for such factors as good social functioning and abstinence than those who had no treatment at all.
Sounds pretty good, right?
Right.
Ah!
No, no, not so fast.
It says Deborah A. Dawson, respected...
Epidemiologist at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, in her 2005 article in the journal Addiction, Dawson pointed out that many health problems often improve on their own through what's known as spontaneous remission.
Everyone gets over a flu or a headache, sometimes even without NyQuil or common aspirin.
She calculated that the natural rate of recovery for alcoholism was 24.4%.
In other words, over the course of one year, a quarter of alcoholics got tired and just gave up.
No meetings, no treatment, no nothing.
They just woke up one day.
And said, enough.
Of course, it's probable that many people die off before they mature out.
The toughest barrier to measuring the effectiveness of AA, and again, I know you're not an alcoholic, but this is really tough to find stuff on heroin, is the difference in value systems.
AA places the highest value on abstinence, but a growing number of clinical researchers are willing to consider other less ideal outcomes like the occasional backslider or binger.
But this is...
Sort of the summation thing.
One of the most illuminating reports on the topic appeared in 2005 in the online journal BMC Public Health.
It analyzed data of an eight-year study that found AACBT and motivational enhancement therapy were all equally effective and reported that nearly all the effect of the treatment was achieved, much like waterboarding, after attending a single session.
One session.
Nearly all the effect of the treatment was achieved after attending a single session.
Dr.
Bancoli Johnson, Chairman of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia, said it was the initial decision to get better that determined a person's chances of success.
What followed made little difference.
Although AA doubtless helps some people, it is not magic.
Now, of course, AA is all or nothing, right?
If you backslide, it's all or nothing.
You gotta stay absent, gotta stay absent.
And some people criticize that as being too, you know, all or nothing kind of high stakes.
So, I don't know.
I've never been to a 12-step program, but the data does not appear to be very clear about all of this stuff.
So, you know, I'm a big one for talk therapy.
And I think that's a very helpful thing.
Well, when it comes to...
Let me see how I can phrase this.
I do...
It's like you go to the meetings, right?
And there's like a person that you trust that you...
They're kind of like your guide.
In a sense.
And you basically confess things to them, and you talk to them about like, hey, I wanted to use today, and they talk you through it, and stuff like that.
And if you do what they tell you to do, it's very much like church, honestly.
I mean, very much like church, where it's like, hey, I'm gonna come in here, and like you said from that study, A lot of it has to do with, are you willing, and this is just something that everyone in the program says, are you willing to chase getting better like you chase the dope?
Kind of like you read.
How much better you're going to get, how much you're going to recover from being addicted is dependent on how far you're willing to go and how much you're willing to admit and how honest you're willing to be about yourself.
And I wanted to ask you about it just because a lot of people, you know, the people view it as like a cultish thing, and that's just kind of ridiculous, in my opinion.
But I see people that their whole life kind of revolves around it.
And one of the things you do, you know, like if you go to AA, you sit down at the meeting and if you're going to speak, if you're going to share, you say, I'm an alcoholic.
If you go to the program I'm in, you sit down and you say, I'm an addict.
You know, you have to, that's like the first thing you do when you want to share is you admit that you're an addict.
But I've thought about it a lot and it's like, well, let's say I stay clean 10 years, like some of the people who are around me who are trying to help me stay clean.
Do I still need to say that I'm an addict?
Am I putting myself down at that point?
And their idea is that you're never cured because you're just one bad step away from using again.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, and again, my amateur personal opinion is that if you're not cured, it's because you haven't gotten to the root of the issue.
And I view addiction as...
Something that is not just family related, but it's the whole damn society.
And I think that younger people are particularly going to be prone to addictive behavior if their elders won't talk about their own addictive behaviors.
And again, it sounds very abstract, like this government money and this money printing and so on, but it is a real addiction.
I mean, if an individual was destroying his life by making crazy promises he couldn't keep and counterfeiting money in his basement, we would recognize that as addictive and self-destructive behavior, wouldn't we?
Absolutely.
If you've got an entire generation who got that and started that going and all of that, I mean, they really are in the grip of a dangerous society and civilization destroying addiction, these boomers.
And, you know, this is the war of the modern world.
It's the war between the comments section and the articles, right?
I mean, it's the war between those who are countering the narrative and the narrative.
I think to go into one's personal addiction, one needs to look at the Addictions not just of one's family, as you point out, there are addicts in your family, but the whole of society.
What are we addicted to as a society?
We are addicted to verbal abuse.
We are addicted to unreality.
We are addicted to a rejection of facts.
We are addicted to virtue signaling.
We are addicted to not pointing out basic realities.
How is the debt going to be dealt with in America or Canada or...
Italy or Germany.
How is the debt going to be dealt with?
How is all of this mass immigration from the third world going to work?
All we are is relentlessly avoiding difficult questions.
I mean, just look at race realism.
Differences between the races.
Well-established biological differences between the races or between the genders.
Can't talk about it.
Can't talk.
This kind of hypersensitivity, this kind of the safe space stuff and all of that.
I mean, Jesus, we look at Oh, these college kids, they need their safe spaces and their puppies and their hug rooms.
How crazy.
Oh, yeah?
Go try talking to people in the mainstream media or your relatives about how the boomers screwed the next generation.
Think they're going to be receptive to that kind of conversation?
The hysteria among the young is a mere shadow cast by the hysteria of the old.
If the old people were modeling...
How to maturely accept difficult truths about yourself and your addictions, the young people wouldn't be freaking out so much.
It's because the old people have such guilty consciences and lived such terrible lives that the young are reality avoidant.
It's because the elders are reality.
It's all modeled behavior.
Can't talk about how single moms are bad for kids.
Can't talk about how feminism is toxic.
Can't talk about how academics are not market-facing.
Can't talk about Marxist infiltration of our society.
Can't talk about race differences.
Can't talk about gender differences.
Can't say things that will offend people.
Dear God!
We're like trapped in the mind of a neurasthenic hysteric.
The spine of the culture is gone!
We are like unguarded treasure ripe for the takeover of anybody with half an ounce of assertiveness, which is happening and will continue to happen until it doesn't.
So, you know, hearing your story, Cody, I'm great sympathy.
But I, because I'm, you know, a big picture guy, I kind of zoom out.
You know, your personal addiction, tragic.
I'm so glad you're doing well.
I'm sure you will continue to do well.
Your personal addiction wasn't going to take down Western civilization, but the unreality, state-sucking, money-printing, debt-enhancing, promise-making addiction of the boomers.
I mean, who's fucking up the world?
Angela Merkel?
Not a spring chicken.
Right?
I mean, all of these policies are all older.
And people are afraid of the media attacking them, and the media is all run by old people and consumed by old people.
It's this culty cabal of reality rejection that is escalating itself right off a cliff.
Stupid bullshit non-arguments infest public discourse to the point where you can't have a public discourse.
You're a racist, you're a sexist, you're a misogynist, you're a la la la.
But these are the kind of cheap, bullshit, manipulative lies that all addicts will tell.
Well, you know this, right?
Absolutely.
When you were stealing...
Anything.
Anything to get your fix.
It doesn't matter what you say, who you lie to, right?
Tell me.
I mean, you're exactly right.
Anything you can do, as long as you're not sick.
Anything.
Yeah.
Walk over bodies, right?
Absolutely.
Steal from children.
You have to get your fix.
And this virtue signaling, this addiction to being pawns of state power and...
This addiction to debt?
My God.
It's staggering.
And that's why I say I'm not surprised that so many young people are addicts.
I'm surprised there's not more.
The entire elder generation, complete addicts to state power.
Well, we don't want to confront the teachers unions because that would be uncomfortable.
So fuck the kids.
Fuck them.
They don't have to learn.
They don't have to be taught how to think.
They can just be indoctrinated and propagandized and all the white kids can be told to hate themselves for being white.
What do we care?
We got our pensions.
Don't touch my pension.
Don't touch my drug.
Don't stand between me and my drug or I will fuck you up.
I may do it through verbal abuse, I may do it through physical abuse, I may do it through some method, but I am gonna get that drug.
And government money is the drug of the boomers.
And until they can admit this fundamental addiction, conflict is going to escalate.
That's very profound.
you It's a lot to take in.
And it's something I'll think about.
All right.
I'm not trying to pick on your parents individually.
No, no, no.
Right?
I mean, it's a big societal problem.
It's all across the West.
And I mean, this is kind of...
You know what the Islamic world is?
The Islamic world is not addicted to debt.
Right?
Right.
Who's doing better?
Who's spreading?
Who's shrinking?
Who's growing?
And who's fertile and who's not?
I mean, there's a lot I disagree with, with the Islamic belief system.
But they're not addicted to debt.
That's a Western thing.
That's a boomer thing.
Absolutely.
Huh.
Women have political power in the West, and the West is addicted to debt.
Huh.
I'm sure that's just a coincidence.
Sorry, Cody, go ahead.
It's fine.
I think a lot of the problem Kind of like you said, there is no discourse.
We're not allowed to talk about these things.
I remember, this is just an example I've encountered in my short life so far, but when I was in intensive outpatient therapy, the guy, the counselor that would lead the sessions every day,
he was talking about You know, reasons like he was bringing data to the table of why certain groups of people were addicts and what led them there.
And he would never talk about single motherhood.
And it really bothered me, single parent households.
And I actually printed off Two pages from the Census Bureau once.
I'm looking at it right now and I brought it to them and I was like, this is all the things that single motherhood and single parent homes in general cause in the children.
And it's incredible.
It's incredible, like, if you look at it, how many kids, like, the percentage of children that are going to be more likely to exhibit behavioral disorders It's like 85%.
80% of rapists motivated with displaced anger are from single parent homes.
71% of high school dropouts.
75% of all adolescent patients in chemical abuse centers.
70% of juveniles in state-operated institutions.
And he didn't want to hear it.
This comes from the state.
The Census Bureau has this information.
And he didn't want to hear it.
He wouldn't let me talk about it in our therapy class.
And I guess for good reason.
He didn't want me to upset the single moms in the room.
But you know what?
Yeah, it's funny, right?
And there was a bunch of- No, but this is how powerful it is.
He would rather people continue to be addicted, continue to be dysfunctional, and continue to describe themselves as addicts.
Without talking about the environmental toxins called single motherhood that may have been the foundation of their addiction.
This is the addiction to unreality.
Absolutely.
He would rather addicts suffer than single moms get upset.
That's insane.
And it's deeply insane.
And when we have in our society a fundamental dedication to unreality and a hostility towards truth, that is the foundation of addiction to me.
And I just wanted to mention before we close off the conversation, Gabor Maté's two great books, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Close Encounters with Addiction, and When the Body Says No, The Cost of Hidden Stress.
And yeah, until the boomers can say, my name is And I am an addict to state power and social approval.
And I'm now just avoiding the negatives rather than pursuing the positives.
And I cannot think of a good reason why the young should have to pay for my virtue signaling and why people are born now hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, babies, because of my addiction.
Think they're ever going to say that?
I'm not holding my breath.
No, me neither, man.
Me neither.
Well, listen, thanks for the call.
I appreciate that.
It's very, very honest.
I hope it sounds like it was helpful for you.
I'm glad that it was.
And congratulations on your sobriety.
That is a wonderful thing, and the future is yours, and it sounds like you want it.
Oh, thank you, Stefan.
Thank you for everything you guys do at Freedom Aid Radio.
You're welcome, man.
Take care.
Alright, up next we have Brandon.
Brandon wrote in and said, For the past decade, the left-wing agenda has poisoned the mentality of college students.
Do you, Stefan, think that America is doomed to a left-wing utopia, or do you think there could be a national resistance to the rationality of liberal cause now that we are under Republican rule once more?
That's from Brandon.
Hey, Brandon.
Are you in college at the moment?
I am.
Alright.
How's it going?
Well, not too much of the whole liberal agenda is being exposed.
My college is rather small, but I'm seeing all this unfold on TV and all these colleges are especially in these big colleges that are, you know, conducting these big rallies that are going against Trump, you know, with the recent election and whatnot and saying Trump is not my president and He's racist and misogynist and all these things.
And I'm just seeing all this unfold and I'm thinking, what are these people going to do?
I mean, this is the future, you know?
So it really got me thinking and I just don't know.
And why did you win college?
Why am I in college?
Yeah.
Better myself to become smarter and hopefully get into a job that will put me in a position compared to someone who didn't go to college.
But are you getting that?
Are you getting education you consider worthwhile and valuable and helpful and all that?
I'd say for the most part, yes.
Oh, okay.
So the social justice warrior stuff is like just a little bit of side noise or background noise compared to your core curriculum?
It is, for now at least.
I'm sure that once I get older, my kids are going to be exposed to this in some fashion.
I'm not married or what not, I don't have any kids yet, but in the future I'm sure they will be in some sort.
So it will be a problem.
And what are you taking?
I'm taking courses for finance and go for finance.
Okay, got it.
So you're looking for some pretty technical knowledge that the piece of paper can be helpful for.
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
No, I mean, it's not going to last forever because anything which can't last forever won't last forever.
You know, it's like, are we going to end up with this being a permanent state?
Of course not.
Life is not a permanent state.
Everything that lives dies and that's why we're alive because the last stuff died and that's how evolution works and all that.
So right now we're in this weird bubble in higher education.
And when you're in a bubble, you can pull all kinds of crap, right?
You don't have to be market facing.
You don't have to provide value.
You know, you don't have to be a business genius in the middle of the dot com boom to make a lot of money.
I mean, it doesn't mean that every idiot can do it, but it also means that you don't have I mean, the investor is tested in the bear market, not the bull market.
In the bull market, everyone's making money.
But in the bear market, that's where you separate the smart people from the less smart people.
And right now, higher education is just being ridiculously overfunded.
It's being overfunded by governments, it's being overfunded by parents, it's being overfunded by people who think that that's the only way that you can become a success in life and...
It's far from it.
And we've got the truth about college debt on this very channel, so I won't go into it much more in detail.
But the money's gonna run out.
Government's gonna run out of money.
Government's gonna run out of money.
Now, when the government runs out of money, what does it do?
Well, it cuts back.
And it's gonna cut back on funding colleges to a large degree.
And the left is going to scream blue murder because they want people to pay to be indoctrinated into leftist ideals and to be programmed and all of that kind of stuff.
That's just great.
I mean, it's expensive enough programming people with your leftist trap if you can get them to pay for it yourself and make a good amount of money yourself.
Boy, you just can't beat that.
And so the government's going to run out of money or the government's just going to make a decision to stop pumping all this money into higher education.
Right, Donald?
We're going to...
Stop pumping all this ridiculous money into higher education so that American society can rock from the head down.
So when that money runs out, then other alternatives will come to the forefront.
And of course, they should have come to the forefront long ago, given all the technology available to educate people these days, you know, like the internet and all that.
But it's gonna, you know, we're just in this weird bubble.
And the bubble is relatively recent, a couple of decades old.
And It's going to crash, and when it crashes, we'll be a lot better off.
I mean, you know, assholes and propagandists will be worse off, but the rest of us will do a hell of a lot better.
Sorry, go ahead.
It seems like all this riots and this protest and this voice and whatnot seems very passionate, especially within the past few years, which was also, ironically, under a Democratic president's rule.
It seems that The administration of Obama for the past eight years have left such an imprint on America, and not just America, you know, on other parts of the world.
But you don't think it's possible that a lot of these students have such a passion for what they believe in, especially with the LGBTQ movement and also the Black Lives Matter movement.
You don't think all of this is going to last, especially under Trump's administration?
Well, I think a lot of these students may, in fact, end up permanently intellectually crippled.
It's just the reality of it.
You know, I mean, some of them will be able to pull their way out of it.
I mean, I was indoctrinated into socialism when I was younger, and I was able to pull my way out of it.
But, you know, I'm not right in the middle of the bell curve.
And I think a lot of the people in the college are actually a little bit to the left at the peak of the bell curve.
Of intelligence, that is.
So, yeah, unfortunately, some of them will be permanently crippled.
And, of course, a lot of people, and I've talked about this before, a lot of people are going to come out with these useless garbage arts degrees.
And the arts degree used to be helpful, used to be good, used to teach you critical thinking, reading, writing skills, but it's been so dumbed down by all the idiots going into college that they can't fail out that you just have to dumb down the whole thing.
And the fact that as less intelligent people get into college, you get more of this social justice warrior leftist Posturing just tells you the intellectual content of social justice warrior stuff.
I guess dumber people come along.
It doesn't take a lot of intelligence to be offended.
It takes a lot of intelligence to come up with a coherent argument with reason and evidence.
It doesn't take a lot of intelligence to go with the flow and to virtue signal and so on.
It takes a lot of intelligence to reach for the truth through The fiery walls of social disapproval.
So it's just, you know, they're LARPing as smart people.
You've got a bunch of done people who are LARPing as smart people.
And you can LARP in school, right?
You can do your live action role play.
I'm smart.
But the free market, you can't LARP intelligence in the free market.
I mean, the free market is going to measure you by what you actually can produce, not how much you can agree with indoctrinating lefties.
So, yeah, they're going to be permanently crippled.
And they're going to be crippled not just intellectually.
Like a smart person can take a lot of propaganda and still come out okay.
But less intelligent people who get propagandized can't reason their way out of it because they're not smart enough.
They can't talk their way out of it because they're not smart enough.
They can't rise above it because they're not smart enough.
So these people are going to be permanently crippled intellectually.
And they're also going to be permanently crippled financially.
They're going to be coming out $50,000, $100,000 or more in debt.
And they're only going to be able to get minimum wage.
They're only going to be able, because they're not that smart, right?
They're IQ 90, 95, and they, you know, affirmative action or LARP their way into school.
And the standards have all been lowered anyway, right?
And the market figures that out pretty quickly.
You know, when the standards were high, an education, even in English literature, used to mean a lot.
An education in English literature now, what the hell does it mean?
That you've conformed with a bunch of other dummies and been propagandized by people who are manipulating you for the sake of spreading Marxism.
Yay!
That's the kind of person I want.
So the market is already discounting the value of degrees in particular fields, particularly in the arts.
So the market already knows it's all bullshit.
Because the market doesn't want to pay more for anything than it can possibly get.
And the market is now swinging around to the point...
Where they're viewing the prevalence of social justice warriors in an institution as a mark of that institution's imminent failure, right?
I mean, Charles C. Johnson, a great guy, has been on the show a bunch of times.
He, you know, makes a fairly decent amount of coin by finding social justice warrior facing organizations and shorting their stock, which means making money when their stock goes down.
And so the market is already discounting.
So they're paying more for something that is progressively worth less.
And I think it's in the long run going to be a liability.
Because the social justice warriors, what are they taught to do?
They're taught to hate capitalism.
They're taught to hate bosses.
They're taught to hate the free market.
They're taught to hate the necessity of getting up and having to work a living.
They're waiting for giant Marxist robot mommies to come and breastfeed them from here to eternity so that they can learn how to play the lute and compete with Sting and being offensive at the Bataclan theater.
But they're going to be worthless and negative.
Because these people will cause more trouble for an employer because they've been so indoctrinated in the leftist garbage that you don't even want these people around.
They're just like lawsuits waiting to happen in my humble opinion as a whole.
So I would say that they're going to be financially crippled and they're going to be intellectually crippled.
And how are they going to get back from it?
Well, some of them just aren't.
And I think it's terrible and I think it's a real shame.
I have a great deal of sympathy.
You know, the left and the...
Administrators of these universities are exploiting dumb people.
They are exploiting dumb people and they damn well should know better.
But they're greedy.
And they know that the more they stuff the gills and the hallways with idiots, the more money they get from the government.
And the free market would not...
Encourage this.
The free market would say, no, you have to keep your standards high so that we know that the degree, which we're paying more for as employers, right?
Somebody's got a degree, you pay them more.
We want to make sure that that is a good investment for us.
So you better keep your standards high or we're going to discount everything that you do.
Well, I believe that the marketplace is already doing that with regards to degrees, arts degrees, of course, in particular.
So, an arts degree no longer means that you can read and write and make a good argument and think critically and think logically and be creative and debate and negotiate.
It doesn't mean any of that anymore.
It did, to some degree, when I was going through college a quarter century ago, close on, but not anymore.
And so it is brutal.
And it's, you know, at some point, everyone's going to recognize that going to college for bullshit degrees with idiots is actually a huge negative.
And I don't mean for you, right?
You're doing finance or whatever.
There's some things you simply have to do.
Be an engineer, a doctor, you got to do it.
But, you know, women's studies, English literature, which is no longer English literature anymore.
A lot of places you don't even have to study Shakespeare anymore.
Good Lord, it's like doing the Bible without mentioning God.
I mean, it's sort of pointless.
Exactly.
But, yeah, so the market will catch up and people will stop going.
And unfortunately, there'll still be dumb people who think that they can get smarter by going to college.
And that's not how it works.
You don't get taller by joining the basketball team.
You have to be taller already to get on.
And so, the reality is...
A combination of factors is going to take down this massive bubble in higher education, not to mention the fact that there's a trillion dollars of student debt that's outstanding at the moment.
How the hell is that going to get paid off?
I mean, give me a break.
It's not going to get paid off.
It's nonsense.
And so when all this stuff gets defaulted on, well, a lot of funding is going to be cut from universities, and rightly so, and they'll go back to actually teaching smart people rather than exploiting less smart people.
I totally agree.
I might go on a little bit of a rant here, but I wanted to just to see if it's a legitimate claim or not.
But it seems that the left, especially the people that are residing on the left, want to join these groups, these movements, and, you know, these little social justice warriors, little groups that go on.
It seems like they do because it's much, much easier than actually having to work And get through society the way that society or capitalism itself in America.
They're trying to find loopholes and ways to change it to make it easier for themselves.
And I think that it is because of the way that technology has, you know, evolved within the past decade or so.
You know, with everything being all touchscreen, everything being easier access, especially with the impact of video games and In television, I mean, it's instant stimulation of the brain.
If you get on one of these video games and give yourself 20 seconds and boom, you're playing this simulator that is very action-packed and has a lot of things going on, and it's probably a lot easier than getting a whole bunch of friends together and playing football outside where a lot of these kids should be.
Same thing goes with television, and the more these People my age are exposed to things like this, then the reading goes down, then the actual will to learn, that goes down.
They want to find something that's much easier to do and less learning, more doing.
That's why I think that these people on the left, my age, are doing, which is a shame in itself, but now that they are in India's movements, they actually Fundamentally believe all these things.
They believe that why man's keeping them down, we need to push God out of this country, we need to promote globalism instead of nationalism, and we need to, you know, basically push back everything that the right is doing just because we can make it easier for ourselves to, you know, excel in society and so we have to do less work.
What do you think of that?
Yeah, no, I think that's right.
And the question is, why are so many young people, and in particular men, diving into video games and porn?
Well, because conversation is less fun than video games.
And why is conversation less fun than video games?
Because there are a whole bunch of really sensitive people who are going to get very upset if certain truths are spoken.
And whether, you know, it was better when there was more gender segregation in terms of conversation, you know, the men in the living room, the women in the kitchen, and so on.
I don't know.
I certainly could see that being a case made for that.
But I would say that conversation has become more difficult, right?
You know, we got a bunch of messages, and there's lots of people writing about this online at the moment, that after this election, what's going to happen when we go to dinner?
What's going to happen when we go for dinner at Thanksgiving, right?
Well...
Have disagreements.
Fights.
I mean, men, you know this.
We grow up, we have disagreements with our male friends, and then we're fine, right?
There may even be very strong disagreements, and we're fine.
May even hate each other for a day, and then usually we're fine.
But women, well, not so much.
Women can hold a grudge till it grows a beard, and then some.
And a good old, not like my little half-beard thing, but like a good old Gandalf, tuck it in your belt kind of thing.
And...
So because for whatever reason, right, I mean, it's everyone, like, it's no fun and it's really annoying trying to have conversation with people who think being offended is an argument.
What you say is offensive.
What you say is sexist or racist.
It's like, it's boring.
Yeah, I'd rather go play Doom.
Sorry, because it's really, really boring and predictable and annoying and I'm losing respect for you because you're getting upset over facts or even arguments.
Or if I'm wrong, then just, you know, tell me I'm wrong and correct me or whatever, right?
But So, dating is becoming more difficult and porn is easier and having conversations is becoming more difficult and fractious.
Men like to debate.
Men like to fight.
Men like to disagree.
Men like to sharpen their intellect in verbal combat with others.
That's what we're good at.
And, yeah, men and some women are good at it too, but it's, you know, men in particular.
And you can't do it anymore.
You can't do it.
I mean, if you grow up in a single mom household, you can't talk about anything without the moms going hysterical and taking it personally.
Lord above, I remember having, trying to have conversations about privatizing healthcare.
Oh, you want, well, I got, my friends got diabetes and you wanted to just die in the street.
Oh yeah, great argument.
Thanks.
I think I'll just go back to Pac-Man because this really is no fun at all.
So yeah, I mean, I, um, I understand that.
I mean, it's just incentives, right?
As society, as conversations, as debates, as arguments and dating has become less and less fun and more and more annoying because of hysterical people who just scream insults and can't handle a real debate, okay, well, then video games look like a lot more fun.
And as it's become more dangerous and volatile to date women and as the prevalence of STDs has gone up and false accusations of this, that, or the other have gone up, yeah, probably easier to rub one out to a monitor.
But...
This will all change, my friends.
I know it looks like it's going to be forever, but it ain't.
As soon as the money runs out, people have to stop appeasing and start dealing with reality.
And when the money runs out...
Avoidance becomes essential.
Like I just did this, what pisses me off about Thanksgiving, about all this socialist crap that went off.
But when they were actually facing starvation, guess what?
They privatized everything pretty much.
So, you know, it's a phase.
You've got to be prepared for the transition.
It'll be more sudden than you think.
And when the transition occurs, you know, most people's intellects will just kind of follow along because they're just followers and they just make up excuses for whatever's going on in society.
So right now they're making up excuses for central planning and socialism.
When it flips to the free market, as hopefully it will, then they'll just start accepting and dealing with that.
So most people, they're just corks in a stream, just floating down whatever the zeitgeist is.
So do you think all these movements, especially with socialism and all these blackness movements, do you think they're going to dissolve within the next few years?
The which movements?
I don't know.
I am not privy to the data that gives an accurate time frame for these things.
But I can tell you it's going to happen for sure.
And it's going to be Shorter than decades, but probably longer than years.
Because the left is going to try this big counterinsurgency against Donald Trump, and we'll have to see how that goes.
But I do think that a considerable amount of reality is going to come seeping back into these lurid psychotic fantasies that not just the left, but some of the cucks on the right also have.
We are at some point going to be able to talk about real things, and people will be hysterical, and they'll just be told to get away from the adult table because big people have important work to do.
It's been a little bit tough, especially for me for Patsy Reef lately, ever since Trump got in the office, that I've been accused for being alt-right.
I really don't consider myself all right, but the people on the left especially like to throw that word around now that we have a problem.
God help them.
If they don't have a label, how do they even get out of bed in the morning?
Labels are what people use instead of thinking.
If you can't think, try and ascribe a label to someone.
Are people always trying to label me?
No, I'm a philosopher.
Reason and evidence.
I'm not alt-right or white nationalist or this or that or the other, a socialist, capitalist, anarchist.
It's just reason and evidence, people.
It's not dogma.
Idiots need dogma.
Smart people use thinking.
And the urge to stick a label on someone is a confession that you're retarded.
Right.
I even asked the same person why they would consider themselves all left instead of being just left.
If someone is all right, I mean, they promote white supremacy and actually preserve all the things that we're That's the criticism of the alt-right, right?
That's not the alt-right.
The funny thing is, just to point it out, people accuse the alt-right of white supremacy.
There's nobody who criticizes white people more than the alt-right.
They can't stand white people at the moment and think they're vastly inferior to everyone else and they're trying to change that.
But anyway, go on.
But what I don't understand is why they wouldn't give you the alt-right agenda.
You know why.
Come on, you know why.
Because they're idiots.
And they want labels that they can use to smear people because thinking is difficult for them.
Of course, they'll talk about the far right.
You'll never hear about the far left.
No, you won't.
Yeah, you'll talk about some ridiculous gathering where a few people throw Nazi salutes under questionable circumstances, but the fact that the communist part of the United States is having a fetish affair with Hillary Clinton, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't even get mentioned.
It doesn't even get talked about.
So, no, of course they want to demonize their opponents and they want to make themselves centrists and reasonable people.
Of course, this is horrible.
All the result of letting incompetent people into the public sphere of discourse.
Because there's no market out there that is doing all of this.
But it's rather just a bunch of mainstream media manipulation and attempting to promote the Democrat causes.
And there's all this crap going on in universities that are living off the intellectual legacy of when they used to have smarter people in there.
Well, you know, they're like a substandard cover band of a great act, you know?
That's...
And so, this is the result of just letting, what's going on in the moment in public discourse, all this slander and lies and exaggeration and misrepresentation and lying, this is just the result of a significantly dumbed down population.
And when you let dumb people into public discourse, you get a lot of bleating, you get a lot of hysteria, you get a lot of name calling, and you get a lot of noise.
But what you don't get is a lot of arguments.
Now, Sean Hannity is trying to push this alt-left But, you know, I'm not sure that the addition of an additional label is going to really solve the problem.
Yeah, it's definitely not necessary.
It just seems like, especially with this Obama administration that we've had for the past eight years, in the transition of the Trump administration, which the election itself was actually historic, but it seems like this administration has left a special kind of imprint on The people in my generation,
it seems like they have such a passion for it that it's not really going to go away no matter what resistance there is, which I hope would be fundamentally more effective than I hoped.
But if it's not, then what's going to become America?
Well, don't be passive.
Be active.
What's going to become of America?
What the hell do you want to have become of America?
And make that happen.
Don't be passive.
Don't look at this big giant world and say, well, it's going to just roll over me like a bowling ball over a dust particle.
Be bigger than the world.
Be bigger than the future and make it go the way you want it to go.
Don't be a passenger.
Be a driver.
It's also a shame that obviously I'm done with high school right now and Common Core was around, especially when I was in high school, and there's going to be plenty of things that I had not learned in high school that I'm sure when Trump is sworn in, then he'll do what he can to get rid of Common Core.
But these people that are coming in high school, and they're also in high school right now, they won't have to be subject to that, and therefore they'll probably come out much, much smarter than I am, and they might be better off.
But it's just a shame that The people that came out of the high school that I did, the same age group that I did, they came out with this dumb downside of knowledge and they think that they run the world at this point.
I mean, that's the kind of smug, ignorant attitude that a lot of these people have.
They could do just about anything they want, especially given these radical movements that are just swarming the country.
And they think that is justified, which I hope will wear off.
And I hope that with these next four years, they'll be able to come out of this trance that they have and realize that maybe I am wrong.
Maybe what I'm doing isn't right, especially because it's only burying myself.
It's just basically me, me, me.
What can I protect of myself and not really of my fellow Americans, whether it be socially, financially, spiritually, and whatnot.
But, um, I just, I only, I guess only time will tell until we see some actual action.
No, no, no.
You're getting passive again.
Only time will tell.
Make it happen!
Be part of the change, right?
Be the change you want to see in the world.
Make it happen.
Get the...
Pedal on the metal, hit the gas, get out of the passenger seat, into the driver's seat.
Don't be passive.
Don't wait to see what's going to happen.
Make something happen.
And remember, there are a lot of kids out there who are getting their information from the internet these days and are growing up less propagandized than I was when I was growing up, because when I was growing up, there was no internet to get alternate viewpoints.
I mean, you could, I guess, go to the library and try and dig up people, as I did, who had Alternate viewpoints, but a lot of kids out there who have had very strong resistance, I don't mean like kids' kids, but young people, sort of 20 and up, they've had a lot of exposure to a lot of different information, enough to shake the monochrome goggles off of their brain cells.
So, yeah, I mean, this is a very fruitful and opportunistic time for new truths or real reality to emerge in the intellectual landscape.
So, Alright, I'm going to close the show off here.
Thanks so much.
We've had, I guess, close to four hours and I'm going to pack it in for the night.
Thanks everyone so much for listening and watching.
Mostly, greatly, massively appreciated.
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