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Dec. 27, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

04:14:50

3543 Trump Derangement Syndrome - Call In Show - December 22nd, 2016

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	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	First caller tonight, very interesting.
	First of all, where did money come from?
	What was the original impetus for money, for currency?
	And also, what is the relationship between having the government control the currency, full employment or reasonably full employment, and deficit financing?
	Very, very interesting questions which we dug into deep.
	The second caller wanted to know if the sort of leftist revolution that I think arguably began in 1968 It's beginning to end as of 2016, so I talked about the 60s and the 70s, particularly after the hedonism of the 60s, you get the nihilism of the 70s, and where we stand in the cultural battle.
	The third caller.
	Ah, yeah, the third caller.
	What are Donald Trump's biggest flaws?
	He wanted to know, and it kind of went from there, and it got pretty ferocious, and I'm very pleased with the conversation.
	I think you'll find it quite powerful, and I certainly appreciate him calling in.
	It was instructive on so many different levels.
	was on a Hunt the Broken Heart mission.
	He had a relationship with a single mom.
	They were heading towards marriage.
	And it ended.
	And the reasons why it ended?
	Very interesting.
	And the causes as to why it started?
	Even more interesting.
	I think you'll really appreciate that conversation as I appreciate the honesty that the listener had as always.
	Please check out fdrurl.com slash amazon for your online shopping needs.
	And also, please drop by freedomainradio.com slash donate to help out this most powerful and productive of conversations.
	And please don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
	Alright, well up first today we have Nima, the economics junkie himself.
	He wrote in and said, I have an Australian economics background, but have recently come across some evidence leading me to think it's conceivable routine budget deficits might be necessary to supply sufficient private sector saving.
	Do you think in a fiat money system the government needs to run routine deficits in order to allow for full employment and maximum resource utilization?
	That is from Nima.
	Hey Nima, how you doing?
	Hi Stefan.
	I'm good.
	How are you doing?
	I'm doing very well.
	I'm doing very well.
	Thanks.
	Do you want to run through some of the arguments for this before we delve into the mechanics?
	Absolutely.
	I would love to because it's a big topic.
	So if I read from some...
	Research papers and sources at times, is that acceptable as evidence?
	Sure, as long as it's comprehensible to the lay audience, I think that's great.
	Of course.
	So, I would like to start with the barter theory of money, which is arguably at the root of a lot of orthodox economics and also Austrian economics.
	Do you know what I'm referring to when I say barter theory of money?
	No.
	The Barter Theory of Money says that money emerged out of a border between people in very subsistence-based, simplistic economies, and in a competitive market process of exchanging goods for other goods, the items or the goods that turned out to be most useful as media of exchange emerged as a monetary medium in said economy, if that makes sense.
	Right.
	So this is the, I guess it's back to the old Aristotelian argument.
	There were sort of four major characteristics of money.
	You know, that it's fungible.
	In other words, if you divide it, it doesn't lose valuable.
	It's portable.
	It can be refashioned.
	It has more than one use.
	And, you know, I can't remember them all.
	But this is the idea that this is why sort of gold and silver and other of the scarce and precious metals ended up being used as currency.
	Exactly.
	So the first thing I'd like to do is provide some evidence that contradicts this barter theory of money.
	And if I read from sources, can I paste that into the chat somewhere here?
	Oh yeah, there's a chat.
	Okay, just so it's there.
	So I would like to read from an article from The Atlantic, which also references an anthropology research paper, if that's okay.
	Right.
	And I posted the link down here.
	So, the title of the article is The Myth of the Barter Economy.
	And what the author suggests is, and I'll quote, various anthropologists have pointed out that this barter economy has never been witnessed as researchers have traveled to undeveloped parts of the globe.
	No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence of it, of money, wrote the Cambridge anthropology professor Caroline Humphrey in a 1985 paper.
	And there's a link to the paper.
	I think it's a peer-reviewed journal.
	All available ethnography suggests that there has never been such a thing.
	When barter has appeared, it wasn't as part of a purely barter economy, and money didn't emerge from it.
	Rather, it emerged from money.
	After Rome fell, for instance, Europeans used barter as a substitute for the Roman currency people had gotten used to.
	In most cases we know about, barter takes place between people who are familiar with the use of money, but for one reason or another don't have a lot of it around, explains David Graeber, an anthropology professor at the London School of Economics.
	No academics I talked to were aware of any evidence that Barter was actually the precursor to money, despite the story's prevalence in economics textbooks and the public's consciousness.
	Some argue that no one ever believed Barter was real to begin with.
	The idea was a crude model used to simplify the context of modern economic systems, not a real theory but past ones.
	I don't think anybody believes that was ever a historical situation.
	Even the economists writing the textbook, Michael Beggs, a lecturer in political economy at the University of Sydney, told me, it's more of a thought experiment.
	So that's the first...
	I like it when, you know, if I get disproven, I get, no, no, it's a thought experiment.
	You know, like if you say something insulting and people get mad, you say, no, no, no, it's a joke.
	It's just a joke.
	It's just a thought experiment.
	It's like, well, no, it's a hypothesis, right?
	I mean, just very briefly, my view Is that currency was invented by governments because they can corrupt currency, but they can't corrupt barter.
	They can dilute the amount of gold in a gold coin.
	They can create junk metal.
	They can put, you know, crap into the gold coins, as we saw later on in Rome, where the gold coins have become so debased that the government didn't even want to take them as tax revenue.
	So currency was invented because it allows for the dilution Of currency and therefore the appearance of wealth.
	It allows you to pretend to shower goods upon your tribal members or your citizens.
	And it also creates the illusion that the government is adding something to the economic value of society.
	Because, you know, it's like, woohoo, we're wealthy.
	And then inflation kicks in sort of 18 months later.
	Or the price rising, which is the effect of inflation, kicks in.
	But if people are, you know, if somebody's trading...
	I don't know, a bunch of eggs for a hammer.
	Well, the government can't just go out and make eggs.
	You know, it can't just go out and make a hammer.
	But it can go and force people to use currency by saying, well, we need you to pay your taxes in this currency.
	And therefore, people have to use the currency.
	And it's something that the government can manipulate and control.
	And I think that's kind of how currency came about.
	I don't think it was any kind of spontaneous thing that came out of the free market.
	That's exactly, you hit the nail on the head there, and that's very important that according to the so-called state theory of money, the first time money was introduced, it was actually by states who were looking to tax people.
	Actually, even earlier, tribes, where the tribal chief would declare a tax without anyone having that money, and then he would start hiring resources into the so-called public sector, With those tokens, which people now needed because they needed to make tax payments later on.
	So the important thing here is the causality chain is the government spends money into existence first and then collects it later on, or at least collects a portion of it later on.
	For the purpose of tax, actually as tax payments.
	But the point...
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Well, so in a barter economy, if you just sort of think of a sort of small farming village or a farming community, they don't have really any need for currency.
	They don't have any need for money.
	And of course, the longer you need to hold on to the good, the less you're going to be interested in barter.
	Because a lot of barter involves goods that...
	Decay, right?
	I mean, you can only hold on to eggs for so long before they become not particularly helpful for anything other than evil-smelling pranks.
	And so if the government wants to transfer value a long way away, like from an outlying region, Into a capital, then it needs currency to do that.
	Because driving the horses or the sheep or the cows, that's really time consuming and expensive.
	Taking food while the food is going to decay.
	And if you take a good, like a hammer or something, well then you have to find somebody who needs a hammer.
	And so it's a great way of stealing resources from outlying areas into the political capital to introduce currency, which is of course portable.
	Correct.
	So the source of money was actually violence and not barter, is the point of the state theory of money.
	So if we can accept that hypothesis, then we can, or at least the evidence that I submitted so far, then we can move on to my next point.
	Well, sorry, I just wanted to mention, too, that it's kind of ironic that the government invented something that was supposed to expand the power of the state, and 99 times out of 100, that's exactly what it does.
	However, when combined with certain elements of the free market, you get...
	Capitalism.
	I do believe that the free market benefits enormously from a medium of exchange, right?
	From having some sort of...
	So it's kind of like how the government invented the internet as a way of communicating in the event of nuclear war and also invented the communications network that is fighting tooth and nail against the power of the state at the moment.
	So I also want to...
	Reference the example of split tally sticks in England real quick as one more piece of evidence that money was always introduced by the state first and then later on collected as tax payments.
	Have you heard of the split tally sticks in England?
	I have.
	I actually first thought they were just a scar band, but it turns out that there's more to it, so go ahead.
	This is from Wikipedia.
	The most prominent and best recorded use of the split tally stick being used as a form of currency was when King Henry I initiated the tally stick system in or around 1100 in medieval England.
	He would accept the tally stick only for taxes.
	Yeah.
	The split tally of the exchequer was in continuous use until 1826.
	And then at some point, actually, they ordered to burn the tally sticks in the House of Parliament, and they accidentally burned down the entire House of Parliament.
	And Charles Dickens references this in an article from 1855.
	But what's important here, it's a stick, right?
	There's no real value to a stick.
	There's no gold backing behind it.
	It's just a stick that's split in two halves, and the king keeps one half, and the contractor that he hires takes the other half, then other people in that economy have a demand for it, because the king demands that stick in tax payments, or else you have to pay tithes later on.
	And this was medieval England.
	So my point here is that monetary systems throughout history, as far as we have historical evidence, have almost always been these kinds of violence-based Fiat money systems where taxation comes first and that gives the medium value and then it's used in the private sector as you pointed out earlier.
	Well and to add on to that as well I think we should not take the role of religious institutions out of the equation.
	So you have some local farming community and they're very dependent upon the weather and in order to manage their anxiety They want someone to pat them on the head and tell them it's gonna be okay, right?
	Because, you know, I have a friend who ran a farm for some years, and he said, you know, like, when we, we would harvest the wheat and it would lie there in the field, For like two days or three days until we could collect it all, right?
	Some of it would lie.
	And he said, like, you would just be panicking at the possibility of clouds on the horizon.
	Because, of course, if it rains and all of that stuff, then rot can set in and your whole harvest becomes useless, right?
	So you're terrified.
	And it's completely horrifying.
	You know, if your primary cow gets ill, you know, and you don't have any medicines to make it better, then there's a lot of anxiety in farming.
	And so I can completely understand the belief or the need to have somebody from a religious persuasion around to tell you, well, if you pray, if we get together, if we do these rituals, if we do X or Y or Z, then everything will be okay.
	And of course, the point isn't that it makes everything okay.
	The point is that it makes everything feel better.
	It's kind of like a drug for an anxiety disorder.
	And, you know, it sounds like I'm diminishing.
	I'm not.
	It's a very real and positive health benefit that the farming community would get.
	And so they're going to keep the, you know, you've got 200 people in the farming community.
	You know, you've got a priest.
	Okay, so, you know, they chip in 2.5% per person or whatever.
	And they get 0.5% per person.
	And they get all of this benefit.
	Benefit of a ritual and a calming influence and a belief that they have control over an environment that they don't actually have control over, like the weather.
	And so paying that priest is a perfectly valid and perfectly sensible transaction.
	Now, what happens, of course, is when you start to get layers of bureaucracy over and above the priest, which are more remote, then it becomes more complicated.
	You know, bureaucracy is the endless desire to weasel your way away from a directly paying customer, like as much as possible, as much as humanly possible.
	When you start to get layers within a church bureaucracy, then they prefer to have cash rather than be paid in kind, for all of the reasons that we talked about before.
	It's more remote, it's tougher to transport, and so on.
	And that, of course, is the challenge.
	And I think it's one of the reasons why the religious bureaucracy often allies with the government bureaucracy and the government leaders, because they both kind of have that That same need.
	Like the local policeman, people will usually pay him because he's providing it.
	But when you start to abstract away from the immediate and the local, you get these layers of bureaucracy where people won't voluntarily pay them.
	That's when you need a real tax system and that's when you need to introduce this currency stuff.
	Right, and it's interesting you brought up religious superstitions of the past because a lot of what we still know today as a monetary system, it arose out of a lot of these ancient concepts such as original sin.
	For example, original sin is actually a debt that you owe from birth on.
	It's kind of like a tax that you owe to the government and you spend your life redeeming yourself.
	There's a book called Debt the First 5,000 Years by an anthropologist called David Graeber.
	And he argues...
	I guess I don't even need to go into this because you know all of this.
	I think you have a pretty good understanding of the history of money.
	So what I would like to get into is how...
	But do we agree then that the monetary systems throughout history have generally always been...
	As far as we have evidence, have been violence-based, state-based monetary systems.
	And I'll get to the Roman coins in a sec.
	Yeah, I think that that certainly was the motivation behind the origination of these monetary systems.
	But of course, when the government invents something, The free market tries to use it as efficiently as possible, like the internet or like the interstate highway system.
	It's not like the truckers say, well, I don't want to use these roads because they were built by the state for no particular purpose other than allowing troop movements around during time of a nuclear war.
	So when the government does build a bunch of crap, like the internet, like roads and all that kind of stuff, like the interstate highway system, then the market will try and Sort of piggyback on that stuff and try and use it efficiently.
	And it certainly has tried to do that with currency throughout history.
	And that has, of course, been...
	So the government advanced something for predation.
	The free market uses it to enhance productivity, which actually helps the government pray more.
	Right.
	That's a good point.
	So I want to talk a little bit about this mechanism that still exists today.
	Which is the government spends by introducing money and then it taxes later on by taking money back out of the economy.
	So it's not like the government needs to collect our money from us in order to be able to spend or to pay its debts or anything like that.
	The government, even in today's fiat money economies, at least in sovereign floating fiat money economies, that means government that has the Power to issue a currency and tax on that currency, and it doesn't stabilize the exchange rate or offer anything in redemption, always spends by crediting bank accounts.
	It doesn't spend by collecting money first and then spending it, if that makes sense.
	Right.
	I would argue that, of course, a lot of the money that the government raises is a promise of future revenue.
	In other words, it's using the taxable powers that it has on the general population as a collateral by which people assume that they're going to be paid back in the future.
	Like if the government sold a 20-year bond, let's say the federal government sold a 20-year bond, And then promised that in two years it was going to stop collecting taxes, how many people would buy the 20-year bond?
	Well, nobody, because they would say, well, if the government's going to stop collecting taxes, it won't have any money by which to pay me back the 20-year bond.
	So it is a lot of using taxpayers as collateral from which to borrow rather than as receipts from which to pay its own bills.
	But that would imply that the government needs the taxpayers' money in order to pay those bonds.
	And that's what I'm pushing back against here.
	Because empirically, that's not the case.
	Empirically, the government pays the interest on a bond by marking up the bondholder's bank account.
	And it redeems the debt by, sorry, when it matures, it repays the debt By removing the bond from the bondholder's bank security account and in turn marking up said bank's bank reserves.
	Yes, but if it didn't have any income, that would be purely inflationary.
	Of course.
	So it has to have the income to blunt the impact of inflation.
	Because if it's just pumping, like this giant fire hose of fiat currencies going into everyone's bank account, then you're going to get massive price increases and destabilization of the economy.
	Whereas if it can offset the money that it's spraying out with some receivables in terms of tax receipts, then it's going to diminish the impact of inflation, which of course is, I think, what some people want, right?
	Exactly.
	The taxes give the money value.
	That's the point.
	Taxes drive the value of the money.
	They are not a means of fiscal policy.
	They are a means of monetary policy.
	It's a legitimization of the general theft of fiat currency.
	It gives it the veneer of value.
	And it does give it some real value in that we assume that the wealth generated by the taxpayers has a lot of it is, of course, bullshit and fiat currency nonsense.
	And, you know, being the genius who gets free money from the Fed and then parks it in a Fed account for a couple of percentage points.
	And, you know, look, I'm a banking genius.
	Right.
	But some of it is real.
	Some of it is real productivity.
	I would hesitate to guess.
	I don't think anyone really knows exactly how much.
	But that aspect of some of it is real.
	That is important.
	Like if you want to run any kind of scam, like let's say that you you say, well, I'm going to sell all these little local lottery tickets or I'm going to run a bingo hall.
	Well, if no one ever wins, then no one's going to show up, right?
	What you want to do is have people win slightly less than they would if it was completely fair.
	So you can sort of keep the difference.
	So there usually is, there needs to be some legitimacy in a scam, and the legitimacy in the scam of fiat currency is the, I think, genuine wealth that is created and taxed.
	Feel free to disagree.
	You're more of an expert on this, of course, rather than my thoughts.
	I think...
	I mean, you use terms like scam and things like that, which I would just, I guess...
	I would say that if we think of a tribal economy without money, imagine I'm the tribal chief and I have 50 people, we have a subsistence economy, and now I introduce...
	NEMA bucks, for example.
	Everyone now owes me one NEMA buck starting tomorrow.
	Now people will need those NEMA bucks.
	I guess you could say the scam is the violence from the get-go.
	It's the fact that I'm imposing the tax, right?
	Well, you know, you're creating an artificial demand for NEMA bucks through the threat of physical violence.
	Like, I can say everyone owes me a gold coin tomorrow, freedominradio.com slash donate, but not everyone's going to do it, and I'm not going to clap anyone in jail who doesn't.
	So, a scam is probably a nice way of putting it.
	More accurate would be a shakedown, right?
	Like, I mean, if the mafia in a neighborhood says, you know, you need to have this...
	This particular little bauble, you know, and if you have this particular bauble, like a little tiny little amethyst in a certain shape, and if you put that in the window, then everyone knows you're paying off the mafia, and they won't burn down your store, right?
	They won't, ooh, a nice little store here would be a shame if something happened to it, kind of thing.
	And so they've created demand for these little baubles, these little markers of having paid off the mafia.
	But of course, it is fundamentally a shakedown.
	Yes.
	So my point here is that if I didn't deficit spend after I declare this tax, then the next day, if the next day comes around and people owe me my taxes in NEMA box, then they're And everyone now tells me, how am I going to pay your NEMA box?
	I don't have any.
	And the only thing that I could consistently now do other than actually start hiring them is to start taking their things in order to have a collection of the tax.
	The consistent application of the concept of a budget surplus in a fiat economy leads to everyone being in debt to the state ultimately and the state having to take people's things from them because there's no token in circulation that I haven't introduced a token for people to pay the tax, if that makes sense.
	So this is the part where I'm having a little trouble following the argument.
	So the argument is that if the government is spending less than it's taking in in taxation, in other words, if it's running a surplus, and not like a Bill Clinton imaginary money shuffle surplus, but a genuine surplus, Then there is radiating problems in the economy, right?
	Exactly.
	And I would even go as far as to citing the Clinton surplus.
	And I want to look at a couple of examples of historical surpluses next to make that case a little stronger, if I may.
	Sure.
	So I can't put links in the chat for some of the chats telling me it has to be updated.
	So I'll just...
	You can just email them later.
	Don't worry about it right now.
	Yeah, I'll email them later.
	So...
	The historical evidence that we have of budget surpluses in the U.S. I'll just read from a book from Randall Ray.
	He's an economics professor who's into this stuff.
	And he says...
	The US government has been running surpluses from 1817 through 1821, from 1823 through 1836.
	Sorry, sorry.
	1870 through 1821?
	Sorry, 1817 through 1821.
	1817.
	Sorry, my mistake.
	Go ahead.
	The next is 1823 through 1836.
	The next is 1852 to 1857.
	And the next is from 1867 to 1873, and then the next is from 1880 to 1893, and then from 1920 to 1930.
	And the six depressions that we've had in the US, the dates of those depressions were 1819, so we see the first budget surplus was 1817, we had a depression 1819.
	Then we had a budget surplus from 23 through 36, we had a depression in 37, 1837.
	Then we had a budget surplus from 1852 to 1857 and we had a depression in 1857.
	And we had a budget surplus from 1867 to 1873 and we have a depression in 1873.
	And we have a budget surplus from 1880 to 1893 and we have a depression in 1893.
	And we had a surplus from 1920 through 1930, and we had a depression in 1929.
	And to look back at a more recent example, we had surpluses at the end of the Clinton era, and that was followed by the recession, the crash of 2001, and arguably as an extension of that, the Great Recession of 2008.
	So in other words, we have six out of seven examples, sorry, six out of the seven times that the US government ran a budget surplus.
	We've had a depression or a severe recession following those surpluses.
	Now, this is, of course, I'm not saying correlation implies causation necessarily, but I think it's pretty strong evidence that budget surpluses, there's some problems associated with budget surpluses, and I would like to get into the causality, if I may.
	Yes, please do.
	So, what...
	MMT, it's called Modern Money Theory.
	It's a heterodox school of economics and I've spent quite some time recently researching it.
	And what they say is that for the private sector to feel comfortable enough to spend, there needs to be, to spend, sorry, to spend money on either consumption or investment.
	There needs to be a sufficient growth in private sector net saving.
	And private sector net saving means that the private sector accumulates claims upon the public sector.
	And the only way...
	Wait, wait, wait.
	Sorry.
	That's the part where I was having trouble following it.
	So, for sure, companies need to feel that.
	I mean, they have to build up savings in order to do capital investments, right?
	So the capital investments or investments in capital goods, it's the business-to-business market.
	So it is when you invest in upgrading plant equipment or you replace your McDonald's cashiers with...
	Automated kiosk because somebody wants $15 an hour of minimum wage.
	So you do something that's going to invest.
	It requires that you're going to bleed into your savings, but you expect them, of course, to pay off.
	And the sort of analogy to an individual is, you know, you're going to spend four years, you're going to invest in your education.
	And then you're going to come out with blue hair, resentful feminist attitudes, and a massive debt.
	Wait, no, that's not the right way to approach it.
	Let's say that you're going to invest six years or seven years to become a doctor.
	It's going to cost you X amount of dollars, but then you're going to get life satisfaction and more money on the other side of it.
	But of course, you have to either have savings to go be a doctor or being willing to go into debt.
	So there has to be some belief that the business's payoff is going to be Whether it's an education for an individual, and I'm just sort of giving this for people as a whole, or for the business to upgrade the plant requires that they have savings or willing to go into debt or whatever.
	Generally, I think they try to have it come out of savings.
	Now, how does that translate into a claim upon the public sector?
	That's the part I can't follow.
	Yeah.
	Okay, so first of all, I want to push back on one thing there, because the businesses in the aggregate generally don't invest in machinery out of their own Savings, but rather out of loans.
	There may be some who do, you know, out of savings, but in general, on the aggregate, large scale, that is taken care of by loans.
	What I'm rather referring to is for consumers in the private sector to feel comfortable spending, they need to have a certain savings cushion of cash or government bonds.
	Before they feel comfortable spending money on consumer goods.
	So there's a certain buffer amount that they will just hold in bank accounts without spending.
	And then there's some amount that if the private sector saving goes beyond that, they're more comfortable spending.
	And of course, there's bank loans, which is the majority of money that's in circulation.
	But if the private sector gets too indebted against itself, and if there's insufficient claims on the public sector shortly, if there's insufficient cash or government bonds that the private sector is holding, they don't feel comfortable spending and they start cutting their spending.
	And we have a ripple effect all the way through the chain of production.
	Now what I mean by claims on public sector, When the government introduces a monetary token, let's say my NIMA buck for example, if I as a tribal chief pay you in order to become my public sector worker, if I pay you in this token, this token represents a claim on me.
	And it's a claim on me in the sense that I have to accept it when the collection of taxes time comes around.
	So I promise that I will take this token as settlement of tax debts.
	That's why it's a claim on me.
	I, you know, and I'm sorry to be dense here, and I appreciate your patience with this.
	So you're saying that if you offer these NEMA bucks, and then people pay the taxes in NEMA bucks, that's a claim upon you?
	Yeah, because the tax is a debt that you have that is owed to me.
	So you have a claim upon, let's say I owe you $500 in taxes.
	You're the government.
	So you have a claim on me for $500.
	I don't see how if I give you $500, I end up with a claim on you.
	No, no.
	You end up with a claim on me when I give you 500 NEMA bucks.
	Because when the tax collection time comes around, you get to extinguish your $500 tax debt.
	Oh, so it's extinguishing a debt in the same way that if you pay the mafia protection money, they're not going to burn down your store.
	Exactly.
	It's buying freedom from prison...
	Yes.
	By paying off the taxes.
	Okay, so it's more on the sort of coercive side.
	I was thinking of it more on the free market side.
	Okay, sorry.
	Go ahead.
	It's negative because you owe money to me, so that's a net negative on your balance sheet.
	You owe 500 NEMA bucks, but then you get to hand me those NEMA bucks, and your net position becomes zero, in a sense, until the next period begins, and then we start over again.
	No, so technically, if I understand this rightly, by paying you the 500 Nima bucks, I have extinguished your claim upon me, but I have not generated a claim upon you.
	No, no, but the claim on me was the token that I gave you beforehand.
	Because we're going from negative to zero in terms of your liabilities to me.
	So you are exercising a claim on me by extinguishing your debt, which means your net position goes from minus 500 to zero.
	Right.
	I'm thinking a claim on you is you owe me something, but it's the discharging of an obligation.
	That's what we're talking about.
	Okay, got it.
	I owe you the discharging of an obligation.
	That's what it is.
	Got it.
	Exactly.
	So that's why, and it just so happens that empirically we observe that the private sector and consumer spending collapses whenever the private sector on the aggregate Starts accumulating insufficient claims on the public sector in this manner or their claims on the public sector decline even.
	In fact, we just looked at the example of this six out of seven times that this has happened.
	Budget surplus has led to depressions or the Great Recession.
	Okay, I'm sorry if I lost the thread here.
	But I understand the claim aspect.
	So, just sort of step me through what happens to the savings.
	Is it my understanding that the savings of the citizens diminish, and therefore, of course, they're cutting back on their spending, and when they cut back on their spending, this triggers a recession?
	Exactly.
	Take your example we just had with the NEMA box.
	If I give you 500 NEMA box, but you have to pay all of that back in taxes to me, By the end of whatever period, you lose all your private sector savings and you feel very uncomfortable in your net position because in the future, you're going to owe taxes again.
	So people like to have a certain safety cushion of taxes.
	No, sorry, sorry.
	Okay, I understand.
	So what you're saying is basically the government is overtaxing people in order to cover its obligations and to create a surplus.
	But because it's overtaxing people, it's destroying their savings, which reduces their spending, which triggers the recession?
	It's destroying their net savings, to be precise.
	Right.
	So when you say, when the government runs a surplus, the way that I would sort of understand it is when the government taxes more than it needs to cover its bills, then it is transferring resources from the private individual to the public sector, which is diminishing liquidity for spending and therefore for investment in the long run, and that triggers the recession.
	Is that right?
	Sorry, I fogged out after you said the government needs the taxes to cover its bills.
	You said earlier the government doesn't need taxes to cover its bills, just to be clear.
	We agreed on that earlier.
	Well, no, it needs taxes to legitimize the theft that it has.
	So it does need some aspect of taxes, otherwise it's monopoly money, right?
	It needs some taxes, but it's not like a household where it needs to cover its expenses with taxes.
	That's the only point I want to take.
	No, that's true.
	Can you repeat the point you just made?
	Sorry about that.
	So basically when the government is running a surplus, it is taking more money out of the, forget about the bills it needs to pay, but when it's running a surplus, it's taking more money out of people's private accounts, out of the private sector, out of the voluntary sector.
	And it is putting it instead in the public sector, which is not driving the kind of consumer spending that sustains economic stability or growth.
	And therefore you end up with this recession because people just have less money because governments take more.
	And it doesn't put money in the public sector technically, it just destroys money.
	Because it's not like the government ever has or doesn't have any money.
	Right, right, right.
	So it just destroys more private sector net savings than it creates is the point.
	And there's something called the sectoral balance identity, which is in a fiat money system, you can put the different actors in that system in different sectors based on their relation to said fiat money.
	There are in particular three sectors.
	There's the public sector, which is the issuer of the money.
	There's a private sector, which is the user of that money.
	And then there's a foreign sector, which is the issuers or users of a different fiat money, if that makes sense.
	Right.
	So just to give you the comprehensive big picture view.
	So for example, it is possible that the private sector can accumulate these kinds of net savings, net claims against the public sector if the economy runs an export surplus.
	For example, you observe a capital account surplus, which means it has money coming in from abroad, which basically ends up in the Federal Reserve as foreign exchange.
	And the Fed creates actually net private saving that goes into the domestic private sector.
	So we have a sectoral balance equation that has to net out at all times.
	So for example, if the government runs a capital account surplus, it doesn't necessarily need to have the domestic government Deficit spend in order to generate private sector savings.
	But in the aggregate, since not everyone can run an export surplus, there always have to be some governments that have to deficit spend in order to supply the private sector with sufficient money to pay their taxes and save up a cushion to feel safe enough to then go out and spend from there on, if that makes sense.
	Right, right.
	Although if it's deficit spending and fiat currency that's being willed into existence or typed into existence or even borrowed into existence, you're giving people a temporary sense of wealth which lures them into spending.
	And this, of course, is part of the Austrian business cycle theory which I talked about years ago on this show.
	But you're giving people the illusion of wealth.
	Like, woohoo, I got a 20% raise.
	Now, if, you know, 15% of that 20% raise is inflation, then you only feel wealthy.
	And after a while, the backlash called inflation is going to hammer away.
	So it's a pretty temporary kind of consumer confidence that's generated.
	Yeah.
	So one important word in what you just said there is the word if.
	Because you said if it creates inflation, then so and so.
	But the point that MMT makes is that the amount of money that the private sector demands in order to have the savings cushion doesn't go into spending.
	So there's a certain buffer amount that the public sector can introduce through spending that the private sector will just hold onto, demands To begin with.
	I mean, we all know people who need cash, people want cash.
	So there's a certain level of deficit spending that does not have to be inflationary, if that makes sense.
	Right.
	And that's sort of the case that I'm trying to make here.
	And this is one of the reasons why this in general, this lack of savings, lack of consumer confidence, people don't generally realize just how poor and how little buffer Americans have, right?
	So this is from 2015, the end of 2015.
	Most Americans have less than $1,000 in savings and 20% don't even have a savings account.
	62% of Americans have less than $1,000 in their saving account.
	21% don't have a savings account.
	And 1,000 adults that were surveyed in 2015, 62% of Americans have no emergency savings for things such as a $1,000 emergency room visit or a $500 emergency.
	Car repair.
	Faced with an emergency, they say they would raise money by reducing spending elsewhere, 26%, borrowing from family and or friends, 16%, or using credit cards, 12%.
	And that is really quite chilling.
	And it's one of the reasons why, even in America, which has traditionally had a higher birth rate, at least since the 70s than Europe, the birth rate is crashing.
	In California, it's the lowest it's been since the Great Recession, even with the higher birth rates associated with with immigrants and that is really important that people are just living paycheck to paycheck on a razor edge Of crossing your fingers and hoping that nothing bad happens to surprise you financially.
	I just want to toss that in because I'm not sure people are quite as aware of that as I think they should.
	It's a great point.
	The case that MMT makes is that whenever the government doesn't supply sufficient net saving to the private sector, some of the things, the phenomena that you just explained is exactly what happens.
	The private sector will start getting more in debt to itself.
	And private sector debt is very unstable if it grows too large.
	The more private sector debt per income you have, the less stable the economy becomes.
	And we see throughout history some of the most catastrophic events, depressions, recessions, were always preceded by ballooning private sector debt, which in turn is always preceded by a supposedly prudent government running budget surpluses.
	Right.
	And I guess my question is also, though, what happens with this surplus that the government is producing, let's say, or we shouldn't say producing, that the government accumulates.
	If, let's say, they borrowed money from private sector events, or private sector institutions, they run a surplus and they begin paying that debt back.
	Then they are a flow-through mechanism which is taking savings from private sector individuals and giving it to private sector institutions that have lent the government money.
	It doesn't often seem to work that way, but that's one way of roughly keeping it in the private sector.
	Yeah, just to be clear, the private sector doesn't lend the government money.
	This is the point we made earlier.
	And we'll get to government bonds in a sec.
	But so far, there has been no borrowing, right?
	The government has spent money into existence and it has taxed some of it out of existence.
	And there is some of that money remains in the private sector and is used to leverage for private sector, for additional private sector debts and for consumption and for exchange between private sector actors.
	So there's been no government borrowing so far.
	Right.
	It's just the government as a monopoly scorekeeper, adding money to some bank accounts, taking money out of some bank accounts.
	Ben Renanke was on C-SPAN in 2011, and they asked him, so how did you buy AIG? And he just said, so how did you get the money to buy AIG? And he said, oh, we didn't get the money, we just marked up the bank accounts.
	And he just said it totally matter of fact, which is basically we just literally went into the bank account, clicked edit, and changed the number to a higher number.
	That's how the government spends money, you know?
	So, now, because I want to get to government bonds now, because when the government spends in this manner, where it spends money into existence, let's say I'm the tribal chief, and I've spent some email bucks into existence, taxed some out of existence...
	And people now have some net savings that they use to leverage and do private exchange.
	I can offer them, in exchange for some of these tokens, I can offer them government bonds that they can earn interest on.
	So I can say, hey, if you give me those tokens back, I'll just give you a bond that pays you 5% interest per year.
	I'll credit it all back to you in 20 years, to cite the example of your 20-year bond.
	So, the actual purpose of government bonds, as is evidenced by, this has been confirmed by people who work in the administrative level at the Treasury, at the Fed, by people who own banks themselves, The purpose of issuing government bonds is actually not for the government to finance its spending, because the government spends by crediting bank accounts.
	The purpose of government bonds is to give the holders of private sector net savings an opportunity to earn interest risk-free.
	In other words, it's a subsidy.
	It's not borrowing.
	It's not a fiscal operation.
	It's just, as it were, it's a savings account at the Fed, if you will.
	Instead of bank reserves, which is a claim on the public sector in the form of public sector guarantees that they will extinguish tax liability, it's a claim on future bank reserves.
	That's what a bond is.
	Right.
	Does that make sense?
	Yep.
	I follow that.
	Okay, so...
	So what follows from this is...
	Let's just do one more because I do want to make...
	We've got five callers tonight and I can't go until 3 a.m.
	because I'm an old man these days, so go ahead.
	Of course.
	So I just want to summarize what this has sort of...
	Looking at the economy in this manner has sort of taught me the new things I've learned from this.
	Unfortunately, we didn't get to bank lending, but if you have the power to introduce money into circulation, also you have the power to loan it into existence.
	So the state has lending agents that loan money into existence, and those are the so-called private banks.
	And banks don't loan out money based on the reserves that they have in their account.
	They rather loan out money to willing and able borrowers who have good projects to Improve worker productivity through capital investment and stuff like that.
	And in a sovereign floating fiat money system, the routine deficits may be necessary to supply private sector net saving unless a sufficient export surplus is achieved.
	In a sovereign fiat money system, governments don't need to obtain money by borrowing or taxation.
	Borrowing is just an optional offer to give private sector actors an opportunity to earn risk-free interest.
	Taxation is a means to give the money that they spend into existence value.
	By the way, if you pay your taxes in old dollar bills, the money just gets shredded.
	You mentioned that in your article.
	It's not like they need it or anything.
	And in aggregate, another thing that follows from this is in aggregate, in any economy, the spending comes first.
	The economy doesn't get started.
	For example, my NEMA box economy doesn't get started unless I spend NEMA box into existence.
	So there is some validity to some of the things that people say they might be accidentally right or some people say more government spending.
	If there's insufficient private sector saving in a fiat money system where the government runs this racket, there may actually be a point to this.
	If the government spends more money, they can actually create more wealth because they're holding people hostage to their monetary system, if that makes sense.
	Yeah.
	And the interest rates on these government bonds that we just mentioned earlier, some people always talk about bond vigilantes and stuff like that.
	But if this hypothesis is right, then we should observe highly indebted governments with very low interest rates.
	And we see exactly that in a lot of countries.
	We see Japan.
	Yeah, Japan, I was just thinking of that.
	Japan has, what is it, 250% of GDP is their national debt at the moment.
	It's a zombie economy for like over two decades.
	Yeah, and their interest rate on 50-year bonds is close to zero.
	And before that, they're negative.
	So this sort of demolishes the notion that deficit spending has to lead to higher interest rates and things like that.
	It's entirely possible That a government can deficit spend and have deficits and have very low interest rates.
	In fact, what MMT suggests is the government doesn't even need to issue long-term bonds.
	They could just leave the tokens they introduced into the economy in circulation as is, not intervene on the interbank lending market, and the interest rate would naturally fall to zero.
	In a free, unhampered interbank lending market, the Fed funds rate would actually drop to zero.
	So, the manipulation is upwards.
	The Fed forces the rates upwards because it wants to give people the opportunity to earn risk-free interest.
	And that's sort of, you know, we could talk about this all day long, but that's sort of what the things that I wanted to introduce.
	Well, I mean, I think that the big...
	Challenge that people have, and this is something I've fallen prey to myself, maybe even in this exact conversation, is when we think of the money, we think of the government like a household.
	Exactly.
	It gets very confusing, because the government is not a household.
	Exactly.
	The government is a counterfeiter.
	And a counterfeiter is, you know, assuming that the counterfeiter can enforce the acceptance of his counterfeit currency as legitimate money.
	Right.
	The counterfeiter in a private sort of criminal capacity is always facing the risk of exposure and is being hunted by the big counterfeiter called the state.
	So it's very, very confusing when people think, well, you know, if I'm in debt, then I should cut back by spending and I should pay off my debt and everything will be fine.
	And then they say, well, if the government's in debt, the government should cut back its spending, it should run a surplus, it should pay off its debt, and everything will be fine.
	There's no physics in government finances.
	It is all Alice in Wonderland stuff.
	It is all made up nonsense.
	And my daughter likes paying Candy Crush from time to time.
	And I was sort of watching her play the other day.
	And I was thinking how...
	In politics, you know, people say, well, you should do this, or it should be this way, it should be that way.
	But because it's all a made-up universe, it's like saying, well, you know, the candy wrapper shouldn't explode in this way, it should go to the left, and then it should, you know, and the color wheel shouldn't do this, it should do the other.
	It's like, well, you can make it that way if you want, but it's all a made-up universe.
	Well, but we have, at least we do have some ways on, you know, we can come up with some recommendations on if this is how the racket functions, this is what needs to happen to ensure full employment and growth in the economy and things like that.
	So I wouldn't say it's completely Wonderland.
	I would rather say the government is more like a scorekeeper.
	I mean, it's of course a racket.
	It's a violent racket.
	But it assumes the role of the scorekeeper by reserving the right to add bank reserves and take out bank reserves here and there, if that makes sense.
	Right, right.
	Well, I do think it's important that people educate themselves on this stuff.
	For Canadians, there's Canada are bought and sold out land, which is a sort of riff on the Canadian National Anthem is a movie worth recommending.
	There's Money Masters.
	And I don't know if you have any particular...
	Yeah, I'll send some of the sources, the ones that I found most helpful.
	All right.
	Well, thanks very much for the call.
	I do love me some money theory and I appreciate being stepped through it by a patient expert.
	So good for you for bringing that up.
	And people do need to educate themselves on this kind of stuff because we are entering a time of significant excitement.
	if Donald Trump is going to take on the Fed, the Fed is going to counterattack in particularly vicious ways, and people need to know what's going on with the monetary system at the moment.
	They're already trying to crank up rates for reasons that may not be entirely honorable.
	So you need to be aware of this stuff, because this, I think, is going to be one of the big battle arenas of the next couple of years.
	And Trump actually has promised to cut taxes significantly.
	So this could be If you understand this approach, then you understand that what Trump is proposing to do could be a huge game-changer for the U.S. economy.
	And I do expect that he will probably run pretty large deficits.
	And if that happens, then that would not necessarily be all that bad for the U.S. economy.
	No, I have no particular problem with deficits as long as, right?
	Cut taxes, which is fine, but he didn't cut spending.
	In fact, spending went up like two-thirds under Reagan.
	So I don't mind the cutting of the taxes.
	I think cutting of the taxes combined with...
	Massive government spending requires a massive infusion of fiat money currency, which destabilizes the economy and leads to, you know, back in the 90s, it was the housing, it was the tech bubble, and then in the noughties, it was the housing bubble, and so on.
	And this is all the result of just massive amounts of money that needs to be created to cover at least the illusory discrepancy between receipts and payments.
	I think it is, if he's doing it to cut taxes, if he's cutting taxes and then is running a deficit so that he's hoping to grow the economy to grow tax receipts in the long run, you know, your standard Laffer curve, then it's well worth, I think, taking the hit in the short run.
	But if you have the GDP growth corresponding, then it's not a problem.
	But yeah, definitely, I mean, if he just cuts taxes and leaves spending as is, that would already be a huge infusion of net savings into the private sector.
	If he cuts taxes hugely and cuts spending maybe also, but not as much, that would also be good, you know?
	As long as we don't have Republicans starting to do what they tend to do sometimes in Congress, where they start to demand balanced budgets and stuff like that.
	What you want to do with government spending, I mean, everybody should always want to cut government spending, Nima, but in my opinion, if you're going to cut government spending, cut it in payroll.
	I don't care about any other government cuts except in payroll because when you cut government payrolls, you get people from the public sector into the private sector.
	You get them from being, in general, parasites to producers.
	And to me, the Laffer curve is all about transitioning people from government payrolls to private sector payrolls or from government payrolls to entrepreneurs if there's any spine left in any government workers to try and be an entrepreneur.
	And I'm sure there are at least a few.
	So to me, cut government spending, fantastic.
	But I don't want it to be in, I don't know, weird stuff that nobody cares about.
	I don't want it to be in abstract stuff that nobody cares about.
	What I want it to be is fire government workers so that they can be released into producing things in the free market.
	And in general, that will result in a lowering of consumer demand, right?
	Because you've got people with their fat cat jobs in the government going out and eating lunch and buying furniture and so on.
	When they transition to the private sector...
	What happens is they have an unemployment period, which is, of course, a diminishment in their capacity to spend.
	And then when they start in the private sector, well, guess what?
	They're probably not going to be making quite as much as they were in the public sector, at least for a while.
	And so there is a collapse in demand from that standpoint.
	Unless we have a big boom.
	Even then, there's a transition, there's a retraining, it takes a while for people to get their sea legs, especially if they've been in the government sector for a while.
	Payroll tax is probably the stupidest tax of all, I would agree there.
	Oh yeah, if you want to get rid of unemployment...
	Oh, yeah.
	First thing you want to do, as the old saying goes, and you quoted this in your article, if you want to get rid of unemployment, it's pretty easy.
	Just make hiring people as cheap as humanly possible.
	I mean, it's the best way to do it.
	Okay.
	I appreciate the conversation.
	You're right.
	We could chat about this for a while, but I'm going to move on to the next caller.
	Thank you so much.
	Thank you so much.
	I will put links to your articles below.
	And you're welcome back anytime.
	It was a great, great pleasure and a very happy Merry Christmas to you this holiday season.
	Merry Christmas to you, too.
	My pleasure.
	Thanks, Nima.
	Thanks, Steph.
	Alright, up next we have Flavio.
	Flavio wrote in and said, I've read that 1968 was a year that never ended because of cultural changes and its effects over the decades.
	2016, with Donald Trump's victory, Brexit, in the increasing rejection of feminism and identity politics, and the overall dissatisfaction with the mainstream media, signals a rupture of old established narratives and ideas.
	Those narratives ruptured this year can be traced in one way or another to what culminated in 1968.
	Does the assertion that 2016 marks the end of 1968 in the realms of ideas and culture hold any water?
	That's from Flavio.
	Hey Flavio, how you doing?
	you You're doing quietly.
	How's it going?
	It's going well.
	How are you doing?
	I'm good.
	Good, good, good.
	So, you know, it's nearly a half century.
	It was 48 years between 2016 and 1968.
	Why do you think there's, if there is this big sort of pendulum or pattern, why do you think it might exist?
	I think basically because in 1968 there was a big victory of counterculture and this victory came from this counterculture came from cultural Marxism that since the end of World War II and the rise of cultural Marxism in Europe and America and everywhere else it culminated and that was the first victory and that's the reference and Cultural
	Marxism as a countercultural phenomenon won then and has been winning steadily since then.
	But since they won, the pushback started happening and happening and now it culminated with those events that I have mentioned.
	So I think those changes that happened then were a victory of counterculture.
	And since it was a cultural victory, its effects lasted longer than merely a political victory.
	But the pushback against that victory over the last few years has culminated with what happened this year.
	Does that make any sense?
	Yeah, I mean, I think we're early on in pushback terms.
	You know, those in the revolution always think it's further along than it is.
	The big...
	Victory for the left in the 1960s was something that, as we've talked about on this show before, it was something that was put in place as part of the communist international strategy in the early 1920s.
	And in the early 1920s, the common term got together and they said, well, we're going to use blacks in America as weapons against capitalism.
	We're going to use blacks in America.
	We're going to stoke fires of resentment and frustration and anger and rage and violence and danger and blah, blah, blah.
	And this, of course, was the purpose and the goal of this.
	And, of course, women as well, that the women have been weaponized against the culture as a whole.
	And that is beginning to diminish now.
	I think it's less than 20% of Americans who would consider themselves feminists.
	So that is beginning to change over time.
	But the basic argument runs something like this.
	Everyone's the same.
	Therefore, all group differences are the result of prejudice.
	And this is back to the R versus K selection stuff, which we've talked about and we're going to talk about again soon.
	But this is back to, for a rabbit, every rabbit is the same.
	You have sex and you eat grass.
	Those things are both fairly easy to do.
	Hey, sex and grass, that's also the 60s in some ways.
	But the speed of the...
	Wolf, the pack instinct of the wolf, the coordination of the wolves individually and as a pack in their hunting is very, very important.
	You know, you can be a good wolf and a bad wolf, but it's very hard to be a good rabbit and a bad rabbit because you just, you know, you make up, you lack skill, therefore you make up in numbers.
	And we've talked about this in the presentation.
	Gene Wars, G-E-N-E Wars, which I think is kind of one of the essentials for this show going forward.
	So...
	What happened, of course, was there were, and it almost goes without saying, but I'll mention it anyway.
	I mean, there were deep, abiding, legitimate grievances that blacks had in America that absolutely, completely, and totally needed to be addressed.
	And it was wrong and horrifying and criminal that they went for so long being unaddressed.
	And, of course, the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and all that kind of stuff.
	This is...
	Brutal and horrible stuff.
	And was state-driven, right?
	I mean, what people don't, you know, a lot of people will remember the boycott of the buses, Rosa Parks and so on.
	And they think that somehow the bus company was racist, and that's nonsense.
	I mean, blacks were generally poorer, and bus companies serve poorer communities.
	I know this because I spent more than three decades of my life with no access to a car, freezing my nuts off like clangy little castanets in a bus shelter in the middle of nowhere.
	I'm so cold.
	If the bus doesn't come in eight minutes, I'm going to stick to the ground and they'll find me in the spring.
	So the bus company wanted to serve blacks.
	It was the government that forced them to seat the blacks in the back.
	And everyone thinks the protest was against the bus company.
	Of course, it wasn't.
	Fundamentally, it was a state that was forcing the bus company to do that.
	The state segregation laws were very strong and very powerful.
	So...
	It was not the removal of impediments to the black community, though, that was enough, right?
	And it wouldn't have been enough to close off the gap, at least not in the short run, because as we've talked about before and had a number of experts on the show discussing, African Americans have, on average, again, individual brilliance in the black community is impossible to dispute, but black Americans, on average, have an IQ point to standard deviation below that of whites and a little bit more than below that of whites.
	East Asians, and below that, even in particular, the verbal abilities of Ashkenazi Jews.
	And so removing impediments to the forward progress of the black community, I think it is one of the great tragedies of American history, if not world history, that the equality before the law narrative was not what was pursued.
	But it was instead transferred into, you know, lots of welfare programs, lots of affirmative action programs, and forced desegregation and so on, which was a violation of freedom of association.
	There shouldn't have been a government schools to begin with.
	But so what happened?
	And with women, of course, I mean, women are on fewer, less extremes of the bell curve.
	And women, of course, take time off to have children and raise children, which I think is wonderful.
	It's like the best thing ever.
	It's why I'm here.
	It's why you're here.
	So let's never, ever complain about that.
	But it has specific economic issues.
	Results, which is that generally there's a pregnancy and childbirth discount for the wages you're willing to pay a woman in higher skilled jobs, right?
	Jobs which require continuity and a lot of training.
	You get embedded relationships with dozens of customers and it's tough to replicate and trust builds up over time.
	There's a huge amount of intangibles in the economy and the majority of women now, as in back then, the majority of women want to settle down and Have a family, get married, have children, and so on.
	And the narrative through the post-war period that was driven by the Marxists who had fled Europe, because Europe had, well, the Marxist incursion into Europe that was being funded by the Soviet Union kind of skipped Europe and ended up, and North America, and ended up over in China.
	The National Socialist Revolution against the attempted Marxist takeover of Western countries, particularly Germany, well, they lost.
	And therefore the Marxists had to flee.
	And where did they flee?
	They fled to America, which is another challenge with open borders.
	But anyway...
	They fled to America and they began to indoctrinate like crazy.
	And they appealed to, I think, good people's moral conscience about the terrible treatment of blacks in many ways in America.
	And that, of course, needed to be dealt with.
	And equality before the law needed to be upheld.
	But like all revolutions, who the hell knows when to stop?
	It's really tough to know when to stop.
	And so...
	What happened was the natural differences between various groups were all erased, were all erased in terms of rational cause and effect, and were all ascribed to bigotry, to prejudice, and all this kind of stuff.
	Now, where are we as far as that goes in 2016?
	Can you hear me?
	Yeah.
	So where are we as far as that goes in 2016?
	Well...
	Ethnic IQ differences are still completely taboo in most aspects of society.
	IQ differences between men and women, not just in terms of the distribution, but even in terms of the average, there are some significant studies that show that women on average are slightly below men in terms of IQ and more centered around the middle, which, you know, makes sense with all of this stuff to do with, you know, why there's a wage gap and where the wage gap shows up and all that kind of stuff.
	So, we're able to talk about the wage gap, right?
	The wage gap and it's the fallacy of the wage gap being driven by patriarchy and sexism.
	That is something that has been so debunked so many times.
	And when Obama trots it out yet again in his white knighting vote predation upon female gullibility, that is just one of these eye-rolling things.
	So, there is some pushback, particularly from conservatives, on the myth of the wage gap.
	There is some pushback on racism being the sole cause for black and Hispanic underperformance in a free market.
	And as Charles Murray pointed out in The Bell Curve those many years ago, if you...
	If you normalize by IQ, then income disparities between ethnic groups vanishes.
	It vanishes.
	In other words, a black with an IQ of 110 is paid about the same as a white with an IQ of 110, is paid about the same as an Asian or a Jew or an Indian with an IQ of 110.
	And a black with an IQ of 90 is paid about the same as an Asian with an IQ of 90 or a Chinese with an IQ.
	It's all about IQ.
	And, you know, when you think about it, that's what is the fundamental income generator is intelligence.
	So there is some pushback now.
	People are still very loathe to talk about in terms of genetics, which, of course, I understand.
	But the reality is, and I've had both Charles Murray and James Flynn.
	James Flynn takes more of the environmental perspective and Charles Murray is somewhat mixed between environment and culture.
	So there is pushback saying, well, maybe some of the reasons for black underperformance in the free market has something to do with culture, has something to do with single motherhood and so on, although these could also be reflective of IQ that may be genetic in origin.
	And I don't know.
	Obviously, I have no idea.
	But I am really upset that we don't have the liberty to study these things and really find the answers because in the answers...
	As to why there are these discrepancies.
	People sort of think, well, if it turns out to be genetic, then it's somehow a complete disaster that's unsolvable and can't be fixed and we're stuck with it forever.
	But that's not true at all.
	If we find out that it's genetic, let's say we find out it's 80% genetic, Well, that gives us a lot of options.
	Genetic doesn't mean deterministic.
	It just means that there's buttons or levers that might be pushed or changed that could alter things.
	So as far as how, you know, where we are relative to 1968, the Marxist perspective of That remains significantly the case in terms of public discussion of things.
	The taboo topics of IQ differences, the taboo topics of the potential for genetics, the basis of these IQ differences.
	I don't think that we are at the end of 1968.
	And in many ways, we're worse off than we were in 1968.
	Because in 1968, there weren't a couple of generations of welfare dependents who had lost their capacity to make their way in the free market with any particular...
	Momentum from sort of prior experience of parents and so on.
	There also wasn't this massive embedded leftist Marxist social justice warrior stuff all over the place.
	All over the place in academia and the entertainment media, the mainstream media, I mean the news media and so on.
	It's everywhere.
	It's omnipotent.
	It's omnipresent it seems.
	And that wasn't the case.
	In 1968, the national debt, even normalized, was far lower, right?
	Normalized per capita, the national debt was far lower.
	And I think that the sort of...
	Leftist or Marxist cultural takeover of major institutions in the West is going to produce, I think, still a couple of generations of significant dysfunction and trauma.
	And the only thing that I can say is that, and I was just thinking about this today, you know, the fall of the West as it stands at the moment is just an incredible testament to the idea that the pen is indeed mightier.
	I mean, the American government, the American military can significantly impair its combat effectiveness, its warfighter potential, because of political correctness.
	Because of political correctness.
	And that is the pen being mightier than the sword.
	And that is an incredibly powerful weapon.
	Realization.
	And this is why I do what I do, because the pen or the words are mightier than the swords.
	We have a lot of work to push back the bad ideas that were accumulating before and have since hardened into particular social strata since 1968.
	It may be...
	It's not the beginning of the end, as the old saying goes, but it may be, in fact, the end of the beginning of the pushback.
	Yeah.
	So, but I understand.
	But so, what happened over this year, this very eventful year, was basically small battles that have been won, as opposed to a surge in confrontation against those ideas.
	Because what I've been thinking is that The blowback against mainstream media and the way information has been flowing in a different way and the distrust of the population of mainstream media and academia and this may be me being trapped in an echo chamber But
	the way I see it is the beginning of cultural change to go against those accumulated ideas you've just said.
	Yeah, and I welcome us having...
	Intelligent discussions about solutions to significant social problems without the screamy, meme hysterics in the mainstream media calling everyone a racist and a sexist and a patriarch and, you know, all the usual garbage.
	Now, fortunately, that coinage has been diminished.
	There is, you know, there are real racists in society and they can be a repellent and dangerous bunch.
	And the fact that the Left has just called everyone who disagrees with them a racist, has sadly debased the power of the word.
	And it is entirely possible, and I think may be probable, that a lot of the people who talk about ethnic differences in abilities are doing so out of a genuine and desperate desire to find a solution to a problem that if the Marxist perspective is assumed will never be solvable and will in fact only get worse.
	And so it is my hope that we have bought a couple of years with which to get important ideas across.
	And we have, through the process, through the political process in particular, over the last...
	Year and a half, we have pushed back against the mainstream media to the point where they're hysterically pushing, a lot of them are hysterically pushing this narrative of fake news and, you know, we're going to vet this news and we're going to tell you what's true and what's false.
	And it's like, give me a break.
	I mean, after the whole debacle of the Hillary Clinton cheerleading fest campaign from hell, the idea that these guys are going to tell us what's real and what's fake is, you know, it's like going to a schizophrenic for your piloting lessons.
	Yeah, and I think another difference than in 1968 is that from my perspective, from what I've studied, it happened from college students, at least in France and partly in America as well,
	from college students and educated people that have been indoctrinated for that first wave that you said of people that fled Europe To flee from the Nazis and all.
	But, and I think that the difference is that instead of coming from academia, and it still comes, like cultural Marxism still comes from academia, I think the difference now is that the opposition comes from its more grassroots.
	It's more spread.
	So you get, because of the internet, because of the way people are communicating now.
	So I think it's easier to form a counterculture Which is what basically we are.
	But we have upgraded weapons and so does everyone else.
	So the internet is not going to save us.
	The internet empowers the deluded as much as it does The factual.
	It empowers those in hot pursuit of falsehood as much as it empowers those in hot pursuit of truth.
	Both good and evil have the same weapons.
	It really matters how skillfully they're used.
	We didn't get any weapon that our enemies didn't get.
	And so this is why I keep reminding people, don't think the internet's going to save us.
	Don't think Donald Trump's going to save us.
	Don't think Brexit is going to save us.
	The best we can hope for is it has expanded our reach, given us a chance, and bought us some time.
	But the rest of it is going to be up to us.
	Yeah, and I think it's interesting because today I was listening to your talk with Lauren Southern and you talked about how the left lost the ability to have conversations, to have debates, because they got comfortable.
	Whereas those who are pushing back against leftism and cultural Marxism have been doing a lot of study and are much more capable in debating and having conversations and bringing out the facts.
	And they're scared.
	That's why they're trying to silence those voices.
	Sure.
	I mean, if it's a million-dollar prize fight and I know I can't beat the guy coming into the arena, I really want him to trip.
	Like, I really want him to break a finger accidentally.
	Like, I don't want to get in the ring with the guy because he's been training and I've not been training, right?
	If there's some very big prize and I can't win, either temptation to cheat or It's going to be almost overwhelming.
	Particularly, of course, this is the fantastic thing about the left.
	They're so honest.
	You know, I've said on this show for year after year after year, people tell you everything you need to know about within the first few minutes.
	And the left have openly and repeatedly said, we don't care how we win.
	We don't care.
	We have no rules.
	We have no standards.
	We have no integrity.
	We'll pull a bunch of moralizing bullshit if it helps us achieve our goals.
	But we have no interest in being held to any kind of standards.
	Now, conservatives, the people on the right, they have all of these standards.
	They don't like being hypocrites.
	They don't like being pointed out if they've contradicted themselves.
	We don't care.
	We don't care at all.
	We have no standards.
	We have no integrity.
	We have nothing like this.
	This is the Saul Alinsky stuff, which we did a presentation on a couple of months ago.
	They've openly said, we'll cheat.
	We'll hit below the belt.
	We'll kick.
	We'll bite.
	We'll, you know, elbow you in the nads.
	We'll put quaaludes in your Gatorade.
	Like, we don't care.
	We just want to win.
	And now, of course, the right has finally figured out that there's no point fighting by the Queensbury rules if the other people are pulling all kinds of Weasley bullshit.
	You know, there's this whole thing, don't get down and wrestle with a pig in the mud because you just both get muddy but the pig really likes it.
	It's like, no, fuck that.
	You do what you do to win.
	You do what you need to do to win because that's what your enemy is doing.
	That's what your enemy is doing.
	There's an old, and it's unfortunate to bring up Bill Cosby given everything that's going on, but there's an old Bill Cosby bit where it's like flips in history, wins in history.
	Like who got there, like in the beginning of a football game, who won the toss?
	And in the war between the revolutionaries in America and the British, the revolutionaries won the toss.
	And so the judge said, or the referee said, To the British people, okay, you all gotta wear red with stripe, diagonal stripes, so people know where to shoot, you gotta march in a straight line, and that's it, you know?
	Whereas the revolutionaries, you can dress however the hell you want, you can blend in with the foliage, you don't have to wear any big white crosses telling people where to shoot, you can jump out from behind the bush, you can do whatever the hell you want.
	And who won?
	Right?
	The people who marched in formation, or the people who did whatever was necessary.
	To win.
	And again, this is a martial example.
	I'm not counseling or recommending, of course, any violence.
	That's not where we're at, and I hope it never will be at that point of desperation.
	But the important thing is that...
	Once people are liberated from the idea that you should never ever use what works if your enemy is using it, I mean, sorry, if the enemy is going to use a tactic that really works, public humiliation is a perfect example.
	I mean, if the left has been using public humiliation for decade after decade after decade, And, you know, the right has been too far above that kind of nasty little stuff and we're going to just go back to statistics and arguments and erudite essays in various highfalutin magazines and so on.
	It's like, no, you treat people the best you can the first time you meet them.
	And after that, you treat them as they treat you.
	And that is the important thing.
	And people are figuring that out and getting that and punching back.
	When the left used those tactics, use the same tactics back.
	Stay always on the right side of the law.
	Don't use violence.
	Don't initiate violence and all that.
	But there's a lot that you can do.
	And again, I don't mean to mention his name every show, but Mike Cernovich, who you can follow on Twitter, is a good example of somebody who really understands this and is applying it in a very forceful manner.
	Yeah.
	And another thing that you talked to Lauren that reminded me, I'll take the chance since I'm talking to you to ask.
	You talk about Derrida and Foucault and about deconstruction and deconstructionism and philosophy.
	And I've been thinking, and I can't remember for the life of me where I read it, that the destruction of ethics begins with the destruction of aesthetics.
	And I see that a lot with feminism and, well, cultural Marxism.
	How they praise the ugly, how they praise the mental ill, how they praise the fat, how they praise the fiscally disabled.
	Not that there's anything wrong with being fiscally disabled, but as something worth of praise.
	And do you think that the destruction of ethics begins with destruction of aesthetics?
	I think that's very, very true.
	I think that's very true.
	And when I think back on the 70s, for my younger listeners, I'm in fact talking about the 1970s.
	When I think back on the 70s, it was a peculiarly ugly decade.
	I mean, the 60s had a kind of ugliness, but it had a kind of wild, feral energy to it.
	And I've always had trouble outright condemning the 60s because there was some of this wild, feral energy that did need to take down some of the more repressive structures within society.
	You know, it was the greatest generation that kind of got behind the Vietnam War.
	And it was, of course, the youth who pushed back against it.
	Now, I think to some degree they pushed back against it because they were pro-communist.
	But nonetheless, they did push back and I think achieved significant victories in the anti-war movement, at least until the next Democrat got in power and then they all vanished.
	So I know there's a lot of politics involved, but nonetheless, there was a skepticism about it.
	And of course, the music was powerful and in many ways beautiful and so on.
	But the 70s, to me, was just an irredeemably ugly decade.
	Ugly music, this shallow, incessant...
	You know, heartbeat of an empty being kind of disco stuff, these polyester pants, these just horrendous movies, ugliness and unkemptness and seediness.
	It was a seedy decade.
	I mean, it was seedy in the 60s, but there was sort of this orgiastic sexual frenzy in the 60s that I think was bound into a kind of creativity that...
	It has produced some very lasting and powerful works of art, in particular in music.
	But the 70s was, you know, key parties in the suburbs.
	And again, I'm not saying how common it was, but it was definitely there.
	In the suburbs, there were these, you know, everyone would toss their keys into a bowl and then you'd pick up a key and whoever that key was, that's who you'd go home with and have sex with that night.
	Oh gosh, I can't imagine why divorces went up 300% in the 70s.
	The 70s, of course, were the flourishing of the single mother reality, which was horrendous for society as a whole.
	And there was a kind of putrid ugliness to the 70s.
	It was a repulsive decade.
	And we saw the same – you can see really the same thing going on in Weimar, Germany in the 1920s.
	This hideousness.
	I think of Edward Albee who was writing The Zoo Story and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
	Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is one of the most horrendous, caustic, vicious, ugly, sociopathic, monstrous plays that has ever been written.
	He was gay.
	He died, I think, quite recently.
	And he had a play on Broadway called The Goat about a man having a romantic affair.
	With a goat.
	No, he's not from the country you'd expect.
	But anyway, it was a peculiarly ugly, and I, unfortunately, I was exposed to it.
	You know, my mother would put movies on with me around that were wildly inappropriate, looking back in hindsight.
	I mean, just things that, I mean, I wouldn't watch as an adult, let alone have on around as a kid.
	And it was a Ugly decade, like the wound of the 60s produced the scab of the 70s, and it is very hard to desire virtue in a world of ugliness, in a world of decay, in a world of...
	The 60s were like the initial flush of the addiction.
	You know, the guy who's on cocaine for the first month or two, he probably looks like To the untutored, like a pretty, wow, this guy's got a huge amount of energy.
	He's really enthusiastic about everything.
	You know, he just never stops talking.
	He's full of ideas and pep, boy, you know.
	But you go and visit that same guy if his addiction continues, you know, five or ten years later.
	And it's like James Woods in The Boost.
	I mean, he's just, he's shredded himself.
	He's just decayed.
	He's gone from, you know, hyperkinetic idea guy up all night to, you know, zombie staggering for his next meat of Peruvian blood, right?
	And so, to me, the wild breakout was the 60s, but the 70s was when the addiction had taken root so badly that the decay was inevitable.
	And then, of course, there was a backlash to some degree of the 80s.
	From the abyss, the Nietzschean abyss of the pursuit of mere fleshly pleasures, which is always a great disaster.
	It's a great temptation.
	But it is a great disaster.
	The pursuit of fleshly pleasures, sex and drugs and rock and roll, pursuit of fleshly pleasures in the 60s led to the nihilism.
	Because there's no road forward.
	The mere pursuit of physical pleasure burns you out.
	You can't sustain it.
	It is not a virtue.
	The happiness of virtue and love and goodness, these things can sustain you and grow in you.
	But the mere pursuit of physical pleasure, it's called the hedonism, Treadmill, right?
	Which is basically, it doesn't matter.
	You adjust, you adjust, you adjust, right?
	I mean, first hit of cocaine is not like your hundredth hit of cocaine.
	You adjust.
	Your body adjusts.
	You normalize.
	And the nihilism that was being faced by the later stage of the addiction to hedonism that started in the 60s and the 70s, that nihilism was going to take down the West.
	And there was, of course, a recoiling, as there is, and I think you're right to point it out, there is a recoiling against the madness of Now, that is going on in the world and has been for some decades.
	There is a recoiling.
	Whether it's going to be enough, it's hard to say.
	I mean, there was a recoiling in the 80s from the nihilism of the late stage of hedonism addiction of the 60s.
	But it wasn't enough.
	I mean, it just became a complete mess and a monstrosity.
	And it wasn't like Reagan was able to prevent...
	The rise of the social justice warrior phenomenon or the takeover by left-leaning nutjobs of California, right?
	I mean, in fact, he enabled it, right?
	As I've pointed out by legalizing all of these illegal immigrants.
	So there is a...
	An inspiration that we need to have in life.
	We need to guide ourselves.
	We need to have some lodestar, some north star, some compass to guide ourselves.
	The thrill of the moment is base.
	It's animalistic.
	It's nothing.
	It's like a monkey that pushes a button in order to get a pellet that has an upper.
	Or you can have these experiments where you can electrically stimulate the pleasure centers of mice and they won't even bother to eat.
	They'll just keep stimulating that pleasure center if they have control over it until they just die.
	It is a base and materialistic and fun.
	Don't get me wrong.
	It's fun and it's not like it's no part of life.
	The pleasures of the body are an essential part of life, and given sexuality is a pleasure of the body, why there is life at all, all we want to do is eat and reproduce deep down.
	And I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with it.
	I'm not anti-hedonistic.
	But there's an Aristotelian mean, which is really, really important.
	And dear God, have we spun too far the other way.
	So I do think that the destruction of aesthetics is really, really important.
	Thank you.
	An old poem on the relation between truth.
	And this is one of the most famous poems by John Keats, Ode to a Grecian Urn.
	Beauty is truth.
	Truth, beauty.
	That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
	Beauty is truth.
	Truth, beauty.
	That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
	Now, he doesn't take goodness or virtue, but beauty is truth.
	What does he mean by that?
	Well, not everything that's beautiful is true, and not everything that is true is beautiful.
	But beauty is the lure, it is the pathway, it is the avenue to truth.
	Beauty leads to truth, leads to virtue.
	And it is, of course, essential that we destroy aspiration to beauty.
	Because beauty is proportion, beauty is rhythm, beauty is symmetry.
	And all of these things have truth in them.
	And to me, a great argument is as beautiful as the most Rapture-filled sunset with northern lights dancing above it that could be conceived of.
	And I was starved of beauty as a child.
	I was starved of beauty because God help me, I was born in the 70s, the zombie decay town of the decreptitude of the modern age.
	And I was stuffed in a boarding school where they showed us, and I was six years old, and they showed us a movie called The Omega Man with Charlton Heston, which is about zombies and being chased and blowing people up with hand grenades.
	And I'm sure it was a mistake, but they could have damn well turned off that goddamn movie.
	It was horrifying.
	And this was the world that we were living in.
	And I was living in a world where you had to look for...
	The world is back again now.
	You had to look in the bus shelters for unattended suitcases or plastic bags because the Irish terrorists were bombing.
	And you had to watch what you ate because the food was short.
	And you had to watch what you heated because the coal was shortages.
	And it was an ugly and small and Soviet and vicious time.
	And the art was repulsive.
	And there was nothing but – back then it was vampires.
	Now it's more zombies.
	But there were these vampire movies and there were these, again, wildly inappropriate movies that seemed to be on TV at all times that adults were watching.
	And there was a rampant, vile kind of late prostitute, ghastly, radioactive sexuality that was squirming its way like this ugly worm through society.
	This late, exhausted, debilitated, hedonistic, pornographic ugliness that was occurring in society.
	And I think that had a lot to do with scrubbing the higher ideals and bringing a sense of shame into the West that I think has been incredibly destructive.
	I see.
	Yeah.
	All right.
	Well, I'm going to move on to the next call.
	I really do appreciate the question, and I hope that it helps at least get some of my perspectives on it.
	Yeah.
	Thank you very much.
	Thank you.
	Happy holidays for you.
	You too.
	Bye-bye.
	All right.
	Up next, we have Derek.
	Derek wrote in and said, What are Donald Trump's biggest flaws?
	That is from Derek.
	Hello, Derek.
	How are you doing?
	Hey, I'm good.
	How are you?
	I'm well.
	I'm well.
	Thank you.
	So I have to preface this a little bit.
	First, I'm sick, right?
	So I'm tired.
	So I'm going to be very low energy.
	Low energy.
	I'm probably going to be like...
	Dear God.
	Yeah, I know, right?
	I feel like I'm holding up this show with a tent pole and a flaming margarita shot.
	All right.
	I'm going to make Jeb Bush look like...
	I apologize for that.
	I'm going to cough a little bit because I am sick.
	Yeah, just mute when you do, if you can, please.
	Absolutely.
	So, a few things.
	I should preface what Mike said.
	Is it okay if I use your first names, by the way?
	Can I just...
	Which other names were you anticipating?
	We're not anonymous anymore.
	That ship may have sailed.
	Right.
	I was going to use your last names, but okay.
	Yeah, I said in the email prior to that, Trump seems to be a pathological liar, a pompous narcissist, and an ignoramus on a plethora of issues.
	He appears to lack critical thinking and can be wildly inconsistent on policy prescriptions.
	So I feel like that should be stated as the general gist of what I'm going to be talking about.
	I mean, you can state that all you want, but, I mean, it feels like, seems to be, you get that that's all weasel words designed to have you excuse yourself from the requirement to make a case.
	Well, that's why I'm on the show, to make the case.
	Beautiful.
	Let me talk about for a second some things that bother me, I suppose, about the coverage of Donald Trump on the show.
	So you guys put out a video about how the left is saying Russia hacked the election and here's the evidence for it, right?
	It's a hilarious video.
	It's pretty funny.
	And you show nothing, right?
	Because that's the evidence concerning Russia hacking.
	Well, the thing is that Donald Trump He has also made an unsubstantiated claim about the election, saying that if you subtract the millions of illegal votes, he would have won the popular vote.
	And there's no talk about that on the show or anything.
	And that's a problem for me.
	And that's kind of one of the reasons I'm on the show.
	Some other things you have...
	No, no, no.
	Let's do these one at a time.
	Okay.
	Do you want to tackle that one, though?
	Yeah, did you give us a link for that when you sent in the email?
	No, I did not.
	Why?
	Well, because I was going to make the case on the show, and I didn't know if you...
	But you don't give me a chance to research it ahead of time.
	Do you think that's fair?
	I apologize if you feel this is unfair, but, I mean, that's relatively common knowledge that Donald Trump said this.
	Like, have you not heard of this?
	Is this new?
	I haven't read everything that he's said.
	I mean, so he's saying that there are millions of illegal votes and that's why he lost the popular?
	Yes.
	Right?
	And that is equally unsubstantiated as saying Russia hacked the election, right?
	Well, no, no, hang on, hang on.
	Are you saying there weren't illegal votes?
	No, that's not what I'm saying.
	There were illegal votes.
	And do we know how many illegal votes there were?
	No, we don't.
	Okay, so already we have much more evidence, in fact, infinitely more evidence than the evidence that Russia hacked the election.
	Not really.
	Okay, so here's a few things.
	You're kind of moving the goalposts here.
	Okay, illegal votes happened.
	Wait, wait, how?
	No, no, hang on.
	How am I moving the goalposts?
	I'm explaining that right now.
	Yeah, maybe in general, it's generally better to make the case and state the conclusion rather than state the conclusion and then make the case because that's kind of inflammatory, but go ahead.
	My apologies.
	Okay, so there are claims that illegal votes happened, okay?
	Likely that's true.
	No, no.
	Illegal votes happened.
	We know that for sure.
	Not claims.
	Illegal votes happened.
	That's not really the point.
	So, illegal votes happened.
	No, no.
	You need to be able to say things that are true.
	Can I finish, please?
	Illegal votes happened.
	No, no, no.
	I'm not interrupting you.
	You already said illegal votes happened, right?
	Okay.
	So we just need to establish that as our starting point.
	Okay.
	And I said, I just repeated multiple times, illegal votes happened.
	Check.
	Okay?
	Okay.
	Just because illegal votes happened doesn't mean you can say three million illegal votes happened.
	These are two separate claims.
	One is what you're talking about and one is what Donald Trump is talking about.
	Donald Trump is talking about approximately three million illegal votes.
	You are talking about illegal votes in general.
	Those are not the same.
	Do we agree?
	I have no idea what you're saying.
	What's not the same?
	It's not the same.
	Okay, so let me try to use an analogy here.
	Okay, if I say there are fish in the sea, right?
	That is a separate claim from saying there are 100 billion fish in the sea.
	Now you've stated a number.
	Now you're claiming a number.
	The general statement that there are fish in the sea is true, but you may not have substantiated how many fish are in the sea.
	Right.
	And that's why I say it's got nothing to do with Russia, because there's no evidence that Russia hacked at all.
	Okay, I'm not talking about whether this had to do with Russia or not.
	I'm saying...
	Yes, yes, yes, absolutely you are.
	Let's not be Weasley.
	You absolutely are bringing it up.
	You brought up the direct analogy between Russia hacking the election and Donald Trump saying this, and I'm saying the two are not the same.
	One is a difference of degree.
	He said millions of illegal voters, and we know that there are illegal voters, nobody knows, and nobody ever will know, of course, how many there are.
	Could the number be correct?
	I don't know.
	Nobody ever knows, right?
	Now, saying that there are an excess, like it's a difference of degree, right?
	Saying there's an excess, oh, the number might be too high.
	Maybe it was only a million.
	Maybe it was half a million.
	Maybe it was five million.
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	Nobody knows.
	That's the whole point.
	Yes, that is my point.
	So if you're saying that it's bad for Donald Trump to say that millions of illegals voted, okay, well...
	We can talk about that, but that's not the same as what's going on with Russia.
	Because there's no evidence that Russia did the hacking.
	So we've got a difference of degree.
	Some number of illegals voted in America, and I'm positive voted overwhelmingly for the left.
	I think we can all vote for the Democrats.
	I think we can understand that, right?
	So there is some significant number of illegal immigrants who vote.
	And we know that because the left...
	They brought huge numbers of illegal immigrants or aided or abetted and had permitted to sanctuary cities and refused to enforce the border and so on.
	They wanted massive amounts of illegal immigrants to come into America.
	Why?
	Why would they want to do that?
	It pisses off Americans enormously.
	It pisses off the people who came in legally or who in the process of coming in legally just letting people flood across the border.
	Why?
	Would Obama and why would the Democrats as a whole want so many illegal immigrants to come into the country unless they thought there was some proximate political benefit to that?
	Okay, that's fine, but that doesn't prove millions of illegals voted.
	That's the whole point.
	Yes, but we've already said that.
	Of course, we've already said that doesn't prove.
	Okay, that's all that needs to be said.
	That's all I'm trying to say.
	Right there.
	Okay?
	All right.
	Now...
	I'm sorry, I'm still not sure what you're trying to say.
	That he said that there were millions and we don't know for sure if there are millions.
	Yes, we don't know that.
	So him just saying it is unsubstantiated.
	Right.
	And since he says that he does that a lot, right, he calls it truthful hyperbole.
	Okay, okay.
	Right?
	And I'll give you a quote here, which is from one of our presentations.
	I call it truthful hyperbole.
	It's an innocent form of exaggeration and a very effective form of promotion.
	Right?
	And so...
	Now, people are saying, well, it wasn't millions.
	But you know what they're doing?
	They're talking about it.
	And that's what he wants.
	So, I mean, you can say, well, he shouldn't have said that.
	But if he says, this is how I communicate, this is how I get people to talk about stuff, this is how I get issues to the forefront.
	You remember this when he said there were thousands of Muslims celebrating the fall of the Twin Towers on 9-11.
	And then it turned out that, what, hundreds?
	Nobody knows for sure.
	But people were saying, well, no, it wasn't thousands.
	Okay.
	And then people say, well, let's try and figure out what the real number was.
	And people engage in that out of outrage.
	So he's not lying because he's saying, I use this strategy all the time to get people to talk about this.
	How is it not lying just because he said he used a strategy?
	A lie is still a lie, regardless of what you told us you use lies, right?
	Let me rebut your...
	Wait, is he lying?
	We don't know if he's lying.
	He doesn't know.
	So claiming that he has knowledge that he simply does not is a lie.
	Well, it's called truthful hyperbole.
	Whether you like it or not, you can get really upset with him and all that.
	Let me rebut the truthful hyperbole claim then, okay?
	In context of the thousands and thousands of Muslims celebrating in New Jersey.
	Let me talk about it in that context.
	Wait, did he say thousands and thousands or just thousands?
	Yes, he did.
	He said thousands and thousands.
	Okay, so let's talk about what hyperbole is.
	A hyperbole, please let me finish all this statement.
	A hyperbole, for example, is going to the airport and saying, this bag weighs a ton, right?
	And the lady says, sir, we can't allow a 2,000-pound bag on the flight.
	It would throw off the CG. And you look at her and you say, lady, it's not sincerely 2,000 pounds, okay?
	It was a point I was trying to make, it was heavy.
	Please just take my bag.
	Or, uh, I'm so hungry I could eat a horse, right?
	And your friend rolls out with a horse and you say, John, you're an idiot.
	I did not sincerely mean I could eat a horse.
	Please take gone with the wind back to the stables.
	Okay.
	Those are hyperboles.
	Now, if you alternatively pull out your cutlery and a napkin, you are no longer in the realm of hyperbole.
	I'm sorry.
	I apologize for that.
	Could you just repeat that last statement?
	Okay.
	If you, when your friend rolls out a horse, you pull out cutlery and a napkin, you are no longer in the realm of hyperbole.
	You are now making a claim.
	Okay?
	Now, when Donald Trump says thousands and thousands of people in New Jersey for cheering, We fact check him.
	We say, that's not true.
	There were a couple, but now thousands and thousands.
	He then doubled down and said, no, no, no.
	How do you know?
	How do you know that there weren't thousands and thousands?
	That's not an argument.
	How do I know there weren't thousands?
	There's no evidence to substantiate that claim.
	So I can just say anything.
	There were millions, millions of Muslims cheering in New Jersey.
	Well, no.
	It would have to be smaller, obviously.
	I mean, let's be sensible here, right?
	It would have to be smaller than the number of Muslims in New Jersey, obviously, right?
	Okay, let's say tens of thousands.
	And so, yeah, there would, of course, have been people who were celebrating who weren't visible.
	There would have been people who may have been celebrating privately.
	And again, I'm not saying that he's got proof of that, but he's not stating a complete impossibility.
	Okay.
	It's not about whether it's an impossibility.
	That is not an argument.
	Most things are possible.
	You can say, oh, well, Stephan, it's possible that you killed someone in your life, so you are now a murderer.
	No.
	You have to prove that.
	I have to prove that you're a murderer.
	That's how it works.
	No, no.
	That's not the analogy.
	Yes, it is.
	Oh, my God.
	You don't understand this.
	Okay.
	That is not a good, a valid analogy.
	So if a guy has killed three people and I say, he's a mass murderer, he killed like half a dozen people or whatever, I think.
	But he only got caught for killing three.
	Well, he's already killing some people.
	So if I got the number too high, it's still not impossible that he did kill other people that he wasn't caught for.
	It's not the same as saying, well, there's no evidence this guy killed anyone, but it's possible theoretically that he did, and therefore he's...
	Like, you understand, this is not...
	You don't get the difference between this, right?
	Or do you?
	Allow me to explain.
	First of all, this is not just like a random guy that you're talking about.
	You're talking about thousands of people, and you have just inflated this number insanely, right?
	So let me take another approach.
	Wait, wait.
	Hundreds were confirmed, as far as I understand it.
	No, that's not true.
	How many were confirmed?
	A handful is what I heard.
	Rudolph Giuliani, who was a Trump supporter, has said upwards of 40, right?
	Chris Christie, who was the New Jersey governor, who was also a Trump supporter, said that the thousands and thousands of things just didn't happen.
	But okay, let's say 200.
	Is that a fair number?
	200.
	I'd say hundreds, it might seem.
	Okay, 200 is a fair number.
	And when Trump said thousands and thousands, let's be completely kind and say that he only meant 2,000, right?
	Is that fair?
	Yeah, he was off by a factor of 10.
	Okay.
	Well, if you were to do the percent error, and I'm calculating that right now, it is a 900% error.
	So please explain to me at what point a hyperbole stops being truthful and starts being demagogic.
	Where's the cut?
	I don't know.
	At the 100th meridian, I don't even know.
	That's not even a real question because that can't be objectively defined.
	But you're still not understanding the point that I'm saying.
	So he says a number that is larger than the actual number, but that's not the same as making something up out of whole cloth, right?
	So your analogy was that you say some guy could have killed someone theoretically, though there's no evidence that he did, therefore he is a murderer.
	And that's not the point.
	So he went further than was verifiable at the time.
	Sure, that's an exaggeration.
	That's what he calls by...
	And he got people talking about it.
	it and it raised a huge amount of interest because remember there were lots of younger voters who had no idea there were any muslims celebrating the fall of the twin i'm still talking there were younger people who had no idea there was any muslims celebrating on 9-11 so as far as politics go he's a brilliant strategist he gets people talking about things how did he get people talking about immigrant illegal immigrant crime
	Well, he talked about the, you know, the border and the criminals and the proportion of rapists and so on.
	And people were like, well, that's outrageous.
	That's completely false.
	And then they rushed to disprove him.
	And in so doing, they spread the message.
	This is politics and marketing and, you know, 101, right?
	Allow me to explain something.
	Okay, you've got to stop doing that.
	That is so annoying.
	What?
	I'm not preventing you from doing anything.
	Oh, allow me to do this.
	Allow me to do that.
	It's just an expression.
	It's just an expression.
	No, no, don't use it.
	It's offensive.
	Please, go ahead.
	Now, you've created a construct in which no matter what Trump says, it is acceptable.
	No matter how big this number is.
	No, I haven't.
	No, I haven't.
	He exaggerates.
	And he says, I exaggerate.
	I use truthful hyperbole to get the message out.
	How is that not a lie?
	How is that different wholly from a lie?
	If you know what the number is and you state a number that is false.
	Oh, now you know that Trump knew what the number was.
	No, no.
	Wow!
	You actually have gone inside his head.
	You've done an inventory and you know absolutely everything about everything that he knew and that he's completely lying consciously, intentionally, and he didn't perhaps flip through the channels and see a whole bunch of Palestinians cheering and forget 15 years later what he saw.
	You absolutely know for sure the number that he knew and that he exaggerated consciously.
	Well, to make a hyperbole, you have to have a general sense of what the truth is, right?
	Otherwise, you're making a claim.
	Is that fair?
	Is that fair?
	But he doesn't qualify every statement he makes saying, well, this is 135% truthful hyperbole, this is actually only 13% truthful hyperbole, and this is minus 26% truthful hyperbole.
	It's just a strategy that he uses to get the message out, right?
	Okay, but when he comes out and reinforces and double down and says over and over that I am right, I am correct, I have been vindicated, is that not false?
	Yes or no?
	I don't know.
	I mean, I haven't tracked everything the man said about every statement he's made.
	I don't know.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	I'm going to drop this one.
	Let's move on to the claim of lying.
	No, I don't think it's worthwhile dropping it just yet.
	Okay.
	So where did he get the idea that millions of illegal aliens voted in the election?
	I have no clue.
	I have no insight into his knowledge.
	Why?
	What do you mean?
	I have no idea.
	I'm curious.
	Why wouldn't you look up where he may have got this information from?
	Or you just assume he's lying?
	What?
	Okay, hold on.
	Now, I... Don't know, because I have looked this up, and he makes no comments.
	Like, people ask him for evidence, and he doesn't provide any evidence.
	So I don't know.
	Because I've...
	Okay.
	To the best of my knowledge, I have no insight into his.
	Is that fair?
	But this is, I mean, astonishing to me.
	I just did one search and found where he got it from.
	Where'd you get it from?
	But no, that's not the point.
	The point is that you've had weeks to prepare for this.
	You come up with these astonishing claims about he's a liar and he's this and that and the other.
	And you've never even looked up where he might have got the information from.
	Please tell us where it is.
	No, no, no.
	I'm curious why you wouldn't.
	Because you just assume he's lying.
	You just assume that...
	Right?
	No, I never even said necessarily that was a lie initially.
	Oh, come on.
	Oh, come on.
	No, no, no, no, no.
	You said he lied about it.
	Okay, when he gets fact-checked and then repeats the claim anyway, I conclude that that's a lie at that point.
	But you don't research anything.
	Do you have any idea how these numbers were calculated?
	Please tell me.
	No, I will.
	But I want to know why you don't have the self-critical ability to try and figure out where this information might be coming from.
	Because you just assume that these millions of illegal votes is just a lie.
	Wait, wait, wait.
	Are we talking about the millions of illegal votes or the people in New Jersey?
	Where are we talking about?
	What are we talking about now?
	Well, if I say the word millions of illegal votes, I assume that I'm not talking about the Muslims in Judaism.
	Perhaps you hear something different.
	I know what he got that from.
	That was from Greg Phillips, who came out with a tweet, never gave any actual evidence for this, right?
	He hasn't given the data.
	He hasn't peer-reviewed the data.
	It's from Greg Phillips.
	I know that.
	Is that true?
	Yes.
	Okay, good.
	Sorry, we're talking about the same thing again.
	Okay.
	All right.
	Is it Greg Phillips you're looking at right now?
	This is from investors.com.
	So this is just something that I've looked up because I didn't know ahead of time where we were going with this.
	So I have to do this a little bit on the fly.
	And they say, but in fact, it's almost certain that illegals did vote and in significant numbers.
	Whether it was three million or not is another question.
	And it says, At 20
	million to 30 million people.
	But there is evidence to back Trump's claims.
	A 2014 study in the online Electoral Studies Journal shows that in the 2008 and 2010 elections, illegal immigrant votes were in fact quite high.
	Wait, wait.
	What's quite high?
	What does that number mean?
	Do you mind if I read the fucking article?
	Go for it.
	Thank you.
	I appreciate that.
	I have not scanned it ahead and I'm not trying to keep you in suspense.
	I'm reading the article.
	So this is Jesse T. Richmond, Gulshan A. Chatter, both of Old Dominion University and David C. Ernest of George Mason University.
	I don't know Old Dominion, but George Mason is legit.
	Say, we find that some non-citizens participate in US elections and that this participation has been large enough to change meaningful election outcomes, including electoral college votes and congressional elections.
	More specifically, they write, non-citizen votes likely gave Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass healthcare reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 100th.
	And 11th Congress.
	Specifically, the authors say, now this is George Mason University, this is not, you know, podunk on the back of a matchbook university, right?
	The authors say that illegals may have cast as many as 2.8 million votes in 2008 and 2010.
	That's a lot of votes.
	And when you consider the population of illegal inhabitants has only grown since then, it's not unreasonable to suppose that their vote has two.
	Okay, I'm sorry.
	I missed where that proved that if you take away millions of illegal votes, he would have won the popular vote in 2016.
	I heard a lot of talk about 2008.
	I heard a lot of Mays about 2008.
	I heard a lot of Mays about 2010.
	But I didn't hear any definitive answers about 2016.
	I'm sorry, I don't understand what you mean.
	As in?
	The authors say that illegals may have cast as many as 2.8 billion votes in 2008 and 2010.
	Now, do you think that...
	Of course, may.
	Nobody knows.
	We've already said that.
	Nobody knows for sure.
	We've already said that.
	The whole point is an illegal activity that's not tracked by Democrats.
	Of course, right?
	In a 2013 sample of 800 Hispanics, foreign-born respondents...
	Who were registered voters, 13% admitted they were not United States citizens.
	That is a violation of state and federal law, right?
	Survey of 800 Hispanics, they were registered voters, but 13 admitted they were not US citizens, right?
	And so 14.8% of non-citizens admitted they were registered to vote in 2008, and 15.6% of non-citizens admitted they were registered in 2010.
	So here we have, based upon these ratios, right, and based upon the number of illegal immigrants that can be estimated, which again is one big giant unknown, if we're talking about 2008, we're talking about obviously eight years ago.
	2.8 million votes possibly cast by illegals, not just based on some random, right, but based upon surveys and based upon estimates of the population of illegal immigrants.
	So 2.8 million votes in 2008.
	Now, my friend, do you think that the population of illegal immigrants has gone up or down since then?
	I'm sorry.
	I've yet to see where you've proven his claims, have substantiated his claims at all.
	I must be missing it.
	What have you not heard?
	Do you not hear the math?
	Do you not hear the surveys?
	Do you not hear the ratios?
	I don't hear the evidence.
	What are you not hearing here?
	Okay, so here's what you've said so far.
	You said that there's a large population of illegals.
	Check.
	I agree with that.
	You said illegals may have voted, even though we both concede that we don't know how many.
	Right?
	Okay.
	Check.
	So, on what planet does that give anyone the right to make the claim that millions of illegals voted prior to seeing the data?
	What do you mean prior to seeing the data?
	Well, basically...
	These studies were done, like this stuff was done in 2008 and 2010.
	Yes.
	2013.
	A sample.
	2013, we've got a sample.
	I'll step you through the logic if you're having trouble with it, okay?
	Okay.
	So we have estimates of 20 to 30 million, and Ann Coulter goes into the reasoning behind this, and she's one of many who've made these kinds of estimates in the book, Adios America.
	So let's say 20 to 30 million illegal immigrants.
	And if we look at, in 2013, there was a study that said 13% of the registered voters were non-citizens.
	Right?
	Now that's illegal, right?
	And then we've got 15.6% in 2010, right?
	Okay.
	And so let's just say it's 10%.
	So if you've got 20 to 30 million illegal immigrants and 10% of them are voting, well, there's your 2 to 3 million.
	And you're guessing.
	Again.
	No, no, there's numbers here.
	For God's sakes, do you not hear these numbers?
	I'm confused about what planet we're on now.
	Okay, so you're saying that millions of illegals definitely voted.
	Certainly.
	For certain.
	What are you talking about?
	I'm trying to figure out, okay, so this entire conversation...
	How on earth would you ever know if millions of illegals actually voted?
	That is my entire point.
	You have just repeated my entire point yet again.
	Yet again.
	So you don't enjoy the fact, or you don't appreciate the fact, that surveys of people saying, hey, you're going to vote if you're not a citizen, and 15% of them say, sure!
	That somehow we can't make any possible estimates out of that.
	It's not about estimates.
	It's about claiming knowledge you do not have.
	If you say that if he says he won the popular vote, if you take away the illegal votes, that is making a claim that there were three million minimum illegal votes.
	You don't know that.
	I don't know that.
	He doesn't know that.
	And we've all conceded that we don't know that.
	No, it could very well have been higher.
	He could be underestimating it.
	Because if you look at 30 million people, illegal immigrants, and if you take the 15%, right, then you're talking about 4.5 million illegal votes.
	It could have been.
	So he's being a little bit conservative from the upper bound, and he's going somewhere between the upper bound and the lower bound, which is kind of what you do when you do statistical averages, right?
	Oh, my God.
	Okay.
	Listen, I mean, do you pay life insurance?
	Do you have life insurance?
	Yes, I have life insurance.
	Okay.
	Are you a smoker?
	No.
	Okay.
	So you get preferential life insurance because you're not a smoker, right?
	Yes.
	You pay less.
	Yes.
	Do you think that the insurance company is insane?
	No.
	Because they can't prove 100% that you're not going to get lung cancer.
	And they can't prove 100% that the smoker is going to die of smoking.
	Yeah, they're taking a risk.
	They have to take statistical averages, right?
	They're taking a risk, yes.
	This is not the same thing as making a claim.
	No, no, they're not taking a risk.
	They're managing a risk.
	What?
	They're trying not to take a risk.
	Oh, distinction without difference.
	Okay.
	No, it is important.
	They don't do it because they want to take risks.
	Insurance companies want to have as much predictability as possible.
	And so when we have surveys, and when we have data, and when we have extrapolations, it is not insane to say, yes, millions of votes were likely cast illegally in the 2016 election.
	It's not insane to say it.
	You may disagree with it, and you then need to find different data that would support something else, but it's not insane to say it.
	That is a different claim.
	I'm not saying it's insane.
	I'm not saying you're making the claim it's likely, right?
	Okay, fine.
	You can have likely if you want.
	He is making a claim that this indeed happened.
	That is different.
	Fundamentally different.
	If I say it's likely to be high outside and I say it's high outside, these are not the same claim.
	Well, when you have a range of statistical probabilities and you take something in the middle, yeah, that's valid.
	All right.
	I have a ton of other things I want to discuss as well, so if you're ready to press on, I am most enjoying this, so please do.
	So, let's talk about some of the lies.
	Okay, so you have a video talking about how Hillary Clinton is a pathological liar, right?
	And you say, well, there's a caveat, obviously.
	Either she is cognitively disturbed, right?
	Either she has some cognitive deficiency, or she's just lying, and you said that she lies in the moment to win, and these people are dangerous, right?
	Okay.
	And do you remember what it was that I was basing this on?
	I believe it was the second debate.
	It was one of the debates for sure.
	It was a video called Hillary Clinton, Pathological Liar with a Question Mark.
	Okay, and what was I referring to?
	You were referring to the fact that she claimed that she was not present for the red line in the sand when Obama told Russia there was a no-fly zone.
	Yes, I think I remember that, yeah.
	Okay, fantastic.
	But let's deal with something that's more generally known.
	Okay.
	Right, when she says that she never sent or received any classified material.
	Okay, that's fine.
	Which was false.
	Okay, whatever one you want to use, it doesn't really matter to me.
	Okay, let's go with that.
	So, with that in mind, you also said that Trump, one of the jokes Trump plays is that he claims to never have said something That he did indeed say, and that's just a joke of his.
	Do you recall making that claim as well?
	I don't recall making that claim.
	Okay, well, if you want to defend— I'm not saying I didn't, but, you know, I've done 3,500 shows.
	I don't remember them all.
	Right.
	And you can choose to defend that, and you can choose not to.
	I don't really care.
	Let's talk about some of the things Trump has denied saying.
	No, let's talk about Hillary Clinton, because you're very concerned about people who lie, right?
	So I would assume that you're very concerned about Hillary Clinton lying as well, right?
	Okay, you're trying to pivot into Hillary Clinton, right?
	No, no, if you're concerned about lying, then you must be concerned about lying as a general category of moral offense, right?
	Yes, and Hillary Clinton has told plenty of lies.
	I know that.
	I'm aware of that.
	I'm trying to have a discussion with you about Donald Trump, though.
	No, you're trying to have a discussion with me about lying.
	I think the preface for this entire discussion was, what are Donald Trump's biggest flaws?
	Does that not imply I'm talking about Donald Trump?
	Have we not been talking about Donald Trump this whole time, pretty much?
	Well, yes, but your concern with Donald Trump is that he's lying, and therefore you would be very concerned about lying, particularly in public office.
	You know, lies that may have something to do with invasions, lies that may have something to do with the murder of foreign leaders, lies that may have something to do with the dismantling of entire countries and the start of a migrant crisis that could take down Western civilization.
	Those kinds of lies.
	I think would be fairly important relative to, well, it's not quite this number, it's not quite that number about illegal immigrants.
	That is not a particularly relevant lie compared to what's been going on with Hillary Clinton, who has lied in ways that have fundamentally dismantled and disturbed and caused the deaths, arguably, of really countless numbers of people.
	I don't appreciate your inflection of me.
	In that tone that is meant to portray me as childish.
	I don't appreciate that at all.
	That's not very honest debate.
	Okay, then let's talk.
	Then prove me wrong about calling you childish or implying that you're childish or imitating you as childish.
	Prove me wrong by getting outraged about the actual lies that Hillary Clinton has told that has cost lives rather than exaggerations that Donald Trump has used as part of his political strategy.
	Here's the thing.
	I am upset about Hillary Clinton's lies.
	I don't know why you think that because I'm talking about Donald Trump in this instance that I am somehow not outraged about Hillary Clinton's lies.
	This is not what I'm here to discuss.
	I thought this was my call-in and we could discuss whatever I wanted.
	What?
	It's my damn show?
	What do you mean?
	Do you feel you're in charge of my show now?
	Is that how this works?
	Do you want to switch roles like you host the show and I'll call you at the studio?
	I'm not quite sure how that would play out.
	You have these call-ins for people to discuss things, topics that they feel are pertinent, that they feel are important.
	Oh, now you're telling me how I should run my show.
	No, I should give you complete control over the content and process and methodology and conversation that you should be in complete control of how this goes.
	And if I want to talk about something, that's wrong because reasons.
	No, you're pivoting from what I was trying to discuss, and you don't want me to talk about Donald Trump.
	Oh, so if I have a preference to discuss something else, that's called a pivot, and that's bad because it's not what you want to talk about.
	And therefore, you should be in control of this conversation, and I should do what you want in the conversation.
	Okay, I think this has been derailed quite heavily.
	Oh, now it's been derailed because I'm disagreeing with you about what we should be talking about.
	Please get back to the topics, yes?
	Okay.
	If I talk about something different than what you talk about, that's called a derailment, and that's bad.
	So you want to be, what, the dictator of the conversation?
	You want to say exactly how it should go, and if I bring up something that's not what you want, you have, what, a little pissy tantrum and say that it's a derailment, or I want to get back to the topic, and it's like, oh, because the topic is your topic, and if I have something I want to talk about in the context of political lying, that's bad.
	Is that what you're saying?
	No, that's not what I'm saying.
	Okay, so what are you saying?
	I'm saying that I thought the call-in show was meant to give audience members a chance to discuss things with you that they thought were pertinent.
	I thought that in the conversation, we would be able to talk about some of the things that I wanted to talk about.
	Now, if you think that is the equivalent of being a dictator, fine.
	We have talked about some of the things that you really want to talk about.
	And now I'm curious whether or not you're a partisan hack or whether or not you're just anti-Donald Trump because of some like insane reason in your brain or whether you're actually bothered by people in power lying.
	Okay.
	I am bothered, since you asked, I am bothered by Hillary Clinton's lies, by Obama's lies, Paul Ryan's lies, Harry Reid's lies.
	I'm bothered.
	Which do you think are more important?
	Which lies are more important?
	Donald Trump's truthful hyperbole or whatever you want to call it.
	Do you think that's more important or do you think that the lies told by Obama and Hillary and Harold Reid and Paul Ryan, do you think that the lies told by Donald Trump are more important in the campaign when he has no political power, no capacity to start wars, no capacity to assassinate or call for the assassination of foreign leaders?
	Which lies do you think are more important from a moral context?
	Those of the people in power or those of the people vying for power?
	Okay, so I think that Donald Trump's lies and his His tendency to tell lies is now extremely important, seeing as how he's going to become the president of the United States.
	No, no, no.
	I'm not talking about the future.
	I'm talking about the past.
	Okay.
	Whose lies have caused more damage?
	Is it Hillary Clinton and Obama, or is it Donald Trump?
	Let's just say he lied.
	I think that's arguable, to put it mildly.
	But which lies have caused more damage?
	Which person's lies have caused more damage?
	You asked me which one I found more important, not which one I thought was more damaging.
	Okay.
	Now I'm asking you which one have caused more damage.
	Okay.
	I don't know.
	Perhaps it could be a debate between Hillary Clinton and Obama.
	I don't know which one.
	No, no.
	Between, let's just say, Hillary Clinton and Obama and Donald Trump.
	Again, you've just given an ultimatum about Hillary Clinton and Obama, and I said I don't know which one of those lies has caused more damage.
	No, no.
	Let's talk about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
	Which lies have caused more damage and death in the world?
	Hillary Clinton's.
	Okay, good.
	Fantastic.
	I appreciate that.
	So Hillary Clinton's lies have caused immense amounts of destruction around the world.
	Donald Trump's has not.
	And so I guess my particular question is, why are you focusing on Donald Trump if his lies have not caused massive amounts of death and destruction around the world, whereas Hillary Clinton's has?
	Okay, here's the thing.
	First of all, Donald Trump, and please let me finish, Donald Trump will become the next president of the United States, right?
	Hillary Clinton is now off in some corner crying about Russia did this and Russia did that.
	Okay?
	With that in mind, yes, in the past, Hillary Clinton's lies are extremely more relevant.
	But right now, I'm just talking about Donald Trump.
	It's like saying, I can't talk about anyone else's lies but Hillary Clinton and Obama's.
	Like, you can never talk about anyone else's lies ever.
	Is that what I said?
	No, but that's the implication.
	So if I'm talking about Donald Trump's lies, and I just want to have a conversation about that, I am not saying that Hillary Clinton's lies are less important, are equally as important, or are more important.
	I'm not making a claim to that whatsoever.
	Right?
	Derek, let me just ask you a quick question.
	Okay.
	Who brought up Hillary Clinton's lies?
	I did.
	Right.
	Okay.
	Now, I don't know what kind of conversations you have outside of the show.
	Okay.
	But if you bring up a topic, I'm allowed to respond to it.
	Right?
	I mean, that's fair, right?
	I mean, otherwise, you could just have your own show and have a monologue.
	You know, and I do those from time to time.
	But saying that there's something wrong with me talking about Hillary Clinton's lies when you brought up Hillary Clinton's lies seems odd to me.
	Okay, let me explain.
	Now, I brought up your statement concerning Hillary Clinton's lies.
	It's not necessarily her lies that I want to talk about.
	It is your statement surrounding her lies that I found relevant to what I wanted to discuss.
	So I brought them up.
	And I was hoping to continue with what I wanted to discuss.
	Yeah, you were hoping to continue without my input because you want to be in charge.
	No, that's not true.
	You got totally pissy at me having input into the conversation because it wasn't going the way that you wanted.
	So you had a hissy fit.
	I get it.
	I understand that because maybe you've got verbal dominance in your social sphere or you are, of course, very verbally adroit and very intelligent and a good debater.
	So Maybe you just run roughshod over everyone else, but you don't get to run roughshod over me on my own show.
	If there's a topic I want to bring up, I'm damn well going to bring it up.
	And if you don't like it, you can go on someone else's show.
	Okay, fine.
	I'll concede that I had a pissy fit or a hissy fit or whatever because that's not actually relevant to anything I'm trying to say.
	Okay?
	So...
	See, you don't get to choose everything that's relevant in a conversation, Derek.
	That's why it's a conversation.
	There are two people here.
	If I think something's relevant, it's relevant to me.
	You don't get to choose what's relevant and not in a two-party conversation.
	I'm not saying it's not relevant to you.
	I say it's not relevant to what I want to talk about.
	That's what I said.
	Yes, but we're having a conversation.
	Okay.
	You are not the only person whose needs get served in a conversation.
	I'm trying to help you here, trying to have you conversation, which isn't just you...
	Bossing and having hissy fits.
	Thank you for your assistance.
	Now, anyway, I want to talk a few things about some of Donald Trump's things.
	Let's just do one more because I got another caller after this.
	Just pick which is your favorite topic and let's do that.
	Okay.
	Well, let's talk about Donald Trump's critical thinking.
	And I will skip by all the lies that I was going to talk about.
	I'll just talk about his critical thinking.
	Okay.
	Now...
	My whole argument was going to be that Donald Trump appears to not think critically when it comes to certain topics, such as immigration, right?
	In context, I'm talking about— Sorry, sorry.
	I'm so sorry to interrupt.
	This is not—it's just a technical thing.
	Okay.
	My camera has just gone completely out of focus, and I don't know why.
	Okay.
	Hang on.
	Sometimes if I hold my hands up, it can figure out where the hell I am.
	But I basically am in an underwater fish tank at the moment.
	I apologize for this.
	Hang on a sec.
	That's fine.
	All right.
	Maybe I need to switch it off.
	It doesn't usually do this.
	Oh, is it back?
	Yes.
	I'm so sorry.
	And that sounds like a terrible debate maneuver.
	It's really not.
	Please continue.
	It's fine.
	So, Donald Trump's initial plan regarding Muslim immigration was to completely and totally shut it down, right?
	Now, that presented a number of problems anyway.
	And one of the biggest problems I had with it is that he went on mourning Joe to discuss the policy, and he said that the way he would police it is he would ask people if they are Muslim.
	And if they said yes, then they wouldn't be allowed in.
	Now, that is absurdly idiotic.
	I think it can be conceded relatively easily, yes?
	I don't know what you mean.
	Observedly idiotic is not an argument, so I don't know what you mean.
	I mean, as in asking people if they are Muslim is not a way to ban them because people will simply lie, right?
	So the policy prescription does not make sense in that regard.
	Well, then there's no such thing as customs, right?
	Not necessarily.
	No, because customs, like, you voluntarily declare what you're bringing into the country, right?
	Right.
	And there are penalties for lying, right?
	Right, and you can actually check people's lies, but how do you check if someone is or isn't a Muslim?
	Well, I'm not an immigration expert, but I don't think it's impossible to figure out whether somebody is a Muslim or not, if they have papers, right?
	If they have a history, if they have papers, if they have whatever, right?
	I mean, it's not completely impossible to figure out if someone is a Muslim, as far as I understand it.
	Again, I'm not an immigration expert, but I don't think it's completely beyond the realm of possibility.
	Okay, well...
	Is it perfect?
	No.
	And I'm not advocating it, you understand.
	I'm just saying that it is within the realm of possibility.
	Okay.
	Well, he nonetheless morphed, quote unquote, his policy to that of extreme vetting, which he said would be an ideological test for people coming into the country.
	Now, that's even worse.
	And sorry, interestingly enough, just by the by, and this is just to reinforce your point, I think, This is currently a big debate in Canada at the moment, that should there be vetting for compatibility with Canadian values?
	It's a big debate that's going on in Canada at the moment, so he's not alone in that particular issue or approach.
	But sorry, go ahead.
	Okay.
	So, one of the things he said would be views about if Sharia law should be the rule of the land or not, or views on the LGBTQ community, right?
	Now, how do you possibly police for that?
	Any ideas?
	You mean if I was sort of designing some sort of program like this?
	Again, I'm not saying I agree with it, but you mean any ideas on how you would do something about that?
	Yes, because it seems completely infeasible to most people.
	Well, so there are a few things that could be done.
	You could, of course, you know, if somebody wants to Move to America, right?
	I mean, there's lots of things you have to fill out if you want to move to America.
	And, you know, for countries, I think Canada is one of the few countries where you don't need a visa, but you, of course, would apply for a visa.
	Now, in that visa application, you would make a bunch of check marks or whatever, and you would make a bunch of statements.
	And what would happen, I would assume, is that, for instance, you could say, I don't know, I'm just making things up.
	So to take the Islam out of the issue so people can think a little bit Less reactively to it.
	So let's say you want to come to America and from, I don't know, Ancapistan or wherever we want to make something up, right?
	And you fill out a form and you say, on the form it says, have you ever been convicted of a crime?
	You know, and maybe there would be a couple of exceptions or whatever, but have you ever been convicted of a crime?
	And you would then say no, if you hadn't, right?
	Now, I would assume that at some point they would run some checks, right?
	Now, would they check everyone?
	I don't know, but they may check some people.
	And if it turns out that you had lied, then you would be permanently denied entrance or for some period of time you would be denied entrance into the United States, right?
	And there would be ways to check whether you'd ever been convicted of a crime.
	Now, of course, so many people have social media accounts and so on and so many people have this kind of stuff that if somebody has An application to enter a country.
	You could, of course, view.
	You could review their social media stuff.
	You could review if they've had any academic publications.
	You could review if they've, I don't know, I'm just making things up.
	Like you could look at some ways in which that could occur.
	And it may not be completely impossible to figure that kind of stuff out.
	And that would be one approach that could be taken theoretically.
	So, that approach would be able to verify their current views on gay rights?
	Like, okay, so say hypothetically someone in the past disagreed with gay rights, and now they don't.
	Well, how do you prove they currently do not disagree with gay rights?
	I don't know.
	Well, that's my point.
	You can't.
	Look, everybody makes decisions on immigration.
	I mean, and no decision is perfect, right?
	So some people, I don't know, maybe they're disallowed because they have a particular kind of illness.
	Well, can you prove that that person will get that illness again?
	No, but you want to reduce your risks, right?
	And sometimes in terms of immigration, you may say, well...
	We need someone from this particular...
	We need somebody who's a mechanical...
	Mechanical engineers are good, right?
	Or whatever, right?
	And maybe the guy's a really bad mechanical engineer.
	Maybe the school is not very well accredited.
	Maybe he's the son of the headmaster and that's why he got good.
	Like, who knows, right?
	Everybody makes decisions.
	Every country makes decisions when it comes to immigration.
	And those decisions are inevitably imperfect, right?
	Because you can come up with a general rule around immigration.
	And then you can always come up...
	With some exception to that rule, some way that someone's gonna slip through the cracks, but so what?
	I mean, you come up with general rules, and you try and make them as sensible as possible, and it's never gonna be perfect, but it's better than no rules at all, right?
	I believe my argument is that the idea of an ideological test is not sensible, seeing as how people can simply lie about their ideology, what they believe, On gay rights and whether Sharia should be the law of the land, on freedom of speech, they can lie about all of that.
	Do you think that it would be, I mean, do you think that an immigrant into the United States who wants Sharia law as the law of the land and who believes that homosexuals should be criminally punished or stoned to death, do you think that would be a good immigrant into the United States?
	No.
	Right.
	Right.
	So, given that the United States, and this is Ann Coulter's argument, I'm just sort of repeating it here and hopefully not messing it up too much, but why does America need immigration at all?
	I mean, America has taken in an ungodly amount of people over the last couple of generations, like an insane amount of people.
	It's been the largest migration in human history to America in terms of, like, immigration.
	Why does America need more immigration?
	In other words, why not just take immigration down to zero or close to zero, as has happened before in American history?
	It's just one possibility.
	Let's not discriminate, you could say, if you're an American.
	Let's not discriminate.
	We've just taken in, what is it, 50 million people over the last decade or three.
	Let's just stop.
	Let's give a chance for people to integrate and assimilate.
	It's not even counting the 20 to 30 million potential illegal immigrants.
	I mean, it's an ungodly number of people.
	And this is, of course, why a lot of people in America and in the West are saying, we've got to stop.
	Because we don't know how this is going to work out as yet.
	But we do know for sure that if people keep crashing into the country with Questionably compatible belief sets.
	And I'm not talking in particular about Muslims here.
	Russians have a very different set of ethics when they come to America.
	And a disproportionate number of Russians who are white and Christian get involved in scams and criminal activities, particularly white-collar crime.
	So it's not about a Muslim thing.
	It's not about a race thing.
	It's just that there's a culture in this country that And if lots of people come in who don't share those values, it dilutes the culture.
	Now, you can This is an allegory from Lauren Southern's book, Barbarians, which you should check out.
	It's very good.
	So she talks about that there's these gummy bears, and they're sugar-free gummy bears.
	And if you eat just a few, it's okay.
	It's not that great for you.
	It's not bad, right?
	But if you eat too many, your body can't digest them, and you end up with this giant gummy bear lump in your belly, which is like a huge problem.
	And I think that's some people's argument is to say...
	There's a culture in America, and the culture has to do with, you know, the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, separation of church and state to a large degree, a commitment to a pretty free market, and, you know, all that kind of stuff.
	And Enlightenment values, Greco-Roman values, Christian values, this is the way the society is.
	It doesn't mean it can't adapt, but the adaptation is more likely to be successful if it comes from within the country rather than comes because of waves of people with their own particular viewpoints that don't coincide, crashing in from I think there are people in America who are saying, okay, well, let's see if we can find some way to figure out who's going to work best in the country.
	Because the people who don't work out in the country, it's bad.
	And I don't just mean terrorism or anything like that.
	Obviously, that's bad.
	But if you look at the cultures that end up on welfare disproportionately, I mean, people from Europe end up on welfare less than the native population, whereas people from Central and South America end up on welfare like at more than double the rate of the native population.
	So there are better and worse places to immigrate from.
	And so...
	The question is, is there any way that we can figure out how we can still have immigration and still have the country that is?
	Can I interject for a second?
	I'm almost done.
	Now, maybe there's a way to do it.
	And I obviously, you know, I'm not going to come up with something on the fly.
	I mean, that would be a ridiculous question to ask.
	You know, I mean, how do you design a nuclear power plant?
	I don't know.
	I'm not an expert on that stuff, you know, but I know that there are people who are who can figure some of this stuff out.
	So I think people are going to try and figure out how they can...
	Best have an immigration plan.
	That enhances the country.
	Because I think we can both agree with the rest of the world that the country should be run for the benefit of its citizens and not for the benefits of others and everyone else in the world who might want to come to that country.
	The country has to because the citizens are the ones who built the country and who are paying taxes, at least some of them.
	And so the country should be run for the benefit of the citizens.
	And I think there are some people who are going to say, well, let's see if we can figure out how to have a better immigration plan.
	But if there are lots of people kicking back and saying, well, it can't be implemented, and you can't figure this out, and you can't figure that out, and you can't scan for values, and you can't figure out who might be pro-gay rights and all that kind of stuff, then people are going to say, okay, great.
	Let's just stop immigration then.
	Because we can't.
	We can't figure it out, so let's just stop it.
	That's fine.
	I'm actually okay with that, believe it or not.
	But my whole argument is that regardless of where you fall and how you want immigration to be run, this policy does not make sense.
	This policy does not actually give you the insight necessary to determine or discern a person's true beliefs.
	How do you know?
	You don't know what resources the government has available to it.
	I mean, they can hack into European leaders' phones, for God's sakes.
	And I'm not saying they should, and I'm not saying that, but I don't know what the hell they can do.
	You know, they have these cell phone tower simulators in America that your phone will just magnetically hook onto.
	And he's running for office.
	He's trying to get a conversation going.
	And he's on a television segment.
	You cannot reasonably expect, Derek, an in-depth, fully reasoned out, fully fleshed out with all the experts and with all the knowledge you only get when you pass through the magic portal of government.
	The amount of information that Donald Trump has now about the state of the government than he had when he was on the Morning Joe show.
	I mean, he's now being briefed on stuff that has never made it out to the general population, has never made it outside the inner circle.
	Right?
	So, of course, he's frustrated.
	This was after a terrorist attack.
	He's angry and he wants to say something to get a conversation going.
	Is it a fully fleshed out immigration plan?
	Of course not.
	He's upset.
	He's angry.
	He's frustrated, as was the case with just about everyone in America.
	I assume you as well.
	Of course, you as well.
	The day after a terrorist attack.
	And, you know, holding him to that standard, I think, is a little premature.
	Let's see what happens when he's got experts digging into it.
	And he has the kind of information that he has now that he's going to be the president.
	Wait, wait, wait.
	But I have no experts either.
	You have no experts either.
	I don't have information from the government as well.
	But I also know that we can't read people's minds.
	Well, let me fall back on that one.
	As far as I know, we can't read people's minds, right?
	No, but you're assuming that mind reading is the only way to solve this problem.
	And I tend to be very humble.
	When it comes to trying to figure out whether I can solve some big giant problem that I have no expertise in, no particular knowledge of, and no inside information about, and no history in studying.
	So I don't know how they can vet immigrants.
	I'm not going to say it's impossible.
	I'm not going to say it's easy.
	I'm not going to say it's black and white.
	Of course it's not.
	And I'm not going to say it's ever going to be 100% because that's impossible as well.
	But am I going to say there's no way ever to vet immigrants for values?
	I don't know.
	I don't know because I don't have access to There's technology in the government we don't even know about.
	And there's policies, and I bet you there's also kind of handshake deals between world leaders we don't even know about that never get written down.
	I don't know any of these things.
	I'm going to wait and see what the guy comes out with in terms of his actual policies and proposals.
	I'm not going to judge him when he was angry on a five-minute television segment when he didn't have access to the information he has now.
	Hold on.
	My extreme vetting statement, that was the...
	The general idea of what we were talking about in the last segment of that.
	That has been a policy of his for months.
	Months on end.
	At some point, I would think he would get those experts.
	Well, yeah, and I believe he's assembling his cabinet now.
	So, you know, let's see what the man comes up with.
	Maybe it'll suck.
	Maybe it'll be terrible.
	Maybe it'll be cross your fingers and pray for three fairies.
	I don't think so.
	The man has been pretty practical and pretty successful in building an empire and coming in from the outside to win a presidential campaign against all odds against.
	I mean, you've got to give it to the guy for that, even if you hate his guts.
	Man, the guy had some fight in him.
	I mean, facing off with the Democrats, the Republicans, the mainstream media, the Hollywood elite.
	I mean, every every special interest group known to mankind and the military industrial complex.
	I mean, the guy and 17 people to the left and right when it came to the nomination process.
	I mean, the man's got some competence in.
	And you may say, well, he shouldn't have said this and he shouldn't have said that.
	Sorry, man.
	He got the presidency.
	I mean, whether you like it or not, what he did worked.
	And I'm not saying that everything that works is moral or anything like that.
	But he had a very pragmatic objective, which was to secure the presidency of the United States.
	And the more that the media piled onto him and attacked him and attacked his family and undermined him and called him all kinds of god-awful names, the more it became important for him to win because otherwise his reputation would have been shredded to no good effect.
	And he pushed through at the age of 70, doing two or three or four speeches a day.
	He pulled off the biggest political miracle in modern times, perhaps even the biggest political miracle ever.
	And from that standpoint, you can nitpick at this and nitpick at that, and yeah, he exaggerates.
	I mean, if I say to you, I'm about to exaggerate, and then I exaggerate, and you say, well, you're lying!
	It's like, okay, well, you just didn't hear the first part of what I'm saying.
	He did achieve what he wanted to achieve, and...
	What's going to come out of that?
	I don't know.
	Of course, right?
	I mean, I'm going to see.
	I don't expect any particular human being to be an expert in everything.
	And we'll see where it goes.
	And if they can't find a way to implement any kind of extreme vetting, then he's going to shut down immigration from certain parts of the world.
	And then if people end up coming in through other avenues, he's going to shut down immigration from those parts of the world, I think.
	And then at some point, he might just do what a lot of Americans want him to do, which is to say, OK, pause here.
	Hold the phone.
	Put everything on pause because we've been undergoing this massive experiment where we're replacing or augmenting more than a quarter to maybe even a third of the American population within less than 60 or 70 years.
	We need to slow this down and see how it's going to go.
	So let's stop it.
	Let's cut back on taxes, which are used to pay for a lot of immigrant resettling.
	I don't know.
	I'm not going to say it's impossible.
	I'm not going to say it's possible.
	I certainly share.
	Of course, we can't read minds and you can't read the future.
	And there are, of course, to talk about Islam.
	I mean, there are Muslims in England who were very moderate and, you know, cultural Muslims and so on.
	Their kids are getting radicalized at alarming levels.
	The kids, second, third generation Muslims in England, in many ways are much more radical than their parents are.
	And I don't know if that's the internet.
	I don't like, it could be six million different things.
	So we can't tell because of course, when you bring an immigrant in, you're bringing their children and their children's children and their children's children in.
	And from what's going on in Europe, integration is going on average, of course, I'm talking in gross generalities, integration is going the wrong way.
	And that is a huge challenge.
	I don't know what the answer is, but I'm not going to nag at the guy for his reaction to a terrorist attack.
	Here's the thing.
	Okay, so throughout the campaign, I took a look at his policies.
	I just try to see if things make sense.
	Very soon.
	If something does not make sense, I'm willing to call it on it.
	It's nonsense.
	So this is not the only time that he has done something that just doesn't make sense, right?
	And you can call it nitpicking if you want.
	I don't call it nitpicking when you say something on television and you say the exact opposite.
	You say you never said that on television.
	I don't call that nitpicking because it's concerning to me.
	If you were willing to lie about something we have you on tape saying, What aren't you willing to lie about?
	And there's just endless examples of this.
	Does he know Putin?
	Does he have a relationship with Putin?
	He said, yeah, I have a relationship with Putin.
	That's fine.
	No big deal.
	Just don't contradict yourself a few years later.
	Oh, I don't know Putin.
	I've never spoken to Putin.
	But you told us she did.
	So that's concerning to me, right?
	And then when you have...
	And is that because you don't lie?
	You've never misrepresented?
	You've never exaggerated?
	You don't have any experience with that?
	You never do it?
	No, that's not what I'm claiming at all.
	So, he's fallible, right?
	Let's just say that he's done the...
	I haven't looked him up, right?
	Let's just say he's done the things that you say he's done.
	He's a fallible human being.
	And you're a fallible human being.
	And I'm a fallible human being.
	And I'm not sure, you know, this is the old, let who is without sin, you know, cast the first stone and so on.
	So, wait, wait.
	I can't get a stone from a clay thing?
	It is kind of like a pretty high mountaintop that you're casting these things down from, right?
	No, I don't know what that analogy is supposed to mean.
	Okay, let me put it to you another way.
	Let's say that everything you're saying about Trump is valid.
	Do you think that we should wait for a perfectly moral, perfectly honest, never uses hyperbole, never exaggerates politician?
	That's a preposterous question.
	Of course not.
	Okay, so there are going to be differing degrees of what you would consider negative or bad statements, right?
	You're going to have to accept, because we all do it.
	I mean, you drive past the truck stop that says, world's best French fries.
	You know, the guy just wants to sell some fries.
	You know, am I going to throw him in jail?
	So, you're going to have to accept some level of imperfection from your politicians.
	In fact, I dare say you're going to have to expect some level of imperfection from every single human being in the known universe.
	You, me, everyone, right?
	You have to accept some level of imperfection.
	The question I have is why are you focusing so much on Donald Trump's imperfections When they're vastly less, I think, in reasonable ways.
	They're vastly less than Hillary Clinton's or Obama's or George Bush's.
	It's not a Republican or Democrat thing.
	I mean, those guys were god-awful.
	I mean, they started wars.
	They approved torture.
	Unlawful detention.
	They ship people off to Turkey to get waterboarded.
	I mean, they overthrew dictatorships.
	They race baited.
	They caused problems in inner cities that got people killed and neighborhoods burned down.
	I mean, so we do have to accept imperfections in our political leaders.
	I guess I'm just baffled at why you're going at Donald Trump so hard when his are by far the least important.
	And by far the least consequential, even if we accept the truth of everything that you're saying, which I think we've had a fair amount of tussle back and forth on.
	Right.
	Here's the thing.
	As I've said, Donald Trump is going to become the president.
	So whether he lies to the American people is going to be extremely relevant in just a month, right?
	So as I've said, and you can look this up, he's told plenty of lies that are on tape.
	Right?
	Like, he says X and then says not X. Okay, no, no.
	I'm not going down this road again.
	You've already told me he's told lots of lies.
	That's not my point.
	Okay, but my point is, okay, so you have to accept something.
	You want someone who's going to tell absolutely no exaggerations, no hyperbole, no falsehoods, no misdirect.
	That's what you want.
	And if somebody does that, then you are going to attack them, right?
	Well, I will attack lies when someone's clearly lying.
	Yeah, that's kind of how it works, right?
	I'm not claiming to be perfect.
	I'm not claiming we need perfection.
	We must have perfection in order to vote for somebody.
	That's not in any way what I'm implying or saying at all.
	I'm saying we need to call BS where there's BS. Even if we accept this, it's not consequential BS. In your opinion, why is it not consequential if he's willing to lie about things he's on tape saying about?
	Why is that not consequential?
	Compared to what?
	Compared to which politician?
	Compared to which political leader?
	I'm not comparing him to anybody.
	Okay, so you deal with him in isolation with no comparison to others.
	Okay, let's...
	So there's no standard for public life or political life in general, and so you're not judging him relative to anyone else.
	It's a standard of individual perfection, a moral universe only inhabited by Donald Trump.
	Okay, first of all...
	I'm not trying to be sarcastic.
	You're saying, no, I'm not comparing him to anyone else.
	Allow me to explain.
	A lie is a lie is a lie, right?
	Does it matter who it's from?
	And you've proven none, by the way.
	But let's go ahead.
	I would like to prove them.
	But you...
	Do you want me to prove one right now?
	I can gladly...
	No, no.
	I want to finish this conversation.
	Got to help me move on to the next caller.
	But I do want to give you the last word.
	Okay.
	Here's the thing, Stephan.
	Now, over Trump's entire election season, he's said some things that we obviously all disagree with.
	He's done some things we obviously all disagree with.
	Actually, I'm going to stop you there.
	Let's not say we all disagree with things.
	Yeah, I don't know what that means.
	Just talk about yourself.
	Okay, I'll speak only for myself then.
	My apologies.
	You have not discussed any of these flaws, right?
	This is an important aspect of being intellectual- Sorry, are you saying I've not disagreed with anything Donald Trump has done?
	No, but you haven't discussed the plethora of flaws.
	If you look at your video history on YouTube, you see almost endless support for Trump.
	And that's not saying- No, no, no.
	Oh, hang on.
	Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.
	Hang on.
	Okay.
	So you are a moral hero when you push back against lies.
	But when I push back against lies about Donald Trump, I'm a bad person.
	Okay, I'm done.
	Moving on to the next caller.
	Thanks very much for your call.
	It was really enjoyable, but I am so done.
	I am done like yesterday's dinner.
	All right.
	Who's up next, Mike?
	Oh, God.
	I need a shower.
	Is there anything you'd like to say?
	I could say a lot.
	In public life, obviously, way back when at the beginning of the election cycle, having some knowledge of Russia and Putin was a positive.
	So like anyone would do, Trump talked up any and all vague connection to Putin or Russia that he had, which at one point was, we appeared on the same 60 Minutes episode.
	Which if you hear that, they're like, oh, well, they were in the same studio.
	Maybe they had a conversation.
	They were on the same 60 Minutes episode in a segment.
	They never met.
	They were never in the same place, never in the same room.
	But Trump, you know, talked himself up regarding Russia connections when that was favorable because he's a politician running for office and they're, do you have experience?
	Could you deal with international affairs?
	These are all my vague international connections.
	Look, I have vague experience in and around Russia.
	So he talked himself up.
	And then when it was down, when it was, oh, bad, Russia connection, Russia hacking, evil Russia, evil empire, blah, blah, blah, he pointed out that he has no material connections to Russia, has never met Putin.
	So pretty much he did what any sane human being in a situation would.
	He amplified his strengths and hid his weaknesses.
	So, people bring up the 60 Minutes thing as some type of, he lied!
	He said, you know, he's Vladimir Putin's best friend.
	He talked himself up regarding a vague connection regarding a segment they were on together, which is hardly any kind of relationship.
	And then, later, when it was negative to have connection to Russia, he said he had no connection to Russia and pointed out that there's no material relationship or connection between them.
	So, is that a lie?
	It can be purposely vague, but...
	Politics is the art of the possible, and good God, I don't know anyone in public life of any kind that's running for public office in the spotlight that isn't going to talk themselves up where and when necessary and amplify their potential strengths and hide their potential weaknesses.
	And given on the scale of people doing that, Trump, certainly great at talking up his strengths, but compared to the weaknesses he has, I don't know.
	hasn't destabilized the Middle East, hasn't led to the deaths of millions of people, hasn't destroyed countries through their damn bombing, which led to immigration policy and migrant crises and all that.
	I don't know.
	I'm not too concerned that he talked up that he was on the same segment as Vladimir Putin on 60 Minutes as some type of connection and then walked it back when that wasn't a popular thing.
	Like, really, on the scale of things to give a shit about, it's not even on my goddamn radar.
	And if this is the standard, I mean...
	Has this person never had a job interview?
	And the job interview says, well, have you ever dealt with this?
	And you're like, yeah, you know, whatever, right?
	Of course you're going to talk up your strengths.
	And is it going to always be 150?
	Here's the funny thing, too.
	Is this the shitty reference on your job application?
	I mean, well, I did work there and the guy did hate me, so I better be honest.
	And it's like we all maneuver.
	We maneuver.
	We maneuver.
	And look, I mean, if Donald Trump comes up with some, you know, I disagreed with him about the whole Apple thing, was very clear about that, the Apple encryption thing.
	So people, oh, you never disagree.
	Anyway, it's just, I mean, I don't care.
	Western civilization is hanging by a thread, and I really don't care.
	What he said about some comment about something that was 15 years ago.
	Like, I just, I don't care.
	It doesn't matter.
	It doesn't matter to me at all, relative to the stakes of what's going on.
	Now, if we live in a perfect society and someone's doing that kind of stuff, fantastic.
	Then we'll compare him to the perfect society.
	But, I don't know.
	I can't have the best general because the best general said he slept with a woman and I don't think he did.
	No, you need the best general.
	Sorry, I just don't care.
	And that doesn't mean I'm not going to hold him to any standards.
	I'm not going to have any feedback or review on what the guy does.
	But relative to the stakes of what Western civilization is facing, I don't, I mean, this, I mean, it's just, I don't know.
	I don't even know what to say.
	When everyone on the planet is piling on someone and kicking him in the nads and taking turns, you know, I'm not going to join in the pylon and kick him when he's down if there's, oh, here's a minor thing that I disagree on or something that is inconsistent.
	The minor stuff when you have everyone on the planet, and it pretty much was the equivalent of everyone on the planet from a public perception standpoint, and they had the entire mainstream media, the establishment Republicans, the establishment Democrats, and, well, just the rank-and-file Democrats, except all the people that like having jobs and the Bernie voters that went over to vote for Trump.
	Everyone in the media was against Trump.
	So, yeah, forgive me if when he made a tweet that's limited to X number of characters, it didn't say may have Regarding illegal immigrants being in the millions.
	And he said, did.
	I'm not going to jump on that and say, Steph, we should dedicate an entire video to going through that tweet and debunking every possible thing that he could have meant or didn't mean by it.
	Good God.
	There's only so many hours in a day.
	And all those pro-Trump videos, if people haven't caught on yet, they were all anti-mainstream media videos.
	They were all anti-lies.
	You know, this is the funny thing with Derek, right?
	And of course, it's completely unfair that he's not here.
	But this is why the last straw for me was like, okay, so Derek is like, well, you have to stand firm against falsehoods and lies.
	But your Trump videos were total fanboy material.
	And it's like, well, I was standing firm against falsehoods and lies being put out by the mainstream media against Donald Trump.
	But apparently that just makes me a bad person.
	So he's very, very keen on standing firm against lies.
	And even these, you know, and these were outright lies, a lot of them, by the mainstream media.
	I mean, these weren't even like fudgy things or, you know, said three million could have been six, could have been two.
	But, you know, whatever.
	I'd seen more certain...
	That's all gray areas.
	I mean, a lot of these were outright lies that were put forward.
	But when I stand against lies, I'm a bad person.
	When Derek stands against lies, he's a very good person.
	I just think that's kind of funny.
	Good God.
	And let me just point out, too, for the sake of future conversations and people that will listen to this, when you are presenting a question and Steph asks you another question which is related but not immediately on the point that you're making...
	You might want to answer that question.
	And maybe if you're curious, go, why did you ask me that question?
	That might be interesting as well.
	And then you can move on to what you were getting to.
	But there's a reason why that question was asked.
	And in this case, I'm not going to say I can read your mind, Steph, but I've listened to enough of this and I know you.
	You wanted to know if he just had a hate on for Donald Trump or if it was a consistent debate.
	I think we got that answer, didn't we?
	I think we got that answer.
	Because if it's just an irrational hate-on for a single instance or one thing, then we're not talking about Donald Trump.
	We're talking about something else that's going on, which is where the problem and the conversation should probably focus.
	So it helps if you want to move swiftly through the conversation to answer the question, and then we can go from there.
	I try not to enable irrational obsessions, because, you know, this is a philosophy show, which is about reason and evidence.
	And so, yeah, of course, the question is, if you're really, really bothered by people in power telling lies, and you bring up Hillary Clinton's falsehoods, then I have the right to...
	Anyway, I mean, it's just, it's funny, you know, and you can see, you know, there's certain types of people, it's like...
	This is how the conversation is going to go.
	And any deviation from how I want the conversation to go is offensive and rude and bad.
	And it's like, whoa, you must be a lot of fun to be sat next to at a dinner party.
	It's like, oh, can I sit in the stab my own eyeball with a fork corner instead?
	Would that be all right?
	Because I'm going to cease to exist around this totalitarian.
	Well, another thing to just point out, because I was biting my lip, because if I jumped in the conversation, I would not be nearly as nice as you were.
	We put out on October 17th a video called The Truth About Illegal Immigrants Was Donald Trump Right?
	Which went into all the information in the exact same studies that you talked about regarding estimates regarding illegal immigrants voting in general elections.
	Which – we've covered that information.
	We covered it in a very, very detailed format.
	There were charts.
	There was lots of fun stuff.
	The video, I think, is over 100,000 views on YouTube, probably an equivalent amount of podcast downloads.
	So we've covered this information, good God.
	It's not as if, you know, this illegal immigrants voting, this is a complete mystery to us.
	Maybe we should talk about that.
	You know, we've covered it.
	We've covered it.
	But Mike, unless you know the exact quantification of a number that can't possibly ever be known, you can't say anything about it.
	That's really, really important.
	Like, unless you know exactly how many people are going to die from smoking cigarettes, you can't ever say that cigarettes are bad for you.
	Did you know that?
	Steph, can I just finish my point on what I'm going to say?
	Can I finish my point?
	You're not going to interrupt me when I say this, right?
	Steph, you keep interrupting me with your personality and presence, and you're not being the convenient prop for the conversation that I guess I'm used to around me.
	A lot more patient than me.
	It's for the listeners.
	You know it's for the listeners.
	Still, even for the listeners, you're a lot more patient than me.
	Okay.
	Well, up next, unless you have anything else to add, Steph, let's move on to Jason.
	No, no, I think I said, and I'm satisfied with the piece I had during the show.
	Okay.
	All right, I need a cigarette or something.
	Up next is Jason.
	Jason wrote in and said, I don't know if that cigarette is going to be good or bad for you.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Can you definitively prove that I might get lung cancer?
	Jason wrote in and said, I have not been given the chance to make amends, so I am stuck, unable to move on.
	Stefan, can you help me make sense of what has happened?
	Can you help me get some perspective to help end this mental anguish?
	That is from Jason.
	Jason, the perspective that you need is exactly how many illegal immigrants voted in the last U.S. election.
	Once you have that answer, everything will make sense in your life.
	Actually, I'm sorry, that was a rude joke.
	How are you doing, Jason?
	I'm okay.
	You can hear me okay?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Okay.
	I actually think it's totally moot, the whole popular vote thing, because every time someone brings up the, you know, that versus electoral college, They don't take into account that the rules of the election when it was held was based on Electoral College.
	And they say...
	Right.
	Because I live in a state that is way predominantly Republican.
	And I hear all the time someone, I'm not going to vote because the state's going to go Republican.
	You know what I mean?
	So that changes the popular vote.
	That's like saying, I'm going to kick a 40-yard field goal, and I'm going to change the goalpost in the middle of the kick...
	I live in New York!
	I wasn't expecting New York to go red for Donald Trump.
	Yes, this is what people don't understand or willfully misunderstand.
	Donald Trump knew...
	That it's the electoral college that gets you to the presidency.
	Given that, he campaigned according to those rules.
	He didn't accidentally lose the popular vote.
	He wasn't trying to win the popular vote because that's not how you become president.
	And we can argue if he would or wouldn't have won the popular vote, But you don't know if that's not the rules of the election.
	It's totally impossible.
	The coach who says, I don't care how many points we win or lose, I care whether we win or lose the game.
	That's the coach...
	Who's going to win?
	If it had been a popular vote election, Donald Trump would have campaigned entirely differently.
	And he would have gotten the popular vote.
	But that's not how you win.
	So saying he lost the popular vote that he wasn't trying to win because that's not how you win is retarded.
	But, you know, it's from the left.
	So what do you expect?
	So I just think the illegal immigrant thing is totally moved.
	You know, the popular vote doesn't matter.
	No, no.
	It's not moot, though.
	Well, I know.
	Because, no, the reason being, no, the reason being not, he said that, I don't know why he said it, but if I were him, I would say something like that.
	So that people would be talking about illegal immigrants voting.
	Yeah, that's true, yeah.
	So that when I wanted to change things to an e-verifier so that people who were here illegally would have a greater incentive to return back home and blah-de-blah-de.
	It's not because he thinks it's important to win the popular vote.
	He's not an idiot.
	It's because he wants people talking about illegal immigrants voting.
	Because we can agree on that.
	Lots of people say, well, illegal immigrants should also get welfare and their kids should get education.
	But who thinks illegal immigrants should vote?
	I mean, other than hard leftists, right?
	And Nancy Pelosi, maybe.
	I don't Foreign influence on elections is bad, but illegals coming into your country and voting is good.
	Wait, no.
	No, that doesn't work.
	No, no, but Russia hacked the Hispanics.
	That's one thing that people don't, right?
	Putin had his hand up their ass and making the mouse move.
	You know, I was going to say something real quick, too.
	Last year, I watched a documentary on him called The Making of Donald Trump.
	It was excellent because it showed his pattern.
	You know, for instance, he does this...
	This park in New York City is over budget and behind schedule.
	So Ed Koch- Oh, the skating park?
	Yeah.
	So Ed Koch, he drafts Donald Trump to take over.
	And then here's Donald Trump going in the press and blasting Ed Koch, the mayor at the time.
	And they're talking smack about each other back and forth and generate all this animosity and put press from it, right?
	And then the park comes in under budget and ahead of schedule.
	And there they are at the ribbon cutting, arm in arm, hugging each other, you know?
	And a lot of politics is like pro wrestling.
	Yeah.
	You know, it's trash talking to get a message across.
	And then, you know, behind closed doors, it's a different story.
	See, and that's exactly what Trump did.
	You know, when I saw that, I was like, this is what his strategy is.
	He's going to get PR for saying, you know, stuff off the cuff.
	And he pulled it off.
	Perfect.
	You know, it is hard to argue with success.
	I mean, I know there's lots of people who will and lots of purists, right?
	But when you actually have to go out there and get things done in the world, I'm sorry, you have to make compromises.
	I don't believe in taxation.
	I pay my taxes.
	You've got to get things done in the world, if you want.
	If you want to just sit by the sidelines and natter, then you can do that and you can imagine all the perfection you want.
	But you're just taking yourself out of the public equation.
	Yeah, people just got caught up in too much of what he said, you know.
	Let's get to your heart.
	I need to pre-apologize because I'm going to fall apart.
	No, that's not called falling apart.
	If you get emotional, that's called coming together.
	Emotions.
	This is not a show where the intellect dominates the emotions, where it's all about crystalline, pure, abstract thought, and there's no feels at all.
	Feels are an essential part of our humanity, and they're an essential part of thinking.
	Our gut, our instincts, and all of that are our unconscious.
	All of this is an essential part in particular of keeping us safe in an often dangerous world.
	So do not apologize for being passionate.
	Do not apologize for feeling That is where our deepest aspects of humanity are.
	So I've got no problem with that at all.
	In fact, I'd have a problem if you blocked it, if that's all right.
	Right.
	Okay, so give me the lowdown on what happened.
	Basically, we'd gotten to the point where I was going to propose.
	And by the way, it was a long-distance relationship.
	She lived in a different state.
	We met on a church dating site.
	Our religion is common.
	It was a dating website for that.
	It took off and was pretty intense.
	I've been pretty guarded with me because I've had a tendency to get used in the past.
	And the way she was, she made me drop my guard.
	And it just seemed magical in a way.
	I mean, I don't want to sound overly romantic or whatever, but it just did.
	And I thought it was finally happening.
	You know, and I'm older and so you kind of wonder when this is going to happen.
	But we got to the point where I was going to propose and we had some disagreements about it.
	She, at one point, had asked me to propose in front of her kids.
	And I really had a hard time with that.
	I just was like, you've been proposed to a couple times before.
	This is my first time.
	Why can't it?
	You know, be the way I want it.
	I mean, it sounds sort of selfish, but you see my point.
	Like, I just wanted to surprise her with something that I wanted to do.
	And, you know, there's just little things like that that kind of were hanging me up a little bit.
	And, you know, now I think it was sort of ridiculous of me, because I care more about her than that.
	And so it kind of got pushed back and pushed back some because, you know, I was kind of frustrated about some things and finally it got to the point where we had to either push back the wedding because I hadn't officially proposed yet.
	And so I told her we needed to postpone it and I was thinking, you know, a month or two, not much.
	And she got...
	Wait, sorry.
	You had the wedding date, but you hadn't proposed?
	Yeah.
	I mean, it was...
	How?
	How?
	How did that happen?
	I know.
	We got the cart before the horse.
	And I... You know...
	I'm not criticizing.
	I mean, I'm just...
	It's unusual.
	And I just...
	How did that come about?
	We had a lot of serious discussions.
	And we told each other we wanted to get married.
	And so...
	She had to start, you know, she works and she has to plan things around custody.
	She wanted her children to be able to come, which I totally agree with.
	And so she started looking for dates that would be good for her and we settled on something.
	And then I had planned on proposing shortly thereafter and just things kept coming up.
	And so I, you know...
	Wait, wait, wait, hang on, hang on.
	That's kind of an important part of the story.
	Things kept coming up?
	What does that mean?
	Shortly after this, she told me she wanted me to propose in front of her kids.
	By the way, she's not from the United States, so sometimes there was some communication things.
	I think she'd say things like that, that I took as bossy, but I don't think she meant them as bossy.
	Where's she from?
	Former Soviet Union.
	I don't want to say exactly where.
	No, that's fine.
	And how many children does she have?
	She has four.
	From the same guy?
	Yes.
	And why is she divorced?
	Pretty much...
	The guy was, and I've been told this by other people that know him and her, that he was a sociopath.
	I mean, he absolutely destroyed this girl.
	And unfortunately, it came into effect the relationship.
	She had severe trust issues.
	And I just could not You know what I mean?
	I sort of bungled things in a way because I was looking at her through the lens of a regular person, not someone that's been destroyed, you know?
	And so sometimes I just bungled things because I didn't understand her perspective.
	Okay, how pretty is she?
	She's attractive.
	She's very pretty.
	Russian women are not known for their trollishness, right?
	No, she's very attractive.
	One to ten?
	Probably nine.
	And you?
	She told me she thought I was a ten.
	So...
	But I don't know.
	I would say...
	I'd say eight.
	All right.
	She acted like...
	She acted like...
	And I don't think it was lying.
	Like, I don't...
	Or I don't think she was...
	Oh, no, no.
	Listen, let's not give all the caveats.
	Because we're going to spend all...
	Everything's going to have asterisks, right?
	Let's just...
	We'll speak directly without guile, without...
	Justification without, you know, like you've said, well, other people saw this too.
	Like, I'll just accept what you're saying.
	It's true.
	It's fine.
	Yeah, and I'm trying to...
	Why did she...
	Hang on.
	Why did she get married to this guy you described as a sociopath?
	She'd just come to the U.S., and I think he was her first boyfriend here, and it was pretty quick.
	Okay, no, no, that's not...
	No, that's not enough of an understanding, right?
	I mean, there had to be something in her history, something in her past that rendered her, or most likely there is something in her past that rendered her to be susceptible to this kind of personality.
	Well, her family is, it's not good.
	Okay, see, this is what I'm talking about, right?
	Okay, so her family, you know, because normally you would warn your daughter away from someone like this unless you're yourself or highly dysfunctional, in which case it would be tough to warn, you know, you can't warn your children away from dangerous guys who are just like you.
	Yeah, and they were still there, too.
	She was here all along.
	Right.
	Wait, she was where?
	She was in the U.S. all along.
	Her family was still in the old country.
	So did she come to the US as an immigrant and then she met a guy and married him?
	Yes.
	And how long was she with the guy?
	I think 14 years.
	Right.
	Right.
	And she wasn't aware, I assume, before she got married and before she had children, she wasn't aware of his personality, right?
	Correct.
	And that's because, I would assume, I mean, he was good at covering up and she had a family history that would make her less able to see someone like that?
	Right.
	And she told me, you know, we did have a lot of arguments and stuff, but him leaving her was an absolute shock to her.
	Absolutely.
	You know, blindsided.
	Right.
	And how long...
	After they split up, did you meet her?
	Six years, but she had a second marriage.
	So I think, yeah, I think I put that in.
	Okay, so how long was her second marriage for?
	I think it was about a year and then separated about a year.
	And how long after the separation and divorce were you together with her?
	Let's see, I want to say it's been two years since before we started.
	And she was single for that two-year period?
	Yes.
	Right.
	I mean, she had dating.
	That you know of, right.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	So thanks for the background.
	What was the...
	What was the breakup?
	What happened?
	I just felt like there was not enough time to plan everything we needed for the wedding.
	Some of these things that I was frustrated about as well, so I just wanted to postpone it a little bit.
	I was totally committed.
	I wasn't trying to back out of it.
	It had been drug out long enough in her mind that she, I mean, she was frustrated with me.
	And I think she, you know, I'm pretty confident in saying she was thinking I was a commitment phobe and not going to go through with it.
	And, you know, and part of it could be the damage she's had.
	You know, I don't know.
	What happened?
	I told her, I think we need to postpone it.
	There's some things we need to talk about.
	She got really upset and pretty much told me, I don't want to marry you now.
	And it just absolutely blew me out of the water.
	That's kind of why, you know, when I tell you what happened after, we just kind of drug it out over the next month, trying to see if we could sort it out.
	But I could not get over the shock of, I don't want to marry you now.
	And she actually told me that on two different occasions.
	And, you know, when I talked to my dad about it later, he said, he just said, oh, brother, that's, you know, that was, she didn't mean that.
	And that, you know, he's talking from experience that I don't have.
	And...
	Well, no, she already, like, two marriages already ended.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	So when she says, I don't want to be married to you anymore...
	I wouldn't necessarily assume she doesn't mean it.
	I know that she said the first guy left her, but the two marriages ended before.
	She knows what it means to not be married to someone you were married to.
	Yeah, and that's the thing.
	I don't read minds.
	And she told me that twice, and then she told me that she told her kids it wasn't going to happen.
	And when she told me that, to me, that was serious.
	Now the kids are involved.
	And sorry, she said that she didn't want to get married to you because you were taking too long to propose?
	Yeah.
	I think she was so angry about me postponing because she'd asked for work off and she'd arranged custody.
	But why were you postponing?
	And I'm not saying you shouldn't have.
	I still don't know why you were postponing.
	Things came up.
	I don't know what that means.
	Well, this is the problem on my part.
	I, you know, the, the thing with the kids, you know, and the proposal kind of, it annoyed me at first because I, you know, I just, I didn't feel like, well, I, you know, that I had any.
	She's telling you what to do.
	She's telling you what to do.
	And this is your job as a man to propose.
	Yeah.
	I just like, right.
	Don't, don't tell me how to propose to you.
	Right.
	Cause that's bossy as hell.
	Right.
	She picked the location.
	She picked the date.
	Um, She picked the ring, you know, and I'm totally fine with all that.
	I didn't care at all.
	I wanted her to do all that.
	But I just wanted to pick the, you know, my thing with the proposal.
	Right.
	You wanted to actually do the proposal.
	Right.
	Rather than have her give you the script and location and say, here's how to propose.
	Yeah.
	And, you know, I just don't think she could see my point of view on that at all.
	And...
	Well, no, because if she's telling you what to do in something that is uniquely your province, like your deal, your response, if she's telling you what to do, it's because she can't see you in that moment, right?
	She's trying to tell you what to do.
	Right, and so that wasn't ultimately the biggest problem with it.
	I just, you know, there were some frustrations like that.
	You know, I'm kind of wondering where my place is in her life.
	Sorry, you don't have to give me the exact ages, but roughly what's the kids' spread in terms of age?
	So the older two kids were not really involved.
	They're old enough that they chose to stay with their dad, and I didn't know them.
	It was two younger kids around the age of 10.
	The older kids chose to stay with the dad?
	Mm-hmm.
	Didn't you say the dad was a sociopath?
	Yeah.
	But there's...
	So they chose what you described as a sociopath over their own mom.
	Right.
	And I don't want to make excuses or anything because I know that that sounds bad.
	People always say that right before they start making excuses.
	I'm just saying even the judge in the custody case made Was making a connection that he thinks that there was parental alienation going on.
	And...
	Well, I wouldn't take much of what judges...
	I mean, my particular opinion, family courts in America can be a little on the hinky side, but...
	The thing is, Stefan, is that girl loved her kids more than anything on this planet.
	Sorry, loved her kids, you said?
	Yes.
	All four of them.
	She talked to them all.
	Well, except that she loved them enough to choose a great father for them.
	What, say that again?
	Did she love them enough to choose a great man to be their father?
	Yeah.
	I guess not.
	Do you have a follow-up to that?
	Well, I'm concerned always about the sentimentality stuff.
	I'm not saying she doesn't love her kids or whatever, but to me, the love of the kids shows up first in the choice of the co-parent, right?
	I love you kids so much, and I'm not saying he did this right, but the analogy would be, I love you kids so much and I chose a guy who beats you up to be your father.
	I'm not sure that that's really the same thing.
	I don't know why she chose him.
	I assume none of this showed before.
	No, I wouldn't assume that.
	Yeah, I guess we don't know.
	And to be fair, to be fair to your heart, Jason, she's got a little bit of a cruelty bit going on too, right?
	I don't want to marry you.
	I don't want to marry you.
	We're going to keep you around.
	We're going to keep you around.
	Maybe, maybe.
	Oh, I told my kids we weren't going to get married.
	I mean, that's rough on your heart, right?
	Yeah, you know, She's very emotionally driven.
	I don't know what that means.
	I'm just saying...
	But she's irrational.
	If there was something like that, yes.
	There were things said that I don't think she would...
	If she could calm down and think it through...
	Well, no, but did she apologize after she calmed down?
	No.
	One of the times she did, yeah, she said that she was hurt and upset, and that's why she had said this stuff.
	But the thing, you know, telling the kid that, telling her son that we were done, destroyed him.
	And I, you know, that, to me, that, because I listened to you before about dating single moms, and I felt better armed for this.
	And, you know, this was just curveball, you know, there were a lot of curveballs.
	And so when, you know, when I found out the son had been told that, I just, you know, it just broke my heart because I didn't want him being jerked around with this.
	So I was really, I actually was really upset that she had said anything, you know, because two or three days later, she asked me if I wanted to try to work things out.
	Wait, so she tells her son, who's very close to you, I assume, and who wants you guys to get married?
	Oh, yes.
	Okay, hang on, hang on.
	So she is angry at you.
	She tells her son that it's over, that you, Jason, are not going to be his father, his stepfather, which is heartbreaking for him.
	You said it just wrecked him, right?
	Yeah.
	And then a couple of days later, she's saying to you, let's try and work it out.
	Yeah.
	So that's a little unstable, wouldn't you say?
	And a little bit harsh on the kids, right?
	Well, yeah, I agree.
	The thing is, I think this whole week of this stuff was just, you know, a knee-jerk reaction to what had happened.
	And I'm not justifying it.
	I'm just saying, like, I think If there's any criticism I would have of her about this is that she was sort of rash in some of this stuff, you know?
	And just saying what came to their mind.
	Impulsive.
	Yeah, impulsive.
	And so, you know, but...
	I'm just I'm thinking about the kids and and how hurtful that must have been and and I'm not kidding Stefan I just went into a place of I don't know how I do not know how to navigate this at all like I I was just in a mental fog at this point about how to deal with this situation and and I didn't feel adequate to
	deal with it.
	And I just sort of started letting her go.
	But we didn't actually talk about it.
	I mean, I felt like when she said, I'm not marrying you ever, that it was over.
	And when she said, do you want to work it out?
	I said, yeah, but it seemed like any time we talked about it, She wanted to talk about the postponement, and to me that was, you know, it was done, you know?
	Let's figure out how to fix it instead of talk about the postponement.
	And I, you know, it didn't feel like she was hurting about it.
	I found out later she actually was.
	I think she just didn't want to let her guard down and let me know that she was hurting.
	And...
	You mean, no, no, she didn't want to be honest.
	You let her guard down, right?
	Yeah.
	Right?
	You keep using this phraseology that takes responsibility away.
	At the very beginning, you said, I have been used, I've been used in the past.
	And also you said, she made me drop my guard.
	Yeah.
	That's a passive, like she just made me do it.
	Well, yeah, I go back and say that she...
	But you know, it's a general pattern though, right?
	You say she's like emotionally impulsive or whatever, and she loves her kids, and you've got a lot of language around all of this stuff, which is why I think it's hard to process what happened.
	You've got a lot of language around it, but that's not the thing itself.
	You've got a lot of stories around it.
	You've got justifications for it.
	You've got excuses for it.
	But that's because you're not seeing the thing itself.
	You're not seeing the person.
	Now part of you was, which is why you were postponing.
	You were postponing because you were worried.
	You were postponing because you were scared.
	And as it turned out, you were right to be scared.
	Because she's volatile.
	She's impulsive.
	She can damage people.
	She hurt you.
	She hurt her son.
	And I think that's what you're not seeing.
	I'm not going to say this is right.
	I don't want to sort of tell you your experience, Jason.
	I really don't.
	But let me...
	tell you what I think is relevant and then you can tell me if it makes any sense or not.
	If you think that she was the love of your life, if you think that she was the most wonderful woman ever, And if you feel that you made mistakes and if you feel that she was justified in doing any of the things that she did and if you feel or you tell yourself these are not feelings, these are thoughts, these are interpretations of what happened.
	That's something that horribly awry, that she broke your heart, that you should have done better or she, you know, whatever.
	But the things that she did that weren't great were as the result of things that you did that weren't great.
	If you have this sense that something incredible and valuable and wonderful was ripped out of your life and you're a shattered, broken man, well, it becomes true, right?
	It becomes true.
	But that is jumping to conclusions about what happened.
	And the reason I think you're in such pain is Is there's a disparity between your lived experience and the words you are using to describe it to yourself.
	Does that make sense?
	I don't mean do you agree with everything, but does it sort of make sense what I'm saying?
	I was released from prior pain.
	To the degree that I'll never be somebody who wasn't hurt as a child.
	But I'm released from the immediacy and the vividity of childhood pain.
	And it happened.
	And it happened also with relationships.
	It happened when my lived experience, when my empirical experience matched the language I used to describe it to myself.
	When the words and the deeds matched.
	It became the same thing.
	I no longer looked at the past with excuses, with propaganda, with lies, with falsehoods, with self-importance, with self-denigration, with pomposity, with false humility.
	I simply looked at the past for what it was without telling myself anything, without jumping to conclusions.
	I said, what was the past?
	What did it do to me?
	What was it like?
	And I'm going to derive my language from my lived experience rather than tell myself what happened after the fact.
	Because when there's a contradiction between our lived experience, what actually happened to us, the words that were said, the facts that are there, the bald, bare facts of what happened, when there's a big discrepancy between the language we use to describe what happened to us and what actually happened to us in our lived experience, we get stuck.
	We end up with repetition.
	And you feel that you're stuck, right?
	If I get that sense from your message.
	You don't know what's next.
	You don't know how to move on.
	you're circling okay the the Here's the thing.
	She She is, most of the time, almost 99% of the time she was the nicest person I've ever dated.
	And I've had some realizations about her.
	The times when there were problems, are when her her when she detected a threat okay and it's like her major motivation is protecting her her kids um and and she would you know these reactions that happen and
	they weren't there weren't a lot by the way were I can see that almost any time we had any tension, it was because her threat meter was activated.
	And I'm not trying to make excuses for her, by the way.
	It would be so much easier for me, Stefan, to dislike her or paint her as the problem, you know?
	And it'd be much easier for me to move on, but I just see that almost any time there was any type of problem, it was because the threat meter was activated.
	And then reason went out the window.
	Okay.
	Okay, no, I understand that.
	I understand that.
	But saying the threat meter is activated?
	Mm-hmm.
	It doesn't matter.
	Look, everyone's threat meter gets activated from time to time.
	Everyone feels alarmed.
	Everyone feels insecure.
	Everyone feels vulnerable in a not fun way.
	So saying that she got aggressive or she was irrational or she was mean or whatever when her threat was up is not giving her moral agency.
	Mm-hmm.
	It's saying, well, when she was cornered, she lashed out.
	But that's how we would describe a ferret, not a human being.
	Like her threat level being up, so what?
	I don't care.
	It doesn't matter that her threat level was up.
	It matters what she chose to do in that moment.
	You can't evacuate her personality, insert some abstraction called a threat level, and excuse what she does.
	She's still making choices.
	Unless, unless, the threat level is so high that she becomes primordial lizard-brained and completely irrational, right?
	In which case, not a good person to marry.
	No, I hear you.
	I do want to add something about my state of mind about the postponement that factored into it, too.
	I was having these feelings, and I kept pointing the finger at her, and I think that that was...
	I mean, there's these things we've discussed, but I'm just saying there were some problems with me, too.
	Now, you see, I started to criticize her.
	Or point out something about her and you immediately start criticizing yourself.
	I'm not saying that you, listen, I'm not saying you were perfect.
	My question is, Have you lashed out in the way that she has, or have you said hurtful things like, I don't want to marry you, and then let's try and work it out, and said to her son, we're not getting married to Jason, it's over, and then she tries to work it out with you.
	Like, this kind of impulsivity, which really hurts people.
	Have you done that to her?
	In the end, I lashed out, and it's...
	The end, in a sense, doesn't count, and I'm not trying to imagine.
	Like, I'm not trying to say it doesn't matter at all, but...
	By the time you're fired, whatever you say when you storm out of your boss's office after you get fired doesn't really have any effect on your employment because you're already fired, right?
	It doesn't count.
	It's what happens that leads to that.
	I think that's important.
	So did you lash out in the way that she did when she would say these very hurtful things to her son or to you?
	I got impatient a few times, but I never...
	The only time that I could even come close to lashing out, and this horrified me.
	One time she had gotten upset at me for leaving the door between the house and the garage open.
	And she wanted it closed because flies or mice could come into the house, and I understand that.
	We were packing for a trip, and I was packing, and I guess I came through the door and didn't close it.
	She asked me if I closed it, or if I left it open.
	I couldn't remember, so I said, no, I didn't leave it open.
	She asked her kids, you know, did you leave that open?
	And they said, no, Jason did.
	She came and she thought maybe I was trying to avoid being in trouble and I understand that.
	She was upset, agitated that she thought I had lied to her about it.
	I legitimately couldn't remember.
	I don't write if I close the door down in my journal.
	And so she went into the mom voice about the door being left open.
	And I just whirled and said, don't talk to me like you're my mother.
	Yeah, that's fair.
	No, that's not lashing out.
	I mean, that's expressing a very strong preference, right?
	I did it pretty Surly.
	Okay, give me how you said it to her.
	I said, don't talk to me like you're my mother.
	And I had flashbacks of my mom talking to my dad like that.
	And I didn't want that.
	You know?
	Of course.
	I mean, who would?
	Who would want that kind of naggy shit around you?
	Who left this door open?
	Yeah, like that's really, really a big important thing that's worth wrecking a family evening over.
	Who left the door open?
	Oh, no.
	I mean, that's...
	You know, I've had women in my life like that.
	And I don't anymore.
	That's a life is too fucking short category.
	I'm not going to sit there with somebody hovering around, did I do the right thing?
	Did I do the wrong thing?
	Did I do this?
	Did I do that?
	Did I do it the way she wanted?
	Did I not?
	Did I have?
	Right?
	Yeah.
	Forget it.
	Forget it.
	To me, that's like neurotic insane behavior.
	I don't have anything to do with it.
	It doesn't mean I don't have preferences.
	It doesn't mean people can't tell me they want me to do something different.
	I've had a girlfriend who's like, you're folding your shirts the wrong way!
	What?
	I'm folding my shirts the wrong way?
	I mean, are you kidding me?
	A, they're my shirts.
	B, I don't care.
	And C, if this is what's important to you in your life, I don't think this is really going to work out.
	It's got to be folded the right way, you see.
	Otherwise, it's bad.
	It's really, really bad.
	I think she was more agitated.
	Well, I'm sure she was more agitated because she thought I had tried to deceive her about it.
	No.
	The reason why you said that you didn't, you don't know the degree to which you were testing her.
	Jason, you're...
	They call it the shit test from women, right?
	And I know it happens.
	I don't believe it's necessary.
	I don't believe it's every woman, of course, right?
	But you were testing her.
	And not proposing to her was testing her.
	Can you handle it if I do something my way?
	So when she said to you, did you leave this door open?
	You heard a tone in it.
	You heard something about it that reminded you.
	Either of your mom or of something.
	There was your threat center got activated, right?
	Because you didn't say, I don't remember.
	You said, no.
	Now, why would you say no if you have no memory of leaving the door open?
	Why would you say no?
	You say, I don't know.
	I don't remember.
	You said no because you were alarmed, right?
	Right.
	And then she goes and asks her kids.
	And then she comes back.
	And now she's in the right and you have said something false to her.
	How does she handle that power?
	Listen, you know this as well as I do.
	Anytime you're in a relationship with anyone, there are times when you're totally in the right and the other person is totally in the wrong.
	Right?
	How do you handle that power?
	Do you lean in with your moral self-righteousness like a Black& Decker into a side of two by four?
	Yeah.
	Grind the person down.
	I am right.
	You're wrong.
	And I'm going to show you.
	Right?
	So she came at you probably like a little bit feral.
	Like, did you leave the door open?
	No.
	Right?
	So she may have created this reaction in you to some degree.
	And then she goes and asks her kids, did you?
	Like now she's in high touch and she's got to find out who left the door open so she can be right and the other person can be wrong.
	And then what happens?
	She's got power.
	Because you have, quote, lied.
	She's in the right.
	You're in the wrong.
	And what does someone do when they have the power of being right over you?
	What did she do?
	That's not a rhetorical question, Jason.
	What did she do?
	I got the mom voice.
	You got the mom voice, and then you said, don't talk to me.
	Like, you're my mom, and then what happened?
	She, you know, her face, her face just fell.
	It just fell.
	Like, she just, I'm being totally honest, it looked like her heart just got broken.
	And this was not words, it was her face.
	And I honestly believe, Stefan, I don't want to try to make excuses, but I honestly believe she did not know what tone she was using with me.
	Oh, so now she's been evacuated.
	She has no moral responsibility because she's fighting outside her own body.
	It's not okay, but I'm just saying I don't think she had any realization of it.
	And so my reaction just Looked like it destroyed her.
	What do you mean it destroyed her?
	You said, don't talk to me like you're my mom.
	You said it in a strong tone, maybe even a harsh tone.
	How does that destroy someone?
	I don't quite understand.
	Well, I just, the look on her face just looked like...
	No, but why would it destroy her?
	- I don't know. - That's a very strong word.
	It destroyed her.
	When I stood up for myself and I pushed back against her aggressive put-down of me or her interrogation of me, it destroyed her.
	Maybe she was just manipulating you.
	Maybe she didn't feel she could win the argument, so she crumpled up, which is what some women will do, right?
	This is an Ann Coulter line, like, no woman worth her salt can ever lose an argument because all you do is burst into tears and you've won.
	Yeah.
	Well, I... I'm just telling you what I saw.
	And listen, you can't let women treat you like you're a kid because you have to preserve your fuckability.
	You can't let women treat you like your mom treated you because the whole point is to be two adults in a romantic sexual relationship.
	If you get a mom-son dynamic going...
	Yeah.
	That's gross.
	Oh, and I should add, this happened on the day that I was going to propose.
	And why can't you find a woman and have children of your own?
	Why are you going to pull all these resources into what you call the sociopath's kids?
	What's wrong with having your own children, man?
	Well, I mean, we planned on that.
	Really?
	Yeah.
	She's got grown kids?
	Yeah.
	She wanted more kids.
	But she's older.
	Yeah, she wanted them bad, Stefan.
	Was she over 40?
	41.
	Oh, come on.
	Really?
	It's not impossible, of course, right?
	But 41, you're not even married yet, and she wants more kids.
	Come on.
	I mean, either she has no idea about the massive drop-off in female fertility, particularly after 40, and the massive increases in risks of complications, to put it as nicely as possible.
	Either she has no clue about this stuff, in which case I don't even know what to say, or she does have a clue about it and she's dangling kids out front of you so you'll marry her.
	Do you know what the statistics are like for a woman who's in her early 40s?
	Yeah, I know it's a lot harder.
	No, it's not a lot harder.
	Let's see.
	Fertility at age, let's say, 42.
	It's pretty hard.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Can a woman get pregnant at 42 with no fertility treatments?
	It's really tough.
	It's really tough.
	And risky.
	Let me see here.
	The fertility of fecundity of women decreases gradually but significantly beginning approximately age 32 and decreases more rapidly after age 37.
	Oh, did we just drop?
	I'm here.
	Hello?
	I'm still here.
	Oh, I heard someone drop.
	All right.
	Yeah, it is.
	So yeah, 25.
	Rate per 1,000 wives, you know, 500, 600.
	You know, by the early 40s, you know, 100, 125.
	So she's had an 80 to 90% decline in fertility.
	And there's a huge increase in risks of disorders in the...
	And that's just for one kid.
	What if you want kids?
	What if you want your son or daughter to have a sibling?
	Yeah, not gonna get that, right?
	So, you can look at this, of course, as a big loss, and I'm not saying it's inconsequential, and I'm not saying you shouldn't be sad.
	I understand all of that, and there's reasons to mourn.
	But the question, the real question is, to abstract this from the woman that you know, and try and think of her as a category, because this is important, because the next woman you meet is going to be part of a particular category, a risk assessment, if you will.
	Now, if you were my buddy, and I said, I've met this woman, she was married for 14 years to a sociopath, she had four kids with him, and two of them have decided to stay with the sociopath rather than live with their mother.
	And then she got married again, and then she got divorced again, and I'm thinking of dating her.
	What would you say to me?
	Red flags.
	You think?
	You think?
	How long have you been listening to this show, Jason?
	Two or three years.
	How long did you date this?
	When did you first date this woman?
	In April.
	Did you think about calling in at that point?
	Oh, yeah.
	Why didn't you?
	I didn't want to bug you.
	Jason wanted to get some.
	You didn't want to bug me.
	Are you kidding me?
	Stefan...
	I don't want to throw this out there, but I'm still a virgin, and there wasn't any sum getting.
	What?
	Yeah.
	No, listen, that is the brave and magnificent thing to say.
	I appreciate you saying that.
	That's the thing.
	It wasn't a sexual relationship.
	I mean, we have some religious standards, and we both want them to live up to that.
	Whether or not people agree with it or not, I'm just saying that was our decision.
	And believe me, there was attraction.
	Of course, of course.
	No, I get it.
	I mean, you're a 10, she's a 9, I get it.
	It's like, you know, vaguely dusty porn.
	I get it.
	Let's make sure you know I don't think I'm a 10.
	No, I understand.
	I think I'm a 7.
	So you're a virgin.
	Yeah.
	And you dated this woman from April, and when did the breakup happen?
	The beginning of October.
	April, May, June, July, August, September.
	So five or six months, right?
	And has she had sex outside of marriage before?
	Do you know?
	I don't believe so.
	You don't think she has?
	Right.
	So she was a virgin when she married her first husband, and then she had no sexual contact until she married her second husband, and then had no sexual contact with you because you weren't married, right?
	I assume you kissed and stuff like that, though, right?
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	Right.
	Right.
	Well, you are saving yourself, you know, and that's good in a lot of ways.
	Don't get me wrong.
	I mean...
	If more people were virgins when they got married, more marriages would succeed.
	Many, many more marriages would succeed.
	So I'm not gonna come down on you about that at all, right?
	I mean, that's just the reality of your beliefs and there's some real value in it.
	So you're kind of a gem, like you're an unshredded up guy who is a virgin and there's real positives to that, right?
	So my question again is, Do you think you can get a woman, maybe a younger woman, who you could get married to and have your own kids with?
	Yeah.
	Because this would have, listen, I mean, if you want kids, this is not the way to go.
	She's over 40 and you're not even married yet, right?
	Right.
	Well, and I, you know, honestly, I think that's why part of the reason she was frustrated.
	I mean, I think she's aware of that and wanted to get married and start trying, you know?
	Oh, she felt the time pressure of her eggs.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	And, you know...
	And I get that.
	I totally get that.
	Yeah, her sexual market value would have been declining rapidly because sexual market value is all around fertility when you're young in particular, obviously.
	The whole point of sexual market value is for children.
	And so if she's running out of the ability to have children, then her sexual market value is going to drop precipitously, and that's pretty stressful for her.
	Like, it's either going to be you, or maybe she can pull some kind of, I hate to say scam, but whatever you want to call it, and promise kids to some other guy she's going to meet now, but it's...
	It's this kind of desperate time in a way.
	Yeah, and I think her point of view was she thought she wanted to start over in a way and she felt betrayed by her first husband and lost out on her American dream or whatever with the family and And wanted to do it again.
	And I'm not making excuses for anything.
	No, she lost two of her kids.
	She lost two of her kids to the ex, right?
	Yeah, and so on one hand...
	But she also chose to have four kids with this guy you called a sociopath, right?
	Yeah.
	You know, here's the tough thing.
	And I get a lot of pushback on this stuff, and too bad.
	It's just the way it is.
	Like, unless people want me to start treating children, like women, like children, I'm going to keep giving the moral responsibility.
	Sorry.
	Now, people can say, well, you've got to make excuses for women and, you know, they don't know what they're doing and she had no experience and blah, blah, blah.
	Okay, fine.
	Then they're children.
	You know, one or the other.
	Like, either we say women have no moral agency, in which case let's just treat them like children.
	They can't sign contracts.
	They can't vote.
	They can't hold responsible positions in society because they're children.
	That would be the consequence of all of this white knighting, all of this making up of excuses.
	But no, guess what?
	You get to be 18, you get your full-on moral responsibility.
	No excuses.
	Now, you make excuses for women because you're a guy.
	Bye.
	Thank you.
	Because you're a guy.
	The question is, can you have a relationship with a woman when you don't make excuses for women?
	Of course you can.
	It's just going to weed a whole bunch of people out of the equation.
	That I will tell you.
	It's going to weed a whole bunch of people out of the equation.
	And you want that very much.
	You want to weed people out of the equation.
	You want to treat women as adults.
	Because look, this is not just particular to women, but you will meet women, as I'm sure you have, and they will come into your life with the story of woe and victimhood, right?
	Clearly, they've made some god-awful decisions in their life.
	Married a monster, gave him four children, two of them decided to stay with the monster rather than me.
	Red flag, red flag, red flag, red flag.
	Not just because she's from Russia.
	Red flag, red flag, right?
	Now, how does a woman overcome the obvious trail of zombie corpse bad decisions that are dragging after her, which she can't hide?
	Bad decisions, bad decisions, red flags, collapse in sexual market value because of red flags and crazy aura, right?
	How does she deal with that problem?
	I was a victim.
	It was done unto me.
	I had no moral agency in it whatsoever.
	It just kind of happened to me.
	And I had a bad childhood.
	And she did, and I sympathize with that.
	But you still have to be an adult.
	The whole point of getting over a bad childhood is to be an adult.
	That's how you get over a bad childhood.
	You be an adult.
	Because when you were a child, you didn't have control or moral authority because you were being bullied or coerced or whatever it was, right?
	Beaten.
	So you become an adult.
	That's how you get over a bad childhood is you stop being a child.
	That's how you escape childhood.
	You stop being a child.
	So when women come into your life, With red flag, red flag, and they say, well, you see, it wasn't my fault.
	I didn't know.
	I mean, the guy looked totally fine, and then he suddenly turned, and then I'd already had kids, and then I didn't want to leave him because I thought it would be good for the kids, and la la la la, right?
	Red flag.
	How do women overcome the trail of bad decisions behind them?
	They pretend that they're retarded.
	They pretend that they're still children.
	They pretend that they have no moral agency and shit just happened to them.
	Right.
	And it's an...
	You understand, it's a reproductive strategy designed to summon white knights in the male population.
	Wow, there's a damsel in distress.
	Perhaps she'll take my semen.
	And it's a reproductive strategy.
	The women go out, some women go out spraying...
	Infinite childhood, no moral responsibility, nothing like that.
	And that's an invitation for a man to treat them as a child.
	Now, everybody wants the benefit of being treated as a child.
	Nobody wants the drawbacks, right?
	So, if the woman comes up and basically says, yeah, the disasters I've made in my life, the terrible decisions I've made, they're not my fault because I'm basically a child.
	Okay, then you say, okay, well, if you're a child, if you have no moral responsibility, then clearly I should be making all the important decisions because I'm not a child, right?
	And then you get this patriarchy, right?
	Okay, so if you're a child and if you make bad decisions, you don't know what you're doing, clearly you shouldn't be making decisions because you don't do a very good job, right?
	But they don't want that!
	See?
	Treat me as a child when I make bad decisions.
	But when I think you're making a bad decision, I'm going to be your mom.
	Well, which is it?
	Are you a parent or a child?
	Well, you're a child when being an adult makes you look bad, and you're a parent, you're a mom, when it gives you power and authority to bully others.
	That's not a personality.
	That's a strategy.
	Personalities have integrity.
	Personalities have cohesion.
	Personalities have standards.
	Strategies seek the benefit of the moment.
	You understand?
	Well, I come with all these red flags, so my strategy in the moment is to pretend I'm an idiot child and things were done unto me and I couldn't possibly know and there was no way to tell.
	I'm just terrible at making these decisions and there was no way to know and I'm blind and blah blah blah, right?
	Yeah.
	That wins in the moment because it kind of, to the white knight, it erases all of the red flags.
	All of the cup your balls and run, brother, stuff.
	But then you see, when you leave the door to the garage open, boom!
	Now she's going to make fantastic decisions and she's going to get to the bottom of things and she's going to figure out the truth, right?
	She was completely blind to the monster she married, completely blind.
	But she's going to really get to the bottom and the truth about the open door to the garage.
	Then she's really interested in getting to the bottom of things and figuring out the absolute facts of the matter.
	The personality of the man she's choosing to have children with, well, there's no way for her to figure that out, but by God, she's going to figure out who left that door open.
	I am going to assign moral agency to everyone.
	Sorry.
	That's the way it is.
	I am not going to give up on any class of humanity.
	Now, maybe if you've got significant, obviously if you've got significant brain damage or you're a complete child, like physically or whatever, okay, this is not part of my life.
	It's not part of my show.
	You get moral responsibility.
	She gets moral responsibility.
	She gets agency.
	She is responsible for having four children with a terrible man.
	How much is she responsible?
	100%.
	100%.
	It is men like you and men like me in the past.
	This is not how I've always been.
	I've had a tendency this way, but it is us.
	Because we provide a winning strategy to women, Who pretend that they're children when they've made mistakes.
	We infantilize women and we perpetuate this.
	We enable this dissolving of responsibility.
	This childishness.
	This immaturity.
	This abandonment of selfhood.
	If we say to women, you made terrible decisions on who should be the father of your children.
	And not only are you suffering for that, your children are enormously suffering for that.
	And I don't doubt that society as a whole will suffer too, in time.
	You made terrible decisions about who to create life with.
	And we've shielded women so long from this basic moral responsibility, which I just call treating women as equals and with respect.
	You know, respect also means responsibility.
	There's a reason they Let's start with R-E-S-P. Respect.
	Responsibility.
	We are crippling women by having this perspective.
	This is the hysteria, the safe spaces, the triggly puff, the screaming.
	If you hold responsibility, you withhold responsibility for an entire group of humanity for long enough, of course they're going to regress.
	Of course they're going to become like the children we treat them as.
	Now there's a strategy called, I'm going to pretend that I'm a child.
	Doesn't mean we have to enable it.
	And that's the reason why women call into this show and we have great conversations because I'm not going to treat them like children.
	I won't do it.
	Because I don't think it's true.
	I think it's true if you believe it's true, then women can pretend to be children and stuff just happened to me.
	I have no responsibility.
	Okay, well, if you're that bad at making decisions, do you really think you should vote?
	Then they want to vote.
	I'm really good at making...
	I can't choose who to be the father of my children.
	But boy, that Justin Trudeau's got some pretty hair.
	Let's give him all the social justice power in the known universe.
	So this is what I mean when I say you have a description of the thing that happened.
	I don't think you have the thing that happened that matches your description.
	And call me the next time you're interested in a woman.
	Well...
	Don't wait until now.
	Oh, I thought about it many times, and I'm telling you, I tried to implement some of the stuff I had heard from you and got some curveballs.
	And now I'm in the spot I'm in, and I kind of wanted to talk about that with you to see about going forward.
	Going forward, what do you mean?
	From now, where to go?
	With what?
	You know, with myself.
	Because, I mean, this has devastated me.
	I mean...
	Because you thought she was the one, right?
	Yeah, you know...
	I don't know if there's the one, but I definitely wanted to be with her.
	No, see, this is...
	Oh, my God, man!
	You're not seeing the thing for the thing itself.
	If you'd wanted to be with her, you would have proposed in the way that she wanted no matter what.
	And I'm not saying you should have.
	Right.
	But you were ambivalent about it.
	Well...
	That's what I'm trying to say.
	That's where I'm at.
	I would do it.
	You would do what?
	I would do that now.
	No, but that doesn't matter.
	Because it's done.
	It's over, right?
	I mean, it's over?
	Is it over?
	She says she's never talking to me again.
	Okay.
	I think that's pretty much it.
	That's it for me.
	Because then even if she comes crawling back next week, oh God, don't do it.
	Don't do it.
	Whatever you do, right?
	So, you were ambivalent about it.
	There were parts of her that you really liked, and there were parts of her that scared the crap out of you.
	You'd be insane if there wasn't, because she was married for 14 years.
	You understand, right?
	Does she work?
	She works.
	Yeah, of course she works.
	She's a Russian.
	So, this would have been her third marriage.
	That's not a good track record.
	She's lost two of her kids, married to this guy, and there's reason to be alarmed, right?
	And people who are giving us scary signals, we have a responsibility to test them.
	Of course we do.
	We can't just hope for the best.
	You can't just cross your fingers, right?
	And you did not want to do anything to be with her because part of her was scary to you.
	That's what I mean when you've got the sentimentality about it.
	Like, oh, she was the one and I'd do anything.
	When you had the opportunity, you didn't take it.
	Listen, I would have done anything to be with the woman I'm married to right now and have been married to for 14 years.
	So you know what I did?
	We met.
	We kept going out, we kept going out, and I proposed, and we got married within 11 months of meeting each other.
	Right?
	And I'm not saying it's better, right?
	I'm just saying that that's what it looks like when you're not ambivalent.
	And I've never been ambivalent.
	I never said, oh, I wonder if that was the right decision.
	It's like the decision gets better and better every day.
	Every day.
	I go back and tongue kiss myself for that good decision if I could.
	So.
	You were ambivalent and there were red flags and she did not pass the test.
	And that doesn't mean perfect behavior, you understand.
	Nobody has perfect behavior.
	But does she apologize, and does she promise to reform, and does she get better?
	Does she change what she's doing?
	Does she commit to that?
	Does she work on self-knowledge?
	Does she figure out how to make your life better?
	Does she have the basic understanding of manhood and masculinity to know, do not nag and corner a man into how to propose to you?
	That is a terrible way to treat a man's responsibility.
	Right?
	I mean, she's Russian, she's religious, I assume she's something of a traditionalist, right?
	So you don't go around bossing a man and telling him how to propose to you.
	That's bitchy.
	I'm sorry.
	It just is.
	So there was reason to be alarmed.
	And you withheld the marriage proposal because you were scared, and rightly so.
	And the way that she responded confirmed your worst fears of how she would react when she didn't get things the way that she wanted.
	Mm-hmm.
	She could have had you propose to her in one simple day by simply saying, hey, you know what, Jason?
	I'm sorry.
	You're the man.
	We're traditional.
	It's your job to propose.
	You do it however you think is best.
	And I'm so sorry that I tried to step in and tell you how to do it.
	Listen, I didn't tell my wife how to give birth.
	Women shouldn't be telling men how to propose.
	That's the role, right?
	So she could have had you propose to her if she really wanted to.
	Simply by letting you do it the way a man should do it, which is his own damn choice.
	Right?
	Not in front of her kids and not the way she wants it and not holding the particular flower arrangement that she wants.
	Like, fuck, you're a human being, not a goddamn prop.
	So you were scared of her and she was controlling you.
	And she wasn't committed to marrying you, which is why she told you how to do it, which would drive any sane man away from that particular scenario.
	What man wants to be told, here's how you should propose to me down to the last detail and in front of my children.
	Christ.
	Sorry.
	Sorry.
	For heaven's sakes, Odin.
	So she was keeping you from proposing to her, and you were keeping from proposing to her.
	And as it turned out...
	It was for good reasons.
	Because when she didn't get what she wanted, well, when you didn't get what you wanted, you refused to propose to her.
	You couldn't do it the way that you wanted.
	And when she didn't get what she wanted, you to propose, she got angry.
	There's no marriage.
	And I'm going to tell the kids that we're not getting married.
	Right?
	Right.
	Now we're going to marry you.
	Right?
	Fuck.
	Dude.
	Rarely was so big a bullet, so nimbly dodged.
	I hate to put it that way.
	But if you guys think the biggest problem you were going to have in your life was the proposal, think again.
	It was, you know, life is full of a lot of stressors, you know, particularly as you get older and, you know, bits start falling randomly off your body and shit.
	I mean, it was not going to get better.
	And if you had married this woman, she wasn't going to change.
	I guarantee you that.
	Wasn't going to change.
	And the tensions and stressors in your life were only going to escalate as was her way of Her threat levels or whatever you called them, I mean, they were going to escalate too.
	Is that what you wanted?
	No.
	For the rest of your life, wondering if you closed the damn door or if you were going to get in trouble from mommy?
	Is that what you wanted?
	No.
	Because that's what you would have gotten.
	The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.
	Almost every single time, unless massive amounts of work are done In terms of self-knowledge and therapy and to change it.
	That's what I mean when I say she didn't break your heart.
	Your story about what happened is breaking your heart.
	Yeah.
	It's so frustrating.
	It is.
	It is.
	And I am very sorry.
	I'm very sorry for what happened.
	I'm very sorry for what happened to your heart.
	I'm very sorry for what happened to you.
	I did my best to try to avoid being in a situation like this.
	And and now.
	I mean, I, I, I went out with a girl last week and.
	And.
	She's fairly recently divorced, and so we were kind of talking about, you know, our past relationships a bit.
	And.
	And when I started talking about my ex and started talking about her kids, I just fell apart.
	Doing your best.
	I love those things.
	Doing your best is not what happened.
	If this is the result of you doing your best, you're never going to be happy.
	Jason, what you're telling yourself is breaking your own heart.
	I did my best and this is what happened and what hope do you have for the future?
	If this is what the result is, if you're doing your best, what happens?
	Yeah, I hear you.
	You didn't call me because you were crossing your fingers.
	You didn't call me because you were hoping it was going to work out.
	You didn't call me because you got dicknapped.
	Which is, look, when men fall in love, it's a drug.
	You understand?
	When men fall in love, we become insane.
	We lose perspective.
	We lose rationality.
	We lose objectivity.
	We think about the person night and day.
	We are in a daze.
	It's not...
	This is not my imagination.
	You can see the hormone spike.
	You can see the dopamine hits.
	You can see everything going on in the male brain when we fall in love.
	It's an exquisitely vulnerable position and a dangerous position.
	It's not bad if it's a great woman.
	It's a wonderful thing if it's a great woman.
	But if it's a dangerous woman, it's a very, very dangerous situation.
	You did not do your best, you fell in love.
	And we've all done it, and we've all done it, and you lost perspective, you lost objectivity, and you crossed your fingers.
	And you're calling me after the fact, rather than before, when you were safer.
	Of course, your sperm doesn't want you to call me, right?
	Because they just want to make more use, right?
	And I would cock block you with reason and evidence, right?
	Yeah.
	Well, you know, it's like what you're saying, you know, in the moment, you know, living in the moment was so enjoyable that just things, you know, things I should be doing were flying out the window, you know?
	You miss the high of being in love.
	That's not the same as missing the woman.
	I mean, if you listen to the show for a couple of years, I've talked about the dangers of dating single moms.
	I've talked about red flags.
	I've talked about the importance of therapy, which you've not done much of.
	I've talked about the importance of getting advice and you could have called in here at any time.
	So, you understand from my perspective, when you say, I did my best, I say, bullshit.
	You did the opposite of your best, and this is what happened.
	And I understand it, because men go mental when we fall in love.
	So, no, I'm telling you this.
	You did not do your best.
	You did the opposite of doing your best.
	I hear you.
	Yeah, I hear you.
	Right?
	So, because you avoided, you took the drug of romantic hope, you took the drug of falling in love, And you, you know, you pay the price.
	This is the hangover, right?
	Yeah.
	Rather than, you know, you're drinking like crazy because it's so much fun, and rather than say to your friend, you know, take me home, or like, should I really drink more or whatever, right?
	Yeah.
	So you bought the pain of the present with the drug of the past, right?
	With the avoidance of the facts.
	With the avoidance of support.
	With the avoidance of help.
	with the avoidance of perspective, right?
	So your sadness is now saying, hey, I've got a great idea.
	Let's never do this again.
	Because you wouldn't.
	You wouldn't want to do this again, right?
	I mean, your sperm isn't getting any younger either, right?
	So if you do want kids, you can't afford to do this again.
	Right.
	So next time, call in.
	Call in with the woman, if you can.
	It's not like I'm some final arbiter or anything like that, but I think I might have a few useful questions to ask.
	No, you know, I hear you.
	I've got to close the show down, man.
	It's been four and a quarter hours, and it's a long time to stand in the same position.
	I've got to get a union.
	But I really appreciate the call, and I appreciate the honesty.
	I sympathize.
	We've all had our heart broken by the hangover of male infatuation, and I don't mean to minimize your relationship with the woman's children and the good things that you had in your relationship with her.
	But this does not doom you.
	This is the price of not doing the work that you need to do.
	This is the price of not getting the support that you need to get.
	And it's your body's way of saying, let's not do this again.
	And there's no need.
	You've got a support system.
	You've got at least me, people who you can chat with about this kind of stuff.
	And there's no need to...
	To go through this again, all right?
	You won't need to.
	This wasn't the very best that you could do, and you don't need to curl yourself into this self-pitying lump of it'll never improve.
	Yeah, I take that back, Steph.
	Right.
	No, and I know, and I'm just really pointing it out, because those sentences, they dig into our brain and they take up residence sometimes.
	Yeah.
	All right.
	Well, thanks, everyone, so much.
	Thank you, of course, Jason, and to the other callers.
	I really, really appreciate every call.
	And have yourself a wonderful, wonderful night, a very, very Merry Christmas, if you're listening to this before Christmas.
	And I hope you had a great Christmas if you're listening to it afterwards.
	And if you're listening to it a long way afterwards, it's the next Christmas.
	Well, you get how this goes.
	Freedomainradio.com slash today to help out the show.
	Thank you.
	Thank you so much.
	You can follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux and use our affiliate link at FDRURL.com slash...
	Amazon, have yourself a wonderful, wonderful night.

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