Feb. 20, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:56:07
3598 The Feminist Housewife? - Call In Show - February 16th, 2017
Question 1. [1:28] – “I've spent the majority of my adult life devoted to my career, considering myself a 'fiercely independent' feminist and not allowing men to have much control in a relationship. However, a few years ago I started dating someone who didn't accept this behavior and I found myself slowly taking on a traditional girlfriend role, now as a wife and mother. Things have gone really well between us and I'm happy, but still find myself missing my old life. I've heard you talk an awful lot about how women are wired to want men to provide resources while they take care of the young, but I don't feel it's coming natural to me. Am I broken? What can I do to ensure that I don't fall into old patterns? Do you think there's enough space for a woman to balance being a great wife and mom, yet also continue to stay in charge of her career without sacrificing family?”Question 2: [1:26:49] – “As I lived in a communist/socialist country and then moved to UK 10 years ago and I see life is much difficult in capitalism and there is poverty everywhere, can you please explain to me, Stefan why you always say capitalism is the best?”Question 3: [1:51:32] - "Now that we are in the "post-truth" era and we see a large factual divide between the left and right, do you believe it is more crucial than ever that higher education institutions start teaching from a non-partisan point of view, explaining both sides of the debate?"Question 4: [2:15:39] – “I am a libertarian at heart. I believe in the free market, small governments and allowing people to succeed or fail by their own virtues. I also recognize that certain cultures and populations are incompatible with a free society. Libertarians and their insistence on open borders present a contradiction. Is it possible to square that circle?”Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyne from Freedom Aid Radio.
Four callers tonight.
Fiercely independent feminist woman wants to know how on earth did she end up being tamed by a man and being turned into a mom, and how can she live with it?
It was a great conversation, very enjoyable, and we learned something important about male-female relations, I do believe.
Second caller calling in from the UK, the United Kingdom said, Steph, why do you say capitalism is the best?
I mean, I'm here in London and I see poverty everywhere.
So we started with definitions.
Always a good place to start.
The third caller just started his first, I guess of a four-year degree, course in In political science and says, hey man, why are they all such lefties and what am I going to do?
So we talked about college, its value these days and what else might be an option open to him.
A fourth caller said, what is the deal with open border libertarians?
What is going on?
What is their mindset?
Do they just want a free flow of drugs into their Lungs?
I don't know.
But I certainly took some educated guesses at the question.
Having come from the libertarian sphere myself, I know it fairly well.
And we theorized until the cows came home and took a giant dump of knowledge in our yard.
Anyway, sometimes the metaphors work, and sometimes you get those.
I hope you enjoyed the show.
I certainly did.
Please don't forget to support the show.
at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
That's freedomainradio.com slash donate.
Follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux and affiliate link, you know the drill, fdurl.com slash Amazon.
Alright, up first tonight we have Annika.
Annika wrote in and said, I spent the majority of my adult life devoted to my career, considering myself a fiercely independent feminist, and not allowing men to have much control in a relationship.
However, a few years ago I started dating someone who didn't accept this behavior, and I found myself slowly taking on a traditional girlfriend role now as a wife and mother.
Things have gone really well between us and I'm happy, but still find myself missing my old life.
I heard you talk an awful lot about how women are wired to want men to provide resources while they take care of the young, but I don't feel it's coming natural to me.
Am I broken?
What can I do to ensure that I don't fall into old patterns?
Do you think there's enough space for a woman to balance being a great wife and mom, yet also continue to stay in charge of her career without sacrificing family?
That's from Annika.
Oh, hey Annika, how are you doing tonight?
Uh, hello.
He read that much better than I would have.
I'm sorry, say again?
I said he read that much better than I would have.
Oh, good, good.
Well, I'll try not to take too much control during this conversation, but it's a great set of questions.
And is there more you wanted to add to this pattern that you've noticed?
Well, not so much to the pattern, but I think I need to clarify what I mean by feminist.
This started by me commenting in one of your videos, and it led to a very long thread where people were under the impression that by feminist I meant I hated men.
I complain about the patriarchy, and that's not the case.
By feminist, I mean I am not for the welfare state.
I believe that women are equal to men in a lot of ways.
Where they're not equal, I think that's by choice.
As far as the pay gap, I complain about the pay gap quite a bit, meaning I don't complain that there is a pay gap.
I complain that women complain about the pay gap.
So when I say feminist, what I mean is independent.
Like, not willing to use a man's resources.
And so, I mean, that's...
First off, I wanted to clarify that to you so that you don't think that you're speaking to someone who hates men.
Right.
And I don't have blue hair.
Right.
What do you mean by when you said independent, not taking a man's resources?
Okay, so I was single into my 20s.
I started college at a young age.
I... I had a very healthy relationship with both of my parents.
My mother was a stay-at-home mom who later went on to fulfill her career as an aeronautic engineer.
But I never felt comfortable allowing men to pay for dinners.
Part of this might have to do with the fact that I lived in California.
So it was very normal to split meals unless you're going to do other things.
If I knew that I wasn't going out with a guy again, I was not going to let him pay for dinner.
Things like that.
but more like not living with a boyfriend, but I'd rather live in a crappier apartment alone rather than shack up with someone else.
Those, I guess, does that make sense? - I'm not sure it does, but that just could be because of obviously my confusion.
So you would split bills, with a man, but only if you weren't going out with him again, if you were going out with him again, not so much?
There were times where I went on a date or two.
Like I said, I didn't really date until after college.
There were times that I'd go out and I would allow someone to pay for dinner if they insisted on it, or if they happened to pull out their credit card first, I wasn't going to make a scene.
But for the most part, I always had this feeling like I didn't want to owe them.
Or I think also I was exposed to feminism at a young age, like the negative side of feminism in Sweden.
And I saw this kind of like when men would take care of women, a lot of times there was like a control.
I don't know if that makes sense to you.
But like the guy now makes the decisions.
And I think that was a fear of mine.
And so I always felt like as long as I'm paying for my own meal, he's not going to expect more from me.
You don't want to have to give up sex for the price of a meal.
Am I putting it too bluntly?
Yes.
And I think I had one time where someone had asked me out and He kept pressuring and pressuring, and then he eventually brought up how much dinner cost, and I told him I was a virgin.
I think I was like 19 or 20 at the time.
Yeah, you don't want to be a carbonicide-based prostitute.
I understand that, and I think that's very noble, and I agree with you completely for what that's worth.
It's noble.
Hey, I bought you dinner.
Now I own you for the next 12 to 15 minutes.
Yeah, and that's very human.
Have those views.
I mean, I don't think all men are paying for dinner to get in their pants, but it's definitely something.
I mean, the biological reason a man would pay for dinner is he's showing that he has excess resources, which is supposed to stimulate your egg hunger for his protection for the next 20 years.
So tell me a little bit more about, you said you saw the negative side of feminism growing up in Sweden?
Yeah.
Yes.
The things that are happening today that are public, I know you've talked about the problems in Sweden with feminism.
I saw those when I was younger, when I was a teenager.
The very anti-male, the government wanting a matriarchy, so to speak.
Women are treated very, very fairly in Sweden as far as the pay and the way they're paid to go on Maternity leave, but I think a lot of that is, there's like a tribal, or at least there was, a tribal kind of mindset where everyone's like a giant family, at least in the town I was in.
So by taking care of a woman for X amount of months while she's off with her children, you're essentially, it's like a giant family.
You're just kind of taking care of each other.
And that works when it's voluntary.
And when everyone feels like they're family and when you're in a more homogenous society like the area I was in, it worked.
And so nobody complained.
We didn't feel like we were being stolen from and our resources were going to someone else.
Right, some of the more recent adoptees within Sweden might have put that theory to the test, right?
Yes, and yes, I still have a lot of family that lives out there and they complain quite frequently about what's going on.
So anyway, my point is...
But Swedish feminism, sorry to interrupt you, but Swedish feminism, I think has been, what's just over the last week or so, at least from the government side of things, has been revealed as...
A ridiculous and terrible joke, hasn't it?
Did you see the Swedish government women who went to go and visit Iran?
Yes.
And did you see what they wore when they went to go and visit Iran?
I'm trying to...
I'm hoping that this is all just kind of...
I don't even know how to...
I don't know.
I know that...
Okay, so you don't want to answer.
I understand.
So I'll tell people because you don't want to answer.
The Swedish politicians who went to go and visit Iran wore hijabs and bowed to the Islamic patriarchs.
Now, Iranian women, if you really want to see some truly tragic photos, you look at Iranian women protesting being forced to wear the hijab in the past.
Yes.
They really, really did not want to step back through the time portal into the Middle Ages in this situation.
And so it seems that the Swedish feminist politicians have no problem bowing down to brutal patriarchs who oppress women.
And they have no problem wearing the hijab when they go and visit Iran.
And this is all revealed.
This is all revealed that it's all a lie.
It's all worse.
It's toxic nonsense.
It's, you know, they're just, they're bowing down before a patriarchy.
Are you kidding me?
Yes, I don't agree.
Just so you know, I think that that was ridiculous.
I've totally faced it.
I know.
But I heard about that.
I know.
And I think that it makes women look insane.
Well, the fact that it's not being commented on much, this of course is men's fear, right?
Some men's fear is that feminism was, you've probably heard this, right?
But this fear that feminism was this big giant shit test, right?
In other words, the woman is like seeing, are you strong enough to rule us?
No?
Okay, we're going to walk all over you.
Okay, now we're going to go and bow before men who do oppress women because they're strong enough to rule us.
And it's just like...
Oh, please don't feed this idea so strongly.
Yes.
My father once explained it, and this was, I think, probably the late 80s, early 90s.
He saw some things go down in Sweden, and he said that it felt like, sort of like if you have your daughters, and there's three of us, there's me and my two sisters.
He said, if you have your daughters and you teach them to be strong, independent women, and yet they choose...
To be abused because you let them go free.
He said there's that balance between, okay, do I just let them go out and do their own thing and trust that they'll make the correct decisions that are going to protect their lives?
Or, like, how much do I protect them from themselves?
And that's where I feel like it's almost this infantilization of women.
Does that...
I mean, I don't know if you're...
I don't know how familiar you are with the whole Swedish situation right now.
Well, I think anytime women run to the government for resources, they're infantilizing themselves and preying upon men.
I mean, women, be independent.
You don't want no man?
Great.
Then stay out of the men's wallets, for God's sakes.
You know, stop using the power of the state, which you condemn as a patriarchal institution, and stop using the power of male-invented weaponry and a generally male police force to go and enforce the transfer of resources from helpless men before your political power.
If you want to be Independent, strong, equal women, then stop running to the government every time you run into a problem or want some additional security and force men to hand over resources.
That's turning from a dependent to a parasite.
And that right there is why I say, like, former feminist, and I don't feel that pulling resources from those around me is the solution.
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, I have this question about the word anarchy.
Can it be rescued?
I don't think it can.
I'm not sure that feminist is what you're talking about.
Feminist, if it's not political, like if you're just saying, listen, I don't want to be viewed as a mere sex object, of course, I face that struggle every single day, Annika.
It's horrifying.
It's just horrifying being objectified in this kind of way, being viewed by many people as a giant digital-based, bald, spotty dildo.
It's horrifying.
Let me tell you, I don't know how to get out of bed some mornings without feeling I'm just being constantly objectified on this world, so I understand.
No, you want to be equal.
You want to pay your own way.
You don't want to be owned or used.
I think that's called just having human dignity.
The fact that some of it is involved in gender, I don't think would put you under the political feminist side of the fence, for sure.
Okay.
But, yeah, I just wanted to clarify that.
I think what you just explained.
So, tell me about...
It sort of reminds me, and I'm sorry to characterize it this way, it's more to just make a bad joke, it reminds me of a Shakespeare play, Taming of the...
Do you know that was Merchant of Venice, Taming of the Shrew?
Something like that.
Because there is this argument or this idea that women will have certain ideas and women end up civilizing men in many ways, right?
Yes.
And I think that's a good thing.
That we create the community.
You create a community.
You beautify the home environment, right?
The nesting, and then you beautify the home environment.
You remind men to go see the doctor once a year.
You know, you could sort of go on and on.
But there's a civilizing, I mean, men live longer when they're married because they get better food, they're better environment, and so on, right?
Women have a wonderful civilizing effect on men.
What is less well understood, and maybe this is what you're talking about, Annika, but what is often less well understood or processed is that men can have an enormously civilizing impact on women.
And that is pulling them back from the state and pulling them back to family.
And recognizing that if you want to be a wife and mother and you want to be a good wife, and in particular a good mother, you're going to need to be dependent on a man.
Because you're going to stay home and be a good mother for a number of years, and someone damn well has to pay the bills.
Now, the person who pays the bills gets more say about the money, just as the woman who's home more gets more say about the home environment.
So that's where my situation's a little different.
That's why I wanted to get to this part.
I feel like a lot of times in your comment sections, there's been a few...
I'm sorry, I keep bringing that up, but that's kind of what got me...
Well, they're not my comment sections, but it was me.
Sorry, the internet, the...
There is a general view that women are trying to get resources because they're greedy.
I think that's a lot of the reason why it's been an issue for me.
I feel like if somebody pays the bills, even though I'm the one who's doing the laundry, I don't have a housekeeper anymore.
I had a housekeeper in the third trimester of my pregnancies because I could not tie my shoes, let alone scrub a toilet.
Were you, I'm sorry to interrupt, were you a big pregnant lady?
With my first one, I had polyhydronephrosis.
I think I said that correctly.
It's where I had like an aquarium amount of water.
And I thought that I was enormous.
And then I posted images of my bare belly on Facebook thinking I would gross people out.
And I got told that it didn't look as bad as...
But did you gain weight?
Because some women, like viewed from the back, they don't look really pregnant at all.
I don't understand that.
I have a very hourglass figure.
I have a very narrow, narrow waist.
Well, you're Swedish.
You're supposed to look fantastic.
You understand the stereotype, right?
I'm almost six feet tall also.
So I have the very narrow waist.
So from behind, the belly gets filled up with water.
So you're more square.
I gained a lot of water in my ankles.
But no, I mean, I gained the correct, I think my husband gained as much weight as I did.
Sympathy pregnancy.
Well, you're eating for two, I might as well join you.
So part of this, I don't know how deep you want me to get into the story time part of it, but part of this is that I had undergone a procedure to never have children.
Within six months of getting pregnant, and I was under the impression- Wait, wait, wait, what?
Okay, so yeah, that's why- No, no, it's more.
How old were you when you went through the- Not a hysterectomy, because then you wouldn't have kids at all.
No, no, no, no.
No, I had an IUD. Oh, so it's not a permanent, right?
No, no, no.
It was implanted, and it stays in for, what, four to six months?
No, in my case, I think it was a 10-year, I want to say, the one that I got.
I got the non-hormonal.
So this is part of the story because it's actually important to the story.
I went from, I'm a career woman.
I had sold a company and I was...
Yeah.
I was never going to have children.
I'm independent.
That was pretty much my view.
I joked with friends that, well, when I'm, you know, 40, I'll just get a 20-year-old boy.
You know, it was kind of a joke.
I wasn't serious about that.
I'm not attracted to younger men.
So it was just I was perpetually single and always very successful professionally.
Like, I always chased the next big thing in my career.
And I was very much a mentor to younger women.
And, you know, anyway, I don't want to go on a tangent.
Sorry, hang on a sec.
Hang on a sec.
In your mentor, but first of all, I just wanted to know, it's a two-part question.
Okay.
First of all, why didn't you want to have kids?
And secondly, did you mentor other women to not have kids?
I did not mentor other women to not have kids.
I mentored younger girls that wanted to get into STEM fields, the science, technology, engineering, and math.
Well, yes, but you could have said to them, get married, have your kids, and then do what my mom did, right?
Your mom, that is, right?
Which is to get into the field when you get a little older.
So you don't have this big, giant donut hole in the middle of your career where you have kids.
A few times that it came up, I said the opposite.
And this is because I was ignorant, I didn't have children, and I was ignoring the...
Biological clock, I think.
And so the few times that it did come up in a setting with young females, I said, well, why don't you go chase your career and make a bunch of money, be stable on your own, and then settle down and have children after you can afford a house.
So that was my...
Right.
When quality men are virtually absent from the dating pool.
Yes.
When you're facing the panic and time crunch of eggs and you're stressed out from work.
Yeah, that's a great time to settle down and have kids.
It was easy for me to say because I didn't have that desire.
Does that make sense?
So I forgot that there are women out there that they want more than nothing to have children.
But now, why was it that you didn't want to have kids?
I think most of it, I loved my career.
I liked how much I had succeeded and I got high off of that.
Like, I loved going to conferences.
I loved being a speaker in my field.
Not like, you know, on a podcast, but I loved chasing the next big project.
And for me, that was like my baby.
I know this sounds weird.
Oh, no, it's not weird at all.
I've tried to discuss this with some other, like usually men.
When I try to discuss this with men, they think that we're all wired to just want to have babies.
Well, I mean, sorry to interrupt.
Sorry to interrupt.
Okay.
But there is some evidence of wiring that kicks in in the 30s, right?
The baby rabies, right?
Yes, I've heard of that.
Maybe I was denying it, quite honestly.
Maybe there was just something in my mind that made...
And I don't know why I would do that, though, unless it was just natural, because my mother was a stay-at-home mom and she was very happy.
And...
Well, in the West, particularly white women and white men, we're programmed to not have kids, to not think of having kids, to not view kids...
I've been watching a little bit of a Netflix series called Stranger Things because I was kind of curious where the director's let's punch people statement came from in his Oscar or his acceptance speech for some Golden Globes or some award.
And the relentless anti-child propaganda is, well, relentless.
What, you're going to have kids and just move to the suburbs and be a cliche like your parents?
It's just nonstop.
And nobody shows the kids as having any fun with their parents.
And of course, every male in the series is going to betray you or be dysfunctional or, you know, whatever it is, right?
And so this is just one of six billion examples, but there's just relentless propaganda to not have children.
And to, you know, having children makes you square, makes you boring.
And there's this like weird pathological hatred of the suburbs, which you can only assume comes from artists who never thought they'd be able to live there.
But like somehow the suburbs is Satan's land of blank-faced, shiny, happy, plastic people, reproductive factory of emptiness.
I mean, it's just, I don't know.
It's just, it's bullshit.
We still have that in advertising.
Can I add one other fact to my pile of reasons why I didn't want children?
Yeah.
I hadn't met anybody.
I used to tell friends, anytime the topic of do you want children came up, I would always say, well, I don't just want children, but if I were to meet the right person.
And I had not been in a relationship with the kind of person that I would ever think to have children with.
Now, these were not bad people.
They just weren't the kind of people that I wanted to merge my genes with.
So, tell me about this magic man.
So, I lived in California.
How pretty is he?
Oh, my God.
He's gorgeous.
Oh, my God.
Well, there you go.
There you see.
For the men who listen to the other side, it works both ways.
Okay, come on.
Come on.
One to ten.
I'm like getting flush.
What kind of tasty hunk of man meat are we talking to here?
Give me a one to ten.
He's an eleven.
He's an 11?
He's one of those guys that all the gay guys hit on when we go out because he's so gorgeous they can't believe he's straight.
Right.
Yes.
Right.
More problems of my life you're describing, but yeah, no matter what you mean.
So the other...
He was homeschooled in Texas.
He actually has a complete opposite upbringing in some ways.
Like, he was homeschooled out in the field with cows.
Like, literally, it was just he and his brother.
And I went to a school, an international school in a big city.
And so there were a lot of those things that were diametrically opposed in us.
Due to the...
Oh gosh, what's it called?
The International Baccalaureate?
No, I did not.
Okay.
That's probably why you didn't go hardcore socialist and feminist, but anyway.
And even when I was younger, when I was 11, 12, 13, I remember I snuck into a GWAR concert.
Are you familiar with GWAR? No.
Okay, it's very, they wear a lot of costumes.
Anyway, I snuck into the concert when I was about 12 or 13 to use the restroom.
And then I snuck back out, but it was the only place that they had restrooms.
And I remember walking around there with my friend and there were women with their tops off and they had things written on their bodies.
And I just, I remember seeing that and We were in awe and someone said, oh, she's a feminist.
And I was like, oh, remind me not to be one of those.
Oh, it was a feminist who was walking around with her top off.
Somebody had used that as their explanation for why she was walking.
She had ripped off her, I think she was drunk.
But...
You know, it's funny, sorry to interrupt, but, you know, this is one of these great tragedies of life that the people you most want to see naked tend to be very conservative, and the people you really don't want to see naked are taking their clothes off all over the place.
It's real.
Very cruel.
Well, I'll take that as a compliment, because I don't take my clothes off.
Right.
Okay, so tell me more about this magic man and his feminist wrangling.
Okay.
I met him.
Things went very well.
I told him from the beginning, hey, I... Where did you meet?
We actually met Mensa.
Ah, good.
Yes.
And then we later caught up with one another online and we had friends in common.
And so I was new.
And then so, yeah, we kind of.
Yeah, so we had a lot in common with our political views, like he considers himself a libertarian.
I say classic liberal, mostly because it doesn't enrage my friends as much.
So basically he's a libertarian without the drugs and promiscuity.
Okay, so that's good.
He's very conservative that way.
Yeah, and he's very much a free thinker.
But from the very, very beginning, like the very first date, he was kind of, I don't even remember what all he said, but he would poke at me, stuff, and I go, oh, that's sexist.
And he's like, but it's true.
And I had not had any...
Wait, come on.
What did he say?
Anything?
I'm trying to think of...
God, there are so many things he said at the beginning of our relationship that most women would have just slapped him and walked away.
And I just giggled.
It was just really funny stuff.
Like he once told me, he said, you know what, you're probably the smartest chick I've ever met.
And I go, what do you mean, chick?
I go, you mean I'm the smartest person?
He goes, no, I've met much smarter men, but men tend to be smarter.
Things like that.
I'm like, oh my God, I can't believe you just said that to me.
Well, I mean, technically he's right.
They also tend to be dumber.
Yes.
And I know that I understand how the bell curve with intelligence.
That was more for the audience than for you, but sorry.
Okay.
But, I mean, Mensa.
So, he just, he didn't let, I was so used to living in California where men would, you'd say something and you'd make some proclamation and they would either agree with you or Or they would kind of cower.
And that's not any way to have a conversation.
You met a man with enough respect for you to tell you the truth, even if it bothered you.
Yes.
Yes.
You met a man who's actually a man and has courage and is willing to speak the truth.
That's important and is not unapologetic for being in possession of the facts.
Right.
But I still told him that I didn't want a super serious relationship because I was focused on my career and that I liked him.
I mean, I... I wasn't willing to have an open relationship.
Like, I'm not one of those.
I wasn't willing to mess around.
But just that I didn't want to get too serious because I didn't know kind of where my path was headed.
And then, so I had had this, the IUD, and a little more disclosure on that.
I have a neurological disorder, and the medication that I'm on because of it, It means that I can't be on hormonal birth control.
So the reason why I had to take such drastic measures is because the medication I was on, I can't be on while pregnant, and it would have weakened any form of birth control.
So I got the IUD. And within about six months, I fell pregnant.
And how that happened was I got what I believed was either appendicitis or a kidney infection.
It hurt really bad.
I went to a quick care clinic who prescribed me antibiotics, sent me home.
A few days later, my fever spiked to 104 for two days, and he took me to the ER. While I was at the ER, they did a CAT scan.
They did all kinds of tests.
They...
Sent me home.
And I remember friends had kind of joked that I was probably pregnant.
And I was like, no, that's not possible.
And even at the ER, the doctor had said, oh, no, you're not pregnant.
Two days later, I missed my monthly and I peed on a stick.
And sure enough, it showed that I was pregnant.
So...
I knew that there was no way I was pregnant still in my mind.
I was like, this is impossible.
So I went to the doctor.
You're basically married to a Greek god.
You know that, right?
Yes.
I mean, he's gorgeous.
He's unafraid of speaking the truth.
And apparently, his sperm can drill through medieval armor.
Yes.
So that is truly an impressive specimen.
And I'm sure we'll get lots of emails requesting sperm donations.
But anyway, go on.
So I'm trying to get that image out of my head.
Okay, so...
I went to my physician who drew my blood, told me I was in fact pregnant, that it was not a mistaken test at home, and sent me to another doctor to remove the IUD. Now,
at the beginning of all this, I still didn't think I had a viable pregnancy because I I had read enough online that said that, you know, when they remove the IUD, you have a 50-50 chance of spontaneous miscarriage.
However, if you leave it in, there's a lot of problems.
So in my mind, I am not having a baby.
This is a bump in the road.
This is a mistake.
It could be ectopic.
We don't know.
So that's why she sent me to a specialist.
Now, another, to rewind a little bit more into the story, when I had first moved to Texas from California, I had retained my California health insurance for a few months.
So I couldn't see a doctor here, and I couldn't go back to California.
So in a pinch, I went to Planned Parenthood.
And I paid $700 to get the IUD put in.
Because I don't qualify, and I didn't need to qualify.
Wait, sorry, to get the IUD taken out?
Put in.
Planned Parenthood here is...
Oh, sorry, sorry.
We're before now.
Yes, I'm rewinding back.
Okay, sorry, sorry.
I just wanted to make sure.
Okay, go ahead.
To give you a little more so that you don't...
I'm sorry.
I'm like giving all my reproductive history.
No, no, it's fine.
It's fine.
Okay, so I went to Planned Parenthood to get the IUD put in.
Went to my primary care physician to verify that I was in fact pregnant.
She sent me to another doctor.
Instead of going to the other doctor, I went back to Planned Parenthood and asked, you know...
What happened?
And they, of course, did another pregnancy test because that's what they do every time you tell them you're pregnant.
They would not examine me.
They made me...
They handed me a form that made me swear that I'm going to have a DNC. It's like I'm agreeing to a DNC, which is...
No, I know what that is.
It's essentially an abortion.
You hadn't indicated that you wanted a DNC. No, not at all.
I didn't know.
I mean, in my mind, I'm scrambled right now.
Everything's crazy.
I couldn't think rationally at the time because in my mind, I'm just going through this traumatic event where I'm afraid any minute I could bleed to death.
In my mind, I was going through a medical emergency.
I was not...
I didn't get that wonderful feeling that women get when they pee on a stick and they're pregnant and they get excited like they do in the commercials.
Yeah, that wasn't me.
I was traumatized and I was terrified any minute now I could die.
Because that's what I had read on the internet.
So at Planned Parenthood, they told me that I did not have a viable pregnancy.
And when she told me that, now my first degree was in biology.
So I'm familiar with how...
The human body works to some degree.
And I also know that you can't tell someone that they don't have a viable pregnancy when you've not examined them.
And the examination would be fairly complex.
It wouldn't just be a feel your belly.
I mean, there's no voodoo in this, right?
Yeah.
And so they told me, they actually kind of scared me a little bit and told me that I could Have all, like, infections.
They just, they gave me this whole list of horrible things that could have happened to me if I didn't go through with this.
So I went ahead and booked the appointment with the other specialist.
Went to see him.
He is the one who removed the IUD. And I told him what had happened at Planned Parenthood.
That they had told me I didn't have a viable pregnancy.
That they had, you know, tried to get me to agree to having a DNC when I... I was confused at the time, like I didn't really understand what was going on, and he removed the IUD and told me not to go back to Planned Parenthood unless I want an abortion, because they're not in the business of helping women have babies, which I understand.
They serve a purpose, and that's why I went to them in the process.
No, don't understand that.
Okay.
Don't be understanding about that, for heaven's sake, Zanika.
That's quite a story.
I understand that they aren't there to provide prenatal services.
That's not their job.
Well, that's no, no.
But I don't think that they're there to tell people, to tell women they don't have viable pregnancies and here are all the terrible things that will happen if you don't have an abortion.
Yeah.
That doesn't seem to me very, I'm no doctor, that does not strike me as particularly objective medical advice.
No, I am not siding with them at all.
Okay, so let's not be understanding.
What I mean is I understand that's not their job.
Me having a baby is not in their best interest.
All right, okay.
They make more money.
And thank you for that story.
That's very illustrative and instructive.
Okay, so let's move on.
I went back...
So I told you that I went back to the specialist who removed the IUD. He told me things would pass within a couple of weeks.
And I waited for things to pass.
Wait, wait, wait.
What do you mean things would pass?
That after the procedure, I would essentially pass everything.
I don't want to be too...
No, but it's 50-50, right?
Yes, but he was...
I mean, they say it's 50-50, but I... Or that things should pass, I guess.
I think what he meant was if the pregnancy does not continue, then you'll pass the fetus and the pregnancy material.
But if the pregnancy does continue, you won't, isn't that?
Yes, but I went in there under the impression that things were...
That this was not a pregnancy.
That this was an accident.
That there was something in there that was causing my hormones to spike.
And in my mind, I hadn't quite accepted that this was a pregnancy.
Does that make sense, I guess?
All right.
Okay.
Nothing passed.
I waited.
A couple of weeks went by.
Finally, I called my doctor again.
And that's a long two weeks.
I mean, it was at least 10 days that went by.
And I called my doctor.
I went back in.
And, of course, in all of this, I'm still thinking, okay, I'm just waiting for this to pass.
I'm waiting for this to pass and everything to be over.
And, you know, we had discussed my options and I had told her my decision.
And then she put the, I guess you call it the scope?
It's like the ultrasound wand.
With the goo, right?
Yeah.
And I rim it up inside.
And she had said, okay, now we're probably not going to see or hear anything.
So I don't want you to freak out.
And the second, I just heard that swooshing sound that I'll never get out of my mind.
And she actually congratulated me.
And of course, I'm freaking out.
And, you know, I'm like, I can't have a kid.
I'm, you know, I'm a career woman.
And she's...
Fumbling through my charts and, you know, says, well, do you ever want children?
I go, well, maybe someday.
She's like, you realize you're, you know, you're over 30.
Like, someday needs to come sooner than later.
And so I think, I didn't...
Did you hear that?
I mean, when you say the swooshing sounds, sorry to interrupt, Annika, do you mean the heartbeat?
The heartbeat that I... I have friends that insist that's not a heartbeat.
It's just swooshing.
And did you see, I remember seeing my daughter for the first time, she looked like a tiny little Pac-Man.
Yes.
And I still have all of those images.
So, like, really, really long story explaining that.
So then I, you know, eight months later, I had a child.
And it wasn't easy.
I mean, I couldn't announce it for 13 weeks because I was considered high risk.
And there were some other things.
Like I said, I had the polyhydronephrosis, which is where you have lots and lots of water.
Just little things like that.
And then once I hit about 13 weeks, the doctor said that she thought I was in the clear so I could announce to friends and family.
And it was a shock to a lot of my friends.
They thought I was joking.
You know, of course, when I take to social media, because I was known for kind of being a prankster and for saying time and time again that I would never have children, that I loved my career, and I don't know how much of that I was trying to convince myself.
But I'm very happy.
So fast forward to now.
I'm very happy.
We get along great.
We didn't get legally married, and that might be part of this discussion with you.
A lot of the decisions I've made, like to not get legally married or saying things like, oh, I never want to wear a ring, those were all because I associate those with bad women in my mind,
and I don't know really where that comes from other than I... The industry that I'm in, I was surrounded by men a lot, so I've heard a lot of horror stories of women that divorce a man and take everything, or women that were horrible, and I've heard so many stories that I think I just said at one point, you know, I don't want to be like those women.
I'm not going to marry a man.
I'm not going to ruin his life, you know, and I think that has more...
But your mom wore a ring, right?
Oh, yes, definitely.
She wore three.
Three very thin bands.
And, no, my mother was very happy.
She...
But my parents got married at like 16.
I mean, they were very young.
They were each other's first kiss.
So I don't...
So it's not like...
Yeah, I mean, my mother was a good example of...
And my parents didn't spank, which blows people's minds when I tell them.
Good.
Good for them.
I don't want to say I'm trying, because I know how you feel about that phrase.
I have...
Very few times needed to physically aggress myself.
And that's the term I use, even though friends of mine say, no, no, no, it's just spanking.
I go, no, it's aggressing.
And you say, well, we'll get to that, the need to part.
So you're not married, right?
We consider ourselves married.
We're in a state that likely considers us common law.
But as far as booking a date, that's not been a big deal to either of us.
But we live as though we are.
Does that make sense?
No, and it would be nice if the state wasn't involved.
So that's the other thing.
We're not religious.
And I don't really feel...
I feel like it's a business transaction.
And because both he and I have business transactions with other people, it kind of...
I'm already married to a handful of other people on paper.
He's married to other people on paper.
Like, I mean, you know what I mean by married.
I mean business associates.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, very, very briefly, for those who haven't, and I haven't talked about it in a while, my case for marriage is, if you're not religious, and it certainly has nothing to do with the state, but marriage is when you say to your friends, if we think about breaking up, tell us to stay together.
That, yeah.
Right.
That's the key thing.
I mean, and particularly it's around kids, right?
Once you have kids, then you need to stay together.
And a new study just came out a couple of days ago talking about how, and this is a repeat study, or at least it reaffirms earlier studies that say that the people who are facing dark times in their marriage and they stay together, they're much happier.
And five years later, most of them are very thankful that they stayed together.
Yeah.
And so it is just, it's a public declaration of the intent to stay together for the rest of your life, or at least until the children grow up.
And it's the public declaration that says, you know, if you've gone on three dates and you sit down with some friend and say, well, I don't know, they're going to say, well, why bother continuing, right?
But if you've made this public commitment, a public declaration to all of your friends and family that you're going to be together and stay together, then if you hit rough patches or dark times, your friends are going to say, Oh no, now we're going to tell you to stay together because that was your initial plan.
Yeah.
I think that we're to that point.
We've had our relationship affirmed by everyone we know and most people.
That's why I say I pretty much just consider us married, so does he.
People are surprised when they find out we're not legally married.
Right.
Okay, so let's talk about the spanking.
Okay.
I do not believe I am a non-aggression principle kind of person.
I also believe in, you know, protecting my home and my life.
So I'm also a Second Amendment supporter.
Mm-hmm.
Do not like the idea of either yelling or...
I use the word aggress, meaning I don't want to respond to a child, especially a child who's just learning how to...
They're just forming their personality.
I don't want to respond to that person in anger.
And there are very few times where...
And I... I'm not making excuses.
I don't want you to think that I am.
But there are times where it's gotten to be too much.
I breastfed.
I have another one now.
Mine were 12 months apart.
So that's a little bit more of the story is that I finally decided to get my tubes tied because we realized that birth control is not going to be an option for us.
We've two for two.
We had two children and I'm done.
So As far as spanking, there have been a few times I've, like, popped her on the thigh because she was about to run out into traffic, or I've, you know, popped the hand because it was going for something sharp, and I know that that's not a positive thing.
And so, but I kind of, I think in my mind, I was like, well, if they're under two, it's okay, because they're not going to remember it.
But you probably don't agree with that.
I mean, the body remembers the circumcision that occurs a few hours after birth, right?
I understand.
No, and that's why I said I'm not making excuses.
I'm just saying I'm not perfect.
I've also driven home from a bar after drinking a beer in my lifetime.
That doesn't mean I condone drinking and driving.
Yeah, don't hit your kids.
Yeah.
No, like when you say you're not making excuses, but you've minimized it, you use the word popping rather than hitting, right?
Yes.
Yes.
Which is minimizing.
And if you were comfortable with what you were doing, you'd use the correct term, right?
Yes.
Okay, spanking or hitting.
So don't.
No, you're just hitting.
Okay.
So don't do that, right?
Come on.
You're a fiercely intelligent woman.
Okay.
Very well educated.
You listen to this show.
You have no excuse for hitting your children.
And you were raised without being hit.
Yes.
You have absolutely no excuse in any way, shape, or form.
You're smart, verbal, easily competent enough to negotiate with toddlers.
You are smart enough to proactively child-proof your home.
You're smart enough to recognize that if your child's in a dangerous situation, you don't punish the child.
You review your own behavior that led to that situation.
I mean, Annika, I don't need to tell this to you.
That has to be off the table.
Yes.
As far as your parenting.
It has.
Not like, well, I'm not perfect, so I'll allow myself to do it sometimes.
Would you accept that for your husband?
He's so good looking, I'm sure he could have an affair anytime he wanted.
No, of course not.
Well, I'm faithful most of the time.
I'm not perfect.
Yes, I agree with you.
And I mean, it's not been something I've done recently.
And it's not something I intend to do in the future.
Right.
And yeah, don't yell.
Okay.
Then I can, sorry.
It's not worth it.
Okay.
So, but congratulations.
Thank you.
I love to hear smart people having babies.
I really do.
I think it's wonderful.
And so, what an interesting path to a family.
Yes, it was completely unplanned.
It's almost like the family just kind of leapt out of the deep bush like a tiger and took you down.
You know what I mean?
Okay, I guess I'm having a family.
The irony is that I plan everything in my life, like even moving out of state.
It was a four-month sit-down, you know, write everything out.
And I remember when I was younger, my parents decided to start children very early in life at age 20.
And I remember my father, I said, he had asked me at one point in my mid-twenties if I was ever going to have children.
I said, well, when I'm ready.
And he said, you'll never be ready.
And that really stuck with me, you know, and I have thought about that throughout the years, that I don't think I'll have children because I don't think I'll ever be ready.
And I was fortunate that this happened with somebody who is a great dad.
But then there was also that, okay, I sort of flipped out when I realized I was having a baby and I decided to gather my belongings and I was going to leave for California.
Part of it might have been pregnancy brain.
I know, Stefan.
Wait, what?
You've got the guy of, it sounds like every woman's dreams, right?
He's smart.
He's a classical liberal.
He's gorgeous.
He listens to this show.
I'm obviously going in ascending order of attractiveness.
And you're like, wow, he's knocked me up against all odds.
And so I'm going to go and be a single mom in California.
That was the next plan?
It's...
Oh, I know why.
Because then you'll actually have to be dependent on the goodwill of a man.
Yes.
You'll have to trust the father of your child and you'll have to rely upon him to gather the resources you need in order to survive.
You'll have to have a division of labor within the family.
He'll have to be dependent on you and you'll have to be dependent on him.
And you want to be two atoms orbiting each other rather than one unit working together.
That was a lot of it.
Got it.
I didn't want to appear as weak.
I... Does that...
That probably doesn't make any sense to you, but I've...
No, it makes perfect sense to me because we view dependence as weakness.
Yes.
At least I do.
But it's not.
Yeah.
It's not.
No, I mean, dependence...
Dependence on another human being is trust.
It's a form of strength because what you're doing when you depend upon another human being and you surrender your autonomy and your independence to another human being is you're saying, I trust myself to have made the right choice in who I'm going to be dependent on and I am such a wonderful person that my security is how lovable I am, how much value I'm providing to this other person.
And therefore, it is, in fact, a great strength and a mark of my virtue that I'm willing to be dependent on another human being because it means that I value myself enough to know that I'm irreplaceable in this person's life, and that is my security.
Yes.
That's not how I viewed it at the time.
Sure.
So...
Sure.
I mean, because you've...
Again, there's all this programming.
It's all the way in just about every...
It's a woman's film I've seen.
And it's all, well, the man might just wake up tomorrow and be a ha!
You know, he may become a drunk.
He may just get fired and not tell you.
He may go have an affair.
He may leave you for a younger woman.
Yes.
Don't trust a man.
Don't trust a man.
Of course, all the lefties want you to not trust a man, so you end up independent on the state.
It's a pretty simple equation.
But all of this insulting of men, it's not even personal to men.
It's not even like these feminists hate men.
They just...
Useful idiots for feeding state power, that's all.
It's not like they directly hate men, it's just that men are in the way of linking women to dependence on the state.
And so men have to be knocked away.
You know, like if I'm going through, when I used to work up north, the gold panning and prospecting, I would have a machete for cutting my way through the bush.
And when I needed to get to the next blaze, I would cut sometimes through the bush to get to it.
It wasn't personal.
I didn't hate the bush.
Bush.
It was just in my way to my objective.
And for the socialists and the feminists and the leftists and all of that, the communists, well, reliable, honest, decent, honorable, virtuous men are just in the way of their aggregations of state power, which they get by making women dependent on the state and voting for bigger and bigger government.
And It's not even personal like they hate men.
It's just that they love the state and they want power.
And, you know, like if an addict steals from you, it's not because he hates you, it's just because he loves his drug and you're just the means to get there.
So I don't really take a lot of this man hatred or white hatred or whatever.
I don't really take it personally.
It's not directed at any particular analysis of masculinity.
It's just, well, we're in the way to more and more state power and lots of people like state power.
I think part of me there was like a fear of becoming that and I tend to be I didn't want to be like that so much.
Like what?
Like the women who take resources or the women who rely on men.
Like I said, I came into this relationship financially secure.
I had savings.
I was co-founder of a business that by the time I got pregnant, we had sold it and I was doing fine with my own resources.
So the resources part, having a man, financially I could take care of a child on my own.
That wouldn't have been an issue.
Now I understand emotionally and there's a lot more that goes into taking care of a child than just money.
But because I had the finances secured, I would never have to go to the state.
Because I was secure that way, I think that in my mind, I felt like I was able to do it on my own.
Well, it's funny what you said there.
And of course, you know that...
For children to grow up without a father is catastrophic.
Oh, definitely.
And sometimes, you know, in cases of widows, it just happens.
But hang on.
So you know that.
So we won't batten back and forth what we agree with.
But I was interested how you said, I wouldn't want to take resources from a man.
Yes.
Well, Annika, you're not taking resources from a man because you are creating life in the world.
You are creating...
That man's children and you are nurturing and breastfeeding and getting up in the middle of the night to help raise That man's children.
You're not just taking resources.
You know, like, it's an exchange.
It's an exchange.
Yeah.
Like, if you're going to mistake yourself for the, you know, the stereotypical ladies who lunch, you know, like, no kids, two maids, and lots of lunchtime with Hermes bags and white gloves.
You know, like, I can't possibly get a job because I've got some flower arranging courses to take down at the club, my dear.
Yes.
You know, that's not you.
You're creating life.
You're creating this man's children.
You're raising his children.
You're not taking resources.
It's like me saying, well, I'm going to go and steal from the restaurant by having a meal and paying them.
It's like, no, no, that's an exchange, right?
Yeah.
It still was hard for me, and like what you just described, the women with the Hermes bags, and they have a nanny, and then they have a housekeeper, and then they're a stay-at-home mother who does makeup all day.
I live in an area that is very common, and I think that was another reason it was important for me to only have a housekeeper during the few months that I needed, because I kind of felt like, well, if I'm home and if I'm with the children, I can clean up my home on my own.
And so I think that was another, it was like an insecurity.
Like I don't want to be seen as one of those wives that, you know, doesn't take care of herself.
Right.
No, I mean, running a household is a big deal.
It's a big deal.
Oh, it's much harder.
Trust me.
So that's to get to the last part of kind of my series of questions is I love being a stay-at-home mother.
I also work.
I do a lot of consulting in my industry.
I have a lot going on.
But I feel when I'm working that I provide so much more value that is...
I'm not saying that being a mother isn't tangible, but I feel like I can do something.
It's more immediate.
Yes, it's an immediate, yes.
Yeah, you get a paycheck, you get approval, you get, right?
Whereas the kids, it's like, well, I hope they turn out really well a quarter century from now on.
I don't know if I can defend my resource gratification satisfaction that far, right?
Yes, it's that you get to see your name in lights right then and there, and it confirms that you were good at what you did, and then you get another call for the next job.
And I think...
There was a lot of that that I liked, especially because the nature of my work, because I own my own business, it's not like a 40-hour-a-week clock-in-and-clock-out.
I could see the fruits of my labor within a couple of weeks, versus with children.
You work really hard for 18 years, and they could still not turn out the best.
Like, I mean, I don't know.
I think my parents did a great job.
The other good thing is that his parents just celebrated their 45th anniversary.
So he comes from a very stable home.
And his family has been very, very good with this whole situation.
His parents are very religious.
And they were, as they call it, shacking up.
They were not very...
of us not having a piece of paper.
And, you know, that's where he's had to put down his foot and say, you know, this is our relationship.
We're providing a safe, loving home for our children.
And just because we haven't walked down the aisle doesn't mean we're not committed.
And I think that was their concern.
So, but I love his family.
They're great.
And so I think the, but to get back to what I was saying about the immediate gratification, I think that has a lot to do with why there's still that nagging in the back of my mind.
Like, should I just get a nanny?
A Should I just go back to working when they're in school?
I mean, I wanted to ask your opinion if you think that it's possible for women to have both and succeed well in both.
How...
How many hours a week are you working at the moment?
Currently five to ten.
A lot of it, I do a lot of consulting.
So it's really, it's like, you know, a couple of hours here and there.
But the pay is good enough that I don't have to work full time.
Unless I have to travel.
But that's not, that's probably not going to happen for another year or two.
And do you know what you're going to do for educating your kids?
We've thought about homeschooling.
If we do homeschooling, I'd prefer to do...
I don't want public school.
For the cost of two children in private school in the area I live in, I could get a full-time tutor with a degree to take care of in my home.
Because it's almost $30,000 per child at the schools that we've looked at here.
Well, and they follow the government curriculum anyway.
Yes.
And his mother was brilliant.
She was a genius.
And she homeschooled her kids.
And she chose to be a stay-at-home mother as well.
She was smart enough.
I think a lot of stay-at-home moms get a bad rap.
People think that they become mothers because they can't succeed elsewhere.
I don't know if you're...
If you've ever heard that sentiment, but I've...
It's the same thing that men, if men have critiques of modern femininity, or you can't get laid, you can't get a girlfriend.
It's not an argument, of course, right?
And it is this idea that parenting is some low intelligence occupation.
I can tell you why people have that perspective.
Because moms who dump their kids in daycare, being staffed by largely minimum wage workers, like to feel that...
That the low-wage workers who have no particular attachments to their children and who are going to be cycling in and out of the field pretty regularly, they like to think that that's the value of parenting, right?
So, you know, some poor schmuck being paid seven bucks an hour to be in the same room as your child is exactly the same as you...
Being at home and actually parenting your children.
So this idea that motherhood is worth seven bucks an hour comes out of the guilty conscience of people who had kids and dumped them in the brain sewage of daycare.
So it's ridiculous and it's complete nonsense.
Intelligent mothers, intelligent parents, careful, wise, considerate parents are gold on this planet and are completely irreplaceable.
I mean, you are to your children as irreplaceable as your husband is to you.
Yes.
Yeah, I mean, I think that I'm probably more important in the beginning because of the nursing.
And so now the other benefit in our relationship is that we both work from home.
So we're able to share the child rearing 50-50.
Um, so there's a lot of times where he has to like go take a call for work for a couple of hours.
And so we kind of schedule around one another.
Um, there's been times where he's kind of kicked me out of the house and said, go do something.
You're going crazy.
Like, go get your feet done or just do something.
Just get out of the house for an hour or two.
I'll watch the kids.
So that's actually, that's helpful.
And then we split the diapers and, you know, there's a lot of that.
But when it comes to the actual housekeeping, I do that because I'm also, I'm not paying the mortgage.
So there was that, there was that whole, you know, I said, you know, we can, I'll go buy my own house and we can, the kids can go back and forth.
And this was in the beginning.
You know, this was when we decided.
I need to give you a speech here.
Okay.
I need to give you a speech.
Oh God.
Are you ready?
Yeah.
Are you ready?
Okay.
I know how you like an assertive man.
So Annika, I'm going to give you a speech.
Okay.
And I'm giving you this speech out of genuine admiration and concern, not for anything that's going on in your family, but for the discontentedness that seems to have you not enjoying what sounds to me like about the most fantastic setup in the known universe.
All right.
So let me...
Let me just run through.
And also I'm saying this because I can hear...
I mean, I'm happy.
I'm very happy with...
I mean, I wouldn't change.
I get it.
I get it.
But stop hedging your happiness.
Okay.
Because here's the thing.
You know the planet the world over.
You've got half the human population living on less than $2 a day, right?
And here's the world of Annika.
Here's the world of Annika.
I work in a highly challenging, intellectually stimulating field where I can choose my own hours and work from home and get exceedingly well paid.
My husband, pretty much the same.
I have health.
I have a gorgeous husband who loves me to death.
I have two happy and healthy children.
I can choose to work or not to work.
I have enough money.
I have enough savings.
I have enough skills to live as peacefully and positively as I choose.
I'm not bound to send my kids to public school.
I have no fear of divorce or my husband leaving me.
I have what could generally be considered one of the 12 to 15 best lives on the planet.
And I'm grateful.
Right.
So what's the problem?
What problem are you creating?
What rocks are you throwing into this pool to make jagged ripples out of the perfect reflection of a heavenly life?
It's not a problem until I start to talk to friends of mine who...
Hey, I've got a good idea.
Oh God, drop my friends.
I've got a good idea.
If people are making you dissatisfied with a perfect life, they may not be the very best friends you could conceive of.
A lot of them are my old friends.
From prior to moving here.
Yeah.
Don't forget, you know, don't forget Misery Loves Company.
If you have people in your life who are discontented with their lives, either get them contented with their lives or recognize that they're going to try and get you discontented with your life.
Yeah.
You have, come on, you have.
Look at this from the outside, Anika.
What is conceivably wrong with everything about your life or anything about your life?
Things aren't perfect.
I mean, like I said...
Things are perfect, except for friends whispering in your ear like Iago that something may be wrong.
Ooh, something may be wrong.
Ooh, be careful.
Ooh, you don't want to be this.
Ooh, you need to be careful again.
No, thank you.
Enjoy.
This is a perfect time in your life, isn't it?
Yes.
What would you change to improve things?
Um...
The weather?
I mean, if I had to change something.
I live in an area where the weather sucks, but it's hot in the summer.
It's very hot and muggy.
I would change the weather.
Yes, please.
Please tell the Canadian how warm it is where you are in February!
It gets up to like 109 out here.
It's very hot.
Yeah?
Well, we have skiing and sometimes my nose goes red.
Anyway, so...
Um, no, listen, I mean, if, if, if there's, there's nothing, you have like the least problem of anyone who's ever called into this show.
I just, I, and I'm not trying to make you feel bad about it.
I mean, other than this banking thing, which you can fix it.
My original, when I reached out to you was asking for a list of books about philosophy.
I don't know if you remember, that was about a week ago and you told me to call in.
Um, right.
And so I don't have problems like what a lot of the people that call into your show have.
Um, But that's not to say that things are perfect.
I mean, I'm sure I have epilepsy there.
It's a mild form, but it's still, it's something.
It responds to medication, though, right?
Yes.
Yeah, but because of the nursing, I would prefer to have a couple of very mild seizures per month than either poison my milk supply or stop nursing.
So that was a trade-off that I was willing to do.
And I sympathize with that.
I mean, it's not much a philosopher can do about that kind of stuff, but I really...
I sympathize with that.
But in terms of...
I think you've made an amazing transition.
I think that you have fallen in love with a husband and with your children.
And I think that you've navigated...
The dependence that you have, listen, it doesn't have fundamentally anything to do about money.
You know that, right?
The dependence doesn't have anything to do with money in any fundamental way.
I mean, once your basic needs are taken care of.
The dependence you have is now, whereas before your happiness was much more under your control, now, Annika, your happiness is dependent upon those around you significantly, right?
Yes.
That is a, you know, for people who really like being in control of the variables, you know, I don't need to tell you this, every parent thinks about it, right?
Your kids could get sick, right?
I mean, something could happen that's outside of your control, and your happiness will be shredded in a way that never would have happened were you to be a single person.
So what's happened is you've now merged into a complex, interdependent web of happiness, only some of The variables in which you can control.
Okay, so to add to the story, my mother passed away when I was a teenager.
She died of breast cancer.
And I think that had a little to do with the fear of losing the one person in my life that I knew I would eventually lose.
I didn't anticipate losing her as early as I did.
And then seven years ago on Christmas Day, my father passed away from cancer.
And then shortly after my father died, one of my sisters passed away while pregnant.
So I think there was kind of...
While pregnant?
While pregnant.
She was two or three days prior to her making her announcement to everyone.
She died of an aneurysm in her sleep.
Yeah, it was a horrible, horrible thing to happen.
And that was about three and a half, four years ago, maybe.
So you have only one sister left?
Yes, I have one sister.
You all are being very careful, right?
Yes, yes.
I went out and got checked.
I don't have the gene.
We don't have Ashkenazi Jew in our bloodline, so they can't test for the BRCA1 and 2.
If I'm not mistaken, that's the only gene they can test for.
If somebody else has more information than I do, I would...
I like to hear, but from what I understand, the only genes that they can actually test for are the BRCA1 and 2, the BRCA1 and 2.
And because I have no Ashkenazi Jew, I would not have that marker.
I'm pretty sure that's how it works.
Because I did get tested, and I don't carry the gene.
I think all the more reason to cast aside discontent and embrace the joys of life that you have.
I mean, your parents, were they able to Watch you, Annika.
They would want you to enjoy your life as much as humanly possible, and you have so many reasons to have a wonderful life.
Yes.
Right?
They would not...
They would not want you to worry.
I mean, certainly, I think on everyone's deathbed, they look back and say, well, now I have a real problem.
Before, not so much.
Now I have a real problem, which is I'm never getting out of this bed, except when I'm carried out to be thrown down a hole.
So that, I think, is part of the reminder.
And that's a lot of death to absorb in a young life.
So I'm deeply sympathetic to And it is terrible sometimes how bad people seem to live on and on and good people, as the Billy Joel song says, right?
I heard a lot of comments like that when my mother passed away, the number of people that said that she was probably the last person that they would have wanted.
I have a cousin who was raised by a very violent mother.
She's an extended cousin, she's like fifth, but we're very close.
And we keep in contact, and she said that the number of times that she would lay in bed as a child and pray that she'd wake up and her mother would be gone.
And then she said it hit her really hard when she found out my mother passed away, because she really liked my mom a lot.
I mean, hearing things like that makes me happy, I guess, because at least she died leaving a very strong, good impression on those around her.
But...
It's still, it feels unfair.
And I think my biggest fear- And a quarter of her, right?
A quarter of her is poured into your children.
Yes.
And my biggest fear in life would be losing one of my children.
Or obviously my spouse.
But I want, like, it just, I can't even think about it without, you know, it just, it Really scares me.
And I think that goes back...
Part of that could be control.
Part of it is just our instinct to not have our...
Well, it's love.
Yeah.
It's love.
But...
It's love.
It's...
I don't know.
That's the deal, though.
Love and loss.
Yeah.
That's the deal.
I mean, you can avoid loss, but only by avoiding love.
Yeah.
I mean, there's a great movie called Shadowlands about this.
It's well worth watching.
Okay.
I'll write that down.
Yeah, it's with Anthony Hopkins and some woman who seems to die of cancer in every movie I've ever seen her in.
But anyway, that is the deal.
And there's no way around the deal.
Whatever we love, we will lose.
Or whoever we love, we will lose.
Or they will lose us.
That's the deal.
And I don't know that there's no way to avoid it except by avoiding love.
And I've seen the results of that, and that's even worse.
It's the old thing, better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
It's very true.
I've seen the people who've tried to protect themselves by going armadillo versus life, rolling into a ball, putting up the hide of bright armor around themselves, and never getting involved in anything particularly deep or meaningful and skating through life on things.
Netflix binges and video games and movies and nothingness and games that go on way past their due date for adolescence or past adolescence.
And what happens?
What happens?
What happens is they sort of become ghosts in their own middle-aged life.
They're just kind of rambling through.
The avoidance of pain is the avoidance of life.
And not because life is pain, but life always ends in pain.
Always.
You know this from your family.
It always ends in pain and it ends in pain for people who die slowly and it ends in pain for people who survive them.
The alternative being what?
Well, what is the alternative?
Never love?
No way.
No way.
Yeah.
No way, because that's surrendering to the fear of death before you're even dead.
Don't give that bastard one inch before he comes.
Wait a moment.
I have a question for you.
I mean, why do you think that by not having a romantic love?
Because through most of my 20s, I was single and I was very happy.
I was not sad.
I didn't feel there was a hole.
I was very content with myself as a person and friendships and To bring it back to my career, I felt whole without a man in my life.
So when I finally met someone, it was like icing on the cake, but I already had the cake.
Yeah, but that cake doesn't last.
I don't know.
Do you really think that people have to find a partner in order to be happy?
I mean, it's your show.
I mean, I always hesitate to make absolute statements.
Because, you know, I mean, there are semi-autistic people out there who are probably better off with, I don't know, I hate to make absolute statements.
It doesn't have to be love of a person, it doesn't have to be love of a child, although I think those things are kind of hardwired into us, and that's kind of the way I think that love flows.
But it's got to be love of something.
Now, you had a love of your career, and that it loved you back, which is good, because, you know, lots of people love a career that doesn't love them back, like actors or whatever, right?
And so you had a love, and maybe that love could have sustained you.
Maybe that love could have sustained you, but it's not animate.
It's not animate, right?
Yeah.
It doesn't love you back the way a person can.
It doesn't crawl into bed with you and cuddle when it's had a bad dream.
It doesn't need you when it has a cold.
It doesn't demand that you look at it every time it learns every single new possible physical capability and do so repeatedly, right?
Yeah.
So the career won't love you back and the career won't last.
You know, you'll have your kids into your old age.
You live to be 90.
You're good to your kids.
You'll have your kids around.
They'll be grandkids.
They'll be great grandkids.
It's something that sustains and grows as you get older.
But a career, I mean, I guess you can keep going until you're 90 and I guess some people do, but, um, It's not a relationship that can love you back.
You do great things in your career and people will give you money.
Sure.
And that money can be used to buy things.
Sure.
But it is a dry calculation of mutual utility.
It's not reciprocal romantic love with clients and customers and so on.
They're not going to be there when you're sick.
They're not going to be there when you're scared.
They're not going to hold your hand.
They're not going to celebrate your triumphs.
At home with you.
You can spend your entire day being paid $1,000 an hour to satisfy clients.
You come home and the apartment or the house is as empty as when you left in the morning.
So you can love the career, but they can't love you.
The career can't love you back.
It's not reciprocal that way.
And that's why you get paid, right?
The people who love you back, you don't pay them, right?
You don't pay them for their time.
You...
The pay that you get and you give is love, loyalty, affection, monogamy, respect.
That's the intangibles, I think, that build the true basis of a contented, rich, and happy life.
And stuff that works in your 20s is not necessarily the same stuff that's going to work in your 70s or your 80s.
That stuff takes a little bit more building.
And I don't think there's any substitute For live people on the weekends.
You know, customers go away on the weekends and they go and have their lives.
And they go and have their families and they go and raise their children.
And you're home.
And, you know, when you're in your 20s, of course, your friends are all single, right?
And they're all doing the same thing.
They went to college, they're starting their careers, they're doing this, they're doing that.
But, you know, you get into your 30s and 40s and 50s, well, your friends, I hope, are doing different things, right?
It becomes sad.
Like, I have friends that are my age that are, some male, some female, that are still single.
If they were 24, 25, it'd be cute.
But now it's really sad.
They have five or six roommates still.
They are still living paycheck to paycheck, making good money, but living in an area that's very expensive.
And it's hard to accumulate savings when you live in a place like California, or at least the areas I was in.
And so I see them.
And even though I... I can tell that there's sadness there, and a lot of it just has to do with how they view the world.
Not even that they say, I'm sad, but the way that they comment and their views...
It comes out of cynicism.
Yes, they're so cynical.
Yeah.
I mean, and I've had friends that used to say, oh, you're so cute, it makes me want to puke, like talking about a relationship, my current relationship.
What, this is a friend who's telling you that?
Yes, and they're trying to be...
Okay, so that's why you're called again.
It's friends that I've had for years that are genuine and they're kind people, but they say things like, oh, your family's so cute.
You know, like, oh, you make me sick.
But they mean, like, because you're, you know, like, upload a picture, a family photo from Christmas and because they're single and because they're still doing Friendsgiving and they're over 40.
Yeah.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
There's nothing wrong with if you don't have family near you collecting your friends.
I mean, even you've spoken in the past about not everybody has good family and sometimes they have to replace those relationships with other people.
But I do once in a while get, you know, get comments from friends that I can tell that they're just unhappy with their own lives.
Well, success is a challenge.
For people.
Yeah, but not everybody.
It's an old song, success has made a failure of our home.
I mean, when I began to really achieve success in my life in my late 20s in the business world, and then through this conversation, how many of my friends could come along?
When I found the love of my life, and we've now been married 15 years, and how many of my friends could come along?
How many of them were genuinely happy and weren't comparing themselves to me and weren't jealous or envious or troubled by the happiness that I had found, the success that I had found?
How many people viewed my success as a rocket going upwards that burnt them in the wake?
How many of them could be genuinely pleased?
Well, We'd have to share values, right?
We'd have to say, well, success is a very important thing if you're doing it in the right way and for the right reasons, but the right effect.
It's a wonderful thing.
Then they would have to say, well, success in the pursuit of virtue is a very good thing.
And then they'd have to look at their own lives and say, well, am I pursuing success in the cause of virtue?
That might be part of the problem, is that I gravitated differently.
And like I said, the industry that I'm in, there's not as many females.
So the majority of my colleagues are male.
And so I don't really bond with people that have, well, at least prior to having children.
I didn't really bond with people that had children that were always out doing things.
It's kind of like when you're the single person and all your friends have boyfriends and girlfriends.
Uh, you don't get invited everywhere.
So I think that was part of it is that I surrounded myself with other, uh, I was in like the island of misfit toys and we were all perpetually single, you know, hashtag never alone or never, sorry, hashtag forever alone.
Um, that was a interesting little slip.
Um, but like once you start the family, um, You gravitate toward other people that have families.
And I think it's also, it might be one of those situations where the grass is greener on the other side.
What do you mean?
Where, like, I see friends of mine who are in the same industry that I'm in, and I see that they're, like, I've had to pass along jobs to other friends.
You know, someone will email me, and I'm like, I can't do that, but I have a friend that can do that here, you know, and then I see that they've succeeded.
And The fruit of my labor is in the public eye.
So when something happens, I can see it.
I don't know if you care what industry I'm in, but, like, I can see what they did and I can see what they contributed to publicly.
And, you know, they get thumbs up and everyone's excited for them.
And I was that person.
And so my babies were, oh, look, hey, turn on at six o'clock and see what I did.
I do robotics for, like, television shows and such.
And so a lot of electronics.
So I can I can point to something that I made and I can get that validation and people can say, oh, that was really awesome.
I saw what you did.
But now I'm like that mom and that person that's like, yeah, I have children, but what have you done lately?
You know, that kind of...
All I'm doing is building and raising sentient beings when I could be creating a robot for a TV show.
Yes.
You understand the robot for a TV show?
Excuse my French.
Fuck that.
Fuck that.
But I loved it.
You've got real human beings who are going to be with you in your old age, who you're raising to be sentient and good, who love you, who are bonded with you, who connect with you, who respect you.
And you're like, but I could be building a robot demon for a dinosaur show.
I know.
Come on.
I know.
Come on.
I know that it sounds very stupid and it sounds very childish, but there is something there.
It's like, I mean, for you, you're following your numbers.
I know that you can say, oh, I don't really care how many followers or how many subscribers I have, but that is some validation to you.
Wait, that's a good question.
When you wake up and you see- I don't know.
Hang on.
I haven't checked it in forever.
How many subscribers do I have?
566,137.
It doesn't make me feel good to know that, like, that...
Yeah, but for about...
You know the hedonism treadmill, woman.
Come on.
You know this one.
You adjust to every new piece of information in about 10 to 15 minutes.
Oh, I got great news.
I'm over the moon.
And 10 to 15 minutes later, it's like, am I hungry?
I can't tell.
Right?
You know how it works.
You adjust to everything new in about...
10 to 15 minutes or whatever it is.
That's some number.
They've done studies on this, right?
And maybe a lot of it is that I used my career and that anytime I did anything good, that was what gave me joy.
So even when I was alone at Thanksgiving or if I was alone, even at times when things weren't going that well, I could always say, but at least my career is amazing.
At least I'm happy and, you know, and so...
Even at times that I didn't want...
And when you're young and attractive and all of that...
I know.
I've seen the picture.
So when you're young and attractive and you have a great career, it's a wonderful thing.
And everyone's like, she's got it all, right?
But, you know, when you're 52 and...
Eating TV dinners.
You know what I mean?
All the money in the world ain't going to fill the hole in your heart, right?
I agree.
And it's too late to go back, right?
You can always choose if you want to go and have a career, but you can't, you know, past, you know, early 40s, and even then it's pretty dicey.
You can't circle back and go make a family, right?
I agree.
Well, at least women can't.
We have a For men, too.
You know, it's the sperm.
Sperm gets old as well.
I mean, it doesn't slide off the age cliff like eggs do, but those tadpoles do get a little gray-bearded after a while.
That's actually kind of funny.
That's gross.
It's sexy!
No, I know what you mean.
Yeah, I mean...
I also understand that that's more than just the age of the reproductive organs.
It's, you know, it's slipping and falling while you're playing with your kids.
It's, you know, not able to keep up with them on the playground.
Maybe not understanding cultural references because you choose to have children much later.
For a man, like age 50 versus age 30.
Oh, yeah.
No, I have to keep myself in relentlessly good shape.
Yeah.
I have to exercise like you wouldn't even believe, just because I do not want to be that creaky old guy who can't play with his kid.
People think that you're the grandfather.
Yeah, it's like, hey, somebody needs to oil that door.
Nope, that's just daddy getting out of an armchair.
Anyway, listen, I really appreciate the conversation.
I do want to be sensitive to other people's time, so I really appreciate you calling in.
Congratulations on a great life.
I mean...
You can always pick at the threads, but it sounds like you've got a great tapestry in your life at the moment.
And I'm glad, I'm really glad that you're enjoying being a mother.
And I hope, you know, for the people who are like, well, parenting, I find parenting very challenging and very exciting.
I do.
This is so much harder than anything I've ever done, honestly.
Right, yeah.
You can program a robot, but kids got a few more variables in them.
Yes, yes.
And I enjoy the negotiation.
To me, in negotiation, like I'm just working, I just finished the first draft of my book, The Art of the Argument, and I just realized just how absolutely central negotiation and debate and argument is to my existence, which I guess I could have guessed from my show and all that, but that you don't get alone.
You can negotiate with yourself.
You know, should I have that cheesecake or not?
But it's not quite the same, so...
I hope that people like you and I can help people remember that doesn't matter how smart you are, parenting will still be a challenge.
And it's not a low-rent occupation.
It's not a low-skill occupation at all.
And it's not like a dog walker.
So I hope that we can help convince people of that.
Thanks very much for your call.
Welcome back anytime.
And let's move on to the next caller.
Thanks.
Alright, up next we have Diana.
She wrote in and said, I lived in a communist slash socialist country and then moved to the United Kingdom ten years ago.
I see life is much more difficult in capitalism and there is poverty everywhere.
Can you please explain to me, Stefan, why you always say that capitalism is the best?
That's from Diana.
So tell me what you see.
I haven't been back to the UK. Last time I was in the UK... Oh, very brief story.
So I was on a plane on a business trip, and the woman who was sitting next to me happened to be a literary agent, so I got her number, and I told her I also wrote novels on the side, and she agreed to look at one of my novels.
And she looked at it, and she loved the first two-thirds, but she didn't think the ending worked, so I agreed to rewrite the ending.
And I rented a cottage in England, and I went and lived there for two weeks, writing full-time and walking endlessly out in the country, because my novel was set in the English countryside, and I wanted to absorb the landscape.
And then I handed the novel back to her, and she didn't particularly like it.
So it didn't really go anywhere, but that was the last time I was in England, and that was probably 17 or 18 years ago.
Oh my goodness, time flash.
So...
Are you in London?
Is that right?
Yes, unfortunately.
And what do you see?
I know what you mean about the countryside.
That's amazing.
And people are amazing as well.
But unfortunately, what I see is poverty.
A lot of poverty in London especially.
And what I've seen also towards the north of the country where everything seems to be shut.
All the factories or everything that was there.
That's what I've been told.
By people who live here.
And in London, what I see is a lot of multiculturalism.
And not only that, but I see people struggling to live, actually.
Struggling to live, not having any sort of home of their own, sharing places to live and suddenly where I come from that didn't happen until now probably in the last years.
But yeah, that's what I'm seeing and it's a bit scary because you feel like there's no stability and no place to grow from.
It's like every day is a struggle for people.
I was fortunate to have Free education and everything, so I came here fully educated.
But I'm looking at the young people around and it's, for me, it's scary and it looks like a struggle.
Alright, so we will start with definitions so that we make sure we're talking about the same thing.
What do you mean by capitalism?
Well, capitalism...
This profit-based society, which, I don't know, seems to be based only on making profit.
And what I'm thinking is, well, one of my other questions would have been...
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
We're staying on definitions.
I don't want to go to other questions, right?
So profit-based society, is that right?
Yeah, something like that.
All right.
And if there are poor people, let's say, in a free market, why doesn't somebody give them a job and profit from their desire for a job?
Because if they hire less people, they make more profit, I guess.
No, that's not how it works at all.
Okay.
$5 an hour from each worker I hire, right?
So I make $15 from selling their labor, but I pay them $10.
Then the more workers I hire, the more money I make, right?
I make more the more people I hire if I'm making profit off each person, right?
Yeah, you need to expand your business in order to cover all those people, and yeah, I guess.
Okay, so why don't people hire, why don't, you know, capitalists come along and hire the people who are poor?
Maybe the people who are poor don't have the education that's needed for those jobs or sometimes?
Let's say that they're recent immigrants.
Maybe they lack language skills, maybe they lack cultural skills, maybe they lack education and so on, right?
Yeah.
Okay, so if they can't get a job in London, say immigrants, could be any number of people, but let's just say immigrants for the moment.
If the immigrants can't get a job in London, then what are they living on?
Well, the problem with London at the moment is mostly Muslim immigrants that I see without jobs.
I see a lot of Somalis.
I see...
Okay, hang on, hang on.
I don't know why it is I have these conversations with people.
I ask a direct question.
Yeah, okay.
Let's go off on story time.
Question.
What are they living on if they can't get a job?
Well, fair.
Okay, so they're living on welfare.
Is welfare part of the capitalist system or not?
Well, that's another problem of mine because I was listening to your show yesterday and you were saying that it's part of the left and part of the left ideology.
And where I come from and where I lived, there was no welfare state.
And I lived in an Eastern European country, and there was no welfare state.
That's why all the immigrants don't want to stay there, all the people who are coming out to Europe.
So...
Well, what happened if you...
Did you get assigned a job?
I mean, what happened if you didn't have a job in a socialist system?
Yes.
People were forced to find a job.
They were not allowed to sit...
Oh, well, in my country.
I'm from Romania.
So they were not allowed to sit in the street and do nothing.
The police would just take them.
And everybody was assigned some sort of job in some sort of factory or somewhere, depending on...
And you could do that because people spoke the language and it was culturally largely homogenous, right?
Yes.
Yeah.
Right.
So...
You could tell people to get a job because they could actually get a job, right?
Yeah.
But what would happen if the welfare state ended tomorrow in England, what would happen?
Everybody would be sleeping in the streets, probably.
No, they'd leave.
Yeah, after a big fight or something.
I don't see them living that easily.
No, hang on.
I understand all the conflict and all of that.
But if you can't live in a particular place, then you don't stay there.
We know that, right?
So people would go to California for a gold rush in the 19th century when they found gold in California.
And people go west.
They go to the...
Gold rush.
And then when they ran out of gold that was easy to find, do you know what people did?
They went home.
I mean, a third of the people who came to America in the 19th century didn't really like it and went back home.
People do this all the time.
They go to some place, some new country, some new state, some new area, because there's opportunity.
When that opportunity dries up, They leave.
You know, people go and open a mine and there's a mining town.
And then the mining town could be there for 10 years or 50 years or 100 years.
But eventually, they run out of whatever it is that they're mining or at least easy to get parts of what they're mining.
And do you know what happens?
People leave and you get a ghost town.
So people go someplace where there's lots of resources.
If those resources end, as they always do, all resources end at one time or another.
Or at least the easy resources.
And then they move somewhere else where there are other resources.
So people have come to the West because there's the welfare state.
And the welfare state is anti-capitalistic.
It is a violation of property rights.
It is a violation of voluntary charity.
It is an egregious violation of cultural norms and cultural standards.
It's an attack upon culture.
And it is socialist or communist-based, the forced redistribution of income.
It's the basic Marxist doctrine of from each according to their ability, right?
Oh, if you make money and you're productive and positive, we're going to strip all the resources from you, to each according to their need.
And the combination of the welfare state and Europe's open border policy is resulting in the general destruction of Europe.
I have to correct you on one thing, though.
Okay.
This is as of 2012.
There are about 50 types of welfare a Romanian citizen can receive.
Now, maybe this is after when you were there.
As of 2012, it has been estimated that 5.9 million Romanians or half the working population are receiving some form of welfare.
In 2013, the budget granted for social welfare was 17.5 billion dollars.
Yes, because Romania is no longer communist or socialist or whatever.
They are trying to follow the capitalist trend and they're trying to follow the European Union imposed laws at the moment.
So whatever they do, they do because the European Union says they should do.
Right.
And it's funny because in communism, there's the edict.
This is again out of Marxism.
He who does not toil shall not eat.
And now you have all of these supposed free market countries saying, sure, you can eat all you want.
Absolutely.
Come right on over.
We'll pillage the working classes and pay for your lazy butts to sit around and consume resources, right?
So I'm not sure...
I'm not sure...
How free markets, property rights, or what you call a profit-based society, that's got nothing to do with the welfare state.
The welfare state is the complete opposite of the free market.
The welfare state is fundamentally socialist in nature.
Okay, it's an idea, but in theory.
Because what I've seen in practice, all those Eastern European countries, they didn't have that sort of thing.
And people were forced to work.
They had a place to live, given by the state.
They were all paying rent to the state.
But they had a place to live, so they had the basic needs met from where they could grow and grow into some sort of healthy society like they were trying to tell us that we had.
So yeah, I don't see those basic needs met here in the capitalist society where Okay, first of all, hang on.
You know, we just went through this, right, Diana?
Please, don't make me feel like I'm just talking to myself.
That's never a very productive feeling for me.
The poverty is also a relative term, right?
Here's another question.
If housing is so scarce in London, I guess the first question is, when something is scarce, what happens is, in a free market, When housing is scarce, two things happen.
Number one, people don't want to move to where the housing is scarce, right?
Because it's too expensive.
And number two, there's a mad rush to build more housing.
Obviously, because there's a lot of profit to be made in supplying a desperately needed product in a thirsty environment, right?
So the question is, If housing is scarce in London, and the free market says, well, if something is scarce and becomes very expensive, the expense of it will drive down the demand.
In other words, people won't want to live in London, number one.
And number two, well, a lot more houses will be built to satisfy the demand for houses.
And I know that housing in London is crazy expensive.
Why do you think these two things aren't happening to bring down the price of housing?
They are actually building a lot at the moment.
Where I live here, there are a lot of blocks of flats being built.
I'm not sure if they're going to be private, that you can buy them privately, or they don't want to rent them, or it's going to be council flats.
But they're building a lot of flats at the moment.
And why don't they want to move?
Who's going to live in those flats, do you think?
People with money and people on welfare.
Well, sure.
I mean, do you know the numbers for immigration into England every year?
No, I think I read some numbers, but I can't remember now.
Hundreds of thousands of people pouring into England.
And of course, if you are coming, say, from Somalia, you don't want to go and live in some suburb in Liverpool or something where there's white working class people.
example, if you come in from Somalia, you want to go to the local little Somalia, right?
You want to go like, you know, Chinese people go live in Chinatown and Greek people go live in little Greece and little Italy and so on, right?
And the Muslims go and live in Muslim areas and so on.
And so if you come pouring into England and you have access to a welfare state, you can First of all, it's a lot more money than you had where you came from.
So poverty is kind of relative that way, right?
So there's estimates that if you come from, say, Iraq, and you come to Germany, and you get on the welfare state, you earn at least 10 times on the welfare state, or you get the equivalent of 10 times more on the welfare state than you ever could have made, most likely in Iraq or other places, right?
So it may look poor to some people, but it's staggering wealth to the people who are moving to Europe and to England.
And of course they get access to healthcare and free healthcare, free education, and a lot of subsidies and free English lessons maybe.
So they win the lottery as far as that goes.
So you walk around and say, well, there's a lot of poor people, but compared to where they came from, it's an unfathomable amount of wealth that they're able to consume.
Some of it they consume directly and some of it they consume indirectly.
And One of the reasons I think why this immigration is occurring, I mean, the basic reason is because on the left, the immigrants vote for the left, right?
Because of the welfare state and other reasons.
And there was a recent email that went around to Muslims saying that they were going to go to hell if they didn't vote labor, which I assume that a number of Muslims took pretty seriously.
So that's not really democracy.
But anyway, that's a topic I'm sure for another time.
But another reason as well is that a lot of people's wealth is tied up in the value of their real estate.
And we saw this in America during the housing crash, right?
Now, what's been going on in Europe for a long time is called the demographic winter.
Basically, Europeans not having children, right?
I mean, white Europeans not having children.
And one of the reasons why white Europeans are not having children is because they're being taxed so heavily to pay for immigrants and their children, right?
And so, if you...
Like, let's say that immigration was not occurring in Europe...
Then what would happen is the prices of houses would go down enormously.
Why?
Because if you have one child per family, then you have a halving of the population within a couple of decades.
And well, a little bit more than a couple of decades, but there's a halving of the population over time.
And when you have half the population, There's half the demand for houses, right?
And so there would be a lot of empty houses and it would cause the price of housing to crash, like really crash, especially because younger people would, you know, at the beginning of their careers would not even be in the position to necessarily buy houses.
So it'd be great for the young people.
It'd be great for the young people because the price of houses would go down.
And of course, when the price of houses went down, they'd be able to buy bigger houses and then they'd have more money or the same houses and they'd have more money with which to have Children, right?
So if you didn't import a lot of people from other countries and other cultures, what would happen is people would start having more children because they'd have more money because they wouldn't have to spend all of this money on housing, right?
The baby boomers created this huge glut of housing, which was perfectly fine for them, just as they created a huge glut of schools.
And if there wasn't all this immigration, then houses would become much cheaper because there'd be a smaller cohort of people who had A need for houses.
And then they'd have more money with which they could have more children and things would balance out that way.
But of course that's far too long for immediate political calculation that's intergenerational.
So yeah, they bring in a bunch of immigrants who vote for the left and who to some degree at least drive down the wages.
And that contributes to poverty.
It's a pretty artificial situation.
And certainly drive up the tax bills and drive up the problems with the National Health Service.
I'm sure you're aware of all of this.
And if the housing prices were to collapse, then there would be a lot of economic problems for the people who have relied on increasing house prices as part of their nest egg for retirement and so on.
So none of this has anything to do with the free market at all.
Anything to do with the free market at all.
So I'm not sure why you'd say that the problem is capitalism.
Yeah, maybe because I'm in a country that's supposed to be capitalist and I see all that around me.
So why do you think the government is not interested in resolving the demographic winter instead of importing so many people who will never ever work and produce anything?
Just to drive Okay, let's say, Diana, let's say you're a politician, what would you do?
What would I do?
Well, I would encourage people in one way or another to have more children.
Yeah, okay, but that's like saying if I were in business, I'd try and make money.
Sure, okay, that's granted, but how would you do that?
Lower the taxes or give them more money after I don't know how many children, something like that.
Okay, so if you lower the taxes, if you lower the taxes, you can't afford the welfare state.
Yeah.
Yep.
So then what?
Do you stop paying the immigrants who are dependent on welfare?
Yes.
Okay, so that's a solution, right?
Yeah.
Which is you say, I'm going to lower taxes, and I'm not going to make up the difference by borrowing.
I'm going to lower taxes, and I'm going to severely cut back the welfare state.
And I'm going to say, okay, you can't have any access to the welfare state for the first 10 years you come into the country.
Brilliant.
No welfare state at all.
Yeah.
Right?
But the problem is, of course, a lot of people come in as refugees, and you can't deny access to services to refugees.
That's part of the EU charter, as far as I understand it, the Schengen Agreement and other charters that are signed by the EU members.
So what will happen is people will then say, okay, I'm not going to come in as an immigrant.
I'm going to come in as a refugee.
And then what happens is you actually end up with higher costs, because immigrants don't cost as much as refugees, because you have to provide more services to refugees than you do to immigrants.
Now, if Brexit goes through, England will have more flexibility with regards to this.
But it's pretty tough.
And what's going to happen is, as a politician, what's going to happen is, you are going to receive a lot of negative publicity, right?
Italy tried to encourage women to have some babies, for God's sake, because Italy is ridiculous.
It's like Japanese.
It's like 1.2 children per couple.
It's lunatic, right?
And do you know what happened to the politicians who made the suggestion that it might be kind of helpful if people had a few more babies around?
No.
The feminists all attacked them like, oh, you're just trying to turn us into breeding machines and cows for producing children?
Right?
I mean, it's like, yeah, okay.
And socialist feminists all want this giant welfare state, but they don't want any children to actually pay for the damn thing.
Yeah.
So what's going to happen is you may encourage people Women to have children, but you're going to have to cut back the welfare state a lot, which is going to cause you to be called a racist, and it's going to cause riots, and it's going to cause problems, and it's going to, you know, burning cars in the street, and, you know, the usual stuff that happens when government largesse is withdrawn.
And not always, right?
In Canada, cut the welfare state significantly in the 90s without any of this stuff, but it depends on the demographics you're facing.
Yeah.
So you're going to face a lot of short-term problems.
You're going to be called a racist.
You're going to be called a sexist.
I don't know.
You cut the welfare state.
Maybe women would suffer a little bit from that, single moms and so on.
And you're going to face all these problems and there's going to be concerted efforts to get you removed from power and you're going to face death threats and all this kind of stuff.
And what benefit will it accumulate?
Oh, also when children are born in society, they're expensive.
Right?
Right?
You've got to have more childcare facilities.
You've got to have more pediatricians.
And women will leave the workforce for a while, so you've got less taxes.
So what's going to happen is maybe in 20 to 25 years, five politicians down the road are going to reap the benefits of what you're doing today as a politician, but...
You're going to face all the problems and reap none of the rewards, and people way down the road are going to reap the rewards.
I can't think of any sane politician from a mere utility standpoint who'd want to take that decision.
That's true, but everything seems to be going downhill anyway, either way, because if they continue like this, something is going to happen anyway.
We're going to have people burning cars in the middle of the street as well.
Yes, but the politicians won't be blamed for it, right?
Yeah, you're right, yeah.
And I mean, that's happening anyway.
I mean, the outskirts of Paris are currently on fire.
At least they were as of last night.
I saw that, yeah.
It's happening anyway.
So, I mean, yeah, I mean, the problems are going to be avoided until they erupt into violence.
That's, you know, I think what we have to resign ourselves to.
Okay, so that's the way.
I think so.
Unless Europe gets their trumps, which is kind of what is heading that way.
A significant majority of Germans want Merkel gone.
Which is funny.
The woman who seems to walk around the stage mentally wiping her ass with the German flag.
Can't imagine why Germans would have any problem with her.
Marine Le Pen is ahead.
Geert Wilders is ahead.
Although his powers will be limited.
But yeah, I mean, this next year or year and a half, this is the last chance to solve these problems peacefully.
It's the last chance to solve these problems peacefully, which is one of the reasons I've been so proactive in trying to get this information out there.
It's going to be brutal.
If it's not solved proactively and politically, which is still going to involve some potential violence, I mean, it's going to be brutal.
So...
I hope that helps.
Thanks very much for your call and your question.
I'll let you get some sleep.
Thanks for staying up so late for that show.
Take care, Dan.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Nice to chat with you.
Alright, up next we have Roman.
He wrote in and said, Now that we are in a quote-unquote post-truth era and see the large factual divide between the left and right, do you believe it is more crucial than ever that higher education institutions start teaching from a nonpartisan point of view explaining both sides of the debate?
That's from Roman.
Hey Roman, how are you doing tonight?
Good, Stefan.
How are you?
I'm well, thank you.
I'm well, thank you.
Are you in school at the moment, in college at the moment?
Yeah, and then a university in Manitoba.
And it's very lefty.
I don't know how different it is from the States, but it's definitely a lot more left-wing here.
Now, what year are you in?
First year.
What's the kind of stuff you've seen?
Um...
I'm in political science, but I'm taking a cultural anthropology course, and the professor there, she works in Cuba, and so she definitely shows a lot of socialist themes when talking about how to look at culture and stuff.
Even my political professors, they're always talking about liberal points of view and bringing in liberal speakers.
Never really anyone.
Why?
Why are you in college?
And why are you taking political science?
I don't...
What am I missing here?
I don't know.
I guess it's just that...
You know, people are supposed to go to college or whatever.
Oh, come on.
I know, I know.
Oh, come on.
Don't give me that.
Oh, I listen to your show, Steph, but I'm such a comfirmist.
I listen to your show.
I really enjoy philosophy, but I just kind of do what people with bad intentions tell me to do.
I know.
It's not good.
Okay, who's paying for this, Roman?
My parents are.
Right.
Do they know what they're paying for?
Uh...
Yeah, I tell them about it, but they're kind of lefty too.
Oh, so they agree with the stuff you're being taught?
Some of it, yeah.
What do they disagree with?
I don't know, actually.
They don't listen to too much with what I'm saying.
They don't care too much about politics, so when I tell them, oh yeah, well they're teaching very Lefty stuff.
They're like, well, whatever.
Go with it and then get your degree and stuff.
But what do you want to do with a political science degree?
Help me understand.
What's your goal?
What's your life plan here?
I don't know.
I'm taking economics too, so I like politics.
I'd like to get into it, but I know that's...
What do you mean get into it?
You mean you want to be a politician?
Yeah, maybe getting into that or like...
I don't know.
I haven't thought too much...
Do you think that it might be wise to start thinking a little bit about this past?
Yes, and listening to you, like I just started listening in September, but yeah, it's definitely helped me realize, oh yeah, life is a lot shorter than I think.
I need to start figuring things out.
Do you think that if Donald Trump had a political science degree, he'd be more successful as the president?
Probably not.
Oh, how about Arnold Schwarzenegger?
Oh, you know who else didn't have a political science degree?
Just about every other president or politician that I can think of.
Right.
Except the Canadian Prince Daffodil.
He might have one, I'm not sure.
I'm not sure.
So, yeah, don't be on a conveyor belt.
You know, I mean, economics...
If you get good, rigorous economics professors, that has some backup potential, right?
With economics, you're going to learn statistics, mathematics, analysis, logic, rigor, all that kind of stuff.
But the political science stuff, tell me how it's not just leftist indoctrination.
I'm open to hearing the case, Roman, but I just did an interview today with the author of No Campus for White Men.
And I gotta tell you, you know, having read up on a whole bunch of stuff of this the last couple of days, how are you not just paying to be indoctrinated?
Tell me how I'm mistaken here.
You aren't?
I definitely agree with you on that.
All the time.
That's all they say.
They're just like, oh yeah, well, everyone who supports Trump, they don't know what they're talking about.
There's no hope for America and all these things.
And I'm like, well, maybe not totally true, but they definitely...
So if you don't agree with your professors, though, what are you going to do?
Um, I don't know.
Are you gonna lie?
Are you gonna write essays that agree with them that you don't believe in?
I mean, what are you training yourself in here?
Well, for the most part, if there's something, like, really egregious that I don't agree with, like, I'll say, like, hey, well, what about this?
And they kind of just push it to the side and move on, but...
Okay, have you handed in any papers yet?
Uh, yeah, none of them that would really set a divide, like, on a political spectrum, but...
Wait, you've handed in papers to lefty professors, but it's got nothing to do with politics in your political science degree?
Well, it was just about the differences of the Canadian system and the American system, so I don't know how it would fit in.
Oh, okay, okay.
But it's going to happen, I would imagine, fairly soon, right?
That you're going to have to hand in something and...
You may very well go against the grain of the professor's belief system, right?
Right, yeah.
How do you think that's going to go?
I'm not sure.
I would assume probably not be the best thing to go against the grain, but I don't know.
I don't like lying, so...
Right.
But that's the challenge, right?
Yeah.
That's the challenge.
Top five degrees...
Which produce unemployment.
The degrees with the highest unemployment rate.
You want to put any guesses in as to what they are?
English is up there for sure.
No, actually.
No?
No.
No, because in an English degree you learn how to really read and how to really write.
And that's got a lot of value in the world.
Yeah.
Alright.
Information systems...
Well, that's because of the H-1B visas and all that sort of stuff, all of the foreigners being brought in.
Architecture, anthropology, film, video, and photography, arts, and political science.
Oh no.
Oh, listen, you've got to research this shit, man.
You're signing up for four years of your life and your parents are going to spend tens and tens and tens of thousands of dollars probably when all is said and done.
Plus, you're deferring a lot of income, right, to go to school and a lot of life experience, a lot of work experience, a lot of contacts you could be making.
There's a lot of stuff online about political science being one of the worst majors in terms of actually getting you a job.
When was the last time you picked up a newspaper?
Well, you're 18.
What the hell do you know about a newspaper?
When was the last time you checked the wanted ads and said, must have political science degree?
Probably never.
Right.
So you got to stop laughing about this shit, man.
I'm trying to help you here, right?
This is not a joke.
This is your future.
This is your parents' hard-earned money, right?
Right?
I mean, what are the women like there?
Right.
At the school or the professor?
In your classes.
I've noticed they're a bit like, a lot of them are feminists in those classes.
You know that's very risky, right?
Yeah.
If you date.
Right.
So that's a factor as well.
So you're not sure why you're there.
You're not sure what you want to get out of it.
You disagree with what's being taught to you.
Just help me make the case.
Like, help me understand.
I assume you're going to continue.
For what?
I don't know.
Even the stuff that I disagree with, like, I like hearing the other sides and then being able to think, okay, well, why do I disagree with this?
And then try and find, like, not solutions, but like, okay, well, this is something that I would counter-argue to that.
Okay, okay, great.
I think that's fantastic.
And I think exposure to alternative ideas, opposing ideas, is essential.
It's something the right does and the left burns when it comes into proximity.
But here's my question.
Why do you need to go to college to do that?
Can you not find ideas you disagree with in any other place?
You're right.
I mean, there's a Young Turks channel.
It's free!
I mean, okay, it'll cost you some brain cells, but it's free!
Yeah.
I don't know.
My parents are, like, I think they're of the mindset that, like, if you don't have a degree, there's a chance that you won't get a good career in the future.
Neither of them have college degrees, but they are making, like, Right, and listen, I don't want to insert myself into your parents' decision-making for your life.
I don't, right?
I mean, this is your parents' money and it's your family, so I don't want to sort of jump in there and cause trouble.
But you need to do some research into what you're buying here.
You know, this is the most money that you're going to spend.
I know it's your parents' money, but this is the most money that you're going to spend outside of buying a house.
Now, you wouldn't buy a house without getting it checked out first, right?
You wouldn't buy a house without a home inspection.
You wouldn't buy a house without figuring out whether it had a finished basement.
What state the plumbing or the electrical system was in?
You wouldn't, because it's a lot of money.
So my question is, when are you going to do the research to find out the value of what it is you're dedicating close to a half decade of your life and tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of thousands of dollars in the long run of deferred earnings What is the value that you're going to get out of this?
Do you know what the job placement rate is of graduates in your program?
I don't.
Do you think the university should have that information?
Yes.
So will you ask them?
Yes.
Just do it solid, brother.
Just promise you you're going to ask them and say, hey, now that I'm investing years of my life and tens of thousands of dollars, maybe you can tell me what I'm actually buying here.
What is the graduation rate?
Is there an alumni association?
Can you call them up?
Can you say, hey, you guys got degrees here.
How did it work out for you?
Do you know how much...
I mean, are your parents going to be able to afford the whole thing?
Are you going to end up in debt at all?
Do you know?
Yeah, it's not...
I don't know.
In the States, I know it's a lot more, but here it's only like $5,000 a year or something.
It's not as crazy.
Because it's a lot.
The government...
Yeah, except that you could be getting a job for 30 or 40k maybe.
Right.
Or 20 or 30k or whatever it is, right?
And building, right?
So after four years, let's say you get a job at 30k averaged out over four years, that's $120,000 you haven't made.
You know, plus the living expenses, plus...
Well, you'd have to pay those either way, I guess, right?
But books and stuff like that, you wouldn't necessarily be.
Right.
And remember, listen, there's a whole industry out there of trying to get kids into school, into college, right?
Colleges make a lot of money.
The government makes a lot of money.
Banks make a lot of money because their loans are back stopped often by the government.
So there's a whole industry designed to get you into college.
And there's a lot of sales pitches that go on, right?
And so, be alert and be aware of the fact that there's a lot of people who are going to profit from you going to college, and their profit happens whether or not you end up making a profit from your degree.
Do you know what the underemployment...
Underemployment is where you have a job that doesn't make any use of your degree.
Do you know what the underemployment rate is for people with political science majors?
I'm going to guess pretty high, I guess.
That's from...
What I've been hearing from you just now.
It's 49.7%.
That's a lot.
It means that half the people with political science degrees end up doing things which have nothing to do with their political science degree.
It's a huge net loss for them.
You know, I just...
I want you to be aware that there's a lot of propaganda about college.
There's a lot of people who profit from you going to college, and they don't make one dime less if you end up underemployed or unemployed.
Whether you end up making money from your degree or not, they don't care.
They just want you in there.
And sure, you're only paying a certain amount of money, but they're getting a whole bunch of money from the government for it too, right?
Just having your ass in that seat makes them a huge amount of money.
And they don't have any financial incentive to make sure that what they're teaching you makes you money afterwards.
You understand?
They have no incentive.
And it's this detachment from market forces that's one of the reasons why leftists are multiplying like mold in these places of, quote, higher learning.
They don't have to be market-facing.
They don't have to sit there and say, well, boy, we're taking people's money for years.
We're taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from people over years and years, right?
Because, you know, you pay some, but the government pays a lot.
But there's debt.
And we're producing people Only half of whom get jobs that have anything to do with what we're teaching them.
That would never happen in the free market.
And I need you to think like a capitalist.
I need you to think like an entrepreneur.
You're spending money.
You're spending time.
You're deferring income.
You're deferring work and life experiences.
You may be being indoctrinated.
For what?
You may come out less smart than when you went in.
Because sure, you may learn how to overturn leftist arguments, but you might have to hide all of that during the time that you're actually doing essays and writing exams, so maybe you'll be better trained at lying and falsifying your entire existence.
Maybe you'll be better at conforming to people.
Maybe, maybe you'll be convinced by bad ideas.
Because it's easier.
Or maybe you'll get drunk and kiss some girl and she'll be like, Rape!
Read the book.
you Thank you.
No campus for white people.
I don't know.
It doesn't matter what your race is.
It's a lot of crap in school these days.
A lot of garbage in school these days.
And the idea that the professors are going, like, I'm going to tell you what I think.
This is not proof.
I'm going to tell you what I think.
I had a lot of experience in a bunch of different universities.
Four institutions of higher learning.
Yeah, National Theatre School.
Glendon campus of York University, McGill, and the University of Toronto.
Four institutions of higher learning.
All lefty.
Let me tell you this, I did not find one free market sold in the entire wasteland.
Because if I had, I would have held fast to them.
The people who teach you, Roman, did not arrive At the conclusions that they're teaching you after a dispassionate blank slate analysis of reason and evidence.
They have arrived at their conclusions because of feelings, because of our selection, because of genetics.
Like, 40% of political leanings are genetic.
So it's like going to a tall guy's class and he's like, I'm going to teach you how to be tall.
No, you're not.
Because height is genetic.
Hey, feel like signing up for some low maintenance hair balding lessons?
I pretty much got the market cornered after quite some time.
I can teach you how to hold your breath until you get freckles.
No, can't really do that.
Can't really do it.
So 40%, and I think it's higher, but let's talk, you know, 40% is what's been verified.
Right.
40% of your political leanings are genetic.
So it's a tall person's class, right?
Yeah.
And it's, you know, this is twin studies, so it's pretty good.
And again, I think it's, I think it's higher than that.
But they don't arrive at their conclusions immediately.
Through reason and evidence.
Which is, you know, you bring some counter-reason and evidence, and they just kind of brush it aside, right?
Right?
Of course.
And you can't reason people out of ideas they weren't reasoned into in the first place.
Here's how it works.
You're a young man, I'm gonna flash the kimono of deep knowledge here, so.
Here you go.
Here's the way it works.
People bounce around Randomly, from various ideas to various ideas.
You know, if you've got intellectual curiosity about it.
You bounce around a whole bunch.
Boing, boing, boing, boing, boing.
Follow the bouncing ball of random idea exposure.
And then what happens is...
You ever seen those YouTube videos where people are jumping along puddles and then they come to one really deep puddle and they just kind of go in up to their armpits?
That's the way it works with ideas.
People are like, la, la, la, la, la.
I'm skipping down the road.
All these flat puddles and then...
They just go nostril deep into some pit of water and goo and geck.
And that's the way it works with people.
They bounce around, they bounce around, and then some idea hits them like, ooh, yes, that's the idea I want.
That's the idea I like.
They weren't reasoned into it.
They fell in love with it.
They fell in lust with it.
They got seduced by it.
It wasn't a reasoned process.
It was like...
They didn't have any keys that fit the lock of their personality, the lock of their genetics, the lock of their history, whatever it is, the lock of their predispositions.
They didn't have a key that hit that.
And then they get the key that hits that lock and it's like, boom!
Oh, that's for me.
Oh, that's for me.
Absolutely.
And then, you know, if you have...
Intellectual integrity and responsibility.
Then you, you know, take a whack at the beliefs and you try and undermine them.
And it took me a long time with objectivism.
But you work at it and you work at it.
And then you come up with something that's your own.
But they fell into those beliefs.
And what they're trying to do is they're trying to be the deep puddle for the next group.
Because that's how these beliefs reproduce.
They don't reproduce by reason and evidence.
They reproduce according to affinity and self-interest.
And genetics, predisposition.
That's why they want to keep making more of these locks and keys, right?
So they can keep the resources flowing.
So, I can't guarantee this, but I strongly suspect it, of course, that they've already been exposed to the ideas that you like, and they hate them.
And then they got exposed to some other ideas, and the feels made them love them.
Mmm!
That feels good.
That's the one I want.
Oh, yeah.
Ideology.
Who's your daddy now?
I'm your daddy now!
Dance for me!
Dance for me!
Right?
And that's the way that people have come to the conclusions that they have in life.
And they present them like, well, these are just the facts, you see.
But they're just telling you what their genetics and predisposition has inclined them to accept.
And their self-interest, right?
So, the idea that you're going to talk someone out of being tall or they're going to talk you into being tall seems kind of...
That seems kind of silly to me.
And, you know, this is a testable hypothesis, right?
You simply go to your professors and you give them counter examples and counter arguments and this and that and the other.
And I did this and I've told this story before that when I took a class, The Rise of Capitalism and Socialist Response, and had lots of debates with the professor and made a real strong case at the end and he's like, well, you know, if that's what you believe, that's what you believe.
This is what I believe.
I'm like...
What?
What?
I thought this had something to do with reason and evidence, bud.
It turns out that if you have a giant beard and no neck, you're just kind of a communist.
Socialist or whatever, right?
And it's like, okay, so it's just your opinion and my opinion.
Okay.
So why are you pretending to be an educator if all you have is opinions?
I like ice cream.
Do you want to take my course on liking ice cream?
My god.
So just be alert and be aware of that.
If you're in an environment where people are simply repeating their predispositions, it's a bad environment.
It's gonna be bad for you if you have intellectual curiosity.
If you like this kind of show, it may be a bad environment for you.
Look up what the outcomes are for your degree and your college in the areas that you want to go.
Ask them if there's like alumni.
Just one phone call, man.
Alumni associations.
Who do I talk to who's graduated?
How do I talk to someone who graduated from this program a couple of years ago?
Phone the people.
Ask them how they're doing.
Was it worth it?
This is a big decision.
This is a huge chunk of your life.
This is like 10% or more of your working life completely, right?
You work from 20...
5 to 65, that's 40 years.
You're talking four years.
This is 10% of your adult existence on this planet.
Don't just spend it like you can't possibly find out whether it's worth it.
That's easy to find out.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, it does.
Will you let us know what you find out?
Yeah, I will.
All right.
Okay.
Well, thanks for the call, man.
I appreciate it.
And let's move on to the next caller.
Alright, so up next we have Eric.
Eric wrote in and said, I'm a libertarian at heart.
I believe in the free market, small governments, and allowing people to succeed or fail by their own virtues.
I also recognize that certain cultures and populations are incompatible with a free society.
Libertarians and their insistence on open borders present a contradiction.
Is it possible to square that circle?
That's from Eric.
Hello, Eric.
How are you doing?
How about yourself?
I'm doing very well.
Thank you.
Thank you for asking.
How long have you been a libertarian?
Did you fall into a puddle?
Yeah, I fell into a puddle.
Actually, a friend of mine had given me Atlas Shrugged a couple of years ago.
I read through it, and I was able to reflect upon society today.
And what I saw was so many parallels and Ryan was so ahead of her time that it was ridiculous.
Now, I'd always had libertarian leanings and I'd always been a free market kind of guy.
When I was 11 years old, my father actually brought home a lawnmower and he said, You owe me $200 to this lawn mower.
It's yours.
Anything that you make beyond that is your profit.
So I went out, I formulated my own business plan, and I went through the neighborhood asking different people, hey, can I mow your lawn?
I was making $25 a lawn.
At the end of the summer, I was able to buy a radio.
So from a young age, I accrued to appreciate free market principles.
Later on in life, I've kind of extrapolated upon that.
I've always been right-leaning, so I know that libertarians kind of range the gambit, but having that early experience on in life and then bringing my opinions just through various shows like your own and through reading has really helped me solidify that position.
But, like I said, the open border stuff is problematic to me, just because I recognize that there are certain groups in society that aren't necessarily as freedom-loving as we are here in the States.
Right.
Right.
I mean, you know, you just have to ask a libertarian, okay, let's say you move to China, how long is it before you become a communist?
Exactly.
What would they say?
They would be forced to almost immediately.
Well, no, what I mean is, how long would it be, let's say a libertarian moves to China, how long would it be before they're a passionate, committed, dedicated communist?
Well, I would hope that they would be able to stand true to their principles, but given the nature of their situation, you would have to conform to the actual government.
No, no, no.
You're overcomplicating it.
Sorry.
And I know China's not perfectly communist, but let's say you move into China in 1960.
How long would it take for you to become a dedicated communist?
And the answer for the libertarians is, I would never become a dedicated communist.
To which I would say, exactly!
That's exactly the point!
You moving to China in 1960 creates no magic soil transfer where you magically become a communist.
And people coming from X place in the world, setting foot in America, do not immediately become constitutional Republicans.
Exactly.
Doesn't happen.
It does not happen.
There will be a few.
I remember Jan Wong, who used to write for the Globe and Mail.
She met her husband in China.
Her husband had gone over and was working in China.
I don't know what his ideology was, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't conservative.
And occasionally, some people will be like, well, I like this ideology, so I'm going to move to this country.
A guy who shot JFK spent time in Russia.
Hinkley.
Hinkley?
Hinkley.
Spend time in Russia.
Dedicated communist.
Don't hear a lot about that when you hear about these things.
But yeah, leftist assassins, otherwise known as assassins.
So yeah, if a libertarian moves to California, how long until they become a Democrat?
Well, I think most of them would say, well, no, it doesn't matter where I go.
My beliefs are my beliefs.
Exactly.
That's exactly the point from A to Z. Move people from A to Z. They don't become like Z. And then they say, ah yes, well there was a melting pot in America in the 19th century.
Yes, there was.
Two ingredients.
Number one, racial homogeneity.
Number two, no welfare state.
No welfare state.
And by racial homogeneity, what I mean is...
That, mostly people from Europe, and mostly from people from Europe who were white.
European culture, European history, Greco-Roman, blah blah blah, right?
So, racial homogeneity is second generation, you can't tell.
If I move to China, and...
You know, my wife and I moved to China.
We have 10 kids and they all marry white people.
We're going to be recognizable as foreigners until the end of time.
Big-nosed foreign people, as they called me in China when I was there.
And that's just the way it works.
Whereas when Europeans come to America, white Europeans, you can't tell.
So there's no possibility of bigotry because you can't tell.
They're ghosts.
No particular identity that can be identified externally.
And it's just the way things are.
It's just the way things are.
So for libertarians who are like, well, you know, people can come here and they'll just become like us.
Well, that's just a basic lack of empathy and lack of understanding.
That if you go to some place, you don't just admit.
You know, how long is it?
You move to Saudi Arabia.
How long is it until you completely accept that stoning a woman to death for adultery is a fine moral practice?
It's never going to happen.
Never going to happen to say, ah, well, but your kids, your kids will grow up in Saudi Arabia really, really believing that cutting off a thief's hands and stoning a woman to death for adultery and giving some guy a thousand lashes for blasphemy, that's perfectly acceptable and very good.
Really?
You think your kids are going to believe that?
In other words, they're going to have no respect for your belief systems at all?
You're just going to have them completely acclimatized and be completely as if they've lived in Saudi Arabia with their family for 500 years?
Come on.
Nobody thinks that, do they?
And you brought up a fantastic point because when you look at the flip side of the equation, especially with Islam, I know that there are different ways that people practice Islam, but there are 109 verses that specifically advocate violence against people who do not believe in that religion.
Now, if you were to move to the United States and try to assimilate into a community, and I understand that happens in certain situations, but then on the other hand, you have communities like Dearborn, Michigan, which what's the population there that is active participants in Islam?
Now, they're not necessarily going to say that, you know, being a Christian is an ideal thing, or being Jewish, or being an atheist.
They're not going to agree with any of that.
And in order for them to freely practice their religion, as they are prescribed to do within the Quran, it says, hey, if this person does not convert, you give them the opportunity, but if not, you go and kill them.
So that's slightly problematic to me.
Well, look, I mean, you can point to verses in the Old Testament and even in the New Testament where violence can be advocated.
It simply depends what other influences have been brought to bear on the belief system, and I think that's one of the challenges.
But it is just a basic failure to understand difference and different ways of thinking.
And in order to understand what it's like for A cultural foreigner to come to your country.
You just have to imagine going to that person's country and how long it would take for you to fully assimilate into their belief systems.
And anyone who says, well, it's pretty easy, well, they're just missing the point.
And they don't really understand things.
Now, I don't particularly mind people moving around the world, obviously.
I mean, I'm a non-initiation of force kind of guy.
And this is such an old point.
I mean, I'm scarcely the originator of it.
This goes back many, many years.
Welfare state, open borders.
Pick one.
You can't have both.
It's that simple.
Open borders, welfare state.
Pick one.
Because the welfare state violates the potential for ostracism.
Because you have to fund people whose beliefs you may not agree with, whose culture you may find negative or incompatible.
You may not choose to hire certain groups if you don't like whatever it is, right?
I mean, the Christians who may not want to bake cakes for gay weddings, fine, fine!
Force people to associate with other people.
If the libertarians achieve the goal of the elimination of the welfare state, which I think most libertarians would agree with, okay, then we can start to talk about open borders.
But while there is the welfare state, while there is the welfare state, you cannot have open borders.
You just cannot have open borders.
And this is an old argument.
To my knowledge, libertarians have not successfully addressed it.
It goes back to, you know, some of the great economists of the 60s and 70s.
I can't remember if it was Hayek or Friedman or whoever who made the argument.
But you can't have it.
And so this open borders while there's a welfare state?
I don't know.
I mean, some libertarians like drugs.
They don't want a wall because it's going to interrupt their flow of hashish.
I don't know.
Maybe they won't get the right kind of weed that they want.
I don't know.
But this idea that you can have a welfare state and open borders.
I mean, you can have them if you want.
It's just going to be the destruction of your society.
One of them has to go.
Right.
And I actually live five miles north of the Mexican border, so I can tell you stories about the drugs that come over the border.
Please, tell us stories about the drugs that come over the border.
So, I can't drive...
I don't think that's vivid for people.
I don't think they understand it.
I can't drive five minutes down the street without passing a junkie.
Who's homeless riding a bicycle in tattered clothing because there's nothing that the local police force and even the Sheriff's Department and Border Control can really do to add that flow of drugs coming into our country from Mexico.
I'm originally from the Northeast and now I live in Arizona and my mother came down to visit me because she wanted to see the state.
And as we were driving from one town to the other, I said, Mom, I look left.
And she said, What am I looking at?
There's nothing there.
And I said, That's Mexico.
She didn't believe me because there was no wall.
There was no protection.
There was no border patrol checkpoints.
There was just open terrain that anybody could walk through.
And unfortunately, drugs come over the border every single day in massive amounts.
In order to come from Mexico into the United States driving, you do have to pass through a border security checkpoint.
And there are a fair amount of drugs that are picked up that way.
But how are you going to pick up the individuals with backpacks who are just walking through the desert?
You can try to spot them.
You can try to catch them all.
And even in places where there are a wall.
So they're set up in slat formations.
So you have pretty much just a steel slat that's placed into the ground.
And The government recognized, hey, drugs are getting pushed through these slats, so they put up some chain links in order to try to make it more difficult to pass through drugs.
And before 24 hours was up, they noticed that the drug package sizes were changing in order to accommodate fitting through that chain link.
The drug cartels seem to be one step ahead of us the majority of the time in actually enforcing that.
And it's really tough talking to people from the Northeast who say that there's no need for a border wall and it's not going to do anything.
But if you know anything about security, you need to practice defense in depth, and that first step is having some sort of obstacle that's overwatched.
And that can really be done in very cost-effective ways.
I talk to Border Patrol frequently just because I'll be at a restaurant sitting at the bar eating, you know, a meal, and Border Patrol will be sitting next to me.
There are honestly some very cost-effective ways in order to accomplish that, but otherwise we're Experiencing an influx of not only the illegal immigrants, but also the crime that they bring.
Property theft is up massively, and part of that's a function of the fact that the drugs are so readily available.
People get addicted to drugs, obviously they spend all their money, don't get fired from their jobs, and have to resort to property crimes.
But on top of that, actually, it's just a pretty terrible situation and all.
And especially during the Obama administration, I've noticed that during the Trump administration, it's gotten better.
But during the Obama administration, Border Patrol was defunded to the point where half the Border Patrol checkpoints weren't manned 24 hours a day.
So the ones that are directly on the border would be manned for 24 hours.
However, there were subsidiary checkpoints to try to catch those people who sneak past the border or walk through the desert, etc.
Those weren't being manned 24 hours a day.
So essentially somebody could pass the border on foot or being brought through the mountains or whatever by a coyote, get in a vehicle and then drive north, wait for that checkpoint to be closed down and then continue into the country.
It was honestly a 50-50 shot whenever I drive north as to whether those border patrol checkpoints would have been open.
Like I said, now they seem to be open with more frequency.
Hopefully we get better funding in order to mitigate these circumstances.
However, it's not a very good situation.
Right.
And, you know, as far as the war on drugs goes, I mean, I'm not a fan of the war on drugs as I've maintained for many, many years.
But it's complicated.
I mean, the welfare state has given rise to the single mother phenomenon.
Single mothers raise children who are often traumatized and dysfunctional and more prone to drug abuse.
And so it's created a demand for drugs.
The single mother state has created a demand for drugs.
You have the welfare state as a whole, which allows people to have drug addictions and still, you know, function.
The sort of hitting bottom and reform doesn't really occur as much.
And there's sort of a variety of other reasons, too.
I mean, the educational system is terrible, and therefore people aren't taught how to think, and so their minds are kind of mangled by propaganda and boredom and indoctrination and so on.
And so you've got a lot of people out there pretty unhappy, suffering a lot.
And, you know, it's covered up with these horrible psychotropics, these pharmaceutical drugs pumped often into the minds of little boys.
And Robert Whittaker has been on the show twice talking about just how catastrophic Mad in America is a great book to read.
There's a lot of artificial money and artificial demand and government subsidized child trauma that is creating a huge demand for drugs.
And weaning the population off this kind of addiction Is to me, it's a multi-generational phenomenon.
And we need to improve parenting.
We need to whittle back the welfare state.
We need to, you know, I think some of this stuff needs to be a bit more of a soft landing.
I'm sort of half and half about that.
So this is not my final thought on it.
But I can sort of see the case, you know, cold turkey or a soft landing.
I can see the case for both.
But...
It is brutal what is happening right now.
I mean, the welfare state creating this demand for drugs, the kids are single moms creating this demand for drugs, easy border crossings creating this supply of drugs.
It is doing a huge amount to undermine American society and destabilize American society and how is it to be solved.
And how is it to be solved?
It's complicated.
It's complicated.
It's going to be a combination of things.
But yeah, I feel for you that it's a big challenge at the moment.
And I certainly would like to see the war on drugs ended hugely.
But again, you know, with the welfare state being right there in the middle, I am concerned that it may do significant harm as well to do that at the moment, because it'll We're good to
go.
It's complicated.
Does that make any sense?
Oh, it makes 100% sense from the stuff that I've just seen and heard on a daily basis.
And, you know, it's not an easy solution.
There are no easy solutions to this issue whatsoever.
Personally, I think that the war on drugs has been a massive failure.
As you've said in previous shows, the war on drugs has created more drugs, just as the war on terrorism has created more terrorism.
Anything that the government I see what you're saying there 100%.
There was another topic before we started talking about drugs.
So my original question, it had almost two parts to it.
The first was that there are certain cultures that aren't necessarily compatible with a free society.
And the second part is that there are certain populations that aren't necessarily compatible with a free society.
So if you look at the finished research, and I know that you've had Dr.
Helmut Nyborg on your show, I've enjoyed that presentation a lot.
It seems as though If you don't have an IQ that's higher than 90, you can't really thrive in a free market economy.
Well, it's not just that you can't thrive it.
I don't think you can really comprehend the value of it.
The free market is like free speech.
Free speech means that I'm going to resist the urge to smack down speech I find upsetting because I project myself forward into the future and recognize that I don't want other people to have that power against me.
So it's a kind of future empathy.
It's a deferral of gratification.
All of these are higher cognitive functions.
It's the same thing with the free market.
with the free market.
It's like, okay, well, I'm going to have a free market and that's not, that's going to give me less money immediately, but it's going to give me more stuff and good stuff in the future, right?
So I'm not going to, like, it's like the welfare state.
We'll get rid of the welfare state.
Okay, well, I'm going to, it's going to cut my income now in the moment, but there's going to be better jobs.
There's going to be better medicines.
There's going to be better technology.
There's going to be wonderful things that I'm really going to need in the future.
Like, I mean, you need to be able to understand how to sacrifice gratification in the moment for the sake of very abstract gains in the future.
That's to some degree an IQ phenomenon.
And, It's very well correlated.
Deferral to gratification with IQ, with life success, these are all highly correlated.
So it's not just, well, you know, if you're not that smart, you're not going to do that well in a market economy.
I think it's really hard to grasp the value of the market economy and free speech and the separation of church and state and all of this stuff if you don't have any particular horsepower.
And I agree 100%.
If you look at this research, especially the study that I referenced out of Finland, no country that has an average IQ that's sub-90 has ever been able to create, sustain, or maintain a democracy.
But where I'm concerned is we do have many socialist programs within the United States, and we do have these massive welfare subsidies that are a dysgenics program that invite individuals, especially after the Kennedy immigration reforms, from countries that aren't necessarily ever going to be able to survive in a free market economy.
Now, I understand that IQ exists within a bell curve, and there are going to be smart populations and less intelligent populations within any subset.
But when I see immigration from the Hispanic world, for example, a lot of the IQs are going to be sub-90.
They're often around 85, between 85 and 80.
Now, if immigration from...
I'm sorry, I think you mean 85 and 90.
Some of them are low, like Guatemala is a little bit lower than 85, I believe.
Okay.
So, regardless...
Okay, sorry, yeah.
Okay, but let's say not ideal.
Okay.
Right.
So, if everybody who was immigrating was going to be, you know, Francisco de Ocona, then life would be fantastic.
I might not invest in this copper mine, but you'd have these free market principles that are coming north.
Well, I'm sorry to interrupt, but except for the regression to the mean, right?
Yes, and that's another issue.
Look at a country like India, for example, where the average IQ is 70.
A lot of people think that India is a very intelligent country, but if you have a population of 1.2 billion people, then both sides of the bell curve are going to be relatively packed with people.
So first-generation immigrants from India might be exceptionally intelligent, but their family members and subsequent generations are going to be that regression to the mean of 70.
Is it 70 in India?
Yes, it's honestly...
I don't think that's true.
It's 100% true.
Really?
Yeah, I double-checked that because I had read it, and I double-checked it before coming on your show because I wanted to bring that up.
But that's sub-Saharan Africa levels.
Yes, and it was honestly surprising to me as well.
I mean, if you want to take a second to look it up, but it's honestly 70.
I'm not questioning your dedication to the...
I'm just...
I got 82 for India here, iqresearch.info.
82.
I mean, I don't see how India could function in the way that it does with 70 average.
Yeah, I pulled that up and it was surprising because it's often referenced as one of, you know, the most democratic countries because they have universal voters and they have one of the highest voting percentages.
So, surprising to me as well, given the research that came out of Finland.
Then again, there are a fair number of socialist policies within Indy, and it's not necessarily dedicated to the free market, at least internally.
So that's how I was able to almost reconcile those ideas.
Well, yeah.
I mean, I've heard that the average IQ of Indians in the U.S. is 106.
Send me some sources for 70.
I don't accept that.
I'm sure you've got sources, and maybe they're right, but I just have to put the brakes on that.
And it's not particularly important at the moment, whether it's 70 or 82 or whatever, but yeah, it's...
It's lower than Japan.
Let's just put it that way.
Exactly.
Even though the average immigrant is substantially higher coming out of India, and it doesn't matter whether it's 70 or 82 in general, but their family members are going to have that regression to the mean.
Indian communities in general in the United States tend to marry other Indians.
They marry within themselves.
It's not like they're marrying out.
When you look at that regression to the mean, three generations down the road, You're now at sub-90, and substantially more of the population is going to be made up of people who have that sub-90 IQ. Yeah, it's a permanent relationship, right?
And I've made the case before that you can have really tall Chinese guys come over to join the basketball teams, but if the basketball teams have to guarantee that they're going to draft their kids too, they might prefer Danish people.
Oh, exactly.
So, that's where I, you know, when I look at these situations, In general, it's tough because being born and raised in America, we grow up being indoctrinated with all men are created equal.
And we have certain, you know, with certain unalienable rights.
And it's not until you get older and you start looking into it that you realize what the founders meant, is that all men are created equal in that they have these certain unalienable rights.
Not that all men are created equal in general, but as a child here, you're inundated with all men are created equal, all men are created equal, all men are created equal.
And then as an adult, a lot of people who Don't end up taking that statement in context.
Look at discrepancies in outcomes in life.
And they say, but all men are equal.
Why aren't we equal?
It's kind of fed into this whole socialist thought here in the States.
Yeah, I mean, the keyword there is created.
Right?
I mean, they could have saved a word.
And I think that Jefferson was known for parsimony when it came to his language.
But...
They could have saved a word by just saying all men are equal, but they didn't.
And that is, you know, equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome is a big challenge.
And remember, of course, the IQ test wasn't invented till when?
140 years after the founding of the republic.
So there may have been some instinctual knowledge, but...
There was no knowledge of what we have now, and certainly no knowledge of genetics or anything like that.
And of course, the study of this stuff in terms of genetics has been, well, chased out of the public sphere for the most part by medieval superstition and prejudice and all that kind of stuff, which is a desperate shame.
But yeah, it is a big challenge, and I don't know a lot of libertarians who understand the ethnicity and IQ stuff.
And, you know, or if they do, they say, okay, well, it's all environmental.
And I'm, you know, maybe it is all environmental.
But the thing is that if you bring people in with an IQ of 85, and IQ is environmental, well, guess who's going to be raising those kids?
Well, parents with an IQ of 85, is that going to have some negative effect if it's all environmental on the kid's upbringing?
Well, yeah.
And how long is it going to take to ameliorate that?
Well, I don't know.
Three generations?
Five generations?
I mean, we start to talk about more than a century.
What's wrong with just having kids with a, you know, like if you've got a domestic IQ 100 population, then just have those kids and you don't have to worry.
Anyway, it's just, you know, it's one of these things, but that's not what the left is all about in general.
And, you know, a lot of the right people, a lot of people on the right have trouble with this concept as well.
And it is a very, very difficult idea to process.
It changes so much in how you look at the world.
It's a really bitter pill to swallow, overall.
And it leaves you almost with more questions than answers.
Because how do you craft an immigration policy based upon that?
Do you say, well...
Given the fact that we care about having a democracy and the IQ in the United States has been steadily dropping, not only as a result of the fact that population seems to be exhibiting a decrease in IQ of one point per generation, but also factoring in the demographic changes within the United States have been altering the IQ as well.
So you have that.
When you're crafting your policy, do you say, well, Are we only going to allow individuals with a certain IQ threshold to enter into the United States?
And even if you do that, do you factor in things such as regression to the mean over generations?
It makes it exceptionally tough.
Yeah, I don't know the answers to any of that.
But it's also in terms of foreign aid.
It's a big challenge as well, right?
Because the whole goal has been, well, we transfer massive amounts of money from the first world to the third world.
And then the third world becomes like the first world.
And what seems to happen is when you transfer massive amounts of money from the first world to the third world, you just get a massive increase in the number of kids in the third world and everyone's kind of not that much richer than they were before, except there's a lot more people living in poverty.
And that is a big challenge and a big problem and the solution to it remains very challenging.
And Like you said, when it comes to redistributing those funds, it also comes to redistributing bullets in order to promote democracy in these countries that aren't going to ever have a democracy.
Look at the war in Iraq.
It was predicated upon the idea of bringing democracy.
We can talk about Weapons of mass destruction and stuff like that, but it transmorphed into something.
We're going to bring democracy to Iraq.
How many billions of dollars have been redistributed to Iraq based upon that concept?
And it's a country that has a sub-90 IQ. Based upon the research, they are not going to be able to create or sustain a democracy.
And this is the thing too, because people think that understanding this stuff makes you mean.
It's incredible kindness.
I mean, imagine how much suffering, if people knew about this IQ stuff, imagine how much suffering could have been averted because they would have tried to sell the war in Iraq as, you know, we're going to create a democracy just like ours.
And people would have said, well, that's actually not possible.
So no, we're not going to support that.
And a million Iraqis would still be alive right now.
More, in fact, right?
So the idea that it's somehow cruel or mean or bigoted, no, we have to deal with the world as it bloody well is, not as we wish it was in some egalitarian fantasy of perfect equality.
We have to deal with the world as it is.
And I think a lot of Americans supported things like the Arab Spring, supported things like the war in Iraq, supported things like All the initiatives to bring a Jeffersonian-style democracy to the Middle East.
And if they knew the truth about differences in intelligence, they would not be tempted to do that.
And they would feel great sympathy, perhaps, for the people who were living in the society.
But they're still alive.
They're still alive.
They would be alive now, not dead.
Because the society has been destroyed.
In Iraq and in other places.
And look at the secondary and tertiary effects to that.
So, in Iraq, for example, that had a direct relation to what went on in Syria later on, as ISIS was able to form in the power vacuum that was left behind by Obama.
Then you had the removal of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.
Prior to his removal in 2011, he gave an interview in which he stated, What happened?
We removed Muammar Gaddafi in the idea that we're going to have some sort of more democratic institution in Libya which just led to ISIS spreading to Libya and other militia groups which has facilitated the transfer of massive amounts of people into Europe.
It's been disastrous overall.
There are certain countries that aren't going to be able to I mean, our democracy is based upon how many thousands of years of Western liberal democratic tradition.
You could bring it back to Greece or you could bring it back to the Magna Carta.
Either way, it's been a very long time.
This has been an experiment several hundred years in the works, if not thousands.
And to say that we can just transplant this into any other country, and also to think that any other country, when they are coming here to the United States or any of the Western liberal countries, really, I'm more partial to the United States just because I love you.
But to assume that that's going to translate here very well is, like you said, it is cruel to think that we can impose that upon anybody who isn't going to survive in that type of environment.
Well, it's the old thing that the first pill costs you $50 million to make, but the second pill costs you a dollar.
Anybody who wants to reproduce the Western experiment is perfectly free to do so.
Right?
And any society that says, wow, you know, the West is doing really well.
They've got a nice free market, separation of church and state, freedom of press.
I mean, that stuff's all been done.
Done and dusted.
And it's not copyrighted.
It's not like the West is going to sue countries that adopt a Western model.
They can do it.
In fact, they want other countries to do it.
I mean, that's one of the things they did with Germany and Japan after the Second World War, both very high IQ populations who were able to make the transition from dictatorship to democracy relatively easily.
Well, not so much for Eastern Germany, but that's another topic.
But they would be, I think the Western powers would be happy.
You know, if North Korea turned around and said, I think we're going to be a democracy tomorrow, I don't think the world would say, oh no, how terrible.
And so it's all been intellectually achieved.
The writings are all in the public domain that justify these things.
And that the mode of life can be reproduced in other societies.
The idea you're going to shoot people until they accept your way of life is just madness.
Absolute madness.
Dictator from a relatively low IQ population and have it immediately flourish into a Jeffersonian democracy is a literally highly, highly murderous delusion.
And it really is out, I think, for me at least it's out of compassion and care that people should be aware of this information because the absence of it is having the world make incredibly disastrous decisions.
I have a friend who's from Sierra Leone in Africa, and he, just in talking, we spoke about colonialism in Africa, and he said, you're not going to hear about this very often, but it was honestly the most peaceful time that we had in the majority of our countries because there was a legal system.
There were laws that were enforced.
There was an enforcement mechanism behind it that kept the relative peace.
Despite the fact that the borders were drawn somewhat arbitrarily, there was an enforcement mechanism, and people lived in relative harmony to one another.
Well, you follow the footprints.
I mean, the number of blacks who were desperate to get into South Africa during the height of apartheid was staggering.
I mean, people were like roaming at night through lion-infested jungles to get to South Africa, risking literally life and limb, desperate to get to South Africa.
And that's tragic, but those are basic facts.
Right.
And you see that experience.
And I heard it firsthand from somebody who lived, you know, through part of a colonial era.
And what he said was that when the Europeans left, they had the model that they could have emulated.
But they were unable to do so.
And he said that it's just the general corruption that comes out of his society, that there's corruption, there's greed, and there's a lack of this deferral of gratification overall, where people just want things and they're willing to take them, and partially that's a result of the war regime throughout the majority of Africa.
But Well, and the incredible fragmentation that people forget about in sub-Saharan Africa in particular, where you have, like in very tight regions, you have like dozens or sometimes even hundreds of tribes and languages that, I mean, the idea of wrapping that into a cohesive national whole is beyond comprehension, I think.
It is.
And that's, uh, he was actually, the guy that I know was actually a gorilla during a civil war, um, and described the brutal conditions that they faced.
Um, but with that being said, Sierra Leone is somewhat stable now, um, However, it was just interesting to hear that perspective, that under colonialism they had this experience where they could see, I wouldn't say Western liberal democratic traditions in the purest sense, but they were able to see how a functioning government would work, that there was just an inability to replicate that afterwards.
And yes, you're right, it is partially due to the fact that you had these disparate societies that were jammed together, but...
To say that they don't at least have a framework to base that off.
And then it's kind of telling that it hasn't been replicated since.
Right.
Right.
Well, these are all very exciting Topics, and it is my sincere hope that we can begin to examine some of the causes.
I was chatting about this with a delightful Jamaican woman last night in the show.
It's my hope that we can bring scientific and cultural and philosophical expertise to bear on this problem of disparate IQs among various populations, find a way to remediate it, or at least accept, if we can't remediate it, at least accept it as part of a factor in our calculations, because The amount of harm that is being done by this ignorance is truly staggering.
And the harm that is being done to the lower IQ populations is unbelievably horrifying.
And that's where my heart really goes out.
Because that's not their responsibility.
That's not their fault.
And they truly are the victims in a lot of these miscalculations.
Yes, agreed.
And then, just to wrap it up nice with a bow for us here, I think, you know, just framing my initial question, how do libertarians reconcile the desire to have an open board of society with having the smallest government possible?
I think that we can both agree on the fact that it seems like we're trying to place the cart before the horse, where there's All of these welfare programs in the United States and the government seems to grow every single year.
Hopefully Trump can turn that around somewhat.
But you can't necessarily just open up the floodgates to immigration from wherever.
And then even once you establish that smaller government society, It seems like you're really going to have to pay attention to the populations that are entering, because there will always be a desire to make government larger, to introduce more social welfare programs.
So there needs to be some controls in place.
Yeah, and I have an open invitation to libertarians.
Tell me how, once you understand human biodiversity, open borders work.
With the welfare state.
That is, you know, I'm very open to, I can't figure it out, but you know, it's like I have to come up with all the answers or even could.
So that's what I need to hear.
And I don't find libertarians even willing to explore the question of human biodiversity, let alone find a way to factor in the challenges into their calculations.
So thanks for the call.
Thanks very much everyone for calling in tonight.
A delightful, delightful show as Well, almost always, but certainly great tonight.
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