Feb. 26, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:31:28
3603 DE@D END - Call In Show - February 22nd, 2017
Question 1: [1:16] – “Stefan often talks about the benefits that Christianity brings to a culture either by supplementing or replacing the Greco-Roman philosophy. African-Americans are on average for more Christian, in practice and belief, than other groups in America, yet they are doing the poorest. Why has Christianity failed them, and would another religion better serve the African-American community.”Question 2: [28:55] – “While most the world believes or have an idea of what Communism is, and quickly view or point fingers to failed countries and its dictators as an example, maybe they really do not understand communism at all. I believe that the idea of communism is flawed, but also believe it can be fixed to flourish in a modern system. Do you believe that it can be altered to fit as an ideal model for future society based on some of the suggestions I share with you? or if you have your own ideas of how it could work or benefit humanity?”Question 3: [57:21] – “With increasing technology it's probable that no work at all will be required to produce goods and the 1833 economic theory "The Tragedy of the commons" occurs, as bogarting commons violates the non-aggression principle. I agree with you that we should be changing education to focus on what we can't automate but this doesn't account for the masses that are going to increasingly rely on handouts/UBI. Therefore why shouldn't we go with Technautominarchocapitalism - Where everything that makes thing for free such as technology is self-sustained individually in a night watchman government, while capitalism accounts for what we can't automate such as space exploration?”Question 4: [1:07:58] – “I am in a long-distance relationship. A couple months ago, my boyfriend was in the process of planning an engagement until I stopped him and told him to slow down. It is a year and a half in and my uncertainty about the relationship is keeping me up at night. I am tormented by the idea that I could be stringing him along. He is a kind, patient, and hardworking alpha male with free-market politics. You have argued on your show that men tend to love very hard, and women are always calculating. My indecisiveness has led to me to feel very guilty about the amount of love he has towards me. My friends and family tend to think I am overthinking it, and they tell me clichés like ‘you will just know.’ What is the nature of this romantic cliché? Is the ‘you will just know’ idea a fantasy that people use to avoid reason and a true understanding of love?”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 Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
We got some good callers tonight.
So did Christianity fail the black community?
Should, maybe blacks in America, adopt a different religion?
And what's up with the Nation of Islam?
So, good caller to talk about that.
The second caller wanted to know, or had a theory, about how communism could be fixed to solve all of the, I guess, glitches that exist within communism, and we had a conversation about that.
The third caller, are you ready for tech notum min narco capitalism?
Yes, I had to practice that once or twice.
It's a way of bringing anarchy and technology together to solve the world's problems.
And we'll see how that went.
The fourth caller is a woman who had a long-distance relationship with a guy who was very pretty, but she just couldn't quite find a way to commit to marrying him.
It had been going on for quite a while.
We went pretty deep, and I think we solved the problem.
Thanks so much for everyone who listens to the show, who, in particular, donates to the show at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
And don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
And also, as you know, use our affiliate link at fdrurl.com slash Amazon.
Alright, well up for us today we have Jeff.
Jeff wrote in and said, Stefan often talks about the benefits that Christianity brings to a culture, either by supplementing or replacing the Greco-Roman philosophy.
African Americans are on average far more Christian in practice and belief than other groups in America, yet they are doing the poorest.
Why has Christianity failed them, and would another religion better serve the African American community?
That's from Jeff.
Hi Jeff, how are you doing tonight?
Great, how are you?
I'm well, I'm well, thank you.
Well, what are your thoughts about why African Americans in America are doing not great?
Statistically on average, lots of exceptions.
Yeah, yeah, of course.
Well, clearly I want to say that when I say African Americans, I mean the culture, not the, you know, blacks as a race.
You know, I would say that there are I guess African-American culture is relatively new.
When the slaves were brought over, they were kind of divorced from their homeland, and so it's only been in the past 150 years that they've been able to establish Kind of cultural norms and a lot of those norms haven't been weeded out yet.
So what you're saying is that if the African Americans had had a continuity of the kind of culture that they were enjoying in sub-Saharan Africa, then that would have been much better because you can compare African Americans to the blacks in sub-Saharan Africa and what do you see?
Well, the blacks in America are doing better than the blacks.
30 times richer.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I don't think it's because they were stripped of their African-American heritage.
Okay.
And of course, another example would be the Jews, right?
Throughout most of the Dark Ages, Middle Ages, and thereon, Jews were persecuted, hounded out, killed, marginalized, expelled, and didn't have a homeland.
And...
Well, they did all right in many ways, right?
They did very well when it came to being in banking, in the arts, in entertainment, in finance, and so on.
So I don't find your arguments particularly satisfactory, but I'm certainly happy to hear more.
Okay.
I... I kind of got on this subject when I was reading about Malcolm X and how he said that he became a lot less violent when he converted to Islam.
And my first reaction to that was I laughed because we kind of think of Islam as violent nowadays.
But then I kind of realized that the difference is ideological versus, I don't know, opportunistic.
Violence?
Kind of like, I don't know, Vikings or pirates.
It's...
The culture there isn't really shaping behavior.
Sorry, the culture where?
In the African-American community isn't against violence.
It's acceptable to go out and take what you need rather than to...
I guess, negotiate for it?
You know, I gotta push back a little bit about general statements about all African-American culture.
No, no, no, no.
I understand that completely.
I guess just when you look at incarceration rates, graduation rates...
Income, savings.
Sure, incomes and savings.
And so the second part of my question...
No, no, no, no, no.
I still want to know what your theories are.
Listen, I mean, it's tragic how, in many ways, on average, the black community is doing in America, the native, right?
The West African blacks are doing about as well as whites and so on.
But yeah, it's pretty tragic.
And I'm just wondering, I mean, I don't know, how long have you been listening to this show for?
About a year.
Have you ever heard any explanations on this show that you might consider a value?
Yeah, I mean, the IQ stuff is fairly interesting, and I agree with it to an extent.
But, you know, that's for my question about culture and… No, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.
Okay.
I don't know what...
You know, when people say arguments are interesting, I don't know what that means.
You know, I have no idea what that means.
You know, I never said in a math test when I was a kid, I never said two and two make five and the teacher said, that's interesting.
Or two and two make four.
That's an interesting answer.
It's like, well, is it valid or invalid?
Is it true or false?
So with the race and IQ stuff, you know, where black...
Blacks in America, African Americans, historically, you know, 85 IQ, 87 IQ, and so on, depending on how you measure it, rose a little bit in the 60s, has seemed to have stagnated since then.
What is it that you find incorrect?
Because listen, if this argument is wrong, please, you know, if everyone out there tells me that this is incorrect, please tell me how it's false.
I'd absolutely love to give up this perspective.
So if you say you only agree with it to a certain extent, I'd just like to know what you disagree with and why.
I don't disagree with it.
It's just one of those things, whether it's correlative or causal.
Yeah.
And I think that you make a very good game.
Wait, hang on.
I mean, I know what correlation and causation mean, but can you break that argument out a little bit?
Well, when you look at the IQ of the nations around the world, there's a vast difference in wealth and success based on that IQ. And I buy your argument.
I think it's valid.
So, okay, so the argument being that there are significant genetic components to IQ, it's not everything, but it's a lot.
And that it is the genetic components of IQ that most likely are driving wealth disparities around the world.
With the caveat, of course, that, you know, South Korea, North Korea, not wildly different biologically or genetically.
However, you know, one has a more free market system and the other one has a hell-sent, satanic totalitarian dictatorship.
And that's going to cause just a little bit of a branch in the old income and freedom and happiness and all that.
Yeah, yeah.
And that's one of the things when I look at, you know, communist China, it kind of always baffles me why people with such high IQs still, you know, this still works.
Wait, what still works?
Communism in China.
What, you mean now?
It's not communist now.
What is it now?
It's a mixed economy.
In many ways, like Russia, it's more free market than the West.
Very true.
Very true.
I mean, it certainly wasn't working under Mao when 70 million Chinese were slaughtered, and there was mass starvation.
I mean, it certainly wasn't working when it was actual communism, now that they've had a lot of free market reforms.
And Lenin considered these called NEP, New Economic Policy or New Economic Plan, tried introducing, just to prevent Russia from starving to death in the 20s, tried introducing some free market reforms, but they didn't stick too long, particularly after Stalin got in.
But yeah, I mean, if there's no free market, it doesn't matter how smart you are.
Sorry, if you're not allowed to use your arms, you can't be a good catcher.
Yeah.
Okay.
So I'm just sort of curious.
I mean, you didn't want to bring up the race and IQ stuff initially, right?
Yes.
Why is that?
Well, I was listening to your show on why your country's IQ matters, and Garrett Jones, I guess, was the guest's name.
He was talking about why Asian savings rates are so high, and when he said that no one really has an explanation, but I have an explanation, my first thing was I jumped to, oh, well, These East Asian countries are Buddhist, and Buddhism is strongly against materialism, or economic materialism.
And so it makes sense that they have- But then you would give all your money to the poor, right?
If you save it, you still have an asset.
So if you're against materialism, then you would be against saving, at least to some degree as well.
True.
It's because IQ is associated with the capacity to defer gratification, which is directly associated with one's capacity to save for the future rather than spend in the present.
Okay.
That makes sense.
Huh.
All right.
So I don't think that a switch in religion is going to necessarily solve the problem.
I mean, I know that there are some elements within the black community and other groups who think that, well, you know, Christianity is the...
Theology of slaves and was inflicted by the white man and the Nation of Islam stuff.
And it's going to be much better.
But, you know, Malcolm X, I mean, there were sort of two big turning points.
Like when he went to jail for the immense amount of criminal activity he was involved in, he met in jail brilliant black men.
You know, the guys who could do, like, massive calculations in their head.
And they ended up, like, doing, you know, wetware books for drug dealers and stuff.
And he's like, how many, you know, black mathematicians and so on have been lost to society and so on?
And, you know, I understand all of that.
I get all of that.
And there's truth in that, without a doubt.
But that was sort of one thing where he felt that there was this big tide of black genius in America that...
Was being stifled and thwarted by racism.
But when he became less directly violent was when he went to other places in the world which didn't have the fraught race relations that America had particularly had throughout its history in many ways but was reaching a boiling point in terms of resistance in the 1960s when he went to other countries which didn't have This history of racial tension, of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and so on.
And he met white people who were very nice, right?
He then was able to say, okay, maybe they're not the devil's incarnate.
Maybe there's something more specific to the American experience that has caused all of these problems.
So I can understand why He would hope to oppose an increasingly decaying urban landscape, you know, like the ghettos falling into single motherhood and crime, and why he'd want some sort of external mental discipline to impose itself on the dissolution of the black family, right?
This is the great plague I've talked about on the show many times before, that the black family was very stable, in many ways even more stable than White families throughout the 1920s, 1930s, when the welfare state came in.
Two things started happening.
Number one, the black move to the middle class slowed and eventually basically stopped.
And in some areas even reversed, right?
So blacks making it into the middle class and so on.
Because remember, massive, millions and millions of highly competent, highly brilliant black people in America.
And that movement to open up the doors to the middle class and the invitation.
And part of that was the unions who put in minimum wages in order to avoid having to compete with black workers and so on.
And so number one with the welfare state was the movement of blacks into the middle class slowed and stopped and in some places reversed.
And secondly, the family fell apart.
I mean, the family fell apart.
And Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote about this in the 60s and was roundly condemned as a racist for accurately predicting the future, as people generally are when they speak facts that radical egalitarians don't like, or just evil hate facts.
This combination of less of an incentive to work, to save, to educate yourself, to have cohesive and positive and peaceful communities that would propel blacks into the middle class.
That collapsed.
And then the family collapsed.
So he's looking at this general collapse of opportunity and...
He's saying, well, okay, discipline.
We need discipline.
We need focus.
We need something to be solved inside the community.
And for him, he looked at the Christianity, which was not able to prevent the decay of the black family.
And then, I imagine, I'm no mind reader, maybe he wrote about it.
Maybe he didn't.
But I would imagine, like I can put myself in his mindset and say, well, the family's falling apart.
Christianity is not able to stop it.
The priests and the churches, the Christian church is not able to stop it.
So what are we going to do?
Well, we're going to have to go to something that has more discipline.
We're going to go to Islam, which has more discipline with regards to the maintenance of the family.
And That's true.
That's true.
It's one thing that's true about Islam is it has a very strong focus on the maintenance of the family and the maintenance of family structure and family bonds.
And I can understand that perspective because the other argument, the other perspective that could have been taken would be to say that it's the welfare state that's the problem.
It's a massive redistribution of wealth that's the problem.
Therefore, we need to end the welfare state and we need to...
You know, privatize education and so on so that blacks could get schools that would cater more to specific needs and so on.
I'm not talking about segregation.
I mean, anything.
Horrible, horrible.
Philosophy and horrible implementation of government walls between communities.
But he would have had to question and be skeptical about the nature of the state, the power of the state to solve racial problems, which the power of the state has not been successful even remotely in solving racial problems.
It tends to inflame and aggravate and escalate them.
And so Malcolm X to really solve the problem, as Martin Luther King Jr.
would have had to really solve the problem, they'd have had to say, okay, The government ran slavery.
The government protected the rights of slave owners.
The government ran Jim Crow.
The government ran segregation.
The government has been in control of race relations since the founding of this goddamn country.
Let's get the government out of race relations.
Let's end the welfare state as specifically toxic to those in the lowest rung of society, right?
The welfare state comes in and where people are, they freeze.
They freeze because the incentives are set up and we've talked about the welfare cliff in this show before.
A single woman with a couple of kids, a single mom has to make like $65,000 to get what she can get from welfare for the same, to get the same benefits that she gets from the welfare state.
So the black community would have had to become...
And there were elements within the black community who were talking about all of this.
You know, we need a free market.
We need to get the state out of race relations.
We need to stop running to the state every time we have a problem.
However, this ran into the most fundamental problem, which is that the black community, the black activism in the 60s and before...
It was being used by the communists as tools to destabilize Western society, to destabilize capitalism, to destabilize the free market.
And so if you went to a movement that had a significant unity with socialism And communism, and as we know from Martin Luther King Jr., was an outright socialist.
So if you went to a significantly socialist, communist-funded and driven movement and said, well, you know what?
We need more capitalism, right?
I mean, you wouldn't get very far.
It's like going to a George Soros organization for mortar for a wall.
They just won't...
They won't be that interested in it.
So that would be sort of my guess as to why there was that attraction.
And the left has allied with Islam and continues to ally with Islam in many ways, and this is not a new phenomenon.
So you don't think that Christianity could have done anything to prevent the welfare state from assimilation?
Absolutely!
Yes, absolutely!
Goddamn Christianity for this!
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but dudes!
Dudes!
Oh, don't get me started.
Okay, I'm gonna start.
A wee little commandment, you know, maybe you've heard of it too.
Thou shalt not steal.
This is what...
It's one of the great things about Christianity.
Thou shalt not steal.
Now, unlike a lot of other groups, it's not, don't steal from your own in-group, but you can steal from other people.
Right?
It's not the, you know, believers and infidels.
It's not the Jews and the goyim.
It's not like, well, these are moral rules, but they're pretty much for our own group.
Everyone else, to hell with them.
Christianity is universal.
Universal.
Thou shalt not steal.
And some of the original commandments, thou shalt not murder, was like, well, thou shalt not murder Jews.
Right?
But it expanded.
Thou shalt not murder.
Thou shalt not steal, saith the Lord.
And the welfare state is massive theft.
Massive theft.
Coercive redistribution of wealth.
Two rules in the Bible.
Ten Commandments and the consequences.
I don't know if you studied this when you were a kid or if you know it now.
Do you know what the Bible says about what are the wages of sin?
Don't know.
The wages of sin are death.
The wages of sin are death.
We can see this going on in Europe right now.
They broke one of the most fundamental of the Ten Commandments.
Thou shalt not steal with the establishment of the welfare state.
And the wages of sin, well, the Bible's pretty clear about that too.
Europe is threatened by its own addiction to sin.
It's own addiction to violations of property rights.
It's own satanic embrace of thou shalt steal.
Stealing is good, right?
I have an unpublished show which will come out at some point.
Socialism is Satanism.
But yeah, it's thou shalt not steal.
And that's what needs to be remembered.
So in Christianity, thou shalt not steal, if the church had said, no, no, no, no, no, the welfare state is immoral.
The welfare state is stealing.
The welfare state is social engineering, and the welfare state comes directly out of socialist thinking, Fabian socialism, progressive thinking, at the turn of the century.
But that would require that the church stand up against the voting preferences of the female voting bloc, which had a lot to do with why the welfare state comes in.
You can see these dominoes happening all over the West.
Women get the vote.
10 to 15 years later, hey, big giant welfare state and big giant socialized medicine approach or standard.
Or, you know, and usually and big old age pensions and women and so on.
It would have required that The church stand up against the women and say, okay, ladies, I know you're kind of new to this.
You got the vote.
Fantastic.
Very excited.
Everyone's over the moon.
We're thrilled.
Thrilled.
But you're kind of new to this.
Kind of new to this.
Don't have a lot of property, ladies.
So it's kind of easy for you to vote away other people's property because you don't really have a lot of property yourselves.
That may be tragic.
That may be unfortunate.
That may be negative.
But we got to stop you on this because, you know, this whole let's have a giant welfare estate, let's have a giant redistribution estate, I got to tell you, probably in about...
For 60 years or 50 years, historically, everything's just going to collapse.
Now, I know that for some of you, you might be dead by then, but a lot of you have kids, and don't you kind of want them to grow up in an environment which is not facing massive social collapse and economic collapse and so on?
But the church didn't do that.
Church didn't do that.
I mean, of course, there were a few and there's some people who said it was bad and so on.
The atheists didn't do it and the church didn't do it because ladies rule in the West in general because it's very case-elected.
And so the deferral to women is the great weakness of the case-elected groups.
And it's funny.
You know, it's funny.
We just had this woman on.
I don't think the show.
The show's not gone out yet on video.
It's on podcast.
Feminist housewife.
And she's a very competent, very intelligent, brilliant, in fact, woman.
And her husband, I guess, I don't know if he was a boyfriend at the time, husband says to her, you know, you're one of the smartest chicks I know.
And she's like, well, wait a minute.
Don't you mean one of the smartest people?
He's like, no, no, no.
I mean, the men I know who are still smarter, but you're certainly the smartest woman I know.
And, you know, rather than be offended, she's like, great, you can have my babies.
I'm going to have your babies.
You can be the father of my children.
I'm now going to stay home and raise your children.
You know, standing up to women is showing respect for women.
I don't know why people don't understand this.
It's just this thirsty, cat-begging position that, you know, I mean, the Muslims pray five times a day to Mecca, but Western cucks are 24-7 on their knees to the eternal vagina.
But so, yeah, I mean, it's the church did not maintain that thou shalt not steal stuff.
And as a result, the West is dying because that's the wages of sin.
So it's just adherence to text or belief or...
Yeah, all you have to do is follow the damn rules, Christian.
I mean, you got a rule, thou shalt not steal.
And at no point in any part of the Bible, I've read the thing cover to cover, but I'm no expert, right?
But there's nothing that I remember where Jesus ever said, hey, you know what?
If you actually go and help the poor directly, it can be kind of smelly.
Like, they've got flies, they could have scabs, they can be grabby, grimy fingernails.
It's gross!
Yuck!
Who wants to get that close to the poor?
So what you want to do is have government officials take over your moral duty to help the poor.
Just advocate for more taxes, mostly on other people, since a lot of Christians are poor, women are poor.
Advocate for taxes on other people, and then faceless...
Soulless bureaucrats will take care of your moral imperative to take care of the poor.
Just shuffle it off to the state to handle and you don't need to worry about being a good Christian and selling your possessions and giving to the poor and following me.
Never said that.
Never said that.
The turning over of charity to the state is absolutely against Christian ethics.
It's about personal virtue.
It's about personal care.
It's about personal consideration.
It's like having a ministry of soul-saving.
Oh, you know, we don't need to tell anyone about Jesus or virtue or goodness or the Ten Commandments or the good news of being saved or being born again or anything like that because there's a bunch of faceless bureaucrats, probably most half-atheists or anything like that, but they're going to be responsible for shepherding every single human loving soul through the golden pearly gates of heaven.
I mean, you'd say to Christians, you want to Put the salvation of human soul in a government program?
No!
That's our job.
We're Christians.
But when it comes to helping the poor, oh yeah, just let the government take care of it because, whew, man, those guys can have some pretty strong whiskey breath at 4 a.m.
in the morning, so don't really want it.
Thanks very much.
So it's just, it's laziness and it was a lack of adherence to Christian values that caused the formation and entrenchment of the welfare state.
So yeah, if you don't follow...
The commandments that God gives you, and when he clearly says the wages of sin is death, well, then you're going to be a Paris hotel owner facing a $1.5 billion drop in tourist dollars, which is really only the beginning of your troubles to come.
So, you know, I've always been a person who advocates for...
Teaching a man to fish rather than giving him a fish.
I mean, so the best thing to do is just some kind of Moynihan-style benign neglect and just deprive them of the things that the state gives of them now?
I mean, how do you help...
Okay, so you basically stopped listening to me completely, right?
You got freaked out by what I was saying.
And you just, all you heard just wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.
You're like in the back of Charlie Brown's classroom, right?
Did I ever, ever say anything about benign neglect?
No, no.
What did I say?
You talked about the, how the state has come in and prevented Christianity.
No, what was the duty of Christians?
What is the duty of Christians with regards to the poor?
What did I say?
Help them.
Help them.
To help them!
Where do you get benign neglect out of that?
I'm just curious, because I never said anything of the kind.
Who are you talking to?
Do you have somebody else in the end of the year?
No, no.
I mean, just as far as the state goes, the state should back off.
And we as individuals, as volunteerists...
Oh my god, no.
It's not that the state should back off.
Thou shalt not steal!
Okay.
Thou shalt not steal.
Thou shalt not abrogate thy moral responsibilities to faceless, self-interested bureaucrats who grow the poor like a pot grower growing some Snoop Dogg weed milf thing.
Right?
I mean, you can't shuffle over your moral responsibilities to the state and thou shalt not steal in the wages of sin or death.
And the Christians are like, I don't know what's happening.
What's happening is you kind of peeled off from the good book a little bit there, didn't you, my friends?
Yeah.
That makes sense.
I mean, Christianity could solve the problem, but it would actually have to be Christianity solving the problem by referencing the rules of Christianity.
If Christians took their belief systems seriously, we would solve a huge number of problems in society.
But, I don't know.
Everyone gets drugged by the power of the state.
Everyone's got something to hide except me and my monkey.
Alright, well I hope that helps, but thanks very much for the call.
I appreciate it, and let's move on to the next caller.
Alright, up next we have Michael.
Michael wrote in and said,"...while the majority of the world believes or has an idea as to what communism is, they quickly view and point fingers to failed countries and its dictators as an example, but maybe they really do not understand communism at all." I believe that the idea of communism is flawed, but also believe it can be fixed to flourish in a modern world slash system.
Do you believe that it can be altered to fit as an ideal model for future society based on some of the suggestions I share with you, or if you have your own ideas as to how it could work or benefit humanity?
That's from Michael.
Mikey Mike, how you doing?
Hi.
Listen, just before we start, and I hate to filibuster on our conversation, I'll just make this very brief.
We had a communist call in recently who was saying that there's really no such thing as property, but then got really upset at the Europeans, quote, stealing the land from the natives in North America, which of course makes no sense if there's no such thing as property, you can't steal stuff.
But I also wanted to mention how when communists get into power, and maybe these aren't the communists you're talking about, Michael, but when communists get into power, they regularly do something called nationalization, which means they take factories and houses and transportation systems, sewage systems, road systems, which means they take factories and houses and transportation systems, They just basically steal it all from the people who've actually made it.
And I just find it kind of interesting how when the Europeans went to North America, generally they traded for the land, which is voluntary, or they would have a fight, which is exactly what the natives have been having with each other for the past, I don't know, umpteen thousands of years, all warring and fighting over a variety of things and catching slaves and capturing slaves and so on.
So it's just kind of funny to me.
I was like, oh yes, but the Europeans came over and stole land from the natives.
It's like, well, what are all the communist governments that come in and steal the means of production from everyone who's voluntarily created?
I guess that doesn't count.
I just wanted to mention that because I had to cut the argument off because he wasn't listening.
So that having been said, Michael, I'm happy to have this conversation.
I'm sorry to put you into this category, but I've talked with a lot of communists over the years.
I'm going to need clear, concise answers, because one thing that people on the left do is they filibuster like crazy.
So I'm happy to have clear answers.
And concise answers, but just don't go off on abstractions, because if you're going to try and lead me someplace intellectually, I really need it to be, you know, simple steps across a stream.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
I mean, I called because of that call that you took the other day.
First off, I'm not I'm not a communist and I love my fast cars and money and clothes and technology.
In general, the non-gulag lifestyle has its perks.
Okay, I'm with you.
But let me tell you a little bit about myself.
I studied industrial design and I pretty much study the function of a product.
We make it better.
We try to figure out what the current problem is and what it can do in the future.
So in that sense, it's not really a standard way of trying to figure out communism or socialism or capitalism.
I'm looking at it in a way that communism as a product, how can it be beneficial and how can it be altered to- Okay, see now you're just using a bunch of words, right?
And I apologize for that.
So tell me about the system.
Tell me about the system that you want.
How does it deal with property rights?
How does it deal with the price calculation problem?
How does it deal with the allocation of resources?
How does it deal with human needs?
How does it deal with the limitations of resources?
Just tell me, you know, give me the elevator pitch, right?
We used to call it in the business world.
You've got an investor, you've got an elevator, right?
How do you sell it?
And I don't want just, you know, well, my system has massive benefits.
My system has blah, blah, blah.
That's like saying to someone who's an investor, well, well, my business is very profitable and my business is cheap to run.
And my business is like, well, you know, that's just a bunch of words, right?
What's the actual?
So how does your system function?
Give me the short version of how it works and what it looks like.
Okay, so basically what we have to do is look for the problem, what the main root cause of that problem is.
Now, for me, when I look at capitalism, socialism, and communism, I notice that there's one common denominator, and that's money.
But how am I going to prove that money is the cause of all these problems?
So I started looking backwards, right?
I'm sorry to interrupt you for just a sec.
Sorry to interrupt you, Michael.
When you say that money is a problem, do you mean government...
Hang on, hang on.
Hang on.
No, still, still.
If you can let me finish the question, you're going to have a much, much better chance to answer it without looking like it...
Anyway.
So if...
Are you talking about currency that would be part of the free market, like a gold-backed currency or something voluntarily entered into?
Or are you talking about the modern central planning, socialist, centralized fiat currency monopoly that goes on?
Because...
Those two things are – it's sort of like saying when you talk about trade, are you talking about trade like the black market in the Soviet Union or are you talking about trade like a free market?
So are you talking about government money or are you talking about free market money?
For me, it's the system.
Just the money system.
No, no.
See, you've got to answer that question for me, Mike.
Sorry.
But this is kind of important, right?
When you talk about money, is it fiat currency run or controlled by governments?
And I know everyone's going to say, well, the Federal Reserve is a private institution.
Yes, I understand that.
However, however, the government grants it a monopoly.
So it's not really that private when you think about it.
So are you talking about government-controlled currency or are you talking about free market currency when you talk about money?
I'm talking about the idea of money in general, like the trade of currency, anything.
It doesn't have to be the Fed or the IMF or any of that.
I'm just talking about money in general.
So any medium of exchange is a problem.
Any sort of common denominator that facilitates trade, that is the issue.
Yes.
Okay.
I'm going through it as a, how can I prove it?
And let me work backwards and, you know, find out what the problems are.
Hang on, sorry.
Saying money is the problem is like saying, I don't know, joblessness is a problem.
I'm trying to figure out, just give me some solutions.
You know, I'm not getting younger.
Okay, so why is money a problem?
What does it do that is problematic?
Well, if you look at drugs, you know, why are drug dealers selling drugs?
Well, they want money.
Why are people in power?
Why do they want to hold on to power?
Because of the money.
Why are there corruptions?
Because of money.
The drug companies out there, they're selling you drugs that don't work.
And they pay off the lobbyists.
Why?
Because of money.
But everything you're talking about, sorry, everything you're talking about there is government control and coercion, right?
Drug dealers are selling drugs because no one else is allowed to in general, in the West, right?
Portugal accepted some US states with marijuana accepted and so on.
But drug dealers are doing it.
People in political power are doing it because they have the political power of the state.
Drug companies have...
The state patents, state licenses, state controls, they sell huge amounts of stuff to the government.
And psychiatrists and their voodoo trade in brain shrinking psychopharmaceuticals are all licensed by the state and often paid by the state.
I don't think money is the central thread that ties everything together here.
I think it's government power, but of course, correct me where I go astray.
No, because I mean, The fact that we're talking about how we can correct or how we can benefit parts of communism or take some of the ideas that Marx introduced.
I mean, he never practiced what he preached.
And from your previous videos, I know you're calling him a hypocrite.
And, you know, in most ways he was because he didn't practice what he preached.
Well, he exploited the workers, right?
I mean, he got his money through Engels who ran a factory system, and the money had to be taken from the mouths and pockets of the workers in order to feed Marx.
He ran out massive debts and never paid them off, thus exploiting other people who had savings at the bank, most of whom were workers.
And he also banged his maid and then threw her out in the street and disavowed his own child in order to avoid scandal.
So yeah, he was a colossal asshole and a truly postulant human being.
Yeah, and I agree with you on that.
Okay, so let's get back to what is the problem that money creates.
Money doesn't create greed, you understand?
Greed was around long before money, and there's greed for lots of things that don't involve money, right?
There's greed for power over people.
That doesn't always involve money.
There's greed for sexual experiences, even in destructive senses.
That doesn't necessarily involve money.
There's lots of greed.
There's greed for food.
Gluttony doesn't always involve money.
You can grow your own food if you want and eat too much of it.
So there is a lot of greed that occurs, a lot of addictive behavior that occurs that people get their endorphins from that don't necessarily have to do with money and certainly would survive and in fact predate a monetary system.
That's true.
But from my take is that although money is not, you know, everything in greed, I do believe That money creates inequality.
And through Mark's work, his idea of making people equal and giving them freedom- I'm sorry, how does the dictatorship of the proletariat equal equality?
I mean, the word dictatorship seems to be kind of telling there.
And that seems to be specifically not about things being equal, but about the flipping of the social, like the class mechanism, right?
The bourgeois have stolen everything from the working class.
We're going to have a dictatorship of the proletariat.
We're going to take away things from the hated bourgeoisie.
We're going to hound and steal their property.
We're going to harass and imprison them because they're enemies of the working class and so on.
I don't know how you get equality out of that particular process, but maybe I've missed something.
No, I mean, his idea was that he just wanted the common man to be equal to everyone.
Okay?
I mean, I could read off something here.
It says, in the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat.
So...
I don't know if I understood that correct, but I kind of thought that to be equal amongst humanity.
No, but the proletariat is a very specific group in humanity.
It's not all the humanity.
Not everyone is a proletariat.
Proletariat is the working class.
Right?
And so they're the people who have no ownership over the means of production.
They are the cogs in the factory machinery that produces the product.
So just not everyone.
And I'm sure you're aware, and you've listened to the show, I assume, for more than 12 minutes, but I'm sure you're aware that...
Human abilities exist in a bell curve.
Human intelligence exists in a bell curve.
And it's to a large degree genetic or innate, a lot of these things.
How do you propose making everyone equal when people can be effectively thousands of times more intelligent?
How do you end up with people being equal when they have such enormously different abilities?
In other words, let's say that you wanted everyone to be an equally great singer.
But some people are born with great voices.
And some people are born with okay voices, but they can train them to become better.
And some people are born with terrible singing voices, no sense of pitch, no rhythm or whatever, right?
So if you have the goal, say, of making everyone an equally good singer, how would you go about achieving it?
I know it sounds like a bit of an outside-the-box approach.
But a singing voice has some element of genetics, and a singing ability has some element of genetics.
You know, I got a friend whose daughter, perfect pitch, boom, it gets perfect pitch, you play her note on piano, she knows exactly what it is, and she can reproduce it flawlessly.
Well, that's important.
It's pretty important.
So a singing voice is one of these things, you know, some people can't, some people can with practice, and some people can't even if they don't practice.
They just, like Freddie Mercury never took a singing lesson in his life, although he did end up wrecking his voice to a large degree through menthol cigarettes and AIDS. He had this little thing he called the mushroom and pop up in his throat.
But anyway, so how would you propose making everyone an equally good singer, given the bell curve of singing ability in the world?
Well, I mean, let's go to that show about Venezuela the other day that you were talking about, where you said that each person had their own strength, like their strengths, like black people had, you know, they flourished in sports and, you know, the Japanese and the Chinese, they flourished in mathematics, science and, you know.
I wouldn't think that to be, you know, one better than the other.
I think that if all of them came together and kind of, I guess, helped each other, that would make them or, I guess, make everybody equal.
I guess, I mean, that's just my thought.
But does it make everyone equal?
I mean, I think it's fair to say that there are more engineering jobs than there are jobs for sports stars.
I mean, there's just fewer, right?
So it doesn't seem to make everyone equal insofar as if you look at everyone, regardless of race, who has an IQ of 80, they have a particular kind of income.
If you look at everyone, regardless of race, who has an IQ of about 90, they have pretty much the same income.
If you look at everyone who's got an IQ of 100, 110, 100, in general, they end up with about...
The same income.
And so I agree with you, there's strengths and weaknesses to, and even the term strength and weaknesses is kind of meaningless.
There's no such thing as superior or inferior in terms of race, because every race adapted to its own local environment.
There can be problems when you move races from one environment to another.
You know, Europeans didn't do particularly well in Africa in terms of, you know, North Africa or Central Africa, in particular, a disease.
The average European lasted like a year before succumbing to disease and prior to sunscreen and all that.
It was a big problem for we Irish body types.
But it doesn't seem to, in terms of income, the IQ in particular seems to be fairly decisive in figuring out where people end up.
Yeah, and I guess that inbreeding, or not, I mean, not inbreeding, I mean, crossbreeding between, you know, different ethnicities could eventually down the road equalize all that.
Well, yes, but it wouldn't equalize at a high level.
No, no, of course not.
Right, the cross-pollination between IQ 100 and IQ 80 is not IQ 100.
I mean, it's IQ 90 or some...
Yeah.
And so, I mean, when I look at money in terms of, you know, inequality, I just see that Marx was right about, you know, how capitalism are in a perpetual crisis.
And, you know, going back to the IMF or the Fed, they print money, they give credit, but Sorry to interrupt, Michael.
The Fed has nothing to do with capitalism.
The Fed is actually socialized currency.
When the government controls currency, the free market is only a distant afterthought.
Money is involved in every transaction.
If the government controls money, if the government controls the monetary system, you don't have a free market.
You have a socialized market.
So I agree with you.
Capitalism has certain series of crises in it.
Some of those are organic.
And you could call them crisis in the way that you could call puberty a crisis.
You know, lots of changes.
Things are moving that previously didn't really seem to move.
But now they're moving all the time.
Like, you know, heat-seeking missiles.
So there are some things, you know, the invention of the car, the invention of the internet, you know, the invention of the printing press even.
There are destabilizing elements within a free market, but that's just freedom.
And that's not really a crisis.
That's just the progress.
And progress is the creative destruction, right?
And it's cool new stuff, and that destroys old stuff.
But there are crises, of course, built into capitalism.
You know, Marx was looking maybe at...
America.
Of course, America had this big giant-ass civil war, 600,000 people killed, because, well, for reasons I went into, the truth about Abraham Lincoln.
Not very free market reasons at all.
Slavery was a problem.
Huge problem.
Unfair advantages given to capitalists.
Everyone's a capitalist in a capitalist system.
Everyone's selling.
I mean, a worker is a means of production.
Your arms are a means of production.
Everyone's selling their means of production.
But there are sort of quote crises that we want.
We want crises.
Like let's say that there's a cure for cancer that's invented tomorrow, right?
And what that means is there's going to be a huge crisis for a lot of people who sell their services treating cancer, right?
Oncologists, radiologists, the people who run the chemo, all of this stuff, the nurses, the hospital, huge crisis, tons of people thrown out of work.
But see, that's a crisis we really, really want.
You know, when they came up with a vaccine for polio, I mean, the people who made iron lungs, the big giant machines that people had to sit in when they couldn't work their own lungs, huge crisis in that industry.
But that's the kind of crisis we really, really, really want.
So there are crises that are called organic to the market, but there are other ones introduced by government controls and central planning that are not organic to the market.
I just wanted to differentiate that, but sorry, go ahead.
First of all, not a lot of people realize that the Fed is actually a private organization.
Second, in terms of the subject of cancer, a lot of these drug companies probably already have a cure, but they don't release these cures because they're making money on prolonging your Your sickness, you know?
Do you have any evidence for that?
I mean, I've seen it in documents.
I can't really recall right away.
But I have done research.
I mean, I've, you know, looked into it.
But okay, hang on, hang on.
Because look, I got to tell you, I heard this theory from a relative of mine when I was 11, that they're sitting on the queue of a cancer because blah, blah, blah.
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
I mean, look, you're going to bring stuff up like that in the show.
I got to push back, right?
Because first of all, I'm just going to give you the economic logic of it.
If you are a company that is selling cancer treatments, then it's unlikely you're going to be spending a lot of money researching a cancer cure, because what you will be doing is you will be researching better and more efficient and more effective and hopefully cheaper cancer treatments.
Now, there are other people whose business model is not treating cancer, but who are startups or other people, and what they want to do is they want to cure cancer because they don't have a lot of money invested in the treatment of cancer.
So they would be coming in looking for a cure for cancer.
Now, if...
People came up with a cure for cancer.
There would be an enormous amount of money saved in society.
I don't have to go through all the list of it, but you can imagine that, right?
So, for instance, if you were an insurance company and you had a cure for cancer, I mean, if there was a cure for cancer, you could sell your insurance much more cheaply.
Again, outside of, I'm sure, Obamacare would mess it up somehow.
But there would be such an enormous profit in the cure of cancer that anyone who came up with that would...
I mean, basically have a license to print money.
I mean, it would be staggering.
And if you look at all the previous illnesses, you know, polio was a terrifying illness throughout the 1930s and so on.
Smallpox, even before that.
And there was a huge amount of medical investment in the control and management and treatment of, and even prevention of polio and smallpox and other cholera and so on.
And just looking at polio and smallpox, well, someone came up with a vaccine.
And then the vaccine was administered to people.
And the companies who treated it as an illness, they found other things to do.
So there's tons of examples in the past of diseases regularly being prevented or cured or eliminated through various programs.
And the idea that cancer, which is, I think, after heart disease, the biggest killer still, In the Western world, at least, where people live old enough to get these kinds of age-related ailments, the idea that someone's sitting on a cure, I can guarantee you, no matter how much money you're making treating cancer, you will make more money curing it.
I guarantee you.
Because there's just about no price you couldn't charge for that cure.
Okay, well, here's a good example.
I've done a lot of research on marijuana.
Particularly the medical marijuana.
I actually grow it.
Not industrial growing, but just personal growing.
The talks about how it can help epilepsy, Crohn's disease, Skin rashes like eczema.
Those have been actually proven to work.
A doctor in the States has treated, I mean I wouldn't say legally, but treated kids with oil from the cannabis to cure it.
The government, the US government, to cure their brain tumors.
But it's, I guess, cooked or reduced and mixed into oil and administered through an oral syringe.
Now, the government, the US government, owns these patents for marijuana.
They have actually given some citizens access to these marijuana for research purposes.
But again, they're classifying it as drugs.
The drug companies don't want it to be released.
And just recently, everybody's getting into the marijuana phrase.
I don't know.
I mean, I don't know if you get in conversations where you just say a bunch of shit and everyone's like, yo, okay, uh-huh, right?
But, you know, this is a philosophy show.
You can't just say stuff, right?
I mean, you got to be able to back it up.
So here, let's say that the government has got some patent on something, okay, well then again, this is government power, nothing to do with the free market.
And, you know, this idea of the pharmaceutical companies and so on, you know, there are people in the pharmaceutical companies who have cancer.
There are people whose loved ones in the pharmaceutical, like executives, their loved ones get cancer, their pets get cancer, their children.
Get cancer.
And the idea that their parents get cancer.
No, but profit!
You'd make so much money with a cure for cancer.
Not to mention that if you were sitting on a cure for cancer and didn't release it, your life would be I mean, oh my God.
I mean, the amount of lawsuits you'd get would be staggering, right?
Like you just, you don't understand.
You don't understand.
Because I assume that you've not run a business or been subject to shareholder agreements or anything like that.
When you run a company, especially if it's public, right?
You've got shareholders.
If you run a company, you have a fiduciary responsibility.
You have to maximize the value of that company.
Now, if you, as a company...
Are sitting on a cure for one of the deadliest diseases known to mankind.
And you don't release it.
You lock it up.
If anyone ever finds out, you would be sued into the stratosphere.
Like, you would lose everything.
Everything.
You would spend the rest of your life tied up in court, and I can't even imagine the number of death threats you would get.
I can't even imagine the amount of harassment.
I'm still talking.
I can't even imagine the amount of harassment you would get from everyone whose loved one died in their arms from cancer when you had the cure and you were sitting on it.
It would not be worth it.
No responsible businessman, absent massive amounts of state power and a completely sociopathic personality, no businessman or no businesswoman would ever sit on a cure for cancer.
It would be, even if they didn't Have a conscience with regards to ending human suffering and making untold trillions of dollars, they would simply end up with nothing.
They would be sued into oblivion and their lives would cease to be worth living very, very quickly.
So, you know, I have a pretty high burden of proof for this kind of stuff.
Now, let me ask you this though, Michael.
How often do you smoke marijuana?
I don't smoke it.
You grow it, but you don't smoke it?
Do you sell it?
Nope.
I give it away.
Like I said, I'm an industrial designer, so I dabble on everything because I'm pretty much a curious mind.
I go through a lot of things and I'm actually growing vegetables downstairs in the basement.
It's everything.
I'm curious about everything, so I try everything and I look into it.
I don't use it just because I don't know it or I don't need it.
But who knows, but maybe one day I will need it and hey, I know how to grow it.
Okay, well, we've been, I think, about 25 minutes of this conversation, and I still have no idea what your criticisms are of money, and I have no idea what your solution is to society.
So I'm going to move on to the next caller, but I do appreciate the call.
If you want to call back in, just make a couple of notes, because I did say at the beginning we needed things to be succinct and focused, and we just went all over the place here.
So I'm not going to try and rein in these hurting, I'm not going to try and herd the cats of your mental indiscretions.
So I'm going to move on to the next caller, but thanks very much for calling in.
Sure.
Alright, up next we have Sam.
Sam wrote in and said, I agree with you that we should be changing education to focus on what we can't automate, but this doesn't account for the masses that are going to increasingly rely on handouts and things like universal basic income.
Therefore, why shouldn't we go with techno-auto-minarch capitalism?
I think that's how it's pronounced.
Where everything that makes things for free, such as technology, is self-sustained individually in a night watchman government, while capitalism accounts for what we can't automate, such as space exploration.
Sam, can you help me with the pronunciation of techno-whatever-it-is?
Yeah.
Technoto-minarcho-capitalism.
Nice.
So basically, you want a solution that 97% of the population can't possibly pronounce.
Marketing-wise, you might want to boil that down a bit, but that's not particularly important for this part.
Do you want to mention anything more about your perspective?
Yeah.
So, do you know about the Homestead Act?
I do.
Basically, that made it possible for everyone to get their own production and survive without getting an education.
I also mentioned the tragedy of the commons.
With the individualistic idea of America and Basically they didn't need the government but now it's turning out that there's probably a better pragmatic decision for the government to make or through charity for them to basically give everyone self-sustaining automation and then
they won't even need the people doing the research and development jobs to To basically spend money because, as I see it right now, the corporations that are creating all the easily sort of sustaining technology,
like using this sustaining technology to create food and stuff, are actually, like, they're embargoing it and they're bogarting it because They could just do it for free if everyone had their own stuff.
And the problems with communism...
Sorry, what do you mean do it for free?
I'm not sure what that means.
I mean, all resource production would require some resource consumption, right?
As it goes on and on, it will eventually be...
I wish I had a good example of this, but automation is so new.
Yeah, me too.
Me too.
That would be excellent.
Let's say it was air.
Air is not produced.
If they had an embargo on it, though.
It's like the cure for cancer, but it's actually coming closer and closer every day.
I don't know.
I don't know what we're talking about anymore.
You're talking about increasing technology to produce goods, right?
So yes, when you automate things, this is why Bill Cates has this lunatic idea, let's tax robots!
You know, the fact that people say this with a straight face without realizing they've fallen down some giant black hole of economic incomprehensibility, right?
I totally disagree.
So hang on, hang on, please, for the love of God, I let you talk.
I let you talk, right?
Did I interrupt you?
I'm still fleshing it out.
Well, you see, I just want to say this in general to the listeners.
You know, you have this platform.
I'm happy to provide you this platform.
I do six or seven hours a week of providing you this platform.
Sam, quick question.
Do you think it's better to flesh these ideas out before you call in, or do you think it's better to flesh them out while you're calling in?
Sorry, we can go on.
No, I'm just curious in general.
I mean, if you say that goods can be produced for free, I don't know what that means because there's going to require electricity to run these machines.
Someone's going to have to gather the oil.
Someone's going to have to put these machines together.
Someone's going to have to repair them.
Someone's going to have to ship things.
I mean, how would things become free?
I mean, cheaper, sure.
Yeah, but free?
Here's my answer to that.
Everyone would just need basic maintenance education.
And through geothermal?
Well, no, no.
Because the machines are very complicated.
Like, I had a girlfriend years ago who was a real...
She was a real engineer.
And she was a great tinkerer.
And she said, you know, I used to love tinkering around with my cars until, like, she said, like, two cars ago.
It just became impossible because they all became computerized and stuff.
So the more complicated the machines are, you know, the less people will be able to...
it shouldn't things go wrong as they inevitably will.
I mean, maybe, you know, change the oil and stuff. - It'll take a lot less jobs, that's for sure.
Because you can have an entire factory relegated to a couple of people.
And it's definitely a lower.
I don't understand what the problem with that is.
I mean, everybody used to go out and hack down the crops by hand, right?
I mean, there were scythes for the wheat, right?
I mean, now they're a big giant combine harvester, so now you get like 1,000 to 1 production per person on a farm than you used to get even like 100 years ago, 120 years ago.
So yes, what is going to happen to some manufacturing, and it has been happening for many decades, is what happened to food production in the past.
So why is this so radically different?
Well, even the repairing, I think, took more people.
It took, like, you had to go in there with a step stool and stuff, but now it's just pretty much, you can just read the manual and you'll be able to do it.
What are we talking about?
Repairing what?
Repairing geothermal, solar panels, 3D printers, and Soylent Green as the food.
Wait, you think that people are going to fix their own geothermal and solar panels and 3D printers?
They're going to fix them themselves?
Pretty much, yeah.
Have you done this?
Do you have these technologies?
Have you tried taking them apart and putting them back together?
Well, no, but I'd be willing to learn because there's a huge benefit to doing all of this.
Yeah.
I'm sure there are ways.
Anyway, I mean, the point is that there is going to be, you know, it is a great tragedy, right?
And I'm sorry, I was going to go off on a rant here.
But there are two opposing trends in society.
It's one of the reasons why society is such a huge problem these days.
Incredibly brilliant people are coming up with incredibly amazing technology that is, you know, displacing workers.
Good!
We want workers to be displaced in the same way that nobody says we've got to get rid of farm machinery so we can make sure there's no unemployment.
We get that we'd all just end up poor and starving to death.
You're like the average Venezuelan lost 17 pounds last year.
Wait, can I make a point?
No, no, I said I was going to do a rant.
Okay.
So we do want things to be automated, but...
The jobs that are easiest to automate are the jobs filled by the less intelligent members of society.
It's just a fact.
You know, the jobs on basketball teams tend to be filled by the tallest members of society.
So the jobs that are the easiest to automate, like you can't automate a CEO. You can't automate an accountant, right?
You can give him tools to make his job better or her job better, but you can't automate these things.
You can't automate a physicist.
So the high IQ jobs are harder to automate.
The low IQ jobs are easier to automate.
So we have a reduction in demand for low IQ people in society.
For the less intelligent society, there is a reduction in demand because there's an increase in automation.
Now, in a free market, the way this would work is that...
The less intelligent people would have less money to have lots of kids because they'd earn less money because there was a lower demand.
And they'd be supported by some charity and people would make sure that they would.
But there would not be this massive disproportionate system where the highest IQ people are having the fewest kids and the lowest IQ people in many ways are having the most kids.
So there's a reduction in demand for low IQ people.
Which is happening on the market side.
But on the political side, there's an increase in supply of lower IQ people through the welfare state and through, in general, immigration from the third world.
These two things cannot work out well together.
I mean, they just can't work out well together.
If there was this massive demand for less skilled...
Let's just say, if the intelligence thing bothers you, it's fine.
If there was a massive demand for less skilled laborer, Immigration would have its problems, but at least there'd be a market demand for it.
But there's actually a reduction in market demand for lower skilled labor.
But there's a massive oversupply and a huge, massive oversupply of lower skilled labor with legal and illegal immigration from Central and South America in particular into the United States.
Canada has a point system outside of the refugee program looking for higher skilled people.
So the challenges may not show up until there may be a potential regression to the mean second, third generation and so on.
But you have a reduction in demand on the market side for low skilled people and you have a massive increase in supply because of the government programs called immigration, migration, refugees and the welfare state.
This is going to tear society apart unless we wake up to this reality very quickly.
At a time when you have a reduction in demand and increase in supply, particularly of young men, you are destabilizing the very basis of your society.
So thanks for the question.
I'm sorry we couldn't get any further, Sam, but I move on to the next caller.
Oh, okay.
Alright, up next we have Kaylee.
Kaylee wrote in and said,"'I am in a long-distance relationship.
A couple of months ago my boyfriend was in the process of planning an engagement until I stopped him and told him to slow down.
It has been a year and a half and my uncertainty about the relationship is keeping me up at night.
I am tormented by the idea that I could be stringing him along.
He is a kind, patient, and hard-working alpha male with free-market politics.'" You've argued on your show that men tend to love very hard, and women are always calculating.
My indecisiveness has led me to feel very guilty about the amount of love he has towards me.
My friends and family tend to think I am overthinking it, and they tell me cliches like, you will just know.
What is the nature of this romantic cliche?
Is the, you will just know, idea of fantasy that people use to avoid reason and a true understanding of love?
That's from Kaylee.
Oh, hey Kayleigh, how you doing tonight?
I'm good, how are you?
Good, but hopefully we can get some sleep.
Eventually, yeah.
Heading your way.
I'm going to give you the narcolepsy of internet wisdom, hopefully, and get you some Some good sleep.
Is there anything you wanted to add to what you said?
I think just one thing that's important about my boyfriend is that he's in the military.
So he's not in it for life.
He's just doing a five-year contract.
So he's finishing that up.
So I feel like that's important to throw in.
Can you not be with him?
Yes.
No, I mean, with him, with him, not like long distance.
Oh, well, I am finishing up my last year of college, and it would be very difficult to be with him if we did not get married.
Right.
And how long has he been gone for?
We were only together in the same geographical area for about four months, but we've been doing long distance after that for about a year and two months.
And how often do you guys see each other?
I would say every, well there was the deployment, but besides that every three months.
The deployment was six months.
And how long do you see each other when you get together every three months?
From a week to two weeks.
And how did you meet?
A birthday party.
I was doing a summer job, and I would say mutual friend, but we're not friends anymore, but it was a birthday party.
Now, he's got years to go in his contract, right?
No, he just has a year and a half left.
Well, August 2018.
Okay, a year and a half left.
And then would you plan to get married to him before he finished his contract if you were going to get married?
I have it in my head that if that were to happen, we would spend another six months together before we got engaged.
And he's going to come and leave his deployment and come to where you are?
Yes.
And you'll be finished school by then?
Yes.
So you could be somewhere else, but you basically have no particular liabilities keeping you apart in a year and a half.
Not particularly, except for, I mean, I would get a, yeah, yeah.
I mean, we would have to get married because I wouldn't be able to move out there and get my own apartment right away because I need a little bit of cushion room to stay with my parents before I'm out on my own.
Sorry, you wouldn't be able to just give me that last bit again.
I must have missed something.
After this, I'm planning on, after college, I'm planning on moving back home and actually applying for grad school and doing that a little bit.
And what are you taking?
Right now, I am an art history major, which has complications.
It's a little bit of a regret, but whatever I do in grad school will hopefully lead to a more job-ready experience.
Okay.
Who's paying for this?
Well, my parents are paying for my undergrad, and then my dad's on faculty at a university, so I would take on my graduate degree program.
But it would be extremely cheap because I would get basically over half tuition because he's on faculty there.
Your dad?
So your dad's in the university system, and he's happy to pay for you getting an art history degree.
Well, he's a doctor.
He works at a teaching hospital.
So he's not like a traditional...
Yeah.
That's not answering my question.
Right.
Yeah.
He's in the university system.
He has a highly...
Economically valuable education.
Yes.
And you said, Dad, I'd really like you to drop...
How much is he spending?
What's the cost of your education?
It's $40,000 a year, so whatever that...
Oh, my God!
Yeah.
Four-year degree?
Yes.
God!
Yeah.
Damn, Kayleigh!
$160,000!
Yeah.
What are you people, crazy?
Yeah.
No, no, don't laugh.
Oh, yeah.
That's a serious question.
That is a shit ton of money.
Yeah.
Plus, you, I don't know, maybe you get a job making 30 or 40k a year, that's another 120,000.
Close to $300,000.
That's a house.
Yeah.
For art history.
Right, yeah.
Right.
But you know what's going to solve that?
It's another degree in art history.
Yeah.
Well, I was planning on doing something a little bit more.
You know.
Job.
I mean, I could get my PhD.
I'm definitely a candidate for a PhD, but I eventually want to have kids and being, you know, working, being in school for another eight years.
Yeah, that's great, too.
Because that's a huge amount of social resources being poured into someone who's going to have kids.
And listen, I'm a big fan of having kids, and I'm a big fan of having them when you're young, and I hope you'll stay home and do the peaceful parenting thing and all that kind of good stuff.
But dear Lord above, that is a lot of social resources to flush down...
The vortex of childhood, right?
Yeah.
And how old do you want to be when you have kids?
I used to think in my early 30s, but since listening to your show, I was more thinking like 26, 27.
So why don't you just put a nail in the vampiric economic brain-eating coffin of your degree and have some babies?
I mean, why would you want to go to grad school?
I don't understand.
I think that...
I mean, I definitely want to go to grad school.
It's the before grad school, before I have kids, or after I have kids.
Oh, come on, Kaylee.
This is not that complicated.
Yeah.
Why would you make the case economic?
Like, forget whatever bullshit feminist shit has been floating around your orbit.
I can't even comprehend it, right?
But just from a pure, like, imagine you were advising a space alien, right?
Why would you want to get a grad degree if right after getting a grad degree, you're going to have kids?
Because then by the time your kids are, you'd say you have a couple of kids, you're off the workforce for five, six, seven, eight years or whatever, then your grad degree is completely meaningless because you've been out of the field for so long.
Why wouldn't you get your grad degree after?
I just, I saw my mom try to go back to school when multiple times I saw my mom try to get back to school and she always could not do it because it was just so much stress with me and my brother.
So I just was thinking like, I'm not...
So it's your fault.
Well, at least you've changed things by now causing your boyfriend stress.
We'll get back to that in a sec.
Yeah.
No, but so do you think that you would end up doing what your mom...
Like, just not being able to do it?
I have a feeling that even if my kids were five and seven, I would...
Going back to school would just, I don't think I would ever, I don't think I would be able to do it.
I don't think I would go.
Okay, so what's wrong with not going back to school?
Like, you understand that you've had, what, you went through high school, like some 5 to 17, that's 12 years.
You've got 16 years of education.
That's more education than 99.9999% of people throughout history and across the world has ever received.
You know, Shakespeare went to school 12 weeks a year.
And so you'll have vastly more education than the vast majority of people across the world and throughout history.
What's wrong with that?
Why grad school?
There's something going on here that is not practical, and I just want to know what it is.
I think, if I really think about it, I think that I really admire my dad a lot, so I feel like I try to be the He always thought, oh, you know, you can be a lawyer, you can be a doctor, you can get your PhD in anything.
Kind of always encouraging me.
Hang on.
Did he marry a lawyer or a doctor?
No.
So he wants you to be someone quite different from your mother.
Oh, yeah.
Boy, that's really respecting your mom a lot now, isn't it?
I wonder why she might have had stress raising her children if this is the view her husband has of her.
Right.
Well, this has always been a very confusing marriage for me, personally.
Your parents' marriage, you mean?
Yeah, of course.
It's the only one you've got.
Do you think that your father respects your mom?
That's a loaded question.
Not really.
No, it's not really.
It's not really.
It's, you know, we know these things.
I think my dad has more respect for my mom than my mom has for my father.
Yeah.
I think that they don't have enough respect for each other.
I feel like my mom has less respect for my dad than my dad has for my mom.
And why does your mom disrespect your dad?
Um, my dad's a very smart guy.
He, um, but he might be a little bit, and this is not, this is totally undiagnosed.
He might be somewhere on that Asperger's spectrum.
So he's not socially, uh, I guess you could say with it, as much as she would wish.
You mean he's intelligent enough to not like a lot of people?
Yes.
He'll stand extra close to people.
It's funny.
I think the basketball players get tired of staring at ball spots too.
But anyway, go on.
He does some awkward things.
Nothing that I... I mean, he stands way too close to people when he talks.
You know, just some social abnormalities, I would say.
Does he make good money?
Is he a good provider to the family?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
So what the hell is she talking about him standing too close to people if he's pulling home a major coin and giving her a life of luxury?
She's not the most rational-based person you might meet.
So your father's hardworking and emotionally distant and your mother's highly prone to stress and emotionally irrational?
Yes.
They win cliched couple of the planet, of the decade, of the century.
Yeah.
So what you're saying to me is that they're men and women in general.
Yes.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
All right.
So your father wants you to To be a doctor or a lawyer, but is happy to pay $160,000.
America?
We're talking America, right?
I don't think it has to be doing a doctor or a lawyer.
It's more of a status thing.
If I had my PhD in art history, he could be able to tell that he has a daughter with a PhD in art history.
So why do you care what your father tells his friends?
I'm trying to...
It's your life, right?
I mean, he already has status enough because I assume your mother was very good looking when she was younger, right?
Am I right?
Yes.
Yeah, she was.
Yes.
Okay.
Yeah.
So she used her beauty to get a good provider who she then despises for not having all the emotional skills that almost never come with a good provider.
But I understand that.
All right.
So why do you care?
Why do you care what...
Your father tells his friends about you.
And he's really committed to impressing his friends if he's willing to drop $160,000 American, I assume, for your, you know, fairly economically useless education.
I don't know if it's more about impressing his friends.
I think it's more just about...
He doesn't have that many friends to impress.
I think it's more about...
I don't know.
I've kind of been very instilled in a long since I was very little to, you know, get as many degrees as I could.
But why?
I don't know.
Does he not think you're intelligent unless you have pieces of paper?
Doesn't he know you?
I think he just thinks that if you're intelligent, why wouldn't you get these pieces of paper?
And he always, he'll say to my...
Why wouldn't you get an art history degree if you're intelligent?
I gotta tell you, I gotta tell you, Kaylee, I could say one of the marks of being intelligent is not getting an art history degree.
Right.
Well, I'm not saying I'm a genius or anything like that, but...
Yeah.
His thinking is driving something here, right?
Right.
I mean, he will often say...
He'll say, you know, kind of passively, like, oh, my mom's a nurse, and he'll say passively, like, oh, you know, lots of nurses go back and become nurse practitioners.
And he's always kind of, and that's bothered my mother, too.
I don't know what that means.
Oh, it's just a nurse practitioner is, like, basically a step below doctor.
So just going back to school and getting more degrees to be more advanced in the nursing field.
So he's a snob.
A bit, yes.
No, paying $160,000 for a useless degree so you can feel your daughter is smart, kind of snobby, wouldn't you say?
Maybe, yeah.
No, I mean, tell me if I'm wrong.
Tell me if I'm wrong.
But it seems a little snobby to me.
I mean, the other day, I sat for dinner with my daughter, and she was chatting with the waitress, because, you know, I chat with waitresses.
I used to be a waiter and all that.
I like to chat with them.
How's life?
How's work?
And...
The waitress is asking her, you know, what she wants to do.
Why does she want to go to college?
Why does she want to go to university?
My daughter said, I will tell you this.
I don't know a lot about my future, but I will tell you this.
I am going neither to high school nor to university.
That I can tell you.
And, you know, people, you know, she's not the quietest person on the planet.
And people were like...
Looking around like, you know, like, how, you know, how cute and vaguely shameful.
You know, I gotta tell you, I kind of agree with you on that one.
You know, I mean, unless you absolutely have to get the piece of paper to fulfill your bucket list dream career.
Yeah, I mean, I would keep her away from I mean, I don't know if you get the social justice warrior stuff in your arts degree, but arts programs in general are just Marxist training camps for biological self-destruction from a genetic reproduction standpoint because they just turn you against the opposite sex to the point where you view an approaching man as a prow ship from Fukushima.
Fukuyama.
That's part of the reason.
I mean, I do love art and I do like the idea of being able to teach people about it.
With a higher degree.
Sorry, why do you need a higher degree to teach people about art?
Because...
I mean, I guess I could start a YouTube channel and do it.
Hey, now you're talking.
See, it's high def now.
I can understand that, you know, 320 by 240, that it may be a little bit too chunky to get the finer nuances of Jackson Pollock's vomit.
But you can do some pretty cool stuff.
And it's funny because you're listening to a show, I do not have a PhD in philosophy.
But you're like, well, you know, I need these pieces of paper to teach people.
Yeah, it's true.
But yeah, I don't...
Yeah.
It's interesting to think about.
So we still don't know why the hell you want to get a graduate degree other than your father would like it?
I mean, I love school.
I mean, there's no doubt about it.
Oh, absolutely.
School is great.
School, school.
Look, there's a reason.
What is it that somebody saw the other day?
Yeah, it's great being a student because you're unemployed drunkard, but your parents are somehow weirdly proud of you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I love my classes.
If I could be paid to go to school, definitely that would be my career.
Yeah, no, it's because it's completely divorced from reality, right?
That you're paying, I mean, for you in particular, it's completely divorced from reality because you're not even paying a penny for it, right?
Other than deferred income.
Yeah.
Right.
So, you know, I think I have the answer, but that doesn't particularly matter because it's my life, Kaylee.
But I think we have some idea that it's probably a good idea for you to figure out why the hell you might want to go to graduate school if you also want to have children.
Right.
Yeah.
I'm still...
Kids like art, too.
You can teach them.
Sorry, go ahead.
No, I just...
I'm still...
I'm very much on the whole...
I'm thinking about the boyfriend question because I just...
Oh, don't worry, Kaylee.
We've been talking about the boyfriend question the whole time.
Okay.
All shall be revealed.
Don't you worry about that.
Don't you worry about that.
We've been talking about the boyfriend question the whole time we've been talking.
Right.
Okay.
I'm just going to give you a rant here.
This may not apply to your particular situation.
Okay.
But long-distance relationships are really, really, really terrible.
They're absolutely, completely, and totally...
Again, I'm not a big fan of the government.
I'd have two laws.
Three laws.
Don't hurt other people.
Don't violate your contracts.
And for God's sakes, don't have long-distance relationships.
It's the only thing I would tax.
Because long-distance relationships are a giant time waste of treading water and not actually having a relationship.
Because you don't deal with any real life when it comes to relationships.
Like, if you want to get married, then you have to figure out whether you're compatible living together or compatible being in the same neighborhood as each other, seeing each other every day.
You know, everyday stuff is not as romantic as the giant sex-crazed weekend away that you get when you're in a long-distance relationship and you collide together after a huge amount of time apart, particularly when you're young.
You know, I mean...
After the show tonight, you know what I get to do?
I get to take out the garbage.
You know, there's just all this little nitty-gritty stuff.
I paid my bills today, and I have to go to the dentist, and my mother-in-law needs a biopsy, or whatever it is, right?
And so there's no real life in long-distance relationships.
There's yearning, there's isolation, there's sexual lust, but there's no real life in it.
You don't get to progress.
In a long-distance relationship, I've had some, and I just wish somebody had slapped me upside the head with a wet fish when I'd embarked on long-distance relationships.
You know, particularly when you're in college, everyone's moving around, everyone's young, they're going here, they're going there, changing their mind about stuff, and it's just like, for God's sakes, for God's sakes, long-distance relationships are a way of putting yourself in Walt Disney cryogenic freeze of no time, except time is passing.
You're not getting any closer, are you, Kaylee, to figuring out whether you want to marry this guy?
Not really.
Of course not, because you're in a long-distance relationship.
Nothing progresses.
Nothing moves forward.
No certainty.
How you feel at the beginning of a long-distance relationship is exactly how you'll feel at the end of a long-distance relationship, whether it's to something together or not, right?
And that's important to understand.
You won't just know.
Right.
Because you don't get, you know, I don't just have a book of vector calculus in the house, glance at it once in a while and just wait for it to...
I'll just know vector calculus.
You know, like the old, you put the book under your pillow and it seeps up.
Because I actually have to crack it open and study vector calculus every day to learn it, right?
And you don't get to study your boyfriend.
You don't get to see him up close and personal.
You don't get to get into the rhythms of the everyday.
You don't...
I'm not talking about living together.
I don't have...
Enough proximity to be able to make any kind of intelligent decision, right?
You can't stay.
You can't leave.
You can't break orbit.
You can't fall in.
You can't get together.
You can't stay apart, right?
Right.
I mean, don't let me tell you your experience.
I just have had a lot and known a lot of long-distance relationships, and it always goes the same way.
You feel like you're making progress, but you're really not.
Right.
And this is something that I've tried to explain to him, but he gets this long-distance complex from his parents.
His dad was also in the Marine Corps.
They did an even longer long-distance relationship.
His parents did an even longer long-distance relationship.
Met each other one summer, wrote letters for three months, and then just got married.
And then they've been married for 25 years, and they're very happy.
So he sees that as his model, and I'm trying to convince him that Like, we're not moving much forward here.
But his parents got married in three months after meeting?
Well, they knew each other for three months.
They wrote letters for three years, and then they got married.
Ah, okay.
Okay.
Right.
Were they always planning on getting married?
Was that a certainty when they didn't take them three years to figure out if they wanted to get married, right?
I'm not sure about that.
All right.
Well, this is important things to figure out, right?
If this is his template, he needs to know the facts and you need to know the facts.
Does his mother have an arts degree?
No.
Neither of them went to college.
Right.
Right.
So on one to ten, scale of one to ten, Kayleigh, where are you in wanting to marry this young man?
Six.
Right.
Thank you.
After knowing him, for a year and a half.
Right.
My experience, like I, you know, went out with a lot of women and had a great time.
But when I met the woman who I've now been married to for a decade and a half, we went out.
Went out the next night.
Spent every single day together.
Within 11 months we were married.
And we would have done it sooner if we were able to plan it sooner.
Right.
That's my experience.
So why don't you want to marry him?
What are the negatives?
What are the things that are bothering you?
Well, I would say that when we met each other, you know, he's a year and a half younger than me.
So, you know, he was smoking, playing lots of video games, and, you know...
What do you mean smoking?
Like smoking weed?
No, just smoking a cigarette.
Tobacco.
And it bothered me.
I didn't say, you know, you need to change this.
We need to go get together.
I just said, hey, does this...
He literally asked me, hey, does this bother you?
I said, I said...
Yeah, a little bit.
But it was just the first two weeks of going out, so I wasn't going to make a deal about it.
He stopped.
Cold turkey has not picked up a cigarette since.
So he changes effortlessly.
You know, he used to play tons of video games.
Even when I was around, I said, you know what?
It kind of makes me feel like I'm not a priority.
He changed it immediately.
I can't...
It's almost crazy how easily he changes things.
It makes me uncomfortable.
It makes me feel like I'm the girlfriend who's, I don't know, molding a man to her specifications.
And I don't want to be that person, obviously.
You know what women are like, right?
Kaylee?
Yes, I've met one before.
You've met one before.
You may even meet one later.
Tell me if I'm way off base about this.
Women be all like, honey, you gotta change.
Men change.
and they're like, I actually don't really respect that. - Right.
You want the man to change, but it's kind of like a test.
Like if he doesn't, because your basic, I can tell you what your eggs are saying.
Your eggs are saying, well, if the guy is this malleable, if he's this weak-willed, is he going to be out there and fight with other men to get resources for us and our babies?
Is he like spineless and easily pushed around?
I mean, if a woman can push him around, how the hell is he going to go out there and rip resources from the burly hands of Viking men?
That's the thing.
I've never really seen him pushed around in other ways.
A lot of times, he's not one of those...
When he sees a situation going wrong, he will tell someone right then and there.
He's very assertive and vocal in that way.
And that's why I feel like when I'm around him, I feel like I'm around an alpha male.
But...
That malleable thing does.
That is an interesting point.
Look, don't get me wrong.
If he was playing too many video games and smoking cigarettes, good, good.
You know, it's a good change.
Right.
It's not like he was going to the gym and he's like, I don't want you to go to the gym.
He's like, fine, I'll get fat and eat a muffin.
I mean, it was for the positive.
But it is a little weird when people change that quickly.
And that kind of, quote, effortlessly.
Where's the person?
Where's the person there who used to like the video games?
Did they just, like, are they buried in a mental backyard somewhere?
It's the same thing with the drinking.
It just happened over the weekend.
I was like, you know what?
You forgot to call me because you were drinking with your buddies.
That kind of hurt my feelings.
He's like, "I was drinking too much," and effortlessly it's going to change just like that.
Is there more?
I mean, he has free market politics.
I think he gets a lot of his politics from his parents, it seems like.
When you're going to get an arts degree because of your dad, I don't know that you can complain about his parents' influence over him, but let's get back to that in a sec.
Go ahead.
Right.
But I do think that in the face of all this social justice stuff at my college, I have somehow stayed out of it and was challenged.
My ideas were challenged a lot in my other classes.
You know, my history classes and all of that, and yet I still listen to your show.
But on the other hand, it's almost like my boyfriend lives in a bit of an echo chamber with his ideas.
And so sometimes we'll be talking and I will say something, you know, in a political discussion and then I'll hear something that sounds really familiar and I'm like, oh wait, that was my exact words from a previous discussion.
And so that's another thing.
Oh, so like a literal echo chamber, like you yell into his ear and it comes out a week or two later from his mouth.
Yes.
But then, you know, I ask, you know, I say this, you know, I say, you know, I don't complain about him, but I'll say, you know, is this weird to my friends or my family?
And they're like, oh, Kylan, you're so picky.
You're so, so picky.
Yeah, that's never helpful.
Does he have criticisms of you?
That's the thing.
He, well, sometimes I... I mean, I've known you for 15 minutes, and I have some criticisms of you, as I'm sure you would of me and all that, right?
So does he have criticisms of you?
I think he...
I can get stressed out sometimes, a bit like my mom.
So he'll...
It's the uniquely female word, overwhelmed.
Yeah.
It's something men don't.
We don't get to have babies, and we don't ever get to be overwhelmed.
Yeah.
Even though men commit suicide at the rates five times that of women, apparently only women ever get overwhelmed.
But anyway, go ahead.
Right.
Yeah.
So I sometimes...
So does he have any criticisms of you?
Not really.
Don't make me come over there with a dental set of pliers.
He has them.
He does not make them vocal.
What do you mean?
Does he use a clicking sound?
I mean, what do you mean?
No, he doesn't.
He's not told me of them.
He's not told you of them, but you know they're there.
I don't know.
So, can you just tell me no?
No, he has no criticisms of me.
What's wrong with saying that?
Why can't you tell me that?
No, he basically tells me that I'm too good for him, that he's just one...
Oh, no!
Yeah.
Oh, no!
Oh, that's gonna dry up the old hoo-hoo like a summer full of California sunshine.
Whew!
Guys, sorry to interrupt, Kaylee.
Guys, never, ever, ever, ever tell a woman she's too good for you.
You'll give her a tiny thrill of vanity, and then she wants to punch you in the nads.
Anyway, go ahead.
That is the complete opposite of hypergamy.
Hypergamy is the woman wants to marry up.
Never, ever tell a woman she's too good for you.
If she is too good for you, cut her loose and let her better man take her.
That's a horrible phrase to hear as a woman.
Anyway, go ahead.
Yeah, he'll say, like, I'm just waiting for the day when you realize this.
He'll say stuff like that.
Wait, wait, wait, no!
I'm just waiting for the day.
Okay, great George Michael song, RIP, but he's waiting for the day?
I think he was kidding.
For you to leave him?
For you to wake up and realize that he's a non-existent echo ghost of robotic reaction and leave him?
I don't know.
Oh, come on.
Don't fog on me now, Kayleigh.
Come on.
You can't fog on me now.
You know.
You know.
You know the guy better than I do.
I think he was kidding.
I think he was kidding.
But there's, you know, it's kind of like the Freudian slip or something.
You're like, is there truth behind what you're saying?
So, he's...
Okay.
One to ten, what are your looks rated as?
What do you rate your looks as?
I would rate his looks?
No, yours.
Seven and a half, eight.
All right.
And his?
He's a nine.
He's going to be a 12 by the time he's 30, though, because he's still young, so he's got a little bit of the baby face left.
Right, right, right.
Yeah, you know, but it depends what happens with his hair.
Although, I will say there are a lot of women who like this shiny look, but all right.
What about your relative levels of intelligence?
I mean, he did very well on the ASVAB. Yeah.
And your personal experience of his intelligence?
He's very smart in terms of memory and stuff, but in terms of intellectual curiosity...
I mean, I guess you can have a very high IQ, but also be very intellectually lazy.
Well, no, you've got IQ, laziness, and curiosity.
Those are three distinct things that you're all trying to jam in together, and it's like trying to put a bunch of feral cats into a jar.
I don't know if they're going to fit too well.
Yeah.
So tell me, I mean, just to be frank, I mean, what are the limitations that you're seeing with regards to, you know, conversation and growth and all that?
Um, I don't always feel completely challenged.
You know what I mean?
You're such a nice young lady.
Well, listen, nobody always feels completely challenged about it.
You know, you understand?
I mean, that's so nice, you know?
Well, you know, 149%, but not really 150%.
Listen, I mean, my wife and I have great discussions, but there are times...
Where we just need to figure out a whole bunch of list of things we gotta get done.
Life is this big conveyor belt of stupid shit that needs to get done.
You know that, right?
There's a bunch of chores.
Well, you don't know that, you're in college.
But afterwards, trust me, when people aren't paying the bills.
So just be frank, where are the limitations?
I don't know how to put them into words.
and Do you get bored in conversations with him?
him?
Do you feel like you've had these conversations before?
Does he commit what is possibly the only mortal sin in conversation, which is to tell you stories that he's told you before, but doesn't remember that he told you before?
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
Yeah.
He's very handsome.
So he likes to tell me of the story where the, you know, Abercrombie and Fitch actually used to go up to him and try to get him to be one of the store models.
Yeah.
So he's told me that story about three or four times.
Ooh, and he doesn't know he's told you that story before?
I hope not.
What do you mean?
I don't know.
Do you tell him, hey, you've told me this story before?
Yeah, I do.
And then he just...
So he knows!
He laughs at his vanity.
I don't know.
Ah, okay.
So physical vanity, right?
A little bit, yeah.
It's all right.
That'll be fixed when he gets out of the army and continues to eat like he was in the army.
But anyway.
Right.
Sense of humor?
What's his sense of humor like?
Very, very goofy.
It was something that attracted me to him right away.
Yeah.
You know, not...
You mean boyish?
Boyish, yes.
Yeah, video games and a goofy humor.
Yeah.
So you kind of like being a little bit in control here, right?
Yeah, probably.
Well, no, if I'm wrong, again, I don't want to tell you your experience, but, you know, the physical vanity, the goofiness, the video games, the, you know, the eager to please stuff, it's kind of boyish, right?
Mm-hmm.
Wait, I feel like you're just mm-hmming me.
Right.
This is not something you agree with.
If I'm wrong, tell me.
I'm agreeing with what you're saying so far, yeah.
Okay, but why have you closed off completely emotionally when we're talking about this?
Right.
You forced it out of me, but I'm not going to give you anything else.
Baldy.
Um, yeah, no, I, I agree with what you're saying.
Maybe I... I do want to have some control.
I don't know why that would be, though.
I never thought I was attracted to alpha males.
That would not be my position.
Right.
And you say alpha male here, right?
In your very letter to me, you said alpha male.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I can tell you why you want to be in control.
You want to be in control because you feel that's going to give you security.
Because you feel like you're coming at things from a superior angle.
You're better educated.
You're older.
I assume you come from a more prestigious family, right?
Yes.
I do.
Right.
And so you are the alpha in the relationship.
And women like that very briefly.
It's enough to get them in.
It's not enough to get them to stay.
Because you are going to be dependent on this man when you have children.
Like, really dependent on him.
He can't get fired.
He can't go in and cause a problem at work.
He can't have any bad habits.
He can't be susceptible to other people.
He can't have affairs.
He's got to bring home the bacon reliably 150%, right?
And so you like the fact that you're a little bit superior to him because it means that you're not anxious about being out-competed by other women, right?
Yeah.
Because he's monkey branching up, right?
So he's going from a less prestigious family through you to a more prestigious family, which is why he's willing to change everything.
Okay, fine.
Whatever you need.
Whatever you need.
And you like that because it means that you have power over him.
It actually makes me really uncomfortable.
No, no, no.
I'm talking about the beginning.
Not now.
I'm talking about the beginning.
So you like this because you feel like you have control.
You feel less anxious about being left behind, about competing, about any of that, right?
Because he's like your puppy dog.
With abs.
And a uniform.
And no spine, right?
So you kind of, right?
And women want that.
I mean, maybe a lot of people do, right?
But I'm just, women want that initially.
But very quickly, it becomes very frustrating.
That's interesting.
I never thought of it that way.
It's definitely not, you know, people who I talk to, anyone I get advice, it's just listen to your guts.
What is your gut telling you?
No one's going to tell me the truth.
I tell you this, Kaylee.
I'm sorry, I don't mean to laugh because it's not funny.
I apologize.
The advice you're getting completely sucks.
Do you know when people say, oh, you'll just know, what does your instinct say?
What does your gut say?
You trust your feelings.
Do you know what they're saying?
Shut up, I'm bored.
I don't really care about it that much.
I'm just going to tell you something like a Hallmark card so we can move on to something I want to talk about.
Listen, I don't even know you.
I find this fascinating.
Fascinating.
And I really, really appreciate you opening up your heart and mind like this.
I really do.
It's riveting to me.
But if people are just like, oh, you know, this is the biggest damn decision of your life.
This is what it all comes down to for women.
Right?
It's who you're gonna marry.
And I don't mean that women can't have careers and can't have wonderfully scintillating contributions to culture and philosophy and art and everything, right?
But what I'm saying is that women have evolved because, you know, you understand that your biology stretches back millions of years, right?
Women have evolved to try and figure out who is the very best person to marry, who is the highest possible quality man she can get, who won't be snatched away by some other vixen waving her ass at him, right?
It's the very best I can...
Men do the same thing.
It's not...
It's both genders.
Women want the ultimate alpha male who's only going to be loyal to them.
But of course, being an alpha male means you have lots of options.
Lots of options.
So, women want the alpha male.
But with the alpha male comes the insecurity.
Of competition, knowing that you're gonna get older, you're gonna get less sexually attractive, your sexual market value is gonna plummet in your 30s and 40s, right?
And it's certainly gonna plummet when you have kids, right?
Once you have kids, you're done, as far as sexual market value goes, right?
Right.
In general, right?
In general.
There are exceptions, obviously, right?
But in general.
So you want an alpha male.
Alpha male comes with huge options.
Huge options.
Like, you know, he's like stinging his 20s at a concert in Melbourne, you know?
Eeny, meeny.
Okay, I'll take them all.
I mean, that's, right?
You understand.
And so you want, and this is what monogamy is for.
This is what marriage is for, right?
Marriage is to lock the man in to monogamy for his life when he's completely insane with lust.
You know, it's like getting a drunk guy to sign a contract for 100 years, right?
And so you want the maximum alpha you can get, but you also want him to be monogamous to you, but his sexual market value is going to go up over time and yours is going to go down.
That's the challenge.
This is the paradox that women used to have to really deal with before the welfare state and all this kind of crap, right?
Right.
So you, I would argue...
May feel that you're undershooting the potential of the man you could be with.
Because if you have criticisms of him and he changes immediately, and he has not, in a year and a half, expressed any criticisms of you, that is not an equal relationship.
Right.
I would say the only person who's been any remotely honest about this is my dad.
He met my boyfriend and he was like, is he as intellectually curious as you?
It was the first thing he said when he met him.
But he didn't go beyond that much.
Yeah.
I mean, your dad could be a whole other conversation.
Yeah, maybe.
With your parents, Kaylee, who wears the pants?
My dad.
How do you know?
Because he gets the last word.
Why does he put up with this disrespect from your mother?
I don't know.
Yes, you do.
Come on.
Because of us?
You've got a degree in art history.
No, you've got a degree in art history.
You know it all.
No, you know, you know.
Look, you grew up with this family.
You've had decades of experience with them.
You know.
So why does he put up with the disrespect from your mom?
Not to tear apart the family.
Is that a question or a statement?
It's a statement.
It's a statement.
Okay.
And what would happen...
I mean, it's so weird to think that the family is kept together by the woman disrespecting the man.
And I know you say to some degree it's mutual, but I think you said that your mother disrespects more.
So what happens if he says, or if he would have said in the past, when it really would have mattered, right?
You should not be disrespecting the parent, your co-parent at all, but you sure as hell shouldn't do it in a way that the kids are aware of it, right?
That's really terrible.
Never, ever undermine the other parent in the eyes of the child.
That's cheap points and big cost down the road.
So what would have happened to your father if maybe before you guys were born, I know we're a bit theoretical there, or when you were very young, if he had just sat down with her and said, no, no, no, this is not good for the kids.
You can't do this anymore.
Knowing my mom, she would have promised change and then not been able to provide it.
Well, no, and what do you mean not being able to provide it?
Ooh, you went really passive with that one there, didn't you, Kaylee?
Well, she would have tried to, but it would be like trying to ask her to fly.
She doth not have the pterodactyl wing.
Ooh, I think we're getting somewhere now.
I don't, she would not be able to, knowing her completely.
That's exactly the same thing, but it's equally passive.
Is your mother completely incapable of delivering promise change?
From past evidence, yes.
But the past evidence is your father caving.
So what I'm saying is, what if he didn't cave?
What if he didn't cave?
What if he made this, like, no way?
You have to treat me with respect.
I've earned it.
When you stand too close to people, I don't care.
I don't.
That's completely irrelevant.
Your tits are sagging.
I'm still going to respect you.
What happens if he takes that stand?
I don't know.
I bet you'd have more than two kids if she had.
If he had taken that stand.
That's interesting.
The respect is everything.
The respect is everything.
Do your parents like each other?
Now they do.
I think they're back to liking each other.
They didn't like each other, I would say, five years ago.
It would fly pretty close to divorce a couple times.
And why?
I would say my mom would give me her perspective.
My dad would never talk about it with me.
But just mainly that...
Your mother would complain to you about the marriage?
Yeah.
How old were you when this started?
17.
Okay, so it didn't happen before?
No, no.
Okay.
I mean, she would complain about him, but not as in detail until I was...
Wait, so when did your...
Mothers start complaining to you about your father.
How old were you?
I remember her rolling her eyes as one of my earliest memories.
Rolling her eyes at your father?
Yes.
Wow.
Just one of your earliest memories.
So that's imprinted that the woman is superior.
But I see him as superior.
I do.
I see.
I got in a really upset argument with my mom a couple months ago and I called my dad and I said, why did you marry her?
Why did you marry her?
You're so much better than this.
Why did you marry her?
What did he say?
Did not get an answer.
If you marry someone who disrespects you, Or doesn't respect you much, let's say, then how can you be respected?
If you want someone around who rolls their eyes at you, who doesn't respect you, how can you be worthy of respect?
Right.
Yeah, I have a lot of, I look up to my dad a lot, but it's all with the caveat of knowing that he did marry my mom.
There's a sore spot for me that I cannot figure out.
And which one of them is more intelligent?
My dad.
Right.
So your dad is you and your mom is the boyfriend that you have.
Oh wow.
I don't...
Oh yeah.
But my boyfriend's so, you know, he's got such an even temper, you know?
Well, first of all, you don't know because it's long distance.
You don't know.
I mean, everyone looks great.
You know, can you tell how old someone is when they're 100 yards away?
Not that easily.
It's up close.
You see the spots and the wrinkles and the crusty crap in the corner of the eyes, right?
Mm-hmm.
Your father married someone who, you know, could be called not as elevated in some ways, right?
Intellectually and so on.
Is that fair to say?
That's fair.
And he did this, what are his looks like or what were they like when he was younger?
Well, they're 12 years apart, and this is his second marriage.
I get it.
What was he looking...
You said she was attractive, very attractive when she was younger?
I would say...
So what was her number when she was younger?
She was an eight, and he was maybe a six.
So you see what's going on here?
You see the pattern?
Yeah.
Tell me.
Tell me what you see, my friend.
I'm seeing me being my dad.
you Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I already said that.
Give me something a little bit more insightful.
Come on, you've spent $160 larger in your education.
Give me something a little bit more insightful than exactly what I... Oh my goodness!
Do you realize what just happened?
Do you realize?
Remember you were complaining about your boyfriend, echoing back to you things that you'd said?
Boy, it took you like 10 minutes, not even...
Okay, go on.
Tell me what's going on.
Tell me what's going on.
You know.
You know.
I feel like I don't.
Sure you do.
There's a two-point difference between you and your boyfriend in looks.
There's a two-point difference between your father and your mother in looks, right?
Right?
You're 7.5 He's a 9.5.
He's a 6.
Your father and your mother was an 8, right?
Mm-hmm.
Wait, you're fading on me.
Are you still with me, Kaylee?
I'm here.
I'm here.
Are you short-circuiting?
Are you okay?
Are you still with the conversation?
Yeah.
I never know when people are taking that one-way express to their happy place.
No, I'm very much following.
Yeah.
Okay, okay, good.
So, if you're less physically attractive, then you're...
Boyfriend, or your girlfriend in the case of your father before he married your mother.
What do you have to bring to the table to make up for it?
Smarts, intellect, resources.
You're trading brains for looks.
Just like your father did.
And you know why you're doing that?
Vanity.
out.
you Thank you.
And you've seen with your parents how that vanity plays out.
Why do you need a guy who's a 9.5 going to be a 12?
Why do you need that?
Why do you need a guy that good looking?
And you know as well as I do, oh my god, Kaylee, if he was a 6, would you be together?
Probably not.
If he was a 6, would you be together?
No.
Thank you.
So you're going for the himbo.
The reason why your mother rolled her eyes at your father, I think, is because she did not earn his love.
Thank you.
By the virtue of her personality, by the integrity of her character, by the courage of her convictions, and the maturity of her soul.
She was pretty.
I'm not saying that's all she was.
Don't get me wrong.
But that was a fairly big chunk of it, right?
It seems like it.
They're also Christians, so they just thought they were meant to be together, so I don't know.
Sometimes the penis does sound like Jesus, that's true.
Yeah, oh boy.
Follow me to the promised land!
Of a star-shaped lady.
Anyway, so you see these patterns, right?
Thank you.
And listen, Kaylee, I hope you understand, this is not a criticism at all.
I've been there.
I've been there.
I dated a woman...
Oh, man.
She was so pretty.
Everyone thought I was her bodyguard.
Well, I'll tell you this, young lady.
You don't have to be that nice.
Because I'm blinded by the cheekbones.
Sorry?
People think I have low self-esteem in terms of my looks.
I mean, my boyfriend says I'm a 10 out of 10.
I look at him and I look at me and I'm like, eh, no.
No.
I could be more of an 8 or a 9, but I don't see it in myself.
So I don't know if I'm being objective.
Your boyfriend gains 50 pounds.
How are things going?
He's still got a really nice face.
Nobody looks good at 50 pounds over.
Especially if he's still got some baby fat, right?
Right.
You've got to take the looks out of it, out of the equation.
Look, and when I say this, people are like, are you saying that you shouldn't be physically attracted to the person?
It's like, come on, that's a false dichotomy, right?
Right.
But you've got to recognize that a lifetime, you know, particularly from where you're sitting on the age scale there, Kaylee, a lifetime is a long time.
Yeah.
It's a long time.
Satin sheets are very romantic.
What happens when you're not in bed?
Right?
It's a very long time.
And most of that time, you won't be having sex.
Most of that time, when you're in a long-term relationship, particularly if you have kids, most of that time, you won't even be leaving the house.
Right?
I mean, you won't be, wow, he looks really great in a dinner jacket when we go out to dinner at North 44.
You know, like, you won't.
He won't be a vanity piece for you, and you won't be a vanity piece for him.
Because you'll be stuck inside a house with a baby that can't stop shitting.
Right.
And your looks are not going to do a damn bit of good in that situation.
His looks aren't going to matter at all.
Right.
His abs ain't going to help you get up for the third time at night.
Right.
And if you're together for looks...
That's where the resentment and the lack of respect comes in.
And fundamentally, the lack of respect is not for the other partner.
It's for yourself.
Why did I choose this person?
Did I choose them for their virtues?
Did I choose them for their integrity?
Did I choose them for their goodness?
Did I choose them for their courage?
Did I choose them for their strength?
Did I choose them for their honesty?
You know, nothing that you've reported on your boyfriend saying sounds like it comes from a place of genuine honesty.
Well, I think she'll want to hear that she's a 10, so I'm going to say that she's a 10.
Right?
You gotta be with the person you...
You maximum respect.
Right.
Not who's pretty.
You know that, right?
I do, I do.
You think you learn these things when you're young, but you don't.
Well, you're not going to hear about this much in your college degree.
No.
You know, maybe he's a patriarch, but...
Everybody gets old and ugly.
You know, it's incomprehensible when you're young.
Everybody gets old and ugly.
I don't care if you're Blake Carrington, you're still like old shoe leather with a shock of white hair.
And that's what you've got to plan for.
To some degree, at least.
Now, looks aren't unimportant.
Don't get me wrong.
It doesn't matter.
Because some looks are to do with basic self.
Like if you're obese, right?
That's basic self-respect and health and control.
It's a signal of dysfunction to be obese.
If you don't exercise.
If you, like, because then you're just, if you're with somebody who's fat and doesn't exercise, you're just setting yourself up for a lifetime of managing other people's, like another person's ill health problems and diabetes and knee problems and mold growing in their fat rolls and god awful things like that, right?
And, you know, for women in particular, it's hard to get pregnant if you're obese because your body is all messed up.
And an early death, which, you know, if you love the person, is worse, right?
So I'm not saying looks don't matter at all.
Grooming matters.
Hygiene matters.
I mean, so I understand.
But I got to tell you, when the most vivid image I have of your boyfriend is him saying, oh, yes, I remember that time I was at the mall and they wanted to be an African-American fish model, right?
Hmm.
I mean, I didn't say the things that I love about him, but we weren't really talking about him.
Well, you did.
Oh, you did.
The kind, patient, hardworking alpha male, free market politics.
Yeah.
But if after a year and a half of knowing him, you're still only six out of 10 for marriage, what's going to change?
Do you think he's going to become less of who he is?
No.
Is he going to become more of who he is?
I mean, isn't he who he is?
People don't really change that much.
Like they'll change if they really set their minds to it.
And that's usually when there's a huge catastrophe in their life in some way, like they get sick or they can't sleep or something like they can't sleep for months or like something's just melting down and they have to have some God awful change.
But if he's not really committed to change.
Yeah.
I don't want to take up too much of your time, but I do want to say that it seems like for me, I've been through some things and he appears to me like he has never suffered more than maybe two days in his life.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I don't know.
Do you know how he was disciplined as a child?
What?
Do you know how he was disciplined as a child?
He was, you know, spanked when he was young, but I said, you think, you know, I've told him that I would never spank my kids, ever, ever.
And he's like, that's fine.
I was, and I turned out fine, but okay, we can do that, too.
Jesus.
Anyway, the wind blows.
I was like, no, I have reasons.
Like, I have a conviction about this.
You know?
But he's like, yeah, fine.
I mean, it was fine for me.
But if you don't want it, that's fine, too.
Yeah.
You know what?
It's no shock to me that he's in the army, Kaylee.
He's pretty good at taking orders.
Yeah.
Thank you.
What's he going to do when he gets out of the army?
What's he going to do?
Um, he wants, um, he wants to go into cybersecurity.
So he doesn't he's trying to figure out if he needs to get a college degree in order to do that.
If you don't have any indications, and six out of 10 is not enough to get married, I don't think.
Right.
Right.
And what you are doing is you're squandering your highest sexual market value time on a relationship that might not even work out anyway.
Right.
Opportunity costs, it's not just about the money you could have made while you're having your degree, right?
Opportunity costs are, you know, eggs are gathering dust.
I know you're young, and I'm not going to say you're eight.
I know you're young.
I get that.
But, you know, life comes at you fast, as the saying goes.
I'm not that young.
Yeah, yeah.
So, I mean, do you want to be here in another year and a half?
Not sure.
No, I don't.
Kind of.
Well, what the hell is going to change?
What do you expect to change over the next year and a half that's going to give you something different?
Because there's no point asking him to change.
You know why?
He'll just do it.
He'll just do it.
And it won't be satisfying at all.
In fact, you wish he wouldn't change quite as quickly and quite as much, right?
Right.
Please stop making my vagina that powerful.
It doesn't know how to handle power.
It'll turn into Soren's giant eyeball.
I don't even ask him to change.
I just make my preference known and he changes.
I know.
Guy saw one too many Disney films.
No, no.
Women don't want the prince, especially not that gay prince.
Anyway.
So there's nothing he can do, as far as I understand it, that's going to change your mind about him.
And he doesn't even think there's any problem to change.
Or how does he think the relationship is going?
I think he's just so in love.
I had to stop him from buying an engagement ring.
I found out that he was really looking.
I think he's so in that mindset that I don't even know if he...
Well, it may be love.
He also may recognize that he better lock you down before you figure things out.
I mean, I take a little bit more coldly calculating approach to these kinds of things.
When the relationships aren't based on genuine virtues, I take a pretty Darwinian approach to these things.
He's just the least malicious person I think I've ever met.
I've never seen him do anything.
You know, he is in the army, so...
That's true.
There is that aspect of, you know, killing people for a living, so don't give me the teddy bear routine.
That's true.
And that's going to show up somewhere.
So yeah, the only variable here is you.
If you continue to drift along, you're just going to lose another year or half.
Easy.
Easy.
And it's very easy.
Right.
Because, you know, you're just in this waiting room.
Right.
You're in this waiting room.
It's like you're in a lineup.
That's what a long-distance relationship is.
You're just in a lineup.
You're not getting anywhere.
You're just shuffling forward slowly.
It's like an endless commute to nowhere.
Right.
Yeah, and he doesn't...
I've told him that I've seen it.
I've seen it this way in the past.
I was like, you know, this is not as fruitful as a relationship would be in real life.
You realize that.
And he's like, oh, well, my parents did it.
And they turned out they've been married for 25 years.
So does he ask you what you mean or what you...
Like, does he probe to try and figure out what you're thinking or what your perspective is?
Or is he just like, I have a magic thing called my parents' marriage.
Boom, all gone.
No, he doesn't dive.
He's not a diver.
Not a diver.
Are you a diver?
I am.
You are?
Yeah.
You are?
I think so.
I think so.
Well, you're a woman.
Of course you're a diver.
There's nothing wrong with it.
It's beautiful.
I'm a diver too.
I'm just, you know, a diver with a beard.
Yeah, so you have to...
You have to have some standards, right?
And I'm not saying you don't, right?
I'm not saying he's a bad guy or anything like that.
Please understand that, all right?
And I'm not saying whether you should or shouldn't be together.
I don't know.
It's just like it's one call.
But you have a right to get everything you want in a relationship.
You know, there's nothing in my marriage that I want that I don't have.
There's no compromise.
No compromise.
But I'm afraid if I, you know, I got eight years here to find the guy.
Right.
Do you think it's going to be easier when you have six?
Yeah.
Or five, or four, or three?
See, it's not only that you're getting older, Kaylee, it's that the good guys are getting snapped up left, right, and center.
Right.
These choices every single day in this null zone has particular consequences for your statistics, the odds, right?
Yeah.
If you find in the right one, the right one might be meeting the girl of his dreams three months from now in exactly the place where you're going to be.
Right.
It's interesting.
But if the relationship is not satisfying for you the way it is and you've been working at it for a year and a half, then you've got to find a way to make it satisfying or you've got to cut them loose.
Right.
Because that's not fair to him.
I realize that too.
Yeah, it's not fair to him.
It's not fair to you.
It's not fair to your eggs.
It's just not fair all around.
And you know, maybe you can give him a little suffering that might enrich his experience a little bit.
But yeah, you got to sit down with the guy and just tell him all the stuff that's going on for you.
And if he gives you glib, easy answers, well, that's probably your answer.
Because it sounds to me like you go crazy with that.
Like, I don't know if you have these kinds of conversations, like the conversation you're having with me, Kaylee.
I don't have these kinds of conversations a lot, but you're really good at them.
Oh, I appreciate it.
And isn't this the kind of stuff you want to...
Yeah, these are the kind of conversations I have with my dad.
Right.
Well, no.
No, I realize that you are not.
Not about whether you should go to college and get an art history degree and not about whether you should be dating this guy.
Right.
But not about why he married your mom.
So I got to tell you, we've got zero for three in the examples we've got so far.
That's valid.
Very valid.
But, you know, you want to have conversations at this level.
To me, if you're capable of having conversations at this level, and I mean, I've been fairly challenging with that.
I mean, fairly blunt, fairly, you know, not taking, I don't know, for an answer kind of stuff, right?
I mean, I think nice, but, you know, fairly firm.
Is that a way to put it?
Yeah, I would agree with that.
Yeah.
And you haven't exploded, and you haven't, like, I assume it's been somewhat positive for you and an enjoyable experience overall?
Yeah, absolutely.
Right.
So if you're capable of doing that...
It will.
I'm sorry, again, I don't want to extend this conversation and open a new can of worms.
No, don't manage me.
That's my choice.
Don't manage me.
Of course.
Unless these men are listening to your show, quality intellects, for the most part, are looking for other You know, women, intellects, and one of those huge signs of that is that they're in college, they're in grad school, and they're doing something.
Oh, I don't know anymore.
No, listen, your dad, sorry to interrupt, Kaylee, but your dad's generation, and I'm learning this, right, too.
I don't know if you remember your dad's age or whatever, but it's probably not far off.
But I'm learning this, too, Kaylee, that college now ain't college back then.
I think some of the smartest guys are the guys who are like, whoa, college?
Arts degree?
Are you kidding me?
Why on earth would I go into huge debt to be propagandized about horrible things and about what a bad white racist patriarch I am?
I would not assume anymore that the smart kids are in college.
I would not assume that anymore.
And the curriculum has been really dumbed down over time as well, right?
Oh, of course.
Stuffing more and more people into college.
I should not have the GPA I have.
I know that.
Right.
Yeah, no, you're pillaging off the land trolls that are being swept into the university for fun and profit, right?
Yes.
So I would not assume that, you know, to me, you know, the smart people, the smartest people are out there on the internet doing stuff that you don't, like, nobody cares, right?
I mean, half the people who come on the show, I have no idea what their education is.
Right.
And I don't care.
Right.
Can they have a great conversation about something important?
And I don't mean the callers.
I mean, even the...
I don't...
Oh, why does this guy have a degree in this or the other, right?
Like Paul Joseph Watson, I have no idea.
No idea what his education is.
No idea what Alex Jones' education is and a whole bunch of other people.
No idea.
Don't care.
Don't care.
And...
But I do still see it in my whole social circle.
What degrees do you have?
What degrees do you have?
You know?
Is this a social circle that has driven you to me to have this conversation because they've been giving you bland non-advice like, you're just going to know, Kaylee.
No, I found this pretty much on my own.
No one guided me here.
I don't have any...
Well, but what I'm saying is that you haven't been able to have the kind of conversation that has given you some kind of closure about this relationship with the people around you, right?
Right.
Right.
So that's what I'm saying.
So they can all be obsessed about grades and all that.
And remember, you guys, young people, massive amounts of propaganda about college.
Gotta go to college, gotta go to college, gotta go to college.
But why?
Why?
Right?
If you're in a vanity social circle, it's not going to help you make a good decision about who.
To marry, right?
Because if they're like, man, that guy's hot.
And you get a little thrill of vanity.
That can come with a price.
I'm positive my parents married because my mom was gorgeous.
Right.
And...
I think I was almost a professional ballet dancer, and I think part of my vanity just completely comes from staring at the mirror all day and teachers telling me that I can be a professional ballet dancer.
You know what I mean?
Oh yeah, and the people coming up and like, Kaylee, why do I smell Power Bar?
What have you been eating?
Yeah.
Right.
Oh, yeah.
Listen, I mean, I'm no expert, but I dated a dancer or two.
And most importantly, when I was at the National Theatre School in Canada, it was like sister school with the ballet class, like the young ballet school.
So I really hung out quite a bit with the dancers.
Man, they smoke like chimneys.
And I'm like, you people are the least healthy athletic people I've ever seen in my life.
It's like, well, we have to smoke.
We can't eat.
Yeah, yeah.
Most people are like, they're trying to blow away like the smell of smoke with something else.
These people were like trying to cover up the smell of sugar with, it's okay, it's just a cigarette, it wasn't a candy bar.
Yeah, it's all too true.
Still, still, it's not even the 60s, it's still true though.
Right.
So, listen, I mean, you and I both know that the dance community and the ballet community in particular, there are some body vanity issues floating around that, I mean, it's a cliche to say it.
I mean, it's, you know, not as bad as the gay community.
It's a cliche that comes from...
But it's real.
It's real, right?
Yes, it's real.
So did you, I mean, you must have spent a lot of time, you know, dieting and exercising and weighing yourself and all that, right?
Absolutely, yeah.
Right.
Right.
I assume that...
The boyfriend has got a nice build on him.
Yes.
Right.
Right.
So there is that body vanity.
And listen, I understand it.
From an R-selected standpoint, that's all you want to look at.
But I don't think you want it from...
I mean, if you're listening to this show, it will drive you mad if you can't resolve it one way or the other.
And you can't be around people...
You know this, Kaylee, right?
You can't be around people wanting them to be someone else.
You know, people aren't clay for you to mold according to your preferences.
You have to, to some degree, you can ask people to change a little bit here and there, but you have to accept the people for who they are and not just be around waiting for some, you know, maybe they'll get hit by electricity and have a slightly different personality and more this and less that.
And it's like, no, no, no, that's not fair, right?
And if this is where you are, like, either he knows where you are and he's ignoring it, which is pretty bad.
Mm-hmm.
Or he doesn't know.
And that's also bad.
That's terrible.
It means he's got no insight into where you are or who you are.
Like, I'll tell you, it's a ridiculous little story, but I used to do yoga at a gym many, many years before I was married, but I used to do yoga.
And I was chatting with this woman.
Really, very, very pretty.
Anyway, so I was going to go and see a movie after the yoga class.
It was an evening class, afternoon class.
And I was going to go to a movie.
And she said, oh, can I come along?
And I'm like, yeah, please, please do, by all means.
And she's like, okay, I'll just, I'll go change and I'll be right out.
So, you know, I went and showered real quick and I'm like crazy dry skin.
I'm like, I turn into a full crocodile if I'm not immersed in a vat of baby butter or something.
And so, yeah, moisture is up and I'm heading out in big rush, right?
And I'm out there at the front of the gym and I'm waiting and I'm waiting and I'm waiting and I'm waiting and I'm waiting.
I'm like, it's like 25 minutes, and the movie's about to start.
So I just said to the woman behind the counter, listen, if this woman comes out, tell her, I'm sorry, I gotta meet my friends, I gotta go, right?
I'm gonna miss the movie.
And I was in therapy at the time, I went to my therapist and told this story.
And first of all, I was like, what could you be thinking, right?
My therapist was like, what does it matter?
It's a good question.
Second was...
I remember this.
The second was...
I said, well, either she knew I was waiting, because I told her when the movie was.
She said, let me just change quickly.
She said, quickly.
So either she knew that I was waiting, but was just taking her old sweet time, which is bad enough, or she completely forgot that there was any time pressure at all.
And it wasn't like big time pressure, but, you know...
Unless she suddenly had appendicitis, it's a little confusing about what the hell's going on in there, right?
There was a coyote between me and the exit.
I couldn't, right?
And so this...
Sense of other, sense of other people.
And I remember that.
And I never, you know, chat with the woman from time to time, but I'd never ask her out again.
Like, oh, we never went out anywhere again.
She asked once or twice, and I'm like, no.
Because the next time I saw her, she wasn't like, oh my goodness.
Like, I can't believe.
I totally lost track.
It was so rude.
I apologize.
You know, whatever.
I mean, that's fine.
You know, we all make mistakes.
We all get distracted and so on.
But, yeah, it struck me because...
Either he does know what you're feeling, in which case going out to buy a ring and stuff like that, that's not good, right?
That's not good.
Or he doesn't even know that you're at a six.
If he doesn't know that you're at a six, that's not good either.
Well, maybe that's because I'm a manipulative liar.
Like, that could be a possibility too, right?
Okay, so either he knows that you're a manipulative liar, if you are, and hasn't brought it up, or he doesn't have any clue that you're a manipulative liar, in which case you have way too much power over him.
Poor little lamb.
Right.
That's just no good.
There isn't, yeah.
There's no good place from that, right?
So my suggestion would be to have, no, it's not going to just accumulate to you.
If there's a fundamental problem and incompatibility or a question of respect or question of shared values, what'll happen is you'll hang around and hang around and hang around, then eventually your ex will say, fuck it, let's just marry him.
Right.
And then you'll know.
No, you'll panic.
That's not the same as knowing.
That's the same as saying, I'm not going to bother thinking about it anymore because I've got too much sunk cost.
I've invested too much into this relationship.
I've got to get married.
That's not what you want.
Don't be cornered by time.
Be proactive.
So I should have a discussion about how.
I'm feeling.
No longer figuring it out on my own.
You think?
In the middle of the night.
Should you be honest about what you think and feel with the person in your life who you have a romantic relationship with?
I gotta go with a yes on that one, Kaylee.
I don't know why.
I know.
No.
And it's frustrating because you want him to take charge sometimes, right?
Yes.
You want him to say, Kaylee, something's not quite right.
I'm feeling there's a bit of a distance.
I'm not sure what's going on.
Here's where I am, where you're at.
You want him to, right?
You won't get it, right?
Yes.
But he's not.
He's not, ah, get a ring!
Right?
So, yeah.
Have a conversation.
But have a standard about the conversation.
Like, some things have to be achieved or something has to change.
Right.
Yeah, I agree.
Let me guess one other thing.
Kaylee, you ready?
Sure.
Is he tall?
He's six foot, so that's, yeah.
All right.
So he's above the average, right?
Yeah, I'm six foot two.
Makes a big difference.
Anyway, thanks, Kayleigh.
I hope you'll let us know how it goes.
Appreciate the conversation.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
You're very welcome.
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