June 14, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
03:06:11
3715 Is Civic Nationalism Doomed? - Call In Show - June 7th, 2017
Question 1: [2:53] - “When I watched the video you posted titled 'why democracy always fails', I nearly lost faith in you! I think I can demonstrate to you that what you think is democracy is not a democracy at all, but an elected oligarchy disguised as one. A genuine democracy would function very differently. Not only can I demonstrate that; I can present a relatively simple fix to change our elected oligarchy into a democracy that will transfer power out of the hands of political parties and into the hands of voters, where it should be.”“I understand that you claim that you do your show as you want to empower people, well that is the sole function of a democracy, you should - to be consistent - support the creation of democracy. Correct me if I am wrong on this. I think I can logically demonstrate that democracy should lead to what you called the 'collective good' and the most rational course of action; or at the very least demonstrate the change I present will lead to a substantial improvement over the present system. And getting better is what it’s all about. If I am right isn't getting a genuine democracy the priority, as everything else follows on from that change?"Question 2: [45:44] – “Stefan seems to be of the opinion that one of the best, if not the best way to organize a society, is to structure it according to Christian principles. He offers quite a bit of critique for the broadly understood atheist community for not understanding that organizing society without, for example, maintaining a Protestant work ethic, inevitably leads to disaster. Is Stefan’s position that while he does not personally believe in god, it is best for the masses of people out there to remain believers for the sake of creating a more prosperous, safer, and generally better society?”Question 3: [55:19] – “I work for the largest employer in a western state with an employee base of over 40,000 people. Recently, the entire web development department was told that they will be losing their jobs within the next two weeks and being replaced by a consultant company. The employees who are losing their jobs are being forced to participate in ‘knowledge transfer’ meetings each day with their replacements of this consultant company, most of which are offshore in India. This is a growing trend among companies with large IT staffs as developers, architects, database admins and analysts are expensive components of the payroll. With Trump's focus on keeping American jobs in America, why is there little or no coverage of the intellectual exodus of technical positions offshore?”Question 4: [1:33:38] – “What would you say your biases are? How do you avoid confirmation bias when dealing with new information? And how does a young person like me search for the truth without giving in to confirmation bias?”Question 5: [1:49:43] - "As a black American and right libertarian, I've been recently very intrigued by the propositions of the alt-right in the United States and the identitarians in Europe. Given that the refugee crisis and multiculturalism has proven and continues to be an expensive, dangerous, and culture-destroying disaster for Western Civilization, the alt-right appears to have a powerful argument in favor of supporting ethno-states in the West. For myself, who is fervently in support of the Western values inherent in establishing the United States, I have continuously simply described myself as 'American', and have believed that properly executed, policies in line with civic nationalism in the United States are sufficient to curb and perhaps reverse the deterioration of society. However, my concerns about phenomena such as regression to the mean, in-group preference, and the heritability of IQ, etc. shed some uncertainty on whether or not civic nationalism is indeed robust enough to solve these issues when compared to the sort of ethnic nationalism the alt-right advocates. While it seems reasonable to me to support ethnic nationalism in Europe, since identity in those countries is so greatly tied to blood (and its connections to culture therein), in the US, where identity seems to be more tied to the nation's founding principles and ethics, can civic nationalism really succeed at preserving an ethical society, especially one which is characteristically western European at its core?"Question 6: [2:36:47] – “I was born in USSR and moved to USA in 1998. As soon as I landed in USA, I was hit in the face with racism, sexism, and wage gap. Those issues did not exist where I came from. For the first time I heard about ‘Cold War’ and many other myths about Russia. How come there is a difference in information, values, and people? Is capitalism really better than communism?”Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hey everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
Ooh, great, exciting callers.
Tonight, the first, well, he had a big issue with me and my criticisms of democracy.
He almost, can you believe it?
He almost lost faith in me, something I actually don't want people to have faith in me.
And we had a great conversation about the nature and reality of democracy.
Now, the second caller wanted to understand my relationship to God, to the divine.
Am I sort of the platonic noble lie idea that although I don't believe in God, it's far better for people to believe in God as a whole for society because they can't be good any other way?
It's a great question.
Not a massively accurate statement of my position, which we got into, but definitely a topic well worth talking about.
The third caller works for a huge employer in a Western state, like over 40,000 people.
And recently, the whole web development department was told to basically what they call go out and dig their own grays, right?
Train their own replacements.
And we talked a lot about the economics behind this, particularly with regards to the sort of short-term lit-fuse incentives of the modern stock market.
What is going on?
Why Outsourcing is happening so much and some of the risks that people generally aren't aware of.
The fourth caller wanted to know what my biases are, as if it would ever be a plural.
Now we had a conversation about that.
And how do you avoid confirmation bias when you're exposed to new information?
I think my answer might surprise you.
I'm not as opposed to confirmation bias as some people might think.
The fifth caller is a black guy called in talking about the idea of an ethno-state or the idea that a country should have some degree or significant degree of ethnic homogeneity.
And he wanted to talk about that topic, which is a very interesting topic.
And it was a great conversation, really, really fantastic caller.
And the sixth caller...
Professional busybody?
Anyway, he was born in the USSR, and he wanted to know how we can make the free market more efficient.
He considers the number of cell phone companies making cell phones to be entirely inefficient and wrong, and this should be fixed, don't you know?
I pushed back pretty hard against this because I'm never really sure why it's anyone else's business who buys and sells what in the free market, but it was a very fiery and very enjoyable conversation.
So thanks everyone for listening.
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Alright, well up first today we have Rohin.
He wrote in and said, Not only can I demonstrate that, I can present a relatively simple fix to change our elected oligarchy into a democracy that will transfer power out of the hands of the political parties and into the hands of the voters where it should be.
I understand that you claim that you do your show as you want to empower people.
Well, that is the sole function of a democracy.
You should, to be consistent, support the creation of a democracy.
Correct me if I'm wrong on this.
I think I can logically demonstrate that democracy should lead to what you call the collective good and the most rational course of action.
Or at the very least, demonstrate the change I present will lead to a substantial improvement over the present system, and getting better is what it's all about.
If I am right, isn't getting a genuine democracy the priority, as everything else follows on from that change.
That's from Rohan.
Hey Rohan, how are you doing tonight?
Hi, good evening, Steph.
How are you?
I'm well.
Don't ever keep faith in me.
You say, I nearly lost faith in you.
If I ever lose...
No, don't.
Don't keep faith in me.
I don't want anyone's faith.
Okay, so give me your definition of democracy.
Well, a democracy, I think, the primary function of democracy is to manifest the will of the majority.
And if it doesn't do that on a pretty regular basis, then it's not a democracy.
It's a pretty good indication that it's not a democracy.
Okay, and how is the will of the majority manifested in a democracy?
Through the voting system.
I mean, it depends on the form of democracy.
Usually, Most countries that call themselves democracies are electoral democracies and it's done through voting periodically in elections.
That's how it's supposed to be done.
And how are people supposed to decide what is the good?
How are they supposed to learn what is the good so that they can vote wisely?
I think the way I see it is that over time people will vote for certain things and And either they'll make their lives better or it won't.
So if you're doing what is the will of the majority, you should end up in a situation where the majority are satisfied with what is happening.
That's not answering my question, just so you know.
Okay, let me ask it to you another way, Rohan.
Do you think that if the government trains the young that they can wisely choose what is best for them even if it comes at the expense of government power?
In other words, do you think that government education, for want of a better word, government instruction of the young, is compatible with being able to objectively determine what is best for the population, which sometimes what is best for the population, I'm sure you will agree, sometimes what's best for the population is a reduction in government power, a shrinking of taxation, a shrinking of government authority.
Do you think that people can objectively judge the size and scope of government power if they're trained in government by government?
Well, I think you're looking at it the wrong way, in my opinion.
I mean, all a person needs to do in a democracy, all a person needs to do is to decide whether his life or her life is being satisfied, is satisfactory.
If he feels his or her life is not satisfactory, they will vote for something that they think will make it satisfactory.
If what they vote for doesn't make it satisfactory, then they'll vote for something else.
So it's like a self-correcting mechanism that should lead to a collective good.
They don't necessarily need a government education to tell them whether they're...
Okay, let me put it to you another way.
I don't know what you're talking about.
Let me put it to you another way.
Do you think it's possible that if cigarette companies trained the young about cigarettes, that the young would grow up with objective knowledge about the health problems of cigarettes or candy or soda pop or any of these things?
Do you think that that would be possible?
See, what you're talking about there is not democracy.
What you're talking about there is somebody who controls what people...
Somebody who controls information flow.
Fantastic.
So if you have 12 years, 6 hours a day, plus homework, 5 days a week, of training the young in what to think, you are controlling information flow in society, right?
And so if the government is in charge of instructing the young, then the government is going to instruct them that...
Freedom is not so good.
The government is really, really great, and more government is even better.
And so if you are looking for something which would help democracy as it stands, if you are with me in that not having government schools would be a lot better in terms of, you know, everyone says, we want diversity.
Well, here's one standard curriculum for the entire planet, pretty much.
So I would agree with you that democracy is very much hampered by who controls the flow of information.
And the primary agency that controls the flow of information, towards the young in particular, is the government.
So you can't have a democracy when the government trains the citizens for, you know, 10,000 hours or more when they're young.
Yeah, but you're making an assumption that people are perfectly, buy into the propaganda 100%.
I mean, there's no indication.
I mean, if you look, when Russia controls information given to its population 100%, The people did not trust in the government because they could see the reality of the situation did not match with what the government was saying.
I mean, people do have a reality.
What I was saying was that people live in their own reality.
Do you talk much about government power with the average person who's been raised in government schools?
Do you find them to be enormously skeptical of government power and very desperately want I mean, I don't know who you've been talking to, but just about everyone I talk to has that particular perspective.
So I'm not sure I see the same skepticism that you do.
Well, I mean, if you look at the If you look at surveys, say in the USA, let's take that example.
You look at surveys of people's satisfaction in the direction the country is heading, it's usually very, very low.
It's like 20%, 25%.
I think recently it was 16%, 17%.
So the government might be telling you all kinds of things, but people see a reality.
I'm sorry, you don't really get how, I'm sorry to be annoying, maybe even insulting, but you don't get how propaganda works.
The fact that people are dissatisfied with the status quo is exactly what big government advocates want.
Because if people believe that the country is going in the wrong direction or that the country is somehow bad, then that's a great market to sell a big giant new government program, right?
So, for instance, after 9-11, they had all of this prefabbed legislation ready for mass surveillance and mass control and all that kind of stuff.
And it's like, wow, people are really unhappy that the Twin Towers went down, which makes perfect sense to me.
And so they ran to the government for a solution.
The solution was the Patriot Act.
The solution was invading Afghanistan.
The solution was, for some reason, invading Iraq.
So the fact that people are dissatisfied is perfectly in line with the growth of government.
No, I don't agree with that.
I think people didn't run to the government for the Patriot Act.
The government used that as an excuse to increase surveillance over people.
And that people, I think, were more skeptical than you make them out to be.
In the recent terrorist attacks in London, Yeah, but the fact that Doesn't mean that government propaganda is okay.
Hey, man, I'm going to inject you with a horrible disease, but don't worry, there might be an antidote somewhere out there on the internet doesn't make me a good guy, right?
I mean, the fact that the internet allows you to push back against this stuff.
And the internet, by the way, of course, was not planned for by the government control over academia and over the media, where you often have to have a license, or in England, you pay directly...
For the television license.
So control of Hollywood through unions, control of academia, control of mainstream media, control of government schools and so on.
So the fact that there's an internet doesn't make that stuff okay.
It just means that you might have a fighting chance if you work hard enough to undo some of the programming.
Yeah, I think we're kind of on parallel tracks here.
I mean, I think I don't disagree with you that there is government propaganda, but what I do disagree with you is that people have the ability to see through it because their lives are not but improved.
I mean, people who've lost their jobs, who are unsatisfied with what the government provides, will naturally want to change the status quo.
Now, what the democracy does, it allows them A free market choice to choose which direction the government will go.
I mean, I'm not saying the government...
Wait, sorry, did you say democracy offers people a free market choice?
If it is a democracy, it will offer a free market choice.
What we have now is a very peculiar situation where it's not an electoral democracy, it's an electoral oligarchy.
We are ruling...
All right, I'm just sorry, can I just back you up for a second?
Because you said you didn't think a lot of people were keen on the Patriot Act?
So according to a February 16th to 17th, 2004 CNN USA Today Gallup poll, only one quarter of Americans, 26%, believe the Patriot Act goes too far in restricting people's civil liberties in order to fight terrorism.
Nearly as many, 21%, think it does not go far enough, while the plurality, 43%, believes it is about right.
That represents a more than two-to-one balance of opinion against the idea that the Act goes too far.
Public reaction changed little since first measured the previous August.
So I'm afraid you're wrong.
Okay, I mean, in terms of the Patriot Act, it probably doesn't affect people's lives that much, so they are willing to...
No, no, no, no.
Rohan, sorry, you're wrong.
You said that you didn't think people much supported the Patriot Act, and you're incorrect.
Alright, okay.
I'm incorrect about this, but does it negate everything else I'm saying?
Well, it says that you pull opinions out of your ass.
It says that you believe things that aren't true.
I mean, that seems kind of important to me.
But I didn't know you were going to bring up the Patriot Act.
If I knew that, I could have looked up something.
No, but you had an opinion about it either way.
I mean, you still had an opinion.
You could have said, I don't know, but you faked knowledge.
You didn't have.
You said you thought, according to your theory, people can see through propaganda.
My theory was that people are easily propagandized, or at least government control of education propagandizes people significantly.
You said, well, no, they can see through it.
I mean, I brought up the Patriot Act, and you said, well, I don't think that many people were very keen on it.
So, as far as, like, listen, when we start into a conversation, Robin, I just want you to understand this.
Maybe you don't have this with other people you share with.
When you and I start into a conversation, I am scanning for areas wherein you are being honorable or areas in which you are not being honorable.
Now, if you made up a point which is incorrect in order to bolster your argument, do you think that A leads me to trust you more or B leads me to trust you less, particularly when you try and gloss over it immediately?
In other words, how do we progress forward in a debate if you've weaseled the first verifiable thing that I can check on?
Well, I apologize.
I didn't think of it in that way.
I made an assumption.
I was wrong about that assumption.
But I was trying to just...
I was thinking on my feet.
And I just, you know, said something that perhaps I shouldn't have said.
I apologize for that.
What do you mean, perhaps you shouldn't have said?
Do you think it is a good thing to make things up to win an argument?
Like maybe 50, 50, 50.39?
Where are we here?
Yeah, it's just a manner of speaking.
I'm not saying it is a good thing, it's a bad thing.
It's just the way it came out.
Oh, it's not a bad thing?
No, I'm not saying it was not a bad thing.
It is a bad thing, but it's just the way that it came out.
I said perhaps it was not a good thing.
It's just a manner of speaking rather than a position I'm taking.
It's just a manner of speaking?
Yeah, just the way it came out.
I'm not trying to The way it came out?
It's not diarrhea, man.
This is words you're choosing to speak.
Well, it's my first time on this kind of public platform.
I'm just saying things that...
Oh, so the first time you're allowing yourself to be kind of weaselly about a point of fact, because it's the first time.
So it's not that you have standards, or you do have standards, but you're willing to drop them if you feel at all nervous.
No, no.
I'm just doing my best.
That's all I'm trying to say.
I'm just doing my best here.
I'm not trying to...
Deceive you.
I made a mistake.
I apologize for that.
I don't know what else I can do at this point.
All right.
Let's move on to your concept of free market democracy.
What does it mean when you say a free market democracy?
Well, if we had a democracy, can I just track back a little bit and define democracy first?
You already did that.
That's the first thing I asked you.
Well, I said that's the primary function of democracy is to exercise the will of the majority.
Manifest the will of the people.
But the tenet on which it rests is that the people are the supreme power.
If people are not the supreme power, then that's why the state will manifest the will of the majority.
It's kind of a natural consequence of that tenet.
Okay, so the people of the supreme power, what does that mean?
They can say no to taxation if they disagree with what's going on?
Exactly.
Exactly.
Oh, okay, so taxation is voluntary, and so it's like a solicitation for a charity.
They can send you something in the mail saying, we want to do X, Y, and Z, would you like to contribute to it?
I'm actually very much on board with you for what it's worth regarding that particular approach to things.
I think that would be ideal.
In other words, the government is...
No different fundamentally from any other social agency that can request for money in order to pursue their particular goals, but you have the right to say no because as a citizen you are the final authority, right?
Well, only if the majority have agreed on that position.
Oh, so if the majority...
Sorry, so if the majority...
If people say that taxes should double, like 51% of people say that taxes should double, then the other 49% of people have to obey that tax increase or go to jail, right?
Yes.
Okay.
Hang on.
It's not the people who are the final authority.
It's 50% plus one.
It's a plurality or majority of the people who are the final authority because the minority is certainly not the final authority, right?
Yeah, the majority.
I mean, it's not as if the will of the minority won't be manifested in some ways or cannot be, but basically the primary function of the democratic state is to exercise the will of the majority.
And within constitutional limits, there are obviously going to be limits to what the majority can direct.
What would those limits be, do you think?
The limits, you know, Canada has a constitution, those are the limits defined within the constitution, those are the limits that would exist in a constitutional, you know, in a democracy.
Although, of course, there would be a methodology for changing the constitution, right?
I imagine, yeah, there's perhaps something like, that would have to be looked into, you know, like two-thirds of the legislators have to agree on it, or there's some kind of...
There's tons of amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
So these limits or these constitutional limits are to some degree illusory because a supermajority or maybe a two-thirds majority, as you say, can still override the one-third who may resist, right?
I guess so, yeah.
I'm not too sure all the way the rules are.
I think there are There are laws that are the judicial branches that are separate from the legislative branches...
Okay, so what you need to do, just to be...
And the reason I'm asking you all this, Rohin, sorry for interrupting.
The reason I'm asking all this is people always say the will of the majority and the will of the people and the people of the final...
But you're just talking about the majority.
Democracy is a way of imposing the will of the majority on the minority for most things.
And for a few things, it's the will of a two-thirds majority on the one-third minority, right?
To be technically accurate, democracy is the way that the will of the majority is imposed upon the minority.
Now, that even isn't particularly accurate, because in democracy, there's no direct automatic voting, right?
Like, you don't just vote for a particular proposition and then it's magically put into place.
Because the way that you generally do it in a democracy is you vote for a representative.
And that representative, like a congressman or a congresswoman, you vote for a representative who then goes to the legislature and creates or makes the laws, right?
Now, in democracies, there's no enforceable contract between the voters and their representatives, right?
I mean, you know, George Herbert Walker Bush famously made the pledge, read my lips, no new taxes.
And then he got into office and pretty much immediately raised taxes, right?
So there's no...
There's an enforceable contract between the voter and the elected official, the politician.
In fact, the politician doesn't even know who voted for him because usually it's a secret ballot, right?
So if you make promises, like let's say the will of the majority chooses no more taxes, no more taxes, right?
George H.W. Bush, right?
No new taxes.
So people vote for that, and then he just raises taxes anyway.
So it really is not so much the will of the people at all.
It's not even the will of the majority.
It is the infliction of those who can gain the most votes on those who can't gain the most votes, right?
The power resides with those who can gain the most votes through no enforceable contract of any kind whatsoever.
No, well, if you vote for me, I'm going to do X, and if I don't do X, you can get your vote back, right?
There's no refunds, do not spoil, mutilate, bend, or staple any of this stuff.
It is who can get the most votes in a completely unenforceable contract That is where the real power resides.
An electoral democracy.
We are an electoral...
I'm sorry?
...to get elected.
That's exactly my point.
The supreme power does not reside in the people who elect the voters.
It resides in the people who are elected.
This is precisely what I'm trying to say.
But sorry, just before we get to that, how is all of this a free market?
If it was a free market, then you could reject the...
Reject all those on the ballot.
Oh, like a none of the above?
Exactly.
You do understand, though, that for the most part, certainly modern democracies, and I would argue democracies throughout history, have run on pure corruption.
And the corruption is this.
If you're dependent on the government for your money, If you have an old-age pension, if you are on welfare, if you are part of the military-industrial complex, if you are dependent on government contracts, if you work for the government, if you are dependent, as I think it's about maybe a little over half of Americans are, if you're dependent on the government for your income, in other words, if you receive far more from the government than you pay in taxes, do you think that you can be objective about government spending?
You don't need to be objective.
You just have to vote for your own selfish interests.
And this is good for you?
This is what you think is good?
If the majority benefits from what the government is doing, then that, by definition, is for the collective good.
And it is the most rational course of action.
If what they choose ends up in a situation where it makes everyone's life worse, obviously then everyone will be worse off.
And then they'll have to change what they voted for and do something else.
They might head off in the wrong direction, might end up in a place where they made their life worse off, but then they have the power in their own hands to change direction, go in another direction, and choose a set of policies that will make their lives better.
So democracy is a self-correcting, self-driving mechanism that leads to the collective group.
Excellent.
Okay, so you say democracy is a self-correcting mechanism.
So can you point out to me, please, the longest-lasting democracy in the world?
I cannot, no.
But you have a conjecture, right?
You have a hypothesis.
I mean, you can look at non-democratic systems like, I don't know, 6,000 years of Chinese history that was fairly uninterrupted, which was, you know, very, very high IQ. They had entrance exams that were like IQ tests to become a public servant.
There was significant stability throughout many thousands of these years.
So you have a multi-thousand year system.
That sustained itself.
Can you think of the longest democracy that has existed?
Because you're saying it's a self-correcting system, which means it should do even better than oligarchies.
Well, the problem is that we've never had a true...
Well, I can't go back...
I don't want to deceive you again.
I don't want to say something I don't quite know.
But to the best of my knowledge, as far as I can see, that there's only two countries I know currently that have...
What could be described as a true democracy, and one is Switzerland, the other one is Uruguay.
And they're both compared to, you know, if you look at the satisfaction and trust in government for the people of Switzerland, it's very, very high.
And the same goes for Uruguay compared to all the Latin American countries, because they exercise direct democracy, and it's This gives power to the citizens, and they seem to be able to do a decent job in creating a decent society where they can live.
So I can't answer your question, but I can just point out that when we do have democracy, the outcomes are pretty good.
Okay, so you don't really have an example of a long-lasting democracy.
I couldn't I couldn't give you an example of a long-lasting democracy because I don't think we ever had a democracy.
As far as I know in history, I've never seen any examples of a democracy.
Do you think that there might be anything else that might significantly contribute to the success of Uruguay and Switzerland?
Yeah, sure.
Sure there are.
Yeah, I mean, I suppose that you have an idea that IQ is a very important factor in the creation of a society, and I think, yes, IQ is important, and then if you combine IQ with a democracy, then you end up with a better situation than you would without one, in general.
Right.
Do you know what the No, no, I don't know.
Would it surprise you that it is overwhelmingly white?
No, no, I think if I remember something, it's about 10% Afro-Caribbean or African.
No, I'm going to read this to you because I don't want you to go around this path of making stuff up.
So it's 87.7% white, it's 4.6% black, 2.4% indigenous, 5.1% others slash none, and 0.2%.
It's Asian, so overwhelmingly white.
Do you know that Switzerland, of course, is overwhelmingly white or European at least, right?
Yes.
I mean, yeah, all right.
I'm quite happy to concede those points.
I've got no issue with that.
Yeah.
So it may not be that it's direct democracy that is the significant factor.
It may be That you have a largely ethnically homogenous population composed of whites with a European ancestry, right?
And Uruguay has an average IQ in the high 90s, Switzerland an average IQ of 101, and that is a factor.
So you may be looking at an effect rather than a cause.
Yeah, possibly, but that doesn't...
That doesn't mean that democracy doesn't have an effect.
It just could be other correlating factors, or it doesn't also mean that in a low IQ population that the application of a democracy can lead to better outcomes than having electoral oligarchy.
But what I don't quite understand is, I think you and I would have to agree on this, that if individual citizens vote for their own immediate economic benefit, Then in general people will vote to take away the property of other people because it's easier to get a check than it is to go to work, right?
And so there must be some larger universal principle that people are willing to sacrifice their own immediate financial interest for.
There must be some deferral of gratification and there must be the high potential for income in a free market for people to reject the temptations of the welfare state, right?
Because if you have an IQ of 80 The welfare state is way better for you than working.
If you have an IQ of 100, the welfare state is worse for you than working, and if you have an IQ of 120, it's way worse for you than working.
So if you have a low IQ population, then by definition they're going to prefer immediate government checks to long-term abstract property rights.
Now, they will do better in the long run if there's no welfare state, but in the short run, which is kind of what they think of, given that the IQ is lower, they can't really defer gratification as much.
So if you have a lower IQ population, you're going to have people voting for their own immediate economic self-interest, which is going to be getting money from the government, which is going to drive the productive people away from the economy, which is going to cause the Venezuelan-style socialist collapse.
So if you're just going to say, well, we've got this magic paint called direct democracy that's going to make all societies better, I really have to push back on you about that because I think there's a lot of other factors.
That direct democracy, like the welfare state works to a smaller, like to a longer degree, in a smaller, high IQ, ethnically homogenous population.
Like South Korea and Japan.
If you have high IQ and a relatively...
Homogenous, ethnically homogenous population, the welfare state is much more sustainable than it is in other kinds of situations or scenarios.
Because, as you know, you get a low IQ population in a high IQ country where there's a welfare state.
And the low IQ population vote for more and more free government stuff and then they have more and more babies and the high IQ population pays more and more taxes which means they have to work harder and harder and have fewer and fewer babies and it doesn't work at any level for any direct period of time.
So, I think you might want to focus just a little bit more on things like IQ and demographics when you're looking to design a better system.
Well, I would like to make the point that when people Choose the welfare state.
For example, in corrupt countries like Latin America, you're talking about people get votes in governments that will give them a check every month.
Let's put it simply.
They'll give them a check every month.
But what they voted for is a check.
What they didn't vote for is accompanying corruption because the actual goal of the- No, no, no.
Anybody with half a brain knows that the check is corruption.
Because the check is corruption because your vote is being bought from you.
It would be much more honest and much less economically catastrophic if somebody just gave you $500 for your vote at the polling booth.
Because at least that wouldn't be a long-term, demographic-shifting, birthrate-altering system.
This is like the lower IQ people are like, hey, free stuff!
Woohoo!
Woohoo!
It's not like there's the accompanying corruption.
Giving people the welfare state or giving people pensions or giving people unemployment insurance or increases thereof in return for their vote, that is corruption.
That's bribing people for their vote.
Yeah, but that's absolutely valid.
It's not corruption.
Wait, paying people for their vote is not corruption?
No, I mean, maybe if I can just put this more...
No, no, no.
You just said it's perfectly valid.
It's not corrupt when I just described buying people's votes by offering them free government stuff.
I'm just curious what your reasoning is here.
It's not corrupt.
It's the public policy that you're stating and you're saying, you know, I just keep it simply.
You're offering a check to a certain percentage of the population every month if you vote for that particular political party.
You don't consider that corrupt.
No, it's not corruption at all.
That's legal.
Why?
Because it's legal?
Yes, it's legal.
Oh, so, okay.
So you're more of a positive law rather than a natural law.
There's no morality.
There's no universal standards of good or bad behavior.
There's just, hey, it's legal, so there's no moral problem with it whatsoever.
Well, if it operates in the context of democracy, I don't think it's a corruption.
Does it trouble you at all emotionally when politicians say, vote for me and I'm going to increase your welfare payments?
Does it trouble you?
Does it strike you as at all problematic?
Just curious.
Okay, can I answer in a long-winded way?
This is something that I would like to tackle, but I can't tackle it in the way you're...
Can I tackle it in a slightly different way?
Well, no.
Just tell me if it bothers you and then you can give me the long.
Is there any problem?
It's nickel so it doesn't bother you at all.
Of course.
It will bother me because in the long run, as you say, it's not sustainable.
That's why it bothers me.
That's the issue with it.
Oh, so it's nothing to do with ethics.
It's just to do with the fact that it's not sustainable.
So, you have no ethical standards outside of the local laws.
Is that right?
Like, you don't have any ethical standards that are larger or wider than what's written in the books.
Well, maybe you can explain to me what ethical standards are being violated by offering people welfare.
I don't see it.
I don't understand.
It's a violation of property rights, and it's bribing for votes.
It's not a violation of property rights if you're within a democracy, because that's the compact in which you live.
You live in a society.
And you have the votes, and you decide what will happen in that society.
So the majority of people decide it.
But the people who...
Hang on.
But the people who...
The number of rich people is smaller than the number of poor people.
Can we at least get that math straight?
And therefore, the number of rich people...
The rich people cannot outvote the poor people.
And so if the government says we're going to take from the rich and give to the poor, the idea that the rich live in some sort of democracy where they have a say, it's nonsense.
I mean, the rich will do other things, politically connected, they'll donate to politicians or do charity dinners or whatever.
But...
No, it's a violation of property rights.
If somebody says, if you bribe someone with your own money, that's bad enough.
If you bribe people with other people's money, that's really bad.
Which is better?
A country that does what's in the interest of the richest 1% or a country that does what's in the interest of the majority?
Which one is better?
I don't know what you mean by in the interests of.
They're not fucking livestock, man.
They're human beings.
There's an objective moral standard.
Thou shalt not steal.
Do not violate people's property rights.
Do not go and say, oh, howling mob, I'm going to string up these rich people, I'm going to go through their pockets, and I'm going to give you everything that I find in return for you giving me your allegiance.
That is not moral.
That's wrong.
I mean, look, I have a problem enough with the government saying, okay, I'm the only ones who can protect your property rights.
But it is immoral to go and say to anyone, give me your vote and I'm going to go and take money from other people by force and give it to you.
Oh, I'll make it legal.
I don't care.
Well, it's a legality matter.
This is a philosophy show.
This is not a positive law show.
This is not a law review show.
This is a philosophy show, which means universal, moral, and ethical standards.
But what if the 1% in Greek society take money out of the pockets of the poorest?
I mean, is that okay?
How do they do that?
Well, because if you...
Can I give you an example of a study?
Princeton did a study of, you know, just looking at the policies the U.S. government enacted between, I can't remember the exact dates, but it was like 1988 and 2001 or 1981 and 2001.
And they compared that, the policy enacted, with the opinions of the majority and the opinions of the richest 1%.
They found that the policy enacted by the U.S. government had no correlation with opinions of the majority of people.
But they had a strong correlation with what the 1% wanted.
And so the 1%...
Wait, what?
Hang on, hang on.
Are you saying that the richest 1% really, really want a welfare state that they always have to pay into and are never going to benefit from?
Whatever is happening in the USA, what happens is that the agenda is doing what's best for the richest 1%, but they fling crumbs to enough people to get enough people to vote for that political party, tag along, and so they can pursue their own agenda.
So it's not It's the welfare state, what you're seeing as an effect...
Wait, are you saying that the non-rich in America are only getting crumbs?
Yes, they could be getting...
Are you kidding me?
Do you know what entitlement spending is in the United States?
Do you study any facts at all?
Do you know that the richest 1% pay an enormous amount of the taxes, like 40% or more?
It's insane how much of the tax bill is paid for by the rich.
And one of the reasons why it's so hard to control spending in the United States is what's called entitlements or things which aren't non-discretionary spending, things which are baked into law and almost impossible to change.
You know, things like welfare, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, old age pensions, Social Security.
You can't change these things.
And it's trillions and trillions of dollars a year.
So the idea that the rich are just getting their way when a tiny percentage of them are paying almost half the taxes and the trillions of dollars are being poured into the maw of the poor.
I just...
I mean, you and I are just watching two different movies.
That's all I'm telling you.
Well, okay.
Maybe what I see is that there is...
The welfare system is not directed to benefit...
The majority of the population is directed to prop up the government.
So they are doing whatever they can do to prop themselves up.
They're not trying to represent what's in the best interest of the majority.
Okay, hang on.
So you're saying that it's not in the best interest of the majority.
So if you run as a candidate, let's just say in America, if you run as a candidate and you say, I want to end the welfare state because it's not in the best interest of the poor, the majority, what do you think is going to happen to your political opportunities?
Yeah, so this is kind of what I would say.
This is why democracy is a self-creating mechanism.
No, no, no.
If you're saying that the welfare state doesn't benefit the poor, then the poor should be smart enough to vote and say, well, we've got to get rid of the welfare state.
Man, this is terrible for us.
They're in a difficult situation.
First of all, they're dependent on the state for their check.
So it's very difficult for them To, you know, think about five years or ten years down the road when tomorrow they don't have food on the table.
It's a very difficult proposition for them.
So what they can do is...
And I do believe that people are not stupid enough to see that there's a lot of corruption in government.
So what they're voting, they're voting for the welfare check.
They're not voting for the accompanying corruption in the government.
They know that people are taking advantage of...
All this spending in government, some of it is going to people, but a lot of it is money that's been siphoned off for people.
This government money is a trough.
A lot of people, a lot more people than the people who receive the money are using it.
It's a means to an end.
It's not there to benefit the majority.
It's there as a means to an end for the people in power to benefit themselves.
Okay.
I mean, this is just an assertion.
There's no facts.
But I will say this, and I'll close off at this point, because I think we've gone about as far as we can go, at least in terms of my respect for democracy.
But here's the problem, and that you might want to work on philosophically or Intellectually, is that you say democracy, direct democracy or whatever, however you're going to phrase it, is good and self-correcting and self-sustaining and so on.
But at the same time, you're saying that the majority of people who are poor, the vast majority of people who are poor, are going to vote for the welfare state which is bad for them.
Now, if you've got the majority of people who are voting for the welfare state that's bad for them, you have a problem with democracy, whether it's direct or indirect.
And that's the point that I started with, which was that there's massive amounts of corruption.
You're not allowing me to make my case.
This is something that I wanted to speak about.
Because a democracy would allow the population to at least remove the corrupt candidates.
They might want to keep the check, but they can remove the corrupt candidates.
And then, once you get less corruption in the system, then they'll get candidates more willing to represent what is in the best interest of the majority.
And they'll start looking at the system and saying, look, This welfare check, this is what we're doing, it's not sustainable.
Five, ten years down the road, I'm going to end up in a disaster.
So because they're more trusted by the people who voted for them because they are less corrupt than the people who were there previously, they will have more credibility and they'll be able to put forward policies.
They'll start to move towards what is actually in the collective good rather than what's in the...
All this welfare stuff, all this welfare payments are not Being directed to the majority because it benefits the majority.
It's being directed to them because it benefits the people in power.
I'm going to have to interrupt you, and I'm sorry for doing that.
Let's try and experiment.
Let's try and experiment.
Because, I mean, you're just saying stuff, right?
I mean, there's no ethical reasoning behind what you're saying.
There's no facts.
I mean, you're just saying stuff.
And to me, it's like you're just describing a dungeon that you're creating in fifth edition rules.
So we've got a direct democracy.
I guess we can do one here, right?
So we've got three people on this call.
There's yourself.
There's myself.
I'm not talking about direct democracy.
Still talking.
There's yourself, there's myself, and there's Mike.
So the question is, do we continue with this, what to me just seems like a bunch of nonsense syllables leading nowhere, or do we continue with this or do we move on to the next call?
Now, I myself, I'm going to vote to move on to the next call.
Mike, what's your vote here?
I'm going for next call.
All right.
Sorry.
We'd love to register your call.
We'd love to register your vote, I'm afraid, but it's two to one, and that's what we call direct democracy.
Thanks very much for calling in.
Let's move on to the next call.
Alright, up next we have Michael.
Michael wrote in and said, It's Stefan's position that while he does not personally believe in God,
it is best for the masses of people out there to remain believers for the sake of creating a more prosperous, safer, and genuinely better society.
That's from Michael.
Hey Michael, how are you doing?
Yes, hello.
I'm fine.
How are you?
I'm well, thanks.
Stefan seems to be of the opinion.
Oh...
I gotta tell you, if I had a dime for every time I heard that, seems to be of the opinion.
That's kind of like a weasel word where you don't have to prove anything you're saying.
So just at the very beginning, I need you to clarify this.
So have I said the best way to organize a society is according to Christian principles?
Where have I ever said that?
Well, it came up in the video that you've made with Stephen Crowder, who's like a conservative political commentator.
That's just what I kind of got out of what you were saying.
Okay.
See, now this is where you have to stop.
Maybe I just had really, really rigorous instructors when it came to this kind of stuff.
And please excuse my rant against you, Michael.
It's not just you, but this just happens all the time.
All the time.
Steph, my impression of your thoughts is...
And it's like, no, no, no, no.
You don't get to have your own impressions.
You know, I mean, you have to be like a court reporter, right?
So like when I was studying the Protestant Reformation, I had to like learn Martin Luther's thought inside out.
I mean, I had this wonderful teacher, I've mentioned her before, a wonderful professor who taught me Aristotle, and she was like, okay, take this paragraph, reduce it to its logic tree, figure it out from the ground up.
You didn't get to sort of wander in in a haze of distraction and say, well, my impression was that Aristotle seemed to be saying, right?
I mean, you had to actually get the quote, figure out what someone was saying.
I don't know if that's not taught anymore, or maybe I just had a whole series of teachers who, or professors who, Never let that happen.
Like, you just couldn't get it.
You just say, stop, stop, stop.
I don't hear.
I want to hear your impressions.
I want to hear the facts.
We're having a discussion, right?
So I don't want to presume that I fully understand your position.
But basically, what I'm asking is, like, you identify as an atheist.
And so do I, actually.
But then you seem to be, again...
I know you don't like that word, but I don't want to presume.
That's why I'm putting it this way.
So my opinion is that you hold that position, okay?
But do I hold that position?
I don't know if you've ever gone to my website, freedomainradio.com.
You can go to freedomainradio.com.
You know, I've written a whole book that took a long time to write.
You could really argue it took 30 years to think about and write about.
I've got a whole book.
I read your book.
It's my show, okay?
Don't talk in my ear when I'm talking.
It's really annoying, okay?
I've got a whole book on secular ethics.
Now, it's not go read the Bible.
That's not UPB, Universally Preferable Behavior, a rational proof of secular ethics.
It's not the St.
James with small font inside, right?
It's a whole book on secular ethics.
I have books on a voluntary society.
I have books on voluntarism, on anarchism, and so on.
And so I'm not sure...
How you get this idea or this argument that the best way to organize a society is along the lines of Christian principles.
I'm not even sure I know what Christian principles are.
The Bible is a big and complicated book.
There's lots of stuff in it.
Not all of it gels together, right?
Okay.
Can I speak now?
Oh, you're going to do the passive-aggressive thing with me now?
When I've stopped talking, yes, you can speak.
That's kind of how conversation works.
I've read your book about how you stand in relation to belief in God, and basically your claim is that an omnipotent, all-knowing, all-powerful God is impossible.
And I agree with that.
Because that's just observing our reality, that's just the way things are.
It's just that watching your videos, it doesn't seem to square with what you're saying in those videos because...
You definitely mention Christian values.
I cannot quote verbatim because I did not capture specific quotes, but I think you would agree that that was part of the conversation, for example, that you had with Steven Crowder.
Or even today, I watched a video that you had with...
Dennis Prager, who seems to run a university that's not a university.
Not sure what that's all about.
He obviously believes in God.
And, I mean, I understand why you haven't really challenged him on, you know, his belief in God.
You were basically political and avoided that and, you know, you let him speak.
But I did get the distinct impression that you think that probably it's better for people...
To believe in God because it makes society better, safer, even though, you know, that's obviously not your position.
So it kind of creates a double standard, like where, you know, you're an atheist and you think you can draw moral principles just from, you know, rational reasoning.
But for other people, you kind of need the You know, you need to hold the stick over them.
I think that was actually something that you said in the video.
And that may be for the best.
Now again, I'm not saying that this is necessarily...
This is just a topic for discussion.
I'm not...
I don't want to put words...
No, you're saying this is something to do with my argument.
And my question is, do you just generally take impressions from people?
Or do you do even 1% of intellectual rigor and write down what they say and bring an actual quote?
Or do you just kind of go with your feelings or your impressions or your...
whatever?
Okay, so basically you're saying that...
You're not of that opinion.
I don't even know what to say.
I mean, you're saying things that I have no memory saying.
Now, if you say to me, as I've sort of, the argument you may be referring to, I have no idea because I don't know what's going on in this mind maze of yours, but I have said that I would rather have somebody who believes in Christian principles than somebody who doesn't believe in Christian principles and is a statist.
Because a Christian will pursue his version of salvation and he will not rob, not steal, not maim or whatever, right?
And leave me in peace.
But an atheist who is a statist is going to agitate for laws that are going to interfere with my liberty, right?
I don't know that that's saying society should be run according to Christian principles.
That's just a basic observation.
That the Christian does not interfere with my life by being a Christian, but the atheist who's a statist damn well decidedly does.
Okay, what about an atheist who's not a statist?
Just, you know, one who derives his moral principles just through rational reasoning?
You don't need me to answer that, do you?
Well, I don't know.
You can figure that one out for yourself, right?
That's perfectly fine.
I'm not even disagreeing with you necessarily.
I was just wondering where you stand on that issue.
I think you've clarified that for me and I think that's perfectly fine.
Okay, my suggestion.
I mean, I'm trying to help you by...
It's, you know, tough love, right?
Trying to be harsh, to be kind.
Michael, if you want to be taken seriously by serious thinkers, you need to come with more than your impressions.
You need to come with quotes.
You need to come with an understanding.
You can't just come in and say, well...
You seem to be of this, and then just, you can't strawman.
Because it's very obvious that you're strawmanning to anybody.
And you just, I'm just telling you.
I'm not interested in getting a debate with you right now.
I'm just telling you, as somebody who wants you to have more credibility in the future, you've had weeks to prepare for the call.
You've watched two, just a couple of notes.
You know, it's like it takes you 20 seconds to write down a sentence.
Oh, Steph said this.
Oh, Steph said this.
Just give me a couple of quotes.
And that is a wonderful way to be taken seriously.
So thanks very much.
I appreciate the call.
Let's move on to the next one.
Okay, up next we have Dan.
Dan wrote in and said, I work for the largest employer in a Western state with an employee base of over 40,000 people.
Recently, the entire web development department was told that they will be losing their jobs within the next two weeks and are being replaced by a consultant company.
The employees who are losing their jobs are being forced to participate in knowledge transfer meetings each day with the replacements of this consultant company, most of which are offshore in India.
This is a growing trend among companies with large IT staffs as developers, architects, database admins, and analysts are expensive components on the payroll.
With Donald Trump's focus on keeping American jobs in America, Why is there little or no coverage of the intellectual exodus of technical positions offshore?
That's from Dan.
Hey Dan, how you doing?
Great, thank you.
It's a pleasure and an honor.
Oh, thank you.
What's it like in the company?
The reference to training your replacements, it's called digging your own grave.
You know, like you get pulled out into the...
The desert outside of Las Vegas, and then you have to dig your own grave, and then they shoot you and throw you in it.
So this kind of knowledge transfer, it's sort of referred to as that.
What's it like in the company?
Are people shell shocked?
I mean, how are they reacting?
Yeah, so every few years we go through this.
I've been there for about three years, and I know previously to me being there, They've gone through these restructuring segments in time where they react to the market, they react to government regulation, and there's layoffs.
It's kind of volatile every, I'd say, three to four years.
This one's a little different.
This one wasn't really anticipated.
It seemed like it came out of nowhere.
For me, as I wasn't part of the web development staff, although I work with them very closely, there's a lot of unknown.
I've had some good news since I originally wrote to you in that two of my developers have been brought on board with this consulting company.
However, there's a lot still who are being shadowed by these We're outsourced consultants.
And like I said, we're from India.
So there's a lot of unknowns.
It's disappointing, I would say, with me and my other colleagues who are safe for the time.
We're just very disappointed in the approach.
We understand the approach.
We understand the dollars and cents behind it.
But it's disappointing.
It's nerve-wracking for us because we don't know if we are next.
We assume we may be, but there's just a lot of uncertainty.
And we're approaching the 14th, which is their last day.
So I'm assuming that we'll learn more after that, but there hasn't been a lot of communication before.
To this point.
Right.
Right.
And is there, I mean, people obviously firing their resumes out and all that?
I mean, it's got to be pretty rough.
Yeah, that's it.
That's it.
In my department, I'm a little bit removed, but related.
I've been assured that my position's safe.
Again, we're uncertain as for how long.
But yeah, there's a lot There's a big movement to head off any potential layoff situation where it's always better to go on your own terms than leaving or looking for a job when you don't have anything in front of you.
So yeah, there is – it's just a general feeling of uncertainty.
And for me, being unimpacted personally, like through my own job, but seeing other people go through it, who do you turn to to make – We're citizens aware of this because it's not a big – you don't see it.
You don't see a factory moving.
You don't see a factory being shut down.
But it's all this intellectual resource being moved out.
And it's very, very – it's hidden.
It's not obvious.
And you don't hear about it.
At least I haven't heard about it.
I've heard about it through some people in town.
For other big employers, as this is a trend, but I don't get the feel that it's as known nationally as it's happening.
I mean, sorry to interrupt you, but one of the reasons that it's not known that much is that reporters as a whole tend to be complete morons.
No, they don't.
They don't understand technology.
They don't understand coding.
They don't understand databases.
They don't understand maintenance or anything like that.
They don't know.
Oh, you know, they're saving money!
Or the people who really do understand technology, well, they probably need access to a bunch of the people who are making these decisions.
And so, it's not well understood.
Now, do you have any idea how many lines of code are being maintained or what the code library is like, how big it is?
It's enormous.
And not only the code library, but patient medical history.
Things that are supposed to be very secure are, I want to say potentially, but I know for a fact, are going to be accessed by people overseas who aren't adhering to the same type of security protocols as we have to here.
Right and frankly would be much more bribeable as a whole.
Yes, exactly.
People don't understand and I mean I know this.
I know this because I worked with a lot of big systems.
I mean I first started coding when I was 12 and I coded for a living.
I was a head of R&D. The code that I wrote was sold for millions and millions of dollars to big companies and we had to fit into their existing systems.
It may have changed.
I'm not sure how much, but it may have changed.
A lot of big companies, their IT systems are a house of cards.
You have various operating systems.
You have various database standards.
You've got intermediary file depositories.
You've got all kinds of crazy stuff flying all over the place.
It's really complicated stuff, and you have millions of lines of code.
And Every line of code, it's like a butterfly effect.
I mean, I remember when I was responsible for moving code from COBOL 74 to COBOL 80, you didn't want to slip a period.
You didn't want to, you know, like a tiny, you change one tiny thing.
And it can have a ripple effect that could potentially cost millions and millions of dollars.
I mean, this is a high volume trading stuff.
And so the idea to me, when I hear, oh yeah, we're going to transfer all of this knowledge in two weeks?
Across potential language and cultural barriers?
Like, there's no way.
Well, here's what it sounds like to me.
It's like, well, okay, it's true that I have been a brain surgeon for 20 years.
Well trained, steady as a rock under pressure, and I know what I'm doing inside a human skull.
Now, you're from India.
I'm sure you've had some training over there.
I'm going to teach you everything I know in two weeks.
Come on.
But because for managers who don't understand tech, and there is this traditional barrier, the tech people aren't people people, and the people people aren't tech people.
Which is why you have the sales people out there saying, sure, the technology can do that.
You guys can make that change, can't you?
I mean, they don't understand technology, and the tech people aren't necessarily people people, so they don't end up in those kind of management positions.
And...
That's a very real problem because what happens is a bunch of consultants sponge you in to management and they say, well, we've done a review of your payroll and your payroll is this and we can get you something for this in India.
Right?
And it seems credible.
It seems credible.
Now, one of the reasons it seems credible is because if the coders aren't that good, it won't show up For a while.
So you're going to cut your payroll significantly and the problems may not show up for a couple of years.
The problems may not show up until there's a security breach because someone didn't follow particular security protocols.
The problems may not show up until there's some kind of upgrade.
Or the problems may not show up until one system goes down and it has a ripple effect.
The problems are down the road.
The profit Now, there used to be something in business which was a dedication to long-term profiting.
And managers who wanted the quick and easy buck were generally looked on as idiots, as junkies.
You know, why would we want, you know, 20 extra bucks now when we could get 10 bucks extra a year for the next 20 years, right?
And the reason that's happened, this is one of the first shows I did in the True News called the Supercharged Stock Market.
The reason that's happened is so much money has been jammed and forced and squished and crushed into the stock market.
Money that damn well doesn't want to be there.
It does not want to be there.
It's there Because it's being chased by the predators of the IRS or the other tax departments.
Oh, if I don't put my money into some index fund, if I don't put my money into some financial instrument to hide it from the tax man, not hide it, but you know what I mean, escape it.
Escape taxes.
You put your money into your...
Into your tax savings plan, you put your money into your retirement plan, and it's taxed at a lower rate, if it's taxed at all.
And in Canada here, there were some funds that if you invested in them, they were tax-free, and they turned into, you know, the usual clusterfrag of corruption and low returns that you could conceivably imagine.
So money is fleeing the tax man, and its safe haven is the stock market.
But that puts so much money into the stock market that it's sloshing around looking for tiny variations in profit.
The stock market needs to be starved.
It needs to be like one-tenth, if that what it is now.
If people weren't fleeing the tax man, they wouldn't put their money into the stock market.
I mean, who the hell wants to put their money in the stock market?
I mean, there are a few people who love trading and more power to them, good for them.
But most people just want to put their money in a bank account or buy a couple of bonds or just And it's also being driven into the stock market because of inflation, right?
So it's fleeing the tax man and it's being pursued by the giant predator called inflation, which means that just sticking your money in a bank, which should be a reasonable hedge against reasonable inflation, there shouldn't be any inflation at all basically, that doesn't work.
You put your money in a bank and you're losing money.
So people jam their money into the stock market.
The stock market, the people who are doing the money management are then looking for anything.
It's by quarter.
It's like, oh, you know, we missed our earnings this quarter.
Your stocks just crater, and then management gets replaced, and the stockholders are incensed, and there's lawsuits and threats, and it's horrible.
It's a horrible environment, and I mean the halcyon days at the beginning of my entrepreneurial life when I was just creating Beautiful things in code, creating things that reduced environmental impact, that kept the air and the groundwater and the water all cleaner.
That was a beautiful time.
And because we were successful, because my code was successful and my management was successful and other people were successful, because we were successful, Dan, the money man came.
The money man came along.
And they were going to make us rich.
And they were going to get us on a stock exchange.
And they were going to just make all these wonderful things happen.
It's like the devil taking Jesus up to the mountaintop and saying, this land can be yours.
Just focus on the money rather than the beauty.
And it is a horrifying thing that occurs.
And it became spreadsheets, and it became numbers, and it became watching the stock ticker, and it became all about that.
And I kept dragging everyone saying, we were here creating beautiful things that made the world a better place, that made the world a cleaner place, that reduced pollution, and now we're staring at stocks and counting magic money in our head.
Let's go back to creating the beautiful stuff.
When the money men come in, your company can go kind of mental.
And you turn, basically, my experience was you turn from a loving wife into a shallow whore.
And it is a gross process.
So I think what happens is they say, well, you know, we can cut 50, 60, 70, 80% of our payroll and get exactly the same outcome.
The reality, of course, is that, well, you can't.
You can't.
You're going to get...
Bad code.
The amount of knowledge, like, I remember this when I worked at a coding place.
Sitting down with guys and, you know, I need to make this change.
They're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, right?
Whoa, hang on.
Whoa there, young bucko.
You want to make the change to this particular module?
Okay, let me draw that out for you, right?
And they'd sit there on the whiteboard, and it would then look like a map of the London subway or something, right?
Or like a flowchart that justifies the logic of socialism.
Here would be miracles.
So they would put this stuff on the whiteboard, like these boxes and these lines and these diagrams.
This affects this affects this affects this, so you've got to be careful about this and all that.
I mean, they knew their stuff because they'd been coding there for years.
Years, years, years, years, years.
And the idea that you can just transfer all of that in two weeks?
Oh, come on.
Employee base of over 40,000 people.
That's mad.
I mean, I bet you they got a bunch of custom software development there.
They got a bunch of modules linking together.
They got a bunch of databases trying to link together.
I mean, it is like the amount of human knowledge that's stuffed into the minds of those coders and maintainers and testers and so on is absolutely enormous.
And I know this because, I mean, I built code that had quite a lot.
I built a system that had quite a lot of code and integrated with other systems and all that.
The idea that I'm going to transfer my knowledge of that in a couple of weeks, I mean, it's just ridiculous.
But because the business people don't understand tech and the tech people are intimidated by the business people.
You know, the tech people, the best tech people are the ones who just love it.
I mean, I was coding for years and years before I ever made a dime and I just loved it.
Same way I did philosophy for years and years.
I used to debate like this in private and nobody ever gave me a dime.
Well, occasionally dinner.
But the best coders, they're just thrilled to be there.
You know, it's like if you're an actor or, you know, musicians are constantly doing this all the time.
Musicians like, I'm just happy to be able to sing and dance for a living.
And then everyone just rips off everything that they make and they end up with like nothing.
I was just reading this about some musician the other day who like wrote a string of hits and ended up with like 11,000 bucks in the bank account.
Because, you know, it's like Sting's accountant and Billy Joel's manager.
Like they just hoovered up.
I'm just thrilled to be here.
And they don't negotiate.
And it's the same thing with coders.
They're kind of intimidated.
Like the traditional coders are the nerds and the business people are the jocks.
And, you know, it's freaks and geeks all over the place.
And there's resentment and there's fear.
And they don't know how to push back.
They don't know how to prove their value.
They don't know how to stand up and say to the business people, you're making a terrible mistake.
And in a way, it's kind of hard for them to do that.
Because what's going to happen is they're going to say...
To people who don't know any better, i.e.
a lot of money managers, they're going to say, hey, you know, we just cut our overhead and our expenses by X millions of dollars a year.
Now project that forward out.
It's over 10 years we've saved.
We're only spending this.
We're outsourcing.
It's two weeks.
We got a little bit of, you know, one-time hit of people leaving and the money we got to pay for them.
And everyone out in the stock market says, whoa, that's great.
These guys are getting exactly the same product, but they're saving.
Because they don't know.
They don't understand.
And then what happens is the people who are making those decisions get their bonuses, get their stock options, get their wealth.
And that's often enough to keep them comfy for the rest of their lives.
What do they care about what the company is doing in five or ten years?
They've moved on.
See, they've moved on and they look like heroes.
Wow, look at our stock price.
Look at our overhead.
It's way down.
Payrolls cut enormously.
Profits are up.
Stock prices through the roof.
I'm a business genius.
You know, I do run a fleet of taxi cabs, but I've decided to stop changing the oil and maintaining them.
Woo-hoo, look at that.
Maintenance costs are way down.
What do you care in six months, right?
And so, they look like business geniuses.
They make a fortune for themselves and for the company and for the shareholders.
And then what happens is five years later, maybe three to five years later, problems start emerging.
But they may be gone.
Or there aren't enough people who understand the thread of the decisions that are made now versus the domino effects that are happening three to five years down the road.
Or maybe less.
Could be less.
Could be slightly more.
And then it's like, wow, you know, we have lots of problems with IT. Lots of problems with IT. And, you know, funnily enough, when we took our IT... From a country with an average IQ of 100, and we moved it to a country with an average IQ of 80 to 85.
Well, anyway, I know the coders are smarter and all that.
But then what happens is the managers, like, don't go and work for this company in a couple of years, in my opinion, because then you're going to start inheriting all these problems.
And then you're going to say, well, you know, this is, you know, we've got some IT issues.
Nobody goes back and gets money back from the previous guys, right?
Their money's theirs, right?
We've got IT issues.
Man, we're going to have to spend a lot.
We've got to rewrite a whole bunch of stuff.
We've got to take on some extraordinary expenses.
We might have to move it back in-house.
And then that's their challenge.
And then people are going to lose money and stockholders are going to lose money.
But the previous stockholders are very happy.
The stock price went up because of these illusory gains.
You need to starve the stock market of revenue so that people are more critical of the long-term effects of short-term decisions.
If everybody's just watching the needle, ooh, it went up, sell, make money, right?
It's like that old The Fisher King.
There's some homeless guy in the movie called The Fisher King.
There's a homeless guy yelling into a phone that's not connected to anything.
You know, sell!
Sell!
Sell!
And then I think what Robin Williams comes along or someone comes along, gives him 20 bucks and he's like, stares at the 20 bucks and then yells into the disconnected phone, buy!
Buy!
Buy!
I mean, that's what it's all...
Come down to.
I'm sorry for the long rant, but I've had some time to focus on this, and I think it is tragic.
Very, very tragic.
Well, I know this was going to hit close to home for you, as you are a tech guy.
And you're right.
I mean, where these decisions are made, it's made far above where we're I'm at and my colleagues who are being let go and they are just pushing numbers.
My colleagues were shifted to another team who were then In a couple months, we're kind of rounded up into these web developers and then all let go in a big sum.
And I know it's just because they're pushing money around.
It looks better to hire a consultant than having these full-time employees with benefits.
And we've seen other Local, large healthcare companies do similar things in the last couple years.
It's a growing trend.
I'm curious as to why we're not hearing about it.
I hear about it because I'm involved with it.
I'm right there.
As far as nationally, we don't hear about this.
It's just a great big push out there.
Out overseas.
It's been happening for years.
I've heard about it in the past, but now it directly impacts me and we don't hear about it.
It's a huge piece of American ingenuity that is easily being pushed off.
I worked in a startup company about 10 years ago.
And the one developer that we had, it was very small.
We had under 10 employees and he was straight out of college and he was brilliant, but he needed more help.
So they interviewed and they're offering $80,000, $90,000, which isn't really a lot for a developer.
They didn't find anyone who would fit, but they turned to another company who outsourced to India again.
We got five developers for that 80,000, opposed to getting one developer here for that 80,000.
I know that the quality of that person isn't the same.
I know from firsthand accounts of what it takes to ramp someone up, to get them to a level where they're familiar with the databases, the coding, everything that's involved.
And the education level.
There's a definite step down when you go overseas.
So, to your point, my company is going to feel this.
And I believe in the short term.
My customers are people inside of my own company who I work.
Who I need to gather requirements for and provide for, they're going to feel this immediately in the turnaround time that's going to get changes and applications created for their use.
So, it's going to hinder us as a whole.
And I'm just concerned as, you know, not only my own company, but it's obviously happening in other places, but we just don't hear about it.
It's just this vacuum that we don't hear about.
Well, it's also nerds, right?
I mean, people have this indifference, right?
And Michelle Malkin's book is great on this because we haven't even talked about the H-1B visas, but I had a call yesterday.
With her co-worker.
And the book is called Sold Out, How High-Tech Billionaires and Bipartisan Beltway Crap Weasels Are Screwing America's Best and Brightest Workers.
And so, it is one of these great tragedies.
And here's another thing, too, which I just sort of, a point I wanted to make.
And I'm sorry that I couldn't get hard data for this, Dan, but I think we can guesstimate some of this.
I did have a look, but I couldn't find it.
So, America...
Spends an enormous amount per student per year on education, right?
10,000, 15,000, 20,000, sometimes even more to educate kids in primary, junior high, high school, right?
Massive amounts of money.
Now, I saw various estimates with India.
Let's just put it this way.
It's a lot lower.
Yes.
It's a lot lower.
So this is my question.
If after investing...
$120,000 to $240,000, plus, plus, in a student.
How the hell can that student not compete with somebody who was educated at about the rate of four and a half rupees a year, conservative speaking, right?
I mean, we know.
I mean, I know the answer, but it's an important answer.
It's an important question for people to ponder.
How can you just spend two weeks transferring work from people who've had that much education poured into them to people who've had far less spending on education?
Doesn't that mean that we should just spend way less on education?
Because it doesn't seem to make a difference.
You can just two weeks, you can just hand all this work over.
Why the hell is America spending so much money educating people when you could educate them at Indian standards and just transfer a little bit of that?
Anyway.
That's right.
And Stevan, to your point, we're looking at some people who've been there 15, 20 years who have this enormous experience.
The relationships that you build over that time with other parts of the business, you can't quantify.
There's no way of duplicating that within two weeks, within two months, within two years.
There's no way to do that.
It is a tragedy.
It breaks my heart.
Like I said, the people closest to me have actually been absorbed into this consultant company, which is a good thing for them.
But the remainder, we're losing a lot of other good people, but we're gaining a lot of just unfamiliar people.
And you're right, the education is probably not there.
The experience is definitely not there.
It's just concerning to me.
Not only am I next, you know, as being a technical person, but who's next?
Who's next out there who isn't hearing about this?
And there's no great press.
There's no great – there's no fury against it.
We're losing legitimate jobs.
Well, smart people are concerned about it.
But dumb people don't care.
They don't think about, I mean, this company and these people, but as knowledge of this ripples around, see, coders talk to each other.
Oh, online forums and magazines.
You don't know this world.
It's like the whole business-to-business marketplace.
Like, as a consumer, you don't see it, but it dwarfs what you buy at the mall.
It's what businesses buy from each other.
You don't see what's beyond, what's behind, the trucks that pull up.
What happens, of course, is people are like, whoa, I'm not going into tech.
Are you kidding me?
We've got to get you into STEM fields because there's a shortage.
No.
People look at stuff like this.
Oh, great.
So I could get a job and then five years later I'm digging my own grave and I've got a giant and 5,000 other people trying to look for work at the same time.
When everyone's outsourcing, it not only affects the now, it affects the next.
It affects the tomorrow, the year after the year after that.
Because smart people are going to do anything other than Get into tech, and that means that there are fewer local programmers, which means there's going to be more house sourcing.
And we all know this.
Look, come on, let's you and I be frank with each other.
How many times do you call up tech support, hear a thick foreign accent and go, yay!
Yeah.
This is going to be nice and easy.
Especially for me because I know tech.
So by the time I'm calling tech support, which fortunately I haven't had to do for a while, but by the time I'm calling tech support, I'm out of the four-point script that everyone's handed.
Like, I've done all that.
Have you rebooted?
No.
Yes, I have rebooted.
Give me an engineer.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I need somebody who's got more than the flowchart.
I need somebody who can think on their feet, who knows the tech, who understands the issues, you know?
So, yeah, no, that's a challenge.
And it may just be one of these things where it has to hurt to the point where people will change their minds.
It's sad because it's all about incentives.
Everybody is pursuing Their own rational incentives in the moment.
The Indian companies want the jobs.
These people who run the companies want the reduced payroll.
The shareholders want increased share value.
Everybody's pursuing their own immediate self-interest, except, of course, for the coders.
But the reality is...
Well, the other thing that's true as well, if unemployment insurance has a big problem here as well, or it is part of the problem, Because without unemployment insurance, what would happen is people who got fired would take lesser wages just to keep eating, right?
And so what would happen is rather than staying on unemployment insurance, they'd go out and get jobs and that would drive down the wages of coders.
And what that would mean is it would become increasingly more efficient and effective to hire domestic coders rather than go to India.
But because there's unemployment insurance, people then leave the workforce and They're not counted as unemployed after a while.
And they're not in there bidding down the price of these jobs to the point where local coders can compete.
Yeah, that's a great point.
And you know, none of these companies, mine included, have ever come back and said that, you know, going overseas, going offshore, and hiring a consulting company and getting outsourced employees, we're going to save this amount.
You could stay on and maybe get a reduction in pay or leave.
Find your own wage somewhere else.
They never come back and say, look, we're looking out for you.
Maybe if you take a reduction.
Or hey, maybe I'm an executive and I take a reduction.
That never happens.
That's silly.
IT is a disaster as a whole.
And I think a lot of it has to do with H1B Bezos and this idea that coding is just kind of like typing.
You know, why would we want to pay a typist three times and we get a typist for one-third the price.
They type just as far.
It's an illusory efficiency.
It's not like automation.
And it's close to half of software projects completely fail.
Software is, by and large, disastrous.
Can you imagine that for cars or airlines?
50-50, we're getting off the tarmac or not.
It's terrible.
That's it.
You're working with people who want something that they don't really know what they want anyway.
It falls under the IT to understand what they're really asking for and program for that versus what they thought they wanted.
A lot of times, things that What end users think they want isn't possible or they haven't thought it through at all.
The technical minds are normally a little higher level than the people asking for what they think they want.
There's a little discrepancy between the two.
Yeah, and if people want to, just do a search for outsourcing disasters and whatever, and it's legion.
It's legion.
But the same people who've made the money are not usually the same people who end up having to pick up the pieces.
And then, of course, what happens is there's a huge morale problem.
Because...
People don't want to go, like, let's say that there's a, the outsourcing turns to be problematic in sort of three, five, or six years or whatever, right?
So then what happened, this is part of this long-term thinking that is avoided by so many people.
So let's say there's this problem.
Well, what sane human being wants to go in and try and manage that problem?
Oh, we've got 28 different systems.
They've stopped talking to each other.
We've got outsourcing.
It's on the other side of the planet, so you're going to be tired half the time with your conference calls at 2 o'clock in the morning unless you want to fly out there, flip your entire schedule and get deli belly and spend three days throwing up in a hotel room.
I mean… And so what sane human being is going to say?
Well, I'm a really creative, smart individual with lots of options and choices.
You know what I'd love to do?
I'd really love to go into a complete clusterfrag of compatibility and undocumented code issues and try and sort that out with people on the other side of the world where there are cultural and language issues.
I mean, no decent manager, no manager with choices and options.
Can you imagine?
Imagine, hey, Steve Jobs, do you feel like designing the next cool gadget?
I mean, if you were still alive and all that.
Or would you like to go and fix code compatibility issues and security holes and undocumented code from outsourced 3 million lines of spaghetti code from two years ago?
No!
Nobody wants to go back and work for that place because they just toasted all the last people, so they can't hire top talent without paying a hell of a lot of money, in which case people are there for the money rather than the passion of it.
And they sure as hell can't get decent managers because that is the very definition of something that no manager would ever want to do, again, unless you're just going to pay them so much that they'd be willing to bite that bitter bullet.
Yeah, and we were already there.
I talked to some of my devs.
And they said that some of the other guys who are having these knowledge transfers, it's almost been impossible as far as the language barrier is concerned and the time barrier.
I mean we're looking at 10 or 11 hours difference to India.
These guys are exhausted on the other end of the phone.
They're falling asleep while they're having these meetings.
And one of the guys said that I didn't know who was calling me.
I couldn't understand him.
I said, you're going to have to talk to my manager.
He gets a call from his manager and he's being threatened his severance because he's not being cooperative with his replacement.
And I'm like, what kind of morale?
Sorry to interrupt, but I just wanted to mention another thing before I forgot.
And I mentioned this before on the show, so I'll keep it brief.
The cultural issues are significant because the one thing I noticed when I was a manager was that different cultures have different levels of pushback.
I really wanted the coders who would say to me, I think you're making a bad decision.
I think you're taking things in the wrong direction.
And here's why, right?
And then we'd sort of sit down and go over it.
And sometimes they were right.
And sometimes they saved me a huge amount of time and work and hassle because I would say, oh, I think we should do this.
Now, there are other cultures that are much more differential towards those in authority, right?
And they'll say, okay, off I go, right?
And they just, even when they know that it's not going to work or even when they know there's going to be big problems, they're like, well, you're the boss.
I'm, you know, you program me, I program the computer.
And...
If you move from a culture that is more skeptical towards authority, which you could say is sort of the American culture to some degree, and you move to a culture that's more deferential to authority, you don't get the pushback from the people who know the most about potentially bad managerial decisions.
You know, let's switch all the servers to Linux, you know, because, oh, whatever, maybe that's a great idea, maybe it's not, but...
If you don't have people who are going to push back at you when you're making a questionable call, you're kind of flying blind in many ways.
And that is not something that should be taken lightly.
But again, it's the kind of thing that only shows up quite a ways down the road.
Yes, and the opposite is true.
I mean, maybe someone from over there is going to push back and you're like, well, what does he really know?
Maybe you won't value his opinion as much because...
He's just over there.
What could he know?
You're right.
It's not a good situation.
Well, I know how to disagree with people from my background.
It has nothing to do with race or anything, but I know how to productively disagree with people from my background.
If you said to me, how do you productively disagree with someone from Japan?
I'm not sure I would have quite as much fluency in that, right?
Neither would the Japanese person.
I mean...
Disagreeing and having productive disagreements is very complicated and a lot of it has to do with cultural history.
A lot of it has to do with all the arguments you have with your friends and things that went badly, the things that went well.
You can't just snap that out and snap that in with somebody else who's got four fingers and a thumb on each hand.
It's not the same, but again, it only shows up down the road.
It's like heroin.
It's good now, but later you're going to pay a bit of a price.
Yeah.
All right, listen, I've got to move on to the next caller, but I feel we solved the entire problems of the entire industry.
Yes, we're good now.
Send your donations in.
Freedominradio.com slash donate.
All right, thanks, Dan.
I appreciate the call.
Thank you, Stephan.
Appreciate it.
All right, up next we have Brandon.
Brandon wrote in and said, What would you say your biases are?
How do you avoid confirmation bias when dealing with new information?
And how does a young person like me search for the truth without giving in to confirmation bias?
That's from Brandon.
Hey, Brandon.
How you doing?
I'm doing good, Stefan.
Good, good, good.
How do you avoid...
As far as what my biases are, that's a bit of an impossible question, because if I know my biases, they're not biases, and if I don't know my biases, I can't describe them.
So...
I just want to point that out.
I mean, so I don't really know how to answer that.
I'm sure other people will let me know in the comments, maybe, but I don't know how to answer that.
But I will say, sort of confirmation bias when dealing with new information, you just have to rigidly and rigorously dedicate yourself to facts.
And you have to say that my perspectives must, to a large degree, be like the shadow of a statue, right?
Whatever the shape of the statue is, well, that's the shape the shadow is going to be, right?
Your light angle, distance, and contours of the ground, that's where it's going to be.
And when I think of the number of things that I have changed my mind on over the years, Oh my goodness, it's a lot.
And I think that builds trust because it means that I'm not rigidly clinging to a particular position, but I am in fact just trying to follow the reason and evidence wherever they lead, right?
I mean, as people know, I started off as a staunch Christian.
I started off as a socialist, not in this show, but prior to this show.
I was a religious Christian.
I was a socialist.
I was dead keen on diversity.
I was a strong believer in, you know, women's, we live in danger, take back the night, predatory rape culture everywhere, that kind of stuff.
Like, I was just tidying up some stuff in the basement the other day, and I came across an article from a newspaper about A diversity conference I presented at and participated in many years ago in France, interestingly enough, in Paris.
And so I think that for myself, going from...
Don't have anything to do with politics to, well, you got to start looking into Donald Trump.
And here's the reasons why, right?
So if you admit that you've changed, I don't, I can never like the sort of conversations where someone goes 180.
Yeah, had one tonight, right?
Someone goes 180 and just won't acknowledge it.
It's like, yeah.
I've changed my perspective.
I've changed.
I even make jokes about it myself.
Oh, yeah.
2007, Steph is saying this.
2016, Steph is saying something quite different.
That's perfectly fine with new information, with new possibilities, with new opportunities, with new arguments, with new facts, with new data.
You have to adjust.
You know, if you're sailing a ship and you want to get from A to B and the wind changes, you've got to change what you're doing.
That's all I know about sailing.
I've never actually handled a sailboat, but I understand there's something involved tacking, which sounds pretty cool.
So, you just have to really devote yourself to the data and understand that truth is not a conclusion.
Truth is a process.
And as new information comes in, it has to...
If somebody moves the statue, well, you've got to move the shadow.
The shadow's going to move.
It has to.
There's no possibility.
I went from being very critical of Christianity...
To more conciliatory, to more positive, to more understanding, to more appreciative.
That's not necessarily because Christianity fundamentally changed, although the Christians were very nice, and that's a little hard to resist at times, but because there are alternatives that are far worse.
I had a relationship with libertarians, right?
I got my start in the libertarian world.
That was where my first big speeches were.
I got my start in the libertarian world.
And then I... Well, I had a relationship with libertarians that became somewhat different.
Same thing with atheists and atheism.
And so if you provide the reason and evidence as to why your perspective is changing, I think that...
Oh, immigration as well.
I was more keen on open borders and, again, without the welfare state and all that, and that has changed.
So as long as you provide the reasons behind what you're doing, as long as you acknowledge a change and don't try and sort of hide it and pull that underground switcheroo, then I think that's fine.
So if you want to search for the truth without giving in to confirmation bias, first of all, don't have a negative relationship with confirmation bias, necessarily.
Confirmation bias is not bad if you're right.
Do you know what I mean?
Let's say that I'm a trustworthy source of arguments.
Which means that I'll review the data.
You know, I had a call the other day, the last call-in show.
The guy proved me wrong on a particular point, and I'm like, absolutely right.
Thank you very much.
That was great.
And I actually really enjoy that.
I think it's great.
I wish it happened more.
So let's say that...
I have become someone that people trust when it comes to bringing out arguments.
That doesn't mean that I'm always right.
It doesn't mean that my conclusions are always correct.
But I have a decent amount of honor and integrity when in pursuit of truth.
Now, if I say something...
I hope that I've gained enough trust with people over the years, if you've listened to me for a while, that it's not just like some crazy guy in the street yelling something.
I'm sure for some people it is.
But I hope for the most part people are like, well, Steph said it.
He's got a good track record and I'm going to...
You know, maybe give him a little bit more credibility than other people.
In other words, there's confirmation bias with me because I don't manifest confirmation bias on a regular basis.
Therefore, you can, you know, take what I say.
Like, if a weatherman has correctly predicted the weather every day for the last 20 years, hopefully he's going to be better than, you know, your own town Edna who says, my joints are aching, I think it's going to rain.
Right?
So, hopefully people build up credibility and that is, you know, confirmation bias.
You know, like if some...
My daughter's playing somewhere and they said, oh yeah, she just attacked and bit this child for no reason.
I'd be like, no.
No, she didn't.
No, she didn't.
Come on.
No way.
And is that confirmation bias?
Well, no.
I know my daughter.
She's a very gentle and positive person and she'll stand up fiercely for herself, but she would never think of using violence in any way, shape or form.
So, So there's confirmation bias, you know?
And that's not bad.
I mean, just think if the average person go up to them and say, is slavery wrong?
They're going to say, yep.
And then you can say, okay, step me through the reasoning as to why.
They won't really know.
They won't really have much of a clue.
But slavery is wrong.
So they have confirmation bias.
And a lot of culture rests on confirmation bias.
It just does.
A lot of culture rests on confirmation bias.
Hopefully in the future there'll be more reasoning and more whatever, right?
But right now, a lot of the things that we justly think are wrong or bad rest on confirmation bias.
Unfortunately, there's a lot of lefty social justice warrior stuff that is not.
Sympathies to Lacey, of course, as always.
But there is a lot of confirmation bias that is kind of the momentum of culture.
So this idea that confirmation bias is just automatically bad, you know, there are people I trust.
And if they say something, most likely I'm not going to sit there and say, oh, I better triple check everything that they say.
You know, they built up a certain amount of credibility with me.
And so is that confirmation bias or just an acceptance of the trustworthiness?
Yeah, keep focusing on the reason, keep focusing on the evidence, and steer clear of people who either don't change their position or surreptitiously change their position without telling you why and pretend it never happened.
Those people are generally not...
I'm trustworthy when it comes to having conversations.
Like the conversation I had with the guy earlier about, you know, we're starting in a debate here, we're starting in a conversation, and I'm always scanning for people's level of integrity in that conversation.
And if the level of integrity is broken, that's fine.
That can happen, right?
We can all make mistakes or whatever.
Do they honestly admit it, or are they trying to cover it up, or that's just how it came out.
Right, so does that help at all, Brandon?
Yeah, I mean, for me, some of the bigger issues I deal with when it comes to finding the truth is more on things like foreign policy where there's multiple perspectives involved and it seems like numbers can say a whole plethora of different things depending on who takes the numbers.
And for me, that's a lot less systematic than something like welfare or something like immigration because that's something we can just always calculate.
So when you're trying to figure out...
Which foreign policy interventions are justified, not justified?
How do you look at that, and where do you get your- Foreign policy interventions?
And by the way, you've been getting a little crappy tappy from your computer, so if you're just doing something there that's creating tapping, if you could stop.
When it comes to something like foreign policy stuff, I mean, to me, because it's a philosophy show and I get to ride the great white horse of ethical principles, I don't like any foreign interventions, because foreign interventions are predicated on the initiation of force against domestic taxpayers to generate the revenue required to fund said foreign intervention, right?
So the violations of the non-aggression principle, double plus on good in the stuff that I work with, and I think objectively so.
So as far as the effects, where the money ends up that was stolen is not that important to me.
Well, I did take a million dollars from a bank, but I gave $50,000 to charity.
It's like, well, the charity just was in receipt of stolen goods.
And that's bad for them and bad for you and bad for the bank and bad for everyone.
So as far as that stuff goes, the numbers to me wouldn't affect the fundamental ethics of the situation.
Yeah.
Thank you.
The morality is not a numbers game, right?
That's what I was trying to also talk to the guy about democracy, right?
It's not a numbers game.
The will of the majority, the happiness, the benefit of the majority.
It's not math.
It's logic.
It's universality.
But this greatest good for the greatest number, Spock dying in a chamber kind of stuff, this is not philosophy.
I mean, that's barely even algebra.
Yeah, that totally makes sense.
I agree with what you said about democracy.
I think restricting the government is far more important than having the government voice the will of the majority.
I totally agree on that.
But I'm a pretty young guy.
I'm going to a liberal campus all the time, and I'm trying to decide what my ideologies are.
And it's so hard for me to...
If this makes any sense, pick the right evidence.
If that makes sense to you.
I saw something on Twitter some time back.
And it was a guy who went to one of these liberal arts colleges, and he was taking some course.
And in the course, there was, well, the gender gap.
Hey, gender gap, right?
Women make it less.
And so he brought the arguments against that and he got a nice note from the professor saying, well, you're using the wrong sources.
Here's the list of approved sources.
And that is not teaching people how to think.
That's just programming them to economically self-destruct in the long run.
So that begs my next question.
Why are you going to a liberal arts campus?
I'm pretty much only getting my degree so I can go into the military.
I mean, to me, the degree doesn't really matter, especially nowadays.
And I mean, I'm not really into STEM, so I'm just kind of picking a degree just to get the degree so that I can commission as an officer.
Wait, can't you...
Wait, you don't need a degree to go in the military.
You're saying to become an officer, you need to have a degree.
Is that right?
Yes, that's right.
And I would rather be an officer than enlist.
So I'm mainly doing the degree to be an officer.
You'd rather be an officer than being enlisted, than a soldier, so to speak, like a frontline soldier, right?
I'd rather be an officer than enlisted, but yes, yeah, that's correct.
And there's no way to become an officer without getting an arts degree?
I mean, I know a degree, is that right?
You have to get it, I mean, yeah, I think nowadays you have to have a bachelor's degree to be an officer.
You think?
I mean, that seems like a pretty important thing to know for sure, isn't it?
Well, I mean, the one exception would be enlisting for several years, and I don't even, I think that's something that they got rid of a long time ago, but the officers either go through a college or they go through an academy, and that's about it.
You don't want to enlist, so you want to enlist for less time but become an officer more quickly, is that right?
So I'm spending four years at my college, and then I'm going to be an officer for a minimum of four years, and then I'm going to get a job in the civilian world.
Depending on how I like it, I might stay in longer, but I'm not sure.
Have you talked to someone about all of this in terms of your decision process?
Oh, yeah, totally.
Okay, all right.
And why do you want to join the military?
I mean, there's a lot of cool experiences, and I definitely want to travel the world.
And...
I mean, I don't know.
I mean, regardless of whether or not all the wars are justified or whatnot, I think it's motivating to take the fight to the enemy and be an infantry soldier, which is what I want to do.
But what if they send you in a war that you don't agree with?
Would you, I mean, I don't know what you think of the war in Iraq.
Would you think that was a good war?
I don't know if it was justified, but the way I think about it is if I am killing somebody who rapes or tortures or kills other people, then I don't feel bad about it.
But you may be sent to a war you don't agree with.
That is possible.
There are various rules that allow you to have objections to...
Orders that you're given if they are unjust.
If you're basically...
I mean, I can't speak from too much experience because I'm not in yet, but more or less, if you're asked to do something that is unacceptable humanitarian-wise, then you are allowed to object to that.
Right.
No other way that you can get what you want.
Like, you can travel the world.
You can take your money you're spending on college and go travel the world, right?
Yeah, I mean, for me, it's kind of an accomplishment and achievement type thing, too.
It's a pride thing, just the camaraderie that's associated with it and the self-development's a big part of it, too.
Well, it sounds like you're committed to that.
I just had a couple of questions.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, go ahead.
No, no.
I mean, it's good to have questions because there's plenty of people who definitely don't join for the right reasons.
Right.
Well, I hope that I've helped with your questions and, yeah, keep your wits about you.
I mean, I've got to think sometimes the military, at least boot camp, might be a little bit easier than some of the brain drain that can occur in a liberal arts degree, but it sounds like you've got your wits about you, so I wish you the best of luck with that.
Yeah, yeah.
It was great to be on the show.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Okay, up next we have Daniel.
Daniel wrote in and said, As a black American and right libertarian, I've been recently very intrigued by the propositions of the alt-right in the United States and the identitarians in Europe.
Given that the refugee crisis and multiculturalism has proven and continues to be an expensive, dangerous, and culture-destroying disaster for Western civilization, the alt-right appears to have a powerful argument in favor of supporting ethnostates in the West.
For myself, who is fervently in support of Western values inherent in establishing the United States, I've continuously simply described myself as American and have believed that, properly executed, policies in line with civic nationalism in the United States are sufficient to curb and perhaps reverse the deterioration of society.
However, my concerns about phenomena such as regression to the mean, in-group preference, and the heritability of IQ, etc.
shed some uncertainty on whether or not civic nationalism is indeed robust enough to solve these problems when compared to the sort of ethnic nationalism the alt-right advocates.
While it seems reasonable to me to support ethnic nationalism in Europe, since identity in those countries is so greatly tied to blood and its connections to culture therein, in the United States, where identity seems to be more tied to the nation's founding principles and ethics, can civic nationalism really succeed at preserving an ethical society, especially one which is so characteristically Western European at its core?
That's from Daniel.
Oh, hey, Daniel.
How you doing?
Good.
How are you, Stefan?
It's great to be on your show.
I'm well, thanks.
It's a very interesting question, and I appreciate you coming up with it.
But, Daniel, I mean, I don't mean to get all pasty on you, brother, but you think that this ethnostate is some new alt-right thing?
I mean, weren't there a bunch of black intellectuals who wanted a black ethnostate in Africa or even in America?
This is a pretty old idea for a lot of people, isn't it?
That's actually true.
Marcus Garvey did advocate such.
He actually advocated for having an ethnostate in the southern part of the United States, and some people in the Black Panther Party actually agreed with doing that.
And he actually found some allies among white nationalists during his campaigning for such.
Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of people, I mean, you know, who say, well, you know, we've been working at it for 400 years, it doesn't seem to be working that well, so maybe divorce would be in order.
I don't particularly agree with them, but I just want to sort of point out that, you It's an old idea and lots of different ethnicities have talked about it as something that could potentially solve problems.
I just sort of wanted to point that out.
Just for those who don't know their history of both whites and blacks and other groups who've talked about it in the past, it's not some new thing.
It's like, ooh, alt-right, they've just come up with some spanking new ideas.
It's pretty old, right?
Yeah, I guess I didn't make that clear when I asked the question.
I think it was just the fact that the alt-right has recently brought that topic to the forefront.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, Muhammad Ali and the Nation of Islam were working with the KKK in the past because they felt they shared some ideas, I think, to some degree along these lines.
So I just wanted to sort of give that context because I like to feel I got something out of my history degree.
So ethnostate.
Ethnostate.
I'll tell you some...
Is there something you wanted to add more before I sort of go into my thoughts on it, which I've been mulling over all day?
Maybe just to add a little context, because I know...
I think there's been some talks from, at least I saw some of the stuff going on on YouTube, especially in Australia and New Zealand, since they're also dealing with what several, at least, I'm trying to think.
Sorry, I'm a little nervous.
Several people in those countries have highlighted that they're going through a similar sort of cultural degeneration at the Yeah, I'd like to hear your thoughts to begin with.
Well, if the left doesn't give up, and I think it's going to be very tough for them to give this up, Daniel, but if the left doesn't give up screaming racism at everyone, they're really driving the hunger for ethnostates.
And that is something which we really should not underestimate, the power of that.
Because at some point, people are going to say, I'm so sick and tired of living under the shadow of fear of being called a racist.
Like, one way to solve it is just have an ethnostate.
Right.
You know, it's like, and this is why I keep pushing back against this, yes, there are racists, there are racists, I mean, yes, there are, but not everyone is a racist who disagrees with the left, you know what I mean?
Like, you and I can have a disagreement, it's got nothing to do with race.
And so, this pushback against this narrative is because ethnostates, they're bloody to form.
I mean, they don't just arise spontaneously.
You know, like, people don't just have different ethnicities.
They don't just sort of hover up.
It's not like My Little Pony and everybody hovers up and moves into this.
Like, they're messy and ugly things to set up.
So let's not do that if it can be at all avoided, right?
So this is why I kind of push back against this.
Well, it's one of the many reasons other than the fact that it's generally...
Wrong and unjust to screen racism at people all the time, but basically at some point, people are going to wake up and say, I can't take it.
It's too horrible, right?
Now, the degree to which ethnicity and culture, like genetics and culture, are intertwined, it's interesting.
So we've had this guy on the show from, not from, I think he founded American Renaissance, Jared Taylor.
Now, Jared Taylor was born in Japan.
Now, he's white as white can be.
And the question, I guess, is would you look at Jared Taylor and say he's Japanese?
Of course not.
Well, that's an interesting question, though.
He was born in Japan.
That's his citizenship, I assume.
Or at least it was at some point.
I don't know if they hand out citizenship even to people who are born there.
Legally, I don't know.
I don't think they do, in fact.
But you wouldn't look at him and say, that's Japanese.
Because Japanese is a country, a culture, and a very specific ethnicity.
Right.
And it's interesting when you get some...
You know, freckled redhead with blue eyes.
I'm African.
People get a little like, ah, a little different, right?
And so ethnicity and genetics and culture and country, it's complicated.
Now, we are tribal animals, for sure.
We are tribal animals.
We have in-group preferences, or at least We used to.
I mean, at least whites used to.
And there are in-group preferences that are common the world over.
Evolution only works if you have some kind of preference for your own genetics and those who are closer to you in your own genetics.
This doesn't mean that this is how we should organize life.
It just means it's how we evolved.
And for people to just want to wish it away, for people to want to wish away any kind of ethnic in-group preference is as crazy to me as people who say, well, I'm a communist and I can wish away people's response to incentives.
Right.
People will work just as hard if they get paid exactly the same.
People will want to be garbage men even if you get paid the same and have the same opportunity to be a face-painting children's artist.
People who say, well, I can just create a new human being because of my ideology.
That's dangerous.
I mean, we know what happens with communism when they try to create people who don't respond to economic incentives.
Well, everyone starves to death and it's horrible.
And if you're going to try and create a society where nobody has any in-group preference, whether that's ideological or whether that's genetic or whether that's ethnic or whether that's cultural, I mean, that's not going to work because it's not how we evolved.
It's not who we are.
Does that make any sense?
It does.
I have another question, though.
Yeah, yeah.
So you mentioned about trying to combat the left's incessant screaming of racism and that being a driving factor as far as driving people to the alt-right's ideology.
One thing that I'm worried about, especially with recent Canadian legislation, and you'll probably have a lot more insight on this than me, Motions like, you know, M103, Bill C16, and I think most recently Bill 89, in which the government is using basically as a cover hot button identity politics issues such as the transgender issue or Islamophobia to sort of slide in a more authoritarian structure to the government under the guise of, quote unquote, helping underprivileged classes.
And I'm wondering how you think it would be best to combat that as far as trying to reign in and maintain Western civilization, given that that's sort of like itself eating it from the inside.
Right.
Well, so this to me comes down, Daniel, to this basic question of freedom of association.
Like, you know that in America, like 90% of the churches are 90% black or white.
You know, there's the lunchroom test, who sits with who at the lunchroom, where they don't have forced integration in prisons, then people tend to divide along ethnic lines.
Now, you can say, oh, this is racist, but to some degree, it's efficiency.
To some degree, it's efficiency.
Like, if you grew up around a bunch of black guys, black men and women, and you kind of know the jokes, you know the humor, you know what's allowable, you know what's acceptable, you know how things are done.
Some people like to go and learn other cultures.
Like Charles Murray has this whole argument, in your 20s, you know, go to some really foreign city with a couple of thousand bucks in your pocket and get a job and live there for a couple of years to broaden your horizons.
Some people love that stuff.
Not my particular purpose, but, you know, I love to travel, but not, you know, necessarily go learn a little language, live another culture for that long.
It's just kind of efficient.
So, you know, if you're some, I don't know, white Italian family, and all along your block are white Italian families who all go to the same church...
Well, your kids can roam around.
Everyone knows what the standards are.
Nobody's going to surprise anyone in particular.
Everybody knows how to interact with each other, what jokes are acceptable, how things work, and so on.
And that's kind of neighborhood cohesion and so on.
Now, if some Somali family moves in at the end of the street, and it could work the other way around, if it's an all-Somali family and some Italian family moves in, some Somali family moves in at the end of the street, Well, it's just not quite as easy to interact, to know what the standards are, and there could be language barriers, there could be cultural barriers, and so on.
So it's just complicated.
Now, diversity is kind of like a young person's game in that, yeah, it's cool to travel and meet new people, but when you've got to start raising your kids, when you've got to start instilling values into them, it just becomes...
More difficult and complicated than it was when you're just saying, I'd really like to get authentic Thai food in Thailand, so wouldn't it be great to go backpacking?
Sure.
But it's a little bit different when you've got to start raising your kids and instilling values, then it becomes more of a problem.
So with regards to freedom of association...
If people want to hang out together, and they generally tend to, you know, this is no surprise to anyone who's been part of a big city, at least before all of this ordering people around at the point of legal coercion, there was a Chinatown, there was a little Italy, there was a little Greece, there was, you know, all of these places people would congregate together.
I have no objection to that whatsoever.
None.
If people want to congregate together, I can completely understand that.
If people want to not congregate together and they love the options, then they can try that.
But most people, as you know, when they're in a state of freedom of association, like tends to attract like.
And it's not because of prejudice, it's because people are busy.
And not everyone has the time to try and learn.
I mean, imagine if you've got five different neighbors with five different languages from five different cultures.
How the hell are you supposed to have a community?
I mean, you just fundamentally can't.
Diversity decreases social trust.
It decreases social cohesion.
It's one of the reasons why kids are getting fat.
It's so much diversity that people are nervous letting their kids play outside.
Not because they think everyone else is evil.
It's just complicated, you know?
And especially when there are different races, people are always concerned that there might be some racially charged incident or something like that.
And it's like, ah...
It's complicated and it's challenging.
And it's got significant negative effects on neighborhoods.
So when there's freedom of association, people can go live wherever they want.
I think the majority of people will choose to live among people that they know and recognize.
And that doesn't necessarily have to be any kind of racial or ethnic thing.
There are people in America, the Free State Project, they want to get people who want smaller government to move to New Hampshire and affect the legislature.
So there, the standard is, are you a small government?
Are you a libertarian kind of person?
In which case, yay, you know, they don't care about your ethnicity or your gender or anything like that.
That's just their particular thing.
And there are other groups where they've set up, you know, enclaves in various countries specifically designed for libertarians or for anarchists or, you know, whatever it is, right?
And then the standard is not...
So most people will kind of want to hang around people.
Who kind of are like themselves in one way or another.
And some people won't.
And I think the key thing is just let people live where the hell they want to live.
The idea that we've got to forcibly, and it's happening in America, right?
You've got to forcibly try and integrate neighborhoods.
You've got to forcibly try and get people to hang out together who wouldn't naturally necessarily gravitate that way.
That's just creating tension.
And for sure, in prison, when they try and forcibly integrate, things just get horrendous.
Like very, very quickly.
And so I'm curious, and I enjoy sort of other cultures and other ethnicities and so on, but there are other people who don't as much.
Let everyone be free to live where they want to live.
If we can get...
Cultures living side by side, where those who wish to dip into each other's cultures can enjoy that particular experience.
Those who wish to have more of a monoculture can enjoy that experience.
In other words, if we can allow, quote, freely formed ethnic neighborhoods or freely formed belief-based neighborhoods...
I don't think we need anything as complicated as an ethnostate, but if we keep jamming everyone together and screaming racism at any potential thing that we could imagine is racism, well, then we're going to start driving up demands for ethnostates, which I think is a real tragedy because I think in a state of the free market and free movement and freedom of association, I don't think they'd even be particularly necessary.
I think they'd be viewed as a negative.
It's interesting.
I never thought about it like that.
I'm also kind of reminded...
of something that Thomas Sowell said a while ago.
He said something about how the basic liberal premise is that man is inherently good and it's that the institutions that are bad and that if you change the institutions that man will automatically accommodate to those and be in a state of basically like perfection, if you will, or the optimal state of being.
And I think that sort of draws from like the social constructionist idea that man is a blank slate and all you have to do is forcibly change his environment and he'll react accordingly.
And that seems to be what, like, one of the driving philosophies behind, you know, forcing people to be with different groups seems to be, and anybody who bucks against that is basically going against this utopian idea that people are pushing forward.
Yeah, no, I mean, that's very well stated, but I don't believe they believe it at all.
I think that's a line that they have, but they don't believe it.
So let me give you sort of an analogy as to why, how I think this works.
So let's say that you're facing a very difficult army.
But you can somehow convince that army that the way that their army is strengthened is to have 12 different languages spoken in the army.
Right?
then what happens is if you can convince the other army that that kind of language diversity is going to make them much stronger than an army and then they pursue that for a while, well, that army, we know basically it's going to end up weaker because they're not going to be able to freely translate orders.
Like, they're going to have to translate us all the time.
There's going to be stuff left in translation.
There's going to be a lag in how quickly they can react because of translation issues and so on.
And if there are any cultural differences associated with the language differences, then there's going to be less cohesion in the army that you're going to be facing down.
So if you're facing a very difficult and powerful army The best thing you can do, if you can get this done, one of the great things you can do is to convince them that diversity is a strength while embracing no diversity at all in your own army.
Right?
That's going to give you a massive advantage in the fight against the other army.
And so when, to me, when people on the left say diversity is a strength...
Well, they want to promote diversity in everyone who opposes them, but they never embrace diversity themselves, right?
Because look at liberal newsrooms, look at leftist universities and their faculty and their administrators, look at all of this stuff.
They don't embrace it themselves.
They don't say, well, diversity is a strength, so we really don't have enough non-leftists around here.
We've got to really mix it up a little.
You know, we've got to get a whole bunch of Donald Trump supporters in here.
We've got to get a whole bunch of people who think Ayn Rand was fantastic and that, you know, more Ann Coulter.
We've got to diversify it, right?
They're not interested in diversity in their own group.
They're only interested in diversity as a strength for the groups that they oppose.
And that is the fundamental thing.
They have a weak army.
And we can see this, like, when...
People they don't agree with come to American college campuses, what do they do?
They riot, they throw stuff, they try and get it shut down.
Well, that's weakness.
If they had good arguments, if they were smart people, if they were verbally adept, good debaters, they would welcome these people.
Yeah, come in, bring your crazy stuff.
We can debate you, we can do all of this, we can shut you down.
Not violently, but just in terms of intellectual capacity and skill.
So they're weak because they use force and distraction and pull fire alarms and set off, you know, whatever nonsense that they do, sprinkler systems and all that, because they can't win the argument.
So we know that they're weak.
And how does a weak army fight a strong army?
Well, it convinces the strong army to take on self-destructive habits or characteristics.
You know, like the boxer who's not that good at boxing, he really wants the better boxer he's going to be facing to not train and to heat a whole lot of Twinkies, right?
Yeah, you're fine.
You don't need to train.
I mean, come on.
You're in your prime.
Take it easy.
You know, sit on the couch a bit.
Have a nap.
You know, go on the all sumo diet.
That's going to be fantastic for you, right?
I mean, he wants to weaken his opponent.
And the calls for diversity, it's nothing more than a military strategy to weaken a superior force intellectually.
And maybe even militarily, when you look what's happening to the US military and its commitment to diversity and so on.
So that to me is this question of diversity.
It doesn't have anything to do with valuing diversity as a principle.
principle, it has to do with inflicting diversity as a tactic of combat.
That makes sense.
And also, it almost seems like there's a parallel between that, with the leftist pushing to seize policies in the United States and the West in general, and actually, like, radical Islamists who are, you know, accusing Western nations of being, you know, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic and everything, even though the culture that they bring to the West is actually highly monoculture, is very much a monoculture in itself.
You know, everybody must I'll be a Muslim.
Everybody must behave in a certain way.
I mean, there are groups in the UK who are pushing for Sharia to be instituted in certain neighborhoods, and they have Sharia patrols.
And the ironic part of that is that these are groups that are accusing Sharia The broader country that they're in of being, you know, culturally insensitive, but they're enforcing a single culture within their own communities, enforcing everybody else in the country to try to abide by that.
Well, I mean, go to a Muslim country, and people can let me know if I've missed any, but go to a Muslim country and look at how they treat non-Muslim belief systems.
Yeah, like Christians in Egypt.
Right.
Now, I mean, there's varied degrees of harshness, but I don't think that any of them are treated with the same respect that Islam is in the West, I think.
And so that is a challenge for people to sort of process and to understand.
And this harshness with which you treat competing belief systems is something that is part of the left as well.
And I don't, you know...
I don't...
Respect any of the universality that the left claims regarding most of their plans.
And you see this all the time, right?
They're all about, well, equal pay for work of equal value.
But then anytime anyone does an analysis of leftist groups and how they pay men and women, it's never equal, right?
I mean, it's like, come on.
I mean, it's sort of become a joke, picking apart the hypocrisy of the left.
They're really not interested in any of this stuff.
They are opposed, very much opposed, to something like Christianity, right?
Because...
The reason that they are pro-gay rights is because it's harsh for some Christians to work with.
If they were genuinely pro-gay rights, they'd have some questions about Islam coming in with some of its harshness towards homosexuality or other religions or belief systems.
So that Is not, like, it's never what it's about.
That the surface on the left is never what it's about.
You know, there's an old saying, it's a kind of a sort of goofy joke about men and women, you know, like, When a woman says I'm hungry, she's like, well, I'm feeling spiritually unfulfilled, and I'm concerned that we're not as close as we used to be, and I'm using food as a complicated mechanism by which to manage my own emotions, and what I really want you to do is ask me how I'm doing in general in my life, where my mind and where my heart is, and how my relationship with my mom is going.
Whereas a man says, I'm hungry, and you know what he means?
He wants a sandwich.
I'm hungry.
He needs some carbs.
And that is, to me, the left is like, I'm hungry.
I don't know what they're talking about, but it's usually very complicated and usually very bad for everyone else.
But on the right, when they say, I'm hungry, it's just kind of that they're hungry.
And so that is...
To me, pretty important.
And until we get that understanding that the values promoted by the left are in general little more or less than weapons of escalation of conflict, we're never going to have any luck trying to deal with any of these questions at all because you can't ever fight manipulative hypocrisy until it's exposed and the honest people among the left see it and You know,
all groups have their radical elements, right?
The alt-right has their radical elements, the left have their radical elements, feminism have their radical elements, Islam, Christians have their radical elements.
The question is, how does the majority deal with it?
Now, you know, there's the Westboro Baptist Church and so on.
They're not particularly welcome among a lot of, you know, there are racists among white people.
And when a white person is racist, the white people say, dude, seriously uncool, very, very bad, into the naughty corner for like ever.
And the question is, what does the left do with its radicals?
Right.
And they don't seem to have, maybe you've seen it differently, Daniel, but they don't seem to have that same kind of, oof, not cool, not good.
You guys are off the island until you sort this out.
No, I've seen exactly that.
No, you haven't.
Don't mess with me, man.
I also wanted to ask another question, if you don't mind.
So...
I remember, I think Jordan Peterson said something about this.
He said that, you know, a lot of this boils down to trying to fight postmodernism as sort of a repackaged Marxism that's recast, you know, a class struggle in terms of just a power struggle in general, whether that be between races, between genders, or, you know, between people of a different sexual orientation.
And then that also ties into this social constructionism that anybody can be changed into whatever human being that they want, you know, regardless of a complex evolutionary history that morphs human behavior and psychology into what it is now.
And I'm wondering, especially since all those things are tied up into this utopian outlook that's super, super attractive to people my age group in their early 20s and to just the left in general, how do you combat that on such a great scale, especially with a bunch of different forms of media, whether it's the mainstream media or different parts of the internet that are basically echo chambers like Facebook and Twitter.
How do you combat that idealistic utopianism that's so intertwined with emotional language and...
Wrapped up in neo-Marxism.
How do you combat that on a scale that's enough to make change, you know, as far as, you know, a countrywide?
I hate to diss the other callers, Daniel, but you're like winning best questions of the night, bar none.
Anyway, I think, and Rules for Radicals is a pretty good way of talking about this.
Rules for Radicals, right?
The guy who dedicated the book to Satan and...
Whatever.
Pretty honest.
He said, look, we don't have any standards, but the right have standards, so you just keep holding them up to their own standards.
They can't do it to us because we've got no standards.
Well, what you have to keep doing, I think, is you have to keep pointing out that the left has standards that they're not living up to.
Right?
So, for instance, the left says diversity.
It's like, okay, well, where are the Republicans and Christians in your faculty if you're so into diversity?
And keep pounding the back.
And it's not because you expect them to change.
It's because you need to delegitimize the moral high ground that the left has claimed for 50 years or more.
You need to delegitimize the moral high ground that they claim.
We're so into diversity.
You know, we care about minorities.
Okay, where were you when people were going after Clarence Thomas?
Where were you when people were going after Michelle Bachman?
Where were you when people were going after Ann Coulter?
Where were you when women and minorities were being attacked?
Were you standing up for them?
Well, then it's not about women and minorities.
It's about, well, these people weren't on the left and therefore they were open targets.
Sarah Palin, right?
I mean, Bill Maher called her to see you next Tuesday.
Word.
I mean, the same thing happened with Ann Coulter, like more than 20 times at some comedy roast.
Where were you when these intelligent, intellectual, best-selling authors, great public speakers, where were you when these women were being viciously verbally attacked?
And so pointing out that it's not about minorities and it's not about women, it's about leftism.
And leftism is a monoculture.
Leftism is a monoculture.
Now, poor Lacey Green...
Had some questions about leftism.
And some criticisms of some extreme leftism.
Boom!
And the organization came after her.
Yeah!
I'm not even going to talk about what they said and what they did, but it's horrible.
It's like she's trying to get out of a cult or something.
It's like horrible.
Yeah.
And it's like, okay, who is defending her?
Who is pointing out that this is horrendous behavior?
That this is not how you deal with people intellectually.
This is not how you deal with people who disagree with you.
Sorry, you were going to say?
I was going to say, I actually have dealt with that on a very, very personal level.
Growing up, I grew up in a whole bunch of...
I think I moved like three or four times as a child.
A lot of that had to do with the fact that my family was kind of in flux.
But each neighborhood I lived in was relatively multicultural.
There were people with a whole bunch of different ethnic backgrounds, immigrants from different countries.
I actually ended up spending a lot of my time mostly around really white nerdy kids, if you couldn't tell by the way I talked.
But what's funny is that I didn't openly come out with the views I had, being a right libertarian and being a fan of Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign, until after finishing undergrad.
But before that, being highly nerdy and into anime and all this other stuff.
I basically was called Uncle Tom, Sambo Negro, anything you could come up with.
Oh, like the RAO stuff, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
Like, I'm sorry for that.
I mean, I know it's not my fault or anything like that, but that is a shitty, shitty thing to experience.
I'm really sorry for that.
But it's crazy because I've only encountered that kind of bigotry and separatism from the left.
All my friends, my closest friends, definitely super conservative.
A lot of them would call themselves rednecks, to be honest.
But I've never experienced any sort of bigotry from people on that side of the spectrum.
Well, this is the stereotype, right?
The Deep South, you know, the rednecks and so on.
It's like, you know, I think if you want to see real racism, try being a black Republican in Manhattan.
Oh, yeah.
That's brutal.
And again, it's not even about race.
It's about...
Well, the problem, of course, is if you're on the right and you're black...
Well, you know this infinitely better than I do, of course.
But if you're on the right and you're black, you're like a double threat to the racist narrative, right?
I mean, they...
You know, what is it?
They want to keep...
The blacks on the welfare plantation, right?
I mean, this is what some of the black intellectuals say and non-black intellectuals say.
It's a good chunk of truth in it.
If you're a black and not on the left, it's like being a woman and not on the left.
It'd be like being a woman and not kowtowing to the leftist Marxist feminist nonsense.
You're a double threat.
And the viciousness that is reserved for people who break that narrative, who are supposed to be part of the left's protected pet classes and who go against that narrative, the viciousness is astounding.
And, you know, I mean, I've been called names and all of that, but it's never been anything quite as bad as I think what people who the left thinks will be natural allies but who don't go with the leftist narrative.
I think people like yourself and others get it far worse than I could.
The most funny thing that I've heard is people talking about black conservatives and ridiculing them.
They'll say, and this is from the left saying this, who believe that race is a social construct.
They'll say, you're being a traitor to your race.
How could you do that?
Sure.
You're being used by white people to legitimize their racism.
And that's the only reason anyone ever talks to you.
Oh, it's horrible.
I mean, the funny thing is, too, again, with the left, they say, well, environment is everything.
It's like, okay, well, then you should have no fear of hiring conservatives and turning them into leftists because environment is everything and they're going to be coming right into your leftist environment.
They'll just change.
They're not the same way that people change and lose all their incentives and their desire to respond to economic incentives when communism comes along.
And so since everyone's belief is a social construct that's inevitably changed by their environment and you can snap your fingers and change people, just invite a whole bunch of conservative Christian right-leaning people in and you'll just change them tickety-boo into leftist social justice warriors because that's the environment they'll be in.
And of course they won't ever do that.
Because they know.
They know the R versus K stuff.
Now they change like the wind.
They're formless because they're seeking power.
So they're like water coming down the side of a mountain.
They can just change the shape.
They've got no fixed...
Because they are selected, right?
They've got no fixed address, so to speak.
So they've got no foundations, nothing they want to stand for.
They'll change and say whatever the hell they want in pursuit of power.
And so for them, the idea...
In a weird way, it is kind of true for them that environment is everything.
Because they'll change chameleon-like based upon who they're talking to just in their pursuit of power.
So the idea that people have an identity beyond the powerless at the moment kind of foreign case selected principles like the kind of foreign to them So I think that this everything's a social construct It's kind of projection of their own formlessness You know what Ayn Rand used to call the social metaphysicians the people who don't say what is true, but they say what do people believe and I think that that formlessness That they only really take form.
They only really take shape.
It's like, you know, the old Invisible Man movies before there were big special effects and the way that they'd show the Invisible Man is they'd put, like, baby powder in the air and then they'd see his little outline and stuff like that.
So you have to see the Invisible Man.
And the way that you see the Invisible Man, the way that you see the purpose of the left, they have no principles, but the way that you see the purpose is you interfere with their drive to power.
And then they manifest.
And then they strike, and then you see them.
But unfortunately, you know, somebody's got to be the chum in the water, so to speak.
Yeah.
That's a lot to take in, yeah.
But I'm also...
In your personal experience, holding up a mirror to the left using their own claims against them, has that turned out to be the most effective method?
I think it was you who said something about how you were in a conversation with somebody who was a proponent of open borders or something.
I think this was a YouTube video actually posted recently, maybe yesterday, and the person was arguing about how The border should be relatively open.
And you said, OK, well, where would you set the limit?
And the person was like, well, there should be a limit.
But she couldn't give you an actual number.
Right, right.
You should eat all the food in the world.
Really?
No maximum.
Well, maybe some maximum.
I don't know what it is.
Really, I don't think you're going to be my dietician.
It's not to change the other person's mind, and the book The Art of the Argument is done, and we're just getting some final stuff ready for it to go out, and I go into this in more detail there, so I'm not going to tell you a thing, man.
But if it's a private debate, I wouldn't bother.
With a hardcore leftist.
I mean, forget it.
Because it's just, it's not the same language.
It's not the same purpose.
I mean, it almost feels like not the same species if you get the R versus K stuff, right?
But if it's a public debate, what you want to do is give people the baby powder to show the invisible shape in the room.
So, you know, if people are like, oh, I'm really into open borders, it's like, well, who have you taken in?
How much taxes are you paying?
And what's the maximum?
It's just to find out if they have any sensible attitude whatsoever.
Because open borders, you know, if you say, well, I'm really into open borders and refugees, then you say, well, you know, the whites in South Africa are having a terrible time of it.
Terrible time of it.
Let's bring them in as minority refugees in a fairly brutal majority country and see what they say.
Well, they know that the white South Africans are not likely to vote strong left.
So they don't want them coming in.
And so once you understand, it's like, I want open borders for everyone who's going to vote for leftist policies.
Well, okay.
Then it's not open borders.
You just want allies.
You just want to...
Bring people in who are going to fight on your side.
I understand that, but let's not pretend there's any principles.
It's just another military maneuver.
So you just want people to see if you can delegitimize the moral idealism Of the left or people's perception of the moral idealism.
People will do just about anything.
Whatever you define as good for most people, they'll generally follow.
And so, to me, if it's a private debate, don't bother.
Like, I can't even remember the last time I had a private debate with a leftist.
Forget it, right?
Life's too short.
But if it's a public debate, it's not to change the mind of the leftist.
It's to give people the tools to expose the lack of moral legitimacy that the left is claiming.
Yeah, and I think broadly, the way the left is pushing right now, I'm not Now, let's just say that I'm a little less worried about how fervent they are.
You know, don't get me wrong, throwing bricks at people just because you're holding up a sign that says free speech is absolutely abhorrent, as we saw at Berkeley, and, you know, Lawrence did some videos on that.
But I'm actually a little more worried about a, I guess you could say, ultra-nationalistic right-wing pushback to all of that.
Because, you know, sort of like how in a lot of the literature with respect to The Nazi party in Germany, how they described everything as sort of rooting out a virus within the population, cleansing society of this ill and making the civilization whole and pure again.
Eventually, like you were talking about earlier, how people just don't want to be called racist anymore, like the kind of pushback that's going to happen if people get pushed over the edge is what I'm worried about more than anything else.
Well, okay, but hang on a sec, Daniel.
I got to push back a little bit here because when people start talking about the alt-right and then think it's a hop, skip, and a jump to Nazism, I think that's a little bit of a leap.
Now, as far as sort of the alt-right pushback against the left, you're more scared of the alt-right pushback against the left.
I would say this.
I would say this.
Okay.
Compared to what?
Because what happens if the left gets their way?
What happens if the left gets their way?
How are we going to do?
How is our free speech going to do?
How's basic freedom going to do?
How's freedom of association going to do?
If the left gets their way, I mean, Mike Cernovich and I did a show on this, you know, left-wing death camps.
I'm not saying it would have happened under Hillary, but we might have wanted it better than the alternative.
But this sort of slow choke-off of recent debate, this slow chilling effect on what you can talk about, this endless torrents of character assassination and going after your income and verbal abuse, and like at some point it's like I can't open my mouth anymore, and it's Not that much fun drawing breath in a way, right?
For a lot of people, freedom of speech, freedom of argument, freedom of debate is very, very important.
And so as far as the right-wing pushback or the alt-right pushback, I'm not scared of the alt-right pushback.
I mean, the right, they're not throwing bricks at anyone, man.
It's the left who are throwing, not all the left, right, but the extreme left, they're the ones throwing bricks.
They're the ones opening the borders.
They're the ones.
Pushing for these identity politics, chilling, lack of freedom of expression, lack of free speech laws that nobody can define.
When have you done something wrong?
I don't know.
No one can tell you.
So, as far as, like, I'm concerned about the advance of the left.
I'm not concerned about the pushback from the right.
Now, that doesn't mean I'll never be concerned about it.
Of course not, right?
But at this point, what's the alternative?
I mean, you're pushing back, I'm pushing back, and I don't identify as being on the right or the alt-right or anything like that.
But as far as pushback against leftism goes, I have yet to see a problem compared to not pushing back against the left, if that makes sense.
Yeah, that's fair.
I think that was an unfair characterization on my part and a bit of a big leap.
That's not like the alt-right has any...
Even if they did, a lot of their methods aren't even close in terms of the heinousness toward what the left is doing, let alone how entrenched they are in the current establishment in the United States especially.
But it is something that we're...
We're kind of programmed, right?
If it's not the left, it's the far right.
And the far right automatically means you're a Nazi.
It's all in the air.
Yeah, I mean, and that's just something we all have to be careful.
I mean, I don't hugely like the left-right paradigm, but you can't really talk about politics without using that to some degree.
For sure.
But, yeah, as far as the left goes, I mean, it's pretty nutty stuff that they're doing.
And, you know, a lot of the segregation stuff is...
Yeah, Harvard had their all-black graduation recently, too.
Yeah.
So as far as ethnic in-group preferences and segregation goes, I don't know that you've got much to worry about regarding the alt-right.
It seems to be coming a lot more from the left.
And that's because the left, of course, is so much demonizing, you know, whites or non-minorities and so on, to the point where it's like, well, why would you want to spend any time around white people?
They're terrorists and poisonous anyway.
It's like, this is not going to end well, everyone.
Like, this constant provoking...
Of conflicts and hatred and, oh, it's exploitation and, you know, I mean, like Africa, the whites came and took all the wealth.
It's like, well, the blacks have been there for 60,000 years.
I didn't notice a lot of cathedrals.
Maybe I missed something in my studying of history, but I don't think there was a lot of wealth there.
I think it was kind of created.
Anyway, so this hatred stuff, the left loves it, and I don't know...
I mean, the left must just hate people in Africa because they're provoking so much hatred.
Oh, let's go murder all of these white farmers.
It's like, you know they produce the majority of the food, right?
Like Zimbabwe, and now they're suddenly asking for all the white farmers to come back.
Right!
Isn't that natural?
And hideous.
If the left cared about black people, they'd say, you gotta respect the white farmers, emulate the white farmers, apprentice with the white farmers, learn their skills, learn their trades, compete with them, and be great like them.
Because you know what happens if the white farmers leave and there's not been a knowledge transfer?
Millions of you are going to starve.
This is the cold-heartedness of the left.
This is the unbelievable cold-heartedness of the left.
When South Africa's become like the rape capital of the world, when crime is through the roof, when Venezuela is happening and so on, they don't care.
I hate what's happening to the blacks and the whites in South Africa.
I hate what's happening to the people in Venezuela.
I hate what happened to the people in Cuba.
I hate what happened to the people in In communism, undercommunity, I hate all of this stuff, because the suffering is unbelievable, it's bottomless, and it's not necessary, it's not required at all.
But you get a free market coming in, you get smart people doing smart things, and you get a lot of excess food, and you get a lot of excess productivity, and then the left gins up all this hatred of the smart, productive people of any group or race or ethnicity, the left gins up all of this hatred And rouses the mob to start turning on the smart people, and then the smart people go all galt and shut off, shut down.
And then, boom, all the food that's supporting this excess population, all the technology, begins to fall away.
And people die horribly.
Horrible, horrible deaths of malnutrition, of lack of access to healthcare, of It's horrible, horrible stuff.
You've got people in Venezuela, they've got to sell their kids.
You've got women from Venezuela having to go over to the neighboring countries and sell themselves for food, sell their bodies for food.
These are women, they don't want to be prostitutes.
I'm not saying any woman ever does, but these are middle-class women who've got nothing to eat.
It's horrible.
And what is the left care?
Well, it doesn't fit the narrative.
We're just going to keep it off the air.
We're not going to learn a single damn lesson.
In fact, we're going to try and take those Venezuelan policies and put them in America and put them in Europe.
Hashtag that wasn't real socialism.
Let's try again, Dory.
Jesus.
I mean, it's cold.
It's horrible.
The free market is sustaining billions of lives around the world.
You know, if the left cared about the poor, wouldn't they be incredibly positive towards the free market growth of the middle classes in China and in India?
Like in India, 50,000 people a month are going from poverty to the middle class.
A month!
After they abandoned all of the post-World War II narrow-based socialist policies that came out of all of the intellectuals from the European universities, particularly the British universities, wouldn't they care?
The last 20 years has seen the single biggest reduction in poverty in the entire history of the planet.
Ever.
Like it dwarfs absolutely everything that ever happened in the past with regards to the reduction of poverty.
And it's because of the free market, primarily in China and primarily in India.
Would the left care about that at all?
Millions and millions, hundreds of millions of people alive who otherwise would have died.
No, I'm sure they just hate the environmental impact.
So they're cold, man.
So as far as the left goes, I don't know, whatever pushback against the left is occurring right now, it's so far away from my radar of things to be worried about.
Yeah.
You know, it's like giant fire about to engulf the entire city.
Well, I'm concerned that there may be a swamp left over from the efforts to pour water on it.
It's like, you know, I'll take the risk of the swamp right now because otherwise it's burning lessons for everyone.
All right.
I know we did quite a lot, but your questions were great.
I'm going to move on to the next caller, but I really do appreciate the call.
And you're certainly welcome back anytime.
Hey, can I just say something real fast before I leave?
Yeah.
I just want to say I've been watching your show and paying attention to it for about the last three or four years, especially before I finished undergrad.
I think I could say that you probably were responsible for a lot of how I came to think politically and philosophically.
And I think without a lot of your content, I probably would have not ended up as secure as I am, especially just as a person, human being, as a man.
So I just want to thank you a lot for that because you've been instrumental in a lot of my development personally in the last couple of years.
Well, that's wonderfully kind, Daniel.
I moved beyond words.
Actually, who am I kidding?
I never moved beyond words.
But I really, really appreciate that.
That's a wonderful, wonderful thing to hear.
And I really, really appreciate the conversation.
It was a great delight tonight.
Hey, thanks so much.
I am repaid.
All right, thanks, man.
Take care.
You too.
Okay, up next we have Yuri.
He wrote in and said, I was born in the USSR and moved to the United States in 1998.
As soon as I landed in the United States, I was hit in the face with racism, sexism, and the wage gap.
Those issues did not exist where I came from.
For the first time, I heard about the Cold War and many other myths about Russia.
How come there is such a difference in information, values, and people?
Is capitalism really better than communism?
That's from Yuri.
Hey Yuri, how you doing?
I'm doing great.
I've been on hold for two hours and 37 minutes, so I'm just a little bit trying to recover from...
We have truly Soviet-era levels of customer service here.
Your call is important to us.
Please wait for two and a half hours while we get to you.
You know, actually, I do not remember in my time in the Soviet Union ever using a customer service at all.
Like, I have never had to make a call.
I've never even seen my parents or anyone else call.
I just feel like we bought stuff and it was just meant to work forever.
And there was no reason to call.
If it broke, you just threw it out and just bought a new one.
Right.
Right.
I got to assume that somehow in the Soviet Union, customer service calls you.
But not right.
Enough of that.
Enough of that tired little joke.
Something like that, yeah.
Right.
So the USSR, of course, largely ethnically homogenous, right?
Correct.
Did you see a lot of non-whites growing up in Russia?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
But they're not necessarily not white.
We have a lot of bordering southern countries.
So they're darker skinned.
They're not necessarily The same complexion as we were, but we knew where they were from.
But because of such a camaraderie of different states, everybody was accepted because there was no borders, no visas.
Anybody could transition from, let's say, Kazakhstan and come and live in Russia.
Or somebody could come from Uzbekistan and come to live with us as well and work as well.
Everything was integrated into one big working system.
For example, you could get education in Uzbekistan and get a job in Russia.
Well, so you're talking about, if I understand this correctly, and, you know, obviously correct me where I go astray, but you're talking about sort of like Scottish people versus Italian people, right?
Okay, there's a difference in general, right?
I mean, Italians, darker, swathier, darker hair, and so on, except in the north of Italy where there's still some blondes kicking around.
But so there's a difference.
They're all white, but there's a difference in the ethnicity degrees within the white population.
Is that fair to say?
Something, yeah.
Well, you know, there is a lot of influence to south of Russia countries from the Asian parts.
So there's a lot of mixing.
So a lot of people look Asian.
So they're easily distinguishable.
And, you know, a lot of the Muslim people that come over, they have a certain complexity that isn't really variation of Russian.
But we know that they come from one of the countries that border us.
And, you know, so they're accepted.
There's no, this concept of one race is better than the other or one, you know, there's no teams.
There's a, nobody picks a team.
It's like, it's very common in United States where everybody kind of has a team.
You have your team, everybody has a team, but in Russia, there's no team.
It's one big, big team.
Well, I would also assume, and correct me where I'm wrong again, I would also assume that the IQ differences between these various ethnicities is not as great as, say, the difference between Japanese and sub-Saharan Africans or something like that.
And so you're just going to have a lot more in common and a lot more similarity in that.
Yeah.
I see where you're going, but the way that the people were placed, because you didn't pick a place where you want to go.
It's not because everybody would go to Moscow, because it's the center of the country.
But the idea at the Soviet Union level was based on your capability as a person, your IQ included, it's basically by your performance in grade school or possibly university, you were given a particular level.
And based on that level, you have certain options.
So you couldn't Pick a prime spot because it would require a higher intelligence.
So you could only migrate to certain areas that were within your capacity.
Right.
So in a sense, the bell curve is vertically sliced geographically in that people tend to...
Because I know in Eastern Europe and in other places, there are, of course, the group called the Roma, or also called the Gypsies.
I don't know what they're called.
In Russia or even if they're...
Gypsies.
It's an entire nation, yes.
But the gypsies have generally very low IQs.
Yeah, they're roamers, they're performers, they have a lot of ethnic cultural contribution to our...
Gypsies are obviously part of the folklore.
They're considered to be People that are not intellectually gifted.
Which is a nice way.
To put it, you know, in a nice context.
And you know what's funny?
Sorry, I just wanted to interrupt because I just wanted to get this point out and it seems like a fairly decent place to shoehorn it in.
So when I was growing up, the joke was that Polish people weren't that smart.
You know, there was Irish people and there were Polish people and so on.
And boy, I got to tell you now, when it comes to immigration policies, I would just like to apologize to the Polish people for everything I was told and even the odd thought I may have had when I was younger.
You guys are pretty much the smartest people in Europe at the moment.
I just wanted to point that out and just wanted to mention that because I may not get another chance to shoehorn it in.
But sorry, Yuri, you were just about to say something else?
No, I was pretty much finished with my thought.
We could go back to the question and look at other things.
I mean, you were discussing race and IQ, and I basically kind of described that the race wasn't an issue and the IQ wasn't really taken into account.
So it wasn't such an IQ diversity.
So you wouldn't have a lot of low IQ population migrating to regions with high IQ population.
You would have certain restrictions, so you wouldn't, basically, based on your capability, you could do so much.
So they had that problem kind of addressed in a way that didn't just respect people, but it also didn't put them in an awkward situation where they would be placed in a position where they're just not capable of proceeding.
So then they wouldn't be useful in that situation, and the Soviet Union didn't want to put them in that place for their own sake.
So if there were differences in intelligence, they wouldn't be race-based.
Right?
I mean, there are very smart white people and they're very dumb white people.
Of course, it's a bell curve, right?
But if you have a problem, if you say, well, I don't really want to hire this white person.
If you're a white person, you say, I want to hire this white person because they're not that smart.
Nobody calls you a racist.
Because it just doesn't fit, right?
And so in the USSR, when you have at least IQ homogeneity within a geographical region, then...
It's pretty tough to call people racist.
Now, as far as sexism goes, this is quite fascinating to me.
And if you can expand upon this, I know you moved to America a long time ago, but I'm assuming you've kept up to some degree or have relatives.
Is that fair to say that it's still going on in Russia?
You have some contact?
Yes.
Okay.
Half my family is there.
Because the concept of sexism doesn't seem to have taken root in Russia.
Now, from what I've heard...
This is nonsense, so, you know, toss it out if it makes no sense at all.
But from what I've heard, A, Russian women are incredibly attractive.
Now, my first girlfriend was Russian, and I'm going to tell you, yeah.
Yes, yes, indeed.
But, um...
But also not the sort of, you know, the typical sort of ball-breaking, man-hating, feminist troll kind of stuff, right?
The blue hair and tattoos and a, you know, look pregnant but ain't kind of thing.
And so there is not, there's sort of an acceptance of gender differences and a celebration to some degree of gender differences in Russia.
And there's not, I think, the sense that all disparities in outcomes between men and women are the result of evil male patriarchy.
That's sort of my understanding of how things work in Russia.
In Russia today, possibly, but if we are speaking about Soviet Union, so I'm referencing back my memories from the Soviet Union.
In Soviet Union, there was no...
There was no distinguishment between men and women because the criteria by which people were placed in the positions to do their job was not based on the sex.
It was based on intellect.
So if you receive the grades and if you are qualified for the position, you get the position regardless of your sex.
And you get the pay exactly what each position had to pay.
So if a man placed in that position, he gets that pay.
If a woman placed in that position, they get that pay.
So there was never a question whether Women were better, or men were better.
But what about the challenges of women having kids?
Wouldn't that take women out of circulation for jobs at some point?
It would.
It would take people out of the circulation, but that was all accounted for.
Because the employment system, because it was all run centralized, there were certain needs to be met.
So once the needs are met, there's no reason to keep working.
See, in the West, for example, there's never end.
You always produce more.
And if you can produce even more, you produce even more.
So there's never end.
So, you know, if a woman, for example, wants to have a child, there was no problem.
She just goes and takes a year off and then comes back and does the same exact job to continue.
Or somebody will put a replacement for a year for her job and then shift them back again.
Because there was such a placement, it was a very well-oiled machine where That wasn't an issue.
And the pregnancy was, the entire period was paid and the healthcare was free.
Right, right, right.
Right.
Okay.
So, yeah, I can understand why There is sort of less conception of all of this racism and sexism and so on that was going on.
And, you know, the reality is, you say in your email, you say, those issues did not exist where I came from.
Well, the reality is that in many ways, they don't exist where you are either.
Right?
Does racism exist as a significant, powerful, potent social force that shapes people's economic outcomes?
No.
No, it doesn't.
And this has been proved many, many times, you can read the bell curve, Ernstine and Murray's work, that people are sorted by IQ, and there are racial differences in IQ, and that explains virtually all of the disparities in incomes and life outcomes and so on.
So, you know, sexism is the same thing.
Women who have the same amount of education as a man, have been in the workforce for the same amount of time, earn pretty much the same.
In fact, college-educated women earn a little bit more.
And so, racism does not exist as far as economics go.
Sexism does not exist regarding reality or economic reality.
The wage gap doesn't exist.
It's explainable by women having children, women taking time off, and women working part-time because they'd rather spend time with their family than sitting in a cubicle.
So, yeah, they don't exist in the West either.
I mean, the degree to which they do exist is the degree to which they're perceived to exist, and therefore the government has taken massive steps to change outcomes.
So I just wanted to sort of mention that.
And Russia...
It has some significant free market principles available to it, a lack of affirmative action, a lack of the sort of equal pay for equal value kind of stuff.
It's there to a smaller degree, but certainly nowhere as great as it is in other places in the West.
And so there's some free market stuff that's going on there that is solving some of these problems.
I'm sorry?
Stav, could I address the thing that you said before and then free market after that?
Because you made some statements about the fact that the U.S. does not have racism, sexism and feminism.
I would like to disagree with you on that simply because...
You know, the first thing I remember vividly in 90, I said that I came permanently to US in 98, but I first came to US in 96 actually.
And not actually in the United States.
We flew in the United States and then we went to Canada to see friends that migrated earlier.
As soon as we landed, and the first thing they told us in the cab, not in the cab, in their car, is that not to say black people in Russian, because in Russian, a black person sounds like a derogative N-word.
And immediately, we were like, why?
But what's going on?
We were completely unaware of that concept, that there was this racial tension here, that That simply was nonexistent where we came from.
We, of course, we said fine.
Whatever.
We'll say whatever.
No problem.
Let's not cause any problems for anyone.
We'll just do what you say.
But after that, I mean, I had multiple discussions with African-American friends that I have during the elections of last year.
And you don't understand.
How they were literally telling me, playing almost every single one of them was playing victim and telling me that, you know, that they are completely crushed by the system and that they're incapable of achieving things.
And I understand there are exceptions.
Of course, there are exceptions.
And I have friends that are African-American that are exceptions and they do great.
But even the ones that do great also were playing a victim.
It's almost like there's this movement that is just handicaps people.
People of color.
And it's just hard to see because I just came kind of like with the virgin eyes and saw it for the first time.
And to me, it's weird.
I mean, maybe if I was born here and raised here, I would feel that it's okay and it's normal and there is no issue.
But because I came here and I have never had it before, it hits me in the face and I'm just...
I'm astounded that it's happening and the wage gap.
I know the argument that women and men get paid roughly the same based on what they do and what they qualify for.
But the thing is that there is no guidance for women because they're incentivized to get into STEM fields.
Then they get into STEM fields, they cannot perform because I come from a STEM field.
I'm a former developer and right now I'm working in information security.
I'm in IT myself.
I heard the previous caller talking about IT, so it was kind of interesting.
I couldn't relate to him, but I could relate to some of the things he said, because I have been in multiple companies that have downsized, and it's sad to see people go, but that's, you know, bottom line.
Every company has to meet the bottom line, so some people have to be sacrificed.
And that is the exact thing I also did not see in Soviet Union, because nobody was ever fired.
They were just moved elsewhere.
So, for example, if you underperform in a position, they just move you to a position that has less responsibility.
And you don't lose your job and then freak out.
It creates massive stress on the population.
It creates this division.
It creates a lot of things.
And about the free market.
When you said that Russia has options for free market, the thing is, I find free market, honestly, I find free market to be very excessive.
I find that it's very inefficient.
It uses almost every resource possible in order to achieve results.
And it just, yes, you can say, in the end, you get the good results, but you don't have to try every option.
There has to be some sort of...
What do you mean by free market?
You know, what's going on in the West now is not free market.
Not free market.
I understand.
It has not been free market for at least about 100 years.
So certainly since the government took over the currency in 1913, 1917 with the income tax, since central banking, if there's no free market in money, there's no free market.
It's like saying, well, there was a free market in Russia in Soviet Union because there was a black market.
It's like, well, no.
And so as far as what you are talking about in the West, it's not the free market.
I agree with you on that.
I agree that it's not a free market, but if you examine free market in a vacuum, let's say, just the concept of free market, voluntary trade, nobody's forcing anyone, anybody could do whatever they want, and just thinking of how things would materialize in this type of environment,
Ultimately leads you to feel that it's a very inefficient process of free market because you are trying to, like multiple people are trying to achieve the same goal, when in reality you only need one person to achieve that goal.
Give me an example.
I don't know.
It's all too abstract for me to follow.
What do you mean?
Well, this is the example that I'm bringing.
For example, in free market, for example, we want to produce a phone, right?
How many companies are going to start making that phone?
Let's say there is an idea.
We can make cell phones.
How many people are going to be involved in making that first phone?
I mean, you're talking about multiple competitors, multiple companies.
Everybody's struggling to just make this first one because first one to market usually is the success because it's the first one.
It's the novelty.
It's the thing.
They get the price.
So they sacrifice everything, the resources, the money.
And finally, they get that phone.
They come out.
But all the other ones that have participated in this process, what happens to them?
What do you mean?
There's tons of cell phone companies.
What are you talking about?
No, no, there's tons of cell phone companies, but how many cell phone companies are in the United States?
Well, I don't know.
What does that matter?
It matters, because now you see how many cell phone companies are in the US. Wait, are you saying it's inefficient for there to be competing cell phone companies?
I'm saying that it's an inefficient process.
If you want a cell phone, just make a cell phone.
Why do you have to make 100 companies make one cell phone and then try every single combination and waste all this resources, manpower?
Wait, wait, hang on.
Because that's what the customers want.
If the customers just want one company to make one cell phone, that's all they'll buy.
But if customers want different options and choices regarding cell phones, then you think that there's some central mechanism.
This is not the Soviet Union.
It's all driven by what the customers are willing to put down their money for.
Efficient or inefficient, that's not for you to decide.
It's for the customer to decide.
It's got nothing to do with your preferences or your thoughts or your choice.
I don't understand what you're saying.
There's too many kinds of fruit at the grocery store.
It's inefficient.
It's like, what the hell?
I mean, if people want to buy different kinds of fruit, what the hell is it to do with you?
What's your idea of efficiency or inefficiency got to do with anything?
Well, the argument is that the system is just inefficient and it uses a lot of resources.
No, no, no!
You don't understand what I'm saying!
What does it matter what you call efficient or inefficient?
If people are willing to buy a cell phone from a company and it's totally voluntary, what does your opinion have to do with anything?
It's between that person and the cell phone company.
Well, because it has a direct effect on everything else.
Well, what are you talking about?
I'm talking about the system that is used has effect on everything else.
There's no system.
It's a free market.
There's no system.
It's like saying there are arranged marriages because people can date whoever they want.
There's no system.
You're free to own, to trade, to choose, to buy, to sell with whoever you want, as long as you don't use force or fraud.
There's no system.
Who are you to interfere with other people's free choice to buy and sell in a free market?
What does it have to do with you?
It doesn't have to do anything with me, but the problem is the inefficiency of the free market leads to the massive consumption of resources.
Jesus, hang on, hang on.
You keep using this word, inefficiency.
Yes.
And I keep telling you it doesn't mean anything.
Like, let's forget cell phones.
People date who they want and they marry who they want, right?
Well, okay.
Hang on, hang on.
People date who they want and they marry who they want, right?
Mm-hmm.
Is that inefficient or efficient?
Is that a system?
No, it's freedom.
Now, arranged marriages, that's a different matter.
You've got to marry this girl or you're going to go to jail, right?
But if people date who they want and marry who they want...
What does it have to do with you?
Some people are going to make bad choices.
They're going to marry the wrong person.
They may get divorced or whatever it is, right?
I don't know what you mean by inefficiency.
I mean, what does that mean?
I mean, what is efficient?
Putting everyone in an orgy and seeing who wins?
I don't know.
The most greased person gets the prize.
I mean, what does it have to do with you, how people date and get married?
It has everything to do with me because I live in the system and the effects of the system are affecting everything around me.
It affects me on a very intimate level.
So you get to be a busybody and you get to tell other people's free choices.
You get to judge them and possibly change them.
You get to be a busybody because you live on the planet where other people breathe stuff and use stuff?
I don't see how that works.
No, no, no.
You digressing somewhere else.
What I was saying is that when compared in a vacuum, the two systems, the free market and let's say, for example, not free market, but let's assume for the purpose of sake of discussion, it would be communism, for example.
In free market, let's say you're free, you trade, whatever, and that inefficiency is, and I mean, I keep saying inefficiency, but let me link it to the cost, for example.
No, no, you need to stop using the word until you prove something about it.
Okay, I'm going to stop using the word.
Okay, let me prove something about it.
It links directly to the cost.
Now, would you buy a phone for $200 or $800?
I don't know.
I mean, it depends how much money I had.
It would depend on how efficient it was.
Like, let's say I've got a little app on my phone for trading stuff, and the $800 phone is five times faster in its data processing.
That may be well worth it for me.
Maybe I want a really flash phone so that I can impress the ladies when I whip it out in the nightclub.
I don't know.
I don't know whether $200 or $800 is better or worse for people.
I have no idea.
And frankly, I don't care.
I've got my own life to lead.
Let them buy whatever phone they want.
No, but that's not answering the question.
Would I buy a $200 phone versus an $800 phone?
Right now, you have to buy a phone.
$200 or $800.
What's your choice?
I have no idea.
Are you saying exactly the same phone or different features?
I mean, I don't even know.
It's like saying, do you want a $2,000 car or a $20,000 car?
I don't know.
I mean, give me the features.
I don't know.
Same features, different brands.
Oh, so you're saying exactly the same phone, $800 versus $200.
That does not exist in the free market.
That does not exist in the free market.
Because there's no way that anybody would produce an $800 phone or try and sell an $800 phone if there was a $200 model right next to it.
Assume it was produced.
Two phones, same features, different brands.
You're begging the question.
You can't just say, imagine something was enormously inefficient.
Okay, I've proved inefficiency.
That's not how it works.
I'm not telling you what to choose.
You said, assume that somebody has made a ridiculously inefficient economic decision to produce a phone.
Like, either they're producing it for way more than the other company is producing it for.
Have you, I mean, just out of curiosity, have you ever run a business yourself?
No.
Okay, so you don't know this stuff and you haven't studied it, so you got to stop talking about it until you either know it or study it.
So if you're a business manager, right, and you say, I'm going to produce an $800 phone with the following features, right?
The first question you're going to be asked is, what's the competition?
What are they producing?
What are their features?
How are we going to compete?
What's the market allocation?
What's the market penetration?
What's the price point?
What's the demographic who's going to buy it?
Like, you don't just go make an $800 phone.
The amount of money you have to spend in researching and investing and inventing and creating and shipping and transporting and producing.
It's crazy.
Nobody's just going to sit there and produce an $800 phone when there's a $200 phone that's exactly the same right next to it.
And if somebody does do that, that company, like, they're either fired or they're out of business, that phone will be withdrawn because nobody's going to bother spending the gas to ship it to a place where it's never going to sell.
And no one is going to sell that in a store.
Because nobody's going to want to sell an $800 phone to someone who then goes around and says, oh my god, you had a $200 phone that's exactly the same and you sold me the $800 phone?
You assholes!
And they're going to go write about it on Facebook and you're going to get a bad reputation ripping off customers.
Like, it's not going to happen.
But you don't know that because you've either never studied it or never run a business.
I did...
I've not necessarily studied, not formally studied it, but I have a curious mind and I look at many things and I learn quite a bit, quite a lot.
Well, maybe you have, but just not in this area.
I'm just telling you, because you can't just say, well, imagine something's really inefficient.
Oh, look, I proved inefficient.
Steph, Steph, you're not answering the question.
Or how logical.
But you're not answering the questions.
Who could you answer the question?
What?
Do you remember the question that I asked you?
You mean would I buy a $200 or an $800 phone if they were both identical?
I'm telling you it's a nonsense question.
No, no, no.
It's not identical.
Would I buy a horse or a unicorn?
I don't know.
There's no unicorn, so I don't really get the question.
You're changing the question.
The question is two phones, different brands, same features.
One is $200, one is $800.
Which one do you choose?
So it's the same phone.
It's not the same phone.
Different brands, same features.
People don't buy the brands, they buy the features, right?
They buy the features.
No, they do buy the brands.
But for the sake of the argument, there is no brands.
They're just different.
For the sake of the argument, they're different.
One is 200, one is 800.
Which one do you buy?
Same features.
Well, we're back to this.
You don't understand, Yuri.
There would never be a choice presented to be in the free market.
You're avoiding the question.
No, I'm not avoiding the question.
You're asking me would I rather buy a horse or a dragon?
There aren't any dragons, so it's not a real question.
If the horse and a dragon are manufactured by different brands but have the same features, then yes, it is the same thing, but it's not the same thing.
I'm talking about a phone, different brands, same features, different price.
Which one do you get?
Okay, so basically you're just not listening to any argument I'm making here.
You just keep repeating the question like a broken record.
I've given you all the reasons as to why that would never show up in a free market from design, implementation, funding, research and development, shipping.
The store owners would have no desire to sell such a disparate phone.
They would never steer you towards the phone that was four times the price but had exactly the same features.
I've given you all the reasons as to why in a free market that would never show up as an option for you as a customer.
But you just keep repeating the question.
Whoa, a stubborn Soviet.
Never heard of such a thing.
But answer the question.
Okay.
I appreciate the call, but I'm not going to answer the question because I'm not going to play a game which doesn't exist.
So I really appreciate your time.
Thanks everyone so much for calling in.
It's always a great pleasure to chat with you.
Even when it seems kind of annoying, it's actually not.
I really enjoy it.
So thanks everyone so much for calling in.
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