June 16, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:49:04
3718 Is Socialism Needed? – Call In Show – June 13th, 2017
Question 1: [1:42] – “"With the situation in places like Puerto Rico, Cuba and El Salvador, more and more skilled professionals are leaving the country for the US. I personally know some of these individuals and when I ask them "Why did you leave?" it was for things we in the US tend to take for granted such as a turn signals, fire response and access to medical care. Can it be said that a certain amount of 'collective effort' or 'socialism' is necessary to provide a floor of infrastructure and services so that the higher earners of a culture and country do not flee for a better quality of life?"Question 2: [33:49] – “Currently vocal activist groups are seeking to limit parental authority by casting spanking as wrongful conduct. They are beating the drum about spanking not benefiting children, that it does not work, and even claiming it is harmful. The studies they use are not scientific and fly in the face of common sense. The propaganda is regular and the liberal media regularly publish stories trying to sway the public, re-define and demonize spanking, the parental use of force.”“The goal of these groups are to allow for gov't intervention in the family through criminal or gov't dependency actions which allow for the removal of children from parents who may use force to discipline as with spanking. Do you believe that ultimately kids must obey their parents? If you can't use force, you have no authority over anyone. It is easy to understand police authority and the fact that ultimately they can use force. We don't refer to police use of authority as violence or aggression. Do you believe parental authority should include spanking, the use of force to create some physical discomfort? If not, are you not supporting the "socialized" parenting? Are you aware that if a kid goes to a juvenile delinquency center the gov't can use force for their disobedience? Are you aware that all this anti-spanking propaganda is also aimed at diminishing the family unit by diminishing parental authority? Do you think we should ban spanking for all parents simply because some abuse the privilege? No one would suggest that with police, but with the public, liberals always seek the lowest common denominator to treat everyone the same and increase gov't control. Have you considered that your position actually supports socialist and communist ideologies?”Question 3: [1:23:05] – “As a professional engineer and an innovator I find myself working in an industry dominated by people who are, as a colleague of mine very aptly puts it, ‘professional careerists.’ Engineers who rise in an organization just by being on all the right committees and giving management the answers they wanted to hear. They don’t have original thoughts or make decisions. My question is whether you think that this is just a natural phenomenon in a mature industry or is it the result of modern culture? Regardless, as an individual motivated by a desire to be creative what should I be doing with my career?”Question 4: [2:06:22] – “Why should I spend my life trying to do any good, even if we can recognize a simply material-mutualistic benefit to it? When people are so clearly insane they can't recognize great threats to society and their own lives and livelihoods, can't see evil staring them in the face, and you get no rapport but either perplexity or hostility thrown back in your teeth when you dare to mention it, and it would be easy enough to abuse their folly... What more fundamental reason then to try to do good to one and all rather than exploit the wankers and leave them by the side of the road?"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, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
A very different but very interesting show tonight.
The first caller was concerned that smart people leave countries that aren't doing well and what are we supposed to do?
Shouldn't we have a minimum amount of socialism to provide the basic public services and stability that smart people might need to stay in those countries?
It's an interesting question.
Well, let's just say we went a little bit, or I went a little bit back to my roots on that one.
The second caller, well, he's pro-spanking.
And it's been a while since we've had one of those chats.
If you're kind of new to this, then this is definitely one you want to check out.
Some new arguments as well.
We didn't get to quite the resolution that we were hoping for, but a very, very interesting call nonetheless.
The third caller is an engineer who is getting kind of annoyed because Oh, if you've spent any time in corporations, I guess even worse in governments, you know what I mean.
We had a great chat about that.
And the fourth caller, I think, was tempting us all to join him on the merry-go-round satanic slide into nihilism.
He is from Sweden, so I can somewhat understand the sentiment, but I fought him like hell.
So I hope you find this show as useful and interesting as I did.
And please, please, please don't forget to check out our donation page at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
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Alright, well up for today we have James.
James wrote into the show and said,"...with the situation in places like Puerto Rico, Cuba, and El Salvador, more and more skilled professionals are leaving the country for the United States.
I personally know some of these individuals.
When I asked them, why did you leave?
It was for things we have in the United States that we tend to take for granted, such as turn signals, fire response, and access to medical care." Can it be said that a certain amount of collective effort, or socialism, is necessary to provide a floor of infrastructure and services so that the higher earners of a culture and country do not flee for a better quality of life?
That's from James.
Oh, hey James, how you doing tonight?
Just fine, Stefan, how you doing?
I'm doing well, thank you.
Okay, good.
I guess I'm trying to understand the question as a whole.
So I wonder if you could just give me a little bit more detail.
Sure.
In the past year, I've had the opportunity to travel to both Cuba and Iceland, as well as El Salvador.
And I've seen kind of this contrast in culture and government.
And it's kind of a hobby to kind of sort of follow these things.
Hence, you know, also watching your show.
And, you know, kind of struggle with the idea of Of people who, you know, they're typically fleeing for Western cultures where, you know, they don't have to worry about necessarily the water that they drink or, you know, where their excrement goes when they flush the toilet.
You know, they don't have to worry about buildings collapsing or, you know, fire exits.
I mean, I think that there's a certain amount of unconscious or unknown freedom that people want in order so they can pursue their own lives.
And I see that maybe with people, we know several people and kind of our circle of friends who are doctors and lawyers who have left Cuba and have left Puerto Rico for the U.S. just simply because these countries don't necessarily have just the basic infrastructure that we in the U.S. tend to enjoy.
And while I think that the free market could certainly step in and fix a lot of these things or do them better, I'm not so sure that it could do all of them.
Right, right.
So, if I understand what you're saying, there are smart people in less smart populations who want to move to be with other smart people in smarter populations.
Is that right?
Yeah, absolutely.
And your IQ videos have pointed this out time and time again.
And, of course, this doesn't help out the existing population that remains behind.
If anything, it becomes more of a dick.
Detriment to that country.
So in thinking about how to keep these people in their country, what it is, the main reasons that they're moving for, it doesn't, at least in my anecdotal life experience, it's not always for more money and more opportunity.
You know, it's for kind of this unconscious comfort, I guess I would call it, that we tend to experience or enjoy here in the U.S. Right.
Why should people in the West care what happens to other countries?
Well, because we only have so many resources to go around.
I don't know what that means.
Well, I mean, here in the Western countries, we cannot take on the problems of the entire world.
Unfortunately, at some point, our resources, our ability to not only maintain our lifestyle but support others, will give out if people are not kind of...
I'm sorry, I don't know what any of this means.
I apologize if I'm being dense here.
I'm still not sure what this means.
So let's talk about, like we just did this thing on Puerto Rico, right?
Puerto Rico got an average IQ of about 87, right?
Yeah.
So are you saying that we should, like Western, and let's pretend that Puerto Rico wasn't, but didn't have its relationship to the United States, right?
Or let's take Haiti for that matter, right?
Okay.
Are you saying that Western countries should take people in from Haiti because otherwise Western countries will run out of resources?
No, no.
I'm saying that the higher earners are tending to, maybe the people with the higher IQs, are tending to flee for areas where there are some of these comforts that exist in the West.
No, no, I understand that.
I understand that.
We've got to try and be more efficient in this conversation.
I understand all of that.
You already made that case.
I'm asking, and I'm not saying this from a purely cold-hearted standpoint.
I mean, I have sympathies.
But why should Western countries take in people from other countries?
I'm not advocating that they should.
You're not advocating that they should?
Yes.
Okay, so what are you advocating?
I'm advocating that is there an element of socialism that's needed or a collective effort in order to provide a floor of infrastructure to make society livable for the higher IQ or higher income learners?
You mean in those other countries?
Yes.
I know those other countries...
But what do you mean by socialism?
Do you mean like democratic socialism where the IQ 87 people vote for stuff?
Do you think that's going to provide some kind of floor of infrastructure and services?
I think it's up to the individual countries to decide what it is that they want to provide together and what it is that they want to pay for separately.
No, no, you're not...
Okay.
If there's a country with an IQ, an average IQ of 85...
Yeah.
And I assume you're talking about socialism like with a vote rather than socialism like with a dictatorship, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay, so are you expecting the country with an IQ of 85 to vote very intelligently regarding this floor of infrastructure and services?
No, I'm not advocating that either.
I'm just trying to make the point that some of these collective structures are needed in order to kind of keep the high-income earners around.
Whether or not they vote correctly or not.
Saying something is needed is not a magic wand to bring these things into existence.
So are you saying that if it's democratic socialism, and you've said that the average IQ 85 population, hell, I don't think a Western population votes intelligently regarding socialism.
I mean, Russia had a very high IQ relative to, I don't know, Haiti, and socialism was a complete disaster.
So, I'm trying to sort of figure out what you mean.
Like, high IQ populations can't make socialism work.
Are you saying that low IQ populations can?
No.
Well, I'm saying that in normal conversations here in the US, you know, people are, you know, kind of like, arg, socialism.
And I kind of engage them.
And I was like, well, what is it that you mean by that?
Do you want to defund the military base or defund the military and close the 200 military bases around the world?
Because I'm kind of for that.
Because I'm tired of funding that.
You know, to me, is it that you want to just simply stop funding public schools?
We can have that conversation.
But at some point, I get down to things like, you know, homicide detective, your local homicide detective, how does that become a free market enterprise?
You know, how do you get down to incarcerating people or enforcing the laws and still be in a free market?
I think that there are certain kind of gaps or things that are always going to be sort of taken on by the collective.
I have no idea what you're talking about.
I'm so sorry.
I will say this, though, that I think that socialism has been pretty much a disaster for third world countries and first world countries and every kind of country in between.
I think the West should definitely stop sending foreign aid and all this other kind of income support and food support and so on to other countries.
That is a disaster, and it's going to be an increasingly bad disaster.
Now, withdrawing this stuff is going to be pretty rough.
It's going to be pretty rough, but you want to get off cocaine after nine years rather You know, that extra year of cocaine?
You know, maybe there's a way of tapering it off.
I don't know exactly.
But there already has been a massive amount of income redistribution that has gone on in the third world.
And it's in the form of foreign aid and other kinds of food support and food aid and so on.
And that has been, well, just plain terrible.
For the third world, right?
And so I think as far as socialism goes, that should stop as quickly as humanly possible.
And so that I think would be a good start.
But the idea that there's some kind of socialism you could enact in a country that gives it a sustainable...
The floor of infrastructure and services, I don't see how that's possible.
Either it's a dictatorship, in which case it's terrible, or you're trying to hope that somehow it's democratic.
Now, if it's democratic, then you're going to expect a lower IQ population to vote very wisely on the allocation of government resources, and not just Puerto Rico-style vote for massive amounts of government handouts to themselves.
And I agree that, you know, the kind of the government-mandated, the dictatorial style of socialism does not work.
And I am not certainly a fan of socialism in any regard.
I'm certainly not a Marxist or a communist.
What I'm really trying to say is when I get down to things like, well, how would, you know, investigating the murder of other individuals, how would that be integrated in a free market?
I'm kind of at a loss.
Like, I feel like some of these, there's only one source of water here in the West.
Should that be in a free market system?
I'm sorry.
I think I understand.
So now we're not talking about some sort of socialist provision of minimum standards of living.
We're talking about how could crime detection and prevention and punishment, how could that occur in a non-governmental setting?
Yeah, and those are the types of things I think that perhaps they can occur in a non-governmental setting.
Oh, yes, absolutely.
And maybe I'm just not informed enough.
You know, you've got to pick up your Netflix if you have it and watch The Keepers.
The Keepers is a very interesting documentary about the murder of a nun and how little the government did for like decade after decade after decade and how much private investigators and just not like formal private investigators just concerned citizens how much they've actually done and dug up and in fact how much the government is getting in the way of this kind of crime analysis.
Police did not come up with car alarms.
Police did not come up with house alarms.
They did not come up with high-definition cameras.
They did not come up with any of this kind of stuff.
They have not spent a huge amount of money coming up with counterfeit detection machines or anything like that.
And so, did the FBI or the police find that lunatic professor of ethics who was caught swinging a bike clock at someone?
No.
4chan.
Found that guy.
So the police are generally very, well, almost said ridiculously inefficient.
They're just another government program, and they're terrible at what they do, and they don't make any money out of prevention.
If the police prevent a crime, how much money do they make?
No, they make money from a crime occurring.
They make money from arrests and convictions, or at least the individuals get promoted based upon that.
Which is entirely the wrong set of incentives.
Like you don't want your doctor to be making money from you when you're sick.
You want your doctor to be making money from you when you're well.
And what I want in the long run is a free society and a free kind of police system, a free market police system or series of police systems.
And I want to pay...
Every time a crime does not occur, you can have a monthly fee every time a crime doesn't occur.
And the moment a crime does occur, I want them to pay me.
Because that's the right level of incentives for them to work on the prevention of crime, rather than, you know, as the old saying goes, when seconds count, the police are minutes away.
So, as far as free market stuff goes, I've got a whole book called, well, two books, Everyday Anarchism and Practical Anarchism, about how this stuff can work in a free market.
But if you want...
Crime to be reduced in your community.
There are several things that you can do with the certainty of knowing that you're going to have a very strong effect on it.
And, you know, a higher IQ population is going to be less criminal.
Sadly, it's just the way that it works.
It's, of course, not a one-to-one ratio.
There are wonderfully kind and lovely people with an IQ 85 and diabolical Lex Luthor's with an IQ of 140.
But on average, in general, the higher IQ population, the better things are.
I mean, you can walk from one end of Tokyo to the other at 2 o'clock in the morning and not be worried about a thing.
There's a YouTube video of a guy who fell asleep.
On a park bench in Tokyo.
And all of the Japanese people there are helping to wake him up.
His wallet falls out of his pocket.
They make sure it goes into his pocket and it's kept secure and safe.
And as we know, crime rates among the Japanese all over the world are extraordinarily low.
Just as crime raves among blacks all over the world are extraordinarily high.
Look at South Korea.
South Korea with Seoul is the same size city.
As Mexico City, and it's ridiculously safe.
Again, you can walk from one end to the other at 2 o'clock in the morning with money hanging out of your back pocket, and you'll be pretty much statistically perfectly fine.
So you need a high IQ population.
Ethnic homogeneity is interesting, and I have much more optimism for ethnic homogeneity Sorry, I have much more optimism for ethnic diversity, for racial diversity, if the left gets off of its radical egalitarianism bandwagon and screaming racist at everyone who points out ethnic differences, or measurable ethnic differences like IQ and testosterone levels and numbers of vertebrae and brain size and brain volume and white matter and all of that sort of stuff.
So I have much more optimism for...
There's multiculturalism or diversity if we're actually dealing with the facts of the situation.
But if the left isn't going to give up on screaming racism at everyone who has a different opinion from them or different facts or real facts, then you're going to keep seeing more and more pushes for racial homogeneity, which I think is in some ways a shame, but it is just the natural backlash.
People just get tired of being called racist after a while, and if the only way they can avoid being called racist is to live in Ethnically homogenous neighborhoods, then they're going to have a desire for that.
It's a shame, but that is inevitably what is going to happen.
Peacefully raising children.
Peaceful parenting, negotiation, and giving kids very strong language skills.
It's no accident that the kids with the weakest language skills are often the kids who can be the most aggressive.
This is not because of the correlation between low IQ language skills and aggression.
But also because when you don't have words, you tend to use your fists instead, or pushing, or whatever.
And so if you have lots of conversations with your kids, you teach them how to negotiate by negotiating with your wife, your husband, and negotiating with them, then they're going to grow up to be much more peaceful, no spanking, and all that kind of stuff.
Now, this stuff is not that hard.
Certainly, the parenting stuff is very practical to implement.
What you need to do, of course, is have an agency in society that profits or can make It has the right economic incentives to work at the prevention of crime rather than this endless cure of crime which never works.
And I certainly agree with that concept.
I guess I don't see a lot of money to be made investigating the death of people who are already dead and can't pay you.
I'm sorry, can you say that again?
I may have missed that.
I guess I don't see a lot of money to be made to investigating the death of people who are essentially dead and can't pay you.
I'm sorry, perhaps you're not understanding what I mean.
So if I'm in a free society, a stateless society, then I will take out insurance policies against criminality.
And the insurance company, I call them dispute resolution organizations or DROs, the company gets paid a certain amount of money each month.
Now, if I am the victim of any kind of crime, then they have to pay through the nose, right?
Like they have to pay me $100,000 if my car gets stolen.
They have to pay me $5 million if I get murdered.
I mean, so they have every economic incentive to keep crime as low as humanly possible to prevent crime from occurring.
You know, in the same way that if you have a life insurance policy in a free market, well, they're going to care what your body mass index is.
And they're going to care whether you smoke or not.
And they're going to care what your cholesterol levels are.
And they're going to care about these kinds of things.
Because they want you to live as long as humanly possible so you can keep paying them premiums rather than them paying you death benefits.
So I just want to be clear.
You're advocating that people have, like, homicide insurance to some extent.
Not just for that, but, you know, for other things that may befall them, where the justice system would normally investigate those things.
You would have, like, a free market sort of model that would investigate those things.
How does the existing government law and order structure, how does it profit if a crime does not occur?
It largely doesn't.
No.
In fact, it profits when crime does occur.
This is true.
So the incentives are entirely incorrect.
It would be like having an insurance company that profited from you dying and had losses if you stayed alive.
It wouldn't mean that they would hire people to go out and kill you or anything.
I mean, what are they, the Clintons?
No, it would be that they would, just the incentives would be in the wrong direction.
So, and I want to make sure that you understand, I'm not talking about my system.
The whole point of a free market of goods and services is there is no system.
There's simply supply and demand.
This is something that I think would make economic sense and something I would certainly be interested in as a consumer.
But I can't tell you, here is my solution.
I think we should get rid of slavery.
Well, tell me down to every detail exactly how the cotton and the fruits and the vegetables are all going to be picked and shipped to market.
Well, there's going to be a truck here and it's going to go...
Right?
The whole point is freedom.
Like if I say I'm against arranged marriages...
Then I don't have to explain to you how everyone's going to get a husband or a wife.
So I am against the state running anything that I can...
There's nothing I've ever thought of that I think the state is better at running things except running countries into the ground.
So I'm not trying to give you a solution and then you pick apart my solution, if you want.
I mean, we can do that, but it's not like...
It doesn't disprove anything.
I'm just saying we need a state of freedom.
And in a state of freedom, incentives tend to be driven by customers rather than bureaucrats.
And I would agree 100%.
I work in healthcare and, you know, your talk in regards to the free market and healthcare is very much needed.
Just when I examine things like we're just talking about, like the law enforcement, I do tend to struggle a bit in terms of, you know, what would be the best way to model this.
But, and I did come up with the idea of what people would carry around insurance in regard to investigate their death or in the event that it did happen.
And if that's, I could see a lot of pushback From the left, because, you know, of course, the poor can't afford homicide insurance.
But I certainly think that a voluntary society would be a much better model for that.
Well, but sorry, just because the poor can't, let's say that there are, let's say there's a couple of percentage points of the population that can't afford any kind of insurance, right?
Well, first of all, who would know?
You wouldn't have it broadcast on your front lawn.
You know, like gun ownership.
I don't have any guns in the house.
You don't put that on your front lawn, right?
You get the umbrella benefits of gun ownership even if you don't have a gun in your house.
If you live in a sort of you-can-have-guns kind of country.
Because the criminals don't know if you have a gun or not.
Right?
So, first of all, the poor would benefit from the umbrella organizations that would investigate these kinds of things.
Because those organizations would be very interested in the prevention of crime.
And so they would benefit all of that, all of that way.
But let's say there's a...
And also, so then it would become increasingly cheap, because there'd be fewer and fewer criminals.
But most importantly, if there were a number of people who genuinely could not afford their own protection against criminality, well, what's wrong with charity?
I'd want to help those people, wouldn't you?
No, absolutely.
I certainly think that once you get government out of the way, charitable donations would go up considerably.
Right, right.
And just think, if the poor can't afford something, At the moment, when there's a lot of taxation, right?
And the poor do pay some indirect taxation, sales tax, and they also pay corporate tax on everything they buy because corporations have to increase the prices of what they sell.
In the US, by up to 40% because they get taxed at such an ungodly high rate as corporations.
So if the price of everything dropped, I don't know, let's just say about 40%, and if the poor didn't have huge amounts of money stripped off of them for...
Old age pensions and all the other stuff that the government pretends is going to be available for them later.
So the poor are making a lot more money.
Everything they buy costs a lot less.
I'm pretty sure they could find their way free to coming up with another 50 to 100 bucks a month for insurance against any kind of criminality.
And do you think that this insurance would also cover the incarceration of these people?
Well, I don't know because I don't know if incarceration is the best solution.
I don't know.
I genuinely don't know because incarceration is something that was invented by governments in general, right?
So I'm going to assume it's not a great idea to begin with.
But I don't know if incarceration is the right way to go.
Certainly not as it currently stands.
Recidivism rates are enormously high, like 80-90% repeat offense after incarceration.
So I've got to think that in a free market, Whatever solution there could be, I mean, one of that I remember thinking of when I was a teenager, which I'll mention here, again, I don't have an answer, this is just a possibility, is that you could have a sort of manufacturing district where people who were convicted of, let's say, non-violent crimes...
Theft and so on.
Non-violent crimes.
They could go and they could work in these factories and you'd have to calibrate it so it wouldn't be ridiculously uncompetitive.
Like, it wouldn't out-compete all of the other stuff.
I don't know exactly how it would work, but they get up and they go to work.
And if they don't go to work, then they just get bare minimum rations and a cart to sleep on.
They go to work and then they get used to getting up and going to work.
They develop marketable skills while they're in prison and a certain portion of their earnings could be set aside to pay restitution for the victims and also to give them a savings fund to access when they leave prisons.
So when they leave prison, after say a year or two, they've been getting up, they've been going to work, they've been developing skills, they've been developing self-discipline, they've been paying restitution to their victims, and they have a cozy little nest egg to get their life started when they get back out of prison.
It's a work sort of work environment.
I think that would be pretty good.
I know some of that goes on.
But I don't think there's a huge demand for making license plates when you get out into the free market.
So I don't know if incarceration is the right thing to do.
I don't know if maybe psychotherapy is the right thing to do.
And again, I know some of the stuff has been tried in various circumstances, but it's been tried by the government with, again, no direct incentive as to how to make things better.
But I can tell you this.
If you have a whole bunch of insurance companies that are guaranteeing people Or trying to guarantee people to keep them free of crime.
You're going to have the combined weight of countless numbers of the very smartest people in the field with massive economic incentives to figure out how to reduce recidivism among prisoners.
Find some way to prevent this from happening over and over and over again.
And maybe there's gene therapy.
Maybe there's some sort of epigenetic stimulation that occur.
I know that the growing of a conscience, if somebody...
Ends up as a sociopath or a psychopath.
The regrowing of a conscience is very, very tough, but I don't know.
I don't know.
It's impossible to know.
Once you get freedom, competition, and the right incentives in place, that's the very best you can aim for in terms of coming up with some kind of solution to these problems.
And so I would assume that with the right incentives in place and the right geniuses that work on the problem, They're going to come up with something way better than you and I could ever dream of, right?
I mean, like I would never have dreamed of a cell phone the way they go now, sort of 20 years ago.
So that would be...
And of course, the ultimate thing, too, is economic ostracism.
I mean, in order to live in a modern society, you need the participation of other people.
And if people are irredeemable within society, and there's no place or nobody wants to put them in a prison or pay for that...
People can always just choose to stop interacting with them economically.
Remember, if you've ever been to Disney World, Disney World is this whole private area.
You can't just go hang around in Disney World.
It's private, right?
One of the big problems with criminality is public spaces, where nobody has a direct incentive to keep people moving along, to prevent loitering, to make it secure.
But in a free society, there's no government land.
There's no government roads.
There's no government sidewalks.
Everything is like a mall.
And in a mall, they can tell you, sorry kids, you're not here to work.
You're not here to shop.
You're just here.
You've got to keep moving it along.
And so...
So many options about how criminality could be reduced, and I think in the long run virtually eliminated in society, but because we've had it turned over to the government for the past X thousands of years, the problems don't get solved.
I agree.
I agree.
I just probably needed a little bit of the insight there when I was thinking about this prior to the call.
You know, I don't...
I think you're...
Maybe assuming a bit of a personal responsibility that people would carry this insurance and there would be sort of a reset period for people to realize that everything would not be simply taken care of for them.
But you see, would you be interested, would you prefer it for your neighbor to have this kind of insurance?
Of course I would.
Okay, so there would be lots of social incentives to figure that out and figure out how to make that work.
You could set up entire neighborhoods where you say, okay, if you want to buy this house, if you want to rent this house, you have to sign this contract that says you're going to maintain your crime insurance.
There's so many different...
You have to stop thinking of how to make things happen and start thinking about how to sell.
Like, imagine you were an entrepreneur in a free society.
How would you get people to buy your service?
What amazing, creative, wonderful ideas would you come up with that would encourage people to consume your service?
Instead of being like, well, you know, there's this problem and there's that problem.
Think about it as an entrepreneur, right?
How would you create...
A neighborhood or a service provision organization, that would be most helpful to people.
You could do this in terms of national defense.
You can do this in terms of criminality.
You can do this in terms of policing criminality.
You could do this in terms of some sort of punishment or negative consequences for people who break clear and obvious moral rules.
But if you think of it as an entrepreneur, you get into a very creative mind space.
Where you're creating solutions to problems rather than being in this position, which a lot of us are in, or a lot of people are in, where you challenge other people, they come up with solutions, and you nitpick at them.
Instead, put yourself in the mindset of, okay, I really, really want to make a fortune reducing crime in society, because people would rather them not be crime.
I mean, everyone except the criminals would rather them not be crime, and even criminals don't want to be stolen from.
People will pay an enormous amount.
To not have crime in their neighborhoods.
And I see this when I see documentaries and people talking about life in the 1950s, the early 1960s, and so on.
And they say, oh yes, you know, it was a big town, but we left our doors open at night.
We'd sometimes leave them, this is before air conditioning, we'd leave them wide open so the breeze could go through the house.
Our kids would leave all of their toys and all of their bicycles on the sidewalk, on our front lawn.
We never needed to lock our cars.
Even shoplifting was relatively unheard of.
Now, what were the characteristics?
Well, there was ethnic homogeneity.
There was a relatively high IQ population.
And, well, of course, third world immigration was virtually non-existent.
And these are situations that were extraordinarily common.
I saw one of them, it was when I was doing research for my show on Joseph McCarthy, talking about that kind of stuff.
If you go back, and you can find these documentaries all over the place, on YouTube and other places, people talking about the suburbs in the 1950s, it is a kind of...
Crime-free paradise that is pretty hard to comprehend at the moment when we've got all of this.
Well, the drug war, of course, was a huge issue that popped up, really starting to accelerate the 1960s and 1970s, and the drug war has created just a massive catastrophe.
The welfare state, of course.
This is prior to the introduction of the welfare state, as it's at least known modernly.
So you had families, two-parent households.
You had mom's home with...
Similar religions, similar ethnicities and so on.
You had moms patrolling the neighborhood.
You had moms knowing.
Everybody knew each other's kids.
They all knew the standards so they could discipline other people's kids if they got out of line or did things that were dangerous and so on.
These kinds of neighborhoods are like, they're fundamentally incomprehensible to us.
Those of us who've grown up past this kind of period.
the level of security, the level of safety, the level of community involvement, the level of comfort and dangerlessness existence.
You could argue, well, it was that that created all of the sentimentality in the 60s and 70s.
And those kids grew up having no idea how dangerous the world was and so on.
And I kind of understand that.
I don't think that's, you know, we don't traumatize kids so they learn how dangerous the world is.
There are other ways of communicating that.
But you can look at times where crime was extraordinarily low.
And you can look even now at the Appalachian region in the United States, as I've talked about before.
You've got very poor people who commit virtually no crime.
So, yeah, lots of places to look, lots of answers.
It's just that nobody right now has the incentive to implement them.
And the incentives go the wrong way completely.
Well, thank you.
You're very welcome.
I appreciate the question.
It's nice to talk about voluntary society.
It's been a little while, but I'm glad to have had a chance to do it.
Thanks so much for your call.
Thank you.
All right, up next we have Lewis.
Lewis wrote into the show and said, Currently vocal activist groups are seeking to limit parental authority by casting spanking as wrongful conduct.
They are beating the drum about spanking not benefiting children, that it does not work, and even claiming that it is harmful.
The studies they use are not scientific and fly in the face of common sense.
The propaganda is regular and the liberal media regularly publish stories trying to sway the public, redefine, and demonize spanking, the parental use of force.
The goal of these groups are to allow for government intervention in the family through criminal or government dependency actions, which allow for the removal of children from parents who may use force to discipline as with spanking.
Do you believe that ultimately kids must obey their parents?
If you can't use force, you have no authority over anyone.
It is easy to understand police authority and the fact that ultimately they can use force.
We don't refer to police use of authority as violence or aggression.
Do you believe parental authority should include spanking?
The use of force to create some physical discomfort?
If not, are you not supporting the socialized parenting?
Are you aware that if a kid goes to a juvenile detention center, that the government can't use force for their disobedience?
Are you aware that all this anti-spanking propaganda is also aimed at diminishing the family unit by diminishing parental authority?
Do you think we should ban all spanking for all parents simply because some abuse the privilege?
No one would suggest that with police, but with the public, liberals always seek the lowest common denominator to treat everyone the same and increase government control.
That's from Lewis!
Well, thank you, Lewis.
I want to thank you for one of the most compact and black-holy aggregations of rhetorical questions that I've ever heard in my life, and I look forward to the conversation.
So that's some great questions there.
Well, I just want to say I'm a big fan.
I'm sorry?
Can you hear me?
Yeah, I can hear you.
I just want to say first, I am a big fan, but I did find this point of disagreement, and I figured disagreement is much more interesting than all the points that we agree on.
So I'm certainly looking forward to how you attack that question.
I know that spanking seems to be a real passionate issue for you.
So I'm here to hopefully represent some common sense on the other side that I think some of these child advocacy groups are taking things to extreme proportions like they Well, let's start with a place that I'm pretty sure we agree on, but let me know if it's not the case, which is that leftists and liberals, they don't give a shit about kids.
They don't care about kids at all.
If they cared about kids, they'd be really, really against the national debt, which is, you know, economically crippling for children right up front.
If leftists or liberals, if they cared about kids, they would vote to have more charter schools.
They would vote to have more parental control over education and all this kind of stuff.
So they don't care about children.
So the question is, why do they care about spanking?
Well, they care about spanking because they get to troll Christians.
right it's like Yeah, like if they cared about, like, do they care about gay rights, a lot of people on the left?
Well, they say that they do, but they want to bring in very anti-homosexual cultures into the West and then defend them.
So do they really care about gay rights, or do they use gay rights to troll Christians?
So I think where we agree is that when leftists say, well, we care, my kids, they care about the kids for the best interest, the children's banking is so wrong.
It's not because they care about spanking and it's not because they care about kids.
They just like to stick it to Christians.
And that has been the Olympics of the left for about 150 years or so.
And last but not least, of course, if they cared about the immoral use of force and if they say, well, spanking is wrong because it's the immoral use of force, and then you say, well, where does taxation sit in that?
Oh, no!
That's totally different.
Liberals have no problem with the use of force against usually legally disarmed citizens.
Liberals have no problem initiating the use of force.
And so it seems to me kind of precious when leftists claim to be anti-spanking, because if they have an issue with spanking being the initiation of force, then they should have An issue regarding taxation.
And the only issue that leftists seem to have regarding taxation is, can we get some more, please?
Can I get some more taxes with my taxes?
You know, a side order of taxes would be fantastic.
So does that, I mean, sort of starting from that standpoint, we may be on the same side of the track.
Yeah, the first premise is that the, how the left is using, like you say, I think you've admitted that they've hijacked This issue for a specific purpose.
So that's the first thing that I wanted you to recognize because it's actually growing government in a lot of different ways that people don't realize.
And what it's doing is realize that if you have an issue such as spanking, which is, let's just say, before debating the merits or the evils of it, 90% of the people out there agree that sometimes a spanking is appropriate.
What you've done is essentially 90% of the population have, according to these advocates or these government agencies now, are child abusers.
So that gives them the right to intervene in your family because you disagree with basically their Their ideology about this issue.
So taking this issue of spanking, which is essentially a Something that most people do agree with.
They've taken that issue and what I'm pointing out is how they're using this issue for their own purposes in order to expand government and essentially enter into the family relationship.
And that's a danger of, I think, your philosophy or some of the things, the way you're saying some of these, what do you call it, these...
Psychologists and so-called behavioral scientists and they're putting out these reports that, you know, I think we need to look at skeptically.
Go ahead.
Right.
No, and I think that's an important consideration that...
There's another thing that I will say, too, and then I want to get in sort of the ethics and some of the examples that you've pointed out.
The second thing that I would like to mention...
Regarding spanking, is that if we're going to say, and I think it's true, but if we're going to say that people who are religious, and I'm going to go with Christian here, because it's the religion I respect significantly.
Yeah, I happen to be Christian.
Okay, good.
So we're on the same side as far as having some, well, you probably have even more respect for it than I do.
But if we're going to look at that, And I'm trying to think how to put this delicately, not with regards to Christians, but with regards to non-Christians.
Because Christians seem to be able to take a punch pretty well, but other people got these glass jaws and cauliflower ears, but...
We're used to it.
Christians are more likely to spank, and Christians are more likely to spend more time interacting with their children in a very deep philosophical and moral way.
Because Christians want to...
I agree with that.
Explain Christianity and explain good and evil and Satan and God and heaven and hell and the saints, if that's your cup of tea, and the Ten Commandments and, you know, the story of the flood and Genesis.
Like, it goes on.
So there's a huge amount of conceptual investment.
Yeah, go ahead.
They have a very specific life philosophy that they want to pass down to their kids.
Which is language-based.
Which is what?
Sorry, it's language-based.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Right, so if you want to explain the Christian worldview, and I don't mean that to diminish, right?
I just wanted to, you know, differentiate it from, say, an atheist worldview.
If you want to explain to your children what it means to be a Christian, you've got your storybooks, you've got your pictures, you've got your drawing contests, you've got your colorings, you've got your animated Bibles, you've got your conversations, you've got church, you've got, like, you invest an enormous amount Of language,
time, communication, and explanation, and answering questions, and back and forth, and some of the Socratic reasoning that's going to come up with kids, assuming you're not just, you know, believe in Jesus or I'll hit you with a bat, which I think is extraordinarily rare.
So there is a lot of investment that goes along in Christianity with creating a comprehensible, moral, universal, ethical worldview that That is highly motivating and allows for the internalization of universal ethics in a way that...
Pretty much universally, agnostics and atheists don't have and don't do.
So Christians, and I'm sort of reminded of my conversation with Dennis Prager, which has been rolling around in my brain like a mishandled bowling ball since it happened.
But that conversation where he said, look, if you don't have a God, you don't have any way To establish universal moral rules.
Now, I've got my whole book on this, but putting that to one side, given that that's still known to a relatively small percentage of the population, what can atheists and agnostic parents do to instill morality in their children?
Well, it's pretty easy for Christians.
God is all good.
God is all powerful.
God is all knowing.
God says this.
Any questions?
Right?
I mean, it's done and dusted, so to speak.
And the conversation starts from there.
But the kids grow up.
What do kids need?
The kids need boundaries, clear rules, legitimate authority that they respect, and so on.
God and Christianity is a pretty good way, compared to agnosticism, nihilism, atheism, you name it.
It's a pretty good way to get...
It gives children the security of knowing or believing that morals are bigger than man, they're bigger than society, they're bigger than laws on the books, they're bigger than the lives of politicians, they're bigger than mere culture or tradition and so on, that there are universal moral absolutes that transcend anything that is human and attain the almost geometric perfection of the divine.
Whereas for atheists, they say, well, what is good?
Well, you know, we have these traditions, we have these cultures, we have these customs, and it's upsetting to people if you steal from them.
Like, it's just a bunch of soupy-goopy nonsense when it comes to absolutes, when it comes to universalities.
That's why we refer to them as the lost.
I was saying, that's why we refer to them as the lost.
The concept of the lost people, that they don't have this method or a philosophy of living.
That is coherent and that supports community and all the rest that the Christian offers to Christian groups.
Right.
Absent philosophy, Christianity is better than atheism.
I will say that.
I don't think that's even a shock to people who've been listening to me for a while.
But Christianity gives you the certainty of universal ethics.
And again, I think I've cracked that, not philosophically, but...
That's where I stand at the moment.
Now, Christians who provide this kind of security of universal ethics, of absolute right and wrong, of individual conscience, of the capacity to elevate us from being mere meat mattresses of biochemical reactions, right, which is the great danger of the Secularist worldview.
I mean, I've met very few Christian determinists.
I know that there are a few, and the Calvinist side, everything's predetermined to some degree, but I've met very few Christian determinists, but dear God, dear God alive, I must say, quite a few atheist and agnostic determinists.
And determinism strips our humanity, our moral choice, our willpower, our individuality from us.
It It's not arguments, I'm just talking about consequences, but it deprecates the glory and beauty and uniqueness of being human, of being alive and in possession of a rational consciousness.
So, what I've been thinking about since you sent in this question, and I'll shut up in a second and let you take it from there, but what I've been thinking about is...
If Christians are more likely to spank, and Christians, of course, are far more likely to provide to children universal ethics, free will, free choice, moral responsibility, then maybe I think spanking is minus three, but all that other stuff is plus ten.
Right?
So if atheists can only give you plus three worldview, comprehensible moral worldview, And let's say they don't spank, so they don't get the minus three.
Right?
Then they get plus three and maybe plus another three for not spanking.
Let's say the Christians get plus ten but minus three.
Well, there's still one up from...
The atheists and the agnostics.
And that's one of the ways I think when you talk about, well, there are kids who are spanked who turn out really well, morally centered, they have certainty, security, productive members of their society.
And, you know, my instinct is that the numbers are actually far worse than that.
I think that a lot of the atheists end up in negative territory, and a lot of Christians end up in positive territory, even with what I consider a negative called spanking, factored in.
But I was just thinking about this question.
Would I rather, like, in an imaginary situation, as my childhood was unusual, but if I sort of had the choice and said, you know, before floating in this sort of platonic ideal world, this world of forms before I'm born, I'm sort of floating over and I say, okay, well, I can be born into a Christian household with occasional spanking but a comprehensible universal moral worldview and free will and the glory of human existence and all of that kind of stuff, or...
I can be born...
And great conversations about deep and important issues.
You know, I remember going to church and there were important conversations about deep and important issues.
You had, of course, the sermons and your response to them and conversations about it and so on.
There's not really, I mean, I guess this show a little bit, but there's not really much...
They're not really much of an equivalent on the atheist side.
There aren't, you know, churches of philosophy.
I know that there's sort of a few kicking around, but it's certainly nothing like what goes on in Christianity.
So would I rather have occasional spanking, but a very clear, comprehensible, deep, and involved set of parental standards being transferred to me?
Or would I rather be born to a rather nihilistic, deterministic, atheistic household, where maybe I wouldn't be spanked, But I'm morally adrift.
Does that make any sense?
Yeah, it does.
It absolutely does.
And that's one of the big challenges, I think, for Christian cultures now, is that all these These things are being attacked.
And also parental authority, which is, you know, I would then argue not just from a religious perspective, but from a civic perspective.
And as far as America goes in free societies, without parental authority, you really don't have a free society.
It all begins there.
I mean, our whole existence is...
It's not just to, let's say, be happy ourselves, but the greatest source of happiness is our children and being able to pass on our experiences, our wealth, what we've learned to our children.
And that sometimes requires And deserves a certain, you know, a certain amount of authority.
Once the government takes that piece of authority and you essentially become just a babysitter for whatever doctrines they want to, you know, inundate our kids with, you know, now you have, it's even worse with the, you know, iPhones, you know, you've got constant messages coming through and constant, you know, with the TV was the beginning and now it's escalated to this.
And this diminishing parental authority, I believe, is having serious effects on society.
And there are these advocacy groups that are then using this to really, it's turning into the redistribution and displacement of children, like you saw with Indian populations and different I
saw one many, many years ago at a film festival called Once Were Warriors.
And that was similar.
But no, I mean, the same thing happened in Canada with these, they called residential schools, where they took, you know, in this sort of desire to, let's just get people to integrate, let's get the native population, the indigenous population to integrate.
And they took the children away.
And they put them in these boarding schools.
And it was the usual horror show of child abuse and molestation and rape.
And I mean, it got awful stuff.
And it didn't work.
Right, the government, that government solution is just is hard.
It certainly increases government.
And it certainly increases the power of government.
It also increases one of the agendas that I think you've discussed, which is this diminishing of the family unit.
So, this is the alert.
What you say as far as the occasional spanking, that's really what we're talking about.
That's really what it should be.
But as far as, you know, depending on the parent and how occasional it is, it might be that You know, you received one spanking at one time in your life and that really taught you this important lesson for you.
You know, so to ban all spanking and to ban, let's say, the practice, demonize the practice and make it because one parent or because some parents, you know, abuse it, so now all parents, I think it's something that is diminishing our culture.
And like I say, parental authority specifically As this becomes more pervasive also in legal circles and governments are, especially in the last 10 years, Hillary Clinton, if she would have been elected, She was one of the pioneers of the current child welfare system.
And her and Walter Mondale essentially dreamed up this system, which right now rewards the counties and local governments for removing as many kids as they can.
They get paid by the kid that they take over, right?
So they have direct financial incentive to bust up families.
And if they diagnose the kid with some issue, like, for example, ADD, they get an extra four grand.
It's like the moms or the dads.
If they can get their kids diagnosed, if they're on welfare and they get their kids diagnosed as something that the pretend medicine of psychopharmaceuticals can, quote, cure, right?
Brain imbalance.
Then they get additional.
Welfare checks because their kid is mentally disabled.
So paying people to create these diagnoses and, you know, people wonder why the diagnoses are exploding.
It's, well, whatever you fund, you're going to get more of, right?
Are you still there?
Yes.
Okay.
So let me tell you one other thing that we agree with, then we can talk about the disagreements, or at least I think Yeah, that sounds more fun.
I think that we agree with...
The other thing, too, is that...
I'm from New York, so I prefer disagreement.
Yeah, no, we'll get there.
We'll get there.
We'll build some bridges first.
And hopefully have a different outcome than London Bridge recently.
But...
A lot...
Some of the parents...
Some of the more secular parents that I've read about...
Or heard tale of...
Are oddly not involved...
Like everyone's kind of in the house, but on their tablets or cell phones.
And there's just a whole bunch of flyby stuff that goes on.
And as a parent, for myself, it's like I've got endless things to talk about with my daughter, because philosophy and self-knowledge and all that kind of stuff.
And Christians, of course, have an enormous amount of things to talk about with their children.
Like, don't go to hell.
I mean, that sounds kind of silly, but it's very real.
Like, you are responsible for, or you're significantly responsible for the end destination of your children's moral choices that result in eternal salvation or salvation.
Damnation, right?
And so, there is a funny thing that I think that goes on in more secular parenting, which is, there's a lot of busy work, there's a lot of activities, and there sure as hell seems to be a lot of electronics, but I don't know that there's a lot of really meaningful interaction.
I don't know if there's a lot of great conversations.
I don't know if there's a lot, not a lot of analysis.
Let me give you a good term.
As Christians, we embrace a purpose-driven life.
So the Christian faith gives us a purpose, and we try to instill that purpose into our children.
And so that includes an array of beliefs, an array of things that are positive for, let's say, all aspects of health.
Right.
So there's a lot to talk about, and there's a lot of reasons to communicate with your children.
And even some of the people who are into peaceful parenting, it seems to fall to me in the category called unparenting.
We're kind of like roommates who pay the bills and are taller.
And there's a lot of uninvolvement, not a lot of the million course corrections that kids need to grow up in things to healthy and flourishing adults.
So people, when they hear me talk about peaceful parenting, peaceful parenting is enormously involved parenting.
It sounds like the non-aggression principle, like, well, if you don't hit your kids, you're a great parent.
It's like, nope.
Right.
No, no, no.
In fact, you can be a worse parent by not spanking.
And we know this because children who are ignored will sometimes provoke their parents just to get a negative reaction because for a kid, a negative reaction is better than no reaction.
Hostility is better than indifference because indifference would generally be fatal.
Parents wouldn't bother feeding you or wouldn't care about it, would forget you somewhere.
And so, peaceful parenting is...
Not saying, okay, I'm just not going to do stuff.
I'm not going to hit my kids.
I'm not going to yell at my kids.
It's like, okay...
But, you know, there's lots of people I don't hit or yell at in the world, and they don't love me.
You know, that's just, I would say, necessary, but nowhere close to sufficient to what it is to be a parent, to talk, to find out about your kids, to reveal yourself to your kids, to explain how the world works, why it's important to be good, what evil is.
I mean, these are all very powerful and important conversations that kids are generally very hungry for, particularly boys.
But, um...
So this idea that if you don't hit your kids, you're a great parent.
It's like, well, you cannot hit your kids, and that can be part of your general strategy of avoidance and uninvolvement.
And the whole point, you know, I was talking about this with my daughter today, and I was saying, you know, if you were, like, if you didn't need any more parenting, it would be because you're an adult.
And you can't, like, we can't just turn you loose, you know?
I mean, at some point, you're going to be turned loose.
You're going to grow.
She doesn't ever want to think about living somewhere else, so we didn't really go into that.
But, you know, you're old enough to drive, old enough to have a job, old enough to whatever, right?
And then, you know, parenting, you know, we can still be there as available as a resource, but there's a direct parenting.
Parenting staff will be mostly behind us.
But, you know, she's eight, so we've got a ways to go.
We've got a ways.
She's still like...
What, 15, 12?
She's like, yeah.
That's an awesome age, by the way.
It's a great age.
You must be enjoying that.
Yeah, it's wonderful.
And so...
I don't like, like, Christians have a very strong incentive, as you say, purpose-driven, a very strong incentive to get involved in their children's lives, to know about their friends, to know about the values they're being exposed to, to make sure that the good values are retained and bad values are avoided or rejected and so on.
Now, obviously, you can look at the extremes, like, and say, well, you know, they're those hell houses where kids are dragged in with these demon recreations.
This is where you're going to end up if you hang around with Billy...
But that's like judging social drinkers by raging alcoholics.
That's not a fair standard and certainly not representative of the vast majority of Christians.
So that's where...
I prefer the Christian approach because it's very involved, and it matters, and there's lots of conversations, and there's lots of negotiations, and there's lots of universal goodness, and here's how you get there, and here's why you're responsible, and here's why it's important.
I mean, that's great stuff.
And I think a lot of those Christian kids end up more philosophical than the kids growing up with nihilistic, deterministic, avoidant atheism.
Unparenting is like the R-selected stuff, and Christian parenting and involved moral instruction parenting, that's all K-selected.
But the unparenting is, oh, they're like plants.
You water them and you expose them to some sunlight and you stand back and watch them grow.
It's like, no, no, no, that's not how kids grow up.
That's where we agree.
Now, if you want to get to the New York quarter of things, well, there's a moral case.
Spanking is the initiation of force.
It's not self-defense, and it certainly is force, because if you do it to an adult, it's called assault, right?
So it is the initiation of force.
It's not in self-defense.
So, it's not like I have a distaste for spanking.
I mean, I kind of do, but that's not, you know, as a philosopher, I can't sort of sit there and say, well, it feels bad, man.
That's not an argument.
Otherwise, I'd be a social justice warrior.
But logically, it is the initiation of force.
It is violence not used in self-defense.
And therefore, it's immoral if, and this is an important consideration...
If there are alternatives that achieve good ends, right?
So let me sort of give you an example.
A blind guy is about to walk into traffic, right?
I have a baseball bat in my right hand.
Now, if I hit him on the chest as hard as I can with a baseball bat, he's not going to walk into traffic, right?
Right?
But surely there's a nicer way of doing it.
You know what I mean?
To achieve the same end.
Of course.
And so if I just grab him gently and pull him back, I don't harm him or hurt him and I achieve the same end.
Let me speak to that in a minute.
And that's part of one of the things I noticed as far as your language when you describe...
Let's say spanking.
It's very, you know, violence and aggression and hitting.
And all these things have the implicit harm involved in them.
So what's happened is that we've taken what is, you know, an age-old, like the most simplest basic, you know, parenting tool, right?
Which is, you know, let's say a smack on the behind or whatever, right?
You know, even cavemen were able to do that, right?
And we've taken it to— Cavemen peed next to their beds, you know.
I don't know that we want to go with the caveman justification.
Let's call it a rudimentary—you know, it's a basic rudimentary thing that, you know, even though people with 87 IQs can at least manage their kids differently.
Discipline, right?
Keep them from running off or whatever it is.
So you have this basic thing, and it's done.
Obviously, these parents are not doing this to harm their kids.
They're doing it because they see a danger.
They're doing it to keep them from something that is wrong.
And this notion of that, now this is considered violence and hitting.
No, no, no.
Come on, Lewis.
I'm sorry to interrupt you, but come on.
This is something that happens with depressing regularity when this topic comes up.
So, on the one hand, the pro-spanking people, they say, well, you know, it guides children, it gives them something to remember, it really changes their behavior.
Now, if it's going to be a strong enough physical intervention that they remember it and it fundamentally changes their behavior, don't talk to me about a little tap on the butt, okay?
Oh, no, no, I'm saying that's the beginning.
I mean, the thing here is that With a spanking, what you're trying to do is give a physical experience to the person, to the child, that changes their behavior and the amount of force that you use when you You're saying as far as is there something less available,
every parent should be, you know, is interested in using the least amount of force in order to get the result that they're looking for.
Good, good.
Okay, so my question is, why do you need force at all?
If I disapprove of something my daughter does, she's like, oh, you know, I'm sorry, you know, and it's not like she just folds immediately, but she knows I disapprove of something she's doing.
I'm like, Isabel, hey, hey, stop, stop, stop.
What are you doing?
She's like, what, what?
You know, she looks at me kind of wide-eyed, and it's like, why?
She knows I disapprove, and it matters to her that I disapprove.
So why do I need more than that?
No, don't get me wrong.
It matters to me if she disapproves of something, too.
So, you know, it's not like this dictatorial Stalin thing.
But why do I need more than disapproval in conversation?
Here's the thing.
First of all, it depends on the child.
So you might have a girl or a boy.
You might have a black child, an Asian child.
There's so many different distinctions, so many different temperaments, so many different people.
Well, for black kids, it's way worse to spank.
Than just about any other ethnicity, it's way worse to spank, which is why, you know, I did the Zimmerman video years ago, but this whole anti-spanking thing that went out to a lot, like way, way over a million, million and a half people counting the podcast.
Because blacks have this warrior gene, right?
Which means that physical aggression tends to provoke, on average, more of a negative response, more negative behavior, more aggressive behavior on the part of black kids, particularly the boys.
And this warrior gene thing is important, right?
As I've talked about in some of my videos, if you have certain kids with certain genetic tendencies, 100% of them who are exposed to physical aggression and abuse and so on, I don't know, you're going to say the question is whether it's abuse or not.
But you don't know how your kid is going to react.
That's the whole point.
You don't know if your kid is going to react in a more hostile way to spanking.
It's like, well, you don't know if smoking is going to kill you or not.
That's why you don't smoke, because you don't know.
But how should parents raise their children, based on their own experience or based on the experiences of some so-called expert who's never raised their kid?
You're talking to a philosopher, which means that you should guide your life according to moral principles.
You should guide your life according to moral principles.
Thou shalt not initiate the use of force.
Oh, no, no, no, no.
See, that's the thing.
The use of force is not something that is wrong, especially in, you know, Christianity doesn't say that the use of any force is wrong.
No, no, no.
Hey, man, you're strawmanning me right away.
What did I say?
Thou shalt not what?
You said use force.
No, no, no, no.
Thou shalt not initiate the use of force.
Self-defense, I'm down with 150%.
That might be true with, let's say, between adults, between that sort of thing.
But when you're talking about children, again, what I was getting at, what a parent tries to do with a spanking is not hurt their kid.
They're not trying to use overwhelming force.
First of all, they probably have used an array of different tactics.
And depending on this child, this child just might be an explorer or on that day they want to test the boundary.
And it's a parent's responsibility to provide that boundary.
And if you don't provide the boundary, what's going to happen to them is they'll probably have to deal with government intervention in their lives.
No, no, no, but this is not an argument.
You understand?
Okay, go ahead.
This is just, well, really bad things happen if you don't spank, and therefore spanking is the best outcome, right?
This is why I brought up the guy wandering into traffic, right?
You can hit him in the chest with a baseball bat, or you can gently restrain him from going into...
You want to use the least amount of aggression or coercion or whatever it is in a situation.
So what you're saying is it's much worse if you don't spank, right?
Right.
No, it can be.
I'm saying it can be because...
Based on what?
Based on what?
Well, here's the thing.
We have all different parenting techniques.
Okay, you've got to start making some arguments.
Stop just saying stuff.
I'm making moral arguments.
I've made fact-based arguments.
You're just saying stuff.
Now, if you want to have a philosophical conversation, fantastic.
But don't just assert things.
Well, I don't want to say that, you know, obviously, we're not saying that all spanking or that spanking should be the only disciplinary method.
It never is.
And that's why it's unrealistic.
Still just saying stuff.
You know, man, you're still just...
Are you going to respond to the argument that it is the initiation of force to hit your children?
Because we're talking about hitting your children.
And if you just say, well, you don't really mean to hurt them.
Of course you mean to hurt them.
You're trying to negatively condition them with a pain response.
It doesn't work if you don't hurt them.
No, absolutely not.
There's the issue.
So there's the issue.
You're not trying to negatively condition them.
But however, we live in...
Wait, wait, wait.
It's punishment.
What do you mean you're not trying to negatively condition them?
It's punishment.
No, no.
It's not punishment.
It's not cheesecake.
You're trying to teach them.
No, but you're hitting them.
You're trying...
You're trying to negatively condition them to avoid certain behaviors through the inflection of physical pain.
That's what spanking is.
No, no.
Let me give you an example.
No, no, no.
You're hitting your children in order to cause them pain and or fear or both in order to have them stop doing something or avoid doing something.
Wait, are you saying spanking is not hitting your children?
I'm saying it's not hitting your children.
No, what it is, is you might swat their buttocks.
You might...
No, you're hitting them.
Okay, let me ask you this.
Can you do it to an adult with no negative consequences?
Here's the thing.
You hit somebody in a bar fight.
You get it?
You hit somebody in a bar fight.
You hit somebody to damage them.
That's not the intention.
That's not the purpose of spanking.
No, no, I didn't say it was the same as an assault in a bar fight.
My question is, can you go up to an adult and hit them on the behind or pull them over your lap and hit them on the behind because they do something that you think is wrong or bad?
That's something you do in the context of raising kids.
I mean, that's obviously...
No, you're saying it's not violent, but if it's not violent, why can't you do it to adults?
So, for instance, handshaking is not violent.
I can handshake a child.
I can also handshake an adult.
There's no assault in that.
Hugging, not violent.
Offering someone a lick of your ice cream, not violent.
You can do it to children, you can do it to adults.
If you can't do it to an adult, if it's against the law, if it's considered assault...
No, no, no.
Look, you're responsible.
Then it's violent.
Here's the thing.
You're responsible for teaching your kids all about life.
Not just rainbows and unicorns.
You're changing the subject.
I'm noticing that you're changing the subject.
I'm talking about the use of force.
The use of force here.
A parent is going to try to give a physical experience.
After a lot of other things haven't worked out.
And that's what a spanking is going to do.
A physical experience.
You know what else is a physical experience?
A roller coaster.
Driving.
Dancing is a physical experience.
You just need to call it for what it is.
You're hitting a child.
I mean, I can read you the long and boring definition, but you need to be honest with me about you are hitting a child, you're inflicting pain and fear on a child in order to change that child's behavior.
You're using language that is, like I said, with a connotation that a parent is trying to hurt and harm their child.
No, no, no.
I understand that the end goal...
No, no, listen.
Listen.
No, no, no.
I understand.
You're talking about the end goal.
The end goal, I understand, is not to hurt your child in the same way that the dentist may drill your tooth and it may feel like hell, but his goal is to make you better.
His goal is to fill your cavity or do your root canal or whatever it is that's going on.
I understand that.
I understand that.
But what the dentist does hurts.
Now, he's not trying to make you stop eating candy, although I'm sure he might be happy if you do.
But spanking is hitting a child.
Now, I didn't say beating, although statistically a child experiences the two as pretty much the same.
But you're hitting a child.
See, that's exactly, that's the problem.
Since you're using that language, hitting a child, which is something you use also, you hit somebody in a bar fight and you hit somebody.
No, I would use punch more than hit.
Well, you can use, the word hit can mean one thing, to connect with an object, in other words, hitting a target, or you can use hit in the way of causing harm to somebody else.
I hit somebody.
Yeah, the technical definition is to bring one's hand or a tool or weapon, and here we're just talking about a hand, to bring one's hand into contact with someone or something quickly and forcefully.
Right.
But here's the thing.
The difference between a HIIT and a SWOT is that what a parent is doing is tempering and measuring and providing a physical experience of discomfort to the child.
That's what they're doing.
And so when you don't hit a fly, right?
We know that we swat a fly.
Why is that?
Because you're not going to punch a fly on a wall.
You have a way.
There's a way and a method of doing certain things.
And when you're disciplining a child, you're swatting the child's butt up.
Yeah, you know, when you swat a fly, it dies, right?
Which the fly might experience as something violent.
I don't know that this is exactly serving your argument the way that you want it to.
The reason why you swat the fly is because you don't want to break the wall or break the window in the process of swatting the fly.
In other words, there's a measurement of force.
Swat is a measured response.
It means that there's control behind it.
It's not unleashing an amount of force to harm and hurt something.
Wait, are you saying spanking is not supposed to hurt?
I'm saying spanking is supposed to cause discomfort.
Now, when you say hurt, should it leave the child in pain?
Of course not.
Should there be a sting and something that affects the child, gives them a physical experience?
Of course.
It should provide some physical discomfort.
Okay, so it should hurt.
Well, physical discomfort...
No, physical discomfort is like when your leg falls asleep.
Physical discomfort is when you have to stand washing dishes for an hour.
I mean, it's supposed to startle and sting, right?
It has to negatively condition the child to the point where the child wants to avoid certain behaviors.
Look, if it doesn't change the child's behavior, then it's just venting.
It's just abuse, right?
The whole point of spanking is to change the child's behavior, right?
If you're not doing it to change the child's behavior, then you're just lashing out and being a jerk as a parent.
But if your goal is to change the child's behavior, then it must be startling and memorable enough that the child changes his or her behavior.
So don't give me this, it's a tiny little thing, because if it's a tiny little thing, it's not going to alter the child's behavior.
If it's big enough to alter the child's behavior, then it's big enough to be painful.
I think that's where parenting comes in, and it depends on the parent.
So you might have a parent that may have tried giving them a physical experience, a spanking, in order to change their behavior.
Maybe it worked.
Maybe it didn't.
Maybe they tried talking afterwards.
Maybe the issue escalated.
Maybe it didn't.
Parenting is an art.
So it's so difficult to say what is right in all cases.
That's why the autonomy of parents is so important.
So incredibly important.
And understanding what a parent is really trying to do here is, when you say this negative reinforcement, are you saying that we should never use negative reinforcement in parenting, in teaching?
Lewis, what are you talking about?
Is that reality?
What are you talking about?
What have I ever said we should never use negative reinforcement of any kind?
Do you remember I talked about disapproving of something my daughter does?
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, come on.
I mean, I know you've got a position to defend, but I'm not willing to chase you around the block if you're just going in circles, okay?
We've got to listen to each other if we're going to get anywhere, right?
I'm going to listen.
I'm going to listen.
Thank you.
Okay, because, you know, you're kind of talking yourself into a pretty tall tree here, and I'm too old to climb, so.
Okay.
Now, statistically, statistically spanking does not change behavior.
According to the studies, the research, it does not change behavior.
Children will comply for a moment or two, and then in general, on the vast majority of cases, they'll go back to doing what they did before.
These are all based on Gershoff, isn't it?
That's a variety of studies.
For those who want to know, we've got the truth about crime when we go into the war regime.
We've got the truth about spanking.
A couple of interviews with Gershoff, a couple of interviews with other people, but it's a wide variety of research.
These folks are activists.
Not only that, if you look at Gershoff's studies, they were doing studies from parents that the only discipline method they used was spanking.
That's not even realistic.
No parent who truly uses spanking.
Wait, wait.
The only discipline method that these people used was spanking?
In the study.
They never raised their voice.
They never expressed disapproval.
They never used timeouts.
They never yelled.
The only thing just went from zero to spanking.
Nothing else whatsoever.
Because she aggregated...
More than 80 different studies to get the meta-analysis, right?
So are you saying that in all 80 of the studies that she did her meta-analysis of, the parents never expressed disapproval.
They never attempted to coach their children or guide their children.
They never set up clear rules with consequences.
They never raised their voices.
They never yelled.
They never expressed disapproval.
They would just randomly hit their children.
That's the only correction method that was available in all 80 studies.
Okay.
I'm sure that they had discussions with the kid and they were able to talk to the child, but the only discipline method that at least, whether or not it was all studies or not, I did review that study a while back, and at least one or some of them were based on that paradigm, that the only discipline method that the parent used was spanking.
Does that seem believable to you?
I mean, I don't know, even parents who are bad parents and abusive parents.
That would only use spanking.
Well, that would only use spanking.
I mean, my mom was violent.
She never just used violence.
There were lots of other things.
So I guess my question is, well, which study are you talking about?
In Gershoff's study, I'm 100% sure that I... No, hang on, hang on.
Gershoff did a meta-analysis.
So she examined the results of, like, 80-plus studies.
Study of studies, right.
She did a study of the studies.
Right.
So when you say Gershoff's study...
She didn't do the testing directly.
I mean, she may have another context, but she did a meta-analysis.
So which of the 80 plus studies are you talking about that you say that's just this one?
That I admit I'm not sure.
I do know when I read her reports, her, I call it, it's not a study.
What is it that she, her thesis or her paper?
Meta-analysis.
What is it called?
It's called a meta-analysis where you aggregate and attempt to normalize the results of a variety of different studies.
I read her paper and at least, I'm not sure if it was all of them, but at least it discusses one of the studies or some of the analysis that she did was based on this paradigm.
So I would encourage you to take a look at that and review See, I've got to tell you, Lewis, if I was going into a public debate about spanking, I've got to tell you, I'd have my references handy.
Oh, no.
Well, hey, listen, I'm sorry I could...
Find out about that.
I'll have to get...
I don't want to say 100%.
Hang on.
We're going to move on to the next caller.
But why don't you go and look that stuff up, get the citations, and I want to be fair.
I mean, if there's something there, I obviously want to hear about it and know about it.
So we'll take another caller.
Just ping Mike when you're ready, and we will come back to you when you've had a chance to look this stuff up.
Because...
You know, Dr.
Groshev should have a fair shake in this as well.
I'm sure you would agree with that, and I don't want to leave it there, but I'm not going to sit here and try and look it up right now because I don't even know what to look for at the moment.
So hang tight.
Have a look up.
Ping us when you go, and I'm going to bring you back in, and we'll try and splice this in so it makes a bit more continuity.
But right now, let's move on to the next one.
I hope I can find it by the time you're working on this.
Okay, I'll do that.
Alright, up next we have John.
John wrote in and said, As a professional engineer and innovator, I find myself working in an industry dominated by people who are, as a colleague of mine very aptly puts it, professional careerists.
Engineers who rise in an organization just by being on all the right committees and giving management the answers that they want to hear.
They don't have original thoughts or make decisions.
My question is whether you think this is just a natural phenomenon in a mature industry, or is it the result of modern culture?
Regardless, as an individual motivated by a desire to be creative, what should I be doing with my career?
That's from John.
Hey man, how you doing tonight?
I'm doing pretty good, Stefan.
A lot to be grateful for.
I think the world's going crazy over here in the UK, but otherwise, yeah, otherwise great.
Jeremy Corbyn is a fan of Venezuela.
Just wanted to mention that.
So if you enjoy how Venezuela is, please try and give this man more political power, but then don't complain when you end up losing your beer belly and your bone marrow.
What you don't understand is Jeremy Corbyn's going to use the kind of socialism that works, whereas in Venezuela they use the bad kind.
Yes, the emergency backup socialism that everyone's been holding in reserve for the last 150 years and 150 million bodies, the emergency backup, this one totally works, socialism.
You know, I would just suggest that they might want to try using that just a little bit sooner so that it could be a little bit safer.
But yes, emergency backup socialism, just about to solve it all and turn this whole thing around.
Oh, lordy.
You know, you'd think with the sum total of human knowledge being available in everybody's groin these days, you know, like slowly irradiating your testicles with radiation, you'd think having the sum total of human knowledge, human experience, and the works of Ludwig von Mises available in everyone's groin that we might avoid repeating the same mistakes of the past, but you'd be wrong, it seems.
Well, I try to have these conversations, but sometimes I get through to people.
It's quite nice when I do, but a lot of people are very resistant.
Right, right.
Well, I'm going to try to not have too many rants, but I'm probably going to fail ahead of time.
I will.
Enjoy.
I mean, I'm not an engineer, but I did a hell of a lot of coding and research in design and development as an entrepreneur.
And my God, we built some beautiful cathedrals of code.
Oh, it was so good.
You know, I had...
Entire application builders that we could use to build our databases for customers.
I had a layer back in the day when this was really tough.
I had a layer that analyzed Windows programs and recreated them on the web.
It was a thing of beauty and could translate on the fly to a wide variety of languages.
Just like amazing architectural stuff.
And then the business people came along.
Oh, you people are very productive.
I love those flying typing brain fingers that you've got magically making money out of that keyboard.
I don't even know if mine is attached sometimes, but you people are just wonderful.
I think we can make a fortune out of you on the stock market.
Of course, I'm never going to learn anything about what you do, but I do know rich people who would like to invest in something that you people do, whatever incomprehensible thing it is.
So I'll tell you what, let's have, I don't know, six or seven CEOs or members of the board in about 12 to 18 months as people cycle in and out and try and pump up the stock price.
Oh, has everything fallen apart?
Oh, yeah.
That's a shame.
I thought you could tie powder and make up for all of our incompetent management and money-hungry, blood-sucking, squid-tentacle extraction of your youthful vitality, creativity, and energy.
I guess we'll move on to the next company while it's still twitching and has blood for us to feed on.
So, yes, I've had some experience when the money people move in and take a long, slow economic piss all over the fires of your heat-seeking and money-seeking creativity.
It is a challenge.
My solution?
Well, I now yell in my basement rather than work for a corporation.
But it actually gets worse, Stefan, if you'd like me to give a little background on what happened.
Yeah.
Um, basically, I, I was an engineer, I used to work for the government, I used to be in a state funded science organization, and I decided to get out and found this wonderful little innovative company.
Yeah, it was funded by high net worth individuals and run by a couple of amazing engineers.
And I joined and I said to myself at the time, if I can find a A woman I feel the same way about as my job, I'll marry her.
That was how I sort of felt about my work.
I like that old meme.
It's like, ladies, you need to find a man who looks at you the way that John McCain looks at unnecessary wars.
Anyway, go ahead.
Yeah, it was all going great until about a year after I started with the company, one of the engineers came in and said, hey, good news, everybody.
We've got a government grant.
And...
We have a lot of money which we can now use to fund a huge fuckton of unnecessary overhead.
Hey, you know what we've really missed here?
A giant HR department and massive amounts of compliance departments.
And you know what?
Another couple of layers of bureaucrats will really, really smooth the way to getting stuff to market.
Oh no, there's nothing worse for a company than being very successful sometimes.
Go on.
Yeah, we need the project managers.
But the thing that...
It was the upper management, though, that the thing they don't tell you when you start taking government money is that you need a leader of your organisation who will sing all the right songs to your new paymasters.
So we have a...
I don't want to be too specific about titles or anything, but the person running the company, I would call him a politician.
Sure.
In his manner.
So it was a slow process.
You need those people who can speak that special kind of satanic Esperanto.
The sort of whispers of, well, we'll give you all the money in the world.
Trust me, it'd be nothing but strings attached.
But good luck being creative with all these restrictions.
Now, they're going to be soft restrictions.
They're going to come in slowly.
And here's your new binder of procedures.
Oh, I can't breathe.
Yeah.
The thing was I'd sort of been lulled into believing that we're in a company where you start working for a boss who says your opinion matters and then you go and talk to them and your opinion really matters and they listen to you and it's amazing.
And then all of a sudden a new boss comes along and says, oh, my door's always open.
So I went in there and said, well, I'm slightly concerned about the way our culture is changing, these new rules and new ways that we're working and so on.
So I'd like to give you some thoughts on how we can keep the old culture going and how we can keep coming up with all these great ideas.
And it was like I was talking Martian.
I've never felt that I have been...
Well, except, sorry, to be fair, people from Mars have never screwed you out of a company and a culture, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, they land with the ray guns and everything, but they don't...
Yeah, don't take your soul of the business out, I guess.
I mean, I'm maybe over-dramatizing.
I mean, I still like my job, and I've found a corner of the company that's still market-facing.
But, yeah, it's...
There was a meeting a while back I was sat at and had a vocal disagreement with our dear leader.
Basically, I said that...
innovation is done by individuals uh which i actually believe in i really care about understanding how he's going to take that as an insult because people who don't innovate like to claim it's a collective process so they can hang on the coattails of those who are actually building some stuff oh you designed a new piece of software i'm going to consider that a team effort so i can get some options yeah yeah i guess so um I find it...
I had quite a disagreement.
The interesting thing was the number of people who found me after that meeting and said that they were on my side, but none of them were quite the same.
Oh, after the meeting!
Hey, you know when you were facing down that guerrilla of marketing and I said absolutely nothing?
I'm with you in spirit?
Absolutely.
Well, they're with me, but they're all mortgaged up and have families to feed, so...
Ah, yes.
The great conformity of reproduction.
Don't worry, all the single people can take the bullets for the company.
That sounds fair.
Yeah, so my question I was asking is sort of two sides to it.
One of them is, is this a natural result of modern culture that...
This just happened, or is there more work?
I've got my own answer to that, but I was curious what yours would be.
Well, I mean, you're talking about government programs, right?
Well, yeah, that's definitely a part of it.
Yeah, so, I mean, that's, I mean, modern culture.
I mean, the government starts paying you, and you're toast in many ways.
Like, I think you can survive as a company if you just take a couple of government contracts and so on.
But if you end up...
You can only ride the crazy horse for so long before you're going to get thrown.
And there's a lot of money in government stuff, but it can be a real challenge.
Growing a company is very tough because failure is really terrible, but success can be even worse.
And knowing the number of people who can...
You know, there's an old analogy.
It's probably still common, right?
Like, if you're going to take D-Day, right?
You've got the people who go ahead and scout and who, you know, figure out where the enemy is, and then you've got some people who come and set up the...
Mines or whatever it is and then you got people who come and land and then you got you know They go and take a whole bunch of and then you they move on and then you leave behind these policemen to keep order and so on like Having someone who can grow a company from a small company all the way through a big company a very rare individual a very very rare individual which is why they tend to get paid so much generally the people who are really good at the small companies End up allergic to the increasing horrendous bureaucracy and office politics
and bullshit overhead that goes on.
You know, in a free market, overhead and ridiculousness and vanity, they're punished very severely by the free market because they're so inefficient.
And people don't like to work for that.
Everything that hands money to companies that's not part of the free market tends to make those companies worse and worse and worse.
And I'm not just talking about government subsidies, government grants, or even a lot of government contracts.
As I talked about recently, it is having a stock market where there's way too much money sloshing around looking for stock opportunities, right?
Because people's money is all herded and forced into the stock market.
They don't want to be there, but it's either give it to a fund manager or give it to the tax man, and people would rather give it to the fund manager.
So, wherever there's profit that doesn't come directly from customer involvement, when it comes from the stock market, when it comes from government crap, when it comes from lobbying and all that kind of stuff, I mean, to me, it messes up the company.
It messes up the culture and it creates overhead or the capacity for overhead or even sometimes the necessity for overhead that is directly at odds with the creative industrial forces in the company.
And it's a battle.
It's a battle between – I mean, this can also happen if you have the wrong sales structure.
Like if the sales structure is such, sales incentives are such that the salespeople make a lot of money from short-term sales rather than long-term success, then you get a lot of stuff in the pipes.
You get a lot of extravagant promises made to clients that then the technical team has to find some way to backfill.
And you get this big, giant mess where people make out like bandits.
And this can be really toxic to an organization when the salespeople are making a fortune and get to go home at 4 o'clock on a Friday.
But then the tech team have to end up backfilling all of the promises that were made by...
The salespeople and end up working for free because, you know, they're working weekends and nights, but not hourly.
It's salaried, right?
So the salespeople make out like bandits.
Make a fortune for very little work because making extravagant promises that other people have to fulfill, well, they're half politicians to begin with.
And then the tech team or the engineers often will have to end up finding some way to fulfill the mad promises made by the salespeople.
They don't get paid extra.
In fact, they end up working more.
Their hourly rate, so to speak, goes down.
And this creates a lot of tension and hostility between sales and engineering, which there is naturally in companies anyway, but can be a productive tension.
But if the management sides with the salespeople, which they're more likely to do, if you have a non-technical management, they're much more likely to side with the salespeople because they're kind of cut from the same cloth.
They're not technically knowledgeable.
They're not detail-oriented.
They don't know basically what the company is making, the running, the company that they're running.
So if you get management that sides with salespeople at the expense of the productive staff, the engineering staff, the coding staff, and so on, then you end up with basically a civil war.
And because the management is listening to the salespeople and willing to sacrifice the needs of the generally younger and single and able to work that hard technical team, it's only a matter of time before resumes start flying out the door, right?
Yeah, you reminded me of, there's a really good book I read on this called Creativity Inc.
by the guy who created Pixar.
And he sort of describes these two sides of the business and the role of good management is to mediate between them.
I think he calls one the ugly baby and the other the hungry beast.
But at least with Pixar, they had the final test of sales tickets in the theatre, right?
Oh yeah, yeah.
I guess you could make some extravagant promises, but eventually there was a huge amount of strength in Pixar among the creative team because they were the ones whose product was finally going to end up in front of the audience.
And that's not often as much the case in more technical fields.
Yeah, and especially if the technical assessors are the government, so they get their big stack of paper at the end of the project.
That seems to be what they care about rather than even the hardware.
Right, right, right.
So I don't know.
I mean, I was not able to find...
A very satisfying environment.
It became boring and repetitive for me.
It wasn't at every company I was at, but it was enough that it's just like, do I want to do this again?
I mean, do I really want to go through this again?
because I know how this play ends, and it always ends the same way, which is exhausted and resentful technical teams, entitled and annoying sales teams, and a management that only pretends to care about the technical side.
And then, you know, people start peeling off and leaving.
And, you know, if managers knew how valuable the technical people were, particularly those who knew the code, who knew how things were built, that is really hard to reproduce in someone new.
You know, when you lose somebody who's valuable and talented and smart and knowledgeable about what you're doing, it can take six to 12 months to get somebody even remotely up to speed, assuming that the hire works out, which a lot of times they don't.
And And so I always felt that salespeople were a little bit more easy to replace than technical people who were neck deep in hundreds of thousands of lines of code and knowing how they all hung together.
But it seemed like management often had the opposite view, that salespeople were extraordinarily rare to But coders were just typists, you know, like, oh, just get another secretary.
And it's like, first of all, we don't do that anymore.
But secondly, it's not.
To me, the Brad Pitts were always the coders, if that makes sense.
And they were the ones who opened the movie.
They were the ones that people came to see because it was the code that was interacted with, not the sales promises or sales pitches.
But management always looked at the salespeople as the Brad Pitts.
And that kind of conflict was...
It was really tough to sort out.
So I thought, okay, well, I either got to become, like, go from chief technical officer to chief executive officer, but then I'll still be surrounded by people who don't understand tech.
You know what I mean?
And that just became tiring for me.
Now, some people do it.
There are very successful software companies and so on, but it was not my particular, either skill set or talent or desire or whatever.
It just never quite came together for me in that way.
Plus, philosophy came along, which was way more appealing.
Yeah, yeah, I can understand that.
The thing I find really fascinating is, from the point of view of looking back in history, so one of the engineers I work with is very long in the tooth, and he remembers doing projects of a similar size back in, say, the 1960s, like almost the Apollo era, when we were producing things like the Saturn V rocket and Concorde and that sort of thing.
And he was saying that, yes, We did a job of a similar size all that time ago, and we were using pencils and slide rules, and a team of 50 of us did it in three years, not 100, 200 of us doing it in twice that time.
I find that absolutely fascinating.
One colleague I worked with said, yeah, if this was in the 1950s, then we would have worked on...
Three or four projects that would have...
This is in the aerospace industry.
He said they would have flown by this time in your career.
Not even halfway through my career yet.
And now, of course, it's just the lead time to staggering.
Well, perhaps he hasn't got the memo that diversity is a strength and bureaucracy is efficiency.
I don't know.
I mean, I was going to say we're relatively diverse.
No, we're mostly...
We've got a few ladies working with us and a few people from all over the place.
It's definitely the bureaucracy thing.
We seem to have a lot of project managers.
There's this great postcard of a committee around a committee table on a boat.
And they're saying, I think we need to replace our oarsmen.
And there's one guy at the back of the boat with the oars trying to paddle this thing along.
It is, yeah.
As the company gets bigger, there's just more places to hide.
There's more places to hide.
And I never wanted to have people in the organization where I had no idea whether they were succeeding or not.
You know, like you cannot manage what you cannot measure.
And I really dislike the proliferation of positions in an organization.
It's like, I don't know if you've had a successful day or not.
I don't know if you've had a successful week or not.
There's some people, you know, coders and to some degree salespeople and so on.
You can figure that stuff out.
Marketing, you know, they spent this money.
They've made these predictions and they should be held.
But the number of people who are just like, I'm a strategic initiative guy.
I mean, I'm a partnership relationship manager or something, something.
And it's like, I don't know if I've got to keep unfolding your business card to get to the end of the text of what the hell you do.
And I don't know how to measure it.
I don't know why you're here.
To me, the key is I need people to make predictions about what they're going to do.
I need those predictions to be very measurable, and I need there to be positive consequences for meeting those projections, and I need there to be negative consequences for failing to meet those projections.
I mean, that to me is not that complicated.
You're going to sell X number of things.
You're going to complete X lines of code.
You're going to finish this project module by this time.
Whatever it's going to be.
But there are so many people out there.
It's like, succeed?
Fail?
I don't know.
But I look great in this suit.
I think that to me is really wretched.
But there are lots of people who are out there.
Well, I'm a cultural relationship manager.
It's like, I don't know what that means.
I don't know.
I know if I succeed or fail.
In this show, I know I can see the view counts.
I can see donations.
I know if I'm succeeding or failing.
I have some idea.
I just...
I don't...
I mean, are there people like that where you are like, oh, succeed, fail?
I don't know.
All I can say is that we have a project management team that seems to be growing in size.
And I wouldn't say they quite outnumber the engineers, but they're getting close to it.
And...
I'm not sure, having read about and heard about projects that were done 50, 40, 50 years ago, they didn't have that overhead.
And that's how a lot of stuff, it seems to me, that's how a lot of stuff got done.
Because I think it all comes down to risk.
There's this sort of view nowadays that if you can eliminate all risk from the project by planning, then you're going to have success.
whereas in the past they took the attitude that innovation coming up with a new idea is risk so let's have a try oh it blew up let's build a new one oh it blew up let's build a better one and um that that was how they used to do things so there were more i mean it's not necessarily risk to human life but if you build some hardware like i don't know a jet engine or something there's a good chance that first time it's not going to work properly and um
But there's been a big change too.
I mean, I think childhoods have changed enormously in the past.
I mean, this guy who was building stuff in the 60s, you know, these are kids who are building tree houses and forts and tunnel systems and all that from the age of six or seven, largely unsupervised, all working together.
I mean, the amount of project skills that you develop by free play in nature that's unsupervised as a kid is enormous.
And, you know, this, you know, I completed an Xbox level while slowly turning pale in a basement for four years.
It doesn't give you the same kind of raw, get it done, work together, we've hammered out how to get things done kind of stuff that used to accumulate a lot in childhoods and I don't think is accumulating much anymore.
Just the basic negotiation.
I mean, I don't know how old you are, but when I was a kid, we had no money.
So my friends and I, we'd just sort of meet at a park on our bikes or wherever and be like, okay, well, what do you want to do?
What are we going to do?
And we'd go through a whole bunch of different options.
We'd figure out something to do.
And there was lots of negotiation, lots of back and forth.
And if we had a big project, then we'd sort of spontaneously self-organize.
You go do this, you go do that or whatever.
And that kind of spontaneous self-organization that occurred as kids...
I don't really think it's as much part of people's hyper-structured childhood.
You don't need any particular organization to play a video game or to...
I don't know what else gets through these days.
It seems to be a lot of media and like 12,000 hours of screen time a week or whatever.
But it's not the same.
Or if there is teamwork, it's all virtual.
You know, I'll be the healer in this game or something like that.
And I would imagine that...
Those skill sets.
You know, childhood used to be a proxy preparation for adulthood.
And childhood has been so separated from adulthood now that I think a lot of people...
This is why people have trouble making the transition from childhood to adulthood.
This is why it's so stressful.
Because, you know, like lion cubs, they play fight...
You know, week after week, month after month, they play attack, play fight, and so on.
So when they actually have to go and eat a zebra, well, they've prepared for it.
They're all ready, you know?
But I think so much of what goes on in childhood now is not preparing kids for what needs to be done as adults.
And maybe that's why they need more managers.
Maybe that's why there's this caution.
I don't know.
This is just a particular hypothesis.
I don't have any strong proof for it.
It's an interesting one.
I'm actually really interested in trying to figure out what it is that innovative people all have in common.
And I can sort of relate to what you were saying.
I'm very much an introvert.
So rather than going out and playing spontaneously with other kids, I spent a lot of time, unstructured play, but it was building stuff with Lego bricks or my mum still pulls out old drawings that I used to do.
It's the same sort of thing, I think.
Yeah, and I would assume that this has something to do with what you do as an engineer, that there was a kind of soft takeoff from your childhood preparation.
Childhood has been kind of fenced off.
It's supposed to be fun.
It's Disney World.
You've got to have fun and so on.
But to me, childhood...
The point of childhood is to prepare you for adulthood.
It's not like you can't have fun, of course, but adulthood is supposed to be fun as well, as much as you can manage it when you're not doing your taxes.
But there is this idea now that the childhood is just supposed to be a huge amount of fun and that it's not there to help...
Develop in you the skills that give you significant advantages as an adult.
And that's what all that unstructured play was supposed to be all about.
It's so you can learn how to spontaneously self-organize with other groups or with your own particular skill sets.
If you're more of an introvert, you can learn to do all of this stuff.
So that, you know, to me, childhood is like...
You've got an airplane.
Now, if it's not some VTOL, right, some vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, you know, you've got to turn on the engine.
You've got to, you know, you lower your flaps.
You've got to hit your accelerator.
You've got to do all the other things I've mostly done in flight simulators.
And, you know, you gain speed and then you take off.
That, to me, childhood, the whole point of getting on the runway is to get in the air.
You don't just drive the plane around the runway for no particular reason, take it back to the hangar.
The whole point is to...
And to me, childhood is like, it's supposed to be there to prepare you.
For flight, for adulthood.
And it just seems very separate from that.
Now, it probably has something to do with lack of fathers around, you know, moms just letting kids do whatever they want, but this slow coasting to take off to adulthood, the child that it's supposed to be all about.
Adulthood should not be something remarkably different from childhood.
It shouldn't be like, whoa, this is totally different.
I have to work with others or, you know, whatever.
And that has really been separated out from people.
And I think it's pretty unfair to kids.
I say this to my daughter all the time.
You know, my job is to prepare you for adulthood.
And if I'm not helping you prepare for adulthood, I'm not doing my job.
And it's like what my roommate from many years ago in college said.
You know, he said his father said, you know, as a parent, you are drawing back, you know, you're like the Bowman, right?
You pull back on the string, and then you launch the child.
There's a poing, the whole point.
The whole point of being an archer is shoot the arrow, right?
And you can pull it, and off it goes.
And preparing, using childhood as the building blocks to prepare the child for adulthood, that synchronicity seems to be Very separated now from how it used to be when I was growing up.
I mean, most of them...
Sorry, the last thing I'll say is most of the people that I knew growing up, most of the kids, I can very clearly see how their adult occupations were mirrored and prepared for by...
Very youthful activities, like the guy I know who became big in engineering.
Well, he was Mr.
Lego, Mr.
Meccano set, Mr.
building weird robotics to throw the finger out of his basement window or something.
And, you know, the people who were...
A guy who I know became a good writer and an English professor.
He would write stories and have us act them out.
There was this very, very clear mirroring.
Even uber-leftist succubus, Emma Watson, talks about how she would write plays and direct and produce them with her friends.
I used to write space operas, and I'd record them.
I wish I still had some of these recordings.
I'd record them with my friends, these big intergalactic Buck Rogers adventures and so on.
I grew up telling stories and so on.
And I can very, very clearly see how everyone ended up in their adult life based upon how their childhoods were, but it doesn't really seem to be quite as much continuity anymore.
Maybe that's one of the differences as well.
One thing I do wonder is whether the number of innovators in a society changes with respect to what the culture is like.
One thing that I found really, really interesting when I was reading Hayek, Road to Serfdom, And a comment that he makes that really stuck with me is he said that there's been evidence of intricate toys and inventions throughout human history,
but the big difference between societies where technology took off and societies where it didn't go anywhere was sort of the liberal order, liberalism, where if you invent something, you get to keep it and you get to make money out of it.
Well, are you respected?
I mean, this This idea that somehow the success of sort of white Western European nations is colonial exploitation and badness and meanness.
And it's like, okay, well, maybe we'll just stop inventing shit for a while.
You know, I mean, it's crazy.
Like, I did this show on Puerto Rico.
There's a bunch of comments underneath.
Yeah, I know I dipped into the living cancer sometimes.
But there's a bunch of comments of like, oh, yeah, you white people exploited Puerto Rico.
We were doing just great.
I bought air conditioning to Europe.
And I remember how they invented quinine as a way to deal with malaria and brought it to the world.
And oh, all the jetpacks that came out of the third world.
And oh, yeah, fantastic.
I remember how they brought all of this wonderful medicine to Europe to cure people.
And penicillin invented in Haiti.
And it's just like, come on.
Come on.
The Africans had Africa for 60,000 years.
They didn't have two-story homes.
They didn't have a wheel.
No written language.
I mean, come on.
So rather than say, wow, you know, yeah, white people did some bad stuff.
Yeah, like everyone else did.
But man, we really, really appreciate that air conditioning.
You know, penicillin, absolutely fantastic.
The fact that I can take something when I have an infection that's going to kill it, really, really appreciate that.
Lowering our infant mortality, you know, A1, double plus, top shelf, good stuff.
But I think a lot of what has happened is, well, if you're wealthy, if you're rich, if you're successful, well, you've got to be just a jerk.
Well, you've got to be just an exploiter.
Oh, you're just somehow bad.
Because all the Nietzschean resentment losers just sit there and look up at the heights of human achievement and just feel small and get mad and want to pee on the leg of anyone who's taller than they are.
And I think that hostility towards success and creativity and improvement and so on, well, you know, it's the old thing I've ranted about before.
I won't bother doing more than touching on it here.
It's like, hey!
White Christian males ended slavery around the world, an institution that had existed for thousands and thousands and tens of thousands of years, basically back to the beginning of human history, human evolution.
White Christian males ended slavery.
Now, I'll give three guesses on the planet as to which are the only group now that is ever blamed for slavery.
Yes, it's white Christian males.
So, this idea that if you give gifts to the world, the world will not be thankful.
the world will shit on you and the world will attack you and the world will try to do everything they can to make you feel like crap as a way of further exploiting you because maybe they can't figure out how to trade with you properly.
I think that there is something very toxic in the world against success and innovation and creativity at the moment.
And of course, a lot of it comes out of this Marxist resentment.
A lot of it comes out of this idea that the world was just a paradise before Europeans came along.
It's just like, oh yeah, that's right.
That's why the population of sub-Saharan Africa was like four people dying of typhus.
Anyway.
Well, I think that something I find really interesting is the idea that any kind of innovation is in a way sort of subversive.
That everybody's getting along just nicely the way things are.
And then you come along and say, hey, I've got a way of lighting houses at night without using whale oil.
And yeah, it makes a real difference, but it really upsets the people who have all the vested interests.
Yeah.
I mean, if you look at the guy who developed kerosene as a way of lighting people's houses, I mean, that guy saved the whales.
I can't remember if it was Carnegie or something like that, but now it's like, oh, he was just a 19th century.
Rockefeller?
Rockefeller, yeah.
Yeah, the guy who made oil and kerosene cheap enough that it could be used instead of whale oil to light people's houses.
Oh, he's just this evil robber baron.
It's like, do you like having whales in the world?
Maybe he was an evil robber baron.
I don't think so.
But at least throw him that tiny little scrap of, there are still whales around.
Which is pretty important to the ecosystem of the ocean and therefore of life as a whole in general.
I don't know.
It's just like they just can't find anyone.
They can't find some horrible, negative, picky, picky thing to...
I don't know.
So yeah, I think that there's not that same social cachet.
Oh, you're successful.
You really must have been an asshole who exploited people.
Well, I don't know.
A lot of people will look at that and say, well, I don't know.
Maybe I might end up with some money, but...
No one's going to like me anymore.
And I think that's kind of a disincentive for that kind of enthusiasm, the enthusiasm that you need to have those mad projects.
Well, in a way, I'm not necessarily bothered about getting lots of credit.
I care about doing something that I really enjoy doing.
It sort of brings me to the second part of my question, which is trying to figure out what I'm going to do with the rest of my career.
Can you find someone who's going to face the people for you?
I mean, because if you're more introverted, which, you know, I hugely respect and all that, but if you're more introverted, then it's going to be tougher for you to do some of the legwork and face time that you might need to as an entrepreneur.
But if you can find, you know, the Steve Jobs, Stuart Wozniak kind of thing, some extroverts.
I was going to say, yeah, make that same parallel.
At least I'm definitely a Wozniak, although I've put quite a bit of effort into being a lot more outgoing recently.
Right.
But I'm an introvert.
I get very, very tired very quickly if I spend time around people.
Right.
Right.
They are vampires to your soulful energy, right?
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
I managed to find a nice quiet office in a quiet corner two doors away from the corridor and I was happy.
Right.
You're looking at the film office space of the guy who ends up in the basement like, yeah, it's a pretty sweet deal.
Pretty sweet deal.
I've not seen that film.
Oh, you should.
You should.
It's a great film.
Yeah, I mean, partnership, I think, is pretty important.
The partnership is pretty important.
I mean, there are some people like Bill Gates, who was a good coder and also, you know, good at business.
But of course, he had a whole team as well, which happened to be his family.
Like his father, I think, was a patent lawyer who was on the phone with him when he was first negotiating MS-DOS with IBM. I mean, that guy had some – and, you know, he'd be the first to admit it.
He has obviously a very high IQ and all of that.
But he had a whole team around him of family and extended family expertise that It really helped propel him to where he ended up.
Well, which is oddly enough in philanthropy rather than business because he doesn't understand the value of a good capitalist.
But anyway, if you can get people to outsource the stuff that is tough for you, then you can focus on basic division of labor stuff.
You can focus on the stuff where you can add the most value.
But finding the mutual respect to those disparate skill sets.
You know, it's easy for the introvert to look at the extrovert and say, oh, showboat vainglorious, you know, public figurehead nonsense stuff, right?
right?
Not doing any real work, just out there chatting with people.
And it's easy for the extrovert to look at the introvert and say, oh, you just sit in your basement and, you know, like fiddling away with stuff.
And I could be selling it if you weren't such a perfectionist and you're in the way of my vision.
And, you know, you keep telling me no.
And so finding that sort of mutual respect is quite a challenge.
But if you can pull it off, you've got a pretty unbeatable combo, I think.
Well, there's a thing with innovation as well, is that I've got this theory that you can either be innovating or you can be being productive.
which means that you can put somebody in a room and, say, produce $100 worth of productivity, and they'll have $100 worth of productivity out.
Whereas if somebody's being innovative, you put them in a room and there's a chance that they will come out with an amazing, well-changing idea, or they'll come out with nothing.
It's a risk.
And seeing somebody who can You have to trust the people.
I mean, one of the last versions of the software that I built, I had a team of a couple of close friends and coders, and we couldn't get anything done in the office because it's constantly putting out fires and responding to this, and we need you to fly out to help do a presentation or something like that.
So, yeah, I just sat down with the management and said, okay, that's it.
We are now leaving the office.
We will be gone four days a week.
If you need fires, make sure that they happen on this particular day.
We're leaving the office for four days a week.
And I actually slept in this new place.
And I slept there.
And we coded.
And we coded.
And we played Unreal.
And we coded.
And we innovated.
And we came up with a thing of beauty, an amazing piece of software that did just some wonderful, fantastic stuff.
Because we loved it and we loved what we were doing and we had that kind of separation from the day-to-day business stuff.
And yeah, did it cost?
Of course.
I mean, there was short-term hits, but the long-term value of what we created, I mean...
It was the foundation of a company that is still successful and still sustained to this day.
And one of the guys I worked with is still heavily involved and I think still now has my job at the company that we both worked at there, which is fantastic.
So you do have to give people the room to create.
And if they're passionate enough about it and love it enough, oh man, they're going to come up with some amazing stuff.
Yeah, so basically what I'm taking away from this, what really matters to me is yes, I absolutely love being creative, but I'm also wanting to be able to have a job that will bring home a good enough salary that I could support a family.
I'm early 30s at the moment and that sort of matters to me.
So I don't see myself as much of an entrepreneur.
But what you're suggesting is look for that rare Steve Jobs type who values somebody who is able to do that creative side of things that they can't do.
Right, right, right.
Well, you've left it a little bit late for the entrepreneurial side of things, but it's certainly not impossible.
It's just going to be a bit more of a sacrifice as regards to, you know, I mean, if you want a family with a woman who's in the right age range and so on.
But if you want it, then now would be the time to really, really start applying yourself in that direction, in my opinion.
I don't see myself as an entrepreneur either.
I have skills.
No, no, no.
There's no such thing as an entrepreneur.
Everyone's a team.
You absolutely can be an entrepreneur.
Because entrepreneurs have to be part of a partnership that has something to sell.
So you can create.
And being the guy in the basement creating the stuff, that's...
Equal to entrepreneurship is the guy who's out there raising the money and contacting the clients or the potential clients.
Just because you're down there in the basement making stuff and not wanting to interact with people doesn't mean you can't be an entrepreneur.
The entrepreneur has to have something he can put in front of someone that's amazing.
And if you're creating that something that's amazing, you're absolutely an entrepreneur.
You're just not a client-facing entrepreneur.
You're not the, you know, capped teeth, grin and shizzle guy who's out there mixing it up and networking and doing it.
And that stuff's important too.
But Steve Wozniak was absolutely as much of an entrepreneur as Steve Jobs.
Hmm.
Just if you're an engineer and you're shy or an introvert, you absolutely can be an entrepreneur, in my opinion.
I mean, absolutely, because, yeah, you've got to have something to sell.
Hmm.
Okay.
I'll have to think about that.
I'll just have to think about networking and try and find more people, talk to more people, and widen the net.
Yeah.
Have to see.
Yeah.
You're probably very passionate about what you want to build one-on-one.
And so find someone that you're passionate, like you can passionately explain what you want to build.
That person can then, through their extroverted personality or whatever it is, they can then broadcast that to the world and get you the resources you need to build whatever it is that you want to build.
But yeah, you absolutely can be an entrepreneur, in my opinion, with the skill set that you have.
You know, the public-facing guy is just one part of the machine, right?
Oh, well, lots to think about.
All right.
Well, thanks.
I hope it works out.
Let us know how it goes if you can.
And thanks very much for your call.
Will do.
Thanks a lot, Stefan.
All right.
Oh, right up next we have Simon.
He wrote in and said, When people are so clearly insane that they can't recognize great threats to society and their own lives and livelihoods, can't see evil staring them in the face, and you get no report but either perplexity or Or hostility thrown back in your teeth when you dare to mention it, and it would be easy enough to abuse their folly.
What more fundamental reason, then, to try and do good to one and all rather than exploit the wankers and leave them by the side of the road?
That's from Simon in just a little background.
He's from Sweden, so that may explain the mentality a little bit.
Oh, yeah.
Thanks, Mike.
Sweden.
Sweden, Sweden, Sweden.
Yeah, yeah.
It's like if Eat, Pray, Love was written by Siddhartha Gautama.
You know?
Suffer, doubt, die.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, man, you guys are like the total gasping canary in the coal mine.
Wow, that is...
Yeah, I used to actually live in Ternsta, which is like less than a mile away from Rynkeby, you know, the riots.
It's not grenades flying left and right, but constant police presence.
150,000 genitally mutilated women in Sweden, I just saw the report.
150,000 genitally mutilated women in Sweden.
And girls, I would assume.
Sentences I never thought I would utter when I was younger in my life.
Well, if you want to get them in, start them early.
Teach them some discipline.
Didn't we have that discussion?
Jeez.
It's...
What are you to do?
This is the evil that I'm talking about.
But no, no, no.
Cultural enrichment.
Goddamn people.
Yeah, and a genetic replacement of your population within a generation or two.
I mean, Swedish native Swedes, the blondes are going to be a minority in the 2040s.
To be frank, I don't hold with the whole nationalism thing.
I mean, Sweden basically died in the 70s.
That was the last straw.
The thing that we have now is just a...
Shambling zombie pretending at some sort of...
And what happened in the 70s?
I mean, I know there was...
I mean, socialism crept in and the divorce rate went through the roof.
And divorce in Sweden is extraordinarily high.
It's like 47% of managers or something.
Yeah, it was sort of...
I mean, we had had some...
Of course, you can...
You know, you can split things up.
You can try to focus on the individual instance.
But I think it was sort of...
We used to have a public servant's responsibility clause that was removed by Olof Palme.
I don't know if you know who that is.
No, he's a social democrat prime minister.
Of course, we've only had social democrats except for a slim spot recently when we had the moderates.
I suppose you would call them liberals.
Not right-wing for Sweden, but not in any other context.
And of course, people got more revenue.
Entrepreneurship shot up.
We managed to dodge the whole housing crisis.
But no, no.
They were too bland.
People didn't want to...
It's that natural thing.
The moment they see a bit of reduction of deficit...
The socialists are just going to dig their claws in.
They think, oh, look at all this money that we weren't used to.
What social programs can we toss that at now?
I don't know.
Aaron Flam was on Rubin recently, and he pretty much sums it up.
Because there are There are those of us inside who see all this happening.
But it's just, what can we do?
You have the whole weight of establishment against you.
So, yeah.
Yeah, this is a huge question.
And of course, some of the free speech challenges in Europe make it significantly risky, right?
Oh, yeah, certainly.
I mean, I wouldn't go out and...
I mean, it absolutely depends upon the social context.
If I'm talking to somebody, I know.
If I'm talking to somebody, I'm not sure how many callers you have from Sweden, but I know that there are people watching you out there.
I know that there are people taking in information from elsewhere.
It's just more of a question of getting them to turn off the TV and stop trusting...
Stop reading the Metro in the morning.
I don't know.
I think you have Metro over there as well.
Is it just as biased?
You mean the newspapers?
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
No, it's...
I mean, anything that's hard copy is almost inevitably terrible or invariably terrible.
I don't know, Simon.
I mean, the big question is, is there any chance for a soft landing or a soft turnaround to this stuff?
I mean...
Or is it just like, okay, well...
If it's going to crash, better sooner than later.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, that's precisely what I'm so freaking worried about because, I mean, I'm no expert in anything, basically.
Every job I've ever done, every job I've ever gotten, I have basically just come to the workside and proven my chops.
That's how I landed.
I'm an electrician and an electro-technician and not much more than that.
But I have some experience in mechanics and that's really what I want to do.
I'm quitting my job now.
I'm quitting my job because nothing is happening.
What do you mean nothing's happening?
There's no housing?
Well, no, no, no.
No reference to The Last Caller.
No creativity.
Why?
Well, because of the executive chain.
I'm the kind of guy who...
I'm sorry if referencing a previous caller is going to break up.
I'm the kind of guy...
My father, for instance, he works for a pretty major company.
And among other things, pumps and heavy-duty machinery and stuff, they build milking machines.
These automatic robotic platforms where the cows can just walk in and then it wanders around in a traverse.
And...
They ran into some problems with one of those.
And so he asked me to come out and take a look at it.
And what do I see?
Well, I see this setup where they have...
Because they have to be able to take out the platforms and clean them individually or repair them in case something with the drives breaks or whatever.
And I see these platforms, they got two of these, you know, really geared down torpedo-like engines.
You know, lots of momentum because they're supposed to traverse slowly, but they weigh like 10 tons.
And two of them individually for each of these.
And I just go, what the hell?
Hey, you guys, design team, I'm sure you can afford to go to Antwerp.
Have you ever seen a cable lift before?
This is getting a little bit too detailed for the general audience, but let's just say that you're frustrated with lack of innovation, lack of creativity, but Europeans are depressed and stressed at the moment.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
There are these huge questions, these huge decisions that are being made, unprecedented, in European history.
And there appears to be no room for public discussion, public forum.
If you bring any questions or issues up around mass immigration from the third world...
Your media or your government will attack you and there could be big, huge problems.
And so I think that Europeans as a whole just really stressed and really depressed and really anxious and paralyzed about...
We can't talk about these fundamental decisions that are going to have massive impacts on our society.
Already are having massive impacts on our society.
No one's allowed to talk about it.
We can't have any rational discussions.
We can't look at facts.
We can't look at ideologies.
We can't look at religions.
We can't look at compatibilities.
We can't look at IQ. We can't look at genetics.
We can't look at environment.
We can't look at anything.
Anytime anyone brings up anything, they're attacked by, it seems, just about every quarter, and the attacks are public and the support is private.
So as far as, hey, feel like being creative today?
Europeans feel like being enthusiastic and optimistic?
Feel like having a lot of kids?
I don't think so.
I don't think so at all.
I think feel like avoiding?
Feel like getting drunk?
Feel like a lot of meaningless sex?
Well, this is what people do in wartime.
Pretty much.
Power of consolidation, power of establishment.
And of course, the thing is, you know, the breaking point.
When is it going to go?
When are we going to be able to turn this ship around?
But, I mean, look at the UK election.
What actually happened there?
What actually happened was it, this Theresa May, what actually happened was Theresa May found out that Her recommendation on dealing with terrorism by censoring the internet turned out to be neither credible nor popular.
Yeah, but why did she make that goddamn recommendation?
And, you know, the...
It's, I know, you know, Hanlon's razor, you're not supposed to attribute to evil what is more easily explained by stupidity, but come on, this is the UK, this is a story.
Tommy Robinson writes about it, and we talked about it.
The British government is sitting on a powder keg.
They're sitting on a powder keg, and this has been explained, and, you know, Tommy Robinson talks about it, they're sitting on a powder keg, and European governments as a whole are sitting on a powder keg.
Now, Appeasement has been something that has been tried repeatedly throughout European and human history, and it always has generally the same outcome.
According to what Tommy Robinson says, and I think he's got some good information regarding this, a lot of decisions were made decades ago about the demographics of England and of Europe.
And current politicians who were kids at the time and didn't have any say in those decisions have now inherited this challenge, this mess, this potential powder keg.
And what are they supposed to do?
Well, everyone hopes that somehow things are going to magically turn around and everything's going to be hunky-dory and everyone's going to get along and kumbaya and so on.
But there's significant reasons to doubt all of that.
And what are existing politicians supposed to do?
Well...
My answer is, well, you have to give up the welfare state.
You have to give up the welfare state.
You have to end the welfare state in the same way that if you want to find out if someone loves you You have to stop paying them to go out with you if they care about you Then they'll be there whether you pay them or not And so if people really love and respect and want to be part of British culture in history Stop paying them to be there and in particular stop paying everyone to have kids You have to you have to give up the welfare state now if and that's not a racist thing That's not a any particular religion thing you you just have to give up the welfare state and I've been saying this for like Lord, 35 years.
And the wages of sin, as I said before, is death.
And the welfare state was a profound sin against the history of Europe and the history of Western freedoms.
The welfare state was a profound anti-property rights, anti-freedom, anti-family, anti-culture, anti-history measure that the Europeans were susceptible to.
And if the Europeans aren't willing to give up the welfare state, then the immigrants who come who really want to be part of Europe and want to be part of the market and like the values and so on, they'll stay.
And the people who are only there for the money and the free stuff and the eventual perhaps cultural appropriation, they won't stay.
So I think that you can advocate for the end of the welfare state.
I don't think that's illegal.
I mean, how is that promoting hate against anyone?
I want everyone to not have the welfare state because it's wrong.
Yeah, but the thing is, I don't think that's, you know, so what's going to motivate the politicians to give up the welfare?
I mean, you're absolutely right.
They're riding a tiger.
They're riding a tiger.
How do you get off?
You have to convince people that this is what is necessary.
And by God, if Europeans can't give up the welfare state, what does that mean?
I mean, Europeans who fought and died by the millions in the past can't even give up free stuff from the government.
Just going to be selected out of history.
Like, I'm sorry, that's just the way nature works.
That's just the way nature, if you can't give up the welfare, if that sacrifice, and it actually would be enormously healthy and beneficial to society as a whole, even for the people who now consider themselves helplessly and hopelessly dependent upon it, it will be far, far better for everyone.
So, and if Europeans won't give up that, well, then it's just like the guy who won't give up a dangerous drug that's going to kill them.
Okay, well, then you won't give up the welfare state and, you know, the consequences will accrue.
But politicians will follow that.
If there are enough voters who want to give up the welfare state, then the politicians will do it, will follow along with it.
And you don't know how this can manifest.
You know, Charles Murray wrote a book on welfare, and it was – although he rejects what Bill Clinton did with it as insufficient and wrongheaded in some ways – but he wrote a book on the unintended consequences of the welfare state – I think?
So, you know, who knows?
There could be so many different ways that this could go.
And it could be something that would be enormously healthy for Europe as a whole.
Because there are people who come from other cultures and other countries who can add to European culture, but they have to be there for the right reasons.
And the welfare state, it's all the wrong reasons.
Well, I'm going to have to sort of go against you because it's...
Oh, geez.
I'm a rude mechanic.
I look at the basics.
I look at the way things seem to want to interact.
And if there's...
I mean, there is...
You know Hans-Hermann Hoppe?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
I think he's right.
And I think that he's even more right.
Wait, about what?
He's written a lot of things.
About...
Ethnostates, argumentation, ethics.
I mean, what are we talking here?
We're talking democracy, the god that failed.
Right, right, right.
Yeah.
And the thing is, what I think that is, it's, I mean, you look at the latest, you look at market bubbles, they keep getting bigger and bigger.
You look at the inflation of the welfare.
I mean, here in Sweden, for instance, in the last 50 years, the welfare state has increased four times in size and several magnitudes in terms of inefficiency.
And you see something, you know, it's not to the same degree, but it's always moving in that direction.
It seems that administration is the only thing that expands in a completely enclosed environment.
The political drama seems to be mounting.
You look at the UK as an example.
You have Theresa May, this false freaking middle, reaching an ever tighter closing of the Overton window at the expense of ever more political drama and ever more administrative costs.
It's a flip-flopping.
It's a mounting flip-flopping overcorrection overlaid on top of a logarithmically downwards wandering graph of efficiency.
What does that say to me as somebody who's like an engineer?
I see, oh shit, unstable hysteresis.
And the machine is already running.
Well, duck and cover.
Because that only ends...
Okay, so you've given up.
Okay.
That's what you're telling me.
You've given up.
And look, I'm not trying to criticize you.
I'm just pointing out a fact.
You know, if somebody's in deep water and they stop swimming, then they're going to sink.
Right?
I mean, if you're cold and you're in a blizzard and you stop walking and you lie down, then you're just getting ready to die.
Right?
And again, I'm not criticizing.
I'm just pointing out a fact.
You've given up.
Maybe you're right.
I don't know.
I can't read the future.
I think, for sure, if you've given up, and if everyone agrees with you, then it's over.
No, you understand, though.
If you can convince other people to give up, if it's over, and everyone gives up, then it's over.
But you don't know for sure.
You only know because you've accepted it.
I mean, there are times when it's over.
That's not yet.
We've got the internet.
We're having this conversation.
You've got the internet.
There are things that you can do that are powerful and positive and legal.
Things that you can do that are powerful and positive and legal that can help your country, that can help Europe, that can help the world.
Bringing all these people into Europe in an economically unsustainable fashion is cruel to everyone.
It's horrible to everyone.
And so if you've given up, that's your choice.
I don't think that there's reason to give up at the moment because we have the internet.
We have a way of communicating across the world, around the world, never existed before.
It's new facts.
It's new information.
It's unprecedented.
You don't have the right to give up when there's a new tool that never existed before that may be all we need.
Now, it doesn't guarantee us anything.
It doesn't guarantee us anything other than the opportunity to speak and be heard.
But if you want to give up because you're looking at history or you're looking at X or Y or Z, and you're not taking into account the fact that you can speak to the whole world about what's important, then you're giving up with no excuse, with no good reason.
Well, who am I to – I'm not saying that you need – I'm not making that fallacy that you need to have perfect credibility and perfect integrity as you yourself as an individual.
Otherwise, I would definitely not be here.
In order to be able to point out flaws, in order to be able to criticize the behaviors of others, etc., etc.
Oh, Christ.
I mean, how much genuine innovation or revolution comes out of academia, for God's sakes?
Martin Luther was a monk.
You know, and both the positive and the negative kinds, right?
I mean, Lenin was a revolutionary.
Like, not John, but Vladimir.
Lenin was a revolutionary.
He went out and he acted.
This didn't come out of...
I mean, academia paved the way in some ways and so on, but I don't care what people's credentials are on the internet.
I care how good their arguments are.
I care how compelling their focus is.
I care how compelling their topics are.
How much they get it, how much they understand, how passionate they are and how committed they are, whether they're willing to take any risks or whether they're just towing the politically correct party line.
Whether they think for themselves or they just mouth the platitudes that make them popular among idiots.
So as far as, you know, well, I don't have this, I don't have this credential, I don't...
In the modern world, credentials are a negative.
If I had a PhD in philosophy from Harvard, I would be nowhere near as successful as I am in doing what I'm doing.
Credentials raise suspicion.
Credentials these days put you in the category of the ruling elite who've screwed everything up for the past 70 years.
Harvard?
What?
Not to pick on Harvard.
I mean, any of these...
What is coming out of there?
What is coming out of these institutions that's powerful and innovative and compelling and helpful and essential and important?
Oh, well, not much.
Not much?
Right.
Well, again, it's the wrong incentives.
It's just that I've...
It's not just...
Because I see...
Anyone who says, well, I've got to get a PhD from Harvard to be taken seriously, doesn't take themselves seriously.
No, but it's that it's really...
It's not just...
I mean, I'm looking at this stuff and I'm thinking like, oh, you know, it's like a ball bearing.
It's self-explanatory.
But there are people out there who are so freaking smart, who are so freaking meritorious, who have integrity coming out the ass.
And I'm talking about the likes of, you know, Jordan Peterson, Gad Saad, Jonathan Haidt, you know, and...
It seems to me that when they are talking about, you know, oh, okay, so what they do, what they do to all these social justice warriors, these leftists, these, you know, Richard Spencer's stupid fucking face, all of this, they just hammer it.
They nail it.
They, until it's squirming like an ulicastrated dog.
I'm sorry, I lost what you're talking about.
What do you mean?
Oh, better people.
So much better people.
And then they should be able to step back and examine this stuff.
And then they do a 180 and they hold up and laud the system that seems to be creating all this evil.
You know, curing the opportunistic infections and then ignoring the immune-compromising disease.
Wait, who is doing this 180?
Well, like I said, Jordan Peterson, if I'm allowed to make a shout-out, We have...
You're allowed to talk about Jordan Peterson on the show, absolutely, of course, right?
No, but believing that democracy is all we're going to need to solve this.
Well, now we have the media revolution, the democratization of information.
Sure, it can contribute a whole lot, but still, I mean, these layers and layers...
Listen, sorry to interrupt you, man.
Let's say that from your perspective, Jordan Peterson is not doing the right thing.
What do you care?
If you think Jordan Peterson is not doing the right thing...
No, no, he is evident.
He is absolutely doing the right thing.
But I'm thinking, you know, it's not going all the way because...
Okay, okay, okay.
So let's say he's not going all the way.
Why would you compare yourself to someone out there other than as an inspiration to go further?
If you think that's the way to go, then go further.
Then learn from people who you feel are not going far enough and go further.
Well, that's my dilemma.
Slings and arrows, better to take arms against them, yada yada.
Basically, I consider tech to be the only unequivocal good there is left.
So that's sort of the dilemma.
You talk yourself in and out of stuff.
You're either going to do something or you're not.
You know, I mean, just all these words, you know, this person does this and this person does something else and they should go further and so on.
Look, you're either going to do something or you're not.
You know that old phrase, shit or get off the pot.
You're either going to do something in this time of high drama, in this time of absolute necessity for all people of moral intentions and goodwill and rationality and consistency and integrity and virtue to damn well stand up for something and stand for what matters and stand for what's important and stand to save that which we have, which the world needs, which the world desperately needs.
You're either going to do something or you're going to talk yourself out of it.
It comes down to just having the courage to stand up and speak about what's important to you, about what's important to the world, about what's right.
You know, you're going to do something or you're not.
Now, it doesn't have to do with Jordan Peterson, and it doesn't have to do with Gadzad, and it doesn't have to do with me, and it doesn't have to do with anyone or anything else other than Your own choice to do something or not.
It doesn't have to do with whether anyone's going to listen.
And it sure as hell doesn't have to do with whether you're going to succeed or not.
You don't need courage if you know you're going to succeed.
You need courage when you don't know if you're going to succeed.
And the less you think you're going to succeed, the more courage you need.
It is a singular commitment you take...
By looking in the mirror and saying, what am I going to do with my life?
How am I going to spend my precious days on this planet?
What am I going to do to defend the natural entropy and decay of all that is good and virtuous in the world as all the swirling clouds of sinister malevolence want to take it over and milk it for their own profit?
We shield virtue from evil for any residual love we have for the immoral among us who, if they get their way, will end up destroying everything that has been created.
If you want to have the right to criticize, you first of all have to act.
If you want to say, well, this person doesn't do this, or they should go further, or they should do this, how about just being in action yourself?
You'll find that your desire to criticize other people will diminish proportionate to your positive action in the world.
But it's down to you and your conscience and your willpower and your choice.
Yes, there are an enormous number of fools and deluded idiots and intelligent dupes of evil in the world.
It has always been that way.
It will be that way for the foreseeable future, no matter what.
And the only thing that we can provide, the only thing that you can provide, Simon, is the example of your courage, the example of your outspokenness, the example of Of your resolute integrity to speak the truth and shame the devil, as the old saying used to go.
And now you can say, well...
Other people should be doing something different.
Well, it's going to be difficult.
Well, I don't know if it's going to succeed.
Well, people are going to vote this or they're going to do that or they're politicians or there's the media or there's blowback or this or that.
Of course you can do all that you want as far as that goes.
And what you're doing is you're talking yourself out of doing what you damn well know needs to be done.
You know, if you're listening to this show, if you're listening to the people that you've referenced, You know what needs to be done.
And everyone has something different to contribute to that.
You know, Jordan Peterson is really, really great on his...
Well, he's great on a lot of things.
Great on the pursuit of self-knowledge stuff.
Fantastic.
Fantastic.
This audit yourself.
I mean, it's good stuff.
It's good stuff.
He could, you know, maybe work a little bit more on the economic side of things, but...
Doesn't matter.
Everyone has their part to play.
Everyone has their role to play.
Everyone has their individual skills, talents, and abilities to bring to bear on this great, challenging question.
This could be the chance to liberate the world for all time.
You're looking at the downside.
Yeah, you could lose.
You could suffer.
You could experience blowback.
You could be attacked.
You could be scorned.
You could be criticized.
You could be, I don't know what.
For sure.
But look at the upside.
Look at the upside.
We could win.
Now, once we win with the internet, right?
Winning in the past was one thing.
Winning in the past was often temporary.
You push back a little bit in the late Roman Empire, encroachment of the warfare welfare state, the endless colonialism and enforced government doctrine, multiculturalism that was going on in the late Roman Empire.
You could push back against that, and then it would be forgotten, and then, boom, it would sink down into the Dark Ages, and so much knowledge would be lost, and you'd start all over again.
That's never happening.
Short of a planet extinction event, the internet is here forever.
Knowledge is here forever.
These podcasts are here forever.
Whatever you do is gonna be there forever.
Instantly accessible to just about everyone.
Let me finish.
Instantly accessible to just about everyone on the planet for all time.
Whatever you do is available to everyone forever.
Forever.
Never happened before.
Never in the history of human conflict and human ability and human virtue have we ever had this capacity to have as much impact on the world.
Everyone can be their own studio, their own station.
You need a cell phone and balls.
And...
Testosterone-laced ovaries.
I don't know what it is for women, but...
You have that opportunity.
You have that power.
To make that kind of impact across the world for all time, accessible forever.
Now, you can choose to walk away from that.
I can't bully or browbeat or even inspire people into a sustained life of commitment to virtue and public service to the future.
You can walk away from it.
But if you walk away from it, don't at least try and tell me That is because it can't work.
And don't try and tell me it's because it's hopeless.
And don't try and tell me that you can't have an effect.
And don't try and tell me there's too many stupid people in the world.
And don't try and tell me any of that stuff.
You're walking away because you're scared.
You're walking away because you lack the courage to do what you know needs to be done.
I just, I won't give you the out.
I mean, I can't make you do anything, of course, but I at least won't give you the out of saying it's some kind of rational, sensible, considered decision.
If you give up, you've lost.
And if you give up, I'm damn sad, in a way, that we have to save the world, and you're us in it, too.
Okay, go ahead.
No, no, no.
I was just going to remark on how, well, yeah, but when the Romans fell, it was Rome.
When the Byzantines fell, it was Byzants.
When the Chinese decided to lock themselves in a closet for 500 years, it was, you know, now we're global.
If not since 1913, then certainly since 1933 or 1945.
We're at the final watershed.
Right.
So now it's more important to act than ever.
Sure.
And I'll freely admit that, yes, I am scared.
But it's even more than that.
Because, I mean, talking about Jordan Peterson and the whole thing about...
He had this beautiful thing when he said that most of a person's personality, it's like 95% chaff.
You've got to burn it away.
Well...
I think that was my upbringing.
Going through that a bit too much and too early.
I know most of the things that I thought were me.
People found either they didn't care about them or they didn't care for them.
So throw them out.
And now will you...
I mean, come on, please.
I'm here.
Can you...
I don't have agency really yet.
Can you please see me as an investment?
No?
Okay, I'll change these things then.
Let's...
And then I ended up standing basically on a bare slope, as we say, and off Jesus.
I thought that I knew what loneliness was before then, but that was a new level.
And you will remain lonely until you speak the truth.
Because you see, once you've left the herd, once you have valued truth over approval, once you've valued accuracy over popularity, you've left.
You're off the island, man.
You're off the reservation.
You can either press on and find good companions, or you can stand there in the null zone, in the space between the tribe and yourself, between the delusions and the truth.
What T.S. Eliot called the shadow.
You can stay there, which is the punishment land, the limbo land, that the tribe tells everyone that the only thing outside the tribe is limbo, space, nothingness, emptiness, loneliness, ineffectuality, depression, anxiety, nothing.
Outside the tribe, all is darkness.
That's not true.
Outside the tribe is darkness, but if you keep going...
You get to new settlements.
You get to new people.
You get to the villages of the future.
You get to people hard at work trying to keep the illumination going that the tribe continues to try to extinguish with its short-sighted, short-circuited greed for things in the here and now, for moral approval, for virtue signaling, for money, for resources, for government, for power.
There are those of us out here trying to maintain the fundamental engines of civilization despite the constant, constant Wrecking balls being smashed in by short-sighted, short-circuiting democratic greed mongers who want to kill the golden goose that runs a civilization that keeps them alive.
Keep pushing on.
You're surrounding yourself with words and ineffectuality and examination of other people and, I mean, listen back to this.
Half of what you're saying is incomprehensible.
The other half is baffling.
Keep pushing on.
I don't think in words.
I think in mechanics because it's the only part that's left of me.
Well, that's just another thing that makes no sense to me at all.
You can't turn back.
You can't undo.
You can't unlearn how to ride a bike.
And you can't unlearn how to think for yourself.
You must keep going.
There's no way back.
Going back to join the tribe is not an option.
It's like wanting to be five again.
Can't do it.
You must keep pushing on.
And the way that that works on the internet now is you must be public with what you know.
You must be public with the truth.
A lot of the terrible mistakes being made in the world are due to a lack of information.
Bad decisions are not always motivated by ignorance.
A lot of times they're motivated by a lack of information.
It's not malevolence, it's ignorance that drives a lot of these bad decisions.
Everyone's the same.
Every ethnicity is the same.
All belief systems are the same.
Well, people haven't studied it.
They don't know the facts.
They don't know the science.
They don't know the source material.
Inform them about the facts.
And that will help.
You can't change the minds of truly malevolent people.
But there are people who are lockstep and useful idiots for the malevolent people because they lack information.
You give them the information, they can make better decisions.
Some people are going to eat themselves to death no matter what.
Other people, you give them a good nutrition plan, they can turn it around.
They're just ignorant.
They don't know.
They don't understand.
They haven't been told or the information has often been rigidly and relentlessly suppressed and kept away from them.
Keeping information away from people is a foundational methodology for spreading evil.
Because in the absence of knowledge, people succumb to authority.
And evil loves to keep knowledge away from people so that it can substitute its own punishments for authority, which grows in the absence of information.
If you give people information, give people the facts that are kept away from them, and they can then use their own judgment, their own information, and they'll be less susceptible to the machinations of The malevolence that keeps them ignorant so that they can kowtow to the authority of evil.
Go speak and then you'll be seen by other people.
And you can find the good companions.
The friendlies.
All the people who know, who understand, who can enhance what you know.
I know you're going to undermine and undercut what I'm saying.
I'm not just talking to you.
I'm talking to other people, Simon.
I know you need to not talk at the moment, in my opinion.
You need to listen, and then you need to not talk.
I'll close off the show.
You need to listen back to this a couple of times, and you need to listen.
What you're trying to do is justify your own inaction by an appeal to universal hopelessness and despair.
And overcomplication, which is a very waspy form of despair, but is nonetheless a paralysis, as surely as determinism or anything else that you can come up with.
So, it's your choice.
You are responsible for what you do.
You can blame other people.
You can say it's because this, that, or the other.
You can claim hopelessness and so on.
But you wouldn't be calling into this show.
If you were truly hopeless.
You wouldn't be listening to the show if you were truly hopeless.
You'd view me as a deluded fool.
Marching off a cliff thinking I'm going to flinterstone step my way across clouds to the promised land.
You're not hopeless.
You want me to tell you You're responsible.
That you have a choice.
That hopelessness is a damn excuse and you know it.
That despair is a damn excuse and you know it.
That blaming the ignorance of the masses is a damn excuse and you know it.
Because if the masses are ignorant and you have knowledge and you have the internet, you have a damn responsibility to inform the masses, to educate the masses.
Now, if after you educate the masses and after you tell the masses and after you fight the good fight and we all fight the good fight and we lose, Who knows?
Who cares?
Doesn't matter.
We don't know.
The future is not written as yet.
The future involves our penmanship.
The future involves what we carve, what we write, what lasers we can play on the clouds to write out the syllables that save the species so that the eyes of everyone can see.
That's our choice.
That's what we do.
And that's what we inherited.
We inherited a civilization from men and women who took far greater risks.
Then we will be asked to take.
People who brought scientific knowledge in the face of superstitious lunatics who had them burnt at the stake and drawn and quartered at times.
We are enormously fortunate in the lack of risk that we have to take to maintain civilization.
Yes, it's hard.
Yes, it's scary.
Sometimes.
The alternative being what?
If we lie down The grass of death grows over us and our bodies and our histories and our culture and our civilization, perhaps never to return.
Because the internet isn't just available to us, it's also available to the bad people, and it's also available to the people who are ignorant because they wish to avoid knowledge and wish to spread that avoidance of knowledge, just as I think you may be wishing to spread hopelessness and despair to normalize what you don't want to do.
Do it anyway.
Do it anyway.
It's the right thing to do, to speak the truth.
It's the right thing to do.
It's the right thing to do.
And it's the only thing that can work.
It's the only thing that can work.
And if nobody speaks the truth, it comes down to force.
And once it comes down to force, that is a significant dice roll.
And there's much more uncertainty in force than there is in rational debate.
And that's why we need to win the future with words.
So thanks, everyone, so much for listening and for calling in tonight.
A great pleasure to chat with you.
As always, please don't forget, freedomainradio.com slash donate.
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