Nov. 18, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
45:07
3900 THE OH S&!T MOMENT
If you are a human being with any conscientiousness, you’ve had an “oh s&!t” moment after realizing that you’ve made a mistake or created a problem. Stefan Molyneux describes a personal “oh s&!t” moment and wonders that how on a civilizational level, more individuals and leaders ignore the dangerous long-term consequences of their actions without any regard for other people. 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
Let me make a fundamental point by telling you about a terrible meeting.
So I'm 27 years old.
I finished my master's degree and I've co-founded a software company which automated a bunch of environmental assessments of the ground, of land.
Now, there's a company, Company A, that said to people who wanted to do these audits, if you use Steph's software, we'll give you a 40% reduction in the price of these audits because it's automated, right?
There's Company A. I'm in a meeting with Company B who's trying to sell the same services in conjunction with my software, and I'm so used to, you know, as I was the chief technical officer and I did a lot of sales as well, I'm so used to making the value proposition with company A. Oh, they'll give you a 40% reduction if you use our software.
But I'm sitting in the meeting with Company B. Terrible.
You know, sometimes you're on autopilot in life.
And, you know, people say, hey, how you doing?
And you say, fine, even if you've got a splitting headache.
Or, you know, you're just kind of on autopilot.
And it's important to fight that.
We don't want to be robotic that way.
But, you know, it happens. So I'm on this autopilot.
I was kind of tired.
I've been up all night coding the software.
And I was kind of tired. So basically I made a value proposition for the company who wasn't in the meeting.
Like the partner who wasn't in the meeting.
It was not good.
And the guy who I was in the meeting with got really mad at me.
Like afterwards he...
On the drive back.
I didn't even have a car back then.
I didn't get a car until I was in my 30s.
And he was driving me back.
And he was ripping into me.
And I was like... Because he's like, why are you selling our competitors in the meeting that we're having with the customer?
It's, you know, like having a meeting to try and sell Pepsi and talking about how great Coke is.
So, when I realized what I'd done, I didn't, like, he was fairly abrupt in the meeting, but afterwards, you know, you always wait till you get to the elevator, and you wait till you're alone, and then you let rip, right?
And he got really mad at me, and I had this, oh, shit, oh, shit.
The oh shit moment. The OSM. The oh shit moment.
I'm sure if you look back across the landscape and history and promontories of your life, you will see that it's kind of a hop, skip and a jump for some of these OSMs.
These oh shit moments.
Oh shit. I left my passport on the plane.
Oh shit. You know, whatever.
Now... Those shit moments are a moment of vulnerability, of learning, of humanity.
And this taught me to be much more alert and aware to my environment in business meetings and other areas of my life.
It's a good lesson, and I remain sorry for that.
And, you know, I make little errors in the show if I'm talking sort of off the cuff like now.
Anyway, so the OSMs.
You have them, I have them.
At least I hope you have them.
I hope you have them because, you know, there's a certain kind of people, they don't have the oh shit moments.
They don't have that.
I guess they know other people do, but they don't.
So I was reading today about a family in America facing violence.
An increase in their healthcare premiums from $900 a month to $3,000 a month.
And that's with a deductible that's close to $10,000.
Fundamentally unusable healthcare.
$3,000 American a month for healthcare with a deductible close to $10,000.
Now, you know, back in the day before Obamacare came along, The deciding vote for which was cast by grab-baggy, shaggy-haired hands Senator Al Franken, whose election was questionable, to put it mildly.
But, you know, well north of 80% of Americans are pretty satisfied with their health care.
And there was a lot, I mean, there's a lot that's messed up in the American health care system.
People laughingly refer to it as a free market system, and it's not.
The number of doctors is incredibly restricted.
The, um... The fact that your healthcare is so often tied into your job is terrible and a result of World War II policies, believe it or not.
They said you couldn't give wage increases to lower workers, so companies just offered free, like they offered to take over healthcare burdens instead, like healthcare insurance costs and that sort of stuff.
So then because people move jobs, you then can no longer deny people with pre-existing conditions.
Because you can't deny people with pre-existing conditions in the healthcare insurance market, most people just wait until they get sick and then apply for healthcare.
And that drives up the cost of healthcare enormously.
I mean, obviously, if you can buy fire insurance for your home after your fire burns down, nobody's going to bother buying it until their house burns down.
Which makes it completely unsustainable.
This drives up the cost of healthcare to ridiculous levels.
You have, of course, illegal immigrants wandering into doctors' offices and wandering into, in particular, emergency areas and hospitals where they can't be turned away.
And this and a huge clusterfrak of other things, like the fact that the government will pay you extra in support benefits if your child is disabled in some manner, and then you have this imaginary disease called ADHD and all this kind of crap,
for which you can then pump the kids full of drugs, the government pays for the drugs, and will also pay the parents to put the drugs in the children, which I guess is a whole lot better than reforming, say, for instance, the horrifying prison-like hellscape of government schools.
All of this and more has driven up the healthcare.
Everybody wants, of course, to get the government to pass a law to say, my obscure ailment should be covered by insurance companies.
I mean, there are certainly things that I would want to be covered by in terms of insurance, right?
Obviously cancer. I have no fear of heart disease.
I'm very robust. I work out like five days a week.
So I have no fear of diabetes.
I'm a good weight and my cholesterol is right where it needs to be.
And... There's lots of things I don't particularly worry about, and I would check those off.
I wouldn't want to be covered for those things.
I'm really not that worried about diabetes.
I don't want any coverage for psychotropic drugs.
I don't want any coverage for the hellish, to me, body, brain, and soul poison of psych meds.
I wouldn't want anything for that. So you should be able to pick and choose based upon your lifestyle.
And I remember when I got insurance as an executive in the software field, you know, when we...
We needed to have insurance, the executives, to make sure if a plane went down that the replacement costs would be covered.
And, you know, they grilled me.
And they took blood samples and asked me six different questions.
I thought they were going to send up tiny Isaac Asimov characters with spelunking and flashlight up my butt.
Sadly, that didn't happen.
But one day.
So, I mean, you should, your lifestyle should, you know, health care.
70% of healthcare issues, of illnesses and ailments, are lifestyle-related.
In other words, you do things that cause them to happen.
Like you take up extreme sports, or you're overweight, or you don't exercise, or you sit while working, which is basically the same as smoking.
There's a reason I stand.
I had to sit down the other day to do some work for a couple of hours.
I'm like, I feel like a mollusk.
I feel like a question mark.
So... You should be able to manage your healthcare costs with lifestyle choices or pay if you don't want to fulfill better lifestyle choices.
But of course, when it comes to insurance, what people want to do is they want to say, well, my obscure ailment, I need the government to pass a law that it needs to be included in everyone's Insurance so that you can basically socialize the cost of it.
And not to mention, of course, the fact that FDA drug approval has become so ridiculous that experts have calculated that drugs which are perfectly legal in, say, Europe and save people's lives but remain illegal in America due to massive, massive regulatory overburdening.
It's cost more than 5 million Americans' lives over the past couple of decades.
Now, those lives ending, well, they're not paying taxes.
These are not always old people, of course.
They're not paying taxes. And all of the social investment in educating and raising and housing people, a lot of that.
Well, certainly the human capital is vanished.
The housing, I guess, remains.
So, when Obama was first talking about the Obamacare stuff, He was talking about, what is it, 30% reduction in premiums, you're going to get better healthcare for less money, and so on. And this is how it was sold.
And that's how the American government took over 20% of the U.S. economy, basically.
Now, when something is promised, like when you...
Mess with people's health care.
That's a big deal.
That is a very, very big deal.
You know, when you're young and robust and bulletproof, as I was for most of my life, never really had an illness until I got a big one.
You know, health care.
I'm young. I need to floss.
Floss. Well, actually, I've heard arguments to the contrary.
But anyway, water picks are good.
So, You don't really think that much about healthcare, but you get past 50 and suddenly you become good friends with your optometrist and...
I have to send you poop off somewhere in the mail.
So it is one of these things that you become increasingly aware of.
The fragility and aging creakiness of your really mortal instrument of meat puppetry known as the body.
And it becomes really important.
And when you mess with it, that's a very, very serious thing.
I mean, this guy who saw his insurance skyrocket from $900 a month to $3,000 a month.
I mean, he'd quit his job because, you know, with Obamacare I can get decent health care and so on.
And that is really messing with people's lives, not just their healthcare, but their jobs as a whole, their capacity to become entrepreneurs, their capacity to take risks, because what's it going to be next year?
And all of the people who didn't get such enormous raises this year, what's going to happen next year?
And of course, the whole reason behind Obamacare was because of a variety of government regulations and restrictions to entry in the marketplace, healthcare become ridiculously expensive.
I mean, fertility treatments?
I mean, what if you're striving not to get pregnant?
What if you're over 45 for ladies and whatever, over 40?
You don't want that stuff. But of course, all the people who need fertility treatments want the government to pass a law to make everyone else pay for them.
Sure, that's natural. Wrong, but natural.
Inevitable. It's the way the system is.
But... What happened was healthcare got so ridiculously expensive that young people were just saying, yeah, I'm just going to rely on youth.
I mean, it should work the way it works with life insurance.
You know how life insurance works. If you buy it when you're young, you know, eventually your annuities end up paying for themselves.
And you basically get, quote, free life insurance after a certain amount of time.
You should, of course, get health insurance when you're young and robust, have low premiums, pay a little bit extra so they can bank some money aside, invest it or do whatever.
And then you can, or just buy some bitcoins.
And then you can end up with mostly free healthcare when you get older.
That's, of course, how it should work.
And healthy people, of course, are needed for insurance to work.
For health insurance to work, you need healthy people.
You need people who aren't currently consuming healthcare resources, of course, right?
I mean, for fire insurance to work, you need people's houses to not burn down.
It's kind of the way these logical things occur.
And so because healthcare insurance premiums got so ridiculously high, Young people were saying, forget it.
I mean, I'm not paying for all of this healthcare that I'm not going to use.
The deductibles are way too high.
I'm not likely to. And also because nobody can deny me based on pre-existing conditions, I can just wait until I get sick and then get my healthcare from there.
You understand, right? So anyway, the whole system is a complete mess.
And it was predictable. And anybody with half a brain or, you know, a 3% knowledge of Basic free market economics, Austrian economics and so on, predicted, as I did many years ago, that this was going to be a complete disaster, that premiums were going to go up, the entire system was going to be destabilized even more than it was before, and the government, the goal of course was to destabilize the system, the remnants of the free market in the system, in order to socialize healthcare.
Governments love to take over healthcare.
It allows them to buy votes.
It also makes you dependent on the government.
It makes you helpless.
It gives the government massive control over your life, your children's lives, your future, everything.
I mean, it is a godsend to the power-mad socialist monkey brains who are constantly climbing up the ladder of state power.
And that, of course, is the goal.
When Obama and Gruber and others stood in front of the American people and said, this is going to be great.
This is going to reduce your premiums.
30% or more.
And you're going to get better health care.
Oh, and if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.
And if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.
All these promises. How is it...
Like, I'm trying to navigate the spread of what is commonly called humanity.
And by that I simply mean the biological definition, not we share a common humanity, because kind of clearly we don't.
Like, you have your, oh shit, moments.
I have my, oh shit, moments.
And that's a good thing.
But it does not seem to be common to the species as a whole.
It doesn't. I don't know, like, if it's a cold versus warm environment thing.
You know, like, I don't know, if you're on some island where there's plenty of coconuts and fish, you don't say, oh shit, I forgot to store up fish for next week.
You don't have those oh shit moments, right?
Because you're like, yeah, I'm hungry, I'll go get a coconut.
I'm hungry, I'll go grab a fish.
Oh, yum. Like there's no, not that same need for planning for the deferral of gratification, but, you know, if you're in a cold climate, where you farm, right?
I mean, the Inuit or the sort of, what used to be called Eskimos in the far north, they don't, I mean, they're back to hunting and they have, you know, they have the seals, they have the whales, they have, they can hunt the polar bears and so on.
So where you have agriculture and you have winter, You really do have your oh shit moments and you have this anxiety about the future and you, I mean, if you don't, you don't survive, right?
The grasshopper and the ant thing, you know, the ant who works to store all the nuts for the winter and the grasshopper who plays, well, the grasshopper ends up moving with the ant and pillaging off of his planning.
But if you, like you genuinely do have an oh shit moment, if you look at your larder, you look at your pantry come, say, January or February and you don't have enough food.
You have to have that anxiety to, you know, like it's one thing if you're at a buffet, you know, it's a big croning, like the kind of buffet that you think makes the entire cruise ship lead one way or the other.
You don't sit there and say, well, I better manage my, I better not eat too much.
I mean, of course you do if you don't want to gain weight, but in general, that's a personal thing.
So, but if you're in, I don't know, like let's say you're in a boat, like the ship sinks and then you're in a lifeboat and you have like three packs of saltine crackers and it's you and three other people alone on the ocean, you better start really rationing.
Like, then you have an anxiety.
You don't sit there, oh, I wonder if there's going to be more crackers tomorrow.
But when you're in the lifeboat, no more food is coming.
You've got to marshal your water, you've got to really ration your food, and you better plan for things.
You've got to eat the bare minimum. And anybody who suggests more, I mean, even if you want more, don't you feel that sense of anxiety?
And this, looking down the tunnel of time and seeing the negative consequences of an overuse of resources, well...
Maybe this is why environmentalism is kind of like a North American thing or a European thing, whereas in Africa there's just not that same sense of concern.
That same sense of, but what's the temperature of the world going to be in a hundred years?
Maybe this is why when society begins to decay, when taxes get too high, when everybody with a brain understands deep down the system is unsustainable, people say, well, maybe I'll hold off having kids.
In times of stress, the people from cold climates have fewer kids.
In times of stress, people from hot climates have more kids.
This is the RK selection thing, which are the gene wars that I've talked about before.
But there's this cliché.
You know, there was that Bobby McFerrin song, Don't worry, be happy.
And there is this general island mentality, like the Jamaican mentality of, you know, why are you so tense?
Relax, enjoy, put your feet up and have a beer and, you know, that kind of stuff.
And you see this all the time, you know, when people talk about difficult topics.
You know, I talk about art or something like that.
People are like, hey man, just go to relax and enjoy, right?
And yeah, there's plenty of time for relaxing and enjoying, but not if your ancestors evolved in a cold climate.
As farmers who had to deal with winter.
Because then this, you know, relax, enjoy, put your feet up, have a siesta and so on.
That makes perfect sense when it's 9,000 degrees outside and food is as easy as a stick and a thrust away.
But when you do have to make it through the winter...
Then you better damn well have some anxiety.
And you better look down through the tunnel of time and you better learn how to not enjoy yourself in the moment.
Because if you simply indulge yourself in the moment, you're going to starve to death over winter.
Or, even if you don't starve to death...
You may have to lean on neighbors, friends, and family, and then you're going to experience negative social consequences.
The, oh shit, I really, really don't want to have to go and ask my brother-in-law for a bag of flour and 12 loaves of bread.
Because they're going to push back and say, why the hell didn't you plan?
Why didn't you plan?
So that kind of pushback is why you have the oh shit.
Or, even if you have enough food but you have to not eat too much, like you maybe have half rations or whatever, well, what this does, of course, is it means that your body is weakened and that makes you more susceptible to disease.
Which, of course, when my ancestors were evolving, was a really big deal.
So the, oh shit, the anxiety, the looking down through the tunnel of time, the recognizing when things are sustainable and when things aren't sustainable, it's kind of like a cold temperature thing.
It's kind of like a cold temperature thing.
It's not that much a tropical thing.
So, when I look at sort of political leaders, the, oh shit, moments should be, I mean, just...
Like, oh shit, I thought they were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, so I authorized an invasion that destabilized the Middle East and killed hundreds of thousands of people.
I mean, I felt pretty bad selling a competitor's product in a meeting with a partner.
Oh shit. Ah, it bothered me for like two days.
What is... I mean, you think of your oh shit moments in life.
Oh shit. I did this, or I did that, or I made this mistake, or I forgot that, or it is my anniversary, or whatever.
So... For political leaders, it's just to me astounding that they don't have more of this kind of stuff.
They seem to be peculiarly immune to it.
How on earth...
Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama authorizing the takedown of Syria, the takedown of Libya, unleashing a massive migrant crisis, threatening European civilization completely.
If that's not an oh shit moment, I don't know what is.
I fundamentally don't know what is.
And the fact that politicians don't have these oh shit moments.
Like, does it bother them?
Do they ever wake up at like 3 o'clock in the morning and say, oh shit.
Man, now you can buy...
A slave in the open markets in Libya for $400.
You can buy a human being.
That did not occur before I helped overthrow Gaddafi.
Ah, shit. Slavery is back in Libya.
What a disaster.
What have I wrought?
What regrets do I have?
They don't seem to have any.
That's a weird thing.
And I, like everyone, don't you wish you had that poof?
The magic wand. Regrets.
I've had a few, but you just...
That's fine.
Or, you know, you had some way of sealing over the cognitive dissonance.
When you feel... The oh shit moment, it's kind of humiliating.
It's kind of easy to attack yourself.
You have to put things in perspective.
But don't you wish you didn't have it sometimes?
Well, of course, your ancestors also did not want this feeling of discomfort.
If they grew up in cold farming-based climates, they didn't want this feeling of discomfort.
It's just that those who didn't have this feeling of discomfort died off.
Brutal. Like the development of the oh shit moment.
It's the result of tens or maybe even hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary pressure on people who are like, don't worry, be happy.
They're like, stubborn to death in March.
I remember there was a piece of graffiti.
There were two pieces of graffiti.
One that I remember.
One was when I was a kid, when we were frightened of nuclear war.
And it was in the... Bathroom stall in my junior high school.
It was very memorable.
It said, mutate now, before the post-war rush.
I don't know who wrote it, but evil genius.
And another one was, don't worry, be a dummy.
You know, he said, don't worry, be happy.
Don't worry, be a dummy.
We want to be happy, but...
For civilization to continue, we need to be anxious, we need to be cautious, we need to worry.
And there are certain groups in society who don't worry.
And there are other groups who do.
And this distinction is I think really at the root of the cultural battles that sort of manifest themselves as as left and right or rich and poor or class-based or gender-based or race-based but fundamentally there's groups of people in the world in the west they don't worry they don't really think about the national debt they don't think about Shrinking free speech.
They don't think about demographic replacement.
They don't think about birth rates.
They don't look down the tunnel of time.
They just enjoy the moment, which looks like a lot of fun.
It looks like a lot of fun to enjoy the moment.
But it's only fun for now.
I mean, heroin, I hear, is fun in the moment, but can have some challenges for you down the road.
And it's one of the great imbalances in society.
Those who don't worry have a massive advantage in a democracy over those who do worry.
Especially when you have a whole culture that reinforces this, you know, only square is worry, man.
Live for today. Hope I die before I get old.
Like all that crap. Well, and also those who don't have children have a massive advantage in a democracy.
Just by the by, I was thinking about this the other day.
Those who don't have children have a massive advantage in a democracy over those who do have children.
Because those who do have children are very busy and don't have the time.
It's funny because they have more motivation to make the society better because they have kids, but they have no time.
They have no time to do all of this stuff, to do all of this activism.
Like those who don't have jobs in a welfare state have a massive advantage over those who do have jobs.
They have far greater incentive for a bigger state and they have far more time to organize, to march and to make it happen.
And so the hard-working, industrious people who have children, who are the lifeblood and only possibility for civilization to sustain itself, are at a massive disadvantage to those dependent on the state, who don't have or need jobs, and those who don't have children.
It's just a matter of time.
It's only so many hours in the day.
I've only recently started writing books again after taking eight years off as a father.
The Art of the Argument at theartoftheargument.com.
You should check it out. It's a great book.
Very, very proud of it. And only so many hours in the day.
And, of course, even having children.
For some people, for the cold climate people, having children is kind of a sacrifice of the now for the sake of the future.
You know, you have kids, you don't have a lot of sleep.
If you're going to invest in your kids, basically, like if you're just going to have kids and...
Use them to get welfare or just kind of ignore them or dump them on nannies if you're rich or whatever, then this doesn't really apply.
But for people who actually want to be parents, who want to invest in their children, who want to get to know their children, who want to infuse principles and virtues and so on in their children's minds and hearts, you don't get a lot of sleep.
You spend a lot of time dealing with your kids, interacting with your kids.
And so you just have less time.
And again, if you don't particularly care about your kids, they're just around and they just take care of themselves and so on, this doesn't really matter quite as much.
But there's just not much time.
And so are you willing to, if you want to invest in your kids, are you willing to put in the work when they're young?
I mean, parenting, it's all about the first five years.
I mean, I say this to my wife sometimes, you know, our job's done.
A little bit of maintenance, a little bit of course correction here and there, but our job was done years ago.
As parents, because my daughter's eight and all, so she is who she is.
And a lot of that was genetic, just her personality, but it's the first five years.
If you get it right, then it's hard to get it wrong, and if you get it wrong, then it's pretty hard to get it right.
So you make that sacrifice.
And one of the reasons I'm able to work on books, and my daughter's becoming more self-sufficient, which is great.
But you make that sacrifice because you want the happiness of seeing someone grow to adulthood, of having that companionship, of having grandkids and companionship in your old age, and you have that fundamental recognition that, you know, when you're young, people want you.
You're sexy, you're attractive, you're, you know, but as you get older, you know, people complain about this invisibility, like you get older, and people don't care about you anymore.
I mean, it's not like they're buying you drinks at the club, right?
I mean, this is... You get older, you get kind of invisible to society as a whole when you retire in particular.
But if you have a family, you don't.
You have people who care about you if you've done the investment and you've loved them and they will inevitably love you back if you've done it, right?
And so, for smart people, even having children is a deferral of gratification because I gave up writing a lot of books in order to be a parent.
I gave up not having colds sometimes to be a parent.
And so when you're smart, you give up even more to become a parent.
You know, if some person of below-average intelligence gives up a bunch of time, well, they've just given up, I don't know, maybe a bunch of TV or some video games or whatever.
But I've actually given up writing probably eight books to be a parent.
It's a big deal. No regrets at all.
No regrets at all. Books are books.
People are people. So, for smart people, when smart people give up having children, that's a sign.
That's the canary in the coal mine.
That is your sign that your society is fundamentally fucked.
People know fucking society is fucked.
I mean, just look at Japan. Japan has the highest debt-to-GDP ratio in the world, even higher than Greece.
And America is actually higher than Canada, for all you people who think Canada is a socialist nightmare.
Well, socialized healthcare, but not a big giant empire with 700-plus military bases overseas.
Although the demography is a challenge in Canada, to put it mildly.
But if you look at Japan, you have a fundamentally unsustainable society, and the Japanese people, IQ-based, are one of the smartest groups in the world.
Average IQs of like 105, 106, and so on.
Very, very smart group of people.
Well, because they came from the Siberian cold and winter, and you need a lot of intelligence mathematics in many ways to grow rice, which is why they have this great spatial reasoning as a whole, as an ethnicity.
But Japanese people stopped having sex.
Stopped having babies.
To the point where Japanese politicians are just railing against the old people.
And also they don't die.
They have particular genes that resist the accumulation of fat.
Which is why Japanese people tend to be slender.
It's not just the diet. It's also the genetics.
And so they don't get fat.
They don't smoke much.
And so they live forever.
And you've had this zombie economy for, what is it, a quarter of a century now, where they just keep piling more and more fiat currency into the ash heap of these zombie companies.
They won't allow a market correction.
They won't allow a course correction.
And they certainly won't allow for the reduction of benefits to the aged.
So you have this.
This is the, you look at the birth rate.
When the birth rate for smart people starts to go down...
That means that smart people are recognizing that there's going to be an environmental crisis and the fewer children you have, the better.
You understand? If there is a huge number of years of really, really cold weather or hard to farm in weather, birth rates will decline among smart people.
Now, if there are environmental pressures in hot countries, your best survival strategy is to have more kids, not fewer.
To just spray and pray.
Like, do the frog rather than the wolf.
As far as reproduction strategy goes.
So this is one of these...
A society as a whole should have this oh shit moment.
The moment that high IQ birth rates start to decline.
That's your canary in the coal mine.
That's your oh shit moment.
When... It's one of these things I've been sort of toying with this idea that...
One of the reasons why Europeans stopped having...
Babies was, after two world wars, I think people thought, well, what's the point?
Why would I invest all of this time, energy, emotion, and resources into raising a son who's going to get blown up, who's going to get shredded, who's going to get turned into...
A sealed carbon-based container for mustard gas, or turned into its original star shreds floating on a western breeze over a battlefield.
Why would I bother? Or, if I have a daughter, she will then grow up to love a man who will nod and smile and touch his cap and sing sea shanties as he's shipped off on a grey ship to be ploughed under a foreign field in another country.
Why? But there was, of course, a baby boom.
And then there was a baby bust.
Why? Why did people...
I mean, after the welfare state, people recognize that there's going to be significant economic dislocation coming.
Smart people can see down that tunnel of time.
They're just having fewer kids.
And rather than say, and this is decades ago, rather than say, oh shit, people are having fewer kids.
We better fix society.
Because they're the greatest resource, the two great resources in human society.
Number one is intelligence, raw genetic intelligence.
And number two is empathy.
Empathy is very, very tricky to develop.
It requires 13 disparate parts of the human brain to end up working together.
And it's, I think, virtually impossible to recreate if you don't get it when you're young.
So you need empathy and you need intelligence.
And empathy is somewhat related to intelligence.
And there are fewer smart people than there are dumb people in general.
I mean, I know there's a bell curve, but particularly for men, it's certainly on the upside, certainly compared to women.
And rather than say, okay, what...
Aspects of our society are causing the deep genetic alarm bells to go off among our smartest citizens.
Why are they...
I mean, there was propaganda and feminism and all of that kind of stuff, but it needed a place to land.
It's one thing to send a helicopter up out into the desert.
It's another thing to have it land.
It needed a place to land, and the place to land was, I don't really want to have kids because I'm worried.
Whether it was nuclear war, whether it was environmental disaster, whether it was national deaths, whether it was...
I mean, any number of things. What happens is, when the smart people stop having babies, that should be a giant, oh shit moment.
And say, okay, let's sit down and talk to people.
We need this resource.
We need smart people to run the economy.
We need smart people to create wealth.
I mean, the bottom 50% of American taxpayers pay less than 3% of the federal taxes.
50% of the people paying less than 3%.
That's IQ related.
Income and IQ are very closely related.
And so when you have a lot of dumb people and the smart people aren't having babies, your system will collapse.
You need the smart people to generate the wealth to generate the products.
Well, of course, the smart people generate the wealth, which is then transferred through the welfare state and other redistributionist mechanisms to the less smart people who then have more babies, which then triggers these smart people to have fewer babies.
Which then causes this death spiral.
And this oh shit moment that society should have happened the moment that the birth rate began to decline for the smartest people.
The canary in the coal mine.
Why? Are they choosing to not have kids?
Because they can see down the tunnel of time.
They can see the challenges that are coming.
And like all case-selected, gotta survive the winter organisms when resources diminish, Then the number of children you have diminishes as well.
When resources expand, I mean, look at the post-war period.
In America in particular, you could have one guy going off to work for 40 hours a week, and he could support a wife, a house, a car, and five or six children.
America's taxes were lower, regulations were lower.
This is what Trump is trying to get, to some degree, America back to, although it's a long way to go and a lot of dislocation.
And so, when there are plentiful resources, people have more children who are smart.
When there are fewer resources, they have fewer children, that's the big, oh shit, canary in the coal mine that society needed to have dealt with when I was a kid.
It needed to have dealt with that in the, I don't know, in the 60s, in the 70s for sure.
But it didn't. It didn't.
Because those in charge...
Again, Trump accepted so far.
We'll see. But those in charge don't seem to have those, oh shit, moments.
They don't seem, they're immune to them.
They don't seem to have them during the decision.
They don't seem to have them after.
I mean, where is Obama penning his big op-ed pieces saying, what did I do?
Oh God, what did I do?
I have presided over and pushed through as legislation something which has I have destroyed the capacity for many people to even pay for their own health care.
I have stripped them of their doctors.
I have stripped them of their plans.
I have created massive turmoil in one of the most sensitive and powerful areas of people's needs and preferences.
What have I done? This is not what I promised.
The exact opposite seems to have occurred.
What have I done? People don't say this with regards to immigration.
They don't say, well, you know, this third world immigration, man, it's not working out the way we planned.
It's not integration. It's not enriching.
It's driving whites out of their own neighborhoods.
It is creating instability.
There are hot spots of terrorism and no-go zones.
There's massive welfare dependence.
There's huge strain upon social services.
It takes now months to see a doctor sometimes.
Schools are ridiculously overcrowded, and it's a tower of Babel language confusion.
Which means it's almost impossible to get any quality education through.
Housing prices are going through the roof because when you have kids organically, you have time to build new houses because it takes a while for them to grow up when people just come pouring in.
Hundreds of thousands a year, hundreds of thousands a year drives up the price of housing enormously, which, you know, you got a third of kids in America try to get a college education, don't even graduate, but still have debt, a lot of them.
And there's no jobs.
Wages have been stagnant for the last few decades or declining in many ways in many areas.
And teenagers don't get jobs anymore because massive third world importation does result in a lot of teenage jobs either being automated or going to adults.
Because, you know, when you hire a teenager, they're going to quit in six months to a year usually.
But if you hire a low-rent third world immigrant, they're going to stick around.
So it's better for you as a business.
Unless you have the, in general, oh shit moment.
And so, I mean, just look at the unfunded liabilities the American government has promised but can't deliver.
It's well north of $200 trillion.
It's a ridiculous figure.
It can't possibly be paid.
It can't even be inflated away.
So, if you look at Venezuela, in Venezuela, inflation is now running at 3,000%.
People are selling or giving away their children because they can't feed them.
You've got, for 75 cents, you can get a blowjob from a child in Venezuela.
Oh, it's horrible. You've got middle-aged women going over to Colombia to sell their bodies as whores, as prostitutes, as desperate, Les Mis-style ladies of the night just to get some groceries for their family.
And all of those who supported Chavez, who supported the nationalization of so much of Venezuela's economy, who supported the socialization of Venezuela, socialism in Venezuela, did they have any oh shit moments?
Did they have any oh shit?
I thought this was going to be great.
Now the poor are suffering most of all.
I thought this was going to liberate women now they're being turned into medieval slaves of sexuality.
I thought this was going to give people better access to healthcare.
Just look online for pictures of Venezuelan hospitals.
It's like a garage sale from the upside down world of Stranger Things.
Do they have any oh shit moments?
To the feminists who said, we are aiming for female happiness, decade after decade after decade, women are getting more and more miserable.
Now a quarter of middle-aged American women are on antidepressants, which I don't think work at all.
It worked the opposite. Do they have their oh shit moment?
Do all the people who said, let's open up the floodgates to everyone to go to college.
Now you've got a bunch of people who can't reason their way out of a paper bag or argue their way.
Out of a taxi and free speech is dying and violence is increasing.
Does anyone out there, other than us few, us sometimes happy few, does anyone out there have these oh shit moments?
Anybody look back with shock and regret?
The whole welfare state was supposed to eliminate poverty.
There should be no poverty left.
And now we have both entrenched poverty and deferred poverty because of the amount of debt.
Debt is just deferred poverty.
And so we have far more poverty now than before the welfare state.
Started, but we have a couple of generations of people bred with employment-resistant personalities.
That's actually a technical phrase.
Does anyone else out there have these oh shit moments?
Oh shit about Obamacare.
Oh shit about meddling in the Middle East.
Oh shit. About overthrowing leaders in North Africa and other places.
Does anyone have this? Oh shit!
About mass migration from the third world.
About this refugee scam.
Does anyone have this? Oh shit!
Demographic replacement. Oh shit!
Birth rates between various groups.
Oh shit, the welfare state is not, oh shit.
In the 60s when America decided to basically no longer fire teachers, does anyone look back at the collapsing quality of education and say, oh shit, that was a bad idea?
It's this weird paradox, and I'll end here, and I look forward to your thoughts on what I'm saying.
But the way that it works in human history, in society, maybe even in your own life, I think probably your own life first and foremost, it's what you can control.