Question 1: [1:39] – “Let’s suppose we accept the political climate as it is, that we accept its forward projection down the path it has already shown to be going. Where and how should we conduct the conversation, so many might call out the elephant in the room: overpopulation of our world. The idiocracy effect and those two working in detrimental tandem. We can see unnatural systems in place that artificially create the idiocracy effect, such as the welfare state or flying food bombs in sub-Saharan Africa; but there seems to be no sign that these bandaids and crutches are going away. Darwin be damned. Do we not risk large swaths of humanity being taken down the wrong path? Do we not face a swelling tide of lower IQ, higher aggression societies and cultures wreaking havoc on our world and the fruits of our intellectual labors?”Question 2: [56:42] – “How do you ensure your child is not exposed to bad influences? More importantly how do you prevent your daughter from being traumatized by an evil predator or a horrific experience? Lastly is there a way you stop yourself from becoming an overprotective parent, if there is such a thing as over protection when it comes to children?”Question 3: [1:52:40] – “In the middle ages, battles were quite rare, and warfare consisted for the most part of sieges. Roughly around the year 1800, this started to change, and by WW1, it was the complete opposite. In the middle ages, battle commanders preferred to avoid battle for fear of losing too many men. But looking at the battle commanders’ decisions in WW1, how they would send hundreds of thousands of young men to their early graves in a day, you would think their objective WAS to lose their own men. What explains this drastic change in warfare?”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
Well, in honor of International Be Mean to Your Listeners Day, I wanted to introduce to you the first caller.
And he wanted to know what I thought of his idea for achieving a free society.
And I guess I was pretty assertive.
It's designed to be helpful.
I hope it helps you. These are kind of conversations that I've had with myself, so I'm no harsher to others than I am to myself.
But I really think you need to listen to what happened in that conversation.
The second caller, wow, I've been doing this a long time, like 11 years, and I don't think that I have had a single call that went from sunnier to darker as rapidly and as widely.
It was quite an elevator drop.
And so I start off, the question is, how do you keep your children safe from bad influences?
And so I talked a little bit about my own history, my own thoughts, and then, well, hold on to your safety hats, we go on quite a ride.
I hope that you will follow it along.
The third caller wanted to know really how is it possible for commanders, for generals in the First World War to so wantonly spend the lives of their own troops for so many years, for so little gain.
So we talked a little bit about the history of warfare and what it meant in Europe to be a military and political leader in the First World War and the effects that that has even now.
So I hope that you recognize these are incredibly important, highly quality-based conversations.
I hope that you will help support the show at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
But now, International Be Mean to Your Listeners Day starts now.
Alright, well up first today we have James.
James wrote in and said, Let's suppose we accept the political climate as it is, that we accept its forward projection down the path it has already shown to be going.
Where and how should we conduct the conversation so that many might call out the elephant in the room?
Overpopulation of our world.
The idiocracy effect of those two working in detrimental tandem.
We can see our unnatural systems in place that artificially create the idiocracy effect, such as the welfare state or flying food bombs in sub-Saharan Africa, but there seems to be no sign that these band-aids and crutches are going away.
Darwin be damned.
Do we not risk large swaths of humanity being taken down the wrong path?
Do we not face a swelling tide of lower IQ, higher aggression societies and cultures wreaking havoc on our world and the fruits of our intellectual labors?
That's from James. Oh, hey James.
How's your optimism doing tonight?
Oh, great.
You know, I keep a...
It's like half cynical, half smiling is how I go through life, so...
You know, and it's funny, I mean, there are, of course, demographic challenges and all of that in the world, but I can't help but think, given the experience of the last couple of generations in my family, at least there ain't no world war, and that's kind of where we are in society as a whole, where it's like the only thing you can be thankful for is there isn't a giant war that's killing tens of millions of people a year.
So that's how I keep some of my optimism going for what it's worth.
Yeah, it's a good day.
Every day you walk outside and you're not living in a thermonuclear cloud.
Hey, I don't see my own bones at night.
I'm not glowing invisible.
I'm not a nuclear shadow.
That's where we are.
So can you, what do you mean by how do we conduct ourselves?
What do you mean? Oh, how do we conduct the conversation?
Because, you know, what I feel like, geez, how do you say it?
Lots of things that I think are important to talk about are also very unpopular to talk about.
So when you try to bring up subjects like overpopulation and things like, you know, the idiocracy effect, you know, nobody wants to talk about it.
Everybody wants to shush you up because it's just so stigmatized.
Good! I'm not sure why that's a problem.
I mean, it'd be great if people did listen to Reason.
But the beautiful thing about having these kinds of conversations is you never have to feel any guilt or obligation to others when the shit hits the fan.
Let me sort of give you a sort of story.
It's not my story. So way back, Steve Martin, before he was into movies and dealing with tinnitus, he was basically the world's best comedian.
And I was introduced to him.
I was introduced to him by a friend of mine, this guy.
I won't give his name. This Chinese guy.
Hilarious. And he introduced me to Steve Martin.
And Steve Martin used to have this bit, and I'll just do it real short, but he used to have this bit with something like this.
Life is a whole series of closing doors.
You think of life like this long hallway.
It kind of goes down and down and down.
There are all these doors on either side.
And the great thing about getting older is you get to start closing doors.
You know, like somebody says, hey, let's go camping!
And you're like, the door is closed.
Sorry, we're closed.
And to me, making rational arguments to the world as a whole It's giving people the opportunity to avoid the consequences of their own irrationality.
You know, you can't invent reason on your own.
You can't invent philosophy on your own.
That old statement that says, if I have seen further, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.
I mean, that's one of these things like, well, weren't they also standing on the shoulders of giants?
Isn't it giants and turtles all the way down?
But you bring reason to people so that...
Either they listen to you, in which case disaster is averted, or they don't, in which case you have no need for empathy, because you tried.
You tried. You know, like you got a friend who...
Keeps dating the wrong women and uses drugs, he drinks, he drives drunk, does all kinds of stupid and destructive and wrong and immoral things.
And you say to him, man, you gotta pick better women.
You gotta stop using drugs, stop drinking so much.
What the hell's the matter with you? Like, sit down, let's talk about it, let's figure this out.
Hang on.
And your friend doesn't listen.
And then he does something that's really harmful.
He gets thrown in jail.
He gets dragged off to family court because he got some crazy woman pregnant.
He gets some injury.
He gets cirrhosis of the liver.
He gets lung cancer because he smokes too much.
And then he's going to come on your door and he's going to say, you've got to help me, man.
And I'm like, no, I don't. See, I did help you.
I helped you with prevention.
And if you don't listen to me about prevention...
I sure as hell am not going to listen to your requirements for a cure.
Because my job is prevention.
And if you don't listen, then I have no sympathy.
So the whole brick by brick, right?
Brick by brick, you build up the stoic indifference to the consequences of people who don't listen to reason.
Brick by brick.
You have to build that up.
That is an essential survival mechanism in the modern world.
Try to reach people as much as humanly possible with rationality, with compassion, with humor, with...
I mean, you can't get philosophy...
Really, in many ways, better than the way this conversation presents it.
Like calls like this and my monologues and interviews and so on.
It's about as digestible as it can possibly be.
I try and squeeze every ounce out of my semi-charismatic, fevered, half-humorous brain to get as much philosophy into the minds and hearts of people.
And I've challenged them from the very beginning.
Bring it to the people in your life.
Put your relationships on the line.
Make it happen. Make the world better.
And if they do, if they listen, fantastic.
And if they don't listen brick by brick, you've got to build up that wall that says...
They come and begging on your doorstep.
Things are going terribly.
Sorry! We're closed.
Yeah, I agree with you.
For the most part... Absolutely.
But I guess, you know, when we're talking, what you're talking about there are the people, you know, the difference between the people that accept what you're saying and the ones that don't want to hear it and the ones that don't accept it.
But then you have that whole other side, the people that accept what you're saying, but they're just kind of sitting there like, oh, okay, well, we can see the problem, but what do we do about it?
How do we move forward?
At least the ones that can be in agreement, you know?
No, I don't know. Can you give me an example?
Well, okay. So if we're saying that there's a large amount of people that maybe don't want to have this conversation, and you're giving them this cautionary tale, and they don't want to hear it, and then, you know, you've done your due diligence by, you know, at least warning them.
And you say, all right, well, there's nothing you can do for them.
You're right. I can agree with that, that there's probably nothing you can do for them.
I mean, you could keep trying, but it might be difficult.
But what about the people that when you present this kind of thing, you have this conversation, they agree with you.
They go, oh, yeah, I'm with you.
I see the problem.
I just don't see the answer.
And, you know, I have a couple of...
Things I think about that are potential answers.
But, you know, you start to go down other conversation paths and sometimes you get shut with that same thing, you know.
But the people that are, you know, on board with fixing these problems, they really don't start talking about how to fix them because they're still, you know, they're still quieted.
What do you mean they're still quieted?
I don't know what you mean. You know, there's a political climate that exists where...
Oh, you mean there could be negative consequences to speaking out?
Sure, absolutely. Is that what you mean?
Yeah, I guess so.
Okay, then they suffer the fate of people who don't speak out.
I mean, in fact, they're more morally responsible because they know the truth, but they're afraid of the consequences.
And I understand that.
But the only reason we're afraid of immediate consequences is because we're ignoring the long-term consequences.
People say, oh, it's really uncomfortable to quit smoking.
It's like, yeah, well, emphysema, lung cancer, not overly comfortable.
So the only reason we're scared of short-term consequences is because we're somehow crossing our fingers and hoping that the long-term consequences aren't going to come.
Like, nobody wants to jump out of a plane, obviously.
But if the plane is crashing, you jump.
Because you've got a tiny chance if you jump.
You've got no chance if you don't.
So, yeah, I mean, and you can't be in control of what people do with the information that you give them.
You can encourage them to speak out and to speak up.
And I'm not talking about, like, doing stupid stuff that's, you know, don't do anything violent, don't do anything, you know, that's going to put you in harm's way, don't do anything that instigate violence and so on.
But, you know, you can speak the truth.
There's still a fair amount of free speech left in the West, and particularly in America.
So you speak up, you speak out.
And I don't know what people should do.
That's up to them. See, when people come to you and say, what's the solution?
I say, I don't know what the solution is, but I sure as shit know that the problem, a big part of the problem, is you sitting around bleating, what is the solution?
When people come to you and say, what should I do?
How should I act? What should I do?
I'm not saying this is you, right? But if people come around, it's like...
You know, metaphorically, I want to slap them upside of the head and say, do something.
Do something. It doesn't...
It doesn't matter what you do.
Just try things and stop running to other people to tell you what to do.
It's your tribe. It's your culture.
It's your country. It's your civilization.
Find something. Figure it out.
Who do you admire most?
Who do you think the most effective?
Do what they're doing. Mike Cernovich, fantastic at mindset.
Gotta watch his Twitter feed for just every time he says, ask me how I know you're not a lawyer, right?
Mike Cernovich is fantastic.
And James O'Keefe is fantastic at uncovering media biases, right?
Michelle Malkin's passion for the wrongfully convicted is a thing of beauty.
And everybody has something that they're fascinated by, interested in, which they can do.
But this bleating around, there's nothing more annoying.
Because you're in the way.
See, if you come to someone who's in motion and you say, what do I do?
How do I get moving? What do I do?
You're actually slowing down the person who's in motion.
There's an old story. I don't know who wrote it.
It's called The Person from Porlock.
And it's about a guy who's about to have a great idea.
Knock comes at the door, interrupts him, and he never gets back to it.
It comes from... Kublai Khan, the poem, the writer of the poem was interrupted and never got back to.
And the idea is that when there's going to be a dangerous new idea in human society, there is these magical people who interrupt people and stop them from coming up with this new thing because it's too risky.
And when people come to you and say, well, what should I do?
What should I do? They're actually in the way.
They couldn't be working more for the opposition if they tried.
Because now you've got to kind of hive off and tell them what to do.
And that's pointless.
It's like telling someone, okay, write this word.
Now write this next word.
Now write this next word.
Now hit the carriage return twice.
Now hit the caps lock key.
Type this letter. Now this letter.
Fuck that. What a waste of time.
Don't come to me bleating and asking what to do.
Because if you know enough to come to me or to come to you, you already know what needs to be done because you're coming to the person doing it.
It's like there's a guy who's not fat and he keeps going to the salad bar on the cruise ship.
And you keep following him up to the salad bar.
And saying to him, how should I eat?
How should I eat? What should I eat?
How should I eat? Well, you already know he's a slim guy and he's going to the salad bar.
So you don't need to ask him any questions.
These non-starters, they're not actually, usually, asking for anything to do.
What they're asking for is forgiveness for doing nothing.
But they don't want to look in the mirror and say, I'm doing nothing in the most important fight in human civilization.
I'm doing nothing. I'm scared.
So what they want to do is they want to ensnare you into micromanaging them.
It's a trap. It's a trap.
And you'll notice, you don't see me a lot of times on Twitter or in the shows telling people, well, you need to do this, that, or the other.
It's like, do something. Yeah, you can donate to the show, freedomainradio.com slash donate.
You can donate to whoever you want.
You can start your own thing even better.
Is it safe to say that you're of the same opinion of me?
Because it sounds like you are.
Of you? What do you mean? Well, the opinion, you know, that you see this thing coming, this overpopulation and the idiocracy effect, and them kind of working in a detrimental tandem with these, you know, welfare things that create dysgenics.
Are we kind of in agreement in seeing that?
I'm not sure what you're talking about.
Okay. Do you mean like the state of society as a whole?
You're asking about tactics, how to get things done.
I don't know why we would talk about the state of society as a whole.
All right. Yeah, it's raining.
So which umbrella should I choose?
It's like, well, can we talk about whether it's raining?
Well, no, because we already agree that it's raining.
So now the question is which umbrella to choose.
So I don't know why we're going back to whether it's raining or not, whether we agree whether it's raining.
Are we agreeing that it's raining?
I think so. So why are we going back there?
I didn't disagree with anything you said I talked about.
You asked me about what about the people who are always asking what to do, and I'm giving you my answer to that.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
No, I hear what you're saying there, and I'm in total agreement.
But, you know, I'm wondering if, like you said, you kind of share some of the similar opinions of mine.
Have you yourself brainstormed what you would consider to be solutions?
I'm not sure what you mean.
Well, you know, if we see this problem coming down the pipe, well, there's got to be actual, you know, implementation types of solutions that could be suggested, correct?
Have you listened to this show for a while?
You don't think I've come up with any solutions?
No, I listen to your show a lot. Or do you just want me to encapsulate them here for you?
No, no, no, not at all.
You know, hey, I listen to your show a lot, and I respect the heck out of what you do.
Okay, so do you think that I've come up with any solutions in the past?
Yes, yes, absolutely.
But I think that lots of times, and I have no critiques of your solutions, I think they're good.
But lots of times, and I know this is a debate show, it's a philosophy show, so a lot of what you want to talk about is how to have conversations with people.
But I think there is some merit to putting forward at least more specific ideas to even think about.
Because you're kind of jamming up the works here, man.
So you're saying, well, Steph, what are your solutions?
And I said, well, do you know my solutions?
Yes, I know your solutions.
So then why the hell are you asking me what my solutions are?
Yeah, okay. I hear what you're saying.
All right, let me propose this idea to you.
You know, you remember that hurricane hitting Barbuda recently, and it just leveled it, the whole island.
Is that Barbados and Bermuda together?
I'm not sure what that is. Yeah, the fantasy combined two places.
No, it's an actual island. This is an island.
Oh, yes. Sorry, sorry.
You're right. You're right. Sorry for my snarkiness.
You're totally right. Go ahead. No, it's not a place where Oompa Loompas are, but it's a real place.
So this island, right, it gets hit by this hurricane and all the people are gone and they had to move back to the other island.
Now, you're looking at this place that's a beautiful piece of real estate that has nobody on it.
You know, so, for instance, would it not be like an interesting trial in the betterment of society, where if you could like, you could work a deal with that nation, the nation, because it's two nations, it's St.
John's, and they are the governing...
Is this the, like, create a free society on some geographical region?
Yeah, sort of like that.
Yeah, that doesn't work. Well, yeah.
No, no, no. They've tried that before.
They've tried that with seasteading.
They've tried that, I can't remember, someplace in the Honduras.
Because all that happens is someone has that and they give control to you, perhaps, for some period of time.
If you're successful, they'll just take everything.
Okay, but I mean, you haven't heard my point out.
No, but I asked you what it was.
And you confirmed what it was, which is to take some geographical area, get control of it somehow, and then create an ideal society.
Right, and you're saying that if that would happen, that somebody would come and take control of it, you no longer have any governance over your society.
Well, they're not going to let you, I mean, you're not going to just go and create a new country, because pretty much everything is owned.
And so you're going to have to have some kind of lease arrangement or some kind of we'll have it for a while, right?
Yeah, absolutely. And if you're successful and you get a huge amount of wealth and a huge amount of resources flow into your country and so on, then the country will just take it from you.
Well, yes, I agree with that, but I also think money talks more, right?
And I do believe that you could create safeguards.
I don't think the idea is out of the realm of complete possibility.
Okay, fantastic. So if this is a great idea, when did you first have this idea?
Oh, I don't know, a couple weeks ago.
Well, you also haven't heard the whole idea, but okay, go on.
No, I get the idea though. So, what concrete plans would you take to achieve such a thing?
Well, you know, again, this is just a debate for debate's sake, obviously.
No, no. I don't do that shit at the moment, right?
Okay. I mean, I'm not going to do this.
Well, what if somehow a new, I don't know, some island erupted and we were able to create an Ancapistan parent?
Like, come on. We have to work with what is and time is of the essence.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Okay. So here's what I would say, right?
Imagine if you could say to the government, you'd say, hey, listen, you got this island and there's no people on it, no industry.
What if I told you that we could work a deal where we could bring a lot of industry and taxable revenue to your country if you give us a fair amount of autonomy?
And when I mean autonomy, you let us decide how we want to regulate how people come in.
Do you know that this has been tried a number of times before?
I'm not saying it hasn't been tried, but that doesn't mean it's not worth looking at.
Are you going to do it?
No, I'm not saying I'm going to do it.
What the fuck are we talking about?
You have some idea that you don't want to pursue.
Why would we talk about this?
I mean, come on. What if a teleportal opens up tomorrow so we can...
I mean, if you're not going to do it, why do you want to talk about it?
Okay, Stefan. Let's just say that maybe one day down the road I will have plenty of money and I will have the ability to do that.
You don't necessarily know who you're talking to before you write me off here.
I asked what you have done about it or what you were going to do about it, and you very clearly told me that you weren't going to do anything about it.
So don't task me, my friend, with prejudging you when I'm simply listening to what you actually say about what you want to do.
I hear you, and I get you, but I don't feel like you're fully hearing it.
But I mean, I do think what you're saying- When you say you're not going to act on it, what am I not hearing about that?
Enlighten me. Yeah.
So you asked me if I'm going to act on my idea and if I tell you no, then you think my idea is worthless?
Are you serious? Well, you're not going to act on it.
It's failed many times before.
So if you're not going to act on your idea, what does it matter?
I mean, first off, you have a show where you reach, you know, millions upon millions of people.
You never know. It could even be a good idea.
A good idea that comes from you helps to influence somebody else.
You know, I don't think there's any merit.
You want to use my show to communicate your ideas so somebody else does the work for you.
Yeah, no, not at all.
And if that's how you want to paint it, I thought we could have a meaningful conversation.
No, that's not how I want to paint it.
This is what you're telling me.
You're saying, Steph, I'm going to use your show to get this idea out there in the hopes that someone else is going to do the work for me.
Oh, so I have an idea that I think might better society, and that's a bad idea to have a conversation about it?
I don't get it. Compared to what?
It's the opportunity costs.
Because every moment you spend talking about, thinking about, pursuing this idea...
Which you yourself say you're not going to implement, is time that you're not spending doing other stuff.
Yeah, but I think that reduces people to something smaller.
I mean, I get you saying, you know, act locally, live locally, act locally, but I don't think it's bad to have big ideas.
But no, see, there's a difference between an idea and a fantasy.
An idea is necessary but not sufficient for action.
Like if you have an idea for a product, right?
Like let's say you say, hey, Steph, I've got a great idea for a fantastic product in the business world, right?
Some great consumer product.
And I say to you, well, are you going to build it?
And you say, no, God, no.
And then I say, well, what does it matter?
Then you say, well, maybe somebody in your audience will build it.
And then I say, well, that's wanting other people to take your idea and do something with it.
And that seems kind of pointless.
And you say, well, no, what's wrong with having big ideas?
It's like, because it's a fantasy.
If you have something that...
You're not going to pursue yourself.
If you have something that you have no idea how it's going to work, if you have something where you haven't even researched, you had this idea a couple of weeks ago, you know if you have a great idea?
Like if you have a great idea for a product, the first thing you do is do a web search to find out if there's another product like it.
Like if you have, oh, I've got a really great idea for like a whirly thing that could spin around children's fingers and you could do cool tricks or some sort of thing that looks like a UFO with a string attached that you could roll up and down.
Well, the first thing you do is you find out if there are fidget spinners and yo-yos out there, right?
Now, if there are, you say, okay, well, I'm going to need another idea, right?
So you have had this idea a couple of weeks ago.
To my knowledge, you haven't done any research on whether it's been attempted before, as it has many times.
You haven't done anything to promote it to anyone else other than call in this show.
And so this is not a big idea.
This is a fantasy.
This is a way of you not doing something.
This is why I'm being harsh on you, man, because you are doing this in order to avoid doing something else.
And that's the problem with fantasy.
Fantasy is avoidance.
It's not purpose. No, I just don't.
I don't agree with you because I think you're citing things that are, you know, you're saying historically this has been tried, but, you know, technology has advanced incredibly.
You can reach people immediately in large numbers tomorrow.
If you have a good idea, a good idea can get out there.
It's not some, I get it.
It's been tried before and I get it and that it's failed, but I don't think that means it's worth writing off.
I'm not sitting here trying to tell people.
For what reason did it fail in the past?
You have no idea. Well, would you care to lie?
It sounds like you do. No, because I'm not doing the work to support your delusion, to support your fantasy.
If this idea is really important, if you really cared about it, you would have done the work to verify it before you called in.
You would have done the work to say, okay, I've got this idea.
I can think of at least half a dozen ways in which it's been tried already.
Just off the top of my head.
The people, the locations, and what went wrong.
And so if you really cared about this idea, you have one shot to make your case on this show.
And you've done sweet fuck all to prepare for this call on this show.
Like, let's say that you're an entrepreneur and you have some great idea for a product.
This is your venture capital pitch.
And in a venture capital pitch, I know, I've been on both sides of the table.
In a venture capital pitch, you get a few minutes to make your case and you better have your idea ready to roll and you better have your competitive research and you better have...
You're to market strategy and you bet you have your marketing research and you got to have your costs and you got to have your initial outlays and you got to figure out how your cash flow is going to work.
So if you have a great idea, you say, Steph, I got a great idea.
I'm going to go pitch it to some venture capitalists.
I said, well, you better damn well be prepared because you get one shot.
If you cared about this idea and you knew that you were having this capacity to reach a million people through this show, you would have worked very hard to prepare To communicate this idea and not just have something that you kind of idea that you picked out of your belly like a piece of lint, waving it around saying, look, it's art.
You haven't even heard the idea.
You're just shutting me down and shutting me up and pretend that you're not.
You haven't even heard the idea.
In fact, I had other ideas too, but I got a feeling that if I told you some of those, we couldn't just sit here and have a casual conversation where we brainstorm and talk ideas and you could say, oh yeah, James, that could work or that couldn't work or this has been tried and that hasn't been tried.
No, that's a good idea. That's not a good idea because you're just shutting me down.
So you don't really understand how sales works.
You don't really understand how to motivate people.
It's not my job to support your ramblings.
It's not my job to support your fantasies about how to make the world a better place.
It's my job as someone who actually cares about you.
It's my job to ask you the tough questions.
I mean, do you think that I got the world's biggest philosophy show?
By dreaming, by having good ideas and sitting around and not researching them and not figuring them out?
Do you think that I don't know how to build something?
I've built companies.
I've built this show.
I've built massive influence in the world.
Do you think that I don't know how to build things?
Do you think that I'm asking these questions of you because I want to shut you down and you're taking it all emotionally and it's all sensitive and you're upset because you just want to spitball, you want to brainstorm, man?
But if you're not bringing any facts to the conversation, if you haven't researched how your idea has failed in the past and have some way to get around that, it's not brainstorming.
It's gas bagging.
It's just talking about nothing with no knowledge and no history and no understanding of anything.
And that's a waste of everyone's time.
No, no, no.
Because you're saying that my idea will fail because, you know, it's been tried before.
First off, I want to make it very clear that you never heard the whole thing out in the first place.
And at this point, I don't even want to go down that road because I don't feel like you're being very open-minded to it.
But see, it's not my job to be...
Oh, my God. It's not my job to be open-minded to things that you want to ramble about with no research or information.
Like, I'm not saying this to be mean.
I want you, if you've got some great idea, fantastic.
Look, I've got a whole theory of ethics called universally preferable behavior.
I don't think I've ever gone out there and whined about people not being receptive to it.
Have you ever heard me do that?
No, because it's my job to get the idea across.
It's not my job, James, to support you in stuff you haven't researched.
It's to push back and say, you don't have the facts, you don't know why other ideas like this have failed, and you're really not very good at communicating it.
And then you're like, hey man, you're just shutting me down.
It's like, it's not my job to support you.
It's not the job of the world to love my philosophy show or to love what I argue about.
It's not the job of the world.
To love UPB or real-time relationships or my arguments for a voluntary society or my arguments about parenting.
It's not the job of the world to buy my books or listen to my show or donate.
I've got to make people want to do it.
So if you have a great idea, you have a once-in-a-lifetime platform.
Hang on. If you have a great idea and you have a once-in-a-lifetime platform to explain your great idea, why didn't you do the homework?
To overcome skepticism, to overcome objections.
Why didn't you look up, has this idea been tried before?
Has it failed? If it hasn't been tried before, why not?
It's a very obvious idea.
It's been around... Thomas More wrote back hundreds and hundreds of years ago.
There's a book called Era One, which is nowhere spelt backwards, about a fantasy society.
There is The Republic about an ideal society, all of which involves some sort of scrubbing the The whiteboard clean and starting to write from scratch.
There has been one tried in the Honduras.
People have tried it in Argentina.
People have tried it in Mexico.
People have tried it. There's Liberia or something like this.
Liberland, that's it. Liberland.
They've tried that as well. The whole idea behind Galt's Gulch that there's some in Atlas Shrugged at this.
I mean, this is an idea that is not even remotely original to you.
And it's not even remotely original to me.
I'll finish. Just don't talk over me, and then I'll be quiet, all right?
So this idea is not even remotely original.
And so it's sort of like you're coming in saying, well, Steph, why don't you just monetize your videos?
So this has been thought about and discussed and analyzed and attempted countless times.
Over the past 2,500 years, your idea is not even remotely original.
That doesn't mean it can't work, but it means you have a lot of skepticism to overcome.
And it's not my job to indulge you in an idea that is very commonplace, where you haven't done even the most basic of research on how to communicate the idea, and when you openly state to me that you have no intention of pursuing it.
Yeah, you know, but I will say, again, I don't believe you heard it out.
I'd like to know this. You say that the other ones failed, and I understand that.
What do you think one of the largest reasons was that they oftentimes failed?
No, no. See, that's not my job.
It's your fucking idea, man.
It's your job to do that research.
I mean, I have my own ideas, but because I don't want to pursue this, why would I want to do it?
You're telling me they fail.
Why do you think they fail?
We don't have to sit here and have, you know, analytical facts that we're arguing over.
I'm asking you why you think they fail.
No, but see, why should I care about your idea more than you do?
Why should I do the work to explain to you the limitations of your idea?
That's a silly accusation.
That's not an argument.
No, because we're not communicating the same thing here.
Why should I communicate the way you want it?
Why should I communicate the Treasure it and honor it and care for it and nurture it like a newborn baby that's in frail health.
You know, stay up in the middle of the night.
Diagram it out. Draw it out.
Do your research. Get your spreadsheets going.
The amount of planning that goes into what I do would blow your freaking minds.
The amount of conversations that I have before I do a show.
I mean, check out Why I Was Wrong About Nationalism, a show I just put out today.
I mean, I can't even tell you.
How many times I went over that in my mind and in reality and what happened in terms of the manufacturing of it.
If you have a great idea, be careful with it, be tender with it, be passionate about it, defend it, advocate it, push it, respect it.
Because you cannot ask other people to care more about your ideas than you do yourself at all.
You know, if you're a great artist and you make the most beautiful pictures, Then you need to honor those pictures by bringing them to the attention of a world, I promise, is going to be indifferent to you.
Absolutely indifferent.
The world does not care about your dreams.
Your mom, when you were drawing your first picture that wasn't a lollipop person when you were three, says, what a wonderful picture.
Oh, that's great. Oh, good job.
Yay! You walked.
You know, I mean, it's the job of your mom to care about what you do.
And it's a wonderful part of early childhood.
But after about the age of seven or eight, I'm afraid you're going to have to start winning the world's attention.
And the world, frankly, doesn't care.
It doesn't care about me.
My family, my friends, they care about me.
They love me. I love them.
But outside of that charmed circle of biodome virtue and rationality, the world doesn't care about me.
The world doesn't care about what I have to say.
The world doesn't care.
That you want to be an actor.
The world doesn't care that you want to be the best mime since Marcel Mastro.
The world doesn't care about your dreams.
You have to go out and, Lyndon Baines Johnson style, grab the world by its lapel, pant sweaty tobacco breath into its face and say, pay attention.
And you have to tell the world why.
It should pay attention to you.
And I know this. Listen, I started in my car.
I started with a little...
Gosh, what was it even? It wasn't even an i3 back then.
Somewhere between a 486 and an i3.
It was a little notebook and a $20 headset in my car.
And I have built that...
To a show that has done north of half a billion views and downloads over 11 years.
And accelerating now.
We're just about to pass 700,000 subscribers.
On YouTube, I have influence in some very influential places, let's say.
I do a video on YouTube.
Other people did too.
I do a video on YouTube about horrible pedophile suggestions.
And they changed it within hours of me putting the video up.
Now, the world not only doesn't care about what I say, a lot of times they hate what I have to say.
I had a MGTOW guy call in.
Oh, this is going to trigger the MGTOW. Sorry, man, this is just the way it's gone down.
I had a MGTOW guy call in.
Got so mad at me.
So mad at me. And he just emailed today to apologize and to announce that he's engaged to a wonderful woman.
Lots of times people go and get mad at me.
You know, about eight or nine years ago, went for a doctor checkup.
The doctor said, oh, they're getting a little heavy there.
I don't like to hear that. It's like, well, that's good, right?
So I dropped my 20, 30 pounds and kept them off ever since.
So, the world doesn't care about your ideas.
The world doesn't care about what you have to say.
The world doesn't care about your need for things.
The world doesn't want to spitball with you.
The world doesn't want to blue sky with you.
The world doesn't want to bullshit with you.
The world is impatient, the world is busy, and the world doesn't care.
In fact, the world does the opposite of caring.
And to get the attention of the world, you need to be really, really insistent, really, really positive.
You know, there are times, I don't even know if I want to encourage this or not, but there have been YouTube comments where people are saying, do this, do this, do this, do this, do this, and they repeat it, you know, and repeat it and repeat it.
And, I mean, a lot of times I'll be like, maybe I'll look into it and it's not, right?
Occasionally, they're like, yeah, you know, that would be a good show.
So, The world doesn't care that you have some big idea.
The world doesn't care that I care about philosophy.
The world doesn't care that I have a system of ethics.
The world doesn't care about my arguments regarding agnosticism or free will or determinism or any of that.
They don't care about my ideal of the state of society.
In fact, they're really annoyed by it.
And sure as shit, the world does not care about peaceful parenting.
You think people are overjoyed to hear about peaceful parenting, particularly if they've already trashed up their entire family with violence, yelling, and aggression for the past 10 years or 15 years or more?
They really, really And so how do you do it?
How do you do it? Well, you don't do it by saying, well, I had some idea.
I'm going to not do any research about it whatsoever.
I'm going to call someone up and I'm kind of going to waste their time.
And then, not only when I haven't done the work to prepare for a very important call to promote my idea, I'm also going to bitch like a three-year-old at the man who's impatient with my complete and utter lack of preparation to promote my idea.
I'm going to go, you're not listening, man.
You're not supporting.
You haven't heard the whole idea.
Actually, no, that's unfair to three-year-olds because they're three.
And I'm not saying this to be mean.
I know it sounds harsh. I know it sounds harsh and I understand that.
But I want your ideas to get out into the world.
Which means be prepared.
It's a funny thing in life.
The more you sweat, the luckier you get.
That's the way it works.
When I have a debate...
You could go back, if you're interested, and listen to some of my debates.
You can listen to my debates with Peter Joseph.
You can listen to my debate on whether Bitcoin or gold would be a better investment with Peter Schiff.
The amount of preparation that I do for a debate is ridiculous.
Far out of proportion.
The amount of work I do for an interview...
Oh, the person has one book, why not five?
Why not read everything they wrote on their blog?
The amount of research. And I get this feedback from so many people that I interview where they say, man, you really know your stuff.
Man, this is like the best questions I've ever had.
You are the most prepared person who's ever interviewed me.
And that's why the show grows, because I work.
You know, I don't just call people up and say, you know, wouldn't it be great?
Man, wouldn't it just be great if there was some universal system of ethics out there that could replace religion and the state?
I mean, that would be really great.
Don't you think that would be great?
And then think I have done some big contribution to the advancement of the species.
And I am very sorry if this has never been explained to you.
And this is what I meant when I said you don't know anything about sales.
If you want the cheerleader to go out with you, Do some sit-ups, get a nice haircut, and be persistent.
Not stalky. Not stalky.
Don't take no for an answer. But if you have a great idea, treat it with respect.
But don't expect other people to do the legwork for you, because they won't care.
They just won't care.
Everybody's busy. And you know, just think about every ad that you see on television, every ad you see on the web, is someone desperate to get your attention and have you give them money or time or resources or something, right?
Everyone. We probably brush past, in any given day, a thousand people who want something from us.
You know, some ad on the bottom of the browser or something promoted.
They should put that on top, but they don't on Twitter, right?
Promoted. Ooh, that looks kind of weird.
Oh, promoted, right? We go past our ads on TV, ads on the subway, ads on buses, billboards, or just people who want something from us.
Family, friends, someone at work, co-workers, bosses, whoever, customers.
We probably brush past a thousand people.
You ever get an email with people wanting something?
You ever have people who call into your calling show using your precious time who want something?
A thousand people.
Now you say, no.
Get lost, F you, don't care, uninterested, ad block, whatever, to at least a thousand people a day, probably on average.
On average, maybe you're on vacation, you unplug or whatever, but on average, probably about a thousand people a day you say no to.
How many times have you watched an ad and as a result of that ad bought a product?
It's probably very rare.
Probably maybe one in a thousand ads, one in...
10,000 ads. I remember the great ad from when I was a kid.
Hold on, here comes something special.
A candy bar with so much more.
It was a... In a factory, oh my god, it was mouthwatering.
And I actually became a Mr.
Big aficionado for quite some time until, well, until I hit my mid-30s and had to stop.
Because, you know, getting older is like this, you come with this giant rocket to begin with, that's probably the wrong analogy for a guy, but this giant, and then these bits fall away.
Oh, can't have this. Oh, can't have that.
Oh, can't have that anymore. Oh, I'm going to say no to that.
So... But you say no to people all the time.
There are so many people in your life, in your vicinity, in your eyeballs, in your ears.
You turn on the radio, there's ads for shit.
You don't want it. You say no all the time.
And getting from the no to the yes requires persistence.
Like there are studies that say you have to see an ad like 10 or 15 times before you even remember the manufacturer or the product.
Or, you know, like you see mattress ads, right?
Sleep country Canada, right?
You... How often do you buy a mattress, right?
I mean, unless you're that princess testing out the pee theory, you buy a mattress once every couple of years at best.
But please, this is something that Mike Cernovich said about his sort of 40 rules for turning 40.
Get a good mattress.
It's a very good investment.
Quality of life issue. But you say no to everyone all the time.
So how are you going to break through that noise?
How are you going to break through that clutter?
I mean, I was early to the game.
I was on YouTube in 2006.
When I think there were 2,006 members overall or something.
I got the directors. And the moment they said, oh, you can go from 240p to 480p, boom!
I was in. I found out how to do it.
And, you know, in terms of how to do those PowerPoints with me up in the window, I came up with that and have been doing it for 10 years, 9 years.
So, I was in early, but man, there's a lot of people who want your attention now, right?
Lots and lots of people who want...
You're eyeballs who want your attention.
There are millions of podcasts and video logs and all that kind of stuff.
So how do I keep people's attention?
They don't owe me. Squat!
You don't owe me a view.
You don't owe me a click. You don't owe me a donation.
Well, if you do watch a bunch of stuff, I think kind of morally you a little bit do owe me a donation.
Freedomainradio.com slash donate.
That's just an honor thing. Well, I say just an honor thing like that's not somehow really important, but...
People don't owe me squat.
You know, this guy who called in, I mean, just don't mean to pick on him, it's just an object lesson that's fresh in my mind.
He thinks I sort of owed him respect for his idea, listening to his idea.
I don't. And you don't owe me anything.
You can turn me off right now and never come back.
Ever. And I'm not going to chase you down and yell at you.
Because... It's my job to keep your attention.
It's my job to keep your attention.
And I'm not going to do it by being sort of gratuitously mean or nasty or vicious or confrontational for no purpose or anything like that.
But it's my job.
It's my job to provide value.
It is not your job to give me attention.
I must earn it from you voluntarily, peacefully, through...
Charisma and humor and spontaneity and intelligence and creativity and rigor.
It's not your job to buy my book, theartoftheargument.com.
It is not your job to give me anything, other than if you consume a bunch of stuff, you should donate, I think.
I'm not enforcing that.
That's a personal conscience thing.
So I'm just telling you this because if you have a great idea, I don't want you to squander it.
I don't want you to waste it.
I don't want you to lose it.
If you get one chance to promote your idea, I want you to be prepared.
I approach a lot of the stuff that I'm doing as if it was the last show I would do and the most important show I will ever do.
It's what I feel about all of these conversations.
This is the most important thing I can be doing with my life right now.
This is the most important topic.
This is what I need to be fully committed to.
This is what I need to burn every amount of mental glucose in order to get the idea out in a way that You absorb and accept and can work with and you remember.
Don't you remember? You know, as they're all saying, a mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original shape.
But I remember when I had these particular ideas where I'm like, oh, I get it.
Now I understand.
Now I get it. Oh, man.
Never go back. Never go back.
And I want that to be, like, if you're going to listen to this show, you know, I mean...
Three or four, sometimes even five-hour call-in shows.
You don't have to listen to them.
It's my job.
It's my job to keep you engaged.
You owe me nothing. That is an incredibly liberating thing.
You say, oh, it's a lot of responsibility.
No, it's not responsibility.
It's authority. If I think that you owe me respect for my ideas, if you owe me clicks, if you owe me views, if I get petulant because the world isn't giving me what I want, would I like my half a billion views to be 5 billion views or 50 billion views?
Sure, absolutely, of course.
But I don't get resentful of the world for not giving me that because it's my job to earn it.
So if you get resentful, first of all, people won't be interested in what you have to say when you get resentful, right?
So this last caller, he got petty, got pouty, got resentful.
You haven't even heard the whole idea.
It's like, it's not my job to listen to your ideas.
It's your job to interest me in your ideas.
And if I'm not interested, I'm going to tell you.
Well, you know, you didn't even, you shouldn't, right?
No. It's your job to engage me in your ideas.
And if you haven't even done the research to figure out why your idea, which is so, it's as common as dirt.
Oh, let's get a geographical area and set up a perfect society.
It's been explored for thousands of years.
And unless you have some, and you can say, like, if this guy had come to me and said, okay, this is a very common idea.
But I have done a lot of research on the topic.
I think I figured out why it went wrong, and I think I figured out a way around it.
And then he'd say, okay, so it was tried here, and it was tried here, and this is what failed, and it was tried here, and this is what failed, but I figured out how to work around that.
I'd be like, go on, right?
And John Stewart said, I'd be like, tell me more, because you've done the work.
You're not wasting my time.
You're not asking me to light the fuel of your rocket or basically give you the fuel for your rocket.
I would be fascinated and I would be like, wow, good job.
You've done your homework.
Fantastic. But if it's just like, hey man, I had this idea a couple of weeks ago I wanted to bring up with you.
I've not done any research.
I've not done... I don't know if anyone else has tried this idea.
I have no idea why it failed.
But I just want to kind of put it out there.
Just putting it out there.
Yeah, putting it out there like soiled underwear on a line.
My cat does not want to see that, as my daughter would say.
So... Be prepared.
I want your ideas to gain traction in an indifferent world.
And that's why I said to the guy, do you think I don't know anything about interesting people and new ideas or challenging ideas?
I do. I may be one of the leading experts in the world on engaging people in challenging ideas.
Does he want to hear my advice?
No. He wants to get petty, wants to get pouty, wants to blame me as if I'm doing something wrong.
Which is kind of like, you know, you show up smelly with, you know, pieces of asparagus coming out of your teeth.
Your hair going six different ways from Sunday in a tracksuit.
And you ask out the most beautiful girl in school.
And she's like, I don't think so.
And you're like, hey, you haven't even heard what I have to say about what we want to do.
Where are you going? Come back here.
You come back here.
You haven't heard the whole thing. It's like, she doesn't owe you.
Listening, you show up disheveled in a tracksuit, she's going to judge you by that.
And she doesn't owe you one second more of her time.
You understand that? Now, you may be able to get more than one second of her time if you're Matt Lauer or other executives at NBC who weirdly have auto-lock buttons under their desks that lock the doors to their offices so people can't get out.
Look it up. I'm not kidding.
It is the most freaky O'Brien 1984 style shit that you could imagine.
Okay. I'm going to be an executive.
I'm going to have lots of women, attractive women, coming into my office.
What am I going to need? Well, first thing I'm going to need, before anything else, first thing I'm going to need is a button that locks the door.
Why? Why?
Unless you're actually using your office chair...
As a toilet, I cannot imagine why you'd want a button under your desk so no one can see it that locks the door.
You freaks. You freaks of nature.
Matt Lauer fired, man, fired!
One day, this guy was making what, 15 mil a year?
That's what the guy was banking? 15 mil a year, something like that?
Host of the Today Show? And Katie Couric!
Sometime back, I think it was a couple of years, 2013, she was interviewed.
Oh, you've been doing the morning show, Today Show, with Matt Lauer for 15 years.
What's his worst habit? She says, he pinches my ass a lot.
Says the audience. It's really, really funny.
Really funny. Not funny at all.
And Katie Couric, isn't she supposed to be some empowerment specialist?
I mean, shouldn't she have talked about this?
Or shouldn't she have done something about it so that he didn't prey on more women?
What do you have to do? I mean, he's not even put on leave.
He's not taken off the air for a little while.
He's not put on hiatus.
He's like, boom, he's gone.
And that's a huge financial blow to NBC, by the way.
They only pay him 15 mil because he's making multiple that in terms of ads.
Otherwise, they pay him less or they'd get someone else.
And this is the price. So, minor tangent, but look it up.
And this, Matt Lau was the guy who was really heavy on the Trump, if you're rich and famous, you can grab women by the pussy and they like it.
I'm going to take Trump's word on that since that's not my wheelhouse.
But he was really, really appalled.
And he was the guy grilling Bill O'Reilly.
Saying, Bill O'Reilly, don't you understand that you're a really powerful star at the network and people are intimidated by you?
And it's like... What this guy did, Matt Lauer, you can look it up, what he's alleged to have done.
You can look it up. It's some nasty, nasty stuff.
But if you need a button to lock women in the room with you, it's not because you're giving them a challenging performance review, let me tell you that.
So I just wanted to mention that.
Be responsible.
If it's a great idea, then do the work.
Be responsible to the idea.
Let the idea use you.
Treat the idea with respect.
I had great ideas about ethics.
Treated those ideas with respect.
I did a whole bunch of PowerPoints.
I wrote a book. I did endless debates on it.
We'll open up it again. Wrote about it again.
Just did another video on it this summer, the one I did outside.
I mean, I've got to keep pushing it.
Got to keep pushing it. It's not anybody's damn job to learn my theory of ethics, my approach to ethics.
It's my job to push it.
It's nobody's job. No woman has to pay you any attention.
No one has to hire you.
No one has to graduate you.
No one has to have any interest in what you're doing.
You build a coffee shop.
Nobody has to walk through the door.
You got to bring them in.
And that means you get both responsibility and power.
The power to change things means expect nothing.
Feel like you're owed nothing.
And you get this amazing power to bring change to the world.
All right. Thanks everyone so much.
For listening to that rant, let's move on to the next caller.
Alright, up next we have Jack.
Jack wrote in and said, That's from Jack.
Hey Jack, how you doing? Hey Steph, I'm excellent.
How are you? I'm well, thank you.
Very well. Yeah, you can be overprotective and you can be underprotective.
I think it's an Aristotelian mean.
So you can, there's a phrase that's kind of used these days as people have realized that coddling children and keeping them safe from all risk, it's called, you know, we can't bubble wrap our children.
And... So you can be overprotective, which is, you can't go out in the neighborhood.
Now, some of that's a result of collapse in community trust as a result of multiculturalism, as I talked about in the video put out today, which you should check out, which was why I was wrong about nationalism.
But people have now realized that, okay, so you don't want your kid out there roaming the neighborhood.
You don't want your kid out there going through the woods.
You don't want your kid out there so your kid stays home, sits their ass on the couch, and plays video games all day, and then the kid gets fat, and now you have the risk of diabetes, or you have the risk of heart problems.
So you haven't really solved the problem of risk.
And also the hyper-feminization of parenting that has gone on for the past couple of generations in the West, where basically children are raised by the matriarchy.
Right? It's a lot of single moms.
It's aunts. It's grandmothers.
It's primary school teachers.
It's kindergarten teachers.
It's junior high school teachers.
Overwhelmingly women. So it's women, women, women, women.
And what happens? You get a lot of guilting.
You get a lot of manipulation. You get a lot of soft, passive-aggressive emotional abuse.
And you get, oh, be careful!
Right? I mean, I posted on Twitter a month or two ago.
And you should look these up.
Look up Not right now, after the show.
Look up playgrounds, early 20th century playgrounds.
It will blow your mind.
It will blow your mind.
And I posted this, and people put these great comments in, like, oh yeah, I remember that.
They tasted like old pennies and were 3,000 degrees in the summer.
I mean, these are like giant, they look like the skeletal outer shell of the construction of the Sydney Opera House, right?
That brutalized artistic monstrosity.
So there is this, oh, be careful, be careful.
Like some comedian I remember from years ago.
I used to listen to comedy a lot.
I don't really need so much anymore. But it was this comedian who said, you know, like, how with moms, like, when they're talking about something risky, their voice always drops to a murmur.
Terrified murmur. So he would say something like this.
Well, you better be careful on those rocks, because you don't want to end like Bobby down the street who can't write his own name.
And this makes sense, right?
Because traditionally, women took care of kids when they were very young, and they are kind of death maggots.
And then around the age of seven or eight, the age of reason and so on, the fathers are supposed to take over and prepare the children for Natural risks in the real world.
So, yes, you can absolutely overprotect your children and that weakens them.
In the same way that if you keep your leg in a cast, oh look, no mosquito bites and no bone density or muscle mass either.
So, you don't want to be doing that.
So, as far as where the balance lies, I mean...
I find, like, I was sort of thinking about my own childhood and thinking about this question.
And I had the glorious anarchy of a largely unsupervised childhood outside of school, outside of boarding school.
But, you know, it'd be like, come home.
I was a latchkey kid, just went out and figured out what to do with no money in the neighborhood with other kids.
And that was the case in England and also here.
In America. And there's the other thing too.
Poor kids love Dungeons& Dragons.
Because it's really cheap.
A couple of dice. A book or two.
And you can get crazy amounts of...
Like it's pennies per hour. If you do it right.
And you get storytelling skills.
Characterization skills. Language skills.
And also, like I was a dungeon master sometimes.
And it was my job to keep people engaged in the campaign.
Not their job to be interested.
Like, I gotta work. I gotta work.
So, and it's sort of, if you overprotect your kids, of course, there's an old Arab proverb that says, my grandfather rode a camel.
My father rode a Ford.
I ride a Lamborghini. My son will ride a Ford, and my grandson will ride a camel.
Right? The arc goes up, and the arc goes down.
So, it is one of the challenges.
To make sure that your children are having an appropriate level of risk.
Now, physical risk, I don't have as much of a problem with because pain is a great teacher.
I remember... When I was a kid, skateboarding was big, but it wasn't big like all of these weird flips and stuff like that that happens now.
We basically, there was, when I lived, I lived on this, it sounds like gritzier than it was, kind of like an estate.
And there was this curved, sloping pathway that went from the top of the estate down to the, like, the guys in beaders mysteriously drinking beer at two o'clock in the afternoon, bungalows down back.
And, you know, out back of the roadhouse, they got some bungalow.
And we used to take our, my friends and I, we used to take our skateboards and we'd go rocketing down these things.
And I mentioned this before, we have these little sticks.
We try and drop the sticks in front of the other skateboard that would make the skateboard stop if it was the right and you'd go like, but I remember once I was winning, I was winning, I dropped my sticks and I was winning and I was so excited.
And I made the fatal mistake of looking back.
You look back, and because it's curved, right?
And there were these two bars.
I remember them so distinctly, because I was sitting on my skateboard.
I must have been maybe seven.
And I was sitting on this skateboard.
I remember painting it at fire and all this kind of cool stuff.
And I was sitting on my skateboard with my knees up, sort of around my chin, because it wasn't that big a skateboard.
And because I didn't look ahead and I was looking back in my triumph of victory.
It was a great life lesson. Ah!
Victory! Gong!
I went into the iron bars that prevented you from falling over.
And by the way, not very well, I might add.
And it was a hell of a drop down below, like at least 15 feet.
And because my knees were up, I went at a fairly good clip.
Bong! Into these iron bars.
The iron bars went like horizontal iron bar.
About the size of a forearm.
Went into my shins.
I don't know if you've ever barked your shins that way.
But you pray for death in that moment.
Like, it's like, that is the kind of pain.
It's like, I'd rather give birth to like three dolphins out of each armpit than do that again.
Because that is a special kind of, please shoot me now before another wave of this pain happens.
And the only other time that happened for me was when I was in...
I'm fast on my feet.
Like, I was a really, really fast runner.
My daughter's got that. And...
I was running, and when I was a kid, we all played different ages, right?
Which meant that you were doomed if you were a little kid, because the bigger kids could always outrun you.
But I was able to outrun and out dodge.
I sort of figured out that I could change direction more quickly, rather than just try and out sprint the bigger kids, because you can't, your legs are too short.
But you can change direction more quickly.
And I was outrunning some kid, and again, made the mistake, looked back.
This was after boarding school, so I was probably eight or nine, probably eight.
And I looked back and then looked forward and I ran into an iron fence.
No, this wasn't iron. This was aluminum.
Aluminum fence. And it hit me right along the bridge of the nose.
And man, that's the thinnest skin.
Like if you reach just below your eyebrows, right before your nose, like right opposite from your eyes, that little bridge there.
It's like the thinnest skin in your whole body.
And I'm telling you, you whack that, it is a bleeder and a half.
Like people thought I'd been decapitated with so much blood and like they, you know, the teachers are all freaking out and they put this towel over my face, cold towel over my face and I ended up in the hospital and it didn't need stitches because you, I mean, the skin is so thin, I don't think you can even, so they just put those little white tapes on it.
And it was fine. And I got some real kudos for that because, you know, I didn't even cry.
Because mostly because I was so stunned that it had happened because it was such a bong.
You ever those bongs where you just like bong on your head and you can taste like copper metal in your mouth because just something weird happens to your whole gum when you hit your head that hard?
And... So, but those are the only two, okay, one of the, so one, I only get through a whole list, but, so one other time I was wading in a river in Toronto and I stepped on something sharp and I ended up getting six stitches in the bottom of my foot.
And one other time I, oh yeah, when I was going up to a garage to get A tennis ball I was playing with.
And when I came down, my knees buckled and I put my two front teeth into the top of my left knee.
I still have the scar. I can still see exactly how big my teeth were when I was eight because of that.
But, you know, I've never broken a bone.
I've never had anything like that.
So... I mean, pain is a good teacher.
I only did these two things where you look back.
And now, like, I'm watching a movie and someone's, like, looking back while they're driving, I, like, get anxious.
Like, I have a tough time watching it.
Like, if somebody's not eyes on the road, but they're, like, you know, talking to someone next to them and you can see that view, it drives me crazy because I'm like, I can't watch.
It's horrible. It's going to get all kinds of walking after midnight out there.
So you do want risk.
You want your kids to take risks.
But pain is a good teacher, and consequences are a good teacher.
Shielding your kids from pain only, I think, makes them weak.
You know, like, oh, kids might get a sunburn.
It's like, well, but if they're inside all day, then they don't get any exercise.
So you've got to balance things out.
Now, as far as keeping them safe, well...
You just have to be invested and in charge of what they do.
It's like the people who are complaining, you know, well, I left my four-year-old alone with the iPad, and next thing you know, they're watching Elsagate videos, and it's like, why are you leaving?
Like, why is your child unsupervised on the internet?
What are you, crazy?...situation when you're four.
No, I completely understand and agree with...
My big issue is my wife's uncle...
Has been accused by two different young girls of molestation, and he's paid them both off.
And this guy, I mean, my daughter isn't born yet, but I don't want him anywhere around my daughter.
Yeah, that seems kind of like a no-brainer.
And how does he buy off the daughters?
Don't the parents pass charges?
Yeah, so he's very wealthy, and he still has a wife, and he has kids of his own.
Wait, wait, you know about a guy, I assume that these are credible accusations of child molestation in your family?
Well, my wife's uncle, yes.
Well, it's your family. You married into the damn thing, right?
Yeah, yep.
Okay, so your wife's uncle...
I've had him this first time over Thanksgiving.
Yeah, so your wife's uncle has a whole bunch of kids.
And I'm sorry for rambling on about my petty childhood injuries when we had this topic, but I didn't know we had this topic.
What are you going to do about that? Well, I wanted to call into the show before Thanksgiving because it was the first time I was going to meet this guy and I didn't know what to say to him.
I don't know why you would talk to him rather than the authorities.
Well, I see he's gone to the authorities and these girls, you know, they went to court and they settled out of court.
What do you mean they settled out of court?
Well, you know, he denied it.
I'm no lawyer, but I don't think you get to do that if you're criminally charged with child molestation.
I don't think that's a payoff.
Right. Well, I'm not sure.
So what you're saying, it was a civil matter.
They were suing?
Is that right? They were suing him, yes.
But why were they suing him rather than going to the police?
They did go to the police, but all they had was the girl's testimony and he broke one of the girl's femurs.
What the fuck?
He was on top of her.
What do you mean? All they had?
All they had was he broke her femur?
I don't know.
That seems like quite a lot to me.
Yep, and he had legal troubles for years and years, and I guess he paid out a bunch of money, and they just moved on.
Okay, so they went to the police, and what happened?
Well, this was before I was married to my wife, so I'm not 100% sure of the story, but reading the court records, both girls, one was his babysitter, was babysitting his kids, and she said he...
He molested different sex acts with her for three years while she was a babysitter.
And the other one was one of his children's friends who would come over to the house and said he touched her inappropriately.
So wait, he molested the babysitter?
The babysitter and then one of his daughter's friends.
And so, the family of the babysitter, now, was it, who's, like, the femur is the thigh bone, right?
Like, that's a pretty hard bone to break.
It's hard to break, but he's a big guy, and he was on top of her, and I have no idea.
Okay, how is this guy seeing daylight?
Like, help me understand. How is this guy not in a prison?
I've talked to my wife about it, and I said, you know, why do your parents invite him to Thanksgiving?
And they say, oh, well, they think, you know, these girls made it up, and I... They, what?!
They made it up?
That's... Yeah.
Her parents are very nice, but I think they're a little...
Oh, no. That's not nice.
Her parents are not nice.
Her parents raised this guy, right?
Well, it's her mom's brother.
So, grew up with him.
Okay, okay. So how is it nice to invite over a molester for Thanksgiving?
Step me through this. I think they financially support them.
Wait, who financially supports him?
He financially supports them.
Oh, so their silence is bought off by the molester.
I believe so, yes.
How does this fit into the category of nice?
Well, I shouldn't have used that word.
The Craven Betrayal of Children for Fucking Money?
Come on. That's not nice.
It's really disgusting.
Reading the stuff about this guy.
Sweet Mother of God, I hope you're not going for Thanksgiving or didn't go for Thanksgiving.
I did.
You're going to get at me after this, but it was actually at my house.
You what now? It was at my house.
But you didn't invite him.
I did not invite him, but I mean...
Did he come? He has a big family.
He did come. And this is...
I took him aside out.
I was barbecuing, so I said, hey, come outside and help me with a steak or whatever.
And I showed him I had my magnum on my hip and I said, if you're ever alone in a room with my daughter, if I ever suspect anything has happened, I'm putting a bullet through your head.
And he kind of looked down and Walked back into the house, and he didn't show up to the baby shower, so hopefully the message got across.
But yeah, I really love my wife.
She's a wonderful woman, but this uncle of hers, it just enrages me just to think about him.
Why is he in your home?
I don't agree with the threats.
I mean, this is what the police are for, but why is he in your home?
Yeah. Yep.
I thought about it and agonized over it.
Why is this agony?
I know why. I know exactly why it's agony, which is that your wife puts in there because she doesn't want to disturb the family dynamic, right?
Yes. Yep. That's it.
Yeah. Yep.
That's it. I don't want to, you know, make my wife's side of the family.
I don't know. You don't want to piss off the child rapist enablers, right?
Don't want to alienate the people who are supporting the molester.
Yeah, you're probably right.
Probably? No, no, here.
I'm willing to entertain how I'm not right about this, if you want to tell me.
Well, this is kind of my thought process.
I could not invite them, kind of alienate them from my wife's family, but then I kind of see that just alienates me from my wife's family, and my wife's still going to see her You know, her uncles and parents and whatever, and I'm just not going to be there.
And that's how I kind of saw...
Why is your wife going to support this?
I mean, she doesn't really know the guy, but so she just kind of...
Following what her parents say.
She said she didn't really...
He was out of state when she was growing up, so she never really saw him, and she doesn't really know him.
No, no, but she knows what he did.
Yeah, she knows what he did.
So what the...
What am I missing here, man?
What am I missing here?
Yeah, it's a tough situation.
The guy broke... I assume while he was raping a girl, he broke her femur.
Mm-hmm. A child.
Yeah, it's disgusting.
What am I missing? You're not missing anything, I guess.
I just never thought I'd be in the situation where, you know, someone would allow this guy to be a part of their life because he pays their mortgage or whatever it is.
And it's the parents he pays their mortgage, is that right?
Yes, my wife's parents, his sister and her husband.
And? Does nobody call them out on that?
Or do they not want to send him to prison because then their gravy train gets cut off?
Is that the idea? Well, I mean...
You know, the whole legal thing, I think, I'm not sure exactly what happened.
I know this went to trial and then he got them to remove their accusations somehow, through a settlement.
What do you mean somehow? You know exactly how he got them to remove their accusations?
Through a settlement, yes, with money.
Now, did it go to criminal trial or civil trial?
I believe it was criminal, but I'll have to double check on that because you're right, it doesn't seem right that they just let a guy off if he...
I don't think...
I mean, again, I'm no lawyer, and I don't even know where you are, and for God's sake, don't tell me, but I don't think you get to just pay people to drop charges once criminal trials are underway.
Yeah, so I don't think the trial was underway.
I think...
No, it was probably a civil thing that was going to trial, but he settled ahead of time.
All right. So, did you know any of this before you married your wife?
No. I did.
I mean, it was kind of a distant thought.
Like, oh, I have an uncle in another state who was accused of these terrible things.
And, you know, she told me that her parents are still in contact with him.
So I just, I guess I didn't really know what to make of it because my wife, you know, wasn't, she didn't really know him.
She met him a couple of times when she was growing up.
Sorry to interrupt. Is this my, is it my understanding?
And is my understanding correct? That your wife is in contact with her parents who were taking, I assume, some kind of hush money from the molester.
Right. I think...
It wasn't hush money to her parents.
Her parents have always, or her sister has always kind of relied on her older brother for financial support, even before the...
Oh, so it's not your wife's parents who were taking the money, but her sister?
Yeah. Okay, and what does your wife think of the sister?
Well, her mom, yeah, she loves her mom.
She's very close with her parents.
Oh, okay, sorry.
I'm so confused. All right. It's your wife's mother who's taking the money from the uncle?
Yes. Okay.
So what does your wife think of her mother who's taking the money from the alleged child rapist?
She loves her. She loves her.
Yeah. And what do you think of that?
I mean, her mom...
She's a very pleasant lady, but I do think it's kind of a messed up family dynamic where she's accepting this guy in the family after he's been accused of these horrible things just because he sometimes helps her out with her bills or whatever.
But I guess I don't really know what my place is in God, I agonize about this so much.
Are you still moving around, man? I'm getting a lot of bumps from your mic.
Yeah, yeah, sorry.
Sorry, I just...
So what is it in your history that makes this something that ended up in your life?
It's not, it's come out of nowhere, right?
Yep. I, um...
I did get a girl pregnant when I was 16 and I haven't seen my son since his first birthday.
He turned seven in early November this month.
And why haven't you seen your son?
Because my girlfriend at the time and her parents took him and moved away.
And why didn't the girlfriend want you and the son's life to the point where she's going to move away?
I, you know, every guy says this, but she was not a stable person.
She was a serial liar and Could be violent.
And I know why I sleep with her.
Did you know all of this before you slept with her?
I had unprotected sex.
I know. She kind of tricked me.
She tricked me. She seemed normal when we started dating.
And then the monsters just kept coming out of the bag.
And eventually it was too late.
But yeah, that's definitely been a big thing that's haunted me.
Still haunts me. Do you support the child at all?
I don't. This girlfriend I had was from a very wealthy family.
Right. Yeah, I just...
I mean, I'm a big fan of your show, so I know how terrible it is for kids growing up in single-mother households and just, I mean, not being there for that.
Now, what does your wife think about...
You're missing Sam? Well, we have talked about it.
I think she knows I've changed a lot since then.
I kind of got my values straight out.
I used to be really into physical things, beauty and status in women.
And thanks to your show and other things, I've switched over to Focusing more on virtue and a person's innards and how they treat people and how they view the world instead of the first side of physical beauty.
I've also quit drinking to excess.
Since then, I used to do that a lot in my younger days and partly through listening to your show and going to church, I've quit drinking excessively.
I still drink every now and then for work and whatnot.
So I've changed in the seven years since that happened.
But yeah, my wife, she knows about that and she just knows I was a different person then.
And how long have you been listening to the show?
About three years. And how long have you been married?
Nine months. I'm not sure that you have been listening to the show very much.
No, seriously. I mean, you've, you know, since listening to the show, I'm going to be frank with you.
You can tell me if I'm being wrong, but if I'm wrong.
But since listening to the show, you have married into a family that enables and supports and takes money from a brutal child rapist.
You've invited that brutal child rapist into your house and threatened him with a gun.
Yeah, that doesn't sound good hearing it out loud.
Does it sound like a philosophical life to you?
No, but I'm going to vouch for my wife, and she is the best thing that's ever happened to me.
And I know her family isn't perfect.
Oh, no, no, no, no.
Come on, come on.
You can't possibly try and sell that not quite perfect.
So, yeah, I think...
You make some good point stuff, and this thing kind of slipped my mind.
You know, there's so many other good things going on in my life that I didn't really think about.
My wife's, you know, distant uncle, who, kind of out of the picture, he lives in another state, and then he's just...
No, but it's... Sorry, it's not...
It's not just the uncle.
First of all, you keep saying the distant uncle, but he's in your house.
Right. Okay, so don't give me this distance thing, right?
If he's in your house, he's not very distant.
That's number one. Number two, it's not the uncle exactly.
I mean, you're not marrying the uncle.
It's the family as a whole and the moral judgment of the family.
And I'll tell you why.
This guy needs to be in jail, in my humble opinion, if he's guilty.
And it seems like there's quite a lot of evidence.
Why does this guy need to be in jail?
Because, yeah, he's a child molester and he broke a girl's femur, allegedly while molesting her, so yeah, absolutely he should go to jail.
No, no. That's the cause of him going to jail.
But why does he need to be in jail now?
Because people that do that kind of thing probably don't stop and he's probably a predator and And he's got children.
And those children have babysitters.
And there are other children in the neighborhood.
And maybe he goes to Thailand.
I don't know. But if he is this kind of guy, and he's not in prison, my belief is he probably out there raping other children.
But it's okay, because he's given some money.
He's buying the silence so he can continue what he's doing.
Yeah, it's really sick, and I mean, the family's just in denial.
Like, oh, they just accused him because he was rich, or...
Whatever excuses they give.
You know, that's a pretty strong commitment to a false accusation to break your own fucking femur.
Right. Yep.
Okay, so let's say that it's probably a little bit more than an accusation.
Yeah, you know, I read the court documents, and I absolutely believe he's a predator.
I wouldn't have read him like I did.
Okay, so you know...
And your wife knows, and the family knows, and he's not only not in jail.
Because you know what happens is, I'm going to just go out on a limb here, I don't know the court documents, so this is all bullshit speculation, right?
So, but let me tell you what I think happened.
What I think happened was, the children accused, and he basically offered to pay off the parents to shut the children up.
It's not like the kids get the money, right?
So the parents retroactively prostitute their children to a molester in return for money.
Tell me if I'm wrong. Tell me if that is an unfair way to characterize the transaction.
It's sick and I can't argue with that.
It's retroactive prostitution.
The only thing I would say is Maybe the parents, especially of the girl who didn't get her femur broken, thought, there's no way we can convict this guy.
Let's, you know, financially cripple him.
No, what do you mean?
It's a broken femur.
That's not a he said, she said thing.
Right. Even if he just, I mean, if they get Al Capone for tax evasion.
So, if he goes to jail for breaking the child's femur.
He's not preying on other children.
Yep. Yep.
And I, yeah, it's, when you put it that way, it's like, you know, I was having sympathy because I was thinking about my daughter and I, I, I don't even like to think about it, but I just absolutely lose it if something like that happened to my daughter.
And that's the reason I'm calling into your show because, um, I don't know if you have a big extended family, but I do, and my wife does, and there's some nasty characters, and this guy, obviously, the pinnacle of that.
I don't know. To be honest, the thought that popped into my head, Jack, is your wife doesn't have a big extended family.
She's got a big extended crime-enabling syndicate of shakedown.
Right. Her family, they're in denial about.
They know he's been accused, but they think they've been full of sex.
I'm not in denial, no.
I believe that this guy has done some terrible things.
You married into it? Well, like I was saying, when I married my wife, she told me about this guy.
She said she met him a couple times growing up, but hadn't really had any contact with him.
No, no. You keep bringing it back to this guy.
Right. What is the issue?
It's not the guy.
It's the family. It's the enablement.
It's the, he's got to come for Thanksgiving.
It's the normalization.
It's the excusing. It's the taking of money.
The guy is terrible enough.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to brush over that.
But the family structure as a whole that takes money from this guy and enables this guy and normalizes this guy.
Knowing that he's likely continuing what he did?
It's sick. Putting children at risk of rape for money?
Come on. Come on.
Yeah, it's sick, and I didn't think I'd justify it to myself by saying, you know, maybe my in-laws do that, but my wife doesn't take money from this guy.
She doesn't really know him, and maybe, you know, my wife's Mother does, but she's, you know, I don't have to deal with her every day, and she is enabling this.
No, no, because you're forgetting about the children.
His children?
The children he may still be preying on.
Who gives a fuck about what your wife thinks or your wife's mother thinks?
Who gives a fuck about what you think?
This guy could still be out there preying on children.
Absolutely. So, what does it matter whether your wife takes money from him or not?
You're missing the big picture!
So, what would you say?
That I should actively try and put this guy behind bars?
I don't know. I don't know the details.
I don't think it would be the end of the world to talk to a lawyer.
I don't know. Okay.
Yeah, it's tough.
I mean... But this needs to be talked about in the family.
You can't be taking money from this guy.
Sorry! You can't be inviting child rapists over for Thanksgiving.
I can't believe the shit I have to say in this show.
Oh my god! No!
Not on the table! Turkey on the table!
Child rapist knife and fork?
Not on the table! Yep.
No negotiation.
No discussion. Not happening.
Also, people taking money from alleged child rapists, not at the table.
People who took money from a man who may have raped and broken the femur and not on the table.
You know that family discussion.
Okay.
Everyone can come except the uncle and anyone who's a direct family relative, and then we say, okay, this guy could still be doing it to kids.
What are we going to do? That, I guess, can be Thanksgiving, because it might be Thanksgiving for a whole bunch of potentially preyed-upon children if this guy is not around to do it.
I think you make it really clear, and I... The only thing I would say, I think I was a little clouded making my judgment because my wife said, you know, she kind of got me leaning that, you know, he never went to jail, he was never convicted, and...
But they accept he broke the femur, right?
Well, that was in, yeah, that was in the document I read.
So he broke the femur.
Yeah. So, let's say he didn't rape anyone.
He just broke a child's femur.
Mm-hmm. Well, this was in the courtroom.
He says...
No, no, no. I don't care.
I don't care. I don't care.
Please don't drag me down into the weeds here pretending that we can't see the crop circles.
Right, right. You know, you're right.
You're right. But I can sort of understand if...
I thought it's not right, but if a close family member is a drug addict or doing something terrible like this, it seems a pretty human thing that people deny it and kind of shove it to the side and just kind of ignore the fact that it's there.
And I don't want to participate in that.
And I kind of gave in, you know, allowing this guy in my home.
All right, this is just a bunch of noise.
Let me tell you something, Jack. This is what you need to get.
This is what you need to really understand.
You ready? Yes.
Your life will not be the same after I say what I'm gonna say.
All right, just telling you up front.
The anger, the rage that you felt when you showed your gun to this man when you were barbecuing, You don't know how many fathers are out there who feel that rage because what if this man did, has done, and may still be doing.
There may be half a dozen or a dozen fathers out there with exactly the same feeling after the fact that you have before the fact.
And your family, the family you married into, and now you, are complicit in the manufacturer.
Of that parental rage against an abuser who may still be plying his satanic trade.
The rage that you felt to protect your child?
Well, there may be a lot of fathers out there who have that same rage because it's already happened.
Because the family didn't do the right thing.
Maybe the family just took the money.
What does that say to the children who were attacked?
What does that say to the children who were abused?
What does that say to the children who were molested?
What does that say to the little girl who had her femur broken that this guy doesn't go to jail?
Because mommy needs money.
Or daddy needs money.
What does that do to their feelings about society, about their family?
Yeah, he's definitely ruined some lives.
And, you know, I think you've made it pretty clear.
I wish I could have gone on your show before Thanksgiving, but, you know, this guy's never allowed in my house again.
And I think I'm going to have to have a talk with my in-laws about his participation in any family events that I'm going to be a part of.
And my daughter, future daughter.
See, I don't know how anyone in the family is safe for a child to be around.
I mean, I'm telling you, this is a harsh way to put it, but I'm struggling to see it.
Another way, Jack, which is, oh, child got molested.
Ka-ching! Here comes the money, right?
Right. How is any child safe in this family?
Right. Well, we do live a significant distance away from this guy, but you're right at family events and when we all get together.
He's not the only child predator in the world.
If the family enables and protects and normalizes child predation, you don't think child predators can sense that?
Listen, motherfuckers who rape children take enormous risks every time.
They do such an unholy abomination to a child.
They literally are taking their lives in their hands.
Because if they go to jail, well, everybody knows what happens to child molesters in jail, right?
Yep. So they better be damn certain that they're not messing with the wrong family.
They better be damn certain that the parents, even if they find out about it, Are going to be willing to betray their children for money or normalcy or conformity or kin.
They better be damn certain.
You know, a bank robber cases the bank.
You know what that means, right? Yeah.
Scouts it out. Yeah.
He knows when the guards are coming and going.
He knows where, if he's at all smart.
This guy's smart. I assume he's got money.
So, the bank robber is going to case the joint and the bank robber is going to make sure he knows where the security cameras are, how long the alarm is, how far the police are away, what he's going to do with the money, how he's going to get out, how he's going to write.
He practices a bunch of times if he can.
And that's just a bank robbery.
A bank robbery does not come with a death sentence, but being caught and convicted for pedophilia, for child rape, very often is a death sentence because, or at least it's a pretty ugly life sentence because you're going to go to jail for a long time and you're not going to do well in jail, right?
Right. So you better be damn certain before you assault a child that the family is not going to interfere, that the family is not going to put you in jail.
So this is what I'm saying that you're not seeing, Jack.
Is that if there's a predator around you, in the neighborhood, in the vicinity, near the school, and there probably is, the radar of that predator is going to look at your family, your wife's family is going to say, they're safe.
He's going to know. This is what I mean when I say, your child will not be protected.
Until this family is cleaned up.
Because these guys, and their women too, they are very, very good at knowing who is going to betray the children, who is not going to support the children, whose children are safe to assault.
Right. Now, you might...
I mean, I get, you know, you threatened this guy or whatever.
Don't agree with it. I know you didn't.
But... Yeah. But the important thing is that...
Now, you afterwards, right?
Let's say something does happen to your daughter.
Mm-hmm. You can't undo it.
So, remember, not all the predators are in another state or in some distant land.
They're around. Jesus, just look at what's coming out about the media, about the sports world, about Hollywood, about the news industry.
I mean, these fucking vermin are being slowly pulled out, bit by rotten, soulless, zombie-dicked bit.
This satanic underweaving of evil cocks is being pulled apart and exposed.
You understand why Matt Lauer did not want Donald Trump to become president?
You understand why all these fuckers wanted Hillary Clinton?
Sexual predation husband enabling Hillary Clinton?
Do you think she was going to go after any of these guys?
Do you think there was going to be anything of the cultural zeitgeist that would have caused this exposure if Hillary Clinton had gotten in power?
Do you understand why these fuckers wanted Hillary Clinton in power?
Do you understand why they worked tirelessly to oppose the candidacy of Donald Trump?
There are a lot of them out there.
And they know which families are safe to prey on.
They don't just prey on children, you understand.
They prey on the entire family, and they're very good at figuring out who's safe to prey on.
And your wife's family, I'm going to tell you, I'm pretty sure I know where they show up on that radar.
Yeah, I think you're right.
I think you're right. And a question I posed to you is then, your daughters, you know, obviously growing up in this society, what are you going to tell them?
Her, I know she's a little older now, but what'd you do when she was younger just to kind of vet anyone she was going to come in contact with to make sure they weren't...
No, I'm there. I'm there. You're there, yeah.
Unless she's a complete, absolute and total trusted friend or family member, I'm there.
What do I care? It's a couple of years of being there.
Well, if you don't want that, don't have kids, right?
It's a couple of years of being there.
Yeah. And so you're just there.
Yep, that's another thing I was thinking about.
I hate to admit this, but I used to think I was going to send my kids to public school and use corporal punishment and have my, if I had a son, circumcise them.
But since listening to this show, I've done a 180 and there's no way any of my kids are going to public school and I'm going to do peaceful parenting.
But yeah, so Would you, did you look at any private schools before you decided to homeschool your daughter?
Was that an option for you or did you?
Listen, I mean, I don't want to get into the details.
I don't have any particular objection to a good private school, but you have to vet it thoroughly and understand who's there and street proof your kids and all that kind of stuff.
It has to be a very trusted environment and you have to go and sit in on the classes and vet them and all that kind of stuff, which if any decent private school will let you do.
So, yeah, I mean, I don't think private school has its challenges in that the teachers are all still coming out of the general leftist Marxist brainwashing mill of educational systems, like educational systems, teacher education centers, and so on.
So it is, yeah, but I mean, I would not worry in particular.
The problem is, of course, I mean, I assume you're going to be working.
Is that right? Your wife's going to be home?
Yes. Your wife is no boundaries with predators.
Yeah, you know, I'm going to have to have a conversation with her after this, but, you know, she's very protective of me at least.
Very protective of you?
Wait, what? Why is she having a guy in the house that you're pulling a gun on?
If she's so protective of you, I don't quite understand.
Well, I didn't discuss that with her until after I did it.
Wait, did she not know that you would have a big problem with this guy coming to your house?
How the fuck is she protective of you in this situation?
We talked about it.
Did you say that you didn't want the guy coming to your house?
Yeah, absolutely. So then how is she protective of you by violating a core moral principle that you have, which is not to break bread with child rapists?
She's protecting her family, dude, not you.
Let's be clear about that. I think you have a point there.
It was kind of, you know, a last-minute thing.
Like, a week before she said, oh, yeah, and this guy, he's coming from out of state.
And I'm thinking, you know, the guy you told me about who was accused of molesting children is coming?
And it kind of caught me off guard.
And we talked. I said, you know, I instantly said, I don't want this guy coming.
And she said, well, you know, my parents would be very upset if...
You just allow it. He already, you know, bought his plane tickets.
His kids are looking forward to it.
Oh, he bought his plane tickets.
Yeah, well, we wouldn't want to inconvenience the rich guy who bought off the parents of the children he probably raped.
Right. So, please don't, like, you just, you're an excuse maker for this stuff.
And I understand. I sympathize.
I mean, you're in a difficult position.
You've got a daughter on the way in a family that seems to have colluded with a child rapist.
That is not a fun place to be, and I'm sorry that you're in that particular position.
I think it would have been useful to call earlier, but this is where we are.
So I understand why you're spewing out this, like, endless fart tapioca of excuses.
You need to be aware that you're doing it.
I'm not expecting you to stop doing it because you're in a difficult spot, but you need to be aware of it.
I mean, I'd like it if you stop doing it, but it stops saying things like, oh yeah, my wife is very protective of me when she's like, yeah, no, let's have the child rapist here.
Right. No, you're absolutely right.
They are all excuses.
You don't want to have to take a stand because you don't want them to end up choosing the child's rapist over you.
You don't want to end up looking at a family and saying, oh, great.
So, this guy gives the money and they're choosing him over me.
So, they can be bought off to service evil, to put unknown numbers of children at potential risk for the sake of having a bit of Bank in the pocket.
You don't want to make that stand.
You don't want to take that stand because you don't want to pit your virtue against their collusion.
Because you don't know how that's going to go, right?
And you already have one child you don't see and you may be afraid that you're going to end up with two.
And that your daughter is going to be in the orbit of this family.
And this guy, maybe.
Oh, God. And you might not even be there to protect her, right?
Am I getting close? I... If this guy's close to my daughter, there's no way I'm letting her out of my...
I'm not letting this guy out of my house.
No, no, but let's say you confront the family, and then the family convince your wife...
To divorce you. Oh, I see what you're saying.
And then you end up with another kid you don't see, except this one you know is a daughter in the orbit of somebody who appears to have raped children and broken their femur.
Yeah, you know, that's not something I've thought about.
No, no, she's already signaled her loyalty.
She would much rather upset you than her parents.
You are disposable in this equation.
You didn't want this guy to come.
Her parents did. Who did she choose?
Her parents, yep.
So she's already signaled that she values her parents And their corruption more than your integrity.
So your concern, I'm just out front with it, your concern, your fear, I'm sure, is that if you confront your wife and her family about this, she's going to choose her family over you and then you won't be around to protect your daughter because she'll be gone.
Possibly subconsciously, I haven't directly thought of that.
I don't think my wife would choose her family over me if it came down to it.
No, no. She already did, man.
By having this guy over on Thanksgiving against your will.
I'm not going to put this on my wife because I did eventually say, you know, fine, you know.
Yes, but who wanted it?
Who advocated for it?
Who nagged for it? Who persisted for it?
Yeah. Yeah, I would.
Yeah. My wife definitely convinced me or nudged me that way.
Well, I assume it was more than a nudge, right?
I mean, if you're like, well, it's 51-49 to break bed with the FEMA breaking child rapist, you know, maybe I just need a little bit of convincing.
Yeah, she gave me a bunch of excuses, like the ones I was giving to you.
Right. Yeah, I gave in.
Yep. Right. So she has already...
You know, I mean, do you know the risk?
You know the risk, right?
If this guy wanted you out of the picture...
He could have had his cell phone running, recording you making a threat against him.
He calls the cops and you're done, man.
I do live in a state where that's technically felony wiretapping if you're recording someone without their knowledge.
But yeah, you're right.
I mean, I don't know how he could have seen it coming, but.
OK, then he could simply have gone home, written it out, and then the police would have interviewed you.
And if you had denied it and they'd ever found out that it was true, they'd get you for perjury lying to the police.
Yep. I mean, this is why I wanted to call in before Thanksgiving.
So this is a very risky situation, and she put you in that situation, or rather she put you at that environment.
You made the choice to do this terrible thing to threaten his life.
A death threat directly showing a gun?
Come on, man. That is all kinds of wrong and retarded.
I think you're right.
That is not how you handle this situation.
Come on. I didn't know what else to do at the time, but I think...
Well, you knew what to do ahead of time, which is to not have him in your house.
Yeah. So you say, well, your wife protects you.
No. Your wife put you in a situation where you were going directly against everything you held dear, every value that you had, every scrap of integrity that you had.
Your wife was badgering you into a situation where all of that was violated.
Yep. Yep.
And back to the point of, excuse me, her choosing her family over me, I think she would choose me over her family.
I mean, she sees her family maybe once a week, her parents, but I mean, we spend a lot of time together.
And I think if I did say an ultimatum, you know, your family's not coming over or I'm not going to be there, I think she would stick with me.
I'm definitely going to have to have a conversation with her about this guy.
Probably with my in-laws too, about excluding this guy from all future family events hosted in our area.
But you're right, I think it wasn't right for my wife to put me in that situation.
And I also agree with what I did wasn't the smartest thing in the world, but it was through passion and maybe not cognitive reasoning.
God, I made a threat against this guy's life.
Yeah, don't do that. Yeah, I think you're right.
Prevention is the way to go. Prevention, you're right.
All right, well, listen, the microphone's driving me crazy.
Just remember, of course, that everything we've talked about here is sort of third-hand reporting.
It's all alleged, but...
I wish you the very best of luck.
And listen, I do appreciate you calling in and I do appreciate your care and concern for your daughter.
And that I respect and I wish you the very best of luck with these conversations.
And I hope that if this guy did what he did, I hope there's a way to keep the children around him safe.
So thanks very much, Jack. I appreciate your call.
Let's move on to the next caller. Yep.
Thank you, Steph. Right up next we have Advar.
Advar wrote in and said, In the Middle Ages, battle commanders preferred to avoid battle for fear of losing too many men.
But looking at the battle commanders' decisions in World War I, how they would send hundreds of thousands of young men to their early graves in a single day, you would think their objective was to lose their own men.
What explains this drastic change in warfare?
That's from Advar. Hey Advar, how you doing?
I'm doing well, thank you.
Thanks for taking my call.
My pleasure. It's a great question.
And I mean, I doubt we'll be able to come to any conclusive answer in this situation.
But there's a couple of thoughts.
Is there something you wanted to mention as we dive in?
Did you watch the video I linked to you?
I apologize. I don't think that I did.
I may have missed that. But if you can tell me what it was about.
I mean, I've seen a lot of World War I stuff.
Oh, yeah. Have you heard of the YouTube channel Lindy Beige?
No. Well, he's a British guy.
He talks about, well, history and stuff.
And yeah, this particular video was titled A Point About Sieges.
And yeah, he wondered the great detail about how About how rare battles were prior to modern times.
I haven't fact checked him, but he named a few examples that are William the Conqueror, the guy who won a battle at Hastings.
That was his only battle, and the rest of his conquering of England was purely sieges after that.
And Richard the Lionheart, his 10-year military career was three battles.
And this just, when I heard this, it just leapt out at me how different this was from World War I. So that's what prompted the question.
Right. Yeah, and just so you know, I mean, my producer just mentioned that we don't generally pre-watch videos because the audience hasn't.
So then if you and I end up talking about something that the audience hasn't seen, it doesn't usually happen that much.
Yeah, of course. So war used to be a specialized, localized, relatively short period.
So you'd have a bunch of professional knights of the king.
You'd have a battle of 5,000 people or 10,000 people and so on.
Up until 18th and in particular the 19th century and of course in the 20th century it became huge.
And there were a number of reasons for that.
First of all, everybody was grindingly poor.
And there really weren't any excess resources by which to sustain a lengthy global kind of war.
So battles were generally decided by relatively few people in relatively remote locations, which is one of the reasons why, if you look at a lot of battle history, there is a lot of glory in In it, there's a lot of, you know, the Henry V or Hank Sank, as we used to call them in theater school, there's a lot of these, once more under the breach, dear friends, once more, you know, line up the wall, stuff up the wall with our English dead or however it goes.
And so there was a lot of heroism, a lot of guys on horseback with their swords and lightning and, you know, stuff like that.
And there was much more skill involved, of course.
Well, the longbow diminished that a little bit, but in terms of like way back in the day, if you were really good as a sword fighter, you did pretty well.
You did pretty well.
And so skill mattered, and therefore training mattered.
And since you didn't have a lot of resources to buy endless amounts of armor and shields and swords and helmets and so on, Then things were kind of localized.
Skill mattered. Enthusiasm mattered.
And generally, if you got a cut, you were dead.
Like, if anybody knows this movie, I don't know why I've been thinking about it lately, because I'm stuck in the past.
But if anybody knows this movie, I saw it when I was a kid in a library.
It was a black and white movie.
Really had an impact on me.
I was maybe eight or nine years old.
I watched a movie in a library.
It was a black and white movie, I'm pretty sure.
Or maybe it's just on a black and white television.
And it was the reenactment of a medieval battle...
And the agony of it was really clear.
Like, I remember there'd be, like, some guy got shot through the leg or something with an arrow, and he'd fall down, but he wouldn't fall down and die in the way that you always see in these kind of movies, right?
He'd be screaming, and, like, they'd then go to some other part of the battle.
They'd come back to him, like, ten minutes later.
He's still screaming, trying to get the arrow out of his leg, and so on, right?
And it was some medieval battle that I watched in England when I was a kid in a library.
If anybody knows the name of the film, please...
Put it in the comment section below.
I'm sure somebody out there knows.
You guys are brilliant with all of this kind of stuff.
But I just really was struck by that, how localized it was.
And once you get the arrows, it's a little bit less skills-based and so on.
That changed with the 19th century.
With the 19th century, you had such a massive amount of industrial output and such an automation of things.
And of course, the invention of the gun, right?
The gun. Yeah, you need the sound, right?
Otherwise, you don't know what the hell I'm talking about.
But the invention of the gun.
Changed a lot of things. Now, skill didn't quite matter as much.
Now, it did as far as snipers go.
You know, like one of the things that happened in World War I was, you know, you couldn't smoke and anyone could see you at night.
The cigarette, they'd shoot and they'd know where to hit and so on.
So there was some skill as far as snipers went, but snipers didn't really win or lose a war.
They were just kind of harassing and picking off people and allowing those who wanted to go home the chance to put up their hand, Downton Abbey style, and get it shot off so that they could go home.
But... The massive industrial output of the 19th century created the capacity for the kind of warfare that really erupted in the First World War.
That combined with collateral, right?
It's like collateral damage.
I don't mean it that way. I mean collateral like you've got something to borrow against, future tax receipts, the unborn damage.
Countries became so wealthy that they could afford the most extravagant and unholy kinds of wars imaginable.
And there was, of course, a big problem with the First World War in that it became quite evident quite quickly that the rank-and-file soldiers felt they had more in common with each other than they did with their own superiors.
I've talked about this In a World War I presentation I did a year or two ago about the Christmas truce, right?
So 1914, right?
The battle starts.
Everyone thinks it's going to be over by Christmas.
It grinds on. And in Christmas, they were singing.
They were playing soccer in no man's land.
They were trading drinks and jokes with each other that this was a breakdown in military ferocity.
And so one of the ways that you can build up loyalty is In the army is to have lots of people on your side get killed.
I mean, I know it sounds kind of counterintuitive, like we're going to win by dying.
The patent thing, you know, it's...
You don't want to die for a war.
You want the other poor bastard to die for his country, not die for your country.
But... If you get a lot of casualties on your side, assuming it doesn't wipe you out, people get kind of ferocious.
They get angry. They get that 9-11, let's just go invade everything kind of mentality.
And the vividness of local war casualties creates a significant desire for blowback and aggression and violence and so on.
And what happened was, I think, that the ruling classes...
Had to have a decisive end to the First World War.
Because if they didn't, I think there would have been revolutions.
In other words, if 10 million people had died and then another 20 million died with the Spanish flu spread by the returning soldiers, if 30 million people died and nothing changed, not only would I think there'd be revolutions and the rulers would be overthrown.
And remember, right in the middle of the First World War, you have revolutions A revolution in Russia, where the Romanov family, the ruling elite, are shot to death in their basement, I think it was, right?
By the Bolsheviks.
And remember, the First World War was a family warfare.
So many of the rulers were related.
So if one went down, the justification for the other staying up becomes less and less.
So number one, I think they really feared about revolution.
And they really feared that if they didn't keep going and achieve some of the allies, well, both sides, but the allies ended up, some decisive victory, I think they felt they would have gone the way of the Romanovs.
Communism was a big spectrum.
It was a big problem. And communism succeeded in an ancient world.
Aristocracy. With a czar known as Russia, of course.
Just dragged them out of their beds, threw them in the basement.
And as the song goes, Anastasia screamed in vain.
So they were really worried about a revolution.
They were really worried about being dragged out of their beds and decapitated, guillotined, shot, whatever, tortured.
So they felt they had to keep going.
You know, it's much better for a couple hundred thousand men to die in one day in the Somme than it is for the leaders or the rulers.
I mean, good heavens. Much better to throw your toy soldiers in the fire, so to speak, that's all the empathy they had, rather than face the possibility of revolution and death and the end of your lineage and so on.
So they did have to achieve some kind of decisive victory.
Now, the decisive victory was partly arose out of, as I've talked about before, arming Lenin and giving him weapons and sending him through Finland.
There's a history of this called to the Finland Station by a guy who was a big socialist but never paid his own taxes, of course.
He had to flee America because of it.
They sent Lenin to have a revolution in Russia to get Russia out of the war.
And they also needed to get America into the war so they could get the decisive victory that only American manufacturing capacity and militaristic capacity could guarantee them.
So they ended up with this massive, overwhelming superiority on the Western Front.
And they were able to, with the infusion of America and the takeout, So, once Russia was taken out, it was Germany who sent Lenin in to take out Russia because they were fighting a two-front war, Eastern-Western Front, so they took out Russia.
And then, because they took out Russia, they could concentrate their energies on the Western Front.
Then America came in and, with that kind of capacity, ended up giving the Allies this overwhelming advantage.
So that they could impose this insane draconian Treaty of Versailles, wherein Germany would have continued to be paying reparations up until the 1980s, for heaven's sakes, and were reduced to 100,000 men army and gave up massive amounts of territory and were not allowed to have an air force and a tiny navy and just really crippled the Germans.
And their allies. And stripped so much money and wealth.
And Churchill was talking about this at the time.
He says, okay, well, let's say you get a million shoes out of Germany and dump them on the British market.
All you do is put British shoemakers out of business.
You can help anything. But there was this...
It's called the Jupiter Complex.
Destroy your enemies, humiliate them, brutalize them in the way that happened in the Second World War with the Hammer of the Gods bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which I've talked about before to some controversy, but...
So I do think that they really felt they had to have a decisive victory, and they did not feel, the rulers did not feel, did not believe that they could just go home.
Number one, they feared a revolution.
And number two, even if the revolution didn't happen, it would be really tough to sell another war I mean, if it had just stalemated, like if after the first year or two, they'd said, ah, to hell with it, it's a stalemate, let's just shake hands, let's just go back to where we started from, then it would be really tough to sell the next war, because people would remember.
And there were great writers who If you haven't read All Quiet on the Western Front, you need to read All Quiet on the Western Front.
It's an incredible book. Don't watch the movie.
Read the book. There were amazing writers and poets coming out of the First World War.
I mean, incredible stuff.
A really vivid sense of what it was like to be in the front, how crazy it was, how mad it was, how horrifying it was.
This hadn't really happened before.
Because there was general conscription, you brought a lot of literary talent into it.
The military. Whereas before, they were professional soldiers.
And, you know, if you're a really good writer, I mean, there's occasionally there are savants who can do it all.
But for the most part, if you're really good with the pen, you don't pick up the sword and start bashing people over the head with it.
That's generally a more athletic and base of the brain operation.
So because they had general conscription, they brought a whole bunch of really great writers.
And reading the World War I poets, it's one of the first shows I did back in the day, was reading some First World War poetry.
It's incredible, incredible stuff.
And because of the vividness of the poetry and the language of the war, and subsequently the movies that came out, the movies were so powerful that the Nazis wouldn't even allow the German writers, all quiet in the Western Front, to be shown.
And the horror of war was so vivid and so well portrayed through having these amazing writers who survived, and some of whom didn't.
It's even worse, right? That it was becoming, and this stuff was published before the war's end, so they knew it was going to be really tough to sell the next war, and they knew they had to have a decisive victory, otherwise they may face revolution.
And so they really were, I think, they felt that they were cornered.
We can't win the war.
We can't have a stalemate.
We won't lose the war.
So we just got to keep doing what we're doing.
And because they had so much wealth, and so much industrial capacity, and so much of a capacity to borrow against future tax revenues, and so much capacity to print money, I mean, the gold standard was abandoned in many ways.
In the same way that, I mean, it's interesting too, sorry, just the last point I make, I know I've gone on for a long time, but the last point I make is that The equivalent in the Vietnam War was the media, was there being film crews out there, and they never let that happen again.
No film crews at the front anymore, because they learned their lesson.
In the Vietnam War, having the film crews at the front, showing the squirting blood, the horrors, the screamings, the brutality, some of the war crimes and so on, never again.
They never let that happen again.
And the equivalent in the First World War were the war poets.
More vivid in the First World War than the Second World War, partly because some of the poets, of course, and of course the cream of the Western manhood, the cream of European manhood died in successive waves in the First and Second World War, leaving the genetics somewhat diminished, let's say. And...
You know, you end up with this single mom, testosterone-reduced soy boys of the modern era.
Part of that is genetic, part of that is the result of social policy, government policy, and so on.
And so I think these factors of things combined to the point where it had a kind of weird, twisted, totalitarian logic to just keep fighting, because they were spending other people's lives, and they were afraid for their own.
Does that make sense? Yeah. Sort of.
All right, where am I short in your view?
I believe I heard you use the phrase once, when a country loses a war, it's good for the people.
If a country wins a war, it's good for the government.
Or was it the other way around?
I think you know what I'm saying.
Yeah, yeah. So, well, the German government after the war didn't do so well.
Did it? Well, no, I mean, with the Nuremberg trial, a lot of the leading Nazis, of course, were killed.
The First World War. Oh, the First World War, yeah, yeah.
All their aristocracy was all thrown out, weren't they?
Well, to some degree, but...
They didn't lose the war in the way that they lost the war in the Second World War.
Germany itself, while blockaded and starving, was not directly invaded.
And there was very little bombing that went on over Germany.
So in the way that Japan and Germany lost the Second World War, that did not occur in the First World War, not that Japan was in.
But in Germany, they lost the Second World War in a way that...
It has almost never been visited on a country before.
It was end-to-end rubble, completely destroyed.
And then occupied, of course, half and half by the Allies and the Russians.
So, yeah, they lost hard.
And now, was that good for the people?
It certainly meant that they weren't keen on starting another war.
Argument could be made that that might have gone just a little bit too far in Germany to the point where they don't seem to even want to defend their own culture anymore.
But in general, yeah, if the war is lost, then the appetite for war goes down.
The capacity of the rulers to wage war goes down.
War does not seem to have quite as much glory as it used to, so that can be better for the people as a whole.
But of course, if they win the war, then there's all of this patriotic scar tissue that forms over it.
And I was raised in this kind of stuff, like, yay, Battle of Britain, and yay, England's finest hour, and yay, Second World War defeated the collectivists and the socialists, and oh, well, no, no, it didn't really happen.
Yeah, well the thought I had was I doubt the German government really wanted to sign the Versailles Treaty and well I just had a thought that they wouldn't have had to if enough of their army remained but of course all the men of well most of the men of fighting age were all dead because they had been wasted in Useless bayonet charges.
Yeah, and machine gun fodder, right?
And that's why there were 20 years between the First and Second World War because you needed a baby boom and you needed another generation of kids to burn on the fire.
Yeah, absolutely. But what I'm saying is it just seemed really insane and stupid to waste all your good men like that because if they had enough men remaining, Maybe they would have had the strength to defend themselves and they wouldn't have had to sign the Versailles Treaty.
But nobody was really anticipating the Americans coming in.
So remember, of course, Woodrow Wilson, the American president at the time and one of the most corrupt presidents in American history, in my opinion.
But Woodrow Wilson got into office, was voted into office on the explicit promise to not get involved in the European War.
So nobody was expecting...
America to come into the First World War.
So the idea that they had to hedge their bets based on that, I think that they would just, it's sort of like immigration into Europe or into the West as a whole.
There are lots of people who don't think it's a great idea, but nobody, no individual has the direct incentive to re-evaluate things.
So who, let's say you said, well, we should just have an armistice, right?
Well, people would say, well, we've just burned 5 million lives.
For what? Nothing?
For nothing? I'm supposed to go back to the people and say 5 million of your best and brightest suns?
We're burnt at the altar of state power and the god of war for nothing?
We can't do that.
There'll be a revolution. They'll cut off our heads and stick them on a pike in the street.
It's them or us.
It's victory or death for the rulers, especially after 1917 with Russia.
Who has the incentive to stop it?
The soldiers can't.
The generals like war, and the generals always believe that there's some...
Remember, you only know in hindsight that it was a stalemate for four years.
You don't think it's a stalemate four years in year one or year two or year three, because there's always someone coming along saying, oh, we've got a great new weapon coming along.
This tank's going to be deployed.
We've got this mustard gas.
Just hang in there.
We're going to have a breakthrough.
Everybody feels that it's just about to turn around.
In hindsight, you say, well, that was a stalemate for years, but it's not how it appears at the time.
And so if you feel like you've got this great new weapon that's going to turn the tide of the war, why would you seek armistice?
But of course, both sides think that, and it didn't really pan out that way, of course.
But everybody's making horribly rational decisions in the moment, which add up to this kind of disaster, I think, in the long run.
Right. So, all those young men were sacrificed out of What, pure desperation?
It's sort of like saying, and this is not the perfect analogy, but it's, and it's certainly not in the same level of moral horror, it's sort of like saying, why is there a national debt?
Why are there underfunded liabilities?
Don't they care about the economic rights of the unborn?
Why are they willing to sell future generations into slavery?
Whereas, like, why, I mean, it's not as bad as going to war.
Of course, but it's the same kind of logic.
It's that, sure, it's wrong.
But who has any individual motive in the existing system to change it?
I mean, you try being a politician.
Go and say to people, well, we're going to have to jack up your taxes and cut your benefits to almost zero because we've got this huge national debt, which is irresponsible to pass to the next generation.
You're never going to get into power.
Everybody's acting rationally according to the self-interest and the tenets of the existing system.
It's how you know the system is insane, is that everyone acting rationally within the system is producing disaster in the long run.
That's how you know the system is fundamentally anti-rational, immoral.
It's a crazy system.
If rational application of self-interested rules in the existing system produces near-universal disaster, it means the system is insane.
If everybody's following the rules to their own advantage and the game destroys them, it's because the game is insane.
But re-evaluating the game is really tough.
Changing the game is virtually impossible because people's lives now depend on it.
I mean, you could say to single moms, you know, it's wrong that you take all these government benefits.
It's unjust. It's the cost of being passed along to your children.
In the same way you could go to the army generals in the First World War and say it's insane to be spending lives in this way.
But what are the single moms going to say?
We need it. We have to.
I won't survive without it.
And that's what the generals say too.
When the system is insane, madness becomes self-interest and everything decays.
I really appreciate that question and feel free to call back anytime.
So it's a great thing to bring up.
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