March 13, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
03:05:53
4028 Entitlement In Human Form - Call In Show - March 7th, 2018
|
Time
Text
I hope you're doing well. Oh my gosh, what a show.
What a show. So the first is a woman from Sweden.
She's a doctor and she wants it all.
And the steps that she is taking to get it all may be somewhat suboptimal in ways that will truly blow your mind.
Amazing just how much wisdom we've lost in one or two generations.
Now, the second is a debate with a communist.
And it's a mock debate, but a very good one.
And he brings up the usual objections.
And I think it's going to be very helpful for you to push back against these horrifying ideas.
The third caller is tempted by the black pit of nihilism known as anti-natalism.
Do not give birth.
Do not breed.
Do not bring life into a darkened and disastrous world.
Well, if you've ever been tempted or know someone who has, this is the light syringe-filled antidote.
And the fourth caller.
How do you help a world, or an individual for that matter, who truly believes doesn't need your help?
Maybe doesn't even admit that there's a problem.
Hmm. It's a challenge.
We face that, I think, more in our personal life than in our public life or in our life of debating, but it's a great, great question.
So, thanks as always.
To the callers, thank you.
To you, the supporters of this most essential and greatest philosophy conversation in the world, freedomainradio.com slash donate to help out the show.
Hugely, hugely appreciate it.
That's freedomainradio.com slash donate.
Just go there now. Help out.
You'll feel great. I'll eat and everything will be well.
You can follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
And if you've got some shopping to do, it's FDRURL.com forward slash Amazon for free for you.
A couple of pennies to us. And again, win-win for everyone.
Thanks, everyone. Let's get started right now.
Alright, well up for us today we have Susan.
Susan wrote in and said, I'm a 32-year-old woman from Sweden who has just started medical studies after completing a PhD in medical sciences.
Life is good, however, I know my biological clock is ticking and I really want kids, but don't have a partner.
Where are the smart, manly guys interested in a smart, family-minded partner?
I used to not worry too much, thinking I can always be a single mom if, say, by 35 I'm still single.
It would be tough, but I know that I could do it.
However, after I started listening to your show, I feel less comfortable about that option.
Of course, I want the best for my potential future baby.
I think I would be a great mother, but fatherhood is one thing I cannot provide.
I would love to hear your thoughts and maybe get some advice.
That's from Susan. Hi Susan, how are you doing?
Well, thank you.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Oh, good. I'm glad. It's nice to chat.
A very important topic.
A very important topic.
And how's your dating life been like over the last, say, 10 years?
I haven't really had any longer relationships.
I guess the longest would be the last one, two years.
Oh, well, that's fairly long.
What happened with that? Well, the thing with that one, it wasn't really set up to be...
long-term relationship from the start because I knew that this guy would have to go home to his home country.
And so there was no future in it.
Well.
Where was his home country?
I don't know if that would be to disclose too much.
Was it in Europe? Outside Europe.
Give me a continent.
Well, like Middle East.
You dated a guy from the Middle East for two years?
Yes. Was he like Arab Middle East or expat Middle East or what?
Yes. Yes, what?
Those aren't the same thing.
No, Arab.
He was in Arab. Was he Muslim?
Yes. And how did that come about?
Meeting at the workplace.
Yeah. Yeah.
I don't want to disclose too much if anyone that I know is listening, but it's probably been too much information already, so maybe I might as well go there.
And so, then you felt like, okay, well, I can get involved with this Arab guy where there's no future.
You thought that because you thought, well, I'd just be a single mom, right?
Well, not really.
It's like, but I've been dating a lot.
Like ever since I started dating at age like 24, which I guess is pretty late.
But I've been...
There are these internet dating websites, so I've contacted...
People from there meeting up for coffee and stuff like that.
I think I must have met 50 or 100 persons.
And generally, they're all very nice.
I mean, my general opinion about people is quite positive.
They're all nice to chat to, but I haven't really met anyone that I feel like I would want to have a relationship with.
Why is that? What's missing for you?
I mean this sympathetically, like, I mean, nobody's saying eat food you don't like.
I'm just curious what's missing for you.
I guess...
I would...
Yeah, to be honest, I think mostly they...
Mostly maybe not smart enough or...
They weren't smart enough?
Yeah... I think, yeah, many of the times that's the impression I get, that it wouldn't work in the long run.
You want some mental stimulation.
So, would you say that there were any men who were your equal intellectually or none at all?
No, there have been.
I had a long-distance relationship with one guy and he was definitely smarter than me, which I like.
But then there were other things that were missing.
He wasn't enough interested Nothing that invested in me.
Oh wait, so you're not interested in guys who aren't as smart as you and he's not as interested in you because you're not as smart as him?
It's kind of like the staircase going down, right?
I'm not sure. I'm still in contact with him.
I would consider him my friend.
But... When I talk to him now about it, he's saying that he was in a bad place in his life at that moment, that he's sorry if he made me feel unappreciated, etc. But I do think it wasn't really meant to be.
And then I also came to see some sides of him that I didn't like.
One was really a deal breaker.
Right. So when you say, so sometimes when a woman says, just, I want to tell you what I'm thinking, you correct me if I'm wrong.
So sometimes when a woman says that she wants a guy who's smart, she means that she wants a guy who's rich, or who has a lot of money, or who has the potential to have a lot of money.
Is that what you mean?
Or is there something else? Like if he was smart, but poor, what would that do for you?
Interesting. I would ask him, how come he's poor?
I mean, if there's a natural explanation for it, and if he can convince me that he has good prospects in the future, then I might still be interesting, of course.
Interesting is different from getting married, right?
Yeah. Taking a walk on the wild side is not quite the same as, you know, tasting strange ain't the same as setting him down for the same meal for the rest of your life, right?
No. Okay, so, yeah.
Would I date a poor guy who's smart?
Still, why would he be poor?
I mean, you can be smart and play video game all day and that wouldn't make a good income.
So you do mean wealthy rather than just smart, right?
Hmm. It's not a criticism, I just want to be clear.
I see what you mean. He would have to be at least independent.
That's a minimum. Independent, what do you mean?
Financially. From what?
Carry his own costs.
Basically, I can carry my costs, he would have to carry his costs.
Well, but your costs as, like with a PhD in medical sciences, what kind of income are you going to get when you graduate?
Well, I am having an income right now.
I'm working half-time and studying on the side.
Yes, I know, but so how much does a doctor make in Sweden who's got a PhD in medical sciences?
Yeah, actually probably more than a doctor who doesn't have a PhD, but I don't have the specifics.
I know that it increases with time, of course, and But it's good money, right?
You'd be in the top 1%, right?
Yeah. So would you also want a guy who had the same income?
Well, yeah, but it's not absolutely necessary.
Because let's say that you make $200,000 a year and there's a guy who makes $75,000 a year.
He can't pay half unless you live on less than what you're making.
Does that make sense? Yeah.
No, but that would be fine.
I mean, I'm not in the situation that I'm that picky if he's really good in every other sense.
No, you're picky. If you say you've met 50 to 100 guys and none of them have measured up, come on.
If you and I are driving around and we go to 50 restaurants and I say, I don't want to eat at any of them, but I'm not a picky eater, what would you say?
Come on. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Now, let me ask this.
Do you end up with debt in Sweden from school?
Do you end up in debt from going to school?
No. Well, normally you don't pay for school, but you do have to live, of course.
You can get loans for that, but fortunately I never had to use the loan.
Of course. My parents paid.
Oh, your parents paid for everything?
Yeah. Wow.
Nice job for you.
Yeah, well, yeah.
And who earns the money in your parents' marriage?
It would be my dad to make the most part, of course.
My mom, she makes a good income, but my dad, he has earned the extra bit of money.
Wait, are you saying that your education got paid for by the patriarchy?
Oh, yeah. All right.
Just checking. So the model is that the man makes more money than the woman in your parents' marriage, right?
Yeah. And it's going to be almost impossible for you to find a man who makes more money than you.
If you say so.
Don't go rubber limbs on me, young lady.
If you're in the top 1% of income earners, and I assume a doctorate in medical sciences plus a medical degree is good money.
I mean, I know it's Sweden, but it's good money.
Yeah. Then you're probably in the top 1% of earners or so, and that means that you probably want a man who's also in the top 1% of earners, right?
Yeah. Now, if the man is in the top 1% of earners, he has his pick of any woman pretty much he wants, right?
Yeah, exactly. So why would he choose you?
And I'm not saying he shouldn't.
I'm just like, why would he choose you as opposed to someone else?
I mean, that's a really good question.
I don't think I'm a bad pick, but it's quite hard to evaluate yourself sometimes.
No, it's not. No, we do this all the time.
I mean, there's false modesty stuff.
We can work on it for a bit, but I'll only give you so much on that because...
We are biologically engineered, evolutionarily engineered, to figure out where we stand in sexual market value.
And that doesn't mean sex.
That doesn't mean how hot we are.
It means how attractive are we in the dating to marriage market?
Yeah. I don't think...
That's the thing. I don't think it should be...
I don't think it should be impossible to meet someone, but apparently...
You're not answering the question.
Okay. Sorry about the question again.
Interesting. Very, very intelligent.
Didn't want to answer this question.
So the man you're looking for has his pick of women.
Yeah. So why would he choose you?
And please understand, I'm not saying, why would he choose you?
That would be crazy. I'm just asking objectively...
Why would he choose you if he could have, you know, make the sale, right?
Yeah, he could probably find someone who's prettier.
I don't think I'm really bad looking or anything, but I'm not a 10.
So he could find someone more good looking.
I do think I'm a bit of an introvert, I guess, but Once you get to know me, I think I'm pretty warm.
Well, I would say objectively that I am smart, so if he's looking for a partner to discuss things with, that would be the pluses, I guess.
Right, okay. Now, let's say that the man wants a mother for his children.
How do you stack up for that?
I want kids. I want to spend time with kids.
I want to be a really good mom.
So if that's what he wants, then we're on the same page.
You want to spend time with kids?
Yeah. How does that fit with a career as a doctor?
I think it would fit fine.
Well, it's Sweden, so you get parental leave.
It's 390 days with basically 80% of your salary before parental leave.
And then you would probably go back to work, is that right?
Yeah, probably. But what if you want more kids?
Well, then it plays out all over again.
That's right. So you get more than a year at 80% salary for every kid that you have, right?
Yeah. Yeah. You can see why the Swedes aren't having many babies.
And let's say that the man wants, say, two to three kids.
That is going to be tough to meet you at the age of 32, right?
Why is that? Yeah. It could be.
I don't think it should be impossible with two kids.
Well, no, but you see, I'm sorry, Susan, we're not talking about impossible, we're talking about a man who has his pick of women.
So if he wants two to three kids, and you meet when you're 32, let's say it takes you a year or two to figure out if you're compatible, you're getting married at 34, Let's say you want to live together for a while as a husband and wife before having kids.
You're starting to try to have kids at 35 while your career is just starting, right?
And you know as well as I do, probably better than I do, what happens to a woman's fertility in her 30s.
Yeah, it goes down.
It goes down and fast, right?
Yeah. So then, let's say you have a couple of kids and your final kid comes out in your late 30s.
Then you're gonna be home.
I assume you'd want to breastfeed your children, right?
Yeah. Yeah, so you're home, you're breastfeeding.
So, you know, if you wait until your kids are five, then you're not starting your career as a doctor really until you're in your early 40s, right?
Yeah, which wouldn't really be a problem.
Well, it is a problem for some people who might want access to a doctor.
Oh, yeah. Because, you know, society has paid you or has paid millions of dollars to train you as a doctor and you'd be home breastfeeding.
So outside the world of Susan, it's a bit of a problem, but I understand for you it may be somewhat convenient, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course, yes.
So then he's not going to get your income.
Well, I guess you'd have some of your income, right?
He'd get some of your income because the government would be paying you.
You know, after the government has paid you to become a doctor, the government would then pay you to not be a doctor.
Yeah. Sure, because all of that makes perfect sense.
And so he doesn't need your money because he's already wealthy.
Yeah. But you will end up...
Going to work when the kids are still, I guess, fairly young, right?
Yeah. So he gets less of a mom because you'll be working, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But he doesn't need your money.
No. So that may be why it's hard to find someone.
But I'm not, I'm just saying I'm not so sure.
I don't really know.
Let me actually think how many...
How many high-income couples do I know?
I mean, it's really not that common for women not to work in Sweden, to be a stay-at-home mom full-time.
I would say it's exceptionally rare.
Why do you think that is? Your mom worked when you were a kid?
Yeah, she did. Yeah, but what's wrong with staying home?
I stay home. I guess it's because on On average, the income is...
You basically need two...
I don't know if that's true, though.
That's usually what you hear, that you need two incomes to live a comfortable life.
Well, sure, because society is paying for people to become doctors and then paying for people to not be doctors.
So that's expensive. So you need to pay a lot of taxes for all of that.
Yeah, and that's probably not the biggest...
Well, expense for the state, but...
You're up there, but you're probably not the biggest.
You're not the smallest, but I agree, you're not the biggest.
So, if you're a man, do you want the man to be older, the same age, younger, does that matter?
No, it doesn't matter.
I wouldn't be comfortable with him being super much younger than me, but a few years would be okay.
Well, especially if you want him to have money, right?
It's less likely when he's younger.
Well, yeah, but also, even without that, I wouldn't really feel comfortable being the very much older one.
And do you want him to be taller than you, Susan?
Yeah. Okay, taller.
And what about a head of hair?
Head of hair? No, I don't care about hair.
All right. And how tall are you?
I'm actually, I'm exactly the middle-aged in Sweden, which I try to look it up in feet, because that's what you use.
The converter gave me five and a half feet.
You would have it in inches, I guess.
Oh, five foot six? Yeah, probably something like that.
And so you want a guy who's wealthy, who's taller than you are, I assume well-educated.
Would you want that as well? Yeah.
And how many men have you met over the last sort of 50 to 100 that you say you've met who fit that standard?
You want smart, of course, but the smart and the money often goes hand in hand, right?
So smarter, taller, richer, physically attractive.
I assume you don't want a fat man.
No. Right, so relatively slender or at least of normal weight.
Athletic? Yeah. Well, at least not overweight.
It doesn't have to have muscles.
Now, of that standard, how many of the men have you met over the past 10 years?
Not many. How many men, roughly?
Is it 5? Is it 20?
Is it 10? What have we got?
Just roughly. Oh, it's...
Like one or two, I'd say.
So you're looking for one to two percent of men, right?
Yeah. What are you thinking?
Yeah. You sound like you're slowly sliding down the stairs or something.
What is that? No, no.
I mean, when you put it like that, yes.
Yeah. Yeah, you're right.
We're just trying to solve a problem, right?
And math helps, right?
Yeah. All right.
So you're looking for one to two percent of men.
And those 1% to 2% of men might not be looking for you.
Yeah. Right?
Now, we have trouble as well because if you want a man as wealthy as you are, if you're in the top 1% of earners, you're already down to 1% of men.
Right? And then you want taller, you want smarter, you want educated, you want not...
Overweight, so maybe you're talking about one man in 400.
Yeah. Oh, and he has to be single.
Yes. So maybe one man in a thousand.
I'm not kidding. No.
Now, when you're looking for one man in a thousand, and listen, Susan, I'm trying to help you here get what you want.
I'm really working very hard to try and get you what you want.
So when you're looking for one man in a thousand...
How do you find him? And how do you land him?
Yeah, that's a really good question.
How do I find him?
Well, I don't know. I'm not Swedish, so I'm not you.
But you need to answer that question.
How do you find him?
And how do you land him?
Ask your husband. Because waiting for it to happen, well, and wasting two years of your life in a relationship with a guy who's going back to the Middle East, come on, that's not wise, right?
You've got to stop that stuff.
That's ridiculous. No, that isn't wise.
I wouldn't say that. I agree.
No, that was a terrible decision.
I mean, let me just be frank with you.
If you want to get married and settle down, then spending two years, wasting two years of your fertility window on a guy...
Who's not going to settle down with you is ridiculous.
Yeah. It's just that I feel like I've anyway tried everything else.
It's like dating online doesn't seem to give anything.
And I... I can't really think of so many other platforms.
Wait a minute. No, no, no, no. Susan, hang on.
Come on. Don't go victim on me.
You are a smart, intelligent, accomplished woman.
You can't possibly say to me, well, I've tried everything, when you just dated for two years a Muslim man from the Middle East with no future.
Mm-hmm. So don't give me this victim.
I tried everything. You were doing exactly the wrong thing and you knew it.
Quick question for you. How handsome was he, Susan?
Handsome. How handsome was he?
Did he make you tingle? He made you tingle.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sure, sure. Yeah, he made you tingle.
Was he a bit of a bad boy? No, no.
I might have thought so, but no, no.
But handsome, right? Yeah.
Right. So you wasted two years of fertility chasing a boy toy who was never going to commit to you.
Well, I wasn't really chasing.
Actually, I tried to actively avoid it in the beginning, but that's another...
I was convinced, so...
Wait, he was a persistent Muslim?
I've never heard of that before.
Now I know. It's a rare species.
Yeah, so...
Now also, I'll just tell you this.
The challenge that you have is that You have a long history of breaking up, right?
Because you've not had a successful relationship that's lasted even to a marriage, and you're 32, right?
Mm-hmm. So you don't have experience in sustaining a long-term relationship.
No. So when you're doing a job interview for a wife...
That doesn't look good, right?
Also, when you want a wife, you want a woman who's wise and can control her impulses and all that kind of stuff.
And if the man then hears that you were dating some guy, I mean, the Muslim stuff, I don't know, but you were dating some guy who there was no future because he was hot and persistent, that doesn't look very wise.
Because you say you want a smart guy.
Well, a smart guy wants a smart woman too, right?
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And that would be what I would call a red flag.
Would you agree? Yeah.
Yeah, there might be some circumstances that would make it less red flag-ish, but generally I would agree.
No, not really. No, I know you want to hold on to him in your heart or maybe some other part of your body, but no.
There are no circumstances under which that is a wise move.
Oh, okay. Right?
If you want to get married and have kids.
Because you cheated with him on your life plan.
Well, that's the thing, actually, because I've just started listening to your show.
Oh, it's like the last...
Six months, I think, maybe.
Because you were mentioned in passing in a Swedish podcast that I'm listening to.
But now I'm actually listening to your show every day.
But... And so this perspective of really the importance of a father in the life of a kid...
Oh, no, no. We'll get to that.
Sorry. No, you're trying to drag me off this topic.
Really? Yes, you are.
Yes, you are. I know.
You're good at doctor. I'm good at this.
So, okay. Because I don't know that you've been taught to think of what a man wants and how to please a man.
I don't mean sexually or anything like that.
I'm talking about... Have you thought much about what a man would want in a wife, in a mother?
And how well you fit that bill?
Of course I thought about it.
What a man would want in a wife?
I've always, I guess, just assumed that it's Approximately the same thing that I would want from a guy, you know, someone you can share thoughts with.
And there's the feminist Sweden.
Oh, really? There's the feminist Sweden.
Yeah, because what men want is not the same as what women want.
And the reason for that is that men don't become pregnant, and men don't breastfeed.
No, no. Right?
No. And it's interesting to me that you say that men want pretty much what women want, and then you spent two years dating a guy from a fairly regressive patriarchy.
Hmm. Right?
No. Yeah, well, of course, they don't want the same thing.
So when I say that you haven't really thought about what a man wants, you haven't really thought about what a man wants.
You've projected what you want onto the man.
And that's why it's not working.
Ooh, yeah.
Tell me more. Yeah.
Well, no, you have the ooh, so tell me where the ooh hit you.
No, I want to know if I have a blind spot.
I really, really want to know that. No, but when I said you were projecting what you want onto the man, you went, ooh!
Now, was that because it just seemed like a cool idea, or did it hit you someplace emotionally?
Ah... Tell me where I'm wrong.
Okay, let's see.
I guess, what would a man want from his wife?
Support, in all kinds of ways, I guess.
Emotionally available?
Well, of course...
A good mother.
Does it take the time to look good for each other?
Am I missing something?
No, no. Keep going, keep going.
Well, cooking nice food doesn't hurt, I guess.
Keeping a clean home, nicely furnished and everything.
Okay, I'm out of ideas, but something like that.
No, and that's very interesting.
And I don't know what Swedish men want.
I mean, I can talk about, I think, biologically speaking, men in general.
But let me ask you this, Susan.
You talk about being supportive, being emotionally available, being a good cook, a good mom, keeping a clean home, and so on.
So how does a PhD and an MD help you with that?
None of what you talk about requires any education whatsoever.
No, it's parallel life, I guess.
Huh? What? Well, maybe I would work part-time and then the rest of the time I'm committed to home.
So you would work part-time as a doctor, is that right?
And then the rest of the time you'd be home?
Yeah, why not? Well, again, because I assume that people in Sweden need doctors, and you did take a lot of money from taxpayers, it would be nice if you thought about providing them a service.
But of course, the more service you provide them, the less attractive you are as a wife and mom.
Yeah, again, maybe.
I'm not 100% sure on that.
Because the smart guys, they do seem to choose women.
Well... That, like me, they have an education and they want to work, etc.
Because that's, I guess, usually where you meet your future partner is either in education or at the workplace.
What have your parents said to you, Susan, about trying to find a man?
Absolutely nothing. What do you mean?
They're paying for your education.
I assume they care about your happiness and your future.
And if you want to get married and settle down and you're 32, they've said nothing.
Yeah, correct.
I guess they let me figure it out myself.
But you haven't?
No. So, you've been dating for almost 10 years.
You haven't found a guy to settle down with.
I mean, let me ask you this.
How old was your mom when she had you?
What would that be?
32, yes. And are you the youngest or oldest?
My age, no. We're twins.
Oh, twins, okay. And how old was your mom when she got married to your dad?
Actually, I don't know the exact age, but it happens...
I would guess like six years before that.
Oh, okay. So...
Your mother got married to your father when she was 26, so I assume that they met when they were 24, right?
Yeah, they met while studying, so yeah.
Okay. So, by the time your mom was your age, she dated, got engaged, got married, and had twins, right?
Yeah. And she started eight years before you did?
Mm-hmm. So why would she think everything's going fine when clearly it's not?
I don't...
I really don't know.
And if things aren't going fine, what could she do about it?
What do you mean? Oh, come on!
Susan! Are you really saying that?
You're calling up me, a stranger on the internet, for advice but you have no idea what your own mother could do?
I assume she knows you better than I do.
And she's also done it.
I have not been a woman who settled down with a man and had twins.
So you go calling halfway around the world to a guy who's not had the experience your mom has had to ask for advice and you say, well, what could my mom do?
I assume more than I could.
Yeah. Is your mother a feminist?
No. Is your father a feminist?
No. Do they want you to have kids?
Is your sister married?
Or your brother or your twin?
No, it's my sister.
She does have a relatively stable boyfriend now.
They've been together for a while.
They're looking for a house together.
But she's not married and they don't have kids.
Does she want kids? Not desperately, no.
I don't know what that means.
I don't even know.
I guess right now I would say she doesn't actually.
You don't really know?
Don't you use that twin secret language psychic thing that everyone keeps talking about when you're supposed to know?
Look into your own heart.
It's the same as your twins.
No, not so much about that, no.
Has your parents asked you at all about your plans for family and kids?
No. What do you talk about?
I'm just curious. I was kind of curious what families talk about because it seems like there's some pretty important stuff that could be mentioned that's not.
What other topics are taking precedence?
Well, things going on at work, studies, current events, you know, like world events, I guess, my parents' traveling plans, the family cat, that's basically the normal topic.
The cat? You're kidding me now at this point, right?
No, I'm actually not kidding you, no.
Your parents are more keen to talk to you about your cat than whether you get married and have children.
We never really had deep conversation in the family at all.
You think? I'm agreeing with you with that 150%, Susan.
I just wanted to mention that. And did they know you were dating a man from the Middle East where there was no future?
Yeah. And what did they say about that?
He's cute! No, what did they say?
Does he have a cat? No, what did they say?
Basically, not so much.
I guess my dad, he's, well, not so keen on Arabs in general, but, well, me neither.
What? Well...
I'm afraid your loins may be disagreeing with you.
Ah, in general, I mean.
Oh, in general, but in specific, this guy.
Okay. Yeah. Right. So, did your father say anything about, forget the Muslim thing, did he say anything about, you're 30, you're dating a guy with no future.
Do you want to have kids or not?
If you do want to have kids, you need to drop this guy and you need to go find that one in a thousand guy that you want.
Oh, no. Nothing like that, right?
No. What is going on in your family?
Don't they care about helping you get what you want?
They're willing to pay for your entire education, but not figure out how to get you into a family?
I don't understand.
I don't think they have a clue about how to...
No, no. Don't even try.
Of course they have a clue how to settle down and have a family.
You're here, right?
Yeah. They've already done it.
They've been running this family for close to 40 years.
So don't tell me they don't know how to.
Come on. Why don't they care enough to help you?
I don't really know if they could help me, because I don't know an awful lot about my parents' dating history and stuff, but I know that they were...
They could ask a question or two, couldn't they?
Yeah, they could.
Do they not know that women get less fertile in their 30s?
Are they completely unaware of that?
No, I assume they know.
Everybody knows that.
Okay, this is a question to ask your parents and to talk about with your sister.
Talk about fertility, talk about babies, talk about marriage, talk about the future, talk about what's going on.
They're your family. Don't have this pretend family where you talk about inconsequential stuff.
Ooh, what's going on in Syria is really bad.
Why, yes it is. What's not going on in Susan's ovaries, also quite important as a whole.
Yeah. Dating a boomerang Muslim while fertility drips away.
Kind of important. Did they make you wear a helmet when you were a kid on your bike?
Yeah. Yeah, see?
They really want you to be safe.
They want you to be happy. They want you to...
All right.
So, Susan. Yeah.
One in a thousand? Not going to happen.
Sorry. You're smart.
Attractive. Funny.
But one in a thousand?
Come on. You have to be realistic.
Yeah, exactly. So I guess I'll have to go with the other option then.
What? No!
My God, how strong is the hypergamy in you?
I guess pretty strong. No!
You... The whole point of saying not one in a thousand is not so you can go adopt some kid where you don't know where it's coming from.
You don't know what drugs the parents might have been on.
You don't know what the neonatal care.
Come on! You won't be breastfeeding.
Come on! Ah, no, no, no.
I wouldn't want to adopt.
I mean... You said an option!
Wait, do you mean a cat?
Oh, no, no, sorry.
I meant becoming...
Ah, sorry, the second option.
Oh, second option. Okay, sorry, sorry.
So single mom. No. See, no, that's not fair on the kid.
I know, that's my concern.
So you're going to have to grit your teeth, Susan, and lower your standards.
Ah. Didn't cross your mind, did it?
It just feels like...
How would I do that?
I mean...
You dated a Muslim guy.
He was coming and going.
Oh, but he was pretty. No, but...
You do what men do all the time.
Listen, you...
This is good.
Listen, you know what, Susan?
We're building bridges between the sexes here.
This is good. This is very healthy.
Very productive. Very positive.
Listen. Men...
All want the alpha female.
And that alpha female may change over time.
It may be, I don't know, the girl with the biggest tits in junior high school.
It may be the smartest girl in high school.
It may be the best cellist in university.
Men all want the alpha female.
Yeah. And I remember the name of the alpha female in my junior high school, and I went up and tried to ask her out.
And a lot of men did.
And you know what happened?
She said no. Yeah.
And wisely so. And so then, do you know what we did?
We lowered our standards.
Big shock.
No, but...
And you now are the equivalent of a 16-year-old boy.
16-year-old boys, for women as a whole, low sexual market value, probably illegal.
Let's go with 18. Right?
So 18-year-old boys, they're fun.
But they're not serious.
No. You can't settle down with an 18-year-old boy.
No. Because he's unformed.
His brain is still seven years from maturity.
He's got no money. He's an 18-year-old boy.
So, you know, the perma-hard-on is what's towing him along like a miscreant behind a southern truck.
Yeah. Yeah.
Your sexual market value has gone down a lot.
Whereas men in your age bracket who are tall and handsome and rich and slender and educated, they are rock stars.
They can choose anyone and they don't have to choose to settle down at all because they can have kids in 10 years and you can't.
Yeah. So you have to do the tumble down the staircase that men in general who aren't Brad Pitt do all the time.
You have to lower your standards.
But that's the thing, because you would still have to be able to love your partner, right?
Yes, and if you have impossible standards, guess what?
You'll never love whoever you settle with.
But if you say...
Okay, let me give you a tip.
Let me give you a tip here. In general, if you want to know how attractive you are, you look at your partner.
That's in general. Because sevens go with sevens, eight goes with eights, threes goes with threes, tens go with tens.
Right? Yeah. And so, if you have...
Like, if you think you're a ten when you're a six...
Then you will end up alone.
And then people say, well, you should lower your standards.
You should start dating 6s and 7s.
You say, well, I could never love a 6 and a 7, but you're asking a 10 to love you if you're a 6.
So you're asking someone to lower their standards to be with you, but you say, well, I'll never lower my standards to be with anyone else.
But you are on the declining side of your sexual market value.
You have hit the wall.
Your peak fertility...
Was more than 10 years ago?
Yeah, maybe. No, no, that's fact.
That's biological fact.
There's lots of this stuff with conjecture.
That's real.
Your fertility is sliding.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's for sure.
Definitely. So, a man in general wants a very attractive virgin.
Because virgins are the least likely to divorce you.
The number of sexual partners a woman has is directly proportional to her divorcing you.
Ah, interesting.
Dix equals divorce, just for those who want to find a handy way to remember that.
I'm not kidding. No, no, no.
I believe you. It's dose-dependent.
Mm-hmm. So the more sexual partners a woman...
The same is not directly true for men, because difference, right?
This is all in the Truth About Sex presentation.
So not only is your fertility on decline, not only do you have a career that is going to beckon you away from being a wife and mother, but you've had a number of relationships which have not been successful, which means you're very experienced at failing in relationships, which means you're much more likely To divorce.
And another predictor of divorce is do you have very high standards?
There are not even close to enough alpha men to go around outside of a harem.
So if you have very high standards, if you've had a lot of prior sexual partners, you have very low sexual market value because you are the most likely to divorce the man.
And men do not want to go through divorce.
I can imagine the family courts in Sweden are even worse than they are in America.
I don't know.
Maybe. But either way, nobody wants to get into a marriage, these days in particular, nobody ever wants to get into a marriage with a divorce looming.
And you are a very high risk, statistically, lots of exceptions and so on, Susan, but you are very high risk.
For divorcing a man.
Because of prior sexual partners and very high standards.
Now you say, well I should have high standards.
You know, I'm smart, I'm educated, I'm attractive, I should have high standards.
Sorry, go ahead. Well, maybe I shouldn't, but then there's still the...
Because, I mean, to make a marriage work, I guess...
It would really help to be attracted to your partner, right?
Yes, but if you're attracted to your partner based on unrealistic standards, it's not going to work.
No, because then he wouldn't be my partner in the first place.
Well, because if you think, like let's say there's a guy who's shorter than you and you say, well, I can't marry a man who's shorter than me.
Okay. Then you've just cut a significant portion of men out of your possibility.
I wouldn't, no.
As long as he's my height, that's fine.
What do you mean? I can compromise on certain things.
What do you mean? Well, he doesn't have to be that much taller than me.
He can be my height.
Oh, come on. You said you're 5'6".
You've got a pair of two-inch heels on.
You've just taken out 60% of the male population.
I don't wear heels.
You don't wear heels? No.
Do you never wear heels?
Well, yeah, I do for occasions.
Right, so you go out and you have the garden gnome as you perceive it by your side, right?
So here's the thing, because if you're looking at one in a thousand, you need to improve your odds, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.
And to improve your odds means to lower your standards.
Because you can't have it all.
Listen, here's the thing.
Let me just try and get this across.
It's very important, not just for you, but for women as a whole, and men.
You can have your screw-around 20s if you want, but then you have to compromise in your 30s.
You can date the bungee Muslim guy for two years, and you know what that costs you?
Standards! You cannot talk to your family about not getting what you want, and they cannot help you to get what you want, but that means you get less of what you want.
You can date around and have high standards and throw away all these guys in your 20s because they don't meet your standards, and then when you're in your 30s, you have to lower your standards.
And you're probably going to end up with a guy much less good than three guys you threw away in your 20s.
That's the price. You can't have it all.
Now, you can settle down with a guy like your mom did in your early to mid-20s.
Sure. Then you don't have to lower your standards because you're already committed.
You just have to be a great wife and mom as he has to be a great husband and father.
But you can't have it all.
And if you spend your time dating around, screwing around, having serial bullshit relationships in your 20s, Then you're gonna have to crash your standards in your 30s.
That's the consequence.
And it's the same for men as it is for women.
You can spend your time having fun in your 20s rather than working on your career.
Then you're gonna end up in your 30s with no money.
And that means you have to lower your standards in who you're gonna marry.
Because you're gonna have to choose a woman who's okay With you being broke or making 30k a year or whatever, right?
So you can have fun in your 20s for men and you end up with low sexual market value in your 30s.
Or you can work hard in your 20s as a man and you can end up with high sexual market value in your 30s.
For women, you could screw around in your 20s and then you have to get married to Quasimodo when you're 30.
I'm sorry, this is just the reality of the marketplace, which has been strangely hidden from everyone.
Yeah. Right?
Yeah. Was there a guy, Susan, you know, I'm not yelling at you, right?
I'm just passionate about the topic.
I have a daughter. So was there a guy, Susan, looking back in your 20s that you could have settled down with?
Was there one who got away?
No. Well, then you have insane standards.
You understand that, right?
Like you have literally deranged standards.
No. Because you say you met 50 to 100 guys in your 20s.
Then there's not one that you would have settled down with.
And now somehow you think that guy's going to be around even though you're 32.
You can always hope.
No, you can't hope. No, you can't.
Is that what you'd say as a doctor?
No, no, no. You have a 1% chance of survival if you don't take treatment.
I'm not going to take treatment because you can only hope.
What would you say? No, no, no.
Hope is not a strategy.
No. Your ovaries are more important than your patients.
Okay, so...
I guess I'll actively try to lower my standards and still...
You have to... It's not lowering your standards.
That's one way of putting it, but that's going to make it annoying.
Accepting reality. All the good men are taken, Susan.
Do you know why? Because if a woman gets a good man, she's not letting him go.
You're 32. All the good men are taken.
If all the good men weren't taken, why would you be dating a Muslim who's gone back to the Middle East?
Low exposure to good men?
No, where are the good men?
You couldn't find one in your 20s when you...
We're exposed to 50 to 100 guys.
How is there going to be one now?
Well, I'm in a different environment.
Okay, let's go through that.
How many single men in your age group who meet your standards are there in your environment?
Not many, I guess.
How many? I don't know.
Give me a guess. I guess there could be a few.
Could be a few?
Now you sound like a ghost hunter.
I mean, I wouldn't be...
I definitely wouldn't be against dating someone who already has kids either, if there's someone who is divorced.
Why would you date a guy who has kids?
Well, like you say, you have to compromise.
Well, yeah, but I'm not talking about compromise to the point where you have some unknown gene pool that you're now responsible for with some potentially crazy ex-wife floating around staring daggers at you and deflating the air on the tires of your car.
You'd rather date a guy with kids than date a short guy?
No, no. No, you said he had to be your height or taller.
Oh, okay, fine. Shorter is fine, but yeah, yeah, yeah.
But let's say, okay, let's go to the important stuff, the smart stuff.
I would rather date a divorced guy, if I find him all right in the other aspects, that has a kid, than dating someone less smart who doesn't have kids.
Right. Now, you know divorced guys are pretty smashed up, right?
Emotionally? Yeah.
They've gone through a divorce. They have split from the mother of their children.
Yeah. They have additional expenses.
I know it's Sweden. Maybe they've got child support.
I don't know how egalitarian the splits are there.
But you are...
Dating a guy who either, if he's been divorced for a long time and he's a good guy, he's gone.
He's snapped up. Someone got him.
And if he's only been divorced for a short amount of time, he's not emotionally available.
And you said earlier, emotionally available was important.
He's going to be kind of smashed up.
I mean, his whole marriage, the love of his life, the dreams of his old age.
Boom. Right?
Because if you have kids, then you work it out with the mom.
Now, either the guy was too immature to work it out with the mom, in which case he's going to be terrible to date, or he tried to, but his wife was insane, in which case, don't date him.
No. You have to be realistic about the standards.
And you had fun in your 20s.
You dated around a lot.
You didn't commit. You worked on your education.
And you know the way it works.
Susan, everything in life comes with a bill.
There's no such thing as a free lunch.
And you had fun in your 20s.
And you had very high standards.
And you felt superior.
And you were waiting for Prince Charming to come along.
But he's not. He's taken.
He's gone. And he's going to look at you and say, well, there's going to be a lot of time pressure for kids.
And she's really well educated, so she's going to want to have a career, which means my life becomes much more complicated because we have two people working rather than one person home with the kids.
And she's made some very bad dating decisions.
Which means that her wisdom is not good.
Also, I'll tell you this, if we were on a date and I found out these things about you, Susan, I'll tell you what I would see very clearly, which would be very important to me.
Yeah. Your family talks about nothing.
Yeah. And I would sit there and say, okay, so I got another 40 or 50 years with this woman.
Of which 30 or maybe 40 are going to include, maybe 20 or 30 are going to include her parents.
And I'm going to go over to my in-laws, and they're going to be talking about cats, the weather, and world events that have nothing to do with anything.
And I'm going to have to find some way to love my in-laws, even though they did nothing to help my wife get what she wants.
Yeah, but they're my parents.
They're not me. Family...
Marriage is a family deal, right?
You don't just get to marry one person, right?
In general, you marry a package deal.
Especially when you have kids.
I mean, if there are grandparents around...
Who are good and wise and helpful with the kids.
That's very important.
Very helpful. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Definitely. And if the parents are cold and unemotional and won't talk about anything important and so on, are they going to be great with the kids?
I don't know. They weren't great with you as far as helping you get what you want.
They'll pay for your bills, but they won't guard the desires of your heart.
Yeah, that's correct.
But then as...
In-laws, I guess, then it would be more okay to talk about superficial stuff.
I mean, I think they're...
No. You want a guy who's intelligent, who's emotionally available, who's wise, who's smart?
Is he going to want to spend his life talking about nothing?
I want a guy who's smart, but also very, very fascinated by boring trivia.
I want a guy who's really wise and deep, with self-knowledge and wisdom, who really loves talking about cats.
Well, how much time would he spend with my in-laws?
Well, that's the whole point now, isn't it?
That's the whole point, which is he wouldn't want to spend much, and there may be 10 other women out there whose in-laws are great.
Yeah. And a woman who's 25, so there's not the same rush to get married.
And a woman who has realistic standards.
Let me tell you something. Let me tell you something, Susan.
And I listen, I appreciate you listening.
I hope this is helpful. But I dated a girl.
Pretty, no doubt.
Well-educated, yeah.
Yeah, she had a degree in science.
But vain and ridiculously high standards?
Oh, my God. Oh my gosh.
I'm not a bad guy to date.
No, no, I'm sure. I was an entrepreneur, had co-founded my own company, was doing pretty well, had a nice car, funky happening place in Toronto.
And, you know, I just didn't measure up.
She had these very high standards and she was quite considerably older than I was.
Did she tell you about her high standards?
Yeah, of course. Because I asked.
Because I want to know how I'm going to measure up relative to what she's looking for.
All right. You know, she points at a picture of David Beckham and she says, that's the guy I'm looking for.
What do you say is a guy?
Well, that's realistic.
Well, that's quite insane.
Is it? Yeah, I think so.
But your standards are fine. I mean, looks, okay, fine.
He shouldn't be fat. But otherwise, I really, I can do it not super pretty.
So you could do with not super pretty?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. How do you think that sounds to a man?
Oh, come on. You want to know how men react to that?
I could live with not super pretty.
Does that sound a little grandiose to you at all?
Hmm. I could get by with not model looks.
I could lower myself to date somebody who wasn't a Calvin Klein model.
I could get by with not super pretty looks.
But that probably came out the wrong way.
No, I think it came out exactly the way that you think.
And I'm trying to help you.
I'm basically, you know what I'm doing?
I'm yelling from your ovaries.
Feed me! Susan, feed me!
Stop chasing the fantasy ghost at the perfect man and get me some sperm!
Fill me up!
Fill me up with babies!
Get me sperm!
I don't care if it's only 5'5 sperm!
Get me a baby!
Stop chasing Bigfoot!
There are guys all over!
That's... That's...
That's helpful actually. That is helpful.
Of course it's helpful. Of course it's helpful.
Listen, where I want the show to be in the long run versus where it is now, let's just say there's a gap.
Okay. And you have to get there over time.
You can end up with the perfect guy.
It might take you 10 years of marriage.
See, here's the thing. You don't understand your power.
The power that you have And this is true for men too, but I'm talking to you, Susan, here.
The power that you have as a wife and as a mother and as a partner and as a friend is incredible.
Let's say you meet a guy.
He doesn't make that much money, but he's pretty smart.
If you marry him, you may very well support him to the very heights.
He may become the guy that you want because you're there.
But you want everything prefabricated.
If the guy is perfect when you meet him, there's no growth.
There's nothing to shoot for, nothing to aim for.
Yeah. So you're not perfect.
You have flaws. I have flaws.
There's lots of ways to improve, lots of things to do.
Yeah. So the idea you're going to look for perfection rather than grow together in a perfect union is unrealistic.
Yeah, yeah.
And you are looking for huge contradictions.
And listen, men face this too.
It's called the Hot Crazy Matrix.
I'm sure you've heard of it. I want a woman who's super hot but not vain.
Right? Yeah.
Those are challenging things.
Yeah. I want a woman who's sexually experienced, does really wild things, but hasn't dated many guys before.
Right? Yeah.
There are...
I want a woman who looks just as good right after having a baby as she does before.
Well, yeah.
Right? Yeah.
Or I want a woman who's not going to age as if you're not aging as a man.
Yeah. Men have their own impossible standards.
I can remember there was some movie called The Fisher King where there was this astonishingly beautiful woman sitting behind a desk reading Nietzsche.
Uh-huh. I mean, I shuddered.
I was like, oh, beautiful reading Nietzsche!
Yeah, right? But, you know...
Nature giveth and nature taketh away, right?
And these things often don't come up in the same package, right?
Yeah. Or the woman says, I want a man who's wealthy, but who doesn't work too much.
Well, that's a bit unfair.
Well, unless he's inherited his money, in which case he's going to be vain and shallow for the most part.
Yeah. You want a guy who's wealthy?
I mean, let's say that this woman I dated years ago, she ended up dating David Beckham in some way.
She'd be like, you're never around.
It's like, you wanted a guy who's worth millions and millions and millions of dollars and who looks that way?
Well, he's got to spend a lot of time doing sit-ups, spend a lot of money on hair gel, and travel a lot for his businesses.
Yeah. Anyway, that's, I'm just saying, recalibrate.
You are on the downside of sexual market value.
I'm sorry, you get mad at Mother Nature, that's just the way things are.
Oh, that's fine. Right?
But you're on the downside of sexual market value.
You have red flags, right?
Lots of dating, bad dating decisions, very high standards.
You have red flags all over the place.
So you're going to end up alone.
That is a certain sunrise.
If you don't change what you're aiming at, you will end up alone.
You will end up alone.
And I don't want you to end up alone.
I want you to get what you want.
I want you to be a great mom and a great wife and have a great life and heal the sick and raise the next generation.
I want you to get what you want.
And you have to settle.
We all have to settle.
Everyone has to settle.
Yeah. And listen, I went through the same kind of thing.
And the funny thing is, because my wife and I, like, we weren't each other's quote type when we first met, but we were so fascinated by each other's personality that, like, she's perfect for me now.
Yeah. So...
That sounds good. Yeah.
So don't write anyone off.
And examine your standards.
Make a list. Spend some time on demographics.
This is for all women and all men.
Spend some time on demographics.
You want a 10?
Okay, you're down to 5 to 10% of the population.
You want someone who's single? Cut that in half.
You want someone taller than you. You want someone who makes more than $75,000 a year?
Okay, look in your neighborhood, figure out how many people that are, right?
Figure out how many single people there are, and you're like, do the math!
Are you looking for hay, or are you looking for a needle in a haystack?
If you're looking for a needle in a haystack, you've got to readjust your goals.
Yeah. The search for perfection is all very well, but to look for heaven is to live here in hell.
Do the math. You've got a PhD.
You can do the math. Yeah.
Okay, it's a good wake-up call.
And talk to your parents about why they haven't helped you on this.
It's very important. All right.
Will you let me know how it goes?
Oh, yeah, I will. Thank you, Susan.
I appreciate the call. Very, very interesting.
Yeah, I appreciate it, too.
Thank you very much. Alright, well up next we have Daniel, and he was inspired by the mock debate with Lauren Southern about socialism not too long ago and wanted to do something similar.
So, as a conversation starter, he wrote in and said,"...in less than three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, collectivist ideologies have infiltrated our media, universities, businesses, schools, and government agencies." Growing groups of young people clamor for openly socialist politicians like Bernie Sanders and clearly leftist policies like universal healthcare and gun control.
So why resist?
Why don't we turn and embrace communism as a viable way to structure our society if that's what so many people want?
That's from Daniel. Hey, Danny.
How do you want? How you doing? Good.
Thank you very much. I'm really excited to be here.
What do you want to do for the mock debate?
Well, I guess I can kind of give you some of the background story that brought me to that desire.
We could, but I mean, we could, but I'm curious which side you want to take.
Oh, I want to take the side that Lauren Southern took.
So the pro, like, embrace a commie for mommy stuff?
Yes. All right, so let's hear your opening statement.
Okay, well, I guess what Mike read would be my opening statement.
So, your argument is that we've already lost, communism is inevitably going to win, so we might as well get on the right side of the gun.
That's correct. That's my argument.
All right. So, on what grounds do you say that communism has already won?
Well, I guess it's, you know, I see, you know, communism over history rising and kind of being beaten back and rising again in cycles.
You know, in the 1800s, you know, there was the, you know, the revolution, the socialist revolution in Germany.
And then in the 1900s, there was the communist revolution in In Russia.
And now we're seeing kind of a new resurgence.
And each time it seems to be stronger and more pervasive.
And I think as the world develops, there's a good possibility that that's the way that we're going to end up.
And in fact, I remember...
traveling with some colleagues in the former Soviet Union in a car and we were stopped in traffic right next to a monument that was a granite sculpture of Lenin with his hand extended and the engraving said the triumph of communism is inevitable and all my colleagues were kind of laughing at that because The only reason that we could see that sculpture be that place because the Soviet Union had collapsed,
had fallen apart. Yeah, it had collapsed and put its evil collective spores into the air of the West to spread like crazy.
Exactly. I was aware of the social justice warrior movements in the universities and that's every year The universities and colleges are graduating these people,
and we see them moving now into positions of political power and at the human resources departments, big corporations like Google and Facebook and so on, and Ninth Circuit Court judges.
Oh, yeah. No, I understand all of that.
But let me ask you this, though, Daniel.
Do you... Think that communism is viable.
Do you think it can survive?
Do you think it can continue?
No. Okay, so when you say, why don't we turn and embrace communism as a viable way to structure our society, then that's not a thesis you actually believe, because it's not viable.
That's correct. No, but even in your mock debate character, you wouldn't argue that it's viable, right?
In my mock debate character, I would argue it's viable.
And I could provide reason and evidence.
Okay, don't jump in and out of character.
That's kind of annoying, right?
Well, agreed.
Agreed. Okay, so just stay in character.
So let me say, would you say that communism is a viable and sustainable way to structure our society?
I would say that communism is the only viable and sustainable way to structure our society.
And... What is the morality of communism?
What is it that makes it more valuable or more moral than something like property rights and the non-aggression principle?
Well, I believe that at the heart of communism and the heart of these socialist movements and social justice warrior movements and feminism They're all clamoring for equality of outcome.
And how is that equality of outcome achieved?
Well, I spent 12 years living and working in the former Soviet Union.
And I went there at a time when the institutions and the ways of life established by society that, you know, That organized itself on the principles of communism.
I lived in that environment.
I saw what it looked like. I'm sorry.
I'm a little confused. I didn't ask for your travel lock, Daniel.
I asked how is the equality of outcome achieved?
Redistribution of wealth. How is the redistribution of wealth achieved?
All wealth is essentially Managed and collected and redistributed by the state.
And how does the state achieve this collection and redistribution?
In other words, what happens if you disagree with the state?
Through the use of force.
Right. So you believe, or your argument, is that giving a small group of people the power of universal compulsion will produce paradise.
Um... No, I wouldn't necessarily call it paradise.
Better. Do you believe that people are not corrupted by power?
Do you believe that there's a group of angels who are not going to be corrupted by the universal power of compulsion over millions of human beings?
People are corrupted by power.
Ah! I agree with you about that.
I agree with you about that.
And economic power is less Coercive, if not non-coercive, certainly less coercive than political power.
Political power is pointing a gun at people and saying, hand me your stuff.
It is akin to institutional crime, to a hold-up or a mugging.
Economic power is, well, you can come work for me, I'll pay you more.
It's still voluntary. The person still has to choose.
to engage or not engage in economic transactions.
So if political power is coercive and economic power is merely influential and concentrations of political power corrupt the most, since the most power corrupts people the most, then your suggestion is that we hand the most power to the smallest number of people Which is going to corrupt them.
But by the time they've become corrupt, there's no capacity for anyone else to fight back.
Because usually they've been disarmed, as often happens in communist countries.
And the state has a monopoly on the legal use of force.
So a little risky, wouldn't you say?
Well, I witnessed this system in place.
And it...
Anecdotes are not data.
We're arguing at a philosophical level.
So arguments, like personal anecdotes, are not political arguments.
So you need to respond to the issue that power corrupts and that political power is the most dangerous.
Well, but, you know, philosophy realized in real life It may look a little bit different than the philosophy.
That's not an argument.
Theory and practice are different?
Yeah, okay. But theory has something to do with practice, right?
Yeah, and I've seen the theories put into practice.
And the interesting thing is, in Russia, in the Soviet Union, you might have People say, well, make the statement that, well, that wasn't real communism, but they didn't do it right or whatever.
But, you know, I'm trying to understand what's going on.
I've read Marx and Engels and Lenin and Stalin.
This is like filler.
Right? This is filler. So you say power corrupts.
The state has the near universal power of compulsion and the state is composed of a small number of people.
So how do you solve the problem that political power is coercive power and power corrupts?
You don't. Ah, okay.
So what you're saying is, power corrupts.
So let's give the most power to the least number of people, thus ensuring that they will become corrupt.
And that's your idea of a better world.
Well, but the power that we're talking about is political power.
And interestingly enough, when realized in real practice, the power ends up being distributed Somewhat, because the wealth is distributed.
No, no, no. You can't conflate political power with economic power.
We already have made that differentiation.
So if political power gathers resources to itself through compulsion and then hands out those resources to other people, you're buying allegiance to political power.
You're not spreading political power.
Because the people that you hand the money to are now dependent upon the coercive power of the state.
They do not themselves gain the coercive power of the state.
But it worked. That's not an argument.
Um... I think it is.
But it worked is not an argument.
We've already admitted at least three conditions under which it's going to fail and cause problems and be corrupt and corrupt human beings.
So then saying, well, I admit that there are these three things that almost inevitably make it go wrong, but it's going to work is not an argument.
But it can still achieve its goals of equality of outcome, you know, even with the Corruption, even with the centralization of power that you described, because they had all that.
They cannot achieve its goals.
Sorry to interrupt, Daniel.
They had quality of outcome. Daniel, they cannot achieve its goals of equality of outcome.
Because... It did. No, no, it cannot achieve...
No, no, no, no. The Soviet Union, are you kidding me?
You had the inner party had their houses on the Dachas, and you had the proletariat slaving away in Siberia, sometimes in gulags and often underpaid and inefficient factories.
So no, there was no. But the point is that you have a small group of people with the awesome power of coercion known as the state and everyone else who's the victim of that awesome power.
So there's no equality of outcome with regards to political power.
There's no equality. There's no egalitarianism because you have a small inner cadre of people with all the weapons in the world pointed at everyone else who were subjugated to that weaponry.
So there's no equality of outcome with regards to political power at all.
Agreed. But there is equality of outcome in terms of economic distribution, economic wealth.
No, that's not true at all. I think that's of the main interest to the people who are interested in socialists and communists.
No, I understand that.
But I would say, so what you're saying is that, are you saying that under communism, nobody starves?
I'm saying that communism can provide a system where nobody starves.
Has communism provided a system in the past where nobody starves?
I'm thinking, of course, of the Holodomor in Ukraine.
I'm thinking of the killing fields of Cambodia, and I'm thinking of the mass starvation of tens of millions of people under Mao's communist China.
So, in capitalism, people don't starve in general.
In fact, under capitalism, sadly and tragically, massive amounts of food are exported to communist countries who can't feed themselves.
So the idea that there's a quality of outcome under communism in that wealth is redistributed and nobody starves is empirically false.
And there's lots of economic reasons why it's empirically false, but we do know that it's empirically false.
I would disagree.
And I could give you an example where the communist system was in place where nobody starved, and that was in Soviet Union, you know, post-1970s, say.
You mean when it was getting a lot of...
Food from the capitalist West?
Yeah. Yeah.
After they opened up the borders and received the foreign aid of the West, yes, fewer people starved.
When they didn't do that, in other words, when they didn't take the profits of capitalism to feed their poor, they starved.
Granted. Well...
Okay. Well, given that, I would say that, you know, in those days, the Soviet Union was under great pressure from the free societies outside of its borders, you know, in terms of, you know, military might and so on.
And so their economies were undermined by their attempts to protect themselves and resist that threat.
That effort to militarily encircle them.
Are you saying that the capitalist countries were not also threatened by the Soviet countries?
Well, in those days, there was an ideological war going on worldwide.
So you had both parties threatening each other, but only one of them was starving.
So you can't say that the threat resulted in the starvation, because then it would be common to both parties.
There must have been some other differentiator between those two parties, namely the difference between central planning and the free market.
Well, I think that, you know, communism believed that it needed to be worldwide and that if it had been worldwide and the state had felt less threatened, that it would have focused, it would have managed the resources in a way in which it would have managed the resources in a way in which nobody would have So are you saying then that communist countries never aggressed against each other?
Or also you saying that despite the fact that communism darkened, literally sometimes, a third of the planet, if it had the other two thirds, it would have been great.
Yes, if it had the other two thirds, it would have been great.
And do you have proof that communist countries did not threaten each other?
I guess I don't have any recollection of communist countries threatening each other.
Maybe China and Russia threatened each other.
Yeah, they did. Yeah, they did.
But nothing ever really came of it.
Okay, but there was a lot of military on their shared influence geographical space.
And also, of course, communism spread a lot of times through revolution, through war, through taking over other countries, or by refusing, as Stalin did, to withdraw.
From Eastern Europe to create the Iron Curtain.
So the idea that communism, which spreads through violence, would somehow make a peaceful world when it dominated that world is not particularly feasible.
And again, does not solve the problem that power corrupts.
So once communism, if communism took over the whole world, then an even smaller group of people would be in charge of all of the resources in the world, which would make them even more corrupt because power corrupts.
And it would be even more concentrated power if communism was worldwide.
So unless you're going to say, like, power corrupts up to a certain level, but boy, you get 10 times that power and suddenly you become noble, which is not a sustainable thesis, then communism would result in even greater corruption because it would be the concentration of more power and fewer people relative to the population of the world as a whole.
But what makes you think that there's going to be an increase in corruption once a communist state is secure in its position?
means no threat to the dominance of its power.
So when power is consolidated, it becomes even more powerful.
So if you think of five warring mafia families in a neighborhood, if neither of them have dominance, then they can't have massive control over the neighborhood because they're in conflict with one another.
If one mafia family drives out all of the other mafia families and establishes lock-step control over the entire neighborhood, Would we expect their behavior to become better or worse or stay about the same with no competition?
Well, my observation in the former Soviet Union is, you know, once Stalin had purged the place to the point where he, or the government had purged the place to the point where they didn't feel threatened anymore, that The state then needed to support and nurture the population and care for the population.
And yeah, they held the power.
There was corruption, but the state did their job in redistributing wealth to the population, educating the population.
There was no such thing as homelessness.
There was No inflation.
There was no personal debts of any kind.
There was high literacy.
The population was highly educated.
And I think that's that's the part that's attractive to the young people now coming out of the universities.
And.
And.
And, you know, and I guess that that needs to be addressed.
Sorry, what needs to be addressed?
Are you saying that the concentration camps and the gulags were shut down after Stalin died?
They were eventually, that was all, you know, phased out, you know, by the time Brezhnev Was in power.
I think that the occurrences of disappearances and deaths in camps and so on had been greatly diminished.
And do you feel that the millions of people murdered in these camps in order to get to what you term a more peaceful situation was worth it?
Well... It doesn't necessarily have to go that way.
No, no. I'm not saying what theoretically could happen.
I'm talking about what actually does happen.
In, you know, the 100, 220 million people killed by communism in the 20th century, do you feel that those lives are worth it to achieve some beneficial level of income redistribution and potentially some increases in literacy?
Though, of course, literacy increased enormously in the capitalist countries as well.
It was not specific to communism.
Well, okay, the millions of deaths.
And certainly, you know, I listened to you and to, you know, Professor Jordan Peterson.
And, you know, you guys talked about communism and you threw out the hundred million deaths.
That's a pretty good argument.
But, you know, I would argue that, you know, those...
It's a pretty good argument.
Yeah. It's a pretty good argument.
I know. No, I know.
I mean, I would jump all over that.
I would jump all over that and say, it's a pretty good argument.
We're talking about 100 million people slaughtered, and you think that's only...
What would be a really good argument?
How many bodies need to be piled high for it to be a really good argument?
200 million? 500 million?
A billion? I've got to...
I'm going to give you the argument. Here's the argument.
Okay, so, you know, think of the, you know, back in the Roman Empire, the Roman Republic, right?
The Roman Republic, you know, is responsible for laying some big chunks of the foundation of, you know, our beloved Western civilization.
And we honor and revere them for that.
But they had slavery and They had gladiator fights.
They threw people to lions and things like that.
But we don't throw out the baby with the bathwater because of those things, right?
So those things occurred.
Things like that happened in those days.
And that was the level to which the human race had developed at the time.
So we cut the Romans some slack on that.
So if you look at the purges and the Golodomor and so on, those things occurred The worst of them, you know, in the first half of the 20th century executed, conducted by people who were born in the 19th century.
And, you know, in those days people had a different attitude towards how disagreements were resolved.
There was World War I with millions of dead and, you know, people People didn't oppose that to the point where it was stopped.
In World War II, the same thing.
You look at France and England and Germany and Spain.
They had been fighting for centuries and centuries with each other until finally they had enough through World War II in the 20th century.
They haven't They don't fight anymore.
They don't do that anymore. The argument is that the purges and the starvations were a 20th century thing.
They're not really relevant anymore.
Now we see this post-modern communist movement in the United States.
What's happening?
People are losing their jobs and people are being, you know, defriended on Facebook and so on.
So that's, you know, we've seen that humans have developed beyond that point now.
I'm sorry, 100 million people dead slash people unfriended on Facebook?
Well, exactly. I mean, nobody's killing anybody now.
Oh, so that's the improvement.
A communist revolution going on right now.
And there's no purges.
And I don't think that that would even be possible now with people with cell phones and so on.
One of the things that made the purges and starvations possible was that that information could be covered up.
All right, so let's go to ancient Rome.
Now, personally, I would have gone the capitalism killed the natives, and therefore it's exactly the same as the gulags, you hypocritical capitalist scum.
But let's go with your argument, which was that the Roman Empire had its dark side, which it certainly did, of course.
But we don't talk about going back to the Roman Empire.
Nobody sits there and says...
Let's have emperors with near-universal power and massive swaths of slavery, and let's enslave young men for 20 years in the army.
So yeah, there were problems with the Roman Empire, but nobody's saying, let's do Roman Empire 2.0.
Nobody's saying, let's do it again.
So saying that there were problems, therefore we should try it again, Is not a rational argument if you're going to bring in the Roman Empire, because nobody's seriously talking about resurrecting the Roman Empire, but you're talking about resurrecting communism.
Well, I guess I would disagree in that we have, you know, we have gone back to the Roman Empire, or to the Roman Republic anyway, and our own republic here in the United States was based loosely on that concept of a constitutional republic.
And we have a Senate that's called a Senate.
Our founding forefathers, you know, put together based on the Roman Senate.
And we have a Congress of representatives of the people.
It was loosely based on the tribunes of the people of the Roman Republic.
So, no, we have gone back to Rome.
Just because they use the same words, just because they use the same words does not mean that they were trying to recreate the Roman Empire.
But let's look at it this way. Let's look at it this way.
The problems with the Roman Empire were the degree to which the state could initiate the use of force against its citizens by taking their property in the form of taxation, by controlling people in terms of enforcing contracts regarding slavery, in conscripting young men to fight for the empire against their will, of course. And so, sure, there were terrible aspects to the Roman Empire, and those were to do with the government initiating force against its citizens.
That is exactly the same as a communist government.
A communist government survives and is defined by a near universal willingness, right?
The act of initiating force against its citizens to take their property, to tell them what to do with their lives, to organize how their goods are distributed and so on, by interfering with the free play of free market decisions through force.
So if you have problems with the Roman Empire, I agree with you.
Problems with the Roman Empire are the state initiating force against its citizens.
It's exactly the same in a communist country.
It is the state initiating force against its citizens.
So I agree with you. There were dark sides of the Roman Empire, and we should discard them.
One of those dark sides was exactly the same dark side, which is most of it in communism, the use of force by the state.
Well, I would agree with you.
And that communism does, and the Roman Empire did employ the use of state, as a state, the use of force.
And any government, any and all governments, also employ the use of the state, the initiation of force.
Yes, but not to the same degree.
Not to the same degree.
If we're going to have a government at all, the government's going to be, you know, using force.
Well, sure, but not to the same degree.
We might as well have a communist government, because that's one that results in the greatest equality of outcome.
Sorry, in a limited government, the government uses force to a very small degree.
In communism, there are no practical limits on the force that the government can deploy.
So, yes, there is...
Black and white, but that doesn't mean that there's no such thing as grey.
So I want a society with no government, and communism is virtually 100% control over the population, their products, and the means of production by the state.
So saying that, well, all governments use force, absolutely, but not to the same degree.
And the more force that is used by the government, the more immoral the system is.
And since communism is just about maximum force used by the state, it is the most immoral system.
Well, I guess although the state, a communist state, does possess the maximum capability for the use of force, it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to use it.
Your strategy is give a small number of people maximum use of force and then cross your fingers and hope they don't use it.
Why give them the force to begin with?
Then you don't have to cross your fingers and hope for the best.
Well, but their power and their force is derived from the people that they rule.
No, no, no. Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
That's a famous communist leader, Chairman Mao.
It does not grow out of the will of the people.
It grows out of the barrel of a gun.
That's political power. No, it grows out of the power.
The produce of the people.
I mean, you can't have a gun unless you can have the money to buy it and the material to build it.
No, but you steal the money to buy it through collective ownership of the means of production.
You're just taking from everyone.
Here's the thing. If the citizens want collective ownership of the means of production, they can perfectly achieve that in a free society.
So if you say, well, the workers should all own the factory, all own a little piece of the factory, there's nothing in a free market that says you can't do that.
Nothing at all. You can all sit together and you can collectively own anything you want.
Private property is an option.
It's not an axiom. It's not like the law of physics.
You can choose to exercise it or not.
And so if people want to have a communist system, they can perfectly achieve that in a free society and it will be voluntary and that's wonderful.
But in a communist system, they cannot achieve any free market options whatsoever.
And so there's no experimentation.
There's no choice. If people voluntarily want to be part of communism, they can do all of that.
They can buy a bunch of land.
They can farm it collectively.
They can build factories and own it collectively.
They can make all the decisions collectively.
They can redistribute anything they want and everything that they want, as much as they want.
No limitations on it whatsoever.
And so if communism works really, really well, Then in a free society, people will want to do it more and more and more.
It will be adopted, I guess, like you don't see a lot of people running around with rotary dial phones and really long extension cords anymore.
They have cell phones because they work better for talking on the go and other things.
And so in a free society, you're perfectly happy, perfectly able to set up a communist paradise, and nobody's going to say boo to a mouse about it.
It's absolutely up to you. It's the difference between joining an organization voluntarily and being kidnapped and locked in the basement, right?
One is moral and one is not.
So you can perfectly achieve communism in a free society.
You just can't enforce it at the point of a gun on other people.
So what's wrong with that?
If it's so good, why on earth would you need to enforce it on people?
Surely the desire to enforce it on people comes from an implicit understanding that the ideas suck and are terrible and people don't want them.
Yeah, well, I didn't say it was good, and I didn't say it was moral, but I said communism achieves the goals that it claims that it seeks to achieve, and that's equality of outcome.
Good. Then people can join their communist societies in a free society as much as they want.
Perfectly fine. But the people who don't want it, like me, should not be forced to participate any more than I would force to participate.
I would never force someone to participate in the free market.
I would never say to people who bought a bunch of land or enclosed a bunch of land, homesteaded a bunch of land, if they wanted to Work it all collectively and share the profits and divvy things up and live in a big commune.
I'm not going to go in by force.
Like, what am I, the FBI? I'm not going to go in by force and say, you can't do that.
No, more power to them if they want to try it.
I think it's terrible. I don't think it'll work.
But, you know, people got to learn themselves, right?
So I would never in a million years force someone.
To enforce property rights, force people to not own things collectively and distribute profits egalitarianly if that's what they want to do.
So the same respect that I give to communists for them to experiment in the way that they want to do and to be free of force in the pursuit of their forms of social organization, I damn well expect the same thing from communists, that I be free to refrain from joining communism if I so want, in the same way that they're free to refrain from From joining the free market.
Now, if these goddamn communists want to point a gun at me and say you have to be a communist, fuck you, we're enemies.
Fuck you, we're enemies.
In the same way that if I go to a gun with them and say you can't own things collectively, fuck me, we're enemies too, right?
So that's my issue.
You want to be a communist?
Go buy the land. Go enclose the land.
Go be a communist. Don't point your fucking guns at me.
I won't point my guns at you.
You don't point your guns at me.
We can live side by side, happily ever after.
Well, you'll all starve to death, and then you'll go back to private ownership, but that's the deal.
They want to be communist?
Fine. Keep the fucking guns out of it.
Well, okay, I understand that, but what if the situation is, and the one that I kind of observe now that there's a movement, just as you described, to embrace communism and bring in communism, only it's encompassing the United States and Canada as well.
No, no, no. Then they want to take over the government and initiate the use of force against me.
Well, when everybody around you in the whole country of Canada wants to be communist...
Well, then they don't need to take over the government, do they?
They don't need to take over the government if everybody wants to do it voluntarily.
The moment they start taking over the government, they are absolutely admitting that people won't do it voluntarily and need to be forced to do it, in which case, fuck the commies.
Yeah, but they are doing it.
They are taking over your government.
And I fear in the next few generations they'll be taking over the one here as well.
No, they won't. No, no, no, they won't.
They won't because it doesn't work.
So what'll happen is the more they take over, the faster the system will collapse and the quicker we get a reset.
Yeah, that's the problem is that it does work.
And it works in achieving Economic equality of outcome.
No, it doesn't. We already went through this argument.
Because you have people in the inner party who are vastly wealthier and more free than people who are the proletariat.
Granted. However, you know, the Soviet Union, it took them 70 some plus years to consume the wealth of the czars.
And they got a huge amount of support from the capitalist West.
If the capitalist West goes communist, they won't have any other group to give them resources.
So it'll collapse all the faster.
Or, well, you say collapse, right?
But maybe that isn't necessarily an accurate term.
Why do you say collapse? What do you mean, why do I say collapse?
Because that's what communism generally does.
What collapsed? What communist regime collapsed?
Well, there's no communist regime other than North Korea, and even that has turned into a kind of hereditary cult of personality.
There's no communist regime that retains the same characteristics that it did in 1945 or even 1965.
Right. I mean, they've liberalized things in socialist India.
They've liberalized things in communist, formerly communist China.
They've liberalized things in Russia.
And Cambodia has massively transformed.
And so there have been huge changes.
These systems were not the way that they were.
And they have succeeded to the point or to the degree that they're willing to let free market, the free market operate.
Yeah. I would say that, you know, Rather than saying, like, Soviet Union collapsed, I would say that the state faded away, just as Karl Marx predicted it would.
I mean, we all read those terms and laugh, but the state faded away, just as it was supposed to.
Are you going to characterize Putin's Russia as a stateless society?
Well, the capitalist societies around them moved in, you know, and And fill the vacuum.
And that's why communism needs to be global and why they strive to be global.
Look, it just comes down to this.
Do you want to impose your system by force?
Yes, yes. Okay, well then we're enemies, and don't pretend to rationally debate me if you've actually got a gun under the table.
Right? Don't Han Solo me, bro.
All right. Don't tweet on me, bro.
If you've got a gun under the table, then put the gun on top of the table and say, to hell with you, Steph.
I'm going to force you into communism, and if you resist, I'm going to shoot you in the back of the head.
You know, like Antifa when we were doing our Night of Freedom in Washington, D.C., when they were outside chanting.
Yeah. No, I was there, dude.
Yeah, you were there. So you heard them outside chanting, forget about the red pill, how about a lead pill?
Their desire to shoot us in the head, right?
Like good socialists, like good communists, you find your class enemies and you put a bullet, you double tap the bullet in their spine.
And their head. And so, yeah, if you want to impose your system on me through force and shoot me if I resist, okay, well then let's not pretend to be having a civilized debate.
You want to use violence against me, a peaceful man, and we are enemies.
And if you continue in your approach, well, only one of us is going to get to walk into the future.
Yeah. Okay. Well, you have a very good point there.
And... And I would say, yes, communism does impose itself through the use of force.
Okay, and if you're fine with that, then I'm not going to pretend to have a debate with you.
If your backup position is force, I have no interest in- No, hold on, hold on.
I'm not going to have you pretend that it's a debate if your backup position is a gun.
I'm not going to mask what it is that you want to do by pretending we're having some kind of discussion.
That's the reason why you should embrace communism and why Jordan Peterson should embrace communism.
And you guys should be out there preaching and promoting it and carefully guiding our society into a communist society smoothly so that the transition isn't violent like it was in the 20th century.
And you guys would be serving mankind in that capacity with all of your talents and skills.
Well, I think the reason for that is first of all I don't think euthanasia is the way to go.
And secondly, the freedoms that I treasure.
The remnants of property rights, of free trade, of free speech, the freedoms that I treasure, were fought for against what seemed like insurmountable odds at the time by very heroic men, largely men.
And so if I've inherited these freedoms because people fought against insurmountable odds to create and maintain them, Then it would be very hypocritical for me to sell out the freedoms I've inherited through courage because of my own cowardice.
Yeah, there's still room to fight. As long as we have free speech, there's room to fight.
Once free speech is gone, I'm done.
Once free speech is gone, I'm done.
And this is why, of course, the leftists want to so undermine or destroy free speech.
Once free speech is done, then there's no peaceful solution.
There's no peaceful solution. No question.
But as long as we have free speech, yeah, I'm going to make my case because I think there are enough rational people out there to listen.
And the idea that I'm going to be corrupted by your satanic temptation of power and the idea that, you know, well, if you join me, I won't kill as many people and this is some sort of motivation to me.
Join me so they don't have to plow over and kill quite so many people.
It's like, dude, that's on you.
That's not on me. I'm not going to cover up your crimes.
I'm not going to join you to pretend that you're doing something other than gross evil.
No. You want to shoot people?
Go shoot people. I'm not going to cover it up.
Let everyone see the kind of person that you are.
Let everyone see how your ideology is implemented at the point of a gun.
I'm not going to cover it up for you.
I'm not going to join your satanic crew so that people can somehow not see how violent you are.
No. You're going to do violence?
Do violence. I'm not covering it up.
Okay. Let's see.
I got one more.
All right. So, you know, I've been watching YouTube and you and Jordan Peterson.
In fact, you and Jordan Peterson were together talking about IQ, right?
And there was a, you know, and there's the, you know, there came up the question of, okay, you know, society or technology is making life more complex and, you know, pretty soon we're going to have Robots doing menial work, and it's going to get pretty tough for low IQ people to survive in society.
And you were both kind of talking, you know, how does society be structured to accommodate these low IQ people?
And I know there wasn't really any answer presented.
There you go. Communism is the answer.
Communism is perfectly structured for caring for and managing low IQ segments of the population.
And the low IQ people benefit from it because They receive equitable outcome, economic.
So what? No, I understand all of that.
But so what? And the intellectuals are behind communism because now the- Yeah, no, I get all of that.
Hang on. People honestly, Daniel, people have heard that argument.
We all get it. We all get it. Okay, so first of all, I don't care.
So sadists benefit from there being gulags.
Does that mean we should have gulags because sadists benefit from it?
People who like to rape enjoy societies in which it's hard to be caught for rape.
Does that mean we should get rid of all laws against rape because rapists would love that?
No, the fact that some people benefit from a particular social system, hey, Sadists also benefited from having slaves.
Is that an argument to bring back slavery because the sadists would really like it?
No, of course not. The issue is not that society is getting more complex.
The issue is that menial jobs are less in demand.
Now, that does mean that there's going to be a challenge for lower IQ people.
And this, of course, is the problem that we've inherited from 70 years of socialism, where resources have been taken from high IQ people, given to low IQ people.
Low IQ people have had a lot of kids, and high IQ people have had fewer.
That's the result of socialism.
So the fact that socialism has created these problems does not mean that we need more socialism to fix them.
Now, I have great sympathy for people of lower intelligence in a more and more automated society, and I'm perfectly happy to provide charity to those people.
Now, I don't want to provide them so much charity that they have 20 kids apiece, because I also know that intelligence is 80-plus percent genetic by the time you get to 18 years of age.
So, no. I don't want to give them so much money that they can have 20 kids, because then I'm just going to end up with more and more requirements of charity down the road to the point where it simply can't be sustained.
So the fact that socialism has produced a huge problem is exactly why we shouldn't have socialism slash communism.
Massive social engineering programs like the coercive welfare state and massive intergenerational debt cause huge problems.
That's a shame. That's terrible.
I wish that people had listened to me for the last 35 years about the evils of the welfare state and the evils of an increasingly socialistic society.
But they didn't. I don't see how that's my problem.
I'm happy to help people.
Absolutely. I'm happy to help people who can't end up functioning very well in an increasingly automated society.
That is a big challenge.
But whatever the question is, the answer is more freedom.
More freedom.
So let's say you, oh, we've got some universal basic income and so on.
Okay, well, how's that helping the problem?
It just means you're, again, taking more resources from smart people and giving them to less smart people, which means less smart people have more kids and more smart people have fewer kids.
What does that mean? It means eventually you run out of smart people, you have a huge access of not-so-smart people, the entire system collapses, and then what happens?
Starvation. War.
Civil war, predation, destruction, cannibalism.
You don't even know. We've seen this before in history where this stuff goes.
You want to see cannibalism? Go look at the Holodomor, where people literally had to eat their children because the communists were taking all of their food.
So, yeah, it's a problem.
It's a problem. It's a problem produced by government coercive redistribution of wealth.
The answer is freedom.
The answer is not more of the same that got us here.
All right. I think you've converted me.
Good. Well, I'm glad it was helpful.
Yeah, that was a good discussion.
All right. Well, good.
I'm glad it helped. Thanks very much.
And let's move on to the next caller. All right.
Thanks, Stefan. Okay, well up next we have Ashley.
Ashley wrote in and said, I recently listened to a podcast on antinatalism, and needless to say it left me churning for the last few days.
The pro-antinatalist made the point that due to the vast amount of suffering in the world versus the sparse amount of pleasure slash good, that if we were to look at things from the perspective of the as-not-yet-to-exist child that said child would obviously choose non-existence, I can almost understand this proposition but find myself in the end disagreeing with it.
Now, this brings up a few conundrums for me.
Firstly, in order to have an opinion or perspective, a thing would have to exist in some form, so then wouldn't a person be causing undue suffering by consciously denying that hypothetical child the opportunity to experience whether it is full of pain or not?
It seems to me that this is almost a case of the grass is always greener on the other side, wherein from a materialist perspective… There is no such thing as nothingness outside of the human mind.
Even in quantum mechanics, a seemingly empty space has the potential to spontaneously produce little bits and pieces.
So how in the real world would we have any concept of whether nothingness would be better than even the most painful experiences?
That's from Ashley. Hey Ashley, how you doing?
Good, Stefan. How about you?
Well, thanks. Why do you think this was compelling to you, this antinatalism argument?
Well, it's not necessarily that it's compelling to me.
It's more that some of these ideas have a potential to manifest themselves into policy.
And I just...
You said it left you churning for the last few days.
Yeah. I assume it's important to you.
And the question is, why do you think...
Because, I mean, I've heard these arguments before.
Yeah, it's... So why do you think it sits in your heart so much?
I guess I just want humanity to exist.
Right. But the antinatalists, I don't think, I mean, they're saying don't have kids.
I don't think they're saying kill adults.
I mean, I know some extreme environmentalists want to bring the population down to like, what, 500 million or whatever.
Always seems to include them.
But they're saying don't have kids, right?
Yeah. Do you want to have kids?
Well, I'd like to. And do you think that their arguments are strong enough that it would interfere with your desire or drive to have kids?
No. I wouldn't care what they think.
It's more of a matter of, like, if this idea was potentially made into policy.
Yeah, so the antinatalism thing, it's like the environmental zero population growth thing, or like this relentless Weird, horrifying program that goes on in the media trying to convince white people to not have children.
Like that is some seriously crazy crap that goes on.
No, I agree on that. So it's also combined with this weird propaganda that's going on at the moment, like for white people not to have kids.
I really regret having kids.
There, I said it. You know, white people don't have children.
White people don't have children. Which is a very, very soft form of genocide, without a doubt.
It is horrifying and horrible stuff.
The antinatalist stuff in general is a siege against intelligence, because in order to understand the antinatalist arguments, you'd have to have pretty high IQ. So it's like a bioweapon that strikes the high IQ gene set in order to wipe it out from social consideration.
And of course, the powers that be don't like very smart people because smart people don't need the powers that be.
And so if you end up with your human livestock no longer needing you as a farmer, and they're smart enough to figure out, like one of the big problems that's happened is with increased technology, you don't need nearly as much government.
You've got reputation systems.
You've got credit score systems easily available.
You can search people online to figure out where they're coming from and whether they're trustworthy or not.
There's lots of cool things that you can do in order to avoid the kind of problems that a lack of information about someone will lead you to.
So as technology has improved and increased, the need for the state has decreased.
And so... If the need for the state is decreasing, then you want to replace your high IQ population with a low IQ population who will fight and hit their kids and get divorced and be unstable and do dumb things and need you as the government.
That's sort of basic.
So as far as this antinatalism stuff goes, I just view it as a horrible, horrible attack It's a lie and a falsehood.
I mean, if you want to be antinatalistic, you know where you want to go?
You want to go to a place, I don't know, sub-Saharan Africa or Saudi Arabia or certain backwaters of Pakistan or who knows what.
Like, you know where an antinatalist argument would have been really, really helpful?
If they had talked about it, say, in South Africa, Among the black community.
Why? Because the black population went up 800% under apartheid.
Now, if the black population had not gone up 800%, there could have been quite a bit more wealth in the black community, because they converted their sudden wealth under apartheid and other systems into just having more and more kids.
Now, if people had gone and said to the black community, hey, maybe don't have quite so many kids...
Well, maybe Africa would be doing a whole lot better at the moment.
But no, they don't go to those places.
What if they go to the places with the highest birth rates?
Look at some of the Middle Eastern immigrants into Europe.
Extraordinarily high birth rates.
Are they going to those people and saying, oh, you've got to cut back on the number of kids you're having?
No. They're going to hyper-self-conscious, obsequious white people saying, don't have so many kids, it's bad for the planet.
Come on. So white people get replaced with, like, one white kid gets replaced with, like, seven Middle Eastern kids, and somehow that's good for the planet?
It's nonsense. So, yeah, antinatal is, it's just anti-white.
Let's just be honest about it.
Yeah. That's, yeah, that's interesting.
Doesn't sound very interesting to you.
No, no, I just, it takes, I'm kind of a quiet person, so...
Yeah, so, yeah, I would say it's nonsense.
I mean, if you feel that human life is so terrible, then every antinatalist is in control of one human life that they can check in anytime they want.
Not that I'm suggesting it, but that would be a logical outcome.
Rather than convincing other people not to have children, you could take care of at least one human life yourself.
Again, not that I'm suggesting it, it just would be a logical outcome of the situation.
That's kind of where I, you know, kind of led my thoughts to, but I didn't exactly want to say it, but But I just was trying to figure out a way to battle that argument so that there's no room for that argument to be there.
Yes, it's important, Ashley, as a whole.
Most people think they're describing the world.
They're just describing themselves.
Honestly, I see this all the time on my channel.
I see this in comments. Your videos are just too long!
Well, maybe their attention span is too short.
But they don't, we can't think of that, right?
Because, or like I did a video, it just went out today, Why People Hate Donald Trump.
I said at the very beginning, this is going to be a long and complex argument, be patient.
And then how many times did I see in the comments below, this argument takes too long to get to the point!
This argument starts off too early, this, it's like...
So I say the argument's going to be long and complex, and a huge number of people are absolutely shocked that the argument is long and complex.
They have no idea. So if an antinatalist is saying, the world is misery, the world is unhappiness, the world is nihilism, the world is tragedy, it's like, you think you're talking about the world?
You're just talking about yourself. Watching most people talk about the world is like watching some bird attack, a pretend bird in a mirror.
They think there's another bird there.
It's just a reflection.
They're not seeing the world.
They're seeing, right?
They don't see the world as the world is.
They see the world as they are.
So the antinatalist argument is simply a confession that you're a miserable bastard.
You're a miserable, nihilistic, do-nothing, wet blanket, piss-on-human-happiness kind of bastard.
You're a Dementor. You are a Nazgul.
You are a horrible, soul-sucking, depressing human being to be around.
You can't stand who you are.
You can't stand thinking it's just you.
You can't stand the idea that there's a happiness out there that eludes you.
So you say, life is pain!
Life is pain! No, you're a pain.
Life is misery. No, you're miserable.
Life is tragedy.
No, the tragedy is you think life is tragedy, and therefore you can't be happy.
Life is horror.
No, you're horrible.
See, that's different.
And these are the people who say, anyone who's happy is a fool.
Bullshit. There's nothing easier in the world than being miserable.
Nothing. Just fire up Twitter.
There's nothing easier in the world than being miserable.
If happiness is easy, why do so few people do it?
If joy is so easy, if joy isn't...
Listen, people are stupid as a whole, on average, around the world.
If stupidity bred happiness, why are the least intelligent countries generally the least happy?
Why? Why are the least intelligent people the least happy?
Oh, don't get me wrong. They seem happy for a little while.
There was a guy... In my high school.
With a party guy.
Drank. Smoked.
I'm sure he did drugs.
He was a party guy.
Fuck that math test, man!
I'm gonna live in the now!
And you're sitting there, studying for your stupid math test.
And he's out there, having fun.
Not studying for the math test.
He's happy. He's relieved.
He's having fun. He's dead now.
Just heard it maybe a year or two ago.
Died. He died.
What did he die of?
He died of fun.
He died of alcoholism.
Because he was having fun. So much fun.
It's like the marshmallow test, right?
One kid is like, well, you know, here's a marshmallow.
If the marshmallow is still here, when I come back in 15 minutes, you get two marshmallows.
And there are two kids in the room, and one kid is like, oh, eat the marshmallow.
That's how you fuel white privilege, just in case anybody wants to know, is you eat the marshmallow.
And so the one kid, and the other kid's looking over, like, he's drooling, looking over at that kid, saying, oh, man, I can taste that marshmallow.
I'm actually not a big fan of marshmallows.
But anyway, some people like it.
So, and he's looking over, and it's like, oh, that kid is so, and the kid's like, oh, this marshmallow is so good.
I want to have the marshmallow.
But I'm white, I can't have it.
Winter, the color of snow that killed my ancestors.
And What happens 20 years, well, 20 years down the road, the guy who said no to the marshmallow is a lot happier, usually.
A lot more successful, a lot more productive, and so on.
So, yeah, the antinatalist, life is misery, and if you're happy, you're an idiot.
Bullshit. Happiness is hard.
Reason equals virtue equals happiness.
You have to know how to think rationally.
You have to put your rational principles into action in a consistent way that doesn't get you killed, and then you get some happiness.
You know what it's like saying?
It's like saying, being healthy and fit and not fat?
Well, that's for idiots.
The really smart people sit on the couch and eat bonbons all day.
No bread for you! My temper rises because yeast rises.
Screws up my digestion.
And potatoes! Yeah, they were fun while they lasted.
No potatoes for you anymore.
What do you get? Gravel and marshmallows.
So no, it's hard. Happiness is hard.
Happiness is a sign. If you achieve and maintain happiness, it's a sign of intelligence.
It's a sign of perspective.
It's a sign that you're not frustrated by taking on more than you can actually change, but not apathetic to what you can change.
It's a tough balance. It means you've found that Aristotelian mean between courage and foolhardiness.
Between caution and cowardice.
Between trying to change the world without being enslaved to things you can't control.
That's complicated. This is a big balancing act.
People who are reasonably happy in a consistent way, no.
It's a big balancing act.
Doing good in the world is hard because the more good you do, the more evil people hate you.
And knowing that you're doing good, stepping over all the hatred, maintaining your positivity, don't tell me that's easy.
Hey, it would be easier to be happy in a future world where we're actually free human beings.
Right now, yeah, happiness, a little complicated.
But the nihilists, the antinatalists, the existentialists, the postmodernists, happiness is stupid.
Emo is brilliant.
Being miserable.
Being horrible.
Values are for goofs, man.
Nothingness is where everything is.
You think you're smart, but you're happy so you can't be.
Because you don't see, man.
You don't know what it's like to be this miserable.
To see so deeply.
To be so unhappy.
Bullshit. This is the best time in human history to be alive.
I swear to God. At least once every two days, I shit you not, at least once every two days, I say, hey, I've made it to 51, never got drafted.
No smallpox.
No bubonic plague.
No starvation. I have a job the very gods would kill for.
I get to have conversations like this.
Spread wisdom. Challenge people's thinking.
Discomfort the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.
Promote reason, truth, rational philosophy every day.
I kiss the very fate gods that drop me into this ping pong ball of truth.
Who's going to be unhappy?
There's bad things happening in the world.
Yes, there are. And for the first time, we can do something about it before it's too late.
Not in hindsight, but ahead of time.
Anybody who's miserable in the modern world wants to be.
They're protecting the misery of their family.
They don't want to challenge the misery of their friends.
They don't want to find the glory within.
That lifts them up on angel wings.
We can fly.
We can communicate. We can chat.
We can talk. We can reason. We can learn.
We can think. We have access to all the world's information on a tiny, magic, palantir, flat box of knowledge with a touchscreen.
What a time to be alive!
What a time to speak when there's no gatekeeper!
I spent 20 years beating my head against trying to get to a public voice.
Finally, I'm like, fuck it, I'm doing it myself.
Boom! Biggest philosophy show in the world.
Boom! I couldn't have had this 20, 30 years ago.
I couldn't have had this, barely had it started 11 years ago.
Might not have it in another 10.
I don't know! But I'll be goddamned if I'll go down without a fight.
And we have a fight.
You have a webcam, you have a microphone, and you have the truth.
And you can take down major networks over time.
CNN, who has an average viewer age of 60, is bitching and rolling out and trying to undermine and get shut down Infowars.
Well, they're not doing that because Infowars is losing.
Antinatalists are fundamentally embarrassing, and they are a stain upon the potential for happiness the modern age affords.
Well, that's just it. If you think about it, they only exist in a vacuum because if you look on all of human history, like you said, we've never had it better.
And that's true around the world in many ways.
And yes, there's a migrant crisis.
And yes, there is demographic replacement.
And we can talk about it.
You know, these disasters were always happening throughout human history.
Can you imagine?
I'll do a show on this series at some point in my life.
Imagine the internet in 1914.
Talking about the murder of Ferdinand, talking about what was actually going on with the Serbians, imagine if that information had been available.
Hell, do you know how many wars the alternative media has prevented just in the last 10 years or so?
More than a few. I hope a lot.
More than a few. If the alternative media had been around in 2003, there may not have been in Iraq.
So, there are problems, as there always have been, in human history.
But now we have the capacity to talk about them, and there's a reason why.
What was it, the first hate crime trials in England?
Someone got 18 weeks, someone got like 32 weeks or something like that.
Yeah, something like that. It's scary.
Yeah, some woman in Sweden is facing two years in jail for posting an offensive meme about migrants.
Yeah, something about the first person to be charged for sexism just happened like a little bit ago.
Yeah, so of course they're going to try and shut it down.
Of course they are. Of course they are.
It's natural. It would be insane if they didn't.
Yeah. Because we were told...
Knowledge. We were told, you see, that diversity of race, ethnicity, and sex would bring about a new golden age.
Boy, you thought you had knowledge and free speech before.
You wait till everyone's part of the party.
How's that working out?
Feels. Victimhood.
Silence. So, yeah, a natalist, they're just confessing that they're too cowardly to be happy and too dumb to find the path to joy.
And I feel real sympathy.
Because it's one thing to know that you're screwed up and to say, wow, I'm really screwed up.
You know, like, I've got a lot of reason to be happy, but, ah, you know, I'm really screwed up.
I mean, there's got to be some way to be happy.
And then you work on your self-knowledge.
You work on facts, reason, evidence, honesty.
You improve your relationships.
You... Aristotle was talking about this 2500 years ago, for God's sakes.
How do you be happy? You pursue excellence with the goal of virtue.
You maximize the use of your mind in pursuit of the good.
Now, the good may be moral virtue.
It may be making the best violin.
It may be making the best argument.
It may be making the best company.
You use your maximum potential in pursuit of the good of excellence.
Eudaimonia. Eudaimonia!
And this is what you do.
You milk your maximum capacity in pursuit of the good, whether that's art or arguments or business or what.
Doesn't matter. You bring your maximum capacity in pursuit of the good.
You add beauty and truth and virtue to the world to the greatest of your capacity.
And that doesn't mean working 24-7.
Because that will not make you happy, right?
So we've known this for two and a half millennia.
Expend your maximum capacity in pursuit of the good.
No, I'm going to convince happy people not to have children.
Yeah, fuck you. Fuck you.
You think you're describing the world, you're just describing your own sorry ass self.
And you don't even know it. And that's the problem.
This is where the tragedy is, is they don't know that they're fucked up.
They think that they're fucked up as enlightenment.
They think that being miserable and niggardly and miserly is enlightenment.
It's not. It's not.
You have turned your own personal pathology into a universal, absolute, and a good.
So good luck getting out of that.
All right. Well, thanks, man. I hope that was helpful.
Yeah, that was really helpful.
All right. Thanks, man. Let's move on to the last caller.
Okay. Up next, we have George.
George wrote in and said, how do you help a world or someone that believes it doesn't need your help?
How do you save someone from heading to the cliffs singing, I believe I can fly?
I used to believe in the principle of non-involvement and only giving advice when the person slash the world asks for it.
But what if the price of the mistake about to be made is too great?
A personal version of these questions has arisen in my personal life.
My brother is planning to get married and I believe it to be a common case of the son repeating the mistake of the father.
That's from George. Hey George, how are you doing?
Hi Stefan. I'm fantastic.
Yourself? Good, thank you.
What's your brother up to?
He's getting married. No, no, I know that, but what's he up to?
It's bad. Well, to get to that, I need to talk about my childhood and my quote-unquote unimmaculate conception.
That's no problem. I am not averse to a good backstory.
Okay, because, yeah, I wanted to explain the mistake that I think he's about to be making.
But, of course, it can also be projection, and that's what...
Maybe I wanted a second opinion about that.
So, the thing is, I'm an unwanted child, so to say.
The story that I've been told around 12, I think, My father was studying at university back then, and he got back to my hometown.
My mother was using some contraception given to her by her best friend.
And as it turns out, she found out that the contraception...
By her best friend? Yeah.
Not a pill, though, right?
I mean, you can go to a doctor for that, right?
It's an intra-veginal pill or something.
An IUD? Something like that, I suppose.
Matt's a pretty close friend.
Here, stir this up your hoo-hoo.
Okay. Did you wash it?
Yeah, well, it was back in the communist days.
Oh, okay, okay. Contraception was not easy to find.
Socializing and IUD, man.
Oh, that is nasty.
Here, I'm done with the condom.
Feel like washing it out? No.
I didn't ask about the details back then, and I wasn't interested in them.
So... Yeah, this was the story.
And yeah, funny enough, after that night, they discovered the device away on the floor, you know, after they're done with their stuff.
So this is how my conception was told to me.
But listening to You know, YouTube and female hypergamy and yeah, the basic instincts of a woman.
I'm unsure of that story being true, so to say.
Right. Did your brother get married to a woman he knocked up?
Yeah. Right.
Accidentally? Well, so to say.
No, it was not accidental.
They were playing with fire.
You had this discussion.
Yeah, yeah.
They were just together for like two years when this happened.
And this conception also came under what I would consider interesting circumstances.
So from what I recall, it was...
Two years ago. But from what I recall, I asked him, but he said he forgot what happened before or after.
But from what I recall, she had a trip to her parents.
And after that, they had sex and magic.
She got pregnant. Right.
Was she in charge of the birth control, do you know?
Nobody was in charge of the birth control.
Well, all right. They were just...
And is she planning on keeping the kid?
Well, she had it.
This was two years ago.
Yeah, they have a little girl now.
And are they married?
Oh, good to get married.
Yeah, yeah. Right.
Well, he's a father now, right?
He's just got to make it work.
This is a little bit like locking the barn door after the horse has left, right?
True, but, well, I'm unsure if he's the father.
Oh. That's what I was talking about, female hypergamy.
Ah. Well, that can be established, right?
Just, you know, get a hair or a swab or whatever.
If assuming it's legal, then just go get the test.
Oh, wait, you could do it too, I assume, right?
I don't know. I mean, you find out.
Assuming it's all legal, I don't know whether you are, and don't tell me.
But... You could convince him to get a test.
But my guess is that, and again, don't know where you are, but in some places you have only a certain amount of time to contest the paternity, and if you don't contest the paternity within a certain amount of time, the kid's yours whether you find out later that it's not or not.
I don't know the legal aspects of that.
Why do you think that the kid is not his?
Because of these circumstances.
Right. So she went back to her parents' place and then a few days after they got back Yeah, she got knocked up.
Right, so you think she might have had sex with a guy out there, and that guy's not going to hang around, or she doesn't want him, or he's not available, and then she's like, hey, quick, let's have sex.
Hey, it's yours! That's a possibility.
Not the first lady in the history of humanity to pull such a maneuver.
True, and that's why I was telling you about my...
My story. My birth.
Because I think they might be related to an extent because...
I've had questions. Does the kid look like him?
I can't tell. I'm a guy.
What do I know of these things?
I don't know. You know, guys are pretty good at figuring this stuff out.
Evolutionarily, it's kind of advantageous for us.
But nonetheless, it doesn't look crazy not like him, right?
Oh, pfft. Really?
I can't tell, really.
Similar skin color?
Hair texture? Eye color?
Yeah, obviously. Okay, well, I'm just checking for that, right?
I mean... Right.
You know, the redhead in Nigeria.
Anyway, okay, so...
True.
So, what would you like him to do?
What do you think you should do?
Well, just to a second point.
So, that might not be true, but the second option of that...
Is also somewhat damning to her because, well, they've been together for two years and maybe this was the way that she could trap him, so to say.
Because the relationship wasn't going anywhere.
I don't think he was about to propose there without a kid.
So, yeah, I did have a chat with him.
I did give him some compelling points, but I didn't make this one about him not being the father because he couldn't remember the circumstances of having the baby, which I find kind of odd.
But he was having unprotected sex with the woman, right?
True. Okay, so you don't have any particular evidence that the kid's not his.
No, I don't. Okay.
And have you talked to him about the kidnap being his?
You did, right? No. Oh, you haven't.
No, because I didn't have...
If he had remembered the circumstances of her conception, maybe I would have had some doubts.
Okay. So what is it that you want him to do?
Oh, good question.
No, because you say, how do you help someone, but what would helping him, what would be the ideal?
Like, what do you want him to do that you would consider, ah, I talked to him, he did this, I really helped.
Huh. Wow, I cannot believe that I am, I haven't thought of that.
No, that's fine. Like, it's a good question.
I mean, what do you do with people who don't want to help?
But what does helping it mean?
I mean, let's say this is a bad mom and he leaves, well, he's got a kid, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Imagine the scenario of him being married for like 30 years, miserable.
No, no, but he had unprotected sex.
He's now a dad. Like, I'm sorry, that's the deal.
This is why you don't have unprotected sex.
True. I mean, he's a father.
Right. And he has to assume the responsibility for that.
True. Yeah.
I mean, he could be a warning for other people to wrap it before you tap it, but I don't know what he can do.
I mean, he's got a kid.
It's like, oh, was he going to be married and miserable for 30 years?
Well, he doesn't have to stay married.
For 30 years, his kid's two, so he's got 16 years till the kid...
Grows up and, you know, maybe then that can be different, but 18 years in baby jail, that's what happens if you have unprotected sex.
I mean, everybody knows that.
True. And there was a second point to my question.
Sorry, one thing. Your brother is doing some good in the world, though, in that you're having this conversation.
Which means that lots of people are going to hear this and maybe they'll double wrap it.
Maybe they'll use tinfoil.
Maybe they'll use a pup tent or something like that.
But that is a reminder to guys out there that you have little tadpoles in your balls that make real people which come with $200,000 of legal obligations and 18 years of being with someone you might not like tomorrow.
So... Watch where the tadpoles get to.
You get one past the goalie, you're drafted.
True. Yeah, I didn't think of that.
But my question also had an overview side of it.
I would urge people to listen to your speech about Sigmund Freud.
That was also very interesting.
You answered there why it is you do that you do.
But... The second point is, how do you go about doing what you do and convincing people that don't think they need your help?
Like, you know, let's think about this scenario.
Of course, all the names that I'm going to say are completely fictitious.
Say we have a boss, and the boss is called The Union, right?
And it's led by Angela.
And This hot chick is the helm of the bus.
And yeah, it's trying to drive the bus off a cliff.
And they're all singing Kumbaya.
It's gonna be great. We have an engine based on antimatter.
You know, the bus is gonna take off.
It's gonna lead us to Mars.
But You have some doubts, you know, and you ask some questions.
Can I see a dry run of this anti-matter device?
So far, I haven't seen it being tested.
I haven't seen any other applications.
And, well, they say, no, well, it's going to be great once we go off the cliff.
It's going to start and everything is going to be great.
Right? Right.
So how do you convince those people that Well, the mistake of auto may be to be made is too great.
Well, I mean, you can convince people with data.
You can convince people with rhetoric.
You can convince people with passion.
You can convince people with consequences.
And you can try all of those different approaches.
And it's the old saying, right?
There are some who can see without being shown.
There are some who will see when they are shown.
And there are those who will never see.
So you put your best foot forward, you figure out your audience, you figure out what motivates them, you try and find some way to give them what they want or scare them with the consequences of a wrong decision.
And maybe they'll respond and maybe they won't.
But you don't, here's the thing, let me give you a big convincing trick, a big persuasion.
Tip, as Scott Adams would say.
The best way to convince people is to not be too invested in whether they listen because most people They respond hierarchically.
In other words, they try and figure out whether you're more important than they are, whether you have more power than they are, in which case they'll pretend to listen while plotting to stab you in the back.
Or they try and figure out if you're less important than they are, in which case they don't bother to listen to you at all.
If you're in a situation where you need something from someone, then you are automatically in a lower status.
Because you need something from them, and they don't need something from you.
Now, if you need someone to believe you, then you are giving them power over you.
Because they have the power to reject what you're saying and thus cause you upset.
Now, most people in this world respond to your need with mild sadism.
Oh, he needs something from me.
I have power! And the only way to exercise that power is to say no.
The more you need someone to believe you, the less likely they are to listen.
And so, when I tell someone something, I'm happy if they listen.
I'm passionate that they listen.
But I don't need them to listen.
Because the moment I need them to listen, they then focus on my need and whether they should say yes or no and they feel this inflated sense of petty power.
And they're more likely to say no just to exercise that petty power.
And less likely to listen to what it is that I have to say.
Now, I don't want to come to them also as a dominant.
You better listen and I'm going to tell you.
I don't do that at all. I constantly undermine any authority that I have because I don't want people to listen to me because of authority.
To think for themselves. That's the point.
So I come at it from a neutral standpoint.
I'm passionate about what I'm saying.
I'm happy if they listen.
I don't need them to listen. The salesman who's desperate...
Is the salesman least likely to succeed?
The salesman who's willing to walk away is the one most likely to succeed.
The salesman who needs the sale the least is the most likely to make the sale.
Or the salesman who can pretend that he needs the sale the least.
So if you want people to listen to you, Hand them something, but do not be over-invested in them listening to you, or they'll say no just to exercise power over you and to not give you what you want, which is how most people operate.
Right. Well, the thing is, in my experience, people don't change unless they hit basically rock bottom.
Or even if you might convince them of something logically, They don't act on it.
Well, sure.
I mean, for most people, reason and evidence is just some wild hypothesis, and they have to wait for their experience to hit them over and over again.
But the reason and evidence you put there to plant the seeds and to say, this is what's going to happen, and here's why.
And they're like, well, that's just a wild hypothesis.
And then it does happen that way, and you gain credibility.
Not because they believe in reason and evidence, that's a lot to ask, but just because you were right about something.
So they might listen to you more next time.
And of course, I have the very public potential or position, better word for it, I have the very public position of being able to have other people learn from mistakes like your brother's.
All right. So, yeah, bring people reason and evidence.
But if you need them, if you're really ego-invested and they have to listen to you, they'll just shut you down for the fun of it, just because they get to exercise power.
And people feel so powerless in their life for the most part that the moment they get a tiny shred of power, they'll exercise it.
And if their power is saying no to your desperate need, they'll do it.
It's not even that moral a thing.
It's just a basic mammalian response to need.
But I guess we're all kind of invested in the Western civilization as it is.
No, yeah, no, I get it.
I get it. I mean, but you still can't show your naked need for people to believe you.
And because we have respect for the goal of achievement.
What's the point of having the truth if you can't get anyone to listen?
That's being tortured. That's a curse.
You would not want the truth if you can't affect any positive change with it.
It's like that old Kroll movie with the Cyclops.
They know the day of their own death, they can't change it.
Well, they kind of get a little demotivated in the last month or two.
So having a truth which you can't bring to the world in an effective manner is worse than having no truth at all.
And the respect for truth is the respect in its transmission.
The truth is made valuable in the transmission.
There's no point having a cure for a disease in your head if you can't get anyone to take it.
Then it's worse than not having the cure at all because you're tortured watching people die needlessly.
If you don't have the cure, oh, it's sad they died.
If you have the cure and they won't take it, it's sad they died and horrifying that you could have saved them.
So the value of truth is not the holding, it is the sharing.
It is the transmission of the truth that matters.
The possession of it It's a curse.
The transmission of it is salvation, and therefore we must bend our wills to whatever makes the truth spread the widest and the fastest.
That is the organizing principle of being in possession of the truth.
Not that you have it, but that you share it.
And, of course, also applying it in your personal life.
Yeah, like if you have food and other people are starving, okay, maybe, and you don't share it, okay, you're an asshole, but at least you have food.
At least one person is full.
But if you have the truth and don't share it, then people are tortured by their ignorance and you're tortured by your knowledge.
Nobody's better off. Right.
So whatever we do, whatever is necessary to share the truth, that we do.
So that we turn the truth into a blessing rather than a curse.
And that's my organizing principle.
What is the most effective way to get the truth out there?
So people attack me.
Oh, he's a terrible guy.
Good. It's good that they've attacked me because now more people hear about the truth, right?
And there are people who will hate me no matter what because they think it's about me rather than the truth.
I'm just some guy, right? It's like getting mad at the envelope rather than the letter.
It makes no sense, right?
There are people who hate me. They're going to hate me no matter what.
And there are people who love me no matter what.
But the people in the middle, they may hear terrible things about me, say, oh, that's terrible.
I find out more. It's a pretty good argument.
Oh, I want some evidence for that.
He's got a source for that. He's got an expert on about that.
So then the people who want to get people to hate me end up being hated themselves for lying about me.
This is natural, right? This is the way that the truth spreads.
It is not a pleasant thing to watch the spread of truth.
The truth crosses the landscape of Half an angel and half a zombie.
The truth crosses the landscape looking like a hero to some and a devil to many.
The truth lifts some people up and dances with them and the truth sucker punches other people and throws them over its shoulder.
The truth is a lover to some and a succubus to others.
The truth is a fighter who fights alongside you for some and a fighter who...
Punches you in the face for others.
The truth spreads like a glorious light, like a sunbeam burning through.
The mist and the truth sometimes spread like a black flecked virus.
The truth lurches and careens and dances and smashes its way across the human landscape.
The truth is freed and does its horrible bloody surgical work across the human landscape.
Leaving some elevated, some dancing, some flying, and some curled up weeping.
The truth is not pretty as it spreads.
The truth sometimes spreads like a bloodstain, a wound to the prior illusion that spills and spreads.
The truth reads to some like a hymn book and to others, Like a funeral list.
Like a casualty list.
The truth comes to some as beautiful swordplay and to others as a random midnight stabbing.
The truth is glorious and terrible in turns.
The truth is the two sides of Janus.
The truth is the laughter and tragedy masks of comedy.
The truth is a caress and a slap, a massage...
And a beating. The truth doesn't set you free.
All the time, maybe eventually.
But the truth most often reveals that you're in a cage.
You felt more free before the truth.
Hey, I thought I was in a field.
Turns out I'm in a tiny cage.
Oh, I thought the people around me were my friends.
They were succubi and vampires.
Fully. Found it on limiting my potential.
Invested in keeping me small like them.
Fuck you, truth. Turned the light on?
I'm in hell. I thought it was just a lot of sunset.
No! It's hell itself.
Now you can begin to burrow out, but it's pretty horrible when the lights go on.
We think that the truth is like some...
Wonderful starlight or moonlight that guides us through a challenging midnight landscape.
I don't know. Truth is like a bomb.
Boom! It blows us wide and high into the sky, spins us and turns us and shreds us and we fall in pieces and try to reassemble ourselves into a human shape.
The truth is shell shock.
The truth is being buried in a coffin of reality and hoping you can claw your way out!
And that there'll be somebody there when you get to the surface.
Maybe, maybe, maybe. Truth is being cannon-fired into a desert and hoping you'll find an oasis while staggered and blindfolded.
Truth sucks!
There's only one thing that sucks more than the truth, and that's long-term lies.
Short-term lies are beautiful.
Long-term lies are hell itself.
The truth is a predator that hunts what lies within us.
And what lies within us runs and fights and claws to remain with the herd of liars, to remain with the wildebeest of wanderlust, of falseness.
That's what loves lies within us, the Satan says.
Of our syrupy false selves.
The truth comes along with facts and reason and evidence and arguments and data.
And says you think you are alive but you are but a ghost cast by historical prejudice.
You think you have form and you have shape.
You think because you move you live.
You are a skeleton blown by the winds of all the bullshit that came before.
That is who you are.
Who you are is who you ain't.
Who you are is somebody who was evacuated and filled in with the prejudice and lies and servitude of the masters of mankind.
You are a useful robot and a useful idiot designed in the vast horizontal slave market of whacking down anybody who sticks their head up from the trench of delusion.
I think I see something!
Cut him down! Hey, is that the phone ringing?
Is that the truth? Smash the phone!
Don't find it! And we all think that we want the truth, and then someone comes along and speaks the truth.
Fuck you, here's some hemlock.
Fuck you, you're a cult leader.
Fuck you, you racist.
Oh, this is the truth!
Hey, we all want the truth, don't we?
Truth is cool! Oh, not that truth.
Oh, no, no, no. No, that truth?
No, no, that's bad. That's bad truth.
Good truth. Good truth is over there.
Good truth is with the comfortable deluge.
This bad truth. Bad truth causes problems truth.
Jesus. Ah, somebody speak the truth.
Nail him up. Fill him full of hemlock.
Write slander about him.
Tell everyone he's a terrible guy.
He's got the truth. We must put the mark of Cain upon him.
The scholar letter of T is on his forehead.
He shall wander through life accursed because he has facts that we don't like.
He's a fascist.
No, he's a faxtist.
You're missing a T. Faxist, not fascist.
It's not anti-fa, it's anti-fact.
That's where we are as a society, but thank God we can finally see it.
Well, thank the internet and thank the truth tellers that we can finally see it.
Finally, we see the shadow cast by humanity when the truth is visible at the click of a button.
Truth is visible at the swipe of fingertip.
You can finger the truth and impregnate your mind thereby to mix my analogies.
So, you focus on the truth, you focus on that which transmits the truth, and you take your punishment for telling the truth, because that's what the truth demands.
And if you can live without doing it, I guess you can try.
I can't, though. I can't.
I was just thinking about this today, like the race and IQ stuff.
Hey, if I could have stood in front of this camera and said I cared about the world and wanted to make it better without talking about that, it would have been really tempting.
I just can't. I can't.
I can't sit there and say, oh, can you please support this show?
But I'm going to sit on a truth that's really important and really matters and can really help the world because it's painful to some.
I could do it. I mean, I'm not even sure I'd want to even think about wanting to do it.
It doesn't really matter. It's like me imagining what kind of hairstyle I have if I have Brad Pitt's hair.
It's like, I don't.
And I don't have that kind of sleazy, easy infidelity to truth.
It's just not the way my nature works.
I can't. I can't just stand there and say, oh, you should listen to me.
I am really in great integrity.
I follow the data. I follow the facts.
You should support this show. While sitting on very, very important information that is essential to help save the world.
I can't do it. I just can't do it.
And so once you have that responsibility, then you have the responsibility to do whatever it takes to get the truth out there, to survive, to continue to tell the truth.
And you trust in one basic simple fact.
There's an old...
It's a pretty trashy saying.
It's one of these deepity bullshit things often quoted by Democrats.
The arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.
It's like, yeah, right.
But... Over time...
That old biblical saying.
The last shall become first.
He who is highest shall be cast down.
The lowest shall be made high.
The meek shall inherit the earth.
The meek shall inherit the earth means the humble own the future.
That is very true.
The humble own the future.
The word humble is branded on the ass of the future.
It's shaved and put right there.
Because the humble say, I don't know.
And the future is owned by the people with the courage to say they do not know.
With the courage to reject immediate prejudices, easy-made solutions, hand-tailored bullshit that passes for facts all throughout history.
The meek. I don't know.
I don't know if multiculturalism is good.
I don't know if diversity is good.
I know it's told a lot, which makes me kind of suspicious.
I don't know. Let's dig in and find the facts.
I don't know if men and women are perfectly equal.
I don't know. People say they are, which makes me suspicious, but I don't know.
I don't know if university is any good anymore.
I don't know. I don't know.
I don't know if all the races are the same in terms of G or intelligence or IQ. I don't know.
I don't know how much genetic influence there is in personality and intelligence.
I don't know. And therefore I'd like to know.
I don't know means I don't know plus it's important is I'd like to know.
And I will know. I'll find out. Well, we have a very compelling evidence that multiculturalism and diversity are not the right way to go.
Well, no, it is if you're on the left, right?
Diversity is a strength of the left. Diversity is a strength to the left, which is why they can say it so believingly, right?
Biology and history, this proves that.
Because... Well, but they don't care about biology and history.
Leftists are anti-science in general.
Because they'll reject genetic basis for intelligence, even though it's overwhelming.
But they totally believe in model climate change going out 100 years.
Come on. I mean, they're pro-climate change voodoo and anti-empirical psychological biological facts.
So, hang on, I'm going to just take the piece out.
Let me sort of finish my point.
So, the future belongs to people who are humble in the present, to people who say they don't know.
The future, in terms of where we believe or where we know, the Earth sits in the solar system, and the Sun sits at the center of the solar system, that was owned, that knowledge is owned within us by the people who said, I don't know.
If the Earth is the center of the solar system or not.
It doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.
There's a retrograde motion of Mars.
This Ptolemaic system is way complicated.
It seems kind of goofy to me. Maybe.
Maybe the Earth is not the center of the solar system.
Well, it says so in the Bible. The Earth is fixed and does not move.
Well, maybe that's an analogy for the moral certainty of Christendom.
I don't know. I don't know.
And you will very rarely hear me come to conclusions.
I don't have a lot of conclusions.
I have a lot of questions.
And I go where the evidence takes me.
But I've never said climate change is true or climate change is false.
I say, here are my questions. Here's my doubts.
I've never said, for sure, all IQ differences are genetic.
Of course not. I've never said one race is superior to another.
I've never said it. Because I don't know.
Well, I know that evolution has nothing to do with superiority or inferiority, but I don't know.
The meek shall inherit the earth.
The humble own the future.
People with the courage, the balls, the fortitude to speak honest statements of ignorance, they own the future.
Because where you're certain, you don't go anymore.
I don't take walking lessons every morning because I pretty much got that down.
Piano lessons, yes. Walking lessons, no.
Where there is certainty, there's nowhere to go.
And the future is the unknown.
The future is the unknown.
And therefore, those who openly and honestly admit their lack of knowledge about things, they own the future.
If there's to be a future.
I mean, if it's a dark age, whatever, it doesn't matter, right?
But the people who say all disparities in racial outcomes, economically speaking, or education, all disparities are due to white racism.
You don't know that!
And the science is against you.
Can you give up your superstition?
Can you give up your magical answer?
Can you give up your voodoo doll of whiteness?
and actually ask questions because you don't know you have a hypothesis that goes against the data but do you have the integrity and the honesty and the curiosity and the courage to say when you don't know something I don't know something disparities between male and female incomes It's due to sexism and patriarchy.
You don't know. I'm telling you, you don't know and the data goes against you.
Do you have the courage to cast aside the imaginary phallus of pseudo-answer?
Do you have the courage to step out of ideology and into the real world?
Into the world where we actually try to understand things rather than blame people for things they have not done?
Do you have the courage to stop believing what you have been told and stop believing that which is popular and start exploring what might be true?
Because if you don't, you're a cultist.
You're occult and a cult.
It's superstition.
It's blaming the thunder gods for lightning.
It's Primitive.
It's ignorant and prejudicial and hateful.
Blaming whites for racism, blaming males for sexism when there are far better explanations for discrepancies.
Not necessarily true, but certainly better in terms of empirically, biologically, physically validated.
Do you have the courage...
To speak the truth. And the first truth is, I don't know.
I don't know what causes all of the discrepancies between the races and the genders.
I don't know. I am not at all comfortable with the magical explanation of patriarchy and white racism.
I'm not. Just some basic facts.
If it's white racism, then why do East Asians do better?
Why do Nigerians do better?
Why? Why is it when Broward County has to throw out a whole bunch of arrests, is it mostly blacks and Hispanics?
IQ answers that.
White racism doesn't, because it doesn't answer why other racial groups do better, and other racial groups, even blacks and Hispanics, do better when their IQs happen to be higher.
I don't know all the variables.
But I have the humility to say the question remains unanswered.
We should start with the data and we should work from there.
People say it's upsetting and it's offensive.
Well, here's the problem.
It's kind of offensive and upsetting to be told that I'm racist for being white.
See? You don't get away with, well, it's upsetting to racial groups.
This race and IQ stuff.
Because then if you erase all of that stuff, then you end up with, whites are racist.
That's kind of upsetting too, I'm afraid.
You haven't really solved the problem.
In fact, you've pretended to solve the problem in accordance with the race and IQ data.
Well, you see, whites can handle being called racist.
But other groups can't handle IQ discrepancies.
Well, why?
Aren't you downgrading those other groups?
They can't handle the truth. But whites can handle philander?
Come on. You solve nothing.
You solve nothing. Made things worse.
Maybe because it's the point. The point of it is to provoke this kind of hatred.
So, as far as getting the truth across to people, why am I good at doing it?
Because I really care about the truth.
I really care about what is true.
We really care about what is true.
I don't...
It's not that I'm unaffected by what people consider acceptable or right or proper to talk about.
It's just that...
And I take this so seriously, I can't even express how seriously I take this.
If you claim to be a truth-teller, you kind of have to tell the truth.
I mean, I know this sounds kind of ridiculous.
But if you claim that you're interested in science and reason and evidence and data, you have an obligation, an unwritten contract with people who listen to you and read you.
You have a responsibility to tell the truth.
Gender disparities are due to sexism!
How do you know?
How do you know?
The data goes against you.
How do you know? Now, you can say, well, I just say that because...
Okay, then don't call yourself a truth-teller.
Just say, I repeat what is popular for shits, giggles, and shekels.
Okay? Don't claim to be a doctor if you're a snake oil salesman.
Don't claim to be a truth-teller if you conform to anti-scientific biases.
Don't claim to be interested in astronomy if you persecute Galileo.
Or science. Or facts.
If you really, really care about the truth, which means you care about the world, which means you care about the people in it, and there are very few people in the world who in the long run will not benefit from the truth.
If you have that passion and you organize everything you do to transmit the truth to the best of your ability, to the greatest of your integrity, With the most honor and honesty that you can muster and with genuine love for the truth and the people whose lives it will positively affect, more than that no man can do.
The rest, that's up to you.
Well, thanks everyone so much for your calls.
I really, really appreciate it.
It was a great and enjoyable show.
Thank you for listening and supporting at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
You can, of course, use the affiliate links, fdrurl.com forward slash Amazon.
Sign up for the newsletter at freedomainradio.com and follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.