4109 Replacing Democracy - Call In Show - May 30th, 2018
Question 1: [2:42] – “Over the years in my short lifetime, I have begun to see the truth in how the bigger a government gets, the more injustice and oppression occurs. I have put a lot of thought into ways in which we can decentralize national/federal governments and one of the solutions I keep coming back to is a form of direct democracy that uses our current IT technology in place of the ancient Greek forums to replace the executive branches of government. Bureaucratic institutions would obviously still need qualified individuals heading them, so for them I would propose breaking them down into 'crown corporations' that act independently with elected officials at the helm. What are your thoughts on a system like this?”Question 2: [32:10] – “I'm aware of the current situation of the world & the West in particular. Does peaceful parenting prepare children for a future that could very well be conflict ridden? I have some awareness of history and war, those involved were not raised with peaceful parenting, win or lose. I have read The Origins of War in Child Abuse by Lloyd DeMause and learned how a brutal upbringing can create an aggressive society. Could this potentially be an unfortunate advantage during wartime or times of widespread violence? The West has become weak & decadent, will peaceful parenting further worsen its prospect and make future generations less able to cope and excel during violent times? I see the value in peaceful parenting when the future is more predictably peaceful, but those raised with aggression may be more capable of handling violent trauma than those raised with peaceful parenting in violent times. Can children raised with peaceful parenting be readied for intense violence & conflict effectively?”Question 3: [1:00:16] – “Is authoritarianism somewhat of an inevitability? Authoritarianism is defined as ‘the enforcement or advocacy of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom.’ This does not explicitly state that said authority does not have to derive from the government. Certain dictates can be passed down and upheld through religion or culture in general or through other means. Even if we have a stateless society or a minarchist society at the very least, won't authoritarianism only manifest itself in other ways?”Question 4: [1:14:09] – “I am a 43-year-old married mother of a teenage girl on year away from high school graduation. I spent a majority of my life in a victim mentality which was lived out through complacency, harmful coping strategies and underachieving. I feel that I stuck in a pattern I cannot easily break bur desperately want to do so for my daughter’s sake. I fight the feeling that it’s too little to late. What your advice for affecting positive change later in life with older children. Is it even possible to make a difference so late in her teenage years?”Question 5: [2:15:13] – “I have recently departed a career with a very high salary as a result of the industries chosen direction to diversify their staff. As a byproduct, everything that I had built over my career had been dismantled and replaced with a newer liberal friendly culture in less than 5 years with the end result of me being pushed out and my team collapsing. Now I'm questioning the entire structure of the corporate world but more specifically; how can someone compete in this new business culture where women and "minorities" are given preferential treatment? It seems as though the corporate space is filled with incompetent leaders and workers that are incapable of doing the job that they were hired for. Leaving the majority of work on the plate of those that are competent and then punishing them for not meeting unrealistic expectations. Additionally, these workers can't be trained and drag the business further down, taking away any competitive edge that the business units originally had. Perhaps more importantly, is it more advantageous to civilization to have diversity over efficiency in business?”Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
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So, five callers tonight.
Some fast, some slow.
The first one is a man who wanted to know...
Why we can't use modern technology and aspects of the free market to substitute market efficiencies for current government programs and government policies.
And it is kind of an essential debate about ethics, which I push pretty hard on, but I think for the good.
The second caller is a little bit worried that in the West, as we become nicer to our children as peaceful parenting begins to spread, aren't we just raising a generation of kids who can't handle conflict And a potentially violent future?
Fine question. I guess we've all thought about that at one time or another.
The third caller wanted to know, it's the power vacuum argument, but he went deeper than that.
Is authoritarianism somewhat of inevitability?
Are we utopians in thinking that we can have a peaceful and free society?
The fourth caller is a mom, a woman, of course, and she wanted to know how she can help her teenage daughter, who's going a little bit off the rails at the moment, and I guess the answer that worked came out of left field for her, and it's something you really, really should listen to.
Now, the fifth caller has decided to quit an extraordinarily high-paying job career.
In fact, because he's getting sick and tired of diversity and political correctness in the workplace, and we had a good old conversation about that.
And given that we all work, I'm pretty sure you're going to want to listen to that one Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern are coming to Australia in July 2018 with events in Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, Sydney and Brisbane.
Tickets are available right now, including a special preview of Lauren Southern's new Farmlands documentary and rare VIP meet and greet.
Opportunities so you can catch us in Melbourne, Friday, July 20th.
In Perth, Saturday, July 22nd.
Adelaide, Thursday, July 26th.
Sydney, Saturday, July 28th.
And Brisbane, Sunday, July 29th.
So for more information, including the latest updates on Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern coming to Auckland, New Zealand, please go to www.axiomatic.events.
We are dying to meet you.
Please come out.
Let's have a fantastic evening of thought, engagement, arguments and conversation.
But let's go. Okay, up first we have Brayden.
Brayden wrote in and said, And one of the solutions I keep coming back to is a form of direct democracy that uses our current IT technology in place of the ancient Greek forums to replace the executive branches of government.
Bureaucratic institutions would obviously still need qualified individuals heading them, so for them I would propose breaking them down into crown corporations that act independently with elected officials at the helm.
I am curious as to what your thoughts would be on a system like this.
That's from Brayden. Hey Brayden, how you doing?
Not too bad. How are you, Stefan?
I'm well, I'm well, thank you.
Why do you think...
This system would be immune to corruption and the aggregation of power into the oligarchical elite situation.
Because the system essentially works like a free market economy for a political structure, essentially.
It would be self-regulating.
Go on. So, most people are good and they don't really want to do bad things.
And when you have people actually making the decisions directly for their government, instead of having a representative in place who could be corrupted by bribes or some sort of systemic loophole, you can...
People will change the way they look at things.
They'll have to actually start investing time into becoming more politically aware so that their decisions that they're making are grounded and not going to destroy their country that they're voting for.
They'd like it It removes a translation error that can happen with the will of the people.
You know what I mean? But why not just make it free market institutions?
Why even call it a government?
What do you mean? Well, you say that these function as free market institutions.
Why not just make them free market institutions?
You know, like originally manual labor was largely done by slaves and then they turned it into the free market and society got...
Well, modernity, it got progress.
So why not just take the functions of government and turn them over to the free market and have it work that way?
Well, I mean, that's essentially the system that I'm advocating for.
Like, the bureaucracies would basically operate like...
Companies, except the leaders in them, would be elected on terms of some sort, you know, maybe two years, three years.
I haven't really worked out the finer details.
No, but okay, so give me an example of an existing government function and how it would look in this system.
For example, maybe...
Say socialized healthcare, for example.
It's a very large and festering kind of system right now because they're relying on taxpayers' money and the people that are in charge have no incentive really to make the system more efficient.
These crown corporations where like the leaders that are elected have some sort of financial incentive to make the system operate better.
It's still going to be cheaper in the long run if this person's given, you know, an extra $200,000 a year for doing really well in trimming the fat within those organizations.
Oh, but they'll just lie. They'll just say we're trimming the fat.
Like, I mean, you saw this Broward County thing, right?
The Nicholas Cruz who had dozens and dozens of interactions with disciplinary agents of some kind or another.
And they said, oh, you know, if you have fewer blacks and Hispanics being put into sort of what they call the school-to-prison pipeline, then you're going to end up with extra money, right?
So you say, oh, well, now there's a financial incentive.
But all they did was they just...
Stopped arresting blacks and Hispanics and said, oh, look, progress.
And so they just lied, right?
That is true. I think that by having this system like this, though, with the voters voting directly, it's...
In their interest to actually pay more attention because their votes are what are kind of keeping that system going along.
So if they're misrepresenting how efficient the system is, the taxpayers will eventually have to pay the bill.
And at that point...
Just changed and stopped arresting kids and therefore they said, look, our numbers are getting better.
And you see this all over the place.
When teachers are paid to have better marks among their students, then a lot of times the teachers will simply teach the test or will actually, as I think happened in Atlanta, in a wide variety of cases, they just change the answers.
They just fraud and what do you do?
I'm just curious, what's the resistance of just turning everything over to the free market?
Those are systemic problems, though, that happen there.
Because, you know, like you're...
Wait, systemic is not...
doesn't add anything to the argument.
What do you mean? Like the word systemic doesn't explain anything to me, which may be because I'm missing the point, but I don't know what that means.
Oh, well, like these...
Sorry.
With Broward County...
I would say that the – yeah, you kind of got me there.
No, like I'm just – what's the barrier to just say, okay, well, let's just have the free market run healthcare and let's just have the free market run the schools and people can compete with each other to find the very best possible solution to provide excellent quality at reasonable prices and just let – I mean we have this giant mechanism called the free market that has been validated at every single place that it's been tried.
And we have this other mechanism called violence, coerciveness, brutality, statism, which fails every single time it is tried.
And I'm just wondering why you can't let go of the status thing and just say, yeah, the free market should handle this stuff.
The free market should handle medicine and education and defense and arbitration and legality.
And I mean, you have this great jetpack and you have this giant lead balloon and you keep saying, okay, well, maybe we can have some jetpack, but for sure we've got to have the giant lead balloon.
I'm like, why? Well, for a lot of those bureaucratic institutions that I was talking about, the private sector should be able to make companies that compete with them directly and that creates like a system of accountability.
Okay, so if they're just part of the free market, then forget about democracy and modern technology and governments and statism.
And just have voluntarism or anarchism or anarcho-capitalism.
Like if you're going to say, well, they're going to function exactly as companies in the free market.
Okay, I agree with you. Then let's just have these companies in the free market and not pretend to call it a government.
Well, the system that I'm advocating for is like a really modular type government setup where if the free market is doing it better than the government, then the direct – like the voter class or whatever in the government would basically abolish it.
Like there would be no need for it. They would just keep de-budgetizing them.
No, no. I mean that's not how governments work, Brayden.
What governments work – the way the governments work – Is that if something is out-competing the government, the government will regulate it, destroy it, undermine it, and eventually shut it down.
Oh, a private school is doing really well?
Ah, well, now you see you have to have government-licensed educators in there, and you have to follow the government curriculum, and you have to do this.
They just expand their own regulations to incorporate whatever the free market is doing to destroy it.
And then they say, see, the free market isn't that efficient.
Well, that's what representative governments are doing.
But with direct democracy, the people would be more – there's more of an incentive.
Like their children are the ones that are going to these schools.
No, that's true now.
That's true now and you can't change it.
I don't know. Again, I'm just curious, since you value free markets so much and you are very concerned about a monopoly on the initiation of the use of force, what's wrong with just letting go?
You know, just let it go, right?
Just let it go. Let it go and say, yeah, the market can solve all these problems.
Or if it can't, these problems can't be solved.
Yes. But like our system, you can't change everything all at once or it'll completely destabilize something.
That's not an argument. You don't know what happens when people become free.
You don't know what happens when… Free and voluntary interactions displace coercive relationships.
You don't know. And so saying, well, it's going to have this effect or this, you have no idea.
And nobody does. This is why central planning doesn't work.
The whole point is to have a free society to replace violence with voluntarism as much as humanly possible.
And trying to imagine that you or I or anyone can even possibly predict the outcome of that is kind of a silly vanity.
You don't know what happens when people are going to become free.
It might be the most wonderful thing ever.
Yeah. I hope it's the most wonderful thing ever.
That's what I want.
I don't know. I think that using our current IT platforms, I think that by getting rid of representative government, you won't have problems as much with bribing taking place.
Will the government have the power to take from some people and give to others?
No. So then it's, the government has no power of taxation, is that right?
Well, I mean, you do need like some government services.
Why? What do you mean, why?
Why? Well, I mean...
I mean, do you need the government to provide these services?
That's my question. Give me an example.
Some of them... An example for...
You say that you need government services or you need the government to provide certain services.
Which services? Give me one example of a service.
Well, typically water and sewer is usually handled by municipal governments.
And why do you need the governments to do that?
Usually because the amount of investment required versus like what you get back out of the revenue from it.
It usually runs at a loss.
Hang on.
So you're saying that it's more expensive than it's being charged for?
Well, yeah.
So what happens in the free market if people desperately need a service and they have to pay more?
Well, they pay more. They pay more.
So what you're saying right now is that governments undercharge for the service they're providing, thus creating massive intergenerational debt that destroys the society and the economy.
I don't think that's a very productive solution, do you?
No. Okay, so forget about that.
What else? Okay, so policing would probably be something that should be government-controlled.
Why? Why? Well, when...
Okay, so policing...
How would you make policing a profitable business as a private entity?
Do you have any idea that the majority of security and protection is provided in the free market rather than...
By the government. In other words, there are more security guards and other type of related people than there are police.
Well, yeah, I guess.
Like mall security and industrial security officers and stuff.
Yeah, I guess there would be more of them.
Right. So already, people are paying for police.
And what do the police do? Well, the police generally don't enforce the laws that are inconvenient for the leaders to enforce, such as, I don't know, let's say, border security, right?
They don't. We're good to go.
Threaten her with jail for two years and all that kind of stuff.
It's just a crotch. Yeah, I mean, so who are these great protectors of police?
You know, like, so before I married my wife, she lent me a vacuum cleaner.
And I was returning it to her and I had my hands were really, really full and I left my vacuum, I left her vacuum cleaner by...
The elevator, I went to the car with a bunch of boxes, came back literally like 90 seconds later, but someone had grabbed it, right?
So I called the police and they said, do you have the number associated with this?
I don't know. I can ask my girlfriend.
And he's like, oh, well, I guess it just got legs up and walked away.
And I'm like, can you do anything about it?
No, not really. Okay, great.
Glad I've been paying taxes for all these years so you don't go and knock on everyone's door and say, do you have this?
Vacuum cleaner. So what I did was I put a note, I got a note together, and I put the note in the lobby that said, if you took this vacuum cleaner, I didn't have a picture of it, but if you took this vacuum cleaner from the elevator, I'd really like it if you returned it to this particular apartment.
And then the next day, somebody had, I guess they thought it was being thrown out, they, I don't know who it was, but they left the vacuum cleaner in front of my apartment.
And that is how it works.
I know a friend, a guy I worked with, his brother, made it big.
He was a doctor, and he made some good coin.
And he bought a Porsche Boxster, which is a really snazzy, looks kind of like a hemorrhoid for middle-aged men on wheels.
It's a low-end Porsche.
Yeah, it's a pretty snazzy little car.
And it had a GPS tracker and this and that, and the car got stolen.
And so the guy called the police and he's like, you know, you gotta get my car.
And they're like, well, you don't know where it is.
And he logs onto his website and it's like, the car is right in this spot, right in this place.
I can tell you exactly down to the address, down to the part of the building that the car is in.
You gotta go right now because it's probably a chop shop.
They gotta slice and dice it up and sell it for parts.
And they're like, meh, you know, we really don't do that.
What do you do every time I go three kilometers over the speed limit?
Because that makes them money, right?
But they don't want to go into a chop shop where there might be violent people.
That's no fun. So, you know, this guy's on the phone with the cops saying, somebody stole my car.
I know exactly where it is.
And they're like, yeah, we really can't get involved in this.
It's like you have one job, which is to protect the population, or heaven forbid, you get something wrong on your tax return, right?
So, You know, if you don't pay up, man, they're coming over right away.
Don't pay your property taxes there.
So the idea that the police are there to resolve disputes and deal with, you know, like protect people's property, come on.
I mean, this is only said by people who've never called the cops and tried to get them to do something useful.
Well, I went through police foundation.
I know that not all of them, there are some good ones, but like, you know, not all of them are good.
No, but even if there are good ones, there's still a whole system.
There's still a whole system where you, you know, it's really hard to fire people and, you know, there's a lot of cover-up for cops.
Sure, there are some good cops, no question, but I don't care about the individuals.
I don't want a system where I have to I have to sort of pray for the benevolence of each individual within their system.
I want a system where I can rely on freedom and voluntarism and all that kind of stuff.
So, like, emphasizing, like, citizens' arrests and having a Second Amendment would be pretty important to a system of government like this, then?
But there would have to be repercussions for unjustified citizens' arrests.
The people who are actually doing the citizens' arrests, they'd have to be in the know of the law so that when they're doing it, they're not breaching rights and stuff.
Well, but see, again, why do you want any of this stuff?
Well, I mean, communities need to be policed.
But that's my whole point.
They're not being policed at the moment.
I'll agree with you on that to a certain extent, yeah.
So why not just have the free...
I mean, the free market provides the majority of protection in society at the moment.
The free market has provided policing services in the past.
So I guess that's my question, is that when it comes to something like, let's look at the institution of slavery, would you say that the institution of slavery could be modified in order to be good?
Or do you think that the institution of slavery is foundationally immoral and just needs to be ended?
It's foundationally immoral and it just needs to be ended.
And why is it foundationally immoral?
Because we are intelligent enough to build machines to replace things like slave labor.
Wait, wait, wait. Hang on, hang on.
That is a terrible moral argument.
That is a terrible – so if we weren't smart enough, then it would be morally okay to have slaves?
And also until you end slavery, which has to be for some other reason, you don't find out how smart you are in replacing labor, right?
Right. Yes.
Yeah, you're right. Okay. So why is slavery foundation immoral?
I didn't frame that very good.
It's immoral to own people.
People like we're born...
With like a requirement to be free and it's just unnatural to live.
None of those are good moral arguments.
It's immoral because it's the initiation of the use of force and it's the taking of somebody else's liberty or property without recompense, right?
Which can't be universalized and therefore it can't be moral, right?
You can't divide human beings into two categories of people who have self-ownership and people who can be owned.
That's irrational. It's contradictory.
So the initiation of the use of force and the taking of people's property without their permission against their will, using force, right?
I mean, if the slave tried to get away, then the slave would be attacked, right?
The slave would be beaten. The slave could be hobbled or have his Achilles tendon sliced so that he couldn't run and so on.
So it required the initiation of the use of force to gain and to keep slaves, and it took their property without their permission, right?
Yes. Okay. So as far as taking people's property without their permission, 100% of that is slavery, although slaves actually only paid about maybe 20% in terms of tax because they got a lot of, quote, free stuff. Didn't make it moral.
I'm just saying that their actual tax, like how much was taken from them, was relatively low compared to modern times.
So if taking people's property without their permission is immoral, then taxation is immoral.
And then having the social agency called the state with the legal rights obligation, in fact, to initiate the use of force against citizens is immoral.
And I guess I'm just wondering why you're trying to save slavery rather than just saying it's got to go.
I'm not trying to save slavery.
I'm trying to – like there has to be some sort of communal – System working...
If everyone was operating...
You got me.
No, that's good. Listen, I appreciate that.
And I'm asking you, obviously, very tough questions.
And I appreciate you pushing back and I appreciate you sharing your resistance to it.
Listen, I completely understand.
I mean, it's an annoying thing to say, but I was there for many years where I'm like, we've got to find, okay, police, law courts, military, maybe jails.
Okay. But the problem is you're trying to find some magic set of syllables that can turn violence into virtue.
Okay, well, if we have modern IT infrastructure, and if there's direct democracy, and if this is like, no, but the problem with the state is that it initiates the use of force.
And therefore, it is immoral.
So you're saying that representative government would be fine if it was illegal for the government to exert any kind of forced wealth redistribution, like taxation and whatnot?
Because there'd be no incentive for the representatives to actually...
If the government cannot initiate the use of force, it's not the government.
It's just, it's not there.
It's like saying, okay, so the slave owner is not allowed to use any compulsion to keep the slave there.
It's like, okay, then it's not slavery anymore, right?
Well, who pays the representative in government then?
That money has to come from somewhere.
You're still missing the point.
If the government is the same as another corporation or another business or whatever you want to call it, it wouldn't be a corporation in a free society, corporations are statist devices.
If the initiation of the use of force is banned universally in a society, there can be no such thing as what we now call the state.
In the same way as if human beings are no longer allowed to own other human beings, then there's no such thing as the institution of slavery.
Well, in order for a system like that to work, you would need basically citizen militias again in order to defend the country, which I'm not against.
I actually really like Israeli system.
First of all, Western countries are not being protected at the moment.
In fact, quite the opposite is happening, which is Western countries are within a generation or two of ceasing to exist in their current form.
Yes. Because people are being invited in, who not only do not share the values, but are opposed to the values.
Not all of them, but a lot of them are opposed to the values of the West.
And Westerners, native Westerners, are being forced to pay for their own replacement.
So the idea that, well, you know, maybe it would have to be different than what it is, it's like, bloody hope so.
Bloody hope so. And secondly, This is part of the vanity.
And I'm not saying you're vain.
I'm just saying it is vain to say, well, if the government doesn't run something like defense, national defense or whatever you want to call it, well, then it has to be this.
It's like, you don't know. I don't know.
I don't know how it would work.
That's the whole point. Nobody knows how it would work.
Like when you get rid of slavery, how are the crops going to be picked in 50 years?
Nobody knows. That's the whole point.
You don't know? I don't know.
So saying, well, if we get rid of this, the consequences will be this.
You can't possibly know that.
Or if you can see that far into the future, then pull a George Soros, get massive amounts of money and start willing your way to a different world.
Hopefully a better one instead of Soros.
Yeah, I know. His open society foundation should not – like where he's sending his money, like he should be in trouble for that.
Well, it's not an open society program because he's not working to open up the borders of Saudi Arabia or Mozambique or Thailand.
Well, Thailand maybe a little, but no, it's just open up the borders of what are still somewhat called white countries.
It's nothing to do with – Globalism is a mistake.
People say globalism all the time.
It's a completely incorrect way of phrasing it.
It is selling off the value of somewhat white countries in a one-way Right.
From non-white countries to white countries.
I mean, just look at the demographics, the footprints, right?
It's not like they're saying, okay, well, a lot of people from Africa come to the West, but it's okay because a lot of people from the West are going to go to Saudi Arabia and everyone's going...
It's not that. It doesn't work there.
It's not globalism at all.
No, it's a one-way kind of migration pattern.
Yeah, it's a one-way movement with very specific design.
The irony behind the Open Society Foundation is it funds groups that are avowedly against open societies, like they're actually kind of ethnically centric.
Or, you know, they fund groups that are specifically against freedom of speech, right?
I mean, you try and give a speech on American campus and you'll have Weapons and fire alarms and, you know, interruptions and bullhorns and whistles and, you know, there could be riots, right?
So it's not... No, it's not an open society.
It is... That there can be no borders for Western countries.
That's the only – because nobody's focusing on Saudi Arabia and saying, well, you just got to open your borders.
You got a million tents that you can house people.
They're air-conditioned and so on.
No, it's nothing. Nobody's told to Turkey.
You got to open your border. I mean, it's – no, it's – so the idea that, well, you know, without the government, who will protect us?
Oh, my gosh. The only hope, I think, we have is a diminished role in government to the point of zero eventually.
If you're going to have representative-based government, though, if you're not paying them to be representatives, that makes them, I think, more susceptible to bribes and stuff because they're not really- Why are you still talking about government representatives?
I don't understand. We've got this whole conversation.
I mean, you can disagree with me, but openly, don't just slip right back into the government groove after I've just made a pretty passionate case about it all.
No, like, I get your position.
Like, you're more of, like, in the anarchy, like, decentralized.
No, see, you're trying to give me a label rather than respond to my arguments, which is kind of annoying.
Like saying, oh, well, Steph, I've got a label for you.
And that's my response.
It's like, that label doesn't help.
I'm making arguments. Putting a label on them is not responding to the argument.
So my arguments are, we're not being protected at the moment.
The free market has been proven effective and efficient in everything it's been applied to.
And we're actually being acted against by our own governments in many ways these days.
Certainly in Europe, that would be the case very vividly.
And that the violation of the non-aggression principle is immoral, and that's what the government does.
So this is just a sampling of my arguments.
Now you can...
Say, I gotta process these arguments, you can find the logical flaws in my arguments, you can rebut them with reason and evidence, but just putting a label on them is just a waste of time.
Oh, so this is an X position.
And also calling it a position is not an argument.
I'm making a case And it's like, you know, if I'm the prosecution and you're the defense and I say, here's the smoking gun and here's the video camera of your client committing the murder and someone say, ah, well, you're just providing the prosecution's case.
It's like, yes, I am. Do you want to rebut anything or no?
Um, was that like you're asking me if I want to rebut anything?
Yeah. Um, no.
Uh, like I- Good. Okay.
Well, then what we'll do, have them all over and I've got free books, Practical Anarchy, Everyday Anarchy, which will- Answer some of these questions, I hope.
But if you've got new arguments from me and you don't have any rebuttals right now, then have them all over them.
And if you do find holes or contradictions in the arguments, then please feel free to call back and we'll go over them further.
But you've made your case, I've made my case.
And if you don't have any rebuttals at the moment, with great thanks and appreciation for the call, I will move on to the next caller.
Thank you, Stefan. Alright, up next we have Philippe.
He wrote in and said, I'm aware of the current situation in the world and the West in particular.
Does peaceful parenting prepare children for a future that could very well be conflict-ridden?
I have some awareness of history and war.
Those involved were not raised with peaceful parenting, win or lose.
I have read Lloyd DeMoss' The Origins of War and Child Abuse and learned how brutal an upbringing can create an aggressive society.
Could this potentially be an unfortunate advantage during wartime or times of widespread violence?
The West has become weak and decadent.
Will peaceful parenting further worsen its prospect and make future generations less able to cope and excel during violent times?
I see the value in peaceful parenting when the future is more predictably peaceful, but those raised with aggression may be more capable of handling violent trauma than those raised with peaceful parenting in violent times.
Can children raised with peaceful parenting be readied for intense violence and conflict effectively?
That's from Philippe. Hi Philippe, how's it going?
Good, how you doing? I'm well.
So is your argument that we should abuse our children because the world might become violent?
No, that's not my argument.
I actually kind of want it to not be true.
But that is your argument though, right?
Or at least that's your concern, right?
Yeah, concern would be a better word, I guess.
Yeah, I mean... I'll say the same as I said to the last caller.
I don't know what the consequences of peaceful parenting are, and I don't care.
I'm not going to initiate the use of force against my child.
I'm going to act on principle.
Because for me, trying to guess, well, what's the world going to be like in 15 or 20 years?
And what's the level of violence going to be?
And is peaceful parenting going to do this?
You understand? You just paralyze yourself.
Because no one can possibly know these things.
So I act on principle, not on...
Fear of consequences or projection of what may or may not happen because there's no way to know.
Because if you get enough people to peacefully parent their children, you're actually changing the future.
And the idea that I would abuse my child in order to make that child meaner, in case the world turns violent, would be to say that there's no use for philosophy, there's no use for morals, there's no use for ethics and the non-aggression principle.
Is complete bullshit. And I can't make that case rationally, so I can't make that case.
Hmm. Okay.
I see what you're saying.
I'm just kind of seeing it from more of a...
And again, I'm not trying to justify hitting your children so that they can successfully fight a war or something like that.
But you just like...
How to put this?
Yes, the principle of not doing it simply because it's wrong.
I understand that. But I wonder if...
Well, I guess I would just be repeating my own question.
Yeah. I guess it's not like wanting a specific outcome.
So trying to aim towards that, like trying to build a successful warrior or something like that.
So therefore, you hate your kids because that's what successful warrior cultures in the past did or anything like that.
It's just more like, well, we can look at certain groups right now that the West may come into conflict with, whether it be through war or just through violent conflicts and stuff like that.
It's, say, Islam-Muslim cultures and stuff like that.
And it's pretty obvious that a lot of those cultures aren't very kind to their children, I would say.
And I just wonder if it would make the West weaker.
In conflict. I know that it's not exactly a philosophical question.
I guess it's more of just a thought.
Because in the short term, when problems were to arise, or let's just say now in Europe, where there are current problems in certain areas of Europe, they're not going to suddenly change to peaceful parenting, unfortunately.
And the problem is at their doorstep.
See what I'm saying? So do you think that there would be a case to be made for Swedish parents to, say, beat their children, abuse their children, so their children would grow up more full of anger and hostility and therefore be able to fight in the potential civil war?
Yeah, it's definitely not something that you can, like, Convince someone to do.
I understand that. No, no, no.
Listen, it's a perfectly respectable hypothesis.
I'm not saying, well, I don't mean to mock your position.
I'm trying to sort of clarify it.
That you have groups within the world who raise their children brutally, and then you have, I think, according to your theory in the West, do you feel that there's a lot of peaceful parenting in the West?
Is that a lot of good parenting in the West?
Comparatively, yes, but no, there's not a lot of peaceful parenting in the West.
I think that Western parenting is some of the worst parenting that goes on in the world at the moment.
Yeah, I can see what you mean by that.
Because the worst thing to happen to children is indifference and abandonment.
And we know this in general because children would rather act out and cause their parents problems than be ignored.
Children would rather be whipping boys than ignored, because at least whipping boys have some value to the parents who will be kept around as poison containers.
The terrible situation with children in the West is a combination of father absence and maternal abandonment.
And the maternal abandonment can be It's been three weeks since I had my episiotomy.
I'm putting my baby in daycare.
I'm going to pump my breast milk into a robot machine for it to be fed by a stranger in between transferring bacteria from other baby's diapers to my child because they're pooping every hour or whatever.
The problem with parenting in the West is a combination of I think the low testosterone that comes from being raised in almost a pure matriarchy for so many children, particularly black children, raised in an almost pure matriarchy insofar as it's not just their own moms who are most likely unmarried, 77% these days of black kids born out of wedlock.
It's not just their own moms who aren't married, but their mom's moms who aren't married.
Their mom's sisters who aren't married.
Their aunts, their grandmothers are not married.
No men around other than maybe a trashy wannabe thug who drifts through the welfare farm from time to time.
And then they go to school where, because of affirmative action and because of preferential hiring policies for women, female, female, female, female, female, female authority, probably the vast majority all the way through their childhood.
And we know statistically that female teachers have sexist hostility and sometimes downright hatred for boys, We know that boys are marked down by female teachers.
And we know that masculinity as a whole is called toxic.
There's rape culture lies, there's male privilege lies, and all this kind of stuff.
Sorry, I just wanted to correct you.
The 77% is for black families that have not immigrated from other cultures.
Other cultures, the number is lower, at least for a while, until they get a good old dose of American culture.
Boys grow up without men, without role models, without any respect for masculinity.
In fact, they grow up in an environment of contempt towards masculinity.
Now, say what you like about other cultures.
They invested their children.
They train their children.
They educate their children.
They instill values in their children.
However, I may not agree with some of those values.
They're still pouring a huge amount of time, effort, and energy into those children.
And the moms generally stay home.
And the children bond with the moms and the values are transmitted through the moms, but they don't dump their kids in a daycare and let them be raised by the state.
They don't dump their kids into amoral institutions where drag queens read stories to kids four or five years old.
They don't end up with rampant and creepy sex education in primary school.
This is not happening. They don't turn their children over To collectivist monsters and programmers of human disintegration.
So the idea that, well, you know, we're just so nice to our children in the West.
You know, there are other cultures, I think, in particular Islamic cultures, where usury, lending money for interest, is banned, if not frowned upon deeply.
So the idea of there being, you know, massive intergenerational debts and hundreds of trillions of dollars of unfunded liabilities would be tougher to justify according to the theology, right?
And so the idea that, well, you see, we in the West, we're just good parents and other cultures and countries are bad parents.
Well, let's just say there are arguments against that reductionist view and hurting our children.
Well, our children are being hurt.
Our children are being hurt by father absence.
Our children are being hurt by horrifying, amoral schools.
I mean, you come from a culture.
You come from a culture where children are recognized as the essential links on the chain for cultural and religious continuity.
And you look at Western schools, and you read the curriculum of Western schools, and you look at the content of Western higher education.
The idea that other cultures want to assimilate to this relativistic, subjectivist nihilism, this Marxism, this hysteria, this...
I mean, Western culture, you can't assimilate to it without being suicidal.
Because it is on a suicidal course at the moment.
It is full-on seppuku of 3,000 years of history.
And so I would not find it a very compelling case to say, well, we treat our kids well.
We treat our kids as collateral.
We treat our kids as assets.
We treat our kids as disposable.
And, you know, because all these people, well, you know, it takes a two-parent family to raise kids these days.
No, it doesn't.
You know, it takes a two-parent family if you're kind of greedy or if you want the status of both working or because the woman feels like, well, I don't want to say that I'm a stay-at-home mom because then the other women will look down on me and think that I'm dumb.
And it's like, because we all know.
Somebody sent me this message just the other day.
Said, yeah, we did the math, you know, to take our two kids, put them into daycare, need a second car, going to eat out more and not going to have any time to do our chores.
We might even need maids. It is just no way to justify it.
The wife going out to work.
It's like, yeah, of course.
Of course, the money that the wife pulls in after taxes generally goes on childcare and having a second car and more wardrobe and more laundry and more gas and more insurance and, you know, all this kind of stuff, right?
I mean, it's ridiculous.
So, I'm not positive at all that the West is the paragon of parenting and all the other cultures are just terrible.
I don't agree, you understand, with a lot of the practices.
In fact, I very vehemently disagree.
But they do invest in their children.
They do transmit values to those children, and they recoil from the empty, greedy, materialistic boomer nihilism that has infected the West.
Yeah, I definitely don't think that...
I wasn't trying to say that we...
I definitely don't think that we have good parenting in the West at all.
But I guess I wasn't thinking of it from the instilling culture within your children and lessons and that kind of perspective.
I guess I was just thinking of it from more of just the straight up potential for violence in the future point of view and just like violence for violence.
Kind of like seeing their culture of how they discipline their children versus ours and what that could lead to.
I definitely wasn't thinking about it from the, well, they do have some good aspects to their parenting.
And I wouldn't be surprised if they did, like the things that you mentioned.
And again, I don't think that we have perfect parenting by any means.
And especially, I didn't think about how there's basically no male influence anyway.
So, I mean, a child with a good male influence, and let alone a male influence at all, who is peacefully raised, even if they've never seen any kind of violence or trauma in their life, just having a male influence is a...
Not being raised with a father, in general, is traumatic.
Hmm. Okay.
Yeah, I guess it would be.
In a way, well, from how unnatural it would be compared to what the standard should be for a child, yeah, I could see how that would be traumatic.
Well, so the cultural continuity can only occur if moms stay home.
Which is why when you want to destroy a culture, you convince women to abandon their children.
You convince women to turn their children over to daycare workers who often come from different cultures, different languages, different histories.
Cultural continuity transmits itself primarily through women.
Because women teach the values to the babies and to the toddlers and to the young kids.
And then in general, certainly in Europe, there are places where it's like six or seven or maybe even eight before the kids go to school.
So the cultural values are transmitted through women.
So if you want to destroy a culture, you convince the women that staying home, you see, and raising children Is dumb, stupid, embarrassing bovine work.
And any woman worth her salt, any woman with half a brain, would be so mindlessly bored by the ridiculously stupid, dumbass task of running around after toddlers and wiping their noses and wiping their asses and making them sandwiches and doing the laundry and cleaning and cooking and cleaning and cooking.
No woman would want to do that unless she's completely retarded.
And if you can convince women of that, then women will hand their children over to strangers, And the women will go off to work, and the women won't really make any money, because the money all goes into taxes to pay for all of the other garbage that the voters want.
And the cultures that are flourishing, the cultures that are succeeding, the cultures that are spreading are the cultures where the women stay home with the children!
Right? Yeah.
And so, that's how culture is not magic.
Culture is not in the air.
Values don't just float around like dust particles or, I don't know, condom fragments on Billy Idol's futon.
You know, culture is something that has to be verbally transmitted and reinforced over and over and over again by moms with kids at home.
That's how it works.
You dump your kids into daycare, your culture is fucking dead.
You dump your kids into government schools, these days in particular, your culture is dead.
So to murder a culture, you separate the children from their mothers.
Now, if you say, we're going to come over, the government's going to come over and take your children, well, people get kind of mad at that and they push back and it's horrifying.
So you don't do it that way.
What you do is you endlessly program the women into believing that careers are wonderful and motherhood is for idiots.
And then the women believe this.
Off they go to work and the culture that takes you thousands of years to build up It's almost not even wrong when some people say that the Western world has no culture, when you put it like that, you know?
Well, no. The Western culture has a suicidal culture, in that all other cultures are valuable and Western culture is terrible.
Western culture has been turned against itself.
Because it's profitable for the elites to turn Western culture against itself, because the elites always want to have something to sell to someone, right?
The king always has to be able to give you a present, a gift, even if that gift is simply the continuance of your own life.
Otherwise, why would you obey the king?
So the elites always have to give something away.
And as the West has gotten richer, they have less and less need for the elites.
They have less and less need for people to give them stuff, right?
Because the income is so huge.
And so now, The elites are giving away citizenship.
They're giving away access to Western countries.
And that is the gift that they're giving to the entire world.
They don't have that much left to offer the native population.
So now they're selling the wealth of the native population to the world as a whole.
And now, oh look, everyone needs them.
Everybody wants them. They're great.
They have people singing their praises and so on.
So the Western culture as it stands...
It's toxic and suicidal.
And then we say, I wonder why people don't want to integrate.
I don't want to integrate.
Are you kidding me? I don't want to integrate.
So this is why, I mean- I don't think I ever have.
Yeah, this is why you have to keep your kids away from all this garbage.
You simply have to. It's an environmental toxin.
Yeah. The solution is not harsher parenting.
The solution is actual parenting.
Where you stay home and you teach your children rational, virtuous, objective values.
And if you're not willing to do that, there's nothing to save.
There's nothing to save.
It's like reputation.
You can spend 40 years bringing it up and you can destroy it in 5 minutes.
It's a culture. You can spend thousands of years building it up and it can be destroyed in one generation.
Just convince the women that freedom and independence and empowerment and femininity and feminism, well, that's just...
Sitting in some stupid, veal-fattening cubicle pen under fluorescent lights answering calls from angry people.
Oh, now that's what I call being empowered.
To hell with staying home and raising your children and transmitting the Western values that flourished and protected you for thousands of years?
Forget about pouring that into the minds of your children.
No! You got a career!
You got to get going on, honey!
You gotta go out and make some money.
You gotta look sharp in a charcoal little pipe stand dress.
You gotta dress nice.
You gotta be snappy.
You gotta do all these cool things.
You gotta commute!
That's empowerment, baby!
Your kids can be raised by Jamaican nannies.
Your kids can be raised by minimum wage daycare workers who can't tell your children apart and might even hate your entire culture.
Now, the people down the road, people down the road, see what they're doing is they're staying home and they're reading their holy books to their kids and they're reinforcing those values to those kids and they're taking their kids to their churches and they're taking their kids to their madrasas and they're taking their kids to their synagogues and they're taking their kids to make sure that the kids get the values and understand the values and they punish deviations and they reward compliance.
And they say to your kids, well, you've hit puberty.
You've got to cover your hair now because that's what we do.
And you've got to do this. You've got to wear your head in a bun.
You've got to have a ceremonial dagger.
You've got to remember who you are always.
You've got to be tied to your ancestors.
You've got to have the strength of your culture.
Whereas we're like, I don't know.
Maybe I'll be home 7, 7.30, kids.
Just, you know, switch on the Xbox and microwave yourself a frozen pizza.
Of course we know who's going to win.
I mean, there's no question.
That's how you destroy a culture.
That's what feminism is all about.
It blows my mind.
I've known women in my life to where they have a baby and they've stayed with a baby for the first six months or something, but then they want a job really bad.
And apparently going out and answering phones for eight hours a day while your kid's in daycare and you're working just so you can pay the daycare cost and then coming home and basically doing it for absolutely no reason is apparently more fulfilling than taking care of your child.
It makes absolutely no sense to me.
No, it makes no sense. I remember once going for a test drive in a car and the woman who was trying to sell me the car We're so distracted, it was ridiculous.
I mean, I could tell. She was like so distracted.
And this was probably about 7 o'clock at night, so I didn't really think about it hugely at the time.
But in hindsight, she must have had a baby at home.
And how did I know that? Because she was lactating.
No, so we hit the brakes in the car, and the brakes gave a squeal that sounded like a baby's cry, and she started to lactate.
And I'm like, we got to go.
Like, I'm not buying this car.
I mean, this is go home and feed your baby.
That's what you bought. No, I got to sell this car.
That's going to be fulfilling. That explains the stains on the seat, though, right?
I thought it was Billy Idol's car.
I don't know why I'm begging on Billy these days.
But no, I mean, it's terrible.
You know, I knew a woman. I knew a woman who became a wife.
I knew a woman who felt so guilty about putting her kids in daycare and having her kids raised by a nanny that after about four or five years of this, she's like, I feel so bad.
I'm going to stay home.
I've got to stay home.
I've got to stay home with my kids, right?
And you know what she said to me next time I met her?
And I said, how's it going? How's it going?
She said, it's weird.
There's no difference. There's no difference if I stay home or I go to work.
My kids don't really talk to me that much.
They spend a lot of time on electronics.
They play outside.
It's like I'm there but not there.
And it's like, well, yeah, because they have no bond with you because you abandoned them to daycares and nannies.
So, of course, it's not going to be like, well, I'm staying home now.
I'm going to fix it all.
You can't. You missed the window, man.
You missed the window of bonding.
And what values are they going to get?
What values? Well, in the absence of values, we revert to the animal.
In the absence of a soul or a spirit or a philosophy, we revert to the animal, which is why you see conformity, promiscuity, drugs, sex, just, you know, the tickling of nerve endings for the sake of transitory pleasure.
Well, that's what animals do. Goldfish don't have any particular philosophy, so they just eat until their stomachs explode, right?
I mean, so of course you're going to go to hedonism in the absence of philosophy.
And that's what happens.
It's why we have this horrifyingly hedonistic culture.
And not that physical pleasure is bad.
I mean, I'm not trying anything like that.
It's just that if you have one culture that never thinks at all about sacrifice, and you have another culture that sacrifices in order to instill its values in its children, well, you either separate them or one wins and the other loses.
Yeah, and I don't think the separation thing is going to happen.
No, no, no. That's, you know, you can put food coloring into the water pretty easily.
Taking it out is impossible.
Or even if separation did occur, I don't think it'd be very pretty.
And I don't think that, like you said, I don't think we even are organized enough as a culture to even be able to accomplish something like that.
No, no, that's the initiation of the use of force.
That's wrong. Yeah, well, I mean, I'm not saying that I would support it.
I'm just saying that Even if there was the will from a group of people to do it, I think we're so fractured that if someone were to attempt it, it wouldn't even work anyways.
Yeah, so in the past, the way it worked is handled beautifully by the free market.
So in the past, the people who made terrible mistakes with their lives didn't have much money.
In fact, they would barely have any money, right?
So a woman who had two kids by two different men, well, no guy would want to marry her.
And so she'd move in with her parents, they'd pay the bills, and she would basically have no economic input into the society, right?
But now, this woman gets thousands of dollars a month, and she can spend it.
And... That multiplied by tens of millions of women, well, that's a crap ton of money.
And so in the past, people who made terrible decisions were generally taken out of economic and cultural influence.
But now, you think of the welfare state, right?
Just in that context alone.
In the welfare state, trillions of dollars is now being spent, and that influences the culture.
And so, so many single moms have so much money that they wouldn't have in a free market.
And they end up influencing elections, they end up influencing culture, they end up influencing the arts, they end up influencing newspapers, civil discourse, you name it, right?
Because people want that sweet welfare money.
The people who sell products to these women, they want that sweet welfare money.
Hell, Mexico. What is it?
Their number one source of income now is remittances from America, which is generally coming from the American taxpayer, the American taxpayer is forced to bribe the Mexican government through forced welfare payments to immigrants, both legal and illegal.
So when you have a system which transfers trillions and trillions of dollars, To people who've made terrible decisions, then you end up with people who make a huge amount of money by hiding those terrible decisions and by pretending that those terrible decisions are good decisions.
So the economy changes because normally you make terrible decisions You're out of the loop.
You're no longer influencing culture because your purchasing power is very little, if any.
If you make terrible decisions and the government gives you trillions of dollars, you fundamentally change the culture to the point where bad decisions can no longer be.
Criticized. Of course, there's really little point criticizing bad decisions and nobody even wants to criticize bad decisions.
I hate the idea of wandering around society like some big finger-wagging nag bot.
You made a bad decision.
No, you did the wrong thing. I just want the power of ostracism.
I just want the power to not be forced to fund people making bad decisions.
I don't want to bother people.
I just don't want to be forced to pay for their stupid decisions.
And so what happens is, through the welfare state, stupidity ends up subsidizing to the point where stupidity has a massive cultural influence, and you see the fundamental dumbing down of the West.
And this is one of the reasons why I say the welfare state.
Well, it's what we have to go.
It's what we have to let go of if we want to survive.
All right. Well, thanks very much for the call.
I'm going to move on to the next caller, but I do appreciate the topic very much, and I hope it was helpful.
Yep, thank you. Okay, up next we have Edgar.
Edgar wrote in and said, Even if we have a stateless society or a minarchist society at the very least,
won't authoritarianism only manifest itself in other ways?
That's from Edgar. Hey Edgar, how's it going?
I'm doing well, how are you?
You're joining the chorus of worry warts tonight, aren't you?
What if this manifests in some other way if we're free?
Hey, I'll take my chances.
I guess so. No, so what do you mean?
Let's go with the stateless society, a free society.
How do you end up strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom?
Alright, well, I guess I didn't really...
I guess that probably wasn't a proper way to word it, but I... For example, like...
You defined it as, right?
Right. I assume that it's in quotes, so I assume this is not just your definition, is it?
No, that was from dictionary.com, I believe it was.
Yeah, because, I mean, I don't know, like, do you have a dentist?
Uh... I haven't gone to the dentist for quite a while now, but yes.
Okay, go to the dentist, please.
It's important because if you get too much bacteria in your mouth, you swallow it, it can be very bad for you.
So, if you go to the dentist and your dentist says you've got to floss, or as the old saying goes, yeah, you just only have to floss the teeth you want to keep.
Now, I know there have been some doubts about the efficacy of flossing, but I'm still going to do it.
So, if your dentist says you really need to floss to keep your teeth, Okay, you're now not free to not floss if you want to keep your teeth.
So, isn't that strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom?
I don't want to floss and brush.
It's like, well, there will be consequences, right?
So, it's to me an incomplete definition.
Incomplete definition? All right.
Well, I guess an example I could use was how certain race mixing, for example, back in the 1800s, for example, there were race mixing laws, and then certain states got rid of them because they thought that it wasn't needed because it was just so looked down upon, societally speaking.
Do you understand what I'm saying, or...?
Strict obedience. Okay, but then if you're going to say that social disapproval is the same as the state, I think you're conflating two things which are not the same.
So, if you want to get along with your neighbors, and so you don't play your music very loud late at night, as opposed to the police say we're going to drag you off to jail if you play your music very loud at night, I don't think that we can put those two things in the same category, can we? No, okay.
I understand what you're saying.
I see what you're saying. Because if you're learning how to fly a plane, and the...
I remember, so my mom dated a guy.
I guess I was about 11 or 12.
Yeah, maybe 12.
My mom dated a guy who flew gliders, believe it or not.
And we went up for a weekend to stay in his...
I guess it was like a trailer.
I guess if you spend all your money on gliders, maybe you don't have any money left for a house.
But we went to go up and stay on his trailer.
And he took me up.
Gliding. I don't know if you've ever been.
I mean, I've only been the once, but it really was quite something.
So you get this big giant white plane, like a huge albatross, and they tie a cable to the nose of the plane.
It has no engine, right? And then they pull you up, right?
The engine plane pulls you up to, I don't know, it was pretty high.
It was above the clouds. And then just lets you go.
And you glide. And to be up there, it's hissing quiet.
You can just hear the air hissing past the windshield.
And you're above the clouds, no engine noise.
It's beautiful. The sun was not setting, but it was sort of late afternoon, and the sunlight was dappling on the top of the clouds like Laser beams on candy floss.
It was beautiful. Then the guy, I was in front and he was behind me and we both had joysticks.
He said, you take it, right?
I took it. This is before I got into flight simulator, so I didn't know what a stall was.
I took it and I was like, well, I don't want to go down.
This is too beautiful up here.
I pulled the stick. And he's like, no, we're going to stall, right?
Because you've got no engine, right?
So, it's easier to stall in particular.
And I kind of panicked, right?
Because, you know, these guys yelling at me.
And so, I wouldn't let go.
And he's like, you've got to let go.
Because I guess they were together, right?
And then eventually, I let go.
And he got us out of the stall.
Because, you know, if you stall hard enough, you can start falling down backwards.
And because you've got no...
Engine, you don't have a lot of pull to get out of it, so I can understand why he was a little tense.
So, I obeyed his authority in that moment and let go of the joystick at the expense of my personal freedom to die.
Right? So, I mean, a lot of times you submit yourself to authority and it doesn't really interfere with your personal freedom.
It actually kind of enhances it, if that makes any sense.
That makes sense. I have one more question though.
So, let's say if we do have a stateless society, like, what's to prevent a power vacuum from taking place of sorts?
Like, I don't know, the event of- Well, if you end slavery, what's to prevent a slavery vacuum from taking place and blah, blah, blah, right?
Right. Well, the reason that you would not end up with a state again, It's because people would understand the universality of the non-aggression principle.
And because children would be raised peacefully, because the only way that we're going to get rid of the state is to have children raised peacefully.
And people would be...
The entire structure of society would be opposed to the existence of a state coming into being.
Is that what you mean? Like somebody says, I'm going to make a new state?
Yes, basically. So let's say...
Let's say I'm the stateless society and you want to create a state.
How would you do it? Basically, just find a mob of people who agree with me and try to initiate force against people who don't agree with me.
Okay. How would you arm them?
That's a good question, actually.
I'm not sure. Because you'd have to bring a whole lot of armaments into the country, right?
Right. Now, why would anyone choose to have you bring a whole bunch of armaments into the country?
Because remember, the ports are private.
The roads are private.
The waterways are private.
They don't want that shit on their property.
All right. So you start bringing that stuff in, they're going to be like, nope, back you go.
I'm not going to let you land. Forget it.
I'm inspecting this. I don't want this.
I got to inspect it for disease.
I got to expect it for stowaways.
Whatever, right? Right.
So they don't want you to bring that stuff in.
And there's going to be people who provide already protection services.
And the one thing that I call them dispute resolution organizations or DROs, and one of my listeners actually referred to them as DROs, which I think is kind of cool.
So the DROs are already providing services for protection and security and so on.
They don't want all of these weapons to come in, right?
Right. So they're going to make sure that doesn't happen.
Now, let's say that you are a DRO who's providing all of these kinds of services.
People say, well, what if you just start buying more guns and more tanks and then you take over?
It's like, well, that's the first thing.
And we're so used to thinking of the state that we don't think of the checks and balances.
Of volunteerism. So if I come to you and I say, hey, Edgar, man, I'm going to protect you from a whole bunch of bad actors who might want to come in and take over, right?
Well, the first thing you're going to say to me is, okay, Steph, how do I know you're not going to become one of those bad actors?
You know, and I'm basically paying you to take me over.
That would be the first question that everyone would have.
And the entrepreneur or entrepreneurs who successfully answered that question would do very well.
So they'd say something like, okay, I'm going to have a public accounting of all of the weapons that I have and the reasons why I have them.
And anyone who finds I have even one extra bullet, I'm going to pay $10 million.
It's in an escrow and is run by one of my competition or some independent group that also gets rewarded for finding such a thing.
And let's say, well, they're going to start surreptitiously buying all of these tanks and weapons and hiding them and so on.
It's like, okay, well, how are they going to pay for it?
Are they going to start raising fees without providing additional services?
Well, that's going to be a sure sign that they're up to something nefarious, plus people don't want to pay double their fees for no additional services, so the competitors are just going to come in and say, oh, these guys are doubling your fees?
We're reducing your fees by 20%.
And then you just switch over, and then they don't end up with the money.
Or maybe they try and borrow it.
Well, they have to go to a bank to try and borrow the money.
Why on earth would the bank want to fuel The mad power lust of some paramilitary organization that's supposed to protect the people now wants to take it over.
Because the bank will also be in danger of having its stuff taken away and all of that, so the bank won't have anything to do with it.
What about investors? Go to investors and say, ah, why don't you fund my big giant army so I can destroy property rights?
It's like, why would investors want that, right?
And the investors, if they were to fund that, they would lose their contracts with banks, they'd lose their contracts with their Mortgages, they'd lose their contracts with their cars.
They'd be kicked off their land because all of these things would have fail-safes built in, right?
The contracts would be layering.
And of course, there'd be some simple interface to deal with all this kind of stuff.
So the vast majority of people don't want some big giant government takeover in a free society.
And they are aware that that might happen because it's very profitable if you can do it in the short run.
And so there would be tons of fail-safes and all of that built in so that you couldn't Go around to doing it.
And if you want to read more on this, I answer this in more detail in a book called, well, there's two books, Everyday Anarchy and Practical Anarchy.
So, I mean, I understand there are concerns and there are fears, but You know, we're like 50 feet from the shore.
The ship is sinking. You can't swim.
And you're like, well, what happens next?
It's like, what happens next is you got to make it to shore.
So, you got to grab something that floats and you got to kick to shore.
There is no continuity in the existing system.
It can't survive. The Titanic is going down.
You know, our society is like that guy in the movie just spinning down and hitting his head on the propeller, right?
I mean, we can't possibly sustain or survive The basic mathematics of our dissolute system.
Hundreds of trillions of dollars in debt just in America.
Can't make it. Can't do it.
Can't survive. So people say, well, you know, what about this negative consequence if I jump off the Titanic?
It's like, well, what happens if you stay on?
You know, well, what if I go in and it's kind of cold?
Oh, it's going to be cold. Yeah, there's going to be transitions.
It's going to be tough. But we don't We either go down with the ship or we find something new.
There is no continuity to our existing system.
It's either going to get taken over or it's going to go completely tits up.
Or we find some way to fix it.
So I'm a little annoyed, and it's not your fault in particular, Edgar.
It's just, I get, after 35 fucking years of talking about this kind of stuff, I still get the same fear, uncertainty, and doubt shit from people.
Like somehow our current system is sustainable.
It's like, well, we have a free society, sure, but what if?
What do you mean, what if?
What if we're drowning?
Our ship is going down.
We go down with the ship or we find something new.
There's no other option other than being taken over, which I guess is having something new or actually something rather ancient imposed upon us.
So just this idea, well, what if the corporations end up acting like governments?
Or what if some new government takes over?
Or what if there's a power vacuum and it's like, our current system can't survive.
Can't even come close to surviving.
We have to find something new.
It's either going to be something worse or it's going to be something better.
And the fear, uncertainty, and doubt people, you know you're in the way.
You know you're preventing people from a rational examination of this because you're giving them easy, fearful non-answers that allow them to avoid examining a truly free society, a stateless society.
You're doing the job of the bad guys.
I'm not saying this to you in particular, Edgar, although you're definitely tangentially true in this, but you're doing the job of the bad guys because you're sowing fear, uncertainty, and doubt and saying to people, Well, stay on the ship.
It's going to be fine. Oh, you know, there could be sharks down there.
You know, there could be coral that cuts your feet.
There could be swordfish.
You might have a cut that stings in the salt water.
You don't know. Stay on the ship.
Stay on the ship. It's a bit nerve-wracking out there.
It's like, well, you realize that you're talking people to their demise, right?
Because we have to find something new.
This ship is going down.
And... Telling people, don't jump, don't have a leap of faith, don't find something new, is hurting them enormously.
Alright, thanks for the call. I'll move on to the next caller, but thank you very much for calling in.
Alright, thank you. Okay, up next we have Christine.
She wrote in and said, I feel I was stuck in a pattern I cannot easily break, but desperately want to do so for my daughter's sake.
I fight the feeling that it's too little too late.
What advice for affecting positive change later in life with older children?
Is it possible to make a difference so late in her teenage years?
That's from Christine. Hi, Christine.
How you doing? I'm well, thank you.
And yourself? I'm well, thank you.
How old is your daughter? She is 17.
17. Yeah, high school graduation. Sorry.
I keep getting confused because back in the day it was 18 for me.
I just wanted to double check on that.
And her father? I've really been married for almost 23 years.
We were married just over four and a half, almost five years when we had her.
We both work. And And so, going a little bit of a background, I grew up in a really chaotic, kind of abusive home.
As a result of that, I really depended on school and I reached out to my guidance counselor and the people around me to try and tell the adults in my life that there was issues and nobody heard, nobody listened, nobody followed through.
So I myself checked out.
And did not, dropped out of college, basically dropped out of high school in 10th grade, ended up going to college later in life and obtaining a nursing degree.
Her father, same kind of story, chaotic, somewhat abusive home, and dropped out of college, ended up taking college classes on the side and obtaining a job, I'd say what you call a more stable job later in life as well.
We did both work for a while trying to be part of an entrepreneurial pursuit which fell through, which is why I ended up going back to college.
I guess some of that complacency and not having a sense of direction when I was younger, I really kind of feel lost at this point in her life.
Wait, you feel lost at this point in her life or she feels lost?
Yeah. I think that she's somewhat of a reflection of my inability to address her at this stage.
I feel ill-equipped in many ways.
Um, we, when she was younger, uh, we both made a lot of financial sacrifices.
So I was home with her for her first seven years and, um, ended up going to college when she was around seven and obtaining a nursing degree.
Um, it was a boost in my ego.
Cause I was able to do that and graduate towards the top of my class with the 10th grade education.
So I, I, I don't know what lessons it gave to her and she's very intelligent.
We did try, you know, the homeschooling route when she was younger, but being an only child, and she has a very difficult time connecting to her peers because, I don't want to sound snobbish, but because of her intelligence and the type of things that we would discuss at home, she's, you know, Greek mythology, Greek philosophy, having debates.
She wasn't able to translate that easily into her peer group.
So, Yeah, kids can be great conversationalists, but the majority of kids are terrible conversationalists because nobody talks to them.
And so we did try to send her to school.
She was academically very far ahead of her class, so she ended up, you know, moving ahead of grade.
And it kind of caused her to disconnect socially.
And so she missed so much school in middle school that she...
She graduated in the top of her class, but she probably missed almost 60% of the school year.
Wait, sorry, I'm a little lost.
So you were concerned that she was not getting along with the peers who were idiots, and so you put her in school with the idiots?
It was a very difficult decision, as we didn't have the resources at the time to send her to a private academy.
No, no, sorry, just before that, right?
So you said she didn't get along well with her peers.
Yeah. And I'm being somewhat facetious, right?
Yes. Because they weren't equal to her, right?
She had a difficult time connecting.
Wait, wait. Connecting with anyone or just with her peers?
With her peers. She has a few very close friends that she's maintained friendship with for probably the last seven or eight years.
I'm still trying to figure out why she went to school.
I was going back to college.
We were in dire financial straits.
I needed a stable job.
What about your husband's income?
It was difficult with me taking large swaths of time.
I'm a nurse, so I had to do my clinical part of my education during the day.
And she just was really not flourishing in our homeschooling environment, trying to connect with homeschooling groups and doing those type of things.
She was very sad, very depressed, felt lonely, isolated.
Oh, so she was unhappy?
Yeah, she was unhappy. Did that change when you decided to pursue the nursing education, Christine?
Like, was she happier before then and then when you were less available because of your education, she became more depressed?
Or was that something that had happened earlier, too?
It had happened earlier.
We, like I said, she had a difficult time connecting to some of the groups that we were using to supplement socialization when she was younger.
Parts of school, you know, school was a real, putting her into that public schooling was a huge change.
I'm sorry, I hate to keep going back, but I'm trying to figure out this transition point between homeschooling and government schooling.
Yes. Okay. So, you're saying that she was depressed...
While she was being homeschooled, is that right?
Yeah. She felt isolated.
different.
Why did she feel isolated?
Part of it was my...
I didn't do a good job networking with other mothers and we would be involved in the homeschooling activities.
No, but if she's connected with you and she's enjoying her time with you...
Then I'm not sure how she would...
Was there any issue with your emotional availability or any issue with your...
Were you dealing with anything or wrestling with anything that might have interrupted her quality time with you?
That's a very valid point.
I think at that point, we were going through a lot of stressors.
We were dealing with various lawsuits regarding the business we were working for.
Oh, the entrepreneurial thing?
Yeah, we both lost our incomes.
The stress level in the home was quite high.
And was it kind of an unrelenting stress, like, from when you wake up, like, five minutes, like, five seconds after you wake up, boom!
And, you know, until the end of the day?
For a period of time, it really was.
Especially when I was going through the hype of my schooling.
Well, no, no. The schooling is after she went back to school, right?
Yeah. Okay, so I'm just trying to keep the timeline here.
Okay, so how old was she when the business imploded or when the business became stressful?
Um... I'd say she was about six years old.
And how long had you been doing the entrepreneurial stuff at that point?
For about, let me think here, probably about ten years.
Not quite, eight years.
And was the business successful for a while and then not?
Yes, that was the problem that became very successful.
We obtained pretty... We attained some fairly large contracts, and as the software product came into dispute, we weren't able to sell that any longer.
Ownership came into dispute?
Exactly. And that's what the problem with the business was, business side.
In the home...
Wait, wait, sorry. Did you get patent trolled or what?
I'm sorry? Did you get patent trolled?
In other words, was it some sort of...
There was a patent that was claimed to be on the software...
Yes, between the person who financed and wrote a lot of the, you know, the programmer himself and the person who inputted the ideas and the structure of the software.
Oh, they claimed ownership and then they ended up suing, is that right?
Yeah, exactly. Ended up in a lawsuit against each other.
Yeesh. So at a time when your income is going down, you have big complicated legal bills, right?
We ended up having to declare bankruptcy and bailing out of the entire system.
And because we were, you know, we were two, both of us, my husband and I were pretty...
We had been underachievers for quite a period of time in our lives.
We really didn't have a lot of good prospects for a job at the time.
So I had to look around and say, well, you know, logically, who's the best?
And I would, you know, in two years, I could obtain a nursing degree and we'd be in a much better financial position.
Fortunately, in that time period, my husband was also able to obtain a pretty fair paying job with some good benefits.
Right. It's funny, the things we worry about, eh?
Things work out so often.
When she was younger, and I have to say, part of that was I was very emotionally immature.
When I was younger, I did not want to repeat the mistakes of my parents and my grandparents.
I saw this intergenerational abuse and cycle that I definitely didn't want to be a part of.
I read a lot when I was young to try and avoid the pitfalls.
You know, to avoid the promiscuity, to avoid, you know, marrying someone with abusive characteristics, because I knew when I was younger that that was something I'd be very prone to do.
What I neglected was realizing just how emotionally immature and how ill-equipped I was to To be a parent at the time, I really thought I had achieved that point where it was okay.
We were somewhat financially stable.
Our marriage had lasted more than a few years.
I thought that it would be a good point that we could try and have a child and have a somewhat stable home to do that in.
Right. And you do have an adverse childhood experience score of 9, which I just wanted to give enormous...
Sympathy for. That is a very, very difficult childhood to struggle through.
And, you know, congratulations on reading and vowing and sounds like largely successfully to avoid a repetition of this kind of trauma.
I mean, good for you. Yeah, and I have to say that the bomb in the brain was, you know, one of the very transformative, you know, it helped me have a lot of insight, gain a lot of insight.
So I guess what prompted me to call I've been able to avoid some pitfalls through education and just being very fortunate that, you know, people like you and when I was younger, there are other people in my life that, you know, gave me insight into these pitfalls.
But I obviously I fell into other ones that I wasn't even aware were possible.
So while we've achieved a lot from where we came from, I've made a lot of mistakes.
And, you know, especially when I was younger, um, Like I said, I didn't have the tools to be a successful parent.
I realized that I wasn't going to spank her.
I did not want to be abusive.
But then I had, you know, when I was younger, I had a lot of emotional lability and these kind of things that I know did affect her when she was younger.
Sorry, a lot of emotional what?
Lability. Where I was overwhelmed and my resources are stretched, then I had these, I would get very Yeah, angry.
And just kind of shut down.
And I realized it had an impact in her when she was younger.
And do you think that may have contributed to that sense of alienation?
Because, of course, if you're you got an only child and they're home with you, particularly in a homeschooling environment, if they're not getting emotional connection from you, well, they're just not really getting it much at all, right?
Exactly. Right. And, you know, I did try to use the School system as a substitute parent, which obviously was not a very good choice.
And how is she now?
What are the issues that you think are major with her behavior now?
Well, at this stage of life, she just is drifting, doesn't know what she would like to do in the future.
She's taken a very non-traditional path.
She's taken a lot of classes online, taking college classes online, kind of hunkering down, trying to get some prerequisites out of the way.
But she has no idea where she wants to go.
So I feel very helpless at this point.
Why does she have to go someplace?
Just in regards to an educational path.
What does she want to do?
Does she want to go the college route?
Or... You know, take another path.
Does she have any interest in motherhood?
Yeah, actually. We've actually talked about if you would like to be a mother at some point in the future.
No, no, no. Not at some point in the future.
Is she interested in motherhood when she's young?
It doesn't seem like under 25 or...
I'm sorry, what would you...
Well, young, early 20s.
I don't, I don't know.
It's interesting because I don't think, I don't think like you're like, what?
I'm like, would you like to go to Mars?
Or would you like to be a young mother?
It's like, wait, be a young mother?
That's crazy. You know what I mean?
Like, why is that something that's never on the table?
You know, it's like, well, she's got to go and get her education and she's got to get a career and whatever it's going to be.
And it's like, Why?
I mean, being a parent is great, isn't it?
It is. So why not offer that to her when she's young and when she has her pick of men, right?
I mean, she's smart and I think all my listeners are beautiful.
So if she wants to settle down and have kids, I mean, obviously when her kids get older, she can figure out what she wants to do.
But if she doesn't know what she wants to do right now, my guess it's because there's something that she may want to do that's just incomprehensible to you, i.e.
be a young mom. It's very interesting.
I never even considered that path.
That's interesting. But why?
I'm curious. I guess I have the construct that, and it was pounded into my head when I was younger, that you have to be financially stable and you have to have the ability to provide irrespective of your partner.
Yeah, that's retarded.
Not that you are retarded for believing that, but it's a retarded thing to teach people.
Of course marriage is about dependence.
Of course it is. That's why it's marriage.
It's the division of labor, right?
One person raises the kids and one person gathers the resources.
And of course there's dependence on it.
So saying, well, I'm not going to become a mom until I win the lottery, so to speak, or I'm not going to become a mom until I'm financially independent is like, it's just a way of deferring having kids, which means that fewer kids are had and, well, there's just less waste to go around, right?
Mm-hmm. So, yeah, she's going to be dependent on her husband, and that's why you help her choose a great guy who loves her, so that she can trust him to do that.
So, apart from imparting, you know, these ideas of what a marriage, you know, the ideal marriage, like this give and take, a partnership, an investment in each other, and the children that you produce, how do you intervene into the choice of partners, I guess would be a big question.
Into the choices, a choice of partners?
Yes. Well, I think you frankly talk about the strengths and weaknesses in your own relationship with your husband.
You talk about things that you've learned.
You talk about mistakes that you've seen people make.
Listen, kids are fascinated by gossip.
Oh, let me tell you, the moment I have a shred of gossip, like my daughter's all over me, like white on rice.
And because they are like mini series of...
Choices and consequences the kids are fascinated by.
So if you start talking frankly about, you know, family members, good and bad, your own childhood, your own history, she's old enough now to hear the good and bad of your own history, then she will, I think, quite quickly begin to navigate towards something that's better.
And I hope I'm not, you know, I'm not saying, you know, go find some guy to impregnate her by this time next Thursday.
But what I am saying is that When I think, I was thinking about this since I got your question, Christine.
And so I'm just going to be upfront with what may be potential bias so that you can put it all in context.
But man, I knew a lot of women when I was younger who didn't know what they wanted to do with their lives.
I mean, I don't know if it's more common now.
I don't know if it was more common then.
But there were a lot of women.
They did not know what they wanted to do with their lives.
And I think it's because, in hindsight, I think it's because they wanted to become moms, because that's kind of what we're programmed to do in our late teens, early 20s.
That doesn't mean you have to do it then, right?
I understand that. But that's kind of what we're programmed to do, right?
I mean, like, nature doesn't say, hey, I'm going to give you sexual maturity, be sure you don't use it for at least 20 years, right?
It's just not the way that nature works.
And so, in terms of, you know, the way it works right now, late teens, early 20s, or whatever, I mean, I knew a woman who went to do an engineering degree, and she kind of liked it.
She was pretty good at math, but she froze during exams, like just really bad in exam situations.
A lot of anxiety, a lot of tension.
And, I mean, I knew a number of women who were like, I'm going to be an actress.
I'm going to be a model. You know, that kind of stuff.
And they were pretty. And it wasn't like they had any talent or whatever.
But they kind of dabbled. They kind of played.
You know, I'll do a little community theater.
I'll work as a waiter. And it was just like, boop, boop, boop, boop, amble, amble, amble, dribble, dribble, dribble.
And it's just like, man, you're just kind of pissing your time away here.
You know, you're not really getting anything achieved.
You're not really getting to the top.
You're not even getting to the middle. You're just kind of circling the drain.
And it drove me crazy.
I mean, I dated one girl in high school.
She was pretty clear. Now, she came from a traditional family.
A traditional family.
Her mom had gotten married and kids young.
And she was like, because I was like, hey, where do you want to go to college?
She's like, college? It's not for me.
I want to get married and have some babies.
You know, she was like, that was just the thing, right?
And I ended up going to work up north and we visited each other a little here and there.
But I mean, I was gone for too long and she had to move on because she wanted to get married and have babies.
And I'm sure she did.
And I'm sure she's doing well and all of that.
And The women that I know who didn't really know what they wanted to do in terms of some big thing in life, but they're kind of on this conveyor belt, right?
Well, you've got to know!
Because after high school comes college, and you've got to choose what you're going to do.
But the rest of your life, you've got to choose how you're going to spend your precious educational dollars, and you've got to choose how you're going to spend your essential late teens, early 20s.
That's a lot of pressure if someone doesn't know what they want to do.
And I'm the kind of guy who's like, you know, if you don't know what you want to do, stop doing stuff.
And examine the hidden choices.
Examine the choices that seem crazy to you.
And I think that's an important thing to do with regards to your daughter, in my admittedly, of course, humble opinion, is that if she doesn't know what she wants to do, it either means that she doesn't know what she wants to do, no matter what, in which case, sending her off to do something is a huge waste of time and resources, and it's going to do her more harm than good.
Right? Because it's like, I don't know what I want to do.
I'll study X, right?
It's like, well, how's that?
You don't just keep moving for no reason, right?
I mean, if you're lost in the woods, you stop.
You figure out where the hell you are.
And you stop walking because you don't know where you're going and you're just more likely to get more lost, right?
So if she doesn't know what she wants to do, that's fine.
Nothing wrong with that. Then she should stop doing something.
And certainly, I would not recommend investing in a huge amount of college or all of that when she doesn't know what she wants to do.
She could work a little. She could travel a little.
She could just do a bunch of stuff.
But also...
I think it is important for young men and young women to say, you know, we kind of decide to make more of ourselves.
We are bipedal photocopiers and we are at our best and ripest to be parents in our early 20s.
By the time a woman gets to 30, 90% of her eggs have died in her belly.
And so this idea, well, we'll do it later.
Well, we'll push it off. It'll happen at some point.
So then you're trying to bag a man who's the best kind of man when you have the lower sexual market value, when the best men have all been taken, when your eggs are drying up, when you're panicked, you might be in debt.
I mean, that's a terrible situation. You don't want that for her.
I mean, obviously, you don't want that for her.
So maybe, just maybe, there's something that is...
The Voldemort hypothesis.
There's something that's unspeakable in the culture as a whole, which is maybe she wants to become a mom.
And maybe through becoming a mom and through raising children and giving you grandchildren and loving her children and raising her children to be good people, she will figure out what she wants to do after that process.
But being a parent is not a bad way to kill time, if that makes any sense.
Yeah, I think I tend to catastrophize when I envision her not choosing a path at 18 and getting a degree or going...
Oh, don't push her.
The amount of social resources that wastes as well.
I mean, for me, it's like if you can't handle an exam, how the hell are you going to handle building a bridge?
The exam for building the bridge was so stressful, I threw up before and after and I couldn't concentrate.
But designing a bridge that's going to keep people alive or kill them, I'm fine with that.
You know, there's examples of like the number of women that I knew who were like, yeah, you know, I like novels, so I'm taking English.
So, that's not really much of a plan now, is it, you know?
Well, I've always been interested in people, so I thought I'd take psychology.
I remember I used to work in a coffee shop when I was writing, and I befriended this woman who was also writing there and we'd occasionally take breaks from writing in chat.
And she was like, oh yeah, I'm in my third year of psychology and, you know, I like it.
I don't really know what I'm going to do with it, but it's kind of cool.
And I'm like, do you know, like, what do you do with an undergraduate in psychology?
Oh, I don't know. I mean, I guess I could use to apply it for a master's or something like that.
It's like, okay, well, what do you do with a master's?
You know, it's like, I don't know. I mean, and it's just like dumpty dumpty, you know, drifting along like...
Corks on a stream, you know, no particular plan, just the day to day.
And it's like, I just think of the amount of social resources that are poured into indecisive people.
I mean, they are the black holes that are like destroying the economy.
I don't mean to catastrophize with regards to your daughter.
But, you know, if you're like, I don't know, go take physics.
Like, okay, well, she'll go take physics.
Maybe she'll do well, maybe she won't.
But what's the point?
What's the purpose? What's the plan, Stan?
And if there's no plan...
Just pressing onwards is not a good plan.
Because she may then fail at something.
She may waste resources.
She may end up in debt. Or you may end up in debt.
And, you know, a significant portion of people who start out in college never finish.
Because they're just not that into it.
Or doesn't turn out to be what they want.
Or something, right?
And... The vast majority, I just did a show with Dr.
Tom Woods on this today, but the vast majority of people in college, they don't give one tiny shit about their subject.
They don't. Because you try and engage with them about their subject outside of class, outside of exams, outside of studying, and they're like, huh?
I knew people who had taken philosophy.
I love philosophy. Try and talk to them about philosophy outside of the classroom, outside of the assigned texts, outside of their papers, outside of the exams.
They don't care.
They don't live and breathe philosophy.
So why the hell are they taking it?
What's the point? And so for your daughter, she doesn't know what she wants to do.
There's nothing wrong with that.
Either she generally doesn't know what she wants to do, okay, that may be a challenge, or there's stuff that she wants to do that's off the table because it seems kind of like anathema to you.
Yeah. You know, mom, I could join a cult or I could become a young mom.
She's like, well, that's insane.
Become a young mom? I think some of my biases, I was, you know, 30 years old and she was young going to college.
I think in ways it was difficult for me to make that transition from stay-at-home mother, and she was the center of my day, to now she was almost like an outlier on my things to do list, which, as you just discussed with the previous caller in daycare, it just causes an enormous amount of guilt.
And instead of dealing with...
Wait, you were feeling the guilt? I did when I went to college, and I think that that kind of shines through my bias.
I, you know... Becoming a mother younger, I was 25.
And, you know, becoming a mother younger is better than waiting.
But, you know, then this buys, like, you have to have a career.
You have to have everything set up. And I guess I got so invested in that.
I never took a step back and considered the other, you know, options like this.
Oh, yeah. No, listen, I mean, the issue wasn't that you were a young mom.
The issue was that your business exploded.
Yeah. You know, and it wasn't even like a quick explosion, right?
I mean, it was one of these, you know, these lawsuits, I assume, they go on for months or years, and, you know, you have to figure out whether you can survive it, and it's like every time there's a phone call, they go, you know, like, I mean, that's no way to live, right?
Does she know all of the history of that, and what happened, and why these decisions were made?
She was very confident of what was going on at the time, because it was a dramatic change in her life, and I think, maybe I overshared, but we gave her information as to what was going on.
No, I think, Age-appropriate stuff, it's important for kids to know what's going on.
Because otherwise, they know something's changed, and they feel excluded from the situation.
But to me, it's perfectly fine if she doesn't know what she wants to do.
That just means that she might need more life experience to know what she wants to do, a little bit of travel, a little bit of work, you know, whatever it's going to be until she figures out what she wants.
Or it might be, have kids now, that'll give you a purpose that you can bring into a career when they get older.
Yeah. But it's funny, I know what you mean.
Like, when I talk about this kind of stuff, people are just like, you know, they're...
Bewildered by this very thing, you know?
Well, you could turn yourself into a living robot or you could become a young mom.
Young mom? That's insane, right?
Exactly. Why not?
You got more energy, you got more pep, and you're closer to childhood yourself.
So you remember it.
It's easier to be more playful and you're not quite as creaky.
Thank you. I mean, I try staying in pretty decent shape.
I'm working out like four or five hours a week.
It's nothing major, but you know, I'm bike machine and weights and stretching and sit-ups and crap like that.
But you know, I'm going to be 52 this year.
And what that means is, you know, yesterday I did this giant lunge to catch a frisbee my daughter threw and I'm like, hmm.
I guess I remember that now, don't I? Because, you know, I'm walking up.
I went for a lengthy hike that was a lot of climbing today.
I'm like, ooh, that's a little twingy now, isn't it?
And it's like, well, yeah, because you're 52 and you can be healthy, but you can't turn back time.
So at least not without some sort of regeneration bot in your body.
So yeah, young is not a bad time to do it.
And yeah, maybe your daughter's brain saying, eh, I don't know that I want to do all this whole deferral thing, because if you have kids now, or if she has kids when she's young, then she's never going to miss that experience, right?
She's going to always have time for a career, right?
But if you don't have kids when you're young, a lot of women miss that boat when they get older.
I can't remember what the stats are for childless women now, but it's like a quarter, a third.
I mean, it's a big deal, and don't tell me all these women.
You know, as recently as the 1960s, like 95% of women wanted to marry and have kids.
And now like up to a third of them don't.
And they're like, don't tell me that all just evaporated.
But now we've got this whole omerta, this code of silence.
Don't disturb the dusty womb of regret.
Don't make the women feel bad for being barren, for being a dry doe, for not having life.
Don't make them feel bad.
I mean, have these Christine Baranski elegantly quaffed women sitting at home in their perfectly immaculate couches sipping the inevitable glass of red wine as they insistently laugh about the day's events and never ever show a woman crying.
Because she sees another woman pushing a baby down the street.
Never see a woman who hurries through the baby department with her eyes on the ground so she doesn't see a mobile and burst into tears.
Never ever show the regret of women who didn't have children.
Never ever show the emptiness of work.
Never ever show the loneliness.
Never ever show the isolation.
Never ever show...
That the thrill of sex when you're young tends to fade a little bit as you age and should be replaced by community and love and tribe and children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Never ever show the misery of the abandoned continuity of life.
Never ever show the billions of years of life that had to struggle to produce you and you're just like, nope, that's it.
We're done! Thank you for three billion years of struggle, but...
I prefer Netflix. I mean, you can't ever show.
I'm not saying that all women who don't have kids regret it.
Of course not. And there certainly are some women who do have kids who regret it, as there are men in both categories.
But I don't believe at all for a minute that we went from 95% of women wanting marriage and kids to now a third of women not having kids.
Wow. Nobody has any regrets.
Nobody has any regrets that the women who 95% of them wanted and loved it and were happy about it, they were just all deluded, nasty, and we're woke, we're wise, we're being feminized now.
We don't regret it at all.
I don't believe it. It's almost a third of women, almost a third of women not having kids, who in the past really wanted kids and loved it.
And now all this propaganda, you know, there was a McLean's article recently up here in Canada where it was like this, it's inevitable to be a white woman.
It always has to be a white woman, right?
And she's like, I wish I'd never become a mom.
There, I said it. Like, she's just so daring.
And yeah, this anti-birth stuff aimed at white women, it's vicious, it's wretched, horrifying, horrible.
But you can't talk about it.
Because somehow you hate women if you point out that women who don't have kids might have regrets.
And that it's a pretty lonely life.
Because women vanish, you understand?
I mean, this is... I gotta be honest.
I've heard this from so many women who are older.
It's like you wake up, boom, one day, you're gone.
You're gone. Nobody sees you.
Nobody notices you.
Nobody holds doors for you.
You're old. And I don't know why it doesn't hit men as much.
It doesn't seem to hit men as much.
But man, it hits women.
Boom! You're old.
You're in the blue rinse brigade. And nobody cares about you anymore.
Nobody wants to sleep with you.
Nobody wants to hire you.
Nobody wants to work with you.
You're just old. And you smell of linseed oil and you're full of complaints and regret.
A lot of times. And women have complained about this, and some women have dressed up as old women and gone around in malls and stores, and it's like, you're a ghost!
You don't exist!
You're like an extra in the Nicole Kidman movie The Others.
Very good movie, by the way. And what do you do then?
It can happen when you're 50.
It can happen when you're 48.
It can happen when you're 55.
Just boom. You've stepped out of the time-space continuum, right?
I mean, Christine, so you're 43 years old.
So, you know, I guess that's middle age these days.
I don't know. But if you weren't married with a kid, can you imagine how hard it would be to find someone, to settle down with someone, to make sure that lasted forever?
No doubt, yeah. And I have to say that my child has been a lot of the driving force behind the positive changes I've made in my life.
I don't think... I think I would be in a much...
I wouldn't be in the state that I'm in in a positive way.
I was reading about a mystery writer, a woman.
She was a mystery writer and she had every conceivable accolade, every conceivable award, every conceivable success.
And when she got into, I think it was her late 50s.
And she'd never, she'd been so busy with her career and travel and readings and writings.
And I think some of her books have been made into movies or whatever.
And she said, she's looking at all these awards.
Fuck the awards. What are they gonna do?
I'm surrounded by awards as I get old.
And there's no one to help me.
And no one to love me.
And nothing to leave behind.
And she said, I give up all these awards for one day with a baby.
I give up all these awards for one day with a baby.
There's nothing you can create in life That matches a child.
Everything you create dies the moment it leaves your body.
You write Hamlet.
Hamlet is dead by the time you finish it.
You make a movie. The movie is dead.
Why? Because it doesn't grow. It doesn't change.
It doesn't learn anything. And it can't make its own play and its own movie.
It can't reproduce. Everything you make dies the moment it leaves your hand.
Every podcast I make is dead.
The moment it's recorded.
Because it's never going to change.
Never going to grow. Never going to make more podcasts.
Never going to argue back. Never going to challenge me.
Never going to make me laugh. Never going to engage in a tickle fight with me.
Never going to engage with a food fight with me.
Much to the mortification of my wife.
Everything that we make dies when it leaves us.
Except children. Except children.
Children talk back.
Children challenge you. Children grow.
Children Keep you rooted in children if you raise them well means your life is never wasted.
Never wasted. Everything you make can be ignored except your children.
Everything you make can be rejected except your children if you raise them right.
And the problem is, is that there are these devils out there in the world who say to these women, go have this cool life, go have this exciting life.
The thrill, the frisson, the excitement, the attention that you get will last forever.
No, it won't.
It really, really, really won't.
And by the time everything dries up and blows away, and it's too late, well, those women get disappeared out of society.
You don't hear their stories.
Have you ever, Christine, ever seen...
A movie or a play or a book where a woman cried because she didn't have children.
No. Isn't that wild?
Yeah. I mean, I've personally seen people in my, you know, circle that have had the regrets of not having children.
It's the great unspoken.
It can't be examined.
Of course, if you wish to destroy a culture, you don't want to hold up the bitter and broken examples of regretful femininity because that might frighten women into having kids.
And if you want to destroy a culture, you've got to silence the regret of people.
I mean, we do occasionally hear, very occasionally hear, women say, I remember this from a sitcom from many years ago where the woman says, well, when I'm at work, I want to be at home.
When I'm home, I want to be at work.
It's a real challenge, right?
But I've never seen a professional woman in tears of agony because she chose her career over her children.
Like in movies or books or art.
I'm sure it's out there. I mean, I obviously haven't consumed everything, but I've never seen it.
Isn't that amazing? I've never seen regret for infertility or for lack of children.
Well, I have been dipping into, gritting my teeth and dipping into a show called The Good Fight, which starts with a woman in despair because Trump won.
Because, you know, they really want to make sure they get their audience down pat and all that.
Yeah, Christine Baranski, she plays this lawyer and one of the other female lawyers says, you ever regret not having children?
She's like, rarely.
It's just a little thing here.
But all we ever see her is home alone drinking wine, you know, like in this pathetic Bridget Jones kind of way.
But you can't ever...
And she has a great life.
She's positive. She's bubbly.
She's happy. It's really criminal.
You know, women always say, well, we want to have the voice.
We want to give voice to ourselves.
We want to have a voice. But you can't have that voice now, can you?
Can you imagine the outrage, the rage, the hostility that you would get?
It doesn't matter if you were a male or a female who wrote the scene where the woman so bitterly regretted not having children that it broke her heart in two.
And she got angry at all the people who lied to her.
Because the way that we stay visible when we're old is not through our work, but through those who love us.
And if you don't have kids and you don't have a husband, your parents are going to die, your siblings are going to move away, or they're going to get busy with their own kids.
So if you're the woman who didn't have kids and your brother and your sister both have kids, they're busy.
And you have less and less in common.
Every single day. Because their lives are about parenting.
You become a parent, your life is about parenting.
You don't become a parent, your life is about, I don't know, what?
And so, I mean, I can't imagine now.
I can't imagine you saying that.
And so, you're going to go invisible, and people don't tell you that.
People don't tell you that if you don't build the foundation for the last third of your life, in the first two thirds of your life, you're going to vanish.
You'll be like a ghost in your own society.
You can go through the whole day.
Nobody cares to talk to you.
Because people who have the capacity to connect, they're already connected.
And so they don't need a connection with you.
You're just some bitty in the corner taking up space at the Starbucks.
They're not going to come over and find out about your life and, oh, what are you reading?
That's for people who are trying to date you.
But then when you get into your 50s, any man of quality is going to choose a woman in her 30s and 40s.
They're not going to choose you. I remember there was a Tom Likas show from years ago where the woman was like, I'm 52.
I can't find a date.
And he's like, well, you're 52 in his Tom Likas-y way.
And she's like, I don't understand.
I own my own house.
He's like, you don't understand men.
Men don't care that you own your own house.
Men care if you're 50 as opposed to 30, right?
I mean, he can be fairly blunt and brutal and has some challenging perspectives to put it mildly.
But she was genuinely confused why a man didn't want to date her because she had her own house, you see.
And we've had these conversations.
I've had these conversations with the women who are like, but I have a master's degree.
Whereas, of course, the men are ogling the cashier with the youthful glow around her in the Walmart.
I'm sorry. This is nature.
This is biology. You're going to vanish.
And it doesn't just happen to women.
I'm focusing on women.
But it happens to men too.
And I've seen it happen to men who did not build their relationships up when they're younger.
And like, I'm sorry, that means having kids.
That means having kids.
And I've seen this, the men too, they dated a little bit here and there, they traveled a little bit here and there, but they never...
Overcome often their fear of femininity because femininity is terrifying to a lot of men because we're told that it should be comprehensible when it's not.
It's just delightful. At least it's not to men, if you know what's what.
Women are delightfully incomprehensible, just as men are delightfully incomprehensible to women.
And I think we should not try and figure this out.
It's not a language we can learn because it's a brain we don't inhabit.
But I've seen it happen to men too.
Yeah, you've got some friends when you're a teenager because you all play Dungeons and Dragons together, and then you've got some friends and some companions when you're in school because you're all in school together, and then maybe every now and then you go out for drinks with the people at work.
But then, guess what? If they're quality people who are capable of connection, they get married, they have kids, they have extended family, they have aging parents that they need to take care of, they go on vacations, they have no time for you.
And you vanish. You disappear.
Nobody wants to pick you up. Nobody wants to date you.
Nobody wants to... Wolf will slap you.
Of course, now in France, it's illegal.
Because nobody cares about...
Oh, God, I wish people understood this.
Sorry for the rant, but it's so important.
Nobody cares about you.
Nobody out there, right?
You got your family, you got your kids, you got your friends, they'll care for sure.
But your friends will care more for their own families than you, and that's exactly right.
And you care about your family more than you care about your friends, and that's all perfectly fine, too.
But nobody out there cares about you.
If they do, it's because you're young and pretty, or because you've got status, or because you have something that...
It's not you individually, because we meet thousands of people over the course of our lives, and who do we choose to learn about, and find out about, and to plumb the depths of, and so on?
Well... People we want to have some enduring relationship with.
But once we have that enduring relationship, we're done!
We're done with new people.
We're done with new people.
And everyone who hasn't paired off by the time they're 30 or maybe 35, man, that second half of your life, you're a ghost relatively quickly.
Nobody cares. Nobody cares.
Not too far from where I live, there's a subway shop.
Every now and then I'll grab a sub if I'm barreling through and I'm in a hurry.
When there's a guy who sits in the subway shop, he's there a lot.
Why is he there? Because he needs carbon dioxide.
He needs other people's exhalations to be in the vicinity.
And he tries to make the conversation with people, but it's kind of intrusive and it's kind of weird.
But he can't sit at home.
He's just got to be around other bipeds.
He's just... What a horrifying life.
Guy has no kids.
No wife. People go crazy from loneliness, you understand, out there.
People go crazy from loneliness.
There's a reason why so many women are on antidepressants.
You know, there was a picture, again, this is, I don't mean to pick on Maclean's, but there's a picture of a woman.
She's a beautiful woman, like one of these sort of classic Victorian silhouettes of the E.M. Forster female hair and so on.
And she's kind of standing, staring sadly into the distance.
She's a beautiful woman. Probably about, I don't know, 28 or 30.
And the caption's on the cover of the magazine.
The caption on the top of the magazine is something like, The cure for loneliness!
Cure for loneliness? You're a young, beautiful woman.
Get married and have kids.
Hey, look! You've got a cure!
And it's going to last forever if you're a decent parent.
That's your insurance.
That's your hedge. That's the point.
Plan for the last half of your life.
Plan for the last third of your life.
And that means get married.
Have kids. I'm sorry.
I mean, I know there's some people who can't.
I know there's some people who really don't want to.
This is not for them. Although if you want to and you can't, there's regret to process.
And I understand all of that.
And I sympathize with that enormously.
And if you don't want to, fine.
It's not something that you really care about or whatever.
But just because you think you don't want to, I don't know.
It's funny how, I don't know if you got this when you were younger, Christine, but like wanting kids is like just not cool anymore.
It's just not cool. Like, if you want to go be a lawyer or, you know, be a painter or, you know, a real estate agent, that's cool, that's hip, that's interesting or whatever.
A sculptor! But, you know, I remember when I was in my teens, there was a woman, a girl, I guess, right?
This was in grade 11 or 12 or whatever.
So I was, oh, Lord, what was it?
I guess I was 16 or 17.
And there was a girl in my high school.
She loved babies, man.
She worked with kids.
And you know how like there were like pictures – well, you don't know.
She was still younger. Pictures of Duran Duran and all these other kinds of cool cats up in the lockers back then.
She had pictures of babies.
I mean, she so much wanted to become a mom.
And man, people made fun of her for that.
It's brutal. I don't know how it became like – Babies are a distraction from the glorious fulfillment of adulthood.
It's like, oh, that's crap.
Nothing you do, nothing you do will be more important than making a life.
Nothing you do. You're never going to make anything that makes something else except a baby.
And having all of the money and all the stuff around you without people will drive you mad.
We are a tribal species.
We are a social animal.
We're not cats. We're dogs.
We need each other.
We need connection.
And maybe, just maybe, your daughter is getting some of that.
You know how there's a pendulum in society and it goes really far one way and you think, we're doomed.
And then suddenly, it comes sliding back the other way.
Well, maybe your daughter's kind of lost because she's looking at your life and saying, well, love you, mom.
Good mom. Great mom.
But I don't want what you had.
That didn't look like a lot of fun for a lot of time.
So I want something else.
But culture is not serving me up anything.
I've got this inchoate sense that I want something else than what my parents had.
The hedonism of youth is not for me.
The uselessness of random education is not for me.
Travel to no purpose is not for me.
Plus, it's too dangerous to go to Europe these days.
And no one's serving up.
Be a young mom. Build your foundation early.
Be young enough to robustly enjoy your great-grandchildren.
Because, you know, all these women squeezing out one pup in their 30s, be lucky to hold your grandchildren at all.
Or maybe you won't be allowed to hold your grandchildren because your arms are too wobbly.
You don't want to drop them on their heads because you're too damn old.
So maybe she doesn't want to have kids at the age you had her, but society isn't serving her up any other option or maybe any other choice.
So maybe she's kind of on strike.
I don't know. I apologize for the long rant, but I was thinking about this a lot today.
So I really wanted to, you know, for better or for worse, give you the brain dump.
But I wonder if the pendulum is starting to swing back and people are saying, you know, like the Japanese kids who don't want to get married and have families because they saw their parents, their dads in particular, work themselves half to death and be nagged at and complained about.
And they're like, well, I don't want that.
I mean, anime may be kind of childish, but it's a step up.
Like the anime MGTOW stuff that's going on in Japan these days is just a general repudiation of the entire bullshit ethos of the society.
Male disposability is hanging by a thread throughout the entire First World.
Men are like, man, no.
I'm not sacrificing myself for a society that calls me a rapist and a society that calls me a patriarch and a society that calls me a woman hater and a misogynist.
I'm not sacrificing myself at all.
And we'll find out just how far society can go when men stop sacrificing themselves when they go golf with the balls.
And I think that for your daughter's generation, your generation and my generation, Or not what they want, specifically.
And there's some things that they would want, and I'm not saying that we did just terrible things, but we were so ridiculously uneducated, right?
I mean, you with your adverse child experience score of 9.
It's brutal. So you're saying to your parents, I don't want what you want.
And you've made massive steps forward and massive congratulations on what you've done.
But your daughter may be looking at your life and saying, no, that's not for me.
Maybe you didn't look like you were having a whole lot of fun for a lot of her childhood, mom.
It's not for me. I don't want to try and combine work with family.
But because nobody says, be a young mom, maybe strike is all you have.
This is, I don't know. I'm sorry for that.
I hope this makes some kind of sense.
To interject, I say, yeah, I mean, you hit on one of my darkest and worst fears for my daughter is that being an only child with very little family around here, I don't want her to end up alone.
That would, you know, I think ultimately every parent wants their child to have happiness and connection and love throughout their entire life because every, you know, most parents part ways out of their children's life long before they do and you leave them.
You leave them in the world to fend for themselves and I never considered that possibility that I may have been inadvertently pushing into a cycle of the very thing I wanted her to avoid which is this loneliness and spinsterism or married with no children and And alone when she's old.
Yeah, especially for the single kids.
I mean, my daughter's a single kid too, so I completely understand that.
And if she doesn't really connect with her peers for reasons that we talked about earlier, sending her off to college, unless, like if she's there for some substantial learning thing that she's desperate to do, it's one thing.
But if she's just kind of dawdling along and On the train track for no particular reason.
What happens in college?
Well, there's a lot of drinking.
There's a lot of drugs.
There's a lot of useless, soul-destroying, casual sex.
You know, I remember just being astonished when I was in a dorm.
I never lived in a dorm, but I dated people who lived in dorms.
And I just remember when they started mingling the bathrooms and the showers.
And I'm like, this is like Caligula level shit.
You got a bunch of, you know, horny, drunk, away from home for the first time.
People, males and females, showering in the general vicinity of each other.
Come on! That's a shatter blow to the foundation of continuity, of connection.
Encourage young people to have a lot of unbonded sex.
You destroy their capacity to bond.
You destroy the capacity for families to sustain.
And again, you're killing the birthright.
Because sex becomes detached from connection.
I mean, why is sex so good?
Sex is so good so that it binds us in a lifelong way to a partner.
You take that binding to a partner, a parental co-parent partner away, it's a whole lot of cocaine.
It's a drug. And so if she goes to university, we all think it's about the education.
No, there's a whole social environment.
She's going to be put to work in groups.
And it's been pretty clearly shown that when you work in a group, you do less good.
Less well, sorry. You do less well.
She's going to be sitting a lot.
And they found that sitting is actually very bad for learning because it kind of slows down your whole brain process.
She's going to get lectured to a lot.
And being lectured to is a terrible way to learn things as a whole.
She may be pressured into using marijuana, which is not good for your brain, at least while you're using it.
She probably will not eat great food.
She probably will not get a lot of exercise.
She probably will have her sleep patterns disturbed because the classes are late and then they're early and people want to go out.
When your sleep patterns are all over the map, it's hard to learn.
You couldn't really design a worse environment for learning anything than a modern college.
Because at least in the past, there were curfews and more regular hours, and the genders were segregated, so there wasn't all of this ridiculous, casual, gross sweatpants and greasy pizza sex and all that kind of stuff.
You actually had a chance to learn something.
But now, with the hormones and the emotional instability and the drugs and the sleeplessness and the bad food and being sitting bored and lectured and distractions of phones and so on, I can't learn shit in college these days.
I'm pretty sure of that as a whole.
And she also may have a negative view of education because it took mom away, right?
I never considered that.
Yeah, I guess I have to let go of the Kool-Aid that I drank that says, you know, your child's not successful unless they're going directly into a career and they know exactly what they do.
To just step back and discuss the other options.
So thank you. Oh, you ever want to laugh to sit with me and my daughter when we're out for dinner?
And she's pretty chatty and people like chatting with her.
And they'll say, oh, you know, what do you like to do?
I like to do this. I like to do that.
Oh, way to go to school, blah, blah, blah.
And she's like, I don't want to go to high school.
High school, are you crazy? And they're like, well, if you don't go to high school, you don't go to university.
University? Why on earth would I want to go to university, right?
Because she sees me learning all the time.
I learn, I read books.
You know, I have this amazing job where I get to read fantastic books and talk to the authors.
My God, it's beautiful.
Thank you again, everyone, for making this so possible.
I take it not for granted at any point.
And so she sees me, you know, we talk about what I do on the show.
We talk about the interviews. I tell her what I'm reading in terms of the books and so on.
So I'm learning. She's learning.
Nobody's going to college. Yeah.
If I ever wanted to stop learning, then I'll send her to college and be programmed to hate me as a white male.
Yeah, it'd be great. Lovely.
And you get to pay for it, too.
Oh, in so many ways.
Yeah. She told me that middle school is useless and then went on to probably miss about 50% to 60% of the total schooling.
I was going to ask that.
How did she miss all that? She's very anxious.
Just a lot of anxiety going into the school.
She would hold herself together and participate, but she just was so anxious.
She was kind of a meltdown and just let everything go.
Just hold the anxiety in all day.
Didn't like being in large groups.
Didn't like the format of how school went.
She really wasn't learning very much.
So, yeah, she ended up...
Like you said, she had her textbooks here and taught herself a lot of things, graduated, you know, not graduated, but finished eighth grade here in the States in the top of her, you know, top of her class and got advanced placement classes.
She did that missing 50% and Yeah, but she has a bitter experience of feeling like a failure, right?
Exactly, and it really turned her off from the whole educational experience.
Yeah, don't have her repeat that in college.
Christine, that would be very tough.
Yeah, repeat the same mistake.
Oh yeah, like I mean, you really kick yourself for that when you see the pattern, right?
Yeah, wow. Exactly.
It's the same pattern repeating itself and I didn't even see that.
So thank you. Thank you so much.
All right. I hope that helps.
Please let me know what happens and do give my very best to your daughter.
Thank you so much. All right.
Thanks. Let's do one more.
Okay, up next we have Michael.
Michael wrote in and said, I've recently departed a career with a very high salary as a result of the industry's chosen direction to diversify their staff.
As a byproduct, everything I had built over my career had been dismantled and replaced with a newer liberal-friendly culture in less than five years, with the end result being me pushed out and my team collapsing.
I am now questioning the entire structure from the corporate world, but more specifically, how can someone compete in this new business culture where women and minorities are given preferential treatment?
It seems as though the corporate space is filled with incompetent leaders and workers that are incapable of doing the job they were hired for, leaving the majority of the work on the plate of those that are competent, and then punishing them for not meeting unrealistic expectations.
Additionally, these workers can't be trained and drag the business further down, taking away the competitive edge that the business units originally had.
Perhaps more importantly, is it more advantageous to civilization to have diversity over efficiency in business?
That's from Michael.
you Hey Michael, how you doing?
I am well, Stefan. How are you doing?
I'm well, I'm well.
Was there something happened in particular or was it just a general trend?
It was roughly about five or six years ago that I started realizing that something was shifting.
I exited out of a fairly lucrative business opportunity in the computer industry and decided to Do some stuff in project management.
As I got into that, I found out that the entire area that I was working in was a little bit strange.
It was weird. It was a very, very, very liberal atmosphere.
I don't drink.
I'm not a big fan of drugs.
But that seemed to be the culture that was kind of fostered in this business.
And it kind of circled around all in one week where I started butting heads with the philosophy of the business that I was working for.
And essentially what had happened was I had come out during a meeting With all of the other employees, my counterparts and a couple of my bosses.
And I had stated something that to me was very blatantly obvious that they were relying too much on one person, but they were making arguments that this situation was the best type of situation that could possibly happen.
So I dismantled it within probably about two or three minutes.
And then immediately afterwards, I was yanked into my boss's office.
And then this whole scrutiny of my work started happening and I had to prove my worth yet again.
And it's the first time that my work ethic had actually ever been brought into question because I'm not the type of person that works, you know, 40-hour weeks.
I've always worked 80, 90, 100-hour weeks.
So I take my job very seriously being as it's, you know, my life source to keep my family fed and to take care of my wife and my daughter.
So it's...
Fairly important. So, eventually what happened was I exited that company because I realized that culturally it just didn't make sense for me.
It seemed like there was a kind of concerted effort to find an excuse to push you out, right?
Yeah, and I used a really funny term.
I joke about it with my friends now because I'm very data-driven.
I love efficiency. It's kind of, I feel, one of the big reasons why I've done well in the corporate world.
I started off at the baseline only making like $9 an hour and a year and a half when I exited my career and decided that it wasn't worth it anymore because of what I was sacrificing.
I topped out at about 300,000 a year.
And it was a massive shift for my family to have to adjust to a dramatic drop in financial capabilities and luxury and whatnot.
But when I returned back to this business that I loved, I departed because...
The directors refused to compensate me for the work that I was doing, even to the level of my counterparts, even though I had a massive amount of responsibility.
And that's when I actually did the second business, and then I returned afterwards because they knew that I was able to build that business back up.
I proved that I was capable of doing it before.
And they brought me back into the business because it was odd work hours.
It was extremely demanding.
So it wasn't a 40 hour work week.
It was more like an 80 plus hour work week.
And the culture for the engineers needed to be repaired because the management staff had recently turned over so greatly in the two and a half years that I'd been gone that They couldn't even talk technical to the engineers anymore.
Or the customers, which obviously is very concerning because I stepped into the managerial position from an engineer standpoint, and I managed engineers as I had been an engineer.
So the expectation was I would enter back in, I'd repair the culture, and I'd drop attrition rates.
We had a 78% attrition rate.
That's annually? Sorry, that was annually?
Correct, yes. So, three-quarters of your employees were leaving every year?
For this business segment, yes.
It was a weekend business.
No, no, but that is an absolutely unsustainable business, just so everybody who doesn't understand tech knows.
Because I've never been a formal engineer, of course, but I computer program, and I came out of the computer programming world to be a team lead and then to be eventually chief technical officer.
So, yeah. And I built the damn software from the ground up, and so there was nothing that anyone could tell me about the software from the engineering side that I didn't already know better.
If you can't speak to the engineers, then you can't also defend the engineers because everyone knows that salespeople over promise and then the salespeople go home with a big fat check and the engineers have to work all weekend to make up for the promises that the engineers, that the salespeople are paid for, that the engineers aren't getting paid overtime for.
So you have to know this stuff in order to be able to push back to the salespeople and the customers who want everything for free.
Anyway, so yeah, 70, oh my gosh, that is insane.
Businesses can't even survive much north of 20 because continuity.
I mean, it takes six months to teach someone how to get up to speed on a complex engineering task and so on.
And if you've got that kind of attrition rate, oh, man.
Oh, man. Talk about pedaling without a chain.
So it's troubleshooting industry, but it's not like your typical AOL or prodigy internet troubleshooting, how do I connect my mouse to my computer?
It's more like my engineers had to learn an infrastructure on a call, and then they had to deal with the technical complexities of our product plugging into other products.
Oh yeah, no, I get it. And they have to do all this on the phone.
Yes. Obviously, remote software.
But the ramp-up time wasn't even six months.
It was 12 months minimum.
And the training was only eight weeks long.
So, a lot of people were ducking in to get certifications for free and then ducking out whenever they realized they had to work the weekends or something like that.
Well, or if there is a sort of females and minorities promotion culture, why would you stick around?
Hey, you want your minority and you want your women company, you're gonna get it, and faster than you might want.
Yeah, and I started realizing about two years ago, I came across your channel and started listening here and there.
You know, the elections had started happening.
I never even considered politics as something I would even talk about, or even religion and philosophy in general.
It kind of all smacked me at the same time.
I started realizing what was happening.
You know, I had stepped in for the first year and I dropped attrition to 0% for a 12-month period.
And it wasn't looking like it was going to change.
And then through data, because I love spreadsheets and numbers, I proved to the business leaders, my directors, that we needed headcount.
That me working 80 hours a week was not sustainable.
You know, I have a daughter I'm trying to help raise and I need to be there at least sometimes because, you know, as you've stated many times, a family without a father, I mean, that produces very lopsided children.
Let me just point out before you go on, I just wanted to mention this.
That you said that when you, I think if I remember rightly, you said that when your family income went from like 300k down to 100k, there was a huge adjustment, right?
But what is the huge adjustment?
Yeah, 300k down to zero dollars.
Oh, zero. Yeah, huge, huge adjustment and so on.
And that's obviously not overly sustainable.
But the adjustment that a family has to go through when you're working 80 hours a week, Because that's more than 80 hours a week.
I don't know if that includes commuting and stuff, or just the mind space that you have.
Because, you know, if you're a guy you care about, or you're anyone, man or woman, you care about your job, you don't just go home and switch it off, right?
You think about it when you're at home.
It's going to happen, right?
And so... Yeah, I manage 150 engineers internationally, and my decisions affected their lives and their families, so...
Yeah, so why do you think you work so many hours?
Um, I was climbing the corporate ladder for a long time.
I mean, 10 years I went from making minimum wage to 300k a year plus, you know, benefits and stuff.
But, uh, I don't know.
In a sense, it was like my wife was at home.
She was taking care of my daughter.
No, but didn't she say, uh, come home more?
I'm sorry, say that again?
Didn't she say come home more?
Um, in the beginning she did, uh, when I first started out the career, uh, and then we sat down and had a chat and I expressed that, uh, if we want more than, you know, like a house and stuff, I need to climb faster and that's going to take, take me away.
But this was obviously before we'd had a kid at that point, you know, my, my daughter's, uh, oh God, yeah.
Eight years old now. Uh, So, for the first two years, that's kind of where everything was set between my wife and I, that I needed to focus on a career to be able to produce the luxuries, so to speak, of being able to provide for a family.
No, but you don't really get to enjoy those luxuries, right?
Right, right. So you're working for her.
You buy the nice car so you can drive to work.
Hang on, hang on.
So was it mostly for her?
Like she chose the money over you?
No, I think it was more me.
The decisions that I made, I've been self-reflecting since I departed my career.
I seriously regret Not being around more.
My wife and I have an extremely good relationship.
My daughter and I have a really good relationship.
But I feel like I could do more.
I enjoy talking to my daughter and we have probably one or two hours a day that we talk and just discuss Any questions that she may have.
And that's kind of what I was missing out on before.
I was around, but I was stuck in an office because sometimes, you know, 40 hours I would work in the office, but it took another 40 hours out in my home office to actually wrap up the work and reporting, stuff like that.
Well, and when you're competent, the work sticks to you like flies to flypaper.
You're like a caribou walking through a bunch of burrs, right?
You end up more burr than caribou.
Because when you're competent, you know, it's an old saying that was told to me by someone in the business world very early on.
He says, hey, you want something done?
Give it to the busy men. Give it to the guy who's not busy.
It'll never get done. Give it to the busy guy.
It'll get done. And when you have that kind of competence, which is a very admirable trait, then...
Work will just accrue to you and people will give stuff to you because they know you'll do it till it's done.
Yeah, that's my work ethic.
It doesn't matter what it takes, it will get done because it has to get done or else something bad is going to happen.
Well, no, but the work ethic, it's interesting because the work ethic for you was more professional than parental, right?
If you'd taken the same work ethic application to your parenting...
In the past, right? Then you may have had a better balance.
Yeah. Now it's one thing when you feel like your work is Essential and necessary, you're being well rewarded for it and you've got prestige and status and that's all one thing.
But I guess maybe part of your concern is, okay, if they're starting to promote people who aren't necessarily earning the position based on merit alone, then you also feel Like you're kind of being dragged down by other people, by less competent people, by people who are willing to work less hard, and so on. And that is when the work ethic starts to become self-destructive, in my opinion.
I mean, it's tough already, you know, just having that kind of work ethic.
But then if you're carrying other people who were less competent, it's very hard to maintain the enthusiasm.
Yes, more difficult to come to work to foster that culture that's required to keep the business, you know, at an optimum level to keep the employees satisfied to stay long enough to actually learn the job and become proficient at it.
And that's pretty much what happened was I started seeing counterparts that were not on my shift getting promotions into positions that were over me in my business segment.
And they didn't understand the business segment that I was working in.
But it was because they were women or minorities, is that right?
Correct. Right.
Well, at least that's the theory, right?
Yeah, that's one of the things that I feel when I came back, I noticed a lot more of it.
It wasn't, we were, you know, it used to be Hey, welcome to the interview.
Let's go ahead and have a quick chat about how to fix a toaster.
Okay? I'm a customer.
I've got a broken toaster.
Walk me through how to fix it.
And then they would. And then we'd be able to determine their competency based on that questioning and their response.
But what ended up happening when I came back was, what do you do in your spare time?
Do you have...
Do you play a lot of video games?
And do you hang out with your friends?
And do you like to drink?
And And that seemed to be the criteria for the culture of people that liked each other as opposed to people that liked each other because they were capable of doing the job.
Yeah, respect as opposed to compatibility.
Right. Yeah, and this is taking over corporations, as you know, more and more.
This kind of brain virus.
And, you know, we can, I mean, this is one of the reasons why I talk about race and IQ, why I talk about gender and IQ, is we can't have a meritocracy until these things are understood.
And it is essential for everyone that we have a meritocracy.
Because right now, the meritocracy is considered to be racist and sexist and bigoted and nasty and patriarchal and this and that and the other.
And therefore, we're not allowed to have a meritocracy.
And so all disparities in numbers or incomes or positions between various ethnicities and between genders and so on is all put into the pile of racism and sexism.
And that means we can't have a meritocracy.
Because we know from the gender IQ data, from the race IQ data, that there are going to be disparities on average.
There's going to be brilliant women, going to be brilliant everyone, but there are, zoomed out, going to be disparities.
If we have a meritocracy, we get inequality.
This is not true necessarily just between races or between genders, but it's true for everyone.
The more the meritocracy, the greater the inequality.
And this comes out of this basic principle that Jordan Peterson has talked about and others have talked about.
This principle that the square root of the workers produce half the value.
The square root of the workers produce half the value.
Out of 10,000 workers, 100 of them are producing half the value.
Like, I'm sorry, if there's a meritocracy, you don't get equality.
And if you want equality, you have to destroy the meritocracy.
If you destroy the meritocracy, you end up with communism.
Well, it's a different kind of meritocracy, more to do with brutality and lust for power and willingness to inflict pain and horror on people.
And this is why I talk about this stuff, not because I relish the data, not because I enjoy the topic, but because for civilization to survive, we need a meritocracy.
See, we have the population we have because of the meritocracy.
So we have huge increases in populations around the world of human beings because we had, to a large degree, a meritocracy.
Now, if we say all inequalities between groups are the result of sexism and racism and whatever, then we destroy the meritocracy.
When we destroy the meritocracy, we destroy the production that keeps...
Hundreds of millions, if not billions of human beings alive.
I'm not kidding. It is that serious.
The excess human population absolutely depends, like don't kid yourself about this, it absolutely depends on the smartest people controlling the most resources.
That's a meritocracy. And if we say the meritocracy is bad because racism, sexism, and we start taking resources from the most competent—I don't care the gender, I don't care the race—but if we take resources from the most competent and we give them to less competent people— And this happens in the welfare state.
It also happens to some degree in the military-industrial complex.
It happens in jobs, as Michael is talking about.
If we take our precious, scarce resources, and we take them from the more competent people, and we give them to the less competent people, we are undermining the entire productivity matrix that is keeping billions of human beings alive.
Billions of human beings alive.
It is that important.
If people like Michael don't have control over resources because of his competence, if people like Michael No longer want or enjoy being competent because they're carrying too many people, because their work is being blended into less competent people, because they don't like carrying people without praise, without reward.
It's one thing to say, hey man, you know, if you could really cover for me, I'd really appreciate it.
You know, I'll wax your car this weekend.
Something like that, right? That's one thing.
I remember being a waiter, trying to get out of working.
I drew the short straw and I had to work New Year's Eve and I wanted to go to a party.
When I was in my teens, and the amount of work I had to do and the amount actually I had to pay for some other way to take my shift was prodigious, right?
So it's one thing to say, hey man, I know you're better at this than me.
I really appreciate it, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But it's another thing to say, well, you're just a racist, sexist pig, so give me your job.
You know, that is going to kill motivation.
And if we take away the resources from the most competent and we kill their motivation...
I'm telling you, hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death, Zimbabwe style.
So this is why this call is so important, because people really, really need to understand that.
If you're going to have a meritocracy, you are going to have inequality between races, between genders, between more competent and less competent people on average as a whole.
Again, we never judge the individuals, but collectively, this is how it's going to play out.
You can have a meritocracy, which keeps lots of people alive, or you can have egalitarian fantasies that are unjust, usually coercive, and will result, I'm not kidding, in the deaths of hundreds of millions of people, because you're going to run out of food.
You're going to run out of... Don't you feel?
I don't know if you feel this, Michael.
Do you feel... Like, the world is just decaying.
The world is...
Entropy is taking over.
I feel like when you throw a ball up, you know, right when it leaves your hand, it's going like a rocket, it goes up, and then, you know, gravity begins to take over and wears down, and then it just...
See all these planes falling out of the sky.
See all these sewage systems failing.
See the water in Flint, Michigan.
Just see this general decay and the amount of maintenance that has not been done on crucial infrastructure.
All this stuff that's been kicked down the road.
I mean, the pensions and the unfunded liabilities in Medicare and Medicaid.
And I just feel like there's just this general decay as a whole.
And it's really tragic.
And I think it is because we are shifting all of these resources from more competent people to less competent people.
And that's okay for a while.
You can kind of get away with it for a while.
But you do end up paying a price.
And I think that price is starting to become visible.
It's like trying to marry two incompatible systems of socialism and capitalism.
It just doesn't...
It helps things to limp along, it seems, but as soon as I started seeing it in business, that's when I started investigating other things.
Like I said, I've never been interested in politics, but then I saw everything kind of crumbling around me in my other business units and I was struggling to get headcount when everybody was just having headcount thrown at them, and I was the one, you know, producing results.
And the reasoning always became, well, stop weaponizing information, stop weaponizing data, essentially, the data that they produce.
And instead, we're going to give headcounts to these other business units because they're struggling.
Instead of looking at why are they struggling, it was just they're struggling, let's throw resources at them, and the people that are running these business units deserve to be in power.
And it's just like, no, no, that's a terrible idea because competency goes hand-in-hand, I think, with IQ. And...
You want the most confident at the top so that they can actually adjust business strategy and make intelligent decisions whenever data presents itself instead of having this more collective thought of, well, the employees on this shift are less happy, so we need to get them more counterparts so we can reduce their workload.
Right.
But it doesn't coincide with the actual facts because if you look at the other business units that are successful, they're not suffering from that.
And they still have the low headcount just like everybody else, if not less, because now everything's being pre-allocated to these failing business units.
Right.
So the problems that mainstream large corporations are experiencing.
It's hard to say that they're just self-generated because there are often legal requirements, either soft or hard, legal requirements for diversity.
There is, of course, the ever-howling mob of leftist outrage merchants who will attack you if they perceive that you are acting against the egalitarian fantasies that they drug themselves with.
So corporations are just trying to sort of survive.
And if they don't pursue diversity, then the directors can be liable for neglecting their fiduciary responsibility to maintain the value of the shares and exposing themselves to attacks and maybe excluding themselves from certain government contracts or exposing themselves to legal liability.
Who knows, right? So, the big companies...
Well, our business units aren't even run by people within the same country.
Oh, okay. Yeah, but they would still be responsible to the legal and regulatory environment within the states.
So, I think that the gift is, to a large degree, stop working for other people.
Be an independent contractor.
Be your own entrepreneur.
Start your own firm. Start management services.
Start whatever it is. Write a book.
Create a presentation.
Go do a speaking tour. Whatever it is, right?
Because until we get a free society, these upheavals are going to be constant.
These upheavals are going to be constant.
Like that old airplane movie where they had this running gag that people would be lining up for one Of those gates where the planes were.
And then they say, oh, the gate has been changed to her.
And they all go running across. And then, oh, the gate has been changed.
They all go running across to her.
They're all just swarming all over the place like a bunch of tadpoles chasing a laser.
And that is how it's going to be.
As long as we have the state at the center, all of this random shit is just going to keep happening.
Where you make your plans, and your plans get broken.
Where you make your investment, and your investment evaporates.
And you do this, and then you're like, oh, look at all these people.
Oh, we've got to really get into IT, because there's a tech boom.
Oh, no, no, that's gone.
Because it turned out that was just a whole bunch of fiat currency floating around.
And when I was younger, it was like, oh, you've got to get into academia, because all these boomers are going to be retiring.
It's like, yeah. Well, first of all, a lot of them won't.
And secondly, they won't hire you if you're a white male.
So, you know, you're always going to have, because it's not market-driven, it's whim-driven, it's coercive-driven, it's identity group victim narrative-driven, and therefore, it's going to be random as hell.
The only chance for security in the modern economy is independence.
It's the only security, the only predictability you're going to have is entrepreneurial independence and crypto, right?
So, the challenge is Are you going to be able to gain control over your career?
Which means are you going to be able to become as independent and become a meritocracy of one?
I don't see myself residing in this career any longer.
I've kind of given it up. One of the big factors for me and my wife in the way I worked and why I worked the way that I did and had to ensure that I retained my position and climbed the ladder was I walked away with $120,000 in educational debt, so it needed to pay off itself at the very least or else I can't move on to something else.
During the 10 years that I was building my career, I also purchased a house, you know, after my daughter was born and it was a crappy house.
I got it for An eighth of what the rest of the houses in the neighborhood were and sat foreclosed for five or six years and was just falling apart.
So, I figured I'm in tech.
I can research.
I'm a DIY-er.
Why not just fix it myself?
So, went through, got all the permits, basically gutted the entire house, did all the electrical- Shit, were you saying you were doing this on top of your 80-hour weeks?
Yeah, I'd spend about an hour or two each night whenever I'd go home.
Jesus, man. You need help with this work ethic.
That's not a work ethic. That's a slave ethic.
Anyway, it's in the past.
I just kind of wanted to point that out.
You might want to keep a bit of an eye on that.
Well, it ended up being my saving grace was I was working in the house and learning all this new stuff, which was fantastic.
My daughter got to see and help along the line with some of it.
Yeah, that's cool. No, that's cool if she can help you with that.
Yeah. That's quality time.
Yeah, it gave me a chance to sit down with her, you know, intimate time, have conversations while painting a wall or ripping out insulation or doing plumbing under the house or whatever, you know, normal stuff, I guess.
And it's ended up saving us because after I quit my high paying job, obviously all this student loans still exist and all the debt that you accumulate by running the rat race.
And now I'm at the point where, well, let's sell it.
And now it's worth considerably more than anything in the area because I added many upgrades for convenience factors.
But that's how I'm going to clear out all of that and proceed forward.
And it's kind of at the point where do I enter back into corporate America now that I've cleared out all of this debt and work normal hours?
Or do I go and start my own business And go the way of the entrepreneur and actually provide what the business should have been providing in the first place.
You know, unparalleled customer support and taking care of your employees and allowing them to have their families and not to always be stressed.
You know, it's trying to take care of the customer and the employee at the same time.
Well, yeah, I mean, listen, I mean, I would certainly say that more time with your daughter at the moment, and maybe even another kid, might not be the end of the world, certainly the entrepreneurial side.
It depends how you do it. If you do it more on a consulting basis, then you can keep it more limited.
If you start your own company, you know, that's a whole time sink that you've seen before.
But if you go into the corporate world, you know, as a white male, you're going to be limited for the most part, because Everybody knows what the rules are, that the racism and the sexism that is allowed is against white males.
And not only allowed, it's encouraged.
It's required, in fact, for a lot of businesses.
And as long as you know that going in, that your opportunities are going to be extraordinarily limited.
But it sort of reminds me of what Scott Adams says.
So Scott Adams worked at, I think it was Pacific Bell for many years.
And then they basically said to him one day, well, you're never going to get promoted because the mandate has come down that only women and minorities are going to get promoted.
So this is going to be your job until you retire, basically.
I mean, I'm paraphrasing, but it was something like that.
Yeah. And he's like, okay, well, to hell with this.
I'm going to go do my cartooning, right?
And he, I don't know, before or after, but he worked for an hour a day for a year on his cartooning.
And then he started doing very well from that and, you know, became a public speaker and a comedy writer and now a much more serious writer and social commentator and all of that kind of cool stuff.
And so if diversity hadn't come along, then he probably wouldn't have done Nearly as well, because he would have continued to do that thing.
So society hardens, a state of society hardens on a regular basis.
And if you get out in time, then you can end up doing pretty well.
So if you do want to spend, I mean, I would try and, if I were you, I would try and design my life so that I didn't have to work too hard, but I wasn't dependent on a corporate hierarchy that was going to Treat me unfairly.
And there's lots of different ways you can do that, where you don't start your own business, but you're available as a consultant so you can manage your own hours more.
So that would be my particular suggestion, is try and find a way that you're not dependent on a corporation.
And yet, at the same time, not working the kind of crazy hours it takes to start a, you know, bonafide sustainable business from scratch.
Yeah, I don't want to take time away from my daughter at this point because it's...
I see the problems that are being caused.
I've got a group of probably about 12 friends and maybe only two of us are married with kids.
They're all single and they can't find women and It's very weird to see because I didn't see that with my dad's generation.
I didn't see it in, you know, the films of the 80s and the 70s.
So it was...
I don't want to steal time away from my daughter because I feel like she's the most important thing because she's the future of what's going to happen.
And I obviously...
Can't just go out and start a huge movement to try to shift the changes that probably, you know, the massive changes that would be required in our society to be able to become better or at least stable.
So I figure I've got a child and I can help her to see the truth of the world a lot clearer than what I was handed.
Not only that, but as she gets into her teen years and she starts to find group identity, then if she's got questions, I want to make sure that I'm there and she understands that I'm a mentor, shifting from parent into mentorship as she gets older.
Right. So she doesn't feel awkward asking me complex questions, but...
And also pulling my wife into that mentality.
Right. To produce better humans, I guess.
Yep. Yeah, for sure.
And try and convince your friends to have some kids, for heaven's sakes.
Selfish bastards. They're alive because somebody sacrificed to...
Anyway. All right, well, let me know how it goes.
I'm curious, but yeah, I mean, there's nothing.
Like, I mean, okay, maybe abject starvation that would have me go back into the corporate world.
But I haven't worked at a big corporation I don't know, probably for 30 years?
25 years? 25?
Anyway, it's been a long time.
I don't think I can do it.
I've discussed it with my wife, and we've kind of come to the conclusion that it may not be in anyone's best interest.
Right. Yeah, it's almost, for me, whatever you do is fine, as long as you're completely honest about why you're doing it and all that.
I think that sounds like you've really worked through it.
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