Oct. 12, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:20:00
4224 Kanye, Atlas Shrugged and New Employment!
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Hi, everybody. Hope you're doing well, Stefan Molyneux.
Nice to chat with you guys.
It's a real pleasure.
Any advice on how not to quote Molyneux constantly?
No. See, I am constantly quoting Molyneux, and therefore, I have no particular advice.
And we have...
A lot to talk about today.
Oh my goodness.
We have a lot to talk about today.
And just for those, you know, who get mad about the Ramble Tangent introductions, I'm just going to tell you straight up that I want to wait for everyone to gather them and then we get into the big topics.
So here's a little cute story.
It's a funny story. Wow.
But the story goes a little something low.
Is it letting me?
Is it letting me? Don't autofocus me, bro.
There we go. All right. So I'm doing some spelling words with my daughter the other day.
And the word was forehead.
And, of course, what happened was...
She said, don't look at my answer.
And she wrote out, big, chatty, watermelon forehead equals daddy equals Stefan.
And I really can't...
She got all the words right, even watermelon.
So that was kind of nice. And that was pretty funny.
So I just wanted to mention that.
We have a lot to talk about.
I'm going to just dive right in.
So you probably... Heard all of this stuff, but it's worth repeating.
It really is astounding. So CNN. I'm really beginning to understand why they chose the voice of Darth Vader as their announcer, but just monstrous.
So we got Don Lemon, who says to a guest, shut up.
You know, a little rough, but not the end of the world.
But then he did a discussion on Kanye West and Kanye West wearing the MAGA hat and supporting Trump and all of that.
Bakari Sellers and Tara Sedmire.
That's quite a long way from Sotomayor, let me tell you that.
And Sellers said, Kanye West is what happens when Negroes don't read.
Let me just tell you something.
That's a horrible word, Negroes.
I just... It's one of these, I mean, the other N-word's even worse, but it's just, it's such a historical, denigrating, negative, hostile, brutal word.
And, yeah, Negroes don't read.
And Setmeyer chimed in and said, listen, black folks are about to trade Kanye West in the racial draft, okay?
He's an attention whore like the president.
He's all of a sudden now the model spokesperson.
He's the token Negro of the Trump administration.
And then, I mean, Kanye West, I don't know about your musical talents, but the guy's won a Grammy 21 times.
He knows his stuff as far as that goes.
And then, I think this was on Mental Health Day, she suggested, or Setmeyer, Suggested that Kanye West needs to be hospitalized.
Don Lemon also called Kanye West's appearance because Kanye West dropped by the White House and gave a hug to Trump and did all kinds of wonderful stuff.
And Kanye West, the visit to Trump was called by Don Lennon a minstrel show.
Now, for those who don't know, that's sort of the old, camp down ladies sing that song, that sort of hootenanny stuff that blacks used to have to do to entertain whites in the South and in other places.
It's very, it's a very hostile thing.
thing to say, black racial infighting that occurs, you know, like you're acting white if you do well, and you're an Oreo if you're ambitious and use good diction and so on.
And the Oreo, of course, means that you're brown on the outside or black on the outside, but white on the inside, the equivalent for East Asians is a banana.
And yeah, it's just nasty.
And then we all know how rappers love to hear talk about their mamas.
Then what happened was...
Don Lemon suggested that Kanye's dead mother would be rolling in her grave.
I assume to turn over in the afterlife and change the channel to anything but CNN. So yeah, if Kanye's dead mother knew he was hugging Trump, she'd be rolling in her grave.
Lemon said, him sitting there being used by the President of the United States, the President of the United States, exploiting him, and I don't mean this in a disparaging way, exploiting someone who needs help, who needs to back away from the cameras, who needs to get off stage, who needs to deal with his issues.
This has nothing to do, he said, with being liberal or a conservative.
This has to do with honesty.
So Don Lemon, who doesn't seem to breathe without a camera on him, is saying that somebody else needs to back away from cameras.
And, yeah, CNN has referred to Kanye West as a dumb Negro for supporting Trump.
Now, of course, if any other station or group or anything other than the leftists at CNN had done this, I mean, there would just be a giant crater of moral outrage where the studio would be.
I mean, people would call racism.
They would get advertisers to pull out.
There would be a massive boycott.
It would just be astonishing.
And the Democrats lose a certain percentage of the black vote.
They can't hold on to power.
And they have, for the past 50, 60 years, you really could say, since...
According to reports, LBJ bought off the black vote with welfare in the 1960s.
They really desperately need this black vote.
And because they've always been assured of getting the black vote, they haven't really done much, as Candace points out and others points out.
They haven't really done much for the black community.
And so coming up to the midterms, Kanye and Candace and others are doing a really wild and powerful thing, which is To break the programming of a lot of the blacks in the United States who just believe, you know, they have this idea.
So it's kind of interesting, and you can watch Dinesh D'Souza's movie about more on this, so I'll just summarize it really briefly.
So the left, the Democrats in particular, Very hostile towards black rights.
It was the Republicans who had the first congressman who were black.
It was the Republicans who really worked hard on gun laws to make sure that the blacks had access to guns to protect themselves from the KKK, which was the terrorist wing of the Democratic Party at the time.
It was the, you know, why are all these problems to do with marriage and licenses and so on?
A lot to do with the Democrats who put in marriage licenses in order to try and prevent blacks and whites from From marrying together.
And so there is this acknowledgement that there was racism from the Democrats in the past, but there was supposed to be this big pivot in the 60s, this Southern strategy, for which there is no evidence.
This is Nixon in particular.
Oh, well, they switched sides in the 60s and so on, and this is really not the case at all.
They continue to be, in my view, just horribly racist.
Because here's the thing. Let's say...
I mean, we all want to avoid collective judgments of ethnic groups.
Of course we do, right? I mean, because that's not good, right?
I mean, I know I've got the facts on the race and IQ stuff.
That's all big picture stuff.
But we want to avoid moral judgments, in particular, of racial groups.
So, people like Kanye West and Candace Owens and Tommy Sotomayor and other people who break this sort of Democrat mold, like, if you're a Republican and blacks are overwhelmingly voting for Democrats, then you have a problem with blacks just Demographically, right? Because you want Republicans to get in and blacks are overwhelmingly voting for the Democrats.
So it's logical in some ways to have a negative view of blacks if you're a Republican because they vote so much for the Democrats.
Now, if this groupthink can be dismantled, then amazing stuff can happen in that you can start to look at the political landscape and In America, with the diversity that it should have, which is not, you know, well, blacks are 90% plus going to vote for Democrats.
And it is, they're doing some just amazing stuff.
Just amazing stuff.
And it is a brutal thing.
You know, Kanye West, you know, the guy, he's a rich guy, was very popular and very successful and happily married, as far as I understand it.
He's got good kids and a good wife and all that.
Like, why would he want to do all of this kind of stuff?
There is a restlessness and a curiosity and a willingness to confront groupthink in Kanye West and others that is great, is wonderful, it's passionate, and it's powerful.
To see. He doesn't need to do all of this.
He's going to take a lot of heat. He is taking a lot of heat, a lot of hostility.
That's a hard thing.
That's a hard thing. In the black community, of course, being accused of colluding with whites against the black community is a very grave thing to be accused of.
And it's a pretty harsh thing, and it really does polarize and so on.
So, you know, I just wanted to say kudos to that.
Now, I'll just do the top. I will do the...
The Super Chats for just a moment, and then I want to get on to Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged.
So, Johan Carlson, thank you very much for your support.
And Ted Johnson, I'm not going to read that, but thank you.
I think that's not the right thing.
Thank you for the donation, but that is not a positive thing to say at all.
I think it's nasty as hell. So, alright.
So, I want to talk to you a little bit about Atlas Shrugged.
So, Atlas Shrugged is a great book.
It's a great, great book.
And there has been this very successful campaign on the part of the left.
To portray it as crappy, as bad characterizations, an incomprehensible plot, and bad writing, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Ayn Rand, I know, you know, you get a lot of cool points for denying the value of Ayn Rand, but I don't care about cool points.
That's not really the philosophy.
It's not really the philosophical argument to say, I want truth, I want reason, I want evidence.
I don't care about cool points and Yeah, The Fountainhead, I read it once every five to ten years, and it was fantastic.
And the fact that she has one of the most successful novels in English when she was not a native English speaker is really quite something.
And it is...
I wanted to tell you one of the reasons why it's a great book.
This is going to be a bit of a spoiler, so, you know, skip over this part.
It's not a huge spoiler, but it's not inconsequential.
And this writing is fantastic.
And it's important to understand when I get to the part in Twitter where they talk about Atlas Shrugged that came out of a tweet from Literary Hub about Ayn Rand.
And I'm going to read this bit before we get to why I think that that tweet was just bothering me in ways that I think you'll understand.
So, this is from Ayn Rand, contrahumannature.blogspot.com, and I think it's, what is it, 61 years now that it came out?
Amazing. And she spent, what, 13 years writing it, if I remember rightly, and never really wrote any other novels again.
And she was appalled at how it was written.
I remember... Leonard Peikoff, who she designated as her intellectual heir, was, you know, young and, of course, optimistic.
And so, you know, the government programs are going to be dismantled within a year of this book being published because the arguments are unassailable and the perspective is unassailable.
But listen to this bit about the book.
Listen to this part of the book.
And you can pick up the audiobook on Audible and you can get it, of course, pretty cheap.
There's a lot of pompous self-important people who have a secondhand copy that is not really understood.
And I'm going to read you this bit.
And I'll set this up just a little bit.
So there's a woman in it. And she should be, of course, a feminist heroine.
She is a woman. She is incredibly competent and intelligent and powerful.
And she's in charge of a train company.
And there's increasing government control over the transportation industry and other industries, of course.
And what happens, and we can see this happening in the West at the moment, there's this decay of the infrastructure.
You build it up, and politicians like to cut ribbons on new stuff.
They don't really get a lot of kudos for maintaining old stuff.
And so infrastructure is kind of decaying.
And the connection between large-scale disasters and the thinking of people in their personal lives and their personal conversations was always very powerful to me.
And so I'm going to read you this bit.
There's this train heading towards a disaster.
And this is from the novel.
As the tunnel came closer, they saw the edge of the sky, far to the south, in a void of space, living fire, twisting in the wind.
They did not know what it was and did not care.
And there were those who would have said that the passengers of the comet, that's the train, were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them.
The man in bedroom A, car number one, was the professor.
of sociology who taught that individual abilities of no consequence, that individual effort is futile, that an individual conscience is a useless luxury, that there is no individual mind or character or achievement, that everything is achieved collectively, and that it's masses that count,
not men. The man in room at seven, car number two, was a journalist who wrote, That it is proper and moral to use compulsion, quote, for a good cause, end quote, who believed that he had the right to unleash physical force upon others,
to wreck lives, throttle ambitions, strangle desires, violate convictions, to imprison, to despoil, to murder, for the sake of whatever he chose to consider as his own idea of a good cause, which did not even have to be an idea since he had never defined what he regarded as the good, But it merely stated that he went by a feeling, a feeling unrestrained by any knowledge, since he considered emotion superior to knowledge, and relied solely on his own good intentions and on the power of a gun.
The woman in room at ten, car number three, was an elderly schoolteacher who had spent her life turning class after class of helpless children into miserable cowards by teaching them That the will of the majority is the only standard of good and evil, and that a majority may do anything it pleases, that they must not assert their own personalities, but must do as others were doing.
The Man in Drawing Room B, car number four.
It was a newspaper publisher who believed that men are evil by nature and unfit for freedom, that their basic interests, if left unchecked, are to lie, to rob and murder one another, and therefore men must be ruled by means of lies, robbery and murder, which must be made the exclusive privilege of the rulers for the purpose of forcing men to work, teaching them to be moral and keeping them within the bounds of order and justice.
The man in bedroom H, car number five, was a businessman.
Who had acquired his business, an ore mine, with the help of a government loan under the Equalization of Opportunity Bill.
The man in drawing room A, car number six, was a financier who had made a fortune by buying frozen railway bonds and getting his friends in Washington to defreeze them.
The man in seat five, car number seven, was a worker who believed that he had a right to a job whether his employer wanted him or not.
The woman In Rimet 6, car number 8 was a lecturer who believed that, as a consumer, she had a right to transportation, whether the railroad people wished to provide it or not.
The man in Rimet 2, car number 9, was a professor of economics who advocated the abolition of private property, explaining that intelligence plays no part in industrial production, that man's mind is conditioned by material tools, that anybody can run a factory or a railroad, and it's only a matter of seizing the machinery.
The woman in bedroom D, car number 10, was a mother who had put her two children to sleep in the berth above her, carefully tucking them in, protecting them from drafts and jolts.
A mother whose husband held a government job enforcing directives, which she defended by saying, I don't care, it's only the rich they hurt.
After all, I must think of my children.
The man in room at 3, car number 11, was a sniveling little neurotic who wrote cheap little plays, into which, as a social message, he inserted cowardly little obscenities to the effect that all businessmen were scoundrels.
The woman in room at 9, car number 12, was a housewife who believed that she had the right to elect politicians of whom she knew nothing to control giant industries of which she had no knowledge.
The man in bedroom F, car number 13, was a lawyer who had said, Me, I'll find a way to get along under any political system.
The man in bedroom A, car number 14, was a professor of philosophy who taught that there is no mind.
How do you know that the tunnel is dangerous?
No reality. How can you prove that the tunnel exists?
No logic. Why do you claim that trains cannot move without motive power?
No principles. Why should you be bound by the laws of cause and effect?
No rights. Why shouldn't you attach men to their jobs by force?
No morality. What's moral about running a railroad?
No absolutes.
What difference does it make to you whether you live or die anyway?
He taught that we know nothing.
Why oppose the orders of your superiors?
That we can never be certain of anything.
How do you know you're right? That we must act on the expediency of the moment.
You don't want to risk your job, do you?
The man in drawing room B, car number 15, was an heir who had inherited his fortune and who kept repeating, Why should Reardon be the only one permitted to manufacture Reardon metal?
The man in bedroom A, car number 16, was a humanitarian who had said, The men of ability, I do not care what or if they are made to suffer.
They must be penalized in order to support the incompetent.
Frankly, I do not care whether this is just or not.
I take pride in not caring to grant any justice to the able where mercy to the needy is concerned.
These passengers were awake.
There was not a man aboard the train who did not share one or more of their ideas.
As the train went into the tunnel, the flame of Wyatt's torch was the last thing they saw on earth.
That always was a very powerful passage to me.
Because it indicates that it matters what you believe.
It matters what you talk about.
It matters the conversation that you have.
It doesn't matter if you don't have a big platform.
It doesn't matter if you're not watched or listened to by millions of people.
It doesn't matter if you don't have a big influence.
It's in the little conversations, the personal conversations.
That is the web by which our doom or our salvation is knitted.
That is how things change for the better or for the worse based upon your conversations that you have with individuals in the moment.
And one thing that gets kind of tiring It's a comment that was made some time ago.
I think it was on my YouTube channel.
It was something like this.
Three kinds of people in the world.
There are the sheep, there are the guard dogs, and there are the wolves.
And as guard dogs, we are trying to protect the sheep from the wolves of the left, from the wolves of totalitarianism and collectivism and communism and fascism and socialism, collectivism.
And we are running around and running around, trying to guard everyone from the wolves that are gathering out there, the red eyes in the dark, the growls, saliva dripping, yellow teeth bared.
You can see them all coming.
It's as clear as day.
It's as clear as the hand in front of your face.
You can see them coming. And I can understand the frustration.
I can see the frustration.
And it does get difficult.
Because people just kind of bleat this nonsense while we're out there guarding the perimeter.
My role, the grotesque to you, is necessary.
From a few good men.
Something like that. So anyway, this literary hub posted something.
And it was on Atlas Shrugged.
And Zeus helped me.
But what I did was I had a look underneath.
So this was posted two days ago.
At Lit Hub is the...
Oops.
Sorry. It's the Twitter account.
And what they... What they tweeted was this Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged was published 61 years ago today and since then has served as an excellent way to weed out potential romantic partners Now, of course, what they mean by that is, well, if you see a guy, and it's often a guy, if you see a guy who's reading Atlas Shrugged, don't date him.
Now, of course, you can take it the other way and say, well, if you find somebody who sneers in a stupid way at a great work of literary and philosophical genius, then you can dump them as being, well, what Ayn Rand called was second-handers.
She also called them social metaphysicians.
Metaphysics, of course, is the nature of reality, and a social metaphysician doesn't say...
What is true? He says, what do people believe is true?
He doesn't say what is right.
He says, what do people believe is right?
Or what can I get away with? He doesn't say, what is virtue?
He says, what is approved of?
And social metaphysicians are the bane of philosophy.
They rely on sophistry because they have no connection to actual reality.
They guide themselves according to the whim of the masses.
So Literary Hub posted this comment.
Ayn Rand, in Atmastruct, constructs and composes a myriad of very complicated and very deep philosophical arguments.
I know people have told you that it's just a potboiler with silly characters and a silly plot.
Dunning-Kruger. Dunning-Kruger effect.
If you're not that smart, Ayn Rand is a little tough to understand.
So, I read some of these comments.
And I'll just read a couple out.
You can read more if you want.
So one guy, I don't know if it's a guy or girl, said, I found a copy in some holiday accommodation and tried it.
Gave up about 150 pages in and finished it, flicking through it.
Implausible characters created purely to personify an opinion.
No plot, no story development.
It's crap. My wife saw me reading it and didn't leave me.
Another comment. When I worked at a bookstore one day, a teenaged girl came in looking for Atlas Shrugged because her boyfriend insisted she read it.
The store employees chanted, dump him, dump him, dump him.
And someone else, this is a bastardization of a comment I think Churchill made about, if you're not a liberal, if you're not a socialist when you're young, you have no heart.
If you're not a conservative when you're middle-aged, you have no head or no brain.
So somebody said, if you're not captivated by the ideas in Atlas Shrugged at the age of 16, you have no drive.
If you're not convinced it's bullshit at the age of 30, you have no heart.
Hashtag Ayn Rand. It's like this woman spent 13 years pouring heart, mind, and soul into a very sophisticated book with a great plot.
It is a great, great plot.
And Just saying, well, it's only accepted by people who are naive, and people who are nerdy, and people who are sociopaths.
It's like, these are not arguments. This is exactly what she's talking about, although she's talking about this stuff more in The Fountainhead, right?
So, we the living, they lose.
The Fountainhead, it's a draw.
Atlas Shrugged, they win. Someone else says, I'll talk about The Fountainhead with someone all day, but if they try to claim Atlas Shrugged as anything other than an overdose of beating you over the head, nihilistic objectivism, I walk away!
Beating you over the head, nihilistic objectivism.
Well, you can call objectivism a lot of things.
You cannot call it nihilistic.
Nihilistic is the destruction of values, and that is not what it's about.
Someone else says, this is the only book that I've wanted to throw across the room when I was halfway through it.
I finally finished it, and then I actually did throw it across the room!
So freaking witty.
Old joke, what's the diff between Atlas Shrugged and Lord of the Rings?
One is unrealistic, puerile, fantastic drivel of the worst sort.
The other is the story with orcs in it.
Yeah, that's pretty much Socrates right there.
Someone else said, many, many aeons ago, I did a stretch working in a bookstore.
My already tattered faith in humanity was finally swept away when I saw the sheer volume of Anne Rice, Tom Clancy, and Ayn Rand that flowed through that place.
Okay, Anne Rice and Ayn Rand.
Give me a break.
Oh, come on. Rush grew up and so can you.
Actually, okay, that's a little bit funny.
The drummer for Rush. Well, actually, the drummer for Rush is the reason I ended up reading Ayn Rand, at least.
I'm sure I would have come across her sooner or later.
But is it Neil Peart?
This is Geddy Lee. Neil Peart is the drummer.
Yeah, I can never remember the guitarist's name.
But Neil Peart was the guy into Ayn Rand and he put some stuff.
And I think he was also into Lord of the Rings and he put some stuff.
He's the lyricist and a great lyricist and a great drummer.
I've seen Rush a couple of times live.
And it's just, well, these beliefs are fine when you're young, but you grow up and you realize that life is more sophisticated.
It's like, it's not an argument.
It's not an argument. Someone else said, the title is perfect, though.
I read the first hundred pages, shrugged, and then threw it in the garbage.
It's not a masterpiece, but you didn't finish it.
Yeah, I didn't finish the pickled marshmallow pancakes my son made for me, but I'm pretty sure they're not a culinary masterpiece.
See? Atlas Shrugged is like pickled marshmallow pancakes.
Not an argument. I'd yell, but my gum still hurt.
Ah, here's another part, another comment.
Well, the fun part about that is, Bioshock is a nigh-complete takedown of Ayn Rand's entire body of work and the pseudo-philosophy called objectivism.
Abandoned underwater cities with creepy baby carriages is not an argument.
I can't believe the things I have to say in this world.
But it's really not. Oh, lordy.
Someone else said, I had a young woman tell me I should read it when I was 17, like any teen guy wanting to make a little time.
I gave it a shot. She was incredulous when I told her it was stupid.
Still the worst book I've ever tried to read.
Just awful.
No, it's not. No, it's not.
No, it's not. And this, I'm telling you, I'm telling you guys straight up, not a pleasant place to be, but I'm gonna, I said I'll be honest with you guys, right?
So, these comments, and they just, they go on and on and on.
This tweet got 51.2 thousand likes and almost 13,000 retweets, and these comments just go on and on and on.
And they're all, you know, all the same virtue signaling of, like, one of them is a A little cartoon of a bookstore, you pull out Atlas Shrugged, it swivels you around, there's a sign that says, you have terrible taste, and then it swivels you back, and all that.
None of these are arguments, and it's all retarded stuff.
It's just stupid, stupid stuff, where it's like, oh, I hear that this book is unpopular, so I'm going to go out there and dump my chest and say, how silly and foolish.
There's no arguments here. No arguments here at all.
And all the characters are unrealistic.
No. What you're saying is that people of nobility and virtue aren't in your life.
So there's Ayn Rand, and she herself said that her characters are not prescriptions for action, and Nathaniel Brandon has a very good article.
The late, sadly, late Nathaniel Brandon, the most disappointing person I met in real life, but he had a good article where he said, you know, the way that Ayn Rand's characters deal with their emotions is cold suppression, is not healthy, and, you know, all of that was good stuff to read.
And All of these people who are just spitting on this glorious book, saying, well, the characters are unrealistic.
They're ideals. They're ideals.
And of course, they're not supposed to be flesh and blood people because they're platonic ideals of virtue and perspective.
So there's something to aim for.
I mean, if you go to your average Christian, not to conflate the two completely, but it's like going to a Christian and say, well, Jesus is an unrealistic literary character.
Well, that's not the point.
He's an ideal. He's an ideal of virtue.
So all of these people just mindlessly, stupidly, snarkily dumping on this great work of literary and philosophical genius.
And it is. Listen.
Listen. I have the world's biggest philosophy show.
It has 600 million views and downloads.
I break down stuff With deep and sophisticated analysis, I know my weaknesses, but I'm not going to be shy about my strengths either, because false modesty is just another form of hypocrisy.
So I know what I'm good at, and I'm good at this.
And the fact that I can see the brilliance of Atlas Shrugged doesn't seem to give people much pause, you know?
You know, the guy's got the biggest, most powerful philosophy conversation the world has ever seen, says this is a really powerful and deep book.
Is it perfect? No!
There's things that I disagree with with Ayn Rand's philosophy, but...
We are 90% circle overlaps.
But this idea that you just snark in it and you dump on it and suddenly you're in the cool gang, you're just being used.
So what I see, and the reason I read that particular passage of this great book, is what I see...
Is a whole line of train.
A whole line of train carriages, right?
This is like, like scrolling through these tweets is like watching a train.
You're standing on a bridge looking over the train tracks.
Right? Like that great Paul Simon song, Train in the Distance, which sounds like a train in the distance.
But anyway, you're seeing this train go by and it's full of people.
And the people are all mouthing these anti-objectivist, anti-Atlas-Shrugged, anti-Ainrand, stupid idiot platitudes.
And I'm telling you, man, it's tough because these are the people that the job is to save.
These are the people, the sheep, that we guard dogs are supposed to keep safe from the wolves.
And Ayn Rand was an immense guard dog.
Certainly the earliest and most influential philosopher.
I've had people compete lately, but this is why people say, oh, you're anti-woman.
It's like, oh, happily married, got a lovely daughter.
And the most influential philosopher for me was a woman.
And Of course, you know, feminists should be, if they were not just out to destroy Western civilization as a whole, feminists should be praising a whole bunch of women.
They should be praising, I mean, the very first female leader of a Western country was Margaret Thatcher.
They don't praise Margaret Thatcher.
Ayn Rand wrote what is considered by some, and some studies indicate, one of the most influential novels ever written, wherein the heroine is a powerful woman who runs an entire railway from coast to coast.
And it's extraordinarily competent, much more competent than the men around for the most part.
Feminists should be holding her up.
But of course, they don't because that's not their...
The agenda is not pro-woman.
The agenda is anti-West.
So, it's hard to want to guard these people.
It's hard to... Daily Mirror said, Woman's perfect Tinder date with the wand shattered by five simple words.
Have you read Atlas Shrugged? A little graphic here.
There are two novels that can change a bookish 14-year-old's life.
Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged.
One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world.
The other one, of course, involves orcs.
Not an argument. Not an argument.
And when you read Atlas Shrugged, and I hope that if you haven't, that you will, when you read Atlas Shrugged, I would really like you to compare Your emotional experience with the people.
For me, I mean, because I came from this sort of orcish underworld of poverty and degradation and humiliation and abusive relationships and so on, that was like a beautiful, like Plato's Cave, the way underground.
You see the snow-capped mountain.
You want to get there.
Ayn Rand's envisioning.
The beauty of the books was a great incentive for me to get my way out of all of that.
And it's hard.
It's really hard to continue to want to guard all of these people who are just dumping on all of this stuff.
Okay, so the last thing I wanted to mention, then I'll check out your questions.
Wait, do we have...
Ah, Ben Hill, Super Chat, God bless.
Thank you very much. Very kind sentiment.
I appreciate that. The last thing I wanted to mention was...
I'm very pleasantly surprised.
What was it? Many, many millions of jobs have been created since Trump came in.
And I know that some of the numbers are a little dicey and all of that, but I just wanted to mention That it's really, really encouraging to see all the people who are grabbing at jobs like a half-drowning person grabbing at a floating barrel.
You know, like, I gotta get a job, gotta get off welfare, gotta go and get a purpose, gotta go and get up and shave.
And, you know, for the feminists, their upper lip, like, they actually want to go.
And... Get jobs, have jobs, have an income.
It's really, really encouraging to see that.
One of the concerns that I had with the length of the welfare state now is a couple of generations in some places.
The length of the welfare state had me concerned that some people were entirely...
Which is kind of an odd word because it sounds like energized.
It's the odd one. I learned that from Tennessee Williams.
But they had basically given up on working.
And I'm going to assume that some number of those people who have these jobs came from the welfare state, may have come from multi-generational welfare state addiction.
It's great to see. The thirst and the drive for independence, for productivity, for freedom, for an income, for the pride of a job that is still there in so many people.
It's like when you look at what's going on in Iran and other places, this frustration of these theocracies.
It's really powerful to see.
It's really, really powerful to watch and very encouraging.
And I had some concern that the jobs might be there, but people wouldn't want to Have it.
And they do want those jobs, a lot of people, and that's really, really great to see.
All right. Won't be a long, long live stream today, but I do want to...
Brian Mustard.
That's the perfect color.
Thank you for the Super Chat.
I appreciate it. If you guys want to throw some questions in, Super Chats, of course, are available.
Oh, criticize objectivism.
So, yeah, that's a good point.
I never did get round to part four of that series on objectivism.
And I may do a listener call with this.
But the basic issue is, man's life as a standard of value is not enough to maintain an objective moral system.
So, there is some stuff that's been posted.
I don't know if the numbers are correct or whatever, but I think the general trend is correct.
And the idea is that Trump's fortune has declined significantly, like by a billion, billion and a half dollars.
So since Trump went into public office, his family fortune, his fortune has declined enormously.
If you look at Obama's fortune, it's gone up enormously.
Tens of millions of dollars, some estimates.
If you look at it, it's even bigger for the Clintons.
When the Clintons came out of the White House, they were, I think, severely in debt or had zero assets based upon the liabilities of just having enormous, enormous legal bills from Bill's impeachment and all of that stuff.
So, yeah, they came out of the White House.
They'd have a lot of money. Now the Clintons are, what, $100 million worth $100 million?
So, look, I'm sorry, but the Darwinian part of me says that's a hell of a lot of resources, right?
It's a hell of a lot of resources.
And that's good for the family.
That's good for the kids.
That's good for the acquisition of resources that at an Albanian level is very, very important.
So when you say, well, human life is a standard of value.
That which serves human life is a standard of value.
So at an abstract sense, you can say, well, reason, objectivity, the free market, these serve human life.
In general, sure, but that's a collectivist argument.
Individually, I'm telling you straight up, like individually, Bill and Hillary Clinton are way better off in a status system than they would be materially in a free market system.
Because in a free market system, I think Bill would be just some kind of shifty lawyer and Hillary Clinton would end up as a much hated deputy head of HR in some middle-sized company where the employees would regularly threaten to quit and They should end up driving the company out of business with politically correct mandates coming from HR. So they wouldn't do that well.
They wouldn't do that well.
You know, silver-tongued Obama, how well would he do in the free market?
It probably isn't tens of millions worth, and it certainly wouldn't be 100 million worth if that's what the Clinton fortune is, and it's probably something close to that.
So... It's been great for them.
The system that we have has been great for some people.
It's harmful to Trump and his fortunes.
It's great for the leftists and their aggregation and collective of power.
And so their system benefits them.
That's why the system continues. So saying that which benefits human life is the standard of moral value, I don't find particularly satisfying.
All right. Let's see here.
A couple more Super Chats. Thank you guys so much.
Byron Mustard says, what are your thoughts on Hayek's road to serfdom being a companion to Atlas Shrugged?
Yeah, the road to serfdom is very good, and you should read it.
It's a small book. It's a very dense read, and it's the steps by which government control leads to increased government control leads to totalitarianism.
And I think it's a great companion piece, for sure, because it is showing in abstracts what Atlas Shrugged shows in plot.
All right. Brian Azevedo is asking for a presentation on Bella Dot.
See, here's the thing, and I want to make this comment in general, and listen, Brian, I appreciate the support, but I'm going to tell you straight up.
So, when it comes to doing presentations, they're big and complicated, and I do want to do more, for sure.
But here's the thing.
You have to help me find a philosophical angle to what it is.
Like, just for me, just reciting...
Events and personalities and sequences and so on.
It's not philosophical.
It's news-ish.
It's reporter-y, but it's not philosophical.
And I really, really do want to focus on philosophical stuff.
So I get questions on, you know, can you talk about this in Brazil?
And can you talk about this in Poland?
Can you talk about this event that's going on?
And there's trafficking in China and this...
These are all important things, and I don't deny that people care about them, and they may have great relevance in the world as a whole.
But if I can't find a philosophical way in?
I mean, my Kavanaugh stuff had a lot to do with philosophy, and I was willing to do all of that because this innocent until proven guilty had to tell the truth from falsehood.
It doesn't matter. You can't call someone a liar, but you can certainly say that what they say is not true.
Liar is mind-reading, like you know that they know the truth and they're choosing to lie and all this kind of stuff, right?
So there was a lot of philosophical stuff about that.
So, I also wanted to mention that I think I'm going to go and see a movie tonight.
I'm going to go see A Star is Born.
I just have a soft spot for Bradley Cooper ever since Alias, but I'll probably put out a review on that this weekend.
So, in terms of, if you want to sell me on a presentation idea, don't leave it to me to find the philosophical angle.
Find some philosophical angle that makes it important to a wider audience, and then I'm usually happy to look at it by just saying, can you do a presentation on something I care about in my pet course?
It's not going to work that well.
All right. Jean Jeffries, thank you for your support, says, have you done or will you do a presentation on the history of Antifa?
I think that there's a lot of stuff out there at the moment regarding that.
So, again, if you can think of a philosophical angle, have you ever smoked opium?
No. Never even smoked marijuana.
Ross Ogle says, love what you do, Stefan.
Quit spanking my children because of your bomb in the brain videos and your channel changed my life.
Hope to see a truth about it.
Maybe on a separate channel so you don't jeopardize your great work.
I appreciate that. I mean, thank you so much for telling me that.
So this is... The Bomb and the Brain is a series I did some years ago that's well, well worth looking at for everyone.
You don't have to be a parent. There's value because of that.
And... So, I don't know.
Truth about QAnon? Can I get a philosophical angle to it?
I don't know. I don't know.
So... Ted Johnson...
Doesn't covering current affairs expand your reach?
And do you prefer the title, Philosophical Father of the Future, or Powder, the Rainbow Breathing Dragon?
I think both of those are wonderful phrases.
Yes, current affairs does extend my reach, but I do need to find a philosophical way in.
So that is the challenge.
E. Honda says, Sheep hate sheepdogs.
Well, there is that.
There is that for sure.
Cinnamon Bear, thank you, says, you've helped me and my family.
Have you read the Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie?
It got heat, so I had to read it.
Made me cry. Love from Alberta, Canada.
No, I've not read the Satanic Verses.
I actually knew a woman whose father was Indian who said that it wasn't going to be something that non-Indians were going to get because there's so much subtext to do with Indian culture.
So I have not read it, but I will certainly look at it.
I don't have a lot of time to read fiction these days, but it's an interesting book for sure.
Gresh, as a 20-year-old guy, it's hard to find a woman my age who isn't super liberal or left-leaning and won't be offended by my opinions.
It's tough. And yes, it is tough.
It is tough. But can you imagine if you didn't know how dangerous the leftist women were and you got involved in something that got you into real trouble?
Could even get you into legal trouble or get you kicked out of university.
You name it, this kind of stuff can happen.
So I would say that it is hard.
You know, it's sort of like saying...
There are a lot of cats here who are feral and try and claw your eyes out, and I'm having a tough time finding a good cat.
And it's like, yes, but can you imagine how tough it would be if you couldn't even differentiate the good cats from the violent cats?
Sorry, it's kind of an insult to cats, but...
Jake says, Steph, I'm a 20-year-old man from Southern California, and I've greatly benefited from your insights.
Thanks for providing depth and brevity.
Love your work, The Art of the Argument.
Oh, yeah, theartoftheargument.com.
You can check that out. And...
Let's see here. Well, he's just not that smart.
And when you are given things that you have not earned, then it's hard to appreciate them.
It's the problem that rich families have with money.
You know, when I grew up...
I would say, can I get this?
And my mom would say, and honestly say, we can't afford it, right?
So rich parents, I've talked to them about this, it's interesting.
They say, well, we can't, we don't want to lie to our kids.
We can't say we don't afford it. We can't afford it.
So we have to find some other reason for them to end up understanding the value of money, right?
So if you haven't earned stuff, it's tough to really value it.
Now, as far as Justin Trudeau goes, well...
He was born into a very wealthy and very famous family.
His father was a complete lefty, Pietro the Elder.
Prime Minister of Canada.
And he's considered to be good-looking, if you like that Fidel Castro sort of look.
And so, yeah, he's got a lot of fame.
He's got a lot of money. He's got a lot of success.
And he's pretty and all of that.
But, I mean, just watch him go off script.
Like, I've got no script for this other than what I read with Atlas Shrugged.
I'm able to talk, I think, reasonably intelligently in a good deal of detail.
And you just watch this guy go off script.
It's really not very pretty at all.
So it's just a guy who had a lot of money, some good looks, some fame, an easy entree into politics.
So he's got no concept of the common person at all.
He grew up with such a ridiculous amount of privilege, both in terms of pretty and wealthy, that he just doesn't.
And so he's easy to manipulate because he doesn't have any loyalties to historical Canadian values.
All right. Amanda says, just wanted to say thanks, big heart, you're helping me determine the difference between intellectual-sounding nonsense and a good argument.
Yeah, isn't that great when you can just do that?
That's great. Christina says, do you have advice for those who are afraid to come out of the conservative-slash-libertarian closet, surrounded by liberals in every aspect of my life?
Thanks for all that you did well.
What if I tweeted the other day?
You should really follow me on, at Stefan Molyneux if you don't already, but...
Yeah, I tweeted the other day that I wonder if America's fascination with zombie movies is because they realize how many dead people, like zombie movies, where the zombies control society, how many dead people end up voting Democrat.
And somebody replied and said, yeah, there are lots of dead Republicans, but they also end up, funnily enough, voting Democrat, too.
If you can't change the minds of those around you and you can't stand their company, you have to change the composition of those around you.
I mean, really, there's no magic.
There's no special sauce.
There's no powder. There's no wonderful stuff that you can do.
So if you're surrounded by idiots and you can't make them smarter, you either have to get used to being surrounded by idiots or surround yourself with smarter people.
Like, there's just... Words seem to have little effect in some ways.
And I know I say this as a wordsmith, so it does have some effect for sure.
But there's no magic power in words.
Just because you bring rational arguments to people does not mean that they will be rational and make sense.
And I'm concerned because I've done this too.
I wasted years of my life.
Wasted years of my life.
Because I was just hoping that my commitment to rationality was going to change the minds of people around me.
It doesn't.
It doesn't.
T. Bittem says, do you think Kanye has a chance in 2024 if he does run for president?
Thank you.
Thank you.
Hmm. Couldn't imagine Kim Kardashian as first lady.
What a timeline.
So, I think, I mean, Kanye's great.
But he's not philosophical any more than I'm a rapper, and you can see me do my rap from time to time with the show.
So I would say that he has a chance, but I think he needs to, you know, sit down and sort of organize his thoughts from the ground up.
But yeah, he's definitely a curious guy, smurry smart guy, language skills almost second to none.
So I would say with the right preparation, he could.
Ilhitu says, Hey Steph, I'm a Freemason in the UK. What are your opinions of the Freemasons?
Fancy joining us? Now I have to flash some, like I just gesture, right?
And then people stop my gestures and freeze stuff and he's making this gesture, he's making that gesture, this means this, this means that.
And, yeah, I mean, I'm not much of a club joiner.
Like, so when I was in college, she had a room with a guy.
We lived in a frat house.
And I was invited to join the frat, and they were nice guys and all that.
But I'm just not much of a joiner as far as that goes.
But can you imagine if I was a Freemason?
Can you imagine? Can you imagine if I was Jewish?
All right, Ted Johnson says, if you're no longer vegetarian, what forms of meat do you consume and or consider ethical?
Yeah, you know, I would like it if I could keep my energy up and do all kinds of great stuff without eating meat from time to time, but...
Yeah, I would not say that I focus on the ethics of that in particular.
If we can stop children being beaten, tortured, raped, and indoctrinated, then I think we can turn our attention more to animal rights.
So I don't have particular ethical justification other than I simply cannot gain the energy to do the shows, to exercise a lot, to be a father.
And look, I'm not saying that you can't.
I know that there are bodybuilders who do all of this kind of stuff, but that is a...
A very big difference.
So I'm going to focus on children's rights.
I'm going to focus on the non-aggression principle.
And I'm going to have meat from time to time.
Jan says, do you plan to make a material about Faith Goldie campaign in Toronto?
Can't wait to see you in Poland. Thanks for everything.
Yeah, so Faith Goldie is running for mayor in Toronto.
And I can't see a particular philosophical angle.
I certainly think she's got an interesting campaign and people should remember that.
Ted Johnson, he's back.
What advice would you give to men living in female dating pools that are like parking lots where all the good spots are taken and the rest are either handicapped or way out there?
Well, again, if you don't like your environment and you can't change it with words, change your environment.
Just, you know, mix it, move up, join new groups, all of this kind of stuff.
There's this question, I don't mean to sound annoyed, but it is a question that I've had for many, many, many, many years, which goes something like this, which is, I'm stuck in a situation.
Philosophy is not helping me.
What should I do? And the answer to that is pretty obvious.
And I've talked about it for years and years in the show.
I was not happy with my social circle.
I was not happy with my family of origin.
I tried my very best to change people, to be more rational, to listen.
They didn't. So I moved on.
And I came to a wonderful place in my life.
So... You know, if you can't change your mind, change your life.
You can't change other people's...
Minds change their life.
All right. Field O'Bears says, I seem to recall a suggestion of printing important issues on Kim Kardashian's arse, but it seems as though that's happening.
Thoughts? No, I don't have any thoughts on that.
Didn't Trudeau go backpacking around the world on his dad's dime?
Yeah, he was like, what was he, a theater instructor, like a theater school instructor or a theater class instructor.
He was like a surfing guy, I think, or whatever it is.
It's... All right.
Hello, Stefan Molyneux. Do you think gaming is a big problem in the West?
Yes, I do think that gaming is a big problem in the West.
And it gives you the dopamine sense of achievement without actually achieving anything.
And that is, you know, it is related to real achievement as masturbation is related to having a family.
So... Will you read Super Chat posted before?
GMT, please. Oh, did I miss the Super Chat?
My apologies. It's a lot of multitasking here.
Let me just have a look back here and see if I can find it.
Please, talk amongst yourselves.
Talk amongst yourselves. I don't think I can find it.
Actually, you know what? I'm not going to just scroll through because it's a long series of chats.
Farm murders in South Africa is increasing.
Well, the Zulis came out, interestingly, against some of the farm murders saying, well, we need food.
And that's true.
They do need food. And I think they recognize...
Is there such a thing, says Saib Samurai, is there such a thing called an IQ jam?
You cannot increase your IQ, as far as I understand it, once you become an adult.
I think that there's stuff like malnutrition and certain things when you're a kid can affect it.
My understanding, and again, I'm no expert on this, so please look it up yourself, but my understanding is you cannot increase your IQ after you become an adult.
That having been said, IQ is not everything.
Quality of thinking, if you are a critical thinker, if you are philosophical, if you are skeptical, I'd rather have that than a high IQ. A high IQ can make you a huge mess of a human being.
So, I mean, do you think that Albert Einstein was happy?
I mean, he disliked his wife so much, he demanded that she put his dinner under the door of his study without coming in.
I mean, it was pretty wretched.
Although his IQ was, I think, not super high in the 120s.
But... Don't worry about your IQ. Worry about your critical thinking.
Pursue critical thinking and all of that.
I would say that don't focus on your IQ. It's like Going to the gym can't make you taller, but it makes you healthier and it makes you stronger.
And to me, philosophy is like going to the gym.
It makes you stronger.
It makes you more robust.
It makes you more confident in your thoughts.
It does not make you taller.
It will not raise your IQ. But saying the gym won't make me taller doesn't mean don't go to the gym.
Zach Degen says, with the hashtag MeToo movement making approaching women in public like walking on eggshells, do you have any advice for young men out there?
Sure. Ask women what they think of the Me Too movement.
That's all. It's a wonderful conversation opener to figure things out.
Have you considered doing a show, Ninja Bike says, have you considered doing a show with Mark Passio?
I think he'd be a great subject matter expert.
I know the name. I know the name.
Again, make it philosophical for me and that'll help.
Kevin Cappen says, have you read Bastiat's The Law?
Thoughts? The book is scripture to me.
I've read some Bastiat. I don't recall The Law, but it's been a while.
I actually have some Bastiat by my bedside, which I've been meaning to get to.
Eric Norman says, Steph, three things.
One, please interview Jorge Sprave, the Slingshot channel guy, and his fight against censorship and his contributions to the culture of creators and builders.
Two, any thoughts on Indiegogo retroactively cancelling the Alt Hero Q campaign?
Any thoughts on the UK kicking that soldier out for being in a vid with some pics with Tommy Robinson?
Oh, yeah. Well, that's terrible. I mean, I assume that the Muslims got to the army and...
Yeah, it's terrible.
It's terrible. It's terrible.
And it shows where whites are in England.
And I do not remember all of this hostility against whites being talked about in the diversity brochure.
Joe John says, what are your thoughts on those seven fake humanities papers getting published?
My favorite was the one on how becoming a fat slob is a form of bodybuilding.
Yeah, so this is a guy who's been on my show before.
He and two others.
Peter Boghossian is his name, and he's got some very good stuff.
I did rip on his articles regarding Trump a while back ago, but we all make mistakes.
So, yeah, they put a bunch of fake humanities papers.
I mean, I think it's fine. I knew all of this stuff.
I actually wrote about this in a novel.
From, I wrote like 20 years ago, called The God of Atheists, where I was talking about Professor Sokal.
So Professor Sokal submitted a paper to a humanities journal that was just made up garbage.
He was a professor of physics.
And this caused a huge outcry and a huge ruckus.
I don't think it's going to make much difference.
I mean, I think it's a fun and funny thing to do, but the problem, here's the fundamental problem with all of this crap.
So because we don't talk about race and IQ, we end up saying, well, every ethnicity must be represented equally in universities, right?
So East Asians and whites and blacks and Hispanics and so on all need to be at least represented in university according to their population percentage, right?
So if blacks are 13% of the population in a region, if they're not 13% of the universities, Then that's considered a problem and you can get in big trouble and you can lose grants and you can, you know, it just can be a mess.
So because we can't talk about race and IQ, we end up Having to lower, artificially lower the marks of East Asians, right?
Of the Japanese, the Chinese, Koreans, and so on.
Which has happened and is happening.
So we have to lower those entrance exams.
And we have to artificially raise, or universities have to artificially raise, the entrance exams of Blacks and Hispanics, right?
That's just the way it has to go.
Because we can't talk about race and IQ. And so because we can't talk about it, all...
Divergences from proportional representation by population are considered to be the result of bigotry and privilege and racism and you name it, right?
So horrible stuff as a whole.
So because of that, we end up having to lower the standards of the curricula.
That's inevitable, right?
Because if you let people in after artificially raising their scores, well, guess what?
You know, me riding 150 pounds on my...
Medical record does not suddenly make me drop 40 pounds.
It's just a number, right? It hasn't changed anything fundamental, right?
Like, I've always been a shade under six foot tall.
That doesn't mean that if I write six foot two, I suddenly gain two and a bit extra inches, right?
So, just changing the numbers doesn't change anything.
Reality. So, because a lot of people are being led into university who don't have the intellectual ability to be there, and there's some significant reports out there that men are, in general, as adults, more intelligent than women.
The one that says that it's about equal, but men are more represented in the higher and lower ends, I've heard tell that that has something to do with testing men and boys and girls in their early or mid-teens.
But anyway, so... There's a problem in that what should happen, of course, is that all of the entrance exams should be anonymized by race and gender.
You should not have any idea who you're marking.
You should not have any idea the race, the gender, or any aspect, the age or anything of the person that you're marking when it comes to universities.
And then we could find out.
And then if there's a disparity, then you could run IQ tests and you could solve this problem in a week or two.
Easy, right? But people don't want to because, again, the one thing that drives the less completely insane is talking about race and IQ and gender and IQ and gender and intelligence and GE as a whole, and we all understand why.
So the problem is not that there's a bunch of bullcrap artists in the humanities.
Of course there are. Because the humanities used to have very strict standards.
But the problem is that you can't get, quote, underrepresented groups into the humanities if they have very strict standards.
So you have to lower your standards. You have to artificially raise the marks, which means, right, one goes up, marks get artificially raised, standards have to go down.
There's no question of it. And so you're not getting the kind of quality education that you used to get a couple of decades ago, even.
So... The politically correct stuff is very powerful and important when it comes to this kind of stuff, and that's not going to change.
It's not going to change. And women, of course, want to go into the humanities more than they want to go into engineering or the sciences or anything like that.
And... You're just not going to have the same kind of brilliance on average from a group of women than you will from a group of men.
And it's just, you know, again, don't shoot the messenger.
I just simply state the facts.
And if people are outraged, your relationship is not to me.
Your relationship is to the facts.
So get outraged for the facts and then learn that you have to damn well grow up at some point.
So here's the problem, though.
Why don't they just...
Cut the subsidies to higher education.
Because the student loan debts, much like the mortgage debts in the early part of the noughties, like late 90s to 2007, let's say, when the government said, you've got to get more mortgages into the hands of blacks and Hispanics, right? Based upon a flawed study out of the New York Fed.
So what happened was the banks had to do these loans that they didn't want to do.
And they had to then bury these loans in larger financial instruments, right?
So bundling up these mortgage-backed securities and selling them overseas, and they had to get them off their books as much as possible.
So it's kind of like if you have to take a bad medicine, but you can mix it in with something that tastes good, well, you don't want to take the bad, tasty medicine if you could just stir it into something that tastes good and eat that, right?
So they took all of this These crap loans to people who, the moment that variable rate mortgages went up a little bit, they couldn't possibly afford their houses.
And so they had to bundle all of this stuff in.
So all of this mortgage-backed securities and all of this spread of these toxic mortgages out into the financial world was the result of the government forcing financial institutions to lend to people they wouldn't otherwise lend to in order to make equalization in terms of representation.
Again, back to the same thing to do with colleges.
So... The same thing has happened with student loans, right?
People who've gotten student loans, they're not going to be able to pay them back.
They're not. Or, let's say that they do pay them back, it's going to take them forever, and all of the time and money that they spend paying those loans back means they can't go and buy houses, and they can't go and buy cars, and they can't go and do this and they can't do that, right? So what that means is you can prop up the student loan market, but you're depressing the housing market because they're paying so much in student loans.
I mean, you graduate with, what is it, the average is 20,000, 25,000 US in debt.
And you graduate with that and you have a useless, crappy, dumbed-down arts degree.
It's pretty tough.
It's pretty tough to keep that stuff going.
So what's happened is all of these terrible student loans that are unlikely to be paid back have been bundled up into larger financial instruments and spread out into the world financial system.
So if you did something decent, moral, and honorable in the government, if you did something like this and said, okay, well, we're going to change this up.
So the government is no longer going to prop up these loans.
And if you declare bankruptcy, you can discharge these loans.
Well, what's going to happen? People are going to declare bankruptcy by the hundreds of thousands, right?
What is it? $1.5 trillion now in outstanding student loans?
There's no way. There's no way that those are all economically productive.
It's not possible. It's not going to happen.
So, the honorable decent thing to do is the government to stop propping up this stuff and allow students to discharge their loans through bankruptcy because it's horrible exploitation to not allow them to do that.
Now, If that occurred, right, if that occurred, let's just say the bankruptcy won, then hundreds of millions of dollars worth of student loans could get wiped out through bankruptcy.
Because if you're facing like, it's going to take me 15 years to pay off this loan that has not given me or got me critical thinking skills to get a good job, then yeah, you can declare bankruptcy in, what are you, like seven years without credit cards and all that, but you can start some kind of life.
And students are lied to.
I consider it, in my view, it's all a massive fraud.
You've got to go to college.
College is essential for your work.
It's all a massive fraud.
Massive fraud. Lying to impressionable teenagers and getting them on the hook for death they cannot discharge.
Monstrous. Absolutely monstrous.
One of the great evils of the modern West.
And it means that people...
Can't get their life started. Can't move out of their parents.
Like a third of millennials living with their parents these days.
So if you were to simply allow students to discharge their loans through bankruptcy, then I would assume hundreds of millions of dollars worth of student loans would suddenly be vanished through bankruptcy.
Who's going to eat that loss?
It's a big, big loss.
And remember, it's multiples, right?
So if you think about a bank loan, Let's say that the bank makes 3% on your loan.
That means if a loan fails completely, another 33 odd loans have to succeed perfectly just for them to break even.
So if the banks are exposed or financial institutions are exposed to hundreds of millions of dollars of direct losses, that threatens tens of trillions of dollars of loans as a whole.
So the reason why The government, even under Trump, who I'm sure would be sympathetic to this stuff, the reason why the government is not allowing students to discharge their student loans through bankruptcy is that the absolute nature of these loans has been bundled into the rates and risks of a whole bunch of, I assume, trillions of dollars worth of financial instruments that have been spread around the world.
You're going to take one, oh, you know, I'm just going to pick up this one little problem, this one little thread hanging from this tapestry, and next thing you know, the whole thing unravels and your ceiling caves in or something like that.
So they have bundled and spread these toxic student loans all throughout the financial system, which never really recovered from the housing crash.
And it's the same kind of situation.
And it's absolutely terrible.
It's absolutely horrible. And very, very hard to fix.
Some garbage papers get published.
That's not the fundamental. I mean, it's like Mises proved that you can't have a functioning economy without a price system, because without price you can't determine the allocation of resources.
Price can't be a central mechanism, not a push mechanism.
Trying to set price centrally is like to make something move by tying a piece of string behind it and pushing the string.
It just doesn't work. And he did that in the early 1920s, if I remember rightly.
Communism went on for another 60 years or so.
So I think it's fine, but I think that they'd be far better off dealing with the financial realities of these kinds of things as well.
All right. Fielder Bear is still waiting on the intersectionals to complain about the lack of diversity in plumbing.
Well, you know, but women don't want plumbing jobs, right?
Of course, right? AJ Blue says, how can I overcome the fact that my girlfriend isn't divergent?
She's been with one other partner and I hate it.
I want to marry her, but this thought is stopping me.
So, if she's only been with one other partner, your odds are still pretty good.
So, I've got a presentation called The Truth About Sex, which you can look at these rising stairway to hell chances of getting divorced with more and more partners.
If your girlfriend has only been with one other partner in the modern climate, that makes her practically a nun.
Like, I hate to put it this way, but the emphasis and focus on pushing Thought-based lifestyles is very strong, and the fact that she's resisted it to that point is pretty important.
So you may want to think about forgiving her for that.
Alex Fernandez says, how many hours do you work a week?
I like what I do, but I do about 60 to 90 hours a week, and I feel it's taking away from family time, but I don't want to stop working.
How do you balance your work-family life?
It's a great question, and I I have challenges with that, Alex.
I'm straight up with you, man. It's a challenge.
This work is not only engaging and fun for the most part, but it's also very powerful and changes the world and changes people's lives and changes families.
And I mean, it's very hard to find stuff to compete with this outside of direct family time.
But you got to...
Stay healthy. You've got to stay strong.
Like, I'll tell you this.
Like, shifting the call-in show from, like, four hours straight to, you know, intermittent is a tough thing for me.
I mean, this is what I've been doing for 12 years.
It's tough to change. But it is something that your love for truth, your love for work, your love for productivity is very important.
But remember that you love your family, too.
Alex, remember that you love your family, too.
And you can work for a long time in your life, but your kids are young.
Like, Think about this.
I mean, I've been thinking about this lately, so it's important.
So, you know, think, you've got kids, right, Alex?
So, think about this.
You can't, I mean, you can play with your kids when they're babies and all that, but it's not the same as having conversations with them, right?
So, when can you start having important conversations with your kids?
It depends on the kid. But let's say four or five or six years old.
I'm saying an average. Five, you can start to have important conversations.
And the stuff before that is fun.
But in terms of, like, actually having important conversations that mean stuff with your kids, five, maybe six years old.
Now, for most kids, they're going to start peeling away from the parental units when they hit puberty.
11, 12, 13, or whatever it is, right?
So let's just go six to 12, right?
Six to 12... Years of age is a beautiful time for being a parent.
I think it's called the latency period and so on.
The storms of toddlerhood are past.
The storms of puberty are yet to come.
And it's a wonderful time for helping to build connection, conversation, all kinds of wonderful stuff.
But it's a very short time.
You're a parent your whole life.
And that's true. That's true.
But for each individual child, you have a little bit more than half a decade to really get the great stuff in.
Now, if you get the great stuff in, I think that the kids will stay closer, teenagers and so on.
So much of parenting, 90% of parenting is just preparing for the teenage years, man.
That's what it's all about.
And people who try to fix stuff when their kids are already teenagers, kind of trying to lock the barn door after the horse is bolted, so to speak.
So just remember, Alex, that there's this beautiful, wonderful time that you get to have with your kids Particularly from the age of, say, 6 to 12 or 6 to 11, whatever.
But it's not a lot. And if you have that kind of time with them, everything else is beautiful.
And if you don't have that kind of time or you're working a lot, I think you're going to look back and you're going to say, well, I don't really remember the work and I didn't really get to enjoy the money, but I didn't have much of a relationship with my kids.
And don't let that happen to you, if you can at all avoid it.
Ted, you're back.
Have you heard of Liz Parrish, who used to...
Sorry, let me just...
It's a funny kind of font here.
Let's see here. No.
I don't know much.
I have not followed the genetic stuff lately.
I mean, really focused on current events.
How do you keep the weight of losing close friends from weighing you down as you get older and older?
Well, I'm sorry, Ted.
You just put this in.
But... So I said this a month or two ago on Twitter, that if you don't have kids, then the last third of your life is just filled with death.
People get old, people die, people get infirmed, they can't travel, they can't You know, and they get debilitating pain.
They get arthritis. They might get dementia.
It's like the last third of your life.
Let's say you live to 80, right? So 70, 65, 70 to 80.
Like, it's hard.
It's hard. Whereas if you have kids, then the last third of your life is filled with death, but it's also filled with life, circle of life stuff, right?
So if you don't have kids, Ted, then...
You're just going to be surrounded by a whole bunch of friends going down and gravestones popping up.
And maybe you can be around kids.
Maybe you've got relatives, brothers, sisters who have kids.
But if you have the kids, you get lots of life.
Losing close friends. Yeah, I've had a lot of friends that I've lost mostly.
Some through death and a lot just through me having integrity with my values and so.
If you have better relationships, then you can look at certain relationships in the past.
You know how, like, rockets get into orbit.
They have this huge, tall rocket.
You end up in this tiny spaceship in orbit because these stages just get dropped away.
So friendships can kind of be like that as well.
Ah, yeah. Look at that.
Do we have some good student notes? Good students.
So, Kilted Bear says, Steph, I just wanted to say that I just paid off my student loan yesterday.
I graduated three years ago and borrowed 10K and studied IT. The job market was rough in 2016, but it is a brighter future at the moment.
Good for you, man. Good for you.
That's a good investment. Double Double No Pickle says, I know you've been asked about him before.
I'd like to suggest Sam Hyde as a guest.
He worked for Adult Swim TV Network, saw the entire left-wing establishment from the inside.
Interesting perspective. Thank you.
I appreciate that. Lizvonne says, well, it doesn't say, but does a donation.
Thank you very much. I appreciate that.
So let me just go through and make sure I did not miss out on any extra chats.
I think we'll close off soon.
And... Let's see here.
Oh, yeah, that's funny, eh?
Like, I mean, the missing or killed Saudi journalist?
Oof. Now that the Saudis have turned mean, you know, it's like the Saudis can bomb 12 million Qatar children.
Nobody seems to care, but they go after one journalist who had some challenging journalism, to put it mildly, and everybody loses their crap.
And, yeah, it's just their...
It's just one of their own, and now they feel threatened and all that.
All right. Get your last questions in, my friend.
I'm sorry that...
I'm sorry.
I think I did miss a super chat.
Craftmonster says, Stefan, I play most of my video games with no sound, so you can be my sound.
Well, I... I appreciate that.
I appreciate that. And Ron Paul says, can't we finally just leave the Syrians alone?
Yes, of course. Wesley says, super late, but figured I'd say thanks for your vids on South Africa.
Lots of great questions today, says Phil.
Thanks, Stefanites. Appreciate that.
And somebody says they donated through Free Domain, as YouTube doesn't accept.
PayPal, thank you very much.
So freedomainradio.com forward slash donate.
You can just go to freedomainradio.com.
There's a donate button there too.
If you want to help out with that, I would really, really appreciate that.
So thank you everyone so much.
Really, really great to chat with you.
It is a very enjoyable new format.
The new book.
Yeah, I'm just waiting for someone to get back to me.
me.
I put in a message a couple of days ago about I need someone to design a cover.
So I will get someone to get back to me about that.
And it's a very, very good book.
It's going to cause a lot of people to lose their crap sideways through their ear holes, or maybe even through their front holes.
I don't know.
But it is a great book.
I'm very, very pleased with it.
So...
All right. Thanks to everyone so much for a wonderful afternoon of chatting and philosophy.
Great, great questions. Thank you for all of your support.
Please don't forget to help support the show at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
