Aug. 24, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
26:47
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| Time | Text |
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| *music* *music* | |
| *music* So here's a wild number. | |
| 25% of the entire homeless population in America sleep in California streets and shelters every night. | |
| Violent crime in California is 20% higher than the national median. | |
| San Francisco, where we are right now, ranks number one in the country for property crime rates of America's largest cities. | |
| The result of all of this sad underspending on social services and maintenance and repair combined with wallet-busting, if not downright ball-busting taxes, Means that just over the last 15 years or so, about 6 million Californians over the age of 25 have left the state. | |
| If you double that, about 10 million have fled. | |
| Well, so yes, I'm down here from Canada trying to understand California. | |
| We just were in LA, which was exciting, and now of course we're in San Francisco. | |
| How long have you lived here? | |
| I grew up here in Mountain View, about an hour south, and then I moved out for college, so I was gone for six years and just recently moved back. | |
| Six years for college? Yeah. | |
| How well did that go? Well, undergrad. | |
| That's a long time. Yeah, yeah. | |
| Undergrad and grad school. Oh, okay. | |
| Good, good, good. What did you take? | |
| I studied sociology and then got a master's in textiles. | |
| That is a circuitous path. | |
| I like it. Now, has it changed a lot, this area, since you were a kid? | |
| This area in particular or just San Francisco more in general? | |
| Just San Francisco as a whole. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think just the influx of the tech companies has really changed. | |
| You know, the people who are, like, inhabiting the city and, you know, you see people riding around on scooters. | |
| That wasn't here, you know, whatever, 20 years ago when we first moved here. | |
| So I grew up in Mountain View, which is where Google's headquarter is. | |
| Right. And so... | |
| Oh, well, that was a change, right? | |
| Yeah. So now you see self-driving cars and Google bikes and basically all the real estate down where Google first popped up is being bought out by them. | |
| Right. So it really just, I guess, changed the whole dynamic of the city itself, yeah. | |
| The livability seems to be taking some hits. | |
| In particular, the price of housing, I was reading that the average rent for an unfurnished one-bedroom is like $3,400 a month. | |
| Yeah. I mean, is that new? | |
| Is that different? That's absolutely new, yeah. | |
| How long? I think... | |
| I don't know. I guess I wasn't that perceptive to prices of housing when I was a kid, but when I would come back for college and work in the city and stuff like that, it was out of the question to live here. | |
| So within the past six years, it's always been pretty exorbitantly priced. | |
| Maybe a good anecdote is that I'm living at home with my parents right now despite having a job, so I can't afford to live in the city. | |
| This fellow really enjoyed the conversation, as I did with everyone that I chatted with, but there was a kind of dreamy sense of timelessness. | |
| You know, they always talk about this sort of failure to launch, and this guy, I think he was in his 30s, and he was living at home, and what prospects did he have? | |
| Did he have a prospect of coming into the city and of having a life where he could have his own place that was reasonable and decent and large enough for his needs, or maybe for a family if that's what he wanted? | |
| He didn't really seem to have that opportunity and one of the things that is so terrible about the cities in California is because, well partly because of having millions of illegal aliens in the state, you have this massive congestion, you have this massive overpopulation within the cities that drives up the rents to the point where people can only afford to rent far outside the city but they have to come into the city In order to work so you get these horrible commutes and it's one of the main reasons why you know half of the Millennials are looking to bug out of San Francisco because the commutes are just abysmal and we got stuck in some traffic here where you know you feel like your your soul is is being turned over and the hourglass of your life is draining away because it takes a lot of concentration but it's extremely boring and so the frustration of the commute is is pretty significant and this guy My concern, | |
| not with him in particular, but with the generation as a whole, that is sacrificing their future in order to survive in the present, is that at one point they're going to wake up and maybe they'll be too old to have a family, or maybe they'll be too old to easily pull up roots and start again. | |
| There is a lot of sacrifices being made to prop up the current system, and I think some of the progress in the lives of the younger people is that sacrifice, and if they stop making that sacrifice, if they say, well, no, I mean, we should have a livable and workable society, and we should have difficult conversations to get there, I'm not sure that's happening yet. | |
| I think that people are just fleeing rather than talking. | |
| Are you from California? I'm not. | |
| No? Now I'm hungry. | |
| That's fine, that's fine. | |
| Where are you from? I am from Washington, but I came from Oregon, Portland. | |
| So you're a rambling man. | |
| You're like a gypsy. How long have you been here? | |
| For two days now. | |
| Oh, are you just here for vacation? | |
| No, I'm here for a grad school audition. | |
| For which? For auditioning for grad school for an MFA program. | |
| What are you going to audition for? | |
| For a three-year MFA program at ACP. No, but is it acting, singing, dancing? | |
| Acting. Really? | |
| Well, I mean virtually everything, but like acting. | |
| Can I ask you something? Yeah, sure. | |
| Can you give me a monologue? A monologue? | |
| Would you mind? Mama, what in the hell do you think I've been doing? | |
| I've prayed every single night. | |
| I laid in that hospital bed for 32 days and 32 nights and all I did was pray. | |
| You know how lonely it is, mama, to lay in a bed that ain't even your own for 32 days. | |
| Nothing but tubes and your own shit to keep you company. | |
| That was good, that was good. | |
| Hire this man. Now, I was gonna say, that's a real dedicated actor, right? | |
| That guy's just like, camera, audition, I'm on! | |
| And he went from like zero to a hundred. | |
| That was great to see. So would you guys support a wall, no wall? | |
| Do you have a preference that way? | |
| I would rather know a wall. | |
| You would rather know a wall? People are people. | |
| They should be able to come here if they want. | |
| Legally. Legally, yeah. | |
| Then we get back to the wall, though, because without the wall, a lot of people are coming across illegally, right? | |
| Right. Yeah, you have to have some border security. | |
| It doesn't have to be called the wall. | |
| You can call it a fence, whatever you want to call it. | |
| A pit of vipers. But we have to have laws and rules, just like every other country on the planet. | |
| Now, here's a funny thing, because I've kind of noticed this in talking with the men and the women. | |
| That the women are a little bit more like, oh, you know, like, and the men are like, laws and walls or something like it, right? | |
| You don't have to answer this. | |
| I'm just kind of curious because it's supposed to be a very liberal city. | |
| Now, I'm going to go out on a limb and say not so much with the Democrats, a little bit more with the Democrats. | |
| Yeah, well, yeah, I think living here, you're just forced to be naturally liberal. | |
| Really? Is there like a shock troop that comes with Sharia law or something? | |
| Well, you have to be somewhat, but it is hard to take. | |
| It's definitely hard. | |
| I've not met one person so far. | |
| Well, a little bit water security, maybe a wall, but it's very loosey-goosey lefty. | |
| Well, it's just hard. You see all these poor people in the street not being taken care of properly. | |
| That's what I mean. I don't think that's okay to just let people... | |
| We're spending all this money and they're not actually being helped. | |
| Well, some people say that it's because the money is being spent that people come, right? | |
| So it's all very complicated. | |
| Anyway, listen, I really, really appreciate your time. | |
| Thank you so much. This family was great. | |
| Really, really charming. I couldn't help but notice the gender divide, that the women were, you know, caring and nurturing and kind of opening borders, and the guy who was initially kind of back, the father was kind of initially back from the conversation when it came to politics and the border, kind of stepped in and you could almost see him brushing back his Mufasa Lion's mane, because he was like, you know, it's not so great, you know, a little control over this kind of stuff would be excellent. | |
| This male lion patrolling the borders thing is something that I've kind of noticed, and that's why I brought it up in the conversation, that there seems to be a bit of a divide, that the women are... | |
| You know, feels and suffering and open borders and let's not do anything harsh. | |
| But the men are like, yeah, but you know, somebody's paying the bill for all the sentimentality. | |
| And I did get the sense, though I don't know for sure, that he would be the primary breadwinner, which would sort of explain where his position was on that border issue. | |
| And, you know, ask people yourself and see if this correlation holds up at all. | |
| I've seen it fairly consistently, but I'm curious what you guys see. | |
| Now, what do you guys think of another big topic that I've been talking about with people is immigration. | |
| It's a big... | |
| But both legal and illegal, the open borders, where do you guys sit on that? | |
| Honestly, we're not even supposed to be here. | |
| Like, we're inflicting on native land. | |
| Oh, you mean like the Amerindians kind of thing? | |
| Yeah, like I live on the East Bay, and in the East Bay we have a community college called Ohlone College. | |
| Ohlone is based off of or named after the Ohlone people that are essentially not here anymore. | |
| They're just pretty much gone. | |
| Wait, do you mean they're in reservations or they're gone gone? | |
| I honestly believe that they might be gone gone. | |
| Either that or completely integrated. | |
| So in a sense they are... | |
| If we're talking about immigration now, we're the ones that came here for, like, I don't know. | |
| Well, they came, what is it, 19,000 years ago? | |
| People first showed up in California. | |
| Well, no, that's what I mean. But, like, we started coming here after, or, like, first it was the Spanish. | |
| And then we came over and then had the bear flag revolt. | |
| And it's kind of like, I don't know. | |
| There's a lot of... | |
| I'm a huge fan of history, and a lot of these anti-immigrant supporters, they're not very keen on their history, because if they looked at their history, they would realize we're not, I mean, we are the immigrants. | |
| Like, everybody here that is not a native. | |
| Well, but after a certain amount of time... | |
| No, no, no. You know what I mean? | |
| Don't you think that's a certain amount of time where you say, okay... | |
| For us to say that this is a hardcore nation and then they need to get out, I feel like... | |
| Like, who's they? Like, just, um... | |
| Oh, the natives? Yeah. | |
| No, I mean, not like... | |
| People coming from Mexico is different, right? | |
| No, like Americans saying this is American land. | |
| We've only been here like... | |
| Been in California at least for about like 250 years, maybe reaching 300 pretty soon. | |
| When do you think it becomes America? | |
| How many years have to pass? | |
| When... When it kind of... | |
| When we at least accept our wrongdoings. | |
| We haven't accepted any wrongdoings of picking any... | |
| Wait, wait, wait. I'm just curious about this. | |
| Because I assume you haven't strangled any natives. | |
| Of course not. So where's this collective wrongdoing? | |
| It sounds like original sin almost. | |
| It's kind of like... It's kind of like... | |
| The most conceptual example I can come up with is the war crimes that Japan did over World War II. They do not recognize a lot of those war crimes. | |
| And China and Korea are still pissed about it. | |
| Both of the Koreas are still pissed about it. | |
| They have strange relations. Like the rape of Nanking and all that, right? | |
| Yeah. The fact that they actively say, like, no, that didn't happen... | |
| We do that too. We do not acknowledge the fact that there was a genocide of Native Americans. | |
| Well, okay, hang on, hang on. Now, some of the arguments against that is... | |
| It was bad luck that smallpox was so devastating. | |
| It killed 90% of the population, right? | |
| I'm not saying about smallpox. There was a lot of wars. | |
| There was a lot of wars that we kicked them out of their land. | |
| Or like, Mount Rushmore. | |
| Mount Rushmore was carved into the Black Mountains. | |
| Sacred Mountains. And we deface them. | |
| We deface them with our presidents. | |
| And we haven't acknowledged that. | |
| And actually we did... Hang on, hang on. | |
| But there's a lot of money that's been paid to the natives, right? | |
| Not enough, not enough. | |
| How much do you think would be enough? | |
| For people who themselves were never attacked by people who never attacked them specifically. | |
| Honestly, if we were to pay off for all of our crimes... | |
| We wouldn't be a country anymore because we would be so much in debt. | |
| We would just collapse. So what are the crimes that you see? | |
| I mean, the ones we've been talking about, were there others as well? | |
| Well, yeah, of course. There's thousands. | |
| I don't know. It's kind of too much for me to start. | |
| You mean like slavery and so on? | |
| Well, yeah. Including that, yeah. | |
| Literally, we've done so much stuff. | |
| That's just... It's just terrible. | |
| That's kind of like... Do you think that America is exceptional in the wrongs that it has done in the world? | |
| I feel like it's exceptional because we are hypocritical about it. | |
| Oh, so if America had lower standards, you wouldn't be bothered by it? | |
| If America didn't, like, if at least America recognized or apologized or didn't denounce other countries for, quote, doing certain things... | |
| I wouldn't think we're that exceptional, but I would still have a negative opinion about where we stand in everything. | |
| Have you studied other ways in which other continents have been taken over throughout history? | |
| Yeah. When the Muslims invaded India, they killed about 80 million people. | |
| Oh, yeah. I mean, would you say that's worse than what's going on in America? | |
| Well, I mean, like... | |
| Muslims had 100 million slaves and they generally castrated the male slaves. | |
| Is that worse than what happened in America? | |
| Well, I mean, it's not worse. | |
| It's on equal ground. | |
| I would not say... | |
| Numerically, it's worse. | |
| Like 400,000 slaves were taken to America and 100 million slaves were taken to the Muslim countries. | |
| I would also say that we probably smudged those numbers because there are a lot of things that we are being lied to about. | |
| And just recently, within the past few years, We're slowly coming to terms with it. | |
| We're slowly finding out about it. | |
| You kind of want to avoid the Muslim thing, don't you? | |
| Now, that was a lot of fun. | |
| I liked that he had a spirit to defend his position, and I really enjoyed the interaction, but... | |
| It really was kind of a tour of the clichés that people are taught these days, and to me it shows, not this fellow was very intelligent, and I hope that he's going to continue to look into this information, but it shows just what an iron grip the left has on the educational system, that he had not been exposed to any viewpoints counter to the viewpoints that he had. | |
| He was absolutely certain of his viewpoints, even though Even though there were great, challenging pieces of information that counter his viewpoints, and this certainty can only come from a uniformity of information that is presented, and when you present information without a counterargument, that is one of the very definitions of propaganda. | |
| In the long-ago history of the mainstream media, William Randolph Hearst, famous newspaper man who in 1897 regarding a war in Cuba, when somebody said, there will be no war, he said, furnish me the pictures, I'll furnish you the war. | |
| That is the power of the mainstream media. | |
| The alternative media, what you're watching right now, says, show me the truth. | |
| We'll bring you the peace. | |
| Housing. Have we ever heard some stories about housing here? | |
| Yeah. 1.6 mil for an average house, 3,400 bucks for a stoop, like a one-bedroom apartment, unfurnished. | |
| How are you guys doing it? | |
| Are you mostly like sleeping on the streets or in cars? | |
| Do you need five bucks? | |
| I mean, like, how does this work? | |
| You look hard. | |
| It took me, I had to move like three times until I found a place I could afford. | |
| I'm a grad student too, so it's even worse. | |
| So you're in a very expensive city and you're like a homeless guy with a... | |
| I'm in Berkeley, which is a little better, but yeah, I'd be almost anywhere. | |
| Like a homeless guy with books. Yeah, right. What are you taking, by the way? | |
| Education. Ah, okay, okay. | |
| And so do you have to double up, triple up? | |
| I mean, how does it work to live? | |
| I share a house with four other people. | |
| Yeah, I did the same in grad school. | |
| You get to know some people very well. | |
| Sometimes too well. We rent out our living room to two undergrad students. | |
| Oh, there's no eating out, right? | |
| It's just whatever you can boil in a pot, you'll just eat. | |
| Pretty much. Potatoes, you know? | |
| Another thing that people talk about, or at least I've been talking about with people here, is the question of immigration in California seems to be pretty pressing and on people's minds about what's going on to the south, which I guess flows all the way through California. | |
| Are you borders? | |
| Open borders? Wall? | |
| Where do you sort of sit on that? | |
| Definitely not wall. Like physical wall, for sure. | |
| Why not? You said why not? | |
| Yeah, yeah. I just don't think it's effective. | |
| I don't think that there's any way that it could possibly be effective. | |
| And I think it's a waste of money, honestly. | |
| I mean... If it was effective... | |
| Let's say it was. I don't know. | |
| I still don't like the entire ideology of blocking people out of America. | |
| I think America is a place that people come to have a better life. | |
| And there's obviously other issues like why they want to come here. | |
| I don't think it's... There's also a hypocrisy boiled in. | |
| If you're going to be the nation... | |
| Like, Washington census championing globalization, free market, like, integration across national borders, and then close down your borders while, you know, exporting some of the worst parts of that out, causing an autonomic imbalance. | |
| Sorry, you compressed that so much because you were in grad school. | |
| So, could you stretch that out for me a little bit? | |
| I just got a little lost in the middle there. | |
| Yeah. America's... | |
| America was like the global leader in championing sort of free markets, so the lowering of economic borders. | |
| Yeah, yeah. And that leads to things like the exportation, like, you know, I mean, sweatshops in parts of Asia, and then maquilladores, like the factory work, and maybe there's some good parts, but also it's like across that border, a lot of negative things have happened, right? | |
| And then... But then shouldn't, if the factories open in Mexico, then shouldn't people want to stay in Mexico? | |
| For those jobs, if their jobs aren't available here? | |
| Sorry, I'm just trying to follow where you are. | |
| I'm sure it's great. I just... | |
| Yeah, no. I mean, that's what I was... | |
| That was kind of what I was, like, tipping my hat to when I said there have been probably some positive benefits. | |
| But also, like, the evisceration of different industries there, the rising cost of corn. | |
| Wait, they're being... | |
| In Mexico, right? | |
| In Mexico, yeah. And how have the industries been eviscerated? | |
| Because they are a less developed nation with less developed infrastructure, less supports for starting businesses, and their industry is just at a lower level and has actually been sort of depressed. | |
| Buy the influx of cheap goods through free market things. | |
| And in both directions. This happens in like a lot. | |
| It's very complex. And I should say, I'm not an economist. | |
| That's not what I do. No, you made that clear. | |
| No, it's fine. No, I appreciate that. | |
| But we all got to have opinions about these things because we vote, right? | |
| If we're going to lead the world as a country into a certain sort of free market economic policy, then I think that there's just like a basic ethical consideration. | |
| And it just kind of makes sense that the free market, like this disintegration of economic borders... | |
| It's going to lead to flows of people along with flows of money and goods. | |
| But, I mean, Japan has relatively free trade and they haven't opened their borders. | |
| Same thing with Poland. I mean, well, Poland is in the EU. So there are reduced border controls there as part of that whole thing. | |
| And Japan borders water, which is a little bit different. | |
| That's a wall that works. | |
| It's a squishy wall, but it works, right? | |
| Yeah. And they still... | |
| You'd have to look somebody else up, but I think they still have some problems with immigration from the Philippines and stuff, or there's things happening in that way. | |
| Just less of a problem because it's harder to get there. | |
| Right, right. I mean, there are some places that have very strict immigration. | |
| Like, you can't move to China, really. | |
| It's very, very hard. You can't even own property there. | |
| So there are some countries that are doing it, but there's some countries, like in the West, that aren't doing it. | |
| Now, what about... The cost, right? | |
| That's sort of the big question, right? | |
| Because people say, oh, 19th century immigration, but there was no welfare state. | |
| You kind of made it or you didn't. | |
| About a third of people went back home because they didn't like the markets that were there or whatever. | |
| And the deficit and the debt in California government is really quite a lot. | |
| And I guess that's a question I have is... | |
| What about the cost of all of that? | |
| I mean, partly it's why the rents are high, right? | |
| I mean, just people coming in and not a lot of new growth because they've got a lot of controls over building new buildings and so on. | |
| 17%, 18% of the California state budget is being spent on illegal immigration. | |
| It's a big cost. | |
| Can I short-circuit you for a second? | |
| Yeah, yeah. What's the topic of your documentary and what institution are you affiliated with? | |
| Oh, I run the biggest philosophy show in the world. | |
| It's called Free Domain Radio. It's called what? | |
| Oh, it's called Free Domain Radio. Okay. | |
| Freedom Main? It's just Free Domain. | |
| Freedom Main. Like, freedom is the main thing and freedom should be your domain. | |
| Freedom Main. Yeah, Freedom Main Radio. | |
| And what's the topic of the documentary? | |
| Do you have a title? Do you have a working title? | |
| I don't have a title. I just did one in Poland. | |
| That's why I sort of reference Poland. | |
| I was there for the 100 Year March. | |
| And I'm just down here talking to people about California. | |
| Yeah, but surely you have a person here with a camera and you have a microphone. | |
| I do. You have some sort of working sense of framework for it. | |
| I wouldn't write an essay and just start writing and see what happens, even if there's an organic element to it. | |
| So what has you sitting down and writing, so to speak? | |
| Well, I've been doing a lot of research on... | |
| Some challenges that California is facing. | |
| So, in particular, right, I mean, infrastructure decay, very high taxes, massive amounts of debt, and so on. | |
| And I'm just kind of curious how people in California are experiencing that. | |
| And a lot of people are like, yeah, we're kind of worried, we're concerned, but we don't really know what the cause is and so on. | |
| And so that's, you know, you guys are very well educated on this, which is great. | |
| Okay. I feel like you want to stop chatting with me? | |
| Yeah, I think we do. Okay, well listen, I really, really appreciate your time. | |
| Good luck with your opportunity. Thank you very much. | |
| Thank you. Well... | |
| What's that all about? No, it's good. | |
| These spider-sense started tingly. | |
| And, uh... Yeah, I can understand that. | |
| I think he's just not used to having counter-perspectives or counter-opinions, right? | |
| So if he's in the education department, education departments are generally very lefty. | |
| And so you could see it was just like, hey, you know what was interesting? | |
| It was almost like a wall bent up, when you think about it. | |
| Did you see the triggering? | |
| It was like the ding, ding, ding, alarm, alarm. | |
| And it was triggering not because I said anything false or not because I provided an opinion. | |
| It was triggering when I talked about the amount of money being spent on illegal immigration by California, by the California government. | |
| And you could see this immediate switch. | |
| And this is a fascinating thing because when you hear information, if you have a particular mindset, and you hear information that you don't like Then what you do is rather than debate the data, you start looking for motivations. | |
| You start looking for who's funding you. | |
| What's your goal? | |
| What's your purpose? What's your narrative? | |
| What's your bigotry? | |
| What's your prejudice? Rather than debating the data. | |
| It's a real shame. It's a real shame because... | |
| I would have loved to have had a robust debate with that fellow, but it's something that happens with, I dare say leftists, I don't know in particular what his views were, but it's something that, it's this giant flaming eject button to get people out of a conversation they feel uncomfortable with by beginning to imagine sinister motives on the part of the person bringing you data. | |
| And so that was fascinating, and really what I thought of after that conversation, which turned, you know, pretty chilly pretty quickly, was imagine If this man ends up being a teacher or a professor, imagine how he's going to treat his students who bring challenging information to the classroom. | |
| That is something that is an important consideration. | |
| It is really only in San Francisco that they can turn the world into a giant car. | |
| giant cock. | |
| Bye. | |
| I'm out. | |
| So we're here in San Francisco. | |
| We've come out to a community meeting because we're going to be interviewing one of the mayoral candidates. | |
| For San Francisco, and we're at a community meeting where they're talking about policing in a neighborhood where it is very Chinese, Japanese, I assume. | |
| There is a lot of African Americans. | |
| There's a lot of Hispanics. | |
| I didn't hear any percentages for whites, but it would be very low. | |
| And the challenges of policing in a very diverse community. |
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