All Episodes
Previous Next
Dec. 28, 2024 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:31:54
Worker Madness!
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good evening, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
It is the 27th of December 2024, and every now and then, as you know, I will dip into the world of X slash Twitter.
And what did I see?
A mushroom cloud of former credibility in the shape of Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk around this H-1B visa.
In the United States, a lot of places have them as a whole.
I was a hiring manager.
I was chief technical officer and director of technology at two separate companies, then a director of marketing.
So I have hired probably a hundred people over the course of my career, interviewed well over a thousand, and so I have some pretty unique experience.
About all of this.
So we're going to go into a little bit of the H-1B history.
This is just sort of a necessary factual basis for getting into the philosophical discussion.
So let's dive right in.
So 1952, there was something called the McCarran-Walter Act.
This laid the foundation for temporary worker visas, including the H-1 visa category, allowing foreign workers to enter the U.S. temporarily for employment purposes.
1965, the Immigration and Nationality Act.
1965, not a ban a year for American immigration policy, in my humble opinion.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 shifted immigration policy to prioritize family reunification and skilled workers.
Although the H-1 visa category was included, it did not specifically focus on highly skilled workers, right?
So you say, oh, we're going to bring a bunch of workers in, and then you say, oh, but they miss their mommy and daddy, and don't you care about their family?
And then their family comes in, and Daisy Jane, right?
In 1990, the Immigration Act in America revamped the H-1 visa category, creating the H-1B visa program as it is known today.
This was introduced to allow U.S. companies to hire skilled foreign workers in specialty occupations due to a shortage of skilled American workers.
Absolutely false.
There's no such thing as a labour shortage at all.
I mean, smart people can learn just about anything.
I mean, I have been an actor.
I've been a playwright.
I've been a poet, a novelist, a philosopher.
I have been a tech bro, a coding bro, chief technical officer, director of marketing.
I mean, if you're smart, you can learn everything pretty much, and you can learn it fairly quickly.
Outside of, you know, like really, really skilled, like I couldn't learn to be a surgeon very quickly or a pianist or anything like that.
But when it comes to sort of conceptual stuff, smart people can learn just about anything.
And of course, if there's a, quote, shortage of workers, that's what business says when they say, when they really mean to say we don't want to pay people too much, they say, oh no, there's a shortage of workers.
It's funny, you know, when I offered people 50 cents an hour to work at Free Domain, there was just a shortage of workers.
I mean, nowhere.
No one wanted to sign up for 50 cents an hour.
Shortage.
Massive, catastrophic shortage.
No, it just means that you don't want to pay people what the market demands.
And of course, if business runs to Congress, and it takes a couple of years to influence legislation this way, if businesses run to Congress and say, oh, my lovely grime-a-waring-tongue Congress people, we absolutely need to bring in workers from Every of the four corners of the planet, though mostly India, if you've got years and years to do that, why don't you go to universities and say, you know, we have a shortage of these people, perhaps you could crank up the people that are coming out of your programs for this, right?
The idea that there's a skills shortage in the country that put three people on the moon, the idea that there's a shortage of skilled labor in the country that build the first atomic bomb, nuclear power plants, We're second in space after Russia.
It's ridiculous.
And, I mean, the motivation behind it is much more sinister than most people think, which we'll get to in a second.
So, if you've got years and years to lobby Congress and then go through all the paperwork and make sure you vet all the people overseas, which you just can't do, then you have enough time Since it takes years to get this legislation passed, and even a year or two, at best, for the people to come in, and then another little bit of time for them to be trained, and then you have to figure out their language difficulties, which there often are.
So if you have time for all of that, then you have time to go to the American educational system and say, we need these people.
I mean, a friend of mine became a good coder.
He did a 14 or 16-month program.
I mean, he was a hobbyist beforehand, a 14 or 16-month program.
And when it comes to computer stuff, you just hire the hobbyists.
I mean, I hired the hobbyists.
I, myself, was a hobbyist.
I started learning how to program computers at the age of 11 on a 2K PET computer and then moved to an Atari 400 and then bought an Atari 800, learned how to code on that, and So you've got a bunch of hobbyists, you throw them into an intensive training program, you can get those people into the workforce a lot quicker than you can influence Congress to change legislation and then figure out who to hire from outside.
So it's not a shortage of skilled workers.
And it's kind of funny to me that, well, despite the fact that the government runs all of the educational systems known to man or licenses or has massive amounts of Pell grants and other kinds of grants, The fact that the government spends hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars on education, we just don't have the people we need.
Dammit, why are people so stupid?
This is why I'm not on social media much anymore.
I mean, wouldn't this be a massive catastrophe and require a massive revamp of the entire U.S. educational system if The entire purpose of the U.S. educational system is to produce skilled, productive workers, and then they say, no, no, no, we have to go to Bombay, formerly Bombay, to get workers.
We have to drill through the center of the earth, emerge in some other place in the Sahara to get workers.
Why?
Because there aren't the workers we need here.
Well, why aren't there the workers That you need in America.
I mean, you've got the government running everything from pre-kindergarten to post-graduate degrees.
Why wouldn't there be the workers?
Why would you lobby Congress to get foreign workers rather than lobby the universities to produce the workers that you need?
Makes no sense.
Not even a tiny bit.
Anyway.
2001 to 2015. Between these years, the U.S. government distributed 1.8 million H-1B visas.
60% of H1B applicants were for computer and mathematical occupations.
So, it's not super complicated.
One of the things that has happened, and I made this case many, many years ago, one of the things that's happened is something I call the supercharged stock market.
The most persecuted, and in many ways, the most horrendously treated refugees on the planet are people's precious life savings.
You know, you pour your life into work, you...
Defer your consumption, you defer your happiness, you defer your gratification, you save and you hoard like squirrels with nuts for the winter, and then the Federal Reserve prints money, people borrow like crazy, and it all gets inflated away to nothing.
Your precious life savings Are on the constant run, hide, dodge, and dither to get away from the giant predators of fiat currency.
Fiat currency is hunting the precious years of your life that you have saved up in order to have money later, and it's constantly hunting.
So where do you have to go?
Well, you can't leave your money in the bank.
You can't leave it under your mattress.
It just gets eaten away.
Constant gnawing.
Like every piece of grain you store gets gnawed on by rats.
Always, always, always.
So you've got to put it somewhere.
You've got to put it somewhere.
So where do you put it?
Well, you put it in the stock market.
You put it in some retirement savings plan, 401k, RSPs in Canada.
So you're constantly being hunted.
Your savings are being hunted.
Everything you save gets evaporated by inflation.
And changing taxes and regulations and so on.
So you can't put it in the bank.
Your money dies.
Your money should stay.
Your money should stay.
On the blockchain it can.
In the bank account it evaporates and dies.
So where do you put your money?
Well, you have to put it in the stock market.
Why do you have to put your money in the stock market?
Because it's the only thing that can possibly give you a chance of at least keeping pace with inflation.
People put money in the stock market not to make money, But to avoid having their money stolen through inflation.
That's why people put their money in the stock market.
So there's way too much money in the stock market.
And it's all charging around, right?
So people should be in the stock market because they understand the industry, they know the people maybe, they know the variables, they're in it for the long haul, and there should be very little money in the stock market as a whole because people should be able to hold on to their money by keeping it in the bank or keeping it under their mattress if they want.
In fact, hopefully the money should increase in value over time.
So, because you're saving money when productivity is lower, and then as more money gets invested into businesses, productivity goes up.
Worker productivity is the only real measure of an economy.
So you're saving money when worker productivity is low, and then you're spending that money in 5 or 10 or 20 years' time when worker productivity is much higher, so your money should gain in value over time.
Instead, it gets pillaged and robbed by the endless termites burrowing into the basis of dollars.
So massive amounts of money are driven as refugees from inflation into the stock market.
Way too much money in the stock market.
So what happens is The money is just charging around, looking for the tiniest little disparities, right?
The tiniest, oh, this guy made.02% more.
Oh, this guy made.02% less.
Oh, this person has a big plan.
This person cut their payroll by 8%.
And you're just charging, buying, selling, buying, selling at all times.
And the CEOs of these companies have stopped thinking about their customers, have stopped thinking about long-term plans, have stopped thinking about the general trends in the industry, And they're thinking about and rewarded and punished by very, very short-term changes in stock price based upon massive amounts of money charging around, sniffing out the slightest disparity in data, income, and so on.
So any company that can cut its payroll gets a massive increase in the stock price.
Stock prices should not massively increase in a short amount of time, in general, because The CEOs who are responsible for that often make enough to retire in two days.
And it's just wretched for the economy as a whole.
Nobody can plan for the long term.
Everybody's looking to create some tiny advantage to get the stock price up rather than planning for the long term.
And of course, a lot of These buying and selling of stocks is automated.
I know this because I worked on these very programs myself, and I also have been in the process of taking a company public, so I've seen what short-term swings in stock value does to a company.
It makes everyone kind of mental, and everyone's simply focused on the short-term.
So...
What are they doing?
Well, they want to bring people in who can't talk back, who can't fight them on anything, because if you lose your job, you get deported, really.
So, they just want people they can control, and they also want to change the numbers briefly to get themselves super rich on stock prices and so on, right?
So, in 2020, 70% of H-1B visa workers were in computer-related occupations, while 9% were in engineering, architecture, and surveying.
2021, 74.1% of H-1B visas were approved for Indian nationals, while 12.4% were approved for Chinese nationals.
2022 was the highest number of H-1B visa issuances in the program's history, with 206,002 new and initial visas issued.
Fiscal year 2007, the H-1B cap was reached on April 2nd with petitions submitted by May 26th.
Excellent.
So, the cap is reached almost immediately, just about every year.
2009, according to the Department of Homeland Security's report, the top occupations for H-1B visa holders were computer and mathematical occupations, 44.1%, engineering occupations, 21.4%, architecture and engineering occupations, 6.3%.
One in four H-1B applications do not require a bachelor's degree.
Highly skilled, apparently, do not require a bachelor's degree.
Average age of an H-1B worker, 33. Well, and also, America since the 1960s, as is the case in most of the West, have shifted from a meritocracy to, you know, ethnicity and gender-based quota systems.
So, that's also a big problem, right?
So, this is from the American Immigration Council.
The H-1B is a temporary non-immigrant visa category that allows employers to petition for highly educated foreign professionals to work in specialty occupations that require at least a bachelor's degree or the equivalent.
Jobs in fields such as mathematics, engineering, technology, and medical sciences often qualify.
Typically, the initial duration of an H-1B visa classification is three years, which may be extended for a maximum of six years.
Before an employer can file a petition with USCIS, the employer must take steps to ensure that hiring the foreign worker will not harm U.S. workers.
It's a little hard, like once you understand some basic economics, it's a little hard to understand the How it's possible to hire hundreds of thousands of foreign workers without it affecting US workers.
That's just supply and demand.
The more supply, the lower the cost.
So, I mean, I guess it's very fortunate that people don't have much economic Literacy, because that's just not possible.
All right, let's get to a little bit more.
And, I mean, of course, the H-1B visa stuff is public.
So in Sacramento, they wanted to bring in from some foreign country a plumber who's working for $26,000 a year.
I mean, how can that possibly be?
Be skilled, right?
How can that possibly be skilled?
And, of course, because it drives down the wages of people in the tech sector, fewer smart people want to go into the tech sector.
The question of ethnic nepotism is also kind of important.
No matter what ethnicity, are they going to be more likely to hire people of their own ethnicity?
You know, some friend from their village where they came from, some cousin.
I mean, that's an issue, right?
So, I guess the most foundational question is, if this stuff is because of a temporary worker shortage, why has it been going on for 70 years?
Right?
1952 to 2024. That's 72 years.
I mean, it's almost three-quarters of a century.
I mean, shouldn't it have been solved?
Oh, you know, we're short of workers.
We're short of workers.
We're short of workers.
Decade after decade, we're short of workers.
It can't be!
It can't be that you're eternally short of workers.
Because what should happen is you're short of workers, therefore the wages go up in that industry, therefore more people are drawn into that industry.
This is not brain surgery.
So why has the problem not been solved?
It's not designed to be solved.
It's designed for something else.
There are H-1B applicants for entry-level accountants.
Now, it does happen in the finance industry as well as tech, but less.
So what happens is smart people no longer go into tech, they go into finance.
Now, the economic value of the finance industry in a capitalist economy is highly suspect.
Again, having worked in the finance industry, I know to some degree whereof I speak.
The value of tech bros in the finance industry To the economy as a whole, well, I give you the bundling of toxic mortgages in financial instruments sold all over the world,
which resulted in the massive financial crash of 2007 and 2008. The finance bros have questionable value as a whole to the economy, so the fact that you're driving down tech wages and you're pushing up finance wages And the draw and value of finance?
Well.
And Elon Musk says he wants to hire the best engineers in the world.
And Tesla is hiring the best engineers in the world for $76,500 a year.
Oh, boy.
Oh, boy.
That's terrible.
Now, H1B pay versus media pay.
So, if you're a tech lead...
Hey, wasn't there a rather tragic Japanese guy who calls himself tech lead on YouTube?
Do I remember that?
Or was that just a fever dream?
No, I'm pretty sure that was the case.
Alright, so for a technical lead, the median pay is $189,000.
However...
An H-1B visa pay is not $189,000.
It's $95,180.
In other words, it's almost half off.
Almost half off.
50% reduction.
It's not quite so bad.
Software engineers, for median pay, in America, is $161,000.
It's $129,000 for the H-1B visas.
Java developers, Java is one step up from beginner's applied symbolic instruction code, aka basic, aka a language you should give up after the age of 12. Java developers are making $160K if they're American.
H1B pay is $92 and change, so minus 42.29%.
And on and on it goes.
Even accountants.
It's almost $80k for an accountant who's native.
It's $65k for one who's imported.
Of course, top students are getting zero job offers.
This guy, TechWorkerUSA, says top students are getting zero job offers.
Meanwhile, H-1B visa applications are being maxed out by tax companies, laying off hundreds of thousands.
Yeah, there have been tech affairs at universities and colleges, which have had to be canceled because virtually no hiring people showed up.
So the idea that you're bringing in people that you can pay 20, 30, 40, 50% less, and that has no effect on wages.
That's crazy.
So, native-born workers losing out to foreign-born workers, also showing in-group preferences among ethnicities.
Yeah, I mean, that's kind of natural.
Daniel Horowitz writes, over the past year, native-born workers have lost 773,000 jobs on net, while foreign-born workers have gained more than 1 million jobs.
Yep.
The new grad's unemployment rate is showing the degraded value of a college degree.
That's a graphic, right?
So, I mean, this is not brain surgery.
Ah.
Even Chippendales.
Chippendales.
Chippendales.
Thank you.
So, yeah, it is just appalling.
I mean, the whole big question around immigration, I talk about it more in my novel, The Future, which you can get at freedomain.com.
Slash books, freedomain.com slash books.
It's free.
Pick up my novel, The Future.
The lawyer in it, thank you, Adam, talks about immigration as a whole.
So, it's a mess.
It's a mess.
And this is the kind of program, it's a temporary, nothing's more permanent than a temporary government program, right?
So, if it's, oh my gosh, there's some critical shortage, well, why?
Why do you have a system of education which consistently mismatches between what it produces and what the demands are?
If what the American or Western educational system is producing is massively, catastrophically mismatched with what the market wants, then clearly the educational system is fracked up beyond human comprehension, because the entire purpose of the education system is to supply people to necessary and well-paid positions in the society.
So why doesn't it do that?
Well, my father actually had an interesting way of doing this, and I talked about this on my show many years ago.
So my father, in order to get his doctorate, he was contracted by a company that said, hey man, we'll pay you for you to get your doctorate.
You just have to work for us for a certain amount of time afterwards.
So, people's higher education should be paid for by companies in return for work commitments afterwards and that way there's a perfect match between what the companies want and what people are studying because the companies are paying.
It could be either in-house or maybe they pay you for a formal degree and then you just agree to work for them a certain amount of years afterwards and if you want to break out of that, you just have to pay them back for the money they spent on your degree.
It's really not complicated.
The people who are driving The educational allocation of resources and what people are taking and what people are graduating with should be the people who want to hire them afterwards.
Again, it's not super complicated.
It would be very easy to do, but then you wouldn't be able to program people in woke communism because they'd actually be market-based, right?
What is the more sinister reason for the H-1B? I'm sure you know.
I'm sure you know.
I'm not going to tease you if you don't, but...
So, the purpose of a system, as everyone knows, is what it does.
So, the purpose of this is not to close a temporary gap in what's being produced by the educational system and what is required by business.
Because it wouldn't go on for 75 years, or almost otherwise, right?
Americans in the world as a whole are kind of problematic.
If the world as a whole wants to have massive increases in government power, Americans and the American society is kind of a problem, which is why A lot of people view the 1950s in America with a peculiar sort of supernatural horror because that's a baby boom, right?
Americans of all ethnicities were having massive amounts of babies and that was considered, that's why it's got this reputation as one of the worst, most repressive, awful times in human history.
Anyway.
Back when the black marriage rate was 80%.
80%.
80%.
Blacks were married at the rate of 80%.
Incredible.
So, Americans having a lot of babies is kind of a problem for the powers that be who want to expand government control, because Americans are, you know, one of the most foundationally liberty-minded and independent-minded people, not just across the world as it is, but in history as a whole.
So, what do you want to do?
Well, you want to try and lower the birth rate of people who are liberty-minded, because that way the values don't get transmitted down and the patriotism doesn't get transmitted down.
So, what you want to do is you want to set up a system where the native-born Americans, again, of every race, ethnicity, creed, and color, the native-born Americans have fewer kids.
What's the best way to have the native-born Americans have fewer kids?
Deny them job opportunities.
Because if you don't get a job, you can't really start a family.
So, I don't think...
Because the purpose of the system is what it does.
It's constantly displacing Americans.
It's another reason why the manufacturing jobs were sent overseas.
I mean, you can say that there are economic reasons, but in general, the economic reasons for all of that are...
Paid for by society as a whole, which we'll get into that in a sec.
But the manufacturing jobs are sent overseas so that native-born Americans, again, of every race, color, creed, and ethnicity, native-born Americans will have fewer children if they can't get jobs.
So trying to deny jobs to people whose lineage is America is a great way.
And the other thing, too, let's say that you want to implement a bunch of censorship in your tech company.
Let's say you just want to Do an end run around the First Amendment and implement a lot of censorship.
Is it more likely that your native-born American patriotic First Amendment-infused workforce is going to be totally fine with all that censorship?
Or if you bring people in from outside the culture where there's no real history of this kind of free speech stuff, are they going to be more likely to implement what you want with no pushback?
Because if you hire people who are incredibly grateful to be here and who they need your approval in order to stay, like if you fire them, then they have to leave, right?
Then you get a huge amount of power over them and you can order them to do all kinds of sketchy stuff, in my view, and what can they say?
The problem is if you have an empowered workforce, then It's kind of tough to implement bad things.
Like, one of the main reasons why all the manufacturing went overseas from what is now called the Rust Belt, but used to be the industrial heart of America, is because massive amounts of unionization that had government keeping competitors and what are called scabs, like replacement workers, out of the mix.
So manufacturing went to go overseas, Now, what should normally have happened is the unions would have been broken and they would have had...
It's fine.
To me, obviously, unions are great.
Completely voluntary unions are fantastic, right?
Because you do want...
I mean, there are bad bosses out there who underpay people and you want to have the right of collective bargaining.
However, when unions get the power...
To prevent anybody else from doing the job, then that's too much power.
It's too much power for the bosses if the people can't collectively organize, and it's too much power for the unions if bosses can't hire replacement workers because sometimes union demands are outlandish and outrageous.
I mean, the problem of exploitation is not confined to one particular economic class.
Only the wealthy.
Only the capitalists.
Only the owners.
Only the CEO. Only the board members.
Only the top.
They're the only ones who are corrupt.
The workers are noble and kind and wonderful and like all the managers are devils and all the workers are angels.
Now the workers can be devils.
The managers can be devils.
The managers can be angels and the workers.
So you can't have too much power on any side and the government is all about giving too much power to one side or the other of a negotiation to buy votes.
So When unions have the power to exclude replacement workers, then the factory owners are held completely hostage and will start looking for other alternatives to produce their goods, like going overseas and things like that, right?
Normally, what would happen is if worker demands in America are too high, then people will start moving stuff overseas, and then people will go like, holy crap, our industrial base is being hollowed out, so we'd better lower our demands, we'd better lower our requirements, we have to be willing to work for less because, let's say, you've got to take a 25% pay cut to compete with workers overseas.
Well, then you take that 25% pay cut because 75% of your pay, clearly, is better than 0% of your pay.
But, of course, that didn't happen.
The worker's wage didn't happen both for legislative and regulatory reasons and also because of the welfare state, unemployment insurance, welfare state, and let's not forget the disability peninsula, right?
The disability peninsula is people who, I mean, I remember being out in California many years ago.
I was on a bus with my daughter.
We were going to a cactus garden, and there was this guy who was heading to the beach to go surfing.
And he says, yeah, you know, I'm like, it's pretty sweet life on disability.
He told me all about the disability and how he worked it and how it all worked.
And I'm like, What are you on disability for?
Back issues, yet you surf.
Well, you know, it helps keep my back limber, whatever.
Like, it was just...
And again, that's anecdotal and all of that, but...
So, the wages didn't adjust.
In the same way that when towns lose...
I saw this up north when I worked up north, right?
When I worked up north, you would see these towns full of like 500 or 1,000 people.
Everyone was kind of depressed.
They all recognized it was a lonely armpit, ass, end of the universe, and they stayed, right?
They should be ghost towns, right?
If the mine shuts down, everyone should leave.
leave, but people don't leave because of welfare, because of disability, because of old age pensions and whatever you can sort of milk the system, right?
So you end up with these pockets and And then when you have these pockets of unemployment, then you end up with people who have lives with no purpose, lives with very little future, they get depressed, they go on crime sprees, they do a lot of drugs, they have out-of-wedlock sex, a lot of single mothers, and it just...
Right?
Just completely...
Right?
So...
Americans are a thorn in the side of the powers that be.
So if you can figure out a situation wherein you can deny them jobs, and you have to have a welfare state for that, right?
Because otherwise people will rebel.
The welfare state is to get people to accept the evisceration of their economy and the collapse of their birthright.
So, it is a really horrible situation as a whole.
And I can't tell you.
Alright, how hard do you want me to go in the next part?
I know this is a bit of an ask and answer question, but how hard do you want me to go?
I mean, because I can go pretty hard in the next part.
I will tell you that right now.
I can go pretty hard in the next part.
All the way.
Oh, Thomas!
Alright, if I go by your definition diamond hard, come on people, it's Christmas!
Show your friendly neighborhood philosopher a little sweet fiat love, or crypto love, freedomain.com slash donate.
I appreciate that.
I appreciate that.
So, if I go, as you say, Freddie Mercury hard, that is quite the side stem of tinfoil wrapped cucumber, So, if I go hard, come on, freedomain.com slash donate, or you can donate right here on the platform at Rumble, and I'm trying not to call the people.
People on Rumble don't donate very much, but you can change that trend on Locals.
You can as well.
All right, so let's go hard.
Let's go hard.
You know that old Simpsons routine, the old man yells at cloud?
Old man yells at cloud.
Or, say, philosopher who's eaten a bit too much cheese blames gravity for his slightly increased weight.
Oh, I'm just getting back my healthy pooch.
My healthy pooch.
So, this is the funny thing to me.
I mean, I have to laugh.
I really have to laugh.
Although, I get that in a certain moral perspective it's not really funny at all.
But this is what I find tragicomic when it comes...
To this debate, and I see this all over the place on social media.
Because people are like, well, you know, we just want the 0.01% of super skilled people that we just, we need to do this, it needs to be like this, and it's like, old man yells at clouds, philosopher yells at gravity for his ass getting bigger.
And it's just sad.
Yes, let's give...
Power-hungry sociopaths, all the power in the known universe, and then imagine that we can wish them to use it in the way that we want and only we want.
Sure, give me all this power, kid.
I'll absolutely do what you want.
He said, trying to keep a straight face as he talked to the voting population.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I got it, man.
You let me control who comes in, who gets wages, who gets workers.
I'll never be bribed by anyone.
I'll never be threatened by anyone.
I'll never succumb to greed, desire, lust, blackmail.
I've never done anything wrong.
Nobody will ever go after me.
So you give me this power, man.
You give me this power and I'll use it exactly in the way that you want.
No more, no less.
You're in control.
Just give me the power.
My God.
I mean, why don't people just walk up and down the fucking street handing out their bank account, login information, and all of their visa information?
Because I'm sure, you know, people are just, they're not going to use it for anything other than absolute necessities.
I mean, wouldn't that solve your problem?
Let's say you give 10% of your money to charity.
Well, that's a lot of overhead.
You got to fill out a lot of forms and so on.
Got to choose the right charities.
Maybe they're not on the up and up.
So forget all of that.
Forget all of that.
What you want to do is just walk up and down the street handing out cards With your bank account information and your visa information, and that way, people can just log in and take what they need.
It's a much more effective or efficient way of donating.
People will only take what they want, they'll only take things that you would approve of, for reasons that you would approve of, life-saving medicine for their dying child, Food for their starving auntie, like they will only, only take that which is desperately needed, which you would give to them anyway.
So just go up and down on the street, hand out your business card with all your financial information, hand out your crypto access, just hand it all out.
Because people aren't going to misuse that, are they?
They're not going to just take more than they want.
They're not going to pile in there and clean it out.
Because you're going to say, I'm going to give you this card, man.
It's got all my banking and visa information, but you're only going to use it in the way that I would want you to use it.
You're only going to use it for emergencies and charity in the way that I would approve.
People say, yes, absolutely.
Give me all of that.
I will absolutely do it just in the way that you want it.
No more, no less.
And look at all the time and money just by handing me all your banking information.
Think of all the time and money and effort that you are saving by not having to figure out who to give to charity to and all this paperwork.
Why wouldn't people do that?
Just give people all this power over your finances, and they'll just use it wisely, nicely, and well, in a way that you would approve of.
Right?
Oh, sorry, did I get that right?
Did you hear that?
Ah, yes.
The giant rolling bell sound of everyone saying...
What are you crazy, Steph?
I'm not handing out my Visa and banking and crypto information to random people.
Thank you very much.
That's crazy.
They just go in and clean out my bank account.
Oh!
Is that your concern, really?
Is that your concern?
That people won't handle your finances in the way that you would approve of?
Then why would you give all of this power and authority to people in the government and then say, but...
Oh, government power-hungry-monger person, I only want to use this power that I'm giving to you wholesale.
I only want you to use this power in the way that I would approve of.
And I want you to limit it to this and focus it specifically on this in the same way that if you get the login to my bank account, you will only use the money in my bank account for emergencies.
You won't take more than is absolutely necessary.
Oh...
Why?
How can people believe this?
I mean, I've been working in philosophy for 43 years.
I'm still going to answer.
Well, the way that the H-1B visa program should work, you see, is...
Well, if we take from this particular village in Upper Pradesh only these three people and then we make sure that everything's accredited.
Yes, because when you're looking at a salary that could pay you ten times what you could make in some foreign country, nobody would ever make up fake credentials.
There'd never be any fake schools.
There'd never be any fake transcripts.
No, everybody would be totally...
You'd never have any fake references.
No, people are going to be totally honest.
So the way that I think that the H-1B visa program should work is boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Once you hand over the power, you ain't in control anymore, buddy boy.
It's gone!
You are not in control anymore.
You have handed out your bank account information.
Everyone's got access to your bank account.
You're out of control.
And you can't even change the password because you can't undo the power you give to other people.
Once you give the power monger power over you, you can't really undo it.
No control Z, no edit undo for that kind of power transfer.
So now people have access to your bank account for the rest of your life.
Oh, and by the way, the people who you gave access to your bank account can also use it and overdraft it to the point where your children are born a million dollars in debt.
Or unfunded liabilities even higher.
But you see, once I give people access to my bank account, here's the way, here's the way that they should do it.
Oh, yes, I have it all sketched out in my Dungeons& Dragons fantasy map of armor classes.
Yes, yes, it's going to be wonderful.
I'm going to say these words that is going to magically limit the amount of abuse that might be visited upon the bank accounts and visa and crypto that I've opened up to the entire planet.
I mean, people won't be greedy.
What are you, crazy?
They won't be corrupt.
They won't grab anything and everything.
Come on!
Help me understand this.
Why do people believe this?
I mean, I literally see people sketching, well, here's how the H-1B visa program really should work, because I have thoughts, and my thoughts are very important, and my thoughts will absolutely, completely, and totally influence everyone who's running this program forever and ever.
Amen, because I've said what I think.
Ah, this is how I think it should go.
Here's how I think it should go.
Take all this power.
Have all of this access to my bank account, because here's how I think you should do it, sir.
Good lord.
What a load of absolute bullshit, hyper verbiage, embarrassing nonsense.
Absolutely wild. - Awesome.
Thank you.
Absolutely wild.
Well, it should only be for a very small number of people in very high-skilled occupation.
Sure, yeah.
You give this power away.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
People are going to listen to you.
Once they have this power, they're going to be completely bound by your magical words, your language.
Your language shall be their physics, and they will not be able to escape the absolutism of your begging and pleading language.
Some guy sticks a knife to your ribs and says, give me all your cash, and he runs away and you say, be sure to spend it only on essentials.
Don't buy any...
What do the kids call them these days?
Don't buy any kicks!
Don't buy any jewelry!
Because that wouldn't be essential, you see.
Now, it's okay.
He did take my money, but I did yell after him the way that I think he should spend it.
Of course he's going to listen to that.
He won't do anything frivolous or silly.
Won't buy any bling-squared.
No, none of this will happen at all.
Because I have magic.
I think this is the way I think it is.
uh you Well, it should happen this way, I think.
The way the reformers do this.
Oh, my gosh.
Because, you see, the reality is that, you see, when people come to the country, not only, you see, does...
Does it mean that wages won't go down?
But you see, all of these people coming to the country, they're not going to drive up the price of housing at all.
Not even a bit.
Because, you see, they're going to live in the sewers.
Yeah, and you don't want to live in the sewers.
Right?
So, no, they won't see all the people coming into the country.
They won't drive up the price of housing.
They won't lower the wages and they certainly won't place any burdens on the healthcare sick people because they're robots who never get sick.
They just are.
And they certainly won't bring in aged relatives who are also going to be a burden on the healthcare system.
No, no, no, none of that because my wishes and whims completely overturn the basic facts of math and economics.
Wish and whim.
Wish and whim.
I mean, it's just, I don't know, what kind of insane, deranged, narcissistic megalomania do you have to have to think that you can hand over this kind of power and then lecture people on how to enact it?
Well, it's true that we should give a tiny cabal of non-government people the ability to create Currency at whim and set interest rates.
But they will only, you see, ever do it for the betterment of society as a whole.
And with the absolute welfare of the people front and center in their warm hearth-like hearts.
That's what they're going to be doing.
Because the power to create money out of thin air, type whatever you wanted your own bank account, could never be used for anything nefarious or negative.
Not at all.
I'm going to give people this power, and then I'm going to do an ookie-kookie circle joke with my pet hamsters on how this power gets manifested.
I love how Steph's accent goes more British the harder he goes off.
I'm going back to original Source Molyneux.
Yes, original Source Molyneux.
I mean, listen, listen, brothers.
If your language has the power to reshape humanity in your own image, you are actually a living man-god and you shouldn't waste your time talking about politics.
What you should do is talk people's fat cells into leaving their bodies.
You should talk people's neurons to connect more, giving them a higher IQ. You should talk cancer out of people's lungs and spleen and kidney and bowels or wherever it happens to be nestling.
If your words have the power to reshape reality, you are not a man, you are a god.
And you should conduct yourself accordingly.
You shouldn't be muttering away on Twitter.
You should be calming the seas with the power of your language.
You should be calming the storms.
You should be bringing rain through the power of your language and dancing.
You should be bringing rain to low the driest portions of the earth, such as John Cleese's wit.
So, that's what you should be doing.
If your words have the power to reshape reality and change mathematics, then you shouldn't have a car.
You should talk your way into your destination.
You should open a portal that denies reality, step through that portal, and backrooms teleport to where it is you need to be.
You shouldn't go around talking on Twitter about what you think governments should do with the awesome powers that are handed to them through delusion.
What you should do is you should command people's brains.
You shouldn't use any language.
You should simply directly command people's brains I command all the brains of the bureaucrats to do only that which is positive and relevant and friendly to the market.
And I am going to command all of the neurons in the brains of the bureaucrats and the politicians to do that which is the most beneficial to society as a whole, even though they lack price signals because there's no free market.
Magically, it will happen.
Magically, it will.
Don't type on Twitter.
If your thoughts have the power to control The abuses of power then just talk directly to the neurons in people's brains and make sure they don't do anything corrupt.
So much simply.
So much simpler.
So much simpler.
Oh, it's so sad.
It's so sad.
But, you know, people who are like, well, but the bureaucrats and the politicians, they're only ever going to do what I want them to do.
Sure.
Absolutely.
It's like people have never seen The Sorcerer's Assistant from Disney, you know?
I'm going to raise all these powers, so I guess there's a sorcerer who can do it.
But it's really sad.
It's desperately sad to see.
And it's a sight that I find both hilarious and tragically stomach-turning.
It's hilarious in the level of delusion and madness.
However, it is...
Also tragic, because massive numbers of people suffer massively because of all of this, right?
So it really is very sad to see, but I do actually find that I have to laugh.
At this point, I mean, I've been almost a half a century fighting against these mad delusions.
But if you want to destroy the values of a country, bring people in temporarily who weren't raised in that country.
And also, is it reciprocal?
Can Americans go and get great jobs from other countries very easily?
Is it reciprocal?
Nope.
Well, of course not, right?
Okay, so that's the end of my rant.
If you found that satisfying, laid back, have a menthol, and freedomand.com slash donate.
Or you can tip directly on the app.
freedomand.com slash donate is slightly more efficient from an overhead standpoint, although whatever works best for you is gratefully and humbly accepted by me and will make the residue of my Christmases.
I promise not to spend it all on cheese.
I'm going to spend it all on cheese, but I promise not to.
And you can believe me.
You can't get a job in other countries as a plumber.
Yeah.
Very sad.
But again, I mean, the purpose of the system, I mean, this is...
What is the number one reason why people say they can't have families, right?
They say they can't have families because they can't afford them.
Drive down wages, drive up the price of housing in America, and...
So...
I mean, until countries are privatized, immigration will always be a political issue.
Once countries are privatized, people can move anywhere they want.
They just can't take anything from the host population against their will, or against their immediate preferences, right?
Alright, so that's it for my rant.
I am happy to get your questions and comments and challenges.
I really do appreciate that.
Thank you for the tips.
you'll...
Well, and yeah, so I remember I did hire some people from other cultures and countries, I remember back in the day, I hired a guy who had a PhD from a university, a PhD in computer science, and a university from China, a university in China.
A man could not understand user interfaces to save his life.
His backend code wasn't too bad, but whenever it came to present something to the end user, just had no particular concept of it.
And I think that's because, I mean, obviously he was a guy who'd fled communism.
And, you know, it's really just little things like this, right?
So when it comes to sort of user interfaces...
If you grew up in, say, America, then you are exposed to massive amounts of beneficial marketing your whole life.
I mean, most of it beneficial, like advertisements, user interfaces, companies vying for your attention and your dollars and your resources.
Growing up with that is really important because you get a sense of the entire aesthetic and what works and what doesn't work because you remember the ads that you remember and you find the ads annoying that you...
Find annoying.
And so for many, many years, decades, you are tempered with the sensibilities that most appeal.
You come over from China where you have no choices back in the day in particular.
You're just not going to have exposure to all of that stuff.
And you're not going to know What works.
So there's no real marketing or competing user interfaces in China.
So this guy just didn't really understand any of that.
Whereas the people I grew up with, who grew up in the West, they understood that just because they had that.
I mean, this is just one tiny little example of just about anything and everyone, right?
how much can you bench I don't have a spotter.
I don't bench.
I don't bench.
What do I do?
140 just on the machine, straight up.
We need to pump iron with Steph.
Spot him for new PRs.
Personal records?
Let's freaking go.
I appreciate that.
I will tell you this, though.
I am not...
At the age of 58, I'm not looking for personal bests.
Open borders libertarian.
So I don't care who moves where, but I do care that people are paid through the state to move places, right?
That's an issue.
I will hook you up with a cycle.
See, that's close to English, and I appreciate your attempt to be close to English.
I don't know what that means.
Steph is being modest.
unless he's a freaking animal in the weight room.
Steph, I have some cool medicine that would double your previous PRs, trust me.
Yes, I'm pretty sure that a sugar in a straw is not, like the booger sugar is not what I'm looking for.
Although I appreciate, actually I don't really appreciate the offer.
I know, I know.
Steroid joke.
I got it.
I got it.
No, I don't have a frame, if we're going to talk about this stuff, whether it's of interest to people, I don't have a frame that muscles very easily.
It's not particularly common in England.
It's like an Eastern European thing, so.
Well, and of course, the other thing, too, it's funny how the same people who say, oh, kids can spend a year or two learning remotely and it has no effect on them whatsoever.
Well, the workers need to absolutely be in America.
Why?
Why can't you just pay them and, you know, right?
You got your Zoom meetings, you got your code repositories, your Githubs, right?
All of this kind of stuff, right?
You don't need people in the office all the time.
Anyway.
And the important thing, I'll tell you this as well, and I had my faults when I was a coder as far as all of this stuff, right?
But I will tell you this.
Writing code is not the challenge.
Writing well-structured, well-documented, Reusable and logical code, that is the challenge, right?
So the design of the coding modules so that there's dynamic link libraries or whatever they call these days, DLLs, you can have web DLLs now, so that you take all of your date functions, your update functions, your select functions, and all of that.
And you bundle them so that they're a black box that other functions call.
It's all well-structured.
It's all tested.
And yet, it's called spaghetti code.
Go here, go there, jump all over the place.
Things are inefficient.
And well-designed code is a wild thing because most coders, myself included, just want to jump in and start coding, right?
Just jump in and start coding.
Get things moving.
Get things started.
But planning...
One of the things that I always, always, always did in my code was I encapsulated it and documented it.
So if you wanted to call a function, I gave you all the documentation and you didn't have to know anything that was going on in the code that I wrote.
It was rigorously tested because when you put a bunch of call spots in for your code, then you can test it, stress test it, test it with a bunch of different things because you can write code to test code.
So I wrote code that was encapsulated and code that was well documented and all of that, right?
So.
I'll be home for Christmas.
I'm sorry.
All right.
Writing that simple code that does the job is the hardest problem in software engineering.
Yes, for sure.
Writing code, the test code, writing code, the test standards.
That was another thing of mine.
I wrote code that documented everything in the database and also could recreate a web interface if needed.
And multi-language stuff.
Again, I didn't want anyone to have to know how it worked, just that it worked and that it was well documented.
All right.
So just getting the job done.
Mm-hmm.
Thank you.
It's like building a house, right?
I mean, you can get a house up real quick, but the question is, will it last?
Can it last, right?
Well, we threw the back balcony on.
We felt that weatherproofing was really going to be time-consuming, so we just didn't.
It's like, okay, well, then somebody's going to fall through the back balcony, right, over time.
So getting things done quickly is something that the sniff for tiny advantages of the stock price CEOs are willing to do, and they don't know any better.
Well, the code's done.
The system is up and running.
It's only really the small beginning of the issue.
Can the code be maintained?
Can it go onto other platforms, right?
Can it be moved to a cloud?
All of these kinds of things, right?
So it is...
Writing code is like...
Typing words.
If you pay anyone enough money, you can get them to write a novel, but can you write a good novel, right?
You can pay anyone to write code and that code will likely work.
Is it maintainable?
Is it well documented?
I mean, variable names.
Variable names, right?
So, variable names.
Variables are little memory buckets that you store values.
First name, last name, whatever, right?
So, You can name a variable anything.
So you can say, put the first name into a bucket called the letter A, and put the second name into a bucket called the letter B. And then you can throw the letter A and the letter B, but nobody knows what it is unless they trace it back to the beginning, right?
Even then it might not be clear.
If the fields wherein the person's entering it are also called A and B, you then have to look at the interface and trace it down.
Whereas if you say txt First name, TXT, last name.
TXT tells you that it's a text variable.
You've got your longs, you've got your integers, you've got your varcares, you've got your blobs, and all of that.
And shorts, integers are minus 32767 to plus 32767. Singles are longer, doubles are even longer.
This is back when you actually had to conserve memory by having the smallest amount that you want.
You've got your DT should be for date, LNG for long, INT for integer.
B-O-O-L for Boolean, which is just what computers operate out of the basics, is the yes and no, the flips, the binary.
So, do you have well-named?
Now, to even name things well, you have to be very fluent in the language.
Not the computer language, but the language that you're speaking in, right?
So, if you've got a bunch of English speakers, native fluent English speakers, then you need to be able to write the code so that it reads as close to possible as English as possible.
Because you can write computer code with the right variables and the right function names so that it reads.
Like if you say a save name is the function save name and then you pass it a first name and last name and then it returns true or false.
If it's saved, well, then you look at that and you say save name, first name, last name.
Okay, I know what that does.
If it's something else, I don't know what it does.
Can you look at it and read it like it's in English?
Oof, right?
Crazy.
People are desperate.
it.
In America, they're desperate to get to work, they're desperate for a future, they're desperate for families.
And that's just a big filter.
Does this lower the birth rate of the native population?
Of every race, color, creed, and ethnicity.
And if it does, it seems to be the policy.
So I don't think that Elon is not thinking about it from that standpoint, because he's got, what, eight kids or whatever, right?
So Elon is not thinking of it from that standpoint.
But there is also, I mean, outside of all of this, there is a general issue with the birth rate, which is that success leads to failure in countries, at least in status countries, right?
So what happens is, like, I grew up dirt poor.
I mean, honestly, crazy dirt poor.
I remember when I applied for financial aid to go to the National Theatre School, I was called into the office and given some sympathies because they said, we've never seen lower family assets in the entire history of the school.
My mother had like six bucks in the bank account.
That was like we had no assets, right?
So I grew up, like, super dirt poor.
And so for me, any money that I made above the baseline was a massive bonus, right?
I guess I came from the third world in a way.
But the problem is then when you have kids, let's say you get to some reasonably comfortable middle-class lifestyle, when you have kids, your kids are used to a car or two, a house, a backyard, and they're used to all of that.
So for me, everywhere I went was an upgrade in the sort of shit-heap apartments I grew up in.
Even rooms and houses were upgrades because at least there was a house and a backyard.
But for the middle class kids, you leave the sort of comfortable boomer nest and then you go out to, you've got roommates and it's kind of a crappy neighborhood and, you know, I lived, when I was going to do my graduate degree in history, I lived not far from a slaughterhouse and every time they hosed it down, the air stunk of pig intestines.
It was actually fairly vile as a whole.
So, yeah, you just live in bad neighborhoods, in bad housing with often dysfunctional people.
So it just feels like, for me, everything was kind of an upgrade, because at least my mom wasn't around.
But for the kids who grew up relatively wealthy, they feel broke.
I can't possibly afford.
Whereas the people coming from other countries, they feel wealthy, even if they're living, you know, 10 to a house, they feel relatively wealthy.
Whereas the people who come from upper middle class families, they feel poor.
Oh my God, we don't nearly have enough money to start a family.
It's like, well, tell that to the people down the road, right?
I don't know.
That's not a...
To some degree, that's a minor government issue, but that's just a...
You just have to tell people, like...
No, I was having a conversation with a young couple, and they were saying, you know, we can't possibly have kids.
We're too young.
We're broke, and so on, right?
Or even get married or whatever, right?
So I talked to one of their parents and said, okay, so when you first got married, where did you live?
Oh, we lived in this tiny apartment.
We didn't even have a car.
We took the bus, blah, blah, blah.
We had bikes.
And I said, so when you look back on that time, when you look back on that time, does that seem like a terrible time for you?
And she's like, no, no, no.
We look back on it with great fondness.
I look back on the times when I was broke.
With great fondness.
I mean, honestly, with nostalgia, that a year and a half that I was doing my graduate thesis, oh my gosh, I was in heaven.
I was in heaven.
I mean, I had my own little corner of the library.
I didn't have an office.
I wasn't a PhD student.
I was just a master's student, so I had my own little corner of the library.
I could take out books.
I could leave them on my desk.
I used to just go and grab books and sit in the sun and Beaming in through the library window, sitting in these big plush couches, just reading and making notes and thinking and dozing a little while.
It was just sponge absorption of great thoughts and all of this long slingshot recoil for the public intellectual figure that I... Later it became, but what a simple, wonderful, peaceful time.
Well, I shouldn't say totally peaceful.
I had a lot of trouble getting a thesis advisor because nobody liked the scope of what it is that I was doing.
But as a whole, I look back on that time, I lived on My rent was 275. That was everything.
I didn't even have a bus pass because I biked everywhere.
I had an old bike that I'd inherited from somewhere.
I can't even remember where.
I think it was my brother.
Yes, that's right.
So...
I would cook up these giant vats of pasta, put them in the fridge.
I had this puffed wheat cereal that you could get literally by the grain sack.
I'm sure it was used to feed horses in its spare time.
But I didn't go to movies.
I would occasionally rent a movie and all of that.
But I didn't go to parties, really.
I threw a party once or twice.
I don't really drink.
I don't have any particular vices that are expensive.
Never did any drugs.
And so it was just a really calm, peaceful, interesting time.
I look upon that time of being broke I remember when I first got married, we were living real close to the bone and didn't go out barely even to eat.
We had some bills to pay, and I think it was the first 18 months of our marriage.
We played a lot of Scrabble, we went for a lot of walks, and we enjoyed each other's company.
And I don't look back upon that time of not too much money with anything other than nostalgia and affection.
So I said, you know, like, your parents got married when they made less than you do, and they viewed...
Those early days of their courtship and dating with great affection and fondness.
And that's a funny thing.
What feels scant at the time, you realize, was incredibly rich looking back.
Although, even at that time when I was doing my master's, I just absolutely loved that time.
I mean, outside of marriage and parenthood, some of my favorite times was working on The God of Atheists and almost for 18 months And taking Canada's premier writing course.
And the time that I was in my master's thesis time, I was absolutely completely broke.
I was completely broke.
And that was wonderful.
So don't be afraid of...
Being broke and getting married and, you know, people, you know, let's say that the younger generation is the second or third wealthiest generation in the history of the planet.
Well, that's pretty good, right?
That's pretty good.
Your carrot cake habit was big money.
I couldn't even afford to satisfy my sugar addiction.
What did I do with my sugar addiction?
What did I do?
I think, I mean, honestly, I think I got so desperate that there was some free coffee in the student lounge and I just throw a couple of sugar packets in.
My nose, that is.
That's the real book of sugar.
All right.
Well, and the financial incentives with regards to immigration are all and the financial incentives with regards to immigration are all bicycles, of course, and all of that.
Somebody says, my mother agrees with me on politics.
She just knows my sister has a rage problem that when you trigger her, there's no talking to her for hours.
My sister is like 50 now, so expect a little more maturity at this point.
I mean, maybe I'm misunderstanding something, maybe I'm missing something, but who the hell bothers growing up unless you have to?
Bye.
I mean, I had to grow up pretty damn early.
As I said, I've been paying my own bills since I was 15 years old.
Got my first job at the age of 10. I had to grow up pretty damn quickly.
I mean, your sister is 50. Most people don't grow up.
Most people don't grow up.
If there's any alternative to them growing up, they won't grow up.
The natural state of humanity is stasis, paralysis, and stagnation.
Nobody grows unless they have to.
They're like cats.
They don't hunt unless they have to.
They don't hunt unless they're hungry.
The rest of the time, they're slowly drifting along with the sunbeams on the dusty, wooden, hardwood floor.
So, most people don't grow up unless they have to.
And of course, there's this cocoon of fake money that's around people, right?
The alimony child support, particularly for women, there's, you know, Highly pumped up wages and the welfare state and all of that.
So women can stay in this kind of cocoon and society, like the way that you corrupt a society is defer to the women, primarily, right?
Defer to the women.
Praise the women.
Say that they're wonderful.
They can do no wrong.
Pump up the women's vanity.
That kills pair bonding at the birth rate.
It's the praise of women.
Well, this is all the way back to the Garden of Eden, right?
All the way back to this.
So, yeah, I mean, most people don't grow up unless they have to, and it doesn't sound like your sister's had to at all.
Most people don't compromise unless they have to, which is why relationships have become somewhat insufferable for so many people, right?
Some old lady I used to work with, someone says, used to say, if you wait until you can afford children to have them, you'll never have them.
Well, and this used to be well understood, of course, and well transmitted down through...
The generations, particularly among the men, is have kids and you'll find a way, right?
A man's income goes up significantly when he gets married and significantly again when he becomes a father.
There's a kind of laser-like intensity and maturity that comes to men who have children, which is why a culture also collapses when men don't have children because they never grow up.
You don't grow up until you become a father.
You just don't.
You just don't.
I mean, tell you that straight up.
And it's not that it was bad before, right?
But you don't grow up until you become a father, and you don't really work seriously until you become a father.
So you have kids, and the money will come.
The money will come.
Lots of male aggression sublimated into sports ball, yeah, for sure.
Me and my wife live in a tenement with our boy.
We don't have tons, but we have a car, food, and lots of love and fun.
Thanks for your consistent output.
Appreciate it.
Thank you for the tip.
That's very kind.
FreeDemand.com slash donate to help out.
All right.
My sister had a master's degree in business but worked as a model for 20 years, the The rage drove her husband away.
Her daughter and her son seemed so incredibly weak.
Oh, is this the same woman?
Well, and of course, just encourage women to pursue useless higher education degrees, because they're now the number one colorate.
I used to...
You know, do you remember back before Christmas when I could do shows?
It was great.
I had all this...
Oh, what's the word I'm looking for?
Eloquence?
No, that's not it.
Wordiness.
Syllables.
Morpheums.
That was great.
I had a good run.
You know, I made it to 58. Almost in my 59th year.
You know, good run.
Good for me.
Excellent.
Well done.
What the hell was I talking about?
Look at you.
You get to watch the collapse of my brain in real time.
This must be quite exciting for people as a whole.
Articulation?
No, that's not it either.
But of course, you know, the...
The voting population is beginning to understand that the Democrats are the party of the resentful poor and the Republicans are the party of the greedy rich.
So...
What do you mean?
The Republicans...
They don't like...
They don't like even the legal immigration?
Just because it's legal, don't make it moral.
Does nobody remember Nuremberg at all?
Ah!
Steph, you mentioned something about how wordiness can be a sign of trauma.
Can you expand on that?
Well, I could if I was any good at my job anymore.
That would be excellent.
That would be so good.
Squirrel!
So, wordiness is a sign of trauma.
So, the way that you deal with helplessness is through fantasies of power.
Isn't that the case?
How do you deal with helplessness?
You fantasize about power.
This could be superheroes, it could be sports people, it could be war, it could be Dungeons& Dragons, it could be anything.
So, you...
Look at powerlessness and you solve it with language.
You retreat into a place of imagination where you have more power.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
It's sort of like going into hibernation to preserve yourself over the winter of your discontent.
But the problem is, of course, that you have to gaslight yourself with imaginary power, and that creates very strong language centers in your brain.
Can peaceful parenting fix India?
Well, it certainly wouldn't hurt.
Somebody says, I heard an interview with Andrew Tate recently where he had a brain freeze and couldn't think of what he was trying to say.
He usually can't stop talking.
I mean, it's going to happen to everyone, right?
I mean, even Freddie Mercury hits some bad notes in concert from time to time.
It's going to happen to everyone, for sure.
Like, when everything's working well in your brain and the ideas are just coming, tumbling up, you know, it's like little triple cannons.
The idea's coming up and bubbling.
when it doesn't happen, you realize just how much you depend upon the mercy and kindness of your unconscious, right?
Somebody says, I really liked when you said that Americans are the thorn in the sight Spot on.
Well, then, of course, the influence of America extends far beyond America.
Right?
So, what's happening now, or what's going to, I guess, hopefully, I mean, I mean, I doubt it will happen at any point immediately because every human rights organization known to man is going to fire endless lawsuits against any deportations and put a stall on the whole thing.
And there'll be a lot of kickback and blowback and all that kind of stuff.
But...
Thank you.
No, Freddie Mercury was not perfect.
He had some bum nuts.
He had some.
And as a person, he was a bit of a monster.
Bit of a monster as a person.
So, yeah, you realize just how dependent you are upon the machinery of your brain working well, and when it doesn't, you're like, oh, I can't make this happen at all.
I can't make this happen at all.
This is an old thing that Leonard Cohen, who wrote some beautiful songs, of course, Aaron Neville's cover of Bird on the Wire is a thing of semi-operatic, wobbly, maligner beauty, but he was asked, you know, where do your songs come from?
And he's like, I don't know.
If I knew, I'd go back there more often to get them.
Nobody knows, right?
Like Roger Hodgson writing The Logical Song or Dreamer, he says, I'd do that again, right?
Why wouldn't you just keep doing that?
Why wouldn't every song from Paul McCartney be as good as yesterday, right?
Or the day before?
What are your thoughts on hypnosis for behavior correction, smoking, confidence, anxiety?
I mean, it's worth a try.
It's worth a try for sure.
If you've tried other things.
I mean, in general, I think try and deal with the source issues as much as possible, but it can help certainly jumpstart change.
I'm sure of that.
All right.
All right, any other last questions, comments, issues, challenges, problems?
Well, and of course, I had my run-ins People are talking about India.
I had my run-ins with the Indian cohort on X, which was, of course, I think, huge.
It was still huge, but it was particularly big under the last management of Twitter.
And, yeah, I mean, they've sort of well-coordinated and quite aggressive and had a lot of, not all of them, of course, had a lot of discontent towards, you know, the British and for the Raj and all that kind of stuff.
And, you know, they were sort of getting mad about the Raj from 150 years ago.
And I'm like, well, you know, a couple of million, was it 15 million little Indian girls are killed every year because of people's preferences for sons.
You can get mad about what the Raj did 150 years ago, or you could focus on how to improve your own country at the moment, maybe by not killing 15 million little girls every year.
Just a possibility.
Just a possibility.
They did not like.
They did not like.
It's so much easier to resent than to improve, right?
I mean, that's one of the...
Because resentment makes you feel like you're better than, and improving requires humility, right?
Resentment is a function of vanity, and improvement is a function of humility, and most people would rather be vain than improve.
As a Christian, I oppose hypnosis because you're putting yourself under somebody's other power and they can really muck up your head if they so choose to.
And that's a very interesting point.
You certainly would want to be very good.
The British took all of India's wealth, apparently.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, Big Ben carded straight from India.
Absolutely.
Well, and of course, if India is so full or other places so full of all of these genius engineers, why don't they fix India, right?
I mean, if you're taking all of the best and brightest from another country, you're screwing their economy, which means you're condemning that country to remaining poor.
So, what's the benefit of that?
I mean, you take all the best and brightest from country X, so country X remains poor, and then you owe them foreign aid.
So all the money you save, even if you do save, by getting the best and brightest from Country X, you then lose in giving foreign aid and charity to Country X. Right?
Oh my gosh.
That's very sad.
Yeah, it's, uh, it's, and none of it makes any sense.
None of it makes any sense.
But of course it's not designed to, right?
Well, you know, I mean, Vivek also, Vivek Ramaswamy, had some kind of sketchy stuff in the past with this, I think it was an Alzheimer's drug, and two billion bucks worth of stock, and I mean, you can go look into it, I'm not an expert on it, but it does look a little tiny bit sketchy.
You know, I mean, obviously people don't tell the truth about me, so I haven't researched it in any great depth, so I could be completely wrong.
Yeah, Vivek Ramaswamy, he's...
I mean, he was a nominee for a president or a...
You're trying to get into the presidency and so on, right?
Yeah.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Alright, any other last questions or comments?
I really appreciate you all dropping by tonight.
I really do appreciate you all dropping by tonight.
What a lovely and wonderful...
Back in the saddle conversation.
And yeah, what are we doing here?
Yeah, last show of this year is going to be Sunday.
Sunday morning.
Yes, Sunday morning, 29th, 11am.
Maybe what I'll do is I'll tell you my church story.
Why do you think China is not importing Indians?
Because Chinese population is already largely compliant, and so they don't need to have all of that, right?
Love the show, so grateful for its existence.
I really appreciate that.
I really do appreciate that.
You know, there's a very good book that I read which talked quite a bit about Indian culture by a writer named Vikram Seth, V-I-K-R-A-M Seth, and the book is called A Suitable Boy.
A suitable boy, and there is a really chilling scene in it about an incestuous family.
It's really very well written and all of that.
Yeah, the first cousin marriage stuff is a huge issue.
We've talked about this in the show before.
Yeah, the cousin marriage stuff is a huge issue.
Steph, should libertarians drop the anarchy part of anarcho-capitalism?
We just keep telling the truth, but I don't think dropping one particular word or taking another particular word is going to be a big change, right?
Thank you for addressing the H1B. You are very, very welcome.
I'm glad that it was of interest.
And I thought, since I do have some particular experience in this area, I've touched on a variety of things over the course of my somewhat varied and storied life that has sort of coalesced, and sometimes I can really add some white-hot laser-like clarity to a particular issue.
What flavor of Burt's Bees am I rocking?
I rock nothing.
Dear God, I'm going to have to change glasses.
Oh, on go the fish tanks.
What have we got here?
Strawberry.
Mmm, strawberry.
No, there are some brilliant Indians, right?
I mean, it's a brilliant population.
Some absolutely brilliant Indians.
No question.
Yeah, what happens, right?
What happens to India as a whole if the smart people are all taken out of the equation, right?
The cucumber mint guy.
Glasses swap.
Let's go.
All right.
Well, listen, guys, I really do appreciate if you're listening to this later and it is the Christmas season.
I'm going to milk it just a tiny little bit longer.
The cow's not quite turned inside out yet.
So if you could go to freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show.
Oh, question, question.
Oh, my God.
Question, question.
Ah, the questions are flowing in.
All right.
Let's do another minute or two more.
Hey Steph, a couple of months ago I had a girl I really like break up with me when in the middle of a really difficult time in my life.
I wasn't perfect, of course, and it was a pretty short relationship, but I was there for her when she was struggling.
It really affected me negatively.
Do you have any tips for recovering from someone abandoning you when you felt like you needed them the most?
Hope the question makes sense.
Well, sometimes timing sucks, like if you're going through a really difficult Personal period, right at the beginning of a relationship, you know, like, take a sort of an example of, we've been going out for three weeks, and both my parents get killed in a terrible car accident, and my life's in chaos and sorrow, and, right, that's a hell of a burden to put on a young relationship.
So sometimes, if you're in a new relationship, and, you know, bad, really bad stuff happens to you, the relationship just doesn't have, you know, you're driving the heavy truck before the concrete is set on the bridge, and it just collapses.
So sometimes it is just bad timing.
Steph, why did you do that interview with that handcap recently who keep fogging and being passive-aggressive?
I'm not sure what you mean.
Yeah, the Indian culture as a whole is very light skin conscious, light skin versus dark skin.
in.
Thank you.
Very insightful stream.
Thank you, Steph.
Thank you, Mitch.
Any tips for finding better workplaces where people aren't resentful and love improving?
I think you just have to check your gut and your instincts when you're being interviewed and see whether there's a self-critical...
See if there's a self-critical boss.
A self-critical boss can be very helpful.
A boss that can make fun of himself and doesn't take himself too seriously and is eager to improve is usually a very good thing.
We love you.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate that.
I appreciate that.
Thanks.
That helps.
Yeah, sometimes it is just bad luck.
And you can tell the woman, say, look, this was just really bad luck, right?
If you're in a situation where really bad stuff has just happened and it's breaking your heart, then you can say to a new relationship, listen, I mean, I love you to death.
This is great.
But I'm doing some heavy stuff right now.
Let me check in with you when it's done because this may not be the best time for us to be...
I mean, a new relationship should be kind of frothy, a little frivolous, a lot of fun to sort of build that foundation of positivity.
And if really heavy stuff is happening to you, you know, like when I got cancer, I was already married and, you know, but I wouldn't want to be like, you know, a month into or two months into a relationship.
Hey, I have cancer.
I need your support.
It's like, yeah, yeah, I don't have the relationship yet.
Why didn't Toronto turn into Silicon Valley with all the H1B guys Canada imported?
See, if you have the true genius coders, they can be 10 to 100 times more productive.
And I'm pretty sure there's enough domestic talent to, you know, I mean, the West built the West, for God's sakes.
Why does it need a lot of people from outside the culture?
I don't know.
It doesn't really make any sense.
Other than, right?
Other than what we talked about.
All right.
Have yourself a glorious evening, everyone.
Thank you for your support.
Lots of love from up here.
I will see you Sunday for the last show of the day.
And again, freedomain.com slash donate if you're listening later.
▲
Export Selection