In this Wednesday Night Live from 20 November 2025, philosopher Stefan Molyneux dives into a plethora of topics, beginning with an enthusiastic introduction that sets a lively tone for the evening. He enthusiastically promotes the Freedomain merchandise, highlighting the unique and enticing items available on shop.freedomain.com. From mugs to hoodies and high-quality apparel, Stefan suggests the merchandise is a perfect gift for the upcoming holiday season, evoking imagery of floating furniture and invoking laughter as he navigates through his promotional spiel.
As the show progresses, Stefan transitions into a deeper discourse on the implications of women's educational advancements on birth rates. He reflects on recent discussions around a woman's PhD that spurred controversy, examining societal reactions and the psychological landscape surrounding women's achievements in academia. He argues that while education is beneficial and enriching, it inadvertently correlates with declining birth rates—a topic he believes deserves thoughtful consideration rather than blind acceptance.
Stefan, with his characteristic rhetorical flair, explores the complex dynamics of masculinity and femininity in the modern societal context. He articulates a fundamental divide between how men and women process their experiences, especially regarding educational pursuits and family life. He challenges the listener to reflect on the responsibilities of both genders towards society and discusses the contrasts in societal expectations imposed upon women, especially surrounding issues of career success and parenting.
Interspersed throughout the conversation is a rich analysis of cultural perceptions and economic realities. Stefan proposes that as more women join the workforce and delay childbearing, it leads to significant societal ramifications, including shifts in demographics and the potential for civilization collapse. His provocative commentary raises questions about the obligations individuals have toward contributing to society and challenges listeners to consider the balance between individual ambition and familial responsibilities.
In a particularly engaging segment, he addresses calls from the audience, allowing for dynamic interaction. One caller reflects on the emotional challenges men face, particularly regarding societal expectations and support networks. Stefan responds thoughtfully, underscoring that cultural narratives often marginalize men's perspectives while commanding sympathy for women's experiences. This leads to a broader discussion about the role of the welfare state and the complex feelings surrounding the allocation of resources within society.
The conversation flows into the implications of immigration and labor dynamics, where Stefan opines on the contentious topic of H-1B visas and the importation of foreign talent versus the realities of domestic employment. He insists on the importance of hiring based on meritocracy and the risks that arise from labor policies influenced by social agendas rather than economic realities. This segues into an exploration of societal perceptions of immigrants and the inherent biases at play in discussions about workforce participation.
As the episode nears its conclusion, Stefan emphasizes the need for a cultural shift toward reason and freedom in shaping societal values. He encourages the audience to critically examine their environment and the motivations behind prevalent ideologies, proposing that people can often be driven by emotional responses over rational discourse. His insightful commentary implores his listeners to recognize resistance points in arguments, considering how personal relationships and societal pressures can influence beliefs and behaviors.
With the episode wrapping up, Stefan expresses gratitude toward his audience for their support, reminding them once more about the merchandise while fostering a sense of community through shared philosophical exploration. He invites listeners to engage further by calling into future episodes, thereby encouraging ongoing discourse on these captivating and sometimes controversial topics. Overall, this episode is a thought-provoking journey through societal norms, personal responsibility, and the intricate dance between individual desires and collective obligations.
0:07 - The Power of Phonetic Syllables
1:51 - Merch Madness
6:27 - The Role of Education in Birth Rates
14:08 - Modern Women and Societal Obligations
16:05 - The Cost of Childcare
21:21 - Work and Motherhood
31:56 - Global Birth Rate Trends
36:56 - Cultural Shifts in Childrearing
39:22 - Higher Education and Its Implications
39:54 - Solutions to Workforce and Birth Rate Issues
55:22 - Local Hiring Challenges
56:36 - The Myth of the Refugee
59:12 - Cultural Impact of Immigration
1:02:14 - Economic Arguments for Immigration
1:03:25 - Engaging with Denial
1:04:25 - Rationality and Superstition
1:06:02 - Truth-Telling in Society
1:11:27 - Historical Perspectives on Truth
1:14:15 - The Role of Women in Society
1:17:40 - The Shift in Academia
1:20:22 - Emotional Responses to Crime
1:23:00 - Compassion vs. Tough Love
1:25:05 - The Influence of Family
1:26:59 - Balancing Empathy and Justice
1:29:00 - The Nature of Political Ideology
1:31:33 - The Consequences of Sympathy
1:33:13 - The Problem of Virtue Signaling
1:36:11 - Reaching the Misguided
1:38:55 - The Role of Fear in Decisions
1:42:32 - The Cost of Ignoring Reality
1:44:19 - The Dynamics of Political Ideology
1:47:05 - The Burden of Caring
1:49:01 - Embracing Reciprocity in Relationships
[0:00] There we go, there we go. Good evening, good evening. Welcome to Wednesday Night Live.
[0:08] And I just wanted to give to you some of the most powerful memetic and phonetic syllables all the way down to the individual atomistic morphemes, some of the most powerful.
[0:27] Syllables in human speech. They go a little something like this. This is the kind of spell that will have your furniture start floating around your head. So be careful where you put this out. Be careful what you do with this powerful stuff. It goes a little something like this. Shop.freedomain.com. Feel the echoes, the ripples of philosophy merch flying like God's garden hose of wisdom across the universe. And I'm going to say this again. The second time, the furniture will probably start floating around your head and may settle down a little bit, it's hard to know. Shop.freedomain.com. If you go to shop.freedomain.com, you will see the glorious merch. Now, this merch, this merch has.
[1:37] Has been available for donors, which is a beautiful thing. And it is now available to non donors.
[1:51] And let's see, is it?
[1:58] Why is it, uh, is it sharing? Is it moving? Oh, we shall see, we shall see. I thought it would be moving. Somebody says, already picked up some merch. Thanks for setting up the shop, Stef, and gang. Yes, a good thanks. A good thanks to Zimpf. Uh, let's see. Do I do a presentation? I don't know why it doesn't seem to be updating over here. Let me just stop sharing and start it again, just to be sure. I might have shared the wrong thing.
[2:41] There we go. Oh, yeah, there we go. That's what we're looking for. All right. So just going to run you through this real quick. And if you could check it out and order some stuff just in time for Christmas, you can support, of course, if you like, donate and send a message. You can look at me on YouTube. But let's look at the merch. Oh, getting a merch boner going on right here. right now.
[3:14] Uh, so here we've got a free domain t-shirt and we have a free domain mug. This high quality stuff, nothing but the best free domain hat free domain, wind breaker/rain jacket suitable for seal diving. The stainless steel tumbler also teaches you gymnastics free Domain polo shirt comes with its own horse and the Stuart Copeland to ride it. Free Domain regular mouse pad in case you want to coast on your laurels. You'll be coasting on the laurels here. Free Domain embroidered beanie, the Tim Pool special. You can get that. Free Domain coasters to set your coffee on. Embroidered patch should you want to add this to your SAS uniform. And there's a subdued embroidered patch. We don't actually do subdued at Free Domain. A button-up shirt. That's the front. Obviously, that's the back. We've got a circle sticker suitable for slapping on your underpants, butt cheeks, forehead, or only the left nipple. That's all that's allowed.
[4:33] So the Freedomain Camelback Water Bottle, Freedomain Gym Shorts, if your name is not Jim, yeah, you can still go ahead. A premium sweatshirt, a unisex hoodie, suitable for entering into central banking, Freedomain Sweatpants, just in case you're wondering, technically, that's not me that's modeling them, because I do have a head, and I'm not that slender. We have a tote bag, a large mouse pad, another sticker, a camping mug, and a trucker hat.
[5:12] Uh, so we were going to do a trucker Carlson hat, but I couldn't get my voice that high. All right. So I hope that makes a sense. Uh, Kyra says, picked up shirt, hoodie, two mugs, shorts, super excited to pick up some more plan on getting full FDR wardrobe LFG. Yes, it is very cool. And, uh, this is in Canadian U S dollars, of course, much cheaper, much cheaper. We had a t-shirt for 24 bucks and mug for 1255. This is not a massive profit center for me, but I just think it's kind of cool. I like the logo, the mountaintop and the broadcast from the very top, the arrow pointing up, the guru on the hill. And you can see a little tagline there on some of them, reason to virtue to happiness. We've got the two little arrows there, two little greater than science. Reason leads to happiness leads to virtue. You can sort of see that here on a lot of them. Not all of them have it, depending on how the stitching went. But it is all very cool. I have ordered mine, and I think it's very, very cool.
[6:20] So the other thing that I'm going to mention as well, you are the first to hear
[6:25] of it. The very first to hear of it. Yeah, so shop.fredomain.com. We are also working hard to make sure that you can get a hard, copy version of Peaceful Parenting for Christmas so that you can hand it out. My name is not super prominent on it, as you can imagine, but you can hand out Peaceful Parenting as a stocking stuffer, as a gift for.
[6:53] For those who like it. Yeah, I did make it public just before the show, but always good to remind me. Always good to remind me. So yeah, some very, very cool stuff there. And, you know, will they be collector's items worth infinite Bitcoin in the millennia to come? Well, naturally, I can't guarantee it. I know which way I would lean. I mean, imagine, imagine having Socrates' personally embroidered T-shirt. Oh, imagine I talk about this in almost, imagine having the feather pen that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet with. Oh, cool. Every now and then I see some video of Freddie Mercury singing. I'm like, whatever happened to that microphone? And I could never fit into those pants. Those Gujarati pipe stem legs. All right. So that is cooking a long and shop.freedomain.com. Uh here end us here end us here end us the push and of course you're going to also go to fdrurl.com/merch but i think shop.freedomain.com is the way to go all right so yeah if you have questions comments issues challenges problems disagreements hostilities if not downright hatreds i am very do i plan on selling my bath water wink if yes Yes.
[8:14] I will cover up one eye. Bathwater. Hmm. Yeah, I'm middling on being cloned. Hard to say. Hard to say. So, because, you know, maybe you would be able to clone me from my bathwater. Anything is possible. Yeah, so we're going to aim at all of that. And of course, if the merch does well, we'll design and put out more. And, you know, the most banned philosopher in history. And I think that's actually true. I think I am the most banned philosopher in history, simply because the ban was on so many different platforms, all pretty much at the same time, all based on an election year. So I think I am. Of course, there are many philosophers who've suffered a lot more than I have over the course of human history. But as far as the most banned, there is a strong case to be made.
[9:11] All right, so let me ask this. I'm going to take this over here. And can we F11 this? Yes, we can. Yes, we can. All right, so, sorry, if you have questions, comments, you can dive in now. Otherwise, I'm going to dig in to la présentation of this eve. Can we get rid of that? Uh tabs only oh yeah that's good that's good i know it sounds like i'm a little bit too excited by my presentation technology here but it's you know it's kind of cool i mean for the first i don't know like 14 years of the show it was like i'm almost never live streamed except for a little bit wasn't exactly live streaming but there used to be a skype hangouts thing but being able to do presentations with like audience feedback is great. I really, really do love it because it was just, I wasn't even lonely. It's just kind of isolated. It's just kind of isolated doing these presentations and then putting them out and then later seeing comments. So I'm just, I just think it's very cool that we can do this kind of stuff.
[10:22] All right. What am I doing here? Yeah, there we go. Share. Women, careers, and birth rates. I'm going to do it entirely in Duke Nukem voice. We need a live event. Yes. Yeah, I'll do that. I would do that. I'm working on that. All right.
[10:40] Women, careers, and birth rates. So I did a whole show this afternoon. It's out here on the YouTube channel. You know, if you follow the YouTube channel, you will get shows first because, uh, they go automatically, um, to YouTube when we process them. So, uh, if you want to follow me, YouTube at freedomain1, you want to follow on YouTube, you'll get most of the shows first, not the video videos, but all I did a solo show in prep for this, uh, so that I got my own sort of thoughts in order when I've got a big topic. I don't know if you guys are interested in sort of the, um, the warmup conversations, the warm-up speeches, like whenever I used to do debates, I would have a warm-up, with donors to sort of get their thoughts and feedback. And it was a big topic tonight, so I wanted to get my thoughts organized. And so I did a, oh gosh, what was it about? I did almost 50 minutes today, just getting my thoughts organized for this only thing. So as you may have seen and sorry somebody says I love loved seeing your libertarian live conference you were absolutely fantastic oh yeah like when I go and give speeches I do miss I do miss not being a studio band I do miss being on the road.
[11:54] Next year I hope anyway, so
[12:01] This woman posted her PhD and people got upset. And I went to all of the reasons about that, which again, you can get on YouTube. You can get it on Podbean and other places. You will get it very quickly or soon on the regular feed. And I talked about why men were upset at women getting PhDs or why they seem to be kind of mad or tense about it. You know, one of the things that I really do miss, and it really has been scrubbed from our societies as a whole, is just the general basic civilized curiosity about somebody else's perspective.
[12:50] Now, if a woman says, look how proud I am of my PhD, and she gets a giant dump of intergalactic caca, falling like a processed Brontosaurus food on her head, I can completely understand that she'd be upset or mad or contemptuous or eye-rolling. I really do understand. I do understand that perspective. That's the obvious perspective. And it's very easy to say, oh, men just hate women who are educated. And men just hate women who are more learned than they are, or men just hate women's success and all of that kind of stuff. And again, that's very tempting. It's very tempting. And it doesn't help in terms of trying to understand why people are bothered by this stuff. I think it's really, I think it's really important. Women aren't dumb, men aren't dumb. And we usually have very important things to talk about with each other. So one of the things that I posted back was, hey, that's a lovely picture. And I have mixed feelings. I do. I have mixed feelings. Okay, studying the labor division among ants may not be the most elevated thing in the known universe, but, but, also, um...
[14:08] It's pretty cool. And getting a PhD is not the easiest thing in the world. It is a cool thing to do. So I said, I'm like of two minds, you know, congratulations, of course, it's found it kind of cool. But at the same time, the more that women get educated, the lower the birth rate goes, and eventually civilization just collapses.
[14:34] So I'm still waiting to see in the sort of modern women in the aggregate, right? not for any individual, of course, but I'm so curious to see, what obligations modern women accept that they have to society. Is there anything, anything that women are obligated to do for society? Or is it all just I, me, me, I, you know, lattes, cats, travel, pleasure, sex, clubbing, education, debt? Like, is there, and say, well, women don't have any obligations to society. It's like, okay, all right. I mean, I can accept that. but then women should also be ensuring that men don't have obligations to society either.
[15:16] So, one woman was like, you know, women's wombs aren't there for the collective good of society. And I'm like, well, men's, why not? Men's taxes are there for that. Men's taxes are considered to be a resource available for the collective good of society, mostly women. And she's like, oh, you just want R-A-P-E, you know, women. And it's like, no, no, no. Women should be completely, totally, and utterly free to not have children. Of course, of course, forcing women to have children would be a heinous violation of the non-aggression principle. Women should be completely, totally free to not have children. Absolutely. And also, men should be totally free to not be forced to fund women. Right? Right.
[16:05] I don't want to fund other people's children. I don't mind helping. I don't mind if I have a choice. I have sympathy. I don't want to be forced. And this is sort of a basic thing that women don't understand about men. Our resources are our good looks, right? So if women in some horrendous alternate universe were forced, every woman in a group was forced to be as fat as the fattest woman, right? You've got some woman who's 200 pounds in the group. She's 5'1 and she's 200 pounds, right? Almost twice her healthy weight. And then everyone had to be almost twice their healthy weight. So the women who should be 140 had to be 280 and so on. You would consider that heinous, right?
[16:59] Because it makes them less attractive. Well, men being forced to give up their resources in the form of taxation, and as aggregate men pay 50% more than they receive, and women receive 50% more than they pay in the tax system, when you force men to pay for families that are not their own, you destroy men's attractiveness. And you transfer male attractiveness and security from men to the state. We don't like that. We don't want to be forced to pay.
[17:36] For children who aren't our own. If we are forced to pay for children who aren't our own, that is heinous to us. And it's a disaster for society as a whole, but women have a very tough time because women used to be loyal to men. Now they're just loyal to politicians and other women who lead them astray on a regular basis. But it's really, it's kind of hard for women. Women also, I was talking about this today on the show and it's out on YouTube at Freedomain1, but.
[18:08] Women really don't seem to understand how badly men are treated in society, how disposable we are, how uncaring society is for us as a whole. A woman complains, and 60-70% male simps rush to her defense, and all the other women rush to her defense, and that never happens for men. It does not happen for men. If a man complains, he's told to shut up, man up, suck it up, Who cares? Stop being such a pussy. You incel. Like, there is a lot of hostility when men have issues, when men complain, and so on. But when women complain, everyone's like, oh, we must help, right? It is a fundamental divide that women do not understand as a whole in men. And anyway, so, so why did I talk about this woman, her education, and the birth rate? So, there's a clear link between more women taking paid jobs and countries having fewer babies on average. As more women enter the workforce, birth rates tend to drop. So, yeah, God, what's that famous meme? Talking with leftists is them repeatedly pretending not to understand basic things just to make conversation impossible.
[19:33] I remember Arden, the former prime minister of, Jacinda Arden, former prime minister of New Zealand, Kiwi, when I was out there giving speeches with one Ms. L. Southern, back then when she was Ms., Ms., Jacinda Arden had had a child, and reporters were demanding to know what I had said about that. Said she can't be a good mother. And I said, no, if she has a child that goes back to work, she can't be as good a mother.
[20:10] Now, if you've ever been accused of a crime, come on, we've all been there one time or another. Then if you have an alibi, why does your alibi work? You thought that I kicked this dog, but I was on a plane to Thailand to go kick dogs in Thailand. So I couldn't have kicked this dog because I'm on a plane. I can't be in two places at the same time. That's basic. And if you were to ever go to a legal conference and you say, we got to get rid of the alibi thing because people can totally be in two places at the same time, people would look at you like you'd lost your mind and either you were a Marxist or you had. You'd lost your morals or you'd lost your mind, right? We all know we can't be in two places at the same time. If you schedule something to do with work at a time when you're supposed to be going with your wife to the hospital, and you say, no, I'll go to work and I'll take you to the hospital. No, no worries. Your wife would be like, what? Don't be annoying. Of course you can't take me to the hospital and go to work at the same time.
[21:22] That would be obvious right so i don't know why it is that women have such a tough time, understanding that you cannot be at work and with your children at the same time and don't give me any of this working from home nonsense because that's just split focus which means you're bad at both trust me i've tried so.
[21:48] You can't be. You can't be at work and raising your children. If you're working, you're not raising your children. Now, of course, I'm not saying you're not raising your children at all, but particularly for the first five years until they go to school or six years, or I guess it's later in some places in Northern Europe. If you're at work, you're not at home taking care of your kids. Again, I don't know why this is hard to understand. I don't know why this is controversial. and, the idea that I can be a great career woman and a great mother I mean this is the sort of superwoman stuff that was plugged in the 80s to destroy culture because if you can get women to go to work rather than raise their own children then their children tend to be raised by, minimum wage foreigners who can't transmit the culture it's a culture that took thousands and thousands of years to develop in the West can get killed in a generation or two just by having minimum wage, I mean, mostly foreigners, though not all, but minimum wage people who don't share your values, raise your children. Not that hard. I mean, how many devout Christians would send their children, to the hyper-atheist daycare center, or vice versa for that matter.
[23:09] So, if you're at work, you're not raising your children. If you're raising your children, you're not at work. And again, I get that there's overlap and all of that, but I mean, there's overlap either way, right? I mean, when I'm cooking, I'm not raising my children. Well, actually, you kind of are, because you have them on your hip and you explain to them what it is that you're doing.
[23:25] So, yeah, as more women enter the workforce, birth rates tend to drop because women usually need to... Schools are so terrible that you graduate after 12 years with almost no knowledge and almost no economic value. So then you've got to go for another couple of years because IQ tests aren't allowed. You've got to go for another couple of years to university and you've got to go, And then you maybe travel because you've been studying for so long. So, you know, 22, 23, you start to work 24, 25, and you don't want to have kids right away because you just started your career and blah, blah, blah. So then you wait till your late 20s or your early 30s, and that's just going to lower the birth rate. I mean, my gosh, you ever been to homeschooling conference? Man, homeschooling conferences, there are women there who've got, you know, four, five, six, seven, eight children.
[24:14] And they often started having children in their early 20s. I mean, there's no fall in birth rate among Christians. It's really among the secular. So why are the birth rates dropping as women enter the workforce? The connection comes from things like the opportunity cost. So women have to weigh the time and career sacrifices of having kids against their job benefits. Role incompatibility, the tough juggle between work demands and family life, and increased access to birth control through jobs that offer health perks. The negative correlation depends on the country, the job type, and things like government support for families. In some rich countries, the link flipped to positive in the 80s but changed back to negative more recently. So if you look at data, or looking at data from 174 countries over 55 years, that's a big-ass correlation. Back. 174 countries, 55 years, from 1960 to 2015, researchers found a negative link. For every extra percent of women in the wage-paying jobs, the average number of kids per women, called the total fertility rate, or TFR, drops a tiny bit. This held true in regions like Europe, North America, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The effect was strongest with non-farm jobs, but farm work actually went the other way, maybe because rural families can mix childcare with field work more easily. Yeah, when you're living in the country, your children are a source of labor, so having them is a good thing. Women's jobs also...
[25:42] Were also tied to more use of modern birth control and fewer unplanned pregnancies, showing how work can change women's choices. Things like a country's wealth or equal distribution for girls and boys, sorry, equal education for girls and boys softened this link but didn't erase it, and it was extra strong in Latin America. Another big study, 97 countries from 1960 to 2000, experts used changes in abortion laws as a way to tease out cause and effect, a method called instrumenting, to avoid confusing correlation with causation. They found that having more kids strongly cuts women's job participation by 10 to 15 percentage points per extra child for women in their late 20s to early 30s, leading to four fewer years of paid work over a lifetime. Not a big amount. Factors like city living, which made it worse outside of the first world, increase education and indirect effect, as higher education results in more workforce participation, thereby lowering birth rates, and higher wages played roles as well.
[26:40] So let's look at specific places. Again, happy to take your questions and comments. Just raise your hand on X. In both the countries that belong to the OECD, data from 1980 to 2005 showed the negative link, with stats, tests such as Granger or causality, which checks if one trend predicts another, confirming that more women working often leads to fewer births. Policies like affordable child care or paid maternity leave implemented in many places in the 1980s reversed the trend temporarily, with the negative link re-establishing itself after a few decades. A study in Mexico during the 1990s boom in factory jobs.
[27:17] Maquiladoras, used advanced stats, instrumental variables, and differences in differences, which compare changes over time between similar groups to spot real causes to show cause and effect. A small rise in women's factory work boosted overall female employment, but cut births by about 0.08 kids per woman. Why? These jobs came with health insurance, much like the system in the U.S., making birth control, including tubal ligation, a permanent sterilization procedure, easy to get through government programs. This explained about 13% of Mexico's falling birth rates back then. All right. Across 125 countries from 1960 to 2012, using laws on birth control access as a causal tool, results were mixed. One extra child could slash women's workforce participation by over 28% in some cases, but not always. It depended on the type of birth control and other factors like more education for women, which boosted jobs, or increased urbanization, which hurt female labor participation rates outside of first world countries.
[28:23] So, Nassim Taleb, way back in the day, um, said to me that, uh, that IQ is not predictive. At the higher IQ, it's less predictive of life outcomes. Well, yeah. Because when you have high IQ, you have a choice. You can do high IQ stuff, you can do medium IQ stuff, you can do low IQ stuff. So if you're fantastic at basketball and not particularly smart, you should probably try and be a basketball player. If you're fantastic at basketball and have an IQ of 150, the world's your oyster. And so So fewer smart people who are good at basketball are going to end up as basketball players, right? That's not super complicated, but apparently is for Mr. Black Swan.
[29:11] So when women have really bad jobs, corn shucker or, you know, whatever it is, like really bad jobs, manure shuffle, shoveler or something like that, then they'd rather be home having babies. If they can get really cool jobs, high status office work, you know, a day in the life of, you know, where they're wandering around from espresso machine to rooftop patio to hydration massage chair to a little bit of typing on a Zoom meeting. Well, that's a lot more fun than having babies in the moment, in the immediate. So yeah, there'll be less correlation between women's work and childbirth at the lower ends. All right, the negative pattern is so changes in rich countries and exceptions. The negative pattern is common, but there are some exceptions. In 24 OECD.
[30:05] Countries up to 2017 the overall link shifted from negative to positive starting in the mid-1980s but this was relatively short-lived with lots of women working governments tried adding family supports like more spending on child care which made it makes it easier to have kids without quitting jobs flipping the trade-off but only temporarily not all jobs hurt birth rates equally unstable work like temp contracts or unemployment is worse for having kids and steady jobs based on european data in farming or informal gigs like street vending without contracts the link might be weak, positive for non-existence as seen worldwide.
[30:39] The recovery was modest and short-lived in many spots, and birth rates never got back to replacement level at about 2.1 kids per woman to keep population steady without immigration. By the 2010s and into 2025, fertility has kept declining across the OECD, hitting 1.5 on average in 2022, and projected to stay low or drop further. In places like Italy, the positive link reversed back to negative after 2010 with rising female labor force participation tied to fewer first births. Globally, Europe and North America have the lowest rates of 1.4 to 1.6. Is that right? I'm sorry, I think that South Korea is even worse. Why the stall or the reversal? Well, newer studies point to rising costs of living, housing and childcare, outpacing policy fixes. Right. So you borrow and print a bunch of money to pay for childcare and inflation eats away at your husband's earnings, so wife's got to go back to work. Women having kids later, the average age now is 30.9, up from 28.6 in 2000, which is the difference between one and two children, or two and three children, and so on, which means fewer total births. Economic shocks like the pandemic or recessions are hitting harder, even with policies the UN says getting back to 2.1 over the next 30 years is very unlikely.
[31:57] So what influences this, and what's the bigger picture? And again, happy to take your questions and comments. Hi, Wyatt, let me just finish this, and wait, how much do we have? I think we got a bunch. Oh, some of it's graphing, so it's all right.
[32:08] Studies point to key factors to change how strong the link is between women working and lower birth rates. Job type. Officer factory work often means fewer kids. Far more casual home-based work might not, because the kids can help. Government help. Things like childcare subsidies or parental leave can reduce the drop in births or even encourage more kids in rich countries, but it tends to be temporary, like cocaine. Other life factors, increased education, city life, and national wealth all play in, plus easier birth control changes what women choose. And again, if you have the intelligence as a woman to be a lawyer, then in the short run, becoming a mother seems less stimulating, less exciting. And of course, there's all of this, you know, be the cool woman lawyer, it's all on TV, right?
[32:49] Two-way street, often it's mutual. Fewer kids, free up time for work, helped by things like legal abortion or pills. Also, of course, as fewer people have children, the neighborhoods get depopulated. As more and more people have two-parent working households, the kids are in daycare. So if you're home just as a woman, in the past, I remember this when I grew up. I grew up at the tail end of the baby boom, of course. And every time I went outside, there were like 10, 15, 20 or more kids to play with. It was great. And we didn't need much supervision. We figured out our own games. I got a whole section in my book almost called the battle of the gardens talking about the war games that we came up with and so moms could do other things and i remember the moms uh chatting with each other uh sitting there barely watching the kids um borrowing cups of sugar from each other and so on it's pretty nice right pretty it's a great it was a great community uh that's almost completely gone yeah that's uh that's almost completely gone i mean because of diversity and because of the two parent working households.
[33:48] So, let's see here. Graphs. Women's participation in the labor force. Comparison graph for US, UK, France, and Germany. Includes these countries from about 1890 to 2016. So, of course, as you can see, proportion of female population, 15 plus, is economically active, going up and up and up. And the US. Why is that?
[34:16] Let me get that. It's no likey. Anyway, it goes up. Trust me, source. Trust me, bro. Japan, this M-curve graph depicts age-specific female participation rates in Japan, 1973 to 2023. I'm just wondering, layout. Can I do a reading mode here? View. Reading view. Let's see what we get. Does the reading view help with these graphs? I would assume that it does, but it does not. Oh word, you are so very playful. All right, it goes up, and then fertility rates, oh, I'm wondering if I can, hang on, hang on, I'm just wondering, sorry about this, let me just see if I can go to, uh.
[35:08] Uh i'm sorry uh i'm now in uh i don't want okay edit let me just see i just want to see if i can get the graphs to be show up a little better sorry about that well excellent oh it's a little better it's a little better no no it's not better i'm just wondering if i can go um i'm sorry about this uh landscape that's got to do it right there we go i'm sure that's it i'm feeling good, and I'm feeling good. Oh, so close. Margins, narrow. Yes, that's right. I was a temp at one point in charge of massive word documents. All right. So sheriff women in the workforce, and you can see here it's going up in the US. We see down here, Japanese, the M curve.
[36:02] And we go down here, worldwide fertility rates, annual total fertility rate in each continent and worldwide from 1950 to 2023, down, down, down. It would be fascinating to see this broken out by IQ. Total fertility rate in the US from 1800 to 2020. Now, of course, we're looking at 1800 with a fertility rate of seven. Of course, this is how America was settled, right? America was settled by breeding, not by waves and waves of immigrants. But of course, this wasn't the real thing because one of the reasons it goes down is that more children are surviving, of course, right? United Kingdom, this boost is from immigration from high fertility groups, such as those from the Middle East. Same thing with Germany, it was collapsing and then it goes back up.
[36:56] Australia, 1920 to 2020, so this is from criminals on the left to 5% to 6% fewer criminals on the right over the 100 years.
[37:11] Japan, fertility rate is absolutely catastrophic. Way, way, way down. Way, way, way down. It's war. It's war against fertility, right? Educational attainment, degrees attained by women in the United States over time. Associates see the doctorate going up way, way, way, way, way, right? From 30% in 1980 to over 50% now. 50 is sort of middle here, and it's wild.
[37:41] Rising education around the world, education in women, gender gap in primary, secondary, and tertiary education. This is the global gender gap in tertiary education enrollment with developed countries leading the trend where women now surpass men, right? And of course, now that men are the minority in higher education, nobody cares, right? Because, well, we're just men. What does it matter? Everything for the ladies. All right. So a woman says, as a woman with daughters. I wonder if I'm doing them a disservice to suggest they attend college. Somebody says, it's tricky. I do wonder how much of the issue is the sunk cost fallacy. They have degrees to justify it. They have to work. Paying off debt compounds the issue. Yeah, no, for sure. Sure. Yeah, and it's bad for society if you train a woman and then she goes and has kids. Then all the effort and energy and money and resources that you pour into training the woman and then she goes and has kids, uh, that's been wasted because you can have a man who would stay in the work, in the workplace about that. Right. So as far as college goes, obviously, obviously, I have no idea what you should do. And I'll, I'll, we'll put the link to this presentation so you can get all the sources, uh, in the, uh.
[38:58] In the show notes for this. I don't know what you should do. Obviously, my particular opinion is that if you have both sons and daughters, maybe a little bit more true for daughters, is that if there's something specific they want to do that they must be educated in order to do, you know, they want to be a doctor or a lawyer, whatever, then, you know, that's a necessary thing. They can do that.
[39:23] If they're just, you know, taking general art stuff or, you know, don't really know what they want to do, I personally think it's a bad idea. All right. Let's go to the callers. Wyatt. If you want to unmute, thank you for your patience. I would love to hear what you have to say. Shop.freedomain.com Shop. Wyat, are you with me?
[39:52] Hey there, Stefan, can you hear me?
[39:53] Yes, sir, go ahead.
[39:55] Hey, thanks for letting me on. You kind of breached on the question I was about to ask towards the end there, but maybe you can expound a little bit on what you think the practical or maybe even theoretical solution is to this. Do you believe that there's legislation that could make any of all difference, or is this more of a cultural thing, a culture that needs to change first?
[40:21] Well, culture is lubrication for survival. So culture follows survival. So I have a monomania or a magnesium is the source of all the world's problems. I have a monomania, which is that whatever the problem is, the solution is more freedom. So let's play it out. I'll do this really briefly because I don't want to monologue too much. I already had my time and I want to get your thoughts on it. But very briefly, let's say that all forced transfers from the government stop. All of them. All of them. And so now, if a woman has a child outside of wedlock, her parents have to pay if they can't get the guy to marry her, right? If they can't sort of shotgun wedding this, right? So a woman has a child, gets pregnant outside of wedlock, has a child outside of wedlock. Then what's she going to do? Well, it's going to be really tough. So generally what used to happen in the past before the welfare state is the girl would go away. Maybe she'd give the child up for adoption. Maybe she'd have an abortion and then she'd come back. Everyone kind of knew, but nobody talked about it. The other thing that happened, of course, was that the girl would have the child and And then the child would be presented as a whoopsie oopsie from the mother who would be, you know, maybe in her early forties or whatever and say, oh, and then the child would be raised as.
[41:44] A sibling of the actual mother. That's another thing that would happen. But basically, it would be very tough for the parents. Now, because the parents paid the primary price of an unwed single mother daughter, they were very careful at patrolling and preventing unwanted pregnancies, right? So this is when dates used to be chaperoned. You've got to keep the door open, and one foot on the floor at all times, you know, that kind of stuff, right? Because, you know, teenagers want to have sex and it's the parents' job to make sure that they don't get pregnant because that would be a disaster. And so that policing has gone away largely because through the welfare state, children have been turned from a liability into an asset. You can make money by having children. You can have a comfortable life and you don't have to worry about a deadbeat dad because the government will pay its bills, at least until it can't, which is not something that people really think about. So the solution is more freedom.
[42:42] And the solution also is to stop, stop, stop every single piece of bullshit legislation that forces employers to hire people that they might not otherwise hire. If you are an employer and you are looking either at a man who's 23 or a woman who's 23, at a husband who's 23 or a wife who's 23, you are going to hire the husband, because odds are that the woman is going to get pregnant and odds are she's going to have two or three kids. And at two years spaced it means that she's going to be not very economically helpful to you or you're going to be.
[43:22] Um, eight years, right? Kid, well, sorry, kid at zero year, kid at two years, kid at four years, sorry, six years, right? So, cause it takes 18 months of breastfeeding. So for about six years, and then when she's been having three children over six years, well, uh, youngest is, is two. So she's still got another couple of years. So basically it's a decade until the kids are sort of five or six, maybe they can go to school or whatever it is, but you know, school is only 9 to 3 or whatever it is these days, 8 to 2.30 or whatever it is.
[43:56] So why would you want to hire a woman who's going to be having kids and breastfeeding and then pregnant again and recovering and breastfeeding and tired as opposed to a man who is going to be incredibly motivated to work hard because he's providing for a family. So if we didn't have, like if education was privatized, if hiring was privatized, if the government wasn't putting its fingers on the scale to get tons of women into higher education, which demographically speaking is like an act of war in that it destroys the population. You can either destroy the population in war, or you can destroy the population by preventing births. You could say one is more civilized than the other, and I'd agree with you, but arguably it's even more devastating in the long run because it is that boiling frog situation. So yeah, whatever the problem is, the solution is more freedom. Men should never be forced to fund children that aren't their own. It's offensive to our absolutely essential spinal column, spermatozoa DNA preferences and evolution. And no employer should be ever forced to hire someone that they don't feel like hiring. And in general, employers would.
[45:02] I mean, I remember this when I was a manager that, you know, that the moms would all, they're 455, they're packing up all their stuff. I don't blame them for that. I mean, they've got kids to get home to, and it's really, really important to go and get their kids from daycare and bring them home and all of that. But, you know, the young single man and I was a single man at the time. We'd sit there and play Quake on the LAN, which was, you know, pretty rare thing to be able to do back then. We'd go out for dinner, we'd talk business, and we'd be very productive and all of that. So they just, I got a lot of fantastic labor out of the men and the women, you know, they were good. They were solid, but nothing spectacular. And again, and of course for the moms, the young men were very eager for business travel. I mean, I remember when I first thought, I'm getting paid to go to the US grant, 400 bucks a night. Are you kidding me? Fantastic.
[45:53] And have room service and go work out and go for a swim just to do a presentation the next morning. Fantastic. Fly out. I loved it. I loved business travel. But the moms, of course, they couldn't do it because, you know, somebody had to pick up the kids from daycare and the husband might be around, but he also might be busy and they need, you know, they just couldn't, they're breastfeeding. So it's just limitations for that kind of stuff. And so, yeah, whatever the problem is, the solution is just more freedom. And then people will adapt to those situations, which will be better off for everyone, if that makes sense.
[46:24] Yeah, and I thank you for that thoughtful answer. Though there's one concern that stays in my mind from that, and that kind of leeches off of what you were saying about freedom, because what we're talking about are those hiring policies, about employers being forced to hire against what would be practical for the sake of checking several boxes for hiring in certain demographics. But what if that isn't necessarily something that an employer is doing at gunpoint, and more like what we're seeing, maybe not so much anymore, allegedly. I can't say for certain if this isn't still going on, but with the whole DEI requirements, and they're getting in a way a paycheck from a place like BlackRock, who are sort of instigating or influencing hiring standards by saying, hey, if you have this amount of diversity in your workforce, then you get a paycheck. And then in a way, it's not employers being forced by the government or by the state, but by some sort of a, you know, whatever sort of agenda is going on. Yeah, sorry, but if you're talking about.
[47:40] Sorry to interrupt, if you're talking about those market forces, they tend to be self-correcting. So government stuff is not self-correcting, right? Governments can be absolutely terrible at providing education and it's not self-correcting because you've got teachers unions and everyone's forced to pay for it, and kids are often forced to go, particularly in European countries. So, when you have... The government running things, it's not self-correcting. So let's say that there's no rules that the government can impose on who you have to hire. But as you said, companies like BlackRock are pushing some sort of DEI agenda or something like that. Oh, fine. Okay. So what happens? Well, there are companies that will take the money from BlackRock and will hire a bunch of women who might not be quite as productive, especially if the birth rate is up, the women aren't going to be as productive. That's sort of by definition. So BlackRock says you've got to hire all of these people who aren't quite as economically productive as other people. And then what?
[48:45] Well, those companies are going to do worse over time than the companies who hire based on pure meritocracy, if that makes sense. And so the companies that hire based on pure meritocracy will end up kicking the asses of the companies that are hiring based upon, some sort of non-meritocratic agenda or some sort of DEI thing. And so over time, that self-corrects because the more efficient companies will be able to sell better products at lower prices than the less efficient companies, if that makes sense.
[49:20] Yes, and that does make sense, and I do agree with that. To a degree, I am playing devil's advocate here.
[49:25] Yeah, that's fine. Yeah, I appreciate that.
[49:27] My last point, since I don't want to monopolize discussion with you, is if we, again, go down this route of pure freedom, laissez-faire, all that, don't you think with all of the—like this whole refugee crisis and then hiring overseas migrants and H-1Bs, Yes, just like with your previous point, you are getting technically less output, less efficiency with these people. Sorry, hang on. Sorry, I'm a little lost.
[50:00] What do you mean less efficiency with those claiming refugee status? Yes.
[50:06] Well, not specifically with refugees. I mean, more like with the whole epidemic of hiring Indians and shipping them in by the boatload and using programs such as H-1B to fill out certain positions.
[50:22] Um yeah i think i think in the u.s it's somewhere between 700,000 and 800,000 uh that are h1bs it's not a huge amount but it has tertiary hiring effects and it also they tend to be some of the most desirable jobs or and this is sort of something i pointed out on x over the last couple of days is that why is why is it that american universities given that they get you know well three to 400 billion dollars from U.S. Taxpayers at some point, why can't they produce enough workers? Why can they not do that? That's just maddening to me that they can't do that or don't seem to do that. But you can sort of understand the problem. But yeah, that is a big challenge. But okay, so your question regarding, it just, yeah, don't import people in that way. Don't import people in that way. Say, oh, yes, well, we're not going to have enough skilled workers. It's like, sure you do. Because as the wages go up, let's talk about tech, right? So as the wages go up, then people will shift. There's lots of people who are really good at tech who don't have degrees. I mean, I was great at tech. I was a really great programmer. I wrote code that sold for tens of millions of dollars over time.
[51:40] And I was really, really good at that. but I didn't have, like nobody would know that I was good at it because I didn't graduate from a college, right? So there's lots of untapped potential that is going on that...
[51:56] Uh governments don't have any uh governments and business don't have access to because wages are being suppressed by all of this sort of stuff so and and of course the other thing is that everybody knows that the american educational system needs a lot of reform right it needs a lot a lot a lot of reform and all you're doing is putting you know a sticky band-aid on a sucking chest wound you're just taking cocaine for a toothache and so uh you're covering it up But this sort of panic to bring people in and so on really doesn't make any sense. And of course, the other thing, too, is that there's a lot of workers who come in from overseas who are doing very low-skilled jobs. Now, that makes zero sense at all. I mean, low-skilled jobs are what the teenagers are for and what people who aren't particularly smart are for. And those people need, teenagers need the work experience and the people who aren't smart need access to jobs that are not super high skill because they can't do super high skill because they're not particularly smart. Again, I don't say this with anything negative whatsoever, but it is still the case. So, yeah, again, the solution is more freedom. In this case, if you have immigration requirements, you stick those immigration requirements and you don't have a way of bypassing them, all of that.
[53:17] When you say more freedom, what's the freedom solution for that thing? That exact point, that's the biggest point, the biggest problem is the low-skill work that gets taken up by these immigrants, these immigrants shipped in specifically to do these low-skill works. what's the freedom fix for that? Does Mark get self-correct for that one as well?
[53:43] Well, so the question is, I think, foundational is, is who is accepted in a community?
[53:51] Now, people who are accepted in a community have to be there by choice, right? And they have to be voluntarily accepted into the community, and the community has to support their entrance as a whole. So in business, who do you want to hire in general? Well, you want, I mean, certainly you want to hire people that you already know because you can vet them and you've got a personal relationship as best as you can. That's a great way to do it. I've hired friends. I've worked with family before. It's a great way to do it because you already know them very well. Would you say, I have a position to fill. I'm going to India to find someone. But why? I mean, you'd have to somehow vet them from india you'd have to vet their education there may be language barriers there will certainly be cultural barriers uh they you know there's a different system of ethics you know the sort of um in-group preference that a lot of indians have uh may not be that compatible with your particular corporate culture and things like that so would you necessarily go you might outsource some of it although ai is going to replace a lot of that outsourcing AI is going to do a lot of customer support because it's multi-language and has no accent. So, you know, half of customer support these days is trying to understand each other, which is particularly, which is not great, of course.
[55:15] So, yeah, would you necessarily go over? And then are there no people locally that you can hire? Because most people want to enrich their local communities rather than bring someone in from the other side of the world and pay them. So a lot of this stuff is kind of government- bound a lot of people get subsidized a lot of subsidies for hiring people the whole um, I mean, they're currently reviewing all this stuff in England at the moment. Everyone says refugee because, you know, this gives us this sort of shaking feeling of like the shaky person who's fleeing persecution and hiding in a hayrick and coming out of some sort of totalitarian regime and so on. And it's just looking for a shelter and all of this sort of stuff. You know, like there's this, in the morning show, there's this Iranian fencer who's like perfectly lovely and wonderful and so grateful and thrilled to be there and, you know, skilled and smart and there's, oh, it's a refugee and so on. But, you know, everyone knows that the world is full of scammers, right? And so what happens is people get coached on what to say to be, oh, I'm a refugee and here's what I have to say. And of course, government officials can't figure out any of that stuff to save their lives. They don't know who is and who is not a refugee because people are told, burn your papers, burn your passport. So you say this, say that, pretend to be a Christian who's being persecuted
[56:35] by some other religion or whatever it is. So, uh, that's, that's all the government program. And, uh.
[56:42] The best way to help countries is to disseminate the ideas of freedom and see who's interested. You can't help countries by taking the best and the most creative and the most intelligent and the most talented people out of those countries, right? So, Albania is sort of a made-up Scott Adams country. So, if Albania is doing badly economically, and then you take the top 5% of productive workers, you send a whole bunch of foreign aid to Albania, and then, you know, you import a bunch of elbonian geniuses then the elbonian economy gets worse which means more people flee to your country you pay more foreign aid elbonia gets worse more people like it doesn't end right at some point you put out the ideas of freedom and you see which countries are going to be drawn towards those ideas of freedom and you don't just uh invade everyone and then invite everyone because, the local population doesn't particularly want it you know i wrote this um in response to i can't remember who it was oh maybe it was ben shapiro like america's not just some economic zone full of dead-eyed interchangeable corporate profit bipeds right it's a country with uh an ethnicity and uh and a history and traditionally it's been sort of a black and white country and uh.
[57:59] It's not something where you can just plug people in like interchangeable npcs or like pawns it doesn't matter you know it matters where you put the bishop and the rook it doesn't matter where you put which porn, right? Because they're just interchangeable. And so this idea that, well, what you need to do is import people because it's going to give you a slightly better GDP.
[58:21] Well, not necessarily, right? Because one of the arguments about the autism epidemic is it's not even so much that the autism rates are directly rising because of X, Y, and Z, but also because, you know, there's a bunch of people, I think Somalians have been scamming a lot because if you get, if you can get your, um, your child certified as autistic by someone then you get extra money from the government and so on so there's a lot of people who are just saying uh you know oh all our kids are autistic and therefore you get a bunch of money and is it real and so on right so uh do the local people want.
[58:57] All of the i mean there's certainly some classes for sure do they want all the risks that come with um bringing a whole bunch of people from cultures that are very foreign to your local environment, I mean, I don't think that most people would do that. I don't think that most
[59:11] people would want to do that. And if you say, well, but you might have to sacrifice two or 3% of your GDP, and it's like, who cares, right? I mean, we are not economic, I mean, outside our bare minimum, like obviously you need enough to eat and you need shelter, but we're not driven by, I will risk social cohesion, and my history and my culture and my neighborhood, right? Because the Putnam studies, bowling alone studies shows that social cohesion diminishes in the face of diversity, people aren't going to say, well, okay, but maybe I'll make an extra thousand dollars a year, but I won't have any neighborhood for my kids to easily play in. I don't speak the same language as my neighbors. We practice different religions.
[59:54] I can't just send my kids over there. Their kids can't come over here because there's just this concern about incompatible.
[1:00:01] Belief systems and so on, people won't do all of that for a couple of bucks extra a year or 5% extra a year because they'll just say, well, just grow organically. It doesn't, it takes, I'm not talking about you, of course, like it takes a particular kind of sociopath to think that money is the only thing that matters, that you can say to people, well, if we don't bring these people in, your economy is going to suffer. It's like, why do I care about the economy alone? Why do I care about the economy alone? Why would I give up social cohesion, having an easy time communicating with my neighbors, us having shared a value system? Why would I want to bring people in who might, we're going to vote as the sort of leader of Singapore pointed out many years ago, just, it's just an ethnic headcount. Democracy just becomes an, why would I want to, and also if you're conservative or free market or free speech, you're bringing in a lot of cultures that are not pro-free speech. They're not pro-free market. They're not pro-conservative. So why would you want all of that? And so it takes a lot of government intervention to get people to want to make those kinds of decisions. And even then, I mean, 80, 85% of Westerners have wanted lower immigration for decades. So we know that in a free market situation, it's not going to be nearly as big of an issue, if really an issue at all, if that makes sense.
[1:01:19] Yeah, very, very well said. And I actually, I do agree with that. So I'll stop and not blazing your time. Stefan, thank you very much for the answers there.
[1:01:27] Appreciate it. And also the other thing too, is that if somebody wants to bring somebody in, to a country, then that person would have to be liable for any public assistance that the immigrant went on and also would have to be liable for any crimes committed by that. Yeah chris says a healthy economy is a reflection of a balanced society based on trust yeah so what is the social what is the economic cost of going from a high trust society to a low trust society it's immense immense so i do not believe that uh that it is even a good economic argument as a whole. All right.
[1:02:15] Stavka, if you are with us, somebody says they care about the economy alone because society average presence of mind is on level three, view of self, view of others, and view of the two. I don't follow that. I'm sorry. But I think it's just bribery. Oh yeah we're gonna lose you're gonna lose money if you don't accept uh you know a bunch of people to come and work in your local environment it's like okay so so it costs me money what do i care but what i care about is sort of the quality of my kids experience in the neighborhood or whatever it is right i mean is it worth an extra couple of points of gdp in england to have uh rape gangs sorry go ahead.
[1:02:57] Hello, Stefan. How are you doing this evening?
[1:02:59] I'm well, thanks. How are you doing?
[1:03:00] I have a question. It's a little bit off the topic. Is that okay?
[1:03:03] Oh, totally fine. Yeah.
[1:03:05] I think it's one you probably covered a little bit, but recently in my life, I've had some instances where I could use a little bit of your guidance. So here it is briefly. How should one engage with individuals who refuse to acknowledge fault or accept reality, regardless of how clear the truth may be?
[1:03:26] While avoidance is possible but not always desirable, what practical or philosophical approaches can help reach those whose beliefs have been shaped by denial or propaganda?
[1:03:38] Sorry, by denial of propaganda or by propaganda?
[1:03:41] By denial or propaganda.
[1:03:44] Sorry about that. Go ahead.
[1:03:45] I'm mumbling there. what strategies, practical or philosophical, might reach those whose thinking have been distorted by propaganda or self-deception?
[1:03:57] I appreciate the clarity of the question that you wrote ahead of time. It's great. Sorry, you wanted to add something else?
[1:04:03] Yeah, I've been mulling over this question through a few of your presentations and just revising it. I often come across this in my open-minded colleagues.
[1:04:21] We've spoken before, and you might know, you know, I'm an academic. I've been an academic for 30 years involved in, you know, biomedical research at some pretty prestigious institutions in the United States. And I often will bond with more centrist or more open-minded individuals, ones that don't morally judge me for my belief system. I believe most of my colleagues can identify my philosophical point of view just by my appearance. You know i um i'm pretty forward and assertive i are you are.
[1:05:06] You well groomed is that is that how they know what do you.
[1:05:09] Mean um i wear cowboy hats and cowboy boots here we go you know i'm six foot three i'm 210 pounds um you know i i wear you know wrangler shirts and you know uh yeah i I think they can just often tell by my bearing and maybe also my draw a little bit. I have a bit of a Southern draw, which is pretty unique to most academics. And I often just espouse the belief system that I think it's important to have at some point in your life work with your hands. And worked outside and it's sometimes been uncomfortable. Most of these folks, this is their only and ever job. The only job they've ever had is their academic career path.
[1:06:02] And so, honestly, I don't have a lot of respect for their often wisdom in situations. That doesn't affect their rational or their decision-making or their scientific methodology, how they might utilize their intellectual skills, but often also kind of maybe a counter to this question. You know, I wonder how they turn it on and off. They turn on their rational mind, and then for other topics, they're so able to turn off their rational filter. I'm wondering.
[1:06:39] Oh, that's, sorry, that's a survival mechanism that everyone's evolved with, right? So if you're some serf, right, and you've got to produce work on the Lord's land, then you have to be rational and empirical and absolute in order to provide value. you. If he says, go plow that field, you got to go plow that field. And if you don't plow the field, you'll get beaten or thrown in a dungeon or something like that. And so you have to be hyper-rational in the service of your masters. And then you have to flip and say, but he's infused and has been put in there by a giant ghost in the sky to have power over me. So you then have to go crazy superstitious because if you don't do that, you'll also get beaten and thrown in a dungeon. So you have to be able to flip between hyper-rational, because if you're not at all rational, you can't provide service to your Lord, to rank superstitious in that, you know, God has placed this guy power over me because he's just existentially better and more moral or the great chain of being or, you know, all of the giant, the aristocracy is the head and the surface of the body and the clergy is the heart of the soul. and like make up all of this nonsense. And so you've got to be very rational in order to provide value to those who rule you. And then you also have to believe in the validity of them ruling you, which is very not rational. So you have to be able to flip between these two, if that makes sense.
[1:08:08] Um, why can I not be honest to me in private? I feel sometimes they don't believe what they're saying.
[1:08:16] Oh, sorry. In private. Okay. So have you, I'm sure you've had it, uh, over the course of your life where you've started to talk about forbidden topics, you know, not politically correct forbidden topics and people get really tense, right?
[1:08:31] Yeah. They cover their mouth often. There is often a tell in their, um, body language.
[1:08:37] Right. So why do you think people get tense when you start talking about forbidden topics? Why do you think from an evolutionary standpoint, people might've developed that?
[1:08:51] There's a serious cost to pay for voicing incorrect opinions, obviously.
[1:08:58] You could be sent by the Lord.
[1:09:01] Oh.
[1:09:02] Right? So you could be like that the king needs to root out treason. I love that phrase. I'll repeat it every time I can. Treason doth never prosper. What's the reason? Why? If it prosper, none dare call it treason. Right? So the king is always trying to root out malcontents, discontents, and people who are questioning the status quo. And so people get very tense around libertarians and objectivists and minarchists and ANCAPs because we are hardwired to be really nervous about speaking treason. Like, what's the upside? The upside is what? You're not about to have a revolution and take over, right? But the downside is, you know, it's like when you're in jail, you shut the hell up.
[1:09:48] Right what is it your lawyer always tells you don't talk about anything you've done to anyone because jailhouse snitches are a dime a dozen some people are going to come up like oh yeah i'm so sorry man you were totally hard done by what happened blah blah blah and then if you talk to them about anything they're going to go and say oh yeah he totally confessed because that way they can get five years off their sentence so you shut up because traitors are everywhere in society And so, you know, the priest puts on a disguise and comes out and starts speaking out against the priest. And then if you like, yeah, he is kind of a douchebag. He rips off his disguise. And, you know, next thing you know, you're sending your soul sky, but in a puff of sinister smoke. And so, yeah, people get, we have evolved in general to be very nervous about people who are speaking out against the powers that be, because the upside of that is almost zero and the downside is almost infinite.
[1:10:44] But in other men, I interpret it as weakness for not speaking honestly.
[1:10:52] Weakness. Okay. But would your ancestors have survived if they had spoken honestly and purely rationally about the world?
[1:11:03] Maybe not.
[1:11:05] What do you mean maybe? Come on, tell me the scenario in which your ancestors survive with that.
[1:11:13] No.
[1:11:14] Right. And that's not a criticism of your ancestors, and it's certainly not a criticism of you, but it is a very real phenomenon, isn't it?
[1:11:27] Yes, but often I'm more apt to speak the truth, even if it costs me.
[1:11:35] Yes, but the reason you can do that is it's not going to cost you your life. So we have evolved to the point where i mean i i i spoke and i got de-platformed and you know lost 15 years of my life's work and my income got slashed to to catastrophic levels and blah blah but i'm not dead i'm not imprisoned right i haven't been burned at the stake i haven't been banished to Newfoundland. I was thinking of some lonely place. So we can survive that. We can survive that. But our ancestors could not have survived that. You know, we have not adapted to free speech as a species yet, which I think, you know, we can sort of all understand. It sort of makes sense. But yeah, we've not adapted to free speech. We still have all of the instincts of getting killed for telling the truth.
[1:12:30] But a lot of these ideas, woke ideas, have led to a marked degradation and inefficiency in all of our general environment. So it's made the working conditions poor, and it's led to mediocrity and a general decline to the level of competency of people around us. So it's not as if these ideas have not decayed all of our stability and our idea of our security at work.
[1:13:13] Right. Now, so I agree with that. And then this is where I would say that the economic issue is important. So the economic issue is, if I speak out against woke stuff in academia, what is the cost benefit? And, you know, we can say, ah, yes, but do right though the skies fall. Do right, tell the truth and shame the devil. Tell the truth though the skies fall. We can say all of that, but our ancestors didn't say that. And that's why we're here. Like, we're only here because our ancestors practiced rational caution in opposing the status quo. If you oppose the status quo too much, you will get either killed or imprisoned or tortured or banished. And, you know, three out of the four completely destroy your capacity to reproduce locally, and the other one severely damages it because you've been tortured. And so, even if you survive the torture, you're sort of mentally scarred. And so our ancestress.
[1:14:15] Survived by being prudent, right? This is a, if you want to sort of get my thoughts on this from, I don't know, 30, 35 years ago, I wrote a novel called Just Poor. And in the novel, there's a young woman who speaks out against the Lord. And there are terrible consequences that happen because of that. And there's an older man who shares some of her ideas, who tries to counsel her into stopping it, just stop doing it. The truth is not a sword to be drawn at all costs. it will take you down long before it takes him down. And those are, you know, very real questions that we all need to navigate. Now, I'm not saying that, you know, never speak out. I'm not saying, but having contempt for that, which has allowed us to be here is almost nihilistic in a way. I respect my ancestors who did not speak the truths that I speak because I can speak those truths, I may be significantly harmed professionally, but I can survive physically. I have been able to reproduce, right? And of course, even if you were able to reproduce and you were too radical, then your kids would have a lower chance of reproducing as well, right? Because they would be considered to be a suspect or bad or something like that. And so they may have a lower status because of that.
[1:15:36] So you're saying pick your battles to some degree, but maybe there is some sort of irrational situation, like emotions flowing through me because i'm so disgusted by the environment, right i don't do you know how much am i really enjoying being there any longer and also it's it's it's decayed my my ability to collaborate which used to be probably the most like enjoyable most fun aspect of it was working with other really talented people and that's become less, it's become less likely or less frequent because there's just less numbers of talented people around me over time. Like I started doing this 30 years ago. And so I basically was able to watch the entire decay. I think in my senior year of university, they lowered all of the courses in the School of Biological Sciences by 100. So the foreign level courses became 300. They're exact justification for that was to retain more female students within the school of biological sciences.
[1:16:56] Right that was 1997 yeah no and i i was in a university in the 90s and i could see that tsunami of woke coming in is one of the reasons i didn't want to go and do a uh a phd and you You could just, because, you know, the old, the old guard, the, you know, depression era people, the, the sort of post war period, uh, people, I mean, I, I had a, a English professor who'd been there so long. He only, he became a full professor with just an undergraduate degree because back then, of course it used to, uh, um, used to be able to, the, the, the degrees were so good that it worked that way. So, um, yeah.
[1:17:41] I decided to boogie out seeing, and I prefer the business world because it's more empirical and it's more objective, not perfectly, but somewhat better. And the change over the last 30 years is astonishing. Yeah, it's like it's an entirely different planet. This is the long march through the institutions that, again, Southern talked about in Australia in the Q&As. But yeah, it's really crazy just how much it's changed. This is the kind of change that normally only occurs when there is a conquest. And of course, I would argue there has been a takeover of the West and its institutions. And the takeover has occurred primarily in those institutions that are the closest to the government because they're not subject to the argument from efficiency and yeah.
[1:18:37] The demographics have been the greatest shift. I would say gender demographics have, have overall been the most terrific shift that I've noticed. Um, and the differential expectations that are placed upon individuals within the institution.
[1:18:55] Yeah.
[1:18:57] And we feel like we have 10 people, 20 people's, um, jobs on our back. And the other folks can sit around and drink coffee all day and small talk. But if we slack, then they come down on us like a ton of bricks. So that's very uncomfortable when you have such a terrific, you know, differential in the expectation. That's very uncomfortable. It feels very contrived and terrifically unfair. And you're wondering why doesn't anybody else see this, but they don't want to see it because it's to their advantage. And so if you speak up against it, you get harassed and you get anonymously reported to HR and the institution doesn't. While they've been fair to me, that's happened to me a few times over my career. I think I've been lucky. And the only thing that has protected me is my productivity, how much money I bring into the institution. That's been the only thing that's protected me from you know more harsh consequences, right right you know is my utility my my financial value my productivity, um but i think all of that like anonymous reporting people should be absolutely
[1:20:19] done away with you have a right to face your accuser well.
[1:20:23] Yeah and i would say this that one of the things that has occurred with academia and in business and in government stuff as a whole is, we don't have to have sympathy or empathy anymore. I just, I don't say for everyone, but for me, like the poor, oh, the poor, we got to help the poor. And it's like, but the poor have to been shafting the taxpayers now for three or four generations and they get more aggressive and more entitled. And if the snap benefits are going to be cut, they're just going to riot and steal stuff. And it's like, oh, okay. So I'm now out of empathy and I'm now out of compassion. And I don't care. I don't care. People are like, well, what's going to happen with this, that, and the other. It's like, I don't care. I care about as much for the, quote, disadvantage as they have cared about me as a taxpayer. They viewed me as livestock to be pillaged, to be eviscerated, to be disemboweled, to be exploited. They've been voting consistently to just take away more and more money from myself and people like me.
[1:21:23] Although less money as my income went down but uh so so i have as much compassion for them as they have for me and people say well what's going to happen uh with uh the single moms if the welfare state goes down it's like i don't care i don't care because because i treat people the best i can when i first meet them after that i treat them as they treat me and for several generations now the single moms have been just fairly irresponsible in who they choose to have sex with fairly irresponsible and who they have children with, and they haven't cared at all. Like they haven't said, oh man, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry that I'm a public burden because it used to be shameful, right? I'm so sorry that I'm a public burden. Now it's all like, I'm entitled to this. I'm owed this. And it's like, okay, so now that there's no shame and there's no desire to do better, I now don't care.
[1:22:14] What happens to you. And then if it's women are like, well, you know, we deserve this. It's like, yeah, but you've been taking money hand over fist from male taxpayers for three generations now. So I don't care. I don't care what happens. And I think this is kind of the point that people got to with Trump and the tens of millions of illegal immigrants in America, where people are just like, well, they're not respecting our rules. They're not respecting our laws.
[1:22:38] I don't care. And there's this war. The left is like, well, you've got to care. Look at this poor person ripped from the blah, blah. And it's like, but they don't. And I think on the left, there's this infinite compassion stuff. And I've talked about this on X that, you know, you get all these female judges that keep turning these criminals free. And that's because women are trained to raise babies and toddlers.
[1:22:59] Women are trained, this is what they've evolved to do. Now with babies and toddlers, you can't sit there and say, well, you did something violent. So you're gone. You're out of here. You're out of society. It's like, cause you know, you're going to get one of your sons is going to whack another one of your sons and you don't throw him in jail. You just, you have to talk to him and then you have to forgive him and you have to move on and you have to just hope it doesn't happen again. Or maybe you give him a lecture or, but you can't just throw him in jail because women are evolved to deal with young minds. And that's beautiful. And it's perfect. And it's what they, uh, what, what is this sort of natural position for again, lots of exceptions, but, uh, so when you get a female judge and the prisoner is like, oh, I didn't mean to. I'm so sorry. They have a, like, they have a very tough time saying, um, you're going to go to jail like forever. And I'm in lock away the key, that kind of stuff. I throw, lock him up, throw away the key.
[1:23:48] And I'll say, I have a, I have a question there.
[1:23:51] Yeah.
[1:23:51] When, when I'm confronted with these types of, um, issues, like what you've been speaking about, their support for illegal immigration or their lax rules about criminality.
[1:24:05] I hate to interrupt you just as you're starting. I don't think it's a support for illegal immigration. I just think that they see sadness and want to make it better. And that's a beautiful thing in the family. It's a beautiful thing with your children. It's just not a beautiful thing when it comes to adult criminals. But sorry, go ahead.
[1:24:20] I often wonder, how does it serve their self-interest?
[1:24:25] When i think about issues.
[1:24:27] I wonder how you know like how it benefits their their political ideology um how how they some because i believe people are motivated by by through incentive.
[1:24:40] Well but women women hang on but women are not evolved to deal with adult violent criminals that's the job of men women are evolved to raise children that's what because that's what women did from the age of 15 until they died at the age of 80, women raised children. They would raise their own children. They'd have a whole bunch of them.
[1:25:00] They'd bury a bunch of those kids, which would be very sad, but they would raise their own children. And then when their children got older, the first round of children would be having grandchildren. So they'd then start to raise those and then great-grandchildren. And that's what they would do. They dealt with children from zero to seven from the age of 15 until 85. That's what they were evolved to do. And it's a beautiful thing that women do that. It's a wonderful thing that women do that. But it means that trying to put a round peg in a square hole, so to speak, is to try to get women to deal with issues of adult violence. And in a family, you cannot...
[1:25:35] You cannot take a child out of the family and throw them in a dungeon for being violent. And so there's this forgiveness thing. Oh, we're going to forgive, right? The job of not forgiving is the man's job because he's dealing with adults.
[1:25:50] And so women are not evolved for that kind of tough love, for that kind of protect society. Women are evolved for forgiveness. women are evolved for forced redistribution of resources because the smallest kids need to get the food that the largest kids might want to grab and take. So they're going to grab the forced redistribution of resources, endless sympathy for the less, uh, for the smaller and the weaker, because that's how you equalize things between your children. You know, the 10 year old and the two year old, the 10 year old is going to take everything. The two year old can't get ahold of anything. So the mother has to be really forceful in making sure that the resources go to the two-year-old, you know, like I see this, um, with my daughter, we go, we go and we feed birds. She loves to feed birds and we'll take the little, uh, little, uh, box of, of, of, uh, lettuce and grains and, and things like that. And, and whenever she sees a small and sickly bird, what does she do? Oh, I gotta, uh, I'm going to give it to this one. This one's not doing as well. I'm going to give, you know, where it's for men, it's almost like a loser, you know, give it to the biggest and strongest bird. Cause that's, you know, whatever it is. Right. So again, both, both perspectives are necessary and important.
[1:26:57] So when you say, well, how does it serve their self-interest? Their self-interest is to raise their children to survive and flourish. And they need particular perspectives for that, which is sympathy for the weak.
[1:27:09] Forced redistribution of resources, and limited punishment of violence and malefaction. And that works beautifully in the family. It's like communism, works beautifully in the family when it's voluntary. It absolutely is a disaster in society when it's coerced.
[1:27:25] But at the same time, these zealots of this type of philosophical ideology are also hyper-obsessed with safety. So releasing criminals into their environment, violent criminals often, would at the same time make them less safe.
[1:27:46] Well, are they concerned with safety or are they concerned with not feeling bad?
[1:27:54] The first or the second, they're concerned with not feeling bad is probably higher order than them feeling unsafe.
[1:28:01] And women can afford to forgive because men don't forgive.
[1:28:07] Okay.
[1:28:08] Right. So I can afford to, to, if Bob owes me a hundred dollars and Bob doesn't pay me, Uh, Jamie is going to pay me a hundred. Jamie is going to pay me a hundred dollars. Instead, I can forgive my debt to Bob because Jamie is going to give me the hundred dollars. So I don't lose any money. So women, this is the Erica Kirk thing. So women can go around trumpeting about how much they forgive. And you know, you saw this with the Charlie Kirk, uh, murder, right? That the women are all saying, I forgive, I forgive, I forgive. And the men are all like, well, I guess we're just not as good as the women. Cause I sure as hell aren't forgiving him.
[1:28:38] But their behavior is blocking us from being able to enact consequences on these people.
[1:28:46] Sure. But that's because women have authority where they should not, and men have authority where they should not.
[1:28:53] And so women have authority in the disposition of criminals where they should not as a whole, right? And the free market would kind of deal with this. And some women would be great at it, but as a whole, not so good. Correct so um again this is all just because we have a system of voting that relies on one person one vote regardless of competence who should be handling criminals those who have the sweet spot those people who are best able to reform criminals because if you can reform a criminal that's fantastic and in differentiating when the criminal cannot be reformed keeping that criminal out of society in perpetuity right can they be saved great save them if they can't be saved lock them up.
[1:29:35] And men are very good at that. And men and women temper each other. You need forgiveness in society and you need tough love and strict rules. And you need punishment in society for people who can't be fixed. And remember, women dealing with babies and toddlers, there's neuroplasticity. So you can take a, quote, bad toddler and you can love him and befriend him and you can make him into a better person because there's still, you know, 18 months, one year, two years, three years until sort of five to seven years, the brain still has a lot of neuroplasticity. So you can love someone into being better, on the understanding and on the requirement that that is a baby or a toddler. You cannot love a 30-year-old into being better because they've already done their evil. They have a terrible conscience or no conscience. They can't be fixed. And so that needs to go to the men to deal with. But women are optimistic. This is why so many women think, you know, I can fix the bad boy. It's like, because they're wired to fix and to love and to have affection for the underdog and the aggressive and love them into being better. And that's how, certainly in the West, how the feral children get tamed into a more civilized society. And that's fantastic. Again, dealing with babies and toddlers, you can't beat women. But when it comes to dealing with criminals, it's men or doom.
[1:30:59] Absolutely. Maybe it's also, you see that in delaying childbearance, this false hope or that you could, you know, you, you don't want to face the reality of the situation. You want to somehow make, But bare your head in the sand?
[1:31:21] Well, if you can get women to delay childbirth, then they simply mother others. They will mother migrants or immigrants or minorities or whoever can present
[1:31:31] themselves as sort of the sad sacks of society. They will get, you know, what are they? The marginalized, the underprivileged, the excluded, you know. It's just women's wiring to give resources to the weakest among them, which is designed for their children. You can harness that to create these sort of endless entitlement programs for people who are perfectly competent at running their own lives.
[1:31:53] But it lacks legitimate action often. There's no cost to the individual to virtue signal some support. It's often, I want to help these people with someone else's money and someone else's time, not my own time.
[1:32:06] But that's because women generally, I mean, women generally do help people with men's resources and time. So they're designed to want to help everyone, And men are designed to say, no, that's too much. But because we've got voting and we've got the infinite money glitch of fiat banking, fiat currency, men's restraint upon women's desire to help everyone has been short-circuited. You know the old thing. In winter, your neighbors, they didn't plan for winter. They didn't take enough care over the summer. And then they come knocking on the door and say, we're starving. And the woman is like, oh, let them in. And the man is like, oh, we can't. Like, we can't. I'm so sorry, but they're going to die. It's like, well, it's them or all of us. Like, sorry, the men have to be tough. But that toughness of men has been, that end run has gone around men by the politicians to go and appeal to the women and say, you can help as many people as you want, as much as you want, with no cost to yourself. And it's a terrible drug. And it's almost impossible to resist. Sorry?
[1:33:05] It's pathologic.
[1:33:06] Yeah, yeah, for sure.
[1:33:07] It seems to induce some...
[1:33:08] It's cancerous. It turns empathy into a cancer. Sorry, go ahead.
[1:33:11] It seems to...
[1:33:13] Have some pathologies you often see in these types of individuals, some really deep anger issues. They're violent and crass.
[1:33:27] Well, they're addicted, right? Uh, there was a movie, gosh, what was it called? Homestead. There was a movie called Homestead that came out of angel studios. I did a review of it, I think with my daughter and in Homestead, it's a post-apocalyptic world and they just have enough food for themselves and there's a gate and then and then the guys like the lead guy who won't let everyone in because they're all going to starve he's shot and then while he's, in the hospital his wife opens up the gates and lets everyone in we'll find a way we'll make it work that's angela merkel with the like the big immigrant oh we'll make it work we'll we'll find a way it's like no you won't you'll force men to try and find a way and that way will not be found And then it would just be a disaster, and then I'm sure men will be blamed. But, you know, it's just become a terrible, a terrible addiction. And again, everything that is not balanced becomes an addiction, right? And so a women's desire to help is beautiful. I love women's desire to help. It needs to be paired with men saying, we can't.
[1:34:31] They won't listen if they don't have to.
[1:34:32] Right right right and and men should listen to women when women say uh we need to help because sometimes you can and men women should listen to men when men say oh we can't man like i'd love to but we can't we just can't we just don't have the resources and it's tough you know that tension between men and women is really important and And if you don't have that tension, then, you know, sort of very bad things happen in life as a whole.
[1:35:05] It's impossible with fiat currency in the state.
[1:35:09] I'm sorry?
[1:35:10] It seems impossible with fiat currency in the state.
[1:35:16] Well, it is impossible, yeah. This is why it goes to collapse that way. Sorry, go ahead.
[1:35:21] Yeah, it's dark. And one final question. I know we're going long. I'd asked you, you know, what practical or philosophical approaches can you help reach those whose beliefs have been shaped by denial of propaganda? I have a few of my colleagues that I see a potential in. Like, they don't always disagree with me. When presented with evidence, they often will change their minds or they will agree. And so it's almost as if I feel as if I could save some of these people's souls, you know, like, you know, believing in lies, I believe costs you your soul.
[1:36:12] Yes, I agree with that. I agree with that.
[1:36:14] You know, you have to believe a lie and you have to pretend and you lose a sense of yourself or agency of self-worth, self-respect when you have to cow because you're dependent upon others. He's a man, you want to make your own way. You want to have your own gravity. You want to be a provider. You want to protect those within your realm. That's just kind of my idea of masculinity is you make yourself valuable enough, strong enough that you can shield and nurture others. And I see I'm close. I'm with a few people that I really respect, and I know that they're good people. They've just been in an environment where their parents were leftists.
[1:36:59] They've grown up in Oklahoma, of all places, about the most conservative place in the United States you could possibly be. and they still cling to some of these false values and they're going to become a father soon. And I try and, you know, they'll bring up something to me and I'll counterpoint their narrative and show them evidence and then I'll come back to them a week later and they've actually looked it up. They've actually explored it and been honest with themselves about what they've found. And i don't want to pushy or introduce or be too um contrarian to them or bring them this type of information too often you know they're friends of mine i don't want to be pushy upon them but are there any kind of practical guidance you can give me on you know introducing people to, um, objectivism or having them embrace more of, of, of reality?
[1:38:01] Well, I think the important thing is to know what the cost is. What is the cost to them? Because, you know, listen, I don't know what it is. I don't know what it is with men as a whole. And maybe this is, I think this is even more true in Europe. It's like a lot of men are really scared of their wives. And a lot of men are like, oh, I can't, you know, I think a lot of men, you know, if they could be the sort of veil of secrecy or the veil of privacy, they would say it, but I think that they're just afraid of, The wives have become addicted to virtue signaling and the men don't want to say you can't have that drug because the women will turn on them and become, you know, like, like most addicts, emotional terrorists. Right.
[1:38:48] Absolutely.
[1:38:49] So I think that there's a lot of women who are raised.
[1:38:53] By emotional terrorists.
[1:38:55] Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. For sure. Yeah. So, uh, I think you've got to figure out what, like ask them about their relationships and say, you know, um, uh, what, uh, you know, uh, what is, what are your wife's views on these sorts of things? Because a lot of times the men are just, they're not even making their own decisions. They're just, um, they're just doing what their wives allow them to do, if that makes any sense.
[1:39:29] It could also be family.
[1:39:31] Yeah, yeah, it could be too. Or maybe they've raised the kids a certain way and they don't want to change that.
[1:39:35] I think one of my colleagues that I really enjoy is a terrific person and someone I can always rely upon. He has a gay brother. I think that is some reason why he hangs on to some of his leftist ideology.
[1:39:57] Is because some type of affinity or wanting to protect his brother. I often, his wife is, she's foreign and she is like apolitical as you can get. She's a gem. She works as a pharmacist. Didn't take her long and coming here to get on her feet. She's very intelligent, very hardworking. She's completely apolitical. for now um but i always wonder like what it doesn't seem to be his wife it seems to potentially be some familial like he doesn't want a conflict with it he doesn't want conflict with his family, over the over like being honest about how he feels i mean he's he's completely on board with um you know we don't need 25 million illegal immigrants running around the united states and costing us huge sums of money and providing the chaos that, you know, that entails. He agrees with that, but most of his other, if you get into the gender ideology, he's more leftist on that than I would expect.
[1:41:15] Yeah. Well, I mean, that's tough. If he's got a gay brother, then he's going to have that pressure on his relationships. And, you know, people will absolutely toast each other over politics. Politics is very powerful. Politics is the legitimate use of violence in society. And if you think that people don't fight over violence, you haven't studied much of human history at all.
[1:41:41] I'm an avid conflict historian. That's one of the, one of my grandfather was a World War II, like a D-Day veteran and ever, you know, from his stories, I've I think I've read more than 2000 books about World War two alone and, And so I have econ as well, and I appreciate your guidance and my reading in that journey. That's really increased my knowledge level, my competency, and all of your teachings have been fantastic. I've been listening to you for five, seven years now. I've been a subscriber for two or three years. I wish I'd have contributed longer, but I will certainly— Shop.freedomain.com.
[1:42:23] Sorry. Absolutely. And again, yeah, sorry, James was saying the Homestead Review
[1:42:28] was, yeah, it was Izzy, James, Jared, and myself. But no, I appreciate that. So most, I've said this sort of for 20 years, right? Our enslavement is horizontal, not vertical. They can't fight us all, but they can get us to oppose and reject each other by rejecting the truth. So if you want to sell, and you're trying to sell freedom, if you want to sell, you have to figure out people's barriers. What is their resistance point? So if you're trying to sell someone a car and you show them, here's a Maserati, they say, oh my God, I don't have money for that. That's way too expensive. Well, okay, so their resistance point is price. So then you have to look somewhere else. And so you've got to figure out what people's resistance points are.
[1:43:14] As you can see, I've been trying to investigate that.
[1:43:17] Right, right. And as a man, you look for... Resistance points around facts. They say, well, if I give you more facts, you'll be fine. But I'm telling you, women run the intellectual discourse in the West. Women run it. And women run it because they have been propagandized and programmed to ostracize those who don't agree with them.
[1:43:42] And you can't correct them.
[1:43:45] Well, no, you can't because you're trying to talk to a drug addict.
[1:43:49] And you're labeled a misogynist immediately.
[1:43:52] Right. A misogynist is a magic word that says, I'm upset. That's all. If you upset me, you must hate women. And it's like, no, I'm just telling you the truth. Right. But women have been detached from male objectivity through the power of the state. Women don't have to listen to men. Women don't have to respond to male authority, and women have become,
[1:44:17] I call it a chicktatorship, right? Women have become dictatorial through the seduction of Western women by the media and by politicians. And they no longer have to listen to men. All they have to do is, like, there are these women who are crying about, older women who are crying about how expensive their healthcare is in the States. You know, we've got these, uh, it's, it's absolutely mad, like two, three, $4,000 a month for a family to get health insurance. And it's like, but you felt good about voting for Barack Obama and you felt good. Like, why is there, I mean, the, the, the Somalians in.
[1:45:00] Minnesota, cast the deciding vote, or I think it was Al Franken, cast the deciding vote. So you wanted the people to come into America from Somalia, and you thought it would be bad or wrong to question that, and you attacked people who questioned that. And then when people were saying to you that Barack Obama was a socialist snake, it was, oh, it's racist. We want to heal race relations in America, so we're going to vote for him, and we're going to invite everyone in to come and live from Somalia. Okay, so now you have Obamacare, and now the bill is coming to you. And so, you know, there's a great statement I read as a teenager, even the gods cannot break the rule, take what you want and then pay for it.
[1:45:46] Take what you want. And then if you want a life of hedonism, you pay with meaning and happiness. If you want a life of laziness, you pay with not having many resources. And if you want a life of virtue signaling, you pay because you're easily manipulated by people with malintent. And so people wanted to, they were told by the media, Barack Obama is the one, he's going to heal, and it's going to be wonderful. And you're going to get cheap healthcare, you'll keep your doctor, it'll all be cheaper he lied he lied and there were people screaming like me i have entire presentations on barack obama and and and obamacare and i've got entire presentations on how terrible he was as a human being and as a president and all of that uh he's a total snake and uh oh no it's racist you just because he's you just don't like him because he's well biracial whatever and it's like okay so so you got to attack people who were trying to tell you the truth. And I bet you that felt really good. Didn't you feel better and superior? And didn't you feel like you were in the right and these other people were just racist and completely in the wrong? And you just, you loved it. You know, in the same way that heroin, I'd never tried it, obviously.
[1:47:00] I've never tried any drugs, but it's got to feel fantastic and take what you want and then pay for it. And now people are getting mad because they're, you know, they want open borders, they voted for Democrats, and now the health costs are through the roof. Well, of course, they're through the roof.
[1:47:16] But they reject all reasons for it being so expensive.
[1:47:21] Well, okay, that's fine. So the good news is that you don't have to care about people complaining about their health care costs if they won't listen to reason. Like if you tell someone, hey, man, you've got to quit smoking. Like this is really bad for you. You're going to get COPD. You get emphysema, lung cancer, whatever. Like you've just got to quit. And he's like, oh, you just don't know how to have fun. You're an asshole. You just smoking is fine and and who cares and you know blah blah blah blah and it's like and you try for months or maybe even years to get him to quit smoking and he insults you, sure calls you a nazi calls you a a um a racist calls you whatever right and and the good thing is that it it just it just relieves you of the burden of having to give a shit, You know, if I'm going to try and help you and you're going to insult me, I now am relieved of the burden of caring what happened. So, yeah, people will continue to complain. And you and I and other sane people will continue to say, well, this is the result of you not listening to reason. And or maybe your parents would go talk to them. And if they continue not to listen to reason, then it's like, yeah, your health care costs a lot. I don't care. I don't care.
[1:48:32] But your health care costs a lot now, too, because of their stupidity.
[1:48:35] Well, yes, that certainly is true. But they're still not listening to reason. So don't have your health care costs a lot and care about other people's health care costing a lot. Deal with your own health care costing a lot and just, I don't care.
[1:48:53] I couldn't agree more.
[1:48:54] I don't care. I care about their struggles as much as they cared about my reputation.
[1:49:01] Sorry, you were going to say?
[1:49:01] Yeah, I've embraced the idea of reciprocity more and more as I've aged.
[1:49:10] Yeah.
[1:49:11] Out of the frustration of not being able to reach illogical, irrational, hyper-emotive people with reason and evidence.
[1:49:20] Yeah, and they're going to serve as an example of what not to do in the future. That that's all that's all a lot of people are just they're just here to serve as an example of what not to do hey remember all those guys who who rejected basic economics and human nature in order to try and get free healthcare from the government or subsidized healthcare from the government yeah remember what happened to them, All right, is there anything else that you wanted to mention?
[1:49:45] No, thank you so much, Devin. Started to go on so long.
[1:49:47] No, don't apologize, brother. It's always a great pleasure to chat and I really do appreciate your support and I really do appreciate these conversations.
[1:49:55] Thank you.
[1:49:56] All right, thanks everyone. Shop.freedomain.com. Please go and order some merch, bring a thrill to my increasingly cobwebby and dusty chest, you know, just because I'm aging a little. But I really would appreciate that. Have yourself a glorious evening. Thank you, thank you so much for your continued support. Don't forget, you can set up your public or private calls with me at freedomain.com/call. Bye.
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