In this follow up to a question asked in a livestream, I investigate why politics stirs such deep emotional responses, likening it to religious fervor. By contrasting those thriving in the voluntary market with individuals reliant on government funding, I reveal how these differing perspectives shape political identities. Drawing from my experiences in the Department of Education, I underscore how government roles can foster complacency and detachment from accountability, contrasting with the urgency found in the private sector.
I address the generational conflict where older individuals often prioritize their comfort, risking the future of younger generations. Ultimately, I urge listeners to reflect on their political engagements, advocating for discussions that encourage cooperation over dependency on government support.
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I address the generational conflict where older individuals often prioritize their comfort, risking the future of younger generations. Ultimately, I urge listeners to reflect on their political engagements, advocating for discussions that encourage cooperation over dependency on government support.
Join the PREMIUM philosophy community on the web for free!
NOW AVAILABLE FOR SUBSCRIBERS: MY NEW BOOK 'PEACEFUL PARENTING' - AND THE INTERACTIVE PEACEFUL PARENTING AI AND AUDIOBOOK!
Also get the Truth About the French Revolution, the interactive multi-lingual philosophy AI trained on thousands of hours of my material, private livestreams, premium call in shows, the 22 Part History of Philosophers series and much more!
See you soon!
https://freedomain.locals.com/support/promo/UPB2022
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LearningTranscript
00:00Yes, good evening. Good evening, everybody. It's to defend Molly from free domain now. Listen, listen
00:05emergency broadcast this year of our Lord 2024 and
00:09We are talking. Oh, I guess it's the 24th divided by the month gives us 3 24th of August
00:162024
00:17emergency broadcast the emergency being that last night a
00:22man in
00:23Good faith. I think it was a man in
00:26absolute
00:28joyous anticipation of a rigorous answer
00:31Asked me something and then I finished off the live stream after yapping
00:37fairly incessantly
00:38for quite a bit of time
00:41He asked me Steph
00:44Steph
00:45Short question. Why do people take politics so seriously?
00:50It's almost like a religion to some individuals
00:52I mean not even able to joke about both candidates without complete nasty and crazy
00:57replies
00:59it is hard for people on the
01:03Voluntarist libertarian sort of you name it kind of spectrum and and I mean we're on the spectrum
01:10but it is kind of hard for people to
01:13Understand why people get so nuts about politics. I'll put forward a bit of a theory and
01:19You can listen passively. You can jump in and engage you can question query comment oppose whatever
01:27your
01:28ventricles thirst for I am happy to accommodate but
01:31Here we go. So
01:33most of us who are
01:36skeptical of the endless illusory benefits of infinite government power
01:42Tends to be people who get shit done in the voluntary free market arena
01:48We tend to be people who other people are willing to pay in a voluntary fashion
01:54For the joy and presence of our goods and services I
01:59Have never worked for the government. I
02:02have worked with the government as an entrepreneur back in my 20s and
02:07I spent one godforsaken summer tucked away in the corner of the Department of Education working on a giant contract for
02:15a
02:16Union giant union contract and just got to see all the ins and outs of the political process through that
02:22That was I was just a temp and a student I think I was about 20 or so and
02:29It's really pretty pretty eye-opening so most of the people who are listening to this
02:34don't get their money from the government and
02:37the number of people who get their money from the government is really quite staggering and
02:43There's a large number of people who have become in a sense
02:48Human beings that have adapted to the nutrient called
02:53government money
02:54They have adopted and adapted. This is particularly true in the welfare state. Although it's also true in
03:01The civil service as a whole and all of the tertiary people who get paid by the government
03:06You know the doctors and the lawyers and the specialists and so on and so that there are people who work directly for the government
03:11There are people who get money directly from the government and then there are all the people who support and service those people who get
03:16money directly from the government
03:17now for those of us
03:19who provide value in
03:22the remnants of the free market
03:25politics seems
03:27annoying odd
03:30bizarre strange
03:32It's almost fetishistic
03:34but that's because
03:37We don't survive on that food source. I
03:41Mean I'm sure a lion looking at a gazelle
03:46Would be somewhat bemused at what just eats grass. Well, that's weird. There's no flesh in grass
03:52There's no blood pumping through the veins of that grass
03:55So they would look and say well, that's that's weird. Why would you eat grass doesn't taste like anything?
04:00It's gross doesn't give you any nutritional value. It's bizarre and
04:06That's looking across this chasm and it is a true chasm
04:10Between those who pay for government largesse and those who benefit from it, but when you look across that chasm at all the people
04:19Sharpening their political knives on the other side of the great divide
04:22It's bizarre. Why why why are they so focused?
04:26Why do they care so much? I mean one of the reasons I got out of political analysis other than you know, obviously
04:34ever-escalating
04:35Dangerous, but one of the reasons I got out of political analysis was
04:39It is no longer an analysis of policy or preference or economics or morality or rationality or anything like that
04:47it is
04:49the
04:50Analysis of an ecosystem with such wildly divergent
04:55Interests such wildly opposing interests right those who want to pay less taxes are generally
05:02Significantly opposed by those who want to get paid more by their taxes that
05:08It was no longer looking at ideas or arguments or facts charts data anything like that
05:15because
05:17when people have
05:19Adapted to a particular form of income and this can happen at an individual level and it happens fairly quickly
05:26So if you've ever known someone who works for the government and I remember when I was after I left theater school in
05:33Montreal I went to the National Theatre School for almost two years
05:37one as one year as an actor and one year almost as a playwright and I went
05:44To Toronto and I lived downtown in a room with a roommate
05:48I've actually twice in my life lived in one room with another guy and we've always gotten along really well
05:54I'm actually still friends with one of them from Montreal, but I
05:58worked
06:00To produce a play that I'd written which was an adaptation of Ivan Targenev's fathers and sons
06:05I called it seduction and it had a pretty good run. I
06:09produced and
06:11Directed it and I was also working as a waiter in a high-end restaurant downtown
06:17And it actually kind of worked out. Well, I had split shifts 11 to 2 and then
06:225 to midnight and so in the afternoons, I would rehearse the play with the actors that I had hired
06:30now my roommate worked for
06:33the government and
06:35It became a running gag. He'd say what did you do? I said, well, you know, I got up pretty early
06:40I went for a run. I went to work. I worked on the play
06:43I went to work and you know, I'd come home at like, you know
06:46come back to the room at like 11 11 30 at night after closing at the restaurant and
06:51So my days were jam-packed and his days like what did you do I
06:58Can't remember he went to work
07:02He just you know, we had some meetings
07:03I can't remember if anything was really decided nothing really landed on my desk and this was his life
07:08by the by just to dredge this memory up and throw it out into the internet forever because
07:13Apparently every part of my history must be scraped and splurged across the planet. I
07:17Remember him singing a rousing version of calendar girl when he came to meet me at the restaurant
07:23I worked at when it was having karaoke night. I didn't even know there was a song called calendar girl calendar girl
07:28Now I do and every time I've heard it since his rendition was much better
07:32So he had a lot of energy for karaoke, but could not ever remember what he did during the day now. I
07:41want you
07:42To understand why people are so focused on politics
07:45We'll take a couple of scenarios and I'm certainly happy to hear your stories and thoughts
07:49about all of this
07:51let's take a couple of scenarios, so a
07:54woman
07:56works as a teacher for a government school and she gets to
08:01Leave, you know mid-afternoon. She gets summers off and
08:06These days certainly she can download lesson plans from the internet and really doesn't have to do a super amount of work and
08:16She becomes highly desirable as a wife
08:20Why well?
08:22because we have this insane system where parents work till 5 and kids get off school at 3 o'clock or 3 30 and
08:28So there's that latchkey
08:30Void in the afternoon that of course, I'm sure many of us fell through over the course of our young lives
08:36and
08:37If you have a wife who's a teacher she can take your kids home from school
08:42Then we also have this void in the summer where you get two months plus
08:48Off school in the summer, of course
08:50This was originally so the kids could help with the harvest or the planting or farm work of some kind
08:55I don't know. I'm not much of a farmer. I'm an engagement farmer
08:59gentleman farmer doesn't get the kind of calluses on my hands that would give me
09:03manly credentials in a biker bar, but
09:05if you have a wife who is a teacher she can take your kids home after school and
09:11Coincidentally she gets summers off when your kids get summers off
09:15And so the giant scramble that working parents have over the course of the summer
09:19Which is what on earth do we do with our children, right?
09:23that giant scramble
09:25Doesn't occur because why why because you have
09:29You have a wife who also has summers off. So she becomes much more desirable
09:34This woman
09:36Can probably get I mean if she's going for a smart guy who understands these sorts of things even if only instinctually
09:43She can get a much more attractive and wealthy guy
09:47because
09:49her work schedule coincides with the great inconvenience of modern education and
09:54So she's much more valuable. That's sort of one instance now
09:58government workers
10:00don't work very hard and
10:02I don't know if you've ever been in a particular place in your life where you've gotten lazy if you ever had that
10:09For whatever reason maybe you have a slow job
10:13Maybe you are recovering from some ailment or maybe you're having sleep disturbances
10:19Or I don't know rickets some sort of iron deficiency or vitamin D and you're just low on energy and you just get kind of lazy
10:26this
10:27Make it about me again. No, just as an example, right?
10:30So this happened to me with regards to working out when I was in the entrepreneurial world as a the co-founder of a software company
10:36back in the 90s back in the 90s again, and
10:42I didn't work out. I mean when I was on a business trip, I'd hit that head down to the gym. I
10:48Remember waking up. It was a wild day and this was all new for me
10:52so it was all very exciting and I remember waking up and
10:56It was a terrible snowstorm
10:58In Toronto, I was living downtown Toronto on College Street and
11:02I woke up. It was a terrible snowstorm. I didn't even want to go to work
11:07Because the weather was so bad and I got a phone call from the CEO
11:11who said that the client in Phoenix, Arizona was freaking out and so I had to get on a plane and fly down and
11:20mollify
11:21Molyneux mollify mollify
11:23The the client I'm pretty good at calming ruffled feathers
11:27Which is why of course no one in the world has ever bothered by me. It's just I'm that I'm that chill
11:31I'm that Zen. I'm that stoic
11:33So I woke up in a snowstorm
11:35headed straight to the
11:37Airport got on a plane and then was drowning in my own sweat
11:42within a couple of hours heading off to a meeting in Phoenix and I remember swimming at the bottom of the pool after my meeting and
11:50Looking up letting the bubbles go up all the ripples and the chlorine going up your nose
11:56That seems to sit in your sinuses for approximately four lifetimes and just thinking how strange it was
12:01that I woke up in a snowstorm and
12:04before the Sun was set I
12:06was
12:07Blowing bubbles up a hotel pool. It's a wild thing to live in the modern world. It's a beautiful place to be for the most part
12:14But I didn't work out much and then when I got back into the habit of working out
12:18I just felt kind of cludgy and and sludgy and so on. I remember when I first started running again
12:22I just felt I felt my haunches. I felt my mildly
12:27Chunky butt from having a desk job and working 60 70 80 hours a week for a couple of years
12:32So you ever have this thing where you get lazy? Well when you get lazy
12:36You know object
12:38That is in motion tends to stay in motion. That's inertia, right and
12:42An object that is at rest or momentum. Sorry, that's momentum and an object that is at rest tends to stay at rest
12:49so
12:51People who are government workers adapt to that we are
12:55energy conserving machines
12:58So when we do not
13:01Require the expenditure of energy we tend to hoard it now this tends to be the case in warmer climates
13:09Right. If you look at the lion, right? I mean, why are they called lions because they spend most of their day
13:15Yes, that's right lying around. That's why they get their name
13:19I don't think that's true, but it seems true. It feels true should be true ought to be true. It must be true
13:24I decree it to be true
13:25So in warm climates given that you don't really have to worry too much about getting food
13:30When it's hot, I guess you can go kangaroo style and lick your forearms, but you just tend to rest
13:37in colder climates
13:39well
13:40It's a whole different matter. I mean
13:42Intermediate cold like Europe. I'm not talking about the Arctic
13:46Intermediate cold. Well, there's always something to do particularly of course if you're a farmer, there's always something to do
13:53There's a scarecrow to be propped up. There's
13:56Cows to check on there's fences to repair
13:59There's hay to bale. There's seeds to spread there's jam to make there's always something because you've got this
14:06Big-ass winter that you've got to flog your way through with limited
14:09food resources
14:11so basically
14:13What I'm saying is
14:15Epidemiologically
14:17epistemologically
14:19epistolary fashion the government turns people into
14:24Jamaica
14:25Eidemon
14:27You want to put your form of a dear man?
14:29That's what the government does it turns people into lions
14:33Occasionally predatory a lot of time lying around and so people have adapted to that
14:40they conserve energy and
14:42It certainly is true or was true back in the day when I was working
14:47That people seem to have a lot of time to chat and gossip
14:51Well, we're not that busy. How about a little hyper feminine infighting?
14:55Wouldn't that be a wonderful way to pass our lives along to get along a little doggy
15:02So people have adapted to it
15:04they have adapted to a
15:08lack of
15:09consequences
15:10This is really really important to understand that people in the government people who work for the government have adapted to a
15:17lack of
15:19Consequences, it doesn't matter if you screw up doesn't matter if you waste money in
15:24Business you try to save money in governments
15:28You try to spend money because if you save money
15:30Well, your budget is gonna be cut next year and you don't want that to happen because you don't want to fire your friends
15:37all that tasty nepotism
15:39So people have adapted to a lack of consequences people have adapted to
15:48No deadlines
15:49People have adapted to no consequences. No efficiency
15:55now
15:56efficiency is
15:58confrontation
15:59Efficiency is confrontation. You can't become more efficient
16:04without confronting and challenging
16:06People's work habits people have a way of doing things and if you want things to become more efficient
16:12you have to disrupt that way of doing things with different and better ways of doing things and if
16:17you are not someone who is a big fan of
16:22What can be pretty assertive and sometimes even pretty aggressive confrontation?
16:27well
16:29You want to go and work for the government because in the government things don't have to be efficient
16:33Which means you don't have to tell people to change and improve what they're doing and fire them if they don't or can't
16:41So you've got this treacly
16:44weird amniotic
16:46sisterhood of
16:48Everybody just kind of lazily
16:51Kicking their legs and thinking that they're champion swimmers people have adapted to that. They have adapted their entire personality structure
16:59to
17:01Niceness over efficiency and these two things can be polar opposites at times
17:07Virtue and niceness are often polar opposites because immorality so often hides in a smile. It's a great quote from
17:16Hamlet about Polonius let it be written here that one may smile and smile and smile and be a villain
17:24smiling damned villain
17:27but politics so if
17:29You want things to be efficient if you care about efficiency
17:33Then you have to be willing to confront people
17:37Shake them out of their complacency demand better demand different demand change and fire them if they don't go along with it and
17:45only people
17:46Who face no consequences for bad decisions can be unfailingly mindlessly?
17:52NPC style blank smiling nice nice nice all the time
17:56Entire personality structures, and I think even more foundationally
18:01people's sense of self
18:04people's sense of self has adapted to
18:07this
18:09environment
18:10fenced off by coercion free of
18:13consequences they have
18:15Got a sense of self
18:17Well, I work for this department or I do that and I'm nice and and we we can have a convivial workplace
18:25And there's no confrontations. There's maybe a little backstabbing behind the scenes, but there's not we're all nice to each other
18:31We all care about each other because it's very easy to be nice when you face no consequences
18:36for bad decisions in
18:38the
18:40fairly ruthless world of
18:42Software entrepreneurship that I was in for I guess close to a decade
18:46No a little over a decade actually if you make a mistake you're toast
18:52If you make a mistake if you don't land the sale you can't make payroll
18:57You know, I was talking to some friends
18:59I was at a wedding last week and I was talking to some friends and some new new friends that I've
19:05met and
19:08We were talking about the fact that men don't
19:11Approach women and talk to women and say well, there's a lot of rejection now
19:14I back in the day. I did the math once when I was in the software world because I was selling multi-million dollar
19:21Entrepreneurial sorry enterprise level software, right? I mean the software I sold the one corporation was on
19:27most of the continents and it's synchronized
19:31overnight on undersea cables
19:33Of the data's because if we couldn't get the central database
19:35the internet was too primitive back then to support a central database from Australia to
19:40New York, so everyone worked locally and then the database is all synchronized
19:45At night
19:47Approximately 8k per second. It seemed like don't make too many changes
19:51They won't be finished and then we had to make sure that things were fenced off
19:55Despite all the different time zones. Anyway, it's quite exciting and complicated
19:59but
20:00The rough math was something like this
20:03that
20:04You have to make a thousand calls
20:08to get a hundred
20:11interested parties
20:12To get ten meetings to make one sale
20:16point one percent
20:19success rate per call
20:21Should make a thousand calls to get a hundred interested parties to get ten meetings to make one sale now that one sale
20:27was millions of dollars
20:28Which handled payroll for quite a while?
20:31but you had to make now if I had said well, you know, I I I can't take that rejection and so on but
20:38and people would sometimes be snappy and sometimes be rude and
20:41Right. Why are you calling me?
20:43I'm busy and busy man and all that right and people wouldn't return your phone calls and all of that, right? So
20:49That's business though. That's sales. That's sales. I mean think of how many people come through and you do this all the time, too
20:56It's funny how people are so sensitive for to rejection when they're on the receiving end of rejection. Oh, she rejected me
21:02She said no, she didn't want my number that she's got a boyfriend
21:04It's so terrible but think about all the things and people that you reject
21:08This is just a basic empathy thing. You reject all these people all the time
21:13right, I
21:14Mean think about when you go
21:16To a garage sale, right?
21:18You see all these things on the table and most of them you don't buy you may not buy anything
21:22And of course the person's desperate to have things to buy because otherwise he's gonna be left over with a bunch of stuff
21:27He's gonna have to find a home for I guess probably junk, right?
21:30If you've ever gone to a fair or a Renaissance fair or something like that where they have all of these
21:36I don't understand the economics. I'd love to do a documentary on these ones
21:39Like what time do you get here in the morning?
21:41you know the places where they have the jousts and the sword fighting and all of that and people are dressed up and
21:46Of course you go to all of these little booths and all of these little booths are full of people desperate to sell their wares
21:52And you probably buy two or three things out of the hundred
21:56People who were there hundred booths that are there. So 200 people two person of booth, right?
22:00So 200 people you might buy two things. In other words, you're you have a rejection rate of 99%
22:07Do you think about that? Oh those poor people. I actually do I I'm such a softy
22:11I go I go to one of these booths and I feel the urge to buy something
22:16Because I don't want the person to be sad
22:19That's funny. Isn't that funny? I'm such a ridiculous softy. And of course having been on the other side of that table
22:26You know, I used to go to I'm in Vegas and other places there would be these conferences for
22:33environmental software environmental expertise and I would be
22:38Running the booth with someone and be chatting with people and we take their card and I think we oh, yeah
22:44We would bind them an iPod or something like that back at the day
22:48We'd give a here put your card in and then we'd use the card for cold calling and here put the card in and you know
22:53we'll we'll win you might win an iPod now back in the day and
22:58Back when 20 megs was all then was it 20? No, I had to be 20 gigs 20 megs would be
23:04Eight songs. I had a 64 meg player Rio 500
23:09magnificent so
23:12There is all of that you have to make a lot of calls
23:16But if you're in the government, you don't you really only have to make one call which is give me
23:21Funding and then everyone's calling you and you become really important. So you feel like you've got a very nice work environment because
23:28people don't confront each other about
23:30Inefficiencies and everyone can pretend to get along and everyone can pretend to be nice and you're a nice person and you have a nice
23:35work environment and everyone likes you and you can be convivial to everyone and and so on so you get a sense of yourself as
23:42Being a good person
23:45Because you're a nice person and because you're not funded voluntarily
23:49and
23:50You don't have competition
23:52You never have to
23:54Do much to improve efficiency and because you never have to do much to improve efficiency
23:58You never have to disrupt people and you know, there's a lot of people who are like, hey
24:02I'm used to doing it this way. Don't tell me how to do my job and it's like well you have to
24:07Shake people loose, right? I remember working with a corporation. Oh gosh
24:1330 years ago who was transitioning from
24:17Macintosh computers to Windows computers and people went nuts. I know how to do it. I know what's going on
24:23I don't want to learn new I don't want it, but you had to kind of push through it
24:27So people have adapted their entire personalities. I'm a nice person. I'm supportive. I'm helpful and
24:33It's non-confrontational
24:35Because confrontation has to do with efficiency which has to do with survivability
24:40But when you're fenced off from the market have no competition and your funding is guaranteed
24:44Then you don't have to be
24:47Confrontational you don't have to be difficult. You don't have to teach an old dog new tricks so to speak
24:52So you can think of yourself as really really nice
24:56So you get kind of lazy you conserve energy you live consequence-free. You can't be fired
25:02You get as much time off really as you want
25:06Because you can afford them to be really really nice so you can say well, you know
25:10Sally is sick quite a bit, but you know, we can be compassionate for that because
25:16Because we said that Sally is sick and the fact that she misses
25:20You know a couple of days a month or a week, you know, let's just try and find a way
25:24She'll she'll get better soon and all of that, right
25:27whereas if you're in the free market and somebody is ill a lot and you know
25:31of course, we would have natural human compassion for them being ill and we care about that and all but
25:36Well, you can't keep paying them for work that they're not doing see that sort of foundational
25:44Reality, I mean, I remember sweating buckets early on in my entrepreneurial career
25:50Because we had to make payroll cash flow is king right in the entrepreneurial world because sometimes people take
25:5760 to 90 days to settle their bills, which means you've got two to three months of payroll
26:01you've got to meet before you get the big check and
26:05I remember, you know coming from being broke to being a student and living on like I don't know six hundred dollars a month
26:12to then
26:14Signing jaw-dropping amounts of personal guarantees for payroll that that it wasn't even in the corporation
26:20Like it was a personal guarantee that I had to sign that would have put me in debt for many years
26:26To make payroll. It's quite exciting. It's quite exciting
26:30Of course, you know, it's funny because this is true of life as a whole, right?
26:33Isn't it that all the things that horrify you you look back with some fondness later on like at that time?
26:39It was just like God if there's some third-world country
26:42I can sell a kidney in rather than have to do it this way
26:45but of course now I look back and it's like seems kind of quaint and cool and exciting and you know,
26:50It is you know, comedy is just tragedy plus time right often
26:55so
26:56People have adapted and it happens at a very physiological level
27:01So sorry to keep bringing up all my entrepreneurial stuff
27:05but I think it does kind of apply because this is one of the times I mean I still doing the entrepreneurial thing, but
27:10I'll give you an example for instance when I
27:13When the company that I co-founded was being sold
27:16I had to go through a very intense physical blood work and lots of
27:21Questions and and test if I was on drugs or smoking or whatever don't test for caffeine
27:26It's like no. No, that's a given
27:28we have to given that we could probably take your blood and put it in a blender and make a nice latte, but I
27:35had to go through a lot of
27:38Health checks they weighed me. They measured my body fat composition
27:42They took my blood because they wanted to know given that I was the chief technical officer at a software company
27:49Which is pretty much the heart and soul of the operation
27:53They wanted to know that I wasn't ill
27:55So it was kind of important to stay healthy
27:59We couldn't have sold the company if I'd been ill or if I had really bad health markers. In fact
28:07when the company grew
28:09The other executives and I were not allowed to fly on the same plane
28:15Which is fine I
28:17Find making small talk with people
28:19I don't know that well in a business context on an airplane to be a special definition of slow-burning heavily spiced hell
28:26but
28:27so we couldn't fly on the same plane because if the plane went down right the
28:30Investors the price that was paid for the company and the investors money could be towed or would be toast, right? So
28:36So even when it comes to health
28:38so one of the reasons that
28:41smart people take care of their health is
28:44So that you don't miss too much work and you have energy and you have focus and so on, right?
28:51I was just sort of I don't I'm not saying I started this trend
28:54I'm not saying I started this trend but it coincided with me starting to say people would want a meeting and I'd say well
29:00Let's walk
29:01Let's walk and talk
29:03even if it's just
29:05Around the corridors in the office. Let's just walk and talk. Like why do we need to sit our whole lives, right?
29:12Let's walk and talk if it was nice outside. Let's walk and talk outside. It's just much nicer much better in
29:19business
29:20Let's walk with me. It's usually not a good a good sign. It's gonna lead to some Joe Pesci goodfellas basement
29:26wall painting so
29:28But I was like, let's walk. That's what so you don't want to get too sick
29:32You want to stay focused because you're in competition you're in competition
29:35I still remember that was I still occasionally like once a year remember this guy when I used to work
29:40Downtown in in Toronto
29:42There was a guy that you'd see he just had this like he was one of these guys whose legs wasn't too thick
29:48His arms weren't too thick, but he just had this massive slow wake tidal
29:52wave of gut
29:54That looked like it was about to deep throat his belt buckle
29:58It really was just a jab of the hut sliding off his man boobs. And I remember thinking like God, how can
30:04How can you do this? Like I mean, how can you have any energy?
30:08How can you have focus and all of that?
30:12So you stay healthy, but the people of course in the government and I haven't seen the studies
30:16Maybe they exist. I don't know but the people in the government like
30:20Holy crap
30:21They big
30:23they big and
30:25they can afford to be because
30:27They don't need the same level of focus. They don't need the same level of energy. They don't need the same level of intensity
30:33they can get
30:35Estrogen II particularly the males get they can get soy based and estrogen II because they don't have to be assertive
30:40they don't have to
30:41Rock the boat or confront people or get people to change or anything like that. They can just
30:47Well roll along
30:50Roll along and of course, they've got
30:53massive
30:54unions not constrained by any free market or competition restrictions and
31:01They can get big
31:04It's kind of like some of the HR departments where I also worked people get kind of big
31:10Because it's usually mandated work. There's not a lot of competition
31:13Now it's usually mandated by various regulations that you have to have this that and the other in in the HR department. So
31:20They get big they get heavy
31:22Because they can't be fired. They don't have to go and get new jobs
31:26they get
31:28healthcare
31:29Usually free heavily subsidized and they get their pensions
31:34So they have actually physically adapted
31:37to like biologically
31:40Physiologically in terms of overall health. They have adapted to a very different environment in
31:46The business world in general. I mean there was a phase
31:49I think it was probably in the mid 90s where being a big guy
31:53But you can be a big guy if you've got dominant features and thick hair, right then you can be a big guy
32:00But and sometimes salespeople like the sort of big fuzzy wig
32:05Jolly Roger a kind of salesperson and so on but it did become the case that
32:11In order to sell I mean the product that I built was around
32:16environmental
32:17compliance and
32:19And health and safety, right?
32:21So you don't see a lot of fat guys welcoming people to the gym that they own, right?
32:25You kind of have to get high on your own supply so to speak
32:30and so in the business world
32:32Obesity is associated with negative personality traits
32:36And so if you want to be really successful for the most part I can think of some exceptions at various places
32:41but you had to be
32:44And and you had to be somewhat lean and in fact the guys who were like, yeah
32:49I just ran a half marathon on the weekend like the whip it thin
32:52Nervous energy guys were considered to be very productive. And of course as a as a manager you want people who's
32:59Health is not going to interfere with their with their duties with their commitments, right?
33:05So and you want people are gonna have energy and longevity and focus and all of that
33:10So people have like their bodies have distorted relative to their proximity to power
33:16So that's very serious
33:17Now we could just touch briefly on the women in particular
33:21But the men as well, right the welfare state and socialized health care has a lot to do with
33:26Fueling and funding sex addiction, right?
33:29What are the products of sex addiction while broken families? Well that's taken care of by
33:33Family courts in the welfare state and well STDs, but that's taken care of by socialized medicine or subsidized
33:39Medicine and abortions also same and and all of that
33:44so a lot of
33:46state power is there to
33:50Subsidize and thus promote
33:52sexual addiction which is simply
33:55sexual
33:56Intensity the sexual intensity of all of us that is unconstrained by consequences
34:01So, I mean one of the reasons why our sexuality has become so intense particularly for men is it's constrained by consequences you take away
34:08Those consequences and then that which was formerly a great adaptation to pair bond the species and have us grow the biggest brain in the universe
34:15then becomes
34:17An addiction that wipes out pair bonding in great fiery flamethrower swaths
34:23Across the entire society like Ripley and the giant Easter eggs
34:27So we have of course women
34:30who have
34:32adapted themselves
34:33To being you know hot pretty sexy
34:37offering sexual access in return for male resources or even the promise of
34:44sexual access in return for male resources
34:47Could happen the other way too, but it's more common
34:49female to male and
34:52They've adapted that way. You've got people of course who have not saved much money on the anticipation of
35:01Government pensions in their old age. They don't think about the money being inflated away. They don't think about
35:07The unfunded liabilities cracking the back of the economy. They just think it's going to be there so they haven't saved
35:14People who had to pay say for all of their own
35:19medications
35:21Would be far more interested in preventing illness rather than managing its symptoms
35:25But of course, there's not much profit in the prevention of illness
35:28There is profit through government money in the treatment of illness and the more constant the treatment and the more chronic the condition the more
35:35Money goes into the pockets of the unscrupulous
35:38from the taxpayer by the way
35:40Would somebody take better care of their own weight and dietary habits if they had to pay the rather scary amounts of money
35:48That are needed to be paid to manage diabetes
35:52well
35:54Yes, of course, they would of course they would
35:58So people have adapted their entire lifestyles. They have adapted their entire personalities on
36:05consequence-free
36:07political redistribution of
36:09taxpayer cash and
36:12This has become such a distorted element
36:15That people have lost
36:17Their compassion for the young completely. I mean completely
36:22Society is
36:24Foundationally nothing more or less than the sacrifices that older people are willing to make for the young
36:33society
36:34Is nothing more or less?
36:36Than the aggregation of the sacrifices the older willing to make for the young or the older
36:43So why is the birthrate declining so much? Well, there's a lot of reasons, but one of them is that we have a society
36:49Where the old sacrifice?
36:51nothing
36:52For the young in fact the old
36:56sacrifice the young
36:59the old
37:00Sacrifice the young this is why vampire stories right have become so
37:06popular vampire movies
37:08the old
37:10Sacrifice the young vampire movies became popular particularly. I'm thinking of Nosferatu in Germany
37:17After the first world war which was the most conspicuous sacrifice of the old to the young, but of course not many people remember that
37:23The first welfare state in the West was created
37:28Under Bismarck in Germany in the 1880s and it took as you know
37:33really in a half a century for that to
37:36Flourish into the hellscape known as full-scale national socialism and war I
37:41Mean socialism is a war against the citizens
37:45It's a civil war which then becomes an external war in order to maintain any pretense of
37:50unity in the society
37:53So people have adapted
37:55her to all of this
37:57And I'm just going to not flounder around but try to remember why I was on the topic of Germany
38:03I did a whole it was an NFT called the rise of
38:06Nazism which was whole examination all the way back to the origins of Nazism. It was a great presentation
38:13So spicy it was an NFT
38:16Freedom and nft.com actually you can check them out. There's still some cook it around
38:20Still some cook it around my book
38:22Rationalist manifesto some other cool stuff. And of course if you are finding what I'm saying helpful and interesting and valuable in
38:27Comprehending the world freedom n.com slash tonight your help and support is
38:33Greatly deeply and humbly humbly
38:35appreciated
38:37so women have
38:40forgone husbands for the sake of marrying the state and
38:44Freedom voluntarism
38:46less taxes well that threatens their
38:51existence
38:52Now I don't believe it threatens their physical existence. In fact, I'm in enormously sure I'm deeply sure enormously sure
38:59What does that mean? I'm deeply sure I'm
39:01Yeah, sure is kind of binary sure. I'm sure it's a degree thing now. I'm very sure
39:07Maximum sureness has been achieved
39:09I'm sure that say single moms for instance would be far better off in a free society even in the existing structure
39:15If we move to a free society a voluntary society single moms would be far better off because they wouldn't be isolated by welfare
39:21They would you know get together and live communally and they'd all watch each other's kids while they worked and they'd end up in a far
39:28better
39:29Situation the isolation of the single mother issue is is really chilling and very bad for the kids
39:33Of course our single mothers tend to speak only about
39:37600 words a day to their kids
39:39whereas
39:40Other mothers are you know, 1500 2000 and so on so different over time, but yes, so we are in a society
39:47where
39:49the old sacrifice the young the old eat the young as a whole and
39:54One of the reasons why of course the birth rate is down is we have a society
39:59Where people don't make sacrifices for the next generation
40:02The old don't make sacrifices for the next generation because the old vote
40:08With greater regularity than just about any other group and if some politician were to come along and say listen
40:15Oldsters I say this with great delicacy as I sail confidently into my 58th year next month or 59th year
40:22In fact, I'll be 58 but if a politician were to come along and say hey oldsters, there's no money in Social Security
40:29There's too many unfunded liabilities
40:31We're gonna have to means test your Social Security because otherwise there'll be no economy left for the young
40:36oh, and you know, maybe maybe we could reduce immigration just a smidge so that
40:41There are a few more job opportunities and slightly cheaper housing for younger
40:45People but that might mean that you're the value of your home which you bought for 12 strawberries in
40:511952 might go down a little bit
40:54No
40:55It can't be right. So this
40:58steady
41:00Absolutely steadfast dogginess to sacrifice nothing for the next generation
41:05well, that's flowed down from the boomers to the Jan Xers and
41:10Then to the Millennials
41:12Screw the next generation
41:13It's what I want to need that goes. There's no such thing as sacrifice for those who come after me
41:19Well that goes from boomers down to Jan Xers from Jan Xers to Millennials Jan Xers are aging out
41:24well actually have aged out of the
41:27reproductive pool, so it's really around the Millennials and
41:29because
41:31the boomers and a lot of the Jan Xers dumped them in daycare and went off to work and everyone's aware that they
41:37Won't absolutely they will absolutely hear nothing whatsoever about sacrificing for the next generation. Well
41:43Having children is sacrifice
41:46So if the old won't sacrifice for the young the young won't sacrifice for anyone and you get no kids
41:52I mean, there's another thing too. I don't know how accurate this is. I put it forward conditionally
41:57It may not be 5x may not be five times, but I was reading not too long ago
42:02About how if you look at it in terms of real purchasing power and availability of labor-saving devices and all this kind of stuff
42:09even the younger generation right now is
42:12Many times wealthier than the baby boom generation of the 1950s late 1940s and 1950s sort of after the war. Ah
42:20Yes, the baby boom that so horrified the socialists and communists that they had to invent feminism to make sure it never happened again
42:28so
42:29The problem is when kids grew up in I don't know nice houses with two cars and so on they get that
42:36template as the idea of
42:39How they should live but they're comparing the wealth of people in their 20s with the wealth of people in their 40s and 50s and
42:45Generally people hit that peak earning power in
42:49Their 40s and in particular in their 50s. So it's apples to oranges, right?
42:53So they grew up in these wealthy households and then they have to go out and
42:57Maybe maybe gosh forbid maybe gosh forbid. They have to have a baby in a one-bedroom apartment
43:04No, that's appalling. I need a house
43:06No
43:07No, no, you don't so people are refusing to have kids claiming poverty when they are in fact many times wealthier than the parents of
43:15the 1940s in the 1950s
43:17Who had you know, three four five six kids
43:20I mean, I know multiple families with five six seven kids and
43:25They make it work and they're not wealthy and they make it work. So it's not a it's not a money thing
43:31It's the I don't sacrifice. It's a selfishness thing. I don't sacrifice for the next generation
43:37I mean and I don't consider it really a sacrifice
43:40My daughter is one of the greatest and most joyful additions to my life
43:45But I didn't write books for 10 years because I was parenting I don't consider that a sacrifice
43:51But it is a deferral of gratification. Sometimes I really enjoyed writing books rather than going to another playground
43:56sometimes it was great fun, but I missed it sometimes and
44:00So this idea that you would sacrifice for the next generation, that's all gone
44:05So people have not saved in anticipation of government money when they're old and in particular and this again
44:12I defer to the great Kevin Samuels about this and his argument that women need men because they cannot get together the
44:19You know million to two million dollars that they need to retire on. They won't get that without a man. And of course
44:26one of the ways that women are provided for in their old age is through
44:31The life insurance policy of their husband. This sounds sinister, but it's not right. So a women
44:40Are provided for in their old age both by their husband's savings and possible continual work
44:44but also since women outlive their husband sometimes by a considerable amount the husband should of course have and if you are married and
44:52Particularly if your parents and you don't have life insurance
44:54Shame on you stop listening to this and go deal with that for heaven's sakes
44:58But you know for man has a million dollar life insurance
45:02Then when he dies as he often does earlier than the wife
45:05Then she uses that to pay off his remaining medical bills and to live in comfort for the rest of her life
45:09Plus if she has kids and she's a good grandmother
45:12Then they will welcome her into their home
45:15But people have structured their entire lives
45:18around government largesse
45:20People have structured their entire lives. They've adapted to it. They've adapted to it and
45:26It's almost like if you've ever seen these
45:29images
45:30Where a freshwater stream goes into the ocean
45:34There's like a little lake around the tributary
45:37Egress, right? There's a little little lake. It looks like a little lake and
45:41There's there's oceans where you can see these
45:44ocean currents like, you know, you see these when you look out in in Ontario, of course is a land of lakes and
45:52Thousand Islands comes from somewhere and you look out across these lakes and you see these rivers within these lakes
45:57As sort of different currents and temperatures are jostling around
46:00So when you see fresh water coming from the mountains come cascading down and goes into the ocean then
46:08you get
46:10freshwater and saltwater
46:12impacted right and the they look very different they look very different they behave very differently and
46:19so
46:20You've got
46:21Some fish who are adapted to freshwater and some fish who are adapted to saltwater. I remember when the movie Finding Nemo came out
46:30Everybody was like, oh, let's get
46:32Dory and I don't know whatever the clown fish's name was and
46:37It was really complicated because keeping freshwater saltwater fish is complicated freshwater fish is much easier and they were saltwater fish
46:44ocean fish
46:45so the fish that have adapted to the freshwater don't do so well in the saltwater and vice-versa and people have adapted to
46:53government largess government power
46:55government protection government security government
46:58Coddling they've adapted to it. And so when you talk about a free society if
47:06If freshwater fish
47:09were told that they were now going to go on
47:12an
47:14Unstoppable path down the river and end up in the saltwater. They'd freak out and they would view it as a death sentence
47:20We can't live there and they get it deep down and instinctively instinctually
47:25Exploiters don't like free markets
47:28It's like the rich kid right the rich kid if the family loses all their money and he has to go get a job
47:33But he's no longer anything special and he can't Instagram from his private jet and whatever right? Well, he's he's enraged
47:41Right, he's enraged it happens to some women like if they tend to be kind of shallow and looks obsessed
47:47it happens to some degree with women when they
47:50Get older and
47:52Men stop paying attention to them and if they haven't used their youth and beauty and fertility to secure a family they get mad
48:002030 half of women half of women
48:03from 24 to 35
48:05Gonna be single childless
48:07It's a catastrophe
48:09But that's what happens when a lack of sacrifice is modeled
48:12If you won't sacrifice me if you won't even talk about limiting government spending if you won't sacrifice to me
48:17Why would I sacrifice?
48:19For kids it is also the the falling birth rates a lot of times are also vengeance against the selfishness of the parents
48:25That is an unconscious thing
48:26If you were so selfish that you put me in daycare and you wreck the economy and you change the entire country
48:32Not really for the better in many ways
48:35Well, I'm gonna end the bloodline
48:38I'm gonna end the bloodline if you're if you're
48:43Hedonistic if you preferred work to spending time with your children if you're hedonistic
48:48well
48:49I'm hedonistic. Your hedonism was to put you in daycare. My hedonism is to become a dog mom
48:56so yeah, why do people take politics very seriously because they've adapted to survive upon it and they can't imagine life without it and
49:03for them it feels like you're trying to turn a
49:06gazelle into a meat-eater or a lion into a
49:09Vegan they don't know how they would survive without their source of nutrition. It's very powerful stuff
49:16You're dealing with people's identities with their sense of virtue
49:19all of that
49:21All of it. This is why these
49:24conversations get so tense and
49:27this is why it's so easy to get people to say hate someone like Donald Trump who's like Gordian gold-plated toilets and
49:35half a rap star
49:37Ostentatious consumption, but Trump is a free market guy
49:41Trump is a free market guy. He's associated with the free market
49:45So it's very easy to get people to hate and fear him because he represents
49:49The loss of privilege he represents the lost state power protecting you from competition
49:56he pays taxes and
49:58So it's easy to get those who consume the taxes he pays and others pay into hating and fearing him
50:03This is why it's been so easy to do that. I mean other than propaganda as a whole. That's what he represents
50:10So if you are having I don't know if you still have I don't really do political arguments anymore
50:16But if you're having political arguments with people you can just ask yourself, okay, they work for the government. Do they
50:22Rely on the government. Do they need the government?
50:25have they
50:27formulated their lives
50:29to
50:30Adapt to the nutrition and protection of the government. Are they coddled?
50:35Shielded bubble-wrapped from reality have they become virtuous and healthy a pseudo virtuous unhealthy
50:43Could they survive?
50:45voluntary choice
50:47Could they survive voluntary choice? It's kind of like if there was a system of
50:52arranged marriages and
50:54It was all just forcibly arranged and so on and you know
50:57Women wouldn't particularly care how attractive they were because they just be assigned and the guy forced to marry them or whatever
51:02Then you you went to romantic love people would be like, oh god
51:04maybe I should have taken better care of my teeth and not gained weight and you know
51:08Taking better care of my hair and and appearance and and all of that. Well, there's now you you're in the free market
51:15so, I mean, this is one of the problems of government power is
51:18people adapt to it and
51:20then if
51:23It seems
51:25That it might change
51:27people really freak out
51:31so when Trump says was, you know, maybe let's get rid of the Department of Education because it just seems like education a government education is basically just a
51:40massive welfare scheme for useless
51:43Mid-level bureaucrats to shuffle paper back and forth while the children's brains die under there the shadow of their bloated
51:51Loathsome spotty behinds as the old Monty Python quote goes well
51:55it's a lot of people who depend on that money a lot of people who depend on that privilege a lot of people whose
52:00emotions and sense of virtue and
52:02Healthcare all depends. It's gonna be a lot of people who are gonna get really freaked out if they have to
52:09Make it in a voluntary situation. So I think that's why people take politics so seriously
52:15For us, you know, if we're sort of productive members of the relatively free market
52:19It's just like that's just kind of this annoyance from time to time
52:22but for the people who've adapted to it, it feels like though it I don't think it is but a lot of times it feels
52:27Like life and death. So that's what I wanted to get across
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52:50We will talk to you tomorrow morning 11 a.m. Lots of love from up here my friends. I will talk to you soon. Bye. Bye