Stefan Molyneux, Part 1: A fun guy, who is here to help...
Welcome back to Cult Season, where we continue our sincere attempt to make you feel a little bit worse about the world and everything in it.This week, we turn to Stefan Molyneux, online pioneer, prolific content creator, and self-proclaimed most popular philosopher in the world. Alternatively his wikipedia entry describes him as "an Irish-born Canadian white nationalist podcaster and proponent of conspiracy theories, white supremacy, scientific racism, and the men's rights movement." Charming...One thing is for sure: Molyneux is the only man alive who can turn literally any question into a monologue that combines demonic liberals, cutting off friends and family, and female reproductive choices. A true Renaissance man for people who hate Renaissance values.In this first episode we take a brief tour through the Molyneux Expanded Universe™, which includes some infamous clips from his early days as the creator of an online 'philosophy' cult themed around anti-spanking, anarcho-capitalism, and misogyny. We also cover his pivot to MAGA apologetics and overt white nationalism and finally to late-stage Molyneux, where he now lurks in Twitter Spaces, berating callers and insisting the world is populated by demon-ridden NPCs gleefully urinating on their moral superiors.Look forward to learning about his extensive rhetorical techniques, which include thin-skinned narcissism, a penchant for violent metaphors usually featuring urine and anal torture, his constant demand that listeners cut off their families and, of course, his favourite claim: that anyone who disagrees with him is a man-whore NPC who wants to kill you.Also featuring:A Weinstein cameo (because of course)Chris recounting the proto–Decoding the Gurus origin story involving a Facebook post and some early Molyneux contentAnd a rare chance to hear Matt physically wince at a Rocky Horror cold openIf you’ve ever wanted to hear a preening narcissist berate his listener for raising entirely reasonable points... well, this is the episode for you.Scott Adams should be careful, a new contender has emerged for his crown...Part 2 coming soon, assuming we survive this one.LinksFreedomain Radio 6162: The Most Frightening Fact! (Twitter/X Space)Philosophy student reviews Molyneux’s The Art of the ArgumentMichael Shermer’s amazing excuse for endorsing MolyneuxFormer guest discusses Molyneux’s descent into racist pseudoscience (2016)Guardian article (2008) on Molyneux’s online cult & “DeFooing”Daily Mail article (2015) on a family impacted by Molyneux’s communityDaily Beast profile on Molyneux during his Trump pivotSPLC profile on Stefan...
Hello and welcome to The Creating the Gurus, the podcast where anthropologists and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer, and we try to understand what they're talking about.
It's the kind of reductive materialist podcast that if you were to even throw a bone, even hand it to thinkers like panpsychists in any way, shape or form, you will be hung, drawn and quartered.
I'm Matt Brown.
I'm the benevolent pope of this podcast.
And with me is Chris Kavanagh, the evil cardinal, the Inquisitor to my to my Pope.
Hello, Chris.
I like that.
I thought you were going to say Igor Bishop.
And I was like, I'm not sure.
I like that.
But Inquisitor, I can live with.
I like that.
Yeah.
No one expects the Inquisition.
That's right.
The reductive materialist Inquisition.
No one is safe, even the Pope, occasionally.
Yeah, this is true.
And certainly no one is safe in this episode, Matt, because we're turning to a figure who has been on the docket for a number of years, but we never got around to for a lot of reasons.
One of the reasons was that he got banned from a lot of platforms, and then he was less relevant and kind of he faded into obscurity.
And things that shouldn't have been forgotten about, Matt, were lost.
They found their way back with Elon Musk gaining power on Twitter.
But the person we're talking about is one Stefan Molyneux of Free Domain Radio.
As he describes it, the largest philosophy community on the internet.
That's what he describes.
Yes.
Yes.
He does.
If I read his Wikipedia, just the first few lines, it says, Stefan Basil Molyneux is an Irish-born Canadian white nationalist podcaster and proponent of conspiracy theories, white supremacy, scientific racism, and the men's rights movement.
He is the founder of the Free Domain Radio website.
Multiple sources describe the Free Domain Internet community as a cult, referring to the indoctrination techniques Molneux has used as his leader.
That's not a Wikipedia page anyone wants, really.
That's not a good Wikipedia page, I think.
So in this episode, we're not covering, I think, the worst of what Molyneux has said or done.
Oh, don't be so sure.
Don't be so sure, Matt.
We'll cover plenty of things.
And there is a little introductory segment that you don't know about, which I need to play to get you up the speed.
But there's a guy who interviewed Chris Williamson.
He's a comedian called Finn Taylor.
And when Chris Williamson was giving his backstory about, you know, there was a club promoter who was on Love Island before he became an alternative media podcaster.
And he exclaimed, Kant Bingo.
I feel like the description that Stefan Molyneux has at the start of that Wikipedia, like conspiracy theorist, white nationalist, scientific research advocate, cult leader.
It does, I think, justify the term can't be go.
Yeah, I was going to describe it as the trifecta of all things awful, but there's far more than three things there.
Such a long list.
Yeah, that's true.
And this episode is part of Cult Season.
As you know, editor Andy created a theme song, which had a very 90s pop kind of aesthetic to it.
There were complaints, man.
People said, cultural appropriation, this isn't suitable for the show.
You need something that properly captures your essence.
So I said to Andy, Andy, go back, commission whoever you need.
You know, get on it.
Fix this.
Fix this.
And Andy supplied something, a revised version of the intro theme.
So I'd like to play that for you now.
Okay, I'm ready.
Culturally appropriate this time.
So don't listen to the leader.
Come with us and fire up your gourometer.
It's time for cult season.
Get out your decoder rings.
This is cult season on the DTG.
It's time for cult season.
It's time for decoding this cold season christening on the DTG.
Oh, God.
I got a tear in my eye.
I got a tear in my eye after hearing that.
I did expect it to segue into, you know, armored cars and tanks and guns came.
Never have I felt my culture so accurately represented in that Irish lament.
Slight odd choice of pronunciation with Garometer, but, you know, he brought the rhyme home.
That's the main thing.
What Garorometer?
What a talented singer that man must be, that person.
That's right.
Andy.
He's a man of multiple talents.
So there you go.
So any further completes direct his way, editor Andy at gmail.com.
Yeah.
Yep.
It's not his email, but you can direct them there anyway.
That's right.
We outsource all content like this to him.
Yeah.
That's right.
Anything, basically, anything in the podcast that's a little bit, you know, if there's anything that causes trouble or you might find annoying or offensive, that's probably editor Andy.
Yeah.
He's ready to receive your emails anytime.
Oh, yeah.
He's ready, willing and able.
So yeah, editor Andy at Gmail.
That's the.
All right.
So anyway, let's continue on, shall we?
But yes, let's.
The content we're going to be looking at is episode 6162.
The most frightening fact, Twitter expius.
And this was posted on the 2nd of November.
It's from the 31st of October.
I have to stop you there.
Read that number out to me again.
What episode number?
6162.
Right.
So I think this is connected to something you told me, which is that this guy produces an incredible amount of content.
And I think this is a fact not unconnected with this reputation of being something of a cult leader.
No?
Yes, yes.
He used to put out more content than he currently puts out, but he's still putting out, looks like over an hour of content a day.
But at one stage, it was like four hours a day.
He was, you know, in a way, it's kind of predating the streamers because he wasn't doing live streaming, but he was kind of doing talk radio call-in style stuff in podcast format.
So he was along those lines, but also he has been doing this since 2004.
He's an early adopter of this.
He's really a pioneer in technology.
So I think even knowing nothing about the content, there's a little bit of a red flag there in terms of cultishness, right?
Because if you are listening to Stéphane Molyneux in your ears for four hours a day, then you don't know.
Let's just say some bad life choices.
Yeah, yes, yes.
And you are spending far too much time listening to a single source, I would say, you know, something like how cults operate, right?
Yeah, yep, I'd agree with that.
And many cunt, sorry, many cult experts.
You're hooked now.
You said it twice.
I know, I said what I said twice.
Like, I normally wouldn't be so vulgar, Matt, but in this occasion, I think it's warranted.
I apologize.
I won't invoke it again, but I feel it's necessary, right?
And I do want to mention in regards to this episode, that there's actually a little bit of decoding the guru's lore here, Matt, because Stefan Molyneux is part of the origins of this podcast that you don't know about.
In fact, is that right?
Hang on.
No, I am the origin of this podcast.
And there's no way that I could not know this.
There are origins that predate me, are there, Chris?
All right.
All right.
Tell me about them.
Tell me about them.
Well, so I was aware of Stefan Molyneux back in the day just from paying attention to terrible people online.
But one of my university friends got interested in him and was sharing his content on Facebook.
And this was back when people would, you know, use Facebook and argue about things and whatever.
And I responded to some of the things that he posted and was like, this is a terrible person.
And then he was like, well, you didn't refute anything he said.
And he posted this video of him talking to a caller, right?
It was like a 30-minute video or maybe it was longer.
And he said, you didn't, you know, if he's that wrong, you should be able to show some of the mistakes he made.
So I took that challenge and I went through the audio and wrote like a Facebook comment that was probably, you know, 2,000 words long or so.
But it actually was only the first seven minutes of the video.
I went through and I put quotation marks and was like, he said this.
This is undermining the caller.
This is him inferring something he can't know.
Blah, blah, blah.
And it took me ages, right?
And I did seven minutes and I was like, this will take me all day.
And I said, there's the first seven minutes.
That's enough.
That's, that should be enough to get you started.
But that was a, if you like, Matt, they, you know, a precursor to the podcast format that we adopt.
So yeah, I like that.
I like that.
I see now that the podcast is simply me and everyone else living in your world.
You simply embraced the podcast.
I was born.
But yeah, so, and the thing with Steph Molyneux is as well, like I said, as Matt mentions, we're not going to go deep through everything that he's done because there's literally a lifetime's work of terrible things.
But I will mention just a couple of the highlights, okay?
So, as mentioned, he was an early adopter of online technology and has been incredibly accused of running an online cult.
At that time, it focused around a couple of things.
One of them was anarcho-capitalism, a variation of libertarianism, American libertarianism, what some people might describe as just bog standard, extreme right-wing views in a fancy dress.
That's the way it could be described.
But so, anarcho-capitalism, okay, plasma, a kind of Freudian, Jungian, psychoanalytic, pseudo-psychology view that all the issues that people face are due to mistreatment of their parents, primarily through the issue of spanking and Mueller's mistreating their children.
He had a very big chip on his shoulder about women and a very big chip about spanking.
So, this he kind of made an internet cult around anti-spanking and anarcho-capitalism.
That was back when the internet was fresh and young, and you could make a cult around anything.
Well, the anti-spanking doesn't sound that bad.
Oh, yeah, but he made it bad.
It doesn't sound that bad, but he made it bad.
And I want to just give people a little bit of a taste of what kind of stuff he was on about then, because you know, you hear anti-spanking, potentially misogynistic stuff, and you're like, okay, all right.
But I think it's different when you hear it.
Okay, so this is a rather famous clip where he's talking to Caller who was initially trying to complain about his father being an asshole and mistreating his father.
But Stefan took it a different route.
So, listen to this.
Your father was in your life because your mother chose him over a wide variety of other suitors.
Women define the relationship, particularly the longer-term relationship.
Because men ask women out and women say yes or no.
And a pretty woman has lots of guys who want to ask her out.
And some of them are nice and some of them are pricks.
Women who choose the assholes will fucking end this race.
They will fucking end this human race if we don't start holding them a fucking countable.
I agree with that.
They are the gatekeepers, as you said.
Look, women who choose assholes guarantee child abuse.
Women who choose assholes guarantee criminality, sociopathy, politicians, all the cold-hearted jerks who run the world came out of the vaginas of women who married assholes.
And I don't know how to make the world a better place without holding women accountable for choosing assholes.
Your dad was an asshole because your mother chose him.
Because it works on so many women.
If asshole wasn't a great reproductive strategy, it would have been gone long ago.
There you go, Mart.
Okay.
All right.
Yeah, I was wondering how an anti-spanking theme could be made to be sinister.
And now I know.
Yeah, so there you also hear the early stages of the evolutionary psychology of the monosphere, right?
Like it's, it's all women are all to blame for wars and politicians.
Apparently, they just got forward.
They got a lot to answer for.
They got a lot to answer for, the women.
Look, is it true or false that all people that are alive today were born from vaginas?
They're all born of women.
True or false, Matt.
True or false.
Just answer it.
Well, actually, setting the side cesarean births.
Well, yeah, didn't think about that one, did you?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I guess, look, he's an interesting historical artifact who is still, unfortunately, rattling around.
I take your point that he definitely an OG, an early adopter of a lot of this red-pilled, incel, manosphere, misogynistic, just internet weirdness.
Yeah, a trailblazer in that regard.
A trailblazer.
Let's just let him finish that.
You thought that was the climax, Matt.
That's not the climax.
Here's the end of this round.
Women keep that black bastard flame alive.
They cup their hands around it.
They protect it with their bodies.
They keep the evil of the species going by continually choosing these guys.
If being an asshole didn't get women, there would be no assholes left.
If women chose nice guys over assholes, we would have a glorious and peaceful world in one generation.
Women determine the personality traits of the men because women choose who to have sex with and who to have children with and who to expose those children to.
I get that you're angry at your dad and you have every reason to be angry at your dad.
Your dad is who he is fundamentally because your mother was willing to fuck him and have you willing and eager to fuck the monster.
Stop fucking monstrous.
We get a great world.
Keep fucking monstrous.
We get catastrophes.
We get war.
We get nuclear weapons.
We get national debts.
We get incarcerations and prison guards and all the other florid assholes who rule the world.
Women worship at the feet of the devil and wonder why the world is evil.
And then, you know what they say?
We're victims.
Poor us.
Right.
Yes.
So it's an interesting argument to lay the blame of all of the bad things that men do.
And their specific circumstance as well.
Yes.
All the bad things are plus this plus specific thing.
Everything that men do.
Actually, it's the women's fault.
You know, an idiot might think the blame might lie with men, but Stefan Molnier is very clever there, isn't he?
He's figured it out.
Yes, and this kind of clip, by the way, Matt, makes it clear, like when you hear him talking to other people, like Joe Rugan, notably, had Stefan Moly on four times or so back in the day.
And when Joe kind of pushed him on these points, he would adopt a much more reasonable, there was no fucking assholes mentioned or this extreme rhetoric, right?
It was all, well, of course, men are to blame too, but I just want to highlight that there are issues, you know, that are sometimes overlooked and so on.
So this is power for the course.
So, I mean, you might have detected a note of misogyny there.
There was like a little bit, a little bit.
You picked it up.
He's got a lot of issues, this Stefan.
But so that's the misogyny side of things.
But that's not all I did.
So I mentioned anarcho-capitalism.
And that already, a fairly silly fringe political ideology, right?
Mostly for internet fedora-wearing teenagers.
But there are some bold men that also get into it, like Stefan.
And let's just hear a little bit about where he goes with that rhetoric.
Somebody says, I support farm subsidies.
You simply say to them, do you support me getting shot if I don't support them?
I think we need socialized medicine.
Will you support me getting shot if I don't agree?
Or thrown into an ass raping, gangbang, hellish prison hole?
Do you support torture or violence against me if I disagree with you?
We need old age security.
Will you shoot me if I disagree?
Yes or no?
It's a yes or no question.
Will you support me getting shot if I disagree?
Do you advocate the use of violence against me if I disagree with you?
If every libertarian in the world did this, we would be free very quickly.
And that's how, to put some skin in the game, my friends, to look people in the eye.
And you say to them, do you support me getting shot if I disagree with you?
Do you support the initiation of the use of force against me?
Against me.
You following the logic there, Matt?
Yeah, yeah, I did.
I detect a small gap in the logic there.
I mean, I get the vibe.
Like, it reminds me of sovereign citizens and how they feel quite strongly that they can basically proclaim their sovereign independence of any kind of social control, taxation or registrations or anything like that.
So if you don't agree with them, in other words, let them do whatever they want, then you have to force them to buy violence is kind of the weird logic there.
It's kind of ultimately at the end of the chain of state powers against you is the monopoly on violence, right?
The police and the military.
So you don't pay your taxes.
Okay, you start to get fines.
What if you don't pay your fines?
They come to your door.
Eventually, they'll try to lock you up.
What if you resist?
You know, then you pull a weapon, then the military gun you down.
So you're saying that you want people to execute me, right?
And that is the logic.
So that's what he's talking about is like, you know, that because the state has a monopoly of violence, that by not endorsing the anti-state anarcho-capitalism, you're basically endorsing him dead.
And so keep that in mind, Matt, while you hear this.
Are you willing to look me in the eye and say, Steph, you should be shot?
Because that's what we're talking about.
Forget all the abstracts and the statistics.
It comes down to a very simple question.
Should I be shot?
Are you going to cheer when they drag me away and throw me in a pit of anal rape?
Do you support the use of violence against me?
Not others, not over there or that side of the street, but me, as a human being sitting right in front of you, across the dinner table, across the bar.
Do you support me being shot?
That's all it comes down to.
That is integrity, courage, and certainty.
Now, the certainty comes with the effects of that conversation.
This is where libertarians fall down, go boom.
If we truly believe that the initiation of the use of violence is the core evil in the world, and it is, if you don't believe me, read my book.
If we believe that the initiation of the use of force is the core evil in the world, and if we understand that the state is an effect of the moral beliefs of society, then those who advocate justifications or who justify the use of force are creating a world that enslaves us actively and purposefully.
So what are you going to do with those people in your life?
Are we done?
You're done for now.
There's one more clip.
No more pregnant pauses.
Well, I got to say, the more you listen to Ol Stefan, the more inclined you are going to be to answer yes to those binary questions.
He is asking, throw him into a pit of anal rape?
Yeah.
Why not?
You might deserve it.
He's also, I think the funny thing is that he's relying on you being a listener who feels positively inclined towards Stefan because he's like, don't talk about other people.
It's B, Stefan, Baldy Man here.
And in all these videos, he's at a camera, right?
You know, zoomed in on his face, speaking directly to the listener as well.
Yeah, like the 1984 leader.
And you get some hints of the cultistness there too, of course, because he's hinting there at you need to separate those people that are not 100% on board with his particular brand of, let's face it, incredibly juvenile libertarianism.
Then you need to get them out of your life.
So.
Yeah, Chris.
Yeah.
And picking up.
He hasn't changed his style.
In the content we're going to listen to for the main part of this episode, he's got the same style, the same pregnant pauses and the, you know, that kind of interrogating, you know, stupid, you know, binary questions, you know, to the, he's got, he's got a little battery of rhetorical tricks there that are pretty primitive.
Yes, and this is actually what I want, part of the reason I wanted to play this, because although the delivery in some aspects is a little bit different, like you probably won't hear him invoke genol rip as much as he does in these clips, but a lot of the stuff is very similar.
And he hasn't really changed.
He's just kind of moved with the times in terms of what he focuses on.
Because, like, for example, now he's my guy, right?
He was a big Trump supporter.
So that's a strange thing for somebody that is here talking about state powers being, you know, essentially wanting people to die.
Donald Trump, not exactly somebody that is hesitant to use the powers of the state in a way that a libertarian should especially object to, right?
But that was no problem for old Stefan.
So it is, in all fairness, he's hardly the only libertarian that has failed to pass that bar.
That's true.
But, you know, just here, the level of rhetoric where it's so high, right?
The kind of non-aggression principle that's been evoked, all this kind of thing.
But you hinted that there was, you know, there was an element of cultishness creeping in there towards the end.
Yes, yes, just a hint.
One more clip.
Let's see if people can pick up on the element that you're noting.
So if you genuinely believe, if you are certain that the initiation of the use of force is immoral and that those in your life,
not in the news, those in your life who advocate and praise you getting shot, what are you going to do with those people?
If you're certain, what are you going to do with those people?
You know the answer.
It's nothing I need to tell you.
You don't keep people.
It's amazing to even have to say this.
But let me say it.
So there's no misunderstanding.
It's nothing you don't know.
You don't keep people in your life who want you shot.
You don't hang with people who want you shot.
You don't go to dinner parties with people who want you shot.
Do you understand?
What about you means, what against me in terms of violence really means.
You don't go to Thanksgiving dinner with people who want you thrown in jail.
You don't go on little shopping excursions with a mother who wants you shot.
If you do, and I mean, you can do whatever you want, but just now so you understand with real clarity, real clarity, that if you sit down with somebody, look them in the eye, and say, you support the use of violence against me, and that person says, yep.
And then you say, great, let's go play some air hockey, right?
Then you're a coward.
Is that subtle?
It is not subtle.
Of course, listeners will know that a standard practice of cults is to separate people.
Well, first of all, get them on board with a very totalizing philosophy spouted by the irregular dead or they agree entirely with your insane anarcho-capitalist rhetoric.
Exactly.
Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
Never was better advice given in the movie.
But yeah, that is what they do.
And they separate you from your family and your friends and all your social networks.
Anyone, really, on the grounds that the other people have not accepted the absolute truth.
So yeah, Chris, I'm really seeing the benefit actually of us doing this cult season because I think it is helpful to listen to these cultish figures like Keith Ranieri at Stefan Molyneux back to back and you hear the kinds of things they're saying.
I mean, he is like a less sophisticated, less plausible cult leader than Keith Ranieri.
And I think that's why he's like, probably had less success, I think, but also didn't go to jail.
Yeah, yeah, that's part of the issue, right?
He's still around.
He's Matt.
A point here that I feel that's worth noting is these clips are quite old, right?
They're from back in the day in the internet.
These clips existed.
And previously, notably Sam Harris and various other people were unable to determine whether Stefan Molyneux was actually like a problematic figure or not.
Sam Harris literally, I think, talked for a year that he couldn't work out if the smears against Stefan Molyneux were legitimate or not.
Like, it's not that hard to detect, right?
It's not even Joe Rogan raised some of these clips in the interviews he did with him.
But like Michael Schumer went on this show many years after all these stuffs were public knowledge and tweeted out that Stephan Molyneux was an important force for reason.
Right.
So, you know, you feel like it should be very clear, but it's not very clear.
It certainly was not very clear to the IDW people.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I don't understand it.
The studied obtuseness of some of those figures.
And yeah, like eventually people like Sam seem to get it, at least sometimes, with some figures.
It just takes them so long.
And I still don't understand whether or not there's something wrong with his brain or whether he's just so incredibly lazy that he never even spends half an hour.
An evening.
Exactly.
All these clips were, you know, they used to be, actually, Molyneux has done an effort to try and scrub all these.
It took me a little bit of time to find the originals of these because they've been scrubbed from the internet by him, by making copyright claims.
But there you go.
I do think that people do deserve condemnation if they couldn't work this out.
Like there's many long detailed articles like on the Sovereign Poverty Law Center.
And I know that figures in the intellectual dark web have issues with that organization, right?
Because they felt they were smeared.
But you could just follow the links and see the videos of him spouting the thing, right?
And in regards to the Sovereign Poverty Law Center, the main reason they were interested in him is, of course, because he's an ethno-nationalist, a white nationalist.
And he was that for quite a while, also dabbled in kind of Holocaust denialism.
But as Sam Harris said when we talked to him, I brought up Steph Molyneux, by the way, when we originally talked to him, but he said that specific charge wasn't correct because Stefan does not overtly deny the Holocaust, which is true.
But he engaged in the, you know, the kind of frustration, shall we say, Matt, that, you know, the Nazi event is because the Jews were involved with various actions like trade union movements and Marxist movements and so on.
So it was, it's not overt Holocaust denialism, but it's, it's in that territory.
And he's since become a lot more avert about all manner of things that he believed.
He went on Dave Rubin and talked about Riusiq and the size of black people's skulls and so on, right?
So just to hear a little bit of this, he made a documentary about Poland and how Poland was a great country because it's predominantly white.
And I'll just play a little clip of him talking about that so you can hear, you know, the white nationalist elements.
You know, I go to Poland.
What is it?
99% white.
I don't need any security.
The streets are incredibly clean.
Crime is almost non-existent.
Nobody gets called a racist.
There's no talk of white privilege.
No identity politics.
No endless diversity nagging.
You know, I spoken against white nationalism, but I'm an empiricist.
I'm an empiricist.
I went to the country.
I saw how it was like.
We could put something out on social media to have a social gathering.
And we actually had the social gathering without bomb threats, without violence, without attacks, without things coming through the window.
I've spoken out against white nationalism, but I'm an empiricist.
I'm listening.
I'm listening to my experiences.
Can't argue with the facts.
Can't argue with the reality.
I mean, you can, but there you go.
There you go.
There's the gun.
Lovely guy.
What a guy.
But, you know, and oh, and Matt, I forgot to mention that, you know, with the whole cutting off the family things, there was a specific terminology, as there often is in cults.
He had a thing that he called defooing.
It's what made him the subject of various anti-cult documentaries in the mid-2000s and whatnot.
And defooing is the family of origin, yourself, like removing yourself, cutting out your family of origin and embracing your new family, the free Dominion philosophical family.
He's also published a whole bunch of books about philosophy and his politics and all that kind of thing.
At one point, some philosophers reviewed his book and completely tore it to shred and said it was, like, this isn't even philosophy, right?
Like, this is even undergraduate level philosophy.
But he presented that as you would imagine that he would, that that's just the mainstream elites responding against him and so on.
Yeah.
So.
Yeah, it's interesting.
I mean, like Ranieri too likes to likes to present himself as a philosopher.
And I think that's probably the go-to category for the secular type of gurus, as opposed to the religious ones, right?
The religious guru will present themselves as a seer, as a prophet, and even some kind of divine figure.
For a secular guru, philosopher is a convenient category for them.
Yes, yes.
And there's all the things we could go into.
He was, you know, a new atheist, fantastic religion guy at one point.
We'll hear that he's somewhat moved on those things.
But, you know, so the thing that was interesting to me, Matt, was I'd actually written an article by Stefan Molynew back in the day.
So I spent some time looking at his content, looking at the survivor communities that were around him and some of the cult profiles and stuff.
So I knew about his lore, but I had stopped paying attention to him after he got kicked off Twitter and YouTube.
I knew that he was still producing content, but he, you know, it kind of faded into the background.
And then whenever we were deciding to do cult season, I was like, okay, now's a good time to cover him.
I went back to his content and saw, oh, you know, it's still here.
It's been put out.
It's up on YouTube again now.
But he doesn't have his original account back, so it's not a big following.
But he now does Twitter spaces and so on.
And I listened to one piece of content and it was him talking about gaslighting.
And it was the same delivery.
It was the same, you know, pontificating thing.
But unless you knew most of the things that underlie what he's talking about, it was mostly unobjectionable.
And this is part of what he used to do in the day.
He would like do a PowerPoint presentation about the Roman Empire.
You could be googling around for some history topic.
His video would come up and it would mostly be, you know, like a kind of normal history summary video, but it would be sprinkled through with these bits that pointed towards his bigger, and it was mostly like a gateway to get you into his content.
So like he started putting out videos explaining why Robin Williams killed himself, which he blamed, as you might imagine, on his wife or ex-wife and alimony payments.
Like he put out videos as soon as some event happened, like doing an explainer, even when it turned out he knew nothing.
Well, this again reminds me of Ranieri.
And I suspect it's a way that many cults operate, which is they put out the bait, right?
There's the innocuous lures out there, which, you know, could be pretty innocuous.
Here's a little training session to help you be more confident public speaker.
This will help you with your acting.
Here's an explainer about the Roman Empire or whatever's in the news.
And that acts as a funnel, as a recruitment kind of drive.
And you can get people coming further and further in.
And that's when the rhetoric starts getting a bit stronger once you get into a few levels deep.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Now, I was wondering when I heard that first piece of content, oh, maybe, you know, maybe he's modulated his content to make it like less extreme.
Although I didn't really know why, given that in the Trump era, it's kind of like the more extreme, the better.
Candace Owens is the most popular podcaster in the world and all that kind of thing.
But then I was looking and I was looking for a long piece of content and I saw, oh, an hour and a half from at that time, the most recent piece of content.
It was a Twitter space.
And it was called The Most Frightening Fact, right?
It was just a Halloween themed episode.
So I thought, oh, long form, you know, one and a half hour.
That's when people often, you know, get more into their thing.
And this is the content we're going to look at today.
So it is like a random, just recent, just a few days ago piece of content.
And you're going to hear he hasn't changed at all.
He's doing the exact same stuff, the same badgering of people, the same delivery.
He's changed his ideology.
Like he, you know, he can move around between anti-state, anti-spanking, whatever, now to like a MAGA advocate.
He could become like a far left person.
I think it's, you know, it's entirely possible he could have went that route as well.
But the fundamental nature that he's a narcissistic, manipulative individual who relies on one-on-one interactions where he can berate people, that has is exactly the same as it's always been.
Yeah, fascinating.
Yeah.
Like, I think that even before we hear the content, there's a lesson there already.
And it's the same lesson as from Keith Ranieri, which is that like a cultish kind of figure is never going to promote themselves by saying, hey, here's my call.
I want you to sign up and just follow, you know, obey my every word and I'm going to mind control you.
Okay.
And people go, yeah, that sounds great.
I want to join.
No, no, no.
They always present themselves as I'm a philosopher.
I've got deep thoughts, very interesting frameworks for understanding this, that, and the other.
Come join us and join our wonderful community.
And here you'll be able to learn and to grow and thrive.
That is always the sell.
And, you know, he does, I mean, when you put aside what he's saying, similar to Ranieri, he's got a tone of voice and a method of delivery that sounds very considered and very authoritative.
And of course, incredibly confident, which is very important for a cult leader.
Might also be a little bass-boosted.
Let's see, you can be the judge.
All right.
You heard those clips of him talking in the past.
Let's see how he signs more recently.
But last thing, Matt, very last thing, I just want to mention that parallels some things we've experienced with Jordan Peterson and with Dr. K.
So Molyneux's wife, Christina Papadopoulos, she was a psychologist, registered with the College of Psychologists of Ontario.
This might be the same one that disciplined Jordan Peterson.
But actually, she was also disciplined back in the day for her participation in Molyneux's call-in shows, where she would kind of support his takes and reference psychology.
And the Psychology Association reprimanded her for practices that would reasonably be regarded by members as disgraceful, dishonorable, or unprofessional.
And in much the same way, she stepped back from getting involved after that.
But Molyneux spun that as, you know, this was them being targeted for speaking out and all this kind of thing.
So there you go.
There's another parallel.
Like the official reprimands don't really do anything.
You know, this is the general thing.
Once they've cultivated a large enough audience, they might reel against it.
They might get annoyed, but they don't really require anymore the endorsement of, you know, and in this case, it's his wife, but still, just wanted to reference that.
So links in the show notes.
Links in the show notes, as they say.
But to turn to the recent 2025 Halloween-themed episode.
So after hearing Stefan and all those steps, I'm sure people will really enjoy the delivery of this introductory clip where he's just having a fun time to introduce the episode.
Well, you got caught with a flat.
Well, how about that?
Well, babies, don't you panic.
By the light of the night, it'll all seem all right.
I'll get you a satanic mechanic.
Why don't you stay for the night or maybe a bite?
I could show you my favorite obsession.
I've been making a man with a blonde hair and a tan.
And he's good for relieving my tension.
It's a weird movie, man.
I never quite got into it.
But that scene is pretty funny.
All right.
I hope you're doing well.
I hope you're doing well.
Happy Halloween to you, 31st of October 2025.
And I am here for you, my friends.
I am here to listen and respond with whatever is on your mind on your questioning, on your thoughts, and your oppositions.
So I, of course, have my own thoughts.
I have my own thoughts, but if you have questions, comments, I am happy to hear.
All right.
Let us go.
Yeah, I really, I really, I really wish he'd stopped with the Frankenferter impression or the voiceover impression earlier, but he kept going as I cringed harder.
And as he says, you know, he's got his own ideas, but this is about responding to other people's points, hearing different opinions.
Just let's have a discussion, right?
Let's get into it.
He's welcome to hear other people's opinions.
Let's just keep that in mind as we go forward.
Okay.
That's explicitly how it's for him, that he recognizes you know that other people have different positions that he'll be interested to hear them.
I feel like he did emphasize that he's got his own views, his own thoughts, a little bit heavily.
I think that uh, I think that was a bit of a hint.
So, the first caller, first caller we've got here, Matt, um, he gives him a softball, it's a softball to start off with.
It's it's actually a fairly innocuous question where you could give any answer and he manages to go for one of the most sinister possible.
But, um, let's hear it.
Let's hear it.
Hey, just since it's uh Halloween, I thought I'd ask you a uh throwaway question: What is the scariest, most frightening insight in philosophy that you've come across?
Ooh, the scariest the scariest insight that I've come across.
I think for me, maybe this is for others as well.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
That's a great question.
Thank you.
For me, it's not people's inability to think that troubles me.
If somebody's unable to think, hey man, I'm not a tenor.
I can't, uh, I can't sing along with So Lonely by the police, but it's not people's inability to think, it's their refusal to think.
Their refusal to think.
I sort of feel like people's minds are sort of trapped in these encircling, tentacle-bladed iron bars of demonic possession, almost, if that makes sense.
Yeah, yeah.
I noticed his answer didn't involve any like actual philosophy.
Like, he's a philosopher.
No, you know, he was a question about, you know, what's the scariest idea in philosophy that you come across?
He obviously didn't know any, so he just, um, I think fell back on his own stuff.
There's so many like easy things for anybody with even basic knowledge of philosophy to invoke there.
But his invocation is like all the people that refuse to think.
And then he moves to this quite florid description, right?
People with minds trapped in encircled tentacle-bladed iron bars of demonic possession, right?
Yeah.
These are, in fact, all the people that don't agree with him.
Yes, would fall into this category.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, like, I mean, we're going to hear more of this, Brian, but it just, I'm a bit stuck on it.
How these people like him, they describe themselves as philosophers.
They write books and stuff, and they've got their frameworks and their very nuanced ideas, but they don't know any philosophy.
Like, he could have mentioned some freaky late 19th century German philosopher.
I don't know.
Well, maybe someone like Schopenhauer or someone.
Like, they all got weird.
There's a lot of weird shit.
Existentialist stuff or the dark forest.
Yeah, Camus, maybe.
It's like, I don't know.
There's lots of options.
Nietzsche would have a field tape.
I don't think he would know any of it, really.
And, you know, his deep thoughts are just that.
All of these people that don't agree with me totally are so stupid and so deluded.
That's his deep thought there.
Yeah, but you got to be careful, Mark, because he can easily invoke those people.
Like, I'm sure he's made videos talking about a whole bunch of philosophers and whatnot, right?
Like, I'm sure he has done that.
Yeah, I'm sure he can name drop them and do the superficial thing, but I don't think when asked a specific question, I think he would struggle to, yeah, anyway.
Yeah, yeah, I agree.
It's, it's kind of, you know, the same way Peterson invokes people, where it's, it's mostly like a very, very superficial engagement with ideas usually.
And when pressed, it turns out he hasn't even read anything beyond like kind of Wikipedia-ish descriptions of people.
So, yeah.
But so there you go, Matt.
That's the scariest thought that they've come up with.
But let's hear him elaborate a little bit more on this.
Yeah, I've seen examples in my own life trying to wrest someone from a bad idea.
They start frothing almost.
And people in my personal life, especially.
Yeah, it's like you bring them some facts, reason and evidence.
There's this pushback, this aggression, this violence.
And really, we can see what people mean by demonic possession throughout history.
Or even more sadly, there's just this smirk like, oh, you want me to reason?
Oh, come on.
Come on.
Try and reason with me.
I'll play with you a little.
I'll pretend a little.
I'll bat you around like a cat with a rat.
You're never actually getting through to me, but I don't mind you beating your head against my indifferent ice wall of anti-rationality.
I'm not going to reveal it too much, but you can just tire yourself out trying to climb these walls where I pour the inevitable grease of avoidance down the bricks.
So that either it's like, like fight back, fight back, or it's just this sort of snarky, superior, like a like a waiter peeing on you from a great height, a French waiter, a French waiter peeing on you from a great height.
And that either demonic pushback or that, oh, oh, you're bringing that little philosophy brain of yours to the table.
I suppose we can indulge you for a little while.
I can't really go very far with it because heaven forbid we actually think about anything, but I certainly don't mind you tiring us off if that's what you feel like.
Yeah.
Like all of those colorful images, the imagery invokes, it's a bit of a smokescreen for the fact that what he's saying is pretty basic, right?
He's complaining about the fact that when he says stuff, people don't always agree with him.
Sometimes they and he reckons that they're just not trying to understand or they're being dismissive about his ideas.
And it's the lack of self-awareness there, Chris, because as listeners will hear, he does all of those things when somebody says something to him that he doesn't immediately agree with that isn't perfectly in line with what he already believes.
He's incredibly dismissive.
He gets really angry and pissed off.
But, you know, someone like this, they never, they never actually go that far in terms of self-reflection.
No, and he's got a very, you know, like he's talking about people looking down on others and like being pretentious and dismissive.
And that's everything.
That's what he is, right?
He is exactly that.
Even his tone in this whole delivery is like superior and dismissive and like demonizing the art group, right?
So he's talking about people who adopt these kind of, you know, haughty airs.
As he does it.
He's doing right there.
It reminds me of Joe Rogan talking about liberals.
You go, these fucking liberals, like, they just like, and, you know, they're so stupid and they're little namby pambies and you can't reason with them.
They refuse to listen.
And the worst thing is, is that they look down on us.
They don't respect us at all.
Yeah, they're always saying mean things about us.
They're so partisan, these liberals.
And it's like, Joe.
Anyway, yes, a good example there, Chris.
So there we have, right?
And this is laying the foundation for anybody that disagrees.
You know, like you said originally, they can't think.
They're peeing on you.
They're, you know, this relates to demonic possession.
And actually, one thing that brought up to me was the Alex Jones kind of theatrics around when he, you know, imitates demons going, they're frashing.
And like it's, it's, it's a, it's a slightly more restrained delivery, but not very far from it.
So in any case, there you go.
So you've got that.
And as I said, Matt, Stefan was a atheist, a kind of new atheist person, a bit like a James Lindsay type, but he since become, you know, MAGA and pro-ethno-nationalism and what.
And the right-wing audience tends to like Christianity a bit more.
So let's see if you can detect a slight pivot here.
I had that.
I was talking about the atheist today and atheists way more superstitious than Christians because at least Christian faith leads to objective reason or objective rationality.
But the faith that atheists have in the state, which is far more improbable than God, leads to like universal slaughter.
So yeah, I think it's the fact that people seem to be captured.
I view people around me, not immediate people, of course, but I view the people that kind of interact within the world as they've got all of these puppet threads going up to some demonic machinery, literally.
I mean, this is my view.
They've got these threads and they think they're moving themselves.
They think that they're opening their mouth.
They think they're making sounds, but they just sound like everyone else.
Laying it on a little bit thick there.
Everyone is an MPC robot rhetoric, right?
Like, goddamn, Matt.
These cult leaders, they really just go for the classics, right?
Like everyone's a demon puppet.
Yeah, the totalizing language is worth zeroing in on and just picking up on.
Like they want you dead.
They want to commit violence to you.
They want universal slaughter.
They're possessed by demons.
They're empty shells with their strings being pulled by puppets.
I mean, this is.
But they don't even recognize.
That's right.
So this is the outgroup.
This is everyone else who is not fully on board with this particular, let's just call it a cult.
Yeah, this worldview, shall we say.
And yeah, and you heard there, Matt, you know, the invocation that our atheists are way more like irrational, right?
Their belief in the state.
And that relates, of course, as you might imagine, to his kind of anti-communist stuff, right?
You and I, Matt, not great fans of communist regimes, but you know, the right wing have a particular demonization word, like socialized healthcare is essentially the gateway drug for, you know, the pogroms.
It's a slippery, it's a slippery slope, Chris.
If you can't see how universal healthcare is going to lead to universal slaughter, then I can't help you, mate.
That's right.
Anarcho-capitalists, their main enemy is the communists.
You might imagine like it's the actual state study that they exist and live in, but no, no, it's left-wing, anything left-coated.
Laying it on a little bit thick there if everyone is an MPC robot rhetoric, right?
Like, goddamn, Matt, these cult leaders, they really just go for the classics.
Like, everyone's a demon puppet.
Yeah, the totalizing language is worth zeroing in on and just picking up on.
Like, they want you dead.
They want to commit violence to you.
They want universal slaughter.
They're possessed by demons.
They're empty shells with their strings being pulled by puppets.
I mean, this is.
But they don't even recognize.
That's right.
So this is the outgroup.
This is everyone else who is not fully on board with this particular, this is called a cult.
Yeah, this worldview, shall we say.
Yeah.
And you heard there, Matt, you know, the invocation that our atheists are way more irrational, right?
Their belief in the state.
And that relates, of course, as you might imagine, to anti-communist stuff, right?
You know, like you and I, Matt, not great fans of communist regimes, but the right wing have a particular demonization word, like socialized healthcare is essentially the gateway drug for the pogroms.
It's a slippery, it's a slippery slope, Chris.
If you can't see how universal healthcare is going to lead to universal slaughter, then I can't help you, mate.
That's right.
Anarcho-capitalists, their main enemy is the communist.
You might imagine like it's the actual state study that they exist and live in, but no, no, anything left-coded.
But so, atheists, let's hear a little bit more.
Oh, and Matt, just in case you thought that the Weinsteins wouldn't be invoked in this content, oh, how wrong you were.
And in it, one of the characters is talking about NPCs.
And it's just really sad.
It's really sad how eager and willing people are to give up their humanity for the sake of conformity and emptiness.
And it's the superiority in which they go to the original and scorn them.
That is nails on a chalkboard to me.
People today, like I took on the atheists, they're like, well, but the atheists, I think Brett Weinstein was sort of quoting about how people are going back to religion and atheism, the new atheism is dead.
It's like, well, no fucking kidding.
It was one of the Weinstein brothers.
Anyway.
No kidding, because the atheists didn't get to universal morality.
They, in fact, rejected it.
I gave them the answer 20 years ago, worked hard to publicize it, did speeches, presentations, PowerPoints, debates, you name it, to get the word out.
And atheists just walked away from the ultimate and final proof of secular ethics.
They don't care about virtue at all.
We can't live without virtue.
So if you lead a bunch of people out into the desert and they say, you know, we need some water out here.
And you're like, oh, but that's such a subjective, you know, you put on your fucking fedora and you, oh, that's just a subjective preference.
And people are like, no, we like, we seriously need some water here.
Well, I can produce some urine, maybe some bilge water, a couple of day-old Guinness that's been left in the sun.
No, no, no.
Sorry.
We need some water.
We're human beings.
We need water.
We can't live in the desert on urine.
And eventually, if you don't produce the water, people just go back to the town they came from because that's where the water is.
So the atheists lured people away from Christianity out into the desert, refused to give them water.
And now, well, it's failed.
No, you just didn't provide people the water that they need in order to survive as a society, which is universal ethics.
You lured them out into the desert and fucked them over.
Again, colorful imagery.
A lot of references to urine and Enil RIP and stuff.
Like, you know, I said that he didn't invoke that, but I'm just noticing he does like he does gravitate towards extreme examples.
Yeah, I think it's part of the part of the shtick, isn't it?
Like, I think you're right to compare him to Alex Jones, who also has that really strong imagery.
Yeah, lurid, that's the word.
And I think it helps with the rhetoric quite a bit, doing a fair bit of heavy, heavy lifting.
But you strip that part out, and he's basically saying that he figured it all out 20 years ago.
Back when I suppose he was in new atheisty type, before he'd embraced MAGA type, pseudo-religionism.
But so he had all figured out a way to have this universal morality, whatever the fuck that is, to figure it all out from his philosophy, I suppose.
But, you know, stupid atheists, they didn't accept it.
And that's why people are going back to religion.
Got it.
The ultimate and final proof of secular ethics he offered, Matt.
And he had PowerPoints.
We need to find this PowerPoint presentation.
Yeah.
But like the thing that I got here is, you know, just to tune our own horn, revolutionary theory, ding, grievance mongering about Europe not being accepted, ding, right?
Like he's, he's got the same narrative that the Weinstein brothers do.
He discovered this amazing thing.
Nobody was willing to pay it attention.
And now they're paying the consequences.
So this is part of how he squirts the circle about, you know, he was an atheist, but he still wants to condemn the atheist to his like new audience.
So he's like, if they had done what I said, it would have all been a utopian future.
Yeah.
And instead they're getting fucked over in the desert.
Just in the desert.
Yeah.
A lot of fucking going on to the people.
And there again, I just have to say that, you know, the projection is strong because he is, in a way, like one of the king of the incel world, right?
Like when Elliot Rogers went on this spree and killed all the people, right?
And left a manifesto, blaming women for not sleeping with him and him the ultimate gentleman, right?
Yeah, the ultimate, the ultimate nice, the ultimate nice guy.
Exactly.
Stephan Molyneux made a video saying we can't be sure this is about misogyny and stuff.
Like it's right.
But there he invokes like fedora worrying people online who are going to raise these like kind of rationalists is what he's reading out.
But I'm like, but what are you talking about?
That's like you and your audience.
Like you are the federal is coming from inside the house.
It's just the projection is so strong.
Yeah.
And I am really interested in his audience.
The people who are calling in and that he's talking to are big fans, presumably.
They'd listen to hundreds of hours of his content, are fully bought in.
And yeah, you know, getting to call up and have a one-on-one with the master is a big deal for them.
And I am just curious to profile them.
I think you described them as most likely lost boys seekers and really quite sort of they seem to not mind being bullied and dominated by Stefan Molyneux.
No, now in this case, we should say that like this guy is mostly agreeing with him.
Yes, Andrew and saying, you know, so you're not going to see it yet, the bullying aspect.
Here, you're just getting basically, you know, the kind of cultish everybody else is in the NPC.
Anybody that disagrees, they can't think.
They're demonic puppets.
They want you to drink urine in the desert.
And one more just colorful imagery, Matt, before we leave this segment.
So yeah, people get mad and I understand it.
And then, of course, people are like, yes, but yours isn't a real proof.
You never proved your ethics.
You never proved that anything was universal.
You never just fucking idiots.
Just absolute idiots and people who are urinating on the watercolors of their betters.
Sorry, you were about to say something, and I may have overspoken you because I heard a Russell.
Was there something you wanted to mention?
Yeah, I like that he got, you know, taken up by his metaphor, right?
Urinating in the watercolors of their better.
So he's the better, right?
He's the philosopher king that could criticize.
And Jordan Peterson technique of make your opponents don't like this never fails.
It's a powerful, it's a powerful approach.
And he seems to have really adopted this kind of fancy accent.
Like he sometimes increases it, bungs it on a bit more to sort of make a point.
But his default seems to be like kind of pretentious, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Pretentious is the way I would describe it.
And there's been some suggestions about beast boosting voice effects.
But regardless of what the source of it is, he does like to have that very mellifilous delivery and pregnant pauses and so on.
Yeah, yeah.
He's very good at those.
I guess they give him time to think and figure out what his next colorful metaphor is going to be.
So, okay, he's these silly, silly critics.
He had the fantastic ethics.
It would have sorted everything out, resolved any problems the atheists and the religious people might have had.
It's not that he's now pandering to a different audience and he wants to criticize the atheists instead of religious people.
It wouldn't be that, Matt.
It's definitely not that.
And there was one thing that he mentioned because he was talking about he's recording another audiobook.
He self-published a large number of books, as you might anticipate.
But yeah, this reminded me actually of the Verveki school of little side stories where people praise him for his insights.
So listen to this.
I just, I had a very, I had an emotional day.
I just tell you that straight up.
I had an emotional day because I'm reading one of the, I mean, it's the most passionate book in many ways that I've ever written, the book I'm working on, or just finishing up the audiobook reading of, I've got two, one more chapter to go, audiobook.
I just finished the chapter 20.
No, I think I have two more, two more to go.
You have two more chapters to go.
And it is the book is about the sadness as you trace someone through life from early bad decisions to what happens later on when they can't escape those bad decisions.
And I read, I did the audiobook reading of just an absolutely horribly sad chapter.
My wife cried reading it this morning.
We did some work on it.
And then I cried reading the audiobook this afternoon.
Everybody's crying.
You know, when he was talking about it, I had an emotional thing.
You know, I was reading a really emotional...
Like, at the beginning, I didn't anticipate that it was going to be his own works.
His own works.
Yes.
All right.
You know, I was just watching a couple of Garth Marengi clips on Stage last night, Chris.
And this is something Garth Marenki would say.
He was reading his own book and he was absolutely flawed by the profundity and the sheer emotional power of it.
His wife too, Matt, though, his wife too.
You know, Jordan Peterson's wife, she often tells him how brilliant John Vervecky's wife said that he was the most true Christian she's ever met.
And Brett Weinstein, as we know, infamously, has Heller Hang to keep him in check, right?
When he's going off, it's almost like people shouldn't rely on their close relatives as, you know, perhaps the most, you know, objective, independent people.
I don't know, Matt.
I don't know.
Call me crazy.
Well, wasn't Molino himself saying it was all women's fault?
They're the ones enabling these terrible people.
Maybe there's something to that, Chris.
Yeah.
That's it.
Not his wife, though.
It's other people's wives.
So, you know, you made a schoolboy era there.
So anyway, let's hear a little bit more with the Colin interaction, you know, because he was he's giving advice.
He's providing feedback, but he got a bit distracted talking about people pissing on his watercolors.
But what happens next?
Thank you for your answer.
It anticipates something frightful that I get to probably look forward to this holiday season.
I'm going to ask my family member, I guess, the Charlie Kirk question, how they reacted to it, and then get to I anticipate, I think I know their reaction.
I haven't asked them about it formally yet.
I think they might have enjoyed it.
And then I have to deal with the consequences of that.
And I'm sorry about that.
That's a tough thing to do.
But holy shyster balls, is it ever worth doing?
Because there's going to come a time in the not too distant future when people will be informing on you or making things up.
East Germany's Stasi style, and you really can't have traitors in your midst in what is coming.
You need people who are going to be with you 150%.
So it's time to clean house.
Sad though it is.
But if the party and the position of tolerance and humanity giggles over a father and a husband being shot through the neck and bleeding out, you're not breaking bread with people.
You're breaking bed with demons in control of people.
And again, I'm not saying this is a literal truth, but this possession thing, you know, like the bird, like how the possessions, the bird hand, the wide eyes.
Like all the little facial ticks and the bird hands and the staring eyes and the piercings.
It's all just like, yeah, the demon, demons got me and I ain't even fighting it anymore.
You know, you see these horror movies.
Oh, no, the demon has possessed a child.
Fight, Stacey, fight.
You're just like, nah, I'm good.
I'm happy to be squatting in the fetid lap of a smoky skinned demon.
Yeah, yeah, just where I want to be.
It's perfect.
Yeah, I couldn't, couldn't, couldn't, couldn't be better.
Things couldn't be better.
Yeah, I'm actually a little bit triggered by that.
The Charlie Kirk thing.
Like, it just so quickly became this litmus test amongst conservatives where you had to show, you know, so much respect for the man.
You had to not say anything bad about him.
He was the best of all possible men, immediately promoted to demigod status.
And I kind of, I mean, I'm inferring here, but I suspect that the guest there is taking the opportunity to do that with one of his relatives who is liberal leaning.
And of course, Molyneu jumps on that because it is an excellent opportunity to cut them off.
You know, you pin them down, you make them say their loyalty oaths about Charlie Kirk.
And if they don't meet the standard, then you cut them off because they're possessed by demons.
And in the, what, the civil war or the revolution or whatever apocalyptic thing is coming, you need to sever all ties.
He's just.
Yeah.
I mean, he's saying there, there's a ton of stuff, right?
But there's the one, as you noted, like he's suggesting about the need to cut off people.
You don't adhere to your political interpretations.
There he's presenting it like you'd have to be a demon, right?
An absolute demon.
And he's invoking the kind of people gleefully celebrating Charlie Kirk's death.
But like, it doesn't have to be that, right?
It can just be people that don't have this heroed reverence towards Charlie Kirk.
you can see that because he immediately starts talking about possession and demons and stuff and you heard Matt that thing that always comes up where the people can be quick to denounce that
They're not talking about literal demons, but then go on to say, but it is actually very like what demon possession is described, that so you've got the disclaimer where people could say well, he's not talking about literal demons, but he very much is talking about like stereotypical demon possession and like this is, you know, outgroup demonization.
It's in the you couldn't find a more textbook example.
Um yeah, and also shades of Pagot And Peterson and Info Wars guy.
Um, Alex Jones yeah, absolutely Alex Jones.
I mean Alex Jones likes to invoke people being possessed by literal demons.
But I mean, as we'll hear in Electric Small NEW, it's all just disclaimers, because he, he has no issue convoking actual possession and and stuff like that.
But um, so there you know, you get the recommendation to cut out your family over conservative political test, and so this is towards the end of the call.
Let's, let's hear a little bit more.
And the superiority when people get beyond reason and they're beyond the reach of reason or compassion or humanity.
Humanity, we are nothing if we don't reason.
We do not inhabit our humanity if we don't reason.
When somebody doesn't reason, doesn't listen to reason, doesn't reason evidence, doesn't listen to reason or evidence.
They're telling you straight up that they have dehumanized themselves.
And when they have dehumanized themselves, it follows as night follows day.
They will dehumanize you, they will dehumanize others.
They have become machines of murder and it's best to get out of their way.
Like they're a some giant threshing machine that's gone loose and languid in a field, you know it's gonna gonna take you down.
Hey, happy halloween.
Hope that makes sense.
Yeah he uh, he sure does love his evocative metaphors, doesn't he?
Chris, a giant threshing machine that's gotten loose and gone languid the language is a curveball in a field.
Um yeah, machine of murder.
But and I like that hey, happy Halloween super, super upbeat, but that yeah.
So he's constantly invoking that.
These people look down on you, they dehumanize you.
You know they want you dead, like.
We heard him invoke that kind of rhetoric right when he in the earlier clip, when he was talking about like people not being libertarians.
And here it's again.
You know they're monstrous, they want you to die like Charlie Kirk.
And then it's all projection because he's saying they will dehumanize you.
You know, it's like they will present you like demons, like inhuman machines, right?
It's like, what they are like is people possessed by demons or monstrous machines.
How do people not notice?
Like, you know, the blatant devil standards.
It's projection is the right word there.
Projection is the right word.
Yeah, well, what I was hearing there was just, this is like textbook rhetoric, isn't it?
You can follow the little rhetorical angle, which is these other bad people.
If they don't agree with me, it means they can't reason.
It means they're beyond the reach of reason or compassion, which means they've lost their humanity.
And because they've lost their humanity, they've become these demons and they will straight up murder you if they get a chance.
So we have to.
Yeah, like it's perfect example of rhetorical language.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's just like providing the justification again for, you know, cutting people out, right?
Like, why would you want people around you, Matt, who want you dead or who think that you're not human and all these kind of things?
It's distasteful, man.
But let's hear what the listener gets from this.
With regards to demonic possession, it makes me think there's a book I found that you recommended by what's his name, Richard Schwartz, No Bad Parts on the Internal Family Systems Model.
And just everything that you've said about like inner parents and so on.
It's making me think about neuroplasticity and the psychological, I guess, or material reality of these dysfunctional, like bad inner parents that sort of manifest and take control of people's minds.
I think that's probably what's happening in a lot of these cases, that a lot of these political matters are very surface level and it's all just tied to trauma.
Yeah, I mean, there is a very horrible bargain that is put forward by the educational systems and the media systems of the modern world.
Are you familiar with this book, Chris, by Richard Schwartz?
Well, I'm becoming increasingly familiar with this because if you remember, internal family systems therapy was the therapy that John Verbeck was undergoing when he referenced Hermes, right, sneaking in.
And I've heard it come up in other contexts.
I also heard it Allison Mack, for example, in the podcast that she's doing, kind of detailing your life after Nixium.
She's talking about it, right?
And this is the therapy system whereby you kind of personify elements of yourself like they're an autonomous character that you can engage in dialogue with for your therapist.
Oh, so is this where Hermes comes from?
Is he Hermes was, I mean, he broke out of the internal family system.
They were busy doing internal family stuff and then Hermes just interjected.
Yeah, like the Kool-Aid man.
Hermes, what are you doing here?
Okay.
So I don't know.
Yeah, that doesn't, I don't like the sound of this.
I'm going to have to look into this internal family systems model.
Oh, yes.
Well, internal family systems has some issues.
Now, people will swear by it, Matt, because they have done it and they've received positive benefits.
But I will just say that does not validate the actual claims of a therapeutic system, right?
And as it turns out, the founder, the person who they're mentioning there, Richard Schwartz, has recently come up with a like a refinement, shall we say, of the system, which reveals that there are actual spiritual elements.
You can use it to connect with disembodied spirits and non-corporeal beings and so on.
So there you go.
So I just think internal family systems, it's so hot right now.
But here you have somebody talking about trauma, dysfunctional relationships and so on.
And we've already heard how that's fertile ground for Molnu.
But his response, Matt, as well, you know, immediately ties it.
Oh, yeah, that makes me think about the educational and media systems of the modern world, like, you know, the corrupted world narrative.
So yeah, that's, it just shows, you know, they're ready for the pivot whenever they get the opportunity.
Yeah.
And now we've, we've raised the flag, Matt, about hypocrisy, right?
It being a concern, like these double standards that are being deployed being of concern.
Let's see if you can note any like hint of hypocrisy in this Molnu run.
It's the most unholy and historical deal of all, which is you can be good by hating people.
Hatred, like let the hatred flow through you.
Because you literally see.
What was this woman?
I can't remember her.
Jennifer Welsh, I think her name is.
She runs a big podcast.
Her husband, if I remember rightly, was a lawyer and an addict for quite some time.
I'm not sure what kind of addict.
She had a couple of kids with him.
They split up.
They're kind of back together, but half back together.
And just a horrible life, you know, to have, to give children to an addict.
And then, oh, it's just monstrous.
And she was, Riley Gaines has been opposed to sort of this trans participation in female sports.
Now, whatever you think of the debate or whatever you think of the argument, it is an important debate to have.
And Jennifer Welsh, just you're so full of hate.
And then, you know, like, twat, nobody likes you.
Like, just spewing this verbal.
And she's got this weird, I don't know if she had the buckle fat sorted out, like snorted out of her cheeks.
You've got this weird hollow skull-like cheeks and just this venom, right?
And I hate you, so I'm good.
I'm going to trash you.
I'm going to cheer on murder.
I'm going to verbally abuse people.
And that makes me the good guy.
Because goodness should be earned, like the feeling of being virtuous should be earned by knowledge, wisdom, both compassion and strength.
And to just literally grab people by the fucking ears and scream in their faces that you're a hater.
And it's like, and not even notice that contradiction is wild to me.
It is.
It's like beating children saying, don't hit people.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yes, yes.
A lot of compassion.
I could hear it oozing through his voice there.
His caricatures.
Yeah, when he brought up her hollow cheeks, the buckle fat surgery that she might have had and just a weird face and all that.
It just strikes me because he starts off, he's complaining about people demonizing art groups and like portraying themselves as holier than thou people, right?
And then that justifying them being very cruel and venomous.
And then he immediately slips into like a venomous personal attack on the person.
And then you hear him switch to the siege philosopher, right?
like goodness should be earned, right?
It should be blah, blah, blah.
It's all very theatrical, but the like the hypocrisy isn't hidden.
Like it's, it's right there.
He's, he's saying, you know, imagine somebody who doesn't even describe you like a person, you know, just caricatures you in those impressions or something like that and then slips into an impression.
That's it's so weird.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, no, his fans there, the people he's talking to, don't seem to notice any of this.
Yeah, I know.
And there is actually a bit where he immediately after this will try to, I think he's aware, like it kind of flags up in his brain.
Wait a minute.
I'm going to be accused of being hypocritical.
So he tries to head it off at the past.
But just to highlight the hypocrisy one more time, I think I've nailed it, but here you go.
That level of sort of vengeance.
But they do it around language and propaganda.
And I mean, honestly, it's just struggle sessions.
You create class enemies, you label them bigot, phobe, racist, whatever, right?
And then that just Nazi and then that just gives you permission to hate them and feel like a good person, to let the hatred flow and feel like you're just the best person in the world because you've dehumanized others and you now no longer seek to understand them.
You no longer seek for dialogue and so on.
I mean, I've had debates with the communists and socialists and I've even had debates with fascists, which, you know, fascists are kind of rare, although not these days, because fascism is very often a response to escalating communism.
But yeah, I mean, I'll try and talk with just about anybody, but they won't.
They won't do it.
They just, they're told these are people you can legitimately and virtuously hate and want dead.
And they love it, man.
They love like slurp slurp, right?
They love sucking the bone marrow out of the perceived enemies.
And I mean, they're even worse than murderous soldiers because murderous soldiers know that, you know, the enemy is a little bit like them, right?
You see what I mean?
It's almost like a skit or something.
You know, like, like in the same breath that he's describing them as these like vultures or something, sucking the marrow out of the bodies of their dead enemies.
Slurp, slurp, slurp.
Worse than murderous soldiers.
Worse than murderous soldiers.
Yeah, he's sort of lamenting their lack of empathy for their and lack of, you know, trying to understand and build bridges with their fellow human beings.
It's kind of, I find the juxtaposition so impressive because it's like, on the one hand, it's kind of this peon to civility point.
Like, I can dialogue with anyone.
I'm, you know, I'm a fium, the dialogos provider.
But then, and they're always telling you how evil the other people are.
But it's literally 30 seconds later and he's like, and they blood-sucking monsters.
It's like, what?
I mean, I can only assume that it works on his cult members because they have deeply absorbed the truth that he is a great guy and that he hears everything that he said he is.
So he can get away with this kind of stuff, right?
Chris, we have to just mention, you notice he said dialogues with all kinds of people, even communists and fascists and Nazis.
I mean, I'm sure you noticed how when he mentioned the fascists, he had to sort of cut up a break a little bit because these days, the people they call fascists, they're really just reacting against this escalating communism that's going on right now.
Yes, well, this reminded me that Roller infamously, he suggested that the Nazis were just responding to kind of the Jewish-led Bolsheviks.
Like it was the reason that the Nazis targeted the Jews was because they were so prominent in these kind of communist movements, right?
That's that's it.
Not that he's blaming the Jews, of course, but yeah.
So it's just a reaction, Matt.
It's a natural reaction.
The Holocaust.
Yeah.
Yeah, I did notice that.
So after that, I do think he picked up on that the level of hypocrisy might be approaching breaking point.
Like it's it's a bit on the nose what he's what he's up to.
So this is the disclaimer and preemptive defective of criticism that he's about to receive.
So listen to this.
Now, of course, I understand.
I understand.
And I'll address this, right?
I understand people saying, well, Steph, my God, how hypocritical can you be?
Well, I'm always trying to plumb those depths, right?
How hypocritical can you be?
Steph, you're talking about people dehumanizing others through hatred.
And yet you hate them or you are dehumanizing.
You're calling them demonically possessed and puppets and NPCs.
You're dehumanizing them.
Like, no, but that's different because it's in response to.
It's in response to.
If somebody celebrates the murder of someone and you say that person has dehumanized others and they've become intellectually corrupt beyond words, it's not like, oh, but you're just the same.
Because that would be, for that equivalent, it would be like if there was somebody on the left who went around having sort of reasonable debates with people and they got shot and people celebrated that, be like, no, no, that's not right either.
So to point out that people are dehumanized and dangerous, it's saying that the people who want you dead, and I mean, let's not kid ourselves, right?
The left wants people like us dead.
And so people who want you dead to say, well, you're just dehumanizing them.
It's like, I don't know, would you go to a Jewish guy who said, I think the Nazis are evil and say, well, you're just like them because you're dehumanizing them.
It's like, no, no, no, but that's a bit of a different point, right?
Very different point.
Opposing point.
So, yeah, it is just that they'll give you these words that are so charged with hatred that you just attach them to someone and now you are legitimately moral for hating this person and wanting them dead.
And yeah, it is absolutely, absolutely monstrous.
And it is not symmetrical.
It is not symmetrical.
Are you tempted at all to point out the Achilles' heel in that argument there?
Chris, is there anything else?
got 102 that i've seen the one that i just want to flag up before you provide the kill shot matt it's the uh no no don't use words like that You know, yeah, kill him, Matt.
Take that slurping demon.
I'm not demonizing an art group.
I'm just responding to someone who displays hatred.
But yeah, so he's mentioning that he is responding only to these kind of, you know, murderous, dehumanizing people, people that are, you know, ghoulishly celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk and to criticize them.
It's only reasonable.
And now he does, however, go on to say, let's not kill ourselves.
The left wants us all dead.
The left, Matt.
The left, everyone on the left.
So, you know, you and I, we didn't celebrate in Charlie Kirk's death, but we are on the left.
So, I guess we want everyone on the right dead, as he says, you know, so he's in this thing where it's like, it's only very specific people that are absolutely doing the same level of rhetoric.
No, I've never done this florid, metaphorical painting of my enemies as monsters, right, that are slurping bones and all these kind of things.
That's him and Alex Jones do that.
So, my point would be he claims it's in response to like a specific group that's dehumanizing him and his friends, right?
But it's not.
He is pasting that on to every critic and ideological enemy.
But what did you notice?
Well, it's kind of boring because it's exactly the same thing.
You stole my thunder, my friend.
That's just because you're very astute.
I mean, his argument would make sense if you accept the premise.
And premise is that like everyone more progressive than him and his circle.
Like, I think his definition of the left is so expansive that it includes like 70% of Americans, probably.
He's not talking about a dozen random accounts, shit posting online.
He's talking about all of us.
That's right.
And he likens us to Nazis, essentially.
And that is, you know, it's just that absolutist us and them type language that cults do.
Like, you can look at how, what is it, the Westboro Baptist Church, for instance, operates, which is everyone except for their circle is fallen, is just absolutely evil, groveling in the dirt, worms.
And if you accept that premise, then a whole bunch of other stuff follows around, you know, cutting yourself off and protesting outside places and so on, swearing, you know, yelling at them in the street and so on.
So, yeah, so he's like a pure rhetoric monster, you know, sets up, sets up certain things.
Monster you said, Matt, you're dehumanizing him.
Showing this.
Yeah.
The funny thing is, as well.
Oh, and I just want to clarify, Matt.
You said he would cast 70% of America, but you don't mean 70% of America is liberal.
You mean that he regards anybody to the left of him, which would include conservatives, right?
Yes, exactly.
Just clarifying the percentage is that.
I think a lot of moderate conservatives would like everyday people.
Never Trumpers.
Yes, for example.
Exactly.
Yeah, yeah.
So just in case anybody thought Matt thought America was 70% liberal, I'm just pointing that out for your benefit, Matt.
The CFO meals.
So, well, so you heard this, right?
And this deflection.
I think it's actually pretty good, pretty savvy, because this is the kind of thing like Brett Weinstein does or Russell Brandt.
You know, they provide their listener with the deflection, right?
This is the talking point if people bring up that I am demonizing people.
You know, Joe Rogan and Chris Williamson, if they had of being a bit more self-reflective, they could have immediately after demonizing all Democrats said, no, this isn't to see him as what we're complaining about them theory.
That's right, because we're describing something factually real.
Yeah, so that's what he did.
So I kind of like, I'm impressed at the rhetoric skill, but you know, I'm not impressed in any moral sense about it, right?
You just gotta, you gotta admire the technique.
But so his color, Matt, continues.
They're still in dialogue here.
And I think you might pick up on why some of this kind of rhetoric might appeal to his caller.
Well, a curious thing I noticed in my personal conversations or debates is the harshest reaction I've gotten and from men in particular is taking a dance against abortion.
Because I've talked to women about it and I've talked to men about it.
And for some reason, the men get more vociferous.
And I think going back to the sort of internal family systems, at least this is my assumption, my psychological reading of it.
I assume that it must be like coming from a place of being scolded by a woman harshly as a child.
I'm assuming.
I mean, I'm reading into people I know in particular, but yeah.
How do you interpret this psychoanalysis here?
He's saying that he's experienced harsh reactions from men when he's argued with them about abortion.
I assume that he's against it.
And he ascribes these men's response attitudes or reaction to being scolded by a woman harshly as a child.
Does that make any kind of sense?
It's the kind of psychoanalytic approach, but there again, Matt, just not in internal family systems being invoked, right?
Just, I mean, it's just a gloss, right?
To make that point.
But the general notion we're malnu, like we heard at the clips at the start, is women are to blame for men's behavior, right?
So the caller here is mirroring his rhetoric, which is like men have responded more harshly when I've been opposing abortion.
So how to attribute that to women?
Well, is this women's fault?
Yeah.
And he says, well, what about, you know, is it maybe that they were scolded by women?
And that makes sense.
Yeah, they've compensated.
And well, let's see how Stefan feels about, you know, that particular TH.
So let's say there's a bunch of women and it's not theoretical, there's a bunch of women who are like, well, it's a woman's choice and it's abortion is healthcare and so on, right?
You want to enslave women and turn them into breeding cows and so on.
Like this hysteria of the handmaid's tale, which does exist in the world, but I guess Margaret At was too much of a chicken shit to write about where it really happens.
She has to make up where it doesn't happen, which is Christianity.
Fucking coward.
Repulsive.
Brilliant head witch.
He could have been sidetracked by how much he hated Margaret Atwood.
I swear to God, like he's cartoonish in a way, right?
Like, cause there's so much there.
You hear a little bit of the kind of new atheist leaking through, right?
Because I mean, also he doesn't like Muslims, right, Matt?
So this is his thing.
So he's appealing to Christians, but he wants to say, like, if you want to talk about real misogyny and stuff, you'd be willing to, you know, critique Islam, right?
So you couldn't possibly critique both.
So that, of course, is the natural trajectory for someone who is a former new atheist or whatever, who now is transformed or long ago transformed into a full-on right-wing polemicist to sort of, you know, I guess locate all of their previously universal anti-religious sentiments to just Islam.
Chris Dandy is actually fine.
Yeah, maybe there's certain bits of Chris Andy that you take issue with, but like overall, it's so much better than, you know, the communist, godless agenda of the left.
So yeah, he got distracted there, but, you know, let's hear him continue on.
So he was talking about, you know, the abortion thing and the suggestion that maybe it's scolding women that are actually to blame.
Because if you're like, you know, I'm not so sure about the ethics of abortion.
You know, I mean, women have killed more human beings in the past 50 or 60 years than all of the wars throughout all of history.
I mean, is it possible it's gone too far?
Is it possible that it's irresponsible?
Is it possible that it's being used as a form of birth control?
Is it possible that dehumanizing babies is not the way to go in society?
Is it possible that it has long-term psychological and physical negative effects on women?
And it does, as far as I understand it.
But if you even bring that up, right?
What happens in a lot of places?
Because women have just become hysterically left.
Like left to center.
Men are as or maybe even a little bit more conservative.
Women have just gone completely.
They've been completely radicalized into hyper-leftism, particularly among the young.
And so what happens if you like, you take some position that's not hyper-leftist and the women lose their shit?
Oh, he's such a creep.
Oh, he's a MAGA.
Oh, he's conservative.
Oh, he's a patriarch.
And they spread it around and you can't get any dates.
It's interesting.
I'm trying to get a feeling for the kind of audience that he's catering to.
And I increasingly it's becoming clearer.
You got the incel kind of, you know, they won't even be MAGA men, right?
The women, they're hyper-leftists.
They're like, they're looking down on you.
And I like the just asking questions segment.
Is it possible it's gone too far?
Is it possible?
It's possible.
Is it possible?
Yes.
Absolutely true.
You know, you're right.
You're right.
It's possible.
I can't believe they won't let you say that.
Yeah.
But, you know, like, again, I think the way Stefan would frame it is that if somebody even suggested that it's possible that there might be, you know, some possible downsides to abortion, that there might be some negative effects.
Then, of course, as a progressive person, your instinct would be to grab them and scream in their face.
Throw them off the building, like spit in their face.
And yeah, like, no.
No, there's like, and it being used as a form of birth control.
Finally, one woman that would prefer to have an abortion rather than to use some other method of birth control.
It's so ridiculous.
Don't say one woman that that's that's too low of a bar in a in a world of several people.
You know, I don't know.
You're just protecting me against internet pedants.
I know.
Yes, I am.
So, but yes, so he presents it that you're simply there, you're not allowed to even have debates about any of those issues or whatever.
And like, but there are Christian left-wing people who take issues with abortion and moral grounds as well.
Like, it is a topic that people debate and have different opinions on in liberal circles.
Maybe not in like the most extreme, you know, progressive leftist, I don't know, fucking wicking communist book club or whatever.
But across the whole left, yes, it is.
There are various positions.
And just the general thing is that there is an inclination towards women have the most right over their own body, right?
That is the that's that's the thing he's pointing to that's legitimate.
But the rest of it is just like it's hysterically overwrought.
And uh, it is.
Yeah.
It is.
No, no, Chris, it's the women that are hysterical.
Oh, well, well, no, we have to, as we say, women have gone crazy.
Yes, well, take them for granted.
But the question was about men, Matt, right?
And Stefan wants to psychoanalyze the man and what they're up to.
I think there's two answers.
Obviously, they're not the only answers.
They may be the right ones, but I'll tell you the answers that are popping in my mind.
The first is that men who want women to sleep around, in other words, men who are sex addicts and variety sex addicts definitely want abortion to be legal.
I mean, that's for pretty obvious reasons, right?
So sex addicts definitely want abortion to remain legal so that women don't have to be as picky about who they have sex with and they don't have to face negative consequences of sexual activity, which would cause them to pair bond and get married and so on and take them off the market for the sex addicts to plow like Farmer Jones on the back 40.
So that's one.
If, let's say, abortion becomes illegal, then a lot of man whores lose access to easy sex and then they actually have to develop qualities of character rather than this weird nagging charisma nonsense that floats around the manosphere, which I guess seems to work with some women.
And that's number one.
Number two is that they want to show, they want to signal to the women how what an ally they are, right?
What, what, what?
They're just, they're so allied with women.
They will defend women against those men who want to take away women's abortion rights and healthcare and choice and who want to control women's bodies.
I'm with you, sister.
I'm not with those creepy men over there.
I'm with you.
Right?
Where it's the male feminist cuttlefish strategy, right?
So I assume those are the two reasons.
Could be tons of others, but that's the ones that pop into my mind.
He's so repellent, isn't he?
So I like the skewers.
I like the strategic deceivers.
These are beautiful things to behold where it's like, you know, I've got two answers.
They're not the only answers.
They might not, might not even be the right answers, but, you know, there's two.
Let me just throw them out.
It's like very Jordan Peterson.
I'm not saying this is right.
It's like, well, the first one, right?
They're all sex addicts who want to plow them like a farmer.
They're sex people.
The second one, of course, is they're just virtue signaling.
Sneaky fuckers.
Sneaky fuckers.
That's right.
That's right.
sex addicts or sneaky fuckers so i mean it's it's like impossible for him to just like it's so amazing like you said the contrast between how he presents himself as someone he can hear lots of ideas yes Yeah, that's right.
He's all about dialogue.
He's all about the exchange of ideas.
He's a philosopher, Chris.
He's a philosopher.
But he can't admit the possibility that somebody could say, well, I've got a different opinion from you about abortion because I, because I, because it's pretty easy to do, right?
You can, you can, you can represent someone who's against abortion and not make up, make out that they're an insane freak who wants to like kill everybody, but rather just go, well, they believe that, you know, all life is important and life begins at conception and it's immoral for these reasons.
I mean, it's not hard to do, but he's incapable of doing it.
You don't even have to tie it to religion, right?
You can, it doesn't have to believe in life and conception.
You can just believe that human life is precious and that infants and collections of cells have the potential to form into human life and they can, you know, at a certain point they can suffer.
And would you have preferred that you were, you know, terminated before you were born and stuff?
You can easily have the mind space and be like.
But the point is, is that he is incapable of admitting even the slightest bit of decency in someone that doesn't agree with him.
That's the interesting thing.
And so, you know, I stand by it.
He is a rhetoric monster.
He's just Pure rhetoric.
It is so ridiculous that he presents himself as a philosopher.
I know.
He's just a pure polemicist with his little, you know, colorful metaphors and so on.
Well, the other bit about it there is like, so this explanation, Matt, say this was true.
Let's grant them this is the two possibilities, right?
Maybe there were others.
So that would mean that like, say, people who are much older, you know, their testosterone has dramatically faded or they've had many children and they're happy and content in their family life.
Of course, then they shouldn't be for abortion.
It would only be the young people that want to have sex.
Like, unless I'm planning to cheat on my wife with these various like sex people, right?
I shouldn't support women's rights to abortion.
No, it's only like a strategy to pick up women.
Well, unless, of course, Stefan thinks of a couple of other reasons.
He's just given us two.
He did leave open the possibility.
That's right.
That's right.
But I think we can be sure that whatever reasons you have, they would be pretty terrible.
They would be terrible.
It would reflect badly upon you as a person, Chris.
And did you also notice, Matt, that he kind of suggests that he's criticizing the manosphere.
He's talking about nagging.
And nagging is more with the pickup artist scene, which is the precursor for the manosphere.
But actually, the manosphere is much more au fait with Stefan's approach, right?
They want women to only sleep with the high-status man, right?
And the women should always be cheist and all these kinds of things.
So he's presented it as if he's critiquing all sides, right?
He's critiquing, you know, the manosphere and all these kind of people.
But actually, again, it's just the kind of right-wing centrist virtue signaling where you're actually only criticizing liberals or progressives, but you present it as if it's a critique of all sides.
Yeah.
Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but it feels like he's very much targeting a, you know, like a paleo-conservative, traditionalist Christian kind of demographic that wants women to be chaste, to be subservient, and for there not to be any kind of recreational sex, essentially.
It should all happen within the bounds of marriage.
I mean, I think it's that he might be targeting that group, but he's also got the people in his audience who are more, a little more liberal than that, and at least are okay with non-recreational sex.
Like, I think he would present that as, you know, that's the caricature of people.
So people are saying, I'm saying, you know, that we, you can't even have sex for pleasure.
I've never said that, right?
Like, that would be the thing.
But the way he frames this kind of thing, I mean, the other thing that's odd about it is he's this stuff about abortion.
He's kind of presuming that birth control doesn't exist, that there's no other forms of preventing births, right?
Because he's presenting it as, well, people are pro abortion because they want to be sex people and they want to have sex with random people all the time without any consequences.
But, you know, like that doesn't mean that it's not.
Contraception exists.
Like most people who do that use contraception, right?
Yeah, well, but I think he's just saying, you know, he would argue contraception is not 100%.
So there will always be, you know, like some amount of unwanted pregnancies.
And this is the failsaf.
But, well, he does have another suggestion, Matt.
So we give two options though, right?
You have the sneaky fuckers and you have the man whores.
Those are the two meals who might support abortions.
But he does say, actually, there is a third.
But if a man has participated in an abortion, he can't be objective.
Maybe his mother had an abortion or more than one can't be objective.
Maybe his sister had an abortion.
Maybe his aunt had an abortion.
And so because it's become so widespread, you get an automatic base of people who've done wrong who are going to defend it no matter what, because they've just, they've invested in their moral standing into it.
And if you've done, if you had an abortion and then you start to look at the possibility that abortion might be wrong.
Ooh.
You know, that's really, really, I mean, that's an ugly, ugly thing for people to have to deal with.
I mean, one of the ways that you entrench sin in people's minds is you just get enough people to sin that social control doesn't work anymore.
You can't ostracize.
You can't reject.
You can't, because everyone's now bound up into sin, right?
Yeah, well, this kind of speaks to the point I was making that he's like, he's talking about sin there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And, you know, these progressives who have been sinning so much, now they have to abandon all kinds of kinds of social control.
He's describing this as a good thing, that you need to be able to control society and ostracize people that that's sin, right?
Yeah, the sin is abortion, though.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, but I'm sure there are.
I'm sure there are other.
He's got a bunch of other.
Yes.
It's not just abortion.
I know that.
But like, just again, Matt, the rhetoric is so back here.
You could, you know, cut through it because he's suggesting that any society that accepts abortion or that if anybody has ever known anybody that's has abortion, they'll automatically want to defend that person as a good person.
So they'll be unwilling to accept that it's that it's a sin, that it's an evil in the world because they want to think positively of women, right?
Like I did also like one clip ago that he invoked women have killed more people than any of the amount of wars for abortion.
But like, if he applies that logic, haven't they also produced more people than anyone?
Like, it's also.
But usually with the wrong men, you see, Chris.
So you can't hand it to him for that.
They're always, they're always doing wrong.
Don't one way or the other.
That's it.
And I guess they're just doomed to it.
But yeah, so it's just like, it's very like, you know, the way he demonized the media, the way he demonizes education.
He's basically saying by being socialized in a liberal society, you've inherited an original sin that you didn't even realize was a sin.
And you need to like purge it, right?
Like by adopting these correct set of beliefs and stuff.
So it is very religiously coded material, but he's very fluid like that.
He doesn't mind flipping between and saying demons.
And he might say, no, of course, sin is just a label for a moral vice or whatever.
But yeah, he obviously wants the effect, the emotional heft of that invoking that concept.
Oh, yes.
Yes, we should take that as a given that with any time you accuse him of, yeah, any of this specific religious stuff, he can always flip to, well, this is just metaphorical.
He's doing the Jordan Peterson thing.
He's really talking about moral character and conscience and that kind of thing.
Yeah.
So that was colour one, Matt, at Joyus.
We've got three colors on this call, right?
So we've already, we've experienced some highs, some lows, right?
Yeah, I think it's fair to say we've noticed a little bit of rhetoric, a little bit of hypocrisy, and some florid metaphors, which they like.
Now, the next guy to come is, I think he says his name is Drago, and he wants to continue a conversation that they began on a previous call.
So, you know, you just said what kind of people interact with them.
Apparently, there are repeat callers, right?
So, yeah.
And just a spoiler alert, it doesn't end well.
Oh, well, no, but spoiler.
I mean, the first call was beautiful.
And here comes color two.
Okay.
So let's hear the end of color one and the arrival of caller two.
Hey, to all great conversations as always.
I wanted to follow up a couple of days ago to better understand your perspective on how you would talk about, you know, let's say truth and we're talking about reproducibility, et cetera.
So if I may ask a few questions to see if I'm understanding you correctly.
Is that okay?
Yeah, of course.
So, okay, so if would you say the statement, the Earth revolves around the Sun, would you say that that statement or proposition corresponds to reality?
Yeah, I mean, we could caveat and say that the Sun also orbits a tiny bit around the Earth.
The center of the relationship is not quite at the center of the Sun because the Earth has its mass too.
But yeah, I mean, in a sort of general term, it is certainly more true to say that the Earth goes around the Sun than the inverse.
So yes, I would say that that corresponds to reality.
Got it.
Okay.
And then is it fair to say that it's always corresponded to reality?
Yeah.
Well, always is a tough thing, right?
Because we've got the origins of the solar system and, you know, the aggregation of the atoms and particles into planets and the disks.
So certainly I would say since the solar system was stable, it is a, and since the two exists, it is fair to say that the Earth goes around the Sun.
Yes.
This is a brilliant blend of science and philosophy here.
I think we've established...
It's the master.
Yeah, we've established that the Earth probably, for the most part, goes around the sun.
Not always.
Things could have changed in the distant past billion years ago.
Who knows?
It was just dust, Chris.
Yeah.
But, you know, I think we're getting somewhere.
We're getting somewhere.
This give me flashbacks to sense making.
But I do appreciate here, like, you know, Matt, as we were talking about, what kind of people, right?
This seems like someone who enjoys philosophical thought experiments somewhat.
And he's arriving.
You know, let's continue this conversation we were having about reproducibility and so on, right?
Topics dear to my heart, my ma.
And the first thing he's doing is laying out.
So first of all, you accept that there are objective truths that exist out there.
We can identify them.
I was being a bit unfair.
Yes.
The caller is trying to say you could have statements and then you can say that the statements correspond to reality.
Correspondence theory of truth is what he's invoking here.
Okay.
And you heard Stefan.
He was like, can I ask a couple of questions?
He's like, yeah, of course.
Go ahead.
This is all about.
It's a philosophy show, Chris.
It's a philosophy.
It's a philosophy show.
We got a bit sidetracked by politics in the first call, but this is the bread and meat of the Stefan Molyneux experience.
Okay, so let's continue on, right?
Carry on, colour two, and build your argument.
Okay.
Now, can I swap the phrase correspond to reality with true?
So can I say that, you know, is the proposition the Earth revolves around the Sun true?
Yes.
Okay.
So, okay.
So then if 2,000 years ago or 3,000 years ago, I mean, whatever, but before we could prove it, if someone said the proposition, does the earth revolve around the sun, are they saying a true statement, even though they can't actually demonstrate it through any scientific method?
No, they are not saying a true statement because they're stating an opinion, but they cannot prove it.
So, okay, so.
Just if I'm tracking correctly, before I propose this historical, you know, 2,000 years ago thing, we agreed that the statement, Earth revolves around the sun is a true statement.
And it's always been true, you know, as far as there's been a stable cosmos.
But if a person said this statement, is it that the person is not true or the statement is no longer true because the person delivering the message didn't have a way to know it?
Truth is when it is established, not uttered.
A bit of a curveball there.
Are you parsing what old Stefan is throwing into the mix there?
I think so.
I think so.
No, I'm not a professional philosophy here, but my...
You're not even a professional philosopher, let alone a philosophy.
What did I say, philosophy?
Well, I'm not a professional philosopher, Chris.
I'm just a simple country chicken.
But my gut feeling would be that, you know, if you were, it was like 5,000 years ago and you were just saying stuff randomly because you had thoughts that were coming to you in dreams.
And you could say that the Earth revolves around the sun and you'd be saying something true, even if you couldn't prove it, even if it was accidental, even if you flipped it.
Right.
Now, Matt, you have adopted what is called the correspondence theory of truth there.
Okay.
Now, Stefan is not endorsing this, right?
He has a more subjective relative clause where he wants to say that even if they say a statement which corresponds with reality, if they don't have the basis for it, we can't say it's true.
Now, the problem for him is that the caller already established before he asked him this question.
Is it possible?
Is it true to say that, like he, first of all, he said, does it correspond to reality that the sun goes or the earth goes around the sun?
And Stefan said, yes.
And he said, has that always been the case?
And he said, yes.
And then he said, can I replace corresponds with reality with truth?
And Stefan said, yes.
So following the logic, again, I'm not a philosopher either, but I see the kind of premises that he laid out there, which leads to, okay, so when this person says this back in history, they were making a statement that was true.
But Stefan doesn't like that, right?
Because he has a different definition of truth.
So even though he's endorsed all these statements that meet that the obvious conclusion, he has to say no, right?
So he's contradicted himself.
But yes, that's where we are.
Yes, yes, I followed.
The call actually set up a bit of a contradiction there in Molyneux.
Yeah, almost like he knew that there was a contradiction is outlined.
But so that's where we are, right?
So Mullen, you will explain a little bit more about his non-correspondence theory of truth.
So here you go.
Okay.
Now, well, I guess, right, I'm trying to understand your definition of the use of the word truth, because in my mind, isn't there a difference between what something is and how you know it, that knowing something that is versus what it is?
Yes.
Well, I mean, if you're making a truth claim about the structure of the solar system, then you need to be able to prove it.
And the reason that I'm saying that is that lots of people say lots of crazy stuff in the world, right?
Oh, sure.
And so is it possible that as someone who was insane, let's sort of go back to the year minus 2000 or minus 3000.
Like before you could even remotely prove it, right?
I think I was talking about this in the show the other day, that sort of 17th, 18th century, they got it pretty the size of the sun and they got it down pretty well.
But let's go way back in time, 3000 BC in the middle of nowhere.
Some guy's insane, right?
He's just, he's lost, he's schizophrenic, he's lost his physics.
He goes, no, no, no, but the earth goes around the sun, don't you?
Don't you know, right?
And that's because they had a vision, they hit their head, they had a dream, they're on drugs, they've gotten their mind is misfiring or whatever, right?
Is it a true statement?
No, it's not a true statement because it's not proof because it's what I hear you saying is that the contents of the statement cannot be separated from the psychological causes that led to that conclusion.
So in this case, I can't just take his conclusion and evaluate it on its own correspondence to reality because his process of getting there was flawed.
I wouldn't say the psychological state.
What I would say is that truth means it's been proven, not it's been said.
Yeah.
Chris, when I did a little bit of googling about this, it seems that the caller there is describing a correspondence theory of truth, which is that it's different.
The statements you can make about something is separate from the evidence and so on that you can put forward to support it.
But what Molyneux seems to like is seems to be actually closer to like there are some streams of philosophical thought that believe this, that truth is intimately connected to the means by which it's verified or whatever.
So yeah, yeah.
So I mean, they're just both talking to like a classic little like conundrum that's been out there in the philosophical discourses.
But it's worth saying that the perspective that the caller has, the correspondence one, is much more broadly accepted these days.
You know, pretty much all scientists and stuff like that implicitly work from that kind of assumption.
It's Molyneux and his point of view, which is a bit more bespoke and not so common really these days.
Well, philosophers, they believe, you know, 100 crazy things before breakfast.
They do.
But yes, in this particular debate, you can take whatever definition you want of truth, right?
Like you said, there are different schools of thought around this.
And Molyneux's one is like a more subjective one, right?
He's on like relative understandings or whatever.
So it's, but the problem is that he endorsed an objective truth prior at the beginning.
Yeah.
So I think that's the point here, that Molyneux is, at the very least, he hasn't staked out his position in a very sophisticated or eternally consistent way.
Yeah, I would say that basically he accidentally endorsed something that he doesn't want to, and now he's endorsing a different position, but he doesn't want to acknowledge that he said something that's contradictory, right?
So he's just acting like it, you know, like perfectly, it makes sense.
It makes sense.
Yeah, like it's all coherent.
So yeah, so anyway, the disagreement is what it is and it continues.
Caller number two tries to highlight where the issue is that he detects in this reasoning.
Right.
And what I meant by psychological causes, I don't mean specifically like, right, like brain chemistry or things like that, but that there's a premise that leads to conclusion.
So I guess the question is: if someone states a conclusion but hasn't justified that conclusion with premises, does it mean that the conclusion is not true?
Or can the conclusion be true, but their argument be false?
They just have a bad argument while still having a coincidentally true conclusion.
I'm sorry, I feel like I'm not getting through, and I'm sure that's on me.
Truth is when something is proven, not when something is stated.
I mean, I hear the assertion.
Like I said, I'm trying to.
Well, I'm trying to ask a question.
I think it's kind of let's just pause on that because I feel like we're just kind of skidding past each other mentally.
Sure.
So there might some things to know.
First of all, is like the caller is trying to identify the disagreement.
And he's correctly like doing that, right?
Like he really sounds like he's trying to work this through.
Like it'll be really useful to talk to Stefan about that.
I question that, but whatever.
That's what he's trying to do.
And you hear Stefan, you know, they kind of apologize.
Oh, look, oh, maybe, Chito, I'm not explaining this.
Well, you sound confused, right?
It's probably my fault, right?
Let's let's try again.
And hold on, we're skidding past each other, right?
We gotta resolve this.
But Chris, the method that he's using there, like he, Stefan doesn't clarify or justify what he said.
He just repeats his flat position.
Truth is when something is proven, not when something is stated.
Are you stupid?
Do you just not get this?
This is what I have said.
Oh, yeah.
Don't jump ahead, bro.
Because that's where he's going to go.
But yes, that is the underlying impression, right?
But the caller is correctly highlighting, right?
But there's a contradiction in what between what you said, right?
And so anyway, this is the, just for the sake of completion, this is the core boring disagreement stated.
Incredibly boring.
Truth is a category that we assign an opinion to when it moves from opinion to proven.
Proven.
So truth is like a metal that an opinion gets when it's proven.
There is no truth to an opinion that is not proven.
It is just an opinion.
I think that the earth goes around the sun.
Okay.
I think that the sun goes around the earth.
There is no such thing as is it true before it's proven.
I suppose, and maybe it's just, we'll just have different language, but to me, there's a difference between the recognition of a truth, as you said, the assigning of a label.
Like if I assign the label of truth, I need to prove it.
But something is true before I can assign it the label.
I just might not know that it's true until you're looking at truth as if it exists independent of human consciousness.
It doesn't.
Yes, exactly.
No, but it's exactly the assertion I'm making.
Truth is the relationship between concepts in the mind and reality out there.
It's a relationship between concepts in the mind and the reality that's out there.
As you keep saying, Chris, the problem is, is at the very beginning, Stephan said that the earth revolves around the sun and it has done so.
And it's true.
And it truly has been doing that for whatever, billions of years, before humans walked the earth, before the humans knew that, before they had a chance to put a metal on it.
And it's the caller even explicitly said, can I say it's true?
Like, can I replace that word with true?
And stuff's a yeah.
Now, can I swap the phrase correspond to reality with true?
So can I say that, you know, is the proposition the earth revolves around the sun true?
Yes.
So he's now advanced a different definition where that doesn't make any sense, right?
Because like he's now said, it's only a thing which is attached to like a specific opinion that the person holds, right?
And you hear the caller saying, oh, this is a difference of language, right?
We have different opinions.
And he, and then, you know, Stefan is like, no, no, what you're saying is truth exists independent of human opinions.
And he's like, yes, yes.
And he's like, no, but that's wrong.
You're like, no, Stefan, this is called someone having a different opinion.
Opinion.
You have an opinion.
The really interesting thing here, just looking at the dynamics of this conversation, is what you just said, Chris, which is Stefan doesn't really have place in his mind for the possibility that someone else can have a different point of view and have reasons for having it.
And it's correct.
And it's yeah, like there is what Stefan thinks, right?
And then there are people that don't understand.
That's exactly that is the situation.
Him and Sam Harris would get on quite well.
Well, actually, probably not.
No, no, that'd be butting heads like mad.
I don't feel comfortable putting Steph Harris in the same spot as Stefan Mullen.
On this specific issue, I do.
In any case, I like this caller.
Well, I should be careful with my Prius.
I like him in this regard because he doesn't give up this point.
Okay.
So Stefan has laid out, okay, you're just making a mistake.
You're just confused, right?
That's you're making a thing.
And he brings back the point of contention.
I guess going back to the first question, I just want to make sure I'm not misrepresenting.
Because when I asked you, did the statement, the Earth revolves around the sun correspond to reality?
Always, that it's always corresponded.
You said yes, but it sounds like you're saying it corresponded to reality, but it was not always true.
Is that in my unique language?
Hang on.
How do we know?
So some crazy guy 3,000 years ago says the earth revolves around the sun.
How would we know that that corresponds to reality?
Because corresponds with reality means there's some objective way of comparing the statement to the facts.
Right.
So what he said was just a bunch of syllables.
Right.
Yeah.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
Oh, no, I would say, right, to answer your question of, I don't know, like we wouldn't.
So does lack of knowing the mechanism of correspondence.
This is just, I don't know why this is hard.
I'm sorry.
I'm just getting a little annoying.
Doesn't mean it's anything to do with you.
Doesn't mean it's your fault.
Okay.
If I claim something true about the universe, how do we know whether it's true or not?
Now, another little spoiler, these little politicians doesn't mean it's anything to do with you.
Doesn't mean it's your fault.
Those are going to go away shortly.
Somebody who's slightly stronger.
But yeah, so the guy, you know, he's trying to learn, but you, you contradicted yourself.
And he's like, no, Because we can't know if anything, like it doesn't even make sense.
And you're like, well, hold on, but you said it was true, right?
This is why he's confused because your definition means that you should have said no.
He's like the I think you should leave character.
I'm just trying to understand what's going on here.
But yeah, but Stefan like just refuses to accept that.
Yeah, that is impossible.
He's just, he's memory hold the beginning of that conversation.
He's fastened on the second lot of stuff he said, which is about this, you know, verificationist, subjectivist definition of truth.
And the guy's just an idiot because he's not accepting that.
Yes.
And so, well, the next part, Matt, it supports your position that Stefan cannot inhabit a world where people can disagree with him and have valid opinions.
Like the two things.
He cannot imagine that scenario.
And just this, I'm not strawmanning him.
He explicitly states this.
So truth is when it is proven, it is reproduced.
It is internally self-consistent and it corresponds to reproducible experiments in the real world, right?
I think we just use the language differently, but I understand how you can.
No, no, but we need to use the language the same.
We need to use the language.
Either you need to come to me or I need to come to you or we need to meet in the middle.
Because if we don't have the same definitions, then it doesn't work, right?
The conversation doesn't work.
So you can't, it would be impossible, Matt, to have a conversation with someone who has is operating on a different definition of a particular concept.
Is that true?
No.
What would be hard is if you don't make clear the different definitions, right?
So you're using two words inconsistently, right?
But if someone says, well, I take this word to apply to this set of scenarios, and you say, well, actually, I use it more for referring to this, right?
That's it's perfectly possible to have, like, for example, I can have a conversation with someone about religion, and they regard it as religion relates to like the revealed truth of the divine creator, right?
Their religion.
Whereas I regard it as a system about, you know, beliefs and rituals that correspond to supernatural things and so on, right?
I understand their definition.
They understand my definition.
And I can understand when they're referencing religious truth or whatever, that they're adopting their perspective, right?
That's just the nature.
If you have to force everyone to adopt your definition to have a conversation, it kind of suggests that you fundamentally can't have strong disagreements about things, right?
Like because you all have to sign up to the same set of assumptions and stuff.
And yeah.
I kind of feel for this guy because, I mean, I question his choices, his life choices.
Like for one, like for one.
Why is he doing this?
Why are you doing this?
Why are you thinking about the differences between verification theories of truth and correspondence theories of truth?
It's not very interesting to begin with, I think.
And then, like, why are you treating Stefan Molyneux as your little guru to go to that you, you know, very, very cautiously and very politely offer your thoughts to?
He's not going to help you with this.
And Stefan, like, refuses to acknowledge that.
I mean, you know, again, he calls himself a philosopher.
But the reason why I wanted to point that stuff out at the beginning, Chris, is that like this, these are hackney questions, right?
From time immemorial, right?
You know, I'm sure Philosophy 101 undergraduate courses teach them.
And the position this guy has, the correspondence type general is a very common most commonly accepted, like more modern, if you like, point of view.
It's Stefan who is the outlier here and has to has to.
But for him, there is none of that.
None of that exists.
It's just his way.
There's his bespoke kind of opinions about philosophy.
It doesn't cite his sources or anything like that.
They're just his proclamations of what's true.
And he just refuses to acknowledge that anyone could have a different opinion.
Yeah.
So this is really beating a dead horse.
But it's a one-minute clip, Matt, where he again repeats his position on truth.
And it's important because the fact that he lays this out means that in Molyneux land, it's resolved, right?
Like he's explained it, and that's it.
So this plays the basis for what happens.
So let's just hear Molyneux lay out his fucking position on truth one more time.
If I say rape, theft, assault, and murder are wrong, evil, that's just a statement.
I need to actually prove it.
Now, the fact that people said murder is wrong is, it turns out that through universally preferable behavior, yes, it turns out murder can never be universally preferable behavior, rape, theft, assault, all that sort of stuff.
So they were right.
They were right, but it wasn't true.
And maybe that's sort of the difference.
So somebody can turn out to be right if they have a crazy statement, right?
But it's not true, right?
So if somebody says they've lost their minds, so they go on LSD and they say, the price of Apple shares is going to be $1,000 tomorrow at 11.09 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.
And let's say that that does turn out to be the case.
Were they right?
Nope.
Because they have no methodology.
And they said a whole bunch of other crazy stuff that wasn't right.
It's not even accidentally right.
It has no truth value until it's proven.
So you're saying, well, it turned out to be true, but you can't go back in time and say, ah, this person who said this crazy thing, they lost their mind or they said the earth goes around the sun.
We can go back and assign truth to that person.
Nope.
You can't.
Because it wasn't proven.
There was no methodology by which we could establish the truth or falsehood of that statement.
It is just an opinion.
Say, wow, but it turned out to have a relationship to the truth.
It's like only by accident.
Okay.
And there's a point I have to note here, Matt.
He says at the start about universally preferable behavior and that it turns out that people had intuitions towards this.
And then it was in fact that this is the only way to organize society.
And then he says, so they were right.
They were right, but it wasn't true.
Right.
So he's made the distinction, rightness and trueness.
Then later, like literally 30 seconds or so later, when he talks about the person making the prediction about the Apple shares, he says, and let's say that turns out to be the case.
Were they right?
Nope.
Because they have no methodology.
And they said a whole bunch of crazy stuff that wasn't right.
It's not even accidentally right.
So he's now mixing up his terminology.
Yeah, so he's now like he, he forgot that he made a distinction between right and true at the start.
Because the thing is, his position, it's not complicated.
Like this isn't like a super complicated position.
He just wants to say, you know, Alex Jones makes a prediction and it turns out to be correct under my definition that truth requires like scientific evidence.
It can't have been true.
But the reason that that sounds confusing is because the normal thing that people would say is he was right.
It was true.
But his like reasons and all, he just happens to get lucky.
That's right.
Yeah.
He can't do that because he has a very non-intuitive concept of what truth means.
So, yeah.
It's not fair to pass any judgments on philosophy from the ratings of Molyneux, but this is the kind of thing that just makes me so bored and so uninterested in any of these questions because so much of the time it boils down to just splitting hairs about definitions.
They're making a distinction between things being true, things being right and correct and things being correct.
There's probably a couple of other words too.
And it's like, who the fuck cares?
Define it.
You know, just use the normal version of the word.
And when you're creating bespoke definitions of words, like words, like as a bespoke definition of something like true, which actually doesn't correspond to any of your intuitions about the word, then I just think that's a recipe for disaster.
You know, it's just.
I hear you.
I hear you.
Though I do think there are things where there are technical definitions.
I know.
I know.
There's the smart stuff behind all of this.
You know, because you can take a subjective point of view and make a distinction between someone who's just guessing, making a thousand guesses a day, you know, whatever.
Five out of a thousand are true.
And you want to make a distinction between that kind of behavior and the very careful scientist type person works for 10 years, makes five statements, and they're all backed up by evidence and they're true, right?
I get it.
I get it.
It's not just that.
I'm also in a self-serving manner thinking about like when I'm thinking about in-group bias or whatever, I'm thinking about the psychological definition, right?
But like when we talked to Sam Harris, he took in-group bias to mean complete correspondence with everything of a very specifically defined political group, right?
And those were two different definitions that led to much confusion and wheeling and gnashing of teeth.
But I do think you can have, you know, like a technical definition, which is reasonably used.
Yeah.
No, no, I know it's true.
Like, I know that there's like, you know, whatever, logical positivists and the, I don't know, the name and all of, yeah, I don't know.
I don't know.
Neurologists, utilitarians, act utilitarians.
Carry on.
I've read about all this stuff.
I've just forgotten it because it's not interesting to me.
But I know that there are a lot of philosophers who think very carefully about the philosophy of science and our methodologies and models and assumptions.
And when it intersects with actual practical statistical modeling, they have my interest for a very short period of time.
So look, I know the substance there before any philosophers email us.
But I'm talking about at this level, right?
Like these kinds of conversations.
Molyneux.
Molyneux level.
It's not just Molyneux.
It's any kind of like dorm room kind of sense making.
It does end up just being splitting hairs over who owns what word.
Oh, yeah.
Well, I don't think Stefan's position is hard to understand.
This is a bit like a Peterson approach to truth, right?
This also ended up with him and Sam Harris getting stuck on this topic around truth, right?
So if you wanted to hear an R and a half of that, Matt, you could listen that conversation.
But listen to the caller attempting to just resolve the issue.
He just wants to make it clear, like, you know, the connections.
Like, I'm sure the caller will be quite happy to walk away going, well, you know, I think this and Molyneux thinks that.
And it's different.
And I'm probably wrong.
I defer to you, Molyneux.
He just wanted to make things clear.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, and Stefan, we heard his cheery attitude at the start.
We've heard him get a little bit frustrated.
Let's see it.
Continue on.
So There is no truth statement in a claim until it is both theoretically comprehended and proven in reproducible experiments.
And there's no time machine that takes earlier perspectives and validates them.
At least that's my claim.
I'm certainly happy to hear candid arguments.
Yeah, well, I guess two quick clarifiers.
One, so from what you described, right, we said, well, we would be uncomfortable labeling the person 3000 years ago as making a true statement because he had no method.
It was just, could have been crazy.
It's just opinion.
Can we say, would you be comfortable saying in your system that the person had an opinion that corresponded to reality, but it wasn't true?
Is that how you would be comfortable saying it or no?
Is that still?
I don't know what you mean by corresponded to reality.
They made a claim with no methodology.
And people can make crazy claims all the time.
And this is, I mean, the reason why, and first of all, I got to tell you, it's kind of annoying when you say my system.
I'm not trying to create my system.
Like, why would you have any interest in my system?
Right?
That would be like, it would be like trying to, if I come up with some Dungeons and Dragons world and you say that it's universal, it's not.
That would be my little world.
So it's not my system.
I experience that as kind of diminishing what it is that I'm trying to do here because I'm trying to come up with universal statements.
That's what philosophy does.
It doesn't create a self-encapsulated cis-like system that's only self-referential.
So I just find that kind of annoying.
But so, no, you don't get to go back in time and claim that things are true.
So he got a little bit sidetracked there.
He got a little triggered there that the guy triggered and carelessly and offensively referred to Molyneux's work as his system, not the system or not the like universal, universal whatever.
That was very diminishing of him.
I understand why Stefan got upset.
I'd be very upset if somebody did that to me.
Suggesting it's just your opinion.
Yeah.
So I also like the weaponizing of therapy, speech say, like I just want the flag up.
I find that kind of annoying.
That was, you know, your attempt to diminish me.
Like it's, this is the, the Dr. K Kiefer Neary thing where you stop and you say, no, I just want to talk about what's happening here.
Like you're in the position to hold the conversation, flag the dynamics that's occurring.
And I saw this kind of thing happening in my life, Chris, way back when I was an undergraduate student.
There were psychology courses where they were kind of training people to do this, which is to stop, reflect on the process of the conversation and, you know, presented as like a way to develop better relationships.
But what it was in practice is exactly variations of this and Dr. K and all the rest of it, which it is this therapy talk, this reflecting on, just going to stop you there, Chris.
I'm just going to say that that thing you just said, I mean, like that is, it is always weaponized as a little power game.
It is not a good thing.
Surely there must be uses of in therapy that are like within the popular therapeutic session.
Like, you know, somebody spells out their guts and they're just demonizing everyone and talking about how the world is against them.
And you say, okay, you know, we'll get to that, but just let me highlight a couple of things that you did there.
Like, I feel like that's reasonable now.
You are quite right, I think, in the in the context of a, especially for like a genuine therapy session, right?
Where you actually have Dr. K. Dr. K, no, nothing televised, nothing on social media, a private session where you actually have a decent therapist who is actually trying to help you and doesn't want to do any of that stuff.
Then sure, right?
They can stop you and go, look, Chris, you're actually, you know, when you start talking about your mother, you start sounding very aggressive and defensive.
Yeah.
And that's totally cool.
Yeah, but it's just when you see it out there in the real world, whether it's a corporate setting or some sort of group performance.
Oh, right.
Training stuff.
Right.
So you're, are you talking?
I thought you were talking about like when they're training therapists.
You saw people weaponize that.
And I was like, but no, I was actually referring to back when I was studying psychology in undergrad.
We had a series of units that were taught by these freaks who were not orthodox psychologists and they were right into like they had titles like group change and process facilitation and they would have these interminable three-hour workshops and they would make a big deal that it was like a Seinfeld episode.
Like there was no content.
There was no, you know what I mean?
There was about nothing.
So you had to sit there for three hours and reflect on nothing in a group for three hours and people would just get bored and snarky and whatever.
It was like a little petri dish for inciting maladaptive behavior.
It was terrible.
I get it.
I get it.
I thought you were talking about like clinical psychology courses that you taught where people did, you know, like expansive listening techniques or whatever.
And I was like, I think there's valid stuff to that.
I've never had anything to do with the clinical psychology, like postgraduate course, but I would hope that they're nothing like that.
Yeah.
Okay, good to clarify.
Good to clarify what we're referring to.
So this is a short clip.
It's just to highlight that, you know, you mentioned about people, the way that you mentioned your Mueller.
Stefan Mulnew definitely has a lot of issues as well.
He's T-Fooder, amongst other things, right?
But he's talked many times about his abuse of Mueller and what, you know, the torture that she put him through.
But also, it sounds like his childhood, you know, I'm going to do my amateur psychologist hat here.
It might be him that has a couple of issues.
So listen to this.
And I mean, the reason it's important is I grew up in the 70s, which are heavily mystical and people had an Astrodamus and all this kind of crazy stuff was going on that you could sharpen a razor blade by putting it under a pyramid and all just nutty telekinesis and psycho psychic phenomena, all this bullshit, absolute brain rotting bullshit.
I'm not saying that you're in that category or advocating for that.
I'm just telling you why I'm passionate about it because I had to dig my way out of this fetid, greasy rubble of epistemological insanity that came out of my childhood.
So this is why I'm very strict about this kind of stuff and so on.
Now, Matt, there, I want to note this because apart from Mulnew, just like whatever, talking about he grew up in the 70s and they would talk about pyramids and what a fetid swamp of pseudoscience it was.
Okay.
Like my cousin used to sleep inside a pyramid, Chris.
She was part of the problem.
She or he, I should say.
Well, he, he, what?
Look at my biases, shiny food.
But then, Matt, the other thing I want to note is he's sharing here about his childhood.
He's explaining why this topic matters to him.
Okay.
He's he's sharing as, you know, he's not a tick-tic-ticker.
He's saying, look, this is why it matters to me.
I have serious convictions and so on.
This will be important later.
So the conversation progresses.
Lord, does it continue?
Here we go.
So I'm just randomly swiping stuff, right?
And it turns out it's a beautiful haiku.
I mean, obviously very unlikely that's the infinite monkeys making Shakespeare.
But let's say I did that.
Would you then go back and say at that time, he knew Japanese?
Yeah, of course not.
So that's the same.
You understand that's the same thing, right?
Well, I wouldn't say it's the same thing, but I understand your point.
Tell me, hang on.
Because we need to agree on this, right?
So tell me how it's different.
If some crazy guy says the earth is going around the sun and I am blindfolded and randomly painting on a wall and I don't know Japanese, when I'm randomly painting on a wall blindfolded, and this guy doesn't know that the earth goes around the sun, he's just saying stuff in the same way that he's crazy right, and we're just painting random like, how is it different?
And i'm not challenging you in any negative way, i'm just you say they're not the same.
How are they different?
Because because what i'm my position is to separate knowledge of something from no no no, the specific no no, the specific things.
How are they different?
Let me, can I ask, it's a similar question?
I'm gonna ask the same.
It's a similar question?
Maybe this will.
So I understand why the color is a little bit confused here right, because Molnew's example isn't exactly analogous, like he's giving the example about.
Like you know, you do something and you utter a statement about the world and the relationships with it and it turns out that it was true, but you didn't know the knowledge under.
And in the other example it's like you produce a random image and it happens by chance to correspond to another language, so that's not making a clium about, like you did in Clium, it was a Japanese haiku right, and then it turns out to be yeah correct, so I, I take your point.
So, so Molini would have you believe that like if like, if he accidentally wrote some well-formed Japanese characters on the wall right after you know, swiping around madly for for months and months and months, then he's saying well, you know, that'd be crazy to say that I, that I knew Japanese, I could, that I could, that I could write Japanese, but that's not quite the right thing.
That the statement would be, what you wrote accidentally, that is a piece of correct Japanese katakana.
Those characters, those characters yeah, which any normal person would agree with right, like you may have done it accidentally, but actually those characters that are on the wall are separate from you and how you got there and how you made them.
I mean, you could copy them out from a book without knowing.
Don't confuse the example.
Man don't say actually, you know what.
This is a total aside Chris, but it did remind me a little bit of the sort of um, these debates around Ai and stuff, because there are there are many people that would like to refuse to admit that anything artistic could come out of one of these image generating programs that exist, but they have a bit of a problem, similar to Stefan, which is that often the pictures that come out of them look very good and they can't tell the difference between them and a really nice one that a human did.
So they actually have a similar theory right, which is that it's not just the product, it's not just the statement, it's not just the, the scroll that matters, it's the intent and the process that that that went into making it is what makes it good and worthy in art.
Yeah sure so, like the, I think the thing that the caller would try to highlight here is like, Like you could say, did what Stefan put on the wall represent Japanese characters?
Is that true?
Yes, that's true.
Did he intentionally do it with knowledge of Japanese characters?
No.
So you could easily resolve this, but like Stefan regards this as like a killer thing.
But I can see that he's a little bit, you know, tripped up by the example because it has different characteristics, right?
That's why he's saying it.
So he says, let me give you another example.
And actually, his example is much better, right?
So here's his attempt to clarify it.
So if I, let's say I, let's say I make the claim right now today in this, as we're speaking, that the Earth revolves around the Sun.
But me personally, you know, I don't currently have the experience or expertise to tell you what experimental condition we would need to set up to demonstrate it.
I can't actually prove it to you just because I don't have that knowledge.
So I am speaking that statement, but I can't demonstrate it.
And then let's say someone else here, whether it's you or someone else, actually can demonstrate, you know, heliocentrism right now.
And both of us say the same sentence, the earth revolves around the sun.
Does it mean that when I say it, it's not true because I can't demonstrate it, but when the other person says it, it's true because they can and they know it.
Or are we saying that because some human, you know, in humanity proved heliocentrism, therefore any human today who makes that statement, we say, well, yeah, that's a true statement because at least some human proved it.
So you as a human can now say this, you know, Earth revolves around the sun, even though you personally have never demonstrated it or set up the experiment.
Pretty good.
That's very good.
I like that.
He clarified: here's two possibilities, right?
And he's brought up the very clear difference in our opinion.
So what will Molyneux respond?
It's a simple question.
You can simply clarify which of the positions advocating.
Up to B or does he?
It's not a gotcha.
It's just an attempt to clarify what's your position on this, right?
Let's hear what Molyneux says.
So, I mean, this comes down to do you trust, and we got to take government science out of this because government science is horribly, viciously, brutally compromised.
So if astronomers, and I don't know how you could not know this, you're sort of growing up in the West, right?
Because, you know, when I was a kid, there were astronomy books.
We studied all of this stuff in school and so on, right?
And it made sense, right?
I mean, you can make the little models yourself.
And I was very interested, I was sorry, into astronomy when I was younger.
And so we know that larger objects tend to attract smaller objects, right?
So we also know that smaller objects tend to orbit larger objects, which is why the moon, which is one-sixth the size of the earth, orbits the earth and not the other way round.
And so we also know that the sun is much larger than the earth.
And now you say, well, how do we know?
I haven't done the experiments myself.
And for sure.
For sure.
You could say, but then you start to get real close to radical skepticism.
Like this is the brain in a tank hypothesis and so on.
Maybe there's a giant conspiracy to show that to have people believe in the globe Earth and the heliocentric solar system and so on.
And I don't view that as possible.
It would obviously be too much.
Too much dissent.
Dear oh dear, dear oh dear.
Mr. Philosopher, Mr. Philosopher, he really, he's really zeroing in, being precise, zeroing in on the problem, making it clear.
He's not filibustering at all.
Matt, the moon is one-sixth as we, as we know, and you'll have read, you've seen the books with the little background.
Unless you're a brain in a tank, but then that would have to be.
Yeah, he doesn't want to answer the question, does he?
Because he well, it's so simple.
I know.
I mean, like, it's like, like, I get that he's, he's like, he prefers this slightly more bespoke version of truth.
That's fine.
But the important thing is he doesn't seem to have the chops to sort of defend it.
He doesn't seem to be willing to accept, you know, the implications of it.
Like, it is, it is a subjectivist kind of thing of truth where you, where it is connected, just like you said, it's connected to you being able to verify it.
So there would be a situation where two people could say the same thing at the same time.
And when one person's, according to him, his definition, one person would be speaking the truth and the other person wouldn't.
It's very simple.
Yeah, yeah, that, that, that should be simple.
But just highlight, Matt, that it's, it's not so simple for Monday.
So you heard him there, you know, kind of get to the point that he doesn't, you know, well, he was just, that was just the problem, like the pre-bubble babble.
Yeah, that was just him.
That was just him avoiding the question.
Yeah, initially, or just setting the premises.
You know, that would be so be so cynical.
Here he's going to get to the real answer and it'll be crystal clear, okay?
So when people say the earth goes around the sun, what I would say is, I accept that the earth goes around the sun.
I would not say, I personally have proven that the earth goes around the sun.
I accept that the earth goes around the sun because it conforms to my lived experience.
It conforms to all the theory and it is accepted universally by all astronomers and it conforms with everything that we know about gravity and momentum and inertia and centrifugal forces and all of that.
So I would say there is not one piece of evidence that goes against that, which is universally affirmed by the experts and they do not dissent at all and it conforms with everything that I understand about reality.
And therefore, there's no higher standard of truth other than you can't because we can't do the Immanuel Kant thing and know the things in of themselves and know every atom and so on.
And I've not, I've not personally flown out into, you know, among the solar system and checked it out myself.
So still filibustering and he's just introducing more things.
So yeah.
Like it's very unclear, like from what he's saying.
Somebody, if all the scientists say it's true and it's generally accepted to be true, and I, when I look up, it seems like the earth is going around the sun.
And so now there's a new thing you can do.
You can be accepting of something, not just correct, not just right, not just speaking the truth.
Actually, you're accepting something.
But it sounds like he's saying that's the same as being true.
What the hell is he saying?
He's filibustering.
Oh, you think so, Matt?
How dare you?
I can't believe that you would say that.
I mean, it's all sounds so perfectly clear the way he puts it out.
He's just, I'd like to say, he's just setting the premises.
Well, hold on, maybe a little bit more and you'll finally be able to appreciate what he was trying to get.
Like a dollar like you do understand.
So I would say, you know, if somebody said, does the Earth go around the solar system?
I said, yeah.
I said, well, how do you know?
It's like, well, I haven't performed the experiments myself, but here's what I understand and here's how it conforms to everything that I know and so on.
Right.
So, you know, you could say, well, the true statement is I accept it.
But if I have no reason to doubt it, and it conforms with every single piece of reason and evidence that I personally know and that all the experts confirm.
Sadly, he's not there yet.
He's not there.
This is absolutely Philip Boston.
And just pointless blabber, right?
The guy gave him a simple scenario with two possibilities.
And he's just invoked all the technical terms he can.
Immanuel Kant came up.
There he said the Earth orbits the solar system, which is generally the way that people typically describe that.
But he's also doing his best to muddy the waters.
Like it's very unclear then.
Like, what is he saying now?
He's sort of implying at certain points that unless he's done the actual experiments, unless he's been like, I don't know, who was it?
Democritus or someone like that?
They stuck a stick in the desert at the equator and then a thousand miles in the other direction.
Unless you do the experiments and you prove it, then you can't say the Earth revolves around the sun and be speaking the truth.
That could be what he's saying, but mainly what he's doing is just obscuring the question.
Like, because he took issue with the fact that the caller would suggest that somebody could have a different opinion.
Like, it was just, it's such a simple thought experiment.
And he's like, but if you grew up in the West, you've obviously read those books.
And like, it's so.
I mean, but the main takeaway here is this is not how a philosopher talks about things, right?
Like this caller is doing a pretty good amateur version of what a philosopher does, which is to zero down to the precise, you know, disagreement, encapsulation of the problem, a nice simple thought experiment, which highlights the contradiction.
And then you work with that.
And Stefan is doing the exact opposite of what a philosopher does, which is bringing in a thousand unrelated things, trying to muddy the waters and make everything very confusing because he's just not.
I just think it's so funny because this is his job.
This is how he promotes himself.
He is the philosopher sage.
And these people are fans calling in to get his wisdom.
Well, so he's been put on his back foot there.
And actually, that was the end of it, Matt.
That was the end of his answer.
It moves on now.
So you show whatever.
Yeah, but you'll see what happens here.
I think that's actually very relevant because Hurry sounds a bit flustered, right?
He's grasping for things.
He's trying to, you know, just demonstrate he knows lots of things, but he, but he can't just like very simply deal with a very, very simple like thought experiment.
Thought experiment.
Right.
Yeah.
And so listen to what happens here, right?
So the caller tries to say, okay, you know, let's let's try a different one.
Maybe that will help, right?
Because he didn't really get a clear answer there.
So I'm watching on your response.
So interest is very interesting.
So I accept it.
Yeah.
Okay.
So if I, let's say my son, my young son, you know, I mean, toddler, right?
So let's say I teach him the fact like, hey, son, listen, the Earth revolves around the sun.
And now he doesn't know the method.
He doesn't know.
Hang on, So you just say that to him, or do you try and show it somehow and draw it out or get a little model or show him online or, you know, show that I'm sure we could find 6 million JavaScript heliocentric solar system models.
And you talk about the history of it and the world looks flat.
So it's kind of confusing.
And the sun and the moon look the same size.
You wouldn't just say it to him, right?
Would.
Just, you wouldn't be teaching him anything, right?
Yeah, like exhausting, so stupid.
It is exhausting and stupid because you actually know where the caller is going with this right it's, it's, it's another simple thought experiment.
Imagine yeah, you know, somebody's teaching something to someone else who isn't so well informed, and and and so on, and but Stefan is now well, he's trying to preempt it right because like, he got the whole deflection that well, you're an adult, you should know right, and that wasn't the point.
He still wants this scenario.
Where is it true for one person and and not true for the other one if they don't have the right method?
So he tried to make it simpler.
Okay, a kid who just someone tells them like, is it not true for them because they don't know the method?
Right, they don't know all this stuff.
So it's like it's a more pure example.
And then he's like well, hold on, you know, wouldn't you have taught the kid all the experimental details and stuff?
They're like, no, not in this thought experiment.
That's the whole point.
yeah it's just so funny that he's so bad at this like he like this like this guy's not an oppositional person like he's a he's a fan he's a fan yeah he's calling into stefan's show twice in a row right So well, you said you know Stefan's so bad at this matt, but here's what he's good at, right.
So he's not a good philosopher if he doesn't give good life advice.
He's like Danger Will, Robinson?
But look at how he flips the dynamics here, right?
So this guy's trying to give him, you know examples, the clown like.
It's all based around this fairly silly, fairly inconsequential debate about how you define truth.
But but watch the judo flip which occurs here.
Well, I would, but I was.
I was going to ask a question where I whether I would or not, I guess i'm trying to first just ask the question.
Assuming, assuming I don't give a robust explanation, like assuming i'm just teaching him a fact like this is just what happens.
And then my question is, I don't, I don't know, I don't know what, what's?
I gave you an example of how you teach him and you said well, suppose I don't give him a robust explanation, how the hell am I supposed to know what you mean by hang on?
Hang on, hang on okay, for us to have a productive conversation, you've got to just stop dropping things in that are highly subjective and think you've said anything.
So when you say well, what if I don't give him a robust explanation.
I don't know what the hell you mean by robust.
Sorry Stefan, just because I was trying to ask a question, but then no no no, this is important.
This is important to me okay okay, okay.
So you can't use all of these, you can't put all of these caveats in and move forward as if they're clear.
I don't know what you mean by a robust explanation, and if you drop that stuff in and keep moving, I doubt that you have good intentions in the conversation, because that's an obvious one, like that's an obviously subjective term, right?
So I gave you some examples of how you might teach your son and you say well, suppose I don't do that, but I don't give him a robust explanation blah, like I don't know what that means.
And you got it.
You got to stop dropping these subjective, Subjective terms and moving on and then not being particularly gracious when I point that out, because that's not a healthy way to have a conversation, right?
To drop subjective terms and then move on as if they're understood.
Passive aggression.
Thy name is Stefan.
Yeah.
So again, perfect example, isn't it, Chris?
Would you like to take us through it?
What was the first little passive aggressive judo flippy thing you did there?
Well, he chastises him with like, well, hold on, hold on.
You know, I've, I've said that you give him a robust explanation and you're not just saying you didn't.
And it's like, why do you have the magic power to set the hypothetical, right?
Yeah, actually, you adjusted his hypothetical.
And then he was like, no, well, just imagine I didn't give like a robust.
He's like, I can't even conceive.
Like, I wouldn't even be in the rest of the truth.
And then, and then he can't understand what robust means.
Yeah, in this case, even though he outlined what a robust identification would be.
Yeah, so I don't know what it even means.
So it's so silly, isn't it?
Like this, this is the flimsiest pretext upon which to flap around like you're being like intellectually wronged.
Yeah, he, I mean, he overreacts so much here.
It's so dramatic, right?
Well, hold on.
Let me just, you know, no, you're dropping in subjective things left and right.
And it's very important, right?
So Stefan is giving the impression that like he's outreach, not because he's been caught out or because he's unable to answer straightforward questions, but this guy is starting to operate in bad faith, right?
Like he's, you know, frankly, I'm noticing that your, you know, your little subjective asides and what these are actually undermining of the quality of the conversation or maybe you don't have good intentions.
And like Stefan is the one inserting the subjective stuff and asserting that like he's the one saying my thing has to be universal and this kind of thing.
Well, before you described his modus operandi as projection, and this is perfectly it, right?
This guy's done nothing wrong, but he's straight away accusing him of, yeah, undermining the conversation, then not being particularly gracious.
Should I point that out?
Because that's not a very healthy way to have a conversation.
So he, so Stefano is, as you say, it's clearly obvious that he is just turning this into an abuse session of some kind because he doesn't like the way this conversation is going.
And he sort of knows he cannot give a clear answer here.
So he doesn't, he wants to stop, stop probing his philosophical system, right?
And move on to something that he can do, which is undermining the confidence of the caller and talking about relationship dynamics and shit.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
This is a meta-move gurus do all the time.
Like, I don't want to answer this until we talk about what you're doing here.
Right.
Like, and now the caller, Matt, just to say as well, as you mentioned many times, he's a big fan, right?
So you or I might be like, shut the fuck up, Stefan, you piece of shit.
You're such a narcissistic dickhead.
You're doing all this stuff that you're accusing me of.
But this is what the caller says.
Maybe I miscommunicated.
It's not my bad intent at all.
I'm actually trying to get to a good point.
What I'm saying, what I meant by robust is you offered a robust, like I use that word to suggest a detailed, a thorough explanation, which is what you did, right?
I would say you just, in my, that's what I meant when I used that word, where there's an actual explanation, cause and effect, there's logic, right?
The whole thing.
Right.
So he's apologetic and, you know, even trying to like kind of pander, you know, you, what you did, Stefan, that's a, that's a very robust explanation, you know?
Like, yeah.
I fucking hate this debuting.
Yeah, me too.
I just, I wish these people would just stay away from people like this.
But anyway, it goes on.
It goes on.
Yeah.
So you might think that that would mollify Molyneux, but you'd be wrong.
I'm saying, what if, what if my teaching method was, I mean, if I could just ask the question, let's assume that I'm teaching my son where I just show a picture and I show, you know, here's the son of a single person.
Hang on, sorry, just for the sake of fucking sanity.
Are you just going to edge case me?
Well, what if you give him semi-robust, but not quite enough?
Like, is that is that what you're just going to edge case me?
Am I going to like, well, I'm not just saying on him, but I only give him 40% explanation.
Is it 40%?
Are you just going to edge case me?
Because I don't have any particular interest in that.
No, it's not.
I'm not, I'm not edge casing.
I'm trying to.
Can I complete the question, please?
Okay, in the interest of time and sanity, let's not make it too long.
But yeah, go ahead.
Yeah, yeah.
Such a creepy motherfucker, Molly.
He's such a little piece of shit, isn't he?
Like, what is this?
Like, now he's getting on his high horse and flancing around because the guy is purportedly edge casing him.
Like, it is just like his pretexts for his umbrage are so flimsy.
I think that's the thing that annoys me the most.
I know.
It's like it's so obvious what he's doing, but he's not.
But the bit that gets me is why would you go along with this as a caller?
Like, why would you have any respect after you heard someone do this unless you bought in on their rhetoric and stuff, which is just a horrifying that's the horrifying aspect to it?
Because the broader context here is that Stefan Molyneux is the guru in this cult.
And all of these people defer to him 100%.
He cannot be wrong.
He could never be doing the stuff that you and I are accusing him of.
And so they take it, right?
They apologize for things when they've done nothing wrong.
When Stefan is acting like a petulant child, they say, I'm so sorry, sir.
I'll try harder.
That kind of it's a power dynamic, I suppose, but that's one of the really revolting things, I guess, about these cultish dynamics.
Yeah, yeah.
And you can even hear like that the caller is a bit exasperated, but he just, he does what he needs to do, right?
And the one thing I'll give him credit for is he still sticks in it.
Like he's dotted.
I'll give you that.
He's like a human punching bag, but he just sort of like a boba doll.
He comes, he just comes back.
So I find this part really despicable.
So this is the start of it going even further downhill, Matt, than where it is.
Okay, so well, there.
We're not quite at the end, right?
You haven't had your fill yet of Molly.
But we thought it might be healthy for everyone involved, including us.
Maybe just take a little break.
And that's a little break.
We'll be back with part two and the deeper depths that this plumbs before too long.
But yeah, we don't want to overdose people with Molonieu.
Yeah.
Do we, Matt?
I think that's the trick with Molonieu.
Small doses, small doses.
And yeah, I mean, you know, if so far it's felt like a little bit icky, if you're getting like a bad vibe from this guy, it gets a whole lot worse in part two.
It's gonna go way, way worse than you imagine.
So yeah, so you've got that to look forward to.
But yeah, just a little breakie.
You know, we pioneered this system.
Mental health break, Chris.
Mental health break.
Yeah, cult season.
Cult season involves some health breaks.
Okay.
You get some little alone time.
But yeah, just be careful out there.
That's what I want to tell you.
Just be careful, okay?
And we'll be back with part two before too long.
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The Coding Academia interviews, unannounced live streams, all tons of exciting things are all there.
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