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Sept. 1, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:46:27

1447 Post Debate Review Conference Call - Anarchism Versis Minarchism

Some thoughts the community had on my debate with Jan Helfeld.

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	Alright, well, I guess this is thanks for joining us.
	We had a call after the debate with a few people who were around, and I know that people have some additional thoughts that you're posting on the board, and I guess I've had a thought or two myself, and I was just wondering if anybody who wanted to start off with some thoughts,
	I guess I still find the The call's worth it, but I guess that's debatable by some, like the debate's worth it.
	But I guess whatever thoughts people have, if you'd just like to jump in now while I finish adding people, that would be cool-o-rama.
	Alan, I thought you had some great comments as usual.
	I like the moving the bar thing.
	I thought that was great. Oh, thanks.
	Do you want to just explain that to people?
	I think it was a really great insight.
	I hadn't thought of it that way, but I think that's right on.
	Well, sure. Basically, what happens is it's just an endless series of challenges.
	When you respond to somebody's concern, they change the variables.
	It's kind of a three-card money, moving the cups around, kind of a parlor trick.
	Right, it's like, okay, you cleared this fence, now I'm going to build a bigger one.
	As soon as you can't clear a fence, then your argument fails, right?
	Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's just throwing more obstacles in the way.
	Right, right. Right.
	I wonder if anyone has any idea why he didn't prepare.
	That seems really strange to me.
	I had a couple of thoughts.
	His motivations. Not specifically on why he didn't prepare, but I think it might be indicative of why he didn't prepare.
	Alright, let's hear him.
	So... So you say that...
	If we look at what Jan does for a living, which is to...
	Basically, catch politicians out in contradictions, right?
	He's, in one sense, attempting to...
	I can't think of another way to put it, but bully the bullies, if that makes any sense.
	Right, okay, go on.
	And so that's kind of a Simon the Boxer type behavior, right?
	It's something you talk about in real-time relationships is the need to repeat these sort of scenarios in order to feel powerful.
	Right.
	So what I suspect is that in coming into this debate, he was expecting you he was expecting you to be like that.
	You mean sort of with confused principles and premises like the politicians?
	Right. Right, exactly.
	And I think you can see this borne out in the way that he questioned you, because you started out in your opening remarks right off the bat, explicating basically the principled approach to anarchism, And the need to consistently apply the non-aggression principle.
	I think this immediately defanged everything that he had loaded up to fire at you.
	And in his questioning of you, you can see this.
	His very first question to you is, what's your highest value?
	Right? And then you answered him.
	And it was a decent answer, and there were ways he could have questioned you on that answer that would have challenged you.
	But instead, what he did was he jumped immediately from that to...
	Right to...
	The impossible scenarios, yeah.
	Mafia gangs, right.
	So that tells me that he had...
	He had nowhere to go with the principle argument, which is the approach he always takes against these politicians that he interviews.
	So that's why I suspect that he came into this debate expecting basically an adversarial approach from you in which you had no principles.
	Because he's not really familiar with who you are.
	And given his history, it sort of makes sense that he would project an ideal onto you of what he's already experienced in the form of politicians.
	Right. I mean, it is the...
	It is the old Socratic approach and the old Socratic rule, which is to ask people what their highest values are, what their values are, how those values are consistent with their positions, and all this, that, and the other, right?
	I mean, that is the Socratic approach.
	And from Socrates' day onward, right, it has been a very effective way of getting people to almost immediately start tripping over themselves, right?
	Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
	And unfortunately, he came to the one, maybe the one, I don't know, I think the one, the one philosophy dude around who has answers to these questions.
	And I think good answers.
	I mean, that's why, you know, the highest virtue is happiness, consistent with rational principles.
	And I'm actually thinking of adjusting that, by the by.
	I'm thinking of changing that.
	Because I don't think that the virtue, the purpose of philosophy is happiness.
	I think the purpose of life is happiness, right?
	Like the purpose of philosophy is truth in the same way that the purpose of medicine is health.
	The purpose of medicine is not happiness.
	The purpose of medicine is health.
	And I think that the purpose of philosophy should actually be truth rather than happiness because you can have truth.
	Truth being you have cancer doesn't make you happy, right?
	So anyway, just by the by, I was sort of thinking about that.
	But that's why I put that in, if that makes any sense.
	Right, no, that makes sense.
	Also in the context of the little mnemonic that you use of reason equals virtue equals happiness too, right?
	Because reason leads you to truth, right?
	And truth allows you to act on virtue and virtue...
	It gives rise to happiness.
	Right, right. But I think, I mean, that was a clarification I've sort of been working on for the last week or two, and that's why I put that up in that, right?
	Because if you just say happiness, then he's going to say, well, minarchism makes me happy, na-na-na-na-boo-boo.
	And that's, you know, a valid, you know, it's a valid critique, I think.
	So that, you know, happiness consistent with rational principles, I think, is the way to go.
	And so because he, because he Probably has never asked that question.
	I'm guessing, right? It sounded like he'd never asked the question, what are your highest values, and gotten a clear and consistent answer.
	And I think, you know, that's partly because what we're doing here is a little revolutionary.
	It's mind-bendingly consistent, which is to say very revolutionary.
	If you've got your usual trick, in a sense, and it's not like he's a trickster.
	He asks, I thought, in the interviews with politicians, he asks very good, very intelligent questions.
	But the sort of Socratic trick, if you come across someone who's got good answers, where do you go?
	That's the challenge that Socrates didn't, I don't think, ever end up having to face, because the people he questioned were all wrong.
	Right, right. No, that's quite right.
	I think that, and if we assume that he's coming at this from the mindset of philosophy, then it also makes sense why he didn't prepare on the basis of content because his assumption would have been, well, I can just work from principles and I don't really need to know the details of your argument if I can Terry, if I can take you apart on the basis of principles.
	Coming into this, he may have been assuming that of you.
	Right, like a mathematician approaching a chimpanzee with a crayon, right?
	Like, no matter what the chimpanzee writes, it's not going to be any good, right?
	Or if it is, it's purely accidental.
	Right, and that's consistent with the approach that he's taken with politicians, right?
	He knows that he doesn't really have to study their Policy documents, for example, because he can just come at them from the standpoint of, is taxation force or isn't it?
	And it'll trip them all up.
	Right, right, whereas that is not the case.
	But that to me asks another, and I think it's related to what you said earlier, Greg.
	There's another interesting question there for me, which is, Is it a trick?
	Is this request for consistency from an objectivist standpoint, is it kind of like a trick?
	Because if he really is into consistency, then he should actually praise consistency.
	If consistency is a value, which seems to be the case in his questioning of politicians, then I think he should praise consistency, shouldn't he?
	I mean, if I like my omelette brown on both sides, and I finally get an omelette that's brown on both sides, I should say, finally, that's a good omelette, you know?
	Thank you. That's a good point.
	When faced with someone who operates on consistent principle, why would he balk at it?
	I don't know. I don't know.
	I mean, that seems like contrarian, if that makes any sense.
	You know, like I ask questions that people can't answer because I like, not because I want the truth, but because I like asking questions that people can't answer.
	And again, this is not specific to him.
	This is true to a lot of people who ask these kinds of questions from, you know, Socrates onwards.
	Is it that you like tripping people up or is it that you really value consistency?
	Leveling. He's leveling.
	If that's the case, he's leveling, especially with the politicians, right?
	And this is all just speculation and psychologizing from a distance, but going after politicians on consistency is kind of a no-brainer, right?
	I mean, of course they're inconsistent.
	That's kind of what they do.
	You mean it's like boxing bill guides, right?
	Right, or like criticizing the garbage man for smelling like garbage.
	Right, right. Right.
	So, I mean, to go after them in that way is sort of his way of feeling powerful in the face of power.
	That's interesting. That's interesting.
	So then it's really, it may not be around the search for truth, right?
	Right, right. That's a possibility.
	It's certainly a possibility, especially in the context of what you were saying.
	If it was the search for truth, then you would think that after maybe give him a bit of a break and allow some time for him to kind of wriggle around in that whole what-if sort of Because we've all been there.
	I know I have been.
	You mean this sort of what if this or that bad happens in a state of society?
	Right. Right. Exactly.
	But then when you actually say to him, look, this is exactly what the state does, right?
	And this is exactly what you fight against every day in your videos.
	Why didn't he say, oh, God, that's right.
	Why? Well, or, you know, he could have said, I agree with you on the consistency of principles, but I'm going to take a devil's advocate position, which to me is a perfectly valid and enlightened thing to be able to do, right? Oh, right.
	You know, to say, look, I mean, I argue this with politicians all the time, but I'm going to take the devil's advocate position and question you.
	And that to me is fine.
	That would have been a fantastic debate.
	Yeah. Absolutely.
	Absolutely. If he had that kind of presence of mind, I mean, that would have been really challenging.
	Yeah. And that, to me, would be, you know, he has two people who agree, one of whom is taking the devil's advocate position.
	To me, that's, you know, that's showboxing, but that can still result in a damn good fight, right?
	Right. And result in some potential for some Insight and some realizations, too.
	Right, right, right. Right, right.
	So that was sort of my take on why he didn't bother to prepare.
	Yeah, and if you have, you know, this asking for consistency and, I mean, at least from what I saw in his videos, he's kind of having the same conversation over and over, right?
	With the politicians.
	And so you kind of don't need to prepare, as you say, because you can just ask them three questions and they're already tripping over themselves.
	Right, right, exactly.
	And coming into this, he's already sort of expecting that of you.
	Right, that I'm going to start tripping over myself almost immediately.
	Right, and I think that's partly why, too, why some of these questions and some of his responses to you...
	Didn't seem like he was actually talking to you.
	Oh, no. He wasn't listening, for sure.
	Absolutely. Right.
	Right. Like the politician he was expecting to get wasn't there, so he was just going to argue with the fantasy in his mind of the politician he expected.
	Right. It's like that guy who came on the board and said, you know, well...
	You know, Steph said that all governments are the same and every government is as tyrannical as North Korea.
	That having been established, let's debate, right?
	And it's like, I'd love to meet this Steph guy because he sounds like a real ass.
	I don't know who he is, but he sounds like that's really not good, right?
	Jan did exactly the same thing at the very end of the debate in that section that I highlighted in the post on the board.
	Where he says that you claim that the mafia is never gonna try and predate on people, that nobody's ever gonna have any disagreements, and even if they do, they're never gonna result of violence.
	He completely and totally caricaturized your argument at the end as though he was arguing with somebody else.
	Right, right. And that, to me, was a very important insight for me, at least, which I thought I would share, which I think is helpful if you debate this stuff, and I'll certainly try and keep it in mind in the future.
	And that insight is this, is that anarchic philosophy does not deal with the actions of individuals, right?
	That, to me, is really interesting.
	Any more than biology deals with one guy, right?
	Like the inits of one guy, right?
	It is a discipline, and this is why I kept asking him, you know, when he came up with this scenario where some defense guy's son rapes some defense guy's daughter or something like that, right?
	Because I could not get him to clarify whether he was talking about individuals or organizations, because it's very, very important, which it is.
	I think, and I'm not saying he was doing any of this consciously, or maybe this is just my thought about it, but it seemed like to me there was a kind of trap there, where if I can say, yes, an individual will act violently, and then he says, well, if that individual is in charge of a DRO, then anarchism doesn't work because the DRO is acting violently.
	Right? It's conflating the individual criminal with the Organizational structure of DROs.
	And that's why I kept asking him, is it an individual or an organization?
	Because if you're talking about an organization, then you're talking about principles, right?
	Then you're talking about cause.
	In fact, if you're just talking about some individual, then absolutely, individuals can go nuts and strangle each other and so on.
	But if you're talking about the cause and effect of self-interest...
	In a long-term institutional situation, that's very, very different, right?
	It's sort of like saying, it's like this, can some guy go into a restaurant and open fire on people?
	Yes. Can that guy run a DRO? Yes.
	Therefore, DROs are violent.
	And those are very, very different things, and I think that's important to remember.
	It certainly is important for me to remember.
	Right. It's like saying that medicine is invalid because people die in hospitals.
	Yes, well, no, it's like saying medicine is invalid because a crazy doctor can strangle his patient.
	Right, right, that's the beginning.
	And therefore medicine is, right?
	But medicine is a process, or, you know, science is invalid because an individual can cheat his numbers, right?
	It's like, well, how do you know the individual is cheating his numbers?
	Because of science, right?
	Or Dawkins can't answer a particular question about evolution on the spot, therefore evolution is invalid.
	Right, so it's not looking at the long-term process or the free market is invalid because some guy might steal or cheat.
	It's because of people's capacity to lie and cheat that we need the free market.
	It's because of people's capacity to be violent that we can't have a state and we need something more flexible, something more fluid and so on.
	And I think that's an important insight to remember.
	Because if you remember, in the Batnarek debate, a guy started asking me, you know, well, some guy comes and kills my family, and it's like, yes, individual acts of great violence can occur, for sure, for sure.
	But we're not talking about the long-term theoretical organization of a stateless society, right?
	We're talking some crazy, some guy goes nuts, right?
	We're talking about nutrition, right?
	We're not talking about a guy who has a brain aneurysm and strangles his cat, right?
	But shouldn't he be used to that, though, because of how much he's argued...
	I mean, I would think he's argued for the free market in the past, right?
	So he should be kind of used to dealing with that sort of mixing government with individuals?
	I think so.
	Yeah, I mean, I think so. I mean, I think that...
	I think if he were to...
	He may have listened or looked back on the debate.
	If he were to think back on the debate...
	I mean, I just did a short video, which is some of my own thoughts.
	I just mentioned one of them here.
	It's the scare stories, right?
	I mean, he didn't actually have an argument about why a stateless society wouldn't work.
	And it's, of course, very rare to actually hear an intelligent argument as to why a stateless society might not work.
	But his argument was basically, well, in anarchism, these absolutely awful things happen.
	Absolutely terrible, awful, horrible things happen.
	But that's actually not an argument, right?
	That's just an assertion.
	And it's fear-mongering.
	It's scare tactics, right? And the ironic thing is objectivists and libertarians hear this all the time.
	So to receive it from a libertarian objectivist was surprising to me.
	That was one of the first things.
	When I got into libertarianism, I read a bunch of books by John Stossel from 2020, and his entire book is basically a dictionary of status scare stories about what life would be like without the FDA or nuclear power and stuff like that.
	Excuses for government. And it's almost like he's making an excuse for government.
	Well, it's the same thing, right?
	So an objectivist or libertarian will say, we shouldn't have the welfare state.
	And then what comes back is not an argument, but the fear-mongering tactic of, so you want people to die in the streets, right?
	And that's a Disney cartoon.
	I'm sorry? It's like a Disney cartoon of a kid dying in the streets or, you know, like Aladdin or something.
	It's just like, well, this will happen. Or all the main characters always seem really poor for some inexplicable reason.
	Right. It's a Dickens novel.
	It's not an argument, right?
	Yeah. I have a few more observations to add.
	Yeah, please, go ahead. The first is that even though people may come out and advocate the free market, they may not...
	Quite understand what that means, or they may define it in a different way.
	You know, after all, people like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity presumably support the free market, but of course these guys are, you know, staunch statists.
	In the debate with Jan, when you got to the part where he really wasn't paying attention to what you were saying, I've seen this Occur quite a bit in debates between evolutionary biologists and creationists, where even though they're presented with evidence, you eventually come up against what's called invincible ignorance, where they become impervious to any further information.
	They either deliberately ignore it or they don't understand it.
	Or because it conflicts with their preconceived notions, they dismiss it summarily.
	And the last thing that I find interesting about Jant's position is when he was giving you these absurd examples about, you know, what if somebody's in front of your house with a tank?
	Or what if there's a submarine off the coast that's going to launch missiles if you don't Give them your money or whatever scenarios he had.
	Implicit in these scenarios, he seems to think that having a state will prevent this, that there's something superhuman about people coming together and forming a state that can repel this sort of thing, whereas people coming together that do not form a state Or can't do anything about it.
	So I don't know how he is ascribing to the state these magic powers to just do away with tanks and submarines.
	I don't know what his thinking process is.
	No, that's an excellent point.
	And it's something that I was also mulling over.
	I was trying to find one of those good electric metaphors that just drives the idea into someone's spinal cord like a glorious railway spike.
	But I don't know actually what the logic is behind that.
	And Ben Narek has the same idea that we can have this government with a constitution and so on, right?
	And Harry Brown had this idea of buying down the federal government with the chains of the Constitution like it's a physical thing.
	And then they say, well, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, right?
	The people will be so motivated to control their government that they'll do what?
	Have tax revolts every ten years?
	Stop paying their government?
	Take to the streets? Burn down government buildings?
	What are these people supposed to do?
	Write letters and have the guys with the guns go, oh, well, they wrote a letter, let's do something different.
	And so this idea that there's this government that's going to inevitably want to expand, as minarchists will usually admit to, but that there's this amazingly, incredibly activist population that is going to just encircle, arm-in-arm, kumbaya, contain the tigers.
	All the time. But those same people who they expect to be superhuman government, anti-government vigilantes, or anti-government expansion vigilantes, who are willing to risk life and limb to, you know, water the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots and blah blah blah, that those selfsame people won't yank payments from a DRO they're getting suspicious about.
	I just, I can't understand that logic.
	Because it seems to me a whole lot easier to just call up your bank or go online and say, Stop paying Dr.
	Evil's DRO, because I don't like what they're doing, right?
	As opposed to this other fantasy that people will contain it through some sort of massive political rebellious action, I just don't see how the latter is more probable than the former.
	Yeah, if people are that smart and that responsible, why do they need a government in the first place?
	Well, yeah, or if they're expecting the government to be restrained by The massive, concerted, energetic political action.
	Anarchists ask a lot less for people to contain unjust power.
	Don't do business with them.
	You don't actually have to lift a finger, really, to not deal with people you consider unjust.
	So, superhuman feats of endless patriotism with the risk of life and limb in jail, on the one hand, versus sitting on the couch eating popcorn, that's how the anarchist contains the state, right?
	He just doesn't deal with them.
	And that difference, I just, I don't understand how, I'm not phrasing this too well, I don't understand how minarchists say, well, DROs will just take us over when dealing with DROs is voluntary, but super patriots will control a heavily armed monopolistic government.
	Well, incidentally, aren't people that run DROs going to be the same people who are going to run governments?
	So, why would the DROs take over, but not the government?
	Right, right. Oh, there's the other argument I've made before, which is, I sort of say, well, what if one DRO, you know, just takes over everyone?
	And people say, the State of Dominicus will say, well, that would be terrible.
	But that's your static position.
	The government has won and is in control of everything.
	So, if the worst thing that can happen in an anarchic society is the very best thing that you're starting with, How on earth is your position even remotely defensible?
	Well, I think that's the differentiation between corporations and government.
	Like, corporations are somehow more evil, but I'm not sure how.
	They never explain how exactly.
	I think that just comes straight out of propaganda, right?
	Because in every video game, in every apocalyptic movie, future science dystopian movie, It's always the corporation, you know, that is the big evildoer, you know, from aliens to Unreal Tournament.
	Like, anything you come up with is going to be an evil corporation.
	That's just the stand-in for what people don't actually want to really deal with emotionally, which is their status as citizens.
	Oh, yeah, somebody's saying District 9 was a huge evil corporation propaganda fest as well.
	Well, unless it's like Halo, where the government's completely crap.
	Right. But I guess in a lot of science fiction, the government's usually completely useless, or the police are usually useless, while the corporation is just completely all-knowing and powerful somehow.
	Right, right. I don't know if that somehow goes into the father-mother kind of dichotomy, where if the corporation's supposed to be the father and the government's Well,
	corporations are the new Soviets, right?
	I guess they were the stand-in, in a way, between the Soviets and Al-Qaeda.
	And they're becoming more popular now because people have that frightened of Al-Qaeda anymore.
	So, you know, these always need an enemy, right?
	Yeah, they're the new boogeyman, right?
	They scare you into running back to the skirts of the state, right?
	Were they the boogeymen before?
	Say, like, World War I and World War II? Like, the robber barons, they were...
	It was industrialists back then, right?
	It was industrialists who were the boogeymen back then.
	And then it became the Huns, right?
	And then in the 20s, it was anyone who had sex, I think.
	So, you know, there always just has to be some kind of boogeyman.
	I don't remember corporations being particularly vilified at the height of the Cold War.
	I do recall that they were pretty badly portrayed as boring.
	You know, the man with a gray flannel suit and all those Jack Lemmon movies where working in a corporation was considered kind of soulless and boring.
	But I don't think they were portrayed as, you know, evil in the way that they are now.
	I mean, I think they're just the latest...
	The latest group to scare us with.
	Well, they were the ones making everything without them and the government would have not been able to take all their money and waste it with NASA. Right, right.
	They were vilified like this back in the 20s and 30s too.
	The political cartoons of the fat cat porkers in top hats, that sort of thing.
	Yeah, but I think, again, those would be more rich people than industrialists.
	The sort of faceless corporation is a pretty new demon.
	Like, there's usually not a person, it's just the corporation.
	And you might get some sort of weasel-faced guy who represents it, but you never really see the one in charge, because it's just been so abstracted, it's become a kind of corporate demon.
	Yeah, they usually portray them as a trademark.
	They usually show you a trademark rather than a person.
	Right, or was it Paul Reister in Aliens 2?
	Aliens, the second Alien movie, where he plays that weasel, but you never actually really see the corporation.
	It's just this big abstract mammoth thing, right?
	And you get these occasional weasels, but you never really...
	There's no personification in some fat guy with a top hat and a gold monocle or something.
	No, that's true. That's true.
	It's a different way of looking at it.
	But you are right, Greg, because all the cartoons from the period that you're talking about, they show overweight men with those top hats and wearing a suit or a tuxedo with cash falling out of their pockets and bags of money.
	so I know exactly what you're talking about. - Now, do you guys think these, These debates are worthwhile.
	I mean, they take a lot of prep, I'll tell you that.
	I mean, I really have to, and I'm really, I sort of have a commitment to the listener's sanity, as well as to my own sense of originality, to really try not to use the same arguments twice.
	Like, I tried not to recycle any arguments from either prior speeches or podcasts that I've made or prior debates that I've had.
	I was trying to come up with sort of new ways of describing the same thing, because I think it keeps it a bit fresher and there's more of a reason to listen.
	And I've never wanted to be...
	I don't know why this is.
	It's probably some ridiculous psychological twerk of mine.
	But I've always really disliked people who use the same speeches over and over again.
	I've always really, really disliked that.
	I don't know if you've ever known someone like this.
	They tell you the same story, and then like two weeks later, they'll start telling you the same story again.
	And they seem to get offended when you tell them you've already heard it.
	And I remember...
	When I would listen to Harry Brown or even Michael Batnarek and people like that, that you'd hear the same sort of stories over and over again, and I just thought that was not good.
	So there were a lot of prep because I kind of have to come up with new material, right?
	Every debate is I'm telling you for the last time, right?
	Because next time it's going to be something different.
	And that's partly because I don't want people to be prepared for my points because if I use the same points over and over, then people will be much better.
	More prepared, which I think is a less exciting debate, plus it's not a very good winning strategy to have people know your game before you go in.
	So it's a lot of work to prepare for, but do you think that they're worthwhile?
	I thought it was going to be better than it was just because you seemed to get along really well in that previous video.
	I had higher expectations, really, because he seemed to know what he was talking about when it came to the whole point of government in the first place.
	I really liked his video about, is the government forced or not?
	I'm not sure who that was with.
	And I also even liked his video with Nancy Pelosi about minimum wage, wherein people or students were selling their No, I mean,
	I think you're right. I thought that it would be more positive.
	I also thought that it would be more pleasant, if that makes any sense.
	Yeah, I definitely, especially getting towards the end of it, it almost kind of reminded me of a Republican talk radio.
	Yeah, and for me, if I can't be polite anymore, I just really won't continue.
	It actually reminded me of the determinism debates.
	Right, right, right.
	I think there's a lot of value in them for three reasons.
	First, because it gets FDR out of the dome, so to speak, and puts these ideas out in public where they can be exposed to You mean it's not like people who like these beliefs already talking among themselves,
	but it's sort of heading out and taking it on the road kind of thing?
	Yeah, exactly.
	And I think that shows up in what you're saying about having to prep for them.
	And also in And the audience kind of having to prep for it too, right?
	Because the more you engage with people outside of the community, the more effort has to go into keeping the ideas fresh and keeping the thinking clear and keeping the logic conscious,
	right? Secondly, I think there's value in it In that it helps to dismantle the stereotype of anarchism,
	particularly as it's sort of sold by the more like socialist anarchists as a kind of Counter-revolutionary force.
	So, I guess, for lack of a better word, the brand of anarchism that we're quote-unquote selling here is very, very different from that, I think.
	And getting out there, especially the way that you do it, getting out there and, again, for lack of a better term, proselytizing these ideas in the way that you do, It just really shatters that myth that we're all a bunch of recalcitrant anti-social hate mongers just looking to break windows and break legs.
	Yeah, it's basement lurking authority haters, right?
	Right, exactly.
	And thirdly, I think there's value in it in terms of improving I guess the science of freedom in the sense that every time that you do this, you're gathering more evidence.
	Right, right, right, right.
	And the evidence to me is very interesting because the evidence is also, you know, why the short temper, why the resistance, why the tension, why the not listening, why the...
	What is it you said, Alan?
	Incalcitrant ignorance or something like that.
	I mean, to me, it's also interesting to map what the resistance is to the ideas, because there's no point being right if everybody just resists it anyway, right?
	So, I mean, to me, it's a very interesting map of the mind, right?
	Of the mind of the people who just, you know, throw these objections up and get tense, right?
	Because that's the real hurdle to be overcome.
	I mean, Consistency with the NAP is, you know, I'm sure Isabella's only six weeks away from figuring that out, right?
	So I'm not too worried about that as an argument.
	And there will, of course, in the future, people will look back in a hundred years or whatever and say, how could this even have been debated?
	You know, like we look back on slavery and say, how the hell could this even have been debated?
	You know, rights for women or whatever, right?
	And it will be the case, but we have to sort of find, at least for me, the most important thing is not to be right.
	But to be effective. It's important, obviously, it's essential to be right first, but then to be effective.
	So to me, it's also fascinating to just see what I bump up against when talking about principles.
	And then, of course, to ask why, which is the sort of self-knowledge aspect of what we talk about here.
	Right, which I think is a huge part of what was going on for Jan.
	Well, I think so, yeah.
	I mean, I think that...
	And I think it was something that was embedded enough that the reason that I didn't release...
	Our prior conversation and the reason I waited a couple of days to make a little video of my summation because I had these great ideas in the summation that I didn't get a chance to talk about.
	But it's because I was curious if he would sort of, you know, we've all had that, you know, we get hot-tempered or upset or something.
	You know, we sort of cool off and the next day say, oh my God, what did I do?
	You know, you sort of think back on what you did the previous day and so on.
	And then you can, you know, write or call someone and say, You know, I think I was not the best debating partner, and, you know, I'm sorry about that, and so on, right?
	And I was sort of waiting to see if that would occur, and it hasn't, which means that he doesn't have any problem with what he did, right?
	And again, I'm not saying he didn't do anything bad or anything, right?
	But he obviously does not feel that he did anything that was problematic.
	Right, that needed any kind of correction or revision.
	Right, so he's clearly perfectly happy with what he did in the debate.
	I always like to give it a little bit of time to see if that's anything that's going to occur.
	Well, and that actually segues into a concern that was coming up for me in thinking about the value of this debate, which is, given how this debate turned out,
	Is it possible that there is an outside limit or cap or rule of diminishing returns on continuing to debate folks like this in the same way that there was with the determinists, with the theists, with the agnostics?
	Where you constantly run into basically the same arguments over and over and over again and nobody's willing to look inward and ask themselves why they're continuing to ask the same utterly answerable questions over and over and over again.
	Well, I mean, I think that's an interesting question.
	And, you know, when I was first starting out, at least, and had the technology and the time to do debates, I mean, I debated with...
	You know, people who wanted to debate, right?
	I mean, you know, hey, you know, want to debate?
	Let's debate. I got time, right?
	And, you know, people, I think, rightly said, you know, that's a bit, you know, you have a bit too much horsepower to just debate random people on YouTube.
	And I think that was perfectly fair.
	And so I was happy to chat with more experienced people, right?
	People who had some credibility and so on.
	But... I would not say that, and I don't classify the sort of mutual presentation format that I had with Michael in Philly.
	That to me was not a debate.
	It was just, you know, it's like two people trying to get your vote, so to speak, right?
	Right, it was a presidential format.
	Right, right. But I don't feel that the quality of the debates have...
	They've risen in terms of sophistication and language skills and so on.
	But in terms of content, I don't think that they've accelerated too, too much in terms of actually engaging with reason and evidence from first principles and, you know, with a decent knowledge of each other's position and a good grasp of historical precedent and so on.
	I just don't feel that they've really launched that further forward.
	Now, I mean... I'm not sure that there is, you know, a golden debating partner out there.
	I don't know. This was why I was sort of speculating in that thread about whether it might be worthwhile to just sit down and come up with our own, as powerful as we can, our own defense of minarchism in order to be able to pick through those arguments and see how they might be addressed in an anarchistic way.
	Right. No, and I think that's good.
	You know, like that Stephen Colbert formidable opponent thing or have someone play the devil's advocate or whatever.
	I think that would be a good idea to just gather as many arguments together as possible for minarchism and then take them apart.
	But I still don't think that that deals with, and again, I don't know if we can or even should, I don't think that deals with what I got or what I generally get a sense of It's the emotional resistance, right?
	No, that's quite right.
	That doesn't really answer that question.
	Right. I mean, it's not a lack of...
	Sorry, go ahead. I was just going to say, yeah, like if you debated someone from Rockwell about how there would be no emotional response there, but if you started to debate with them about Christianity, there would be an emotional response there, and that would be where you probably wouldn't get much headway, whereas if you debated Someone about the existence of government is almost definitely going to be an emotional response.
	Right, right, right, right.
	Yeah, and even when I first, I guess in 05, when I first started to get stuff out there, I was still naive enough to be surprised at the lack of intellectual content in most of the conversations that I had with people.
	I was... I was still surprised at that, which, you know, I mean, you live, you learn, right?
	It's not like I had a lot of experience, but of course, like everyone, I had a lot of experience of people claiming to be rational and then not particularly acting on that.
	But I thought, you know, within other communities, it would be different, but it really wasn't as much, so...
	And also, I'm not sure how many people are going to want to...
	No one's going to want to play with me anymore.
	I don't think. At least there's not going to be a lot of people who want to have that debate.
	I'm looking through the comments in the chat window, and I think I have to agree with them that...
	Me personally, I probably wouldn't be interested in seeing another debate with Jan...
	He seemed to be getting...
	He was becoming bellicose in the debate.
	He didn't seem very interested in reconciling inconsistencies.
	He seemed to be arguing from a pragmatic standpoint.
	And when it became apparent that you wouldn't see things his way, he started becoming belligerent.
	Yeah, for sure, for sure.
	I experienced that as well.
	And it's almost like he expected it to be the opposite.
	He wanted to be like many politicians in his videos where the politician gets belligerent.
	And I guess I already went over this, but it's almost like he wanted you to have the emotional reaction.
	He's had people, you know, throw him out and steal his stuff, so we had to sue him.
	And it's almost like...
	It's almost like he desired that sort of outcome as, you know, opposed to an actual rational conversation that you're probably not going to get with a politician.
	And he probably knows that he's not going to get that with a politician.
	Yeah, I mean, I certainly do agree that it was sort of an interesting role reversal that I was arguing from principles and saying that the initiation of force is wrong and that taxation is force.
	And he was changing terms and then getting belligerent.
	It seemed like a complete mirror of his conversations with the politicians.
	But, you know, there's probably some very murky reasons as for that, which we can't even guess at.
	But I just wanted to sort of point that out.
	out it was a very interesting kind of a mirror to to his previous conversations at least the ones that I've seen and did anyone have any feedback on on what I was doing or anything that I could do that would be better or more productive.
	Let the fire and brimstone out a little bit earlier with people like this.
	Yeah.
	Go on. I didn't notice you get as fiery and stern as you did in your responses to Badnarik.
	Until very late in the debate with Jan.
	And I was a little bit curious as to why that might have been.
	Was that other people's...
	I'm not looking for backup for your experience.
	I'm just wondering if other people had that same sort of experience.
	Like they were sort of urging me to breathe fire a little sooner.
	Go ahead, James.
	Okay. When you...
	I can't remember exactly the...
	The point it was, but when you did let out the passion, put it that way, it was, I mean, I experienced, and it seemed like a lot of other people experienced it this way too, that it was completely refreshing and exactly what the debate needed.
	And earlier or not, I mean, I think it would have been more enjoyable, at least from our standpoint, but it might have been More difficult to go on for two hours?
	Well, it would have ended, right? I mean, that could only have happened at the end, right?
	Right. At least, that's my thought.
	I could be wrong, but that's what I thought.
	Go ahead.
	Well, I was just going to say that in the section where you were constantly restating and restating and restating, The power and the potential of the free market and what it's capable of.
	I mean, you must have rephrased it like at least five times in his questioning section of the debate.
	After about the third time, I was really just bouncing my head off the desk going, please, God, please make it stop.
	Right, right, right, right.
	Right. I had a different experience.
	I... I didn't find your responses to be repetitive.
	I was actually becoming very uninterested in the discussion as it progressed because Jan was becoming monotonous.
	So my attention was kind of...
	I was more perturbed from that.
	You were more perturbed that he was getting angry than the monotony of the debate?
	Yeah, I felt at that point the conversation was becoming unproductive.
	That he was becoming frustrated and he was basically trying to pound a square peg through a round hole.
	And there wasn't any progress being made at that point.
	Yeah, I certainly would agree with you that progress was...
	Well, to me, progress was pretty much impossible once he wanted to herd me to the coast with all of you.
	So that, to me, was where progress was not going to be made.
	The question I do have for you is why not stop at that point?
	I mean, because that's sort of been the rule of thumb in discussions with people, right?
	The against me argument.
	And this was... In a sense, a kind of against me argument where, you know, the minute he's willing to say, you know, I think you should be packed up and shipped off to a reservation on the coastline, at that point, you're not really in a rational debate anymore.
	You're defending yourself, right?
	Oh, absolutely. Look, I mean, if I had been in a one-on-one debate, I would have shut it down right there.
	No question. Absolutely.
	If I had just been debating with someone in a private setting, I would have just got up and walked away and said, you know, I'm not even going to pretend.
	If your solution to social problems is to evict me from my house and drive me to the coast at gunpoint, I'm not even going to pretend to debate with you.
	But this was a different environment, right?
	This was a different situation.
	Which was, people are going to A, hear these objections that he comes up with all the time, and B, may have these objections themselves.
	And it was a great format, again, not knowing how bad the audio was going to turn out, but it was a great format to be able to respond to these objections.
	Maybe it would have been a good idea to have a pre-debate where you took some side arguing from principals about healthcare or something.
	Or say, the common immigration where Most libertarians would argue on principle against any sort of immigration that isn't government sanctioned.
	Maybe if you had differing opinions based on principle to see how he reacted to someone who used principle in debate rather than just politicians who used emotions and stuff.
	Yeah, I mean, I think you're right that it could have been useful to debate another topic.
	The problem is that it always slides here, at least that's been my experience, right?
	Because if you say there should be, you know, and I think an anarchist, to be honest, has to say, not there should be no government regulation in healthcare.
	I mean, you can say that, right?
	And there's nothing wrong with saying that, I think.
	But fundamentally, that's only a reflection of a deeper principle, which is the NAP, right?
	And so I think it almost immediately comes to that, right?
	And... And then you get defense, national defense, Rhodes, or whatever it is, other people's bugaboos.
	So, although I think it's right, I certainly would be interested in debating a more single topic with a minarchist or a libertarian.
	Yeah, I understand the point of that, because you'd be arguing against taxation mostly in healthcare, not healthcare itself, or that would just be sort of like an argument about free market, I guess.
	Right, because I think in order to be honest, you don't want to mislead people into thinking that the government should not be involved in healthcare, but the government should still be regulating the free market in terms of contract enforcement and all the stuff that Minarchus say.
	I don't think you want to leave that impression.
	At least I wouldn't want to leave that impression.
	You know, God help me, for better or for worse, I just don't want to leave that impression with people.
	And I think that's where you'd have to...
	So, you know, you could have to debate about healthcare with someone and then you'd have to say, but, you know, the contracts with these private healthcare providers should never be enforced by the government and there should be no law courts and government law courts and prisons and so on.
	Right? And then you just go straight into crazy land, right?
	Yeah. And I kind of get the sort of impression that leaves because it kind of leaves people like, you know, kind of not trusting you because you're kind of going against what you would, what directly what you're saying.
	So like I'm in an economics class in college and the economics teachers really free market it, but of course they argue for regulations of the product.
	So it kind of just makes me think, you know, if I knew nothing about this, I would be against free markets because they're Contradicting themselves within their own argument, and that doesn't make any sense.
	So, if you did that, you still have some sort of other debate about other topics, not anarchism versus anarchism, that would go against your legitimacy.
	Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't want to just pull the rug out at the end of it.
	And we'd do a whole lot of agreeing, and then there'd be this huge disagreement at the end about the government, right, as a whole?
	And I think that would be just unsettling for people in a way.
	I think it's, you know, as a guy who's, you know, terminally addicted to philosophy, to me, just you start with the first principles and let things unroll from there.
	Because I've never found it successful, or I've never found a way, maybe there is one.
	I've never found a way to sneak the argument from morality in from arguments from effect.
	You know, like, well, we shouldn't have any regulation here, or here, or here, or here, or here.
	You can make those arguments, and people will never get anarchism out of that, any more than Ayn Rand did, right?
	And no matter how passionately committed they are, you can't sneak in a principle From pragmatism.
	It just doesn't add up that way.
	But you can get very pragmatic solutions out of the applications of principles.
	But the water doesn't seem to flow uphill the other way.
	Yeah, I agree with that.
	You've come off as kind of disingenuous, too.
	That was kind of my point.
	But also, yeah, it's hard when you're just talking about free market.
	Suddenly get morality out of that.
	It would be like a 180 degree turn because people think, oh, you know, this is something else.
	It's not. It's kind of confusing.
	Yeah, I think so. I think so.
	All right. Does anybody else have anything that they wanted to share or any other thoughts that they wanted to add to this topic?
	I had a thought, and I'm not sure if this is something you can actually do, but...
	The Macarena? Is it the Macarena?
	Is that your thought? Close.
	All right. Let me limber up.
	Yes. Oil up, please, too.
	Already done. Awesome.
	No, it was...
	I don't know if there is a way to go about this, but I just want to sort of throw this thought out there.
	Um... Is there a way to actually kind of suggest to people in some way to do some preparation?
	I mean, I know that you couldn't really...
	To do it with someone like Badnarik would be kind of...
	I don't know. That probably wouldn't come across very well, but...
	I'm just trying to think, because this has been the case for two of your debate opponents, right?
	Oh, more than two. Well, right.
	Well, I mean, the two big ones, right?
	The recent big ones that have known outside the sphere, right?
	Right, right. Put it that way.
	Or the dome. But I don't know if there's a way to actually do that.
	It's not even an expectation for people to prepare, so if there's a way to sort of approach debates with that in mind.
	It's sort of a two-part thought that I had.
	Right. If that was at all clear.
	No, no, I think you're right.
	I would actually be less inclined to suggest to someone that they prepare for a debate.
	And I'll tell you why.
	I certainly do think that it was clear to people that he was not prepared, right?
	Mm-hmm. I mean, I don't think...
	He hadn't read anything really about anarchy, right?
	Right, right. No, that was clear.
	And that was not a surprise, I mean, to him, because the debate was minarchy versus anarchy, right?
	I think it was fairly clear that I had put a lot of thought into the minarchist position, right?
	Yeah, right. Because I had, you know, understanding of the approach and good responses to the objections.
	So this wasn't the first time I'd heard these objections.
	You used to be a minarchist?
	I used to be a minarchist, absolutely.
	Of the sleaziest and foggiest kind, voluntary taxation, because I love oxymorons.
	But so...
	I mean, there's a couple of different things that go on in a debate, right?
	As you know, 90% of communication is nonverbal, right?
	And the fact that he was not prepared for a debate that he himself had suggested several weeks ago tells you a lot about the intellectual rigor of the minarchist, right?
	Right, right. Right, so...
	My, you know, my goal in a debate with somebody whose ethics I disagree with is to win, right?
	I mean, if it's a mutual exploration of ideas with respect, then we're partners, right?
	You know, if I'm just out playing tennis with someone and it's a fun game, then we'll, you know, we'll tell each other how to play better.
	We'll, you know, whatever. It's friendly.
	But, you know, if there's a prize and it's my goal, then I want to win, right?
	And I was very keen to approach this as a sort of partnership exploration.
	But, you know, he pulls out Seasteading Anarchists, and for me, I now want to win, right?
	Right, right.
	And there was a bit of a hint of that in the previous week where he called up and wanted to discuss all this stuff on a call-in show and...
	Which, you know, just seemed a little odd to me, and that was, you know, something that I mulled over and sort of came to a variety of conclusions about.
	But I think if I tell people to prepare, then I'm not letting them be who they are in the debate.
	Hmm. Okay, okay, that makes sense.
	I'm not letting them be authentically who they are in the debate.
	I'm faking it in a way.
	Well, yeah. In a way, that would be preemptively raising their shields, right?
	Raising their defenses. If they have them.
	Which, if they're minarchists, they almost certainly do.
	Right. And, I mean, I had this very similar debate.
	In fact, the exact same topic.
	A debate publicly available for free.
	With Bad Narek, where a lot of these topics came up, right?
	Right, right. So...
	If you can't be asked to skim that, at least, or whatever, right?
	You know, pick up a copy of...
	A free copy of Everyday Anarchy and listen to it in two hours, right?
	If you can't be bothered to do that, then...
	That comes across, I think, very clearly and speaks to the intellectual rigor of each person.
	And what it does is it speaks to the humility of each person.
	I mean, the reason that I do a lot of prep for debates is because I'm not sure of my knowledge, right?
	Because I'm humble, right?
	You know, I need to learn.
	Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
	And as you were sort of describing, it occurred to me, the parallel, which really is a very good parallel between creationists and evolutionary science, where the creationists, they don't prepare.
	And if there was to be an actual debate over knowledge, a meeting of minds, as it were, then that would be...
	They would take the time to learn the other side and actually have a debate of sorts.
	But in a way, there's kind of no possibility for an actual debate in that sense.
	I mean, just from terms of how wrong or not even wrong religion is, but if it all makes sense.
	Yeah, no, it does. And all of that stuff gets really, really clearly communicated in these kinds of conversations, right?
	The first person to temper generally loses.
	If somebody is provoked for a long time and doesn't express any temper, then I think that's not productive.
	I'm not faking anything, but I don't think that's productive either.
	There's just a lot that goes on in these kinds of conversations.
	That's one of the reasons why I was pushing the video, right?
	And for the video, right?
	So you get the body language and this and that, which, you know, I think is important.
	That's why it's been frustrating not to be able to get the video of the veterinarian debate.
	And so all of those kinds of things are really, really part of communication as a whole, right?
	It's not just about having a fact straight and being right, but it's about You know, the ease of communication, the presence of mind, the calmness, you know, whatever wisdom you can fake or whatever, right?
	Just that kind of stuff. And so if I sort of say to other people, prepare, that's, I think, not...
	I don't think that's quite as useful.
	The friendliness. I had a question.
	No, the friendliness, for sure. Sorry, go ahead.
	Yeah. And Jan said something during the debate that I didn't quite understand, or I didn't catch the whole sentence, but he said something to the effect that he doesn't agree that the non-aggression principle is an axiomatic starting point.
	He said something like, it's not a means to an end, but it's an end.
	I don't recall exactly how he phrased it.
	Does anybody else remember what exactly he said in that regard?
	I don't remember it exactly, but I do remember that he said that the non-aggression principle is not an axiom because, you know, I'm sure it would be something like, like property rights are not an axiom because we would all steal to stay alive.
	And the non-aggression principle is not an axiom because we would all initiate violence in some particular situation if we had to knock someone over to grab a piece of bread because we were starving, right?
	And that's standard objectivism, right?
	That life is the highest standard of value and that which serves human life is that which is the good, right?
	The good is that which serves human life.
	And that's, I mean, I've done a...
	A video series on this, a podcast series on this, is my fundamental problem with objectivist ethics, which is that it's consequentialist, right?
	Like he says, Hellfeld says, for the good of society, we need a small state, right?
	And that's where all these scare stories come from about anarchism.
	For the good of society, we need a small state.
	And, of course, there's no such thing as society.
	What he's basically saying is, I want a small government.
	But other people want a big government, and how's he going to say no to them?
	Because it's better for them to have a big government.
	I mean, George Bush does a hell of a lot better under a big government situation than he would under an anarchist situation where he'd be a used car salesman, right?
	So the success of each individual, depending on their abilities to lie, manipulate, cheat, and whatever, are going to be very, very different under different social setups.
	And so I think he's saying that we have these sort of principles of non-aggression and property rights and so on, but they are subsumed to that which is best for man's life.
	And he says, minarchism is best for man's life because too much government is totalitarian predation and too little government is anarchic predation.
	And so that which is best for man's life is a small government.
	And that's strange. To me, that's straight out of objectivist ethics unless somebody else has a better understanding.
	Well, it sounds like his argument, he's putting the cart before the horse.
	And to dovetail off of what you said earlier about why would you want to continue associating with someone who thinks that anarchists should all be sequestered into a camp somewhere to test their ideas?
	What is the point of having...
	Any kind of relationship with somebody who doesn't think that the NAP is an axiomatic starting point.
	Right. Well, I mean, that's why I won't debate with him again, right?
	Yeah, I think he's confused.
	He seems to think that you have to violate the NAP in order to have the NAP. Yes, that's standard minarchism, libertarianism, objectivism approach to government for sure.
	Well, just to be clear, it's not an axiom.
	I mean, it's a reasoned ethical principle, which is different.
	Yeah, it's UPB. I mean, NAP and property rights are the two foundations of UPB-compliant ethical theories, for sure.
	Yeah, sorry, it's not an axiom, but...
	But it is a strange little twisty thing that they do with that.
	And again, I just think it's a failure.
	Fundamentally, I think it's just a failure of imagination.
	In the same way that people who think that we can't get charity without the welfare state.
	It's just a failure of imagination.
	And it's also a failure in benevolence.
	The people who seem to live in this universe, and I met some of them in Philadelphia, And a few are in New Hampshire, but they live in this universe where there literally are...
	It's like this Catholic sin universe, you know, where there are these seething beasts that are restrained only by the thin blue line of statist violence.
	And they just seem to live in this world where there's just this massive amount of pent-up aggression.
	And the moment the government...
	If the government would have vanished, everybody would immediately...
	Just start drinking each other's blood and stuff.
	I mean, I don't get what kind of world that is.
	I really don't. It's like when the stoplights go out, like when the electricity goes out for the traffic lights, it's like...
	You would expect everybody to start smashing into each other.
	Yeah, they're just going to start ramming each other.
	They're going to start drag racing.
	I mean, we had a huge power failure here.
	Yeah, it never happens. Everybody's perfectly civilized, and in fact, traffic moves very well when the power goes out with the lights.
	Well, this was certainly the experience I had as a kid in my family, so...
	Why would it be unreasonable to assume that this is where that comes from?
	Oh, you mean like if somebody had a lot of violence in their childhood that they hadn't dealt with, that they would sort of, that would be projected in some way out into the world and they would feel that there's this pent-up violence out there or whatever?
	Yeah, exactly. Well, even in more direct terms, too, you know, when my parents left the house, all hell usually broke loose.
	Right, right, right.
	So without the restraining impulses of parents, the children are just going to run wild and so on.
	Yeah, no, it is a very common perception, and to me it just goes to show how We simply can't be free until we're free of these particular kinds of illusions, some of which are definitely inflicted in childhood and take a lot of work to overcome.
	But, I mean, I think you could also see this difference, too, in that the guy who thought that the world was really aggressive was the guy who was becoming belligerent.
	You know, it's like, don't mistake the world for yourself, right?
	That's job one of philosophy, right?
	It's just know thyself, because otherwise you just look at the world and you think you're seeing the world, but you're just seeing yourself, right?
	Right. And the guy who's criticizing you for wanting a world without rules sets up these complicated, stultifying rules and then refuses to follow them himself.
	Sure. Absolutely.
	Absolutely. And it's another reason why statism doesn't work.
	Those who promote the rules don't follow them.
	Yeah, so I really do appreciate that feedback, and it certainly is.
	To me, it's a very interesting topic.
	I mean, this question of what goes on for people in this kind of way.
	I don't think that there's a lot of capacity for productive reasoning in those kinds of situations, but as always, I'm really just using that particular kind of format as a stage to face the audience, right, and to hopefully... Both show and say, you know, a benevolent universe principle that I think is really important.
	Acting on your values.
	Yeah, well, that's what they're for, so.
	Yeah, really demonstrating the principles that you live by in a real visceral way, too, I think.
	And I think Jan did exactly the same thing, ironically.
	Right, right, right.
	Now, just before everybody bolts, or I bolt, I guess, first of all, I just wanted to thank everyone.
	I know that the podcast production has been somewhat low lately, but I really do appreciate everyone's patience as I continue to hack through a variety of things.
	But is there anything that is yearning, burning in people's minds that they want, say, to run through the chattering ticker tape head of me that is sitting on the list of got to know topics?
	Excellent.
	I knew that was the reason that I wasn't podcasting.
	Perfect. - Okay.
	Well, are you wanting suggestions?
	Yes. Yeah, and look, I know this is just a question I have in general, right?
	I mean, I know it's really weird to put people on the spot.
	Give me your thoughts, right?
	Because we're just chatting about other stuff.
	But I was looking for that feedback.
	Well... Somebody posted something about RTR at work that I thought...
	I've been thinking about a lot, so...
	Maybe your thoughts on that, just where the lines are, where the boundaries are, and just your own thoughts on that, not a conversation or anything.
	Right, right. Sure, that would be helpful.
	The guy who works around and do RTR work, absolutely.
	Just making note of these.
	The concept of negotiation has been popping up a lot, especially around this debate, and I think it would be interesting to get your thoughts on negotiation as a practiced skill and its relation to aggression and how the two mix or don't mix.
	Well, yeah, I would say negotiation and aggression.
	Assertion, yes, aggression.
	No, but okay, that's good.
	Someone came up, and I think this is a big topic these days because of the economy, about working for the government, which I thought would be interesting to talk about.
	Yeah, because at some point, as things progress, either...
	There's a massive increase in government jobs.
	I keep getting these people that are offering positions in some state job, and I'm like, no thanks.
	I think that's where all the jobs are actually going, or to the government.
	At what point is everybody going to be working for the government, and it's going to be It's just one guy with taxes like you would not believe, right?
	Right. Somebody's asked, have you ever updated your estimate of when the government might collapse?
	No, I don't think the government's going to collapse in the fall of Rome where pigeons live in the...
	In the streets or whatever, or in the houses.
	I don't think it's going to go like that.
	I think that the economy is going to go through a wrenching change, and that which we don't manage through nutrition, we end up going to the ER for, right?
	So you eat all the bacon sandwiches you want, and then you end up with a heart attack, right?
	And I think it's going to be sort of like that.
	But maybe I could do a little bit more on my really, really amateur and guessing thoughts about that.
	I guess it was about four years ago, I said 10 to 15 years.
	Five to 15 years, I said four years ago.
	I don't think it's imminent, but I certainly think that it's getting closer.
	And it'll be a series of wrenching changes.
	I don't think it's going to be any kind of big collapse.
	I mean, people are You know, the livestock management techniques have improved enormously from the 20s and 30s.
	And when all of this stuff went before, plus, of course, the pool of wealth and the human capital that's available is much larger than it was back then.
	So I think there will be a series of changes.
	I've always been sort of interested in taking the time to sort of plot out how it might happen and just hold it up as a possible model and see how well it goes up.
	up.
	But yeah, I think I'd sort of stick with my original estimate so far.
	Maybe something on the collapse of the fiat currency system.
	Your own thoughts on...
	Yeah, how that might work, right?
	Or whether, you know, if they end up auditing the Fed, whether the Fed's going to tell them the truth at all.
	Anyway, of course they won't, right?
	Right, maybe as a follow-up in the context of the article that you read.
	Yeah, thank you, Mr.
	Mr. Fed, but I don't think that fuck you is actually a financial statement, but I guess we'll have to take it.
	Peter Schiff actually talks about this very subject rather frequently.
	He He thinks that probably what will happen, he refers to it as decoupling.
	The federal government borrows a lot of money from China and Japan, foreign governments, and he thinks that what's likely to happen is that these governments are going to wake up and Realize that they're never gonna get their money back and so they're gonna stop loaning it to the federal government in which case the federal government will just you know the printing presses will be on overdrive and will have hyperinflation.
	So he suggests investing in precious metals and overseas stock markets.
	I don't know anything about overseas stock markets but I've been seriously considering picking up some junk silver at the local coin dealer, but that's Peter Schiff's opinion.
	Yeah, I don't see hyperinflation in the US myself.
	I just think that it's...
	I mean, the economic knowledge is so much further advanced than it used to be, and I just...
	I mean, I just, I don't see it happening.
	I think that there's enough wealth that the ruling classes have gotten away with that they just know exactly what's going to happen if they start pumping out.
	I mean, they'll try printing a little bit more, but I don't think it's going to end up being sort of the way that that sort of article that I read about, the French history, I don't think it's going to be quite the same.
	It's too visible. It's such a heavily watched currency.
	And it's so embedded in so many people's, other countries' wealth and the bonds that they hold and all that.
	I just don't think they'll be able to get away with hyperinflation within the United States.
	I think they're just, what they're going to do is they're going to start slashing benefits to the weak and the most vulnerable in society, right?
	And, I mean, they're already doing it with regards to schools and all that, right?
	They're just going to keep hacking benefits, keep handing out IOUs, but I don't think it's going to be hyperinflation.
	I think what's going to happen is they're going to start hacking down so many benefits that at last, right, the sort of two-generation experiment of the welfare state and all of its ghastly glory will be visible,
	right? And I think that libertarians and other people We'll finally be able to hold it up and say, look, this is what happens to the poor under statism, right?
	And I think that we will start to be able to, and it'll be horrible what happens to the poor, but we will start to be able to actually say it's not a free society where the poor end up really suffering, because we can see this happening now.
	Or the old, right? Or there'll be rationing, or there'll be clawbacks in social security benefits or whatever.
	And... So my guess is that there's just going to be a lot of clawbacks and that's how the government's going to sort of slowly fold in on itself.
	I don't think it's going to go hyperinflation.
	I just don't think they could get away with it myself.
	Yeah, you know, now that you mention that, that does seem like a plausible scenario.
	And we're actually seeing it unfold in England.
	You know, we've seen these stories coming out about The dereliction in their NHS, where they let people die in hospitals if they don't think it's worth reviving them.
	Right, right. Yeah, it's going to be a lot of under-the-table stuff.
	You know, people's benefits will just be cut off.
	And, you know, then they'll get mad and they'll go down to their office.
	There'll be lots of paperwork. They're just going to stop Sending out the benefits.
	And then it'll be like, holy crap, right?
	I mean, then at least our examples of how the poor suffer in the long run under statism will have the final wish it were different empirical proof that hopefully we'll close the case.
	All right, but that would be an interesting series of podcasts about what might happen.
	Thank you.
	Could I say something briefly about the One World Government question?
	Yes. I think that I had a breakthrough with this topic recently.
	I'm a recovering...
	Conspiracy theorist. I was the guy a few months back who was in the chat room making a fuss about FEMA camps.
	Right, right, right.
	I come from the Alex Jones hard right, you know, anti-UN fear, world government type of propaganda.
	Sorry, I'm probably not speaking nearly loudly enough for you.
	Do you want to switch ears to the other side?
	Just kidding, sorry, go ahead.
	Yeah, so I... I was just thinking the other day that it might actually be a lot easier for statism to collapse in the event that a one-world government is ever formed.
	They have no one to outsource inflation to.
	Right, right. And there are no immediate alternatives.
	If you give the state all the power in the world, then they can't really Nobody in the state can say, well, we need to have more power in order to solve these problems that still exist in society.
	Well, they can't create enemies.
	Right. Oh, sure they can.
	They'll be all the people who resist one world government.
	They'll invent space aliens. I mean, remember when nobody was invading Russia and Stalin had all the power in the world?
	It just became saboteurs from within, right?
	All they just start doing is they start, when things go wrong in the one-world government, they just start blaming, you know, the saboteurs from within, witch hunts and...
	Greedy merchants.
	Yeah, the anarchists that block traffic and break windows.
	Yeah, price gougers and all that kind of stuff, so...
	Well, yeah, we have that in America.
	We have the drug dealers or the illegal immigrants, you know, people you can't really...
	Place any blame on, but it's just vague enough so that you can blame them for all your problems.
	Right. I mean, I don't see one-world government happening.
	I just don't see how it could happen with...
	If a whole bunch of mafia groups have nuclear weapons, no one is ever going to emerge dominant.
	It's just not going to happen.
	I kind of see it as another boogeyman for the right to focus on.
	Because they don't want to focus on, you know, the real problem.
	So, actually, I guess the left has that, too, in, you know, anti-trade organizations.
	Or, oh yeah, like World Trade Organization.
	So, both the right and the left kind of have that.
	Sorry. No, that's, I mean, I think that's quite right.
	And I think even more fundamentally, right, that the rabbit hole that...
	That I've certainly gone down is, you know, going from that thing is like, well, these truths are pretty self-evident and they're pretty obvious.
	So why is it that people are so resistant?
	And that leads you back to their first impressions of authority, back to certain aspects of the history and so on, right?
	So it's that level of self-knowledge and introspection that I think needs to occur for freedom to spread.
	And I think that a lot of work is put into avoiding that, I think, by a lot of people who You know, I just sort of blame them because maybe they just never heard anything different or better, but I think that's partly what's being avoided with some of that stuff.
	Oh yeah, I mean, I was a Christian for 18 years and that was the only real reason was because I never really heard any argument to the contrary.
	Yeah, I mean, I don't consider myself a bad guy before I figured out some stuff.
	It's just, you know, exposure is essential.
	You don't know what you don't know.
	You don't know what you don't know.
	The key question is, what do you do when you do find out?
	And I think we had an object lesson in that with this debate.
	Yes, yes, for sure, for sure, for sure.
	You put your fingers in your ears and go, la, la, I can't hear you, la, la, la, la.
	Pirates are firing mermaids at me.
	Yeah, you find out who has...
	Integrity and intellectual honesty real quick.
	We can all not have that in the moment, but it's the aftermath that is also very interesting.
	Well, to me, the thing that really drained away all my respect was not so much that he was coming up with all these scenarios, but that he was Implicitly accusing you of being a freeloader, implicitly accusing you of being a hypocrite, implicitly accusing you of being an aggressor.
	Oh, because if you consume government services, then they can legitimately send you a bill, right?
	And you should pay that, like a plumber coming to fix your sink or whatever, right?
	Right. And the fact that you don't want to move to his anarchist camp It makes you an aggressor because you're imposing your anarchism on everyone around you.
	It was a sheer load of projection.
	The whole thing, from the very start, from his very first opening line.
	I mean, those things to me really disgusted me because, I mean, he didn't even realize, it's almost like he didn't even realize that he was Throwing all these, like, personal slurs at you.
	Oh, yeah. Personal?
	The guy doesn't even know me.
	It's nothing to do with me.
	Right, but that's what I mean. No, but it doesn't have anything to do with me.
	I think that's where you and I differ, right?
	I mean, I think that, you know, just between you and I, Greg, and other people listening, I think he got under your skin in a way that your dad did.
	Because it's not personal to me.
	It's not personal to me.
	I think he means the tactic.
	He was using almost like an ad hominem, attacking the man, was what his type of arguments were.
	Well, yeah, but I mean, attacking the man is herding me to the coast, right?
	I don't need anything more abstract than that, right?
	And of course, there is a bit of a...
	When people use those scare tactics, you could take it as kind of insulting.
	You know, like, Oh, right, national defense.
	I'd never thought of that.
	I'm so retarded that I'd never thought of how life could be without a government and never thought of how a country could be defended.
	Or I'm actually keen on all of this bloodshed that's being portrayed as the inevitable results of a state, the society or whatever, right?
	But to me, it's nothing to do with me.
	It's just the other person telling me about themselves.
	They're not saying anything about me.
	I think there is some sort of personal to it, although it's not about, I agree it's not about you, but like people in the army, if you argue with people in the military about whether or not you need a military, they'll almost always go to the argument that, oh, well you're a,
	you know, you're a pussy and you never fight for your own rights and you just kind of, if someone came down the street in the tank or something, I guess, You know, you wouldn't try to defend yourself, although at that point it's kind of, you know, that wouldn't be a good tactical choice, but the point is you would never fight, and I have to fight for you, and that just kind of sounds like something, you know, a father says to his kids, where, like, oh, I defend you, so you have to do everything I say.
	That's kind of the sense I got.
	Right, you spineless coward, you.
	Right? Yeah. Yeah, but I mean, that's not an argument either, right?
	It's not an actual knock on you.
	Yeah, but it's not an argument.
	I mean, you're a pussy, it's not an argument, right?
	No, it's a diversion.
	And like I pointed out in the forums, these problems that people can't figure out solutions to, like roads and national defense, these are logistics and engineering problems that they cannot figure out in their head.
	So they...
	They say, oh, well, we need a state, and then they start attacking you.
	They start making these implicit, baseless accusations.
	And it's to deflect attention away from the fact that they don't have any answers.
	Well, and, I mean, fundamentally, I think, when none of us have any answers about how this stuff actually is going to work, the question is, are you comfortable with not having the answers?
	That's a really fundamental... I mean, certainly in religion, they're not, right?
	Where did the universe come from?
	Well, fundamentally, we don't know.
	And that's okay, right?
	It's okay to not know, right?
	But, you know, religious people, they have to have that answer, right?
	By answer, I don't mean that we need to supply somebody with architectural schematics and say, okay, well, this is how it's going to be done.
	I mean, I don't know how to create, you know, computer parts, but we understand fundamentally how the market works.
	But it's with the implicit...
	I'm sorry to interrupt.
	No, go ahead. It's just what you're saying there.
	It's with the implicit premise that the state does know how to do these things.
	As if that's the solution.
	The state doesn't provide an answer.
	It's not designed to, in the minds of people who are statists, any more than God provides an answer.
	But what it's designed to do is to eliminate the question, right?
	How is the poor going to be helped?
	Well, the state's going to do it. Where did the universe come from?
	God made it, right? It's not to answer the question, it's to eliminate, it's not to actually come up with an answer, it's just to eliminate the question.
	It's like a lazy cop-out.
	I don't necessarily think that it's being lazy.
	Again, this is my particular bugaboo, which may or may not be valid.
	I would simply go back to that person's childhood.
	I mean, you never get these answers usually from these kinds of people, but if I could, I'd just go back and say, you know, hey, when you were raised, was it okay to not know the answer to things?
	You know, when you said, I don't know, Did people get mad at you?
	Because if you associate not having an answer with aggression, then you're just going to make stuff up, right?
	But that's statism and that's religion.
	Yeah, I totally agree with that.
	Or maybe it's okay in your home, But what happened in school when you didn't have the answer?
	Did the teacher calls on you?
	Did the other kids laugh at you?
	Did the teacher roll their eyes?
	Did you feel humiliated?
	Did you have a negative experience of not knowing?
	Because if you have a really negative experience of not knowing at some point in your life, you're just going to be really tempted to make up answers, just as anxiety management, nothing to do with lazy.
	I mean maybe it is for some people but not necessarily yeah no more along the lines of intellectually lazy but not as in that person themselves I wouldn't say
	That would be kind of like the same as saying that someone who grew up in a bad neighborhood and had bad schooling was lazy because they just wanted to get money by selling drugs or something because they don't have that many options.
	Yeah, no, that's a good distinction, I think.
	I'm sorry, I went too far with my objection to your perfectly reasonable response.
	That's quite right. Sorry about that.
	No, you're right. I mean, you're right.
	It is intellectually lazy for sure, though it's not the same as an emotional flaw necessarily.
	Yeah, that goes kind of down back to the criticizing someone as an individual, like what Greg was saying, and Criticizing, you know, someone through your own sort of bias.
	So it would be like if someone would call you lazy, then that would mean that, you know, someone had called them lazy in the fountain.
	At least that's how I kind of got it.
	Right, right. So if someone else can want to say something.
	No, this is good. I got RTR at work, working for the government, negotiations, practice skill, and its related regression.
	Talking with atheists about anarchy, as opposed to the other way around.
	What are your thoughts on one world government?
	Are they efficient enough to achieve and achieve it?
	How will the system eat itself?
	What happened when you didn't know?
	You made up answers, God and states.
	That's good. Hey, look at that.
	I got a whole week and a half worth of podcasts right out of that last 20 minutes.
	On the one that's...
	On that list, on working for the government, I had a thought that not just in terms of ethics it's bad, but it's kind of a divestiture of skills.
	Right, but brother's got to eat, right?
	Yeah. But at what cost?
	Because you spend a year or two in that Bureaucracy of drudgery and paper pushing and no efficacy whatsoever and you're going to lose a lot of what you had as marketable skills.
	And sure, I guess, you know, if you've got to eat, then...
	Oh, yeah, no, it definitely could be considered a pretty economically toxic environment for sure.
	And this might not be exactly congruent to what you were just saying, but imagine that, but just times a thousand in the public school.
	Yeah.
	Okay. If you just think like one year, You know, like if you had a bad job for one year and just think how that would, you know, for someone who hasn't thought about it, change their philosophy and how they thought about life and what they thought about, you know, people and how, you know, what sort of society or how sick must people be to set up something where you have pretty much just mental static for an entire year.
	Think how much people think about that for 12 years.
	Doing basically nothing.
	That's what I think about school now.
	Any sort of intellectual experience really stands out.
	I think I described them as public sector jobs as roach motels in a podcast I just did because Because you check in, but you don't check out, because you get snared in with these amazing pensions and benefits, and you just can't get back to the private sector very easily because your pay and benefits will go down.
	Right. All right.
	Well, I'm going to be a cowardly dad and slither off because Isabella gets up at god-awful hours in the morning.
	I will throw a picture into the chat window if anyone's still there.
	Well, leaving now just proves that you're not interested in...
	Right. You're not interested in more podcast ideas, obviously.
	No, I guess that's it.
	Well, you know, given my output lately, this would do me for a month, man.
	Why can't I send a picture here?
	Let me try just going to a different browser.
	We'll have to find out where to transition you I think that anxiety of not knowing showed up in this debate, too.
	Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely.
	I got a little bit of a chuckle at the end there where he was demanding that you, as a responsible anarchist, have answers to all of his objections.
	Yeah. And, hey, I'm happy to have answers, but only if you're listening, right?
	Right, right.
	It was as if he had co-opted your point earlier about how, you know, when a defense agency or entrepreneur goes to investors, he's going to have to answer a lot of questions, right?
	Sure, absolutely. So he co-ops that and says, well, if we're going to try a brand new political system, then you have to answer all of our objections or it's too risky to try.
	Right. But he's not even interested in investing.
	Right, exactly. I mean, at some point you've got to say, well...
	Well, you're obviously not listening to.
	Sorry? Well, the investor is looking to make money, right?
	I mean, the investor wants enough answers that he's eventually going to...
	Because he wants to invest, right?
	Whereas this was not the case, right?
	All right. I'm going to, if that's all right, I'm going to just shut the server down.
	You guys are obviously welcome to keep chatting as you like.
	Not with my server, but it was great chatting with you all, and I really do appreciate the feedback, and always enjoyable to speak with such a gorgeously brilliant mind.
	So, thank you. I really do appreciate it, and I'll talk to you guys soon.

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