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Dec. 25, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:56:35

2062 Merry Christmas from Freedomain Radio!

A scintillating Freedomain Radio Sunday call in show: dealing with ethics, asking for raises, dealing with Internet conflicts, and all other sorts of well packaged goodies!

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	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio.
	December the 25th, 2011.
	I hope you're doing magnificently.
	Merry, merry, merry, merry Christmas to everyone.
	I hope you're having a wonderful day.
	And it's a good thing, I think, that Christmas is not eclipsed by philosophy, at least on this particular day.
	Because otherwise we'd be saying, have a merry, merry, and there'd really be no word for it.
	Because philosophy is not so friendly to Christ, nor mass.
	But other than that, you know, people have asked me a lot about Santa.
	At what point I'm going to begin to resemble him, and I think three days no shaving and a similar amount of cheesecake as I had last night, and I think I'm pretty close.
	But what do you tell your children about Santa Claus?
	Well, of course, you tell your children that he's an acronym, or he's a mixed-up word for Satan, and you must get clear of his graspy materialism.
	But yeah, my daughter sees Santa everywhere, and everybody talks to her about Santa.
	It's kind of obsessive a little, I think, but it's a fun story.
	It's a fun story. I tell her the story of the fox and the grapes, but she doesn't actually believe that foxes speak, I guess with the exception of Megan, who slurs.
	But it's a fun story.
	It's a nice story, and there's nothing wrong with fun and nice and imaginative stories.
	So she's not a big fan, and she tells everybody that quite explicitly.
	So yeah, that's sort of my particular approach.
	It's a story. She doesn't think the toys really come to life at night, although she's watched Toy Story, so it's a fun story, and I hope that helps in terms of your examination of Christmas.
	Now, we've had some callers who want to call in, but the first thing that I wanted to say is just a huge, massive, from the bottom of my soul, heartfelt thank you, everybody.
	Thank you, everybody, for Thank you so much for giving me the privilege and the honor of representing, as best I can, A wave of philosophy that I think the world has not seen before.
	Again, largely as a result of the efforts and strength of this community, the honesty and openness of the people who call in, the curiosity, the occasional troll fest that happened.
	All of these are part of the glorious equation, I think, of helping to spread an actionable Deep and delicious and powerful and scary and wonderful wave of philosophy in the world.
	So I really can't thank you enough.
	I think of this every single day.
	I think of this every time I sit down to do a show or write an article or have an interview or going to go public speak.
	I think about the trust that everyone has put in me to represent philosophy.
	It is truly humbling.
	I cannot thank you enough for everything that you've done to be interested in the show.
	Even if you're just a Band with Hog listener, it is still a beautiful thing.
	I really want to thank everyone who takes the time to write me every day to talk about how much philosophy has helped their life, how much it has challenged their relationships, challenged their own lives.
	I sympathize with the people who are in the throes of crossing the desert to the real.
	And would like to remind everyone to shoot up flares to help guide their way across the desert to the new and steadily growing village of, I believe, the Truly Rational.
	So I really want to thank everybody so much for allowing me to do this crazy, wild, exciting, scary gig.
	It is a magnificent privilege.
	And if I didn't mention thank you, thank you.
	Alright, so that's it for me for the intro.
	Four minutes, look at that. It's staggeringly...
	Quick! So, James, do we have a question from the chat room, or do we perhaps have somebody who wants to tickle my eardrums with some philosophy feathers?
	We do have somebody on the line who is looking to chat, so go ahead.
	Hello. Hello, Steph.
	How you doing? I'm great.
	How you doing, man? I'm doing pretty good myself.
	I'm not sure if you're getting any feedback.
	I'm here with my girlfriend, Shiny, and I have you hooked up to the stereo.
	I just want to verify if there's no wacko cancellation problems or anything.
	That sounds fine to me.
	How do I sound to you? You sound very well.
	I'm amazed at the sound quality here.
	I'm trying a whole new setup, so that's why things are starting a little late today.
	Thanks for your patience. Are you the UPB couple?
	Yes, we are the UPB couple.
	How are you doing?
	Oh, I'm fantastic. Thank you.
	How about you? We're doing good ourselves.
	Merry Christmas to you two.
	Thank you. Well, as I'm sure you know, we posted a few questions in the board which generated lively discussion at the same time.
	We posted the same question to Reddit.
	It also generated a lively discussion.
	It's hard for us to Try and come to terms with what we appear to have discovered or maybe just stumbled upon.
	And just as a general disclaimer, we actually do agree intuitively with the principle that makes UPV unassailable.
	However, we think we have discovered a way To demonstrate that logically, strictly logically, the proof that UPV is unassailable, as well as the proof that praxeology itself is unassailable, are not logically consistent.
	Does that make any sense?
	I want to really differentiate.
	I'm no expert on Hoppe's argumentation ethics.
	My understanding of it is that there are a number of axioms or norms or principles that you have to accept in order to have a rational discussion.
	You cannot have a rational discussion While violating the premises that make rational discussion possible.
	That's my amateur understanding.
	I've got his book.
	I've got articles. I have not had time to go through them.
	That is not particularly essential to UPB. To me, it's always interesting when people approach the topic of UPB, they really get, I think, drawn into the argumentation ethics, which are put forward as supports for the principles explained later in the book at the beginning.
	But everybody seems to avoid what I think is the most powerful and useful aspect of UPB, which is the argument, you know, the two guys in the room, they can't both simultaneously follow a UPB commandment called, murder thou shalt, rave thou shalt, steal thou shalt assault.
	And so it's those areas where I think UPB has the most...
	That's not something that people talk about.
	I think they get knotted up on the argumentation ethics of it.
	I think it's definitely worth talking about, but even if we dump all the argumentation ethics aside, it still can't be sustained that thou shalt murder can be a universally preferable behavior, or thou shalt murder, thou shalt steal, thou shalt assault, thou shalt rape.
	It can't work from that standpoint.
	And so I really just wanted to focus on that.
	That having been said, I did have some criticisms of what I read on the thread around, if I understood it rightly, the argument is sort of that you can say nobody has self-ownership except for you and me.
	Is that sort of where you're coming from?
	Well, not necessarily, but that's one of the approaches that you could take.
	I went to the Well, let me backtrack a little bit and say that, yes, the reason that people feel drawn to argumentation ethics, that UPB kind of resonates with argumentation ethics, and by the way, you should read the book. It's pretty interesting.
	I mean, it's probably a little bit long, but it's pretty interesting, and you should take a look at it.
	You're going to enjoy it yourself.
	I mean, I'm talking about the Human Action book, if that's the book you're speaking about.
	The reason people feel drawn or they remember, they are reminded of argumentation ethics when they touch UPB is because, well, just like it's my impression, it's kind of our impression that Mises and you have both taken count and run with it, in the sense that you have proposed that a rule, for it to be valid, needs to be universal.
	And so you accept universality, and in the course of accepting universality, that makes the rule unassailable, because for me to say no, this rule is wrong, because I can propose a refutation that is non-universal,
	I can demonstrate that the rule is not valid, however, I would need to accept universality first, I mean, as conceived by Kant, to To say yes, absolutely, I agree with UPB conceptually.
	But that's the thing, right? You can easily prove that universality only with logic.
	If you rely solely on logic, you can easily prove that universality and the idea of its unassailability is not necessarily true.
	You can actually come up with at least a conceptual example.
	Now, let me disclaim that again by saying that yes, We do agree that this concept of yes, you can't be in a room with another person and say the rule I'm going to propose is murder is legitimate and it's morally good and then Because, well, we end up at each other's throats and somebody would die, if not both people, and then of course...
	I'm sorry, I hate to interrupt you.
	I just, you know, in the interest of time, if you could talk about not what you agree with, which may not be particularly fruitful, but where you find the errors or contradictions are, let's make sure we dig into that.
	Sure. Sounds fine with me.
	Let me go directly to the contradiction itself.
	So... Yeah, I think this is...
	Okay, this is great.
	The argument that UPV makes is that truth is preferable for all people, and of course it cannot be denied because in order to deny it...
	I'm sorry, I hate to stop you at the beginning there, but did you say truth is preferable to all people?
	No. I said truth is preferable for all people.
	That's basically the same.
	Sorry, I don't agree that truth is preferable to all people.
	You don't agree that truth is preferable for all people?
	No. I mean, if truth were preferable to all people, there would be no need for philosophy.
	I mean, so for instance, the Pope, I wouldn't say is necessarily invested in truth.
	A con artist is not necessarily invested in truth.
	A criminal who's trying to avoid conviction is not interested in truth.
	You could sort of go on and on.
	But I think there are lots of people who vastly prefer falsehood to truth.
	I don't mean to argue that all people do, in fact, prefer truth, but rather that truth is preferable for them.
	We're taking apart the assertion that truth is universally preferable by saying, for all people, truth is preferable.
	We've put a categorical qualifier...
	You could say that a con man is better off if he gives up the con and starts living an honest life, but he would probably reject that.
	You could say to Saddam Hussein, you're going to be happier if you stop torturing and murdering people.
	And I'm sure maybe some people did make that argument, however, briefly in his presence, but he didn't believe that and he could just reject that and say, no, the power is everything.
	The power to control, the power to amass resources.
	Genghis Khan would say the power to murder people and spread your seed would be the key.
	So I think there are lots of people who would reject the truth and virtue and People would put other rules in their place around whatever you can get.
	The Nietzschean will to power, whatever you can trick or lie or force your way into getting in terms of resources is the good.
	Supposedly good people are just these mealy-mouthed, weak people who try to control you by setting up these pretend universals.
	In my experience, the vast majority of people actively dislike and fear truth.
	Whenever you bring some basic truths like taxation is forced to people, they recoil and often attack and feel alienated and get hostile.
	In my experience, the vast majority of people don't like truth in any philosophical sense.
	Can I ask you a question?
	Of course. Is it your contention that truth is universally preferable, not a correct statement?
	This is the challenge of definitions.
	What I will say is that if somebody is correcting me according to a universal Then that person is implicitly stating that truth is preferable to falsehood.
	They may be explicitly stating, but it certainly is there in the argument.
	If somebody says to me, Steph, you're wrong about X, and you need to correct your perspective or your opinion, Then what they're saying is truth is better than falsehood, and I'm not asking you to conform to my opinion, but I'm asking you to conform to objective, empirical, universal facts, right?
	So if I say, you know, the sun goes around the earth, and somebody says to me, no, that's incorrect.
	The earth goes around the sun.
	What they're saying is it's better to believe something that is true.
	It's not just slightly better.
	It's 150% better.
	It's perfectly better, so to speak.
	And also that there is an objective truth called...
	The Earth goes around the Sun, which is not just my opinion, but it's universally true.
	So people who are correcting me about the Earth-centered or heliocentric model of the universe are correcting me according to universals, according to reason and evidence.
	It's not personal, and they're saying that it is far better, infinitely better, to believe something that is true rather than something that is false.
	They don't say, well, I'd kind of prefer it if you would accept my personal model of the solar system, which is that, you know, we all orbit around Newt Gingrich.
	They're saying, no, you're 100% wrong.
	You need to conform your opinions to that which is true and correct and empirical and rational.
	And it's not a matter of opinion.
	It's not a matter of perspective.
	It's not a matter of minor preference.
	It is an absolute preference to conform your ideas or your arguments to that which is true, or conversely to that which is logical, both, I guess, empirical and or logical.
	Does that make any sense? Okay, so to...
	Be sure that, as you said, you don't agree to the statement truth is universally preferable, but you claim that when somebody is in a debate, they are using the concept truth is preferable to falsehood in this debate at the very least, and yes, that means I agree, and I would like to go on the record and say yes.
	Sorry to interrupt again, but I would not even say that it's necessarily a debate, it could just be a statement.
	Somebody says to me, 2 and 2 is 5, and I say, no, 2 and 2 is 4.
	There's no place to debate from there, right?
	So it can't just be, it doesn't have to be a debate or an argument, it can't simply be a statement.
	Correct, yes. I completely agree with that.
	I mean, if I tell somebody, you know what, I'll be honest with you, you've been thinking that X is true and X is not false because of Y and Z and W, I am relying on the fact that the person who's talking to me and myself, at least the both of us, know, you know what, truth is preferable to falsehood, at least in this context.
	Right. Of course, if I say that the sun goes around the world, I'm saying that the contents of that proposition are slavishly derived from reality.
	I'm not saying it's my opinion.
	I'm not saying I had a dream last night that we all orbited a grape.
	Isn't that an interesting dream?
	That would not be a truth statement about anything other than my claim of the content of my dream.
	So if I say that the sun goes around the earth, I'm saying that I have that opinion because that's the way it is in reality.
	That my opinion is in a sense like the shadow cast by a statue called reality.
	And wherever the statue is, that's where my shadow is.
	So if I say something is true, then I'm saying, well, I am accurately describing that which is.
	And if I'm not, then I need to, you know, if the statue moves, then my shadow, which is my derived perspective on that, which is true, if the truth turns out to be something different than what I'm saying, then my shadow has to follow it.
	Of course, most people want to keep the shadow there.
	Even though the statue moves, which of course is not rational.
	So anybody who makes a true statement about reality is accepting a whole bunch of things, you know, objectivity, universality, truth is infinitely preferable to falsehood, and so on.
	And so when I correct someone and say, no, the earth goes around the sun, I am attempting to move their statue and, you know, if they're rational and healthy and responsible and mature, then the shadow will follow the statue.
	Then they will say, oh, now I've seen your proof and I understand.
	Okay, so, sorry, I was incorrect.
	Since I'm deriving my arguments or my perspectives or my, quote, opinions from reality, then since reality is different than I thought, then I need to change my arguments since they are mere slaves to that which is.
	Yes, that is what Eliezer calls updating your beliefs, and I agree with that.
	However, you just said that when you're argumenting with somebody, you're having a conversation about something, you implicitly accept universality, which is why I got the impression that there's a statement you've made at some point, if I recall correctly, maybe I'm recalling it completely wrong, that truth is preferable for all people, that you can derive the idea that truth is preferable from all people from the idea that truth is preferable for the person I'm talking to, While we're debating anything, right?
	Sorry to interrupt, but let me ask you your experience of debating with people.
	Do you find that truth is preferable to people?
	That people say, well, my beliefs are slavishly derived from reality, and when you prove to them that the reality is different than what they think, do they change their beliefs?
	Oh, that's a very tricky question.
	I will say the following. I think that when I've debated with people, and oh, I've debated a lot, People don't actually prefer the truth.
	You know that, right? Oh, I know, absolutely.
	I wouldn't have to have so many shows if people preferred the truth.
	That's the thing. I'm making the distinction between people should prefer the truth and people do prefer the truth.
	And definitely people don't prefer the truth.
	But people, the question is, should they prefer the truth over falsehood?
	And is that universal?
	This is why I made the whole logic, that's why I make, that's actually when I started, and that's how I made the whole logical analysis with my girlfriend, and we got to this conclusion that, I'm not sure we have shared yet, but is there a difference between people do prefer the truth and people should prefer the truth in your opinion?
	Well, I think that the confusion is that what most people mean by truth is a piece of icing I put upon my shit cake of delusion in order to make it taste better, right?
	So people grow up with all of these nonsense things around countries and gods and sports teams and nationalism and patriotism and my army is better than your army.
	They grow up with all of this nonsense.
	And it's all local, regional, cultural prejudice.
	No question, no doubt about that at all.
	And what they do is that they would feel very humiliated emotionally if they had to say, well, I'm just a slave to my local cultural prejudices.
	So what they do is they go out into the world and they seek out confirmation bias.
	And we're all prone to this. It's natural and it's not necessarily unhealthy.
	It's just something you need to keep an eye on.
	If you grow up as a Christian, then you're going to read a lot of pro-Christian works, and you're going to find ways of maintaining your faith and your belief.
	And if you're a statist, you're going to go out and say, well, the state does all these good things, and if the state didn't do these good things, they wouldn't get done.
	And so you'd use an argument from effect, and you'd use the social contract.
	So people grow up stuffed to the gills with destructive and exploitive lies.
	And what they do is they then claim, in order to avoid the humiliation of having been lied to and ground into a kind of ghastly gray cultural paste to be used as mortar in the brick walls in the service of the masters, they go out and they say, all of these lies that I was fed are true.
	They're real. They're right.
	They're valid. They're true.
	And that's what most people mean by truth, is the confirmation bias that arises out of the scar tissue of having been force-fed, literally force-fed lies almost their whole life.
	And that's what most people mean by truth.
	It is an ex post facto justification to cover up the irrational indoctrination that they've been subjected to.
	And so when you start to show them that what they believe is not true, You start to expose the emotional wounds that come from having been lied to, manipulated, controlled, and turned into a form of statist or religious or familial livestock.
	And so people don't want that, so they jump back, they recoil, they start making up new things.
	It's like, you know, when you poke a squid, it squirts out underwater a whole bunch of ink.
	And this metaphor works better before the internet, but that's what most people's writing and argument and this and that is all about.
	People write books in order to cover up the lies that they've been told and justify them, and they Go to like-minded newspapers and magazines and people and websites and all of that to reinforce this supposed truth.
	And so when you say, do people prefer truth?
	I don't think that the word truth, as we use it philosophically, it's almost diametrically opposed to what most people use or believe that the word truth represents, which is a confirmation that is false of their existing biases.
	Well, correct, and I don't mean to interrupt you, but we're starting from your definition of truth here, right?
	We have assumed that we're not talking about truth as in the product of the indoctrination and the scar tissue that's covering the wounds that people have, which we agree with.
	I am talking, and we are actually making this effort using the definition correspondence with reality, which is the definition that you've said for numerous times.
	Yes, sorry, but you're bringing in the definition of what most people prefer.
	That's why we're talking about this.
	That's not my definition. We really don't want to be bringing up what most people do prefer.
	We want to bring up preferable, not preferred.
	Yes, I agree. So let's drop the sort of what most people prefer and just go with what truth is, which I think is more productive.
	I mean, I'm glad you talked about it to clarify my position, but let's move on.
	Correct. So yeah, we're just basically pointing out that we only invoke the concept of what most people prefer, so we can point out the dichotomy between truth is preferred by people, which is false, for the most part, and truth is preferable by people, which, correct me if I'm wrong, you've made the statement before.
	Well, again, when you say truth is not preferable to people, they wouldn't agree with you.
	Like, nobody says, I believe stuff that isn't true, but I pretend to myself that it is true, right?
	They genuinely believe that it is true, right?
	So, you know, neocons who supported the war, they genuinely believe that this was a just and moral action.
	Christopher Hitchens went to his untimely grave and Defending his support for the Bush invasion of Iraq in 03, believing that it doesn't matter what we did as long as we remove the mafia criminal family of the Husseins from power.
	He didn't say, well, I know it's not true, but I'm going to hold to that opinion anyway.
	People will tell you that they absolutely believe in truth and that their opinions and their arguments are derived from that which is and that which is right and that which is moral, that which is empirical, that which is rational.
	It's just that it's not, for the most part.
	I don't want to get stuck on that, but I think it's really important to understand that most people will tell you that what they believe is true.
	I completely agree with that.
	If I phrase it like this, I'm going to make a proposition.
	Can you tell me if you agree or not?
	I can. Alright, so if I state the proposition, all people at all times and at all places should prefer truth to falsehood, where truth is defined as correspondence with reality, would you agree with that?
	I would not. Alright, I'm curious now, why wouldn't you agree with that?
	Well, I mean, I can think of situations where lying is better than truth, right?
	I mean, it's the old argument that says someone bursts into your house and says, where's your wife?
	I want to kill her. You're not going to tell the guy.
	Or imagine somebody's dying.
	They've been in a car crash with their wife and their daughter, and they're dying, and their wife and daughter have died, and they say, how is my wife and daughter?
	I would be damn tempted to say, they're fine, they're going to live on, so that his last few minutes wouldn't be untold agony.
	I can see where falsehood would be preferable.
	To truth, I could think of a million situations where that would be the case.
	So I'm not sure that it's universally true that we would always want to say that.
	So, look, I agree with that.
	Of course, if you're in a situation, if you're in a live boat scenario, the one that you've proposed just right now, feel free to jump in and interrupt me if I'm wrong.
	If you're in a scenario like that, obviously truth is definitely not preferable, right?
	We're trying to sort of get to the root of a statement that I think we've heard you make in some videos.
	I can tell you what the statement is, I think.
	Sorry to interrupt. I can tell you what the statement is, I think, that you're trying to get a hold of?
	Go ahead, yeah. Yeah, that a claim for universal truth must be both universal and true.
	If somebody claims that something is true and universal, then it must in fact be true and universal.
	I know that's almost tautological.
	It's an A is A thing, but I think that's what we're trying to get at.
	So, people may not prefer truth.
	They may prefer lies.
	They may have lies in their heart which they cover up with a supposed truth which is impenetrable.
	There may be all this nonsense going on.
	But if someone comes to me and says, for instance, that the Earth goes around the Sun, then they're making a universal truth claim.
	And that claim must be then both universal and true in order for it to be valid.
	Now, the reason we have to state that so boldly is because most people make these truth claims without understanding the need for universality, objectivity and, of course, conformity to that with its empirical irration.
	I don't mean to interrupt you, but that's not the claim that we were referring to.
	That's not the claim we think we've seen you make, but I will go on the record to say that that claim you just made, I of course completely agree with.
	I don't think there's any doubt in this conversation that the claim is true, right?
	That if I make a proposition and the proposition is true, necessarily the proposition must be true for everybody.
	Otherwise it's just an opinion, right?
	Right, and so where this comes in is when people say universally preferable behavior is invalid and therefore you should abandon that standard, then this is a self-contradictory statement, right?
	Because they're claiming that truth is preferable to falsehood, that universality is the standard of truth, and therefore we should use that to reject both universality and preference for truth.
	And so that is something that That can't work.
	Like if I go up to someone and say, it is impossible for you to change your mind and you need to agree with me on that even though you don't hold that opinion already, that is a self-contradictory statement.
	So that's where I think the value comes in.
	You can't reject universally preferable behavior without using universally preferable behavior.
	And so that to me is where most people have problems at the beginning of the theory.
	That argument that you just made is the one that we want to call into question because I think that we have an objection there.
	Go ahead. I'm not sure because I was reading the chat.
	Can you state the argument again?
	Actually, go ahead. What he actually said was that you can't deny universally preferable behavior without essentially confirming it by arguing.
	Yes. Yes.
	This is closer. Let me run you through the deduction we've made and please feel free to point out any flaws, alright?
	All right, so to the extent that I know, what we do is we propose a rule, right?
	And not we, right? But we say, all right, so we're having a conversation with somebody, and somebody is talking to us as well, and so we make a number of truth-bearing claims.
	Implicit in those truth-bearing claims that we're making is the fact that the other person should prefer truth, because Well, if he prefers falsehood, I'm wasting my time, and if he prefers falsehood, he has no point defending anything, right?
	Now, there comes a time in the discussion about UPV where people say, well, you know, you see, you have to argue for universality, and therefore we've derived this idea that you can't You cannot possibly refute the statement, truth is preferable to all people.
	Because in doing so, in refuting the statement, you are necessarily accepting the preferability of truth for yourself and for others, right?
	No, no. See, again, you've gone back to truth is preferable to all people, which is where we started, and that is not the way that I would formulate it at all.
	Because then you would just end up in a whole quagmire where people can quote you all sorts of people who prefer falsehood to truth.
	Correct. Yeah, but we're talking about preferable, not preferred.
	Sorry, we don't want to talk about what people actually prefer.
	Maybe we shouldn't have our simulated conversation between the UPB supporter and the UPB denier.
	Do we have that one saved here?
	Yeah, I'd have to go up here to the parent and then navigate.
	But maybe it would be easier if we moved on to We took the same argument to the realm of human action.
	I can tell you what the principle is, and you can tell me if you agree or not, and then we can pick it up from there.
	What about that?
	Well, sorry, didn't we just...
	I thought we were going to talk about UPB, the last argument.
	Sure. Let me just look the argument up.
	This is James Carlin.
	Well, why don't you... Do you want to just play the skeptic, and I'll play, let's say, I'll go out on a limb and play the UPB advocate?
	And you play the skeptic, and we'll just try that?
	Let us play the skeptic and the expert again, and correct us if we're wrong, because we're going to get feedback, okay?
	So you're going to be the expert, honey.
	I'm the expert? Yes.
	Okay. So I, as a UPV expert, say truth is preferable to falsehood as one of the pillars of UPV. Correct.
	And I'm going to deny this because no, truth is not preferable to falsehood because I'm going to give you a random reason why.
	All right. I don't care about your reason, actually.
	I say you depend on truth being preferable to falsehood in order to set forth this argumentation because if you didn't prefer truth to falsehood, you wouldn't be arguing with me.
	Is this correct, Steph? Yeah.
	All right, so we unpack this using, here's what we do, we unpack this using predicate logic to arrive at this.
	And this is, maybe we're doing the unpacking wrong, and this is where we really like the feedback that you can bring to bear.
	So we're going to do the same conversation, except we're going to unpack it with predicate logic.
	And I'm going to have my expert on UPB start.
	Go ahead, honey. Okay, so I make the claim, truth is universally preferable to falsehood.
	Nah, truth is not universally preferable to falsehood because, you know, I have scar tissue and I deny truth.
	Aha! But you depend on truth being universally preferable to falsehood in order to set forth that assertion.
	You apply it by debating with me and trying to get me to see truth.
	Nah, not really. I only depend on truth being preferable to falsehood during this debate, and only for you and me, which is quite a smaller claim than your initial claim was, honey.
	That fails. Alright, I want to hear how.
	Well, it's an arbitrary distinction.
	It's like saying, um...
	All human beings are mammals, except for bald guys over 40.
	Well, what does bald over 40 have to do with being a mammal or not?
	It's an incidental characteristic.
	It's not an essential characteristic, right?
	The essential characteristics of mammals is, you know, give birth to young without eggs, suckle their young or warm-blooded, you know, that kind of stuff, right?
	So you can't create arbitrary distinctions.
	I mean, you can, but you're just wrong.
	It's like saying, all the lizards in this room are geckos except for that one.
	And it's actually a gecko, except for that one because it's blue.
	Well, a blue gecko is just a blue gecko.
	It's not a non-gecko. So if you're going to create arbitrary distinctions and say, well, it's just for this argument, or it's just for you and me, it's just at the moment, and I think somebody made that argument about, you know, self-ownership is valid only for you and me during this debate.
	Well, you have to say why.
	I mean, just think about how a biologist would characterize something, right?
	You know, this eight-legged beastie with whatever characteristics are necessary for a spider, mandibles, no antennae, a thorax, whatever the hell that is, right?
	Well, that's a spider.
	But you can't say, well, all of these Black Widow spiders are Black Widow spiders except for that one because it's slightly bigger.
	Well, slightly bigger doesn't have, it's not a relevant categorization standard or criterion.
	And so you can't just create arbitrary distinctions and say, well, just for this moment, it's like saying, I have a theory of physics that says, you know, all rocks fall down except for that rock.
	Well, why? Why except?
	If you say all rocks fall down except for that rock, then you've just created a contradiction, an arbitrary categorization that is not relevant to the general concept.
	Does that make any sense? It sort of kind of does make sense and far be it from us saying yes, man is not biped because there's some poor souls that arrived from the war, limbs missing, right?
	Yeah, and again, you can say that human beings are born without, you know, human beings have a separate independence.
	They're not, I don't know, a bunch of algae that grows together.
	You say, oh, we've got a Siamese twin.
	It's like, well, yeah, there are exceptions to these categories.
	But we know that there are exceptions because they're rare.
	So mutations, you know, human beings are born with whole upper lips, except there are some kids born with cleft palates or whatever.
	And there are still human beings with cleft palates.
	But what you're suggesting here is a much more arbitrary standard because there's no reason whatsoever to confine a statement about truth, which is naturally universal, to a specific time period.
	It's like saying this theory of physics is valid only when McDonald's is serving hot cakes from 7 a.m.
	to 11 a.m. It's like, what on earth would that mean, right?
	Unless the physics theory generally involves hotcakes, it would make no sense.
	Okay, that makes sense.
	However, I have this, I mean, there's two observations that I'd like to make, they're probably interrelated.
	The first one is, you do seem to be agreeing to the rule, truth is, to the theory, truth is universally preferable to falsehood.
	With the caveat that there may be some exceptions, right?
	You do seem to be agreeing with that in this conversation.
	No, what I'm saying is that somebody who claims that truth is universally preferable to falsehood has to have that standard throughout the entire debate.
	That's all. I know that truth is not universally preferable to falsehood, right?
	It's what is implicit in the proposition of the debater.
	Somebody who corrects me according to a universal is correcting me because truth is universally preferable to falsehood and I'm incorrect and his formulation is correct and I should have my shadow follow the moving statue of truth and have my opinions follow or have my perspectives or arguments follow that which is true.
	So if somebody comes up to me and says, That truth is universally preferable to falsehood, then I accept that.
	But then they can't come up and say, it is true and universal that truth is not universally preferable to falsehood.
	That just doesn't work.
	Correct. But then again, you're assuming universality in order to make this, right?
	No, the other person is assuming universality in order to correct me.
	Yeah, I agree. And that means that two people are assuming universality.
	The universality of the truth, but not the universality of the preferability for truth, right?
	Sorry, I'm not sure I followed that.
	Yes. Maybe we need to make a distinction between instances of truth-bearing statements...
	Look, forget about the general...
	Sorry to interrupt. Just two guys in a room.
	Let's just go back to two guys in a room.
	Bob and Doug, right? Yeah.
	So, if Bob says to Doug, Doug says it's daytime, and it's actually nighttime, and so Bob says it's daytime, and Doug says, no, you're wrong, it's nighttime.
	So, what's implicit in that statement?
	I would say in the statement, well, in both statements, the implicit premise is you should prefer truth.
	Well, yeah, but first of all, I would say, first of all, there's a whole bunch of ways.
	So first of all, the guy's saying, not, I had a dream that it was daytime, even though, but it is, it is.
	I am accurately describing reality that is daytime.
	The other guy says, no, it's nighttime.
	Well, that's not an implicit premise.
	That's the explicit one, right?
	Well, implicit in that it's not directly stated.
	It's just a shorthand, right?
	So when you say it is, right, then you're saying this is derived from objective, sensual, material, empirical reality, whatever, right?
	And so when the other guy corrects him, he's not saying, well, no, it's like they're not two guys deep in a mine and they've lost track and they say, well, I think it's daytime.
	I don't know. I think it's nighttime, but who knows for sure, right?
	He's saying, no, you're absolutely incorrect.
	It is nighttime, not daytime, and therefore you should correct your statements and blah, blah, blah, right?
	So in the act of correcting someone to say it's nighttime, not daytime, You're saying that our opinions should be derived from that which is.
	You're saying that it is better to have opinions to conform to truth if you're claiming.
	Because the first guy who says it is daytime is making a truth statement that is universal and empirical and blah blah blah, right?
	And the other guy is saying, no, if you're going to make a statement that is empirical, let's say, then it has to be empirical to that which you're claiming to talk about.
	In other words, it's nighttime and not daytime.
	So just in the act of correcting someone, there's a whole bunch of embedded stuff.
	We don't need to go in what everybody prefers or universally preferable to truth.
	Just look at what the person is actually saying in the debate at the moment.
	Trying to go beyond that is to get into a whole quagmire of what people prefer in general, and I think that gets very confusing.
	It does get very confusing.
	We've been spending a few days in this already.
	But yeah, we're not disagreeing that when somebody's trying to correct another person, the person who's correcting is not arguing implicitly for you should not prefer truth.
	It's actually arguing for, yeah, you should prefer truth.
	You should derive your beliefs and opinions from facts, from reality.
	We do agree with that.
	But the problem is we have the impression that at some point you said the truth is universally peripheral in reference to the idea that, let me unpack the statement again, To the idea that all people across all time should prefer truth regardless of what they do prefer.
	Well listen, I tell you what, why don't you see if you can dig up where I said that?
	I do remember saying in the book that there's evidence that people generally prefer UPB to denying UPB since most people eat and are therefore alive and so eating requires not subjectively preferable behavior but universally preferable behavior like eating food that has some nutritional value, getting some Putting clothes on, getting something to drink and getting some sleep, and this is all universally preferable behavior in order to stay alive and be able to debate.
	I remember talking about that, but if you can dig up where I've said human beings should always universally prefer truth at all times, then I would be happy to debate that.
	But unfortunately, since I can't remember it and I don't want to defend something which I don't remember saying, let's see if you can dig that up and I'm going to move on to the next caller.
	Sounds good. Can I get a closing statement?
	Oh, sure. Yeah, well, I want to say something.
	I do appreciate a lot the work you've done.
	This UPV is by no means, even if I can find the logical proof that one of the proofs don't actually hold, UPV is a magnificent piece of work.
	And we do actually intuitively accept it and live, try well, we try to live our lives to the best Thank you for having us here.
	We're going to find where is it that you made a statement and we're going to point it to you the next time we get an opportunity.
	How does that sound? That sounds fantastic.
	I really have enjoyed the conversation.
	I look forward to more. I also want to compliment you on being the most critical about that which you most intuitively want to accept.
	Because that's where a lot of people glide over.
	It's like, oh good, it denies theft and murder and rape and assault and that's great.
	But to be critical about that I think is really good.
	What I would focus on in particular though is just the Bob and Doug in the room stuff around theft and murder and rape and all that sort of stuff.
	That, I think, is where the real power of UPB is.
	Nobody talks about that stuff and gets stuck.
	Everyone gets stuck on whether UPB is valid or not.
	Again, I would focus on that just in terms of the interest of we don't live forever.
	But if you found logical problems in UPB, fantastic.
	That just means that my explication of it is less than perfect, which I'm sure it is.
	And that only affirms UPB. In other words, if there's a deviation from reason and evidence in the book UPB, that is only confirmation of the value of reason and evidence as UPB. So, good.
	I mean, I'm happy to correct it where it's fallen short.
	Looking forward for the second edition of UPB, then.
	Yes, thank you so much.
	All right, James, we have another caller on the line.
	Or a question in the chat room.
	We don't have any other callers on the line right now.
	I've been asking for questions in the chat.
	See if anyone comes and pastes what they're saying.
	Well, if we don't and the other couple who were already listening want to talk about, I think there was one that came up around property rights, I'm happy to talk about that.
	I didn't want to continue on the conversation if other people were chomping at the bit, but if we have a Christmas dearth of new callers, I'm happy to return to our brilliant couple who have me on stereo here from this side and then from this side.
	I'm going back and forth. I don't know how long you want to wait.
	Give it a couple of seconds, but if they want to come back, then I'd say let's go for that.
	Yeah, we'll be fine with that.
	We do have a question in the chat.
	I think he maybe covered it before, but it's about Ron Paul.
	And he asks, would Steph prefer to see Ron Paul win the presidency or not?
	In other words, does Steph think the positives, less immediate government, of his election would outweigh the negatives, give libertarianism a bad name in the face of impending doom, etc.
	So positive or negatives of Ron Paul, your take?
	I don't know. I mean, it's a great question.
	It really is. I was just talking about this with a friend the other day.
	I mean, the intellectual, philosophical, vulcanized, bloodless part of me knows that it would be a bad thing, I think, for Ron Paul to gain the presidency, because the system is so far gone that he would forever be remembered as the guy who went bubbling down, hat floating with the Titanic, and that would, I think, besmirch Libertarianism for many, many, many decades, if not centuries.
	But that having been said, I mean, if he won the presidency, let's just say he won the nomination, I guess, in January and he won the presidency, I mean, I swear to God, part of me would just be glued to the TV like, holy shit, what is this man going to be able to achieve?
	Because look, I could entirely have my head up my ass and be entirely wrong I think I put forward some pretty good arguments with lots of evidence and statistics and so on about why.
	I consider it impossible, but nobody can fully predict the future.
	There are a billion, bajillion variables at play in all of these kinds of situations, so I don't think that it's a good thing that he gets elected.
	I've made arguments to that, but this is not a mathematical argument.
	This is an argument from effect.
	To a large part. And so, if he were to get in, I think it would be a disaster and I think that it would be a truly spectacular disaster and would set the movement back significantly.
	That having been said, I could be wrong.
	I mean, nobody has a monopoly on predicting the future.
	And so... I would be absolutely fascinated if he got in to see what was achievable.
	I mean, people argue, they make the argument, they say, look, he, as the commander-in-chief of the American Armed Forces, he could shut down all the wars and close military bases overseas.
	I mean, wouldn't that be amazing?
	Wouldn't that be fantastic? He could shut down federal departments.
	He could... Control, minimize, or perhaps even eliminate in some areas the amount of federal intrusion into states' rights or state choices and so on.
	I mean, the list goes on and on of the things that he could achieve.
	And of course, he'd have a great bully pulpit.
	He could really finally get the full-on audit of the Fed and could have a great bully pulpit for getting that information out there.
	And, you know, it's the ring, you know?
	I'm not sure if he's Boromir or Aragon.
	It's the ring. So I would be fascinated to see what would happen if he became president.
	Fascinated and horrified, probably.
	But nonetheless, it would be fascinating.
	I would absolutely love to be proven completely wrong in my arguments and estimation of the success of It's not a Ron Paul thing.
	I think Ron Paul is a pretty nice guy.
	He's very smart, obviously, and very dedicated, and very committed, and educated, and he's a pretty good public speaker.
	It's not him in particular.
	It could be anybody, but I think that it would be fascinating to see what would happen.
	I would have the same qualms about any Libertarian presidential candidate.
	I don't want him to get in, but I would be fascinated to see what would happen if he did get in, and I would be overjoyed to have my head proven to be completely at my arse for the last couple of years and for significant steps towards freedom to be achieved through Ron Paul.
	I mean, obviously that would be fantastic, but I don't think that is going to be the case at all.
	I have very little doubt that it would be disastrous all around, but again, I mean, I could be wrong.
	I don't want him to get in, but I'd be fascinated to see what happens if he does.
	Alright, we'll see if there's any other questions.
	Otherwise we can move on to the color.
	There is an interesting question.
	I'm not sure if it requires some more context, but someone says that they sent you an article about Curry County in Oregon and that they're going broke for really real this time.
	And his comments are, no one in the local government has any idea even how to proceed.
	In other words, how to dissolve the county government and carry on.
	What would you realistically suggest to them?
	I suppose to either the people in government or the people in the county.
	We know moving immediately to volunteerism is entirely realistic out of the gate.
	Do you have any thoughts on that?
	Well, yeah. Tell them to privatize everything.
	Sell everything you could off to the highest bidder.
	Sell the schools off. Sell the roads off.
	Sell the sanitation.
	Sell everything. Use that to pay the debts as best you can.
	Hopefully return as much as you can.
	Repudiate the debts. All government debts are illegitimate and unjust and predatory.
	Repudiate the debts. Sell that stuff off as much as you can to the most committed and skillful entrepreneurs.
	Let's have an experiment in seeing how not shoving guns down people's throats gets the voice of the people out through customers and the democracy of the dollar.
	A lot of that is still going to happen anyway.
	The government has to run out of money.
	They're going to start selling off assets like crazy and of course bringing troops on.
	That's going to happen with the collapse of the currency or at least the collapse of the cash flow in the government as it stands.
	Yeah, that would be my advice to them.
	It's not an argument from economic efficiency that that would occur, but it's fundamentally just an argument from voluntarism versus violence.
	I mean, wherever you can move a transaction from violence to voluntarism, you have added another star to the Milky Way of growing virtue in the night sky.
	All right, well, I have someone who has a question about sort of specific what they're doing with their jobs, but I'll try to get them on the call so you can have a chat.
	I mean, I've been asked for some of my opinions on these Ron Paul I've been asked for some of my opinions on these Ron Paul newsletters, by Yeah, I mean, what's in them is kind of unsavory.
	This is the stuff that was floating around in the 90s.
	The authorship remains unknown or unadmitted.
	Yeah, it's nasty, of course.
	I mean, some of the stuff that's in there.
	But... Of course, as I've said before, you'll know Ron Paul is getting some significant traction when a huge amount of slander, mud, lies, and libel gets thrown at him.
	And that is as predictable as sunrise.
	It is a way, of course, of short-circuiting Any moral or philosophical arguments that he may have.
	It's a way of avoiding the question of what is the Federal Reserve.
	It's a way of avoiding the question of what is imperialism.
	It's a way of avoiding the question of what is isolationism in fact, which simply means not bombing other people into the stratosphere.
	So all of this stuff is a way of getting people to talk about supposedly moral issues and Rather than talk about this supposed racism rather than talking about any of the real issues that are going on, like what is the gold standard and what does it mean and so on.
	I think it is a shame.
	I think that his avowal that he didn't read any of this stuff, he disavows it, he wasn't aware of what was in the newsletter under his name until 10 years after the fact.
	It solves one problem, of course, while creating another because people have concerns about his management abilities.
	If stuff goes out with his name on it that is pretty unsavory and he just doesn't even know about it, that's a problem.
	It would be beneficial Whoever wrote this stuff for the Ron Paul newsletter would be enormously beneficial if that person, assuming that he or she is still alive, if that person would have come forward and say, I snuck this stuff in there, I was drinking heavily at the time, I was a bad guy, I have since reformed, pour the heat on me, I slipped it into the printer just before it went out, after Ron Paul had read the proofs, and mea culpa, bad me.
	Whoever did write that stuff should be the one coming forward, if that person is...
	Deceased, then there must be somebody in the organization who's still alive who would know who did that.
	That's what needs to happen to come forward.
	And if that isn't happening, then my guess would be that whoever wrote that stuff is still in the Ron Paul orbit.
	And that would probably be why these disclosures are not coming forward.
	Again, it's all speculation and I don't know.
	It's not particularly relevant, I think.
	But it is sadly tragic the way the media works.
	Just pick up whatever they can to throw at people rather than deal with any intelligent issues at all.
	I mean, I'm not saying it's unimportant, but relative to his fiscal positions and his positions on foreign policy, it's pretty unimportant.
	All right. Well, we have a caller on the line.
	Go ahead. Hi, Steph.
	My name's Josh. Hey.
	Hey there, big fan.
	Well, thank you. Merry Christmas to you, Josh.
	I gotcha. I actually just had a question.
	I took a job a little over a year and a half ago doing social media marketing for a small retail shop.
	I have, with my limited skills, since blown the business up into a million dollars annual revenue plus.
	On and on, the business is going extremely successfully.
	In the time, the year and a half that I've been working there, I've gotten a $2 raise and one time a $50 bonus for the new year last year.
	I feel like golden handcuffs around here and I love your career advice.
	I want to know what you have to say.
	I'm not sure where the business started but you feel or believe or accept that you've had a good deal to do with growing the business significantly?
	And why do you think you've not been recognized, I think, in a fair way?
	Well, about four months, five months into being hired and already expanding the business, the boss hired his cousin as well, someone of my own age, who quickly was set to my salary level and kind of mirrored my responsibilities and had been groomed since then to kind of take over as a manager.
	And I think that has a big factor to do with it.
	Right. So preferential nepotism is holding you from the just gold that should be pouring down your staircase?
	Yep. Alright.
	Well, I've negotiated salaries both, of course, as an employee and as a manager further up the chain.
	And there's two ways that you can do it.
	I mean, these are the two that I've used, and I hope that they're useful.
	The first, of course, is to get industry standard pay, and there are websites out there, there are reports that you can order that will give you the average pay by geographical location, so you obviously get the closest job to the closest to you, and they will give you Some sort of sense of salary and bonuses and this and that and the other.
	And that will give you some sense of where you stand in the industry as a whole.
	It's not perfect but it's a place to start.
	And at one job I was able to get about 20% extra for my employees simply by comparing their salaries to industry averages for those positions in the geographical region that the company worked in.
	So that's one way of making it somewhat objective.
	The second of course, which I think is more powerful and more compelling, You need to make a business case for your raise.
	When I started, this company was doing a quarter million.
	Now, two years later, it's doing a million.
	Let's say that I can take credit for half of that, so I'm getting $750,000 extra in.
	Let's say your overhead is 10%, so I'm getting $75,000 more.
	Sorry, your profits are 10%.
	I'm getting $75,000 more a year in here.
	What if I were to get just 10% of that?
	So 1% of everything that I've helped you increase, that's $7,500 a year, and here's why.
	Now, if you have to go and hire someone else, which I hope you won't have to do, here's the average cost.
	It costs between $20,000 to $40,000 to replace a mid-level manager, and there's always the risk the new person isn't going to work out.
	I'm just giving you the real sketch.
	There's lots of different ways you can do it, but I think you need to make the business case.
	The managers may not be aware of the degree to which your contributions have affected this growth.
	If you make that case and say, look, given how much money I've driven into the company, if I were a salesman, I'd be earning 6%, 8%, 10%, 12% a year on these sales or more.
	I consider myself as a marketer responsible for these increased sales to at least some percentage.
	And then you go in with a spreadsheet and you can say, look, you may disagree with my calculations.
	You may say, well, look, I don't think you're responsible for 50%, maybe 35%.
	It's like, okay, well, let's adjust it to that.
	Let's meet in the middle. And you can go in and you can just do it, you know, overhead projector and You can tweak the numbers and then you get them thinking just in terms of how much value you've contributed to the business, how much extra money they're making because of what you're doing and that will get them.
	You may not get everything you want in that meeting but you will at least start putting them in that mindset about how things are going.
	There may be aspects of the business that you're not aware of where losses may be occurring.
	It's good to start digging into those.
	So that would be my suggestion.
	Does that help at all? It does a little bit.
	I was also wondering, too, maybe if it was a good idea, and you're saying to get kind of a comparison on my salary with the other companies to go to, not necessarily the competitors, but people that are in the same industry and see if they're looking to try to get a job to leverage the possibility of quitting and working elsewhere against them?
	Yeah, I mean, look, I... I'm not a big fan of ultimatums in the business world.
	I think ultimatums in the business world are sort of like ultimatums in romantic relationships.
	Like, you know, give me a ring buster or I'm moving out.
	That doesn't bode well for the future of that relationship.
	You may get the ring, but you're not getting the commitment.
	You're forcing the commitment. And so if you sort of go in and say, I want a raise or I'm going to quit, you may get the raise, but I don't think that's good for your long-term relationship because you haven't taught them anything.
	It's like sort of threatening a child, so to speak.
	Do this or I'll punish you. Well, they don't learn anything.
	I think you want to try and enroll them or encourage them to see things from the perspective of how much value you're actually adding to the business so that they appreciate what you're doing.
	Now, maybe they're selfish jerks and they won't do that or whatever, but that's important to know.
	You don't want to get a commitment to a raise out of a selfish jerk because a selfish jerk may give you that raise, but he'll find other ways to make you pay.
	And what you've done then is you've said, okay, if you give me this raise then I'll stay, but you haven't dealt with the problems in the working conditions.
	So you may stay, but you haven't actually improved your working conditions or made a rational case that the other person has accepted.
	That stuff almost always bounces back to bite you in the other hand.
	So let's say you stay and you end up with more problems in your workforce.
	Well, what's going to happen is you're going to get a shitty recommendation to your next job and that's going to hurt you or whatever, right?
	You know, you can certainly cast your net about and say, you know, if you were to hire me, sort of what salary would I be looking at, if you know anyone in the industry or whatever, but to sort of go in there with a job offer or slam it on the table and say, give me a raise or I'm gone, I think is punitive, it's confrontational, and it does not sow the seeds for a productive and happy working relationship down the road.
	Okay. Well, I really appreciate your advice.
	Thank you so much. You're welcome.
	Let me know how it goes.
	And of course, like everyone who I give job advice to, if it doesn't work out, you can live in my basement.
	All right.
	Awesome. All right.
	Thanks, man. Thank you so much.
	Bye. We had another caller join.
	I wasn't clear on whether he had something to contribute, but he's just coming on to listen.
	So if you are looking to chat, go ahead.
	Otherwise, I think we can return to our other callers from earlier.
	Can I just jump in?
	Yes, that was you. That was you I was talking about.
	Sorry for not being clear.
	Go ahead. Okay.
	Hi, Steph, and Merry Christmas to you, too.
	Merry Christmas to you, my friend.
	How are you doing? Oh, I'm fine.
	I had a couple of things I'd love to just hear your opinions on.
	One thing I think I'd like you to almost write on, if you could, is One thing I just noticed myself is that whenever you get a contentious kind of issue like about is the government valid,
	just for example, you know, you see quite a variety, an interesting variety of thought and thinkers, you know, especially in a kind of wide open forum like you get on the internet or FDR. You get people who Really seem to be able to put together some pretty good sequences of insight and logic and so on and then other people who You know,
	they seem to be, at first glance, just trolling.
	And yet, it's so dynamic.
	It's exciting, you know, because you don't know for sure.
	It could be just somebody who is inexperienced at expressing things in a debate forum.
	And, you know, it's just like so much going on.
	I'd love to hear you kind of address the issues of You know, you've got to give some people a little room to grow in their ability to think, let alone express their thoughts and debate and, you know, that sort of thing.
	And yet other people, you know, it just seems like a complete waste of time and it really is a waste of time, you know, if you Sort of cater to their little Tantrums or whatever they are offering, you know, and it's it's not always easy to To spot who's who and that sort of thing and yeah,
	I look there are there are the genuine truth seekers who are very few and far between and I say that with humility I certainly have not been a genuine truth seeker for a good chunk of my adult life and so I In other words, the truth at all costs, regardless of its effect upon my personal preferences or history or whatever.
	It is with humility that I say, because in my own life, being a truth seeker at all costs has been the minority of my adult existence, I think, since I started FDR shortly before.
	Most people are not truth seekers at all costs.
	And a lot of people, when you talk to them about the truth, they, as I mentioned before, they have this emotional reaction because it's threatening.
	And it's not because they fear the truth.
	It's because they fear criticism, condemnation, isolation, rejection, alienation, and ostracism from those around them.
	This is the great false rainbow-colored cultural spiderweb we call relationships that can't usually stand the weight of a single philosophical feather.
	It's tragic and horrifying.
	But that's the reality that most people are not that interested in truth.
	They're interested in defending a particular position.
	And it's Dan the Torpedoes throw all castaways overboard and everyone who is not on the approved list gets tossed out of the club on their ass.
	So that's very few people.
	Now there are people who...
	You see this on the message board sometimes.
	It's a hard thing to get your head around.
	It's hard for me to get my head around it.
	They're just shit disturbers.
	And what happens is they see an opening where they can create friction, cause trouble, infect other people with irascibility, and they will then try to stir up trouble.
	And it's because, of course, they're highly dysfunctional and abused people.
	And probably to the point where they themselves have become abusers.
	And that occurs quite a bit.
	And you can, as I mentioned on the board recently, you can see that when, you know, somebody damns you morally for being morally damning.
	You know, like they're doing exactly, in fact, turned up to 10 what they're criticizing.
	And that is, I mean, I don't know what the technical term is, but that's just being a shit-disturber where you just sort of, you sound your crazy horn and you wait to see who it summons and that happens too.
	And those people, of course, you simply can't engage with because they're not being honest about what's troubling them.
	So, philosophy is a series of rules.
	And like nutrition, like science, is a series of rules and standards.
	And the majority of people, when they encounter rules and standards, get really angry.
	Because rules and standards have been used to control and crush them.
	And humiliate them.
	And that is...
	That is a problem, right? There was a guy who's been posting for about ten months and I did a calculation.
	He was posting between five and six posts every single day, long posts.
	English is not his first language.
	He's a smart guy. I like him.
	I gave him some private coaching on his videos, but it was causing disruption for people on the board and it was alienating people who wanted to come by because you'd see just floods after floods.
	It was diverting a lot of energy and attention into Complicated, convoluted discussions that didn't really seem to go anywhere, and so James made the decision to say, hey, listen, you know, it's nice, I appreciate you, but you've got to take a break.
	Plus, the guy was pinging me like 10 times a day, and I just was a bit concerned that he was going too heads deep into the freedom-made radio world and not getting other things done that he needed to get done in his life.
	So we thought, you know, just take a break.
	You know, it's not an easy situation.
	I mean, he was occasionally abusive, but not too bad or not too much.
	Is that a difficult situation?
	I really appreciate how extremely difficult I sympathize with you and James, you know, how to come down with such calls.
	Like, I don't know how I'd handle it either.
	You know, I really don't. I know it's just rough.
	You know, you got to do something, but I don't know how you come to a decision.
	It's tough. Yeah, it is tough.
	You know, I mean, it's balancing the needs of a highly disparate, highly intelligent, occasionally fractious and challenging community dealing with ethics, which are the most powerful electromagnetic current flowing through the human brain.
	So I think, again, I think as a community as a whole, we're doing really, really well.
	I mean, what, over five years, there's maybe 30 people who've been asked to leave the board out of 13,000.
	I mean, it's tiny. I've been banned.
	I've been permanent IP banned from boards just for posting a video.
	Because I'm an anarchist or because I'm an atheist or whatever.
	I mean, I'm not going to sit there and start to stir up shit on that board and say, I was banned for this and you people, I can't believe it.
	Because I've got better things to do with my time than to chase after people who don't want me on their message board because I have a life.
	So it is a challenging situation.
	Is it always handled perfectly?
	No, of course not. I mean, I've apologized.
	James has apologized. If we've got bad information or made decisions which, you know, under the light of, you know, cooler heads prevail, it's not the right decision.
	Sometimes it's right, sometimes it's not.
	But, you know, you do the best you can with the information that you have at the moment, with the interests of the community as a whole.
	And it's not easy.
	It's not an easy position.
	You know, James, I think, did a good job.
	It's, you know, it's not fun.
	Nobody looks forward to the inevitable, you know, people coming, hey, where's this guy gone?
	Oh, my God, it's censorship. Oh, my God, this is...
	Right? I mean, it's just...
	It's silly noise that comes out of immature people.
	Putting in some rules into a community of rabid anarchists is like putting your foot into a pool of piranhas, you know?
	Well, yeah. I mean, so the people, what happens is a standard is put up where we say, okay, so there's no formal rule that says you can't post, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	And people try and trap you with rules.
	And they say, well, there's no rule. He didn't break a rule.
	Well, but there is a rule called the good of the community, which is something that has to be weighed and balanced.
	And of course, there's lots of people who disagree with me, lots of people who disagree with others on the board.
	I think that's fine. It's good debate and so on.
	But when you've got 20, 30, 40 complaints in a month about a poster, I think you have to try and do something about it for the enjoyment of everyone as a whole.
	Is it easy? No, it's not easy.
	But people will try and say, well, you have to be a slave to rules.
	Because that's true when it comes to good and evil, but that's not true when it comes to APA. Aesthetically preferable action is not...
	Something that is rules-based.
	If you say, I'm going to meet someone at 7 and they arrive at 7 o'clock and 1 minute, do you get to scream at them for being late?
	No. Are they late? Yes.
	Is it 2 minutes? 3 minutes?
	Is it 3 1⁄2 minutes? Is it 15 minutes?
	Is it half an hour but they had a car crash?
	Are you still going to scream at them for being late?
	Whereas if somebody just goes and, I don't know, stabs your cat, then obviously that's bad, right?
	But people want to try and move these aesthetically preferable things into the realm of, you know, really good and bad and so on.
	And so it's hard for people...
	When a rule is imposed or a decision is made, because so often people have had rules, they can be beaten down with rules, or they've had these contradictory rules.
	So the first thing, when people experience a rule or a ban on a message board, it's just one example, it could be anything, when people experience this, what they experience is...
	Someone in authority abusing through power and maybe claiming rules afterwards.
	So the first thing that they want to do is to find an exception to that rule or to find a way to disarm the person imposing the rules by getting them to self-attack morally.
	It's not bad behavior per se.
	It definitely is immature because it doesn't have anything to do with James or me or the message board.
	It's all to do with family stuff, with priest stuff, with teacher stuff.
	It's all bomb in the brain stuff. It has nothing to do with it.
	I mean, a message board is not that important in people's lives.
	They've got to obsessively post about one guy who's asked to stop posting for a month.
	Anybody with any perspective realizes that is not a big fucking issue in people's lives.
	It's all bomb in the brain stuff.
	What happens is you activate people's desire to evade rules Either by over-complication, by counter-attack, by, oh, a rule has been imposed and all rules are bad because they were used to attack me when I was a kid and so I've got to find some way to turn the tables.
	It's creating massive amounts of anxiety in me and massive amounts of hostility and fear.
	But they don't process that.
	They don't take the responsibility to say, well, why is this upsetting me so much?
	What is this like in my past that I really need to deal with?
	But they just, you know, in an immature way, they just go act out on the board, right?
	These kinds of shit disturbers, they can actually be quite useful in a way too, right?
	I mean, I posted something about my interview with Stephan Kinsella, or a conversation really, about the Stop Online Piracy Act.
	So a guy was posting on the YouTube channel, on that video, and he was saying, oh, okay, so some guy sets up, you know, a Steph...
	The website where he mirrors every single thing that you've done and everyone donates to him and you make no money at all.
	And wouldn't that bother you? You're telling me that wouldn't bother you at all?
	I mean, that's the kind of shit-disturbing question that's just supposed to stand the flames.
	Yeah, that would bother me.
	That thieving bastard, give me that website.
	I'm going to go to his house with a shovel, right?
	You know, it's supposed to get you riled up.
	But the reality is that nobody's going to do that.
	I mean, nobody's going to sit up and mirror my whole website.
	What would the point of that be? And, of course, anybody who listens to what I'm talking about and thinks it's worth something, then will come and donate to me, not to this other guy who they will clearly recognize as somebody just piggybacking.
	Anyway, but they'll just try and stoke you with resentment by pretending there's this big moral issue.
	But my God, wouldn't it be great if we lived in a world, you know, that was one of the biggest threads over the last month, wouldn't it be great if we lived in a world where asking a confusing and alienating overposter to take a short break from a message board was the biggest moral issue ever.
	In people's lives, oh God, I dream of that world.
	And of course it's not. I mean, it's completely unimportant relative to the other stuff, but they're doing this rather than dealing with whatever other stuff is stoking them.
	Yeah. Well, I take an interest in...
	You know all the UFO debates and I know this is totally sideline for FDR but the main interest actually over there is just to look at a sort of field or a forum of debate and contention and believe me that's highly you know disputed just everything from fact A to theory B and it's interesting just to see the same kind of lineup in a way you have people who are To me,
	admirable reasoners with a really, and they're really doing a good job to try and make sense of what is sometimes just chaotic information and various trolling and flaming and, of course, government disinformation and accusations and suspicions, conspiracy theories, everything else, and they're trying to make sense of it.
	And it's interesting to see there are some parallels there, you know?
	Yeah, I mean, to me, I always look for, you know, a reasonably mature and positive curiosity, right?
	So if somebody wants to correct me on something, they say, yeah, okay, you're a smart guy.
	You obviously thought this through.
	I think that, you know, maybe you missed something.
	What about this? Or, you know, oh, well, that was a tough situation.
	I'm not sure exactly how I would have handled it.
	Blah, blah, blah, blah. But, you know, people just polarize and say, well, I like this other guy's post.
	It's like, well, then you can email him.
	You can, you know, you can have a conversation.
	I'm not stopping anybody from, you know, from having conversations with whoever they want.
	But people, they don't, there's just no empathy, right?
	And there's no empathy. And, of course, the first thing they accuse others, people with no empathy, the first thing they accuse others of, Of lacking is empathy.
	That's almost inevitable. It's like watching those videos on YouTube with guys who have way too much time on their hands setting up like six million dominoes all falling in a row up and down stairs and round and round and all this kind of stuff.
	It's just inevitable, right?
	You see this stuff come down and you see it just knocking over because there's no thought, no self-reflection, no self-knowledge.
	There's rank hypocrisy, frankly.
	You know, condemning mods for being condemning.
	I mean, come on. It's like yelling at someone to stop yelling.
	I mean, it's, you know, without any sense that this is so self-contradictory.
	Anyway, it is a challenge.
	But on the other hand, I will say that I don't have a lot of experience with message boards, but I think it's very civilized for the most part.
	I mean, I think there's apologies. I think there's curiosity.
	I think there's, you know, help me to understand rather than you're just an idiot and you're wrong.
	And there's a minority of people, right?
	I mean, it's so predictable, right?
	There's always one guy who jumps in, who's never had a post before, but he jumps in right in the middle of a contentious post and starts stoking up more flames, and it's like, oh, come on.
	He's never been interested in FDR at all.
	Oh, but now he's like, it's just a joke account, right?
	I think it's very civilized.
	I think it's a very positive sense of interaction.
	You do have to deal with difficult and aggressive people in your life.
	It's not a bad thing to see and get used to.
	People don't approach you with respect and curiosity.
	Just don't engage. It's the old thing.
	You can go down and mud wrestle with the pig, but all that happens is you get muddy and the pig likes it.
	I don't respond to people unless they don't have to agree with me at all.
	They can even be very challenging, but they do at least have to treat me with some dignity and respect.
	That's the way I try to extend my interactions with people.
	If they don't, there is this big invitation to come down and have a shit-flinging fest down in the monkey cage, but I'm just not going there.
	Yeah, no, if the other person is really interested in debate, you can maintain a very civil tone, even though they're taking an opposite position from you.
	Those are productive debates sometimes.
	But when the tone is all inflammatory and, you know, it's just one insult after another, it isn't worth it.
	That's true. Right.
	Yeah. Did you have another question?
	I had some unrelated comment.
	No, no. I always like talking with you and I don't always get a chance.
	So around Christmas time I do.
	So I just thought I'd call in and just say hi anyway.
	Merry Christmas.
	It's nice to hear from you again. Okay.
	A couple of corrections of things that I have gotten wrong in recent videos.
	It turns out I'm not bald. It was just a trick of the light.
	But first of all, I said that The Great Wall of China was visible from space, and people have told me that that's not true.
	Now, of course, I meant visible from space with a telescope pointing at the Great Wall of China, but apparently it's not true.
	It's an urban myth. It's a legend.
	So disregard that.
	I think in the last weekend's show, I talked about, in terms of evolution, that there were these Light moths and dark moths and polluted trees with darkened tree trunks and so on found out that that was a completely cooked up and false quote support for the evolutionary position that these moths were actually nocturnal so it didn't really matter that there was different colored tree trunks during the daytime and that the pictures that showed up in my biology textbook when I was a kid and I think are still around to some degree the pictures were actually They actually stapled these moths to the trees to make it look like there was some evolutionary principle that turned out to be just another built-down thing.
	Sorry about that. I sometimes feel like I have to double-check everything.
	Even stuff which was in my biology textbooks when I was young, I have to double-check it because it could have turned out to be false.
	Thank you to those who corrected me on that, and there were quite a few of you.
	I appreciate that, and I will certainly strive to do my best.
	I can't double-check everything. I am one guy.
	And, of course, I do need time to pick my nose and scratch myself.
	So, wow, that's about 20 hours a day.
	day.
	There's not much left outside of that, but I will try and get more fact-checking in as we move forward.
	Yes, my forehead is visible from space.
	I think that's what even if I'm underground, strangely enough.
	That's the incandescent thought that's going on here, my friends.
	All right.
	I don't want to drag on people's Christmas experience if we have a paucity of viewers because everybody's too busy stuffing their talking hull with Tofurky.
	But if we have another caller or another question in the chatroom, I would be happy.
	Otherwise, Let's close her down.
	I'll get back to putting my head in a cheesecake.
	I just wanted to extend my appreciation for the reminder of the criticism, you know, the criticism metric, I guess you could say, you know, whether to pay attention to criticism or not.
	Yes, I know, and I could see you getting worn down there like a sandcastle in front of a tsunami.
	And like, I understand it, I really do.
	You made a decision that...
	It was in the best interest of the community.
	I think we got some good criticism about other ways to handle it, which I thought was fine.
	People, they're power seekers.
	If I can get this person to self-attack, then my sadistic impulses will be satisfied.
	I would strongly suggest not giving them that satisfaction.
	Don't ever feed that as best you can.
	And for what it's worth, it also kind of, not just kind of, a recent conflict I had in sort of a friendship sphere really related to that too.
	It just sort of tripped me up, the unjust criticisms.
	Self-attack is like blood in the water.
	It draws people. It draws sharks into the neighborhood.
	Self-criticism is great.
	Self-examination is great.
	Self-attack is just like a big bugle horn calling all the crazy wolves in the vicinity to come and feast on your entrails.
	With an extreme metaphor like that, I hope you can relax.
	Well, I mean, we've definitely talked about this.
	We had this whole roleplay, I think it's three years ago now, where a little over three years, October 08, right?
	Where it was, you got to meet my critic, so...
	Yeah, no, and look, we all have that guy.
	We all have that colossal brain-spanning asshole in the head who lacerates us sometimes for errors that we've made.
	I mean, the way that I would suggest also is the prospectometer that I think is really important.
	It's the prospectometer of the criticism relative to the stimulus is really, really important, right?
	So you asked a poster that many dozens of people had complained about being disruptive.
	And whose threads did not seem to be to achieving a lot of illumination.
	Again, it's everybody's choice for themselves.
	But you ask that guy to take a break from posting.
	In terms of moral issues within the universe, this is entirely in the spectrum of volunteerism.
	It is certainly not abusive to set up boundaries for that kind of stuff.
	I personally think it was healthy for him.
	I don't think that that level of focus on the message board is good for someone.
	I think you kind of have to take the chocolate cake off the diabetics fork once in a while.
	But not a huge moral issue.
	It's not like you're confessing to having strangled a sack full of kittens or something.
	I sort of look at that issue and say, okay, this was the stimulus, what is the response?
	If the response is vastly out of proportion with the stimulus, then I just know it has nothing to do with me.
	Nothing to do with me and nothing to do with you.
	You made a decision, I think it was a reasonable decision, could have been fine-tuned maybe, but there's nothing wrong with getting that kind of feedback.
	But, you know, I mean, the level of, I mean, the malevolence of the hostility, it's got nothing to do with you.
	I mean, this is all just people who are dumping their shit on you because they don't want to deal with it themselves.
	And, you know, relative to the stimulus, you know, it's just like, you know, holy crap, you know, like, if people don't recognize just how nutty a response that is to asking somebody who's been posting five to six messages a day for 10 months, long messages and posts and responses, Let's save our outrage for, say, 100,000 Iraqi civilians murdered.
	Let's save our outrage for hundreds of thousands of Americans unjustly imprisoned because of non-crimes.
	Let's save our outrage for the fiat currency debt being handed down to future generations.
	Let's save our outrage for the big important issues because if people spend that much amount of rage on a completely inconsequential little message board decision somewhere out there on the internet, I mean, it's mental.
	It's completely mental. And it shows such a lack of proportion that it's just all bomb-in-the-brain stuff.
	I just wanted to sort of mention that.
	I mean, people probably don't know just how ridiculous it looks, because maybe they've got people who are like, oh yeah, there's a hypocritical community, and they call itself Freedom Aid Radio, and then they...
	It's like, wow.
	I mean, if people don't understand the degree to which they're spending a...
	Pathetic, ridiculous, and embarrassing amount of moral outrage on an inconsequential little board decision that inconvenienced someone for maybe a month.
	I mean, if they don't see how crazy that looks, then they really need to do some self work.
	But if you engage with it, you give it a kind of reality that obscures how nutty it is, right?
	That's true. And I sort of thought, you know, like, I don't know,
	if I was single and some woman didn't want to go out with me or went out with me on a date and then didn't want to go out with me again, and then I just sort of spammed her message board where she was with, you know, nasty things about her.
	Be like, oh, I think I get why she didn't want...
	You're not exactly helping your case here.
	I think I get why she didn't want to go out with you, right?
	Right.
	Yeah, it's just the noise that wounded souls limping around unaware of their unbrokenness make when they see a standard.
	And of course, part of it is this diversion therapy, right?
	It's to To make the cost of having standards so high that we resist wanting to have standards, right?
	Oh, the cost of benefits so high.
	But that cost is optional to us, right?
	And if you just ignore that noise, then the cost is, you know, whatever, right?
	But it's a way of trying to get moderators to not have, you know, reasonable standards for the message board.
	And, I mean, it is so rare.
	It is so rare that anything like this comes up, that people who find this to be some big monstrous moral crime, I mean, it's just ridiculous.
	It's so foolish and so obvious, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	I mean, if I go back to not doing it like months earlier, really the reason I didn't want to deal with this crap, you know.
	I didn't want to deal with all the hooting and hollering and stuff.
	But you don't have to, right?
	Just don't get updates from the thread and ignore it.
	I mean, switch off.
	You know, that's perfectly fine.
	Right.
	All right.
	Do we have any other questions or issues?
	Oh, somebody dig up, was it the, in Odessa, in February, I think it's February the 11th, I'll be doing the Master Ceremonies work and some speaking work for the Texas Meetup.
	If somebody could drop that into the chat room, I will read that off.
	I hope you can come out and see that.
	I really like the emceeing work at Libertopia.
	It was a lot of work, but it was a lot of fun.
	And got to meet some really great people.
	So if somebody can throw that up, I will read it off, but I hope you'll be able to come by.
	I don't know. People have asked me.
	I don't know if they charge or not.
	I assume that will be something.
	I don't know if they donate.
	It's donation-based or not.
	I am coming to Texas, baby.
	I am coming to Texas.
	I'm just waiting for the...
	Oh, somebody said you were awesome at Libertopia.
	Thank you very much.
	I appreciate that.
	Yeah, it's a good lineup of speakers, so I hope that you'll be able to make it down.
	And yeah, they've got a lot of production quality stuff down there, so it will definitely be recorded.
	I don't know if it's going to be streamed or not, but it will definitely be recorded.
	Right, so I will be hosting Liberty Fest West in Texas, February the 11th, 2012.
	It's a one-day event.
	I'm talking with the organizers to try and get also a sort of breakfast meeting as well, because I'll probably be staying there overnight.
	I will be staying there overnight. So we'll try and get a breakfast meeting in there as well.
	LibertyFestWest.com and I hope that you will be able to come by.
	I'll be coming in a little bit earlier so if anybody wants to meet sort of for I guess an early dinner or maybe even a late lunch I would be very happy to sit down and chat with whoever's around.
	Always a pleasure to meet the delicious cream filled listeners.
	So yeah, LibertyFestWest.com Alright, last call for alcohol.
	Last call for callers.
	We've answered everything.
	Wow, I guess we sign off at 2540 or whatever it is.
	No, no, barge in.
	There's a vacuum of callers, you're not barging.
	Excuse me, somebody asked me to barge in.
	Excuse me, somebody asked me to barge in?
	Yes, please go ahead.
	My god, has it been a week already?
	No wonder I have to pee. I wanted to get your input on...
	I hear that you haven't read Human Action, but I wanted to get your input on Austrian economics.
	From the extent that you know about it, what can you tell us about it?
	What can I say about Austrian economics?
	Yeah. Well, it's for economists who don't like math.
	That's my understanding of it.
	Well, I mean, it's praxeologically based, and it is also based upon intrinsic value rather than absolute value.
	So, praxeologically based insofar as...
	It has self-contained certainties that so for instance all other things being equal an increase in the money supply will result in an inflation of prices or in any exchange That which is voluntary is by definition really considered to be of benefit to both participants.
	And their benefit is obviously unequal in terms of they want what the other person has more than what they have.
	So it's unequal but it is to each person's benefit.
	That's what praxeology means to my knowledge and understanding is that it's simply innate within the transaction.
	If it's voluntary it must be preferred because the person is choosing to have that exchange over every other conceivable exchange or no exchange.
	That could be occurring.
	It's empirical, it's praxeological, and it says that there's no objective value.
	Gold has value. Well, no, gold has value to people who want it to have value.
	Even a glass of water to a thirsty man has value only to him, and he may choose not to have it if he's going through some sort of fast.
	If it's Ramadan, for instance, he may be really hungry, or as my driver in Morocco said many years ago, Ah, you know, when you are in Ramadan and you are in no water in the day, by the end of the day, the water looks like a beautiful, curvaceous woman.
	I don't know what accent that is.
	It's generic foreign, and I apologize to anyone who knows anything about a Moroccan accent.
	That was not even close.
	But the sentiment was definitely there.
	So, I mean, as a result of all of this stuff...
	Since you can only tell the value of an economic interaction if there's no violence, coercion or compulsion involved, then you have to oppose government intervention in the free market and be pro-free market.
	It is essentially founded upon property rights and the non-aggression principle.
	And because of that, it is anarchic in its essence.
	And the degree to which it deviates from its anarchism, you know, Friedman and, of course, Sein Rand, who wasn't an Austrian but was not far off in that.
	Rothbard, of course, was a pure anarchist.
	Anarcho-capitalist, but since it says that the value of an economic interaction can only be determined or its value to both parties can only really exist in the absence of coercion, it is fundamentally non-aggression principle and property rights.
	It's got great critiques of socialism, the calculation problem, All of which, you know, gosh, I don't know the degree to which it's had any effect in the world, but they've had great critiques of central planning.
	Obviously, they were one of the first groups and one of the most powerful groups to oppose communism, and it is, to me, a massive star of honor on the chest of the Austrian school, and Mises in particular, because...
	Those of us who are more schooled in classical liberalism, it's easy to forget the degree to which intellectuals worshipped the Soviet Union.
	I'm not just talking about intellectuals like Shirley MacLaine, who also worshipped China in throes of communist starvation.
	There were pilgrimages that were sent over.
	A reporter won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Russia when he was sent to all these Potemkin villages in the 1930s, Fat, happy workers were being well-fed while, of course, two miles from the village, everybody was lying in a ditch eating their own nipples from hunger.
	The amount of slavish worship of collectivism, of socialism, of communism throughout the 20th century was It was staggering and was by far the majority of intellectual life from the Fabian Socialists onwards, from Marxists to Leninists, Marxist Leninists to Troxias, the Fabian Socialists onwards.
	There was even massive worship for Mussolini.
	People forget the degree to which he was just praised and revered, the fascists.
	Even Hitler had his fans, particularly in the British aristocracy in the late 20s and early 30s.
	So the degree to which the Austrians were skeptical of and hostile towards and rightly analytically critical of communism and socialism is to their absolute enormous and undying credit.
	It's not a credit that's often given because everybody wants to sweep under the rug the degree to which Communism drew its lifeblood from Western intellectuals, but I think it's an incredibly noble historical tradition from that standpoint.
	Mises did work in the government and worked to help control inflation and did some real and genuine, though unfortunately not long-lasting good in that area.
	His biography is well worth reading from that standpoint.
	I mean, a man to be admired, standing up against that level of unanimity on the socialist communist side took some real cojones and he had some big heavy clanging sets.
	I would have to agree with that and in a further point of agreement, when I was in Germany, I spent three months of my life in Germany As an exchange student, right?
	And at some point in a conversation with my host family there, they were older people, about sixty-something years old, about, and we just struck up this conversation about Hitler, and at some point I said something like, ugh, Hitler, you know, he's really bad.
	And my host father said, hmm, you know, There's a lot of bad things that are said about Hitler, but at the same time, you know, he really rebuilt the German economy.
	And for example, he provided work by letting people build the highways and stuff like that.
	And I couldn't believe my ears when I was hearing this.
	I was like, hmm, are you really apologizing?
	I mean, I'm not sure if you're apologizing for the Holocaust by saying that Hitler rebuilt the economy.
	So I was... I was kind of taken aback and I didn't know how to respond.
	But then again, I was like 16 years old.
	Well, sorry to interrupt, but I mean I assume that this guy would have been old enough to have experienced directly what happened in Germany in the post-World War I period in the Weimar catastrophe.
	Which is currently being played out in the West almost everywhere, which is the fiscal disasters, the paralysis of democracy, the massive bribery on unfunded liabilities into the future.
	Germany was facing a genuine catastrophe.
	The hyperinflation completely destroyed The middle class.
	If you destroy the middle class, you get nothing but radicals.
	Nothing but radicals take over.
	This is why the decline of the middle class in America and other Western countries is so dangerous.
	You hollow out the middle of society and it collapses.
	It really collapses into freedom.
	To a lot of people, Hitler got in, massive public works.
	He stopped the payments under the Versailles Treaty.
	He kept the gold in Germany, which was used, of course, as the foundation for some economic recovery.
	He loosened some economic laws.
	He fought back the trade unions, which were heavily communistic at this point.
	There were big public works projects.
	Most fundamentally, he reformed the currency.
	His economic advisors obviously reformed the currency.
	Yes, he imposed a dictatorship relatively quickly and very brutally.
	But remember, a dictatorship for a lot of people is not particularly important if you're not on the radar of the dictator.
	For the average German in the early to mid-1930s, there was some Improvement in the economic life.
	Now, of course, you look down the road and the dictatorship leads to war, as it always does, because the socialist policies of the dictatorships can't be sustained, and so you always end up in wars.
	But from that perspective, you can say, okay, well, there was some improvement for a lot of Germans under the initial Nazi regime, but, of course, it just was a headlong plunge into pure evil.
	Yep. I have a recommendation to make to your listeners, and in case they want to learn more about Praxeology, there's a TV channel, well, it's not a TV channel, it's a webpage with a YouTube channel called Praxeology.tv, where quick lessons of Praxeology in the form of three or four minute pills are actually available.
	I think you'll find it interesting.
	I have one more question for you, though.
	Yeah, so I would also recommend Praxgirl.
	Yeah, that's basically Praxeology TV is Praxgirl, yeah.
	Oh, same thing? Okay, sorry. So, have you, I mean, I'm going to express my appreciation and admiration for This man called Hans Hermann Hoppe.
	I'm sure you've heard of him.
	Are you familiar with his argumentation ethics?
	He kind of derives self-ownership and property rights in a very, very interesting manner, which is quite similar to the way you do it, but he starts Strictly from empirical observation, and well, he does set forth a value.
	He says, you know, the idea of these moral norms is to reduce conflict, and in fact, if we assume that's what moral rules are for, everything he says sounds completely unassailable.
	Have you ever watched his video on YouTube, one of his videos on YouTube?
	I have not. Actually, I ordered the Hans Hoppe collection from Mises.org, and I plowed about halfway through Democracy, The God That Failed, and he's got one book on praxeology, which I've started.
	I have not started his works on argumentation ethics.
	I'm certainly keen to, but it's the kind of thing that you, I mean, for me, I really need concentrated time to work on that, and at the moment, I feel, in terms of my prioritization, I feel that 2012 is going to be an absolutely crucial year in the history of the world.
	I really, really believe that the shit's going to hit the wall as far as statism goes and we really need to be out there front and center, full flares, full throttle, screaming to the wind and whoever will listen how it is violence that has failed and not peace and voluntarism.
	Certainly, I would be fascinated, but to me, it would be a little bit self-indulgent right now.
	What I need to do is work on this documentary that I've started scripting and I've got a number of people involved in to work on.
	And, you know, again, if you want to donate to that, that would be really helpful because it's going to be an expensive thing.
	But, you know, Freedom Needs It's Zeitgeist movie.
	And, you know, I have humbly nominated myself as somebody who might be able to produce something That might get as widespread as that.
	And if anybody wants to get involved and wants to help, this is not a solo project.
	It's a big deal. I've got musicians, I've got producers, I've got really starting to work the connections to get the stuff underway.
	I really feel that this is a very, very crucial time to get a message that's bigger than anything I've been able to do before.
	And obviously, if you're interested in reviewing the script, the script is pretty crucial.
	And that's my focus at the moment.
	So I think Hoppe is...
	A very interesting and, you know, I mean, a very serious scholar and a very well-researched writer and a good writer in many ways.
	And he's certainly a very creative thinker, but I don't think for the next little while at least I'll be able to get much of a chance to dig into his argumentation ethics.
	Well, I can send you a link to a video that lasts about 50 minutes.
	If you have 50 minutes of your time in 2012, I highly recommend that you look at it.
	I appreciate that. Maybe you can post that in the chat window, too.
	And on the message? Yes, I will post it in the chat window.
	Post it as a forum post, probably.
	You keep tabs on people's postings of the forums, right?
	Obsessively.
	No, yes I do.
	I'm so mindful.
	Somebody's asked, is the disbelief in God necessary to work towards UPB and a stateless society?
	That's a great question. I would argue...
	Of course, accepting the non-existence of deities is a mere subset of accepting the non-existence of things which do not exist, right?
	I mean, there is ghost goblins, Santa Claus cruising through Google Earth and so on.
	We have to accept that which does not exist, does not exist.
	That is, I think, fundamental to having a free society.
	The only freedom, fundamentally, is freedom from illusion.
	If you are free from illusions, freedom will follow in all controllable areas of your life, inevitably.
	Not saying fun freedom, but freedom from illusion is freedom from corruption.
	It's freedom from self-attack. It is freedom from Rage.
	It's freedom from discontent.
	And in the long run, it's freedom from fear.
	So freedom from illusion is freedom from control.
	It's unhooking all of the geppetto strings that people hook into you to control you by getting you to live in a world of words rather than a world of things that exist and things that are real.
	So, can you say, obviously there are people who can reject the state and accept God.
	I mean, that certainly is the case.
	And I'm not sure what discernible or empirical harm has come from that.
	I would need to sort of think about that some more.
	But I will say that it is important for, if I'm right, and it's a multi-generational process, and it's very important to not teach your children things That are false as if they are true.
	And again, I wait with bated breath for my daughter to start talking about gods and devils and saints and Jesus and Muhammad and so on.
	I think that the moment that you have to tell your child that something is true when it's not true, then you are, in a sense, demanding that that child subject their independent reason to your authority.
	And the surrender of integrity to authority is the essence of hierarchy.
	And so the moment that you ask the child to abandon critical thinking for the sake of your authority, you have set up the groundwork for a pyramid-shaped hierarchy in society, a state.
	And so I think that it's not so necessary to reject God to achieve a stateless society, but it is important To teach your children not to surrender their integrity to authority, not to surrender their critical thinking to a hierarchy.
	Whether that hierarchy is religious or educational or familial or statist, you have to retain your direct relationship with and appreciation of and understanding of reality.
	And your own independent critical thought in relation to reality.
	If you surrender that in any area, then you have weakened, I think critically, the capacity to move forward as a whole.
	And so I think that, you know, there's no substitute for first principles.
	And first principles mows down many a tall oak and tiny dandelion.
	It's just the way things have to go.
	Children have to grow up recognizing that the sovereignty of their own intellect and their own integrity, their own understanding, their own reason, their own processing of reality It's paramount and inviolable and I cannot violate that with my children and I would certainly ask that religious people not teach their children that religion is true.
	They can teach them about religion, because religion is certainly something that exists in the world.
	But you cannot, I think, justly teach your child that religion is true without asking them to surrender their sovereign, independent reason to your authority.
	And I think that is harmful.
	Yeah, sorry.
	Yeah, my daughter doesn't know Santa Claus, because, you know, we go to the mall and there's a guy in a fat suit and a beard with whiskey breath.
	So, yeah, she knows.
	But, I mean, she knows that lots of people dress up, right?
	She's seen clowns. When we were at Libertopia, not last year, but the year before, there was a guy in a turtle suit that she liked to hold hands and walk around with.
	So, yeah, she knows about lots of mythical creatures, but she knows that they're mythical, right?
	All right.
	Well, I actually am...
	I hate to sound so base and materialistic.
	Although, you know, okay, one last thing.
	One last thing I haven't mentioned. I haven't mentioned this.
	It was too funny. I don't know if anyone can find this picture.
	It was on the Huffington Post this morning.
	I won't say where I was when I was checking it.
	But the Pope has come out against the materialism of Christmas.
	Thank heaven. The Pope has come out against the materialism of Christmas.
	And he says, do not be distracted.
	By the shiny baubles of Christmas.
	And he says this, of course, while wearing a giant embossed tea cozy and what looks like a spaceship of diamonds coming up from his head in a big white plume.
	Do not be distracted by the shiny baubles of Christmas.
	Apparently only of Christianity and of the Pope.
	But for the Pope to rail against The materialism of religion, while sitting on a $35 billion fortune largely extracted from selling imaginary cures to imaginary illnesses, i.e., salvation from sin, to complaining about materialism and shiny baubles while looking like you're standing around in a jazzed-up Liberace costume from Alice in Wonderland is, to me, truly astounding.
	And when you're standing on a city made of gold, Torn out of the credulous hides of people propagandized from birth, truly is an astounding statement.
	The fact that people can both say this and hear this and not fall down laughing is truly astounding.
	It just shows you how far we have to go as a society.
	The Pope! This is like Barack Obama railing against political power.
	I mean, it's truly like me rallying against the power of the internet.
	It's just madness. But this is where we are as a society.
	It's deeply shocking that it's not shocking to people to hear this kind of nonsense.
	Anyway, I just want to sort of mention that.
	Oh yeah, look beyond the holidays.
	Superficial glitter. Superficial glitter.
	I mean, when you're in a costume that Liberace would say, "Oh my god, that's just way too much," you might want to have a rethink about your opposition to superficial glitter.
	That's one of those things that get you started on a laughing jag.
	You can't stop laughing.
	Oh, yeah, I really was this morning.
	I was like, oh my god, can this be serious?
	I mean, can he seriously... I mean, at least tone down the gay parade disco headgear a little bit when you're talking about shiny, empty materialism.
	Just, you know, that would be...
	I mean, it's bad comedy.
	That's the shocking thing about this stuff.
	Will you be having a show next week, the first?
	Well, yeah. I mean, did people like this show today?
	I know we had a bit of a dearth of callers.
	I guess we had some. I mean, how many people we got?
	60 people in the chatroom.
	That's not too far off what we normally have.
	I love chatting.
	I love chatting to listeners. If people want to chat with me, I am forever and a day open to listening.
	I love you guys all.
	I love you guys all so much that I have to be restrained from jumping at the mic at every opportunity.
	If people want to talk to me, I will, with great joy and bells on, make myself available.
	All right. We'll make sure we post that a little earlier so that people know.
	But I think, you know, because it's sort of a semi-holiday.
	But yeah, that's cool.
	All right. Okay, well listen everybody, have yourself a completely stupendously wonderful week.
	I hope that you bring out your combat ninja chucks, nanchucks for Boxing Day if such is to be your intention and if you can pry a few bottles of frankincense and myrrh to send to Free Domain Radio's way for the end of the year.
	Before the end of the year that would be fantastic.
	Christmas of course is a A challenging month for any donation-based institution that's not got a cross on top.
	So if you have any loose change rolling around the couch, if you could fire it through Carrier Pigeon to freedomainradio.com forward slash donate, I would really appreciate it.
	Thank you everybody for joining us on this Christmas Day 2011.
	Have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful week.
	Thank you again a million times for all of your support and encouragement in this conversation.
	Thank you to all of the parents who are writing to me saying that they have cast away The rod to spare the child and they're no longer hitting, raising the voices, yelling, reasoning.
	Thank you for everybody who's telling me how well that's working, how beautifully the children are responding.
	Just remember to apologize for the wrongs that you've done.

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