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April 13, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:19:14
2123 The Bondage of History - Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio Interviewed on Freedom Feens

Definitely a different kind of interview, but well worth checking out.

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Time Text
You ready there, Mr.
Molyneux? I certainly am.
Cool. Is it Molyneux or Molyneux?
Um, Molyneux.
Alright. I've heard people really, really mispronounce it that should know better and call it Molynex and things like that.
I'm sure you've encountered that.
Yeah, people who've had exposure to one too many blenders, I think.
Cool. So thanks for jumping through the tech hoop so we could use Mumble instead of Skype.
It'll sound a little better. And you did well.
You passed the tech test, although you used to be a professional geek, weren't you?
Yes, now I'm just an amateur one.
Cool. Do you want to tell me real briefly, I know you've told this before, but for people that might be a different audience on this podcast, how you came to quit your job and start your media empire or city-state or whatever you got going there?
Well, I don't know if you've noticed, man, but...
Working is really hard.
I mean, you've got to get up.
You've got to shave.
You've got to bathe and put on pants and drive and sit in a cubicle.
Actually, I had a corner office, not to brag, but you know, it's hard work.
And so when I had the opportunity to talk about philosophy rather than sell software packages to multinational corporations, you know, I just wasn't sure if the world needed more lines of computer code and more software sales or more and better philosophy.
I think the domino fell on the ladder and kind of took me with it.
So, you know, I've really almost – except for a bit of panic at the beginning, I've really never looked back and I've just never been happier with that choice.
You know, who dares wins?
Seize the fish, the carp, something like that.
Seize the bear. Have you seen the Guns and Weed movie where the cop played by me gets killed by a bear?
I have not seen the whole thing, though I have it on DVD and I've watched about half of it, but I haven't seen that part, no.
Yeah, later there's a tribute to a fallen hero type fake TV news piece with tinkly minor chord piano music in the background about what a great drug warrior he was.
And it shows his gravestone at the end and it says Carpe Ursa on his gravestone.
I see. Ursula Andress?
It sees the bear.
Sees the bear.
Very nice. It's not some hot chick actress.
Ursula Andress.
No. Yeah, I used to play in rock bands, and I always liked the soul of the music, and whenever I pick up guitar tech magazines and look at them, I think it's like guitar porn.
You know, I thought most musicians were way too into the devices and the tech that they used than the soul that was coming out of them, and I kind of thought about that while you were talking about the, does the world need more lines of computer code, or maybe it needs a few more lines of actual truth of human language.
Well, I think so. I think so.
And I think that really good philosophy is very rare.
It's rarer than good wine.
It's rarer than diamonds.
It's rarer than a rap song from Whitney Houston.
So, now, anyway.
So, yeah, I'm very happy to be contributing my small slice to the wisdom pie of humanity.
And it's going well.
I've got... I'm speaking at Porkfest.
I'm going to be at Freedomfest with Jeffrey Tucker and Wendy McElroy.
I'm going to host Libertopia.
I'm going to do a presentation on ethics in Vancouver.
So lots of travel, lots of great places to go, lots of wonderful listeners and panelists and organizers to meet.
And it's a real privilege and a real honor to be able to do what I'm doing.
So I thank the listeners.
I thank you for giving me access to your audience, you crazy bastard.
So, thanks. Yep.
And even though I do believe that the soul of what's being said in the world is far more important than the gear porn behind it, I do want to ask you some tech questions because there's a lot of independent media out there in the world and a lot of it sounds and looks like crap.
There's a lot of it that's pretty good and yours sounds really good as well as having a great message.
One of my What I used to do for a living, it's kind of similar to where you came from and how I came to this.
I used to write tech books for a living for O'Reilly and people like that.
I don't think you probably have any of the books I wrote.
You might, but some of them are on film and audio production.
I worked for those tech nerd companies writing tech books and did that for 10 years.
Now I'm doing movies and media for a living.
Every once in a while, I still have this urge to go, you know, write a tech description with screenshots, which I guess is 10 years of doing it 80 hours a week.
Now I have to do it about two hours every two weeks.
So I do a lot of posts that I aim at the Liberty movement on, you know, how to configure Mumble or how to do a double enter podcast or how to get the best quality audio for the lowest price.
So you have really good sound and I want to ask you a little bit about your equipment.
What do you use? Well, it's varied.
You know, I'm an audiophile myself.
I mean, I really like high quality and audio, and I've been obsessed with that from very early on.
Back in the days of 45s, when my very first stereo turntable...
Do you have a tube preamp for your stereo?
Yes, I'm afraid that I did.
I thought you might. I picked it up from a now defunct company and it was a wonderful little device for playing records for those readers younger than us.
Records? Yeah, records.
How old are you? I'm 47.
How old are you? I'm 45.
Youngster. My first turntable was so bad that You couldn't even close it if you were playing a 33.
Only a 45 could you close the lid.
And the needle was so bad that I actually...
Like, it would skip and drift all over the record if it was a 45.
And so I had to put lumps of plasticine on top of it so that I could hear my music.
That, of course, caused the music to slow down.
It didn't skip. But it was slower, and basically it functioned as an apple peeler when it came to the vinyl.
So I had short-lived enjoyment of my records back in the day.
And yeah, I wanted good quality.
So I've tried to make some decent quality.
My video camera has a line in because there's just no way to get any kind of decent audio out of a camera like that.
Word. I use an Audio-Technica USB microphone for a lot of my audiobooks.
I've got a Sony mic with a great windshield for when I'm outside.
I've got a Rode microphone which attaches to the camera for backup audio.
A sort of handheld 24-bit WAF recorder with a line in for the microphone.
And yeah, for Skype, I actually sometimes will use a wireless mic if I sort of want to pace around and all that kind of stuff.
And that's a pretty good one, actually, with the only drawback being you have to turn off Wi-Fi, otherwise the recording has clicks and it's just one of these weird things that you figure out by accident.
And that's a creative, I think it's an HS10. It's a gamer one, but it's got pretty good audio for recording.
So yeah, that's a variety of the setups that I use.
Do you have a Zoom H2? I do not.
Do you know what that is? The Studio on a Stick?
Studio on a Stick. It's about a $150 digital handheld recorder on a stick that sounds stunning.
I mean, your 24-bit field recorder may be better.
I don't know though, but the Zoom is amazing.
You should check them out. I will.
Yeah. The first 20 or so episodes of Freedom Fiends, if you skip the first 10 where we're figuring out how to do the double ender and go to like episode 10 through 30, any of those, we're done.
My end of it is done with a Zoom H2 and then I normalize it later in SoundForge.
It sounds pretty darn good.
Oh yeah, and for the post-production, I mean, I use Audacity like most people do, and sometimes I'll use, I have a, there's a program called The Levelator, which sort of boosts and lowers different sounding recording, which has saved me, like, I've got, basically, I'm going to live to be 800 years old, because of the amount of time that saved me from individually rising up and lowering down the noise levels in various recordings, so all of that's been hugely helpful, so, yeah, lots of great tools and cheap, cheap out there.
Levelator is one of the few programs made specifically for podcasting that doesn't suck and it's free.
Yeah, and it doesn't drop your audio quality.
Everything else, especially when you're working with MP3s, you want those programs that slice and dice them that don't.
But then it's really hard to find editing programs that don't lower the quality.
So anyway, it should be boring people who understand this stuff.
But yeah, I've really tried to get decent audio quality since I stopped recording in my car, where obviously audio quality was a challenge.
But yeah, I've tried to make it pretty decent, and I think it's been all right.
What did you use for the couple episodes you did where you're walking around town and you're like, I can hear your keys go in your door at the end.
Well, originally, I had just a little iRiver 720, which was one of the only ones that you could get with the line input.
The little red thing.
No, mine's a little silver one.
It was only 2 gigs, and it only recorded at 160K MP3. It didn't record WAV. But it was the only one back in the day where you could actually put a microphone in and record that way.
Because all of the ones that have the pinhole mics, I mean, they just sound like you're yelling through tin cups on the moon.
And so, yeah, I used that.
And then, of course, I did my sort of handheld WAF recorder later on.
Because I like to pace.
I like to move. I find sort of just sitting and I don't know how the people – I don't know how Rush Limbaugh sits for three hours a day to do a show.
It's like – Painkillers. Painkillers.
Did you ever see the Oak Mikes from the I-River?
I don't think I did. They're made of little stereo mics made of wood that were made for the iRiver.
They had two little Electrete condenser mics in them.
They were like $25 and they had a stunning quality.
They were really amazing. Yeah, I liked them.
Yeah, if you do your research, you don't have to spend a lot of money.
I mean, I did an interview with a guy, I think, who had spent, I don't know, $10,000 on his mind.
Now, he did sound great. He had a good voice to begin with, and he used to be in radio.
And, you know, that's way over my budget.
You can make it sound pretty good as long as you're willing to just do the research and experiment with a variety of settings.
I mean, it seems like it's just one of these things that always something changes, you know?
Like, hey, this mic and camera combo worked perfectly last week.
Now there's a hum. Why is there a hum?
And eliminating hums has become my obsession, you know?
Eliminating any kind of background hum or any kind of hiss I hate using noise reduction because it clips the quality of the audio.
It derounds it. And so trying to get rid of hums has just become my absolute obsession.
It seems almost impossible to get rid of them, but I'm still trying.
It's my fetish.
I'll bet that guy who spent $10,000 had a 528E voice processor rack mount unit.
Do you know that one? I don't.
I haven't even looked at anything that high-end.
It's a real radio thing.
It's about $800 minimum.
FreeTalk Live uses one.
It's got about eight things in one box, and it's mono, one channel, and it's a very radio sound.
I like it on them, but I wouldn't use it.
I like a liver sound. So, I mean, does it just process the sound more cleanly?
Does it add stuff? Does it make you sound sexy?
Yeah, all of that.
I mean, to me, it basically makes you sound like you're in a box.
But, you know, Rush Limbaugh sounds like he's in a box.
People like that use it radio.
Ideologically speaking, I would have to agree with you.
A very small box with a very big box.
But, you know, with painkillers to keep them company and sedentary.
But no, that unit does like eight things.
It does compressor, EQ, limiting, preamp, warmifying, sexifying, all sorts of things.
I don't know. It's the magic box.
So it basically goes from your typical sound to sounding like somebody's slowly making sweet love to your inner ear canal.
I got it. Yeah, yeah. It's like, you know, for the Barry White of politics or something.
Yeah. I like to think that I bring the white to the Barry White.
Baby, I'm going to non-initiate aggression on you, baby.
All right. So, do you live in Canada?
I do. Proud member of the Canadian Tax Forum.
Do you ever have problems crossing borders because you are you?
No, I've not had any problems crossing borders.
I mean, everything I do is legal.
I, you know, I'm perfectly free to suggest changes in society as long as I suggest them in a non-violent manner, which, of course, I always have.
And you are, you know, there is free speech in Canada, there's free speech in the US, and I do not incite aggression or violence, and I do not, you know, I've never been arrested, I don't do drugs, I don't, you know, I mean, so no, I have perfectly pleasant crosses of the border.
Are you a gun guy?
I have shotguns.
I have hunted, but I am not a gun guy.
I can say that without a shadow of a doubt.
Is it hard to be a gun guy in Canada?
Do you know? I know they've changed the laws.
No. I mean, I think you've got to register them, but it's not particularly more difficult as far as I understand it than it is in the US. I don't think you can open carry anywhere here in Canada, of course, unless you have that magical blue costume on.
You can't legally conceal carry there either, right?
Yeah. I don't know for the variety of laws across the provinces, but I've never seen it.
I remember when I first started to see it at libertarian conventions, it was quite surprising to me.
But, of course, I grew up in England where these things are even more restricted, but yeah, you can have, I mean, as far as I understand it, you can have a gun in Canada and so on.
I don't think you can carry them around, but that's never been a particular interest of mine, so it doesn't really affect me, although, of course, I perfectly believe that people should have the right to, you know, carry tanks on their backs should they be so constructed.
Have you ever read anything by Boston Tea Party?
Yeah, that name is so familiar.
He was at Libertopia.
Yeah, I was MC at Libertopia last fall and he was there.
I don't think I've read anything by him though.
Yeah, he's a libertarian mover and shaker from Wyoming, which is where I'm from.
And he believes that libertarians that don't own guns and know how to shoot them aren't effective libertarians because aggression can be initiated on them and all they can do is wriggle like a fish when caught.
Yeah, I got to tell you, I lose a little bit of patience when people try to brand who's a real libertarian and who isn't.
I mean, I don't think there's – for people who are not intracentral planning, having a central stamp of validation for being a libertarian or being a non-libertarian, he's not a real anarchist.
He uses Federal Reserve notes.
It's like – it's really around the – The ideology, the philosophy and, you know, putting it into practice as much as you reasonably can or comfortably can, I think is fine.
I don't think we all need to be modest. So saying, well, he didn't have a gun.
He ain't a real libertarian. It just, you know, it's like, I don't think there's a place where you get that stamp called being a real libertarian.
I encountered that back in the punk rock days in the 80s in Washington, D.C. of, you know, who's a real punk and who's not a real punk and who's this and who's that.
And I remember, you know, the singer Henry Rollins?
Yeah, yeah. He did a rant about that one time.
He does public speaking for a living also or spoken word as they call it.
And he did a thing about, you know, I've been...
Yeah.
Basically, he said something like, "I guess there's a rule book out there for anarchy, but I've never seen the book, but I've been accused of violating it." Yeah.
Yeah.
A real punk.
He doesn't dye his hair red.
He just cuts his scalp.
Anybody who buys hair dye us, what's it out?
Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
I mean, I think we have bigger battles to fight.
Let's keep pointing at the enemy and let's not turn on each other.
I'm always wary about ending up as an extra in a Monty Python skit.
The one where they, in the life of Brian, where they're all sitting in there in the amphitheater and they're all dissing all of the other rebel groups, you know, people in Judea's front, split us, you know, and it's just, let's keep focusing on the Romans.
Let's not turn on each other.
I think that's kind of important.
I'm really fond of the Monty Python bit of the two serfs digging for mud on their mud farm and King Arthur rides up on his horse and says, bow before me, I'm your king.
And they're like, I didn't vote for you.
You don't vote for a king. You call yourself a king just because some moistened bint lobbed a scimitar at you?
You've got to be joking! That is one of my favorite ones.
They go off into a discussion of anarcho-syndicalist versus something else or an autonomous collective with two-thirds of a vote for this and that.
What do you think of the left anarchy people?
People that say they're anarchists but are anarchist socialists.
I mean, I could see how that would work in a voluntary, like, okay, we're going to have our city-state that is socialist and we're going to share everything at gunpoint or however they're going to do it.
But it always sounds to me like they want to take away all private ownership and mine, you know, my guns are going to come out when that happens.
So it's not going to happen voluntarily on my part.
What do you think of that? Just when you sort of mentioned the left anarchist thing, I was sort of reminded of a conversation I had with my aunt when I was about seven.
The conversation was something like this.
She brought out a cake and she said, this is an upside down cake, Steph.
And I said, oh, what? And she said, this is an upside down cake.
And I looked at it and sure enough, the icing was on the bottom and the whatever was on the top, right?
And I said, so it's not actually upside down.
This is how it's supposed to be.
And she said, no, it's not upside down, but we call it an upside down cake.
And I said, although it's not upside down, you call it an upside down cake.
Well, why don't you just call it, this is, you know, the cake with the icing on the bottom.
No, it's upside down. But it's not upside down.
You know, we kind of got into this, you know, couldn't, like if you're going to bring a cake out where the icing is supposed to be on the bottom, don't call it upside down because it's not upside down.
It's the right way up for a cake with icing on the bottom.
And this is sort of what it is for me with the left libertarians.
Just focus on peaceful, rational interactions.
Putting the gun away.
Taking violence out of human interactions.
If people want to form themselves into human pyramids or hippie communes where they bathe in duck butter and pate if they want, that's fine.
I mean, just... All we need to do is put the guns down and let society and individuals and groups and families and communes and whatever form however they want.
That's fine. But saying how things should be organized in the absence of a state, to me, is completely ridiculous.
It's the same as this is an upside down cake.
Well, we now have no state, and here's how sheepy people should organize themselves.
It's like, no, no, no, no. Once you get rid of the state, you don't get to say how people organize themselves.
That's the whole point of getting rid of the state.
It's like saying, after we freed the slaves, there's going to be a central committee, see, that assigns the slaves to an owner who can make that owner, and the owner can then make that slave work in the fields and can hit them at any time that they want, and they don't get to leave, and they own their children and so on.
It's like, wait a minute, that just sounds like slavery again, doesn't it?
So you can't say, after slavery, we're going to tell the slaves what to do.
No, no, no, no. After slavery, the whole point is you don't tell the slaves what to do.
After we don't have a state, after we have rejected fundamentally the use of aggression in the organization of human affairs, no one gets to tell anybody else how to organize their affairs, assuming that they're not violating their own aggression principle.
So to me, it's...
Let's get rid of the state. And then let's pretend we have a state and can tell everyone what to do.
It's like, no, you won't get to do that.
There's no state. People will organize themselves.
If you have a great idea, go ahead.
Make the case. You know, put out videos and write books and say, we should all organize elves into human pyramids that kneel in duck pate.
Great. Then make that case.
But saying... That there's some way that society should be organized, and of course, fundamentally, if they're anti-property, that's just lunatic.
I mean, you can be anti-property if you want, then don't exercise any self-ownership, don't write any blogs, don't make any arguments, and I'll never hear about your nonsense, right?
But if you want to be anti-property, you first of all have to accept self-ownership, you have to accept that you own the effects of your arguments and your actions, and then you have to say that there's no such thing as self-ownership and owning the effects of your actions.
It's a ridiculous position.
But if people want to get together and not have property, that's fine too as long as it's all peaceful and voluntary.
I don't know about kids getting born into that and then that seems all, you know, because kids do not live in a voluntary environment because they're so dependent on their parents and they're not economically or morally independent.
But, yeah, if people want to get together and give up property, that's fine.
They can do that. They can even make the case that other people should do that.
But, you know, there's something in the human soul as it stands.
You could almost argue the human soul as it stands.
We simply can't get these busybody bees out of our system that we want to tell other people how to live.
And that is one of the hardest things to give up.
To me, that's, you know, I've just said there's no such thing as a real stamp.
The real stamp of somebody who's a voluntarist, somebody who's a libertarian, No, there's no problem.
There's so many things that people do that I disagree with.
But if I spend my life focusing on what everyone does who disagrees with me, I don't change them.
I just lose my own life.
And it's just giving up that, letting it go.
Society will be fine.
People will be fine. Reason and evidence will win out as long as we don't have violence and human interactions.
It may take a generation or two or five or ten, but it will happen.
Just getting rid. And there's a kind of bossiness to left libertarians and libertarian anarchists, you know, that just annoys me.
You can't use money.
Screw you, I can use money if I want to, as long as I'm not initiating force against anyone.
Of course I can use money. But there's this busybodiness, this standing over people and saying, well, this is good and this is bad.
You shouldn't be using property. Money is bad.
Interest is bad. You can't have a fractional reserve bank.
That's wrong. No, we can have all of these things as long as they're not inflicted through violence.
Just get off my back and go have a life and stop running mine.
Worms. Worms.
Let's stop... Sorry, I may have missed that worms, worms.
Worms. Oh, well, you know, people say word, meaning that's the word, that's the truth.
Oh, I see, I see. Hip-hop slang.
The freedom fiends say worms.
Ah, fair enough.
So, yeah, left libertarian.
So, I mean, left anarchy libertarian.
Would you say that they are not true anarchists?
Well, I mean, I wouldn't say that because there's...
There's two states of, I think, any true philosophy or any belief system, you could say.
There's the state where you get it intellectually and you can argue it and you know your examples and your reason and your evidence.
There's that bit, right? There's that bit.
And I think that's necessary but not sufficient for truly getting it, for truly getting it.
So, giving up on the idea that I should tell other people how to live their lives, I should make other people...
And I'm really heavily invested on how other people live their lives.
It's sort of an...
It is an ego...
I'm ego invested in my way being the right way.
That is... One thing to get in your head, it's another thing to really get in your heart, in your guts, in your balls.
It's a really hard thing to get.
And I just don't understand why the left libertarians care whether other people are using money.
If you want to have a group of people without money, go have a group.
I don't care. I'm not going to sit there and say, you have to use money.
What do you mean? You have to use money.
You must be using, get the money.
Here's some money. Here's some free money.
Start using it. And it's like, why do I care?
If they want to try the thing without money, I know it's going to fail.
I know they're not going to have the division of labor.
I know they're not going to have the efficiencies of a price mechanism.
I know that they're going to spend their whole lives trying to find somebody who wants to trade three beans for their goddamn strawberry.
Fine. Then let them learn that.
Let them learn that. Let them go out and learn it.
But I just... We've turned into these fussy helicopter neurotic Blanche Dubois mommies.
In some of this area where it's like, well, you can't do it that way.
You have to do it this way. If people want to believe that vaccines are bad and fluoride makes your nuts fall off, go for it.
If you want to believe in homeopathy, it's your money, it's your life.
Go for it. But we've got this fussiness and it's got to be this way.
The whole point of a voluntary society is we have a multiplicity of experiments.
I cannot, for the life of me, claim to know the best way that everyone should live.
I don't even know half the time the best way for me to live.
And, you know, after taking a crap sometimes, I wipe my mouth and brush my ass.
I get so confused. And I'm not going to tell other people how to live.
And letting go of that compulsion to say, It's really bad to use money.
It's really bad to use property.
It's really bad to have banking.
Forget it. Go live your life.
Have the best experiment you can with your life.
If it wins other people over, fantastic.
If it doesn't, so what?
And I think that isolating yourself from this desire to manage and control and tell other people what to do, that to me is the real heart.
Not just of anarchism or libertarianism, but fundamentally freedom.
Freedom fundamentally is not political.
Freedom fundamentally is not even freedom from violence.
Freedom fundamentally is freedom from the drive and the need to tell other people what to do, to make other people conform to your ideal.
That is fundamental freedom.
That is the kind of freedom that detonates all of our existing social structures.
I mean, not just the state. But, I mean, religion and some of the current existing top-down aggressive styles of parenting, just let other people be.
Just let other people be.
That's a hard thing to get deep down in your heart.
But I think it's the most essential thing to get because that's where true freedom can be achieved now.
Not when the state is free.
Not when one Ron Paul waves his magical constitution wand and frees us from the shackles of, you know, who knows what.
But that freedom to, you know, other people can go and make mistakes.
Other people can go and do stupid things.
Other people can go and blow all their money.
Gamblers can go and blow their money at the gambling table.
People can drink too much.
People can decide not to use property.
People can do all of these silly things.
And they're free to do it.
And it's not our business to butt in and tell them what to do.
I think when you get that really, really deep down in your heart, that to me is true freedom.
And that's, I think, the only place where true freedom can eventually arise in these external social areas.
I wrote an article recently that seemed to resonate with a lot of people called the only three kinds of people in the world and it basically breaks down to those people that want to control, those who want to be controlled and good people.
I think it's that simple.
Although, disassociating yourself from people who are in the first two groups can make them very angry.
I know you've been taken to task for telling people to get bad people out of their life and I wrote a book called The User's Manual for the Human Experience that Has a chapter on no contact.
Even if it's your family member, just say, look, I'm not going to read your email.
I'm not going to take your phone calls.
I'm not going to open my door to you.
I'm not going to talk to you for a year, and then we'll see how it goes.
Do you want to talk a little bit about that?
I mean, you've been called a cult leader for it, which I think is insane, because I don't think you are, and I don't feel under your spell.
Too bad. Dang. Something really good for me, and we'll talk about this in the third part, when I ask for your redemption in the third act, as they say in Hollywood and in screenwriting, of, you know, make us feel good at the end with a dénema, or however the French say it.
Sometimes I stew in my own libertarian juices too much and just read too much news and go, we're all fucked.
The world is coming to an end.
We're all dying. We're all going to be dragged off to FEMA camps in two weeks.
Even if it's not FEMA camps, it's like arrested for free speech in five years or something.
When I feel like that, I listen to you It's usually 4 in the morning.
I listen to you or I listen to Bad Quaker and you two out of all the whole pantheon of spectrum of libertarian anarchist type people, you two are the two that make me feel better not worse after an hour of listening.
Good. Well, I mean just one point of clarification.
I mean I certainly don't tell people to ditch people from their lives.
I mean because that would be to fall into the pit of telling other people how to live.
But what I do is remind them that adult relationships are voluntary.
I mean, that's just a fact.
And that's a fact that was drilled into me endlessly as a child when divorces were an epidemic across society.
I think perhaps a little bit too much so.
But adult relationships are voluntary.
And if somebody in your life is destructive or harmful or abusive, Then you are free to not see that person.
And I think there are some considerable benefits to not seeing the people who are toxic and destructive.
And I'm not just talking about people you have some disagreements with politically or economically or this guy's a little bit Keynesian and you're more...
I'm not talking about that kind of stuff.
I'm talking about, you know, people who put you down, people who...
Won't support and encourage that which is best in you, but instead inhibit and put it down.
I fundamentally believe, my friend, that we cannot be bigger.
We cannot be bigger in this life than how we appear to those around us.
In other words, if we have somebody significant in our life who thinks that we are small and inconsequential and insignificant and powerless and ridiculous and over this and over that and paranoid and conspiracy theorist, whatever it is, you can't fundamentally be bigger Than the person around you who thinks you're the smallest.
And so I think if you have any kind of ambitions, I just think it's really, really important to have people around you who are going to support your ambitions, who are going to help you just as you can support and help them with their ambitions and their growth.
And yeah, I mean, good heavens.
I mean, if you grew up in a family where you were beaten and raped and I mean, oh God, I mean, well, of course you don't have to see these people as adults.
I mean, I didn't tell people you can't see...
I mean, what a ridiculous thing it would be to say on the internet.
You can't see your... I mean, right, you can't see these people.
That's not the reality.
The reality is you should remind people that they're free.
And this is exactly what I was told growing up.
You know, if you're in an abusive relationship, if you're a wife and you're being beaten up by your husband, then you have the right to leave.
And in fact, you damn well should.
Probably should be the best thing for you.
I don't go to you damn well should because I think that's a choice everyone has to make for themselves.
But... To me, that's incontrovertible.
If we believe in the non-aggression principle, and we understand that violations of the non-aggression principle are immoral, then surely where the power is the greatest, which is parent to child, where the degree of voluntarism is the least, which is parent to child, Then,
if the non-aggression principle is repeatedly violated against you when you're a child through violence, through assault, through neglect, you don't have that choice as a child to find your own companions, then yeah, when you become an adult, of course you're free to see or to not see those people.
And I think that there are some good moral arguments and good psychological arguments as to why it's better to not have people, unrepentant abusers in your life.
I mean, if people repent and You know, they attempt to make restitution.
They all go to therapy or whatever it is that's going to make the situation better.
Fantastic, wonderful, couldn't be happier.
But, you know, that's not often the case.
Sometimes it's the case, which is great.
It's not often the case. But, you know, I've yet to figure out or fundamentally understand why we should forever be slaves to other people's mistakes, immoralities, corruptions, decadence, whatever.
We are free to choose our own companions as adults and if we accept the non-aggression principle, then people who support the use of violence against us, even after it's been patiently explained and showed it to them and whiteboarded and grafted and maybe there's an app for that too and you've traced it out with feathers on their palms or whatever it is that gets it across to them.
If they still say, yes, you are my friend, you are my brother, you are my whoever, you're my uncle.
But if you disagree with me about the drug war, I support armed men dragging you off and putting you in a cage for years.
It's a pretty aggressive action.
So many people don't get that.
I mean, the average person that I encounter in my day Who likes the state or maybe, you know, they complain about it.
They complain about those damn Democrats or those damn Republicans because they're not using the guns where they want them to use.
And you try to explain to them, there's a gun under that pile of papers that makes up that nanny law.
They don't fucking get it a lot of the time.
Do you think they don't?
Do you really think they don't? Or do you think it's just a defense?
It's so obvious. I don't see how people couldn't get it at some level.
You may have a better...
I don't know. I've brought a lot of people to liberty, but you may have a better chance with bringing the unbringables to liberty.
I generally get the people who are the disaffected 18 to 25-year-old youth who like hip-hop music and like to smoke weed and like guns.
I don't know. That's our target demographic, and we seem to be able to do it with them.
But I don't know.
I can't... I try to talk to my garbage man, who's a member of a union, and explain to him why...
In my vision of the perfect world, in my lib pair, my libertarian paradise, you'd be working for an independent contract.
And he's like, no, no, no. The union's good.
And this is a small government Republican guy.
And he's like, no, I'm in a union and the union's good.
Unions help workers and it's the American way and it's great.
And I'm like, no, but you're stealing.
And he's like, or if I try to explain to somebody, my stepson just went into the army this week, which is a big mindfuck for me.
Sorry about that. I know.
I love the guy. I'm not going to talk bad about him.
I love him. I know, you know, he knows how I feel about war.
I've been anti-war since I saw it on TV on the Vietnam War in 1969 at age five.
But, you know, when you try to...
In the state I live in, Wyoming, there are probably the highest number of people sending their kids off to war here, and they're proud of it, and they hear that your family's done it, and they're like, hey, tell them I said thanks, and I don't even know what to say to that.
I don't know what to say to those people.
What do you say to those people?
Well, you know, this is a tough question.
I mean, if somebody's already signed up, I'm not talking about him.
I'm talking about everybody everywhere who believes the state is right and cannot wrap their mind around the simple, what you do in kindergarten is what should be done in adulthood kind of mentality that we have.
They don't fucking get it.
Right. A lot of those people...
No, but see, if you say they don't get it, then the temptation is to keep helping them, try to help them get it.
I don't. But if you say they do get it, but they reject it, that's very different, right?
If somebody says, yes, this pill will cure my cancer, but I'm not going to take it, that's very different from somebody who says, this pill isn't going to cure my cancer.
Because if you have a pill that cures cancer, then you just need to keep giving them the facts and the evidence and the expert opinion, the peer-reviewed papers, the double-blind experiments, whatever it is, to convince them.
But if they say, yes, I fully accept that this pill will cure my cancer, but I'm not going to take it, then you're in a different – then more information isn't going to help people.
Because they've already made their decision.
And they already accept that the pill is going to cure their cancer.
They just don't want to take it.
And nowadays, I mean, anybody who doesn't doubt the foundation of the societies that we live in Is corrupt, evil, malevolent, or just so enmeshed in the social matrix that they simply are inaccessible, the truth is inaccessible to them.
Because I think what happens, so you talk to your garbage man, and let's say he accepts your arguments, right?
That he's stealing.
It's the dominoes that are set in effect from the ideas.
And people see the dominoes go rolling down the hill.
You know, one of these monstrous machines.
What are they called? Rubric machines or, you know, the ones where...
I can't remember.
But anyway, there's the machines where everything goes falling down all at once, right?
Rube Goldberg machines.
Something like Goldberg machines. Anyway, so they see, right, all of these things go fanning out.
Everything's going to fall. Everything's going to change.
Because this guy is going to say, holy shit, I'm stealing.
Well, that's not good. So what's he going to have to do?
Well, he's going to have to think about quitting his job.
And he's going to say, well, you know what?
I've been knee deep in garbage for 20 years and now I'm going to quit my job.
What am I going to do? And I'm going to quit my job and I got a pension.
I have to give up huge chunks of my pension.
You know, it's only five more years to my retirement and there's no jobs out there.
I mean, no jobs out there.
So what am I going to, I'm too old to join the army.
And even if I accept all of that, I'm going to quit my job and all that.
Well, you know, two of my brothers also work for the government.
So am I going to sit down and have the same conversation with them?
And what's going to happen to them?
And what if they don't agree with me?
What if they fight me to the nail?
Are you saying of you, two of your brothers?
No, the garbage men's brothers, right?
So he's going to say, my mom was a teacher.
I'm going to sit here and say, you know, you were a forced indoctrination catalyst for the destruction of the minds of children, right?
That was your whole life. My dad was a mail clerk at the post office or something.
Most people are stuck in their social matrices, like prehistoric flies in amber.
They can struggle a little bit, but they're encased, if that makes any sense.
What they do is they see this idea dropping into their matrix, and then they see all of the sparks and the electricity and the The lights and the will-o'-the-wisps go shooting all over the spiderweb of their social interactions, and they see in their mind's eye everything that is going to happen from that first fucking domino going down.
Everything that's going to happen.
And they're like, whoa, you're wrong!
They don't want to say you're right, but I won't do it.
Because that's too painful.
That makes them feel enslaved by their society.
And I don't mean their general society, but their local, their families, their friends, their church, their extended family, their co-workers, whoever, the people on their neighborhood.
They don't want to feel that.
They don't want to feel, well, if I accept that what you say is true...
All of my relationships are going to be reconfigured, and some of them are going to be lost, and I'm going to be hated, and other people are going to, whatever, do terrible things, say terrible things about me, and so on.
And they get that, and they say, okay, well, if I accept this idea, this truth that taxation is force, if I accept that the government is force, I see everywhere that that affects my relationships.
All of this Goldberg machine, and everywhere that it rolls, and all the things that go flying through the air and crashing down and all of that, And I don't want to see that.
I don't want to see the degree to which all of my relationships are founded upon my acceptance of corruption and falsehood.
And so they simply push back the truth.
They don't even want that first domino to go down, because then they have to stop it.
And then they have to say to themselves, why am I stopping these dominoes going down?
Because I know where they're going to lead.
And, you know, maybe it's not all, but most, right?
Certainly, statistically, from what I've heard, and it's been the case in my experience, very few relationships survive the enlightenment.
And so, I think that they do get it, but I think that, remember, the unconscious is 9,000 times more powerful and faster than the conscious mind.
And the unconscious says, danger, Will Robertson, danger, danger, all social relationships, bowling ball heading towards spiderweb of delusion.
You know, and they just will it away.
I mean, and in a way, you know, I can't blame them.
I can't blame them.
I mean, I try. Oh, Lord, do I try.
And there are some times when I succeed.
But, you know, people taking Social Security, yeah, I can see why they take Social Security.
People joining the army, well, yeah, socially approved, it's, you know, gets you out of the workforce, gets you maybe a pension, maybe you'll like it, maybe you feel like you're doing some good.
People who join the police, the thing blue line keeping the criminals at bay and the drug dealers away from the children, and yay, everybody thinks you're the greatest thing since sliced bread and so on.
And you get job security and a pension.
You can't... I mean, you can't even get fired for raping people.
I mean, according to some of the recent things that have gone on.
And you throw into that a sort of maybe a slightly sadistic thirst for power and control and the idea that you can walk around throwing your weight around and everyone parts before you like the Red Sea before the staff of Moses.
And it's kind of hard to see why people wouldn't.
But the thing that changes, right?
I'm just playing Seesaw yesterday with my daughter.
And it's sort of reminded, you know, as a kid, you walk from one end of the Seesaw to the other once you get bored of, hey, I've just spent a year going up and down.
I think I'm done with that now.
You walk from one end of the Seesaw up to the other end.
And there's one point in the middle where it tips, right?
And right now, delusion holds the population in its thrall.
And delusion is sitting and the population all at one end and there's like three tiny little guys up at the other end.
But we just, we get some people over, we get some people over and things begin to tip and things begin to change.
It is a tiny incremental process.
It is grains of sand going through the hourglass.
And so my argument is...
It's triage, you know? This person's not going to make it.
Move on. This person's not going to make it.
Move on. Oh, here's someone who can make it.
You've got my time and attention for as long as you want it.
And if you then give up the ghost and vanish, I cannot spend another year trying to figure you out.
I'm trying to change your mind because I don't know if there's a mind there to change.
I don't know if reason and evidence is even available to you, but I do know that there's other people I simply have to light a match and they will burst into flame.
Whereas you, I'm trying to blow like wet logs, trying to get this thing going, calling in lightning strikes and...
You know, napalm and I can't get this light going.
Other people, you just light your cigarette and they burst into flame and just a little bit of exposure to those ideas and they become a lifelong devotee of truth, reason and evidence.
So I think it's, you know, it's a triage situation and most people won't make it.
But the more people we can just get across that seesaw, the quicker we can begin to change this synergy.
I want to call this, if it's okay with you, I want to call this episode, Stefan Molyneux freaks out on the gumbo.
Is that okay? I can't claim to be praised or offended, since I don't know what that means, but go for it.
I'm sure. Is it drug slang?
Is that what? Well, I don't know.
The picture of music is kind of psychedelicized.
I'll send it to you. You just seem really on in a good way.
You always do, but you seem especially like you've had your triple espresso enema or something today.
That's a good thing. You know, it's hell getting the cinnamon out, let me tell you.
It's just hell. I'm like fighting brown dust for a week.
Anyway, go on. Well, while we're speaking on things you couldn't say on radio, what about sex?
Talk about sex. Whatever you want to say about it.
I ask everyone about it. Ah, sex.
Ah, sex. I just watched The Hunger Games, and oh my god.
Oh. I mean, talk about your platonic, sexless teenage relationships.
I mean, it just struck me. I mean, of course, the violence is unbelievably ghastly and repulsive, and I just gritted my teeth to watch it through.
But it's so platonic, you know, all they do is hug.
I mean, this is like the vampires, you know?
And it just sort of struck me that, I mean, my memories of being a teenager was like...
The Naughty Bits was really the sun around which my mind orbited.
In fact, I can't really say that my mind did much because all the blood flow was heading elsewhere.
So I think that sex is something that is not discussed, I think, philosophically nearly enough.
And I think that, I mean, the sex drive is why we're all here.
And it's such a fundamental and powerful thing.
It is something that philosophy needs to tackle.
You know, Socrates said this about sex.
He said when he got into his 70s, shortly before he was slaughtered by the divine will of the majority, he said that he so adored getting old because he could stand in front of a young buck like Alcibiades and look at his taut, rippled, you know, Spartan Buttocks.
And he said, you know, it was great that I don't feel that level of sexual desire.
It's like being free of a demon.
It's like being free of a demon.
And I think that there's not really been much talk about sex in philosophy.
Because it's got the two sides.
It can be an incredibly beautiful, exciting, wonderful spiritual experience that brings two lovers closer and bonds them in physical and emotional and psychological ways.
But it can also be, of course, much darker.
I mean, the rape of children, which is still astonishingly prevalent.
What is it? Two in three girls and two in five boys have reported not necessarily rape per se, but, you know, some molestation as children.
So the exploitation of children, prostitution, pornography, and the other kind of things.
They, you know, there is a dark side, an exploitive side to sexuality, and trying to understand the difference, I think, is really important.
And I think, for me at least, the difference is that if sex is something that is supposed to make you Feel worthwhile, then it's going to be destructive.
Whereas if sex is a byproduct of your joy and passion of life, then I think it's really great.
And I think, I mean, this is true, I think, of just about anything in life.
Anything that you use as a substitute for self-esteem will end up consuming you, whether it's, you know, fame or wealth or looks or sex or gambling or whatever success as a whole.
Whatever you use, To attempt to cover up whatever holes you have in your soul will end up consuming you like an acid.
Whereas if you have that self-esteem and you have that positive outlook and you have that joy in life, then the sexuality that is part of your life is going to be a very happy and healthy part of your existence.
But sex is one of these things.
It is a drug. I mean, not only is it like a drug, it is a drug.
I mean, it causes 20 plus biochemical responses in your In your mind and in your body, of course.
And a lot of them would probably be illegal if you isolated them and sold them.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
I mean, the orgasm is just an unbelievable obliteration of identity and a pure cosmic burst of sunflower goodiness.
And that is something that can be very addictive.
I mean, there's clear correlation between, like, I was just watching a show the other day.
Do you know that women, girls who grow up without fathers, menstruate, start menstruating significantly earlier?
Significantly earlier, like years earlier.
And it has, you know, that is how foundational sexuality is to us.
And the biological reasons seems to be that if you grow up without a dad, you need the protection of another man, and so you're going to start having sex earlier.
And a girl who grows up without a father is two and a half to three times more likely to have a pregnancy in her teens.
Right? So, this is how foundation, it's shaped even by the absence of a father figure.
Promiscuity is highly correlated to child abuse.
So, children who are abused, not just sexually, but in other ways, end up with far more sexual partners and, I would imagine, far emptier sex lives.
And, I mean, I don't want to sound puritanical.
I mean, sex sometimes doesn't always have to be a spiritual union of, you know, perfect squishy goodness.
It can also be, you know, just a fun romp and all that kind of stuff.
There is a correlation between destructive families and empty, repetitive sexuality that I think is really, really important.
The best way to create healthy sex in the world is to have, you know, better, more peaceful family life, particularly for children.
They'll grow up, you know, with all of that kind of good stuff floating around in their heads, which they have the expectation for and they won't have this desperate need to feel valued by someone.
And to feel valued by someone for your virtues is a very good thing.
To want to feel valued by someone for your vagina is not a good thing because, you know, they're as common as noses, apparently, among half the population.
And so I think that, you know, if we give kids that sense of worth, that sense of love, that sense of happiness and satisfaction with who they are, they won't grow up, dare I say it, with this hole that needs to be filled or needing to fill a hole.
And I think that is a real challenge.
And it's always been somewhat disappointing to me that when I read through Philosophers, you don't hear a lot of, you don't read a lot of discussion of sex.
I mean, obviously, there was some reason for that in the past, or you get into that sort of creepy S&M that objectivism has.
And so, you know, I think that it's a good question.
It's something that I think needs to be discussed.
You know, I think that libertarianism needs to tackle some of the issues of sexuality because they're so foundational to how society works.
I mean, think of marriage.
Marriage is fundamentally designed In a healthy society to pair bond couples for the long-term raising of children because that's the healthiest statistically for children.
Societies that have policies in place that undermine corrupt marriage end up with single-parent households which are destructive for children, particularly boys and girls in different ways.
They end up with There's such a lack of resources in the raising of children that it's almost like a vacuum that draws state power in.
You know, like women who've made bad choices as teens and end up with two or three kids and no dads around, they need to feed their children.
They need health care for their children.
They'll do anything. They'll vote.
They're not going to Delay gratification, obviously, at every level.
And so, the lack of responsible and mature sexuality creates chaos in the family and need for resources, for money, for education, for healthcare, for living, for food.
It creates this vacuum for state power.
And trying to control the state without trying to improve the family, to me, is crazy.
We need to create families where that state power is not So desperately needed by everyone in there.
They desperately need the welfare.
I gotta find some place to put my kids during the day so I need public school and I can't afford private school and so I've just got to vote for all this stuff or whatever it is, right?
And so if we get better lives in families, if we have more intact families and less of this We won't have this huge vacuum of need, this desperate clawing for resources to feed your children, to give healthcare to your children. Who can say to parents, well, you can't have these things because of libertarian principles?
They're not going to give a shit. They're just going to go and get them anyway.
I'm not a parent, I know. So, I think that libertarianism and its relationship to the family and sexuality is, I think, a bit put in the cart before the horse.
Let's reform the state and then society will take care of itself.
I think that until we improve families, no chance to reform the state.
I mean, no mom with three kids who are hungry and, you know, one of them has appendicitis is going to listen to arguments about the long-term...
Economic efficacy of Austrian economics and problems with inflation, and that's why she shouldn't go to the free clinic that's government subsidized.
She's going to say, well, that's all very nice and good, and maybe I even agree with you, but my kids are hungry and they need some healthcare, so I've got to go where that is, because your shit ain't going to solve anything for the next 20 years.
And I'd say she should do it, would you?
Yeah, of course. Of course she should.
I mean, it's not the children's fault that the mom has made.
I mean, this is right. Children, in a sense, are kind of hostages in a lot of ways in society.
I'm not saying their parents treat them that way, but they kind of are.
I mean, you talk about, let's get rid of the welfare state.
Well, you know, there's a lot of people who've made a lot of decisions, and I wouldn't say they're very good decisions, but they've made those decisions already, and it's not the fault of the children that the parents have made those decisions, and usually the single parent has made those decisions.
What are you going to do? You can't take all that stuff away.
You just can't.
You can't quit cold turkey.
You can't quit the state cold turkey.
You get revolution.
You get starvation.
You get increased abuse.
You get, I mean, you shatter the spine of society if you take people off these drugs.
I mean, you can't even quit ADHD meds.
Without medical supervision and slowly tailing them off, you got to cut this stuff cold turkey and people's heads will explode and the children will suffer who's not their fault.
You got to find a way to do it slowly and you can't do it slowly from the supply side.
You can't do it slowly by saying, well, we're going to cut government expenditures by only 3% a year until, right?
Because everybody who's expenditures you cut are going to go completely apeshit about everything that you cut.
I mean, it's so boring. It's so repetitive.
We just went through this shit in Canada.
You know, it's like the government is slashing things to the bone because they're The government increased by 20% over the past three years is now going to slow that increase to only 18% and suddenly everyone's going screaming and the end of Canadian society as we know it and there won't be anything left but a smoking craters smelling faintly of bacon and maple syrup.
And the reality, you can't lower or you can't slowly diminish the state from the supply side.
You can only diminish the need, the hunger, the desire for, the vacuum that is the pull for state power.
I mean, state power doesn't expand where people don't want it.
It expands where people desperately want it.
And it's sometimes the special interest groups and sometimes it's unions and public sector or private sometimes.
But so often, it's the family.
It's the people who, the single moms with five kids and no dads, they need this stuff.
And you can't just cut them off.
So you can't cut it from the supply side, and you can't convince people to cut it in the here and now from the demand side.
All you can do is find ways to organize society, make arguments that you know will diminish the demand for state power.
And that's going to, you know...
You can't have a tug of war if only one person's pulling.
If you get rid of the demand, the whole system is going to start to fall over.
And that's why I argue for voluntary adult relationships.
Peaceful parenting that respects the self-ownership of children and respects the non-aggression principle.
You know, no hitting, no spanking, no intimidation, no abandonment, no neglect.
You stay home with your kids, invest in them.
That is going to... Lower, on the demand side, the vacuum that is pulling state power ever more and ever greater into our lives.
And that's where we can actually have some control.
It ain't going to come from auditing the Fed.
Worms. That was an eloquently, loquatiously succinct answer to tell me about sex.
I love it. Baby, let's talk about you and me.
Anyway, go on. I have two little follow-ups.
One is... It's about the creepy S&M objectivism comment, and the other is, do you participate in Canada's national healthcare system?
Well, as to the, do I participate in Canada's national healthcare system?
Yeah. I mean, if I need to see a doctor, I need to see a doctor.
And I don't have any choice about that.
I mean, there is not a private health care.
I can't pay my doctor. It's illegal.
He won't accept payment.
He'll go to jail. And, you know, so yeah, I mean, what I try to do is stay as healthy as possible.
I exercise four times a week.
I try to eat well. You know, I just dropped 20, 25 pounds or whatever because I was...
Got married. And so I try to stay as healthy as possible.
But yeah, I mean, if I'm sick, I'll go to the doctor.
I don't have a choice about that.
I mean, it's like I drive on the roads.
Yeah, I was just going to say, that's not a, do you use the roads?
You're not a real libertarian question.
That was a just, I'm just curious.
And I got married and gained 20 pounds in about five years.
Yeah, no, it creeps up on you there a little bit.
Hey, I have more chins than a Chinese phone book.
Yeah. Well, a lot of it, too, is sitting in front of a computer, you know, yelling to the world 24-7.
I tell you, walk around.
I walk around doing my shows now.
It's better for thinking. It's better for...
I mean, I'm standing doing this the whole time and pacing a little bit, so it helps.
Yeah. Sorry, the creepy S&M thing?
Is that what you... Let's talk creepy S&M. Yeah.
I'm often open carrying a gun when I'm walking around my neighborhood.
If I were speaking into a – there was somebody who did a video on – a Free State New Hampshire person who did a video of them open carrying a gun, open carrying a sword and wearing a kilt while holding a video camera in front of their face and talking to it and walking around and like being surprised when the police came up and contacted him about it.
The only thing that would make that video perfect is if he was only wearing a kilt as a headband.
That to me would make that perfect.
One of the comments on it was like, I don't like the police, but I'm not surprised they contacted you.
If I saw someone doing that, I'd think you were on your way to murder your ex-girlfriend and were doing your suicide note on video.
I showed up at the synagogue with a huge swastika on my forehead and I'm quite shocked that I got in trouble.
Yeah, okay. There are better ways to spend your energies.
So do you think that S&M is creepy or objectivism is creepy?
I don't think objectivism is creepy.
I think S&M is...
I mean, to me, it's just such a clear replaying of childhood trauma of some extremely dysfunctional history within the childhood that I can't conceive.
And again, I haven't looked in the statistics of this particular aspect in particular, but other aspects of dysfunctional sexuality or you could say non...
I hate to say non-standard because, of course, most of what we talk about is non-standard.
It's not Sigma-6.
Yeah, I mean, sort of out of the biological necessity, I mean, you know, you have to rub the naughty bits together to create this spark called a human being.
The hot wax on the nipples doesn't exactly do the same thing.
I don't know, man, because, well, my wife and I are in a 24-7 consensual BDSM, you know, DS relationship.
BDSM, I got. DS? Well...
I don't know what that acronym means.
Dominant submission, but it's more, it's less role-playing and more that it's kind of like signing a contract that I will do what you say unless it's harmful.
And did you yourself as a child have any premature sexual experience?
I knew you were going to fucking say that.
Of course I was. Look, I already told you what the theory is, so tell me.
Yeah, I was nothing with my parents.
They weren't great parents.
They were too busy making a living.
I was a latchkey kid. They got divorced when I was young.
I'm so sorry. Yeah, but I was molested by a male babysitter's brother who was 15 when I was 9.
It was weird...
I don't know if I can say rape.
I guess a nine-year-old does not have the ability to consent, but I consented, but I was afraid and wasn't- No, you don't have the ability to consent.
No, he didn't hold me down and hit me or anything.
Yeah, that's true, but my wife did not.
She was never sexually abused as a kid, and she had a strong dad who was gruff, but didn't hit her or anything like that.
I don't think it's out of the norm of mammalian behavior.
I mean, when cats fuck, they bite each other on the scruff of the neck, you know?
It's play. And it intensifies...
Yeah, but I assume that you don't shower by licking yourself, right?
I mean, there's still things that we can...
You know, there's always things we can find that are similar with what animals do, but that doesn't necessarily translate into...
Into our behavior, right?
And have you ever, I mean, what have you done with this experience?
I mean, have you talked to a counselor or therapist or anything like that?
No, because I don't think I need to and we've been very happily married for seven years.
More happily married than any couple – most couples that I know.
Not any couple, but most couples that I know.
I'm happy to see her every day when she comes home from work.
I mean there's never a day when I'm like, ugh, it's her.
It's like when she gets up in the morning, I'm happy to talk to her.
I'll get up even if I'm tired and chat with her.
Well, of course, because you have to get out of your little spiky box and someone's got to open it.
I mean, if you're gimped up for the whole day, of course you want to come home.
I'm just kidding. I'm just stereotyping in a completely unfair way.
You are stereotyping, and I know you're kidding about that now, but the stuff you said before I think kind of fits into that same spiky box.
You're saying what you do is different than what I do, and I think there's something wrong with it.
I don't think I ever said that there was something wrong with it.
You said I'd need to see, or I should see a therapist, or you asked if I had.
That's kind of suggesting that there's something that needs to be dealt with.
I don't think there's anything that needs to be dealt with.
We're really, really happy.
And in adult consensual relationships, if one person agrees to give up a certain measure of control, what part of the non-aggression principle is that violating?
It violates no part.
I mean, we're very clear about this.
I have no thought in my head that there's anything immoral, of course, in that.
There's no violation of the non-aggression principle whatsoever.
There's nothing immoral or bad in it.
And the reason I'm saying that is that I don't want to give you the pleasure of calling you bad.
No, I'm just kidding. One more time.
You're so naughty.
You're so bad. You're so wrong.
Bend over. But no, there's nothing but the correlation between the behavior that you describe as an adult and negative or premature.
Well, premature and negative are the same thing for childhood experiences of sexuality.
The correlations between these two things are clear.
No, they're not because my wife didn't have them.
Well, I mean, not talking to your wife, I'm just talking to you, and I obviously don't disbelieve anything that you're saying.
And I think that it's not anything to do with the way that you conduct your adult life sexually.
I mean, the hell, you can do whatever you want, consensually, right?
If there is an effect, and certainly trauma, I mean, a significant trauma like that is going to have an effect on you, obviously.
I mean, obviously. And if you're not fully aware of what that effect is, it might be something worth mapping.
Maybe that will have no effect on your sex life.
I've mapped it entirely. I've spent years thinking about it, writing about it.
We've published a book about it called Diary of an S&M Romance that we did under pseudonyms that's reached a lot of people, touched their lives, changed them for the better.
But not gently. It's touched their lives, but not gently.
But hopefully with something hot and spiky.
I know you're joking, but I think you've got some contempt prior to investigation about this in the same way that people who hear the word anarchy say, you know, that's horrible.
That wouldn't work. There'd be blood in the streets.
I think that you have some of that with S&M. And it's obviously not for you, so I'm not saying you need to investigate it and do it.
But I'm saying, bead some stuff by some people who practice it who are consensual and healthy.
There's tons of it out there. I could send you a reading.
Yeah, send me a book.
I will promise to have a look and certainly will apologize if I have appeared close-minded.
I'm simply looking at the information that I sort of gleaned over the years.
I'm certainly not going to tell you that your experience is bad or wrong, but you at least have to grant that I was right about the premature sexual experience.
You were 50% right because you guessed me and you guessed wrong about my partner.
Yes. Well, no, I didn't ask if your partner had.
I was simply asking. No, you asked me, but if you were talking to both of us in a room, you probably would have asked both of us, wouldn't you?
I would have, yes, but I wouldn't simply have asked if your wife had been...
Here's what I'd say. Here's what I'd say.
Statistically, in my experience, because this has come up on kink forums, this often comes up as a question.
And a lot of times it comes up because...
Somebody is writing a term paper, someone who's not even kinky, and they go on the internet to get answers from experts or people who practice it.
And the general consensus, I would say, is roughly, give or take, the percentage of people who are in lifestyle relationships that are BDSM or DS or kink or whatever, is the same of people who've been molested as people who haven't.
It's the same as people who are vanilla.
You know, I mean, what did you say?
What percentage of girls have been molested?
It's high. It's a third or half.
Yeah, it depends on how you count it.
And of course, it's all self-reported.
But I've heard statistics as high as two and three and two and five boys.
So yeah, it's high. Absolutely.
And, you know, I don't...
I mean, obviously, I don't want to sort of...
Homosexuality was considered deviant at some point, and of course it's not, and transgendered stuff was considered deviant, and it's not.
So I don't want to fall into that same mistake.
The big book of crazy that psychiatrists use, what's it called, the DSM-4?
Yeah, still categorizes BDSM as paraphilia, and the DSM-3 still categorized homosexuality as paraphilia.
Well, I want to congratulate you on bringing a topic to one of the shows I participated in that I've never participated in before.
So I really appreciate that.
That's the goal of this podcast.
I mean, in the intro, I didn't have an intro for the first two episodes, but I wrote one tonight and I'm going to pull out the whip and make my wife voice it.
For this episode, it's going to be the first one with an intro and outro.
And yeah, it says we talk about...
I mean, I took some of it from the email I wrote to you.
You asked me, what are we going to chat about?
And I said, liberty, guns, rock and roll, sex, drugs, superficial differences between Canada and the US, finding a balance of having a life while speaking to a large audience online, and mainly maintaining hope in a worrying world.
That's pretty much the intro now.
So there's two questions here we haven't dealt with.
One is, how do you... You know, having a life with your family and yourself and your friends while, you know, having this city-state world empire on the internet.
Well I mean to me it's a very simple thing in theory and it can be tough to achieve in practice but I do the very best I can to push this cart forward and I have no investment in whether it goes forward or not.
That's the best that I've been able to come up with.
So I will I expend every ounce of mental sweat and blood that I can to make the most compelling and entertaining and engaging and hopefully rational and empirical arguments for truth, consistency, reason, and virtue.
And I have no investment if anybody listens.
I mean, that's a delicate – you can't sing without an audience.
Well, when you started – when we start, no one's listening.
Your first episode, how many people listened to it that week?
Yeah. Some guy in the next car because I'm my window down.
But I have no...
I desperately want to change the world and I'm putting every ounce of effort that I can as consistently and hopefully adroitly applied as I can.
But... I have no power over whether the world will change or not.
So you make your most compelling, it's like a doctor.
You can say to the guy, listen, if you keep eating like this, you keep smoking like this, you keep drinking like this, you're gonna get sick.
And you can make that really passionate case to him.
And the more passionate you make that case, the more likely he is to listen.
But you have no control what he does when he leaves your office.
So you make that case and you really don't want the guy to get sick.
You really want him to live well.
And then he walks out and you have no ownership anymore of what he does.
It's that balance. And very often, we follow people out of the waiting room.
In the waiting room, we follow them, put down that cigarette.
I don't drive so fast. You can't have that cheeseburger.
That's not good for you. You know, whatever it is.
Come back for a checkup. You need to get your blood tested.
Your foot's looking black.
You need diabetes? We follow people.
We stalk the world.
We can stalk the world. I mean, we can.
It doesn't make us miserable to change the world.
So, you push as hard as you can and you don't care if it moves or not.
That's the only thing that I can do that has given me, I think, the most freedom.
I'm very passionate about the course of truth, reason, and philosophy.
And I am as indifferent as I possibly can be as to whether people listen or not.
Because that is the most rational thing that I can do.
I only have control over what I do.
Of course, I have no control over what anybody else does.
And, I mean, I can't even control my daughter.
She's three, trying to have a conversation with her mom at dinner.
She is an unbelievable wind-up chatterbox.
Now, I can't exactly complain about where she might have gotten that from.
It's a mystery. Obviously, it must skip a generation.
But I mean, I can't even control my daughter who's three and I'm ten times her size and, you know, I hopefully have a few more bits of knowledge.
If I can't control my three-year-old, I'm not going to pretend I control someone else, right?
And so I really want to change the world.
I'm going to put every effort that I can into it.
Whether the world changes or not, fundamentally I could care less because I have no control over it and I try not to imagine I have control where I don't because that's a sure path to misery.
Worms. So, final question.
And this is a big one for me, because as I said, I listened to you and Bad Quaker when the weight of the world is scaring my little brain.
I vacillate between really just thinking we are fucked and thinking, you know, there might be hope.
I'm 47, my dad's 90, and I have a healthy lifestyle.
I don't smoke or drink or do drugs, so I will probably live to be maybe about that old bar getting hit by a bus or whatever.
I'm wondering when I'm that age if things will be better or worse.
Is it going to be Hitler's Germany?
Is it going to be Brave New World?
Or is it going to be libertarian paradise or something in between?
And what do you think and how do you deal with those thoughts if you have them at all?
No, of course I have them.
I mean, I think it's impossible to not have them.
I mean, it would be mental to not have them.
When you study deeply the syphilis of the world, you've got to look into the future.
And we, you know, we are a kind of doctor, I believe.
And doctors... Gain efficacy through studying disease.
And so, yeah, we study evil.
You know, we study evil and we attempt, at least I should say, I study evil and I attempt to come up with as many antidotes and preventions as possible because it's almost impossible.
Yeah, it's almost impossible to cure evil.
So, it's, you know, evil is stage four lung cancer.
It's almost impossible. All you can do is prevent.
Tell people to put down the cigarettes because by then it's usually too late if they haven't.
So yeah, if you study disease, then you're gonna see that and you're gonna see where it leads.
The signs are not good.
The signs are not good.
The power of evil is greater because we have generated so much wealth in society that they can use The sweat of our labors and the genius of our minds is unbelievable collateral to sell us into the distant future to banksters and other white collar criminals.
And so we have fed the cancer of the state with the fuel of our productivity to the point where it towers over us with a size and strength that is unimaginable in the past.
You know, in the past, you know, Macbeth could kill the king and become a new king.
Done. Coup! Done!
Because there were no surveillance cameras, no weapons of mass destruction, no endless gulags all over the planet, no extraordinary rendition.
So... No passports.
I mean, all of this sort of stuff. Now, of course, I'm not suggesting that anything to do with killing because it's not how you overturn the state.
But, you know, these mofos have some significant power juice in their engines and all we have really is three-quarters of the truth, as Jimmy says, right?
We have the truth and we have this amazing medium which allows us to have conversations.
I never would have had I mean, I would never even have the little show that I have if it wasn't for the internet.
I wouldn't know you existed.
I mean, maybe you would have gotten a book into Borders and I might have stumbled across it with a hundred other books that I'd thumbed through that day.
But I consider that unlikely.
Yeah, because the gatekeepers of culture have come crashing down with the rise of the internet.
The gatekeepers of culture, and culture I view as the enemy of truth and reason.
Culture's upset about that.
Culture's not happy. Yeah, yeah, well, culture should get some goddamn reason and evidence that philosophize itself a little bit.
Culture should get some culture. Yeah, it's the reason that we use the same word for delusions of grandeur and things that infest and grow and kill things, right?
A culture of germs.
Anyway, so yeah, I mean, we can't help but look into the future with extraordinary trepidation because the technology is so great that I fear that if liberty is lost, it will be very hard to recover.
And this is not the end of Rome.
This is not the end of the British Empire.
This is not the end of the Ottoman Empire.
This is very different. This is a very different environment that we have.
The possibility of mass surveillance and mass information gathering, chip IDs and RFIDs and everything.
The possibility of controlling the human livestock has become so powerful and so extraordinary that I fear...
I fear that this may be freedom's last stand and its greatest stand.
We have the greatest opportunity. The same technology that might cast it into darkness forever might rise us to the light in perpetuity.
And I think it's that essential a crossroad that we are at.
I hope this is being followed with a conjunction like but, because you're making me feel worse, not better so far.
I'm scared. I'm scared.
I'm just trying to please you.
But the possibilities are extraordinary.
It's a race. It is a race.
And we are in incredibly fast vehicles.
There is the vehicle of the bad guys over to our right.
And they are hitting the gas with everything they can.
They are passing as many laws as they can.
They're using as much indoctrination as they can.
They're controlling as much media as they can.
They are opposing as much as they can.
And there's this fucked up, endless tentacle of brain-crossing technology called the internet, which is racing them to the finish line.
And we better hit the fucking gas, because if we lose, I don't think anyone's gonna win again in the future.
But if we win, We win for good in every sense of the word.
And I think that we have a damn good shot.
But it is all about the efficacy, the focus, the intensity, the passion, and the conviction that we bring to bear.
That we bring to bear on these essential questions of voluntarism versus violence.
It's the only two, right?
Those are the two massive motorcycle car spaceships we're driving at Mach 12 million.
It's violence versus voluntarism.
They edge ahead sometimes, we edge ahead sometimes.
We got to hit the gas because they're not going to pull back.
They're not going to hold off. This is an ancient race.
Of rulers and their dependents who wish to rule and command the human soul and the human spirit.
And we've got to hit the fucking gas.
They're not going to slow down. They're not going to turn aside.
And either they hit the wall or we do, metaphorically.
And so all I say is, Fuck where we end up, we don't control that.
Fuck where the people listen to us, we don't control that.
The only thing that we control is the power and the intensity and the focus and the reason and the evidence and the passion that we bring to this calling.
That's all we can control.
The vulnerability of wanting the world to get better is a terrifying place to be at times.
The vulnerability of having children and needing the world to get better.
I am so embarrassed to introduce this planet to my daughter.
This planet better shape the fuck up before I have to introduce it to my daughter because I don't want to describe the shit that goes down in this world to my daughter.
It's an embarrassment. It is an embarrassment to have to describe war.
It is an embarrassment to have to describe the prison industrial complex.
It is an embarrassment to describe why she's not going to the public school down the corner.
It is an embarrassment to describe national debt, what has been done to her before she was even born.
This world better shape the fuck up so I can introduce it properly to my daughter and I'm going to do everything that I can to help that along with the full knowledge that there's absolutely nothing I can do to affect it.
Wow. Yep.
Worms. That's awesome.
Passionate. I'm kind of lost for words.
I like the, we better step up our end of it.
I mean, I think, I've always said that the real people who change the world these days aren't out on a Friday and Saturday night.
They're sitting in front of a computer screen, which is what we're doing on a Friday night.
So, I think we're doing what we can.
Make sure that we get your info to my listeners as well.
We'll probably cross post this.
So if people want to pursue where you're coming from, where should they go?
Welcome to freedomfiends.com.
That's F-R-E-E-D-O-M-F-E-E-N-S.com.
That's my main podcast.
This is my new side.
I do that with another guy every week, Nima Vedati.
And this is for my new podcast, which is Anarchy Gumbo Podcast, which is at...
Nothing like that. It's kittyfeet.com.
K-I-T-T-Y-F as in Frank.
E-E-T.com.
Like the feet of a cat. Kittyfeet.com.
It's a domain. Yeah, I'm at freedomainradio.com.
Sorry, I just wanted to turn that to your listeners.
I don't know if we got that in at the beginning.
Sorry, go ahead. I'm at freedomainradio.com.
I've got, I don't know, 10 or so books which people can download for free.
All the podcasts are free. There's no ads on the site.
It's listener-supported donation, blah, blah, blah.
So I hope that people will faceplant into the feast of philosophy that is freedomainradio.
Yeah, it's a complete free university of liberty.
It's kind of like Khan Academy for liberty.
All right. Well, thank you so much for a really very exciting and enjoyable conversation.
I really do appreciate it.
Cool man. Thank you for coming on.
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