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July 21, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:28:02
2435 Freedomain Radio Call In Show July 21st, 2013

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, discusses surviving in the moment, shifting values, parenting sleep challenges, market speculation, alcoholism, attraction, ethical studies and free market space exploration.

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Good morning, everybody.
Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
It is the 21st of July 2013, 9.58 a.m.
Yes, it's true, we're starting early, as most of my girlfriends could have told you.
There's a huge amount I can get done in two minutes, just none of it too satisfying.
So, welcome to all the new listeners.
This is, I guess we got 8,000 or 9,000 new subscribers, I think.
Off the truth about...
George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin, a video which, with mirrors, is over 800,000 in a week or so.
It's a hot topic, I suppose, and had some good feedback from the follow-up videos as well.
Had a chat with Peter Schiff as well, which was fun.
It is, of course, a hugely challenging topic.
Race is one of these highly volatile issues that wise men avoid and foolish philosophers weighed in blindfolded.
I hope that you're doing well.
Of course, we have an email set up specifically for questions, which I try to answer in the videos and podcasts.
So you can email questions, quandaries, schisms, ambiguities, and skin rashes to mailbag, mailbag at freedomainradio.com.
And also, please check out the new message board.
It is...
Well, I guess it's...
It's a lot of messages with some messages below.
I mean, I know we've started introducing people to the message board, so like half the screen is taken up with welcome messages.
That will diminish over time.
It's a very pretty message board.
And finally, after only seven years of listening, we have managed to implement a listener rating system.
And I have rated myself as Paris Hilton Hot, which I feel is empirical and verifiable.
So, you might want to check out board.freedomainradio.com.
As always, the show relies on your donations.
So, fdrurl.com forward slash donate or just go to freedomradio.com, click on the donate button and do help us out.
I think that we're doing a lot of great good in the world.
And you know, with 800,000 or so, you know, if you count the other videos and so on, maybe 900,000 videos, sorry, 900,000 video views, not counting the podcast as well.
Count the podcast, probably 1.5 million, 1.7 million.
You know, that is a big enough impact to shift public opinion to a small degree in the U.S. And, of course, this is a...
It would be a ridiculous claim to make in any absolute way, but I think that there was probably a small impact.
One of the things that's quite positive about the justice for Trayvon marches and so on is the degree to which Even some of the race huckstras are promoting non-violence, which is good.
And, you know, did 1.5, 1.7 million perspectives that may have been shifted by the work that was done from Freedom in Radio?
Well, it probably had a tiny effect.
You know, did it stop a few riots?
Maybe.
You know, this was really the goal in putting the video out.
And that's not a bad thing.
Day's work to have actually potentially, in a tiny way, shifted public opinion and made the situation a tiny bit less volatile.
And, of course, you know, a lot of people wouldn't have changed their minds based upon the videos, but I know that a significant portion of people did.
You know, they came in with one perspective and they went out with another perspective.
And, of course, the goal with presenting reason and evidence is not always to change people's minds immediately, of course, right?
And it may not even be to change their minds in the long run.
One of the goals that I always have is to at least help people to see the other side of things.
And since the media has been portraying...
I was reading this BBC report the other day.
Oh, man.
It's such a matrix.
It's such a brain fog.
It might as well be injecting media Alzheimer's directly into your frontal lobes.
I was reading this British report.
On the, I guess, hundreds of protests being staged around the U.S., Justice for Trayvon and so on.
And, you know, the usual idiot and deceptive memes are thrown in, you know.
A boy, they always refer to him, Trayvon Martin, as a boy.
And, you know, what's funny is that if you were to say to Trayvon Martin or any other, you know, young, tall, healthy, black American, if you were to say, come here, boy!
I mean, how do you think they would react to be called boy when they're 5'11 and, you know, a year away from legally voting and that they're legally able to join the military?
And although I think that they're not allowed to be shipped overseas, but they can join the military and learn how to shoot a gun and throw grenades and so on at that age.
And if you were to say, Trayvon, come here, boy!
I mean, can you imagine what reaction You would receive calling him a boy?
Ah, you see, but when it serves a political agenda, then you can call him a boy.
So call him a boy.
And of course, all the memes.
He's got Skittles and iced tea and all this kind of stuff.
And they say that he was shot when Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman got into an altercation.
Got into an altercation.
You know, like they just tripped and fell against each other.
Or there was some sort of name-calling, cat-calling.
and then they pushed each other and you know like although the jury you know with self-defense means you have no culpability in the origin of the attack no culpability in the origin of the attack and therefore George Zimmerman according to the jury who heard what two and a half weeks of testimony from a wide variety of experts and thought deep and hard and received a huge amount of instruction on how to dispose of the case That they were just wrong,
you know, and people who are reading the media are just somehow right.
And it really is, read some of the stuff with a critical eye.
I have probably read 30 or 40 mainstream news articles on the trial and its aftermath.
And beforehand as well, of course, I read a bunch of it as well.
And in not a single one, Did they ever talk about Trayvon Martin's attack upon George Zimmerman, which the physical evidence, the forensics, the witness testimony, and Zimmerman's testimony, and so on, all corroborate.
And this is about as true as you're going to get without, like, head cam footage, you know, if George Zimmerman had been wearing one of those sports cams on his head, then maybe that would be slightly, you know, but this is about as true as things are going to get in this kind of situation.
And you can read huge amounts of media without ever, ever finding out that all the evidence and testimony points to the fact that Trayvon Martin attacked George Zimmerman and that George Zimmerman was defending himself against an unprovoked attack.
And it really is.
This is the kind of matrix that we live in.
This is a kind of anti-reality, brain-fogging nonsense.
And...
This is the degree to which, you know, a really horrible death.
I mean, this is a terrible, terrible event that occurred.
And to use this kind of stuff for race baiting, for money making, for political stuff.
I mean, everyone's talking about, oh, stand your ground laws are terrible.
They invite racial profiling and so on.
But of course, this had nothing to do with the Trayvon Martin case.
It was not invoked as a defense.
And it was impossible to achieve in reality.
Stand your ground had nothing to do With the Martin Zimmerman altercation.
It had nothing to do with it at all.
Stand your ground is sort of related.
So there's a castle defense.
The castle defense is if somebody comes into your house, you have to assume that they're going to – you are legally allowed in many places to assume that they're going to cause you great bodily harm or death.
And you don't have to wait for that to start.
If somebody comes into your house, breaks into your house and so on, then you can use force and self-defense without waiting for them to start attacking you instead of hostile defense.
And the standard of ground is that you have no obligation to retreat if somebody is attacking you, right?
So, you know, if somebody starts attacking you and in the past, if you had an option to retreat, then you would have a harder time claiming self-defense.
So the stand your ground is you don't have that obligation to retreat.
You can stand your ground and use force to defend yourself against an attacker.
You don't have the obligation to try and run away, to try and get away.
And there were a wide variety of reasons that that was implemented.
It doesn't hugely matter.
You don't know if the guy's got a knife he can throw or a gun.
So to try to run away is not always that great an idea because then you expose your back to your attacker and so on.
But none of this had anything to do Zimmerman had no possibility of retreating, again, according to all the evidence and testimony, eyewitness testimony, and so on.
He had no capacity to retreat because he had a 160-pound young man on his chest, sitting on his chest, and attacking him.
So the possibility of retreat didn't exist.
So everyone who brings up the Stand Your Ground stuff is just using the horrible death of a young man for political gain.
And that's about as low As you can go.
It's just horrendous.
It's just horrendous.
I mean, using a corpse for political gain is just, I mean, it's wretched.
Wretched beyond words.
Anyway, I don't want to spend the show on that, though certainly if you have questions or comments, I'm happy to hear them.
Thanks again to Mike for taking over.
Thanks again to James for his long stewardship of the show.
Let's move on to the first caller.
All right, Cornelius, you were up first.
Go ahead.
Hello?
Hi, Cornelius, how are you doing?
I'm doing pretty okay.
By the way, about my name, Cornelius, do you know which reference I'm making?
Is this your FDR stage name?
Yeah.
It's from Fight Club.
Oh, who's Cornelius in Fight Club?
I don't remember.
Yeah, it's the nickname, the main character gives himself to go to the reunions at the start of the film.
Oh, not the reunions, the support groups, right?
The support groups, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, and just to address something, I'm French-Canadian and I have some level of social anxiety, so you'll have to bear with me for my English.
Oh, listen, you're doing great.
And I must tell you, I mean, I get this comment a lot.
Oh, I wish my English was better.
The only languages I've ever been able to learn are computer languages, and I've learned like eight or ten of them.
I have tried to learn French.
I have tried to learn German, and it is not an enjoyable thing.
Some people, there was an old explorer named Sir Richard Burton, no relationship to Mr.
Elizabeth Taylor, but he learned like 18 or 20 languages or something like that.
Some people have this polyglot skill.
I have an intense admiration for people who fluently learn other languages, and your English sounds fantastic.
So, you know, you may feel like you're 10% below, but for me, you're 90% above my skill set, and so I hugely admire what you're able to do.
That, to me, is a kind of minor miracle, you know, like people who can play slow blues.
It's really pretty amazing, so go ahead.
I mainly wanted to talk about some personal issues.
A lot of it has got to do with my personal development.
First of all, it's a matter of mood swings and issues with my family, which I have started differing with.
And it's been a very bumpy road, and one of the incidents was a fight between me and my father.
We had a few fights together, and the last one happened a month ago, and I never spoke to him again, because I have a restraining order, since I basically went up and slapped him.
Oh, so he put a restraining order upon you?
Yeah, the police came to his house because I came here.
We started fighting verbally and things escalated and I ended up slapping him because I was so enraged at him, at his reaction and at his...
just the way he was ignoring me.
And it ended up just in the worst ways I could have imagined.
That's rough.
Yeah.
Now, you know, I mean, you know that you did, in that case, initiate physical aggression, right?
Yeah, well, I've been trying to, like, I don't know if I'm trying to overanalyze, but, of course, I've been trying to look at the emotional causes of my act of violence.
But, by the way, yeah, well, my father had used violence on me before.
It had not been so long ago, but yeah.
Well, is this your conclusion?
Do you think it needs further examination of the situation?
Well, no.
Parental relationships, of course, have so much history to them that if If you slapped your father, now this is not an egregious violation of the non-aggression principle.
I didn't shoot him in the kneecaps or something like that, but verbal aggression is still separate from physical aggression in terms of moral stuff, right?
Now, were you spanked or hit by your father when you were growing up?
I have no idea.
I have no recollection of my father physically assaulting me, but I'd say he was an enabler.
It was my mother who did so.
Right.
Now, parenting is one of these areas where I don't believe that if the father allows the mother to hit the children, I view the father as morally culpable as well.
And if the mother allows the father to hit the children, I view the mother as morally culpable as well.
And the reason for that is that if you see a crime in progress and you enable that crime, then you are aiding and abetting.
Aiding and abetting a crime is itself a crime.
Now, this is in the status paradigm, but I mean, I think that would be pretty true in any just legal system.
You know, if you drive the getaway car, as I've argued before, if you drive the getaway car, you are actually enabling the bank robbery.
I mean, you don't even go into the bank.
You're just driving a car, which is not illegal.
But the bank robbery is only occurring because you're willing to drive the car away.
If they didn't have a getaway driver, there'd be no bank robbery.
And so, if you are the co-parent of somebody who is harming a child, Then you are aiding and abetting, because you are a witness, and you are not doing anything to protect that helpless, independent child.
Now, tragically, of course, in a lot of countries, hitting children is not illegal.
I mean, here in Canada, I think the law is, from the age of 2 to 12, you can hit children, just not with implements and not in the face.
I guess that's what they call progress from the medieval world.
So, It may not be a crime if the child is not hit with implements and not hit on the face.
I mean, to me, there's still a moral crime.
It's just not a legal crime.
You know, in the same way you can have legal crimes like smoking marijuana, which are not moral crimes because there's no initiation of force involved.
But we tend to put our parents into different moral categories, but I don't really think that's true.
I think that co-parenting is...
The lowest common denominator.
Like, whatever the worst crime is that goes on, I feel that both parents, right?
But I would make the argument that both parents are morally responsible.
So sorry for that long sort of sidebar, but I just wanted to mention that.
That if your mother hit you now, did she hit you with implements?
Did she hit you on the face?
Or was it, I guess, in conformity with the general legal rules of hitting children in Canada?
It was in compliance with, yeah, I guess everything you could imagine.
That is every law.
But morally, it was quite repugnant.
It was quite terrifying.
It was aimed at creating an effect on me, on my conscience.
I really believe that she was trying to manufacture some sort of memories for me.
She wanted it to basically stick with me.
She ran after me in the house.
Well, I'm gonna tell you a specific incident.
She was getting a divorce with my father.
She was basically talking behind his back.
She was saying things about him to me and my sister in the house.
We could hear her voice no matter where we were.
So I came out of the bathroom.
I had just taken my shower and I simply sighted at her.
And she ran after me up the stairs to my room.
I'm sorry, you said you sighted at her.
I'm not sure what that means.
Yeah, I just don't know how to pronounce the word.
Well, can you give a description of the action?
I just went, you know.
Oh, sighed at her.
Sorry, sorry.
No problem, sighed at her.
I was just exasperated.
Just showed how...
Exasperated I was from the whole situation.
She took it as a sort of intimidation from me.
I know it couldn't possibly appear that way, but she started running after me to my room, screaming at me as usual, stepping on the floor as hard as she could.
As usual, the spanking was very violent.
It was very repetitive and when you see it happen on TV, it's always a controlled thing, a sort of disciplined thing, but it was an assault that was in compliance with law.
And how old were you at the time?
I was around 10 years old and it started earlier.
Was there any explanation or was it really just a kind of lashing out?
Yeah, there was never any explanation.
Even the parents who disciplined their children would tell you that they were incompetent because they just had nothing to say.
It was always just random when I was punished.
When I was confined to my room I never knew how long it would be.
Yeah.
I'm incredibly sorry for all of that.
I mean, I get this, of course, all the time.
People say, well, you see, spanking, you explain to the child beforehand, you sit them down, you give them a few swats, you hug them afterwards.
It's always portrayed as a very controlled, quote, reasonable or rational kind of thing.
You know, like you're just giving some medicine.
But boy, that's almost never how it plays out in the real world.
In the real world, the parents just lash out.
It's a pretext for something nastier.
Yeah, it's just a way of...
It's like the way people describe spanking.
Well, there's a difference between beating your child and a few light swats on the butt.
Well...
You know, if you think that spanking is a few light swats on the butt, then you don't really know what spanking is.
Spanking, of course, is behavior modification about essential and important issues.
What do people say about spanking?
Oh, you see, if your children get to run into traffic or grab a hot pot from the stove or bloody, bloody.
So it has to be something that is scary and behavior-modifying enough that it can save a child's life from running into the street or grabbing a hot pot or whatever.
And a few light swats aren't going to do that.
So it has to be something that is impressionable and scary and terrifying enough for the child to permanently alter their behavior to save their life.
But then, of course, people always just lie about it and say, well, it's just a few light swats and so on.
It's like, well, that's...
I mean, that's just not spanking.
That's not what spanking is.
Spanking has to change behavior about life and death situations.
At least that's the way it's always portrayed.
And therefore it has to be scary enough for the child to permanently change his or her behavior in life-threatening situations.
And so it has to be humiliating and painful and scary enough to permanently change a child's behavior.
And that is not a few light spots on the butt.
It's just not how it works.
It's not what it's designed for.
And so this is just...
People with a bad conscience can either face their conscience or lie about what they did.
And most people, of course, tend to the latter.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, well, to be honest, I feel kind of wretched at me slapping my father.
I mean, that's the reaction I'm getting right now.
I feel like I just denounced myself, and I never really felt terrible about it.
I just don't know.
Well, look, I mean, I think clearly that was not the right thing to do.
No.
I mean, I understand, you know, family history is volatile and so on.
And I, like, I really get that, right?
And I'm sure he was being really annoying or maddening or frustrating.
I get that.
But...
And, of course, the irony is that you would be hit repetitively as a child, and you couldn't call the cops because it was all legal, right?
But you slap your father once, and suddenly, right, the whole weight of the law comes pouring down on top of you, right?
I mean, that's a pretty ridiculous situation to be in, if that makes any sense, right?
So, you know, a helpless child, you get hit all over the place, but, you know, one slap for your dad as an adult, and suddenly, right, all the law.
It comes pouring down on you, right?
I mean, certainly when it comes to parents and you, you are much more sinned against than sinning, right?
Yeah.
You've been hit a lot more by your mom than in terms of hitting your dad, right?
And your dad condoned all of this, I assume, and certainly didn't intervene to stop it.
So, you know, like 500 hits against you, no law.
One hit against your dad, ah!
All the law in the world comes pouring down on top of you, right?
It's quite unfair.
Well, you know what is interesting about that, of course, and tragic, but what is interesting about that, and I think what you can learn from that, is that your father has no problem.
In fact, not only has no problem, he initiates an incredibly strong response to a family member hitting another family member, right?
Yeah.
Except when it was your mom hitting you, right?
So I think what this does is it says that your father has very high moral standards in that family members should not hit each other in any way, shape, or form.
In fact, one slap is dealt with not through talking about it or talking it out, but through bringing in the authorities and getting a restraining order.
That's how passionately strong your father feels about family members hitting each other.
Except with your mom and you, when you were a helpless, independent child, right?
That was fine.
And I think that's the, I don't know how to put it nicely, the values disparity that probably would be worth meditating upon.
Well, it's a great struggle to...
To understand how it's possible that such a break within the mind can occur in one of these people.
Why is it important to understand that?
Because, well, from a psychological standpoint, because it's interesting, but yeah.
Okay, but why?
I mean, let's just say it's hypocrisy.
Why is hypocrisy Important to understand.
Maybe it's just a personal thing because it's just that I can't picture myself really living that way.
I can't picture anyone living that way.
I know it exists, so there's no question to be asked about it.
Look, to me, It's just my opinion.
But to me, there are two basic kinds of personality structures in the world.
The first personality structure strives for consistency.
When inconsistency is perceived, discomfort results.
The discomfort continues until the consistency is achieved.
This is people who have a drive towards integrity.
They have a gravity well called integrity.
And, you know, it's a struggle.
I mean, but when somebody points out inconsistencies in values or behavior, or opposites in values and behavior, then there's, you know, like a sand, a grain of sand in an oyster.
There's an irritation.
There's a nagging sense.
The Jiminy Cricket conscience says, wait a minute.
You say this, but you do the opposite.
Or you say this, and you also say the opposite.
Or you do this, and you also do the opposite.
And there's a discomfort that is generated from that.
And then through that, this is how you progress as a human being.
There's discomfort with opposite values, with hypocrisy.
And unfortunately, these kinds of people remain quite rare.
Quite rare.
Quite rare.
Now, there's another type of person.
And the only thing that they're concerned about is advantage in the moment or surviving the moment.
And they will say whatever they need to say to gain advantage or to survive the moment.
And every moment is unconnected to every previous moment.
Right?
There's no continuity in their lives.
So, I mean, like you and I, I think we probably have some similarities this way.
So our life is like a stream, right?
The stream is all directly connected to what came before.
There's a current, there's leaves floating down it, there's fish swimming around, crayfish and all this kind of stuff, right?
And, you know, pollution upstream flows down.
So our stream is all connected and there's continuity.
But that's not how most people operate.
Most people operate without connection to the past and without connection to any prior statements.
And what they do is they conform to whatever gives them the most power in the moment or to whatever helps them avoid the most consequences in the moment.
And whatever helps them survive the moment is what they say.
And of course they'll say it as principles and so on, but they use principles the way that you and I would use an oar in a boat, right?
When we just use the oar to row someplace and then we throw the oar in the bottom of a boat, we don't carry it with us.
It's not like an obligation to be...
We don't use the oar in a boat.
We only use...
Sorry, we don't use the oar in a car or in an airplane.
We only use the oar in a boat.
And...
There's just whatever will give them advantage in the moment, whatever gives them satisfaction in the moment.
And fundamentally, it's all self-indulgent and incredibly destructive to everyone around them, right?
And so, you know, when your parents have power over you and if they are this way inclined, then they say, well, you've got to tell me the truth.
The truth is, you know, whenever you've got information that they need or want, you say, tell me the truth.
Truth is a value.
Truth is a virtue, right?
But then if you're a kid and you're in some social gathering and you say something, you know, about Aunt Edna's wart or something that embarrasses your parent, then they get angry at you and they say, that's rude.
Okay, it's true.
You did say the truth.
She does have a very prominent and hairy wart on her chin.
That is, everybody's been talking about it behind her back for years.
She won't get it dealt with.
But you, when you talk about it as a child, you're being rude.
So now truth is not a value.
So when the parent wants some information from you, they'll say, Truth is a virtue.
Honesty is a virtue.
Tell me the truth.
But then when you tell the truth about something that is uncomfortable for your parents, then they will say, well, that's rude.
You're being impolite.
How selfish.
Think about other people's feelings.
Okay, so truth is not a value.
And then they'll say, well, you've got to take responsibility for your actions.
If you hit that boy, you've got to confess and you've got to take your punishment.
Don't lie.
If you hit someone, don't minimize.
Don't lie.
Don't make excuses.
Okay, and then you become an adult and you confront them about spanking.
And they say, well, it was right.
And then when you prove to them that, you know, it kind of wasn't right, you know, both scientifically and morally, then they'll say, well, I was doing the best I could.
And they start to make excuses and start to minimize and start to avoid exactly what they punished you for as a child.
Right?
And you can say, well, this is hypocritical and so on.
But I don't really know What that means.
Because for people to be hypocritical, they almost have to have integrity as some kind of value.
You know, it's like calling a dandelion fluff confused because it changes direction when the wind changes.
Most people are just trying to maximize winning in the moment and minimize loss in the moment.
And sure, they use principles because principles are very powerful to do that, but not because they have any respect for principles or not because you can hold them to their principles.
But merely because principles help you win a disagreement in the moment.
So parents say, well, I did the best I could with the knowledge that I had.
But if you had tried making that excuse when you were a kid about failing a spelling test, your mom says, you've got a spelling test in a week, you've got to study.
You say, I'll get to it.
I'll get a spelling test in five days, you've got to study, man.
I'll get to it.
Got a spelling test in two days.
One day.
Spelling test tomorrow.
Spelling test today.
Go do well.
Did you study?
Kind of.
And you go fail your spelling test, your parents say.
You failed that spelling test.
How come you failed that?
I must have reminded you 50 times you had to study.
Why did you fail that spelling test?
Why are you getting mad at me?
I did the best I could with the knowledge that I had.
I just didn't happen to have much knowledge about the spelling test because I didn't study.
And would they then say, well, okay, sure, you did the best you could with the knowledge that you had, so that's perfectly understandable.
I'm sorry that I got upset with you.
Good job.
No.
But when it comes to parents who hit or parents who yell or parents who abandon or neglect, and they say, well, I did the best I could with the knowledge I had.
It's like, well, sorry, did you not know you were going to have a child?
Did you not know that parenting was something that you should study about?
Can you point to me the books that you read about parenting that said that yelling and screaming and hitting and Neglecting was great.
And they say, well, you know, I didn't really read any books about parenting.
It's like, okay, well, when I was a kid and I had a spelling test that I didn't study for, you got mad at me for being unprepared.
What's more important, a spelling test or the molding and shaping of an entire human consciousness from pre-birth to adulthood?
Is it more important to be prepared for a spelling test when I'm six or is it more important to be prepared for parenting as an adult?
I mean, I have lots of theories about parenting.
I still read tons of books on parenting.
I kept them all.
I'll point them out to Izzy.
When she gets older, she'll say, well, what informed your parenting choices?
Well, there were these books, these theories, these approaches, my own reasoning, my own moral arguments.
And, you know, I'll tell her about that even now.
She says, why are you doing this?
Well, this is my theory.
We'll have a discussion about it.
By the by, it's just a cute story the other day.
She was in the back of the car.
She looked pretty serious.
I said, are you sad?
And she said, no, Daddy, I'm just resting my smile.
And so I just wanted to sort of point that out, that trying to figure out people who only conform to winning in the moment, to getting what they want, to satisfying their urges in the moment, so parents angry, they just lash out and hit you.
And then later, when you point out that that was wrong and bad, they'll just make up some other nonsense to escape that conversation and to win in that particular moment.
And then if some other thing comes up, they'll just say whatever they need to say to win in that particular moment, whether it's fogging or whether it's getting aggressive or whether it's becoming critical or whether it's bursting into tears.
All they're trying to do is win the moment.
Not have integrity, not have consistency, not have predictability, not have values, not have virtue, but win in the moment.
Now, trying to figure out what makes people tick who only want to win in the moment is like trying to figure out the flight path of a dandelion fluff.
In a storm.
You can't predict it because all the dandelion fluff is doing is responding to the wind.
There's no flight path.
There's no flying.
There's no what I would consider consciousness and certainly no conscience.
There's only winning in the moment and you can submerge yourself into the quote psychology of people who are trying to win in the moment and I doubt you'll ever come up from air for air and I doubt you'll ever see anything down there because it's all just about winning in the moment and let me just sort of finish off by saying there's one there's one quick test That you can do to find out if people are like this in your life.
It's a quick test.
Again, this is all just my idiot amateur theories, but, you know, empirical tests are very important.
People who just try and win in the moment lack empathy, I think, fundamentally.
Because winning in the moment almost always means at the expense of someone else.
And if you prefer to win in the moment at the expense of other people, particularly your children, then clearly you lack empathy.
Because the harm you're doing to others in defending your own inconsistent actions is very damaging to them.
So feel like empathy.
So the best way to figure out if people only want to win in the moment or whether they have any integrity is to say, if you have an issue, let's say with your mom, if you have an issue with your mom, it could be anyone in your life, we're just talking about moms and dads here, it's quite easy.
All you have to do is say, mom, it's really important.
For me, it's really important that we have a conversation about spanking, but I'm not going to pester you about it.
I'm not going to bother you about it.
I'm going to let it sit with you, and when you're ready, we can have that conversation.
I'm just telling you that it's really important, but I'm never going to bring it up again.
I'm just going to leave it with you, and when you're ready to talk about it, we'll talk about it.
Now, let's go out and have a fun day, or let's go to the movies, or whatever it is, right?
Just tell the person that it's important to you, but you're not going to nag them about it.
You're not going to bother them about it, and when they're ready, Then they come and talk to you.
And you just leave it there.
Now, if the person has integrity and has empathy, then they will remember that you really want to talk about this.
And they will think about it.
And they will plan a time.
And they will prepare themselves.
And they will maybe read books or look into research or whatever it is.
But then they will come back to you and initiate that conversation because it's important to you.
And they have empathy for what is important to you.
And they're willing to do things that are uncomfortable because they're important to you.
And then, yay!
You know, woohoo!
You know, that's fantastic.
That's significant evidence towards the possession of conscience and empathy.
Ah, but if on the other hand you say, it's really important to me that we talk about X even though I know it's uncomfortable to you, but I will let you determine when, and I will let you bring it up, and I'm never going to bring it up again.
Now, if it never comes up again, well, I think that's your answer.
That's somebody who only wants to win in the moment and is not willing to do something uncomfortable for them for the sake of your peace of mind.
Tells you, I think, everything you need to know about their level of empathy, about their level of sympathy, and I would argue really about their level of love and their level of integrity.
And, you know, neither one of these is 100%.
But it's not 0% either.
Significant pieces of information.
As long as we nag people, then we're like central planners in an economy.
We don't know if they're responding to us because they care about us or because we're nagging them.
This is why nagging is so destructive.
Nagging is always a way of avoiding the truth about the other person's level of compassion and curiosity and integrity.
We nag because we're afraid that if we don't nag, we're going to get the truth about the other person.
And their level of care for us.
And so that would be my suggestion about ways to approach this.
And I certainly would strongly advise against trying to figure out patterns of behavior in people who only want to win in the moment.
Sorry, end of speech.
Well, it's very interesting.
And it's got a lot to do with my parents, The kind of life you've described that these people have.
And I think my parents are very far down that path.
After having lived for so long with them, I really don't think they can come back from it.
I think they've pretty much lost themselves down that path.
Yeah, sorry to hear that.
That is a pretty terrifying path.
Another way of telling it too is if somebody's really angry, let's say your mom is really angry at you and then the phone rings and her anger almost immediately vanishes and she becomes sweet as sugar to whoever's on the other line of the phone, that's another example of somebody who's just trying to win in the moment, right?
Yes.
Well, yeah, that's another thing she always did.
They used the, we did the best we could argument Everybody did.
It was so popular in my family.
It's almost like my mother was a bipolar sometimes.
I don't know what kind of metaphor I can make.
It's like she had these extreme mood swings, but it was just a great manipulation, a great distortion of her own She just doesn't have any personality.
I think that's another thing with those people.
There's just a sort of facade of neutrality, of tense neutrality.
I mean, these people just don't know what to do with their lives.
They're like chameleons too, I believe.
Yeah, except chameleons, of course, do what they do as a defensive thing.
I mean, this is a defensive thing, but it's really at the expense of other people's sanity, particularly their children's mental health.
It's very damaging to others to constantly be maneuvering, to be in the right in the moment.
It's very disturbing for kids.
And it's really hard to respect people like that.
Well, speaking of facades, I thought I could dive under the facade that I've been talking about since the start of the show.
Like what led up to the emotional issues I have today, just briefly.
Yeah, that's something I wanted to talk about.
Because it didn't come out of the blue when I slapped my father.
There was so much repressed anger that was brought up in me.
And I don't know if my father knew it or if my father knew it or not.
But I think it's something I, as a child, I wanted to do for so long just to assert myself.
And it just came out the wrong way.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, for sure.
And certainly, if you are in a relationship with someone that you have the urge to be physically violent with, that's not a good place to be.
I couldn't get out, but yeah, I know it was the right thing to do, to just get out.
Yes, yeah.
I mean, I think that's not controversial in any way, shape or form, that if you're in a relationship with someone Where you feel a strong urge towards physical violence, that that's not a good relationship to be in until that problem is resolved in one way or another.
So, like, in a weird way, your dad is actually kind of doing the right thing.
I mean, I don't know about the restraining order and the cops and all that kind of stuff, but if you are so frustrated by your father that you have the urge to physically hit him, well, that's obviously...
I mean, good heavens.
I mean, that's...
If you sort of think about that, it's sort of a husband-wife scenario, wife-husband scenario.
I mean, that's not good, right?
I hope that you'll get some therapy about this and talk to a therapist about this.
But yeah, clearly that's not where you want any kind of relationship to be.
It's where you have to kind of white-knuckle your way to not hit people.
Well, I've been seeing a therapist for at least a year now.
And about the violent impulses I have towards my father, it was a bit terrifying to see myself think about those things.
A lot of time in my apartment, I've had some episodes of uncontrollable rage, especially after speaking to him on the phone and seeing how I'm I was sort of trying to argument with him.
I was bringing myself down to his level and I just felt so manipulated when I was being hung up on the face, when he hung in my face.
I just threw through things.
Well, sorry, and the other thing I would suggest too is, I don't want to tell you what your experience was, of course, but what struck me from the very beginning of your story was that You said that you were enraged by his ignoring you or not responding to you?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I think there's a logical case to be made that neglect is worse than anything for a child.
That neglect is worse...
than anything for a child because most children will act out in negative ways to gain parental attention rather than be ignored like they would rather have negative attention than no attention which means that for a child no attention is the worst thing and we also know of course because children will submit even to sexual abuse Rather than confess and risk losing their parents or being neglected by their parents or being abandoned by their
parents.
And biologically, it makes sense, right?
If your parents become indifferent to you as a child, biologically, they'll stop taking care of you and feeding you and you die, right?
So I just wanted to point out that if neglect is the worst thing for children to experience, and I think it is, if neglect is the worst thing for children to experience, then if your father was ignoring you and you acted out in a negative way, In order to get his attention, and you sure did get his attention, then that follows that particular paradigm, right?
That follows that particular pattern that we would rather have negative attention from our parents than no attention.
Right.
Listen, I'm so sorry.
I know this is a big topic, but I want to make sure that we get onto the other callers today.
I'm glad that you're talking to a therapist.
I'm incredibly sorry about what's happening to your family.
I'm so sorry.
What a mess.
What a difficult and Tragic situation that is to be in.
I'm so sorry that this is the maze you have to find your way out of.
I mean, there are good things that come out of trying to find your way out of these kinds of mazes, so it's not all negative, but this is not exactly how we want to grow and learn.
So I'm really sorry about all of that.
Well, thank you, Stéphane, for all the truth that you brought to the world so far.
I think it's of great value.
And I'm looking forward to donate when I have the possibility to do so.
Well, I appreciate that.
Don't rush.
Pay your therapist first.
I think that that's the most important thing.
I would say this in general, certainly.
I don't want anybody to go hungry or to not get the things that they need.
In your case, I would save your money for therapy.
And if you want to donate at some point, you know, a year or two or three down the road, that's fantastic.
But the most important thing is to take care of yourself during this incredibly challenging time in your life.
If you're desperate to do something for FDR, you can share some videos or whatever it is, stuff that doesn't cost you any money, but really, really focus on taking the resources you have and applying them to help you navigate this incredibly challenging time in your life.
So I appreciate that thought, I really do, but I would be much happier if you paid your therapist first.
Well, I'm glad for the sympathy that I just received, which comes as a change.
Because I've really never had any sympathy in this whole thing.
I've been seen as a monster.
I think it's hypocrisy because, I mean, who doesn't have violent impulses?
People are going to vote for governments who point guns at people, and that's the only reason why they stay there.
I don't think people know who they are, so they can't really assert any sort of behavior.
But I'm very happy about this conversation.
I think it was very truthful for a change.
Well, I'm very glad for that.
And, you know, parents define the relationship.
They just do.
I mean, now that I've been a parent for four and a half years, I'm even more clear about that than I was beforehand.
It's something I always believed.
But parents define the relationship.
And if there's dysfunction in the relationship, I mean, just look to the parents first.
Anyway, thank you so much for your call.
Wish you the very best of luck and I'm very glad that you're going to at least not be in a situation where you're tempted to violence in the near future and I would certainly recommend avoiding relationships where that occurs.
So thank you so much and Mike, who do we have up next?
Alright Tim, you're up next.
Go ahead Tim.
Hey Steph, I've got a question about parenting as it relates to being a new parent.
Funny enough, I actually My wife and I met you at a convention in Dallas about a year ago.
And I believe one of us had casually mentioned, hey, we were thinking about being parents.
And at the time, my wife was actually pregnant with twins.
We didn't know at the time.
Oh, really?
Oh, yeah.
So I actually met four people.
Actually, one of the babies is in the room with us right now.
Oh, my goodness.
Twins.
Oh, man.
Oh, man.
You know, I just tell you, I mean, I think because we weren't the youngest parents on the planet, part of us was like, hey, you know, if we have twins, that'd be kind of cool.
Another part of us was like, oh, if we have twins, ah!
Yeah, it wasn't even on our radar, you know.
But anyway, so it's awesome.
But one of the reasons I'm calling in today is the twins, they're almost six months.
They'll be six months at the end of this month.
We went into this as far as sleep and nighttime activities where we were very against not picking our children up when they were crying.
We've had a lot of family members, you know, just let them cry it out and they'll get over it and they won't remember any of this.
And all that kind of stuff.
And so kind of one of the debates that we've had is, you know, as they're getting older now, their sleeping has kind of even declined.
I think one night I counted, I think we got up like 31 times between 11 and 5 or 6 a.m.
or something.
And so, but, you know, some weeks are better, you know, some nights are better, some nights are just horrible.
So I know that you dealt, I think very briefly, you had mentioned in a podcast or something about sleep training.
And I'm kind of more, I mean, I can get all the advice I want from my pediatrician or from parenting books.
But really, like philosophically, we're having trouble with kind of, you know, doing anything other than, you know, what we're currently doing.
And just kind of wanted to get some of your thoughts on that, because I know that you had mentioned you had kind of gone down that path at one time.
Yeah, we did go down.
I think my daughter was eight or nine months old.
It was the same kind of issue, just getting up dozens of times a night.
It was not good for her to get that little sleep.
It was not good for my wife.
I would get up sometimes too, but it was mostly her.
It was not good for her.
So, of course, you know, we did the research and we got what's called a sleep doula in, a sleep expert in to sort of give us feedback and all that.
We did the research and what we came up with or what we sort of understood was that, you know, some children will settle in and learn how to sleep and some children won't.
Now, if a child doesn't learn how to sleep, in other words, if they don't learn how to self-soothe themselves back to sleep, then they can kind of get addicted to the parent coming and And that association is then, well, I'm awake, and they kind of panic because they don't know how to get themselves back to sleep without the parent coming in.
And if there are sleep problems for children, which aren't dealt with, in other words, if the children don't learn how to self-soothe themselves back to sleep, then the studies that I read pointed out that you can actually trace these sleep problems all the way to college age, right?
So if the If the children don't learn how to self-soothe, or the infants or the babies don't learn how to self-soothe themselves back to sleep, then their sleep remains disturbed, and children need sleep in the same way that they need food.
Particularly the REM sleep is essential for the developing brain.
You understand?
I'm just talking about this all amateur hour as usual.
And so...
And we didn't want that...
For her, we didn't want that for us.
But primarily it was for Izzy that we didn't want her to go through life with sleep problems.
Because, I mean, that's pretty rough.
And so, of course, it's her job as parents to make sure that she gets what she needs.
And sometimes that's uncomfortable for her.
Right?
So she has her immunizations.
Those are uncomfortable for her.
She tries new vegetables.
That's uncomfortable for her.
If she were, you know, throwing up violently, we may have to take her to hospital and have her receive liquids intravenously.
That would be uncomfortable for her, but that would be necessary for her health.
We take her to the dentist.
That is uncomfortable for her, but it's necessary for her oral health, oral hygiene, and so on.
We floss her teeth, which is uncomfortable for her.
You sort of get the pattern, right?
So you can do things which are uncomfortable for your child if...
A certain number of criteria have been met, which we don't have to get into in great detail here.
But we did, after trying literally everything and having experts in and reading every book we could get our hands on, we did sleep train her.
And she's great.
She sleeps fine.
She's happy.
She's secure.
She's connected.
And now she sleeps really well.
And that is a huge relief for us because we You know, we need to give her sleep in the same way we need to give her food and medical attention when necessary.
So, it was, of course, a horrible decision.
And it's nothing that we took lightly.
And, you know, we certainly did try everything under the sun.
And I think, like most parents, we were like, oh, you know...
So, it's uncomfortable for us if she gets up ten times a night or whatever.
But, you know, we'll muscle through it and so on.
But...
It actually also became, you know, we were so sleep deprived that I was not convinced that we were being great parents when we were that sleep deprived.
And, you know, other things too, like, you know, sleep deprivation for parents makes driving more dangerous and your reaction times are slower and, you know, all that kind of stuff.
So there was a wide variety of reasons that we did it and she cried when she was being sleep trained and then she learned that she could get herself back to sleep.
And she did.
And now, of course, if she's upset at night, we'll go and comfort her.
And because that's not, you know, 10 times a night, but, you know, maybe once every two or three nights.
So, and we all always, when she goes to sleep, you know, I will, sometimes my wife and I will both, mostly we'll both do it.
You know, we'll go and sit with her, we'll read with her, we'll chat about the day.
And she cuddles up with us, and we don't leave until she's fallen asleep.
And that's just great family time, and it's a great time where we're not too busy with other things, and we can actually have some really great chats and tell some great stories and all that.
I'm currently reading to Izzy Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, and she's got lots of questions.
I mean, I'm obviously translating the language a little bit on the fly, but she's just loving the book.
Mr.
Bingley!
She finds a very funny name.
So, again, I can't advise you in any professional context, but I can certainly relate to you the decisions that we made.
I was very sorry that that decision had to be made in that way, but I certainly think it was the right decision, and I was sorry for the discomfort that it caused my daughter, but she began to get the sleep that she needed, that her brain needed for its development, and her body needed for its development as well.
And now she's in the 85th percentile in terms of height and the 50th percentile in terms of weight.
Or as the nurse said, she's tall and skinny.
Every girl's dream.
So does that help at all?
Oh, yes, yes.
That helps a lot.
And I think part of it is just the fact that as a new parent, especially with young infants, you get a lot of advice, a lot of unsolicited advice.
And a lot of times A lot of the advice that you get is centered around how to make a parent's life easier.
To me, people do the cried out method in the first two weeks of bringing a baby home.
That's obviously not something that's good for the baby.
We're kind of in that middle zone.
Six months, do we hold out for a couple more months?
Should we tough it out?
Are we not picking up our baby because it bothers us and not that it's a harmful thing to them?
You kind of get into all this gray zone.
You can't, in a sustained way, be getting up 30 times at night.
Right, right.
That can't be good for them, you know, regardless.
You know, this is an extreme example, but I was reading in the Michael Jackson trial, and I tell myself it's for the show, so it's not celebrity gossip.
It's research for True News, man.
But, you know, he was going to die because he wasn't getting any REM sleep.
Like, he had these, I don't know, god-awful horse tranquilizers or something that apparently this is all what is said in the trial.
I have no idea if it's true or not.
But the doctor was saying, like, he was just going to die.
Because without REM sleep, you just die.
So, I'm not saying this is your situation or anything like that, but it doesn't...
You know, that's not good for your health to be getting up 31 times a night.
I mean, that's how they break political prisoners, is they continually interrupt their sleep.
I mean, that's not great.
Now, of course, if your kid's sick, you know, then that's a sort of manageable short...
Period of time.
Like if Izzy gets cold or whatever, then a couple of nights she'll be waking up a lot upset and sneezing and nose blocked and all that kind of stuff.
So, you know, we'll go and get her at that point because that's sort of a short, manageable time.
But if the trend is that it's either staying the same or getting worse, then I think that the whole family needs to get some sleep.
And if the kids are unable...
And again, I don't know what the right age to do it at is.
I have no idea of the expertise.
You can sort of read up More on that.
But I do think that you need to protect your children's developing brain and they need that REM sleep.
They need that solid sleep.
I hugely sympathize.
This is not a decision that any parent wants to be faced with.
I mean, we all want our kids, we don't, you know, first couple of months, absolutely, you know, wake up and, you know, we then want them to sort of get the hang of sleeping and so on.
But if they're not, I certainly feel that it was a regrettable necessity for us and it has worked out in a very positive way.
My daughter now can sleep 10-12 hours at a stretch and that of course is great.
I mean the other thing, and this sort of happens to parents as well, the question sort of becomes at what point is the family too focused on the kids?
In other words, do you and your wife have any kind of relationship outside of taking care of the babies?
And that, of course, is one of the great challenges of becoming a parent is the degree to which your entire focus just becomes reoriented around these black holes of need and resource requirements called babies.
It is important that you and your wife have some kind of relationship.
And if all you are is exhausted because of the kids, and you've got twins and that's understandable and so on, but I don't think it's particularly healthy for the children as a whole as they develop if all they see are the parents facing the children and never the parents facing each other.
So certainly my wife and I have been quite strong in reminding Izzy that there's times where we need adult time to chat.
Because she needs also to learn about relationships, not just from people relating to her, but watching adults relate to each other.
So I would also recommend that you remember that the reason that the kids are there is because of your relationship with your wife.
And that relationship needs to be maintained and needs to be sustained.
Because the great temptation is to fall into just taking care of the kids or talking about the kids or, you know, having – that's it, right?
And I would really recommend – the sleep thing has to do with that as well.
One of the reasons that I wanted Isabella to be able to go to sleep is that I wanted to be able to have a conversation with my wife that lasted more than eight minutes before I had to go and take care of Izzy.
And it's okay to be selfish about your relationship with your wife because that is the foundation of why there are kids there to begin with, if that makes any sense.
Oh, yes.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
This is great.
And just one little quick question.
I know you're writing a new book on parenting.
Any idea when you're going to be done with that or is that going to be kind of a project over a period of years?
No, not years.
In fact, I've got the first chapter or two done, and I'm going to start releasing that to donators to get feedback.
Because there are lots of other parents out there.
I, you know, I scarcely claim to have any monopoly.
I've got some theories, and I've put some thought in it, and I've got some experience.
But, you know, there are other parents out there who have experience with sibling issues that, because we have an only child, I can't, other than through my own childhood, I can't really speak much to.
So I'm going to release that through to the donators who are interested to get feedback.
To get feedback, but I'm gonna try and get that done over the next week or so.
All right.
Well, thank you.
Thank you very much and congratulations.
I know that it's a hell of a challenge.
Like, I can't even imagine.
I can't even imagine.
But, boy, talk about getting it all done at once.
At least that's you.
I don't know if you're gonna have more kids or whatever, but congratulations on that.
My very best to you both.
And, you know, I would certainly make a very strong case that if you listen to this show, Your kids are incredibly lucky to have you as parents.
And so, you know, good choice for them on when to release from the stork's legs over the chimney of your house.
Good job.
All right.
Take care, man.
Best of luck.
All right, Ben, you're the next caller today.
Go ahead.
Morning, Steph.
Good morning.
So I came across a subject that I believe to be true, but conflicts with something that you've said in a previous podcast.
Go ahead.
Next.
I'm sorry.
We have all the time we have for you today.
Go ahead.
So I've been listening in order, and so I'm up into the 700s.
And so 707 said, speculators are good.
And actually, as you described, you described a scenario, and I actually believe that that's true, that as described, basically...
Speculators accumulate goods when they're cheap, and they make them available when the supply is scarce, so they even out supply and even out price, and I agree with that.
So I asked Michael if the subject had come up in the 2,000 cents podcast, and he said the subject has not yet been beaten to death, so I figured I'd give that a shot.
So, I guess I should probably start off by saying that I'm not a professional.
I'm familiar with stocks, and I've bought one of those home study courses on commodities, and it got as far as doing some paper trades and lost money on paper every single time.
So, I've not actually traded in commodities, but commodities is this parallel that I wanted to talk about.
So, the difference...
Oil is the most...
It's an extreme example, so I'll use that.
But the difference, the way that speculation works now, is instead of accumulating the goods when the price is low and then making them available when the price is high, is that speculators today, they don't take delivery.
There is no storage.
There is no accumulating when it's low and making it available when it's high.
In 1983, the New York Mercantile Exchange added the commodities, and prior to that, oil traded in a tight band, like $10 to $20 for like ever.
The only exceptions were when there was a true world shortage, like a war or something like that.
So even today, speculators do provide value in Creating liquidity for the market.
So the oil producers, whenever they want to sell, there's always a buyer.
And the refineries, whenever they want to buy a contract, there's someone willing to sell it to them.
So they do add the liquidity to the market, which has some value.
Now, can I just ask you to, and I appreciate the background, but if I could ask you to get to the part where I'm wrong, that's always the juiciest part for me.
So go ahead.
The point that I have the problem with is that speculation is bad in this scenario because speculators now control 70% of the market.
So it's broken the market.
There is no tie between the availability of the good and the price.
Well, wait a sec.
Sorry, sorry.
You're saying speculators control 70% of the market and they've broken the market.
But why are speculators not part of the market?
Like, you sort of sliced the market into speculators and non-speculators.
And you said, well, speculators aren't part of the market.
But they're buying and selling based upon anticipation of price and availability.
I'm not sure why they wouldn't be part of the market.
Well, okay.
So, well, the commodity, though, has changed from...
Actual oil to contracts.
And so the shortage, the contracts do, there are shortages of contracts.
For example, when a news item comes out that, you know, war in the Middle East or whatever, then the price shoots way up.
And everybody knows the price shoots way up because speculators now are 70% of the market.
So all the speculators know that the other speculators buy on news.
And so Any even rumor of news can shoot the price way up, while since I think the latest statistics show that actual oil, the demand is just kind of now catching up with where we were in 07, and supply is.
Every out-of-the-ground oil tank is full.
The Saudis stopped producing because there's no one to take the oil.
So there's, not only is all the supply maxed out, but there's excess capacity.
So normally...
Oh wait, sorry.
Are you saying that the price doesn't actually reflect market conditions because of speculation?
That's the part that is broken, yes.
The way that speculation...
Well, but sorry, again, I don't claim any economic expertise, but price is perception, isn't it?
I mean, you say that there's some price that should be different from what people are willing to pay for something, but I don't think there is such a thing as price that's different from what people are willing.
Price is something that is determined in the moment of transaction, and there's no platonic ideal price that should be higher or lower.
I mean, it's just simply what people Are you kidding me?
Quarter million dollars almost for some crappy old two-bit computer?
Or it's like I was talking to a friend of mine who made thousands and thousands of dollars on signed baseball cards.
Now, dear God in heaven, if there's not something that's useless on this planet, it's signed baseball cards.
I mean what a load of nonsense.
I mean it's a picture with some ink on it.
I mean what the hell value does that have to anyone?
But the reality, of course, is it has huge value to people and they're willing to pay thousands of dollars for a particular signed baseball card.
Now, you can say, well, that's not curing cancer, that's not feeding the hungry, that's not building houses for the reigned upon.
I mean, it's just a stupid baseball card.
And then I think, wait a minute, what if there was a Freddie Mercury baseball card that was, ah!
You know, first of all, he'd look great in those pants.
And secondly, you know, a signed picture of Freddie Mercury, I think that'd be pretty cool.
What I'm pointing out is I don't know that there's price that exists.
I don't think there is a price that exists outside of what people are willing to pay for stuff.
I think the problem comes from government regulations that force all these transactions through these markets.
I think the single point that is relevant is that So when prices shoot way up, that's a signal to consumers to cut consumption as far as you can until supply increases, right?
So then this huge price encourages more production, so then you get the supply up and then the price comes back down.
That hasn't happened.
So we've got the supply is maxed out, the demand is zero, and the price is still at record highs.
The prices right now, Sorry to interrupt, but if it's government regulations that you have a problem with, which I would certainly agree with, then your issue is not with speculation.
Your issue is with regulation, right?
Effectively, but it shows up.
So right now, the speculators really aren't even the bad guys because it's not like they're making a ton of money.
And this is, I think, what's confusing for a lot of people is because the speculators will say, well, look, for every winner, there's a loser.
And that's true.
Speculators don't care where the price is at.
They just want it to move, and they want to be on the right side of that move.
The thing is, the way that the regulation has forced everybody into this market, people are paying, people have to actually, the consumers, the refineries, have to pay this market price that isn't really for the oil, it's for these contracts.
It's like somebody's playing a game in the other room when you're at an auction and you want to buy some good, and they come out and say, oh, well, no, our card game resulted in this number, so that's what you have to pay.
Right.
And so, again, I would focus on not the people who are profiting from a legal environment, but from the legal environment itself.
And the reason I say that is that you simply – somebody who's a speculator – I mean, at least they're speculating with their own money, with their own reputation, based upon their own pay.
The regulators, of course.
I mean, regulation is one of these things that is so crippling to the economy.
It's such a hidden tax, right?
I mean, I was reading this report the other day that said if regulations had remained the same from 1948, I think it was, to the present, then America's GDP would not be $15 trillion in change, but rather $53 trillion in change.
Now, imagine what people could do.
With, you know, four or so times the amount of money that they had, right?
So instead of the average income being whatever it is, 30K, right?
Imagine if it was over $100,000 a year of after-tax income that people would have.
I mean, there'd be no involuntary poverty.
There'd be enough money for people to pay for whatever schooling they wanted for their kids.
We'd have enough money as a society to put the right kind of pollution controls in because I'm sure that's what people would want.
I mean, almost all social problems would be Would be solved.
There would be enough money for one person to work, the other person to stay home with kids, which would be much to the betterment of society.
And that's just regulations, let alone all the other crap the government has piled on to kill the economy.
I mean, so having, you know, three, four, five times the amount of money in your pocket with nothing else changing other than, you know, it wasn't like the government didn't regulate any parts of the economy in 1948 if it had just stayed at that level.
Which has killed two to three percentage points of growth every year.
I mean, people would be...
They'd be so rich they felt they'd won the lottery.
You know, like, so if you're getting four times the amount of income, then basically, you know, from the average, you're looking at gaining $60,000 or $70,000 a year.
Now, if you're looking at gaining $60,000 or $70,000 a year, and you're looking...
Like, if you were to get that money, then...
That would require that you invest, you know, $800,000, $900,000 at a couple of percentage points of return.
So it's like everyone just got three-quarters of a million dollars and then got some money off of that.
Probably more, actually.
Probably closer to a million, 1.2 million, because, you know, 10% is pretty high to get a consistent return on investment.
It would be like everyone won over a million dollars if there just had been less regulation.
What would that do to our society?
You'd say, well, let's privatize this.
They'd say, well, fine.
Privatize it because people can afford it because they've got so much damn money.
Wealth is what breeds quality and makes voluntarism look more accessible to people.
There'd be so much money in the economy that social problems would be vastly diminished.
To the point where we could continue to shrink government and get even more money.
So anyway, I just want to point that out.
You can focus on the speculators all you want.
But to me, that's like saying, well, you know, those rat bastard capitalists who take government contracts.
Well, unfortunately, if you're the CEO of a company, you have a legal obligation to your shareholders to make sound business decisions to maximize your income.
You do not have the legal obligation to take a stand based on voluntarism And undermine or destroy the value of the company by refusing to take government contracts.
That's actually a breach of your fiduciary responsibility to your employees, to your shareholders, to the company as a whole.
So you can get mad at the military-industrial complex, but really it's just the power of the state that you should, I think, really be focusing on to make sure that you don't muddy the issues.
You know, some guy strangles a cat.
There's no point getting angry at the flies eating the cat.
I mean, that's what the flies do.
But I think focusing on the guy who strangles the cat is the important thing.
Yeah, and again, like I said, speculators aren't necessarily the bad guys.
It's just the way that it has been set up that it is the excess speculation.
Oddly enough, it was even the Saudis when they asked why is the price so high.
That was their answer, which it seemed kind of funny that they actually admitted to it because most of the time the speculators, they won't tell you speculation is a problem because they're making money off of it.
But I'm confident that if the speculation were reduced to just, you know, speculators could, I don't know, say just be part of an actual delivery, you know, with either a refinery or a producer, that the price would drop by like 75%.
So, yeah, it is the state regulation.
It's not specifically, I don't think speculators are bad guys.
I don't have a problem with speculation.
I speculate myself.
But yeah, it is a real problem.
Particularly with oil, it impacts the entire economy.
And the Arab Spring, I mean, that was all about the other commodity prices of foodstuffs.
Yeah, wheat and so on.
Yeah, people couldn't eat.
Yeah, well, when your budget for food is like 75% of your income because you're going to buy a bag of grain for the month, And that doubles in price.
Now, there's not enough money, even if you spent all of it on food, so the people were just starving.
And so, I mean, the excess speculation, just the way the markets are set up, really messes things up, and that was my point.
Yeah, no, I mean, it's so weird, the degree to which we live in this artificial Franken-world.
And people, they don't see it, they don't understand it.
You know, why do you have two parties in America?
Well, I mean, the Democrats, I mean, talk about the Republican issues, but just talk about the Democrats for a moment.
I mean, why is there a Democratic Party?
Well, for two fundamental reasons, sympathy from the media and donations from unions.
I mean, without that, there's no Democrat Party fundamentally, because there's been some pretty credible estimates that sympathy from the media Adds about 10 percentage points to the Democrats in terms of election results, which makes them a credible party because it's very rare that, particularly at the national level in the US, that an election has a greater than 10 point spread in winning and losing.
So sympathy from the media adds about 10 percentage points to the election results for Democrats.
And of course, hundreds of millions of dollars get funneled to the Democrats from public sector and private sector unions, but in particular public sector unions.
Now, The sympathy from the media is all the result of statism and, of course, the laws that create and sustain the forced funneling of union money from union members to political parties, violating, of course, their right of freedom of association.
Forced association is a violation of freedom of association in the same way that rape is a violation of sexuality.
The Democrat Party is only propped up by the media and forced status laws.
You can get mad at that and say, well, if people are shoveling hundreds of millions of dollars and promising you positive media coverage, who the hell wouldn't take advantage of that, particularly the general soulless population?
So you get mad at the Democrats.
It's just an artificial environment.
That is created and sustained by the power of the state.
And so much of that is the case.
And, you know, so yeah, I mean, the price of everything, the quality of your hotel room, the degree to which your toilet flushes, the degree to which your clothes get clean, as Jeffrey Tucker has pointed out.
So much of our life is conditioned by the power of the state.
We really live in the belly of a dragon and think that that's the world.
Well, thank you very much.
Good points to bring up, and I'm not sure whether I ended up being right or wrong, but I certainly did filibuster my way to the next call, and I consider that to be a massive victory.
Thank you very much for bringing it up, and Mike, who's up next?
All right, Don, you're up next.
Hello, Stefan.
Can you hear me okay?
I can.
Go ahead.
Basically, the reason that I wanted to talk to you was I've been having a lot of problems with the implications of the things that I'm learning.
I was raised Catholic.
I never really bought into any of it, you know, but my mom took me to church every week and everything.
Then I had problems with drugs and alcohol in my teenage years, and I got exposed to recovery, to AA, and that's where I found the higher power concept, and that I could do, which was fine.
It was very helpful to me, I suppose.
When I started listening to your podcasts, and especially when I started reading your books, which are amazing, oh, and I should also say that after accepting the agnostic sort of viewpoint, then I met a woman that came from a very strong Christian family.
I ended up marrying her, and a fundamentalist Christian family, and I really started to buy into that.
You know, I listened to some arguments, and it started to sort of make sense to me, and I think that On top of that, it was probably, you know, I sort of, this desire to sort of conform and be accepted.
And I thought, I always, my whole life, I've thought, you know, religion, I've associated religion with morality.
But then I started hearing some of the things you were saying, and I was just able to see how there is no objective morality from, like, the Bible.
It's all very convoluted.
And confusing.
And then when I was listening to Against the Gods, because even at this point, as soon as I... And I started reading the Bible, too, and that was very troubling, because I started reading all of the terrible things in the Bible.
But then in Against the Gods, I still had this higher power view, which was...
Which worked for me or whatever but then your arguments in there like I can't I want so badly to to refute the arguments that you're making but I can't and I don't want to I don't even want to fight it anymore but the point is is I've I've still I've been struggling the reason I emailed the show is I've been struggling with you know recovery from alcoholism and addiction and the only thing that's ever I've ever really had any success with is AA and it's you know it's very It's a spiritual program.
They talk about God.
They say the Our Father at the end of every meeting.
Everybody holds hands and says the Our Father together.
The serenity prayer at the beginning of every meeting.
We talk about prayer.
Even though it's not talking about the Christian God or whatever, it's talking about higher power.
It started making me feel uncomfortable at meetings.
This time around, I've only been sober for a little over three months.
So now, I'm just kind of in between a rock and a hard place because I feel like...
I mean, it's almost like right out of the matrix where I took the red pill and I can't go back.
And it's actually sort of ironic because in the program, you kind of learn about how once you become an alcoholic, it's like turning a cucumber into a pickle and you can never go back.
And that's kind of how I feel.
So now I'm like, well, shit.
What am I supposed to do now?
And I'm so afraid because all of the things that I'm doing as far as...
I mean, so many of the things you've said have just totally...
They've challenged everything I've ever believed about anything.
And I'm so grateful to have heard and to continue to be exposed to the messages that you're sending out.
But now I'm like...
None of that is really going to mean anything if I don't stay sober either because it compromises my life in so many ways.
And so that's where...
I don't know.
I wanted to toss it out there and see if there's...
I know you had mentioned a book that I'm going to read called In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, which sounds good.
And Michael had suggested that I look at the podcast that you had with Dr.
Mate...
Yeah, which I did, which I found very helpful.
But I'm having a hard time right now with this.
I get it.
No, I really do.
And first of all, I mean, congratulations on the sobriety.
Good.
Good for you.
That's hard.
That's hard.
So, you know, good for you.
I want to sort of really start off with that.
Secondly, good God, what's wrong with surrendering to a higher power?
I mean, I do it every day.
I mean, surrendering to a higher power seems to me exactly the right thing to do.
Now, I happen to call mine philosophy, reason and evidence, but I certainly surrender to a higher power.
Okay.
And there's nothing, to me, that's, I mean, otherwise you end up with the narcissism of greed, satiation in the moment, right?
Which is kind of addiction, right?
Which is not where you want to be.
So I think that surrendering to a higher power is a great thing to do.
Now, I mean, you know, I know that they don't have specifically Christian references in that, but they talk about surrendering to a higher power.
I think that, as Ayn Rand has pointed out, that serenity prayer, you know, God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can't change and the courage to change the things I can't, the wisdom to know the difference, as Ayn Rand pointed out, other than the God grant me, I mean, that's a pretty good rule of thumb.
Okay.
I think that's a pretty good rule of thumb.
There are some things I can't change.
I can't change history.
I can't change my history.
I can't change the choices that I or other people have made in the past.
I can't change gravity.
I can't reform human nature as it currently stands.
I can't end war by snapping my fingers and so on.
Yeah, so there's lots of things that I can't change.
I can control my choices and my actions to a large degree, although even that is tricky.
Because there are things that you know and there are things that you don't know.
I'm going to continue to accumulate knowledge as I go forward in time.
I guarantee you that if I had the knowledge available to me now that I'm going to have in 10 years, I would make different choices now.
If I could go back 10 years and talk to myself, I would suggest making different choices than those I made along the road, some of them.
I can control...
I mean, I can't even control the wisdom of my decisions.
What I can do is I can continue to accept, absorb, and pursue better evidence, better arguments, better philosophy.
And that will work to improve the decisions that I make over time.
So, you know, we have a pretty small window of the things that we can control.
And so I, you know, I think all of that stuff is It's great.
Now, as far as the morality thing goes, well, you know, just to jump back to the Zimmerman-Martin thing for a sec, you know, there's lots of...
I mean, the black community is a very religious community.
It's a very religious community.
And, of course, a very Christian community and a significant amount of fundamentalist Christians in the black community, right?
Now, in the past, during these times of crisis, I would be waiting with bated breath for...
This highly Christian community, or at least for the leaders in this highly Christian community, to remember the words of Jesus Christ and to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
What are we sending death threats to Zimmerman for?
What are we attacking Zimmerman for?
What are we asking the government to continue to attack Zimmerman for?
Remember what Jesus said was Jesus said to love your enemies.
Let's show George Zimmerman the kind of love that Jesus commands of us and stop trying to Seek vengeance.
Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, not the people.
And Jesus said, to love your enemies.
And since we are Christians, I'm just waiting for that, too.
And I used to wait for that.
I don't wait for that stuff.
I mean, it's not going to happen, right?
So, even if religion could make people do things, It would be suspect because, of course, we can't have a morality based upon authority.
I mean, that's the exact opposite of what morality is.
Morality has to have something to do with universal principles independent of authority, just like the scientific method, just like mathematics, right?
There's no math council that determines what's good and bad mathematics.
And fundamentally there's no science council that determines what is good or bad science.
It's a set of methodologies that everyone can pursue and you can get published and change the world if, like Albert Einstein, you happen to work as a patent clerk and not even be a scientist.
In the same way that you can revolutionize the literary world by writing a great book without ever having attended a creative writing class in your life.
So there's no council of philosophy or math or Science or anything like that.
It's just methodology that's common to all.
That has to be the way that morality is going to work.
I mean, it's the way medicine works.
There's no...
I mean, yeah, because the FDA and stuff, but I mean, the ideal form of medicine is, you know, double-blind experiments and tests and all that kind of stuff and to separate coincidence and spontaneous remission from genuine cures and so on.
The most...
And it's the way the free market works, right?
Property rights and trade and so on.
But no central planning, at least ideally.
So all the things that work in society work when there's a commonly accepted methodology, but no central authority.
I mean, that's the stuff that just works best in the world, and morality has to be that.
I mean, it simply cannot be that it is commanded from on high and interpreted by mere mortals.
I mean, that's just a recipe for disaster, that right and wrong is something that somebody tells you about as an absolute and cannot prove.
I mean, that's just fundamentally an argument from authority.
Well, God said it, or the Pope said it.
I mean, this doesn't even remotely work logically.
So morality can't be that way.
And it doesn't work in practice.
You know, I've not seen a single prominent Christian leader say, wait, Jesus would command us to love George Zimmerman.
So, you know, let's send him flowers.
Let's gently remonstrate with him.
Let's show him the errors of his ways in loving format.
No, they're all howling for his blood and trying to sick the DOJ on him and stuff like that.
I mean, so, even if it did work, it would be problematic and irrational and an argument from authority.
But it doesn't even work.
As I've always argued, religion takes the prejudices of the mob And turns them into irrational absolutes, which is incredibly dangerous.
It's like reinforcing psychosis.
It's incredibly dangerous.
And this has been the continual pattern throughout history.
So I certainly understand the challenges that you're facing, and I certainly don't want to do anything that's going to end up with you getting back into any kind of addiction.
And I do understand that it's a huge challenge.
But I think there's great peace in surrendering one's mere ego to higher principles.
This is why if people disprove what I'm saying, great.
I'm only invested in the methodology.
I'm not invested in the conclusions.
And so if there's a better method, if somebody disproves or there's evidence against or whatever, great.
I'll do a whole show reading out stuff that's corrections to me.
Fantastic.
Good job.
And like I did a show the other day when I mentioned something about somebody dying in the protest against Governor Walker.
Now, a bunch of people told me that this wasn't the case.
Nobody did die.
I haven't verified it.
But of course, if nobody did die, then I'm sorry.
I read something that somebody did.
And so it's my mistake.
If it's not true, it's no skin off my nose.
And I'm sorry to have said something that was false if it turns out to be false.
But not where to a conclusion.
And there's great peace in surrendering to principles.
Because it takes the angry ego out of it.
You know, you can see I've been watching some of the debates, the sniper fire back and forth under the Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman video that I put out a couple of days ago.
And I mean, you can see this, just people invested in the conclusion.
Adapting the facts, quote facts, to see what they want.
The emotional escalation, the bullying, the violence, the verbal abuse that spews back and forth.
And boy, is it ever a nice reminder of how nice my listeners generally are when it comes to their debates.
I mean, they're not often firing off the megaton wattage of the see you next Tuesday words at each other and so on.
So it is really nice to see that.
But you can see this is the challenge when people have these ego-driven conclusion-based prejudicial approaches to things.
And really have trouble.
Trying to process any kind of opposing perspective without blowing up.
This is vanity.
This is immaturity.
And this is the existential panic of people who are wedded to conclusions and feel...
As soon as you align yourself with conclusions rather than a methodology, then you face emotional annihilation panic when your conclusions are disproven because you've wedded yourself into a particular conclusion rather than new.
You can't disprove the methodology of reason and evidence.
I mean, you can't because the only way you disprove it is using reason and evidence.
It's a UPB thing.
But you can disprove certain conclusions.
And so if you're wedded to conclusions and the conclusions are disproven, what happens to your personality?
Well, it faces annihilation panic, which is why people get so aggressive, why people get so crazy hostile.
Because they're wed to conclusions, not a methodology.
You know, fuck the conclusions.
Who gives a shit?
The methodology is the only thing that counts.
The methodology is the only thing that matters.
And so, you know, as far as that goes, I think that there's a fair amount.
Of value in the stuff that comes out of the self-help movement as far as addiction goes.
Does that sort of make any sense?
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
That's all very helpful.
One sort of derivative question I have then based on that is like, even if we were to accept the premise that morality could be like authoritative, like you could just, someone would know what morality was and they would just tell you.
I guess, because, see, I listen to...
And I really appreciate you putting the Lloyd DeMoss book that you have on your website, The Origins of War and Child Abuse.
Yes, this is a very important book.
And so my question about that was just, Because I don't really understand all the time frames.
I'm trying to evaluate all this stuff, and I'm not that smart, but it's very important to me.
Hey, you said derivative question.
That puts you above 19 out of 20 people in the population.
Go ahead.
First of all, the stuff in this book is very, very troubling.
It started talking about these tribal cultures and all of these behaviors that they had.
The thing that really struck me was when we got into the Nazis and how clear it is.
It's just unmistakable that the way that they were raised, that they ultimately acted out those experiences.
It was down to the words.
The words that they would use to describe what they were doing in the world just was...
Correlated almost directly to these child-rearing practices.
And so what I'm wondering is, where do biblical times fit into this?
Do we know what the...
I know that, for instance, the Bible mentions swaddling, and even Jesus was swaddled, right?
So was this...
I mean, we've found out that swaddling is abusive, correct?
Yeah.
And it's very destructive.
So, I guess what I'm wondering...
Yeah, swaddling is the practice of wrapping babies up so tightly that they can't move.
Yes, that they're totally...
And in Germany, they would actually hang them on hooks and there would be lice in the swaddling bandages.
And thus, the babies in early childhood experiences of lice crawling through their own bodies would be horrendous, as you can imagine.
And then, of course, when you refer to the Jews as lice, that has very powerful...
You know, like in the Rwanda massacres when they referred to the opposing as cockroaches.
Well, the cockroaches in the tropics are horrendous.
And you crawl over the children and crawl in their ears.
The precursor to violence is always language.
Language is what sets the stage for violence.
Without the dehumanization of language, the dehumanizing capacity of language is very hard to To enact violence.
There's always a language that comes first, right?
So when Trayvon Martin's Gentile, I think her name is, talk about a homonym that doesn't quite fit, but when his friend was talking to him on the phone and said, you know, You know, that guy who's following you, that, you know, he could be a rapist who just wants to prey on black men or whatever, right?
She's sort of whispering into his ear about, you know, then it, of course, becomes a gay bashing crime if this was a motivation for him.
But, you know, when he calls this guy a creepy ass cracker, I mean, that's language that dehumanizes somebody else, right?
And when he calls himself No Limit Nigger, or Nigga, I guess, N-A-G-G-A, then he's dehumanizing himself.
The violence must always be preceded by dehumanizing language.
It's almost impossible to be violent towards someone without, in your own mind, dehumanizing them through language.
I think that's essential to what it is that we're talking about.
Sorry, you were talking about the biblical stuff.
Actually, what you said was also, I think that's one of the most important things that I've learned from you is that we very much, as a culture, I guess every culture, I don't know, we hide behind our language.
We call things different things.
If I murder someone, that's wrong.
But if I put on a costume and President Obama tells me to kill someone, then it's virtuous.
It's good.
And I will be applauded.
And when I come home, What I've done will be celebrated.
And this is just so important.
But just to continue, my question was also the things from that book, some of the things about pedophilia and this idea that you can cure venereal disease by having sex with a child.
Was this stuff going on around these times?
Because the conclusion that I have tentatively drawn is that the people that – this was a very primitive people, and they were all very – they were likely very sick.
Is that fair, or is that supported by – What we know?
Well, I don't know the details.
I certainly can't claim to be an expert on the details of child-raising practices in the Middle East of 2,000 years ago.
But what I can say is this, is that we consider the writers of the Bible to be foundational to the Judeo-Christian culture and to Judeo-Christian ethics.
Okay, so we carry this book forward in time, and it's the foundation of our moral center for worldview and our culture and so on.
Okay, well, So let's imagine that the people who wrote the Bible are transported forward in time, I guess, a little under 2,000 years.
I think the Bible was sort of collated 100, 200 years after the death of Jesus, if Jesus was born and lived.
I don't know.
Probably did.
Who knows, right?
Well, let's say that somebody comes forward and they openly preach and believe and say that, you know, they believe that a friend of theirs Came back from the dead, walked on water, turned water into wine and, you know, multiplied loaves and fishes and could speak with the dead and could heal people with a touch and so on and so on and so on, right?
Well, this person would be institutionalized as psychotic, as delusional.
And they would be possibly restrained and certainly drugged.
With antipsychotics.
Not that I'm a big fan of antipsychotics, but, you know, I mean, this is how they would be treated.
Well, this probably does happen, no?
I mean, I imagine some people...
Yeah, of course, yeah.
I mean, you know, every second person is either Jesus or Napoleon.
I don't know if Napoleon is still so common, but...
Right, so...
And if they said, well, I did bad things because an invisible ghost who hates me was whispering to me all night.
And if they said that they were able to be in direct contact with...
Omniscient consciousness that would tell them exactly what was true and false and so on.
If the fundamental tenets that the people believed who wrote the Bible were espoused in the modern world as genuine facts, then this person would be mentally ill.
So the foundation of Judeo-Christian culture and morals and worldview and so on and laws is mental illness, craziness.
And the only reason that Christians aren't considered crazy is that they're not Christians.
Right?
So, I mean, in the Bible it commands Christians to put unbelievers and homosexuals and sorcerers and witches to death.
And so the only reason that Christians aren't in jail is that they reject that part of the Bible.
And it's tragically only quite recent that they rejected that part of the Bible.
In fact, I would say that monasteries probably came into being because people wanted to hide from homophobic, murderous Christians.
So they'd all pretend to be celibate when they actually wouldn't.
It's just the gay bar of the Middle Ages, my guess.
But it's only the degree to which they reject the ethics portrayed of the Bible.
Against slavery?
Okay, well, that's because you're against the Bible.
The Bible explicitly condones slavery.
It's selling daughters into sexual slavery and You know, some kids who made fun of a guy who was bald, well, you know, God sent a bear to kill them.
I mean, this is all insane shit.
You know, like if you said, well, you know, my kids are making fun of my bald head, so I'm going to take them to the zoo and drop them into the bear cage, you'd be fucking nuts!
Right, and rub them in marinade and drop them into a bear cage right before feeding time because they made fun of my bald head.
I mean, you would be insane!
Your kids would be taken away and you'd be either locked in a jail or you'd be institutionalized.
I mean, you could go on all day.
It's a shooting fish in a barrel to find crazy stuff in the Bible, so it doesn't really matter, right?
But the degree to which we say the Bible is the foundation of our culture is the degree to which we say people who would be institutionalized and drugged as being psychotic are the ones who define our culture.
Well, if you're willing to say that, With a straight face and be comfortable with it, then, you know, maybe there's room in the next cell.
I don't know.
Well, it seems that their...
Sorry to interrupt.
It seems that their defense to that is that Jesus came along and, you know, made all of that irrelevant or it no longer applies or...
I don't see that, though.
I see...
I've even seen...
Well, it's not what Jesus said.
Right.
That's what I'm saying.
Jesus explicitly said...
Well, first and foremost, if Jesus was the Son of God, And God is like the Christian deity or the Jewish deity, or I guess in the Old Testament, the deity of the three major religions founded on this stuff.
Well, if that's your God, then your God is crazy and evil.
Right?
So if Jesus is the Son of God and God sent Jesus to save mankind, then you're taking the word of a crazy, evil deity that what he's doing now is good.
So first of all, it doesn't solve the problem.
I mean, you can only make...
If the New Testament contradicts the Old Testament, then Jesus is explicitly calling the deity evil.
But the deity is the only thing that legitimizes Jesus as a divine figure.
So you can't call the deity evil if that deity legitimizes you as a divine figure.
Because then you're just a product of evil.
So that's sort of the first...
Even if Jesus did contradict everything in the Old Testament, but it's not the case.
Jesus explicitly said...
Everything in the Old Testament stands.
Everything in the Old Testament stands.
I've not come to contradict anything in the Old Testament.
So he explicitly approves of all the rules, laws, and crazy shit that goes on in the Old Testament, according to the story.
And of course he has to.
Of course he has to.
So, I don't, you know, this idea that Jesus came up, he was, you know, the kind of gentleman...
Gentlemanly beta version.
It's out of alpha in the Old Testament.
It's into beta.
And we've made some significant improvements.
Well, no.
It was, to say the least, backwards compatible.
Windows 8 is not the opposite of DOS. You can run DOS in Windows 8.
It's the same thing with the Bible.
It solved the problem.
If Jesus contradicts significant portions of the Old Testament morally, then why did he say he was going to fulfill it all?
And he basically is saying that God did a huge amount of evil, and I'm the son of God, and you've got to worship God, and then, you know, through me, and so on.
I mean, that's just, without the weight of culture and history and cathedrals and stained glass and propaganda and songs, this would be completely unbelievable.
I mean, if I said, I have come here As the son of Hitler, to redeem the Jews, although I approve of everything that Hitler did, people would say, are you nuts?
And I'd say, well, no, no, no, I think we should treat the Jews better, but I also approve of everything that Hitler and the Nazis did.
You'd say, well, what are you talking about?
I mean, it was the Holocaust, for God's sakes.
How could you say we want to treat the Jews better and then also say that you approve of everything that Hitler did?
And that you're the son of Hitler.
And that your only value to the world is being the son of Hitler.
And Hitler and his ideology legitimizes everything you're saying now.
I mean, if you put forward that argument, people wouldn't even roll their eyes.
Their jaws probably wouldn't even drop because they'd recognize somebody who's just crazy.
But it takes a huge amount of culture to normalize crazy.
And, of course, that's its main focus.
Yeah, I think that is just a fantastic analogy.
And, you know, I appreciate that.
I wish it didn't even have to be said.
It's one of these things that's so obvious.
But of course, the whole purpose of propaganda is to make the obvious seem obscure.
But these people don't seem to question it.
And even if we accepted that, say, Jesus came and he made everything different, it was still the same deity that did all of this wrong.
That you're supposed to worship.
Yeah, and you worship him because he's perfect.
He's perfect, but he gets angry?
And he murders?
Okay.
Well, this is a very helpful discussion for me.
Good.
Well, I appreciate that.
At the same level, the people who abandon religion very often end up in a pretty terrible place.
And certainly the purpose, I think, of part of what I'm doing here is to give people who abandon the craziness of religion a sane place to land.
Where they can still have a surrender to a higher power.
It's just called reason and evidence.
It's called philosophy.
We want the guy who builds her house to surrender to the higher power called physics and engineering.
I want people who build my planes to surrender to the higher power of wind speed and thrust and lift and weight and drag and all the stuff that Blue talks about in Rio.
I want people to surrender to a higher power.
I want the guy who does surgery on me to surrender to the higher power called physiology.
Yay!
I don't want him to make it up as he goes along.
I don't know.
This kind of looks like a spleen to me.
I guess I'll take it out.
Wait, that's my left testicle stuck?
So, you know, it is only the mad vanity of narcissism that doesn't want to surrender to a higher power.
And I'm delighted to surrender to a higher power because, you know, it's pretty important.
Excellent.
All right.
Well, thank you very much.
And best of luck.
Congratulations.
Thank you very much for everything.
And stay sober, man.
Thank you.
Good for you.
All right.
All right.
Who we got next?
All right, Davey.
You're up next.
Go ahead.
Hello.
Can you hear me?
Yes.
Davey?
Davey?
It's Davey.
Like the Mojave Desert.
Ah, well, hello.
Sorry to white up your name too much, but go ahead, my friend.
So, I'm working on a project, and I wanted to kind of solicit your ethical expertise.
I was at Porkfest this year in New Hampshire, and there was an agorist pitch contest, and I won the contest with the idea of sort of running Milgram-style or Stanford Prison Experiment-style Psychological experiments that reject the sort of state's ethical guidelines but are based on a sort of voluntarist or non-aggression principle sort of ethical guidelines and so I was wondering if you
had any thoughts on what a sort of like legitimate non-aggression principle derived guidelines for experimentation would look like and specifically the thing that people are concerned about is trauma and whether or not causing someone to witness something traumatic Can you give me an example of what that would look like?
What sort of stuff?
Well, yeah, this is sort of one of the major objections to Milgram and the Stanford experiment, is that those subjects, even though they signed consent forms, underwent very traumatic experiences, and that's why the ethical guidelines were changed, and that's sort of why they have not really been repeated,
and why studies into authority have been very Sort of tame by comparison, but the experiment that I proposed was on police brutality, and the question was whether or not putting someone in a position to witness an instance of police brutality was unethical.
Right, that's a very interesting question.
Yeah, that's a very interesting question.
I mean, self-knowledge is Is important.
You know, one of the great things that came out of the Milgram experiments, I'm thinking more in particular the one where, you know, the guys in the white coat said, we're doing an experiment on learning, you've got to shock this guy.
And two thirds of people, I think it was, were willing to administer a fatal dose of electricity to someone just because that person told them to.
So those people underwent a lot of psychological stress.
Those subjects didn't just go willingly.
They were shaking, but they just physically couldn't refuse for some reason.
Well, it's how they're raised, right?
Yeah, it's how they're raised.
Yeah, it's how they're raised.
You defer to people in authority, and you don't question people in authority.
I mean, that's what the state wants, and that's what the teachers want, at least in the government system, right?
So it's what the police want, to defer to people in authority.
I mean, that's how...
It's tough to do fascism if people are morally independent of authority, right?
And, of course, there's a great relief in surrendering.
For a lot of people, there's a great relief when you live in a corrupt society to surrender your moral authority to other people in authority.
Right.
Because then you don't have to worry about whether you're doing the right or wrong thing.
You only have to worry about whether you're escaping punishment or gaining Gaining rewards.
So it is interesting.
So if I had the capacity to murder someone because someone in authority told me to, I think that would be pretty important information for me to have.
Is it traumatic?
Hell yeah.
Yeah.
Is it important for me to know that about myself?
I think it kind of is.
That's interesting.
So you're kind of doing them a favor.
Well, you know, favor is a tough, you know, it's a tough word to use because it's such a difficult situation.
I think if you sign a release, then there's no initiation of force or fraud.
Right.
Well, there's no force involved anyway.
There's no physical...
Well, there is some...
Wait, sorry.
I said fraud somewhat glibly.
But there was some fraud involved in that there weren't actually electric shocks being...
So can you even conduct it?
I mean, if there's no fraud involved, then I don't understand.
I'm not sure.
Then you can't test, right?
You can't test because you changed the results.
Yes.
So people have to believe that it's actually occurring.
So yeah, you can't tell them this is a fake police officer.
Right, right, right.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, you know, with the sort of hidden camera stuff, it only works if you show the people afterwards, right?
Right.
So it's tough.
I think if somebody says, like, I'm willing to submit to an open-ended psychological experiment, then I think that's not the initiation of force.
And because you're saying it's open-ended, like, we're not going to tell you ahead of time what the psychological experiment is about.
Right.
Or the parameters.
Like, if they knowingly submit to that open-ended thing, Then I don't see that force or fraud is involved, in which case it's a voluntary contract and so on.
Now, if it's upsetting to find out that you're capable of murder if someone tells you to, that is traumatic.
But I, you know, I'd sort of argue that it's better to find that out in a lab than a concentration camp.
Yeah.
So it's better to find out how to simulate it than you actually do kill someone.
Like, you know what I mean?
Like, it's better.
To have a dry run where nobody's actually hurt and you find that out about yourself.
The difference between the university experiments and your hidden camera type reality TV shows is when the paper is signed.
So with the university level stuff they sign a consent form at the beginning, but in a reality TV show they sign a release form at the end.
But in the hidden camera stuff I'm talking about, like you see on the plane, I can't remember, but it's the Just for Last stuff, where they set up these cameras and goofy situations and so on.
I assume those people sign releases after the fact, but they don't sign anything ahead of time.
They just see something.
But that's usually funny, not traumatic, right?
Well, I'm suggesting that would be better results, though.
That if you brought a person into a scenario where they encountered it without...
Without even knowing they're being involved in an experiment and then you ask for the release at the end, how much does that change the ethics and how much does that...
I don't think you can inflict trauma on people without at least some possibility, without some signature ahead of time.
I think that would be pretty damaging to someone.
You could theoretically scoop someone off the street and put them in a pseudo-concentration camp.
And then study the results.
Well, they would be forced to be there at that point.
Yeah, I mean, they're forced to be there and so on.
So I don't think that you can impose artificial situations on people for the sake of experimenting on them if those artificial situations are going to produce trauma rather than sort of make them giggle like the funny stuff does.
Right.
So I think then you would sort of be liable for some pretty significant emotional distress.
But if somebody signs ahead of time and says, yeah, I'm willing to be part of this open-ended psychological experiment, I don't know the parameters, but...
You know, let's go in.
Then I think that's, you know, like if you go into a haunted house, you can't say I'm suing them because it was scary.
Yeah.
Yeah, I hear that.
So, I mean, the thing that comes to mind is the thing that people keep comparing it to is the show What Would You Do?
And those people are, I mean, the difference between what they do and what I'm interested in doing is theirs are all horizontal and I'm interested in doing something vertical.
But they've set up scenarios where you're in a restaurant and you see a woman being verbally or physically abusive, or a man being verbally or physically abusive to a woman, and they see if the people in the restaurant react.
That's how the show runs?
That's how the show runs.
And that strikes me as the kind of trauma I'm talking about.
Like, that could be very distressing, especially if somebody had a history of that.
Yeah.
So, I mean...
Once you say that it's unethical to cause someone to witness something without consent, there's this weird gray area in the middle, like where is the line?
And that makes it very difficult for me to sort of design the guidelines that I could use to design an experiment.
Well, and it can happen if you can cause trauma to people inadvertently, right?
So there was a commercial, I don't remember for which car company it was, but there was a commercial where I think it was kind of poor taste, but there was a commercial where a guy was trying to kill himself by locking the garage door and running his car.
And the argument was that this car runs so clean, he can't kill himself that way because the emissions are so minimal.
So he got frustrated.
I didn't see the commercial, but I heard that he got frustrated because he wasn't dying because the car burns so clean.
Okay, I think that's kind of tasteless.
But what happened was some journalist saw it and her father had killed himself By locking the garage door and running the car.
and so she saw this car commercial and she was sobbing and shaking and this and that it's hugely traumatic for her now is that I don't know I mean that's a tricky area I mean I have no idea what the answer is and I don't know that there is any sort of objective or pure answer to these kinds of things I mean every act of violence that you portray in a film is something that may have occurred to someone and is incredibly traumatic for them
yeah like I remember talking to a woman who went to see a film many years ago called I think a film from New Zealand called Once Were Warriors and And in it, there's a scene of the rape of a child and she herself had been raped as a child and she found that unbelievable and horrifying and shocking and it caused intense flashbacks for her and so on.
Does that mean we can't show anything that's ever going to be traumatic for people?
Does this mean you have to have...
Like, I remember talking to some guy who was saying, oh, you know, and I quit smoking.
And they should have warnings on films.
Warnings.
The charismatic bad guy smokes throughout the entire film.
It's going to give you nicotine fits like you would believe, right?
Yeah, you caused the craving, right?
Yeah, it's like, oh, best cigarette ever.
I'm going to go do evil.
It's like, okay, I can do the evil thing.
I don't want the evil thing, but that cigarette looks damn fine.
And...
So it is, you know, to what degree can we act in a way to portray truth in society wherein we end up causing discomfort to people, right?
So a lot of feminists in the 50s and 60s and 70s said, you know, don't put up with abuse in your marriage.
And as a result, a lot of women left their husbands, right?
And their husbands are like, those damn feminists, right?
Well, okay, so they caused distress to the husbands.
By making a moral case, right?
I make a moral case that adult children don't have to see abusive parents.
They can make the choice, whatever, right?
Some people have declined to see their abusive parents.
Abusive parents are like, ah, that damn show, right?
You know, it's hard.
To what degree do we promote the truth at the expense of people's discomfort?
Well, I mean, if we're not allowed to cause people discomfort, then clearly we have to get rid of laws, right?
Because criminals don't want to be caught, and they certainly don't want to go to jail, right?
They certainly don't want to experience any negative repercussions for their actions.
Which is why they generally try to hide their actions and try not to get caught.
So I don't think that we can live in a society where we don't upset anyone.
I think that's not possible.
If there's a cure for cancer comes out, then some people who make their living off treating cancer are going to be upset.
I'm not saying that they would want to not have that cure, but clearly their whole specialty has kind of vanished, right?
And so that's going to be upsetting to them.
They've invested Huge amounts of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and becoming people who treat cancer, if there's some pill that cures it, well, you know, they're going to have to go and do some significant retraining to whatever, right?
So, I mean, there is always, you know, people who cleaned the shit off the streets in the 19th century didn't like cars, because cars were played horses, and they had no shit to shovel anymore.
So, you know, naturally they went into journalism, because same kind of thing.
So, you know, this level of upset is something that people trumpet quite a bit.
People will say, well, this argument, this perspective, it really upsets me.
And they think that means something.
Well, you know, ending slavery upset all the people who transported, who caught, who bought and sold slaves.
You know, their expertise in finding a healthy slave and their expertise in knowing a good price for slaves and the market for slaves all vanished.
So do we not upset All moral progress is upsetting to people who are profiting from the prior immoral situation.
Yeah.
So anyway, I sort of pointed out that upset is certainly no cause.
I mean, if we're not going to upset anyone, then we can't change anything.
So do you think that there's any way of deriving a criterion that you could use to sort of decide what was too far or what was too...
Well, you know, I think there would be standards, right?
In a free society, there would be standards.
Well, I'm trying to write those standards, is what I'm saying.
Well, no, no, right.
But you can go with common law to some degree.
Yeah.
Right?
I mean, there's this sort of idea of emotional distress and so on.
You can go to common law to some degree, right?
So George Zimmerman is currently suing, I think it's NBC, who edited the tape of his nine...
One call to make him appear racist, right?
So they edited his call so that he was saying something like, this guy looks suspicious, he looks black, you know, and it sounds kind of racist, right?
He looks suspicious because he's black.
And they edited out the dispatcher saying, you know, is he white, black or Hispanic?
Yeah, what's his race?
Well, he looks black.
Which is actually interesting because he didn't say he is black, he said he looks black.
Because, you know, hoodie, rain, who knows, right?
Mm-hmm.
So he's suing because they created an impression of racism by editing a tape and lying about what he said.
You know, is he going to win that or not?
Well, I think that if you portray someone as a racist by editing material that they put forward, I think that's pretty egregious.
So, you know, there's a fair amount of sort of existing legal precedents for, you know, what constitutes emotional distress.
You know, like if I kidnap your kid, And then say, I was just playing a prank.
Well, sorry.
You know, that's not a funny prank.
So it causes unnecessary emotional distress and you would certainly be liable.
But so in what sense are these legal precedents legitimate if we're sort of imagining this in a free society?
Well, again, I can't really claim any expertise other than to say you can sort of look up some of the common law stuff around this.
And some of it is going to make some kind of sense.
And, you know, other things...
If you have a psychological experiment where you have someone who pretends to stub their toe, I don't think that people can legitimately say, well, that ruined my life, watching someone stub their toe.
Right.
Whereas if you have something where somebody accidentally walks into a propeller and gets decapitated, you do some massive special effects thing, well, people can say, well, that's pretty fucking traumatic to see, right?
And if you're looking for the perfect area in the middle, I mean, I don't think you can come up with that.
You know, what if he just loses a fingernail?
What if he loses a finger?
What if he loses...
Like, I don't think you can come up with that.
I think what you would do is you would try and design the experiment to get as much information with as little trauma as possible.
And that would be part of the creativity that you would have to pursue, right?
Like, if you did an experiment where, you know, something we've all seen, which is a parent slaps a child on the butt.
I think, I mean, everybody's seen that because it's just common, right?
Right.
Then I think you could say, well, that's not outside the bounds of what people would see.
But if you did some sort of Homer Simpson thing where he's strangling the child, well, I've never seen that.
And that would be pretty traumatic, right?
I mean, it's funny because since listening to your show, the first time I actually saw somebody spank a kid, I found it very distressing.
Right, but what I mean is it's not outside the bounds of what people would see in general.
Yeah.
And so I think you would try and design the experiment to...
Reproduce something that people would normally see and gauge their reactions.
And then I don't think that they could say that it was so traumatic that they would sue you.
Because then what?
If I was a representative, let's just say, if I were a lawyer in a free society, I'm not a lawyer, of course, but if I were, then I would say to the person who was going to sue you, I'd say, have you ever seen a child being slapped on the butt before?
Right now, of course they have, right?
We all have.
I'd say, well, did you launch a lawsuit against that parent for exposing you to trauma?
And they would say no, right?
And then your precedent would have been set, and you'd be fine.
So that kind of sounds like if the instance of fake police brutality was something that somebody could realistically see from a real police officer, then you're commenting on real society.
You're not presenting anything that they might not see in a shopping mall.
Your defense would be, if you've seen this before and not launched legal action, then you have no particular right to launch legal action now.
Now, if you've never seen this before, then you would be in a more precarious position.
So again, I would try and design it, again, this is all theory, who knows, right?
But I would try and design it so that it would reproduce things that people had seen before, where they would not have pursued legal action ahead of time, and that would be a precedent that would be set.
And of course, if you were exposing people to what they had seen before, where there was no legal precedence.
Like, I don't think anyone's ever been taken to court for emotional distress because they spanked their child in front of someone.
Right.
Or hit their child on the butt or something like that.
Particularly because in most places it's legal, right?
I don't think so.
If there's no precedent for that, for people being...
I saw you hit your child on the butt, and therefore I'm suing you for emotional distress.
If there's no precedent, then I think you can show that to people, and they would not have a particular legitimate reason to pursue that.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, it does.
It makes it difficult to devise the experiment, though.
Well, sure, of course.
But you don't want to be traumatizing people, right?
Yeah, no, but I do want it to be...
I want it to be effective.
Milgram's experiment was very sanitized, if you think about it.
It's a curtain and a control panel.
They're not witnessing a whole lot.
But it was traumatic for people.
Sure.
And that was a situation that they had not been in before.
Yeah, that's true.
Other than in the voting booth, which they wouldn't recognize as that situation.
Well, they wouldn't hear the screams when they cast their ballot.
Right, right.
They don't see the people thrown in jail because they're afraid of their kids being on marijuana because they've been bad parents or whatever.
I hope that this was helpful.
It's a great question.
I mean, I love these gray area questions because they are a real challenge.
But that's, of course, what an objective and rational legal system would be.
We'd be working to define ahead of time.
People want predictability, right?
So you'd go to a lawyer ahead of time in a free society and say, this is what I want to do.
And you would have somebody who would, in return for guaranteeing you against legal costs, would, you know, help you design the experiment, right?
And then part of that design would say, and if you do get sued, I will take on all the costs.
That would be their jeopardy, right?
So you would have security if you went through the right channels, at least to some degree.
So that would be my suggestion about it.
And there would be people who would be experts in this kind of stuff and would be able to give you as great a guarantee as possible that you would be on the fine side of the law as far as this went.
Does that help?
Yeah, I think the common law, the legal precedent angle is an excellent lead.
I'm going to listen to this a couple of times, I think, but I think I definitely have more to work with.
Okay, good, good.
I hope so.
The law has become pretty bastardized through the state, but you can look at sort of the common law traditions and the stuff that to a large degree came out of the sort of free market.
It came out of how things worked when people didn't have a centralized political authority with all the incentives to multiply laws like bacteria.
So it's not a bad place to start looking at.
And of course, Stef Kinsella and a bunch of other people got some great writings on some of this.
So, you know, look at some of the common law stuff.
You can look at the World Guild stuff.
You can look at the laws that were developed in Ireland during its thousand-year statelessness.
It's not a bad place to start, so I hope that helps.
Yeah, thanks a lot.
You have to reinvent the wheel, is what I'm saying.
All right, let's move to the next caller.
Last caller of the day.
Thank you everyone so much for your patience.
All right, Ross, you are up.
Good afternoon, Stefan.
Let the Sausage Fest Parade continue, Ross.
How are you doing?
I'm well.
How are you doing?
Fantastic.
I just had some questions on how a free society would deal with something along the lines of what happened in Russia on February 15, 2013 with the asteroid explosion.
I don't know how much you know about it, but it was particularly incredible because it was only about 53 feet in diameter, traveling at about 18 kilometers a second, just a little over 41,000 miles per hour.
And managed to cause 1,400 injuries and actually collapsed a couple buildings en route.
And shatter some windows.
And a lot of this research as far as tracking these meteorites and, of course, our space programs are a government function currently.
And one could even argue that it perhaps has been one of the most successful as far as, you know, reduction of microelectronics, various things that the pursuit of exploration and space exploration, these have provided great technologies for our society.
But also...
You can't expect me to get behind that, can you?
Well, I mean...
I mean, the...
NASA, of course, the Apollo 11, which actually today is the 44th anniversary of us landing on the moon.
I'm not asked, but go on.
Right, yeah.
A couple of guys, yeah.
But, you know, the...
NASA has had some amazing benefits as far as technology.
Some optics used in the Hubble have actually allowed doctors to detect breast cancer earlier.
I'm not going to doubt any of that.
Government spending creates jobs.
It's not the scene that's important.
It's the unseen.
Correct.
Right, so how much technology didn't come into existence because people were taxed or inflated or indebted to the point where they couldn't start their own companies.
Right, right.
And I mean, now if you look at SpaceX, you know, NASA's talking about, well, how much would it cost to get to Mars and SpaceX, which I don't know if you know is a private corporation who's contracting now with NASA. You know, they can do it for a third of the price than what NASA can.
And I think that speaks a lot for the free market.
Anyways, you know, I hate to say it, but I mean, this is my particular perspective, so I wouldn't fund it myself.
I mean, other people obviously have a different perspective, but who the fuck wants to go to Mars?
Right.
Of all places.
Well, I mean, yeah, that's kind of irrelevant.
Desert.
I mean, just go to the Mojave Desert and don't, you know, breathe once every 30 seconds and you're done.
Right.
I mean, it just, like, to me, what a ridiculous waste of resources.
Like, ooh, we have some moon rocks.
Well, fuck...
Who cares?
I guess my question here is...
How about some jobs for impoverished youth that could have happened?
Anyway, go on.
Right, right.
No, and I definitely see all those points.
But as far as a, you know, Apollo-sized asteroid, which is an asteroid that has a collision course, or not a collision course, but a same trajectory that could intercept with Earth.
Well, there was a huge one that happened.
I don't know why Russia is such an asteroid magnet, I guess because it's so big.
But in Siberia, I think in 1910, there was a huge one.
Yes.
That flattened thousands of acres of forest.
And I mean, it was just a monstrous...
People think it might have even been part of a black hole or some godforsaken thing like that.
Right.
So, yeah, I mean, with the basic, you know, so...
You know, it's either a risk that people are willing to pay to alleviate or not.
Right?
Right.
So the question is, okay, so I've got a house.
And that house could get hit by an asteroid.
Correct.
Now...
Am I willing to pay for asteroid insurance?
Well, if I'm not, then I guess some charity could track this stuff or whatever.
But if the vast majority of people aren't willing to pay for any asteroid insurance, then it's either going to be charity or nothing that's going to protect people from this, right?
Now, if it's like 50 cents a year to have some weapon in orbit that's going to blow up or divert some monster asteroid that could create some godforsaken catastrophe on the planet, Then, yeah, I think people would do that.
I mean, I would.
50 cents a year, I'd probably manage that.
You know, if it's $5,000 a year, I guess I'll take my chances with not having that kind of protection.
But, of course, the free market would try and find the cheapest conceivable way to do this, right?
So, I mean, when it comes to global warming, you can read this book called Cool It by Bjorn Lomborg, who's a Smart Shockhead fellow has actually been on this show, which is how I know he's smart.
But, you know, he puts forward a...
I can't remember the details, but he puts forward a way of dealing with removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
It costs $100 million or something like that.
And, you know, why have you never heard of it?
Well, it's scientifically validated.
It's been, you know, gone through rigorous peer review process and so on.
Why have you never heard of it?
Well, because...
It's not an insurance situation where people who are concerned about global warming, you know, let's say, I don't know, a quarter of the world's population is concerned about global warming, and that's what, 1.5, 1.7 billion people, and let's say only half of those have enough money, so it's going to be about a dime apiece, 10 cents apiece, to solve global warming in a free market environment.
Well, shit, I'll pay that.
I mean, I don't even believe in global warming as sort of an anthropogenic disaster scenario.
But what the hell?
I could be wrong.
And if it's a dime, by the time you finish selling me on it, it's cost me more than a dime's worth of my time.
So here's your dime.
Go solve global warming.
But that's how it works in a free society.
Right.
And so would it cost a huge amount of money to have some radar that would...
Detect these kinds of asteroids and something.
I don't know.
Maybe it's a buck a year for a couple hundred million people.
Yeah, I'd pay that.
I think right now the total NASA budget is a half of a penny of every tax dollar.
Well, and that's NASA, right?
They're doing a whole load of useless shit, and they've got a whole bunch of dead weight sitting around doing nothing and pushing papers.
It's like that famous meme that was floating around Facebook, computers in 1980, computers now, went from this big-ass box room to something that fits under your phone.
Cell phones, 1980, it's this big coffee cereal box, which you had to point at the satellite.
Outside, don't be under a tree.
You know, there's these tiny cell phones and, you know, space technology, 1980, space shuttle.
Space technology, 2008, space shuttle, right?
It doesn't progress.
Coercion freezes everything in time.
So, I mean, it would be ridiculously cheap because it would be such a collectivized risk and such a focused solution.
So that would be my guess about it.
And, you know, who wouldn't pay that?
I mean, I think everyone would pay, you know, 50 cents or whatever a year to make sure that, If the city didn't get blown up from an asteroid, I think people would do that.
Well, and I think that a lot of the lack of support for such a thing comes from a lack of education, and I think that has a lot to do with, obviously, the government being in charge of it.
But these Apollo-sized asteroids, they're greater than a kilometer in size, and you wouldn't just be talking about a city.
You'd be talking about all of humanity.
Right.
But even if people didn't want to pay, then the insurance companies would pay.
Because it would be cheaper for them.
It has to be some kind of cost-benefit analysis, right?
Obviously, the destruction of a city would result in billions or tens of billions of dollars of payouts from the insurance companies.
So they would pay anyway, right?
Because it would just be cheaper.
Or they'd say, well, you're not covered for asteroid damage.
If you're not covered for asteroid damage, but for 50 cents a year you can get coverage for asteroid damage, people would pay.
Of course they would.
Because they'd be so much richer now.
Let's say they're so much richer in a free society.
10 times the income that they have now.
Within a generation, if we had a free society tomorrow, literally people would have 10 times the income that they have now within a generation.
That's not just my guess.
That's fairly well-established based upon the argument about regulation 1948 to the present that I made earlier in the show.
So, you know, it would actually, you know, if you have 10 times the income, then 50 cents a year becomes 5 cents a year.
Now, would any sane human being, for the sake of 5 cents a year, not pay that to have protection from asteroid damage?
Well, I mean, of course you would.
I mean, who the hell cares about a nickel a year, you know, compared to what might happen if an asteroid hits your neighborhood.
So I think it'd be pretty easy to deal with.
And if I could just squeeze in...
Happened to work with a lot of statists and one of them.
I knew there was at least one person out there who did that.
I encountered a pretty interesting argument in regards to this because I find this particular science, astrophysics, that kind of stuff, very interesting.
And he was talking about, well, the government had to take the initial risk before the free market would step in, and we had things like SpaceX kind of come online.
And that if the government wasn't there to take the risk, we never would have gone there in the first place.
And, you know, we wouldn't have a good understanding of the universe that we do now.
Yeah.
Well, first of all, the government wasn't taking any risks because they weren't spending their own money.
That would be my first argument.
Like, what the hell risk are you talking about?
Right.
I mean, no government official was personally liable for the success or failure of any particular program.
I mean, that's called the free market, where if you start something and it fails.
I mean, when the rockets didn't work, you know, how much loss did each government official incur?
Or each engineer?
Well, zero.
In fact, they generally, when it didn't work, the government is the only entity that gets rewarded for failure.
I mean, with government, if the program works, well, it's working, so let's do more.
And if the program doesn't work as well, it's underfunded, so we need more.
So the government wasn't taking any risk.
And there's no way to know whatsoever when the right time was for human beings to go into space.
There's no way to know in any way, shape or form when the right time was for human beings to go into space.
Without the government, it might have been in the 1940s.
Without the First and Second World War destroyed massive amounts of human and financial capital, it might have been the First and Second World War in those years, which wouldn't have occurred without the state.
It might be 20 years from now.
Who knows?
I mean, maybe you and I would be able to go to space for $5,000 now if the free market had been allowed to operate since the 1960s.
That would be fantastic.
I'd love to go to space.
Hell, I'd love to go to the Moon and Mars.
It'd be fantastic.
Yay!
But, you know, I don't get to do that because they blew all this money in premature displays of pointless ability.
Right.
You know?
So, you know, if they went too soon, then they had to spend a huge amount of money, which meant that the debt and, you know, inflation and all that kind of crap.
And, of course, they drew everyone out into this useless paramilitary NASA situation.
They drew everyone out who might have actually created passenger flight to the moon.
Right?
Right.
And that's pretty tragic.
How awful is that?
So, you know, people who say, well, you know, the government took on this risk and therefore we have all these benefits.
Well, you tell me the risk the government took on.
I mean, they got to buy votes by handing out lots of money to companies.
Ooh, what a great risk for a politician that is.
You know, go against the crowd.
You know, they got a whole bunch of nationalism and patriotism.
Because remember, the space program was free at the time.
You know, I mean, because they just funded it through debt.
I don't remember them cutting any other government services I don't remember anyone saying, well, we can't have the space program, but we have to eliminate the welfare state.
Right?
I mean, they basically got to buy a bunch of patriotism and buy a bunch of votes and buy a bunch of mindless cheering of, you know, big penis rockets by going into debt.
You know, it's like saying to people, do you want a grand spectacle for free?
Well, sure.
I guess so.
Right?
But, so, you know, there was no debt.
In fact, it was all just politically advantageous to people as a whole.
And it was all complete nonsense.
Well, and I always get these complaints, oh, you're anti-researching.
And it's like, no, I'm just anti-coercion, that's all.
I just don't think, no matter how pretty the rockets are, that it justifies them being funded through coercion or the enslavement of the next generation through debt.
Right.
Well, and I think the very funding of the space program wasn't for research from the government, at least I don't believe it was from government perspective, simply because Russia did something and we were like, oh, well, we got to get up there and we got to do it.
It was kind of more reactive.
I love that.
Yeah.
We got to beat socialism by expanding the government and creating more socialism in the space program.
It's like, How exactly is that beating Russia if you turn NASA into basically a Russian-style socialist program?
I mean, that's just so bizarre to me.
You know, it's like saying, well, the guy across the street kidnapped his wife.
And that's terrible.
You know, you should have a wife by kidnapping her.
So the way I'm going to fight against that is go kidnap my own wife.
It's like, I don't think you really understand what opposing the principle means.
I mean, it's just terrible.
Right.
It's like England saying, you know, we're going to fight to the death against National Socialism, so let's nationalize everything right after the war.
I think you do not use this word in the meaning to which it's intended, right?
So, you know, with that tip to the great Wallace, Sean, if you haven't seen Princess Bride, you really need to.
But, yeah, I mean, this is just the ridiculousness of what people call progress, right?
Stefan, I really appreciate you.
I just finished watching a couple weeks ago your video on spanking and showed it to my wife and it's really helped us to be better parents and I really appreciate everything you're doing for us and I hope you keep it up.
Well, thank you so much.
I hope so too.
And, you know, one of the things I'm the most happy about with the recent video success of the Martin Zimmerman video is that hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people, potentially about a million people or over a million people if you count the podcast, a million and a half people have been exposed to a strong anti-spanking message.
I mean, that's more important to me than the criminal trial or who's guilty or who's innocent, the fact that people have been exposed to a strong principled anti-spanking message.
Is the most important thing to me.
Even if only 10% of parents end up questioning spanking out of that, you know, that could be 100,000 people who've stopped spanking their kids, or at least who are questioning it.
I mean, what a great weekend's work that is.
And what a huge step forward in the planet that is.
What a way to break the cycle of violence.
And that, to me, is the major value of that whole video series.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
And thank you for your support.
Thank you for your questions.
Thank you, Mike, for wrangling the sausage conga line known as the Free Domain Radio Sunday Show Listener Queue.
Have yourselves a wonderful week, everyone.
Just finishing up the research on the video about Edward Snowden and maybe touching a little bit on Bradley Manning.
And thank you, everybody, for your support.
That makes all this work possible.
If you'd like to help out, fdrurl.com forward slash donate or just Share like crazy, whatever we've got.
Thank you so much.
Have a wonderful week, everyone.
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