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March 10, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:48
2635 The War You Can't Win - Stefan Molyneux on Infowars Nightly News
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Joining us tonight is Stefan Molyneux.
Now, he has a philosophy website, freedomainradio.com, where he gets three to four million downloads a month.
Now, that may sound like a lot for a philosophy site, but once you hear what he has to say, you'll understand why people are going there and listening to him.
Very compelling speaker, Stefan Molyneux.
Welcome, Mr.
Molyneux.
Thank you very much.
Thank you so much.
I really enjoyed your conversation with Alex.
And you've talked about a lot of different issues.
You talked about guns, but I don't want to belabor that.
We've got a lot of things we want to talk about.
Bitcoin, drug war, the war on men, and where you see the future of America going.
But I do want to talk about this article that just came out today on Infowars about what's happening in Canada.
We've got Canadian...
Royal mounted Canadian police that are enforcing gun controls that basically are against what the civilian government wants to happen.
So we got a bureaucracy that's essentially out of control.
You had a liberal party that didn't have the votes to get certain guns banned.
The Mounties did it anyway.
When the minister in charge said you can't do that, the next day they banned other guns.
So they're basically not accountable to any elected leadership as they're supposedly.
What's your comments on that?
Well, I think it's highly instructive.
You know, it helps people to understand that the voting part of democracy is kind of a sham.
Like, they have a particular agenda, and they will try to put it to a vote.
And there are times where, when it's very obvious and in public, they are constrained by the results of that vote.
But in this particular instance, they want to take the guns.
They've tried to get the votes.
They can't get the votes.
So they're going to take them anyway.
And so I would assume it's sort of related to three things.
The first, of course, is that As I talked about with Alex, gun control imperatives go up extraordinarily high when governments are about to run out of money.
Because there's a huge number of dependent people dependent on the state.
I think in America like half of the population is to some degree dependent on the state for its continued economic survival.
And in a country like America, where there's 40% of people have $500 or less in savings, you know, they really are living paycheck to paycheck.
If that check doesn't come, or if it's been inflated to the point where they can't buy anything with it of any substance, then you get rebellion.
And so governments want to take guns away.
And the firearms are much more dangerous than pitchforks.
Absolutely, yeah.
No, pitchforks, you know, you can go back behind your gated community, but, you know, you've got to emerge sometimes to interact with the sheeple.
So I would say that this is a trial balloon that's going up.
They're trying to see what extra legal stuff they can get away with.
If there's a strong pushback, you know, then they'll wait and regroup and try again in some other way.
But if they get away with it, then it's going to embolden them to continue doing what governments do, which is spread like a tumor until they take over the body politic.
Yes.
So I would assume that...
But it's kind of like, isn't it...
What we see going on in America where Obama says, I've got a pen, I've got a phone, this is going to be a year of action, I'm going to do what I want.
We see the government in both America and Canada essentially breaking away from the structure that they're supposedly bound by, don't we?
Well, I think they're being more open about...
Yeah, right.
I mean, I think it's always been the case.
I mean, life, liberty, and property was the original founder's vision, and then, you know, George Washington riding down with a whole bunch of troops to, you know, the Pennsylvania whiskey.
People didn't want to pay the Pennsylvania whiskey tax.
He just rides it down with the troops and goes and takes it by force.
So I think it's always been a function.
There's a lot of verbal...
Dressing to government, right?
A lot of verbiage that goes on in government where it's like the icing on a very, very bad sandwich.
You still have to eat the sandwich, but they'll put all these florid words on it and so on.
I think that's really falling away now.
Yeah, in that sense, Obama really is transparent.
He promised to be transparent, but now...
He is a transparent, power-mad dictator.
Yeah, they are.
And we can see him for what he is.
He's not even pretending that he's not using the IRS and his political enemies as all the other presidents have pretended.
Yeah.
He's just, he gets caught doing it and he just doubles down and keeps doing it.
Yeah, I mean, what's delightful is that the gun of the government always goes off at night, but at least he's taken off the silencer.
I mean, you can hear it at least now, right?
So I think that's...
You know, it's positive.
There's an old Confucian saying which says, the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names.
And the name of the state used to be force.
And everybody knew that, and George Washington said, you know, that its government is not reason, it's not eloquence, it's force.
and because governments had been so dangerous throughout human history, huge revolutions were fought throughout the Western world, from the Enlightenment through the Renaissance, to constrain the power of the government, and in some countries, the aristocracy was gotten rid of entirely.
In other countries, it was very much, its power was minimized as in England, and in countries like Russia, I mean, they got rid of the aristocracy and replaced it with a communist dictatorship.
Oops!
Left turn.
But, so I think that, What happened was we kind of changed our whole relationship then.
We forgot that it was force and we start to think of it like a friend, you know, like a charity, like a dad, like a guy who's going to help you out when you're in trouble, like a do-gooder, like a, you know, someone who's going to...
Like a woman might think of an abusive husband.
Yeah, yeah.
He actually really does love me even though he beats me every night.
We've got the livestock home syndrome, right?
Yeah.
I think that we've turned away from the recognition that government is force and we've tried to turn an agency of violence into like a charity, like someone who's going to educate the poor and help the needy and heal the sick and take care of the moms who's married the wrong guy and...
We've forgotten that it's forced, and we've tried to turn this gun into a bouquet of flowers, and it just doesn't work.
What happens is every time we ask the government to do stuff for us, it ends up doing stuff to us, which we don't like.
It's just inevitable.
And I think there's also this illusion that if our guy, if our team, they break everything into two teams, and if our team gets in, somehow we've got some control over that, but we're really kind of just like the kids in a shopping cart where they give them a steering wheel that doesn't connect to anything.
I mean, that's kind of what the elections are.
And people are really slow to come to that.
You know, the Republicans are slow to realize that when their guy gets in, they don't have any control over him.
He still does a lot of the same stuff the other guy did.
And most of the Democrats aren't aware of the fact that, or not...
Are still not waking up or responding to the fact that even though they thought he was going to do all these Democrat things, he's now doing everything that they hated.
Everything that he said he was not going to do.
So they have no control over him.
Everything they hate when a Republican does it.
That's right.
Everything.
The magic.
It's like, you know, there's this rapture where people are supposed to be taken up and vanished in their cars.
They're driving.
It's like that's the whole anti-war movement since Obama came.
They just got beamed up.
They got spirited away by, I guess, ideological prejudice.
But Yeah, it is.
I mean, I've sort of pointed out that it doesn't really matter the hood ornament on the car that runs you over.
And the president is really just a hood ornament that's supposed to distract you from the real power, which is in the bureaucracy and in the unions and in the military-industrial, the welfare-warfare complex, right?
All of the people you never get to vote for.
Or the central bank, which brings us to why you're here.
Bitcoin, right?
Yeah.
So, we've seen a lot of troubling news about Bitcoin.
We see Mt.
Gox going bankrupt.
We see another couple of small exchanges.
Just this week we had, it was Flexcoin, Polyneau.
One of them is going out of business.
Flexcoin is going out of business.
Polyneau has lost 12% of its users' coins.
We see Fortress Investment Group now because of the price of Bitcoin going down.
They're taking a loss.
We saw a scandal with cheap marketplace back in December.
What is your take on Bitcoin?
Where is it now?
And what's your take on the larger issue as to the hope of the future of getting away from central banks?
Okay.
First of all, it's important to separate Bitcoin from companies.
Bitcoin is an open source architecture for the exchange of value.
Some of that is currency.
Some of that is contracts.
Some of that is dispute resolution.
Some of that is selling shares without having to go through $3 million of underwriting costs and lawyers and all that kind of stuff.
So there's an architecture And then there's companies that are making money, trying to make money by helping people navigate and use that architecture.
I mean, if an ISP goes down or if an internet service provider goes out of business, we don't say that's a failure of the internet, right?
Or that's the failure of TCPIP or whatever.
So MTGox and MtGox and all of these other companies that have had problems, it's not Bitcoin that is the problem.
It's, you know, people who are making money.
Like, if a company goes out of business, it's not a problem with the free market.
That's actually...
The point of the free market is, you know, the moral hazard.
You can go out of business.
Yes.
So the fact that companies have gone out of business, I think, signals the strength of Bitcoin.
I know that sounds kind of weird.
That is interesting.
Hold that thought.
We're going to be right back.
We need to close the show.
Well, that's it for our regular schedule program.
But we're going to continue this interview on the other side.
We're going to hear the rest of what Stefan thinks about Bitcoin, as well as many other subjects.
Stay tuned.
Welcome back.
We were just talking about Bitcoin, and that's what Stefan Molyneux is here about.
And you were just saying that you thought that the strength of Bitcoin was the fact that bad actors could be taken out of business.
Continue with that thought.
Okay, so let's compare Bitcoin to central banking, right?
I mean...
There's no such thing as too big to fail in Bitcoin.
Isn't that wonderful?
I mean, one of the creative destruction elements of the free market is less competent or less moral people or less hardworking people are supposed to have the resources go away from them and go towards more competent, more moral or harder working people.
That's the reallocation of resources in the free market from the less able to the more able is how we get economic growth fundamentally.
So with Bitcoin, people think that somehow the architecture has failed because companies have failed, which is like saying the free market fails if companies go out of business.
No, no, no, no.
The free market succeeds when companies go out of business because it releases resources.
However painful it is for the individuals, and I sympathize with that, it releases resources to more competent people.
So there are people who were in the Bitcoin world who were companies profiting from adding value to the Bitcoin architecture, and they were incompetent or they were immoral or whatever.
I don't know the inside story of all the companies, but they went out of business.
Isn't that wonderful?
They did not get a bailout from Ben Bernanke, right?
They did not get to sell bonds.
They did not get to borrow money from the Fed at 0% and then lend it out or buy bonds at 2% or 3% and call themselves financial geniuses.
They went out of business.
That is a wonderful thing to happen to banks.
It's a wonderful thing to happen to...
They weren't specifically banks, but it's a wonderful thing to happen in a financial infrastructure.
You know, if you look at some place like Japan, they've had these zombie banks going on and on with government subsidies for 20 years.
And they've had a 20-year recession slash depression that has been going on and on.
There's no too big to fail in the Bitcoin universe.
And if you don't do a good job, you don't satisfy your customers, you don't secure their money, then you will go out of business.
And then resources will get reallocated and customers will go to more competent and better businesses.
I think it's a great degree.
If nobody failed in the Bitcoin universe, that would be catastrophic, I think, to the entire architecture.
Oh, yeah.
Well, you draw a distinction between the architecture and then the way it's implemented.
And from what I understand, I don't follow it that closely.
My son has followed it more closely than I have.
Isn't that the way?
Yeah.
He thought that Mt.
Gox was, people were criticizing it because perhaps it wasn't waiting long enough for transactions to clear, and there were some issues like that.
There may be fraud in the case of the sheep market, or let's see which one it was.
But whether or not that's the case, how do people evaluate, though, in this kind of environment?
It's difficult for people that are new to it to evaluate what the risks are.
Well, we're not used to doing it.
Right.
I mean, ever since FDIC came in, right, the insurance, right?
Yeah, don't worry about it.
Yeah, I mean, hey, you know, my money is secure, assuming you don't have like $9 billion worth of sheep's head in some vault somewhere.
So we're just not used to doing it.
And what you need to do is be an informed consumer, right?
I mean, you know, if you're going to go buy gold from some guy, you're going to make sure it's not tungsten wrapped in gold or something like that.
And so you need to do your research.
You know, you need to be an informed consumer.
This is lots of money that can be at play here, and you need to be careful with what you're doing.
We're just not used to that.
Because we've had this government umbrella of fantasy land, no risk protection.
But people need to get re-informed about what it means to evaluate the health of a company.
Read up on the company.
Be an informed investor.
I mean, Bitcoin is a form of value transfer, but it is also an investment at the moment.
As people know, its value has gone up enormously, even with the recent scandals and so on.
And I would argue because of the recent scandals, people are viewing it more seriously because it can't fail.
So what do you think is going to happen with Bitcoin providers?
Are they going to...
Do you think they're going to have to do a better job of educating the public, a better job of telling them, this is how we're going to protect you from fraud, from loss, from invasion?
I think for it to grow, don't you think it's going to have to go through a cycle of education, a cycle of trying to win the public's trust back after we see these failures?
Well, it's a market challenge, right?
And I assume that there's going to be the Bitcoin seal of approval where you're going to have an independent consortium or group of security experts and business experts who are going to give some seal of approval to reassure customers.
But this shakeout period, you know, Bitcoin is really only a couple of years old.
And in terms of its recent impact on people's consciousness, a year or two, you know, most people have only heard about it over the last year since the price went through the roof.
I don't know if you were a computer guy, but I was a computer guy way back in the day, you know, when you had computers with 2K of RAM that just seemed like more than you could possibly.
Think of all, you go back to an old computer magazine from like 1980, flip through all of the ads and then look up those companies and see if they're still in business, right?
In the early part of any industry, it's volatile.
There's a shakeout period.
until the most stable providers emerge.
And, you know, some of those people who advertise were Apple and Microsoft and IBM and Xerox.
Those companies are still in business.
But, I mean, a lot of those companies are no longer in business.
And so be aware that you're in the opening end of a new phenomenon.
And it's really, really important to do your research and do your homework.
Don't put all...
I mean, my opinion, don't put all your eggs in one basket and be diversified and all that kind of stuff.
And, you know, learn a little bit about what it is.
We don't need to really think about banks...
But we do need to think more about Bitcoin and listen to the experts.
There were people warning about Mt.
Gox early last year, you know, that its security measures may not be implemented the way that people want, that it was having issues with keeping everybody's coins, because basically people handed over their Bitcoins to this place to facilitate trading.
So they gained value.
You can just remember your code and you don't actually have to have physical coins.
It has to be accessible anywhere, right?
You can unplug your computer.
You can write it down on a piece of paper.
You can put it in a safety vault.
But people went for the convenience of having somebody else store their coins so they could trade them more easily.
As we all know, with reward comes risk, right?
And so they gave their coins to other people, and again, nobody knows exactly what's happened.
That's going to be shaken out over time.
But beware, you know, I mean, if you're going to go for an advantage, you know, the horse with the bigger payout has less chance of winning, right?
And if you're going to go for an advantage, be aware that you're taking on a risk.
There's perfectly wonderful ways to be absolutely secure with your bitcoins.
They're just not quite as convenient as, here, you take my bitcoins, and if I want to trade, do it for me, so...
Just be aware.
Well, hopefully it's going to roll back one of the major control points that the governments have had, which is the central banks.
But another major control point they've had, I want to talk to you about, is the war on drugs.
And just prohibition in general.
The government's ability to come in, just as we were talking about at the beginning of the program, To come in and prohibit arbitrarily the possession of a firearm.
Well, they can come in and prohibit the possession of drugs or anything else, which I contend they don't have the constitutional authority to do because we had to have a constitutional amendment to prohibit alcohol.
Where's the constitutional amendment to prohibit all these other things that they're prohibiting?
We see it out of control here.
I've talked to law enforcement against prohibition, a former Chicago prosecutor.
He says 80% of the gun violence in Chicago is drug-related.
We know that's what the real culprit is, that and psychoacoustic drugs, SSRIs that are being given to people.
But they focus on guns and solutions.
What do you see happening now with drugs?
Do you see people waking up to the futility of trying to use government as the instrument to address something that is really a personal issue as to whether or not somebody uses too much alcohol or uses too many, cannot handle the drugs that they use?
It's really fascinating because if you think of the media, you know, I mean most people aren't going to get their cultural opinions from news.
They're going to look to the media and so on.
Drug comedy has been around for decades.
And, you know, way back to the Cheech and Chong movies, I think we're in the 70s or whatever.
And the pursuit of drugs and so on has been a staple of comedy for teens for a long time, just as the pursuit of alcohol has been a staple.
Now, there's no I strangle hobos comedies, you know, because people recognize that going out and killing someone, you just can't make it funny, right?
It's just a horrible, awful, evil thing to do.
But there's been a very different perspective on drugs for as long back as I can remember, which is just an indulgence.
It's goofy.
It's silly.
Yes, some people get addicted, but people get addicted to anything.
It doesn't mean you can't, right?
I mean, Paul Walker was addicted to fast cars.
It doesn't mean we closed down NASCAR, right?
Well, you're talking about the difference between vice and crime, isn't it?
I mean, crime is essentially something you're doing to harm other people.
I like Pink Floyd.
You know, A Dark Side of the Moon is a great album.
They were not popping chiclets when they made that.
You know, Freddie Mercury starts taking cocaine and writes Bohemian Rhapsody.
And I love that music.
I don't take drugs myself.
I haven't, but I'm not going to...
I mean, Sgt.
Pepper's is a great album.
I mean, I can't say that anything that produced that beautiful music is necessarily a vice.
It's not my vice.
Maybe I have others, but that's not it.
But I do think that the example of places like Portugal, which has decriminalized drugs for over 10 years now and has seen a 50% reduction in addiction and so on, everybody recognizes it doesn't work.
I mean, it's been openly talked about now for several years.
And things like The Wire, I don't know if you ever saw the show The Wire.
So in The Wire, which was written by a former cop and a journalist, the police basically legalized drugs.
On their own initiative.
They just say, look, here, you can go to this area and we're not going to prosecute you for any drug trading.
Crime goes down and drug deaths go down and so on.
It's so ridiculously profitable to get people addicted to drugs that people try to get people addicted to drugs.
They give you free samples, they'll cook it up so strong that you have to come back for more.
And as a lot of Doctors and people who study brain chemistry have pointed out a lot of drug use is self-medication for prior trauma in life, right?
So there's a Canadian doctor, Gabor Mate, he's actually been on my show, who talks about all of the heroin addicts that he's treated, all of the women and some of the men were all raped as children.
They all suffered extreme childhood sexual abuse.
Produces two problems in the brain.
One is a deficiency of motivational chemicals, and the other is a deficiency of basically happy, the stuff that makes you happy and content.
And drugs both provide those, right?
If you have deficiency of motivation chemicals, cocaine moves you to a more normal state of motivation.
And if you are missing endorphins, then you can get drugs which supply those to your system.
And so, you know, we're kind of happiness level here.
So a couple of people take drugs, they go here, and then they go back down to here.
If you start with the happiness level of here, down here, Then you go up to normal, and then you go right back down.
It's really, really difficult to sustain what you now understand as unhappiness, whereas before it was just your life.
You felt what it's like to be normal, right?
You see, a similar thing with people who are taking drugs for palliative care, for pain medication.
They don't get addicted to them like people who are on the outside at all.
It's the same sort of thing that you're talking about.
And that's one of the things that concerns me the most, is how people can turn their back on people who are taking chemotherapy and they can't keep anything down.
They need marijuana, they need it whole as opposed to some pharmaceutically derived extract.
They need it whole for it to work and yet they turn their backs on these people.
I remember an activist who Basically was arrested by a judge, put in jail for this, had it withheld from him.
He died in his own vomit.
How do we justify that as a society, withholding that from people who need it for medical purposes, even if you don't understand that some people ought to be able to have the decision whether they want to use it recreationally or not.
And if it gets to be a monkey on their back, there's other things other than a cop with a gun and a billy club that are better to help with that, right?
Right.
Yeah, if somebody's self-medication has gone awry, you give them medical intervention.
You give them methadone.
It's a medical issue.
It's a spiritual issue.
It's not a law enforcement issue.
And that's the thing that concerns me so much is to see that happening.
And you're talking about prohibition and films.
Well, we've seen that with alcohol prohibition.
We've seen the violent crime, we've seen the shooting in the streets, the rise of criminal gangs, we saw the concentration of the form of alcohol as it was prohibited, increasing in intensity and potency, and we've seen the same sort of thing with all forms of drugs under general drug prohibition.
Oh, and the corruption of law enforcement.
Yes.
Law enforcement, of course, you know, used to be passive.
In other words, you'd phone and say, hey, somebody stole my bike or somebody's, you know, bumped into my car, and then they leap into action.
That's right.
But because with two people who are buying and selling drugs or using drugs, there's no complainant.
So the government has to be proactive and start sticking its nose into everything.
And this has corrupted our sense of law, our sense of order, security, and also it's corrupted law enforcement.
I mean, under prohibition, you'll probably remember the film The Untouchables with, I think Kevin Costner played Elliot Ness.
Mm-hmm.
Elliot Ness in his autobiography, the average American was making about two grand a year back in the day when two grand was real money.
And he was offered by Al Capone two grand a week.
Wow.
To leave them alone.
Two grand a week.
Wow.
Can you imagine?
Yeah.
I mean, to get a year's salary, it's basically now you'd be offered $30,000 a week to not go to some place where if you go, they're going to shoot at you.
Yes.
You know, I'd be tempted.
I like not getting shot, and I'm not unfriendly to $30,000 a week.
That's right.
It's just so ridiculously off-kilter.
I think that it is.
I think it's partly a generational thing.
You know, they say in science, like, you don't convert the old scientists, they just die off, and then the new scientists with the better theories come along.
I think that's somewhat true with the people wrapped up in prohibition.
I don't think young people have the same stigma around drug use that older people do.
I mean, they watch something like Reefer Madness and laugh at it as being ridiculous propaganda.
And so I hope it's going to go in a more humane direction.
I mean, what it has done to families in the drug wars.
The mandatory minimums.
Horrendous.
I mean, black families in particular, Mexican or Hispanic families, have just been shredded.
And, you know, you were talking about the gun violence being part of the drug trade.
Absolutely true.
But another thing, too, is that when you remove fathers out of the family, children are much more likely to grow up to become criminals.
I mean, it's just one of these things that nobody talks about.
Because, I mean, we've even talked about the war against Mexico.
Yeah, let's move to that.
Let's talk about the war on men.
It's horrendous.
I mean, so much of criminality.
Statistically, there's no better predictor of a negative outcome, if I can mix my idioms.
There's no better predictor of a negative outcome for a child than coming from a single mom or single-parent household, mostly single moms.
Mm-hmm.
I mean, it's a greater predictor of negative outcomes than intelligence, than socioeconomic status, than race, than gender, any of these things, than neighborhood poverty or anything like that.
It's the single biggest negative outcome for children.
And, I mean, the drug war and a wide variety of problems in society, almost all generated by the state and its crazy quest for power and its crazy desire.
It's funny, the government goes against people's dependence on drugs, but the government is continually trying to make people economically dependent on itself to guarantee future votes, right?
And to make sure that you create a huge cohort of slaves willing to attack any other slave who threatens their income by suggesting a shrinkage of the state.
So, yeah, it is terrible.
And the war on drugs is a war fundamentally on families.
Yes, and we've pointed out many times on this program how we have in America more people in prison in absolute numbers, certainly not as a percentage even, but as absolute numbers we have more than China does, which has a population many times greater than ours.
The number of people that we have in prison is just astronomical.
And most of it is because of things like mandatory minimums for possession of marijuana, that sort of thing.
And the divorced family courts where people...
And mostly black males.
And so they're destroying the black family by locking up the father, taking him out of the cage.
America, and I read the statistic recently, it just blew my mind.
It's 5% of the world's population, 25% of the world's prisoners.
America has more inmates in prison than were in the entire Gulag Apikalago that Solzhenitsyn wrote about under Stalin and Khrushchev.
Yes.
I mean, that is unbelievable.
And there's many reasons for it, too.
We have private prisons that are operating at a for-profit level.
We have our own slave wage system there that operates out of prisons.
And they have an obligation to keep these prisons occupied or pay these private corporations that run them money.
So they want to make sure that they're occupied and that the taxpayers are paying that for them.
And you couldn't design a worse system.
Yeah, you couldn't design more perverse incentives to end up with injustices against the innocent than paying people to fill prisons.
I mean, what a ridiculous system that is, and the inhumanity.
I mean, Amnesty International has visited particularly prisons in California and places where there's this ridiculous overcrowding.
I mean, you couldn't legally keep animals in these kinds of cages, and people are being stuffed in there and left to rot.
I mean, it...
Overcrowding, and when they started with the mandatory minimums under Reagan's war on drugs, they were letting violent criminals out on society so they could lock up peaceful people that were growing marijuana in their closet based on simply how much it was.
Not based on their threat to society, not based on anything in their past, simply because of the weight of the quantity of the marijuana that they were growing.
And they would let out Rapists, murderers, people who were a real threat to society because they were not only overcrowded, they just simply couldn't fit them in, but they're still overcrowded.
I'd rather live in a neighborhood where somebody might overindulge in my Doritos bowl than somebody who might stab or kill me or steal from me or something like that.
I'll take my chance with the stoners because they're probably not even going to get outside.
they're too busy watching The Wizard of Oz with the soundtrack of Dark Side of the Moon or something.
They're not out there being a threat to society as a whole.
And, you know, to be fair, a lot of creativity can come out of drug use.
I mean, that's been known for a long time.
I mean, one of the greatest poems of the 19th century was written while the, Kublai Khan was written while the poet was on morphine or heroin.
I can't remember which.
But yeah, we've had a lot of creativity that's come out of it.
I like when people are creative without it.
The government has gotten very creative with the police state, with the militarized police state, because of the war on drugs.
Well, it's a war you can't win, right?
It's like 1984.
You always want the war you can't win.
And that every time you escalate the war, you escalate the problem.
That's a perfect recipe for governments, right?
I mean, if you want to get a rapist out of a community, you arrest the guy, you throw him in jail.
Hey, problem is solved.
No more rape.
But if every time you try and pursue a solution, you exacerbate the problem, that's a perfect upward escalation of state power.
So the war on drugs is fantastic.
Also, of course, you can grow marijuana at home, right?
I mean, tobacco and wine, it's much harder to grow and make at home, right?
But one of the reasons is that, you know, tobacco is legal because tobacco lobbyists give huge amounts of money to the government.
I mean, marijuana, you just grow at home, so there's no lobbyist, no concentrated economic power that drives government policy on this Well, marijuana is a competitor to a lot of businesses.
It's a weed!
In terms of even hemp, which has no psychoacoustic properties, it's a competitor to the clothing industry, it's a competitor to pharmaceuticals.
That has a lot to do with it being banned, but the government gets very, very creative, and I've seen this for 20 years, they've created things like SWAT teams, but they've also created these legal fictions where they would charge an inanimate object with a crime, confiscate it, Oh, you mean the seashores?
Charge the plane, you know, the U.S. government versus this plane or versus $9,000 in cash.
I mean, they actually did that kind of stuff all the time here, and they've been doing it for the last couple of decades.
Now they're moving all of that into the war on terrorism.
Look at the image of like a Nuremberg Trials with a tank in the state.
Yes.
The tank was the problem, right?
Absolutely fantastical and insane, and people would not believe us when we were talking about it.
It's like a conspiracy theory to them, but actually you can look at the court records and you can see how they're charging inanimate objects with crime so they could confiscate the property.
It's completely destroyed the rule of law in this country, but now we're going even deeper.
We're going even further with the war on terrorism.
What do you see as the future of America, in conclusion?
Well, I think there's no set path to history.
I mean, my graduate degree is in history, and there's no set path to history that I've ever been able to determine.
I mean, people talk about these big historical movements like these inanimate pendulums of principles or something that's way back and forth over the human landscape.
History is made by the willpower and resolution of articulate individuals.
That's what I've always found.
Somebody emerges, makes some incredible case, like the Founding Fathers made their cases.
Martin Luther made his case in the 15th century.
Francis Bacon in the 16th century made his case for the scientific revolution.
Socrates made his case.
People emerge and make very powerful and articulate cases for...
Something.
You know, the abolitionists, the Western European Christians in the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries made the case against slavery and virtually ended it as a worldwide institution that had lasted since prehistory.
Articulate, committed, passionate, resolute, well-grounded individuals stand and cry their barbaric reasons to the winds and society changes.
If you reach yourself deep enough in principles, the world ends up having to orbit you.
It's just the way things work.
So the future of America is going to be whatever the most resolute.
And virtuous and articulate and consistent people are going to make it be.
Now, I hope it's not going to be the bad guys because they don't have that virtue thing, which is kind of important.
They are resolute, though.
They are resolute.
Oh, yeah, and they're hugely self-interested.
The problem is, you know, evil pays off now, like addiction, right?
Virtue pays off down the road.
It's like dieting.
So the evil people are getting all they want now with the power of the state and the ability to type whatever they want into their own bank accounts and call it a banking system.
Whereas good people, we go through some flack, we get some negative publicity, we get some hostility, we get some trolls, and then we pass a better world along to our kids.
So it's just focusing on that long-term goal and being willing to stand in the face of evil and hostility and fear and negativity, being able to stand that and guide yourself by that North Star.
Of passionate virtue and reason.
That, I believe, is going to determine the future.
But that's each individual's choice to do.
And therefore, the future can't be predicted because you can't know for sure when and how and where people are going to stand up for what is right.
Well, that's very well stated.
And, you know, I find that very hopeful because you're getting a lot of exposure with your free domain, Radio.com.
So you get three to four million downloads.
Is that per week?
No, that's a month for a very abstract philosophy.
Yes, for philosophy.
For philosophy, that's very encouraging.
Or if I had cats playing piano, maybe Schrodinger's cat playing piano.
That's my next video.
But I think that, yeah, for a philosophy show, I think that's amazing.
Oh, it is.
It's excellent.
I'm very, very thrilled.
And as long as we've got the internet open, we've got a platform where we can reach people.
So that's very encouraging.
Thank you for coming in and talking to us.
My pleasure.
Thank you so much.
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