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July 22, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

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3030 Selling Babies to Cannibals - Call In Show - July 19th, 2015

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	Hey everybody!
	Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	Hope you're doing well.
	FreeDomainRadio.com slash donate to help out the show.
	I am ready, willing, and able to take on the philosophical all-comers from the n-dimensional galaxy of perfect rationality, aka The Freedom Aid Radio listeners.
	Mike, who's on with the firstness?
	All right.
	Well, first today is Levi.
	Levi wrote in, and his question is, I assert that all rights are a subset of property rights, therefore freedom, a right, is a property of the possessor, and then can therefore be bought and sold.
	Do you agree?
	If so, do you support slavery?
	If not, why?
	That's from Levi.
	Levi Lux's money!
	How you doing, man?
	I'm doing pretty well.
	So why is this a big question for you, just out of curiosity?
	Are you currently contemplating selling yourself into the multidimensional slave trade in the Far East?
	Well, I was reading something about how the shift between who owns an individual has changed throughout time.
	The Romans for a while there believed that you owned yourself so you could be bought and sold.
	Some people believe...
	Wait, wait, hang on.
	Wait, you owned yourself so you could be bought and sold?
	Like you could sell yourself, right?
	Like if you were in a position where the alternative was death, you could trade freedom for not death.
	Got it.
	Yeah.
	But some people believe you're the property of God, so your rights can't be traded because they're not really yours, they're God's, so you can't trade God's property.
	Right, right, right.
	And I guess the third alternative is you're the property of the state, so...
	No, what I'm curious about, I don't mind, I think it's a great...
	It's an interesting question, I'm just curious why it's important to you.
	Because it's theoretical in your life, I would assume, right?
	Yeah, I was...
	I don't know, I just thought about it and it doesn't have a clear answer.
	That was it.
	Well, and again, I'm not sort of saying that it shouldn't be, but...
	Of all the questions that you could ask, and I'm not saying it's a bad question, but I just want to understand why this one is important to you.
	Well, I kind of get the impression, like, thinking about how society works these days, you know, we have the government needs more power, says everybody else.
	And I kind of think, like, why do people think that?
	You know, why is it okay to...
	Reduce someone else's freedom for whatever personal benefit.
	And so, in some ways, there's already transactions with people's freedom.
	It's just not normally the person whose freedom it is who's doing the transaction.
	Does that make sense?
	You're happy until the end.
	What do you mean by that?
	This person may not want to go to school, so they don't have the freedom to not go to school.
	We're going to make that transaction for them.
	Oh, you mean a child?
	Yeah, children or just regular old people who don't want to pay for other people's medicine.
	You know, whoever else, like, their right to make that transaction has, you know, basically been traded to the government for taxes.
	Well, it's not a trade.
	Right.
	But, sort of.
	No.
	Yeah.
	Not in any typical sense, but...
	No, it's no.
	Come on.
	I mean, if someone kidnaps, I don't know, a pet of mine...
	And then I give them 50 bucks.
	That's not a trade.
	It's a crime, right?
	Because they're stealing something, right?
	So if I buy my freedom from a government rape room by paying them off in the form of taxes, that's not a trade.
	I mean, that makes a voluntary trade that is chosen with no Cornering or compulsion that makes a voluntary trade meaningless, right?
	It's like using the same word for lovemaking and rape.
	You can't, right?
	Right, right.
	But what I was suggesting is not that...
	See, that's what's happening now, is that some...
	In that analogy, you're conducting the transaction with the dog thief, but...
	If the dog thief only stole your dog because somebody paid to them to steal your dog, then the dog thief and a third party are having a transaction involving your property, which is kind of how the government...
	No, not a transaction.
	Because it's like saying that if I hire someone to murder someone, that's just a free market transaction.
	No, it's not.
	That's a crime, right?
	No, it's not free market.
	Absolutely.
	It's not free market at all.
	I mean, you can't call that a trade, because what that does is it completely muddies up The words.
	The words, right?
	You can't use a coercive interaction and use the same word as you do for a non-coercive interaction, right?
	Right.
	So what's the...
	That's exactly my point, though, that people...
	Just call it a crime.
	All you need to do is just call it a crime, right?
	Okay, so there's crimes against people's rights that are instigated by third parties, right?
	The violation of your rights was between you and the government, and it was instigated by a third party who voted for that government official to, or, you know, bribed them or whatever, to take those rights.
	So is it okay?
	Sorry, so it's the person who's voting who's instigating the The government wouldn't be elected, right?
	Somebody had to agree with them at some point in the United States.
	Somebody must like these people, I assume.
	They get elected or we've just got massive fraud.
	So someone thinks it's okay for the government to take my rights or take my property.
	Well, it's not a question of liking, right?
	I mean, in Chicago, there was a study that was done where companies that gave, this is off the top of my head, but it's very close to the right ratio.
	Companies who donated $7 million to a mayoral campaign received $2 billion worth of government contracts.
	$7 million investment in a politician reaps you $2 billion.
	I mean, that's like government lottery, right?
	Yeah.
	And this is the imbalance of rewards versus costs that is so distorted the free market.
	The idea that someone likes these politicians, yeah, I think they all hold their nose and say, well, you're the guy who can get the gold, right?
	Right.
	Well, so going back to my question and what inspired it is the...
	Currently, you have people who go to government schools, they get in debt with student loans from the government.
	The United States is the worst person to owe money to.
	They basically live under the pressure of inescapable debt for a very long time.
	That's functionally a little bit different than slavery, but there's still some similarities there.
	So people have kind of traded freedom for...
	Okay, but here's the thing, and this is why I wanted to sort of do this background, Levi, is that you're using the term slavery.
	Now slavery, to my knowledge, is a historical institution that, you know, there's significant anthropological evidence that people were buying and selling and using slaves before there was even a written language in the human species.
	But it's when you capture someone, maybe as part of a war or something else, you capture someone, and they submit to your will, and that's not any part of their choice.
	Now, on the other hand, if you're saying, well, somebody could voluntarily sell themselves into a contract, that would limit their choices in the future in return for, say, a guaranteed income.
	But that person is making the choice.
	So I was trying to understand the way that you use language when you say, well, if I sell myself into servitude or whatever, are you then in favor of slavery?
	But if you choose to sell yourself into servitude, that's not slavery.
	Right.
	So, and this is why it's really important to be precise with these words.
	And the reason being that if you use such emotionally laden terms, right, like, are you in favor of slavery, right?
	I mean, it's not really a debate if you're muddying the voluntary with the violent.
	Right.
	Okay, so there's not really good language for what I was trying to suggest.
	So...
	A slave doesn't have rights, normally, the way we imagine somebody who is a slave.
	What they want to say, they can't say.
	What they want to do, they can't necessarily do.
	There's definite limits on the rights of someone who's considered a slave, as opposed to a voluntary servant.
	Although it is arguable, and I haven't chased this data down to the nth degree, but I've read some arguments that an economic analysis of Southern slavery, say in the 18th century...
	In the early part of the 19th century, that if the slave produced $100 worth of value, the slave consumed $90 worth of services to do that.
	In other words, the slave, quote, got to keep 9 tenths or 90% of the value that they produced.
	In other words, the taxation of slavery was only 10%.
	Boy!
	Wouldn't that be nice to have a flat tax of 10% these days?
	So I just really wanted...
	And again, I haven't verified all of that.
	It's an argument that's made by a historian.
	Whether it's true or not, I can't verify.
	But certainly somebody's put their reputation on the line for it.
	So it's probably worth examining if people want to.
	But it wasn't so much that they weren't allowed to do or say things and so on.
	It's just that they received the majority of their payment in kind rather than in cash.
	And again, that doesn't make it just or right.
	It's an evil institution.
	But it wasn't so much that they have no rights.
	They obviously didn't have the right to quit, and they didn't have the right to choose the composition of their remuneration.
	Like they'd get usually health care, they would usually get food, obviously clothing, shelter, and so on.
	But yeah, according to some arguments, slaves got to keep 90% of their income, boy, doesn't it?
	He's pretty nice in some ways.
	The debt 5,000 year history, he sort of looks at the institution of slavery as humanity without context.
	So a typical person would have a societal debt to their family or to their village or whatever.
	So they have some sort of relationship and role within that group.
	Slaves have no role within the community of their masters.
	They're out of context from The society of their masters.
	If the slave acts poorly and makes the master look bad in the company of their peers, kind of thing.
	Much like how children misbehave in public, people look at their parents and not their children.
	You know, they don't go, oh, this five-year-old needs to, you know, we need to talk to them reasonably.
	They're like, parents, what did you, where have you gone wrong?
	Yeah, or if in the past, in certain places, if a woman got into debt, her husband was automatically assumed to be the surety.
	He was like the lender of last resort, so to speak.
	He was always responsible for her debts.
	Okay, so to dive into the question, I don't want to use the word slavery.
	Let's just say servitude.
	Okay.
	Just because slavery implies the involuntary, completely involuntary nature.
	Now, Clearly, we do this at times.
	Right.
	So if I take 20 bucks to mow someone's lawn and it's going to take me an hour to mow their lawn, have I become their slave for an hour?
	You know what I mean?
	So to sell yourself into something that you consider to be economically advantageous to you is...
	Very, very common, right?
	Most people do that.
	I do this show and ask for donations to support what it is that we're all doing here at Free Domain Radio.
	And does this make me a slave?
	So there is servitude, right?
	I mean, if you...
	Have a contract, then you take someone's money.
	Have you become a slave in providing them the goods that they have asked for?
	No.
	You have a contract.
	You can return the money, maybe pay them for their inconvenience or whatever, right?
	So we can do this for an hour.
	We can do this for, you can go into contracts for six months.
	And those contracts, usually you can You can end those contracts if you're willing to pay a penalty, right?
	So when I was a student, well, when I was a student at an accredited institution rather than my house, when I was a student, there was this constant problem, right?
	So I went to school in Montreal.
	I did almost two years at the National Theatre School, and then I did two years at McGill.
	So I was almost four years in Montreal, right?
	And needed a place to live and the first year I was there I lived in a frat house, shared a room with another fellow and then we got our own place and the big problem was we were there for eight months and the lease was for a year so we always had to find someone to try and take over that lease in the summer and that was a big challenge for us, right?
	Now if we couldn't find someone we could break the lease But that meant we had to pay three months' rent.
	Right?
	That was the early withdrawal penalty.
	And we have this with cell phone contracts, too.
	Like, if you want to cancel your contract, you can do so, but you have to pay a penalty.
	So, normally, we can sell ourselves into, quote, servitude.
	Or we can...
	We can sell our future obligations.
	Servitude sounds a bit close to involuntary servitude, so maybe we can just say obligations.
	So we can sell our future obligations.
	It does not mean that we have to.
	It just means that we pay a penalty if we don't fulfill those obligations.
	Does that make sense?
	Right.
	So can you sell rights?
	So we can do that for an hour, certainly.
	We can do that for a month.
	We can do that for six months.
	Now, at what point does it become not great?
	So clearly I can sell my next hour, right?
	Can I sell my next decade?
	I don't know because it's hard to know what I'm going to want to be doing in a decade, right?
	I mean, let's say 20 years ago, I said, man, I love the software business.
	I was a software entrepreneur.
	So I'm going to sell my next 20 years in software.
	And then I say, ooh, philosophy show.
	That's cool, right?
	And so at some point, I think you are trying to guess what your future self wants.
	And that's a challenge.
	Now, on the other hand, when I got married...
	Till death do us part, right?
	I mean, I was making decisions for my future, hopefully 90-year-old self, right?
	Right.
	And again, if you want to withdraw from the marriage contract, you can do so.
	There's just a bit of a penalty.
	Sometimes it's more than a little bit of a penalty.
	So we do accept contracts until death with regards to sexual fidelity, sharing of income, and so on.
	So that's the basis of the marriage contract.
	Does that mean I'm selling myself into sexual bondage?
	Only on a Saturday night with a bit of Jagermeister.
	But I don't think that we would say...
	I certainly wouldn't say that I would.
	I find marriage much more liberating than being single.
	So we can sell our future obligations for an hour, a month, six months, a year.
	We can enter into mortgages for 25 years.
	Or sometimes I think there's 30-year mortgages.
	So that's...
	Really throwing the net of time forward quite a ways.
	So I think that given that philosophy does not depend upon a tipping point of time, you know, like murder, totally immoral, except between 2 and 2.30 a.m.
	every second full moon, right?
	That wouldn't make...
	It's a universal, right?
	So I would say that you can...
	Sell your future obligations.
	Theoretically, I can see why you would make the case that, what would you say?
	Well, 10 years, morally good.
	10 years in one day, morally evil, right?
	That doesn't really make much sense.
	And then we would have to abandon lifelong marriage commitments and so on.
	So I think that you could.
	Now, I do think, though, that the difference from slavery is that you have to be able to withdraw your consent for that contract and pay a penalty for it.
	Right?
	So, because a contract that is simply irrevocable, that is indentured servitude.
	And I think that's not a good thing.
	Because it says that you have no free will in the future.
	You can't ever change your mind.
	Of course you can change your mind.
	You can get out of any contract if you want, if you're willing to pay.
	Right?
	Like, Donald Trump is suing Univision for, what, $500 million because they've canceled his participation contract.
	In Miss Universe or something like that.
	So, you know, they could say we don't want the Donald around anymore.
	But they have to pay their penalty for it.
	So, but I could certainly see those situations where somebody might find it advantageous to sell future obligations for money.
	Like there's some people who are spectacularly bad at running their own lives.
	Yes.
	Right?
	Rappers.
	Not known to be the very best money managers in the known universe.
	MC Hammer filed for bankruptcy after making, I don't know, 10 or 20 million dollars from parachute pants or whatever the hell he did.
	Hammer time.
	So, you know, I could see if somebody was spectacularly bad At managing their own lives and their own money that they might say, look, when I make decisions, it goes really, really badly.
	And so I'm going to just go into this place.
	They're going to give me room and board.
	I'm going to work.
	I've got an internet and I can leave when I want.
	It's sort of like rehab, but for financial stuff, right?
	Right.
	So I can see why people might want to do that because they're just really bad at running their own lives.
	And so maybe it's just better to offload that to somebody else and all that.
	But again, that's not slavery because You may live there, you may sleep there, you may work there, like in a rehab facility, I guess, but you would have the option to back out at any time.
	And the last thing I'll say, and I'll turn it then over to you, but the last thing I'd say is that I don't think that lifelong contracts would be honored in a free society.
	Like, if I were to wake up tomorrow and say, I'm just really bad at running my life, I'm going to sell the rest of my life to someone else.
	Until the day I die, I'm just gonna sell the rest of my life to someone else.
	Well, I don't think anyone would make an offer, really.
	It's a bad investment.
	It's a terrible investment.
	Because basically I'm saying, buy me because I'm really bad at running my own life.
	So maybe you'd like to have the liability of me badly running my own life, right?
	I just get into too many car crashes.
	I still want to have the ability to drive.
	Now please buy me and my future.
	Because the moment that you own someone until the end of time for a fixed amount of money, which I assume would be the contract...
	The only people who'd really want to make that deal are people who basically, it would be like the new form of government worker.
	Like the people who just, who just are going to, the moment they get that contract.
	Greeks, I think is the word.
	Greek.
	I'm sorry?
	I said Greeks, I think is the word.
	Greeks.
	I was just reading that even in the Middle Ages, there was a difference, right?
	So in the Middle Ages, there were all these saints' days.
	And in England, a third of the year was taken up with these saints' days, right?
	But in the Mediterranean countries, it was still even more.
	It was like five months of the year, so.
	It was taken out with Saint's Holiday, so you weren't allowed to work.
	So, you know, I could see how people might want to do it, but it would not be the same as slavery, because slavery requires that the government catch the slaves and enforce a contract that they never signed and that they can't break out of, and there's no way in a free society that would be happening.
	I think people could sort of say, look, I want to live like a frat boy.
	You know, I just want to go to work.
	Like, when I lived in this frat, We're good to go.
	But anyway, so I could see why people might want to do that, but it would not be slavery because they could opt out.
	They voluntarily opt in and they could opt out maybe by paying a penalty.
	But the longer the time frame would be, the less people would want to get involved in it.
	I'm not saying that's like a perfect, all-encompassing answer, but that's how I think it would work philosophically.
	So my...
	Taking that, like, one step a little bit further is, so could you trade your life for something?
	Like, you know, obviously these are all bad investments.
	Like, no sensible person would buy someone's lifetime work unless they were really certain it'd go well, like the irresponsible person.
	Like, could you say, okay, well, I'm going to trade my life for this cause or whatever.
	Like, not like the rest of your life, but like, you will be dead and then compensated.
	Like, or whoever on your behalf will be compensated.
	All right, hang on a sec.
	Just a sec.
	Mike, you wanted to clarify this Univision thing?
	Oh yeah, I'll just mention Donald Trump owns a large portion of the Miss America competition and Univision signed a contract to air the Miss America competition and backed out of airing it.
	So that's why the Donald is going after them for the $500 million.
	There was no back-out clause they backed out.
	So he's claiming financial harm and that's why he's suing them.
	So that's the long and short on that.
	And he bought it because the last guy who was in charge of it was not allowed by his wife to show up to the actual concert.
	Seriously.
	Is that true?
	I'm telling you.
	Really?
	It's true.
	It's true.
	I didn't know that.
	Believe it or not.
	So, Levi, you were talking about, like, could someone, say, sell their life?
	Yeah, like, you know, some just really rich, crazy person was like, you know, I'd like to hunt you for sport and, you know, we'll compensate the rest of your family with untold riches in exchange for this good contract.
	You know, is that a thing?
	I would say organ transplants would probably be closer, right?
	Right, yeah.
	Like somebody wants your whole liver or something and like probably more likely than, you know, that hunting people for sports stuff, right?
	Organ transplants, whatever.
	We'll buy your, you know, we've got two twins here.
	They both got kidney disease.
	We need both your kidneys.
	It's the only match or whatever, right?
	Right.
	Exactly.
	That kind of thing.
	Is that okay?
	Like from a philosophical standpoint?
	Well, you do own yourself and you can sell yourself.
	I would tell you this, though, I don't think anybody would want to do business with a company that would enforce such a contract.
	Right.
	I mean...
	I wouldn't.
	I wouldn't either.
	It's like there's this Planned Parenthood confuffle going on at the moment where some undercover filmmakers shot a video last year of a woman fairly high up, I think she's a doctor in Planned Parenthood, discussing how they get the fetuses out of the mom in such a way that they don't destroy vital organs that they can then...
	she does discuss costs.
	Planned Parenthood says, well, that's just the cost to cover the extraction and transportation.
	We're not selling baby parts or whatever, right?
	But that's, you know, that kind of stuff, if, I don't think it's going to turn out to be true, but if it did turn out to be true that Planned Parenthood was selling baby parts or whatever, I mean, I don't know.
	I think society, all but the most sociopathic elements of society would pretty much rebel against that.
	I mean, that's far worse than what Acorn did when that undercover filmmaker had them...
	Like, he went in and the Acorn guys were trying to help a pimp hide his income that he got from his...
	His prostitutes, he was just pretending to do that.
	And they got defunded, and they're no more, as far as I understand it.
	So, I don't think...
	That would never be part of, I think, any kind of formal contract, like anything that would be enforceable in the free market equivalent of a court.
	Right.
	Because if a company came to light, If a company came to light that was enforcing a murder-for-organs contract, it would not be worth it for them.
	Well, it wouldn't really be murder if you're voluntarily killed, though.
	Okay, euthanasia of a healthy person for body parts.
	Listen, and you know what?
	Thank you, because I was nagging you earlier about the correct use of language, so I really appreciate you bringing me up short on that.
	So, no, you're right.
	That would be euthanasia of healthy person for body parts.
	I mean, I'd assume that if you were hunting a guy, you'd want him not bedridden.
	Right.
	I'm just thinking of this.
	Guy, like, slowly wheeling himself down, like on a hospital bed with a bunch of IV tubes attached, wheeling himself down some jungle pathway while some guy's zooming in.
	Almost there!
	Almost there!
	Release the hounds!
	So...
	No company would ever want to get involved in enforcing that contract, and they'd just be like, ew, like, no way.
	Right.
	It's not worth it.
	Too hideous a thing to get involved in.
	And so it would be extra legal.
	Yeah.
	And so, does philosophy have much to do with the black market?
	I don't know.
	I mean, if it's not part of something that society can really control, does it really matter?
	You know, it's one of these tree-falling-in-a-forest kind of things.
	Like, if people are going to do it, shake hands under the table, they're going to make it look almost exactly like an accident, and he's going to sign his donor card, and they're going to be right...
	Like, if they do that much fakery to it, then...
	That probably would not...
	Then it's sort of like, is it a crime if nobody ever knows it a crime?
	I don't know.
	I've got more important things to spend my brain energy on.
	But could you combine those two concepts, though?
	So could you say, you know, these two really bad ideas, right?
	So I would like to live like a frat boy, and I'm willing to trade the rest of whatever for it.
	And the person's like, okay, but the escape clause in this contract is, if you fail to meet your obligations, we're going to take your organs.
	So, in that case, you are trading...
	See, again, nobody's going to enforce that.
	Right.
	Well, it'd be a bad idea, too.
	I mean, I can't speculate what nobody would do.
	That's kind of...
	Oh, no.
	Listen, I'm telling you, I mean, I hate to pull the entrepreneur card, but, I mean, the number of decision layers that somebody would need to go through to get something like that approved...
	Right.
	So, I mean, let's say you're some middle manager.
	Some guy phones you with this idea and you're some middle manager at a dispute resolution organization or whatever it is in a free society.
	And you're like, yeah, I like liver and onions.
	This sounds great.
	You know, papa beans and all that.
	And you got a little face mask on with a grill for your teeth.
	And then you say, I'd really like to do this.
	Well, you have to go get the approval of your boss.
	And let's say your boss is equally insane and evil.
	And...
	And he takes it his boss.
	At some point, somebody's going to have to approve this.
	It's going to go all the way up.
	And the higher up you go, the more people have to worry about shareholders.
	And insurance.
	And insurance, yeah.
	And if you, as a senior executive, and I remember this when I was up in that rarefied atmosphere, if as a senior executive, you knowingly do something that destroys the value, Of the shares that people have bought or significantly harms them.
	I mean, you get sued.
	I mean, the shareholders will just take your finances apart like atom by atom and toss the remains to the four winds.
	And so they just there's so many checks and balances in a business.
	In a business like that, it's incomprehensible to me that some kind of decision like that could ever be made with the approval of people high up in the organization.
	Because, I mean, how much would somebody be willing to pay for that?
	I don't know.
	Let's say that they want to pay a million dollars.
	Whatever.
	It's nonsense, right?
	But let's just say they want to pay a million dollars to enforce this kind of contract.
	Any reasonably sized company is going to trade at, I don't know, let's just be conservative and say 10 times earnings, right?
	And so let's say that this is a very middling successful dispute resolution organization and they only do 100 million a year, right?
	So their stock market is trading about a billion dollars worth of valuation.
	And let's say that after this, the stock value, like after this comes out, the stock value goes down by 25%.
	Well, you've just lost a quarter of a billion dollars worth of value for a one million dollar contract.
	In other words, your losses are 250 times your gains.
	Right.
	No sane business.
	And again, this is all very simplified and it's not exact.
	And, you know, please don't write me with, well, it's only paper.
	I get all of that.
	Right.
	But nonetheless, people don't make it high up in an organization if they think it's a real, like you don't become really big in the business world if you think that a 250 times loss is worth the risk.
	Right.
	Well, I don't think that any of this is a good idea.
	Can I throw out a more plausible example?
	Sure.
	Possibly.
	I mean, it's a common movie trope.
	I think I've seen this in at least half a dozen Will Smith movies where he's the father and child has some type of illness or there's an accident and needs an organ.
	So the father, or in some movies I've seen the mother, donate the organ for the sake of the child and they're making the decision there to...
	Pretty much end their life, most assuredly, for the sake of their child to give them the organ so they can continue living.
	Now, I'm not going to throw a father that wants to do that for their child in jail.
	You know, I'm not going to say...
	Wait, hang on.
	So the father is donating an organ that the father needs to live?
	Yeah.
	I can't...
	I mean, maybe that shows up in the movies.
	I don't think you can do that in a hospital.
	That's a good question.
	It's just a Hollywood trope.
	I don't think that you're allowed to kill someone in order to save someone else.
	Otherwise, it would be like, rich guy has been in a motorcycle accident.
	Go down to the pool ward with a hammer and get me some organs, right?
	I mean, I don't think – But there's nothing conceptually wrong with a voluntary transaction like that, right?
	Like, it's probably not currently legal, but, like, if every party involved is for it, there shouldn't be an issue, right?
	Well, see, when children are involved, it's a tough call because children can't give consent, right?
	You also have to have consent from the person receiving the organ.
	Right.
	So, it's tricky, but...
	While, you know, there are things that are theoretically possible, you know, like that creepy, I hate to say it, inevitably German guy a while back ago who wanted to be a sexual cannibal and advertised on some place on the internet for a victim, and then some guy came over and then, you know, he killed him and ate him up.
	Okay, so that's consensual.
	You know what I mean?
	Like, okay, but...
	There's things which are theoretically, you can get away with it in terms of philosophy, but people's moral horror at the actual transaction would be so universal that just because it's theoretically, vaguely possible from a consensual standpoint doesn't mean that it would ever really happen.
	Does that make any sense?
	I guess, but...
	Well, you know what's true as well with this organ example and the father donating to the son or daughter?
	The only reason that there's an issue with organ transplants is because you're not allowed to buy and sell them.
	You know, if...
	If you could buy and sell organs, I know this sounds sinister on the surface, but hear me out.
	If you could buy and sell organs upon someone's death, everyone that's even remotely healthy would likely become an organ donor because their family would then gain some profit.
	It's the wrong way to put it, the death of a loved one.
	But they'd get some type of financial restitution upon the death.
	And someone else, there'd be a far greater incentive to For people to participate in organ donor programs.
	And the organ derivatives business.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I mean, obviously there'd be a huge market to mine for my penis, but the shipping would be so exorbitant.
	I mean, you'd need one of those flatbed trucks probably more.
	Anyway, we can go talk about that another time.
	Can we really?
	It's not so much the shipping, it's storage.
	And what's that old joke about the guy with the 18-inch penis who just likes to get into a bath after a long day and unwind?
	No, like, so, I mean, you could say, I mean, make a horrifying case for a baby dies, can the mother sell it to a cannibal?
	Baby died of natural causes.
	Can the mother sell the baby to a cannibal?
	And it's like...
	I don't even...
	I think I'm going to throw up my family to consider that as a possibility.
	It's either going to be something on society's radar, in which case the amount of ostracism and moral horror that would react to that kind of transaction would be such that no sane human being would ever do it.
	Like doing that would just mean you're insane and you need to not be in society.
	Or it's done in some way that nobody can ever tell, in which case You know, nobody can tell.
	It doesn't show up anywhere in society.
	Is it a moral crime?
	I don't know.
	I mean, let's say, do we need the fire department for invisible fires that burn nothing?
	It's like, I don't think we do, in fact.
	So, you know, there's sort of the limits of consent and voluntarism and so on.
	You know, you can make cases for some nutty stuff and some really stomach-turning stuff.
	But the reality is that society is very good at enforcing these kinds of rules.
	You could say that they're merely aesthetics, right?
	The baby's dead or whatever.
	But nonetheless, I mean, I don't want to live...
	I don't want to do business with anyone who's involved in baby eating, you know?
	These are other sentences I never thought of in my life.
	I'm gonna have that contract.
	Like, in the fine print, I will be baby-eating double-plus ungood.
	Oh, but come on!
	I'm telling you.
	My soul sent me those business plans.
	Oprah gets the four skins, remember?
	They need the foreskins for the skin cream, yes.
	I think that's a myth, though.
	Because when we put out the circumcision video, people were emailing us and saying, ah, yes, but there's a face cream that uses baby foreskins that was endorsed by Oprah.
	I think that's not true.
	Maybe if you want to just check on that, Mike.
	I'll look at Snopes.
	We'll see.
	Yeah, I think that's a bit of an urban legend.
	I do think that there's a face cream that uses it.
	I don't think Oprah ever.
	Let's clear that up.
	So yeah, I think that I have good faith in the practical moral revulsion of the general population.
	And even if you could find some way to justify these things from a moral standpoint, I'm not particularly concerned about any sane person pursuing them.
	Plus, of course, you know, we only have a free society when the vast majority of people are raised in a nonviolent manner, in which case I can't imagine any philosophically and peacefully raised child wanted to Sit down to a steady diet of baby organs or something like that.
	That's so disturbed that that would come from such an unbelievably disastrous childhood that I just can't see it showing up much in a free society.
	Okay, apparently they use cells from a single foreskin sample to grow the cells needed for the skin cream.
	That's so weird.
	And that's the one that Oprah...
	Yeah, that's apparently the deal behind it.
	So, I mean, kinda?
	Some kernel of truth in it, but...
	It's not great, but it's not like Oprah dipping her hand into what looks like some bald onion rings or something like that.
	Okay, got it.
	Well...
	I thought it was calamari!
	Jesus!
	Alright.
	Well, have we sufficiently horrified you to stop doing business with us?
	Levi, is that what we've been able to achieve?
	No, it's actually a very different answer than I normally get when I've talked about this with my friends.
	A lot of people get held up on whether or not you can do lifelong transactions that are binding and It's quasi-permanent.
	But you can't.
	It's the quasi that counts, right?
	Just remind a marriage.
	You can get married, that's your lifelong commitment, but you can get divorced, but there's a penalty.
	Right.
	And in the event that whatever horrifying situation had a penalty of death on that contract, which is separately...
	We can agree that it's morally a silly idea.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	In a free society, there's no penalty of death on a contract because nobody would enforce that.
	Right.
	But that's just a...
	Nobody would enforce it for moral reasons, not for philosophically inconsistent reasons.
	Like, if it's okay to do whatever and sell your organs, For whatever contrived situation that everybody feels good about, it would be possible to do it at the back end of this terrible contract.
	It would just be likely unenforceable because most people would consider that a terrible idea.
	Well, either it would show up on society's radar, in which case It would be shut down very quickly through ostracism and all of that.
	Or it wouldn't show up on society's radar.
	In other words, it would be such a deep dungeon, bottom of Skyrim, black market deal that we're talking about being able to prevent something that we never know is going to ever occur.
	In which case, I just don't think it's that important.
	Okay.
	So that's a good answer and different than normal.
	Okay.
	All right.
	Well, thanks very much, man.
	I appreciate it.
	Welcome back.
	I do like the theoreticals.
	They are my crack, unfortunately.
	But no, the great, great question.
	Thanks for calling in.
	All right.
	Thank you.
	Yeah.
	Alright, thanks, Levi.
	Up next is Matthew.
	Matthew wrote in and said, I have a strange desire to eat a baby.
	Will you sell one to me?
	Wait, no, sorry.
	Matthew wrote in and said, is the act of repossession immoral?
	Specifically, the act of vehicle repossession?
	Repo Man!
	From the movie, from the big screen to the medium-sized podcast.
	In only 25 years.
	As opposed to the immovable collateral such as houses and land.
	For this question, vehicle repossession shall include all types of motorized collateral, from the lowly ATV to private jets.
	Is the act of vehicle repossession immoral?
	My daughter says you're in the clear, Matthew.
	I just wanted to mention that.
	Oh, your daughter says so?
	Yeah.
	Okay, that's...
	And since she is the Delphic Oracle to my secondhand Socrates, I'm afraid that's all we have time for.
	Isabella says, okay.
	So, yeah, so, I mean, they're stealing if they're not paying for their vehicle, right?
	That would be the thought process, yes.
	I mean, if I go to a hotel room and I pay for a night and then I just move in...
	And I say, no, I'm not leaving.
	I still want maid service, of course, and I like the pool, but I'm just moving in.
	Well, then, I don't know, for like $100, I've just got a little condo, right?
	And lifelong maintenance fees and all that.
	But that's not how it can work, right?
	I mean, if you lease a car or you rent a car, you don't get to keep it, right?
	And you're paid well for not keeping it insofar as you don't have to pay the full cost of the car.
	Right, so in a lease, you pay the depreciation value over like two or three or four years, but you're not paying the full value of the car.
	In the same way, you can rent a place and you don't have to put down a down payment.
	You don't have to do your own maintenance and repairs and so on.
	And so you're well paid for not exercising a claim of permanent ownership.
	And if you take that subsidy for non-permanent ownership, But then you act as if you have permanent ownership, then you've stolen the difference between the two, right?
	Yeah, I suppose so.
	Can I say a few words, Stefan?
	Yes, please.
	First off, I want to say it's an honor to talk to you.
	I've been a fan of Free Domain Radio for many years, probably since you first started putting content on YouTube, and I just want to say it's a great honor to speak with you.
	Thank you.
	I am a repo man, and my question had to do with what's legally known as self-help repossession, or the right to We're good to go.
	The idea that we can seize collateral involuntarily from individuals as long as we can do so without breaching the peace.
	Breaching the peace is a deliberately vague terminology and it's really important to interpret it broadly.
	Like no blood, right?
	No gunshots, no blood, no...
	No screaming profanity.
	If people come out of their homes upset and irritated with me, I'm supposed to leave, etc., etc.
	But the question is, is self-help repossession wrong?
	The idea that I'm invading someone else's property and taking their collateral.
	Is that a...
	Well, no.
	It's not their collateral if they haven't paid for it, right?
	Yeah.
	That's my thought.
	Yeah.
	It's my thought as a repo man.
	That's what I think.
	Yeah.
	I mean, you're not invading, right?
	Again, the old thing, like if somebody kidnaps my dog and it's in their trailer park or it's in their trailer home, right?
	I don't know, like...
	Right behind the M&M character in 8 Mile or something.
	I go into that.
	It's not a home invasion.
	I'm getting my dog back.
	If you don't want people to enter your property, don't take their stuff is one way to achieve that, right?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	I think it's incumbent upon the debtors to pay their bills or else they are liable for what ensues.
	Well, I mean, because they're not just stealing from the company, right?
	Like, I mean, in retail, 15% of the price that you pay is the asshole tax.
	15% of the price that you pay in retail is the price you pay for shoplifters.
	Yes.
	Just being total assholes.
	And what they do is, by doing that, they're not stealing from the store, they're stealing from the other customers.
	You know, there's kids there who can't get a toy because it's 15% more than what the parents can afford because of shoplifters.
	Right?
	And so, they're not stealing from the car company.
	They're stealing from everyone else who's going to have to cover the costs of all of this, right?
	Like, let's say that you could sign a lease and then just keep the car.
	Well, who the hell would ever buy it?
	At which point, the lease price would then be exactly the same as the purchase price.
	And there would be no more leasing.
	Now, leasing is really important for some people.
	I mean, it's important for some yuppies who want a Mercedes and can't afford it and just are willing to trade it in every couple of years, right?
	Okay, that's fine, you know, whatever.
	But that still brings down the price of these things to the point where other people can afford them.
	But of course, for a lot of people who are poor, a lease, you know, like, I don't think there's any really high-end cars that are advertised as, it costs you this bi-weekly.
	You know, whenever you see bi-weekly, you're like diving down to the lower ends of the economic strata.
	And there's nothing wrong with that.
	So there's some guys, you know, they got high school education, they need to get a job, and the only way they can get a job is with a car, and they need a reliable car because in a lot of those low-rent jobs, and I worked a lot of them, I mean, if you're late more than three times, you're out the door, right?
	So they need a reliable car.
	And the only way they can get it is through a lease program, right?
	And then, you know, maybe they buy the car with the money they've made from their job after the lease is up or whatever, right?
	And so if people take the car on a lease payment and then don't return it, in other words, they exercise full ownership when they're in a lease situation, what they're doing is they're driving the price of cars and in particular of leases up for everyone else to the point where somebody can't get a job because they can't afford the lease because the job doesn't pay them enough.
	And, you know, every time you increase the price of something by one penny, someone somewhere is going to drop off.
	So if the price of people not paying their bills, look, and I get it, sometimes you can't pay your bills.
	You know, when I was young, I've been there.
	I remember being completely cornered sometimes.
	And sometimes you can't pay your bills.
	So then you get off your rickety old sofa, you open up your trailer park home, you get it to your car, and you drive it to the dealer.
	And you say, listen, man, I'm really sorry.
	Can't pay my bills.
	Here's the car back.
	But the people who want to keep the car when they don't pay their bills, they're stealing from society as a whole.
	Because those costs to deal with all of this are passed to the car company, and they don't pay it.
	They can't.
	So it's passed along in increased prices to everyone else.
	And this form, like every time you steal, you're not stealing from one person, you're stealing from everyone.
	Right?
	Every time you go into someone's house and you take something, you're not taking something from that person, you're taking it from everyone.
	Because they then have to go and replace that thing which drives the price up for everyone else.
	Plus they may submit an insurance claim which drives the price of insurance up for everyone else.
	There's almost no stealing From an individual, there is almost always and forever only stealing from society as a whole.
	Yeah, yeah, you can think, oh, you go to Ted Kaczynski's house and you take a candlestick, which he's never going to replace, yada, yada, yada.
	Okay, but what that means is that instead of buying a candlestick, you've gone out and stolen it from Ted Kaczynski's hut.
	The Unabomber, just in case you know, right?
	And so you have not given the money, like let's say it's 50 bucks to buy a candlestick, you haven't bought the candlestick and given the guy, right?
	You've then lowered the price of candlesticks because you've reduced demand for candlesticks.
	There's no theft from an individual situation.
	And There's only theft from society as a whole, right?
	So we talked to a finance guy.
	He was the finance in particular for, you know, the buy here, finance here kind of guy.
	FDR 2846, the Stephen Hawking pinup calendar, which was a call-in show from November 19th of 2014, just for those who want to go into more background of this.
	But no, I have lots of sympathy for people who can't pay their bills.
	I have zero sympathy and a lot of antipathy for people who can't pay their bills but want to keep that stuff anyway.
	Because it means that people like you have to go out and risk confrontation and drive up the price for everyone else.
	And it's just a big social ripple effect that everyone else ends up having to pay for these assholes and I don't like it.
	Yes.
	Okay.
	So when you do your job well, sorry, Matthew, when you do your job well, you are helping the poor people and the people who need these cars.
	Because, you know, if you didn't do your job or you didn't do your job well and efficiently, then the price of these things would go up and make it unaffordable to some poor people, which would be a disaster for them.
	So I think you are doing God's work in this good green earth.
	Okay, I appreciate what you're saying.
	And I've been on the same thought process as well, because I do know that repossession helps keep the cost of loans down.
	But then that opens up the whole other conversation.
	Like me personally, I believe debt is evil.
	Debt is evil?
	Hang on.
	Debt is evil?
	Can you unpack that one a tad for me?
	For me personally, debt is evil.
	I think some people...
	No, no, no.
	If it's for you personally, then you can't use the word evil, right?
	You can say, I don't like debt, but you can't say that there's a personal evil, right?
	That's a universal subjectivity, right?
	If it's evil, then it's universal.
	It's an immoral thing, right?
	The type of debt that leads to inflation of currency, I believe that is an evil to society.
	Oh, government.
	You mean government counterfeiting?
	Yes.
	Oh, yeah, yeah.
	I agree with you for sure.
	Counterfeiting and borrowing on behalf of others without their express consent and approval and so on, right?
	Yeah, I agree with you.
	It's completely evil.
	And it's the worst kind of evil as well.
	You know, we talk about, oh, we have this horror of slavery.
	Well, how about a debt-to-GDP ratio more than 100% with an unborn generation coming trundling down the vagina tracks?
	You know, it's like, well, that's pure slavery, isn't it?
	Yes, I believe debt is slavery.
	Government debt?
	I believe all debt is slavery.
	Ah, you see, that's what I thought you meant at the beginning.
	Now, all debt is slavery.
	So if I borrow money to buy a car so I can get to a job, I'm enslaving myself?
	Yeah, let's call it slavery light, but yeah.
	Slavery light does not bring much clarity to the moral situation, I'm afraid.
	I'd say it's a minor evil, and I understand some people are backed up to a corner and believe that there's no other way, but me personally, I think there's always another route besides debt, that you're just not trying hard enough.
	Well, wait, wait, but what if you want to buy a house and you don't have the half a million dollars or maybe the $100,000 or whatever you're buying, right?
	See, a $100,000 house.
	Should you not take out loans to buy the house and pay them back?
	You should try to come up with at least 20%.
	Oh, no, I'm not saying that.
	I mean, but whatever.
	But so then you're borrowing $80,000, right?
	I believe debt for personal residence is the only acceptable form of debt.
	Oh, the only acceptable form of debt.
	So if somebody doesn't have health insurance...
	And they need to borrow $10,000 for a life-saving operation.
	That's also not an acceptable form of debt for you?
	I think if you just go to the hospital, they'll treat you and you don't have to come up with the money ahead of time.
	Well, wait, so you should have some, everyone else should pay for your operation but not you?
	Okay, I guess you got me backed in the corner and you're pointing out the flaws.
	I'm not trying to be a jerk.
	I'm just really trying to understand because you're making very big statements.
	And look, I get from your job, you're like the lung doctor talking about smoking, right?
	Yeah.
	Because you see the negative results of debt every day you go out to repo cars, right?
	But there are some times when debt, I think, makes perfect sense.
	When I was starting a business, I borrowed some money.
	We had to sometimes borrow money to make payroll.
	And it was a great idea.
	The business grew and ended up employing dozens and dozens of people.
	And if we hadn't borrowed any money, then none of that would have happened.
	And I think you're a saint because you paid off that money.
	A lot of people don't.
	Well, a lot of people you see don't, right?
	Pardon me, say again?
	Well, a lot of the people that, I mean, I guess just about everyone that you deal with professionally on the, quote, customer side, they've been people who've not paid off their debts.
	I don't know what the default rate is on debt.
	I don't know.
	I mean, I've always worked really, really hard To pay off debts.
	And I've sometimes, you know, literally eaten ramen and water.
	Tap water!
	Let me tell you.
	Oh, the horror.
	But, yeah, I mean, I've really gone full-on monastic to pay off debts at certain points in my life because...
	You know, the soft thievery of bad credit has always just left me...
	You know, if I'm going to go steal for someone, I should at least take the risk of getting involved in them with an alley and a switchblade, right?
	I don't like the stealing from people by, oh yeah, I'll pay you back.
	Plus, you know, I've lent money to people and sometimes had a huge amount of trouble getting the money back.
	So I know what it's like to be on the receiving end of trying to get money back from people who've lent you money.
	You know, this awful cat and mouse game of trying to call people and they don't ever answer and they dodge you when they see you.
	I mean, it just turns into this stupid game of immature tag.
	Neither a borrower nor a lender be is actually not a bad set of...
	But I grew up...
	This is probably an old, I don't know, Anglo-Saxon or an old British thing that, you know, it's a matter of honor to pay your debts.
	It's not a matter of, oh, I want a good credit rating and it makes it cheaper and so on.
	It's just...
	Thou shalt not steal, right?
	I mean, if you borrow and don't pay back, you're stealing.
	And I don't know that that's...
	I don't want to be like Mr.
	Good Old Days kind of thing, but I don't know that that's such a strong ethic anymore.
	It's sort of like being on time.
	Like, I was raised...
	And I'm not always perfect this way, but I really, really strive to be...
	I give myself maybe 10, the very outside, 15 minutes.
	I aim for that.
	I mean, you know, every now and then you drive in some place and the train's crossing and then you get stuck behind some tractor in the middle of the suburbs for some reason or whatever.
	So...
	I try to be on time.
	And being on time, I don't know, just doesn't seem to be much of a universal value anymore.
	But it was, you know, promptness is next to godliness is the way that I was raised.
	And yeah, you pay your debts.
	Default rate for credit cards.
	In February 2015, the default rate for credit cards went from 2.61% to 2.84%.
	So that means like almost three people out of 100, Mike, that are not...
	Paying their credit cards?
	Yeah, but I don't know if that includes bankruptcy or not.
	I can't imagine it does, but I'll see if I can find out more about that.
	That seems low to me.
	I would have expected it to be higher, but hey.
	Now, that's just people who didn't send in a check at all.
	That's what I'm trying to find out.
	They're not very specific about it.
	But that's pretty bad.
	If that's just one month, like assuming that that happens every, like you got to multiply those numbers by 12, wouldn't you, to get the full year's default rate?
	Yeah.
	Huh.
	And that's like 36?
	What's it saying?
	I figured it would be higher.
	Oh, you thought more than a third of people miss a payment every year?
	Jeez.
	No wonder everyone's rates are 20% or something, right?
	Yeah, I'll see if I can get any more information on it, but it's definitely quite a bit.
	I certainly, like Matthew, I'm with you, that I think...
	Debt is an immense immorality if you neither pay your debts back nor make arrangements to do so.
	And again, I know that there's big variables in life.
	I know, I know.
	Stuff can happen.
	You stub your toe, you drop your gold bar in the sewer.
	I mean, whatever.
	Stuff can happen.
	But the weasels that bother me the most are the people who don't pay the debt back and don't tell you, don't sit down and work something out with you.
	And tell you what's going on.
	They just kind of avoid you.
	And then if you corner them, they lie to you just to get by in the moment.
	And I think that's really Weasley and very R-type behavior.
	Anyway, yeah, there is...
	I would no more fail to pay a debt back than I would go and steal a car, because it's the same thing.
	Sorry, somebody said something?
	Yeah, there's a little more information.
	It actually peaked in April of 2010, 9% default rate for credit cards.
	In a month?
	In a month.
	April 2010.
	Wow.
	That's the peak.
	And it's been on the decline.
	It's around 3% now.
	But yeah, that's...
	Holy hell.
	Well, I mean, you know, credit cards?
	I don't know.
	I mean, you might as well ground them up, mix them with cocaine, and hand them out to, like, teenagers in a lot of ways.
	Because it's free, you know?
	I mean, but I'm sure someone's done this math, Mike.
	Like, if you buy a $100 pair of sneakers...
	On a credit card, and then you pay the minimum, you end up paying like hundreds and hundreds of dollars for these.
	Oh, it's insane, yeah.
	Right?
	Now, I am what is colloquially known as a deadbeat by the credit card companies.
	Do you know what that means?
	You take the points and pay off the balance every month.
	Oh yeah, baby!
	I'll take those points, thank you very much, and here's a check for the exact amount every single month.
	Yeah, no, I think that's...
	I can't remember the last time I carried a balance month to month.
	And if I did, it was because, I don't know, I forgot to make...
	Like, you know, every now and then, right?
	But, yeah, I mean, the number of people who, like, crank up their credit cards, like, it's free!
	It's like, it's not.
	There's nothing more expensive than free.
	And people should not...
	Like the fact that it jumps from 3% to 10% during a time of economic hardship tells me that, you know, I mean, that's three years after the recession began.
	And people should not be putting stuff like, no, cut your spending, move out of your house, go live somewhere cheaper.
	But don't, yeah, don't miss your payments.
	Just shoving everyone, shoving the costs on everyone else.
	First mortgages default rate peaked in May of 2009 at 6% that month.
	6% of first mortgage default.
	Now it's hovering around 1%.
	And it looks like auto loans peaked in November of 2009 at 3%.
	And now it's also hovering around 1%.
	1% a month.
	Yeah.
	Currently.
	Well, that's a...
	You know, I don't like the socialization of irresponsibility.
	I don't like it in the welfare state.
	It's a little bit different in credit card companies because you can choose not to have a credit card.
	But, you know, paying the irresponsibility tax.
	And again, I'm not saying everyone who defaults on a payment is being irresponsible.
	I get that there's a lot in life that happens, as is shown by these numbers tracking with the recession.
	But I think that a lot of people, it's like they're letting the government determine the ethics of their debt.
	You know, well, the government doesn't pay deficits and neither do I. Like, is that really who you want to have your moral standard, you know?
	A hitman doesn't have to get up early, so I'm a night owl.
	I guess I'll be a hitman.
	I think we should have slightly better standards than that.
	No?
	Excuse me, Stefan?
	Yeah.
	I was going to say, you know, I live in a university town, and so there's a lot of liberals here, so I get to pick their brain.
	Amazingly enough, many of them have adopted that exact poisonous thought, which is eventually our debts will be forgiven.
	And I can tell you so many people right now are going to college with absolutely no intention of paying their student loans and believing that America is going to turn into a socialist country in time for them to get a free education.
	And they're voting for Bernie Sanders.
	No, no, I'm sure they're going for Donald Trump in a stunning turnabout of complete incomprehensibility.
	Wow.
	Do you pick their brain, Matthew, before or after you repo their car that they're late on paying for it?
	Pick that brain.
	Don't you have to find it first?
	I want to first recommend my debtors and say where I live out in the country, the majority of repos end up as voluntary repossessions where individuals set up a time with me and give me their vehicles back.
	I would say 10% to 12% of the time I'm practicing self-help repossession.
	Now, if I lived in a big city, the inverse would be true.
	90% of the time I'd be stealing people's collateral.
	10% of the time I'd be peaceably speaking with them.
	But in the country, you know, there's a certain embarrassment factor, especially for the Mormons.
	With the Mormons, I can just roll up on their workplace and tell their boss I'm looking for them, and all of a sudden they're ready to give me their cars because it's such a shame-driven society.
	And I suppose to some degrees that's good that people want to amicably and peacefully own up to their delinquencies, but the other 12% of folks, you've got to track them down like animals.
	Yeah, except animals don't raise the cost of my car payments or whatever, right?
	Don't insult our nice furry-feathered friends who never seem to welch on their debts.
	Yeah, that is rough.
	I mean, I graduated from university with some debt and worked hard to pay it off.
	Again, I get what people are saying.
	Some studies have just...
	Come out that have basically shown that the government giving subsidies for college tuitions and so on and giving subsidies directly to college has just raised the price of college.
	I mean, this is what subsidies do, right?
	They don't...
	You subsidize something, you just increase the demand and you increase the capacity of colleges to raise their tuitions.
	And if you subsidize people's tuition costs by 50%, lo and behold, it doubles over time.
	It's natural, right?
	I practice repossession in southern Utah, and that's where my highest recovery rate is.
	I'm from northern Arizona, in case the listeners are interested, near the Grand Canyon, but I do service southern Utah, and my recovery rate is very high because the Mormons, they are very easily shamed, and when they are shamed, they just give you their cars.
	Well, that's because they're pure K, right?
	I mean, they're very K-selected.
	I'm sorry for those who don't follow this.
	Go watch the Gene Wars, people.
	I'm working on Part 3 this weekend, but they're very K-selected.
	Like, for me, there's no...
	There's no thing that's worth not feeling good about being in debt, right?
	Oh, if I had these sneakers, it would be worth being in debt.
	Or if I had this tablet or if I, I don't know, whatever, right?
	This camera or that vacation is worth being in debt that I'm not sure I can pay off, you know, all that.
	There's just no thing out there that's worth Being in debt.
	Now, I mean, I did borrow some money to go to school and paid it off.
	I thought that was a good investment.
	I think it probably was.
	You know, I don't know.
	I mean, if I didn't have a degree or a graduate degree or whatever, I don't know if it adds anything or I don't know, but whatever.
	I'm glad I did it and it was a lot of fun to do.
	But in terms of just buying something, you know, there's no restaurant meal that is...
	It's worth not getting indigestion, because I don't know if I can pay for it, if that makes sense.
	But there's lots of people who don't feel that way, right?
	Mike, are there any gender differences between...
	That's a great question.
	That's not charted, but I'll look for it.
	But ours, they don't feel that.
	The liberals, right?
	They don't feel any particular unease about debt.
	Oh, you know, the future will take care of itself and blah, blah, blah, blah.
	Something's going to happen.
	It'll work out.
	Don't ever be a farmer with me.
	I'll eat my seed crop, but you never know.
	A giant sperm well could fall from the sky.
	We could eat that in the spring.
	I don't know.
	Stefan.
	Yeah.
	I've also...
	I've also been sent to the areas where the FLDS church is located, the polygamous offshoot that was run by the now-imprisoned Warren Jeffs.
	And I've been sent out over half a dozen times, and I've repoed zero of their cars.
	These polygamous Mormons are extremely effective at hiding their collateral.
	So that I see as kind of a difference, especially...
	So could we suggest that the polygs, as...
	They're known around here are R-selected, are an R-selected...
	Oh, by definition, yeah.
	No, by definition, the K-selection is pair-bonding monogamy.
	So these guys would be pure R-selected.
	Okay, that would make sense.
	And if you were mentioning genders, I would say more females have their automobiles loans defaulted than men, but a lot of times that's because their husbands and or boyfriends were lying to them about making the car payments when the vehicles were actually in the female's name, but the females were giving these vehicles to be used by the men in their lives who were testifying to paying for the automobiles, but in fact were not.
	Well, how do you know?
	I mean, couldn't that just be what the women are saying?
	Well, that's what they're telling me.
	I just assume commonality that I see over and over again.
	I'm not sure I'd go 150% with what the repoed women are telling you as being accurate to the nth degree.
	Maybe.
	I don't know.
	I just wouldn't.
	Any more than I'd say believe the guys who say, but I mailed the check yesterday.
	I mean, you know, maybe it's true, but probably not.
	Okay.
	I mean, I've certainly met women who claim that their boyfriends ran up their credit cards and so on.
	And, you know, my basic response is, well, why would you go out with someone like that?
	And why wouldn't you check your credit card statements?
	And, you know, why wouldn't you call the credit card company and cancel the cards the moment you see an irregularity?
	Like, what are you two?
	I mean, come on.
	This is your life.
	At which point I usually would not talk to them for a little while.
	Okay.
	And as you mentioned, I can't remember which one of your podcasts, but that would be the exact example of information you would find out on a first date and then not date that woman again, right?
	Oh yeah, I was on a first date with a woman and she was telling me about the $17,000 credit card bill that her ex-boyfriend had left with her and I'm like, okay, I'll pay for my coffee, you pay for your coffee, I'm done, I'm gone.
	Absolutely, absolutely.
	Yeah, listen, I mean, the capacity to be comfortable with debt.
	And again, I don't mean like, if you borrow to buy a house, that to me seems like a reasonable debt to get into.
	Because you could scrimp and save and live in a shoebox for 15 years until you have the money to buy the house.
	But why?
	You know, just especially when interest rates are like a couple of points.
	I mean, buy the house and pay it off over time and work at improving your Your value.
	So that your value grows faster than inflation and grows faster than the interest rates that you're paying, right?
	I mean, if you're paying three points on your house, three percentage points on your house, you should be working to increase your economic value by 6% to 12% every year, in which case that works.
	And there is also a...
	Like when I worked in the software field, I would sometimes go and pick up And these were clients from very big, prestigious companies who were using our software.
	So I sometimes go and pick them up.
	Now, when I was going to go and buy it, I bought my first car in my 30s.
	And when I was going to go and buy it, I was looking for a cheap, not a beater exactly, but you know.
	And the board said, no, you can't do that.
	You can't go and pick up A client from this giant corporation, a senior executive from this giant corporation in a car with one of the Adam Sandler cars with seven different colors that you have to open with a coat hanger and stuff like that.
	It wasn't that bad.
	But they said, no, you're a professional.
	We're paying you a good salary.
	You have to get yourself a decent car.
	And so there is that aspect, too, that it goes back to this.
	A friend of mine from high school.
	Dare I say that we played Dungeons& Dragons together?
	That may be all you need to know.
	But when I was in high school, Adidas bags, I've mentioned this before on the show, but Adidas bags were the big thing.
	And my friend said, I don't know why people spend like $10 or $15 on an Adidas bag to carry their stuff around in, because I get grocery bags for free.
	And, you know, that's hard to argue with, but it's also...
	Absolutely wrong.
	I mean, because it just says something about you as a person if you're carrying your stuff around in what was then Dominion.
	I don't know if the store is still around, but Dominion.
	It was a grocery store near where we live.
	Grocery stuff, you know?
	I mean, it's just...
	Shampoo costs money.
	You know, I don't know.
	Anyway, so there is a certain amount where you spend money and it gives you markers of success.
	You know, it's like a nice suit, right?
	I mean, if you go for an interview in a nice suit, maybe you spend a couple of $500 or $1,000 for a really nice suit, but then you go for an interview and people take you more seriously and there's markers of success and blah, blah, blah.
	So...
	There are times, I think, where spending beyond your means is valuable.
	I try to do it like if it's going to get me more money.
	If it's an appreciating asset like a house, yeah, I think debt is a fine thing to take on.
	And if it's a depreciating asset, Like a computer, unless you need it for work, like if it's for gaming or whatever, you know, again, people can do whatever they want if they can afford it.
	I don't know that going into a lot of debt for, you know, a $5,000 gaming computer if you don't make much money is a really good idea.
	I mean, because I don't know if there's enough World of Warcraft to fill in the uneasy hole of indebtedness in your heart.
	But if it's an appreciating asset, or if it's something that's going to get you to an appreciating asset, like a salary, if you need to get a car to go and get a job, then, you know, I used this example recently in The Truth About the Euro, right?
	If you're going to get a $40,000 job and you're going to buy a $10,000 car, well, yeah, that makes sense.
	Makes sense because you're making money from your debt, right?
	But debt for consumer stuff, debt for vacations, debt for stuff that's going to depreciate in value is not a good idea.
	What did you get, Mike?
	Well, I found something on student loans based on an analysis of a 2009 follow-up on beginning post-secondary degree students.
	64% of defaults are by female borrowers and 36% by male borrowers.
	This is partly due to a distribution of loans by gender, 60% of loans going to females, 40% going to males, which is also influenced by differences in enrollment by gender, which is 58% female, 42% males.
	Mike, does it have anything to do with gender disparities in degree chosen?
	That information I don't have, but that's also interesting.
	Now I'm very fascinated.
	I'll probably do something on gender and debt.
	Go have a quick look at gender enrollment.
	Let's see how many physicists, oil engineers, engineers as a whole, computer scientists and so on, how many of those seats are sat on by the Ferris X? Matthew, was there anything else that you wanted to add?
	No.
	Just to clarify, I was calling to ask if self-help repossession was in any way immoral because I know clearly it can be very upsetting to individuals to have a tow truck roll up under their property in the middle of the night and seize collateral that in their minds they may see as their own.
	I've always felt, rightly as what you've said, which is no, these individuals are stealing from the banks that I represent and driving up the cost of automobiles because yes, people do have to pay for loss.
	So I felt what you said, but I also just wanted to be You know, emotionally sensitive to the fact that it can be scary to have a tow truck roll up on your house in the middle of the night.
	But there's no need for it.
	I mean, you ask if there's something immoral about, sorry to interrupt you, but if you say there's something immoral about, what was it, self-help repossessions?
	Yeah!
	You shouldn't have to go out and get the car.
	They should bring the car to the dealer.
	It is immoral.
	You should not have to go out and get the car.
	People are like, oh, I don't want something.
	Hey, I guarantee you, if you take your car back to the dealer, if you can't afford it, they're not sending a tow truck.
	Well, okay.
	I like what you've had to say.
	So I'm a fan of Dave Ramsey, which maybe you can let on, which is why I had some extreme viewpoints about debt.
	And I've always been very curious about what the two of you would think about self-help repossession.
	So I greatly, greatly thank you for entertaining my question, Stefan.
	I'm a huge fan.
	I'm a supporter now of what you do.
	I'm happy to make donations.
	I think what you're doing makes a difference.
	And it's good to have someone out there espousing the virtues of case selection as you are studying now.
	Yeah, and if you can't, I appreciate that.
	And just the people out there, look, if you can't afford your car, pick up the phone, say, when can I drop it off?
	Don't make good old Matthew come to your house.
	I mean, I don't want you to be out of a job, Matthew.
	Don't worry.
	There's lots of people who aren't going to hear this.
	But be proactive.
	You know, if you can't pay something off, call people up and sort it all out.
	Most people really appreciate that effort.
	And again, it can happen that you can't pay your bills.
	So...
	Yeah, I appreciate you calling in, and no, I'm sorry that you have to do it, but I'm glad you're doing it, because I really think that it's important to keep prices low, because I care about the poor, and people like you are doing a great service, taking the property out of the hands of deadbeats.
	And I say deadbeats not because they can't pay, but because you have to go out and get it, right?
	Yes.
	They're deadbeats and taking property out of the hands of deadbeats and giving it to good people is God's work, brother.
	And the banks always warn them before they send me out.
	They only send it out to debtors who have made absolutely zero contact with their financial institutions for three months.
	That's what does it.
	Yeah, deadbeats and thieves.
	And I wish you could take a kidney too, but I'm sure that's Sony semi-legal.
	Yeah, I don't know.
	I know there was a movie about repo men taking people's kidneys, but that doesn't happen yet.
	Not in the real world.
	Okay, well, thanks very much.
	Let's move on to this question.
	And remember, if you see Matthew in your driveway, be a nice guy.
	Give him the keys.
	No fuss.
	Thank you so much for this great honor, Stefan.
	Thank you, man.
	Take care.
	Oh, and thank you for your donations and support.
	I don't want to skim over that.
	That's very, very helpful.
	Of course, that's the whole reason why we have a show.
	So thank you so much for that.
	Yeah, thanks, Matthew.
	Absolutely.
	It's important to donate to you guys.
	All right.
	Well, up next is Masan.
	He wrote in and said, I have found that I am intelligent, resilient to hardships that crop up in my life, and have extremely ambitious thoughts about my future.
	However, I can't seem to be comfortable with the fact that I am fundamentally better than other people.
	This causes me to curb my abilities to spare others the stress of dealing with an intelligent, confident, and driven person so that they too can succeed and not feel inferior.
	Any thoughts?
	That's from Masan.
	Do you want to know what my daughter said?
	Um, sure.
	Get smarter, friends.
	LAUGHTER Yeah.
	If he answers it in one sentence.
	Is there anything we need to add to that?
	Is that a curiosity?
	I mean, I think that, too.
	I think that it's very important to have, you know, well-rounded friends that can complement your intelligence.
	But I think it's very hard to find them in a consistent basis when you're, you know, young.
	You might not be from the best area.
	with your birthplace and stuff like that.
	And also with just like your base culture, the way that you live, it's kind of hard to proactively put yourself in that place without going through kind of muck to find yourself where you want to be.
	Yeah, I mean, I think that MC Hammer, one of the reasons he went bankrupt is he had an entourage of 200 losers hanging around with him, sucking up all of his money, right?
	Yeah.
	And yeah.
	I just watched 8 Mile the other day.
	I don't think that Cheddar went with B-Rabbit to the big time.
	There is a phase where you outgrow people.
	And I'm thinking of Henry V. Where he's got these jokey low-rent friends, Falstaff and all those, and, you know, he ends up moving up in the world.
	And it is sort of a big and challenging question what you do when you start in a low-rent environment.
	And, you know, you rise up like Atlantis from the ocean.
	You rise up.
	And it's kind of bewildering to people.
	It's like they stop at five foot six and you just become like 30 feet tall and keep growing.
	And they're like, whoa, I didn't feel short till I was around you.
	I felt pretty tall and now I'm not.
	And I think from that standpoint, I mean, that was a great tragedy of my life.
	And I don't want to sort of eclipse your questions and comments.
	But yeah, I grew up with some...
	Pretty low-rent companions.
	And it was rough.
	A friend of mine from Jamaica, he got into a fight with his mom and he threw his bike over the balcony and it was just like, okay, I'm not sure we can too much hang around with that.
	I had another friend who had some sort of bronchitis or whatever and his big claim to fame was an ability to make a sound like a wounded Sperm whale lying sideways on a beach, kind of noise coming in from the back of his throat.
	I don't know if it was like a mating cry for a hippo or something like that, but that was his big claim to fame.
	And he played hockey and his mom would go to these hockey games and like would scream from the top of the rafters, like high up in the hockey seats, you know, come on, son!
	You know, just loud.
	That's all hockey parent stuff.
	That's all hockey.
	No, no, no.
	Even among the hockey parents.
	Even among the hockey parents.
	There's always that one that's a little too involved.
	Showers of popcorn like little dim fireworks would go off around her and she just bellow from the top.
	But I mean and there was some but I mean she was like people gave her space in the in the arena the ring of seats around her because she was too loud for the people around her and Yeah, I had a friend of mine who would get into fights with his mother and Like fights, not like verbal fights, but like he'd have her up against a wall.
	I mean, this guy was heading to a very bad place and he did end up dying in a motorcycle accident.
	And I had some pretty, you know, Rat-faced hoodlums around when I was in my sort of early to mid-teens.
	We started a gang, you know, all that.
	I mean, please don't, I'm not straight out of Compton here.
	I understand, you know, I still came with the accent and all of that.
	But no, I had some pretty rough, you know, unibrow knuckle dragon mouth breathers with neckbeards if they could summon them.
	And it was a challenge, you know.
	You have to kind of We're born into our environments like these mastodons in a tar pit, and you're going to either sink or you're going to get out.
	And sometimes getting out, it feels like you're leaving half your legs and your toenails behind.
	And, yeah...
	Gang.
	I mean, we were a bike gang.
	And by that, it means we had dirt bikes.
	And by gang, I meant we hung around in the woods.
	We cooked little fires and boiled beans so we could eat them.
	I mean, it was not any kind of...
	We had no gang signs.
	We had no gang sign other than, in the summer we need sunscreen.
	That was our gang sign.
	SPF 15, brother, all the way.
	Represent!
	Represent a Luga in a microwave.
	So, yeah, it was, please, you know, I'm not, this was Don Mills.
	This was not, you know, 313, I'm not representing the D. But no, I mean, definitely criminal activity.
	You know, these guys were floating around that kind of situation to some degree.
	Not all of them, but some of them.
	And it is a challenge, you know.
	I mean, where are they now?
	I don't know.
	I don't know because they didn't have the purchase price for this ride.
	And...
	It is tough, you know, when you're committed to growing, when you're committed to reaching and exceeding any potential that you thought you might have, when you refuse to put any limits on yourself, right, that's called progress.
	And it's really the only thing that progresses humanity in any particular way.
	No limits.
	No limit.
	What was it?
	No limit?
	I don't know, the Trayvon Martin thing.
	But...
	You just refuse to put any limits on yourself.
	And...
	Well...
	What happens when the people around you start imposing those limits on you and they start to get anxious or non-participative?
	Like, I was writing novels in my teens and I remember one friend of mine, he was going to Nunavut.
	No.
	Yeah, Nunavut, which is like way north in Canada.
	He was going to Nunavut and he was going to be like gold panning in a warehouse for like six months, right?
	And I wrote a novel called The Jealous War about the First World War.
	And I used him as one of the characters.
	And I gave him this novel.
	It's my first novel.
	I've still got it somewhere.
	It's pretty good, some parts of it.
	Anyway, my first novel, I was, I don't know, maybe 18 or 19 or 20.
	Anyway, and I said, hey, man, I'd really like it if you'd read this book.
	I mean, I put a character of you in, you know?
	And he's like, I don't think so.
	Right?
	And I was like partly wounded, but I was also partly like, you're going to Nunavut!
	This is like decades before Netflix or the internet or more than three channels in Nunavut, two of which are it's snowing.
	So, I mean, I'm like, what does this really say fundamentally?
	I mean, if someone I knew wrote a novel, and I was going to Nunavut for six months, and I was in that novel, I'd be like, damn, give me a copy.
	I'm going to have time.
	I'm going to have time to read it.
	And he didn't.
	And, you know, what happened?
	Well, he never changed.
	He never left the neighborhood.
	He never even left the building he grew up in.
	And kind of doing the same thing that he was doing back in the day.
	And so what do you do?
	You know, you can hang back to make people who are stuck in history, they're just stuck like sinking like mastodons into history, not moving, losing mobility.
	You can stay back so they don't feel upset.
	But if you have any sense of heroism...
	I mean, the capacity for heroism, which you can tell by your love of heroism, heroes.
	I can't...
	Like, I thought of this the other day, and I can't remember why, and I'm sorry, I'll shut up in a sec, but it's a big sort of topic for me as well, but...
	I... I was watching some movie, and...
	I think about this, like, so the actors who are in this movie, you know, they all went to some grade school, some junior high, some high school, right?
	And there's like hundreds of people who remember that person going to that high school or that junior high.
	I mean, Geddy Lee, the singer for Rush, he went to my high school, not when I was there, but he did.
	And so, you know, there's a bunch of people who...
	Remember Geddy Lee from being in a high school in Don Mills, in Ontario, Canada.
	And, you know, how many of them would think it would be pretty cool to be Geddy Lee?
	I think it'd be pretty cool to be Geddy Lee.
	I mean, you're not singing a lot of Barry White, you're, you know, screaming like a helium-based hobbit, ratcheting out Lord of the Rings at octaves above Mortal Man, but...
	Pretty cool, right?
	And I've seen them sort of twice live in concert.
	Very great musicians for three guys.
	They make an amazing set of sounds.
	I mean, I don't even mind the drum solos, and they can be a little bit grating.
	Freddie Mercury vocal solos?
	Absolutely.
	But...
	So...
	When they became rock stars, right?
	Was it Neil Peart, Geddy Lee...
	The guitarist, Alex Lifeson or something.
	I mean, they went stellar all the way, right?
	And the people who were in the high school were like, oh man, those guys, they went really far.
	Maybe they've got hometown pride, and maybe they don't.
	But if they had stuck back because they didn't want to upset anyone, we just wouldn't have that great music.
	And that's true of all of the stuff that, you know, Marlon Brando was in an acting class, in the Stella Adler acting class.
	And there's a sort of famous bit where the acting teacher said, you're chickens, and you hear a bomb, the whistle of a bomb coming down.
	And of course, everyone...
	Was running around, squawking and flapping their wings, and Marlon Brando's chicken sat down and laid an egg.
	And the acting teacher's like, that's exactly right.
	That's exactly what a chicken would do.
	Which tells you, of course, that teaching acting is quite a lot of bullshit.
	But anyway.
	And he, you know, there were people in his class, in Marlon Brando's class, who resented his success.
	I mean, I went to theater school, we were all like, am I better than this person?
	Am I worse than this person?
	This person did something really good.
	I feel good, but I also feel jealous, right?
	And so, if he had sat there and said, well, I don't want to out-act anyone, I don't want to out-strip anyone, I don't want to do any of that stuff, you know?
	I mean, if Queen hadn't been interested in out-shining Mott the Hoople, then they would have remained a cover band their whole lives.
	And we wouldn't have all of that great music.
	So everything that you probably treasure in your life is provided to you by people who were willing to vastly outstrip their origins.
	And why not add to that instead of hanging back with the Brits, so to speak?
	Anyway, that's sort of all I wanted to say, but what are your thoughts?
	I agree with you on some point.
	I've already gone through that.
	I read Atlas Shrugged last year, and I think I chose a really bad time to read it because I was at a point where I had just gotten a job with a family, and I was kind of working with them, and I didn't ultimately have all the tools to build my life that I wanted myself because I had already kind of conscripted myself to their service.
	Wait, this sounds...
	When you say family...
	Do you mean an Italian family with very thin mustaches and sharkskin shiny suits and a predilection for threatening restaurateurs or just a family business?
	It was, you know, to be honest, it was a Chinese family and I was in China.
	And I was working, like teaching their kids, but I'm not exactly sure what they did.
	You know, they were rich, but, you know, I'm not sure what they did at all.
	I think the answer is, invest in American real estate, driving up the prices and creating a bubble.
	They're really sketchy.
	They had a driver that would drive me around, and we would stop at these tea shops.
	Usually when you buy tea in China, you buy in big bulk, but he would just go in and get this one round brick and come back out and just sit in the front of the car and His eyes would look really insane and crazy, and then five minutes later, we'd just get back on the road and go wherever we had to go.
	That was my first little insight into what the hell's going on in this family.
	I'm not sure what they did.
	Their father never told me exactly what he did for a job.
	All right.
	So, what's it going to cost you?
	Who do you think, you don't have to give obviously any names or genders or anything, but of your couple of closest friends, who do you think will be able to join you on the journey that you envision for your life?
	And by join you, I don't mean sort of slavishly folly or anything, but, you know, the Algonquin Roundtable of the great writers in the 1930s, Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, and I think F. Scott Fitzgerald was in there for a while, or the more modern version of Christopher Hitchens and...
	I can't remember.
	Salman Rushdie and all these guys, they're all sitting around and they're all incredible writers, whatever you think of their ethics or whatever, but they're amazing writers.
	And they all sort of hang around together and I think they inspire each other, right?
	And so the question is...
	If you want your journey to be something remarkable, how many of the people around you currently do you think would be on board with also having remarkable lives that you can encourage and inspire each other with?
	Maybe three.
	Three out of the people I've met so far.
	That is fantastic.
	That is, like, Malcolm Gladwell talks about, um, that there was, like, three or four kids where he was growing up that were just all super smart, and they've all gone on to do really well.
	For some reason, I think one of them was Dan Hill, and Dan Hill's brother wrote a famous novel, whatever, right?
	But three is good.
	Um...
	I would say that, but I've had to fight tooth and nail to get these friends.
	They're not people that I would have usually hung out with.
	I had to really change my perspective on how I live life and how I view people and other perspectives to even start to think that these people are even positive.
	And so for me, it's like they're not even securely my friends, even though we have had countless experiences together.
	There's still a point in my brain that's like, are they going to be there constantly?
	I know my friends from 10, 15 years old.
	Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
	And I used to have this belief that I have an excess amount of intellectual energy.
	And so I can sort of turn around and help by pushing other people, right?
	Or pulling them along in my slipstream or whatever, right?
	And it doesn't work.
	It doesn't work.
	You know, if you have an excess of energy and ambition, it will be bled away by inert people around you.
	Your excess of energy will never translate into their motion.
	It will only slow you down.
	So if you're in motion and other people are in motion, you can encourage each other and so on, but you can't have a relay race with somebody who refuses to run, like the whole baton stops, right?
	And so my concern is, you know, and I try not to sort of project my experiences onto you as usual, but Be careful of the fantasy that you can circle back and help other people.
	Like, if you're both flying in formation, you can do cool stuff, but you can't get out of your airplane and push theirs along, right?
	And you just fall and they fall, right?
	Yeah.
	Do you think there's any way to lead people?
	Do you think there's any way to make other people see or capitalize on the things that they can achieve?
	If you see that potential in them or you see that they do excel at some area of their life but they're kind of batting it back with drugs or alcohol or just really bad influences, emotional avoidance, stuff like that.
	If you are Soaring, if you are flying, if you are achieving, if you are an embodiment of courage and self-knowledge, love, fighting the good fight, there are people who will be irresistibly drawn and encouraged by your example.
	And they will begin to become in motion themselves.
	And those people, I think, can benefit from your example and can benefit from some wisdom, right?
	I mean, like this interaction, for example, right?
	I mean, I would assume that you're asking me these questions because you think that I have something of value to offer.
	Now if I wasn't in motion, you wouldn't be talking to anyone right now.
	If I wasn't visible as somebody striving to achieve and striving to improve the world, you wouldn't be calling me, right?
	In this situation, you're excited by the possibilities that I and I'm sure other people represent in your life.
	And so if you're going to be in motion, some words can be helpful, right?
	For sure.
	I mean, coaching and feedback in which we all get and we all need, that is a very important part of achievement.
	But if you're talking about people who are addicted to drugs or alcohol, your enthusiasm, in my opinion, cannot solve those pathologies.
	That's kind of hard to...
	That's very hard to accept.
	Tell me why.
	What do you feel?
	I mean, the people that I grew up with, I mean, we will have problems, but we all...
	At that time, we're really working through things together on a very fundamental basis.
	It's just very hard.
	I have this loyalty that I have, I guess, in my head that makes me want to not be able to leave these people behind because they did help me at crucial points in my life.
	How can I just say, I'm at this point where I've done all these things and I'm completely removed from you.
	I do not need to talk to you at all.
	I know that.
	And I know that talking to you will only bring me down.
	But how could you forget about those past experiences?
	No, and I get that.
	And I have a weakness for that as well.
	I do.
	I can nurse a relationship for a year on two crumbs of kindness, and that is a fault that I have.
	If you've seen rockets, they start off huge and they end up tiny, because these giant rocket bases are full of fuel that is designed to get the rocket into space.
	And then these fuel Right?
	These giant fuel containers break away from the rocket and they fall back down to Earth, right?
	So the rockets are essential for getting the spaceship into space, but they don't go into space, too.
	In fact, if they didn't detach, if the spaceship didn't detach from those rockets, it would never get into space.
	Now that's an imperfect analogy because that sounds like we're just using people to get ahead and then tossing them aside.
	Have you read The Fountainhead?
	You've read Atlas Shrugged, right?
	Yeah, read Atlas Shrugged, that's it.
	Well, very briefly, and I'm not going to put really major spoilers in here, but, you know, this is an architect who's got a lot of talent, and other people want to use his talent for their own advantage, and he does.
	He tries to help other people with his abilities, with his talents.
	And it destroys them.
	Because his abilities elevate them above what their native abilities can sustain.
	And so they end up crashing.
	Talent is like a drug to other people who don't have it.
	Talent and ability and competence and excellence.
	And they want to grab onto it.
	Right?
	Because that amount of talent and ability, if they can grab onto it, then they feel that they will get the benefits of it as well.
	Have you seen the movie Eight Mile?
	Yeah, I have.
	Okay, so you remember at the end, the future, the MC of the rap battles, right?
	After B-Rabbit has this amazing...
	Rap breakthrough, right?
	He gets through his...
	Sorry for spoilers and blah, but it's an old movie right now.
	Is it 2003 or something?
	Yeah, 2000.
	No, 2000.
	Something like that.
	Anyway.
	So, at the end, do you remember what Future says to be Rabbit?
	I have no idea.
	It sounds something like I'll see you later down the road or something like that.
	No, so the DJ, or the MC, sorry, the MC of the rap battle says to B-Rabbit, because B-Rabbit has just exploded, right?
	And everyone knows he's going to go places now.
	And his friend says, we should host these battles together.
	We should do it together, right?
	Because he's just realized this guy's got a ferocious amount of talent, and Eminem, of course, has a ferocious, literally ferocious amount of talent.
	And his friend is like, you're going to go places, so now we should do this show together.
	Now that you've had this big breakthrough, now that everyone's, you're the master of the rap championship battle or whatever, we should host these shows together, right?
	So he's hoping to hook on to this guy's comment, right?
	And B-Rabbit says, no, man, uh, I could rather just do my own thing.
	And that's when you have a lot of talent and ability, people will view you as a line of coke on a mirror.
	They'll want to snort you up.
	And they will want to blaze up with you.
	And that is not a good idea for anyone involved.
	It hollows out the people who vampirically hook onto other people's ability.
	And it drags down and can eventually destroy the people who have that ability.
	Like anybody who's got any fame has gone through these sorts of experiences, right?
	Where everybody wants them to be part of their project.
	Everybody wants to get their name.
	Everybody wants to get their money and their contacts and their resources.
	Everybody's like, wanna, wanna, wanna, clamor, clamor, clamor.
	It's like being surrounded by a bunch of those little red and yellow beaked squawking birds and they're all expecting you to like drop endless worms into their mouths, right?
	The moment that you have talent and ability and can get things done and can move and can be successful and can create and can communicate, everybody, right?
	Out come the vampire tentacles from the heart.
	It's not of everyone, but of some.
	They all want to come along, want to come along, want to come along.
	And because the future and success can be scary, can be alarming, is unfamiliar territory to a lot of us.
	We kind of want these companions to come with us, right?
	And that MC Hammer 200 of my closest friends are coming with me in this private jet to go see the crash site of Alia or something, right?
	I mean, you want people to come along because it's unfamiliar territory and they want to come along because you're the best chance that they have for any kind of gold, any kind of gusto, any kind of achievement.
	And in 8 Mile, B-Rabbit says to his friends, you know, they all want to be like rap stars.
	And he's like, but all we ever do is talk about it.
	We just talk, we talk, we talk.
	It's like, no, I want to get the big cars and the bitches.
	But all we're doing is talking about it.
	Now, the fact that they're not willing to work and do and achieve and risk and all that, Well, that's how society keeps resources from people who will squander them.
	Right?
	I mean, this guy, Eminem's character, is willing to write the lyrics and confront his fears.
	He's so scared to go on stage.
	He's throwing up at the beginning of the film.
	I'm sure that's real.
	I know he didn't write the script, Eminem, but, you know, he probably had quite a lot of conversations with the writer as it was going forward.
	And that it is a truly magnificent song.
	Lose Yourself, I think it's called.
	But I mean, it's very powerful.
	And I mean, I'm not a big fan of rap, but that one gets the Brit guy's gold star.
	Good job, Mr.
	Candy.
	But he's willing to really do the work and really...
	Achieve and grow.
	And, you know, he's won this rap contest.
	They say, where are you going?
	Because they're all going to party even though they didn't achieve anything.
	They're just friends with the guy who achieved something and they want to go party and celebrate.
	You've gone your way.
	You're going to make it.
	You're going to be huge.
	They want to go party.
	And he's like, I'm going back to work.
	So the guy who actually achieved something, he's going back to work.
	The other guys, they all want to go and party.
	And they don't seem to have jobs as a whole.
	He does, right?
	So...
	If you do have...
	I hate to put it in this kind of cheesy way, but if you do have this kind of divine spark of creation within you, you will be viewed as a highly mindable resource by those around you.
	Talent for a man is like great looks for a woman.
	Everybody wants a piece of it.
	Everybody wants to hook into that energy.
	Everybody wants to hook into that creativity, that capacity, that generation of things.
	And we, being big and great and grand spirits, wish to help.
	We want to help people.
	Go do something.
	Go create something.
	Go be something.
	I'll help.
	I'll help.
	And oh my god, I've spent so much time trying to help, trying to help, trying to help, trying to help.
	I don't mean listeners or anything like that.
	I'm talking outside of this show and before this show.
	So much time circling back, pushing and nudging and encouraging and reviewing and helping and funding and growing and investing and oh my god.
	Oh my god.
	Creativity is an organ that you can slice and dice up to the point where it's useless and hand it out Like feeding crackers to fish doesn't add anything to the capital of the world.
	Just makes a few fish burp.
	And the responsibility is to what you can achieve and the good and positivity that you can bring to the world.
	That's your responsibility.
	Not to the people.
	If they weren't given or didn't earn or didn't create or didn't work to achieve this divine spark of thought, of reason, of creativity, of creation.
	Can't help them.
	Can't help them.
	To the degree to which talent is either genetic or hard work, it doesn't really matter.
	If you're born with a great singing voice and everyone around you squawks like crows, there's no point having them in your band, right?
	Because you can't make them better singers, but they're going to make you sound a whole lot worse, right?
	All right.
	I have to think about this.
	It's very hard to...
	Well, think of it like a band, right?
	If you're a great singer, guitarist, and songwriter, and you've got a bunch of friends around, and you're like, hey, man, let's start a band.
	And they're all like, well, you know, I guess I'm sort of interested in...
	Always maybe wanted to play some bass or whatever.
	And then you wait for a week or two and nothing happens.
	And then you're like, oh, okay, well, listen, man, I'm going to buy you a bass.
	It's going to be a top of the line bass.
	And you get him the bass, right?
	And he's like, oh, this is cool.
	You know, plugs it in.
	Wait for a week or two.
	Nothing really happens.
	Except he tells you he finished, you know, level 67 and Sparkle Unleashed or something.
	And then you're like, oh man, I wanna start this band.
	Okay, listen man, I'm gonna hire you Sting as your bass teacher.
	Sting's gonna teach you bass.
	And very high singing.
	So Sting is gonna teach you bass.
	And you pay whatever amount it takes for Sting to come to your private function and teach this guy bass.
	And the guy's like, oh cool man, that's cool, right?
	And then you wait for another week or two, right?
	What's happening?
	Nothing.
	Except you're not moving ahead.
	The opportunity cost of trying to get your friend into your band is huge.
	Because you're not going out writing your own music, getting your own musicians.
	You're just waiting and circling around, right?
	Now, if you say, hey man, I'm going to start a band.
	And your friend is like, oh, I am dying to play bass.
	I've always thought about it.
	Give me, like, a week.
	And then that guy does the, you know, got my first real six string at the five and dime, played it till my fingers bled, was the summer of 69, right?
	Like, just you play it till your fingers bled.
	You're full-on Stevie Ray Vaughan putting crazy glue on the end of your fingers to finish your set.
	And he's just going nuts for it.
	I mean, I don't know how long it takes to be a great bassist, probably at least six months to become even remotely good.
	But if the guy's really diving into it, right?
	Well...
	Okay, so at least he's in motion, right?
	Maybe he's not going to be in your band.
	Maybe you've just inspired him to be in a band.
	Or maybe he's just going to work so hard he's going to become the best bassist in a year.
	I don't know.
	What am I now, right?
	Bass is one of these deceptively simple instruments.
	But you're not sitting there saying, well, I'll buy you a bass and I'll get you Sting to teach you bass and I'll do this and I'll do that and I'll do the other, right?
	And If you've got like a bunch of people, let's say you want, I don't know, there's five people in your band and you're a nine in your abilities and everyone else is a two, what's the average number for the band?
	It's 3.4.
	So they go up 1.4 and you go down 5.6.
	That's not going to get you to the top.
	Getting the top means you don't carry people.
	You know, people will buy synchronicity despite Andy Sumner's god-awful song Mother, right?
	But that's only because you could make a tape.
	Everyone just took it home, took a tape of the album, kept in Mr.
	Gredenko, dumped out Andy Sumner's god-awful song Mother, which is like literally an unpleasant experience to be around.
	And They were terrible.
	Well, I shouldn't say Bombs Away, Stuart Copeland wrote.
	I think Miss Gredenko, he wrote.
	But his Clark Kent stuff was terrible.
	I mean, I was a big fan of the police and I listened to some of that Stuart Copeland stuff and I saw him actually give a speech even in Hollywood when I was there putting a film of mine in or film I produced into a film festival.
	And I mean, it's terrible stuff.
	I don't want to be rich.
	I want to be rich.
	I don't want to work in a ditch.
	That literally was the song and the tune was barely better than that.
	You can't carry people in the long run.
	It diminishes you and it's destructive for them.
	People should find their own level in life.
	And it doesn't mean you can't help people.
	It doesn't mean you can't coach people.
	Of course you can.
	It doesn't mean people should starve to death.
	I get that.
	We want to help people out.
	But people should find their own level in life.
	You cannot chase people around and stick your hands up their ass and make them your ambition echo hand puppet.
	It simply doesn't work.
	And it's delusory.
	You know, for both of them.
	I'm sure Celine Dion, if she has a sister, her sister doesn't sing nearly as well.
	Does Celine Dion say, hey, you can do half my Vegas show?
	Well, no.
	That's not encouraging the accurate processing of reality in people.
	And if you try and take over other people and move them along with you, it's fundamentally dehumanizing for them and it's kind of selfish for you, right?
	Because you're not recognizing their humanity and you're not giving them their own free choice.
	Most people, let's say you're going to do some great stuff with your life, most people don't get that example in their circle of friends.
	Most people didn't grow up with like Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer or, I don't know, Larry Ellison or Steve Jobs in their circle of friends.
	Man, if you grew up knowing one of those guys, damn, you up close and personal, you'd see it happening right there in front of you.
	That's an incredible opportunity, even if they never do a damn thing to help you.
	So if you provide this example for people, you are giving them an incalculably great opportunity.
	Listen, I hope that there are people out there who are where I was as a kid.
	I hope that there are people out there Young men and young women listening to this who came from a dirt poor neighbor who faced evictions, who were so broke that they literally were looking for under couch cushions to buy bread.
	And that you can get to a great place in life from there.
	I can't fly over to their house and coach them 24-7 and that would be disrespectful to their capabilities.
	But there's a pretty bad movie called...
	I think it's called The Bear or something with Alec Baldwin and...
	Hannibal the Cannibal or whatever.
	And it's about guys fighting a bear.
	Fighting a bear.
	Anthony Hopkins says, what one man can do, another man can do.
	What one man can do, another man can do.
	If you give people the example of what is possible for people...
	Then whoever really wants it, and so much of success is just really, really wanting it.
	And the best success is when you want it not just for yourself, but in particular for the world, for the benefit of the world.
	The edge, sorry, the edge.
	Not just a highly pretentious name for a guitarist, but the actual name of a fairly mediocre film that's still worth watching just for some of that stuff.
	But...
	Give them the example and you have given more of a gift than most people will ever get.
	And the great thing with the internet is there's lots of examples now that would never have been available before.
	Most people who end up As public intellectuals come from highly privileged backgrounds.
	I'm a half-ghetto street fighter.
	Grew up on the wrong side of tracks and climbed the social ladder with my incisors.
	And I hope that people understand that you can get out and you can achieve Success, you can achieve love, you can achieve stability, you can achieve virtue.
	And to be provided the example, because I'm not someone from the wrong side of the tracks, from a bad and dirty and low-rent neighborhood who made it big and flamed out, who made it big and went bankrupt, right?
	I mean, I've got a stable and happy marriage.
	I'm really enjoying being a father.
	I have a stable and successful conversation with the world about things that really matter.
	And that's what I want to see to people, that you don't have to squirt out of a bad history like some crazy, out-of-control early Russian rocket experiment where you might hit some dizzying heights and then blow up.
	You can have a nice, graceful, organized, calm flight.
	So provide people the example and you've given them an immeasurable gift already.
	If they're in motion and they wish for some advice, I think provide it.
	But the idea of shredding your potential by turning back and attempting to move the inert I think is a waste of such potential and such a disrespect for the potential you can achieve that It robs the world without helping anyone in it.
	All right.
	Oh, thank you for that.
	I mean, you know, it's been really hard for me trying to find people that kind of match my level ever since I was a kid.
	It's been super hard.
	To even have a conversation that I actually want to have because they're just not in the spectrum of what other people are thinking.
	It was only until I turned 17 that I got to find out people that were even remotely interested in the things that I was interested in.
	But it's just so hard because you really think that the people in your past are It's essential to who you are as a person now, and that they also would like to become great and successful, but they don't really respond to what you try to give them.
	So I do agree with you, and you kind of wrapped up a lot of the things.
	It's funny how these things that we think are so personal are kind of universal.
	The way you talked about it sounds just like the things I'm going through.
	So, thank you very much.
	Yeah.
	I'd just like to talk for a little bit longer, if that's alright with you.
	Sure, yeah.
	No, I was saying thank you for that point.
	No, and I appreciate that, but you said that your friends want to be successful too?
	Well, they say they wrap around that fact, but They wrap around it, and I'm the type of person, I'll take action.
	So I think I want to do something, and I don't necessarily have to tell anyone about it.
	I'll just, you know, I start trudging down the path, but I have a lot of people that are my friends who will say they want to do stuff, but they're kind of just talking about it in theory, and then I try to approach them with things that they should actually do, and I've even I've gone through hundreds of people at this point thinking about conversations and things and connecting with people.
	And I wrote a little book.
	It's not even a book.
	It's like 40 pages.
	Let's call it a prolonged essay.
	But it was really just a comprehensive look on how you can transform the circumstances you're in by focusing on the people who are in your life and the influences that you can It kind of changed by being proactive about your social environment.
	Only 10 people were really interested in it when I put it inside of their hands.
	That was super tough because I literally wrote this so a lot of people that I grew up with could have something like this.
	It addresses a lot of the problems, but even when they have a solution, something very clear-cut, they're not...
	They're not gonna...
	It seems like they're not doing anything about it.
	Yeah, because most people idly want the effects of success.
	Right?
	Like the guys at 8 Mile, right?
	We want the sweet rides and the hot bitches.
	Right?
	That's what they want.
	Well...
	I mean, that's...
	I want 10 million dollars a year like PewDiePie.
	Okay, well then, go and stop making the damn videos.
	Don't just sit there and say, well, if I had 10 million dollars, I'd do...
	Right?
	I mean, you have to aim at the thing itself.
	You know, nobody's going to be, I don't know, maybe some people, I don't think you're going to be a very successful musician if all you want are groupies, because you can get groupies without being a very successful musician.
	You have to be in it for something other than, like, what motivates people after they've made their first million dollars?
	It's not money.
	Or whatever amount of money that, you know.
	Why does Bill Gates get out of bed in the morning and trying to think about the best way to get mosquito netting around people in Africa?
	Doesn't need the money.
	Why does Jack Nicholson make another movie?
	Doesn't need the money, doesn't need the prestige.
	Why on earth would Donald Trump run for president?
	Guy's worth, what, like 10 billion dollars?
	One of the most successful businessmen since the age of what is derisively and inaccurately called the robber barons.
	He's the most, I would argue, one of the most successful, certainly in the realm of real estate.
	One of the most successful businessmen of the past century.
	And why on earth would he want to run for office?
	Jonesen to be called a racist.
	That's the only answer now.
	And he hates vets, you see.
	Because the guy he raised a million dollars for called his supporters crazies.
	Yeah.
	Classy McCain.
	Very classy.
	The guy, I mean, Trump raised like a million dollars to help McCain's campaign back in the day.
	And then McCain trashes Trump supporters calling them crazies.
	It's a bit more debatable.
	But anyway, that's neither here nor there.
	The Yeah, there is a great desire because there's this great canyon.
	If you want to achieve great things in your life, there's this great canyon of into the unknown.
	Into the unknown.
	What does it mean?
	What does it mean to traverse beyond everything that you've known and to go into a new sphere?
	Lots of people crash and burn out of that.
	And I would argue that it is a fear of defining ourselves According to values rather than history, I think that keeps us back from that great leap.
	Who am I going to be if I'm not surrounded by the people I grew up with?
	Who am I going to be if I define myself according to philosophical values rather than historical accidents?
	That is a A great and deep challenge and most people come to that precipice and flee back to the comforts of even a rotten tribe.
	I'm not saying that's yours, but I think a lot of people do.
	And I don't know if Eminem has a lot of people around from the trailer park.
	In his life now.
	I mean, he was like the biggest star in the early 2000s.
	He had like the number one single, the number one album, the number one movie.
	I mean, he was monstrous in terms of what he did.
	I don't know.
	But at least the people around him did believe in him.
	They were encouraging him.
	But the real challenge happens when the people around you are not encouraging you.
	And they're not even discouraging you.
	The most demotivational thing is for your dreams and desires to not show up in your social radar.
	People fight you, you're real.
	People cheer you, you're real.
	People ignore you, you're not.
	There's two things that sort of remind me when it comes to publicity.
	One is, I don't care what you say about me, just make sure you spell my name right, number one.
	And number two is, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
	I don't know who said the first one, but the second one comes from Oscar Wilde.
	Now, he was then found guilty of sodomy for his desire to have rough sex with sailors down the dock.
	He was put in jail, which broke his health, and so it was a little worse for him to be talked about in that context.
	But the people who will demotivate you the most are not the people who read your book and say, I hated it, and here's why.
	And they give you a big detailed critique of it.
	That's great.
	Right?
	It's the people, you give them your book.
	And it's like you never gave them your book, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	Like they forget about it.
	You're like, did you read my book?
	Did you read what I gave them?
	Oh, God.
	Horrendous.
	I produced a play.
	I wrote and produced a play.
	I adapted a play, I shouldn't say.
	I called it Seduction.
	It was an adaptation of Ivan Turgenev's novel, Fathers and Sons, or Fathers and Children, depending on your translation.
	And I put the play on.
	And I gave a great friend of mine the script to read.
	It's not like a five-hour play or anything like that.
	It was about a cozy 80 or 90-minute play.
	And it was just before I started casting and all of that.
	And I said, listen, I'd really like you if you could read it.
	I respected his literary taste.
	And he dropped it on a nightstand by his bed.
	And every time I'd head over, it would be there.
	Maybe you're braver than me.
	I don't know, man, but I couldn't ask him.
	I'd already made it clear why it was important.
	I had time to change it.
	I'd like him to read it as someone who hadn't read the original material just to see if it made sense, if the characters were consistent and all that.
	He never did.
	And he never did.
	And he never told me, you know, I'm not going to read it.
	Listen, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have made this commitment.
	It disturbs me, this ambition of yours, or whatever, right?
	And I couldn't bring myself.
	Why haven't you read it?
	Would you mind reading it?
	I mean, I've already told him how important it was to me.
	And we've been friends for quite some time, and it would only take him an hour and a half to read the play.
	He had like a month before really the play couldn't be changed much anymore, maybe about six weeks even really.
	So we'd been friends for years, needed an hour and a half from him, maybe then a half-hour conversation, two hours from the guy.
	But it was a good play.
	People really liked it.
	Anyway, so he never read it, never told me why, never brought it up with him again.
	You know, we keep in life thinking that we're not seeing what we're seeing.
	We keep in life thinking that the bare facts of the people around us are some kind of self-decepticon mirage that we can will away.
	We keep doing this by making excuses for people.
	But that's called being a shitty friend.
	If my friend was sinking months of time and cost a lot of money to get that play going and I was a student, if my friend was sinking barely afforded money and months of time and energy into this and he asked me for two hours, of course I'd do it.
	And realizing that I was a better friend than those around me.
	And realizing...
	In a more fundamental way that they weren't even bad friends insofar as that's as good a friend as they could be.
	Right?
	If someone's not...
	If someone's not capable in any practical way of something, it's hard to say that they're bad at it.
	Like, would you say, well, that staff sees a really bad ballet dancer.
	Well, of course, if I was out there trying to be a ballet dancer, I would be.
	But I'm not.
	I'm not trying.
	So can I really be bad at something I don't even try at?
	That was sort of my understanding.
	That's what I got.
	Okay, I'm not going to get mad at these people because they are the best friends that they can be.
	Because when you openly say to someone, this is really important.
	I need you to do this for me.
	Will you do it?
	Nod.
	Yes.
	Yes, I will.
	Here's the play.
	Get back to me.
	And you hope they read it that day or the next day or the day after.
	And every day that goes by when you don't hear about it or they call you up and talk about something else, they're telling you everything you need to know.
	People come with these amazingly monosyllabic, simple subtitles.
	I can't come.
	Steph, where you're going, I can't come.
	And I can't even say that I can't come.
	That's how much I can't come.
	I can't join you.
	I can't match you.
	I can't keep up with you.
	And I don't even want to know that I can't do that.
	Right?
	Like, if I wanted to be a singer in a band and a friend of mine Let's say we both had great voices or whatever, and a friend of mine went to go and be a singer in a band, and I told him, man, I hate that you're being a singer, man.
	It keeps me awake at night.
	It's driving me crazy, right?
	I hate that you're doing it.
	It makes me angry.
	That would be something he could work with, right?
	That would be something that would be a mark of my ambition.
	But if I simply pretended that he was not a singer in a band, but just never gave him any feedback, then I'm never going to be a singer.
	Because where there is hatred, there is life.
	you Thank you.
	Where there is avoidance, there is only death.
	And so the people around you who took your book that you worked on, And didn't read it.
	Like, friends of mine over the years have given me books to read, sat down, tried to read through, tried to give me feedback, tried to, you know, because that's called being a friend.
	And because I'm in motion, I'm not threatened by the fact that they're doing stuff, right?
	People have called into this show and said, I really want to start a podcast.
	I'm like, yeah, here's what I did.
	Here's how to do it.
	You know, we're helping another guy at the moment who wants to set up his own podcast.
	Fantastic.
	Love to help.
	It's not like we're running out of ears on the planet.
	150,000 new ones in America alone every single year, right?
	And every month, not every year, every month, not every year.
	And so the people...
	When you look into the mirror...
	of another person and everyone around you is a mirror.
	I don't mean that they have no identity and you're just only seeing yourself.
	But what I mean is that we are social animals.
	We are not these Randian superheroes of pure individuation.
	We are social animals.
	And we can't be any bigger or more powerful than the people around us support and accept, just as they can't be any more powerful And ambitious, then we support and accept.
	And when you look into the mirror of who you are, based upon your effect on those around you, if you look at yourself in the mirrored hearts of another person and you see nothing, that is chilling and that will empty you out.
	That's how you know that you're dead to them.
	Because that is what a vampire sees.
	A vampire looks in the mirror and sees nothing.
	And when you look, you create a book, you write a book, you put your thoughts down, you're passionate about it, you hand it to your friends, and it's like throwing it down a well with no bottom, then what you're doing is you're looking into the reflection of who you are in their hearts and seeing nothing.
	You do not exist to them.
	That's what I got.
	I do not exist to these people.
	Friendship of years.
	Need you to read a play.
	It's a pretty good play.
	I'm not asking you to listen to the song Mother by Andy Summers over and over again.
	I'm just asking you to read my play.
	Read my book, right?
	Went out with this girl.
	Funded a movie, wrote a movie, produced a movie.
	After it was all said and done.
	And we were a finalist in a film festival in Hollywood.
	Did pretty well.
	You can find it online.
	It's on this channel.
	It's called After.
	And I said to her, I've got this novel called Just Poor.
	I'd like your feedback on it.
	She'd never gone quite around to it.
	Now, her I was living with, so I did push the issue.
	I said, you know, I wrote a movie, put in lots of money to make this movie.
	I just need to read a novel.
	She says, well, if I'm not doing it, it's because you're not motivating me to do it.
	I said, ah.
	Subtitles, which I had ignored for a long time, were blazingly clear.
	I'm not here for you.
	You're not here for me.
	I exist for you.
	You don't exist for me.
	Ah, my childhood.
	Ah, of course.
	Of course.
	How could I have missed it?
	it?
	Well, because everyone around me needed me to miss it.
	And I'd rather you didn't waste that amount of time.
	So, Everyone's telling you everything you need to know about themselves all the time.
	It's just painful to really hear it and see it, right?
	Now you don't have to try and achieve great things.
	You can try and shrink your ambitions, and maybe for some people that can work.
	It won't work for me.
	No, probably not.
	It won't work for me if you do that.
	I mean, you'll create some great stuff in your life.
	I'd like to see that.
	Can I ask you a question?
	I mean, I get agitated when I'm not doing the things I'm supposed to do.
	I feel like I'm Creating like world problems like another hundred thousand people will die if I don't like I have this crazy sense of Moral responsibility, but you know is and I feel like that's something that a lot of the people that who I've socialized with lately Have as opposed to the people from my childhood like they could do things and who cares because they're kind of just thinking about themselves,
	but Is that Do you feel like that sense of, I mean, it's compelling.
	It will not even let you go to sleep without you doing the things that, you know, will get you to the point that you need to be at.
	Yeah.
	Ambition, particularly moral ambition, is incomprehensible to those outsiders.
	To those who are outside the moral furnace of the heart of mankind, What I do is incomprehensible.
	They cannot.
	A lot of people can't even remotely figure out why I do what I do.
	Why would you want to do this?
	Why would you want to take this on?
	Why would you want to oppose this group and oppose that group?
	And why would you want the hatred from some?
	Why would you?
	It's incomprehensible to people.
	Ah, it must be a lust for power.
	He's got to have mommy issues.
	It's got to be about his childhood.
	He likes to boss people around.
	Incomprehensible to people.
	Well, to the Arsilectians.
	So there are selected people.
	It's incomprehensible.
	But it's okay.
	Their lives are incomprehensible to me as well, so it's a fair trade.
	But, you know, I'm not sure, and you don't have to tell me what it is that you want to do, but it sounds like it's going to be great, and I want to see it.
	But I know how rare a good actionable philosopher really is in the world.
	I know.
	How rare they are, because I've studied it.
	I've studied the history of philosophy, not exhaustively, but fairly extensively.
	I know that it can be hundreds or thousands of years between a good, actionable philosopher and the next one, right?
	Someone who can really make the case, somebody who can motivate people, someone who can really bring values and virtues to life for people.
	To make them want to do this.
	Lots of demagogues, lots of people who lead you down to a blistering September 1939 invasion of Poland and a lot of other people who will lead you down other garden paths of service to the state and service to the king and service to the gods.
	Not many people who can motivate you to pursue reason and truth and virtue and do so with courage and actionable Dedication.
	It's been a long time since we have seen that in the world.
	Somebody whose power of language is not for entertainment and service of tradition like Shakespeare, is not for demagoguery and enslavement to the rulers like politicians, is not for bewilderment and confusion and subjugation To the deity like a priest's.
	But to be in service and beholden to no god and no master and to have the ear of the planet is unprecedented.
	And for me, it would be a criminal irresponsibility of a multi-generational nature If I had backed away from speaking with the world.
	You can disagree with me all you want.
	You can call it crazy.
	That's where it sits for me.
	And those who get it really get it.
	They understand.
	If I have that divine fire to speak to the world about things that matter, and it is damn rare for people like me to come along, if I step back out of fear, For consequences, out of fear for, oh, some people aren't going to like me.
	That would be an act of criminal irresponsibility.
	That would be like not giving the planet CPR because it might have bad breath.
	The conjunction of capacity, technology, and receptivity.
	If the internet had happened 50 years ago, I couldn't do what I'm doing.
	Because then we were still in the early flush of Keynesian spending and crazy stuff was happening and the debts hadn't started.
	But because things are starting to break down now, the dominant narrative is starting to break down now as well.
	To lean on a building will not push it over unless it's already detonating from the bottom and then you look like a superhero.
	Everything has come together.
	And that's what I like about that song.
	Mike, can you get me some lyrics for Lose Yourself?
	I've listened to it.
	You know the song, right?
	Yeah, of course.
	It's an amazing song.
	It's powerful because the greatest things are what you have to grab in the most transitory moments.
	There is no slow build to...
	Exactly the right thing at exactly the right time in exactly the right way.
	And we all think, oh, well, I'll prepare and I'll be ready for it, but you can't.
	Because when you're involved in the hurly-burly of deep discussions with the whole planet, well, you have to do it.
	Or the world has to wait for another 500 years or another thousand years.
	Until somebody else wants to do it.
	And who knows what the world will look like then?
	It may not be in a position where it can receive truth and wisdom.
	The song starts, look, if you had one shot or one opportunity to seize everything you ever wanted in one moment, would you capture it or just let it slip?
	Now, the difference is, for me, it's like, look, if you had one shot or one opportunity to seize everything the world needs desperately in one moment, would you capture it or just let it slip?
	If you had one shot or one opportunity to speak the words that end war, would you speak them or run and hide?
	If you had one opportunity to speak the words that end abuse, would you say them or would you run away and wait for hundreds of years for the next person to do it?
	If you had the capacity to send up words of fire that drive back the legions of evil in the world, would you speak them or would you be afraid that they might say mean things about you and lie about you?
	If you had one shot or one opportunity to put your shoulder behind the wheel that brings peace to the world, would you push or run away?
	Once you have that choice, my friend, it is no longer a choice.
	All virtue is, is clarity.
	It's putting things in a perspective that is so inescapable that your choice becomes effectively null and void, if this makes any sense at all.
	If I said, well, you know, I'd like to do a podcast and it might help the free market a little bit and it might help people understand the evils of the state a little bit, And it might, you know, help people understand how bad regulation is, and maybe I'll do a little bit of something here and there on fiat currency or whatever, right?
	It wouldn't have been enough!
	Lots of people have done that.
	But...
	Knowing what I know about childhood and knowing now what I know about epigenetics and knowing what I knew about the cycle of violence that begins in the family with knowing the foundation of the state is brutal parenting and neglectful parenting and knowing how to break this cycle out and knowing that I had the capacity to bring that to the world.
	And I'm not saying I'm the only person.
	I think I'm the only person who ties it all together that I know of.
	You don't go to Ayn Rand for childhood, you don't go to Murray Rothbard for childhood, and you don't go to childhood experts about anarchism.
	And you don't go to economists about childhood, but you don't go to childhood experts about fiat currency.
	I'm the one who puts the whole fucking thing together.
	And if there's somebody else out there who's done it, I'd like to know.
	But I'm the guy who can put it all together.
	And In a way that people want to listen.
	I don't know, we've got 110, 120 million plus downloads by now.
	That is what is technically known as a fuckton for a very challenging philosophy conversation.
	And when you put that together and say, well, Socrates didn't talk about parenting, but maybe the next really great philosopher will put it all together.
	To my knowledge, hasn't happened before in history.
	Nietzsche may have talked a lot about culture, And the etymology of religion didn't really talk about parenting, didn't really discuss much about fiat currency, didn't talk about the toxic effects of public school.
	We got people who will talk about the toxic effects of public school and then they just sign rand and...
	Anyway, I wanted to be one place where we could put it all together perfectly.
	No, of course not.
	But in a way that if you put everything together and you realize that how you parent is how the world becomes peaceful or violent.
	And that the choices that you make as an individual within your own relationships, within your own family, within your own parenting, within your own marriage, within your own friendships, as we're talking here, that's why I wanted to talk longer.
	Then, the choice of virtue or fear, the choice of courage or cowardice, Can only tend towards fear and cowardice if you lower the stakes in your mind.
	If the stakes are raised in your mind to where they actually are in the world, the choice of cowardice becomes incomprehensible.
	The stakes of me not doing what I'm doing are so high that to not do it Would be incomprehensible.
	Courage is only clarity, which is why this conversation feeds so much courage into the world, which is what we're talking about fundamentally.
	Do you have the courage to pursue your gold when everyone around you is tin?
	We're talking about courage.
	And courage is only clarity.
	And clarity is only philosophy.
	And by bringing philosophy to the world, by helping people understand the stakes of the decisions they make every day, who they spend time with, who they expose their children to, what they say, how they conduct themselves, what example they provide in the world, whether public or private, it doesn't fundamentally matter.
	By bringing that clarity to people, The courage that follows is inevitable, which is why people resist clarity so much, because when you have clarity, courage is inevitable.
	And it's no longer even courage.
	I have so much clarity about what I'm doing that I need almost no courage to do it.
	Because not doing it It's incomprehensible because I know what happens if I don't do it.
	We gotta wait for the next guy to come along and in an engaging and entertaining and consumable manner put everything out for free.
	I'm not putting a lot of money on that happening anytime soon.
	Is it just me?
	No.
	It's the technology, it's the times and this and that, but This is the moment.
	This is the time the audience is waiting.
	You got the mic.
	The spotlight is on you.
	You fucking open your mouth.
	Because to piss yourself and walk off the stage is to abandon the children to the jackals of the irrationalists and the superstitious and the collectivists and the fascists.
	You stand with your fire between the predators and the unborn.
	It's what you do.
	It's what you do.
	Because I know enough about my childhood and I've connected so much with my own history that I know what a horrifying absence it is to not see moral courage in the world, to not have clarity, to have people around me be afraid to take on any abusers, to be afraid to take on any bad people, to be afraid to harm the interests Of the mean and cold-hearted.
	Well, I know what it's like to not have that, therefore to not provide it to others would be incomprehensible.
	When you've processed enough of your own pain, re-inflicting that pain on others becomes incomprehensible.
	And the world provoked me to the point where my airstrike of rationality on the tottering foundations of history became inevitable.
	Greatness in the realm of ethics It's provoked by moral horror at your surroundings.
	The only way that slavery was ended was that there was deep moral horror at the institution of slavery.
	And the only way that the cycle of violence will be ended is when there is deep moral horror at the reality and prevalence of violence in the world.
	And that means reminding people of the brutalities inflicted upon children and reminding people of the hidden violence in the world, which is women's violence against children.
	And so what I'm sort of trying to provide here is the kind of clarity that will give you the courage to pursue your highest capacities, my friend.
	Because when you understand that you will squander those capacities and rob the world for the sake of no benefit other than the transitory imaginary security of those around you who cannot achieve what you achieve, If you get that you will be dousing the baby of your ambition, Not for the sake of bringing life to anyone else, but out of an act of sadism to appease the insecure
	You will no more want to kill your ambition than you would want to strangle a baby in some ritual designed to benefit only the superstitious and fearful Can I um I just thought of a I wrote a poem when I was about 16.
	It was right after I had finished doing a trip in South Africa where I went and I did the service project for two weeks.
	But I basically saw a lot of people in these really horrible circumstances.
	These kids running around with...
	The government had completely destroyed any sense of structure.
	They were running around in this garbage-filled...
	It was disgusting.
	But after that trip, I think a key kind of unlocked something where I could see kind of past whatever was holding me back.
	And I was seeing past all the daily problems and all the emotional BS that people were throwing at me.
	And I have it in this poem.
	I wrote it in like That moment.
	If you wouldn't mind, I would like to read it for you.
	Go for it.
	Alright, cool.
	It's called Fake.
	Sorry, did you say fake with a K? Yeah, fake with a K. Living a lie, erasing my mind In a world that is surely not mine Secrets stowed below my hold Never forgotten but always untold Stories generated from a life untrue It only pushes me farther away from you To a land by myself where I sulk by a shelf It holds all I want to be, my dreams in the great Gatsby.
	But this will never come true, for I haven't a clue that I'm living a lie, a lie inside my own shoes.
	They obviously don't fit, and as I fall and trip, I wonder what is this blunder that makes me so unfit, unfit to move, unfit to shoot, for a past glory that I wish to bring true.
	As I continue to journey deep inside my mind to find out what it is that makes me cry, a cry that echoes inside my soul for lack of a true life to hold to my own.
	I break through the veil and witness the landscape on a high cliff with the fog in my mind shape.
	I jump off the cliff to a place I've forgotten, now always myself, ripe, never rotten.
	Was the last line, ripe, never rotten?
	Yeah.
	Beautiful.
	That's the timing.
	You don't want to eat the food raw.
	You don't want to wait till it's rotten.
	Seize the moment of ripeness.
	Yeah.
	That's beautiful.
	And it's funny because, I mean, so much of that imagery is what we've talked about, right?
	The canyon, the leaping, the...
	It's crazy how we're having this conversation.
	It really is all these thoughts that have been going around in my mind.
	I think you do have a talent for summarizing these abstract points and pulling them together into what we're actually trying to get at.
	That's awesome.
	Thank you.
	Right.
	The people in history, I speak generally, this is not true for everyone, but it's generally true, which doesn't mean it's true for everyone, but the people in history want us to define ourselves relative to them, not relative to values, not relative to philosophy.
	And the reason being that everybody taught us not relative to philosophy, but relative to history.
	Believe in this God because he's been around for a long time.
	Believe in this country because it's been around for a long time.
	Believe in your parents because they're older than you.
	Believe in the priest because he's got God in him.
	Believe in the teacher because they're older and wiser.
	It was always relative to people that authority came.
	To people and punishment.
	The two things go hand in hand.
	Nobody believes in people without punishment or praise.
	And philosophy says, no, we cannot judge anything relative to people.
	Thank you.
	When we judge reality relative to people, we end up with religion.
	When we judge reality relative to reason, we end up with science.
	And science is incalculably superior to religion in almost every field, except for moral relativism, which is something that philosophy is supposed to fill in with ethics.
	And to judge yourself relative to people is to surrender our power.
	Because then we are saying, do you approve or disapprove of who I am?
	Do you approve or disapprove of what I do?
	Do you like or dislike what I plan?
	Do you support or not support?
	Do you get behind or get in front?
	And we're always judging ourselves relative to other people.
	Now, people who are broken and who have themselves judged themselves only relative to people want you to do that because they have no power with regards to reality because they're only judging themselves relative to people.
	Not, is this true, but is this popular?
	Not, is this right, but is it liked?
	Pure R strategy bullshit.
	So the case, we want objective rules, we want debates, we want reason, we want evidence, we'll fight it out.
	The R's are all like, well, that's mean.
	I'm offended.
	I'm upset.
	You're a racist.
	It's all just bullshit.
	They don't want to have any objective rules.
	That's why they never deal with any facts and arguments, just slander and muck.
	But...
	A healthy person never wants to win by cheating.
	You get no pleasure from it.
	The R's, the slime balls, the social metaphysicians, they...
	They only want to win by cheating because winning is the only point because they can't win in a fair fight so they have to hit below the belt and Cosby style drag you out, right?
	And so people are constantly tempting you to judge yourself relative to them.
	And it is an incredibly dangerous trap.
	They're desperate to do it because if you don't judge yourself relative to them then they feel how little power they have.
	If you judge yourself relative to reason, to evidence, to standards, to reality, to objectivity, to truth, then the imaginary power that the vast majority of humanity has invested themselves in dries up, vanishes, disappears.
	The motors fail, the lights die all across the human city landscape of self-delusion.
	The Motor of this avoidance of reality slows to a growl and stops.
	That's why people try and keep you away from objectivity, from philosophy, from values, because it robs them of the power to define you.
	Are you good?
	You are good if we say you're good.
	And you are bad if we say you're bad.
	You're a racist if we call you a racist.
	You're a misogynist if we call you a misogynist.
	You're a sexist if we call you a sexist.
	You're evil if we call you evil.
	Because if you define yourself relative to other people's judgments of you, you give them the power to shape the moral universe according to the bitter and illusory storms of mere verbal abuse.
	And you surrender Your being, your soul, your integrity, your virtue to the wild and empty words of the endlessly immature.
	To those who believe that their words have a magical power because so many people obey those words.
	How many people shape what they do out of fear of being called a racist?
	Or a sexist?
	Because they're not defining themselves according to their values.
	They're defining themselves according to what people say.
	Do you know what happens when you appease bullies?
	You simply breed more bullying.
	And to define yourself according to philosophy is fundamentally threatened to those around you because it reveals them as powerless over reality and only as human farmers having power over people.
	And it is extremely humiliating to understand that you only have power over not only people, but the lowest quality people, those who are susceptible to this kind of bullying.
	And so when you define yourself according to philosophy, you are unplugging the engine that motivates people and gives them a sense of efficacy and power.
	In the same way that if you get rid of the government, the sophists in control of government feel all that power draining away from their bodies, all of that Kiss the ring.
	I can give you contracts.
	I can put you in jail.
	I can have you investigated.
	I can get you audited.
	All of that kiss the ring power evaporates with the illusion of the state.
	And our genes sure do like to accumulate power.
	Gives us resources to give to our children.
	And so draining resources through independence from the codependents around us It's very disorienting and provokes a lot of hostility.
	You know, the reason that you are afraid of growing fundamentally is because you're afraid of being attacked, of being criticized.
	Oh, he's too good for us.
	Oh, he just thinks he's all that.
	Who do you think you are?
	And lording it over us.
	Stay down, stay low, stay under our fucking heel.
	Don't take away my imaginary powers.
	Don't you dare to tell me that my magic isn't real.
	Don't you dare to tell me that my words have no power, that my indignation and my hostility and my disgust and my attack is like a bird thinking it's winning a battle because it's pecking at a mirror.
	Don't take away my fantasies of control.
	Don't reveal me as impotent by your refusal to participate in my subjugation of you.
	Don't say no.
	Because if you say no, I am nothing.
	Don't say no to my power.
	Don't say no to my bullying.
	Don't say no to all the accumulated vituperative hatred of my history.
	Because if you say no, I am banished.
	Not even like an exorcism, but by the simple act of disbelief.
	Don't need a priest.
	Don't need kids' heads spinning.
	Don't need blood on the ceiling.
	Don't need holy water.
	Don't need big dramatic scenes.
	All you have to do is stop believing in these devils and they vanish.
	And since so many people have invested in control over others, anything which frees anybody of control from others is viewed as a banishment of them to non-existence.
	Sorry, vampires.
	The world is fresh out of blood.
	Well...
	Oh, man.
	Awesome.
	So Well, I hope this helps.
	Will you keep us posted about what you're up to?
	Yeah, I mean...
	I'm not sure how I would do that, but...
	Just drop us a line, let us know what you're up to, if you've got anything you want us to help publicize, and maybe what you can do is send us that poem, and we can tack it on at least to the bottom of the video, because I think more people should read it.
	It's something that needs to be absorbed more than just from an audible standpoint, but read and absorbed.
	I'd also like to read it again.
	Sure.
	Thank you for that.
	Stefan, I would just like to say you are very extremely influenced.
	Oh wait, I can't even speak right now.
	But you put forth a great influence in I feel like a lot of people's lives and especially mine and I know because you're reaching such a personal level of understanding.
	and I've never talked to you before.
	You don't know anything about me, but every single word you're saying is ringing bells and ringing associations in my brain, and I think it's amazing.
	And I really do have to commend you.
	You've really blown my mind every single time.
	Thank you for that.
	I really appreciate this.
	Very, very kind words.
	And given your own skill and language, my friend, it's very high praise, which I appreciate.
	Well, thank you everyone so much for a wonderful, wonderful conversation as always.
	It moves me.
	It enthralls me.
	It excites me.
	And it energizes me.
	And I really appreciate that.
	So, of course, I'll be up until about dawn.
	But thank you all very much.
	Freedomainradio.com slash donate to help spread and grow this conversation.
	I believe, of course, the most essential conversation in the world.
	And have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful week.
	And thanks, of course, Mike, for setting all this up.

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