Aug. 28, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:53:48
3060 The Wrecking Ball of Skepticism - Call-In Show - August 26th, 2015
Question 1: Recently, a Greek life sorority published a recruitment video which was later taken down after criticism regarding the lack of diversity that it portrayed. What are you thoughts on the impact of selective societies such as fraternities and sororities which don't adhere to any racial or income based quotas?Question 2: If a government is merely a collection of individuals who own a vast amount of property, aren't these individuals justified in imposing a tax on anyone who wishes to live on such property?Question 3: How do you think roads in a free society would work? Should they be regulated and maintained by private entities for a toll to pass through or should they be free for everyone to use?
Hi everybody, Stefan Mullen from Freedomain Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
Today is the 26th of August 2015.
There has been a terrible shooting, as of course they all are, to media people.
I think a cameraman and a reporter are gunned down by a disgruntled former employee, I think is the way the story is going, who faxed a 23-page manifesto detailing his objections to his perceived Racial treatment at the hands of those around him, so we'll be doing more on that.
We are researching and following that as we go along.
I just wanted to acknowledge that before we go into the show tonight.
Many years ago, I was playing Macbeth, and we were doing rehearsals, and the word came that That weapons of mass destruction have been launched at Israel.
This actually turned out to be false, but the director said money.
He said that he gives a great speech and he said that, you know, we're trying to do our good in the world and we cannot let the evil events of circumstances in history overtake the good that we're trying to do and all of that.
He actually gave a really great speech.
I found it quite moving.
Unfortunately, he shot it down later when I mentioned What a great speech it had been and how inspiring.
He said, oh, I didn't believe any of it.
I just had to get everyone back into rehearsal.
And I was like, oh!
Why?
Why did I lift the lid to see what was going on?
That's a real shame.
And he didn't listen to Nietzsche's dictum that you never leave your actions in the lurch.
Don't betray them.
And so we will continue to do the good that we can do in this show.
And that has to do with talking with you, the fine listeners, if you want to support the show.
And I hope that you do, because I don't think we can do any better than we're doing.
So if you want to support the show, freedomainradio.com.
Slash donate to help us out.
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I mean, we really are bringing a tsunami of reason and evidence to a benighted planet.
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Mike!
Alright, well up for us today is Mr.
Steve.
And Steve wrote in and said, I'm a 22 year old college graduate who is fascinated by your views regarding the college debt crisis and the effects of government subsidies on the cost of college and the type of people attending it.
Recently, a Greek life sorority published a recruitment video which was later taken down after being exposed to heavy criticism regarding the lack of diversity that it portrays.
I watched it, and it's the whitest video you've ever seen in your life.
He continues and said, I would like to know what your opinion is on the effects of selective societies, such as fraternities and sororities, which don't adhere to any racial or income-based quotas.
That's from Steve.
Are you there, Steve?
There you go.
Yep.
I hope you don't mind, Steve, if I use your name the way that the monkey does in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.
Steve.
All right.
So...
You're asking a voluntarist how he feels about voluntary association.
I find this interesting.
How do you think I'm going to respond to that?
It's something that's really great.
You're going to go on to say that it has no negative effect.
Though I truly believe in the rhetoric that you present, though I might think that it might have, to some extent, some negative effect as a whole.
Would you think that it would be negative overall for us to consider selective society as the way to go or a certain kind of quota might be beneficial on the long run?
A quota.
Now, which area of the gene pool are you hailing from?
And I would say that So, for instance, I'm Armenian myself, yet a quota does not include me because I'm technically European, though I would say a quota regulation is proven to have some kind of a beneficial effect to the extent that we're just creating,
if we let students in colleges In a certain kind of a lazy, fair society, we're going to see a number of societies developing that are inassociated with each other.
So I would suppose then you would imagine, or hope, because, you know, I look at Def Jam Records and Motown and so on, they don't have a lot of white artists, so the...
The rap record producers, the rap music groups, would have to have majority whites in their stable.
The NBA, of course, would have to have a majority of whites.
Breakdancing competitions would have to have a majority of whites.
So if you want to put quotas in, where would you stop, right?
right?
Would you begin by, I think some of the biggest imbalances in terms of population is in the NBA, right?
Which is significantly black in a very white, heavy society.
So would you start with that?
Well, I would stop in a lot of places, but I think our current society does have a lot of quotas and does have a representational democracy.
But, And I'm just wondering how would an anarchist society go about solving problems regarding Certain kind of people not having to bump shoulders with each other at all.
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
First of all, why is it a problem?
And secondly, why is it any of your business who people choose to associate with?
Because there's a certain kind of value for people to exchange ideas and not to segregate themselves and alienate themselves.
Let's go back to the college example.
When we're going to the general college and student population, it is definitely selected among a quota.
This video was a representation of the University of Alabama.
We saw this laissez-faire different society of different students being segregated into different societies.
And among these societies, students do not interact with each other at all.
This would actually hinder the process of exchanging ideas and actually debating what is the common good.
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
Hang on.
Okay, so first of all, again, if you're going to do quotas, then you would want to make sure that the media has a lot more centrist and right-wing people in, because it's very much dominated by left-wingers.
Also, in academia, you'd have to make sure you had a lot more conservatives put in, because, of course, there are very few conservatives in academia.
The vast majority of scientists, strangely enough, because they get their money from the government, tend to be hostile to the free market and pro-socialists.
They're very much on the left.
So there's lots of places.
Before you even get to the students, you'd have to start with the faculty, and you'd have to start with the media.
And also, I'm not sure that there are a lot of Republicans who are teaching school.
And so you'd have to get a lot more Republicans into school.
Also, I'm not sure that there's a lot of men.
In fact, I'm quite sure there are virtually very few men.
Who are teaching in primary school and the younger grades.
So rather than dealing with the students, what you'd want to do is start dealing with everyone who's in charge of the students.
So that would be a pretty huge task.
So that's the first thing that I would point out.
The second thing that I would point out is that when it comes to diversity and quota systems or what have you, there is an implicit collectivism.
In this.
Because what you're saying, let's just take a standard example.
Are you saying that white students should be more exposed to what?
Black thinking?
Are you saying that there's a kind of thinking that is specific to blacks that white students can't have exposure to unless black students are around?
I'm saying when all white students or most white students hang out together for the majority of time, that will alienate them and make them empathetic to the causes of different subcultures.
Well, hang on.
But why would you be blaming whites for that?
Because wouldn't you say that the black students also would hang around?
I mean, do you lecture a lot of the black people for not being more inclusive of whites?
No, I'm not blaming either side.
I'm blaming this.
I'm not blaming.
No, no, no.
Hang on.
All you've talked about is white people so far.
Yeah, but I'm not blaming them.
This level of organization is a result of the laissez-faire type of society that they were brought in.
I'm sorry, I have no idea what you mean by laissez-faire kind of society.
Are you saying that most white people are very much pro-free market and minarchists or anarchists?
No, I'm saying that.
Not from my experience, but go on.
All right.
So I'm saying that among the students, they are left for their own devices.
They are left to associate with whichever society they want to go about or join.
So among the different students, there are different organizations that you can join.
And the school policy, let them join whatever they want and let them construct this exclusive, selective society, such as Greek life, meaning sororities and fraternities.
And that's what I mean by laissez-faire.
Laissez-faire is that the school allows such societies to be selective and no intervention whatsoever is placed.
Okay, so people, let's say that there are whites who want to hang out with whites and there are blacks who want to hang out with blacks.
And I'm sure that there's a Japanese student association without a huge number of Scotsmen trying to get in.
So people are, let's say that they prefer their own culture, whether that's race or not.
And you're saying that it would be better for them if they had a lot of commingling with other cultures and other races.
Is that right?
Yeah.
I'm not talking about culture.
I'm talking about people having the option to join whatever they want.
Okay, you're not answering my questions.
You're not answering my questions.
Okay.
Just grab your politically correct stuff into a giant ball and throw it out the window for now, right?
So you said that there are big advantages to mingling with other races or other cultures.
Is that right?
I never said anything about advantages.
I said something about...
Yes, you did.
Mike, did you hear that?
That there are proven advantages, I thought he said about...
Not sure of the exact wording, but certainly the impression I got.
I can listen to it to be sure.
So, sorry, are you saying that there aren't any particular advantages to this kind of multiculturalism?
I'm saying it is definitely beneficial for...
Okay, so there are advantages.
Why are we dancing around like this?
I say, are there advantages?
And you say, I never said that.
And then I said, is it beneficial?
And you say, yes.
Well, if you're going to use the word benefits and say it has nothing to do with advantages, we may not be speaking the same language.
Well, advantages in terms of advantages for the people as a whole, not advantages for a subculture to join another subculture, but rather advantages for the society as a whole.
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
You know what I mean?
Okay, so pretend that I'm the president of that, I think it was a white sorority, right?
So come to me and make the case why I would...
Absolutely find it in my benefit to pursue minorities or other cultures or whatever.
I assume that there's nothing illegal, like they're not saying, well, you can't join, right?
Maybe people just don't want to join.
So what's the benefit to say, I want to go out and get a bunch of, say, Pakistani people into, Pakistani women into my sorority.
What would be the advantage?
Well, it wouldn't be an advantage to yourself as the president.
It would be an advantage for the collective whole.
I don't know.
You know I'm a voluntarist and an anarchist.
What on earth are you talking about?
The collective whole.
You might as well say it benefits the assfarts of leprechauns, right?
I mean, there's no such thing as a collective whole.
And even if there is such a thing, how would it possibly accrue to these benefits?
Alright, so would you like to explain to me how would it be beneficial to actually allow this kind of segregation to take place and have a world eventually that is composed of different societies that is really extremely separate to each other and no type of...
Hang on, hang on.
Are you saying that in the absence of compulsion, people tend to self-segregate by culture and by race?
Is that right?
Well, I'm not sure.
It was never tried before.
Okay, stop, stop, stop.
Okay, look, if we're going to have a conversation, you have to be able to answer my questions.
You have this, like, I ask a question, I'm not trying to trap you, I'm just really trying to understand what you're saying, and you go off on these tangents.
Okay, let's start again.
So you're sort of saying, well, if people don't have quotas or whatever, then they'll self-segregate.
They'll sort themselves into their own cultures or genders or races or whatever, right?
So is it your contention that in the absence of quotas or prodding or poking or guilting or laws or whatever, that people will tend to self-segregate according to their own race and culture?
My answer would be, I don't know.
I haven't tried to have a free society.
Then you're wasting my time.
Because you're saying, how is this problem going to be solved?
And I'm saying, okay, let's define the problem.
And you're saying, well, I don't even know if there is a problem.
Because if people aren't going to...
Sorry, go ahead.
I'm sorry.
So my question was not, how is this problem going to be solved?
It's just my question would be, is this beneficial or not?
And how would it take place in an anarchist society?
So for me, I'm unable...
Oh my God.
Dude, you said it is beneficial.
You said it's beneficial to some collective good.
In my perspective, what do you think about it?
And how would you picture it in an anarchist society?
Why would I think about it?
Why would I think about it?
Let's say that there's some black guy's chess club.
Why do I care?
So they want to have a chess club with only black guys in it.
Why would I think about it?
What would it matter to me?
As a follow-up, what if the whole world was composed of different black guys or subcultural chess clubs that are completely unentangled and separate from each other?
How would you say it would be beneficial?
Would you think it would be a good thing or not?
I'm sorry, what is a good thing?
If the whole world is comprised of different subcultural exclusive groups that are separate than each other and refuse to have any kind of a debate or any kind of an exchange of ideas.
So what if this exclusive club that you suggested and you said that you don't care about its existence, what if this kind of club where the whole humanity and each subcultural group will be separated and segregated from every other person?
Okay, let's say that that is a potential scenario.
Let's say every subculture ends up dealing mostly with its own members or exclusively with its own members.
Chinese people stay in Chinatown and, you know, black people stay in the black part of town and Scottish people only go to those weird dances where you try not to cut your feet and stuff.
Let's say that happens.
All right.
Right?
Let's say that happens.
So what?
Okay.
In my perspective, I think that would be a negative thing.
Why would you think it is something that I shouldn't care about and something that...
Well, look, because, look, hang on.
If that's what people want, then you can tell them that it's negative for them.
Now, most people are pretty good at figuring out their own self-interest, right?
And so if something is negative for people, generally they tend to figure it out and change their behavior, right?
So if I start up a rap label, right?
Big chatty foreheads, house of booty shaking, throw your hands in the air like you just don't care.
house of rap, right?
And I say, I only want elderly Armenian women.
That's actually good.
To do my rap albums, right?
How well am I going to do?
Oh, pretty well.
Really?
A lot of market out there for elderly Armenian women rap?
Well, that's a hypothetical question.
No, no, answer me the question!
Let's have a conversation, like we're actually talking and listening to each other, okay?
Am I going to do well if I have elderly Armenian lady rap albums?
Absolutely, if there's a market for it.
I don't think there is a market for it, but you are going to do well.
I agree.
I don't think I have to be a music expert to know that that's the case.
Okay, so let's say I'm a racist.
I start up a rap label and I don't want any blacks because, boy, I'm just such a racist.
Am I going to do well or poorly?
Very poorly.
Right.
A, because a lot of the most talented artists are black, and B, because if I'm known to be a racist, not a lot of blacks are going to buy my elderly Armenian female rank.
All right.
So here's an example where racism goes against my self-interest, right?
Let's say it's the 60s, and I want to sign...
So a whole bunch of artists and of course there's, you know, unbelievably great acts coming out of the black community.
I mean we're talking, you know, Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, a little bit of a tottering Ella Fitzgerald, I mean Marvin Gaye, we've got Smokey Robinson, I mean just you name it.
There's just like a staggering number of incredibly talented black singers and songwriters and musicians.
And I say, I'm not going to sign any black people because I just like committing economic seppuku based upon my prejudices.
I'm not going to do very well.
So in those situations, for people to self-segregate, Would be really, really bad.
Or, you know, I saw this, there's a version of Higher Ground and Roxanne that were done by two guys who are friends, Sting and Stevie Wonder.
A wasp named Sting.
Anyway.
And they love playing music together.
Stevie Wonder did harmonica for one of Sting's songs.
And they just have very similar voices, very similar styles.
And they can both funk fairly hard.
Although I would say Stevie Wonder a little bit harder than Mr. Ferret Face.
But so they love playing music together.
And so they really enjoy it.
So you don't have to have quotas.
You don't have to say to Sting, you've done a lot of records with white people.
So you've got to go find a brother to do some music with.
I mean, or if you go and see Stevie Wonder, one of the great songs in the modern pantheon is a Superstition by Stevie Wonder.
And if you go and see him rock that mofo out on Sesame Street, I mean, there's a couple of white guys in the back who are just funking harder than Wagnalls.
And nobody knew Stevie, got too many brothers in the band, you know, got to get some of the melanin challenged people back there because, you know, it's not working.
And so these are people who get together and make great music and work well together and have a blast doing stuff together.
Nobody needs to have quotas and nobody needs to convince them because it's in their self-interest.
They enjoy it.
They like each other's personalities.
They like the way each other plays.
You got Clarence Clemens doing deep soul kisses with Bruce Springsteen on tour because they love making music together.
So people are going to collaborate when they find it profitable and enjoyable.
I don't mean profitable in money, although that's part of it, but people are going to collaborate when they enjoy doing stuff together.
But if they don't enjoy doing stuff together, then they probably won't.
But why would you need quotas?
I don't really understand why.
People are going to get together if it's a value to them.
But if it's not, why would you want to make them do it?
Well, first of all, to a large extent, a value of having people share stuff together.
But in an event where there is no unifying body to actually facilitate these ideas to be transferred.
Okay, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.
Because I just gave you a bunch of examples which were all to do with musicians, and I didn't make that case accidentally.
Do you think that there was a governing body that made Sting and Stevie Wonder make records together?
A governing body.
I would say there's a governing body that allowed for multimedia to actually be transmitted.
No, no, no.
Come on, man.
No, no, no, no.
Come on.
Come on.
When Sting wanted who he calls one of the best singers in the world, Chep Mani, to sing on one of his songs, Desert Rose.
Was there a governing body that facilitated that transaction?
Oh, not at all.
Okay, so you don't need a governing body telling musicians to work together.
If they really enjoy working together, they'll do it.
They don't care about the race, they care about the fun and the quality of what they can produce together.
Okay, so you don't need a governing body for people to enjoy working together across races, across cultures, and so on.
And that is correct.
We definitely reached that point.
So what if they do not enjoy...
What if they voluntarily said that we do not want to associate with these other people?
We're good on our own.
Wouldn't you think that would be a situation that would call for an intervention of any kind?
Why?
Because there would be points in...
The lifetime of humanity where humans or at least large bodies of the population needs to agree on certain values to move forward.
And if we saw this whole idea of people being separated, wouldn't you say that would be...
Kind of a loss of communication among ourselves and would prevent us from moving forward because we're seeing people...
Do you get what I mean?
I'm saying that an interventionist body is actually needed to form a unifying ground for people to actually perform and make progress.
Okay, well, let's say that you had a governing body called the government, let's say.
And the government for, let's say, at a minimum 50 or 60 years worked really hard to get two groups to agree on something and to work together and to join together in common values and in a common vision of society and to put aside their differences and to work together as one.
Some people would call that something like Head Start and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, I think it was, and welfare payments and other forms of wealth transfers from whites to blacks.
And let's say after 50 or 60 years of this government program, which is supposed to have everyone end up with common values, you still have extremely wide statistical divergences in things like crime rates, in things like single motherhood, in things like voting patterns, in things like income, in things like assets, in things like educational attainment.
Now, I think that that's made things far worse.
It's a government program.
Of course it's going to make things worse.
There's no government program that makes things any better except for agitators, bureaucrats, and lenders.
And so maybe you could go out to people and say, you're not actually acting in your own self-interest.
You know, if you want, let's say you want an all-white sorority or an all-black sorority, you're not acting in your own self-interest.
And you could go out and you could make that case.
And you could say, look, it's really great to have a diversity of opinion to have, although I really dislike that as a whole.
The idea that you've got to embrace diversity by going to speak to Chinese people is like saying, well, you see, you have one way of thinking, and Chinese people have another way of thinking, and they kind of all this one giant blob called Chinese people, and you're this one giant blob called white people, and you're this one giant blob called black people, and you're this one giant blob called Asians or whatever.
And so you've got to mix it up because you all think differently.
Well, if that's true, I'm not saying that it is, but if it is true, That all the races or all the cultures fundamentally think differently.
Well, first of all, that can't be true unless everyone's irrational, because there's no such thing as different thinking.
There's good and bad thinking, but let's just throw that aside for the second.
But if all of the...
Let's say the races.
If all the races sort of fundamentally think differently or are different, well, then we have a huge problem.
And the problem is, okay, well, what is the benefit of going into a very foreign mode of thought?
Like...
I really valued a lot more diversity when I was younger, and I was involved in diverse reach-outs and diverse programs and so on.
And as I get older, I just have less time to learn other cultures, right?
So, like, if I went to Japan and I tried to integrate into Japan...
It would take a huge amount of work.
Because, you know, people who grow up in Japan, well, they speak Japanese.
They know all of the Japanese culture.
They know how you greet people and what you say and what's acceptable topics and what's not acceptable topics and all that.
And it's kind of exhausting.
You know, if you're going to go travel and bike through Japan, like a friend of mine did that when he was younger.
He goes to bike through Japan.
Had a fun time, right?
Met people and chatted and so on.
But if you're going to go and live there and you're going to go and work there and you're going to raise children in Japan...
Well, it's a lot of work to try and figure out how you're supposed to do things and what you're supposed to say.
I mean, I found it tough going from a poor family background in Canada to a rich or relatively well-off business environment when I became an entrepreneur.
How do you mingle?
At cocktail parties with people who are worth millions of dollars when you grow up in a single-parent, dirtbag, poor, poverty-laden household.
Well, that took a lot of learning and a lot of self-consciousness and so on, and that's adapting just to a different economic layer within my own damn society.
Going to another society, it's fun to visit, but it's incredibly time-consuming to really be able to fluidly work in another culture.
So that you're not offending people by accident.
So that you're not withdrawing from them.
Like, what may be tact in one society is considered rudeness in another society.
What may be rude in one society is considered tactful in another society.
How do you date?
How do you pick up?
When do you meet the parents?
When do you...
Who pays for what?
Like, it's all really complicated.
There's a huge number, thousands and thousands and thousands of rules that you have imbibed in your own culture just by growing up in it.
And you probably don't even know half of them except instinctually.
Like, you say this, you don't say that.
Now, I've of course lived, you know, little bits in Ireland, a lot in England, little bits in South Africa, a lot in Canada, and I've traveled lots and lots of different places.
And I really, I'm not saying you haven't, but having been to these different places, you know, government-run crappy schools, crappy-run private schools that cost a fortune and all that, and three different universities in Canada, York and University of Toronto and McGill University, plus theatre school, like I've gone to a lot of different environments.
And I recognize that the number of embedded instinctual rules of behavior, of governance of behavior, Within each society, within each economic level and layer within those societies.
And this is not to mention, I mean, how long would it take for you to go to a synagogue And know what to do.
And know how to chat with people.
And know what jokes were funny and what jokes were offensive.
And so on.
Or know which jokes you should laugh at and which jokes you shouldn't laugh at.
All of these instincts that you have built up like sedimentary layers of history that are informing just about everything that you do.
When you move from one culture to another culture, or from one race sometimes to another race, depending on where those races originated, Man, you're like, suddenly you cross the street and you have to become this razor-sharp-witted archaeologist who's figuring out everything that's going on.
And so there is a huge time investment that is necessary to fluidly be able to go from culture to culture, particularly when those cultures have some opposing values.
And certainly among blacks and whites, in general, as a whole, there are some Opposing values.
And so why, you know, I know what the cost is.
Like, I know how difficult it is to go and navigate between different cultures.
Like, let me give you a tiny example.
So, this is insane.
I come to Canada, right?
So when I first came to Canada, we lived with the brother of my mother in Whitby.
And I was put in grade 8 because I was fairly advanced.
And they tested my writing and my reading, which has always been off the charts because I've been I started writing short stories when I was five or six years old and Was reading from as long as I can remember and so I was in a class in grade a and when I came to Toronto when we finally sort of settled down in Toronto I was moved back to grades into grade six and my first day I went to the school and And I sat down and,
you know, we go through the lessons and all that and it's all pretty basic, especially the reading stuff.
Anyway, so then the bell rings at 10.30 and out we go for recess.
And I'm like, oh, I wonder what we're going to play.
Well, let me tell you, man.
All right.
The game that we played was called Chase the Girls and Punch Them in the Groin.
All right.
Now, I grew up in a somewhat, somewhat dicey neighborhood in England.
Let me tell you, a game I had never thought of as remotely playable is chase anyone and punch them in the groin.
And so I was like, I was like, and first of all, I thought I was being punked, right?
I thought like you, prepubescent Aston Kutcher, they're trying to get me to go and chase the girls and punch them in the groin.
So that I'm like, oh, here I go.
I'm from England.
I'm going to go and whack you in the peepee.
You know, and then everybody was like, I thought I was just being punked.
Until they went and actually chased the girls and punched them in the groin.
Now, I found that appalling enough.
Because I thought, well, you know, it's the old thing, right?
Well, if I was a girl, I wouldn't like to be punched in the groin.
Except, except these girls did.
This is the insane thing.
Oh my god, out here in the rough colonies, I believe there's pee-pee punching and people like it.
What the heck is going on?
And so they went and they punched these girls in the groin and these girls were laughing.
I have this incredibly vivid memory of the girl in the alcove where the doors open into the school and she's on the ground and this guy's trying to punch her in the groin and she's laughing her head off.
And I'm like, what layer of Lord of the Flies hell have I popped out in?
I mean, I'm not sure how I'm going to be unpopular, but I sure know how I'm not going to be popular.
I'm not going to be popular by punching girls in the groin, and I never did punch girls in the groin.
I quickly found another kid who seemed equally horrified, and we went and talked about things that mattered.
As we tended to do.
And we walked around every recess.
And just very briefly, another story was in England, you play a game called rounders.
And when you...
It's like baseball.
When you hit the ball in rounders, you get three pitches.
You can choose whether you run or not.
Because if you don't hit it that well, you can say, next!
Or something like that, and you'll get pitched again, right?
Now, I'm pretty good at sports.
And I was very sporty back then.
And I was pretty good at rounders.
Always been a good hitter.
I'm a southpaw, right?
So...
I hit the ball.
And first of all, it was one of these weird softball things.
So it's like when you're used to hitting peas, suddenly you're hitting like a grapefruit or almost a watermelon, it seems.
So it was pretty easy to hit.
And I cracked it pretty hard.
But I thought, yeah, you know what?
I could do better than that.
Not by pretending it's a girl's groin.
And so I hit the ball pretty hard.
And it goes over left field.
And I just, you know, I just lean on my bat.
I say, next!
And, of course, all of the British, all of the Canadian kids are like, run, you limey bastard, run!
I'm like, no, no, I'll just take the next one!
Like, drop your monocle, you limey bastard, and run!
So, of course, I threw my, but just something as simple as that.
You know, how long did that story tag me in school?
You know, like, oh, I'll just take the next one!
Became like the thing when the people would go up and play baseball.
And that's, you know, these fairly minor things, but that's just coming from England to Canada in a fairly similar kind of economic sphere.
And, you know, it took a while to adjust.
And I knew everything I needed to do in England.
And I just, you know, coming to Canada, it's like, okay, well, what the hell do I do?
You know, not to mention, well, I wouldn't give my story if I've said the story before of jumping onto the ice rink with my skate guard still attached.
At least they weren't on my hands.
That's wonderful.
And, you know, thinking I was dressed up quite formally because skating in England is always a pretty formal affair.
And all these little hockey kids are like, hey, silver pants, you know, knocking me over in the ice and stuff.
But at least they weren't punching me in the groin.
Although my hair was kind of long.
I think that was the connection.
But...
So here, like, that's just a tiny example of an adjustment that's made in a fairly similar kind of culture.
So, you know, as you get older, it's like, yeah, you know, I could go and learn all this stuff.
Give me the cost benefit, right?
I mean, I know what it's going to cost me.
I know how much time it's going to take.
And I don't know if it's ever going to succeed, whether people are just going to be polite, particularly if you're trying to deal with a really polite culture, like Japanese cultures.
If you go wrong, people may not even tell you.
You know, there's some cultures, if you go into their house...
And you admire something, they have to give it to you.
Nice painting.
Here it is.
And it's like, no, I just, I was trying to explain this to my daughter the other day, and she's like, well, no, I'd give it back.
It's like, but that's an insult.
So good luck with all that.
Like, how much you have to monitor yourself, it's more difficult to learn another culture than it is to learn another language.
Now, if you're saying to me, well, Steph, If you spend the 10,000 hours to learn Japanese, you will have access to all of these great books that are written in Japanese.
It's like, I will, and I'm sure the translations don't quite do them justice, but still, that's 10,000 hours.
And so I have a certain amount of hesitation.
When it comes to unreservably recommending that everyone mix with every other culture or whether that's race or culture or ethnicity or religion or whatever, it's a lot of work.
There's a lot of minefields.
And if someone can tell me why it's worth it all the time, I'm happy to hear.
But people always talk about these untested benefits, right?
Like people have gone out repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly trying to find out...
What's so great about multiculturalism?
What's so great about having people with different and often opposing beliefs all trying to live together in the same society?
What's so great about it?
Well, food, music.
Yes, I agree.
Food and music, fantastic.
But outside of food and music, what are the benefits?
And people have studied this extensively.
And they, every single time that I've read about, they find the same thing.
It sucks.
It's bad for society as a whole.
Trust goes down.
Cohesion goes down.
Neighborless snow goes down.
And this is really bad all around.
And so it is, and I think that's just because there's this great Grand Canyon of understanding because we all grew up in different cultures.
My solution to this, of course, is to replace culture with philosophy.
But that's taking a little bit of time.
In fact, it's going faster than I thought it was.
Once we replace culture with philosophy, then a lot of these problems will be solved.
There will still be regional preferences around humor, around how you pick up someone or express that you're interested.
You know, like the way they do it in Australia, brace yourself, is a little bit different than the way they would do it in Japan, which involves, I think, I don't know, tipping a piece of sake on your shoe.
I don't know what they do, but...
But there will be lots of local and regional differences around non-moral aspects of society, you know, like you drive on the left or the right or whatever.
But right now, not only are these cultural differences in terms of, you know, social habits, mating habits, humor habits, and so on, but there are big moral ones as well.
And so if someone can explain to me and also find the data, you know, like whenever you're told something is universally good in society, that's usually a great place to bring your giant wrecking ball of Miley Cyrus-laced skepticism to the entire structure.
So whenever you hear diversity is our strength, multiculturalism is our strength, say, okay, well, let's hear the data, right?
And I don't want to just, you know, it's like the guy John who called in the other week who's like, Steph, you're just wrong.
It's like, man, don't tell me I'm wrong.
Show me how I'm wrong.
Multiculturalism is a strength or diversity is a strength.
It's like, okay, show me the data.
We're having lots of disparate cultures and groups and religions and ethnicity.
Show me the data where this is great.
Because everywhere I look around the world, it looks terrible.
It looks like a complete disaster.
So, you know, if you want to go off and do this and let us know, I think that'd be fantastic.
Now, where you have rational values...
People can work together really well.
Like, Stoyan and I work together really well.
Obviously, we put up with Mike.
But Stoyan and I, we really are the team that makes...
I'm just kidding.
It's actually me and Mike.
Stoyan...
Well, he's asleep now, right?
Yeah, okay.
Throwing Stoyan under the bus for this one.
But, you know, we've got a guy from Bulgaria.
We've got a guy from, you know, war-torn New York.
Yeah.
And we have me.
I think we work together really well.
Our conflicts are relatively few, and where they are, they're very productive because we share the same values.
So those who are willing to replace culture with philosophy can work together.
Can you please elaborate on that, just briefly, if you may?
Like how we gang up on mic?
No, how can we replace culture with philosophy?
How would that take place?
Well, I mean, I've got 3,000 shows.
But no, it's everything that you're handed to, you put through the Socratic reasoning, right?
Diversity is a strength.
Okay, let's see the data.
Now, I understand if you're building a house, you want a guy who knows how to do the roofing, you want a guy who knows how to do the basement and the plumbing and the electrical and hanging the drywall and, you know, doing the window.
They're all going to have different skills.
Nobody's talking about that.
Of course, diversity, the division of labor is a strength, but they can all be from the same cultural group or they can be the same or racist or whatever.
But if you're building a house, I can't for the life of me understand how it would be really great to have, you know, two guys who speak Polish and one guy who speaks Swahili and one guy who only speaks Spanish.
Because of a quarter.
Yeah, like, what the hell?
Like, that would be terrible.
I mean, that would be the most inefficient thing conceivable.
Gotcha.
Or if you're running a school...
Wouldn't it be helpful if the students spoke the same fucking language?
I mean, I don't even know how to put that so obviously, right?
And so if you have, like, there are schools in America where there are 20 or more languages spoken natively by the student population.
That's called impossible to teach in.
Because the amount of resources that are sold...
So the people who speak French...
They should go to their French school.
Does that mean they shouldn't learn English?
No.
They can learn English if they want.
But if you say, well, everyone from every different language part should all be put into the same school, you're basically saying no one should get educated and everyone should fight.
I mean, if you look at what happens when Hispanics move into a black neighborhood, oh my god!
That's not always the prettiest merging, right?
This isn't exactly hands across the water.
It's more like, you know, shivs across the bars.
And so it is, you know, so replacing culture with philosophy is the things that you believe and you divide them into two.
One is the moral and one is the aesthetic.
Aesthetically preferred actions, like being on time, being polite and so on.
The aesthetically preferable actions, this is from my free book, Universally Preferable Behavior, available at freedomainradio.com slash free.
you divide your beliefs into two areas.
One is the aesthetic stuff, and you don't give a shit about that because that's not urgent.
That's not life-saving.
That's not essential.
That stuff can all be dealt with down the road.
So you look at your two sets of beliefs.
One is aesthetic.
Well, there is a bunch of beliefs you have, like, you know, Queen is the, actually, Queen is the best band.
It's more metaphysical.
So that's another topic for another time.
But you have your beliefs which are not related to philosophy, I like jazz.
I like a pie.
And then you have beliefs that are preferable and semi-universal, which are your aesthetically preferable actions.
And then you have your moral beliefs, right?
The non-initiation of force.
And you look at your beliefs and you say, what is the role of violence or force in these?
Now, if it's self-defense, you can use it in reaction.
So for you, the way that this, I think, is most helpful is you can say, I have a preference that people...
Of different cultures and races and groups joined together and are non-self-segregating or whatever.
And then you have to ask yourself, is that I like jazz?
Well, no, because you're saying there's a universal benefit.
And liking jazz is not a universal benefit.
Everyone being on time would be a universal benefit, but it's not something you can enforce through violence because lateness is not enforced on you through violence.
And then there's the use of violence.
So clearly, you have a preference that is more than I like jazz, and it's less than thou shalt not kill.
So it's somewhere in aesthetically preferable actions.
Now, you can't initiate the use of force to get people together, because that's called kidnapping, right?
I really think that there should be more Pakistani people in the Indian sorority, so I'm going to...
Put them in a sack and hang them from a flagpole in front.
You can't initiate the use of force to get people to merge together.
Now, if you want, you can say to people, I'm going to give you the empirical benefits.
I'm going to give you the moral case.
Well, you can't really give people the moral case because it's not immoral to self-segregate.
If I only want to hang around with bold people, it's not an immoral thing.
If you want to only hang around with Armenian people, You're not initiating the use of force against anyone.
And so, it's not a moral thing you're talking about.
It's aesthetically preferable.
Now, aesthetically preferable is basically, I'd like people to be more polite.
And the way that you do that is through encouragement and also giving them better data, and also through ostracism for those who don't fulfill your belief systems, right?
That's why ostracism is so powerful.
All the people on the left who say we need a big government to enforce things, they all enforce things through ostracism, by screaming racism at anyone who talks about anything real when it comes to the races.
So you would put yourself in the category of, I have aesthetically preferable things, I like it if people...
So you've got to bring data.
You've got to bring data.
I make the moral case for not spanking, but I also point out that it makes your kids happier, and it makes your relationships with them better, and their IQs will likely go up.
So I give these positive benefits, and I bring the researchers on and compile the data and put it all in graphs and make it as enjoyable and entertaining and engaging as humanly possible because I'm making a case.
And what I don't do is run and say, well, we should throw parents in jail for stanking, right?
Yeah, you could make a case that it's a violation of the initiation of force, but what's the point?
Because most people think it's a good thing to do anyway.
So you've got to go out and gather the data and say to people, here's why you should...
Engage with different cultures.
Here's all the benefits you can get from engaging with different cultures.
I think you're going to have a really tough time finding that data.
If you do find it, please send it to us, because I'd like to see it as well.
But don't assume that just because people have repeatedly yelled at you that diversity is a strength, I mean, we need more Democrat voters, that it's necessarily true.
Does that make any sense?
For sure.
And you can say to people, I don't associate with those Who aren't multicultural.
You can certainly do that.
You say, I'm going to shun people who aren't multicultural.
The problem is then, is that you're saying it's good to shun people who have a different value set, in which case you're kind of reaffirming how bad multiculturalism is, right?
Yeah.
Anyway.
Does that help?
Oh yeah, for sure.
Thank you very much.
It's really an honor for me to speak to you.
And great questions.
I really appreciate you bringing that up, because I just love tiptoeing through landmines as if I'm blindfolded and have...
Metal legs.
You do it so well.
All right.
All right.
Thanks, Steve.
Thank you.
Up next is Brendan.
Brendan wrote in and said, That's from Brendan.
Hmm.
All right.
Brendan, are you ready?
I am, yes.
Okay.
On the count of three, you and I will both scream at the top of our lungs, I own Mars.
And whoever says it first gets Mars.
Are you ready?
One, two, three.
I own Mars!
I win!
You now owe me taxes because you looked at Mars yesterday.
Sure, sure.
Wait, did I actually own Mars by screaming I own Mars?
I don't believe so, no.
I wouldn't make that argument.
What if I put it in a stirring hymn?
Oh, say can you see by the red bloody light?
Right?
I mean, what if I get a nice flag with, you know, giant spotty foreheads?
I mean, what if I do things that just aren't anything to do with ownership but claim I have stuff?
Sure, sure.
So how does this government own stuff, Brent?
Yeah, sure.
And I think that comes down to the question of how is property obtained?
And can anyone just claim property?
Then anyone who happens to be born in that property can simply be taxed by the property owners, which in this case would be the government.
Well, have you done any studying on common law with regards to property acquisition?
I'm not trying to trap you.
I'm just curious where we're starting from.
I have not studied any common law in that respect, no.
Well, generally, the way that property is owned is it's created, right?
So if I go out to a lake and I spend time fishing and I pull that fish out of the lake, I have turned it from something that was not ownable, which is a fish at the bottom of the lake, and I've turned it into something that can be, you know, fried up and eaten or used as some kind of sex toy or whatever.
And so you create property.
If I go and build a house on land that's not being used by anyone, then obviously the house is created.
It wasn't there before.
If I fence in the land and I clear it and I plant it, then, you know, I've created crops that weren't there before.
So, property is that which is created.
Now, there's lots of property that will never be created if the prerequisites to creating it are not there.
In other words, no one's going to build a house If they can't guarantee that by building the house, they'll own the land underneath it, right?
Because if you build a house and I come along and say, hey man, that's my land.
I spat on it, so it's mine.
And I then bring my cousins over and we beat you up and take your house.
No one's ever going to build a house.
In the same way, no one is going to...
Plant crops if they can't be guaranteed that they can keep the proceeds of their crop planting, right?
Which is why civilization is founded on property rights, because you can't have any of these things without that.
So there's the prerequisite for property, which is I've now laid a claim.
And in general, in common law, what happens is, and I know this, it's so weird, everything was just like a training for this show, right?
So when I was after high school, I got out of high school a bit early because I did some extra credits in the summers.
And I went and worked for a gold prospecting company looking for gold and getting samples and all that.
And the way you did it was you would go in a kilometer square and you would blaze a trail and you would nail your, they were like little tin things with your company and the date and all that, and they nailed to the tree.
And then you would get it, I don't know, for a year or two afterwards that anything you found then would be yours.
And if you didn't do anything with that land, it would revert back to an unowned status.
And that's how mines get found.
You stake out a bunch of land, and then if you find gold underneath that, it's your land, and then you start building on it, and then it's yours forever, right?
So the way things, you indicate a preference to use the land, which requires labor.
Like, you can't just mark it off, you know, like Churchill's little hiccup, and he's dividing India and Pakistan.
You can't just draw a big circle throughout the Great Shield and make it yours.
You actually have to go and invest land.
That's how invest labor in demarking the land as something you want to use.
And then you actually have to use it.
Otherwise, it reverts back to an unowned status.
And a lot of what we did was, well, we think there might be gold here, but it's been two or three years.
We have to go back and redo these things.
And that's how you do it.
And you do it in a kilometer square so that it is harder for you to just say, you know, I take a helicopter here.
And then I take a helicopter 500 kilometers over here.
And then, right, then you just get too much land and it's not reasonable.
So you have to do it by foot.
You have to blaze the trail.
You have to nail these things in.
And a kilometer square is not something you can really do by helicopter.
Plus, there's not a lot of places to land.
So you find some way of making it difficult to do, but not impossible or not really expensive.
And you don't have to build a moving sidewalk from one end to another.
So then once you have that claim of, I'm interested in this land, then you really put a lot of effort into trying to figure out if there's any gold there.
And if there isn't, then you let it lapse back into its unowned status, right?
And so, I'm not saying that's perfect, but that's kind of the way that it's developed in a lot of places.
Like, I gave a speech, God, I can't believe it was only last year.
I gave a speech last year in Amsterdam, on Bitcoin, which you should really watch.
It's a great speech.
And...
There was a sidewalk sale that was going on the next day.
And I was walking around, and people had put these little chalk outlines, and they'd written their name on things.
Right?
And they staked that claim.
And you couldn't go and put your stall where someone else's claim had been.
And because that's the way everyone accepted that it was done, It worked out perfectly.
Nobody really...
I saw them all setting up and so on.
I walked around the whole town.
For hours, I didn't see a single conflict.
Because everyone had to go chalk out.
Midnight, you've got to go chalk out your outline, there's your name, and then that's where you're going to set up your storm.
There was no conflicts about it.
And Jeff Tucker's got a great chapter on tailgate parties and how stuff is marked out in his book, It's a Jetson's World, which I actually read as an audiobook.
You can find it on this channel if you want, or download it as an mp3.
It's a good book.
But, so that's how property is, you create, I'm interested in using it, then you either use it or you don't.
If you use it, it becomes yours.
If you don't use it, it reverts back to unowned and someone else can claim it.
So that's generally how it works.
Sure.
Well, how about we assume, say, a government claims property and then performs labor on that property.
Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.
Okay.
Sure.
So you're saying, let's assume that a unicorn is in the horse race and it has magical wings.
It's like, actually, we can't really assume that, right?
Let's assume we can violate the laws of physics and build a bridge out of soap bubbles.
Actually, we really can't assume that.
So when you say the government, what do you mean?
You mean a group of people, right?
Yeah, a collection of individuals.
So a collection of individuals.
Hang on, hang on.
For law to exist, it must be universally applicable.
So why would this particular group of individuals be able to establish a claim of property that violates two fundamental rules of property?
One is there's no investment in labor to mark the property as yours.
They stick a flag in the ground and, ah, the angels, the magic, it's mine!
I claim this for Queen Victoria and her tiny panties, right?
So they don't have to go around claim staking, right?
They don't have to do that laborious process of marking out their territory and building fences and registering and blah, blah, blah, right?
So they have a way of claiming property that cannot be universalized by its very nature.
Because if someone has the ability to point at a giant landmass and say, that's mine, then everyone has that ability.
And therefore, each of their claims contradict each other and nothing can be done.
So the first way that government claim of ownership violates property rights is they don't have to invest any labor to demarcate unowned property as theirs.
The second is the unowned part, right?
Because when the government forces you to pay property tax...
What they're saying is, you and I own this property.
Right?
If I go and clear out the woods and I go build a log cabin Walden style, then I own the land that I've cleared and the house.
Now, the government then claims that they also own that, which can't be universalized.
Because if everyone could just assert rent-based property income based upon nothing, then everyone can do that and the government can say, well, you owe me $5,000.
And I'll say, okay, I'm going to point at the parliament building and now I'm going to say I own that and you owe me $5,000 to rent that.
And then, you know, like we don't get anywhere.
If you can just arbitrarily point at something and say, well, now you owe me rent because X, right, because I made a nice flag.
Well, so the government not only doesn't have to demarcate its property or invest in its development, but also it can claim property rights on already existing property.
That's actually the definition of theft.
If I go steal your car, I'm using it as my property despite the fact that it's already owned.
That's how we know taxation is theft.
Sure, yeah, yeah, I agree.
I'm going to throw a hypothetical out here, so let's just assume...
Hang on, hang on.
I've got my special duct tape here, because I knew this was going to be a kind of hypothetical show.
I'm just going to put the duct tape of hypotheticals around my helmet, around my head, and I'm ready.
I'm assuming the crash position, Jamaican bobsled position.
Go!
Alright, alright, alright.
So let's assume I'm some astronaut or whatever, and I decide to fly to the moon, and once I get to the moon, I decide to perform some labor on wherever I land or whatever.
I have some sort of military or police that's able to protect that land or whatever.
Would I still be able to claim that is my property?
And if anyone was born on that property, would I have the right to, say, charge them rent and claim that I'm some government and be able to collect taxation as a result?
Okay, let's take these claims one at a time.
Sure.
Is it your rocket?
Let's just say yes, sure.
Okay, so it's your rocket from your money, because if it's taxpayers, you don't ship, right?
Then you're just like, you're a stowaway, right?
I stowed away on this vessel, I guess it's mine.
Okay, so you got your own rocket, right?
And you went to the moon.
Sure.
And you set up some sort of perimeter, right?
Like you build a fence or something, let's just say a kilometer square.
Okay, well then you own.
You own that provisionally.
You own that for whatever, two years or whatever, let's just say two years.
You own that for two years.
But if you don't develop it, you don't own it anymore.
So if you go and build something there, then it's yours, right?
But if you don't, then it returns to an unearned status.
Now, the question is, why the hell would anyone be having babies on your property?
It's your property!
Yeah, I know.
It's definitely a stretch.
I'm just, like, assuming, let's say...
No, no, I'm fine with the theoretical.
I'm fine with the theoretical.
I'm fine that a whole bunch of Mexicans took a wrong turn at Albuquerque and tried having anchor babies on the moon, which I'm sure would please Donald Trump to no end.
But I'm fine with that theoretical.
You know, like, wow, the stars are beautiful in America.
I'm so much lighter.
Whoa!
My diabetes must be getting better.
I'm thinner.
Right?
So, wow, this fence is really high.
I thought it was only a couple of hundred feet.
It turns out it's a quarter of a million miles.
So, let's say someone comes and they have a baby on your property, right?
Sure.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, they're trespassing.
Sure.
Right?
They're using your property without your permission.
You might not care.
You might be like, yay, you know, human life, fantastic, right?
Here, have citizenship.
Sorry?
I'm basically saying, like, I'm letting them live on my property, assuming that the property's mine because I performed labor on it or whatever, and I'm basically charging them rent to live on the property.
If they don't pay me rent, then I'll just kick them off, say, go back to Earth or some other...
No, no, hang on, hang on.
You're not charging them to live on your property because if you haven't done anything to develop your property, it's not going to remain yours.
So if you build a space hospital on the moon, right?
You build a space hospital on the moon where women finally don't have swollen ankles because they weigh one-sixth of what they do on the earth.
So you build a space hospital on the moon and someone comes and...
They what?
Like they have an emergency, their moon buggy breaks down on the way to their other hospital, they have to come use your hospital when you charge them, right?
Yeah.
Or their insurance pays or whatever, right?
So you charge them and they have then discharged their use of your property through paying their hospital bills, right?
Sure.
Sure.
Yeah.
So you don't get to charge them rent forever because they were born in your hospital, right?
Yeah.
Well, let's assume they decide to stay on my property or whatever.
I'm letting them stay on my property by charging them, say, a monthly rent or something like that.
I can declare myself a government and basically that rent...
No, no, no, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.
Okay, so you went from being a landlord to being the government.
And that is like going from an old police song to a Canadian nightclub.
Oh, that is one of the most obscure references, set of references I've ever made.
But anyway, you can't go that far.
Because if you are a landlord, it means that you built...
Let's just change it from a hospital to a condo.
No, a bunch of apartment buildings.
An apartment building.
So you have an apartment building on the moon and people want to live there.
Okay, great.
Then the reason they pay you rent is they don't have to build it themselves.
And they also don't have to pay for the entire building themselves.
It's because you're still responsible for maintenance and they're also paying you back only a small portion of the capital that it took for you to build it every month, right?
So they're getting significant economic benefits.
They don't have to save up for a down payment.
They can move in right away and they can move out.
With three months notice anytime they want, which is not usually the case when you have a mortgage.
So they're getting a certain amount of flexibility and they don't have to invest a lot of capital to move in and they don't have to worry about maintenance and upgrades and things going wrong.
And so they're paying you for your building.
So that doesn't make you a government.
That's like saying that everyone's a government who's in Uber because people get the use of their car in the back for a while, right?
Yeah, well, couldn't I declare myself the leader of my property?
And couldn't I define myself as the government over my specific property?
Well, you could call yourself the unicorn of the Mona Lisa's forehead, for all I care.
But the question is, what is the reality of what's happening?
Governments claim property rights over that which they did not build, which is also owned by other people, and they prevent people from leaving.
So in order to be a government, hang on, in order to be a government, someone else would have to build everything.
You would have to charge a surcharge on everyone in that apartment building, and you'd have to prevent them from ever leaving the apartment building.
Sure.
Okay.
That's a lot more than a landlord, right?
That's more than the market.
Yeah, yeah.
I think our definitions of what is a government were different from one another, which is where the confusion kind of came from.
Well, I thought we went over that, that the government can't establish property rights without property investment and certainly can't do it on already owned property and therefore can't be a government.
Okay.
I guess that makes sense.
I also have another question about anarcho-capitalism.
I don't know if we have time or not.
I don't know either.
Why don't you ask it, and let's find out.
Okay, okay.
Well, I was having a conversation with a friend over coffee the other day, and we were talking about how anarcho-capitalism is probably, well, is the most ethical political and economic system you could have, simply because there's no initiation of force, there's no violation of property rights, and so on.
But we were talking about the sustainability and the practicality behind such an anarcho-capitalist society.
And we came up with two problems with the system.
The first problem was, I'll tell you these one at a time, the first problem was how would we come about establishing an anarcho-capitalist society?
Would it have to be through some sort of revolution simply because, you know, it doesn't seem to be politically feasible at the moment when so many people are reliant on the two-party system of Republicans and Democrats or Would it have to be a slower process that would take many years before we would develop such a society?
It's a very ethical system, but is it practical within the coming years, basically, is my question.
Okay.
Well, let's start with that one.
Sure, sure.
Let's start with that one.
Okay.
Are you ready for a rant?
Yes.
I know I am.
Farewell, voice!
Okay.
Okay.
So you say, oh, so many people are so dependent on the state.
Oh, they're so dependent on the state.
And therefore, we can't have freedom because people are so dependent on the state.
I call staggering amounts of bullshit, not on you, but on that particular approach.
Okay, brief history of humanity.
Humanity has adapted to the equator.
Humanity has adapted to the Arctic Circle.
Humanity can even adapt to living in a Kardashian household.
Humanity has adapted to the Japanese hinterlands, and to Siberia, and to South America, and Madagascar, and you name it, humanity has adapted.
Teeny tiny pygmies to big giant olafs of Norwegian-ness, humanity has managed to adapt to incredibly diverse environments.
Humans have overcome saber-toothed tigers and woolly mammoths and lions and sharks and botulism and the bubonic plague and Ebola and the Kardashians again.
I don't mind picking on them.
They just come into mind.
And so human beings are incredibly resilient.
Human beings have adapted to being hunter-gatherers.
They have adapted to killing polar bears with brain rays.
They have adapted to, you know, eating seaweed if they have to.
They have adapted to planting crops.
I mean, they've adapted to just about anything that you could conceivably imagine.
There are Japanese soldiers up until the 80s and 90s, maybe there's still some out there, I don't know, these people seem to be undead who live forever, who haven't adapted to the end of the Second World War and still thinking they're fighting for Hirohito!
So human beings, if there's one thing that human beings can do, it's adapt.
Now, since human beings can adapt to incredibly wide and varied and highly opposing circumstances, the idea that human beings cannot adapt to, say, getting out of bed at 8 o'clock in the morning and going to work is completely incomprehensible.
And...
False.
It's a complete insult to everything that we know about the adaptability and resilience of human beings.
Human beings adapt to excess resources by lazing around and screwing like crazy.
Assuming there's no MGTOW movement.
But when you make those resources scarce, shockingly, human beings get up and go to work.
I mean, they've seen this millions of times.
In the 90s in Canada, there was facing a massive budget shortfall, and because it's not America, we cared.
And they cut welfare rates by like 35%.
And guess what?
All the people on the left were like, the poor, they will starve and the street will run out of squirrels because they'll be gnawing on them and they'll have to sleep on subway grates and oh my god, we can't possibly, the pigeons will go missing being roasted over lighters that they found in the toilet.
And what happened?
Absolutely nothing!
Hey!
They got work!
Of course they did.
I mean, they did the same thing under Bill Clinton.
Oh, shit, I gotta get a job?
Okay, I'll get a job.
Human beings, they don't just, oh, wow, the free drip, drip, drip of government money has stopped, so I'm just gonna starve to death like a soccer team on top of the Andes.
That's not what happens.
Oh, free ride's over?
Yes, I'll go to work.
You know, for the most part.
There's people who've got, you know, genuine ailments, illnesses and all that sort of shit.
But that's easily taken care of by charity.
But I remember Harry Brown was talking about, you know, if they end government schools and his call to one of his shows, I think they're still worth listening.
The call to his show was like, there'll be chaos.
And Harry Brown was like, eh, maybe for a week.
But people will be like, they'll set up schools in their garages if they have to.
They'll set up schools in their living rooms.
They'll put up big tents.
People will get things done.
People will just get things done.
And so the idea that, well, we can't have a free society because all these people have adapted to statism, what we mean by that is women.
That's what we mean.
Women and minorities.
Let's be honest about it.
Because nobody says, well, you see, we can't have a war because men are not adapted to war.
You see, we haven't had a war in a long time.
And, you know, men are just not adapted to war, so we can't have it.
What we mean is, oh, the precious women are minorities, they've been adapting themselves to government handouts, and so we can't...
Or even the white...
Minorities can be like lazy white people, I don't care, right?
But let's just be honest, because no one ever says, well, you see, it's got to be inconvenient for the men.
Side rant, side rant, side rant.
You know how everyone says, should women stay in unfulfilling relationships?
Shouldn't they just get divorced, even if there are kids?
It's just an unfulfilling relationship.
They're bored.
Let's just let them go.
You know, why should they hang around in unfulfilling relationships?
Blah-de-blah-de-blah.
Because women are precious flowers, have hibiscus, egg-bearing fruit that must be sheltered from the storms of life.
Because I can't remember one fucking article my entire goddamn life, not one article that ever seriously asked the question, hey, are you a man?
Are you stuck in an unfulfilling job?
I mean, you have kids.
You have obligations.
Your wife's a stay-at-home kid.
Your wife is a stay-at-home and you have kids.
Are you stuck in an unfulfilling job?
Well, let's take a page from the ladies.
You see, if you're stuck in an unfulfilling job as a man, you just quit.
Other people will figure out what to do.
So you had responsibilities.
Who cares?
Just quit your job.
It's unfulfilling.
Why should you stay in an unfulfilling, non-enjoyable job when there's whole levels to be conquered on World of Warcraft?
And those snipers in Call of Duty, they're not going to shoot themselves, for God's sakes.
And that's a hell of a lot more fun than going to work as an accounting person at a large corporation.
That's not fun at all.
Your job is unfulfilling.
Just quit it.
Never heard that in my entire life.
Because, see, women, they're fragile.
Women, if they're not happy, they've got to go.
But men, get back to the trough, man-mule.
We've got to get some stuff from you.
So go back.
I don't care if it's unfulfilling.
You've got responsibilities.
So anyway, I just wanted to point that out.
But no, I mean, nobody says, well, you know, we can't invent the car because, you see, a lot of men have horse and buggy companies and they can't really be expected to adapt to new...
Bullshit.
Bullshit.
Men can adapt and women can adapt.
They'll be fine.
What we're really scared of is when we say, let's have a free society, we're really scared that women have completely forgotten, en masse, how to be nice to men.
Right?
Because they've been programmed out of it for the last 50 or 60 years.
Because, like, men are stupid.
Men are unnecessary because I can get my money and cheddar from the government, you see?
I don't need penis because government cheese in a van down by the river.
Right?
So what we're really concerned about is that for the past two or three generations, women have completely lost the habit of appreciating men because they haven't needed men.
They can treat men like shit because...
Government comes with the money.
Like if the government gave men free sex, there wouldn't be a whole lot of Hallmark cards, chocolate hearts, and dating going on.
They'd be like, hey, government sent me over some pussy.
Don't need to be nice to the ladies.
I'm not saying that's true for all men.
It's true for a lot.
And so women bring sex and men bring resources.
That's the ancient bargain of all of the animal kingdom, insects included.
So the idea that We somehow can't adapt.
What we're saying is, well, if women actually have to depend on men to bring them resources if they happen to be moms, do we really think that men could be liked by women again?
Do we really think that women could end up treating men well and wanting men to stay?
In other words, could we ever conceivably think, or could society ever conceivably think, that A man's needs could be met in a relationship.
And that women could say, well, you know, I have these kids with this guy and it's really important that he stay around because raising kids and breastfeeding and all is a lot of work, so I need someone to bring me home with a cheddar, so I gotta be nice to this guy.
Well, if we don't think that women can ever be nice, let's just be honest about that and say, well...
Women have turned into, you know, ice queens of infinite testicles, scratching icicle fingers, and they have nothing of any positive things to bring to men, so we can't possibly have a free society because women are too horrible for men to stick around and pay for.
I don't think it's true, but let's just be honest about it, because I've studied a lot of the history of war, and I don't ever remember anyone, let alone women in particular, saying, well, you know, can't declare war, man.
We can't do it.
You know, maybe we got completely mistaken about 9-11 and thought that Iraq had something to do with it.
We can't declare war because, you know, I mean, men aren't adapted for it.
There's been peace forever, so men are not adapted.
And certainly nobody have ever said, like in the 60s when there was conscription for Vietnam, no one ever said, well, you know, these men, they're not adapted for war.
I mean, their fathers may have gone to war, but they never have.
We can't possibly.
It's too much of a transition.
I mean, if anyone doesn't think that the transition from peace to, say, jungle rot, heroin-soaked warfare in the jungles of Vietnam is somehow not a bigger change than no longer getting the free drip of government cheddar up your ass, well, they're wrong.
It is a far bigger transition for men to be drafted to go and fight in Vietnam than for other people in society to adapt to a situation of voluntarism and peace and not pointing guns at people to get what they want.
So...
Men can adapt fine.
I think we all accept that.
I'm fully confident in the fact that women will somehow very magically rediscover the ancient arts of being nice to men.
You know, it's not like we could have had a species without it.
And minorities and everyone and the poor whites and the poor blacks, they'll all be fine.
They'll just go like, oh, okay, gravy train's done.
I guess I've got to get up and walk and get some work done.
And yes...
Some single moms will have a tough time because they've got two kids.
You know what they'll have to be?
Really, really, really nice to a man with resources.
They'll have to make him rub his feet.
They'll just have to be so nice to him That he's like, okay, well, you come with a lot of bills and two kids who are going to say, you're not my dad for the rest of my natural-born existence, but you're such a great human being.
I'm going to put all of that aside, and I'm going to marry you anyway.
So when the women are behind in the eight ball, so to speak, maybe more than eight balls, if they've only got two kids, it could have been 80.
But they're just going to have to be nice to men.
And, you know, it's not like that's completely been lost from their DNA. They'll just wake up one morning and say, oh, shit.
No more free government stuff.
I gotta latch on to a man.
And the man will be like, ooh, I don't know.
You know, that's kind of a heavy cross to bear there, sister.
And they'll be like, here's how great I'm going to be as a partner and as a wife and as a mother.
And here's how wonderful I'm going to be.
Here's how nice I'm going to be.
Drama free!
No tantrums!
Yours forever!
I'm going to sign a prenup and it's going to be just great and they're going to have to wake up in the morning thinking like how am I going to keep this man happy because I got two kids, I got bills and it's going to be wonderful because that's called love.
When you actually really, really care about making somebody happy.
Now, it doesn't work without incentives.
Otherwise, Soviet restaurants would have been the best restaurants in the world.
And Soviet service, when the waiters got paid either way, would have been the best in the world.
It doesn't work without incentives.
But incentives breed a lot of love.
And the problem is we've really killed love in society by removing the incentives to make other people happy.
And the same thing will happen with single dads.
Single dads will have to go to the women and say, wow, no more steady diet of government cheese for me.
I don't get any more free stuff, so I'll go to the charities.
But, man, I've really got to make some woman happy who's going to come and work so I can stay home with the kids.
And that's gonna be a big challenge so how can I rub her feet and make her life better and so on so people will just adapt by being nicer to people and I think we can do it and if we don't think we can let's just be honest and say I think that Single moms and and all the other people dependent on the welfare state have just become so irreversibly horrible that we can't have freedom because trolls And I just,
you know, let's be honest about that, because nobody ever worries about men's transitions in society.
Well, I think that's where my question was derived from.
How do you convince people that an anarcho-capitalist society, based off of voluntary interactions, is workable if people are able to adapt?
No, no, forget workability.
People aren't going to give up free shit for workability.
Sure.
Well, I know that's what I'm saying.
No, no, no.
I'll tell you what.
I'll tell you what you do.
Have you ever heard of a place called Costa Rica?
Yes.
Okay, I'm going to take you on a journey.
Are you ready?
Alright.
Yes.
Okay.
We are flying through the clouds over the rainforest south of Panama to a little lovely place called Costa Rica.
Costa Rica, interestingly enough, is home to one of the world's most Beautiful, gruesome, and deadly varieties of poison frogs in the world.
Oh yes, Richard Attenborough, my secret dad, along with the guy who did Cosmos.
No, connections.
So, we are going to open up a restaurant in Costa Rica, and we're going to invite people in.
I don't know, what's your favorite food?
I'd say Italian.
Okay.
Is your favorite dressing unspecifiability?
Can you maybe narrow that down a bit?
Oh, I don't know.
I'd say Mastacholi.
It's pretty good.
I don't know.
You what now?
Oh, you're giving me a passive-aggressive backhanded.
I can't pronounce this because I'm British.
Mastacholi, you know?
Yeah, you know, I'm just going to say pizza.
I mean, that's...
Thank you!
Pizza works.
Yeah, that works.
Thank you.
It doesn't really matter, I guess.
Okay.
Can I be annoying internet pedant for a sec?
As usual.
You know, pizza wasn't invented in Italy, technically.
Anyway, that's fine.
So, we're gonna make pizza.
Sure.
Now, there are people who are going to come in, let's just say they're from...
Mississippi.
Now, when you think of Mississippi, outside of the stereotypical Deep South racism, what do you think of when you think of people from Mississippi on vacation?
Big, medium, or small people?
Larger, yeah.
Larger, okay.
Like, meter across the hips, they gotta shimmy their way around revolving doors, that kind of stuff, right?
When your mama sits around the house, she really sits around the house.
So people are going to come into our restaurant and we know damn well they should not be ordering half a cheese pizza because they're fat, right?
In our Costa Rican restaurant with the poison frogs.
Now, have you ever tried to talk someone out of a bad habit, Brendan?
No, I don't think so.
What?
Maybe, I'm not sure.
Okay, either A, you have no people around you with bad habits, and I know you've got status there.
I can smell them.
Or B, you don't give a shit about other bad habits.
You just don't.
No, now that I think about it, yeah.
I couldn't think of any specific examples off the top of my head, but yeah, I definitely have.
How's that gone?
Not so well.
Did they get offended?
They get upset?
Who are you to tell me how to live and blah-de-blah-de-blah?
I pay your taxes, so shut up.
They haven't changed it.
Okay, they don't change, right?
So, people from Mississippi, they're going to come in, they're going to bring their loathsome behemoth body pines down on our intentionally uncomfortable bar stools, and they're going to order half a pizza.
And we're going to say to them, you know, that's not that great for your cholesterol, and you're not big boned, you're fat, so you really shouldn't be eating.
The consequences of this food will be, this pizza will be bad for them, and what are they going to do?
We're going to continue to eat the pizza because I'm not in some other way.
Well, they'll probably tell us to screw ourselves and then go next door and get the pizza, right?
Okay.
So that's not going to work.
Right.
Sure.
Now, if on the other hand we say it is a tradition in Costa Rica to blend a poison frog in with the pizza dough.
Sure.
What will they say?
Now this, I gotta tell you, if you don't know, this like, this poison frog shit is insane.
Like this one little, like literally the size of the end of your thumb, this poison frog that has enough poison to kill like 10 adult men.
Sure.
So if we say, it is a tradition in Costa Rica that we blend a poison frog in with the dough.
Sure.
Are they gonna order pizza?
Probably not.
If they knew those statistics, probably not.
Well, even if they didn't, even if they didn't have proof, are they going to take their chance?
Like, you go and order that deadly poison fish in the Japanese restaurant, and the guy's like, I think I cooked it all, right?
You know, the one that you don't see, you'll be like, I think I will not have that.
I think I will instead have the poke in the eye with the chopstick.
Yeah, yeah, probably not.
So this analogy, long and labored as usual, Brendan, but this analogy is appealing to consequences for people almost never changes their behavior.
Sure.
But if they are personally at risk and it's immediate, that would change their behavior.
Sure.
It's what's got the most chance.
Okay.
So you're saying that people are willing to accept an anarcho-capitalist society because they see our current political system as one that threatens their livelihoods?
No.
No.
No, it's much more sinister than that.
It's going to require for you to be much braver than that.
As it does for me, too.
The poison frog is the condemnation called...
You're evil.
Okay.
Because people will say, well, what are the consequences of a free society?
I don't care.
But you're evil for supporting the state.
Sure, sure.
The state is evil, and I get it's going to take a little while for you to understand that.
But once you do understand it and you can't rebut it, you must now behave better.
Evil, the condemnation called you're evil...
Is what motivates people to change.
People are so fundamentally driven by good and evil.
For reasons involved with our integration of concepts and universalization engine called the human brain.
Sure.
But how do you end slavery?
People are going to say, who's going to pick the cotton if we don't have any slaves?
Yeah, sure.
If you tell them the truth, as I've said before, if you tell them the truth, nobody will leave you.
Don't worry!
See?
There'll be these giant robots about the size of four houses and they're gonna be driven around on these fields and they're gonna be, let's say, they're gonna run on crushed prehistoric tree juice.
Yeah, let's go with that.
Crushed prehistoric tree juice because we're straight out of rainbow farts and they're gonna creep and pick and all this is gonna be stuff, right?
It's gonna be fantastic.
Sure.
You know, like, as Ann Coulter was saying, people are saying, well, who's going to pick the strawberries?
It's like, you know, they have robots to do that.
You know?
So, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter what happens after the immoral stain is taken away.
I mean, let me ask you this.
Let's say you're up against Betty Frieden or Gloria Steinem in her prime.
Feminist warriors, right?
Yeah, sure, sure.
And they say, I want to go to work!
And you say, who's going to wash my dishes by hand?
Who's going to clean my rugs by hand?
Who's going to wash my clothes by hand in the river?
And they'd be like, I don't care.
I don't care.
I want to go to work.
And if you try and stop me by force, it's wrong.
And so no one ever said, well, you see, the way that we're going to get your clothes washed is there's going to be these little robot boxes and you put them in and it swirls them around and takes away all of the dirt and there's going to be this magic powder and then these little sheets that make you not explode if you shuffle around in a library and touch your own ass and there's going to be all this fantastic stuff.
And that's how it's going to happen.
There's going to be another little box.
You put in the dishes and you put in like magic balls and you push a button.
They're clean two hours later after it sounds like a robot is whacking itself off on your kitchen tile for a while.
And so you don't have to answer.
You don't have to answer the practical consequences.
It doesn't matter.
Nobody can predict it and it'll be fine.
In fact, wanting to answer what freedom looks like is placing yourself squarely between humanity and the door that leads to freedom.
You can't have your freedom until you tell me exactly how freedom works in 500 years, or 100 years, or 50 years.
I need to know exactly what every rule is going to be.
I need to know exactly how the children will be educated, and who's going to date who, and how every poor person is going to be taken care of, and what kind of surgery is going to be available, and I need to know exactly what the rules of Dungeons and Dragons version 6.6.7 are going to look like in a hypercube.
Can't do it.
Nobody can even tell you what the price of stock of Apple is going to be tomorrow, except if you get a private message from Tim Cook a la Jim Cramer.
Nobody's even going to know.
Nobody's going to know.
How tall are human beings going to be in, say, 62 years?
If you can answer me that, maybe I'll support this freedom thing.
Can't tell you.
People shouldn't be put in jail for following their conscience.
I know that.
People should not be initiating force against each other.
I know that.
We shouldn't be selling off the unborn on the chopping block of Baxter's fundamental desire to strip the planet of all its resources.
I know we shouldn't be initiating the use of force.
I know that for sure.
That's wrong.
That's evil.
What happens when we stop initiating the use of force?
How are women going to get pregnant if they're not being raped?
I mean, we've got Genghis Khan.
He's out there raping pretty much everything, including my elbow, my cat, and my ear.
But let's say Genghis Khan is prevented from raping women.
Where are we going to get people from?
Can you answer me that?
Porn and cups in a windowless room in a fertility clinic.
Sure, sure.
I'm not questioning the ethics behind an anarcho-capitalist society.
I'm just saying...
The government does have a functioning military that is willing to imprison those who do want to do whatever they want to do.
For instance, if I wanted to smoke marijuana or whatever, I don't.
I'm not into drugs or anything.
But hypothetically, if I wanted to smoke marijuana, I couldn't practically because the government has a police force.
They have a military that's willing to imprison me for doing what I want for my body.
So I know that's wrong.
I know that's unethical.
But it's just not practical at the moment because there are so many people that are supporting the state and that are supporting the government.
You are excellent at pretending I never spoke.
Call them evil.
You'll be shocked how quickly people change when you call them evil.
Well, let me put it this way.
You'll be shocked at how quickly your relationship with people will change when you call them evil.
People get upset with me.
I call this the against me argument.
And it's like, people get upset with me.
And that's so hypocritical.
Because libertarians and classical liberals have been defining the initiation of force as immoral for hundreds and hundreds of years.
And I say, here are the logical consequences of calling something evil.
When you call something evil, since it only exists because of people's support...
The evil only exists because of people's support of it, then the support of evil is the evil.
If a God only exists, if a God only has presence in people's minds because people believe in it, then getting people to disbelieve in it eliminates the God, because it doesn't exist out there, it only exists in people's minds.
The state only exists because people believe it's moral.
They're wrong.
It's evil.
It's immoral.
And so people say, well, this thing that I've defined as evil only exists because of people's belief.
Therefore, people's belief is the evil.
But if I call people who believe it evil because their belief is the evil that I've defined as evil, you're mean.
Well...
Change your beliefs are telling me that I'm wrong.
You're mean.
You're causing trouble in my relationships.
No, I'm not causing trouble in your relationships.
You're just living consistently.
You're living consistently.
And if you don't want to live consistency, fine.
Get out of the way.
People have got work to do.
There are adults at the adult table.
And it's about goddamn time we got a free society out of this shit heap of human history and this shit heap of exploitation and destruction and degradation.
It's about goddamn time we got a free society.
And I'm sorry, not you particular, Brandon, but I'm sorry if in general it makes libertarians and other freedom lovers uncomfortable that these are the natural results of calling something evil.
People with red hair are evil.
They're so evil.
They're the only source of evil and really the only evil that exists in the world.
You know you're surrounded by red-haired people.
Wait, you're not going to be in conflict with them, are you?
It's like, what have you just been saying?
The state is evil.
It only exists because people believe it's good.
Therefore, their belief is the source of the evil.
Therefore, their belief is the evil.
It is the only reason that evil exists.
And so if you go to people and say, what you believe supports evil, and once you understand that, if you continue to do it, you are evil.
Somebody who brings evil into existence and that evil would not exist without them bringing it into existence is the evil.
Is the evil.
If I go to a peaceful man...
And I kidnap his family and I say, go and strangle that dog or I'll kill your family.
I have created that dog strangulation which otherwise would not exist.
I am the only guilty party in that entire interaction.
And if people's belief in the state is the only reason why debt and war and unjust imprisonment and the strangling of economic opportunity and the programming and degradation of the capacity of children to think, If this is the only reason why all of these evils exist, then by God, we have to call a spade a spade.
Or we have to get out of the way and let people with stronger stomachs do it.
Sure.
Sure.
Well, I mean, not only that, but I remember Murray Rothbard actually brought up in his book, I think it was Anatomy of the State, I don't remember, but he brought up how government naturally forms out of militaries and police forces and so forth because they have the guns and they're able to enforce whatever laws and regulations they impose as a result of having those guns.
I was wondering, I mean, would governments naturally exist even if you had an anarcho-capitalist society or at least naturally come about as a result of certain individuals obtaining guns, you know, and having a military and having a police force and establishing a government that could even be more authoritarian than the current democratic system we have now.
I'm not saying our democratic system is ethical, but I'm saying it could potentially be worse.
It could potentially be something like Soviet Russia under Stalin or something like that, you know what I'm saying?
Okay, let's say you're a really hot chick.
Okay.
You're a really hot chick, and some guy jumps you in an alley.
Okay.
And he's going to rape you.
Sure.
Now you have a nice little pearl-handled revolver in your purse.
He doesn't know about it.
Okay.
Okay.
And you pull it out, and you say, well, I could shoot this guy.
Maybe I could threaten him.
I don't know.
I'm not an expert on this.
People say, if you're going to pull out a gun, just shoot.
Don't threaten.
Because if he's got a bigger gun, he'll shoot you, right?
Yeah, I see what you're saying.
Is that your belief?
Like, if you pull out a gun, just shoot someone?
I'm not even sure.
I actually was mugged once, but I didn't take proper actions, but...
Alright, so you're this hot chick and this guy's trying to rape you and you've got a gun.
And let's say the only way you can save yourself is shooting him.
Okay, yeah.
Now, will you say to yourself, well, I don't know, I could shoot this guy and not get raped, but I am a hot chick.
So, this might happen again at some point in the future.
Would that stay your hand?
Would you then let yourself be raped because it's possible that you might get raped at some point again in the future or be threatened with it?
No, I would defend myself.
So the fact that there may be another government that grows out of whatever goo people are putting into your brain or other people's brain, the fact that another government may grow out of a state of freedom at some point in the future, who cares?
Well, I got cancer a couple of years ago, and I'm like, kill it!
Kill it with fire!
Well, you know, you could get cancer again at some point in the future.
Kill it with fire!
Nuke it from orbit!
I see where you're coming from, but my problem with that analogy is with the attractive chick or whatever, I mean, it's not a sure thing that she's going to be raped in the future.
I mean, it's definitely more possible than if she was unattractive, but it's not like 100% certainty that she's going to be raped in the future, whereas government naturally formed— Even if she is, you still pull the trigger, and then you keep your gun with you for the future.
I agree.
I'm saying government naturally forms out of either people's acceptance or wanting of some institution to exist or some military or police force that's coming out.
So there's almost...
No, no, no.
Hang on, hang on.
Sorry, sorry.
Because you're not making an argument.
You're just saying naturally forms.
Sure.
I mean, if that logic is correct, I don't have any statistics to back that up because I've never seen it.
No, no, no.
Hang on, hang on.
Okay.
Let's say we live in a free society, right?
Sure.
Let's say you want to start a government.
Tell me what your plan, what are your steps going to be?
Well, I'd probably have to have a military to enforce my rules, because if I didn't, then no one would follow my rules.
So establish some sort of...
How do you get a military?
I'd have to recruit support for my ideas or offer like let's say economic favors for supporting me and say like if you serve in my military or whatever then I'll give you a hundred thousand dollars or something like that you know like offer political and economic favors if okay okay so let's take this one step let's take this one step at a time okay sure so in a free society everyone can have whatever weapons they want right Sure.
And probably there will be like insurance companies won't want you having a tank in your backyard and shit, right?
So that stuff's not going to happen, right?
But let's just say handguns or whatever, right?
So people have a lot of weapons.
So let's say you live in a country of 100 million people and you don't know what kind of weapons they might have.
How many troops, how many soldiers do you think you would need to take over A country of 100 million people with unknown numbers of weapons.
Well, I mean, it would have to take a significant amount of time, but what you could do is you could start by invading a neighboring city, for example, or a neighboring county, and then we'll put everyone in that city.
Okay, fantastic.
Okay, hang on, hang on.
Hang on, hang on.
So let's say you've got a neighboring city, and let's say in that city, it's not that big a city, it's a million people, right?
Sure, sure, okay.
Okay, so how are you going to get together an army together?
That is going to invade and take over not just a million people but a million people who also have security guards and a private police force and maybe even a private military just in case some asshole from outer space comes by or whatever or someone from some other country.
So it's going to have some level of weaponry.
How are you going to get enough of an army together with nobody noticing?
Because if they notice, they'll just cut off your electricity, they'll cut off your bank accounts, because all of these people are going to have a little clause.
Love to do business with you.
No armies, asshole.
It's the no armies, asshole.
The nah!
No armies, asshole, is going to be in there.
You can have a bank account with us, but no armies, asshole.
You can have a house, and I'll be supplying you with electricity and food and water, unless you're building a giant robot army in your basement, in which case you're totally cut off.
So you're going to have to amass some kind of army of 100,000 people.
You're going to have to find a way to pay them.
You're going to have to find a way to arm them.
And you're going to have to find a way to feed them and to house them with no one noticing.
How are you going to do that?
It'd have to be one step at a time, but I mean...
No, no, no, no!
You don't get to say one step at a time.
I mean, you've got to do it all at once.
I will jump to the moon in two foot increments, because I can only jump two foot at a time.
It's like, nope.
Can't do it.
Well, then how do governments form then?
I mean, doesn't it start out with one group has some military or whatever, they're able to take over a neighboring village and then recruit even more?
I mean, isn't, like, the history of the existence of the state, isn't that the result of having a military that's stronger than the neighboring military and they're able to invade and then, you know, assert their laws and regulations and so forth as a result of having that military?
I mean, isn't...
Governments form out of child abuse.
I've got a whole book, a whole audiobook from Lloyd DeMoss called The Origins of War in Child Abuse.
You can get it at freedomainradio.com.
There's a PDF you can read if you don't want to listen to me talk about it.
Governments fall into child abuse because children get abused and they learn that might makes right and they learn that to have authority is to have power and to impose your will violently and then they grow up into a society where guess what?
There's a giant set of secular powers that impose their will violently and it just kind of feels right.
You know, governments grow...
In a society, the way that Japanese language grows in Japan, because that's how the children are trained.
So that's where you have governments.
And that's why far back in history, society coalesced itself around childhoods.
Childhood is like the great unspoken and unspeakable physics of human society.
The child is the father of the man.
And child abuse is the father of the horrors of the world.
So if you want to change society and you want to change statism, you have to change people's childhoods to the point where they don't grow up thinking that authority is something aggressive and violent and imposes its will against their will with no recourse.
Abusive parents are the foundation of the state.
I'm sorry?
So, I guess, how do you change it, then?
I completely disagree.
I mean, I completely agree with you that there's a lot of indoctrination going on, especially with our public education system.
But how do you change that in a short amount of time?
Would it have to be a longer period of time to, you know, I mean...
How do you change what?
Completely overhaul our current education system.
Sorry, Brendan.
We've talked a lot about a lot of things.
What do you mean when you say, how do you change it?
What do you mean?
You mean statism, society, violence, childhood?
If I understood you correctly.
Yeah, well, I mean, if I understood you correctly, one of the major reasons for why governments form is the indoctrination of children or whatever.
They're taught to believe that they need a state in existence.
And in one of the ways that the government is able to do that, that indoctrination is through the public education system.
But that education system has become so ingrained within society.
How are you able to overhaul that system in a short amount of time?
Would it have to be a long period of time?
It's easy in practice.
It's tough to implement emotionally.
But if you want to make the post office more efficient, how do you do that?
I'm not sure.
Do you go and lecture them about efficiency?
I mean, what do you do?
How do you make the government-run post office more efficient?
Sure.
I mean, you probably have to convince them of a more efficient method.
I'm no expert on what goes on at the post office.
Oh, come on.
Do you think I'm asking you some tricky technical expertise question?
Yeah, probably not.
How do you make the post office efficient when it's run by the government?
I guess open it up to competition?
Yeah, you privatize it.
You change it from a coercive relationship to a voluntary relationship.
Sure, okay, okay.
So that's how you change the family.
Sure, okay.
But again, would that have to be, you know, would that be something that's short-term?
Are we able to do that in the short term?
You know what I'm saying?
I just can't see waking up tomorrow and seeing the whole education system being overhauled and...
Wait, wait.
Why are you talking about the education system?
I haven't mentioned it.
Hang on, hang on.
I haven't mentioned anything about the education system.
Oh, when I mean education, I'm just saying like how children are growing up, not necessarily the actual schooling itself, but how...
No, no.
Why are we talking about...
What have we just been talking about?
Why are we off on schools?
I thought your post office analogy was related to the education thing.
No, no, no.
Post office analogy was related to the family, not the school.
Well, no, no, no.
That's what I'm saying.
Like, when I say education, I'm not necessarily saying the school itself, but the schooling and the parenting and everything that just plays a role in indoctrinating children to believe in the existence of the state.
Does that make sense?
No.
Because when you talk about the education system, I don't think you're talking about parenting.
And when you talk about schools, I don't think you're talking about parenting.
Yeah, but you would agree that they both play a role, right, in indoctrinating children, both parents and the school system.
I mean, you can choose either one, but I mean...
Right?
I mean, they both play a significant role in indoctrination of other children.
If...
If spanking is immoral, let's just take one example, right?
Because, you know, 70 to 80% of parents in America are still spanking, and a lot of the others are lying.
But anyway, let's say that we're just talking about spanking.
How do you end spanking?
Well, of course, you want to encourage parents to be better parents, and you want to give parents the facts and so on.
But as we already talked about, negative consequences don't change people.
We just did a whole presentation called The Death of Reason about how consequences, reason, and evidence Don't change shit in people's heads.
You know, we may in fact be seeing a tiny bit of that in this conversation.
But the way that you do it is you give as much positive information to people as possible.
And then you tell people, oh, if your parents spanked you, if they hit you, that was immoral.
That was evil.
They did the best they could, but the knowledge they had.
Bullshit.
I refuse to hold society to a lower standard than society has held men to, particularly white men.
Fuck you, society, if you don't think we've noticed, we white men.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, I don't ever remember feminism saying, well, you see, you've got to be sympathetic towards men because they're doing the best they can in the patriarchy with the knowledge that they had.
No!
Male chauvinist pigs, evil patriarchy, down with the patriarchy, heterosexual sexes, rape, rapists, evil patriarchy.
Oh yeah, okay, so I get how this works.
If you don't like something, you scream evil at it until it changes.
And it'll change pretty damn quickly.
See, we've been on the receiving end of that weapon, but the moment I try and put that weapon into the hands of men, it's like, oh my god, it's evil.
No.
No.
It's wrong.
Look, even if we say that the feminist theory is correct, the men who grew up in patriarchy should be viewed as victims of patriarchy.
Sure.
It wasn't their fault.
It's just the way they were raised.
No.
It's what their mothers did.
No, that's not what happened.
What happened was men were screamed at for being immoral and evil and racist and sexist and scum and chauvinistic and patriarchs and blah, blah, blah.
You just scream epithets at people until they change.
Okay, I get it.
I'm being a whole lot nicer than other people are, but I get it.
This is the rules for radical stuff.
This is what you do.
You just scream epithets at people until they change.
Now, if those epithets are actually just and fair...
Good.
Then all the better.
But that's what you do.
So you say to people, oh, did your parents spank you?
That was immoral.
That was evil.
That was wrong.
What they did.
And hopefully the parents will listen and accept and change and so on.
But if they won't, then people have choices to be made.
And my concern is with the next generation.
Like only when you understand how child abuse and the way children are Treated how much that drives society, then all you care about fundamentally is the next generation.
Is it the Fed this?
Is it interest rates that?
That stuff's interesting and it's worthwhile getting people into the conversation that way, but my sole focus fundamentally is the next generation.
Now, if people, though they were abused by their parents and their parents are unrepentant, my particular preference, everyone can make their own choices, but if I had my magic wish, abusive grandparents should not be inflicted upon children.
Their grandchildren.
You know, if you have an alcoholic father, you shouldn't let that alcoholic father who drunk drives, you shouldn't let him drive around your babies in the back of his car.
That's bad parenting because it's really fucking damaging to them.
And if you have some screaming, abusive banshee as a mother, you do not have the right to expose your children to an abuser.
You do not have the right to expose your children to an abuser.
The cycle has to stop somewhere.
If your parents change and they become better and you get this wonderful thing, it's happened and I've had those parents on this show and I applaud them.
I think it's wonderful.
Great!
If your father sobers up and he's been sober for a number of years, okay.
Maybe he can take the kids out for a Sunday drive.
But if he's unrepentantly committed to both drinking and driving, you cannot let your kids be driven around by him.
And if you have an abusive parent around, you don't have the right to expose your children to that toxicity.
In the same way, you may have the right to smoke as long as it's outside and it's not affecting your kids, although it's kind of an asshole thing to do because you're supposed to be there for your kids, but you don't have the right to force your children to smoke.
You don't have the right to inflict an environmental toxin on them.
So in the same way, if you've got some horrible abusive parent, you can go out and see them if you want, although I think that's an asshole thing to do because it's going to screw you up for coming back home to your parents, but you don't have the right to expose children.
Your children to an environmental toxin, whether it's lead in the walls, a la Freddie Gray, whether it's secondhand smoke, whether it's cyanide or whatever, lead paint from China, I don't know.
Or it's an abusive environment.
You just, you don't have that right.
And that's how you get it done.
Sure, sure.
Yeah, and I think you and I both agree that, you know, all those things are unethical and inherently evil.
I guess one last quick question.
Oh, dude.
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
How many callers have we got, Mike?
Just one more on the line.
One more on the line.
Okay.
Brandon, please, please keep this quick.
Do not trip over any rant wires in my brain, because they seem to be all over the place today.
Go ahead.
Wait, each?
More than one?
Man, you're like Gandalf with dwarves at the beginning of The Hobbit.
Okay.
One really quick question.
When do you think that all this evil, all this, you know, terrible indoctrination or whatever, when do you think that we are going to truly have a voluntary society built on, you know, the non-aggression principle and a violation of any property rights or anything, when do you think that's reasonably going to happen in the future?
I can tell you that exactly.
Okay.
When you want it to.
That's a very powerful answer.
Because you think that there's some change, some movement out there that you might be able to catch the wave of.
Brendan, it's exactly when you commit yourself to it and when you make it happen in your environment.
Society right now is in this fog of...
Relativism.
Nobody really has to make any particular moral choices.
Now, when people are in a fog of relativism, they tend to become hysterically vitriolic witch hunters, which is why you see these witch hunts going on all the place in society.
Duke LaGrosse!
Right?
I mean, you see these witch hunts going all the time because relativism does not make people peaceful.
Relativism makes them vengeful.
And society doesn't have to make any stark fucking choices anymore.
And I think that is the most horrible place for society to be.
Because when society refuses to make the easier moral choices, it ends up having to make much more difficult moral choices.
So right now, for instance, there are old people who are ripping off the young because there's fuck all in the social security accounts.
And rich people who have nine times or ten times the assets of young people are like ancient, wizened, crypt-keeper vampires sucking the economic juice out of the youth of the future.
They gave all their money to the government and said, hey, I'm sure this is coming back because governments are so great and trustworthy.
I'm going to give them all this money and I'm going to be like, hey, when I get older, I bet you there's going to be a giant honeypot of well-saved, well-invested currency that I gave to the money over time of the government.
It's great.
When have they ever lied to us?
When have they ever screwed us over?
I mean, I might as well put it in gold.
And there's nothing there.
Nothing there.
You're stealing from the young!
Stop it!
It's not the young people's fault that you bent over and thought you were going to get roses when the government boned you up the butt.
It's not the young people's fault they didn't even vote when you sold your fucking freedom for pennies.
For empty promises.
Oh yeah, this guy who's currently in power, who's 55 years old...
He's going to promise me money in 40 years because politicians are nothing if not concerned about the effects of their policies long after they're dead.
What politician would ever sell lies which he'll never have to fulfill long down the road in the future which he can blame on some other bankers?
What politician would ever want power in the here and now in return for unverifiable promises that he'll never have to fulfill?
I mean, this is such an obvious scam, and anybody who claims that they didn't have any clue is just completely ridiculous and shouldn't be listened to with any seriousness.
I mean, I'd rather listen to somebody explain to me in great detail how the world is in fact flat and nobody ever went to the moon than the fact that Social Security was a really great idea.
You know, they do start wars and put people in jail unjustly, but I'm sure they're going to hang on to this $5,000 for me.
Well, no problem.
It's like in Ferris Bueller's Day Off is it where he gives his beautiful car to this incredibly skeezy looking parking lot attendant, right?
And of course they bring it back, but that's much more likely than that the government's going to hang on to your money.
So we don't have any fundamental choices.
So people aren't saying, like, Donald Trump brings up one tiny little fundamental choice, which is, how do you want your country to look in 50 years?
One tiny fundamental choice.
Relative to other things that are going on, it's not hugely significant.
And everybody freaks out!
Because, like, wait a minute, we can't have it both ways?
We can't have it both ways.
Everyone's addicted to the DP of fantasy and superstition.
And it's like, what?
What do you mean?
I have to make a choice?
Resources aren't infinite?
It's one or the other?
Oh my god.
Amygdala.
I'm R. I can't do it.
Keep the K away from me.
It's not ketamine.
It's not some cereal.
It's reality.
Right, so...
So the people, like, there's no choice.
Okay, the choice that was presented to me is that, look, if you're mean to your wife, she's going to leave you.
Hey, if you're mean to your kids, maybe they'll leave you.
Probably, yeah.
You know, if I'm mean to my customers, you know, we just had a guy call in, I'll get fired.
Yeah, yeah.
And so, if I'm mean to my girlfriend, she shouldn't stay with me.
Because, you know, it's just not a satisfying relationship.
See, women should be able to leave unsatisfying relationships.
Okay.
Okay.
Is it a satisfying relationship if the elder generation has voted for free shit after free shit after free shit after free shit, leading you buried under hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt and voted away all your freedoms because goodies and because, well, I don't want to be called a racist, so I'll vote for a socialist.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So if they didn't have the courage to stand up for anything that the elder generation bequeathed upon them in terms of freedoms, who should have any respect for these boomers?
You know, the boom sound is the engine crossing the sound barrier to fascism.
That's how it works.
So we don't have...
Like, there's no money.
There's no money for Social Security.
So...
Whose fault is that?
It's not the young people's fault.
They didn't vote for it.
Older people's fault.
So there's no money.
So stop taking people's money.
But people don't want those choices.
They freak out because we've gotten into this hazy world of nothing and everything and goo and distraction and let's be nice and let's not bring up anything contentious.
Well, you may not want to bring up something contentious, but reality sure as hell is going to.
So you'll have a society when you start giving people the stark and real choices that exist in the world.
Hit your kids, there'll be consequences.
Hit your wife, there'll be consequences.
Continue to rape husbands through the divorce court process.
There will be consequences in that men will stop working.
Men will stop marrying.
You can ride the cock of the alpha state all the way into the stiggy and hell of fascism and economic decay.
But at some point, that shit's going to run out and you're going to have to learn how to be nice again to men who are really pissed off at you.
And that's going to be tough.
And it's going to be hard.
And it's going to be ugly to see you try and look pretty.
Because the men will know that the women are only coming back because the government ran out of money.
Sure.
You know, I'm back from Vegas!
I don't know if this is Ben Affleck's conversation with Jennifer Garner.
I'm back from Vegas.
I've decided to quit gambling because they threw me out and I ran out of money.
I love you.
Can I get a kiss?
Right?
I mean, the women are only going to come back to the men because the government's run out of money.
This is why I want women to do it before the government runs out of money, which is why some time back ago, I put out the why men don't want to get married, which is men are waiting for an apology.
Sorry we treated you like shit for two generations and sorry that your fathers got divorced and raped in the courts and thrown into the trash heap and pushed around and robbed and all that.
Sorry about all that shit.
But you all, women, you better do this shit and better turn this around before the government runs out of money.
Otherwise, no one's going to believe you when you say that you're sorry.
Oh, shit.
No more free stuff.
I gotta latch onto a man.
Okay, I'm sorry.
Can I get some money now?
I'm totally sorry.
That was terrible.
Oh, feminism, that horrible stuff.
Oh, the divorce court stuff.
Yeah, you can tell me about men's rights.
Hey, listen, can I get some money?
Because, you know, I gotta get some stuff.
And the government's out of money.
Okay, I gotta give you a blowjob.
You're the hardest thing ever.
Can I get some money now?
It's like, who's going to believe that shit, right?
Anyway, so it's going to happen when you start giving stock choices to society that actually exists within reality.
And it's emotionally uncomfortable to do.
I get it.
We're all conformists.
All want to get along with the tribe and all that, but we've got to have that stuff.
We can't live in a post-tribal, post-industrial, highly technological society and then be run by Stone Age conformity.
I mean, we can, but we're just going to end up back in the Stone Age.
Okay, man.
Got to move on to the next call.
Thank you for your call.
All right.
Thank you very much.
Appreciate it.
Yep.
Thank you.
Alright, thank you, Brendan.
By the way, my daughter enjoys this show called Race to the Edge.
It's from How to Train Your Dragon.
And in it, there are two twins named Ruff and Tough.
And in one episode, they want a boar pit.
And people say, why do you want a boar pit?
And he's like, Everybody needs a bit of entertainment.
And at one point, they're planning some outpost, and the two twins are in the background.
Do you know what they're saying?
Boar pit!
Because they really want a boar pit.
So for those who don't know, like Mike gives me some feedback during the show as I'm doing it, and much in the same way that Rough and Tough say boar pit, Mike's like, pedant!
Pedant!
More pedant!
More pedant!
So, I just wanted to point out.
I'm definitely not just enabling, but thoroughly encouraging the pedant voice.
Mike's pedant fetish is why your ears hurt at the moment, and my voice.
And I know that saying other people's opinions in a whiny voice is like a cheap trick.
I know, but I like the pedant voice.
It makes me laugh.
So, gotta balance the two of them.
Mike needs a giggle.
And apparently I have no will of my own, so I just wanted to let you know that, everyone.
Like a kite in the wind!
I wake up in the morning and it's like, how can I please Mike today?
If only that were true.
Let me just mention before we move on to Dante, we were talking about Mars and immigrants to the moon or something like that.
That would...
That would actually unite the left and right, I think, if we sent all the illegal immigrants to the moon.
The conservatives would be happy, you know, to see the end of the immigrant crime problem, and the liberals would be thrilled because we're increasing NASA's funding.
So it's just a wet dream for everyone involved.
Only if they had voting rights and have the lightest anchor babies in the solar system.
Actually, I think Donald Trump wants to build a fence so high that with like an additional leap or two, you can get to the moon.
Yeah, we've been talking about a lot of good and evil, and now we're bringing up a caller named Dante because synchronicity, baby.
Dante.
Dante.
His question, he's got a bunch of libertarian-esque questions, and the first one on the list is a libertarian favorite.
How do you think roads in a free society should work?
Should they be regulated and maintained by private entities for a toll to pass through, or should they be free for everyone to use?
That's from Dante.
That's question number numero uno.
Okay, we're doing one in time.
What does free mean there, Dante?
Um...
Does that mean that you're going to dedicate your life to growing your own food and building roads that you're not going to charge anyone for?
Well, I don't know.
The question came to me one day and I was just kind of wondering about it.
Would it be like some sort of...
No, no, no.
Hang on.
Already you're not answering my question.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
What does free mean?
What does free mean?
Free for everyone to use.
Well, who pays for them?
Free for everyone to use.
Well, I kind of thought about it If we're considering free, in a sense that maybe a logging company or whatever kind of company that economically benefits from the road would maintain it.
Okay.
So I think what you mean by that is, so when you're a logging company, you want to go out into the woods and get your trees, and you want to build logging roads.
And I used to use these up north, terrifying, because, you know, the logging trucks don't ever imagine there's going to be anyone else on the road.
They didn't usually, you might mind using the roads, but they come around the bend at hugely high speeds with like four tons of trees on them.
But, so yeah, I mean, if you're going to build a cottage, you've got to build a road to that cottage, right?
So, and you may want to keep that Maintained, but still not free, right?
You pay for it yourself.
Yes, yes.
Okay, so tell me where the free part comes in.
I guess it means free for people who don't necessarily benefit economically from the...
I mean, I'm sure they would benefit somehow from crossing it, but just not...
Some organization that has decided that they need it more than someone else does.
So they decided to...
Oh my god.
Okay, stop, stop, stop.
Sorry!
Do you even know what you're saying?
I mean, yes.
I'm saying that if...
Let's say there's one company.
Let's say, you know, a logging company.
They have big trucks.
No, no, no.
Logging is a private-use road and usually is overgrown after you've finished harvesting the trees.
So we're talking about paved highways and stuff, right?
Well...
Yeah, let's say a different company.
If you want to live in a society only with logging roads, I don't want to be there.
So let's just go a little bit further, right?
Let's say it's like a concrete truck or something and some sort of a big vehicle that...
Notices this pothole in the road, and they say, we can't get past this pothole, so why don't we fix it?
Because it will be in our economic best interest, even though it will cost money to fix the road.
It would also be economically beneficial for us to move our concrete or gas or whatever across it.
Okay, that's still not free, because they have to go and get the materials and the expertise to fix the pothole, which means they have to raise the price of their concrete, so that's still not free, because it's just paid for by the people who buy their concrete.
Well, I guess I didn't mean free, then.
No, and that's important, because when people use the word free, it's like, only in Magic Land, right?
Exactly.
And so...
Yeah, so there's no free.
And of course, there's an incentive for them not to fix the pothole, which is that if they can just get past it and the next concrete truck fixes the pothole, they get the value of the fixed pothole without having to raise their prices.
So they get a free good and they get a competitive advantage by not fixing the pothole.
So I don't think that's something you could rely on, right?
Whenever you're hoping for selflessness, it's going to happen for sure, but you just can't build a society on it.
I guess as a follow-up question...
Hang on.
I don't even know if we've answered this one, right?
Sorry.
Because we still don't know, right?
Okay.
Who fixes the potholes in Disneyland?
Disney.
It's not a trick question.
It's not a cartoon character.
Goofy!
Yeah, the company.
Disney itself, the company.
Yeah.
That's right.
A giant frozen Walt Disney comes out and shaves ice into them, right?
No, so they fix their...
They build all these roads and they clean up all the garbage because that's what people want, right?
And if you buy a...
It's like, who fixes the carpet in the hallway of the condo building?
Well, everyone.
Because they all want to live where they're not tripping all over wrecked up carpets and stuff.
So if a carpet gets worn out or gets a big rip in it or whatever, then they...
They fix it and they pay for that because, right, it's their property, right?
Yeah.
So whoever, you know, how do roads get built?
Well, roads get built when it's economically viable to build those roads.
So if you build a whole bunch of houses, obviously no one's going to buy them if you've got to take to the sewers to get there, right?
So they're going to build a road out to this thing and you're going to have a contract.
Nobody's going to want to buy a house if the contract is, well, the road's going to be maintained for six months.
And then we're going to let it go to shit, right?
I mean, they're not going to do that.
They want to know that the roads are going to be maintained for as long as they have their house, right?
So my guess would be that people who have the house at an end of a road will want that road maintained.
And they'll contract with a company.
And they'll say it's a 20-year contract, but every year we can cancel it if we want.
if you become uncompetitive or lazy or whatever, And there'll be people constantly bidding up how to make better roads and do better things with roads and make them last longer and be cheaper to maintain and whatever, right?
And then other people will be inventing jetpacks and teleportation devices.
And I'm only semi-kidding about that.
Rather come up with working from home stuff and find ways to bypass roads, right?
And so...
That's how roads, and how do they get paid for?
Well, with GPS, it's become very simple, right?
In that you can literally bill people, and you can set up anonymous stuff, right?
If you want to not know where, have people not know where you're driving, just set up an entire anonymous account or whatever, and the GPS would feed the data to some central computer, which would charge you, and the money would be distributed among whoever had the roads.
So, I mean, that's just one possibility out of many, many, but that would be, I imagine, how it would work.
Now, let's say I wanted to...
Get somewhere far away.
And I needed to use an interstate.
And a lot of interstates are kind of in generally more rural areas.
At least a lot of the ones I've been through don't really have a lot of houses and things bordering it.
How would you suggest that those kind of roads be maintained and whatnot?
You mean where there's no economic...
There's not enough traffic to justify it economically?
Not that there's not enough traffic, but that there's not a property owner in the vicinity that can...
Oh, no, no, no.
It's whoever drives on the road would pay the toll.
And it would be an electronic thing, and so you wouldn't need to worry about it.
You just get a bill, right?
You just get a bill.
Now, if there's a giant highway that leads to five people...
Then there's no conceivable way that they can afford.
They can afford it with the government, right?
Because you just offload the costs onto everyone else.
But if there's a village with five people at the end of a 50-mile-long road, there's no way that they could possibly maintain that so they'd move.
They'd have to abandon their houses because they couldn't afford to maintain the road.
And that's good because what a huge waste of resources it is to keep driving up and down a road that's not barely used.
Now, what do you suppose would happen if...
There was really only one way or at least one easy way to get somewhere.
And a company decided to...
Whatever company or group of people...
Oh, hang on.
I think I know this one.
So this is like you've got a house and they build a road all the way around your house and then they charge you $500 for you to drive on the road to leave your house.
That's the one, right?
Yeah, something like that.
What's the...
What's the solution?
Why would you buy a house unless you had a contract that says, I'm not going to be overcharged to use the only road that leads to my house?
You wouldn't buy that house.
Well, it wouldn't be necessarily a road to a house, but maybe just a main highway to get to a...
No, listen, it doesn't matter.
This is a question like this.
And I'm sorry, I'm going to use this voice again, because I'm enjoying it.
So this is not meant to make fun of you.
I just write, okay.
No worries.
So, Steph, I've got a question for you.
Hana Free Society, how would it work if, let's say, I'm the only guy who flies to a little island off Hawaii, and I drop people off there...
For $1,000.
And then I charge them $10,000 to come back.
And nobody else is going to come out that way.
So they have to pay me the $10,000.
How would that be stopped in a free society?
Well, they're called round-trip tickets.
You pay for them up front, right?
I mean, who the hell is going to be dropped off on an island and then say, yeah, charge me whatever you want for the way back.
Because I've totally got a strong position called I don't want to starve on this island, right?
Yeah.
Right?
So, I mean, if there's only one road that comes to your house, then you're not going to buy that house.
You're not going to build that house unless you have a guarantee that those prices are not going to go insane, right?
Uh-huh.
Now, if somebody, let's say, just breaks the contract, then you sue them and get your money back.
Or let's say that they get bought out by somebody and that the contract is torn up and so on, and then they want to charge you $500 to use that road.
Well, it's not your road.
Somebody's overcharging.
Which means that...
They're going to get hugely negative publicity, right?
Because everybody's afraid of this, right?
Somebody's got a monopoly control over your service and they jack up their prices.
Everybody knows that that's so unfair and it's kind of an abuse of some economic influence.
I don't want to say power because I want to confuse it with the state.
And so, you know, guess what's going to be on every news item, you know?
Asshole Incorporated charges $500 for the guy to get, and his wife is sick and he needs to get to the hospital, and they're charging him $500, right?
Yeah, yeah, that's kind of what I thought would people...
And then what's going to happen to your company reputation?
Who's going to want to do business with you?
No one.
No one!
And are your investors going to be happy that you've destroyed the value of the business?
In business, and people, I hate to be annoying, but people who've not been involved in the buying and selling of business, there's something called goodwill.
And goodwill is roughly defined as the positive perception that your company has, right?
And so somebody who wants to, you know, you've got...
You've got, I don't know, one road that leads to an old age community.
And you jack it up to 500 bucks a passage, right?
Okay, they get on the phone, they get the media out there, and they're all these sad-eyed old people looking at the world they can no longer get to.
Looking at the road that to them leads nowhere.
Looking at the medicines they cannot afford to buy.
Because Asshole Incorporated jacked up the price of their road dolls for no reason whatsoever.
How's that going to play in Peoria?
Yeah, tears rolling down their cheeks.
And you know what you'll do?
You'll get their grandchildren way down at the end of the road, waving, waving at them plaintively, calling and saying, I'm sorry we can't see you, Granddaddy.
This is the closest that Asshole Incorporated will let us get.
I'm so sorry.
I miss you so much.
Right, this is what you'll do.
I haven't been this sad since I watched an Indian cry as a motorist threw something out their window.
Yeah, because that's the big problem in the Indian community.
Literate.
Not tuberculosis-laden blankets, buckshot, and false promises from the government.
It's a potato chip bag.
That's their big issue.
Not the mass majority of their children imbibing copious amounts of copier fluid.
It's a gum wrapper.
Think positive.
Maybe the car is going to a casino, though.
The great vengeance of the Indian tribes.
Tobacco and gambling.
Anyway, I think it's about even now, guys.
Let's stop with the smoking.
But no, so, I mean, that is going to, like, the investors will sue you.
Because if you, as a corporate executive, whatever that looks like in a future society, it's not going to be the same as it is now.
But if you, as a business manager, like, you're the CEO of that company, and you decide to jack up rates...
And you get ridiculously bad publicity out of that.
And the value of people's shares declines by half, which is a very generous estimate.
Probably would be worse than that.
Those people can sue you for knowingly making a business decision that had a high likelihood of destroying the value of their stock.
Wow.
I never thought about that one.
That's awesome.
It is.
So I have another question.
And actually, the answer, like, I guess, well, at least a potential answer kind of came to me today as I was sitting in a mythology class.
And we were talking about how the...
Wait, you're studying political science?
Oh, rimshot!
Right there!
So we were talking about how the Greek city-states...
The very decentralized Greek city-states fended off the Persian Empire.
And I kind of had a similar question.
Let's just use America as an example.
Let's say the country, the area that America occupies tomorrow becomes an anarchistic society.
What would prevent us from...
Aggressive actions from places like China and Russia who may see it in their best interest to attack us and seize our land.
Well, let's pretend that you're selling protection from that to a bunch of people.
What would you offer them?
Like money-wise?
No.
Or protection from, like, an aggressive country.
Yes.
I would offer them...
Well, first, I would offer them my services as a defense agency, you know, soldiers' weapons.
I would offer them their own weapons, probably.
You know, maybe some sort of shelter or warning system as well, you know, if we were to get attacked.
Probably just stuff along those lines.
Yeah, you would offer them some methodology for dealing with that dispute, right?
And you would make it not worth the foreign leader's while to invade your landmass.
And how would you do that?
Get a lot of people under my defense plan.
And builds up a large or at least a formidable presence or a group of mercenaries or soldiers or whatever.
Oh, you're such a statist.
I'm not a statist!
No, no, I don't mean that.
I don't mean that.
What I mean is that you're thinking of war in a statist paradigm.
Giant armies, right?
Yeah.
Tell me.
Iraq had about.3% of the military budget of the United States.
And who won?
Well, we definitely didn't win.
Well, first of all, there's no you, because there's no we for you there.
But America did not win that particular conflict, because it's a guerrilla insurgency with a foreign culture.
Mm-hmm.
Which army was bigger, the Soviet Empire's army or the Afghani's Mujahideen army in the 1980s?
The Soviets, of course.
Right.
And you can take down a $20 million MiG with a $15,000 Stinger missile.
Mm-hmm.
And so when it comes to fighting against an invader, well, Afghanistan has been invaded approximately 12 billion times throughout the course of its existence.
Nobody ever stays.
I'm not saying that you would get invaded or anything like that because that's, you know, but what I'm saying is that you're thinking, well, the best way to fight a giant army is with a giant army.
I don't think that's true.
I'm no military expert, so this is just...
I'm barely an expert on anything, but these are my sort of thoughts.
Least needed caveat ever, Steph.
I'm not a military expert.
Yeah, yeah.
I say!
Well, no, that's not...
I did, you know...
I wrote a book on war.
Anyway, but...
So, these are just some thoughts off the top of my head.
Well, first of all, you would...
I would do research into DNA-specific illnesses.
Oh, interesting.
So some sort of virus that would attack only a particular DNA, right?
If I could only get it down to a bloodline, that'd be fine with me.
And you would then simply release that in the area where the leader of the hostile army was, right?
And hopefully, you know, turn him into some sort of liquid that fills his shoes.
That would be lovely, right?
Because, you know, that's self-defense, right?
Yeah.
So that kind of decapitation is really important.
And it has been less used throughout history, partly for reasons of geography and partly because there's just this kind of unwritten rule that we don't take out your leaders, you don't take out ours.
It's a lot more fun to push imaginary people around on a map than it is to, you know, actually get hit yourselves, right?
Oh, yeah.
And so that's sort of one particular option, a very specific bioweapon that would be focused on the leaders.
The other thing is to take out a giant bounty right on, you know, I'm going to pay $10 million to whoever kills this guy.
That's kind of self-defense, right?
Yeah, yeah.
And again, these are just things I don't know what the final answer would be.
The other thing, too, it's really tough to invade an anarchic country because there's no tax base to take over, right?
The reason that you invade another country is to take over its tax base.
When the Nazis took over northern France in May of 1940, they just started taking all the taxes from the French people.
And that's what they used to continue to fund their war.
And so and they seized all the government gold and all that kind of crap, right?
So there's no centralized power structure that you can take over that's going to provide you a lot of goodies if you're trying to look at an anarchic society.
And I go over this more in practical anarchy, which is again, freedominradio.com free book, but it's really tough to do that.
The technology in a free society would be very powerful.
The wealth would be staggering, right?
A free society would easily be growing five to ten percent economic growth a year without the accompanying environmental destruction that comes from hysterical debt-based growth.
And so they would have the very best military equipment that could be conceived of, the very best and most specific and targeted weapons that could be conceived of.
They would have a near infinite supply of wealth relative to Relative to the opposing army.
And basically, it would be like watching the post office compete with Mark Zuckerberg.
Yeah.
By public competing with private, you've got a private army.
I mean, in a weird kind of way, the Iraq insurgents were a kind of private army, so to speak, right?
And they weren't a state agency, and they won.
And they won with almost no money, and they run with vastly inferior weapons, and they won with no centralized organization, and no generals, and no uniforms, and they won by not playing by the rules of, you know, let's get two people out on a battlefield and blow tank juice at each other until one of us breaks into pieces.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
I guess another question I have kind of related to this talk is using the same kind of argument that we would use against the company not providing a road towards the homes of elderly people.
Do you think a potential solution to the problems in our country with law enforcement could be achieved by privatizing it?
Sorry, which problems with law enforcement?
Well, you know, just the stuff you see on the internet.
Maybe more almost not perceived and real problems with these arrests.
Like the Sandra Bland thing, for instance.
You know, this kind of unnecessary arrests and...
General bad press that the police gets.
Well, I don't know about general bad press that the police get.
The police seem to get a lot of good press insofar as most of the people in trouble call the police.
But that, again, could be because of a monopoly.
I mean, there's lots of problems with...
The way the police is set up at the moment.
But the biggest, I think, challenge is that everyone has their moral bugaboos, right?
Like the guy at the beginning, the first caller, all due respect, he was like, well, how do we force people of different cultures to get together?
So that's your moral bugaboo, right?
And other people are like, you know, my brother died of a heroin overdose.
Heroin is like the worst thing ever.
We've got to ban it.
And other people, you know, mothers against drunk driving and so on.
And of course, I'm very much against drunk driving too.
And I think that there would definitely be significant sanctions for it because that is putting other people physically at risk.
But, you know, the women who wanted to ban alcohol because their husbands were drunks and they married the wrong guy.
They married a drunk.
So we gotta ban alcohol, right?
I mean, and everyone's got these bugaboos, like things that they just desperately want changed in society, you know?
Like, I got a bad haircut, man.
I paid for that bad haircut.
It sucks.
And so we gotta license these people.
You know, I had some food and I got sick from some restaurant.
And we just, we gotta have health inspectors.
And it's got to be paid for by other people, right?
Because what puts the cap on this constant and ever-present and ever-escalating moral witch hunts?
You know, where like a third of Americans now need a license to have a goddamn job.
Yeah.
You know, they've got little fucking kids on the front lawn trying to sell lemonade, and you've got cops coming up demanding their permits.
Mm-hmm.
Because unregulated lemonade, that would be anarchy.
I mean, there could be pits in there and maybe some bits of rind and heroin, right?
I mean, so what is it that stops?
What's the balance?
Of course we want an organized society, but everyone, I don't know if you know people, they just have these weird fetishes.
I hate drummers.
Just kidding.
But everybody has these weird fetishes.
Like, this stuff really bugs me.
And it's based upon their personal history and so on, right?
Like, Donald Trump's brother died of alcoholism, right?
I mean, that's going to have an effect.
Dr.
Phil's father was an alcoholic.
That's why apparently he doesn't touch alcohol.
And people have these...
And there's nothing wrong with them.
And I completely understand why people have them.
But what is it that keeps these from escalating into these endless moral witch hunts?
Well, it's the price mechanism.
What is the price of indulging in your moral witch hunt?
Well, if you have to pay the bills or if you have to convince other people to pay for them voluntarily, Okay, you don't have to convince me that people who drive drunk should have sanctions.
I don't think you'd need to convince a lot of people except a few people who like to drive drunk.
Right?
A lot of people would say, and so I'm willing to pay for that.
It's worth it for me.
Right?
Now, this guy's moral bugaboo was like people not mingling outside their own culture.
I don't care!
So, that's why I said to him, you know, make the case, bring the day to try to convince people.
And My moral bugaboo is treat children really, really well.
You know, negotiate with them and reason with them and all that.
And I'm not going to force people to do that for moral reasons.
But people don't have those moral reasons because they don't understand what morality is.
They just conform.
And so people are like...
My brother died of heroin.
It's now my crusade to get heroin banned from society because it's worse stuff and they dive into the data and they find all these horrible stories about heroin and they never read Kublai Khan.
This poem that was written by Coleridge under I think opium or whatever.
They just they immerse themselves in all this negative stuff and it becomes this echo chamber of ever-increasing moral hysteria and they've got to get it done.
It becomes their life's work.
It becomes their obsession again.
Fine, you know, but don't force me to pay for your bugaboo.
Don't force me to pay.
Most people are like, yeah, murder, I'm okay with that being sanctioned.
I think that's great.
Murder, rape, yes, absolutely.
Let's get rid of that.
And theft, yeah, account of the society.
Assault, yes, absolutely.
But after you get past the basics, no weed, no weed.
Well, you know, I get some people, they have a really bad experience, and then their dog dies from eating a hash brownie, and, you know, and then whatever, right?
And then they want it gone, right?
Oh, but there's some skeevy drug dealers, which is probably the result of the war on drugs.
But, you know, something bad happens, and they get this bugaboo.
And I've known, you probably know people with their bugaboos.
I know people with their bugaboos.
You have them, I have them, everyone has them.
Certainly.
But the government turns these bugaboos, these personal obsessions, into national policy.
And then creates this whole bureaucracy which depends on it and creates a whole media which has to feed it.
And it's really tough.
It's really tough to raise personal bugaboos to the level of geographic policy.
Without a cost-benefit evaluation.
Look, there's moral reasons, of course, why people don't want theft and they'll pay, but there's also a cost-benefit that's pretty easy to make.
If no one's going to protect anyone or anything to do with property rights, it's a subsidy for thieves, and thieves will multiply.
I mean, in a free society, everyone's brought up, well, who knows, right?
But the way it sort of sits right now.
And it's the old thing like if children are never allowed to fail, they're not going to try.
And so negative consequences and positive consequences are kind of how we navigate through a lot of things in life.
Because very few of us sit there and say, really want to kill that guy who's snoring on the train.
But there's these laws, so fine.
I won't.
Or there's three American military guys and I'm on a train in France.
It's so funny, eh?
Once again, the Americans say France.
Anyway.
But...
Most of the decisions we have to make are these sort of little tweaks around ethical issues or ethical questions and positive and negative consequences of the way that we navigate these things a lot of ways.
And so you need to make a cost-benefit analysis of some of these things so that the proliferation of laws In a free society?
I mean, can anyone conceivably imagine that even if there was such a thing as taxes in a free society, that you'd end up with this multi-hundred-thousand-page code that no human being can possibly comprehend called the IRS tax code, right?
Yeah, exactly.
It would never, ever happen.
It would never happen in a million years.
So the purpose of freedom and entrepreneurship is to simplify it.
To make things as easy and as cheap and convenient as humanly possible.
Which means that there'll be a few basic moral rules, non-aggression principle, respect for property.
People are going to agree on that.
They're going to try and get those enforced as efficiently as humanly possible.
People's bugaboos, well, they can go and write blogs and they can make the case and they can write movies and they can do whatever they want to try and influence people's decisions.
But they're going to be fighting the uphill battle that it's not cost effective for people to indulge their bugaboos.
And this bugaboo subsidization is why we've become such a nanny state.
Because people have legitimate concerns and their voices should be added to the chorus of attention-seeking and moral improvement in human society.
But when they can latch onto the state, they don't face the same cost-benefit justification.
They don't face people's indifference.
You know, you cure bugaboos with other people being indifferent.
Can I get Mike to listen to a Queen's song?
Well, with enough duct tape, no.
Hey, I actually like a few Queen songs.
Remarkably strong teeth.
Yeah, it's not enough to like the late stuff, man.
Don't give me I want it all.
Don't even think about it.
That's my favorite.
Anyway.
Sorry?
That's my favorite Queen song.
I know it's your favorite.
You told me.
It still burns!
Night at the opera, day at the races.
Anyway.
So, people's indifference is essential to keeping society.
Very effective.
And very efficient.
People are incredibly indifferent to what you're passionate about.
And that's fine.
That's exactly how it should be.
Should everyone be as passionate about philosophy as I am?
No.
I like to eat.
So people gotta grow shit.
So, no.
Absolutely not, right?
And philosophy isn't getting any oil out of the ground to get food to my head.
Anyway.
So...
So it's my job to try and get people engaged and interested in this because it's my bugaboo.
Philosophy, ethics, virtue, reason, consistency, evidence, all that kind of good stuff.
It's my job to make that engaging for people.
The fact that people are hugely indifferent to it is fantastic.
That's exactly how it should be in the world.
And so indifference is how we keep things efficient in society.
But when you can hook into the power of the state, people's indifference doesn't matter anymore.
I mean, your sister got some weird disease.
It's very expensive to treat, so you want to get it.
And you'll get some charity and all that.
Maybe she's loved and you're loved.
You've helped out the community.
They help you out back or whatever.
But maybe you get this thing where it's like, the government should cover the cost of this disease for everyone.
And that's your bugaboo and I completely understand it.
But other people are kind of indifferent.
And they, you know, care about it a little bit and whatever, right?
If they care about your sister, they'll be caring about her, right?
But if you can get the government to pass a law that says this needs to be included in everyone's insurance, which is one of the reasons why, along with illegal immigration and six million other things, healthcare in America is so expensive that everyone gets their bugaboo jammed down everyone else's throats through mandated into their healthcare insurance.
This is why you've got 70-year-old women paying for fertility treatments that they're never going to use.
So...
Unless they want to give birth to a 40-year-old or something, right?
So, people's indifference is really fundamental.
People's indifference, that's how you know something is real quality.
When enough people really care about it and get enthusiastic about it, it means someone has magically overcome the giant inertia called indifference.
That's why it's so few people make money in the arts or through YouTube or online as a whole or in writing.
Because the vast majority of people don't give a shit about the novel you wrote, and they don't give a shit about the YouTube video that you made, and they don't give a shit about the fact that you've learned how to play a crazy little thing called love on the guitar.
So when people go apeshit over Taylor Swift, she's bringing something really cool to the mix.
And so you need this massive wave of indifference so you know what's got some value and what doesn't.
Yes, Taylor Swift has value.
Sorry, she's a great songwriter.
And quite a pretty little cutie doll of infinite stretchiness.
I mean, I swear to God, seeing a picture of her next to Lena Dunham, it's like the Eloy and the Morlock.
Anyway, so, but the government blows away this indifference by forcing everyone to have to pay attention.
And I think that's how this massive tidal wave of indifference, and this doesn't mean non-cariness.
The fact that I don't care about your bugaboo doesn't mean I don't care about you as a human being.
I got my own bugaboos and sometimes they eclipse yours.
My sister didn't die of that weird disease and I sympathize but it's not as visceral for me.
And so we have to have a high barrier for getting people involved in stuff in society.
And unfortunately, the government doesn't do that.
It just forces people to pay attention.
It forces people to do stuff.
It blows past the inertia of indifference, which is supposed to conserve society's precious time, energy, and resources.
Just don't care that much.
You know, if some animal is going to become extinct, yeah, some people will care about it, and they'll really care about it.
Lots of people care about it a little bit.
A lot of people don't care about it that much, right?
Now, whether the animal should go extinct or not, I don't know, 98% of animals throughout human history have gone extinct.
Including right-wing people in academia.
But the...
I don't know what the answer is.
I'm willing to listen to people's cases, but everybody's got...
There are 8 billion, 6 billion people in the world, and about 60 billion bugaboos.
We can't act on them all.
But everybody would love the government to enforce theirs, and this is one of the reasons why things get so crazy.
Wow.
That was a lot to take in.
Now, as far as...
I've kind of been toying with this question.
As far as...
Last one.
Last one.
I'm sorry.
Make it good.
Make it your best.
As far as applying these concepts to my life, would it be morally right for me as a person to...
To not necessarily constantly speak out on a public forum, but almost do the opposite.
What if I took my family and moved to Montana and raised children there in a peaceful and, to use your word, a virtuous way?
Would it be morally okay to do that?
Or do I have a moral obligation to, I guess, the rest of humanity To try and reason with them or make them see...
No.
No?
No.
If you move to Montana and raise your kids peacefully, are you initiating the use of force or fraud against anyone?
No.
Are you stealing anyone?
No.
Anyone's stuff?
You raping anyone?
You assaulting anyone?
No.
No?
Then you're in the clear.
Wow.
You cannot have a positive moral obligation.
In other words, something that you did not enter into voluntarily.
You can have negative ones.
Don't steal, don't kill, right?
And if you sign a contract, rent a car or whatever, you've got a positive moral obligation to maintain it and return it.
But no, you have no positive moral obligation to make the world a better place because you are not initiating the use of violence by avoiding that.
Wow, that makes me feel a lot better now.
Yeah.
I really like that.
I really like that.
Thank you so much.
I wish you would.
Don't get me wrong.
I'd like it if you did.
Oh, yes, yes.
You know, like, I mean, if my daughter's drowning and I'm not around and you can swim, I'd like you to save her.
Of course.
Can't throw you in jail if you don't.
Of course.
So it's not a moral question.
It is a love question.
Because if you move into Montana, you're saying you've given up.
And you cannot find a way to make the world a better place and be happy.
It means you've gone, rage quit Earth.
Right?
You say, fuck the planet, I'm gone.
Now, of course, your kid's got to live somewhere, so if you're having kids, you might want to work to make the place a little bit better.
You know, like if there's some beam that's creaking and cracking over your baby's crib, you might want to Get that fixed.
Well, the whole thing collapses on your baby, right?
Yeah.
So, if you, especially if you have kids, or just, if there's love, can your love of what the world could be, can your love of what the world could be overcome your hatred of the way it is?
Right?
The love and the hate.
The battle, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Can your love Be so intense that it transfers the paradise of your vision to other people.
Because it really can only be...
It can shore it up with reason, with evidence, but again, fundamentally, it is the passion and the yearning and the vividness of the world that you picture that is the conduit by which it transfers to other people.
It is your love.
Of the world that does not exist in any other place than the future and your present imagination.
It is your love of that world that transfers it to other people and has them see a vision and if enough people decide to go in a direction, they pull the whole world with them.
Doesn't even have to be that many people.
The vast majority of wealth is created by very few people.
The vast majority of art is created by very few people.
The vast majority of philosophy is created by the fewest people in the world.
The vast majority of social change is created by very few people.
There's an old saying that says, never doubt that a small and committed band of individuals can change the world.
Indeed, it is the only thing that has ever done so.
And if you can love the future enough to inspire people with the same flame of love, to see the same future, that future manifests.
If you are passionate enough and creative enough In your movie script, it goes from words on a page to Jennifer Lawrence shooting people with arrows.
And it goes in vividly creating the RK Gene Wars continuum in the movie Twilight, right?
So you can go from words on the page to people in the world.
The force of imagination Shakespeare has been dead for hundreds of years.
The force of Shakespeare's imagination still gets Benedict Cumberbatch up treading the boards every night as Hamlet.
And he's been translated into every known language, including some that are basically whistles and clicks.
And the force of Shakespeare's imagination has launched untold numbers of plays and Actors and careers and all of that.
And the guy who first...
Canadian who first dreamt up basketball is responsible for an unbelievably distracting series of shoe squeaks that drive you insane if you're watching the game and can't tune it out.
And the guy who invented hockey has enriched enormous numbers of dentists throughout the world.
So...
You know, there's that, if you build it, he will come.
If you build it, they will come.
Actually, if you build it, he will come.
If I build it, he will come.
That was a terrible movie.
I never even made it to the end.
It was just way too insane.
Like, if you want to do insane, you know, give me a German nightclub in 1928.
Don't give me a fucking Midwestern farmer's field.
I mean, that's just tragic, right?
Yeah.
But there is the truth in that, that the future is the shadow and the light cast by imagination in the present.
And if you can imagine the world that you want to live in with such vividity that it passes like electricity through your love of that vision from person to person, that is what the future will become.
If you go to Montana, you're off the grid.
You no longer have your finger on the scale of human justice.
You no longer have your shadow.
Guiding people towards the future.
You no longer have the love current that pulls people to a better world.
The natural state of humanity is decay, like the natural state of evolution is dysgenics, because the number of negative mutations vastly outweigh the number of positive or beneficial mutations in an organism, and the number of negative influences in society vastly outweigh the number of positive influences.
Because most people use ideas only to serve their own immediate ego and greed and to dominate in a world where everything is win-lose because we don't have philosophy.
We have states and armies and gods and heaven and hell.
And here's a piece of cake or I'm going to hit you.
And so the number of negative influences vastly outweighs the number of positive influences.
This is why societies tend towards Entropy, tend towards decay, tend towards collapse.
And there are a heroic few who see that and through sheer force of ferocity and will and commitment, seek to reverse the inevitable decays within society.
And I talk about status societies, superstitious societies, I think a free society will be much more sustainable, although a free society will breed laziness.
I don't know what the outcome of that is going to be.
I'd love to try.
I'd love to see how it goes.
I'm Committed to seeing how it goes.
But I see the future down to the last piece of dust floating in the air of the most northern hemisphere airplane hangar that can be imagined.
I see the future detailed.
When I was going through therapy, I had a dream.
I was flying over a city.
One of the few incredibly mind-blowingly realistic and vivid dreams.
And I was flying over the city.
I could see every hair on the head of every person.
I could see Every sparkle on every piece of turned quartz dust in the road.
I could see every pixel on every billboard.
You know how when you zoom in, it's all pointillism like papers used to be.
And I could see every letter on everyone's screen through the window.
I could see everything.
And the future to me is that clear.
What we're trying to build.
What we're trying to get to.
How happy and joyous the world could be.
In a way that can't be conceived of.
That can't really be conceived of.
I can imagine it.
I feel the electricity of where it could be.
I can't live there.
And I can't imagine what it would be like to live there.
Somebody born in a wheelchair, they can see people run, they can maybe imagine it, but they haven't had the visceral experience, so it remains an exercise in imagination.
And all cures are born out of a love of health and a hatred of disease.
All cures are born out of a love of health and a hatred of disease.
The love of health is not enough.
You really have to hate the disease as well.
And the curse of violence, particularly against children, I love the cure.
I'm living the cure.
I hate the disease.
I hate the immorality.
I hate the big ass bullies picking on helpless, independent children.
And through that passion, we can build a better world.
If you all take off to Montana, nobody's going to piss on your grave as a bad person.
No one's going to visit your grave.
It'll be like you were never here.
And there aren't enough of us doing this work that I don't care about that.
Wow.
Thank you so much, Stefan.
You are very welcome.
Thank you so much for calling in.
And thank you, everyone, so much for making this conversation possible.
It is an honor and a privilege and a startlingly, surprisingly joyous interaction every time we get together.
FreedomMadeRadio.com slash donate to help out this most essential conversation in the world, I believe.
