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May 27, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:04:53

3301 The Corruption of Science - Call In Show - May 25th, 2016

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	Hi everybody, Sven Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	Hope you're doing well.
	Had a bit of an emotional beginning or introduction to this call-in show.
	A singer I really like, a songwriter, a wordsmith, a lyricist, a troubadour that I really like.
	It's just revealed that he has terminal cancer and he's young, he's 52.
	And it hit me hard, so I wanted to share my thoughts and feelings about it.
	I hope you will find it interesting and motivating and inspiring, with any luck.
	But the first caller, ah, what do you do if you are a smart, young science graduate and you go to work in a lab and there's some bad stuff going on?
	To what degree has science become corrupted these days?
	We talked in great depth about that, a really, really interesting guy.
	And now the second caller is what is called indigenous people.
	You may know them as Native Americans or Native Canadians, Aboriginals and so on.
	The preferred term, as he told me, is indigenous people.
	Can they gain justice for the past wrongs they've suffered at the hands of the state, using the state?
	You may be forgiven for putting some money on guessing my answer, but I think that the route we took to get there was quite powerful, and it was a very, very productive, enjoyable, and I think powerful conversation that we had about injustices, and when is it time to let them go and live for the future?
	Freedomainradio.com slash donate.
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	Help us with the show.
	Sign up for a subscription.
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	Freedomainradio.com slash donate.
	Don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
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	Sundown in the Paris are the prairies.
	Wheat kings of all our treasures buried.
	And all you hear are the rusty breezes.
	Pushing around a wet-a-vein Jesus So, last night I couldn't sleep.
	I don't know if it's because of that magnificent bastard Milo's attack on social justice warriordom or what, but around 3 o'clock in the morning I rolled out of bed and I checked the news.
	And Gord Downie, lead singer-lyricist of the Canadian rock band The Tragically Hip, announced yesterday that he has terminal brain cancer.
	He's still going to do a tour this summer, and let me tell you, if you get a chance to see this band, this man, this force of nature alive, please do it.
	He got a very invasive and fast-growing form of brain cancer.
	It's inoperable.
	He has not responded to treatment, and his doctor has just told him that he is terminal.
	Based mother...
	And he is an incredible entertainer, singer.
	He tells stories.
	You look up on YouTube his Killer Whale speech from years back.
	And they have some amazing songs.
	A little uneven in the output, but, you know, check out...
	38 years old, check out Boots or Hearts.
	Great, great song.
	And a mournful, impassioned, dedicated, soul-searing baritone, which is unusual.
	You know, all these damn tenors making it impossible for us baritones to get a note across without straining ourselves.
	And...
	He was diagnosed with the cancer in December.
	He's gone surgery, done chemo, done radiation.
	And he has the diagnosis.
	He is one of Canada's greatest songwriters.
	And just the song that I started off, obviously I can't do the song justice, but that's a great line and it says, The walls aligned, all yellow, gray, and sinister, hung with pictures of our parents' prime ministers.
	And that's true.
	In high school, there were all these pictures of our parents' prime ministers, and it's just those little details and connections that the man was able to bring across to the audience.
	He was, um, is, I don't know if it's past tense, He is able to encapsulate and concentrate and reflect back details and essences of what it is like to live in Canada and what it is like to have the history and the challenges and the nature.
	The nature is pervasive throughout his lyrics and the despair as well.
	And then that song, Weed Kings, which is an incredible song.
	He sings...
	Because it's about a man who was wrongly convicted of murder.
	20 years for nothing, well, that's nothing new.
	Besides, no one's interested in something you didn't do.
	And that's true.
	The man is, barring divine intervention, the man is not long for the world.
	And I am...
	I'm amazingly impressed with the degree to which this band had been together for 30 years.
	They met in high school and they've been doing the whole thing.
	They tour relentlessly.
	13 studio albums.
	He did three solo albums.
	He wrote a book of poetry, maybe more than one, but the one I remember, it says, diet on the road or something like that.
	If you're on the road, what do you consume?
	And the poem was three words, beer and gum.
	So maybe he didn't live the healthiest.
	I don't know.
	But that commitment, that commitment to getting a connection with the audience, that commitment to concentrating and risking and going to the edge of what you're capable of in order to connect to the audience, I try in my own small way to emulate this.
	There are certain people like, My gods are singers and philosophers.
	That is my twin pantheism.
	And I've always...
	Who doesn't go to a concert and at least think about being up there?
	Freddie Mercury, Live Aid, whoever.
	Sting, Secret Policeman's Other Balls.
	I shall be released.
	You've got to listen to that.
	Or Sting's Message in a Bottle, which he does acoustically.
	Beautiful.
	But...
	There's a phase, you know, I know a lot of younger people listen to this, and I'm glad that you do, but there's a phase, you know, when you're young.
	At least for me, there are some deaths.
	Three in particular come to mind.
	I had a friend.
	I first met a gentle, wonderful, deep, resonant soul that I first met when I came to Canada, in Toronto.
	First I lived in Whitby, then came to Toronto.
	And I mentioned before, like, I just, you know, feel like I'm reaching with robot arms into a amber woven past and pulling someone back to life for a moment to live forever as Gordon Downey lives in his songs.
	We'll live forever.
	But this Mark, his name was, a great, great kid.
	We were the same age, and while the other kids were playing Let's Punch the Girls in the Groin, we would walk in sort of Brownian motion patterns around the playground, just talking about everything.
	Everything that we could think of, everything that came to mind.
	The kid was an incredible conversationalist.
	And if you spent a lot of time around kids, you'll know how rare it is to find a great conversationalist who's a kid.
	Even adults, for that matter.
	And didn't come to school one day.
	Because he didn't wake up.
	He had a congenital heart defect.
	Nobody knew about it.
	He died in his sleep.
	Heartbreaking.
	That this was the only connection that I made with friends, and it took a long time to make another at that time.
	And then a guy named Glenn had a degenerative disease, went from a walking kid to a wheelchair to a grave.
	And another friend of mine, a dangerous, impulsive young man, died in a motorcycle accident.
	Beheaded.
	So there are some young deaths from impulsiveness, from accidents, from diseases that, or disorders that don't promote the attainment of adulthood.
	And then there's like this long period where nobody dies, like 20 to 50.
	Nobody dies.
	And then it starts.
	You know, a friend of mine, a guy I worked with many years ago, he was much older than me, said, oh, your 40s, it's about teeth problems and your parents getting sick.
	And I guess late 40s, early 50s is when people start to drop off.
	I guess the mortality begins to increase and so on.
	And when you have a talent for language, for singing, for communicating, for fronting, A band, which is...
	I mean, the amount of...
	The alignment of the talent planets that needs to come together to be a great frontman of a band is something that is...
	I mean, this is why they don't fire them, unless they're complete jerks.
	They don't fire them, because it's so rare to find somebody who can connect with the audience to that degree.
	And...
	Gord Downey...
	I don't know.
	It's tough for rock stars to go bald.
	It's fine for YouTubers.
	But it's tough for rock stars to go bald.
	And he handled it, I guess, with better grace than the edge from U2. But...
	What I would suggest...
	And we're going to talk about this in the show because I know the questions that are coming up.
	But what I would suggest is listen to the band's music.
	Listen to the man...
	The passion, the mournfulness, the intensity, the concentration of energy that he brings to both his live performances and to his studio albums is nothing short of cosmic and astonishing.
	You know, there are certain concentrations of talent that strike me almost as supernatural in their intensity, and that is something that I... Really recommend that you pursue.
	And...
	I mean, it struck me, of course, you know, for those who don't know, you can see the scar on my neck.
	I'm a cancer survivor myself, lymphoma, a couple of years.
	And it just reminded me, you know, you never know, right?
	Cancer can sometimes be a spear you throw away, and sometimes it can be a boomerang that cometh back.
	And it reminded me, as I hope this mortality of people...
	You have a connection but that you care about.
	I hope that it reminds us that we do not know how many days we have.
	We do not know when that final door is going to close up on a history and all our free will and all of our animation and all of our choices and all of our decisions and all of our commitments will then be frozen in time, immovable, save for the slow shifting of degrading memory.
	Record what you can.
	Pursue your passions.
	Connect with the world.
	Fight the good fight.
	Defy evil.
	Shine.
	Incandescently.
	As best you can.
	And it doesn't matter what field it's in.
	But it does matter That we leave something that accumulates over time.
	Many years ago, I watched home movies of someone I knew.
	And there was some aunt smoking away in the background of some home movie.
	I think it was from the 70s or something.
	I said, oh, who's that?
	And my friend said, oh, it's some great aunt, I think.
	I said, oh, what was her name?
	And she said, I'm trying to think.
	I'm trying to think.
	Don't be that person.
	If there's anything you can do to avoid it, don't be that person.
	Don't be the person who's like a little thumbprint in the back of a Degas painting.
	Crowd in distance.
	Little thumbprint.
	Of nothing in absence.
	Of compliance.
	Of conformity.
	Of forgottenness.
	Be like some of the wildest flowers that forget me nuts.
	Be something wild.
	Be something extravagant.
	Be something passionate.
	Be something dedicated.
	Be something with a purpose.
	Be something that leaves the world brighter and deeper.
	And richer.
	Then you found it.
	It doesn't have to be public.
	It can be among the people that you know.
	Be a truth-teller.
	Be a fact-bringer.
	Be a resounding bell of empirical reflection.
	Be something that the wandering mind of people bump up against and recoil from and awaken through contact.
	Be like one of those electrified bumpers in a pinball game.
	Bing!
	And people wonder.
	They are confused.
	They are desperate.
	They are frightened.
	be someone they can recoil from and who can wake from They may, like all startled and woken sleepers, through the air horn of simple facts, they may be startled, they may dislike you, they may have problems with you, they may never be right again with you.
	But all of that is better than sleepwalking your way into an old movie Where people forget your name in 10 or 15 years.
	And they say, that great aunt.
	I can't remember her name.
	Never said much.
	Nice.
	Always gave me the same kind of presence.
	Left life like a javelin dropped from a plane into a clear pond.
	Bloop!
	And gone.
	So, Gord, I am incredibly sorry for your diagnosis.
	I am sorry of the music.
	That we will not get to hear from that golden, aching throat.
	But I will tell you this.
	I will tell you this, Gord.
	While there are ears to listen and hearts to love and thirst for depth and clarity and beauty, Gord Downie.
	You will never die.
	All right.
	Let's move on with the call.
	All right.
	Well, up first is Joe.
	And Joe wrote a pretty long message about how great science is, how it can never be corrupted, and how everything is perfect within that sphere.
	Joe's going to read the email that he sent to me to start off the call.
	So welcome to the show, Joe.
	Hey, how's it going?
	It's going all right, Joe.
	How are you doing?
	I'm fine, thank you.
	Can you hear me well?
	Yes, perfectly.
	Thank you.
	Okay.
	Just let me know if at any time my sound is a bit off and I'll fix it.
	So my email.
	So I'm a 24-year-old graduate student in medicinal chemistry slash chemical biology.
	I have been admitted to various different schools.
	I had multiple offers from individual labs upon finishing my undergrad.
	I eventually made the best decision I could with the information that had been made available to me at the time and I picked a specific lab that seemed to have copious amounts of both money and publications.
	The reason I chose this lab was that it seemed to be the best place to propel my career forward despite it being almost 5,000 kilometers away from my home, my family and my friends.
	As I was gearing up for the long and grueling five years that were to come, I saw the lab I had chosen for what it really was.
	The reason this particular lab had so much money and fame was because the professor was forging his results and presented these erroneous results to both private and public funding organizations In an attempt to gather more money for himself.
	Worse still, when graduate students, postdocs or lab techs brought the non-consistent data to his attention, he simply would brush them off and tell them to hide the information.
	It even got so bad that the professor fired a couple of postdocs and graduate students because he thought they weren't going along with his manipulated data.
	This professor is more concerned in being the rock star of the university and the celebrity of the city than he is in being an honest scientist in the pursuit of truth.
	Sadly, I think this attitude is pervasive in the minds of many of my colleagues.
	I think this is so because our society has a tendency to view scientists as the new priests and science as a new god, as you have precisely pointed out.
	In short, I have two questions that I was hoping you'd help me answer.
	Firstly, How can I, as an individual up-and-coming scientist, help prevent the forging and manipulation of data from happening within the scientific community, but particularly in my own field of medicinal chemistry?
	And secondly, how can I play a part in de-priestifying scientists and help bring this careerism, which can often end up with a lot of innocent people suffering, to a halt?
	So that was my email.
	I'd just like to add that I have since left that lab and I moved to a different lab in the department.
	So as I read this now, I realized I hadn't told you that, but that's essentially where I am now.
	So I'm in the new lab, but with this sort of wound, I guess, the scar, you know, that you come in all fresh-faced thinking, I just want to learn me some chemistry.
	And you kind of get slapped in the face and there's a big shock.
	Anyway, I'm just looking for some help here.
	Right, right.
	The data that you say was being faked was to do with obviously some degree of medical cures or approaches to medical illnesses, right?
	Yeah, so actually I think this is very interesting.
	No, no, I don't.
	Sorry, I just don't want to get into details about it.
	I just want people to understand that Yes, yes it is.
	To my way of thinking, this can be fatal for people, right?
	I mean, if you fake results about that which cures people, then they will take pseudo-cures and not pursue potentially better cures, so this couldn't get people killed.
	Absolutely, absolutely.
	And it's like saying, you know, We're going to cure your disease, so drink some bleach, I guarantee your disease is going to die.
	Yeah.
	I think that's...
	So the kind of person who would choose fame and money at the expense of people's survival is a shocking...
	It's a shocking state of a personality, to put it mildly.
	Yeah, you're right.
	Absolutely.
	Now...
	Where was the funding coming from?
	Was it coming from government?
	Was it coming from private agencies?
	How was it possible that there was not quality control and independent verification of such important data?
	So the first question, I think it both comes from government.
	So the country where I'm at, the government has specific boards, like science boards, science and engineering, I guess, councils, where they write a grant and he gets approved.
	But most of those grants are based on preliminary data, you know, or, oh, This is where we'll take the research based on what we've seen.
	We hope this will happen, so give us money.
	Now, there's very little in terms of making sure that you use that money for what you actually said you were going to.
	But that's the government.
	And then there's also private organizations.
	So if you're working on specific disease X, and this guy is...
	You know, he goes to societies that say we raise money for disease X, or he goes to really rich people in the neighborhood, I guess, in the city.
	And it's like, oh, by the way, look at how good this drug is killing this disease.
	Give me your money because I need your money to push it into clinical trials or Well, and there is, of course, I mean, I know this from my own support of cancer research, but there is, you know, people who have survived an illness obviously very interested in finding a cure for its potential recurrence.
	And also, if, you know, if you just buried your wife or your husband or, as Joe Biden tragically had to do, his son from some felled disease— You are emotionally very vulnerable to exploitation from people who claim a couple of bucks to a cure, right?
	Well, absolutely.
	And I think the tough part, too, is...
	So this guy, he has what the British call the gift of the gab.
	So he's a very good salesperson.
	He's a relatively good-looking young guy, comes up to you, flexes his muscles a bit, winks at you with his big blue eyes and says...
	I'm going to help cure this disease X and oh wow you're so smart take my money I think that plays a huge aspect to be honest that this guy is a young guy with a I think he's from somewhere where they have an accent somewhere in the British Isles and really takes advantage of people's vulnerability and There's
	willingness to give to a noble cause.
	I want this disease X done because my loved one had it and passed away or fought it valiantly and survived.
	Well, especially, of course, now that the link between dread diseases and genetics is...
	Fairly well established.
	People who like, well, my father died of this disease.
	He was, you know, he had me when he...
	I got 30 years, right?
	My father died of this disease, which means that I may be more likely to get this disease.
	So if you bury your parent and you carry the genes, potentially, you are also vulnerable for fear of that illness and maybe more keen to give money for a cure.
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	And see, this guy, he...
	You know, he goes after the children as well.
	Oh, you know, yeah, your grandfather had it.
	It's possible that your father has it, you have it, and even your child.
	And then obviously that freaks people out.
	And he shows this data, and they just cough up money, and the university just...
	Sorry, I got a bit of a cold, so I apologize.
	I can cure that for you.
	I've got some data.
	We'll arrange this afterwards.
	It's mostly prayer, but it's really, really effective.
	Are you flexing right now, Steph?
	Please tell me you're flexing.
	Wait!
	Blue eyes!
	Look into my blue eyes.
	You know, I just had the eyedrops which widened up so you can photograph the back of your eye.
	I should totally do a show with those.
	See if anybody noticed.
	Bambi saucer eyes or something.
	I look like I'm Elsa.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	That's okay.
	I feel better already.
	So, the fact that he brings in so much...
	I'm talking about millions of dollars.
	Millions and millions of dollars to this...
	Satellite campus, kind of, nothing really going else for it, so I think there's people willing to look the other way, I suppose, because they say, oh, you know, his drugs aren't in clinical trials yet, he's pushing, that's why he needs all this money, but hey, this is good money for our publicity, and he's a scientist, and he's a good-looking guy, and whatever.
	And it leaves me really...
	Shocked, I guess.
	To expose my naivety, it left me just flabbergasted.
	Look, I mean, science...
	is largely a government program.
	Oh, absolutely.
	And whenever the government touches anything, it turns into crap and corruption and waste and dysfunction and exploitation.
	And it tends to promote shallow, self-confident people who are generally pretty to positions of influence.
	And there is science itself.
	I love science.
	Science is the coolest thing ever outside of the free market.
	But it's a government program.
	Comparing science as it stands now to science as it should be is like comparing the welfare state to charity.
	I mean, it's not the same.
	And there has been an enormous amount of corruption in science.
	The pursuit of money.
	And because in the free market, If you make a claim, hey, we made $5 million this year.
	Well, you've got accountants, you've got shareholders, you've got regulators, you've got a whole bunch of checks and balances.
	You have a board, usually.
	You have a whole bunch of checks and balances where you have to verify your actual information.
	And still, there can be corruption.
	But when there's no person who benefits financially from the exposure of corruption...
	Corruption flourishes and science as it stands, who financially benefits from the exposure of corruption?
	Yeah, nobody.
	Nobody!
	Because, you know, I put forward skepticism about various scientific positions, and people are like, oh, well, you know, if you can disprove all these scientists, you'll be famous!
	I don't think that's how it works, because the whole peer review process as well is, you know, it turns science into...
	The whole government process in science turns science into like a factory under Stalin.
	You can just make up whatever numbers.
	It's not anything real.
	There's nothing market-driven.
	There's nothing limited.
	There's no multiplicity of warring interests, which is the only way to minimize corruption.
	Sorry, you were going to say.
	No, no, absolutely.
	It's so true.
	And you know what's the most terrifying part about it is that, you know, Well, the whistleblowers, who I suppose in this case would be me, I'm just some lowly graduate student.
	What am I going to do to come up against some professor with millions of dollars in funding and all these people who are invested in just milking the taxpayers for everything they've got to just further their, you know, what they call science, which is really just mental masturbation.
	Oh no, no, that really is an insult to masturbation.
	No, that really, masturbation, unless I guess you're flying a plane while doing it, generally doesn't get many people killed.
	Yeah, well, this is true.
	Masturbation would be a net positive relative to what's going on here.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Sorry, I'm trying to think of a way to phrase this.
	The The extent of the injustice, it paralyzes me just to look at this and just be in shock of how these people can do these things, manipulate to get More money and, oh, look at me, I'm the rock star.
	Oh, no, people, look, when it comes to money and no accountability, there's no limit to that.
	I mean, I know it's a tough thing for a young man like yourself to see up close and personal.
	But when people have virtually no accountability and virtually unlimited funds based upon a particular story to be told...
	They'll tell it.
	Look, just think of the advertising industry, right?
	So the advertising industry, let's say that your job is to promote Brand X.
	And let's say you don't even particularly like Brand X.
	Let's say it's not that great for people.
	Let's say it cleans copper pennies overnight or something like that.
	But you will create a very compelling story about how cool, how sexy, how hip, how fun Brand X is.
	Maybe you'll even put people's names on the bottles.
	I don't know.
	But so advertisers will tell wonderful stories for money.
	Oh, yeah.
	And certain religious figures will tell wonderful stories for money.
	Being paid for storytelling is one of the oldest human occupations, probably the second oldest human occupation, is to tell stories for money.
	And there's a long, illustrious, somewhat beneficial and somewhat evil tradition of people who tell stories for money, money.
	Marxists tell stories for money and power.
	They tell stories about exploitation.
	Social justice warriors tell stories about exploitation and white privilege and you name it for money.
	Black Lives Matters, people do the same thing.
	People will tell and narrate and create very compelling stories In return for money.
	Because stories create comprehensibility.
	Stories give people hope.
	Stories give people a sense of connection and purpose.
	And people will pay for that.
	Because it's a lot easier to get sucked into somebody else's narrative and pay them for the privilege of dragging you along behind their craziness like a water skier behind an outboard than it is to actually do the challenging work of Self-actualization.
	Yeah.
	And becoming not just a story that you're part of, but an identity you've achieved.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	And I think it's exacerbated by the fact that, you know, if someone told a story but nobody was listening, you know, it does less damage than if 100 people listen to it and take it to heart.
	And I think that specifically because You know, the way you phrased it was so perfect, that scientists are the new priests that we look to, you know, like back in the old day.
	Oh, is it going to rain?
	Oh, I don't know.
	Shake a stick at the cloud.
	Oh, you know, the gods tell me it's going to rain.
	And you have to pay, you know, half a farm for that information.
	I think that because they have a platform to speak of, like people idolize them and hold them up, you know, in their minds, that It is prime ground for rampant corruption.
	Well, and of course priests would give you a sense of safety in the face of death.
	Yeah.
	If you're going to die, you'll go to heaven.
	You'll be reunited with your relatives.
	You'll live forever in the arms of God and so on.
	And so priests would reduce your anxiety around death in return for money.
	And not just money.
	I mean, a lot of people genuinely in the priesthood believed these perspectives.
	And scientists, you know, if you're This is why I started with this, right?
	If your father died of some illness and you've got anxiety about it, well, you give money to the scientist who's going to promise you a cure or promise to work on a cure, and that reduces your anxiety in the face of death.
	But both are just the illusion of control, if the science is not rigorous.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Let me give you some facts, and I'm sure you know this, but for the listenership and monstership as a whole, and we'll put links to this.
	So, I mean, the pharmaceutical industry with regards to psychiatrists, the amount of corruption there is, in my view, completely off the charts.
	And we've had Robert Whitaker on this show twice to talk about it, so you can do a search for that.
	But according to this writer...
	Again, we'll put the link to it.
	It says, there are increasing concerns these days about scientific misconduct.
	Hundreds of papers are being pulled from the scientific record for falsified data, for plagiarism, and for a variety of other reasons that are often never explained.
	Sometimes it's an honest mistake, but it is estimated that 70% of the retractions are based on some form of scientific misconduct.
	Oh, yeah.
	And that is important.
	The retraction watch, you can look it up.
	Every day there are one or two new examples of research that has been quietly withdrawn, right?
	Because it comes out in a fanfare and it disappears in a midnight fog.
	And that is pretty important.
	It, of course, is god-awfully worse in the softer sciences.
	I mean, it's bad enough in the hard sciences.
	But...
	Somebody who was, you know, a group that was curious took a bunch of psychology studies that were sort of, I think, big and leading in the field and so on, and tried to reproduce them.
	And over half of them failed to be reproducible.
	Only 39 of the 100 replication attempts were successful.
	39 out of 100.
	39 out of 100.
	97% of the original studies found a significant effect.
	Only 36% of replication studies found significant results.
	Now, you could keep going and that number would probably go down.
	As you know, there's some coincidences from the 97 that show up in the 36 and it would decay from there.
	Now, this is a mature human discipline.
	Psychology.
	Oh, it's got statistics.
	It's got peer review.
	It's got academic studies.
	Boards that are supposed to approve and disapprove of certain things.
	There's a lot of things that are supposed to be there to keep corruption out of these kinds of things, right?
	And 39% success rate.
	That is appalling.
	Terrifying.
	Yeah, it's a...
	And you know...
	Especially, I guess, in this field, when you're making drugs, especially drugs against diseases that people have a particular soft spot to, like you were saying.
	It's...
	it's it's just Scientists aren't these fluffy angels that never lie.
	And I honestly have felt that going through that experience in that previous lab, in the first lab where I first landed, has taught me to look So intensely at the details and think critically about everything, the way they're presenting data.
	What are their controls?
	What haven't they used?
	Like you were saying, what was it?
	37%?
	36%.
	I didn't realize it was that low, but I do know that sometimes when I'm reading a paper, okay, they took A and B under these conditions to make C. It's published in one of the top journals.
	Okay, I want to do it myself.
	I do it, and I try it 50 different times, and it doesn't work.
	It's like, well...
	I don't know.
	Maybe I do need to pay a priest to shake a stick at my round bottom because it's not working out for me.
	Hey, you know who's another pretty guy?
	Dr.
	Oz.
	Yeah.
	Ever heard of this dude?
	Yeah.
	This is not Wizard of Oz, no?
	No.
	Dr.
	Oz has got a show.
	It goes in like 118 countries and millions of people watch it.
	This is from the LA Times, Los Angeles Times by Karen Kaplan.
	She writes, what do real-world doctors have to say about the advice dispensed on the Dr.
	Oz show?
	Well, less than one-third of it can be backed up by even modest medical evidence.
	If that sounds alarming, consider this.
	Nearly four in ten of the assertions made on the hit show appear to be made on the basis of no evidence at all.
	The researchers who took it upon themselves to fact-check Dr.
	Oz and his on-air guests were able to find legitimate studies related to another 11% of the recommendations made on the show.
	However, in these cases, the recommendations ran counter to the medical literature.
	You know, and I did a couple of, sorry, this sounds random, but I'll tie it back.
	I worked for the government in the ocean sciences.
	I was doing some marine chemistry with them.
	It wasn't quite to this extent, but everyone has this mind frame.
	It essentially goes something like this.
	This person...
	It gave us money to look at man-made, human-made climate change and how it's accelerating.
	You have to put the borders around your experiment, so to speak, so that it fits with the person who's giving us funding.
	I don't know.
	It...
	People respond to incentives.
	People will say to me, and I'm sorry to repeat this for those who've heard it before, I say, Steph, why don't you put ads in your show?
	It's because I love my audience.
	I care about my audience.
	I want to be in the business not of delivering your eyeballs to advertisers or your ears to advertisers.
	I want to be in the business of delivering philosophy to you.
	And as soon as advertisers come into the equation, I know enough about human beings to know that people respond to incentives.
	I am a human being.
	I will respond to incentives.
	I may fight it.
	I may say this.
	I may say that.
	But...
	If I no longer have a diffuse set of anonymous donors to this show, but instead a concentrated set of economically self-interested advertisers, my focus is going to shift to them.
	And I don't know the degree to which I'll just do...
	Like, I simply couldn't.
	Because the moment the question comes up in your head, well, if I say this, is it going to upset an advertiser?
	You have a different show.
	Absolutely.
	You have a different show.
	Who pays the piper, calls the tune.
	This used to be very well known.
	And now it's somehow not, because people think that somehow the dispensation of government cash is somehow different from the dispensation of corporate cash.
	And it's true.
	It is different.
	It's worse.
	Because with corporate cash, at least there has to be some kind of outcome.
	And as far as, you know, I'll just finish off with this Dr.
	Oz thing, because a bunch of researchers randomly selected 80 people.
	Of these recommendations from each show and look to see what evidence, if any, could back them up.
	Only 21% of the recommendations on the Dr.
	Oz show could be supported by what the researchers considered believable evidence.
	Another 11% was supported by somewhat believable evidence.
	There's another show called The Doctors.
	32.5% was supported by believable evidence.
	Another 20% were backed by somewhat believable evidence.
	Good or so-so evidence contradicted 11% of the claims made on Dr.
	Ars and 13% of the claims made on the doctors.
	For both shows combined, 40% of the recommendations mentioned a specific benefit of the intervention being touted.
	The size of the benefit was discussed in fewer than 20% of cases.
	Possible harms or side effects came up less than 10% of the time and potential conflicts of interest were mentioned in less than 1%.
	Of the cases.
	The researchers, sorry, the whole exercise left the researchers to ponder, quote, whether we should expect medical talk shows to provide more than entertainment.
	Entertainment.
	That's brutal.
	Well, you know, and of course this stuff was published and his show is, as far as I understand, it's still running.
	In the same way that if prayer doesn't work, people still go to church because it's not about prayer.
	It's about having a narrative that has a positive emotional response for you.
	Yeah.
	So you're not...
	You are not...
	I mean, you're not far off when you talk about this kind of corruption.
	Yeah, I mean, I guess it really...
	Puts light on what it honestly means to be an academic if you want to be a successful academic.
	I had it in my mind, oh, I want to be a professor.
	I want to have my own lab.
	I want...
	You know what's going to happen then, right?
	Tell me.
	Well, you're going to be offered the same deal?
	With the same bribery, so to speak?
	With the same...
	We can make or break you.
	I mean, if you become successful as a scientist, my guess is, well, you are going to be offered the same incentives and punishments as everyone else is offered and that just about everyone else falls for.
	But you will be heavily invested in your career and you'll have kids and you'll be married and you'll have mortgage payments and you'll have car payments and you'll want to go to Hawaii and it'll be like, well...
	I can find some way to justify this at some level in my own mind.
	So sure, I'm willing to go along.
	You know, I'll take this little bit of money, I'll give them what they want, and I'll use all this money for great good.
	Just around the corner.
	I mean, the path to corruption is usually not being pushed off a cliff, right?
	It's a slippery slope.
	A little bit here and there, a little bit here and there.
	You know, to take an extreme example, when they train torturers, they don't just...
	Bring some guy in, hand him some pliers and put them over someone.
	Right?
	They have them as a guard stationed down at the end of the hallway.
	They can barely hear anything.
	And then they move them up the hallway a little bit.
	And then they have them guard outside the door.
	And then they have them guard inside the door.
	And then they say, listen, can you pass me the pliers?
	And then don't touch him, just clean him down.
	And then can you just hold this while I use the pliers?
	And then eventually, can you just do the pliers?
	And then the torture leaves and this guy, step by step by step, finds himself standing over some squirming, half-ragged, broken, smashed up vestige of a human being that looks like an extra out of the Doom franchise and wondered how he got there.
	Well, how do you get there?
	The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and the journey to the destruction of a human soul always occurs in increments.
	So how would you even get to the position of having a lab in a corrupt environment?
	I'm not saying it's all corrupt, obviously.
	But that potential is there.
	Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
	And I guess now that you mention it, it brings forth to mind, I was watching a documentary on Netflix about the Colombian drug lords, and they would always tell them, you know, lead or silver.
	Like, either you take the bribe, or I'm gonna kill you and kill all your family.
	Like, it's ridiculous.
	Yeah, that silver starts to look pretty good, right?
	And also, you know, the thing is that you know that if you take a stand...
	My career in science is over.
	Well, no, just to take the Mexican drug laws, for example.
	Let's say that you say, nope, I'm going to take a stand, and maybe you don't get killed.
	Maybe your family doesn't get killed.
	What have you changed?
	What have you changed?
	What will change if you take a stand?
	And that is one of the great challenges, because it really becomes tough.
	To say, well, I want to put my life, my family in danger, or I can get all this comfortable money, and what's going to change either way?
	Like I go round and round and round in my head when it comes to corruption.
	Ooh, it's a merry-go-round of doom.
	Drives me crazy.
	Ah, the people in Venezuela, they voted these socialists in, so they're responsible.
	Well, but they were trained by all these socialists, probably teachers and all this kind of stuff, and they don't know any better.
	And, you know, one of Hillary Clinton's advisors has got a Nobel Prize in economics and was very keen on socialism.
	So are you some kid from the back alley of Caracas being told to vote for socialists by a Nobel Prize winning economist?
	You're going to say, no, I won't because X... And then I say, well, you know, the IQ is kind of lower in that country, whether environmental or genetic, who knows, doesn't really matter.
	The fact is that it is.
	So maybe they're not capable of making better choices, but they are capable of making better choices if they're taught well, but they're taught badly.
	I mean, just go round and round.
	Yeah.
	Just go round and round.
	You can't solve it, right?
	And of course, you could say, well, the adults who voted for it and avoided facts and were greedy and let their greed run away with them wanted something for nothing.
	Okay, then they can be punished.
	But what about the people who voted against this stuff?
	And what about their kids?
	And right, they're not responsible.
	Anyway.
	You don't need a tour of that particular labyrinth of my brain, but it's there.
	Yeah, and I guess when I'm faced...
	And that's exactly it, I guess.
	It's that helplessness, or that seemingly helplessness, where I look at all this and I'm like, this is fucked up.
	And there's nothing I... Okay, but listen, man.
	How many people have contributed enormously to science without being part of the scientific establishment?
	I'm thinking of some guy who worked in a patent office.
	Help me out.
	Einstein.
	Oh, Albert Einstein?
	General theory of relativity developed while he worked in a patent office, right?
	Right, right.
	Arguably, I would say that Ayn Rand contributed an enormous amount to philosophical discussions in the 20th century, even into the 21st century, While not being part of the professional academic-based philosophical Ivy League club.
	Yeah.
	Because there is...
	There's this mistake that we make a lot, which is to conflate the state with the thing.
	And...
	You know, people say, well, who's gonna build the roads without the state?
	Well, people build the roads.
	You don't need the state for that.
	And people say, well, who's gonna help the poor?
	Well, people help the poor.
	This idea that the state manifestation of the thing is somehow synonymous with the thing itself is a huge mistake.
	The state manifestation of science is not science.
	It's not science.
	It's not the same as science, right?
	So there's massive contributions people can make to science without being in the science state industry, right?
	The industrial state science complex.
	Yeah, I see what you mean.
	Because you think, well, if I want to be a scientist, well...
	What do I have to do?
	I have to become part of the state science thing, right?
	Yeah.
	Well, you don't.
	If I want to make an impact, I still get messages from people who are like, Dude, you totally should have been a philosophy professor.
	Right.
	Yeah, because then I could maybe train a thousand people my whole career in philosophy.
	Right.
	As opposed to what I think I'm doing now, which is at least reaching a lot more people than I ever could have as a scientist.
	So you say, oh, well, philosophy, that's an academic discipline.
	You've got to get a PhD.
	Well, why?
	What if you could do science without the state?
	without the funding.
	Where would that funding come from?
	I'm sorry.
	Well, where does my funding come from?
	That's right.
	I invite listeners to my house and sell their kidneys on eBay.
	Come to my house.
	We're having kidneys for dinner.
	No, where does my funding come from?
	It comes from people who care about what I'm doing.
	freedomainradio.com slash donate for those who want to help out.
	It's crowdfunding, crowdsourcing.
	Right.
	With the internet now.
	Kickstarter, you name it.
	With the internet now.
	Look, if Anita Sarkeesian can get money for not producing videos, I'm sure you can get money for producing cures.
	Right.
	That makes sense?
	That makes a lot of sense?
	You know, the internet now has given us the remarkable...
	Capacity to really go outside of ordinary structures.
	And this idea that we have to automatically plug ourselves into institutions that were all developed prior to the internet is not a rational or empirical approach to the problem of how to get money for what you love.
	Right?
	I mean, you know, think tanks, right?
	Yeah.
	Think tanks where they produce all of the papers, they produce all of these arguments, and sometimes they produce more populist type of articles.
	Well, I've not done the study, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that it's fairly possible to predict the position of a think tank based upon the position of its major donors.
	What do you think?
	Do you think that would be a testable hypothesis?
	Oh, absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	Because if you're really into open borders, you are not going to fund our good friends at the Center for the Studies of Immigration.
	If you are really anti-Trump, you are not going to be funding a lot of people who say would debunk the lies and myths told about Donald Trump, right?
	If you want to do it, God, can you imagine doing it where you're facing the donors, your actual individual people who've given you money?
	Imagine doing that rather than some blood-stained, corrupt, ring-based, smoky, wallet, acidic, soul-eating government cash and all of the mess that comes with it.
	Why not just go straight to the people?
	You know, the movie Angry Birds couldn't find any Hollywood backing.
	They raised the money themselves, which is why the movie looks like the way it does, rather than what Hollywood would have turned it into, which would have been a kumbaya, we can all get along, everybody hug together, all at once, do-si-do.
	And you're calling into a show, I don't take donor money?
	It's so funny.
	I did this review of Doom, like, I bet he got paid for this.
	I didn't.
	It's just funny.
	He's a shill for ha-ha.
	It's like, nope.
	I may be wrong, but I ain't a shill.
	But just you got to think outside the box.
	You don't have to take the world that was handed to our forefathers and say, well, we got to plug ourselves into that because ha-ha, right?
	Yeah.
	Maybe you won't get millions of dollars right away, but I bet you, you do some crowdfunding thing and you come up with some significant success, you can start to divert money away from all that other crap, right?
	Yeah.
	Well, to be honest, I'm a little embarrassed.
	I didn't think it through.
	You know, and I understand that.
	Listen, way back at the beginning of the show, I did mull over whether to sell podcasts, whether to sell books.
	And I did sell my books for a short time.
	And then I decided not to for a variety of reasons.
	So I understand this.
	The freemium idea or the idea of crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, and so on.
	People like to give money for what they care about and what they believe in.
	They really do.
	And I think, I think that you will have a better, happier, more effective, more powerful, more honest, less corruptible career by going straight to the people.
	And isn't that exciting to have at least that as a possibility?
	And you can be your own boss.
	You don't have to be in charge.
	You don't have to have someone in charge of you telling you what to do, what to focus on.
	You don't have a lot of grant paperwork to fill out.
	Oh, God, right?
	You don't have to kiss babies and press the flesh while you go to the people who deliver the funding and you don't have to follow their agendas and freedom, right?
	That's the way you want to live, baby.
	That's the way you want to live.
	Yeah.
	To be honest, I was speechless because I never thought about it that way.
	As...
	Like I said, it's as embarrassing as it is, but it's, yeah, I guess because we're molded into thinking.
	Well, everybody wants to get you on the train track that leads you to subjugation.
	Oh, yeah.
	Look, this train hack, it's all downhill.
	We'll put you on the train track.
	We'll tell you what to do.
	Here's how to show up.
	Here's what to do.
	Follow this.
	Fill out this form.
	Do this experiment.
	Don't spill that Petri dish and we'll get him.
	Boom!
	You're on a train track.
	But a train track only ever leads you where other people have built it to go.
	When you get on someone's train track, you surrender autonomy, obviously.
	You're in a helicopter, you're in a car, you can go a bunch of different places.
	You're in a train track, you go one place, which is wherever they built the train track to go.
	Now, it's easy.
	Look at that.
	I don't have to be an entrepreneur.
	I'm just going to plug myself in.
	Like the 11th caboose on a CN train.
	I'm on a train track.
	And that's tempting.
	I understand that.
	But...
	And look, I can guarantee you this, my friend.
	You are not the only person who's upset by corruption in science.
	You are not the only person who's chomping like a ferret in an overturned moldy aquarium to get out of whatever hellhole they're currently stuck in where they wake up every morning dreading to go to work because they can't figure out whether they should tell the truth and shame the devil.
	Or try to continue to plod along and pay off their student loans and be honest and have integrity later.
	Tomorrow never comes.
	Yeah.
	I mean, we're doing research into figuring out how to crowdfund research that nobody's doing.
	you You know, I'm dying to find out the prevalence of the warrior gene in populations other than whites and African Americans.
	Dying to find out, I mean, God, wouldn't that be fantastic?
	And there's research I'd like to do around unparenting versus discipline-based parenting versus peaceful parenting.
	I'd like some facts.
	We've got a whole list of the research projects we want to crowdfund at some point.
	Because we want some answers.
	So, yeah.
	Isn't that cool?
	Yeah.
	Life-changing, baby!
	That's why I'm half-singing everything, because I started the show with a song.
	No, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
	It's almost as if, yeah, I mean, It's been inculcated in us ever since I started my undergrad.
	Your professors are gods.
	You are lucky to get a whiff of their farts, let alone be working in their labs.
	And any good professor would not want that approach.
	That, to me, is grandiosity and narcissism.
	Yeah.
	People who want to be worshipped to that degree are not healthy and barely sane, in my humble opinion.
	Yeah, I would definitely agree with you.
	I mean, I hope that I've never, ever come across, just do what I say, because I'm right.
	I have the show and you don't.
	And so just obey.
	I mean, that would just be terrible, terrible, terrible.
	The whole point is to empower other people with the capacity to think, not to have them think like me.
	Because the moment you're thinking like me, you ain't thinking.
	And certainly to assume that I'm right about everything would be completely disastrous for everyone and everything involved.
	And yeah, of course, I mean, people who want that kind of...
	And they do have a ridiculous amount of power.
	They can fail you.
	They can pass you.
	They can recommend you.
	They can not recommend you.
	They can hire you as a TA. They can not hire you.
	It's kind of arbitrary.
	Because there's no market.
	Right?
	Like, I mean, if there's a market, then the manager has less arbitrary control over who he hires and promotes.
	Right?
	So if there's Take a silly example.
	If you're a restaurant owner, there's two waiters.
	One you really like, but is a bad waiter, and one you don't like, who's a great waiter, and the people love him and come just to interact with him.
	Who are you going to hire?
	Who are you going to keep if you've got a cut?
	Yeah, the guy you don't like who brings in the dough.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	You know, the number of...
	I mean, there are directors who hate working with certain actors, but they just know that those actors are able to open the film, so that's what's going to happen.
	But in academia, there's no market-driven, because the people are not paying more than a couple of points on their total education costs, right?
	Well, maybe it's different in the States, but this...
	Yeah, just jump the tracks, man.
	It is really, really liberating.
	It's alarming, of course, because, you know, government schools in particular are all designed to get you into the sense that you're just...
	A corpse on a conveyor belt.
	Dead meat on a rolling landscape.
	Runaway train.
	Never coming back.
	And so, you know, what is it with school?
	Well, you sit here, you move here, you move here.
	Now you stop interrupting with this.
	You've got to go now to work on this.
	And now it's time for your break.
	Go out.
	Even if you're still in the middle of working something, you might be in the middle of the game.
	Get the hell back in.
	Sit down here.
	Listen to this.
	I'm going to write this on the whiteboard.
	Now do this.
	Read this book tonight.
	Come back tomorrow.
	This test is on Friday.
	The fuck?
	Yeah.
	I mean, that's not being on the tracks, that's beating the soul out of people with a railway tie.
	Oh, it is so true.
	You know, when I was working, and this reminds me of a story, when I was working in one of the lives of my undergrad, there was a graduate student who had just finished her degree, and she told, you know, the prof, whom we were both working for at the time, Oh, you know, I have my place, my apartment, until the end of August, and at this point it was like April, I suppose.
	Can I stay on for a couple months just to finish a couple things, tie up loose ends and obviously I need to live so you can pay me.
	And he paid her for the first month and then told her that he wasn't happy with the results and that he wasn't going to pay her until the end of August.
	The only way that he would pay her was at the end of August and if she produced good results.
	And obviously, my friend, unfortunately, had to move back to her country of origin.
	Wait, wait.
	What does that mean, good results?
	That sounds a little sinister.
	Give me the results I need.
	Maybe I'll throw some shekels to you.
	Yeah.
	Well, that's basically it.
	It was like, we're looking at, you know, whether, like, we're trying to crystallize proteins.
	But it's black magic.
	It's really difficult.
	Nobody really knows how.
	Yeah.
	And he was like, well, unless you can get crystals of these different proteins, I'm not going to pay you.
	It was insane.
	And it really...
	That story came to mind when you were saying there's no, like, market for it, there's no accountability, this guy can pull this sort of stuff, screw this girl over, and nobody gives a- Now, imagine, but imagine this world instead, right?
	Imagine where, this is just off the top of my head, but imagine this, imagine the situation where it's the insurance companies who are paying the researchers to reduce the costs of treatment for particular illnesses.
	Ka-ching, ka-ching.
	Cash-based.
	Right?
	So if you can find a cheaper way to cure someone, that's great.
	Then the insurance company will fund your research and so on.
	Or if you can find a way to keep someone alive rather than having them die, then the insurance company doesn't have to pay out the life insurance for the death, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	So they're going to be all over you because they're giving you money in order to save themselves money.
	Cheaper treatments, no death payouts.
	So you damn well better have your data right.
	And if you don't, they'll sue the shit out of you.
	Breach of contract.
	Falsification.
	Fraud.
	Because they're giving you money in order to get money back.
	The problem is all this money is flowing to a bunch of scientists.
	Nobody's invested in getting the money back.
	Nobody's invested on making sure it was a good investment.
	But they love cocktail parties, and they don't mind pretty young doctors.
	Oh, yeah.
	And that is a sad reality.
	Yeah.
	We have Dr.
	Jim Penman.
	Doing tons of research, funding it and stuff.
	You can go to biohistory.org, the research slash the research, the dash research.
	Tons of people are doing this kind of stuff.
	And look, don't feel bad for not thinking about it.
	I mean, why would you?
	You've been on a train track since you were four years old.
	And now I'm saying, you don't have to be a train.
	I'm like, well, with no train tracks, I was thinking this won't.
	But that would be my suggestion.
	Now, you do have another question.
	Which I would like to discuss maybe briefly.
	Sure.
	You are in possession of information that can save lives, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Regarding your previous lab.
	Yeah, sure.
	I mean, if I don't say anything and this guy, for one reason or another, gets his drug into clinical trials, people are going to die.
	Okay, no, that's why I discussed the stakes at the beginning, because I wanted to circle back to this at the end.
	So this is a reality.
	And what you do about it, I mean, Everybody knows what you should do about it, and you know what you should do about it, how you go about it, I don't know.
	But I just really wanted to circle back, because I want you to be enthusiastic about the future and have an option other than sitting on these squalid train tracks to hell.
	But at the same time, you have been cursed with knowledge that can save lives.
	And what you do with that, I don't know.
	But I think if you do nothing with it, that's not good.
	Alright, so don't give me a plan, right?
	Because, I mean, that's a lot to ask.
	I just really wanted to circle back and mention that, that once you're in possession of that kind of information, rightly or wrongly, you do have some kind of obligation, and that is important.
	And it is dangerous work.
	It is dangerous work.
	To expose corruption.
	So if you can meet with someone who you can talk to in confidence, who's maybe had some experience with this before, who's blazed a trail with this kind of stuff, or maybe, you know, do a search for scientific corruption, and people who publish journals or maintain websites about this, I'm sure will speak with you off the record or privately about steps you could, there's tons of things that you could do.
	But if you are in possession of a knowledge of this kind of corruption, particularly where lives are at stake, I think something has to happen, even if it's anonymous, even if it's through a third party, even something, right?
	But I think something has to happen.
	Yeah, I totally agree with you.
	Yeah, and it's a certain responsibility that I suppose in my mind, you know, it's either academia or you're going to be a homeless person for the rest of your life.
	Right, and that's not much of a free will scenario.
	Yeah, that's right.
	Put it mildly.
	Yeah, yeah, and I guess that's kind of why it left me so paralyzed at the face of this great injustice because I was thinking, well, I could be a good guy and blow the whistle and talk to someone.
	Okay, but I'm going to be a homeless person for the rest of my life.
	You know, I mean, obviously it's a...
	It doesn't follow, but it's just...
	Yeah.
	Anyway, I'm rambling, but I agree with you.
	No, no, listen.
	One of the reasons that I wanted to move into philosophy is that I found in certain areas of business there was some challenges to my integrity, to put it as nicely as I can.
	And they were somewhat...
	Hard to take.
	And so it's one of the reasons why I wanted to branch out to a more sort of directly customer focused and crowdfunded situation.
	Crowdfunding is a beautiful, beautiful thing.
	I really shudder to think of what directions this show would have taken had it not been for my relentless or our relentless focus on satisfying the needs and preferences of you, the listener and the watcher.
	That's the gig.
	That's the goal.
	That is how I measure the success of what it is that I'm doing.
	Not theoretical breakthroughs.
	Those are fine.
	Those are great.
	But in terms of people actually changing their lives based upon virtues and values, That without us, they would not have found.
	And that is what makes it worthwhile.
	That is what makes it so powerful.
	And that's what makes it so compelling.
	And this is why people keep listening and why the show keeps growing.
	Yeah.
	All right.
	I don't want this to be an ad for myself.
	More so that, you know, this is an opportunity that you can also pursue and connect with.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Yeah, thanks.
	Lots to think about, for sure.
	Lots to do.
	Lots to do.
	Keep us posted on how it goes.
	I will, I will.
	And sorry, just as a side note, this is totally unrelated to what it was, but I listened, I remember there was a call-in show and the guy was saying, oh, women who don't, who stay at home and don't work or whatever, it was a Swedish fella, I don't really remember, and you made the case of, oh, you know, if you're such a retard, shouldn't parenting be so easy?
	Anyway, whatever.
	Yeah.
	It really solidified for me that parenting, basically that the government and their agendas and what they're pushing are not always the truth.
	So thanks for opening my eyes to that.
	You're welcome, and I hope that pays off if and when you choose to become a dad.
	And if you do, I'm sure you'll be great.
	Yeah, so thank you.
	Thank you so much for the talk, Steph.
	I appreciate it.
	It's my pleasure, my friend.
	Thank you so much for calling in, and very best of luck to you as you go forward.
	Thank you very much.
	I'll see you later.
	All right.
	All right, up next is Jesse.
	Jesse writes in and says, I'm 27 years old, half indigenous, and half Italian.
	My question is, to what effect can we morally hold the government accountable To the abuse native people have been subjected to in the past.
	What is the solution to our cultural problems, and is it moral to cut government social services programs designed to help impoverished natives after all the government damage?
	That's from Jesse.
	Well, hello Jesse, how you doing?
	Hello, how are you?
	I'm well, thank you.
	How are you?
	I'm doing pretty good.
	Alright.
	So, half Italian, half indigenous.
	Quite a witch's brew, I must say.
	I've not heard of that one before, but all right.
	And do you want to mention, for those who don't know this god-awful history of this attempted and forced assimilation that occurred, I assume that's what you're referring to when you're talking about your grandmother, do you want to help people to understand what the government did to the native populations back in the day?
	Okay.
	Well, let me just ask you a question, Steph, or give you a kind of line of reasoning.
	Imagine that the government comes in and takes your children away from you, And then puts them to their own schooling.
	And at that time, there was a lot about Christianity and teaching them to really get rid of their traditions and basically telling them that they're savages and they need to conform and assimilate.
	So if that happened to you and that breaks up your family, how would you react to it?
	What would be the best way to react to it?
	Well, so you're talking about the assimilation programs that were occurring, right?
	Residential schooling, yeah.
	So, yeah, young children would be ripped away from their families and put into 24-7 government schools, and they were attempted to...
	There was an attempt made to change them from historical indigenous cultures to general Christendom, and there was...
	You know, massive, massive amounts of abuse.
	I'm thinking in particular out in Newfoundland, I think it was, but there was significant amounts of abuse that were occurring with the amount of power that the government teachers had over the natives.
	Is that a fair way to summarize your understanding of it?
	Pretty much exactly, but It wasn't just the children who were oppressed.
	As I was saying, my grandmother's mother, my great-grandmother, She had her spouse chosen for her and he was a mountain ranger who actually had some kids with her and then kind of just said goodbye and had another family.
	And so my great-grandmother was left to raise her kids by herself.
	And my grandmother told me this one story.
	Well, she said that she remembered how she used to try to run out of this school And go see her mum who was dying from breast cancer and she just remembered being taken away every single time and brought back to the school and forced not to be able to see her dying mum.
	So it was a tremendous amount of oppression going on.
	And I think that there is an enormous amount that can be learned.
	Look, I mean, it's a god-awful...
	I mean, there are no words that I could possibly summon that would encapsulate a tiny percentage of the horrors of this program.
	It was family-wrecking.
	It was culture-wrecking.
	It was soul-wrecking.
	And the degree to which it's had a ripple effect...
	I mean, you're talking about Canadians.
	The degree to which it has had a ripple effect on dysfunction...
	Within the Aboriginal or Native communities in Canada is beyond calculation.
	I mean, it was a sword swipe through the very heart of the family structure and the cultural legacy of the Aboriginals.
	And it was, I mean, vicious and evil and brutal beyond measure.
	And the only thing that, like, when I stare at that kind of horror, which, you know, I mean, I'm looking at From a fair distance, obviously, compared to what your family has gone through, my friend.
	But when I look at that kind of horror, the only thing that I can do is sort of grit my teeth and recognize that the best that can be done is to extract lessons from it to avoid pain.
	Any kind of repetition of those mistakes.
	That's the only thing that I can find that makes anything valuable out of such a degree of shocking horror.
	My grandmother, she was part of a class action lawsuit a few years ago, and she was able to get some money back from the government to, you know, some sort of reparation for the trauma that she was put through it.
	It was around $40,000 which she then used to help pay off her house.
	I'd just like to say that although there is dysfunction in my family, I'm nowhere near the level of family abuse that I see.
	I'm kind of at a midpoint in the spectrum of Happy, healthy, functional Native Americans compared to, you know, the worst.
	Right.
	And there is something, you know, I'll tell you this, I mean, there's something that I find enormously powerful about aboriginals, in particular, I mean, Americans, and you know, you can of course tell me the degree to which this, you know, spills north of a border that of course to aboriginals is entirely artificial, but nonetheless is there.
	You know, there's always a question to be asked about the aboriginal experience in the United States.
	And it's a small component of it, but it's, I think, quite important, which is they would not be slaves.
	Right?
	I mean, the white people, I guess everyone around the world, but in this particular locale, the white people wanted slaves, right?
	The question is, why did they go to Africa?
	I mean, there were Native Americans all around.
	Why did they go to Africa?
	Well, they went to Africa because the Native simply refused to be slaves.
	Yeah.
	That they would rather die than be slaves.
	My auntie was telling me that the Native Americans...
	Actually, I should just stop and just say that the...
	The term that we prefer is indigenous people.
	Indigenous?
	I appreciate that.
	I appreciate that.
	But as she was telling me, the invention of the mohawk was actually a way to tease bounty collectors who would scalp natives for the bounty.
	And so we invented the mohawk to tease them.
	Because look at my head, it's more easy to carry my scalp because I shaved it before you come and get it.
	Wow, that is a screw-you attitude that I can't help but admire.
	It's pretty badass, yeah.
	Yeah, and that is one of the great noble resistances in human history, is the degree to which indigenous people, as you say, just simply refuse to become slaves.
	And, you know, if everyone had done that, there'd be no such thing as slavery, and I just think that's a noble...
	And passionate dedication to freedom.
	I mean, indigenous peoples just did not...
	They did not submit to captivity.
	And that is...
	That's an incredible feat.
	It's an incredible strength of will.
	An incredible dedication to liberty that I've got to tell you, I just find...
	I find inspiring, if that makes sense.
	Well, I appreciate that.
	Thank you.
	Sure.
	Now, lessons that could potentially be learned...
	From these disastrous situations.
	I say lessons because we get to the government role and I don't want to forget your question, but I wanted to mention what I think is important.
	Okay.
	So, what can we learn?
	First of all, the lesson is that integration is hard, right?
	Oh yeah.
	I mean, it's a ridiculous thing to say because, you know, given the depth of the destruction that we're talking about, like an attempt to destroy a culture and remake people in the Marxist model, right, in the socialist model, in the environmentalist model, which is, you know, well, you know, you raise these aboriginal kids as, you know, white kids, as Christian kids, you raise these indigenous kids as white kids and they'll be just like white kids.
	How did that work out?
	Not very good.
	Well, it was disastrous.
	It was disastrous.
	And I'm not trying to hijack this for my own particular focus at the moment, but I don't think it's unfair to say that this is a lesson for Europe with regards to the migrant crisis.
	Even if Europeans took the kids of the migrants, I'm not saying they should, obviously, but if the European governments took the kids of the migrants and raised them As white Christian kids, it would be worse than anything that could be imagined that might otherwise occur.
	The integration is not going to happen.
	Right.
	And just the level of bitterness that indigenous people have, especially the young ones today, it's just incurable.
	It's just pure poison.
	And I think I was listening to you, and I think you said that A victim mentality leads to a mentality of entitlement.
	And so a lot of Aboriginal people, including myself in a small phase of my life, I just felt like I was owed reparations.
	Hell yeah, I totally get that.
	I totally get that.
	I mean, it wasn't like you invited Whitey over.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	I mean, and so I completely understand that.
	And this is the counter-intuitive lesson, I think, that can be gleaned out of all of this stuff.
	Which is, it was, in general, the government that screwed over the indigenous people.
	And I'm sorry to use the term screwed over.
	I can't say destroyed, because you're all still here.
	but that really fragmented and harmed the indigenous population.
	It was the government that did that.
	And religion, the Baptists.
	But could the Baptists have done it without the power of the state?
	Well, even if the government wasn't there, they might make some kind of attempts on it, right?
	Well, yeah, okay, but without the government, I mean, obviously indigenous populations fought amongst each other as well and there's always a human tendency to want to impose one's own way of life on other people.
	That's part of the general war of human tribes that has occurred throughout all corners of human history.
	You know, there are certainly some records that seem to have shown up now that there was, prior to the current indigenous population, there was a previous indigenous population that there was conflict with.
	I mean, that conflict between tribes...
	By that, I don't mean necessarily war and bloodshed and burying the dead or whatever.
	I mean by that, just the conflict and the sparks and the frisson that can occur between competing ways of life.
	To me, that's part of general human progress.
	But without the power of the state, I think that the process of interaction between indigenous and European populations without the power of the state Could have been much more beneficial.
	I mean, look, tell me if I'm way off base here, and I'm treading with as much cultural sensitivity as I can, so tell me if I go astray.
	But the Europeans did bring some pretty cool stuff to the indigenous populations of North America.
	Certainly over time, right?
	I mean, science, healthcare, and the free market, and some stuff that, you know, there were certainly some aspects of that to native populations, but there were some benefits that came across with the Europeans.
	And those benefits could have accrued in a sort of more free environment, in a non-state environment.
	I think that there would have been, where benefits could have been exchanged, there would have been exchanged, and where conflict would have escalated, there could have been, you know, you stay over there and we stay over here kind of stuff, right?
	It could have been to the potential somewhat enrichment of both cultures had the interactions occurred— And I'm sorry to lump indigenous cultures as one.
	If it's any consolation, I'm also putting all European cultures as one.
	But there could have been some beneficial interactions between the two cultures had it not been for the power of the state to enforce its will.
	I mean, you said being paid bounty.
	Who was paying the bounty?
	It was a state who paid the bounty, right?
	Who turned the indigenous populations into animals sometimes to be hunted and murdered.
	And it was the state who negotiated these treaties and these deals and then subsequent states or even sometimes the same politicians who then broke them.
	Now, if private contracts had been signed, then the indigenous populations would have been able to appeal To a third party, we'll call it the state for the moment, for violations of those contracts.
	But when the state violates the contract or the treaty that it signs with you, where do you go?
	Exactly.
	You can't go anywhere.
	They say, oh, white men, you know, the cliche white men speak with forked tongue, you know.
	But, I mean, it's the state.
	And it speaks with forked tongues to white people as much as anybody else, to Europeans as much as anybody else.
	Right.
	So, to me, the giant lesson of, and the great tragedy is that these two cultures could have enriched each other.
	They did a little bit.
	Yeah, it did to some degree.
	It did to some degree.
	And the two cultures could have enriched each other to the benefit of both.
	However, the state, which was of course squarely under the control of the Europeans, was able to escalate the aggression to the point where it was fight or die for a lot of the indigenous populations in certain situations, right?
	Right.
	And...
	So my argument for indigenous populations would be something like this.
	Well, how's your relationship with the state been for the last four or five hundred years?
	I would say pretty damn bad.
	So why don't you boycott the state?
	Why don't you stop dealing with the state?
	Why don't you stop trying to get justice out of the state?
	It's sort of like an abusive relationship where you keep going back.
	Well, he beat me up, so now he's got to buy me a nice dinner.
	And I'm sorry to use those ridiculous analogies, but he's going to buy me a diamond because he beat the crap out of me last week and he always feels bad afterwards, so I'm going to go back and get my diamond.
	I think that that relationship is so destructive.
	And it's not something I say to most people if you can avoid interactions with the state.
	Does that make any sense?
	It does.
	Absolutely.
	I hate the government, too.
	That's actually why I like you so much.
	We have that in common, right?
	Yeah.
	And look, I have more in common with you than I do with most Europeans.
	If that helps, you know, if we both dislike the government and are very skeptical, to put it mildly, of its capacity to create productive social outcomes, then, you know, we're brothers in the tribe of future freedoms.
	Yeah.
	What's your opinion on the reservations?
	Just with the freedom that reservations have and the lack of freedom that they have?
	Because people who live on the reservations, they aren't taxed.
	They get free benefits from the government, but it's not like some private business sector has exploded there like you might think it would because it's a small portion of the free market down in one spot.
	I just wanted to know what your opinion is on that.
	Look, I'm not much of an expert on this, so I'm just going to go with general principles.
	Look, the average non-indigenous person, let's say, who's living in Canada, is not responsible for what the government does.
	Did, right?
	And, you know, we could spend a whole show and not, you know, get much to scratch the surface, right?
	Just so people know, in 1933, British Columbia, which is, I guess, Canada's California, became one of two provinces to implement a clear eugenic sexual sterilization law.
	The province's Sexual Sterilization Act legislation was passed in 1933 and repealed in 1973.
	And so it is...
	Compulsory Sterilization Act in Canada, 1973!
	I was seven!
	I was seven!
	And this shit was going on.
	I mean, it's...
	So, I thought of this many years ago, and again, I submit to your expertise and experience, but culture is something that we have That's like a muscle, and muscles develop with resistance.
	In other words, there must be problems to be solved in order for culture to exist, in order for culture to be worthwhile.
	And my sort of concern with the reservation system is the degree to which it isolates indigenous populations from mainstream society, which is not the end of the world.
	Got a fence between myself and my neighbor.
	That's not the end.
	But the problem is that by giving the, quote, free stuff, it makes culture non-functional, non-relevant, non-valuable, non-purposeful.
	Just sluggish, hey?
	Yeah, sluggish.
	Like, okay, so I'm awake today.
	I don't have to worry about food.
	I've got free healthcare.
	I can go get free college if I want to.
	I've got free money rolling in.
	If the chief decides he likes me that day or whatever.
	And so now what?
	And I think that aspect of the isolation and then the welfare state, and I don't know of a nicer way to put it.
	I mean, it's not the best way to put it, but it's also not wildly off.
	The isolation plus the welfare state is one of the things that produces, I think, such horrific dysfunction.
	In these communities, you know, somebody wrote to me a while back ago, and you can tell me if you think this is true, that this was to do with America, maybe it's somewhat to do with the Canadian indigenous population as well, but they're saying it's a wildly matriarchal society in that, you know, the men generally aren't that much around and it's a lot of single moms and all this kind of stuff.
	And, you know, ghettoization plus Isolation plus welfare plus matriarchal societies, well, I can't think of anything that produces a more concentrated toxicity to an environment.
	And that combined with what I understand to be a genetic sensitivity to the effects of alcohol, a sort of inability to process alcohol, the enzyme.
	Like there's this argument that says that Western Europeans developed a resistance to Alcohol poisoning because water was dangerous to drink and also you could get a lot of nutrients from drinking beer and so on.
	And so there is some susceptibility to alcoholism, but not as rampant.
	But as far as I understand it, and again I'm no geneticist, but as far as I understand it, the indigenous populations lack some capacity to effectively process alcohol and thus seem to be much more Susceptible to alcoholism.
	And I think all of that combines to create a sort of, in a sense, a perfect storm of woeful destruction of an entire culture, an entire way of life.
	And I just, you know, my experience having visited a couple of reservations and scenes, I mean, it's, well, you know, right?
	I mean, it's a mess.
	Yeah.
	And so it's one of these situations where people are like, well, the government really screwed us over, so now we're going to go get restitution from the government, we're going to get free stuff from the government, and it's like, whoa, I think this cure is almost worse than the disease.
	But it sounds nice, and that's what's so...
	Well, it appeals to one's sense of justice.
	But the problem is there's no individual.
	Yeah.
	There's no individual that you can punish.
	You know, if some guy, I don't know, crashes his car into the side of my house, okay, well, then I go to that guy and tell him to fix my house, right?
	But there's no individual that you can punish for what happened in these residential schools.
	Now, you can go to the government and get angry at the government as if it's the same guy.
	It's not the same guy.
	Those guys are all dead.
	Long gone.
	It's like going after the third cousin...
	In another province of the guy who crashed his car into my house and making his kids pay, right?
	I mean, I don't think that the problem is we have this idea that the state is this thing and it did something wrong to us like an individual so we're going to go back and we're going to get it to apologize and we're going to get it to give us resources like it's some individual and the same individual who did us wrong.
	But it's not.
	Those people are all long dead, all long gone and even if they were still around, If you got them to admit fault and to pay up, all they do is borrow, print, or tax the money to pay, which means that people are punished who had no say in these residential schools, who had no say in how the government treats the indigenous populations.
	So the injustice just keeps rolling back and forth because the state is considered to be the cause and the solution of all these kinds of problems.
	And how do we...
	And I think this focus, this focus, sorry, I'll shut up in a second, but the focus just on what we, you know, the state did us wrong, we're going to use the state to do similar things in the black population in the United States.
	Reparations, right?
	The state did us wrong.
	There was slavery, there was Jim Crow, and these things were terrible.
	Of course they were.
	So, so if the state does you wrong, how can the state make it right?
	Because there's no such thing as a state.
	So, sorry, you had a question, I really apologize, but go on.
	I was going to say, I think we can both agree on the solution, but how do we make it seem less offensive to the indigenous people to get them on the right solution, on the right path, which is personal accountability?
	That's really the hardest part of it.
	Yeah, that is very tough.
	I mean, I don't have any huge answers for that.
	You know, I will speak from my own personal experience here.
	That's the closest I can get to hopefully coming up with something useful, and hopefully it will be.
	But my personal experience, I've been wronged by people.
	In my life, I'm sure you have been as well.
	And I have, like everyone who's been wronged, had thoughts, fantasies, dreams of Chasing the people down who've wronged me and making them make it right.
	I mean, you've felt that, I'm sure, in your life.
	Oh, yeah.
	Now, I have, as a result of therapy, introspection, philosophy, willpower, you name it, I have gritted my teeth and resisted that temptation.
	I do not chase down the people who have wronged me and attempt to To force them to make it right, or to make them make it right, or to bully them, or to shame them into making it right.
	With that self-discipline, I mean, it's good to have that self-discipline, but just remembering the damage that's done, it can make you a little bit crazy, especially.
	I absolutely completely and totally understand.
	You can circle that drain forever, can't we all?
	Regardless of our culture, we can all find in our countries, in our cultures, in our tribes, in our lives, in our families, in ourselves, in our hearts, we can all find injustice that we can stare at until our eyes fall out.
	And we can obsess about, and I know that's begging the question, and it's not an argument, but we can obsess about these wrongs that were done unto us.
	And it gets that hot Fight-or-flight thing going, and we want to get sucked into the drama of making wrongs right again, and restoring the balance, and making everything better, and fixing it.
	It's like a lot you get.
	I'm sorry?
	It is.
	It's a great temptation, right?
	Yeah.
	Just an ego kind of...
	Well, I mean, this is a lot of the stories.
	A lot of the stories that we hear, right?
	There's an injustice, right?
	Superheroes, there's an injustice, and...
	The man goes to fight the injustice and to make things better!
	Look, I can't speak for indigenous people, obviously, but what I can say is that in my own life, the temptation to follow dark deeds down to a dark place and to attempt to bring lightness and sunshine and butterflies to a cave of historical Disastrous and corruptions and horrendous behavior.
	That is a great temptation.
	We fight it, we face it in our personal lives if we have been deeply wronged.
	It is not exactly a daily struggle because, you know, once you make the commitment that I'm not going to let the bad people dictate what I do from here on.
	I am not going to let the evils of the past be the train tracks that I must inevitably follow in the future.
	What is freedom from evil?
	Is it pursuing evil and chasing it down and grabbing it by the throat and shaking it until gold and apologies and fixedness fall out of its eye sockets?
	I think that's to some degree becoming what we despise.
	Ah, the indigenous people suffered at the hands of the state.
	So now they wish restitution at the hands of the state, which must make other people suffer.
	How is this not a pendulum?
	Right.
	How is this not a pendulum that is a blade?
	How can we ever find peace with each other, we tribes, if we are continually grabbing the guns of the state and training it on each other?
	And saying, well, you did me wrong.
	No, you did me wrong.
	Well, what you, you know, the wrong that my ancestors did you, you are now doing against me.
	At least theirs is separated by time.
	Yours is in the here and now.
	And oh, how is it working out?
	For people who take that path?
	How is it working out for people who take that path of rubbing forever the salt in the wounds, seeking restitution from the very evil agency that committed the injustices and wrongs in the first place?
	How is it working out?
	We can see so many examples of this throughout history, across the world, in now, so many examples of this.
	If I brooded over the wrongs that were done to me, Many, many years ago.
	And I chased the people down and I cornered the people and tried to make them pay for what they did.
	I would lose because they're much better at being bad than I am at making them good.
	They have much more experience being bad than I have trying to reform badness.
	They are deeply studied and knowledgeable in the arts of wrongness.
	And this is my first rodeo at making bad things good, making bad people good.
	They are way Way more experience than I will ever be in this realm.
	And I'll lose.
	I'll lose.
	And I never get to escape bad people if I'm always circling back and trying to punish them.
	All that means is I will now forever spend my life around bad people trying to reform them, trying to make them pay, trying to make them suffer, trying to make them see the errors of their ways, trying to make it better, trying to...
	I will never be free.
	I don't have bad people in my life.
	And there is only one way There is only one way to get bad people out of your life, my friend, and that is to give up the idea of revenge.
	Or trying to save them.
	Yeah, I don't know that there's any people who genuinely feel that they want to save bad people.
	I think that's a lie people tell themselves to give themselves...
	Some virtue signaling better motives for what is fundamentally vengeance.
	Listen, don't get me wrong.
	Revenge can be fine in certain times.
	There's nothing innate like, oh, we should never.
	I'm not a pacifist.
	But what I'm saying is that in the big arc of your life, revenge costs you the company of good people because a good person does not want to be around somebody obsessed with revenge.
	Yeah.
	They don't want to be around somebody who is circling the drain, staring at past injustices, feeding off their own resentments, however legitimate they may be.
	And the more legitimate they are, the more dangerous they are, because the harder they are to let go of.
	And the letting go of things doesn't mean forgiveness.
	I don't forgive the people who've done me wrong.
	No.
	But I wish to be free.
	Of their influence and the desire for vengeance is the surrender of will to evildoers.
	Yeah.
	Because now they run my life.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	After you come to terms with not wanting to take revenge out on people, the next thing you might end up thinking about is trying to heal the people around you.
	And I have people in my family who are not doing good and I want to help them as much as possible, but maybe the healthiest thing is to just let go.
	It's called The Origin of Illness by Dr.
	Robert Keppe.
	And he says that pain comes from over-idealization.
	So if I idolize this particular vision, if I have a vision of how I want things to be, my attachment to wanting to see that vision carry out It can end up in just my pain.
	For example, my mother, she always wants the family to be closer together, more tight-knit, more family picnics and reunions and stuff like that.
	To her brothers and sisters, to her family, to all the family, right?
	But it just doesn't come together and I just see the pain that she feels from that.
	So after getting over the revenge part, how do we healthily How do we get over trying to heal ourselves if it's not happening?
	Well, you know, I think once you're over the revenge part, then you can look at a future free of the clutters of historical evils.
	I think that does a lot to the healing.
	But my particular dedication...
	I don't know if it's for everyone, but again, just all I can do is speak from the heart in this issue and hope that it's helpful.
	But my particular dedication...
	Is I do not want vengeance against evildoers.
	But I'll tell you what I do want.
	I want to take away power from evildoers.
	I want to take away their power.
	And I don't want to take away their power by confronting them.
	I want to take away the hold that evildoers have over others.
	So...
	This is why I say that the potentially positive interactions that could have occurred between these two tribes were smashed and destroyed by the power of the state.
	Just as two religions can benefit from each other without the power of the state, there are things to be learned from religions other than your own, even if you're an atheist.
	There are things that I learned from Christianity.
	There are things I admire about Islam.
	There are things to be learned.
	But not if there's the state.
	Because other religions come with different perspectives that can be mind-altering and mind-opening.
	And it's not like, oh my god, I mean you've heard some of the callers into this show recently.
	It's not like people in Europe or people in the West It's not like they can't benefit from a greater focus on virtue and a greater focus on self-restraint and a greater focus on the bigger picture in society.
	And so there's things that Westerners could have learned from Aboriginals, things that Aboriginals could have learned from Westerners, mutually beneficial.
	But the moment the state comes in, well, then it becomes...
	A form of legitimized civil war where everybody tries to grab control of the state.
	And sometimes the Westerners have control of the state and they're sterilizing and they're ripping kids away from their families and they're forcing the indigenous population to get married.
	Slavery, Jim Crow.
	And then other people get a hold of the state.
	And maybe now the indigenous population has more control of the state and now there's lots of People being taxed to send off welfare to these populations and now the blacks are trying to gain control of the state and impose a particular view and vision and affirmative action and other forms of injustices as swing back and forth, back and forth, everyone trying to grab the gun in the room.
	Because it's there and if you don't get it, someone else is going to get it.
	And the natives, you know, this is the great temptation to say, well, you know, when the white people had control of the state, look at the disastrous things that they did to us.
	So we better get control of the state.
	And that pendulum is going to go back and forth and back and forth.
	Yeah.
	I really feel that, you know, people in general, they want to funnel power to individuals that they have faith in purely because they're just kind of lazy.
	You know, they want to get that peace of mind.
	And that's why we'll always have a problem with people wanting to state, people wanting power to exist.
	You know what I mean?
	Yes, and this is the interesting thing about...
	This is how...
	Jesse, this is how corrupting the state is.
	Is that among the indigenous population in the tribal society, was there a state?
	No.
	There's a hierarchy for every tribe.
	Yeah, of course, hierarchy, I get that.
	And look, I'm not saying it was all anarcho-capitalist or anything like that, but there was not a state in the way that Westerners would conceive of a state.
	And that's what's so incredible.
	This is how corrupting the power of the state is.
	That the state is even infected, the idea of the state and the power of the state has even infected a group that for thousands and thousands of years had no state, as we would understand it.
	Yeah.
	That's how powerful and terrifying the modern state is.
	What's your opinion on the Idle No More movement?
	The goods?
	Yeah, go ahead.
	Why don't you give a bit of an explanation for the listeners?
	The I Don't Know More movement is a recent movement that's been around for a few years where a bunch of the bands of the Native people have come together and they've made big activists Movements to stop production on pipelines, to lobby the government in a way.
	I work on pipelines, actually, and I've once had a job where the I Don't Know More movement, they blocked the roads so we couldn't get to work.
	So you couldn't get to work?
	Yeah.
	I got paid and I got off for a few days.
	So, idle no more.
	I mean, aren't they enforcing idleness by not letting people get to work?
	I'm not sure I quite understand the phrase.
	What is it supposed to mean?
	Basically, it's the mentality that, okay, we've been sitting around letting so much stuff happen that we're not going to sit around anymore and we're going to do something.
	Yeah, okay.
	Well, so activists, right?
	Not necessarily, right?
	It's just activists, right?
	And the activism, I assume, is to influence the state and to try and get what they want from the state.
	You know, this is my...
	Probably complete nonsense recommendation or speech, but go something like this.
	Stop dealing with the state.
	Boycott the state.
	Stop taking money from the state.
	Stop taking power from the state.
	Stop trying to control the state.
	Stop trying to influence the state.
	Have your own history and your own culture return to you by stop attempting to grab the gun of the state, which is a white man's gun, out of the hands of white men and women.
	Boycott the mechanism of a traditional enemy.
	Lead the way, not just for the indigenous population, but for all people tempted by the power of the state.
	Walk away from the negotiations.
	Walk away from the table.
	Walk away from the, quote, free goodies.
	They're unjust.
	They're unjust.
	You know, kids born now are not responsible for what happened Due to the power of the state in 1933, they should not have to pay.
	That is unjust.
	Walk away.
	That does not mean walk away from society.
	That does not mean be isolated in remote areas.
	It doesn't mean anything like that to me.
	It just means put down the ring of power.
	Walk away from the goal of controlling the state.
	Lead the way.
	For a group of people who refuse to be slaves, Which is one of the most powerful moments and interactions in human history, in my opinion.
	Well, to refuse to be a slave means to walk away from the temptation to control the power of the state.
	The power of the human slave.
	Yeah.
	And if indigenous people were to do that, what an example they would set for others.
	And I think that there is something in the constitution of indigenous people that yearns for a kind of freedom that is hard for some of the other minorities to experience.
	So, if we got government out of the way, pretending that government doesn't exist right now, we finished it, what do you think are some viable solutions to our cultural problems?
	For example, let's say I was a wealthy man, and I just wanted to give to charity.
	What kind of charity do you think helps us with our problems?
	My mom, she actually works for the government.
	She's a social outreach manager.
	She's actually for indigenous people and she helps new parents to become more functional.
	She gives them help to become better parents.
	It's certainly the worst things to do with your life, right?
	You know me.
	I'm all the way for somebody helping people be better parents.
	It's hard for me to say anything negative about that.
	There's certainly worse government social programs, too.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Indigenous people...
	I'm sorry for all these generalizations, but I'm just sort of based on my experience.
	And I've worked with some Indigenous people.
	I mean, I've visited reservations in Northern Ontario.
	And I work with some Indigenous people as well.
	Like, astonishingly robust and hardy people.
	Why did you visit the reservations?
	For which reasons?
	I was invited.
	Oh, okay.
	So you just wanted to, you know, see how it was like?
	Well, yeah.
	I mean, I met.
	So I worked with some natives, right?
	They did trailblazing and all that for, you know, and like ridiculous, like up at dawn and working all day.
	I was like, you know, I'm 19 years old and struggling to even try to keep up.
	Did you do a sweat with them?
	I'm sorry?
	Did you do a sweat with them?
	No.
	No, I just, I visited and, but no, I didn't do a sweat.
	But, um, So, what worked in the past is not a bad place to start.
	And in the absence of the state, there will be some people who wish to stay with the old ways, just as there are, quote, conservatives in every group, and they'll wish to sort of preserve the old ways.
	And in the absence of the drip-drip of government resources, they'll be back to Finding that challenging balance between human beings and nature that we're all struggling in every civilization to try and find.
	You know, like, we love nature, but we don't want nature to be in charge because that comes with smallpox and other god-awful stuff, right?
	So trying to find that challenging balance in the absence of state power is something that indigenous populations, I think, can help a lot with.
	So some, of course, some indigenous people will choose to join the, quote, mainstream society, and some people will choose to remain wedded to the old ways, but they will do so with challenge and with risk.
	You know, when you're on, sorry for this completely cheesy reference, but when you are on government welfare, it's like playing a first-person shooter video game in God mode.
	You can't really fail.
	It's kind of boring.
	Yeah.
	It's empty.
	It's an empty experience.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	I've been exposed to some pretty bad things through my mom's work.
	And one thing that really upsets me the most is the way the welfare system is.
	is it actually incentivizes the poor people to want to have more kids because the government will pay them more money.
	And I've even met mothers who say, "I think I'm going to have one more kid because the government's going to give me a little bit more money." Yeah, no, that's certainly not central to indigenous peoples.
	I mean, I said this a while back ago, I think it was last summer, just listening to two single moms talk about, you know, Down to the dollar and change what they could get for various decisions around procreation and so on.
	The accessibility of sperm didn't seem to be a big challenge for them.
	Guys!
	I'm giving you advice that's consistent with the advice I give just about everyone who calls in, which is if you can find a way to minimize your contact with the state, then do so.
	The temptation of having been wronged, and indigenous populations have been wronged, Some of it is assholes from Europe and some of it is just some bad luck.
	The alcohol thing, bad luck.
	Smallpox, it was not a bioweapon.
	It was just bad luck.
	Smallpox had ravaged the European population for thousands of years and indigenous peoples in North America had been largely unexposed to it and it was brutal and gruesome.
	But it was not, you know, here you go, cough into this now, it's going to kill you, right?
	I mean, it was...
	I didn't even know the germ theory when this stuff...
	I mean, there was no germ theory of transmission when a lot of this stuff was going down.
	It doesn't mean it's any less horrible, it just means that it was not a willed evil in the same way that some of the other stuff that we're talking about here was, if that makes sense.
	So, there have been wrongs, and there has been confusion, and a lot of it has been...
	You know, I like the story of...
	And I hope it's more than a story.
	I'm sure there'll be people who'll tell me it's not.
	But I like the story of the fact that the pilgrims, some of the early pilgrims that came over, started this socialism crap, right?
	Oh, collective farming, and they all started starving to death.
	And then the natives were like, why are you doing that?
	Here's some food, right?
	I mean, that's how things could have gone to some degree prior, because there was no state back then.
	Yeah.
	Personal accountability just forces you to be a better productive person.
	Yeah.
	And so it's funny that some of the original British settlers were saved from socialism by the natives, and now the natives are trapped in socialism from the descendants.
	You know, it's like, oh, indigenous people, sorry.
	That's tragic, and one of the horrible ironies of history.
	Everything that a culture can teach you can be wiped away with just the new generation, which is what they try to do with residential schooling, you know?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And, you know, this is multiculturalism.
	Again, I never have any problem with multiculturalism as a whole if there's no state.
	But given that there is a state, we have to sort of take that into account.
	But I fundamentally think that the letting go of resentment is really, really hard.
	Because I think for certain groups that have been beaten down and excluded for long enough, the resentment is the identity.
	The culture has become the culture of resentment.
	And resentment is not the right word because it's not strong enough.
	But hatred is too chaotic a word for it.
	But the victimhood and the sense of injustice and the sense of hostility and the thirst for vengeance that is thinly cloaked in the idea of restitution, it becomes so compelling and such a drama and such a character-defining trait that it almost elbows aside everything else.
	There's an old saying in economics that bad money drives out good money.
	And vengeance drives out personality, and you become a reaction to injustices that nobody initiated who's alive, that nobody had any control over who's alive, and that no one could be held accountable for without creating more injustice.
	And that is a very, very hard narrative.
	To let go of.
	But that would be, from my personal experience, and I believe that we have enough in common that we may be different tribes, we have enough in common that what is most deeply felt for one can also be most valuable for the other.
	But in my personal experience, man, letting go of the desire for vengeance has freed me from the power of evil.
	And the best revenge, as the old saying goes, the best revenge is a better life.
	As long as you want to bend evil to your will, you will forever be bent to the will of evil.
	Thank you.
	So those would be my suggestions, you know, again, with all the caveats in the world.
	Now, how do we spread that message worldwide?
	Well, we just did a conversation about it.
	That's not a bad start, would you say?
	I mean, look, you and I are both having a civilized and I think very productive and enjoyable discussion.
	Because, you know, we're always told, let's have an honest conversation about race.
	Let's have an honest conversation about tribalism.
	Let's have an honest conversation about multiculturalism.
	I think you and I, just as I have with Muslims and I have had with blacks and I've had with a wide variety of people, we're having an honest conversation and a respectful and mutual exchange of ideas about where things are and where they could go.
	I think we've just done a great damn service to the planet.
	Actually, I was going to make a joke about how we need to spread this message through the state.
	I'll tell you what, man.
	You and I, we're going to get together on the weekend and we're going to write a hand puppet play for this.
	We're going to take it on tour.
	Sounds good.
	We'll open for Gord Downie's last tour.
	Do you know his number?
	Yeah, I think it's getting shorter.
	What is it they say?
	Oh, there's my calendar.
	It's days renumbered.
	But listen, man, thanks so much for calling in.
	Will you stay in touch?
	Let us know how things are going and what you're up to.
	Yeah, I'd love to ask more questions and be brought back on, too.
	It was a great pleasure.
	You're certainly welcome back anytime, and thank you for being part of this conversation.
	Thank you, Stefan.
	Take care, man.
	All the best.
	Thank you.
	Thank you, everyone, so much for calling in.
	This evening, always a deep and abiding pleasure.
	To speak to who I genuinely and generally perceive as the smartest group of listeners in the known universe sounds like praise.
	I think there's thousands of shows of empirical evidence, or at least hundreds of the call-in shows.
	So thank you everyone so much for listening.
	Tonight, today, tomorrow, and until, I don't know, eight minutes before I'm dead at some point in the hopefully distant future.
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	We will speak to you soon.

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