Sept. 18, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:54:13
3417 The Great UFO Debate! Yes, Really - Call In Show - September 14th, 2016
Question 1: [2:51] - “Do the extraterrestrials that are currently visiting the Earth bother you or excite your curiosity? Have you studied this topic?”Question 2: [1:00:28] - “One of your themes is that progressivism is in conflict with human nature, biology and history. However, has technology fundamentally altered the equation, enabling social transformation to continue indefinitely? There need not be a return to any historical baseline if technology continues to provide an economic surplus and the means of controlling populations.”Question 3: [1:32:40] - “The recent events regarding the early release of Brock Turner have caused quite a reaction in the mainstream and social media. I have observed many people resorting to public shaming as a way to obtain a level of justice above that which the court systems have provided them. One person on my friend's list even asked the question ‘if we are going to publicly shame someone for sexual assault, why don't we publicly shame people for getting multiple DUI/DWIs?’” “I argued that public shaming is rarely a good thing, and that it often leads to punishment that exceeds the original crime. Going along the theme of justice from one of your previous interviews, do you think that public shaming is an acceptable form of justice when the public feels the convicted person got a lenient sentence?”Question 4: [1:47:50] – “Catholics appear to have consistently lower divorce rates in North America compared to most other groups including protestants. For Catholic couples who attend mass, pray regularly and practice Natural Family Planning, rates have been documented below 1%. If we can accept that number as being even remotely accurate, what can our society in general learn from it?”Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
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You can, of course, follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
So I guess we've been talking about aliens for a little while, but this is more vertical than horizontal.
This is space aliens.
A caller who is deeply versed in ufology wanted to know what I thought of the aliens...
We had a good chat about it.
I guess I had some skepticism, as you can imagine, but I certainly allow for the physical possibility of such things to occur.
But I think it was kind of a master lesson or master class in how to examine arguments that are challenging and controversial, and I hope that you will enjoy the conversation.
I know I did.
The second caller wanted to know what kinds of work are essential and what kinds of work are frivolous in society.
Is it frivolous to have a video game channel a la PewDiePie?
Is it essential to grow food and build houses and so on?
And we did have a good chat about that because it is a challenge.
You know, we get that you can't have a video game channel unless you have something to eat, but you can grow food and eat without having a video game channel alone.
So how does this all fit together in a free market?
And it's a really, really good conversation, and I hope that it will illuminate things for you as it did to me, and hopefully the listener.
The third caller wanted to know, why don't we use more ostracism in society?
We ostracize people who we think have sexually assaulted people and so on.
Would it be wise to do it with people who are, say, serial offenders when it comes to drunk driving?
And so on.
And we talked about how ostracism might work now, its strengths and its limitations, but more importantly, how it would work in a free society.
So I hope that will be illuminating to you as well, because, as I've argued many times before, we can use ostracism instead of the state.
It's a lot better and cheaper and less prone to get us into wars.
Now, the fourth caller didn't quite make it through to the end of the conversation for reasons you'll hear during the conversation.
And he wanted to know why the rate of divorce among Catholics was so low, around 1%.
And I've talked, of course, about the Amish who have a virtually non-existent divorce rate.
And so we examined how it is possible for Catholics to have such a low divorce rate and what this might mean for other people who want to get into marriages and steps that they might be able to take to limit their risk.
Let's put it that way.
So it was a very, very enjoyable chat.
So without any further ado, other than freedomainradio.com slash donate.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Let's move.
Alright, well up first today we have Victor.
Victor wrote in and said, Do the extraterrestrials that are currently visiting the Earth bother you or excite your curiosity?
Have you studied this topic?
That's from Victor.
Well, hello Victor.
How are you doing tonight?
I'm doing good, Stefan.
How are you?
Hopefully doing good and well as well.
When I was younger, I guess in my early teens, I was quite interested in the UFO phenomenon.
And this was when Close Encounters of the Third Kind was out, and there was quite a lot of talk about UFOs.
And I found it all interesting and fascinating and did some research.
And, you know, as far as the physical possibility of it, yeah, of course.
I mean, the idea that human beings are the only sentient...
Beings in the universe seems to me an act of sort of mad, egotistical vanity.
And the idea that nothing else could ever come and visit us, I think, would be untrue.
So I certainly don't put aliens visiting the Earth as beyond the realm of possibility.
It certainly is physically possible.
But naturally, as you can imagine, it's a pretty high standard of proof, to put it mildly.
Well, that's one thing I think that Carl Sagan said, something to the effect that extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof.
And I doubt if that's really true.
I was curious, have you ever read Carl Jung's book on flying saucers, you know, the famous protege of Sigmund Freud?
No.
He wrote a small book.
It's like 144 pages.
And the full title is Flying Saucers, A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky.
And he basically spent most of the book stating that it's one of his archetypes.
You know, modern man is under such stress that he needs something remarkable.
But at the very last chapter, he gives a brief summary, just a five-page summary.
Could I read just a couple sentences?
Sure.
It said, as I said in the beginning, it was the purpose of this essay to treat the UFOs primarily as a psychological phenomenon.
There were plenty of reasons for this, as is abundantly clear from the contradictory and impossible assertions made by the rumor.
Then the next paragraph, he says, unfortunately, however, there are good reasons why the UFOs cannot be disposed of in this simple manner.
So far as I know, it remains an established fact, supported by numerous observations that UFOs have not only been visually, but have also been picked up on radar screen and have traces on photographic plate.
I base myself here not only on the comprehensive reports of Edward Ruppelt or Donald Kehoe, but on other things.
But anyway, I've got a lot of books in this field that I've studied, and it's remarkable what different people say on the topic.
Why is it of interest to you in particular?
Like you, when I was a teenager, in the 1960s, I read a book by Frank Edwards called Flying Saucers Serious Business.
You were born, I think, I heard you say 66.
Well, this book was written around 67, 68.
Frank Edwards at that time was one of the most popular radio announcers in the United States, and he would have a lot of guests on that relay all sorts of fascinating phenomena.
Anyway, so he writes a book on flying saucers.
Well, I read the book and it was fun.
It just showed a lot of still photos of poor quality and of supposed alien craft.
But since I was just a teenager, I figured it obviously must not be true because the authority of government said so.
All right?
And that's the last I thought of UFOs.
Well, in 1993, I happened to be watching a television program called Sightings.
It had a lot of strange phenomena.
On this particular episode, they showed a sighting in Gulf Breeze, Florida where two men, Gulf Breeze, Florida is just a little island just next to Pensacola in Florida.
Two men, they didn't know each other, took video cameras of the same object over the strait between the island and Florida itself.
And what was amazing, I'm an engineer and scientist, is that these were old video cameras that They don't do the digital recording like they do today, but they have, you know, magnetic tape running by and it makes little slices of recordings.
Well, these two guys pictured the same thing.
They were three quarters of a mile apart.
I could figure out based on what they said, the trigonometry, and they're both Videoing this object that was floating above the water that kind of looked sort of like a gigantic trash can.
It was a cylinder, silvery, whatever, and in both of their videos, it seemed to just disappear instantly.
Well, on the television program, they had a video expert who could slow it down one strip at a time, and it didn't just disappear.
What happened was it was gone within like three frames, so I did the math, and it meant this object, whatever it was, went from zero to about 3,000 miles per hour in less than a quarter of a second.
Well, that was beyond any technology I know on the planet, and so that got me started.
Well, hang on, hang on.
Sorry to interrupt.
We're not quite getting as to why it's interesting to you, but just for a second, I mean, an object traveling at 3,000 miles an hour through the atmosphere, would it not face significant heat issues?
Well, that's a good point.
Just saying why it was important to me because this was such a phenomenal thing.
I never saw anything like it.
Now, getting to that question, you're assuming that it follows our technological limitations.
No, no, no, hang on, hang on.
So the fact that air would produce friction on such a fast-moving object is not a technological limitation, right?
Now, they may have technology that absorbs or dissipates the heat or something like that, but the heat would be there no matter what.
There's no technology that can destroy the laws of physics, right?
Well, Stephen, I'm sorry, Stephen, you're saying, you're assuming human technology is it.
Art, science is it.
But I can't possibly explain something of this nature.
So you can logically say, well, this couldn't happen.
It would make a sonic boom.
It would cause massive winds or something.
But that's the thing.
It didn't.
Well, but that would be an indication that it wasn't a physical object, right?
Like, this is the challenge, that if you take away standards of proof from something, it doesn't make it more believable, right?
So if you say, well, if something accelerates that quickly, first of all, everything inside it would be completely squished, right, because of the laws of inertia.
Secondly, it would be a sonic boom.
Thirdly, it would have a crazy heat signature and most things that we can imagine would burn up or break apart in such a wild acceleration.
And then saying, well, these things would be true, but I'm going to remove them as standards of proof because I'm going to inject unknown technology.
It doesn't make it any more believable, if that makes sense.
Well, I hear what you're saying.
Right.
You don't want to think of some unusual technology, which we can't explain.
That's perfectly fine.
No, no, no, no.
No, hang on.
It's not that I don't want to think of some unusual technology we can't explain.
It's that saying unusual technology solves these physics problems and we can't explain it is not an answer.
Right?
You might as well say magic, right?
Because if technology is solving significant problems of physics, like, okay, so you could say, well, if something accelerates from zero to 3,000 miles an hour, Certainly a human being standing in such a craft would be squished.
And then you could say, well, maybe they have a sort of stasis bubble that takes away the laws of inertia.
Okay, well, then you've just gotten rid of the laws of inertia.
And you say, okay, well, maybe they have some way of bypassing the sonic boom that would occur.
You say, okay, well, then we've just taken away that.
Or maybe they have some way of controlling or dissipating the ridiculous heat signature that that would provoke, right?
And you say, well...
We're just taking away standards of proof and saying we can do that because of magical alien technology.
That to me, again, I'm just looking at it from sort of the skeptical viewpoint, which I'm sure you appreciate.
But let's get back to why it's of interest to you, right?
Because we all exposed, we all, we all are exposed to a whole bunch of different stuff in the world, right?
We see documentaries on Bigfoot.
We see documentaries on Ghosts in the Titanic.
We see documentaries on UFOs.
We all exposed to Different things that strike our fancy.
This one, of course, has become, I guess, what some people will call an idée fix, or like it's become very, very important to you.
And I'm just curious if you know why.
So saying, well, I got exposed to this stuff, therefore, it became very interesting to me.
You know, I've been exposed to a lot of music, but there's only a few bands that I really love, right?
So the exposure to music doesn't cause the love of the bands that I have.
There's other things.
That are involved.
And so my question is, of all the things that you've been exposed to, from Loch Ness Monster to Bigfoot to UFOs or whatever, and not putting them all in the same category of belief, but why do you think this became, in some ways, your life's work?
Well, it's not my life's work.
In fact, about five years ago, I stopped looking into this because I've learned so much about it that it's kind of like old hat.
I'm looking for new things.
For instance, I found you looking for stuff about anarchy, and I've watched some of your podcasts on other topics.
The thing is, at the time, that was remarkable to me.
That was beyond any technology I could understand.
If this indeed was a real phenomenon, There's really something going on here.
Well, then I started to read a lot of other things.
I found out in my area in central Illinois, there were about 20 people who claimed to be abductees who met in a town 30 miles away once a month.
So, in 93 to 95, my wife and I used to go to their meetings and we learned a lot of things from, you know, their retelling of their experiences.
And then I read a lot of government information.
For instance, there have been four major U.S. government documents giving a lot of information about ufology, you know, strange things that happened with flying saucers or whatever.
And almost nobody knows of this stuff.
So that intrigued me even more, and I learned a lot of different aspects of this topic, looking at things from a scientific point of view.
Unfortunately, most of my peers in various UFO clubs, whatever, aren't really very scientific, and they're more wowed by the phenomena than really trying to analyze and think what it means.
Anyway, that's what really got me into it.
Okay, but why do you think this particular topic became so interesting to you?
It was something really new.
It was really something new, and the possibilities of it were quite fascinating to think of actually having other...
Well, first off, for instance, I know you know Enrico Fermi, one of the great physicists of the 30s and 40s and 50s, he made a comment about if there's aliens all around, where is everybody?
Because they can't see them.
Okay?
It's not like it's a common thing.
For instance, the United Nations actually made a brief study stating they think over 150 million humans have had UFO sightings indicating that they meant something like flying saucers.
For instance, all flying saucers are UFOs, but not all UFOs are flying saucers.
And so, I mean, this is incredible.
Then there's the whole psychological, sociological thing of the system, the mainstream media wants to poo-poo this and make a joke of it.
Now, I look for you, you know, stuff in Malianu with UFOs, and I found two of your podcasts where you just mentioned things flippantly and glibly, and that's fine, you're just having fun, but you make some statements that aren't really well thought out about this topic,
and You, being an anarchist, and you know the inherent unethicalness of governments, know that the state wants to control us any way they can, they will not give us good information on lots of things, and UFOs happens to be one of them.
And to me it's an intriguing sociological effect that here, I've been a scientist since I was seven years old, basically, and I've learned all these things, and then I see Bad science from the government trying to poo-poo things like UFOs.
And it shocks me.
And you make a very good point at the beginning that I can't claim what the technology is, you know.
And that's absolutely true.
It just, to me, there's been, for instance, there's been so many scientific measurements of things that are called Some strange flying object in the air that's not man-made.
At the same time we see it, we have radar of it, we have videotape of it, we have infrared recordings of the same object, and yet we don't know what it is.
It's just, to me, it's fascinating.
That's a fascinating topic.
Okay, but so far, what you've talked about, Victor, is stripping away science.
Or at least scientific standards from these observed phenomenon, right?
So you say, well, we've got to take a scientific approach.
So just the first thing that you talked about, an object accelerating to 3,000 miles an hour from a standing point, is pretty physically...
I mean, it's hard to believe.
It's way beyond our technology.
No, no, no.
But see, that's not science.
I'm not a scientist, but I do understand how this works.
If I propose something that is impossible...
To a scientist, right?
I say, let's say I'm gonna hold a ball in the earth, like above the earth, I'm gonna let go of the ball and the ball is just gonna float there, right?
And I say, this happened to me yesterday.
And he says, well, that's physically impossible because the mass of the earth is gonna pull the ball down.
I don't get to say, well, aliens held it up or there's some unknown physics in that particular area, right?
Science is a universal, right?
So when things are sort of physically impossible, saying that alien technology can make it happen somehow is not scientific.
What it is is removing standards of scientific proof.
Stefan, let me ask you a question.
Do you remember who Antoine Lavoisier was?
I don't, in fact.
Well, he was one of the best scientists of the late 18th century in France.
He was one of the first modern chemists.
He explained some real basic fundamental relationships of chemistry.
In addition, he was one of the prime movers of the metric system in the Academy of Sciences in France.
For his time, he was like the top scientist.
Well, in 1772 in Luce, France, for instance, peasants in a—this town was roughly 150 miles west of Paris—peasants saw a rock fall from the sky, and they were amazed at this, okay?
This rock crashed down in the sky.
In those days, they didn't know about meteors.
But anyway, they had somebody—and these are a bunch of peasants they couldn't write.
They got somebody who could write a letter to the French Academy of Sciences, said this incredible thing happened.
Well, the French Academy sent Antoine Lavoisier himself to go there.
It took him probably five days or so by carriage.
Anyway, the best scientists of his era looked Talked to the peasants.
He saw this fused metallic rock on the ground.
When the peasants said it was like during a lightning storm, he said, aha, there it is.
He knew that these poor peasants were very unlearned.
They couldn't understand that a lightning bolt must have come from the sky and hit the rock.
Infuse this metals and that's the answer.
Well in 17, because Loise's mindset was very simple.
Rocks don't fall out of the sky for the simple reason is there are no rocks in the sky.
And if you want to say there's the scientific principle, This is not a—you want to call it a universal—our level of science is so immature, it's ludicrous to think that we understand all of the scientific natural phenomena on the planet.
So here are the best scientists— Oh, come on, Victor, Victor, Victor, come on.
Don't give me the straw man argument.
Did I ever assert that human beings know every conceivable scientific principle or method?
No, I'm sorry, but you're indicating that I'm throwing out science.
I'm not throwing out science.
I don't know the science that could be involved with this.
Saying that there's an answer to something that involves scientific methods or scientific properties or technologies which we can't even figure out is exactly the same as saying magic.
Okay.
The meteor falling from the sky, a rock falling from the sky, doesn't violate the laws of physics, right?
Now, the problem that this physicist or the chemist that you're talking about had was that it violated his cosmology.
Right?
So the cosmology was that there were no asteroids or, you know, I guess they looked at the moon and they saw craters on the moon and they could see those.
But they assumed, so there was rocks flying around at some point.
But, I mean, they knew there were comets, right?
They'd certainly seen comets since...
I mean, Hadrian saw a comment.
There was a Hadrian's comment.
So they knew that there were things flying around in the sky.
You can see shooting stars, right?
So they knew that there was stuff flying through the sky.
Now, maybe there was some particular belief that there was a dome of glass or I don't know what it was, right?
I have no idea what the cosmology was in 18th or 17th century France.
But they had some cosmological belief that...
Forbade them from, or forbade this guy, conceptually from thinking about an asteroid or a meteor or a piece of rock falling from the heavens onto the earth.
And that has had various sets of belief, right?
The belief that the sky is a dome 3,000 miles up, as some people have claimed in the past, and that nothing can come through it.
But they have a faulty cosmology, but a rock falling from high up to the ground doesn't violate the The laws of physics, right?
He just couldn't conceive of that happening because of his particular approach to the cosmology of the Earth and the solar system.
I agree with you, Stefan, but I'm just saying people's worldview can limit what they can understand of their environment, of their surroundings, you know?
No, no.
See, this is the argument that is often made by people who have come with very unusual claims, right?
They come with unusual claims, and then when people start to push back, they basically start to insult people, in a way, by saying, well, you're just too You're too limited in your thinking.
You're too bound into your particular worldview and you just can't expand your mind to get to my particular place.
And listen, I think it would be super cool, beyond cool.
It would be fantastic and wonderful if there was proof of alien intelligence.
As I've said before on the show, they're gonna arrive here to trade because it's only the free market that's gonna give them the technology.
So they're going to arrive here to trade.
It'll be a big giant floating mall that comes down with flashing lights and jetpacks and time travel and teleportation devices and virtual reality, Kate Upton hotel rooms or something.
I don't know.
But they're going to come here to trade.
They're not going to come here to slice us up because that would be a government program.
There's no profit in slicing people up.
They're not going to come here to impregnate buck-toothed women in the backwoods of Arkansas because there's no profit in that.
I mean, right?
So they're going to come because they want to trade and they're going to be very interested in trading.
If you look at sort of imperialism, which is sort of the analogy to what happens with UFOs, like how the British went to India or the British went to China or South Africa and so on, then it's like colonizing.
And there's a little bit of trade involved, but it's a government program, right?
But I don't think that aliens are going to get to interstellar travel without – like with government programs.
I mean, there was one giant government program that got a few people to the moon and a few more people into orbit.
That's kind of been it for a while since the space shuttle took off in the 80s.
Nothing, nothing really has been going on in the space program.
So the government programs aren't ever going to get people from one star system to another because you can't violate the laws of physics, at least any way that is known as yet.
You can't go past sea.
You can't go past the speed of light.
If you try pouring more energy in to go faster, it just gets converted into mass.
And so, of course, if you go to the speed of light, time slows down, so it feels like you're getting places a lot faster, but it doesn't actually slow down in objective reality.
There's no way that a government program is going to bring space aliens to Earth.
It's going to have to be free market.
It's going to come from an anarchic society where technology is allowed to pursue the goal of interstellar travel.
And so if you have a bunch of anarchist aliens who want to come and trade, then...
Where's the mall?
Right?
I mean, I just, I don't understand the motivations.
You know, are they biologists?
Okay, well.
Well, that's stuff, and that's one thing that you had said in a previous podcast, and you were stating that, why would they come here?
You know, for what purpose?
Well, that's the basis of science in a nutshell.
It's the curiosity process.
Humans, we study bacteria, viruses, very incredibly simple life forms.
We study inert matter.
I mean, I think curiosity would be the single most powerful driving force in the universe of all sentient beings.
They'd want to come here because...
Yes, but we don't study...
We don't impregnate and study monkeys in horrible vivisectionist ways while hiding ourselves from their presence, right?
We're not bacteria.
I mean, obviously the space aliens would be more advanced than us, but because they're more advanced, they would understand that we are sentient human beings.
And therefore, we wouldn't be raped, we wouldn't be impregnated.
They'd have to have some ethical foundation, again, because they'd have to be a free market society in order to be able to get into space.
The free market promotes and rewards empathy considerably, right?
Because you have to figure out what people want and how to efficiently provide what they want, right?
Like Uber starts because people say, well, there are a lot of people sitting around With cars, and they could be taking people places, but it's really expensive to buy a taxi plate, so if there's some way we could get this to work without that, and they found a market and they used that market, and so they figured out what people want.
It's too expensive to take a cab because of the overhead of regulations and licenses and so on, the taxi plates.
And so for a free market to work, you have to be empathetic.
And you don't always have to be empathetic for everyone.
You can have mean bosses.
But you do have to figure out what the customer wants and be able to supply what the customer wants.
And so the only way that space aliens logically are going to get to us is if they have...
Developed and been rewarded by the empathetic free market, which is what has produced their spaceships and their modes of travel and all that.
And so they would have significant amounts of empathy if they came.
And so I don't see why they would not.
And they'd also know that it would be startling for us to come.
I would sort of think of them as really advanced anthropologists.
You know, if you think of someone like Margaret Mead, who wrote this book, I think it was somewhat discredited later about Samoans.
She didn't put on a ghost outfit.
And sort of creep around the Samoan village and occasionally butcher their cattle and then sort of creep back into the jungle and then sort of come back with some big giant horned mask on and, you know, rape one of the women and then go back into the jungle and then come back and say, play peekaboo with the children.
I'm here!
And then they're gone.
You know, that would be kind of sadistic, right?
That would be a pretty cruel thing to do.
No, she went in, she introduced herself, she, you know, recognized that they were...
Further back in development from the Europeans or from the Americans.
So she went in and gentle.
She learned the language.
She talked with them.
She wrote stuff down of questionable validity.
I think of it as anthropologists.
Even if we say it's not some sort of free market program.
Let's say it's an anthropology program.
Then they're anthropologists and they're curious.
But anthropologists don't mess with the heads of the people.
They don't sort of fly around and then vanish.
And then they're visible and then they're gone.
And then they slice and dice a cow.
And then they abduct someone.
And then they rape them.
And then they dump them back in the road.
And they don't just sort of fly by and turn off people's cars for fun.
Like, I don't know if it's like frat boy physics or something, but I just, you know, we can't.
We can't just say weird stuff is happening and it's explained by incomprehensible psychology and incomprehensible physics.
That is the same as saying there's no answer, if that makes sense.
Well, some of the things you said, for instance, let's take vehicles being turned off in the presence of some UFO objects.
In one of the biggest Debunkers for the United States Air Force and Project Blue Book was Dr.
Joseph Allen Hynek.
And for roughly 22 years, he worked on various projects looking at various astronomic phenomena, showing people that what you saw was the planet Venus or this, that and the other.
Okay.
But he talked to over 22 years, he was a very conservative man.
He's a good scientist, but extremely conservative.
He talked to so many people, he couldn't quite understand These are very credible people and very serious people and they're saying things that there's some things he couldn't explain, he couldn't debunk.
Well, finally, when they closed Project Blue Book in 1969, partly because of a thing he did in 66 that caused a public outroar, he started to realize the government was only printing the things that he could debunk and they were very quiet on the things he could not Disprove.
And by 73 he started CUFOS, the Center for UFO Studies.
One of his people was Dr.
Mark Rediger, who did a study of over 600 automobiles and other machines that shut down the electronics when a craft went by.
Now that could easily be explained by a high electromagnetic field, so that wouldn't take very advanced science at all.
But if you got some craft with some unknown propulsion system, That gives an electromagnetic fingerprint, footprint, whatever.
That could explain a lot of things.
No, no, no, no.
See, Victor, this is what I'm saying.
Like, X explains nothing.
Like, some unknown propulsion system that has some effect that accords with what some people say doesn't explain anything.
You're just saying that I have no explanation, so I'm going to insert magical technology that we don't understand or alternative physics that we don't understand.
That doesn't explain anything.
Let's do a thought experiment.
Can we do one simple thought experiment?
Okay, keep it quick, man.
Please.
Let's say in 1993, Intel made the first Pentium processor ship.
Let's just say, for sake of argument, that we could send that microprocessor chip back 100 years to 1893.
And give it to the best scientists and engineers of the time.
Some of them were quite good, alright?
Could they understand that microprocessor chip?
Well, they could look at it under a microscope and see it basically has two types of material.
But in 1893, they wouldn't know how to power this electronic device up because the idea of the electron wasn't even known to man until 1897, four years later.
For us, it's very simple science today.
Then it would be incomprehensible.
It was the magic of 1993, which you and I don't think is so magical now.
So just by saying we don't understand something doesn't mean it's got to be magic in the sense that you and I mean.
To me, it's just advanced technology, something beyond our capability right now.
Fantastic.
So is there a place where I can look at a microchip from a space alien's world?
Or a rocket ship from a space alien's world?
Can I go and examine it?
Because what you're providing here is physical, tangible evidence that would be beamed back 100 years to 1893 of a Pentium chip, which they could open and they could examine.
Now, of course, they would say, we don't know exactly what this is.
We don't know how it works.
We don't know what its purpose is.
But it would be there.
Physically able to be seen, to be examined, anyone could look at it, anyone could try and figure it out.
They could run electricity through it and see if they could figure it out, right?
So everything that's there, they may not understand the purpose of it, but it would still be there for them to examine, a physical object.
Okay.
If you want something in your hand, you're going to have to go to the federal government.
But for the layman, for us, for the normal people, there have actually been one doctor, Roger Lear, he was a podiatrist.
He helped something in the order of 30 or 40 people have surgeries to remove unusual implants in their skin, underneath their skin.
And they've had these materials analyzed and they're very unusual combinations of elements that are not normally found or ever manufactured in, you know, in the world as we know today.
And you're right, we don't have an alien spacecraft, all right?
But we have lots of scientific evidence of strange phenomena from radar It's not a...
Well, radar records, visual records, infrared records, ultraviolet records.
There's a lot of different scientific stuff that, yeah, but the average person doesn't have a spaceship.
Does that mean...
Are you saying absence of evidence is evidence of absence?
I don't think so, just because we don't have something.
I know China's here.
Oh, no, no, no.
It depends, right?
So with claims that are extraordinary, right, that human beings have had bits of alien technology injected into their bodies or absorbed into their bodies or implanted into their bodies, that is an extraordinary claim, right?
Now, is it physically possible?
Sure, space aliens could come down and they could use little blow darts and they could put tiny drones into people's bodies or whatever's going on.
Yeah, physically, it's certainly possible.
It's not contradictory within the laws of reality.
It's not like they're turning people into square circles or something like that.
But if you say this has happened, then it's an extraordinary claim.
If you say a bird flew from one tree to another yesterday, that is not an extraordinary claim, right?
So I don't require evidence to say, yeah, I'm down with birds flying from tree to tree.
That happened.
That's real.
That's honest to goodness fact.
It's not an extraordinary claim.
But if you're going to make an extraordinary claim, like there are human beings who've had alien technology dug out of their bodies, and I say, well, show me one.
I'd like to see it.
I'd like to independently evaluate it.
And you say, well, we can't get a hold of any.
That's different, right?
So absence of evidence is not evidence of absence logically.
But when combined with an extraordinary claim, it certainly isn't going to push something into the true pile in the way that if you say one bird flew from a tree, To another tree yesterday.
Well, that's not an extraordinary claim.
Okay, so you're saying an extraordinary claim needs extraordinary evidence.
Well, the example I gave before with Lavoisier, that was an extraordinary claim.
And yet, he refused to believe that a rock fell out of the sky.
For his time, that was...
No, no, no.
We went over this.
The rock...
He didn't say there's no rock.
No, he said there was no rocks in the sky.
No, no, no.
I understand that.
But he saw the rock.
It was just the limitations of his cosmology.
Maybe I... Something happened.
The rock got in here somehow, but it didn't come crashing through the house because there's no holes in the house.
So if this guy believed that there's a dome over the earth, then a rock can't fall from the sky, can't fall from space to the earth, right?
So we already went over this.
So the fact is that at least people could examine, right?
They may be wrong about where it came from, but that's like saying, well, here's some space alien rocket ship, and there are elements here we've never seen before.
There's technology we don't understand.
We don't know how it's powered.
Now, if we say, I don't know which star it came from, that doesn't matter as far as, you know, the fact that it exists and it's beyond any technology that we know of and it has elements that are not seen on the earth and whatever, right?
And so the rock and the microchip that you talked about do not fit because there's nothing physical to examine that is incontrovertibly not of this world and of technology that can't possibly be Stephen, or some civilization with advanced technology that we had no other examples of.
I don't think that's really the case.
Certainly not in the Australian outback.
But I would say that you're not, you know, and I wanna be, you know, I wanna be convinced.
I mean, it would be pretty cool, I would enjoy it.
But the examples that you're giving don't match the requirements that extraordinary claims need.
Stephen, let me ask you one question.
What is the first part of all science?
What is the beginning of all science?
Observation.
No, no.
I think skepticism.
Skepticism is the authority of experts.
At least that's what Feynman said.
Well, authority of experts.
You know what Mark Twain says about experts?
No, what?
Let me see.
He says, in religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand and without examination from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue, but have taken them at second hand from other non-examiners whose opinions about them were not worth the brass farthing.
Right.
So you're trying to convince me of something which I've not directly experienced, which you can't show me empirically, which you've not directly experienced, which is related from other people.
So how is this not falling exactly into the Mark Twain quote that you just provided me?
There are thousands and thousands of observations of all sorts of strange things that can be shown from machines, from radar machines, from telescopes, from cameras, and if you want to ignore all that, that empirical evidence, because you don't actually have something in your hand that you call an alien vehicle, well then, how would anybody learn?
If you want to ignore tremendous amounts of stuff.
The Mexican Air Force, about eight years ago, they released a bunch of photographs of some strange craft with their FLIR, forward-looking infrared cameras, on jet planes that were flying.
The United States government was curious that they got this out in the mainstream media.
There's something flying there that was not visual.
Their visual cameras showed nothing.
Their infrared cameras showed objects flying in front of them with heat signatures.
So, Wade, hang on.
Are you saying that measurement devices don't malfunction?
No, not at all.
But they seem to be working perfectly fine.
There have been lots of cases where...
How do you know?
How do you know that they were working perfectly fine?
I mean, this is what I mean by second and third hand stuff.
You know, like you, I bring up the possibility that there can be errors, right?
I've worked with computers on and off my whole life and there are errors, there are artifacts, there are problems, there is lots of different things that can go wrong with measurement devices.
Whether it's the measurement device itself, something anomalous in the environment that can be explained with non- UFO findings or the recording or second or third-hand information.
So, you know, if I say, well, things can go wrong with recording devices and you say, well, they seem to be working fine, you don't know that.
And it's making these kinds of claims, Victor, that makes it hard to follow your argument.
All right.
Let's go, for instance, in 1952 in Washington, D.C., when a bunch of UFOs, flying saucers, whatever, flew by the nation's capital in the United States.
You're Canadian.
They had it on three different radars.
They had planes up above where radio towered from people down below saying, look over at this direction, you should see something.
They visually verified it.
The radar operators couldn't believe what they were seeing on their scopes.
They got out of their little cubicles, took out a few steps, and they saw lights in the same position.
They had some video cameras of the phenomena.
Victor, I'm sorry to be annoying.
Okay.
These space aliens can travel.
It's not from this solar system, right?
We can't imagine that there's life outside of maybe microbes on Mars, but there's nothing going on in the giant pea soup fog atmosphere of Jupiter.
There's nothing going on in the frozen planets other than maybe some tiny microbes or something, but there's no big giant...
Sophisticated interplanetary technology in our solar system.
So they're coming from outside the solar system.
No question.
So they've figured out interstellar travel.
That is a big, giant monster deal.
You know, space program's been running for, what, 50 or 60 or 70 years?
You know, haven't even bothered going back to the moon.
Can't even think about getting to Mars.
And, you know, we've had some pretty cool technology.
You know, again, it's not in the free market, but some pretty cool stuff has happened.
So the argument is something like this.
They have developed technology to traverse the incalculable distances of interstellar space.
Like, it's mind-blowing.
It takes eight minutes to get the light from the Sun to the Earth.
It takes a couple of seconds to get light from the Earth to the Moon.
The closest star is 4.3 light years away.
That is how unimaginably far that is.
Alpha Centauri.
Yeah.
Now, either it's Alpha Centauri, and I know they found some, I think, M-type planets or potentially habitable planets around some pretty close star systems.
But the idea that it would be the very closest star system is pretty unusual.
I got to think it's going to be, I don't know if it's Betelgeuse, like hundreds of light years away or something else serious or whatever, right?
But so let's just say it's, I mean, it's dozens of years to get here.
And so these are space aliens that are willing.
You know, they've obviously got a nice planet.
They've got good technology.
They've got, I don't know, gray-headed Netflix to binge-watch, whatever it is.
And of course, we've beamed a bunch of stuff into space, which they can pick up and enjoy.
Squishy pink things, doing unholy things to each other.
But they have decided to leave their planet and to travel space.
All over the place, right?
Because they've got to go from star system to star system to star system to try and find life, right?
And no man's sky, lots of people are demanding refunds because it's really boring.
So they've got to go from star system to star system to star system, spending dozens of years sitting in a tiny tube, going from place to place and trying to find life.
And then they finally find life on our planet.
And it's coincidental that, you know, it wasn't, you know, I don't know, a couple of thousand or a couple of hundred thousand years ago, it would be useless, right?
Because, I mean, it would just be something, maybe they get to see some apes and some other mammals and some reptiles and amphibians and fish and so on, but it wouldn't be that exciting as having people.
Dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs.
A couple of hundred thousand years ago, dinosaurs.
Hundreds of millions of years ago, dinosaurs.
65 million last ones.
Was it?
Well, unless you see a snapping turtle, in which case, they're back!
But, so these space aliens, and I'm sorry for this long-winded thing.
I just want to sort of set the stage for the listeners.
But, so these space aliens, they have flown through space.
They have finally found our planet.
They have figured things out.
And there can't be that many of them, because they can't be sending a thousand spaceships to each planet, right?
So, you know, there'd be maybe a couple of spaceships.
And...
They've got all of this incredible technology.
How do they keep themselves alive for dozens of years in a spaceship?
How do they propel themselves?
And why would they even...
I guess there'd be a few of them who would bother or whatever, but you'd lose your family, you'd lose your friends, you know, because if you're traveling near Lightspeed, then you're gonna, you know, as in Brian May's song 39, you're gonna come back a lot younger than the people you left behind.
Your mother's eyes from your eyes cry to me.
And so...
They're leaving all their friends, their family behind.
They're going on these multi-decade voyages, which they either experience directly because they're going at sublight speed significantly, in which case it's going to be 50, 60, 70 years.
Or they're going somehow to light or past light, in which case their time dimensions get all screwed up.
So they have all of this incredible technology.
They can survive for decades in space.
They can get to near light or past light.
They can accelerate from zero to 300,000 miles an hour in the blink of an eye.
But you know what they get defeated by?
After all of this incredible technology that they have, do you know what they get defeated by?
20th century radar.
I mean, they can detect that we're using radar devices, right?
I mean, they're not going to send something without any sensors or probes, right?
So they can detect that we're using radar.
And America, I think, has recently developed, not even that recently now, has developed airplanes which are invisible to radar or virtually invisible to radar.
So even late 20th century technology was able to defeat mid 20th century technology, i.e.
radar.
I got to think that the space aliens who have this staggeringly, astoundingly, unbelievably magical technology would pretty much figure out how not to show up on radar.
I agree with you.
I mean, that's a possibility.
Another thing is, for instance, why would they be coming here if they're within 50 to 60 light years from us?
They're watching I Love Lucy that far away right now.
They've got all of our radio broadcasts.
Do they really go that far?
Would they go 50 or 60 light years?
Yeah, it's been 50 or 60.
I mean, I know once they get into space, but I mean, wouldn't they disperse just a little bit?
You'd get the I and the Y, but nothing in the middle.
I'm sure they'd have tremendous pattern recognition technology to examine electronic signals.
Yeah, like zooming in on Minecraft to get detailed civilization.
But still, part of your argument, Stefan, is you're assuming our human limitations of what we think reality is.
No, no, no.
No, Victor, I'm not going to metaphysics with you.
I'm sorry.
If your argument has to be rescued by alternative realities, you're in the wrong show.
I'm sorry.
I can't go to metaphysics with you.
Because you're saying that the UFOs show up in this world, right?
Now, here's the thing.
I mean, it's a logical possibility.
Either the aliens don't want to be seen.
In which case, boy, according to my YouTube search today, they seem to get seen quite a lot.
So either the UFO craft...
That's that Klaatu song, Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft.
It's actually a pretty good song from the 70s.
Please, interstellar policemen!
Oh, I shouldn't.
Sorry.
They're going to come back from the dead if they're dead and kill me.
So either the aliens, they don't want to be seen, in which case it's a little confusing because they're getting seen a whole lot.
Or they do want to be seen, in which case, why are they hiding?
It's sort of incomprehensible, right?
You're saying those are two possibilities.
If your earlier claim that these beings have to be ethical because they're anarchic in their society, maybe they have, like for instance, the old Star Trek TV shows, the Prime Directive, they know if they're really empathic and really care about developing emerging civilizations,
they don't inflict themselves on them until, for instance, they have light travel or they have some advanced technology where But then how do we know that if the whole point is to not, like, let's assume they don't have any Captain Kirk who has endless fetishes for weird alien tentacles up his nose and his butt.
Why are they able to see us, right?
They're doing a very bad job of keeping their prime directive if they're all over radar and they're abducting people and they're slicing and dicing cows and they're, you know, injecting people with alien technology.
It's like, bad prime directive, dudes.
Well, here's one of your assumptions.
You're I keep saying they, according to a lot of people, there are 50 to 100 different civilizations visiting the Earth as we speak.
And they'll be at all different levels of development.
Wait, 50 to 100 different civilizations visiting the Earth?
That's pretty specific.
Is it the flags?
Is it the writing?
How do they get it down to 50 to 100?
One of the, well...
Because 49 would be crazy.
101 would be plain nuts.
Who do you want to believe?
For instance, there's something called the Disclosure Project, where they have roughly 450 government witnesses who are in the military, who are in contractors, scientific organizations that work with the government, that have made claims.
They have experienced different aspects of alien Technology, alien beings themselves.
So some of them claim the United States government has a document, states, I think one guy, I'm trying to remember his name, Clifford Stone, he was partly, he was in a group of technical people that reclaimed crash or downed alien spacecraft over a 12-year period.
Sorry to interrupt, but don't the aliens beam up people from time to time?
Well, on television they do.
I don't know in reality, you know.
I can't, you know, our imagination is endless.
We can think of anything.
No, no, we don't want to use imagination on a philosophy show.
But they can teleport, right?
I mean, they can beam people up or beam people down.
They can teleport.
In human science fiction, you're right.
So if they didn't want the U.S. government to have these documents, then they would just go and teleport them out, right?
That's the thing.
Maybe you are correct in that alien civilizations in general are They're empathic.
They're really civilized.
They're caring of other sentient beings.
And if that's true, then would they steal?
Well, if you are trying to cover your tracks and it fits your prime directive, right, then you would, right?
Like the men in black thing where they push that button to erase people's memories, right?
So if you recognize that for human beings, we're so fragile that if we find out about other civilizations, we will be traumatized or I don't know what, right?
Do a Thelma and Louise off some conceptual cliff.
Well, then they would want to take away the evidence, right?
Because they will have violated their own prime directive, which I assume is pretty important.
See, the prime directive is pretty important because let's say that they have a cure for cancer or tinnitus or whatever, right?
Let's assume that if they can travel interstellarly, they probably have a cure for cancer.
So the prime directive is pretty important because they're letting millions of people die every year when they could just walk down and give us a free cure for cancer, right?
Or blindness or whatever's orbiting Hillary Clinton that's doing such damage.
I don't know.
Maybe that would be a whole – maybe they need 50 civilizations for that cure.
I don't know.
But they're letting hundreds of millions of people die every year.
That's about right.
Hundreds of millions of people die every year from like heart disease and cancer and accidents and all that.
Maybe they can't cure the accidents.
They cure the heart disease and the cancer and all, right?
So the prime directive is really, really important.
If you're willing to let hundreds of millions of people die every year or a couple of years, then boy, that's super important.
And so the fact that they would willfully violate a prime directive of non-interference by being seen all the time.
How do you know they're being seen all the time?
Because you sent me a link, and I went and checked it out.
And you're saying, well, here's this evidence, and here's that evidence, and here's the radar, and here's, you know, 4,500 pilots, 10,000 pilots have said this, and in Mexico there's that, and here's the videos, and here's like, you know what I mean?
Well, there's a tiny, tiny number being seen.
Who knows how many are being seen?
I'm just saying that maybe 1% of them are being seen.
The other 99% aren't.
I don't know.
Well, if you want to not be seen and you have the capacity to not be seen and you're super intelligent, then you won't be seen.
I mean, do you think they just forget to turn on the don't see me on radar switch?
I mean, if they're super intelligent, I think that that stuff would be automated.
Hey, we're going up in a prime directive airspace.
Automatically, your radar shield goes up and all that, and your visual shields go up and all that, right?
Sorry, 55.3 million people die each year, and I'm putting that totally on the thin gray sole shoulders of the space aliens.
It's their fault, because if they could find some way to solve it and prevent it, and they're not doing it, I think they get intergalactic assholes of the year award.
What if they could say this, and we have 55 million more people every year, or 100 million or 200 million, and...
It's runaway growth and we can't handle it in our society.
Should they be interfering with us so significantly?
No, because if fewer people died, then fewer people would need to be born.
I mean, they wouldn't understand that, right?
I mean, when half your kids died before the age of two from some god-awful disease, then you had a lot of kids.
And now if you look at the West, particularly among Asians and white people, it's very low replacement rates because kids are pretty much guaranteed to make it to adulthood.
So the idea that fewer people would die and therefore, you know, the population would just go up like crazy, that they would understand that that's not how things work.
And yeah, I just want to say, you know, I mean, listen here, space aliens.
I got something to say to you.
I know this is going to go out, but here we go.
This is what I got to say.
Look.
I had it pretty rough as a kid.
And if you're space aliens, you know that lots of children have it rough out there in the world.
And if you're not doing anything about it, You're kind of jerks.
And lots of good people suffer needlessly from disease, from injustice, from persecution, from false imprisonment, from false charges, from all this kind of stuff.
And if you guys are out there and you're not doing anything about it, I'm going to tell you something.
Screw your prime directive.
Get a Black& Decker, drill it up your whatever you call behinds, and just hit the gas because you are complete and total intergalactic jerks for not solving things.
When there are wars, you could have come down and maybe put some kind of shield Around some of the unjust wars that have occurred throughout the world.
You know, when this stuff has been around for a long time.
And, you know, the Second World War.
Maybe you could have just put a few shields when bombs were raining down on innocent children in all areas of that conflict.
And if you've got wonderful laser scalpy surgery things that are able to fix human ailments and so on, and you're not coming down and showing us how they work, kind of jerks, right?
I mean, you're like the guy who's in the restaurant Who invented the Heimlich Maneuver.
We actually had his daughter on the show at one point.
Hi, Janet.
But you're like the guy who invented the Heimlich Maneuver who's really enjoying a lovely German chocolate cheesecake.
And some guy starts choking because he swallowed half a marlin sideways.
And you're like, oh no, I see, I have a prime directive not to interfere.
But you have this, you can fix it.
You can cure the guy probably, get the thing out of his throat.
No, no, you have a prime directive.
It's like, well, if you have a prime directive, should he not be able to see you?
Or shouldn't he be, like, he shouldn't be able to see you, right?
No, no, no.
See, I can, because, you know, the food's really good, so I'm going to come here.
But I'm not going to do anything to help anybody who's choking.
And so I gotta tell you, I mean, if there are space aliens out there of near infinite power and ability and medicine and cures and safety and security and so on, and if they figure it out, Some wonderful way to organize society while we end up in massive debt and wars and terrible public services and crappy schools and decaying neighborhoods and ghettos and crap like that.
And they figured out some incredible, wonderful way to organize themselves so that they get interstellar travel while we get progressive social decay and dysgenics.
The fact that they're not coming down and saying, hey guys, we figured it out.
If you don't have a government, you get to travel through space.
If you do have a government, well, you really can't get out of the hood now, can you?
They would be also kind of real jerks about that as well.
That may be our passport to the cosmos.
If we cannot govern ourselves in a sane, rational, ethical, empathic way, we don't We don't deserve to be saved by outside forces.
Who knows?
Right, right.
So what you're saying is that the kid in Iraq who gets bombed by the coalition, he should be allowed to die because he's just not governing himself correctly.
No, I'm saying, I'm talking about the whole planet in general.
It's the United States government that's messing up a lot of things.
Right, so save the people.
Save the people from the government.
It's not the people's fault that the government is doing all these terrible things.
It's not the people's fault that the government's taking all this money.
It's not the people's fault that the government gets to print whatever money it wants.
It's not the people's fault.
So why on earth would the people be forced to suffer because the aliens could do something about this?
And I actually did a short story on this years ago, which you can find on this channel, called Space Aliens from Luxembourg.
And so if the aliens...
Are somehow saying, well, the poor, the indigent, the sickly, the people who've done nothing to cause their own disasters but are simply trying to survive in some god-awful hellish status society, that those people should be allowed to die, they should be allowed to be imprisoned, they should be allowed to be poisoned, they should be allowed to be disassembled from the air by giant bombs.
Well, then I gotta say, if that's the alien's morality, I got only one thing to say.
Aliens are assholes.
Well, there are no more than earthlings.
It's we humans that are doing most of these terrible things.
Now, one thing you just said, though.
This is not.
All human beings are not governments.
It's like saying that the animals in the cage are somehow responsible for the actions of the zookeeper.
I mean, come on.
Listen, I'm going to move on to the next caller, Victor, but I really do appreciate you calling in.
It was a very thought-provoking and stimulating conversation, and I remain open.
I remain open to these ideas and these arguments.
I try to grip my teeth and stay as curious as humanly possible, sometimes as inhumanly possible, it feels like.
But I do appreciate the call, and thanks so much, and we're going to move on to the next caller.
Okie dokie.
Alright up next is David.
David wrote in and said, Stefan, one of your themes is that progressivism is in conflict with human nature, biology, and history.
However, has technology fundamentally altered the equation, enabling social transformation to continue indefinitely?
There need not be a return to any historical baseline if technology continues to provide an economic surplus and the means of controlling populations.
That's from David.
Do you want to expand on the question at all?
Well, it's just that I often feel pretty pessimistic with the way society is going.
It feels like the human race is kind of becoming domesticated.
And we're entering a new stage where our population and technology has increased and perhaps we're not going to be as free as we used to be.
And human nature that we might have thought of followed certain laws, we may be able to be manipulated by central powers.
And so it's like there's so much available energy in the system that gravity can be defied in a sense.
I'm sorry.
I really don't know what you're saying.
I'd like to.
I'd like to.
I was with you for a bit and I felt myself breaking up in the atmosphere.
Can you boil it down to a sentence, Roteo?
Well...
Traditional society may never exist again in the future because we will be able to be controlled by technology and essentially become very passive and docile.
And I think a lot of people listening to your channel are very much Concerned about this kind of thing, but there may not be anything we can do about it because of the inevitability of social change.
A docile population is an unproductive population.
Yeah.
So they don't provide enough resources for the rulers to rule, and so the society collapses, right?
Right.
Well, you know, in the past, people's labor was very necessary.
Like, you needed to have...
96% of the population engaged in agriculture, say, just to sustain the population.
But now we have only 2% of the population, their labor is able to sustain, create enough calories for 98% to remain unproductive.
So it's a fundamentally different equation.
Hang on, hang on.
The 98% who aren't Farmers are not unproductive if they can be.
98% of the population is not engaged in agriculture anymore.
Right, but that doesn't mean that they're unproductive.
Because otherwise, if they were unproductive, why on earth would the farmers bother to grow food for them?
The reason the farmers grow food for you and for me is because we provide some good or service in exchange.
So the farmer is not making wheat for the doctor or bread for the doctor because he just loves the doctor.
It's because he wants money so that if he gets sick he can go to the doctor.
So they're not 98% unproductive.
They've just been released from labor on the farms to do stuff that is more value added to society.
Okay, but when you think about what is really necessary for society, you know, we have agriculture, construction, medicine, teaching.
All of those can be provided by a small percentage of the population.
And the rest of us, we are just here kind of, you know, shuffling papers electronically, talking over the internet.
And essentially, we don't need to leave our houses.
10% of the population can look after us.
You know, if you want to look at it...
Why would they?
In basic physical terms.
No, but why would...
I mean, are you taking care of large numbers of people in society?
No, I'm one of the electronic paper shufflers, you know, I'm not...
You're on the receiving end of all of this, right?
So what is the motive?
What is the motive of people to take care of you?
I'm gainfully...
Like, I work very hard.
What is my motive to send you money?
We're creating value in some sense, but we're not creating the physical necessities for a life.
Okay, no, no, I don't know what you're talking about.
If I'm making money, and I work very hard, so if I'm making, you've got to let me finish my sentences before you talk.
It's one of the most annoying things on the planet to try and make a point and have someone talking in your ear.
I know I do it sometimes, and people are welcome to call me on that, but let me make my point.
And just answer it briefly, right?
If I'm making money by working hard, and you're sitting at home Watching Netflix or whatever.
What is my incentive to send you money?
If you are making very hard, working very hard...
If I'm working hard and making money and you're not working hard and not making money, what is my incentive to carve off some of my labor, the value that I have created, the money that I have made?
Why would I send it to you?
Well, people who have money will send money, will send surplus to people that may amuse them or provide some fleeting validation or anything.
But do you make any money?
Yes.
Okay, do you send your money to people less well-off than you?
Well, I send my money to all kinds of people for different reasons.
Okay, and what percentage of your money do you give to people who make less money than you?
Well, I don't know.
Like, I have some people working for me who are...
Just give me a guess.
I'm not asking for four decimal places.
Is it 1%, is it 50%, is it 90%?
Okay, 10%.
So, if you make 500 bucks, you take 50 bucks and you give it to people in need?
Part of that is, as an employer, I... I would hire some people who are less well-off than me.
That's true.
Okay, but now you're not talking about giving money to people who are unproductive.
You're talking about hiring people, but you don't hire people to just stay home and watch Netflix.
You hire people to provide you a service, which you then transfer to some customer, right?
Yes.
Okay, so that's not what we're talking about at all, right?
So I'm not talking about mutual exchange for mutual benefit.
I'm talking about you're saying that there are people who will, 90% of the population can be taken care of by 10%.
And my question is, what is the incentive for the 10% to take care of the 90%?
Right.
Okay, now I see what you're getting at.
Because the 90% provides some perceived value, but their labor is not necessary for physical existence.
So you're saying that the 90% should be paid by the 10% because the 90% can be the friends of the 10%?
I'm not saying the 90% should be paid by the 10%.
All I'm saying is that we're essentially engaged in some kind of...
It's almost like a game where passing around this, well, mainly electronic, now electronic currency, while in the past, everyone needed to put their shoulders to the wheel and harvest wheat, you know, build buildings.
Yeah, I know.
There's automation that has displaced physical labor.
I get that.
I get that.
And the way that it works in the free market, I mean, it never works in a state-controlled market for very long, but the way that it works in a free market is like this.
The smartest people will make the most money.
The smartest people will therefore have the most children.
Now, if there is a genetic component to intelligence, which there seems to be 50 to 80%, depending on which stage in life you're in, it starts off lower and it ends up higher in your life.
Smarter people make the most money.
Smarter people have the most children.
Since there's a genetic component or seems to be a genetic component to intelligence, then human intelligence will rise over time, right?
Okay.
And the least intelligent people will have the fewest children and therefore the genes associated with low intelligence will tend to diminish over time.
That's how it works in a free society.
And this is not eugenics.
This is not any kind of you can't let poor people breed.
It's just the natural.
Those who have the most resources tend to have the most children.
Intelligence is associated with income and therefore an income is associated with the number of children you can have.
It's not perfect but it's there.
Otherwise I think Mark Zuckerberg would have to have about four billion children, which would basically turn his wife into an oriental baby cannon.
But the reality is that over time...
As things become more automated, then the people who are doing the automation can have the most kids, and the people who can't really provide much value in that context, because they're not very smart, will have fewer kids, and generally the human population will get smarter.
And this has happened many times throughout history.
I had a whole interview with a guy talking about how Jewish intelligence was raised over the course of a couple of hundred years.
And it happened through the Black Death.
It happened through the 18th and 19th centuries and so on.
So the way that this problem is solved in the free market is generationally, over time, you end up with smartest people having the most children, which tends to replicate the genes for high intelligence.
And therefore, you're not going to end up with this tiny elite of smart people in this giant sea of less smart people in some, I don't know, hyper Venezuelan dystopia.
And so that's the way it would work.
How it works in a state of society, well, that's pretty clear.
It's that the people who are very smart tend to make a lot of money, and then the people who are less smart run to the government to get resources from the smart people because they don't want to take the risk of taking the money themselves by force.
And so you get a massive transfer from the more intelligent to the less intelligent, and next thing you know, you've got the idiocracy movie.
So, you know, this kind of dysgenics or whatever, I mean, it's not native to society.
It's just one of the many disastrous things that happens when you have a government.
Okay.
Well, You are doing good work and putting out material on how to be more virtuous and so forth, and that's earning you income, I understand it, because people want to pay for that content.
But there are also other YouTubers who put out information which doesn't lead to greater virtue, it's pure entertainment, maybe it has negative social value, and they're also getting paid for their efforts.
Wait, what do you mean by negative social value?
Well, I don't know.
Let's just hypothesize a YouTuber who's putting out stuff that you or I would not find valuable.
We might find destructive.
But you and I aren't society.
I mean, with negative social value, I'm not sure what that means.
Well, let's say...
Just because you and I don't get right.
Okay.
Let's say there's a YouTuber who puts out video game playthroughs, you know, just plays video games.
Okay, it's entertaining.
It's entertaining.
It's maybe of no great lasting value, but that person is earning income from their efforts.
And so?
What's wrong with that?
Nothing wrong with that.
Well, I'm saying that this is essentially unproductive.
I mean, if I can allow people to watch me doing calisthenics on YouTube, well, that's actually could be quite good.
That will earn me money, but it's not putting food on anyone's table.
It's not healing anyone's illnesses.
It's essentially just the money that is coming to me is just being redistributed from the productivity that is in the system.
I'm sorry, how do you know that the video game playthroughs are not putting food on anyone's table?
I can think of a million scenarios in which video game playthroughs would put food on people's table.
And as far as video game playthroughs, you know, Mike and I work together and the only gap that we fundamentally have, we're of different ages, the only fundamentally gap that we have, the only dichotomy that we have is called the Great PewDiePie Canyon, which is that I look at PewDiePie and it's like Nails on the chalkboard of my brain.
And Mike thinks it's great.
So, you know, but it's subjective, right?
I mean, he likes it.
I don't.
And there's, you know, some stuff that I like that he doesn't.
But I can see.
So let's say.
Let me just give you one example, right?
You're a farmer.
And let's say you're playing Doom 2016.
And let's say that you're, you know, a bit of a OCD tidy, got to do everything right farmer.
And you get to the end of the level, some level.
And you didn't find one of the secrets.
And it bothers you.
It kind of drives you crazy.
It's like, oh man, I looked everywhere.
I looked everywhere.
And let's say you go back and you look again and you look again, you can't find it.
And it's bothering you.
And you get to sleep late.
And then you sleep in and you don't milk your cows in time and they get lowing and uncomfortable and your day is just unproductive and you don't get a whole bunch of milk made and all that kind of stuff.
But let's say there's someone out there who's got, this is your level and here's all the secrets in three minutes.
And then you go and you look that up and you get the secrets and then you find them and you're happy about it.
You wish you'd found them yourself, but you'll take second prize of at least being able to complete it on paper.
You have a nice early night.
You get the milk going the next morning.
You're whistling.
You're happy.
You're peppy.
But that's just one scenario by which somebody who's making a video game playthrough is actually helping someone put food on the table.
Okay, certainly.
I see what you mean, but I just want to establish one basic point and then hopefully use that as a foundation to get on to a further point.
And it's simply that only a certain Amount of labor is required to produce the essentials of life.
As I said before, in the past, it took 100 people in a village to support one priest and one whatever who weren't working in the fields.
They just could not produce more calories than that to allow more people.
Yeah, I get it.
Keep going.
I get it.
There used to be a lot of people in farming.
I get it.
Okay, let's keep moving.
And now there's only a small number of people required.
So the 98% of us, sure we can do all these wonderful productive things of creating YouTube videos, but if we stop doing that, in theory the system could still sustain us.
There'd still be people pulling fish out of the sea, building our houses, etc.
So we have this large mass of people, 98% of the population or 90 or whatever it is, who are basically engaged in the social world, not the physical world.
Does that make sense?
No, not a bit.
But it seems like you've got this kind of Marxist analysis that, I'm not saying you're Marxist, but you've got this Marxist analysis that only food that delivers, like only labor that's physical in touch with something that delivers food and medicine and houses and other kinds of essentials, that's the real labor and everything else is frou-frou or nonsense or whatever, right?
But let me ask you this basic question.
I don't know, have you ever watched the YouTube videos that I make?
Absolutely.
Okay.
How good does my camera need to be?
I could do this with a webcam.
I could strap an old cell phone and do 240p video or whatever, right?
And I would still be visible and I would still be audible.
How good does my video and audio need to be?
Well, everyone likes and continually increasing resolution, I think, in technology.
So there's no practical upper limit, right?
I mean, I'm assuming that people don't want to have the virtual Steph reality device, right?
Because, you know, I can be kind of 40 and sneezy.
So how good does my camera need to be?
So I think it was like A couple of months ago or whatever, my last camera broke and it was going to take six or seven weeks to get it fixed.
And so I just, I got a new camera.
Now I have a backup camera.
The other one got fixed.
And, you know, lots of people said, wow, this looks great.
And it's, you know, we don't have to adjust the color afterwards.
It takes a three-prong plug directly into the camera so the sound...
It's even better for when I'm doing straight video and all of that.
It also has the added advantage that when I do screen recordings of PowerPoint the new camera syncs up perfectly so we don't need to adjust things which saves a lot of time.
And so it's been a net productive And it's a couple of thousand bucks for the camera, but in terms of the time that it saves us and the degree to which we can get videos out quicker because I can actually just shoot on this and upload directly to YouTube if we're in a big hurry, which sometimes we are if something's really important that's breaking, which helps gain more views and all that kind of stuff.
So how much should I spend on a camera?
Well, the answer is there's no answer.
There's no answer.
There are people who have popular channels who seem to be shooting through an old aquarium with a 240p webcam and have terrible sound.
And their channels are pretty popular.
There are other people who've got really fancy-dancy setups and they're not that popular.
There's no objective value in economics.
It's called the subjective theory of value.
There is no objective value.
In economics.
And you're trying to say, well, there's this stuff that's really important and then there's this stuff which is less important.
None of that matters.
None of that matters because you don't know whether it's important for me to get a better camera or not.
Look, I had an old camera that I had from years ago.
It was 1080p.
It had a little three and a half millimeter jack input so I could put a little mic that I've got on it.
It was okay.
I mean, it wasn't bad.
It was certainly a step up from the camera I had before that, which was not as good.
But the problem is that it drifted in color, right?
I mean, the color would just drift no matter what settings I tried.
I couldn't get it to sort of stick.
So it was kind of annoying to me, and I upgraded it.
Are you going to say to me, well look, Steph, you upgraded your camera.
Or, you know, to take another example, when my last camera broke, I could have said, well, you know what?
I'm just going to use my old camera for a couple of weeks until my new camera is fixed and back and better and all that kind of stuff, right?
And there's not you, there's not anyone on this earth, on God's green earth, who can say to me objectively what the right decision is.
Should I upgrade the camera?
Should I use my old camera until my broken camera is fixed?
No one can tell me that in any objective way whatsoever, any more than you can objectively say to someone, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they should buy an iOS phone or an Android phone or one of the three remaining Windows phones, right?
I mean, there's no one who can tell you in any way, shape, or form what the objective best use is of their scarce and precious resources.
It's called the subjective theory of value, and it's The only, I mean, other than the price calculation thing that you can't figure out what is needed where without prices, it is the great defense against central planning.
And I'm not saying you're a central planner or whatever, but once you kind of fundamentally get this, you can't divide labor into, well, this is really productive labor because it puts food on the table, and this is really unproductive labor because all it's doing is a video game walkthrough.
Because you cannot ever say that food on the table is always more important than a video game walkthrough.
I mean, I know it kind of seemed, well, if there was no food on anyone's table, then no one would be alive, right?
That doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
There are people who've foregone food for two or three days to play a video game.
I think some guy died.
Last year, because he just kept playing a video game until he died.
Now, is that a very wise decision?
No, I would say not.
But you can't possibly say objectively to somebody, you can give them counsel, you can say, I don't think you should gamble, I think you should save the money, and so on.
But you can't ever say objectively that gambling is always worse than saving your money.
You can't ever say, saving your money is always better than spending your money.
You can't ever say, you should invest in this rather than this.
You can't ever say, your labor is more productive than your labor.
Your labor is more valuable than your labor.
Because in a free market, the mechanism that does that is called price.
Now, PewDiePie makes, what, like $10 million a year?
And a thumb...
It was $10 million a year or two ago.
Maybe it's more now, I guess, right?
And he cheers people up.
He makes them laugh in some incomprehensible space alien manner.
You know, he's able to also has the emotional capacity to handle fame and he's also generous and I think he gives to charity and helps out people and all that.
So, yeah, seems like a nice guy.
He's a funny guy.
He puts a lot of hard work into his videos and he's able to make the transition to fame without much disturbance.
He's not gone off the deep end or whatever.
And so you say, well, you know, boy, doctors make, what, $150,000 a year.
This guy makes huge amounts.
More than that, is he worth hundreds of thousands of doctors?
Doesn't matter.
Doesn't matter.
Because in a free market, it's the price that matters, right?
Because doctors require physical labor to interact with every patient.
The reason why he makes more money, I haven't got, like we've had, we've got 111 million downloads on YouTube and probably an equivalent number.
So we're, you know, clocking in close to, I don't know, a quarter of a million views and downloads.
That doesn't mean I've gone to a quarter of a million downloads.
Houses and knocked on the door and said, hey, can you just stand here for three hours while I tell you about Rome?
And, you know, if I could get an umbrella, it's raining, right?
So the difference is between the value that is replicated instantly and relatively easily through, like, PewDiePie makes a video and goes out to millions and millions of people and he doesn't, that's it, right?
And whereas a doctor usually has to see someone, so there's that logjam of labor that slows everything down and so on.
12 million PewDiePie makes.
So, uh, So, you know, there's just no way to say whether PewDiePie is worth, you know, a thousand doctors or whatever it's going to be at 120k a head or whatever it's going to be.
There's no way to know.
Because it's not like PewDiePie didn't make that money.
It's not like everyone would then say, well, I'm going to go spend it on a doctor's visit whether I need it or not, right?
I mean, if PewDiePie didn't make that money, it would go to six million other things, of which I'm sure you would disapprove of 90% and approve of 10%.
But your approval or disapproval doesn't matter at all.
I'm trying to sort of liberate you from judging the economy.
And you can go out and make your case that I think you should, you know, you can say, well, I think you should spend less on junk food and I think you should spend more on healthy food and I think you should spend less on a comfortable couch and maybe more on an exercise machine and so on.
And there are costs and benefits to every one of those decisions.
But thinking there's objective value turns almost everyone into a judgmental busybody.
I'm not saying you necessarily, but there is no objective value when it comes to To the consumption and allocation of resources.
Now, there are moral values.
You can hire a hitman.
I mean, I get all of that.
But we're talking outside the realm of morality.
It's all a matter of aesthetics.
And saying, like having judgments about what people spend their money on is a way of kind of slowly driving yourself crazy because very few people will ever agree with you and you're not dealing with anything objective anyway.
Well, I understand that, and I wasn't making judgements against people.
I mean, if Tom Cruise can make $20 million for a movie, I mean, he's creating that value, and that's fine.
But what I am saying is that given that PewDiePie can make $10 million a year from shooting videos in his own home, we have entered kind of a new stage in human evolution and history where Where human nature is kind of being changed, and we're not connected to our biology anymore.
What does that mean?
Is he a floating head?
What does that mean, not connected to his biology?
Well, for example, like...
You mean if he was chopping down a tree, that would be real work, whereas making a video is not?
Average testosterone levels have changed a lot in the last 30 or 40 years because more of us are sitting around lifestyle and diet changes and so forth.
Because we don't have to do physical labor, there are significant changes.
Our whole society is changing and I think we're becoming more like domestic animals rather than, say, the carnivorous predatory kind of animals which we might have been more of in the past.
And there is a huge distortion occurring which is capable of being taken advantage of by those in power.
That's what I'm saying.
Well, I mean, the lower testosterone levels, I've heard a variety of explanations about that, about the fact that there seems to be quite a lot of female birth control pills in the water supply.
And that does not seem to be particularly good for all of that.
Eating soy seems to have something to do with it.
But I would also argue that When government schools were first instituted, you were certain to get, or when schools as a whole were first instituted, you'd spend, you know, five or six hours a day in your school.
And then your physical activity levels would be guaranteed by the fact that you generally would be on a farm or you'd be out playing or doing something.
You know, kid labor was pretty common in the 19th century for certain parts of it.
And so When you would be in school, you'd be sitting there and then you'd have your recess and your lunch or whatever.
And then when you'd get out of school, you would be running around or working and so on.
So there was a huge amount of physical labor that was understood for children or physical movement, let's say, if it wasn't labor.
But now, of course, kids are sitting in school and then they generally come home and they sit on the couch or they, you know, sit with their tablets or phones or whatever it is, getting nice healthy doses of EMF radiation.
And the physical movement is no longer guaranteed at all.
And I think that has a lot to do with what's going on for all of this kind of stuff.
And so that is a pretty important thing.
And let me just...
I'm going to just get...
This is something I've been meaning to talk about.
I'm going to, I think, reasonably shoehorn it into here.
Let me just do my...
Quick search here.
I should have got this beforehand, but it just plain didn't.
All right.
All right, so let me just try one more look here.
Oh, typing on the side.
always so productive.
Childhood and activity could cost your kids five years of their life.
I'm going to leave.
And it is some kind of crazy number that the amount of time that children spend basically indoors and sitting versus the amount of time they spend outdoors in free play is It's like over 20 times more indoors and relatively inactive versus outdoors in free play.
It doesn't count things like if you're in a sort of structured play environment, like you're on a soccer team or something like that.
But this has become a huge, huge problem for children, just sort of not moving, just not being active at all.
And this is in the UK. Only 10% of children are doing physical activity every day at school.
60% of parents are worried about obesity levels in children.
Three quarters of our children don't even do one hour a day of exercise.
A third of parents struggle to keep their children active.
So inactivity for children is a huge problem.
And I've talked about this before, the degree to which It's just so much associated with single motherhood and two parents working.
You don't get a community, you don't trust, so you want to keep your kids home because you don't figure out your neighbors and how to feel safe with your kids all out there.
In Ireland, a quarter of children are overweight.
And that's probably pretty conservative.
It is a big challenge.
Whether this has to do with testosterone and so on, I don't know.
But I generally, as you know, always start with childhood and go from there.
And the answer to all of this, it's a big, big question.
But certainly in a free society, with all of the technology, That we have.
The idea that you would need to have kids sit there for six hours a day, being lectured to by people who mostly don't want to be there, that is, I just can't even imagine that that would be how it works in a free society.
And in a free society, there would be neighborhoods and communities because you'd need to know your neighbors because you'd need to get their help should it end up that you, you know, get out of a job or you need, you know, you don't have a welfare state and there'd be charities and so on.
But it is, there would be communities, there would be trust, there'd be neighborliness, there would be less time in school and all of this kind of stuff.
And, you know, I think that would have huge positive impacts over the long run when it comes to You know, as you say, domesticated, right?
And so I would say that those would be the solutions.
So again, the solution is always freedom, less compulsion, less state, and more voluntarism.
All right.
I guess we're going to move on to the next caller.
Thanks so much for your call.
Very interesting stuff.
Alright, up next is Jonah.
Jonah wrote in and said,"...the recent events regarding the early release of Brock Turner have caused quite a reaction in the mainstream and social media.
I have observed many people resorting to public shaming as a way to obtain a level of justice above that which the court systems have provided them." One person on my friends list even asked a question, if we are going to publicly shame someone for sexual assault, why don't we publicly shame people for getting multiple DUIs slash DWIs?
I argue that the public shaming is rarely a good thing, and that it often leads to punishment that exceeds the original crime.
Going along with the theme of justice from one of your previous interviews, do you think that public shaming is an acceptable form of justice when the public feels a convicted person got a lenient sentence?
That's from Jonah.
Hey Jonah, how are you doing tonight?
Hi Stefan, I'm doing fantastic.
How are you?
I'm well, thank you.
I'm well.
I think he's going through a little bit more than public shaming, Brock Turner, just so we know.
But, yeah, I mean, there are people who our society disapproves of significantly, and they experience ostracism, they experience shaming, and so on.
And it's, you know, it's not the end of the world when it comes to how society should enforce things.
And...
Yeah, I mean, I think it was Richard Spencer who was talking about how he's on the alt-right or sort of the center of the alt-right, and he was saying how, you know, people, store owners would tell him not to come back into their stores and all this kind of stuff, right?
So he's, you know, facing that kind of stuff.
So I think social ostracism is very powerful.
And it is one of the things that Can metastasize, so to speak.
In other words, it can be something where it kind of feeds on itself and things get kind of hysterical.
But I think those are people who've got significant anger issues and are just looking for like a target to vent on.
And I think with, you know, healthier childhoods and healthier upbringings, then that will occur.
In a free society, then whoever meets out punishment, I call them dispute resolution organizations.
And for those who want to know more about that, They can read Everyday Anarchy, Practical Anarchy.
These are free books available on my website at freedomainradio.com slash free.
So if, let's say, there was some dispute resolution organization that had a too low punishment for shoplifting, let's say.
Well, people wouldn't want to Hire that DRO to represent their business, right?
So if the DRO said, well, the punishment for shoplifting is you have to do the chicken dance three times.
Well, if you're a store owner, would you want that?
No, probably not.
You'd probably want something else.
And so if a convicted person gets a lenient sentence, that is a blow against whoever, whatever agency is giving the sentencing out.
And if that becomes more common, Then that agency or that group is not going to want to...
It's not going to do well in the marketplace because they'll be perceived as too lenient.
And same thing if a punishment is too strong.
So, you know, if a government court system hands out something that is too lenient, what do people do?
What can they do, right?
They can double jeopardy, I assume, prevents anyone from being tried for the same crime twice.
So they can go and it's out of a sense of desperation or frustration or maybe misinformation.
I don't know.
But...
They don't have any particular recourse.
Whereas if some dispute resolution organization, some DRO in a free society, hands out too lenient a sentence, people can organize a boycott.
They can do a whole bunch of things.
They can short the stocks and then try and drive the value down through legal or honorable means.
They can write articles about it.
All of these kinds of things.
So there's a lot of recourse.
People tend to act out when they don't have Any effective recourse.
And so I think this sort of social shaming stuff is acting out against individuals because people don't feel that they have any control over the state system as a whole.
And so I think when people have more control over this by having their own private agencies to deal with these issues, then they won't need as much public shaming.
They will find ways to do it that would be economic ostracism and so on.
And, you know, public shaming, is it a good thing?
Well, it's hard to say in isolation.
The old question which, you know, is foundational to philosophy is compared to what?
I'd rather have social shaming and ostracism than big giant government bureaucracies with the power to do god-awful things to people's freedoms.
I would rather have social ostracism because when people get all fired up about some issue, it's really important to them.
The problem with the government is they then lobby the government and the government does it forever.
You know, I want people to get burned out from social activism.
I want people to get tired.
I want people to get bored.
I want them to get hot.
I want them to get uncomfortable.
I want their shoes to stick to a hot pavement or something like that.
Simply because, you know, going out and holding a sign all day because you're upset about something.
Okay, I respect people who do that if that's really important to them.
But there is the limiting thing that you kind of have to, you know, get a job and it's tiring and all that kind of stuff.
Or have an income.
Whereas, you know, people who get the government to pass some law, well, they can just say, well, I'm upset about this.
I get the government to pass a law about this.
Now I'm upset about that.
I get the government to pass a law about that and just keep going and going and going.
And this is how stuff piles up.
So at least with public shaming and ostracism and so on, it's a usually fairly active thing, which means that eventually people are going to run out of steam.
Whereas with the government, the laws that come, they just stay forever.
Does that make any sense?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Well, good.
I'm glad I've answered the question.
Is there anything else you wanted to ask?
Yeah, well, I mean, certainly my point, certainly going back to the point where it kind of leads to justice that kind of goes beyond what the legal system provides.
And you're absolutely right.
In a perfect world, in a theoretical world, where we would have some sort of a committee instead of a centralized government bureaucracy or legal system that can automatically just dictate things to us, It kind of breeds – these sort of cases kind of breed a lot of resentment in the general public, which leads a lot of distrust in the legal system that we have.
And there are plenty of instances.
I know there are cases where our current judicial system absolutely denies people an adequate level of justice.
But the entire thing where people kind of feel that they've been cheated by the system and that they need to do something outside of the system, well, I mean, you've studied history.
You know what can happen when people kind of...
Lose faith in the system that they have and they kind of take matters into their own hands.
Going back to my example, talking about the social media thing where my friend had popped the question, you know, for somebody who has multiple DUI slash DWIs, I mean, you know, should we do this?
Should we publicly shame people?
And...
Immediately, right in the comments section, one of the reasons why I felt like I had to reply was one of the respondents said that, well, I mean, we should just execute somebody.
I mean, if they're caught with a DUI on the side of the road, let's just shoot them, get it done.
Like, well, that kind of defeats the idea of justice.
And I mean, I know it is just kind of macho man talk on social media, but this stuff has manifested to the point where people kind of Just go all crazy and decide that they want to take matters into their own hands, maybe go and find the person who was given the lenient sentence, maybe beat them up.
You know what I mean, right?
Lynching.
Yes, exactly.
And that's sort of the thing where I understand the point where public ostracism and shaming can be beneficial.
I mean, certainly there are times when Well, the general public needs to know that these people are out there, that they've done bad things, they did get a sentence, whether it's lenient or not, right?
Yeah, sometimes it can get out of hand.
A prime example, I know your American listeners may not understand this, but certainly here in Canada, where we had the Gian Gomeschi trial, That was a, you know, kind of a good example of why, you know, people going, taking their fight onto social media can kind of take things a little bit too far.
Because if the people had, you know, read the judge's response and the evidence provided in the case, it probably would have diffused a lot of these, you know, angry people outside the courtroom and social media.
Oh, that's optimistic.
But yeah, maybe.
Yeah, maybe.
You're down to something else.
Oh, dearie.
Said that the judge was a patriarch, but...
Oh, yeah.
Male privilege, you know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, you know, do you...
People who drive drunk regularly, people who drive drunk at all, are complete jerks and dangerous people.
And that would not be in my social circle.
You know, I mean, would I necessarily go out and publicly shame and humiliate people?
I don't know.
Hard to say.
Depends how personally it affected me or how important I thought it was.
But I wouldn't hang around with somebody who was a sort of regular...
Drunk driver.
I mean, there is technology that you can have that will help with these things.
Like you could have the technology that says you have to pass a breathalyzer in your car before your car will start.
You know, that's one possibility.
So at least, you know, if there are ways of bypassing it, yeah.
And then there's actually that technology exists now that you can't start your car until you blow into the tube and you don't have alcohol in your breath.
So there's lots of ways of solving this kind of stuff.
But again, I mean, we don't get a free society Until children are raised peacefully and children who are raised peacefully won't be drinking and driving very much because it's an act of supreme selfishness and brutality and danger.
And so I just, you know, people who weren't making those kinds of decisions if they've been raised well.
So again, I think we sort of focus on a free society.
We focus on better parenting and these things will resolve themselves over time and give people the market incentives and the market power.
To have some control over punishment agencies in their society, which is really not going to happen very much while there's a state.
Yeah, yeah, I would certainly agree with you on that one.
It would be really nice to see that.
And that's kind of part of why I'm enjoying your conversation.
I'm glad these sort of things exist because here in Canada, we're kind of fed this dogma where, you know, the state is this grandiose savior that if, you know, just one more regulation, if you just give us a little bit more power, we're going to make your life so much better.
Another point that I wanted to make is specifically going back to shaming people for impaired driving and whatnot, especially the repeat offenders.
A lot of these people, not all of them, of course, some of them are just making a bad judgment.
Well, all of them are, realistically.
But some of these people, if they're willing to put themselves and their families and complete strangers on the road at risk, I mean, is public shaming really going to do all that good?
Or will it just exacerbate the problems that already exist?
And I guess my last point regarding that is oftentimes when somebody is brought into the public spotlight...
Let's just use drunk driving as an example.
If there is intense outrage towards it, what's going to happen is that not only is that individual going to be in the spotlight, but pretty much every single person that they know is going to be put under the spotlight under harsh scrutiny, very harsh scrutiny in many cases.
My argument is, is it really justice to inflict that kind of stress on somebody when they may probably didn't even have anything to do with it in the first place?
Sorry, who's getting stressed here?
Oh, okay, sorry.
Well, let's say your best friend, or maybe not even your best friend, somebody you work with, let's say.
But someone you definitely know, somebody that everyone can find out that you know.
Let's say that person gets into an accident, harms somebody, whatnot.
Pretty much everything, especially if it hits the media, I mean, there's going to be a lot of people asking questions and kind of making judgments, because you know how these sort of things go.
I mean, for the case of Brock Turner, I mean, immediately and reasonably, in the case of the parents, where the parents came into the spotlight under pretty harsh scrutiny, and But that's not always just the people who may have had an immediate effect on the situation that happened.
Sometimes it's complete strangers where, you know, you could be like, hey, I know that you know this guy.
He's a scumbag and yada yada yada.
Why do you hang out with this person?
That sort of thing.
You know, is it justice to put that sort of thing into the spotlight to where something like that can happen?
I mean, going back to your...
You know, I mean, look, I don't know.
I mean, there's so many theoreticals and so many possibilities.
People get wrongly accused, right?
Someone may say, oh, this person did something really mean to me, and, well, we talked about John Gomeshi, right?
And he seems to be wrongfully accused.
Or at least the court didn't find him guilty.
So people can be wrongfully accused, and people could get beaten up as a result of that.
And, you know, these are all...
Potentially terrible situations which are solved by better parenting and free society.
You can always come up with situations where something bad could happen or something negative might happen.
But peaceful parenting and a free society, that's the best we can hope for, for these kinds of things.
I have no problem with social ostracism because...
If we say people can't socially ostracize, then we're violating freedom of association by forced association.
You know, in a future society, it's not like there won't be a search mechanism.
And if you've done something bad, you'll be on the web and people will look you up and maybe that will cost you jobs and maybe it'll cost you, you know, something.
Who knows, right?
Maybe you're in Ashley Madison and they get hacked.
I don't know.
But again, peaceful parenting in a free society will lead us closest to the best solutions for these kinds of things.
And it's a balance, right?
You don't want people completely indifferent to other people's moral deeds or misdeeds, and you don't want people chasing down other people with pitchforks and lit torches, right?
So it is, you know, we want a reasonable degree of engagement while outsourcing the actual verification to third-party agencies so that you don't end up acting on a false allegation.
So I hope that helps.
Thanks very much for the call.
Very interesting stuff.
And let's move on.
All right.
Thank you.
All right.
Up next is Sean.
Sean wrote in and said, Catholics appear to have consistently lower divorce rates in North America compared to most other groups, including Protestants.
For Catholic couples who attend mass, pray regularly, and practice, NFP rates have been documented below 1%.
If we can accept that number as being even remotely accurate, what can our society in general learn from it?
That's from Sean.
Hey Sean, how you doing?
Are you Catholic yourself?
I am.
Right.
Is it really 1%, right?
I have seen as low as for couples that are practicing NFP, I've seen it as low as 0.2.
0.2.
Wow.
That's wild.
Can you enlighten me into what NFP is, please?
Natural family planning.
So, no use of contraceptives of any kind.
Right.
Sort of reminds me of an old joke from when I was a kid, the Eurovision Song Contest, that the Italian entry called I Can't Get No Contraception didn't make it to the finals after the Pope told them to pull it out at the last minute.
But...
I think it does say some important things.
And I sort of said recently that the Amish have a divorce rate that is virtually non-existent.
You know, a tenth of a percent, a fifth of a percent, a half a percent or whatever.
I think society can learn a lot.
So, you know, the things that would work for Catholic couples, of course, we would hope that they would have the same values or at least very similar values.
And the...
The woman who is, and the vow, the vow means something in Catholicism, right?
I mean, I know everyone says this vow, and we're going to be together till death do us part in sickness and in health, for better or for worse.
Well, for the Catholics, they're saying that in the eyes of God, and they will forever remain married in the eyes of God.
You might be able to get yourself an old if something goes really haywire, but you are married.
And, you know, what God has joined together, let no man tear asunder.
So they believe that they are married in the eyes of God and they cannot get divorced.
They cannot be separated.
It is a permanent state.
And that, you know, for Catholics, it is a huge sin to get divorced and they can't get remarried.
Then it's bigamy as far as polygamy, right?
So...
So the fact that people's vows really mean something, that they need the backup of the eye in the sky, but the fact that their vows really mean something is very important.
And so vows matter, values matter.
If they are not using contraception, then of course the odds of having a child go up enormously.
And so if the woman is pregnant and with child, then her sexual market value is significantly diminished, right?
She's pregnant or she's breastfeeding or she's got a lot of kids around, so she's not out there dancing up a storm at the local bar.
And she's also very dependent upon her husband, who is very responsible for a pretty significant brood of children, right?
So the man has to work and the woman has to raise the kids and they are wedded in the eyes of God and they share the same values.
And they go to church where if they have issues, right, I assume that they talk to the priest or the priest may encourage them to get some sort of family counseling or for marital therapy or something if they're having real issues.
And I think that they would also face significant social ostracism if they split up, right?
I mean, it's like that old scene from Goodfellas where, you know, Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro Come over to the guy's house.
It's like, you've got your mistress on the side, but you've got to stay married.
She's your wife and all that kind of stuff.
And so I think that there's a lot of social and religious and biological and familial responsibilities that entwine Catholic couples.
And...
That means that they're going to stick together.
And that is a hugely positive thing.
And again, it's one of these things that is a very significant positive with regards to Christianity.
And I would say within Catholicism in general, whatever keeps families together, you know, assuming that there's not God-awful abuse going on.
But whatever keeps families together is a big plus, because if families are stable, you can have a small government.
If families are unstable, you're going to end up with a big government no matter what.
A big government and a self-destruction in society, an economic collapse of one kind or another.
And so if I say, well, I can have atheism, which, you know, for whatever reason seems to be associated with family dissolution, not directly, but, you know, by taking away the sort of vow of God and the social pressure to stay together and the shared values and so on.
So if I say, well, I can have atheism, which is going to have some correlation, not necessarily a causation, but some correlation with family breakup with a giant state and with economic and social collapse, or you can have Catholicism with, you know, small state, stable families and parents who stick it out together.
Well, I'm just saying that I can understand the argument for the latter.
Does that make sense at all?
It makes so much sense, maybe he fell asleep.
Sean, are you there?
Looks like he's gone.
All right.
Well, let's close off the show then.
I'm sorry that we lost him, but I think I answered everything that he could possibly have asked in one short speech.
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