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Jan. 9, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
58:28
3956 FREEDOM | Gavin McInnes, Mike Cernovich and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi, everybody. Happy New Year to you all, here with the good friends Gavin McInnes and Mike Cernovich.
Now, Gavin, of course, an original co-founder of Vice Media and is the host of Get Off My Lawn on CRTV at CRTV.com and Twitter.com forward slash Gavin Underbar McInnes.
We'll put the links to that below.
Mike, of course, as you know, lawyer, filmmaker, Periscope merchant, and the best-selling author of Guerrilla Mindset, How to Control Your Thoughts and Emotions to Live Life.
On your terms and MAGA Mindset, how to make you in America great again.
He is also the producer of the film documentary Silenced, A War on Free Speech, and the upcoming Can't Wait to Consume, hoaxed the media's war on truth.
There is, of course, twitter.com forward slash Cernovich, and we are talking about A Night for Freedom, which is coming up on Saturday, January the 20th, 2018, in New York, New York, New We're good to go.
It's a lot. It's complicated, yet for me also, perhaps it's kind of simple.
But let's get your thoughts, Gavin, first, on what does freedom mean to you in your life?
Well, first of all, I was going to say thank you for having us, but Mike and I aren't in the same room, and that seemed kind of rude.
So I changed it to me at the last second.
Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
Is that okay, Mike? Yeah, I don't...
I love you more than a friend, Gavin, so I'll let you get away with things that other people couldn't get away with.
This is what freedom means to me.
It's funny because back in the early 2000s, Free speech was doing quite well.
Political correctness was around in the 90s, but it took a dip in the early 2000s.
And back then, if you were bitching about freedom a lot, you'd sound like a baby.
But right now, there are so many rules of what you can and can't do that it's a radical statement to say, I want to be free to have fun.
I want to be free to joke around with my friends.
I want to be free to have naughty thoughts.
I mean, people are getting fired for who they are associating with or laughing at a joke.
Or today I was just talking to Count Dankula over in Scotland who is, uh, going to, who may go to prison because he made his dog into a Nazi.
And it hasn't occurred to the court that he was goofing around, and he doesn't really want his dog to exterminate Jews.
I'm pretty sure he's not trying to found the fourth ruff, so it's very strange.
Well, that's really what they're saying in court.
I mean, he's already been to court twice.
So when I say I want freedom, it's the freedom just to be normal, the freedom just to be able to make jokes and to goof around and to say things.
I mean, now on Twitter and in social media, you have to be really careful how you phrase things lest you be banished.
Well, and people are becoming deliberately obtuse to the point where sarcasm and parody and satire have become landmines that can be easily taken out of context.
Yeah, like look at Trump. He says, oh, it's freezing out there.
I wish we could have some of that global warming.
And the left takes that as, Trump says global warming doesn't exist because it was cold one day.
So they take him literally, but not seriously, where the right takes him seriously, but not literally.
And that's happening to basically everyone slightly right of center.
Everything we say has to be dissected and analyzed.
And if it doesn't meet the criteria, the Bleckle test, or whatever her name is, Then you're banished and they'll call your boss, they'll terrorize your clients until you're unemployed.
And you know what's funny about that, by the way?
When they do this ostracization and they say, this guy's a Nazi and the way he ate pizza was racist, he gets ostracized, he gets pushed, banished to a corner of the social earth.
And the next thing you know, the only people that he could hang out with are Nazis.
So he goes, yeah, maybe I'm going to try this.
Maybe I'll check it out. So these people are creating Nazis where Nazis didn't exist.
Right. What do you think, Mike, in terms of what freedom pops into your mind?
Well, freedom always starts with freedom of your own thought and the freedom to think whatever you want to think.
And it fundamentally starts with your own mindset and your own life.
And then, of course, freedom of consciousness or freedom of consciousness, the freedom to live in accordance with your values, with minimal interference, especially from the state.
So in my world, if the rules were applied equally to the left and the right, I wouldn't really have a problem with people being fired over tweets or whatever if it were applied To me, the issue was less one of Oh, my God, you should be free from the consequences, whatever you say, and more along the lines of, hey, we live together in a society.
If we're going to live together in a society, we do have a social contract.
And under the social contract, we should expect everyone to be treated equally and to be held to the same standard.
So to get to Gavin's point, it's fascinating where everything Trump said is treated literally and fact check, fact check, fact check.
But that Michael Wolff book, Everybody is saying, including Brian Stelter, well, I mean, it isn't really true.
There's a lot of factual inaccuracies.
But the vibe, it's like, well, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.
I thought we had to go line by line and fact check every assertion.
But now when it's a book about somebody they don't like, they go, well, you know, a lot of these anecdotes are factually incorrect, but overall the vibe of the book is good.
It feels true. And this is what Conbert was a couple of years ago with this truthiness thing.
He was talking about that.
And there's also this weird thing like after Oprah's speech at the Golden Globes.
People are saying, well, you know, that that could be the next president.
And there's no sense of irony that when Trump ran for presidency, oh, well, he's just a TV guy.
So he's got a lot of money, but he's just a TV guy, got no experience in politics, even though, of course, he's been giving speech at political conventions for decades.
And now they put forward Oprah with no sense of irony.
And the same thing, of course, as you pointed out, Mike, occurs with now.
Trump be crazy.
Trump be mad. Mentally ill.
Nuts. Four sheets to the wind of senility with no evidence whatsoever.
But any time, as you did, and as you talked about on 60 Minutes, you bring up Hillary's health when she's pitching forward into vans like a felled tree.
Well, that's crazy. But you can speculate all you want about Trump's mental health with no possible evidence.
And it's really just being a concerned citizen.
Yeah. Can you imagine if they had to stand up to the kind of rigor they demand of us?
I mean, they wouldn't last an afternoon.
They're spoiled rotten.
You look at that woman's march and they're wearing pussy hats Based on a joke he made in private on a bus, his throwaway joke is your entire identity now.
I still see women in my neighborhood walking around with these stupid hats on and I feel like yelling at them, he was kidding, you fool!
You imbecile! And then they go to a women's march and they're putting on these hijabs.
While the Iranians are ripping them off as a form of protest.
And you think, you guys are so soft.
You're so bad at logic.
You can't make a point.
You don't even know what your own marches are for.
They're just, they're mentally obese is what they are.
Well, can you imagine this idea of putting your genitalia on your head?
If a men's march, if a march for men's issues, we actually put giant dicks on your head.
Yeah, we did that when I was in a punk band.
It was called making fun of ourselves.
You literally would be a dickhead.
I mean, I don't know how this is any kind of political statement.
But this is, of course, the interesting thing is that by being held to these kinds of standards, by having this complete disjointed set of standards, we end up getting tougher and they end up getting lazier.
And, you know, in the long run, I think we all know evolutionarily speaking where that turns out.
Exactly. One of the benefits of being attacked so viciously by the left is, last year and the past 18 to 24 months, I made a nice amount of loot on Bitcoin.
And it isn't because I'm a genius investor.
It was because- We're good to go.
Okay, sure. $5,000 is real money.
I'll figure out this Bitcoin thing.
And then I forget about it.
And next thing you know, a year later, I'm reading headlines and I go, wait a minute.
I have Bitcoin.
Check under the couch. Wait, how much is this worth now?
Right. I'm like, oh, okay.
Well, thank you. So by attacking us, they forced us to become more resourceful.
And because of that, a lot of people have done well financially and done well message-wise.
You know, our games have to be sharper.
And their game is so weak that even though they outnumber us, they aren't compelling.
And our message is compelling because we're in a very Darwinian environment.
Right away you learn, okay, that didn't land.
That joke didn't land.
That is going to be taken out of context.
That's going to be twisted.
And because of that, we're getting, you know, the mob by attacking us is actually making us stronger.
Yeah. Well, it's funny, every time I'm doing a speech, because I mostly speak off the cuff, it's very rare that I'll have anything prepared.
I'm really committed to what it is that I'm saying, but I have this parallel processor of, okay, every five seconds that can be extracted and turned into an out-of-context GIF. Huh, how would that play?
How would that play? And it does give you, if you have the fluidity to be passionate and committed and live in the moment while at the same time being aware of how you can be taken out of context, that's a pretty good brain exercise.
And I think the left don't really need to worry about that.
And of course, in the left, because they don't have anything to do with people outside their own thought bubble as a whole, if you're pushed out of the left, you're done.
Like, you're gone. But on the non-leftist, and I don't even know what to call it, I mean, I'm not on the right or anything, but on the non-leftist environment, sort of free-thinking environment, if you're attacked, kind of a badge of honor.
Like, this idea that it's going to destroy you, I think, has been pretty deep in the rear view of these days.
Well, they say that about the Scots.
They say, evolutionarily, after being attacked by the English for 700 years, the ones who don't enjoy conflict are extinct.
And they also, Dr. Drew was saying, the reason the Scots are such drunks is that they genetically like a battle and alcohol handicaps you.
So they go, all right, let's have a battle, a war inside my body.
You know, we see this all over the right.
Remember Ann Coulter said, our blacks are better than their blacks?
And she was saying...
Black people, when they're conservative, they're getting hammered at Thanksgiving.
Hammered meaning questioned and interrogated.
They get interrogated at Christmas by their liberal relatives and eventually their arguments become honed like a diamond.
And this is the biggest problem with the left is they live in fear of any kind of confrontation, any kind of rigor, any kind of due process.
And that's why they always say don't give Nazis a platform or don't give anyone right wing a platform.
What they mean is don't debate them because you will lose.
We just saw this with Stephen Miller and Jake Tapper.
Jake Tapper had to have CNN security escort him out of the building because he was so good at it.
And whenever you do that, The other liberals say, why'd you give them a platform?
What they mean is, we're vulnerable.
We're like North Korea. We can't have the internet.
The more discussions there are, the more we hash it out, the more we're going to be exposed as buffoons.
So they just zip it.
They go at rallies in your face.
They pepper spray me at NYU. Because speaking is the worst thing you can do for them.
Well, this is an interesting thing around freedom.
And I know, Mike, you've done a lot of work in this area.
And it seems to me that if you are able to control your own emotions, then you can let other people say and do what they want.
Because you're not going to hyperreact.
You're not going to be sleepless.
You're not going to have panic attacks.
You're not going to have nervous breakdowns of becoming intensely neurotic and so on.
So because you can handle contrary opinions because it's like, fine, I could be wrong.
I could improve my perspectives.
I'm happy to hear the case that other people are making.
Because you're willing or able to control your own emotional responses.
And there's something around tyranny that to me seems intensely emotionally fragile and I think this is the safe space stuff that we see happening on the left.
They don't seem to have the ability to manage their own emotional responses to external stimuli And therefore, the external stimuli is so emotionally horrifying for them.
It's like somebody running at you with a knife.
They almost feel like they're acting in base biological self-defense.
And that fragility leading to tyranny, for me, self-control is very much the essence of freedom.
Because if you can't control yourself, you end up really having to control others.
Well, that's why if you're a big government or collectivist movement like the left, you want people...
Who are delicate and fragile because you just work them up into a fury and you send them off to do whatever you want them to do.
They are like a hive mind.
It's one thing that Jordan Peterson's tried to explain it.
I don't think anybody is adequately explained and you and I actually, Stefan, we talked about left-wing death camps and the fundamental question that keeps me up at night is What is it about our brains that are different?
For example, the three of us, you know, good friends, you guys needed something.
I'd be on a plane, you know, right there for you.
But we don't like coordinate.
We don't have a, you know, a weekly meeting where we're like, hey guys, what are you going to talk about?
How can we, you know, or how about we arrange the time slots that we're in so that we can all, you know, create a block of programming for people.
Or here's our collective enemy.
Let's work to destroy them this week or whatever it is, right?
Yeah, and it's just like a right-wing thing where we don't coordinate and collude, maybe to our detriment in some instances.
And a government doesn't want people like that because we're a lot harder to control because we're just thinking, well, fine, dude, we'll just do our own thing.
Like, oh, so you're trying to tell people they can't, you know, give me money because they're afraid of bank records?
That's cool, bro. I'll just go get Bitcoin.
Well, no, no, you're not supposed to do that.
Now you have more money than you would have.
Now you have 30 times more than you would have with that donation.
And no, no, no, that's the wrong thing.
So they hate people who are individuals and exercise the freedom.
Fundamentally, the only freedom of a man or woman that matters, and this is the one the government takes away, is the freedom to go your own way.
That's what they want to stop.
The freedom to just say...
Okay, fine. I don't want to be part of your system.
In fact, I watched a documentary, Baking on Bitcoin, and we saw what happened to the Silk Road people, who they simply wanted the freedom to go their own way.
We saw what happened with Charlie Shrem.
He just wanted the freedom to do as he liked without harming anybody else.
And that is the only freedom that should matter to a thinking person, and that is the one freedom that the state and their left-wing enablers want to take away from us.
Can I say one thing?
One problem I find with the right, anyone right or center, is a lack of unity.
I mean, the left has it in spades.
They have it to the point of barbaric idiocy, the way they embrace Linda Sarsour and jihadists and even ISIS in some cases.
They are mental patients.
Every time you go to a rally, there's Che Guevara, Mumay Abu-Jamal, it's all one big cause for them.
That's dumb. But I think we have the opposite problem.
And I'm a big unity guy.
If you want small government, you're pro first day and second day, you're in my good books.
I don't really care.
I like Ben Shapiro.
I like Never Trumpers.
I like paleocons, neocons.
I like them all.
As long as they want me to be left alone, then they're in my good books.
I wish we had more unity on our side.
We do.
I mean, we tried that.
I tried that last year.
And then the worst thing I ever did was become anywhere near these alt-right people who I don't know if they're federal agents or agent provocateurs or whatever.
I'm thinking, no emotionally healthy person wants to throw a Nazi salute.
So the flip side to that is I really did try.
I'm like, oh, you guys do your thing.
Fine. I'm not going to counter-signal other people.
But then eventually you have people who...
Well, the problem is that Here's a big problem.
People on the right can get media attention by dropping in bombs, throwing up Nazi salutes, and the media rewards that.
So you created an incentive structure to have saboteurs come in on the right.
So that's the frustration is I'm definitely a live and let live person.
And I don't think that my job, like I've told people, I go, look, My job isn't to be the ADL-lite or the SPLC-lite.
These organizations and groups have billions of dollars in budgets.
That shouldn't be my job.
But that said, there are people who aren't sincere, and they do try to pretend to be right-wing in order to discredit everything that people like us do.
Well, there's an unfair standard, of course.
I should have been clear. I didn't want to include Nazis in that.
But then, Nazis don't really want smaller government.
The far, far right, the alt-right, they talk about all these socialist programs all the time.
Yeah. But yeah, I obviously don't mean being included with them.
They're bad guys. Well, the thing is, of course, I mean, there's an active campaign to keep people who are not on the left from having any kind of organizing principle, any kind of community.
And the methodology is pretty simple.
Anytime anyone who's not on the left gets together, We're good to go.
I mean, they don't sit there and say,
do you disagree? They don't use that sucking sound of the lowest common denominator followed by the disavowal and guilt by association stuff.
And of course, as we saw with the deplorable, Mike, right?
I mean, you try and have a fun gathering of like-minded people and you're facing terrorist actions.
Yeah, there's a lot of points you raised there and maybe we're going far afield of a nightforfreedom.com.
But hey, one thing is that frustrates me is when Keith Ellison...
picture of himself holding a manual endorsed by domestic terrorists.
Why isn't right-wing media calling up every member of Congress and saying, "Hey, do you guys support this?
Do you support domestic terrorist groups?
What are they doing at the Daily Caller in Breitbart?" I don't mind calling people out.
"What are they doing?
Oh, they're reblogging.
Oh, the fake news media, very fake, Jake." Well, great.
Great.
You have budget.
You have You have reporters. Why don't you get your reporters in D.C. knocking on every door?
Because you know that if I lived in D.C. and Keith Ellison had done that, you know darn well that I would have been banging on every door saying, hey, do you endorse this picture?
You've got to go on the record.
You've got to talk about it.
So right-wing media is, quite frankly, a joke.
As much as we do have these double standards, look what we did with the Sam Seder example.
That never would have occurred to right-wing media to just say, oh, what we're going to do is you're an idiot and you've tweeted things that you would use against us.
If any of us tweeted out what that guy tweeted out, we'd be in big trouble.
Well, right, why is it me?
Why is everything on your shoulders and three of us, right?
We don't have huge payroll and big budgets and 50 and 100 people on staff.
So in that regard, it's another reason that I, you know, unity would be nice, but it would be nice if right-wing media were actually effective and worked on breaking news and did something other than just reblog whatever the Washington Post or the New York Times is doing, too. Yeah, good point.
You know, I've had journalists say to me, If Proud Boys, my men's club, if Proud Boys aren't racist, how come you talk about having to kick out Nazis all the time?
You're booting out Nazis. You're obviously attracting Nazis.
And I go, no. The right has always done that.
Buckley was doing that back at National Review in the 60s and 70s.
Get out of here, Nazis.
And we do that because we're honorable people who want to have a clear, strong message.
The left would be kicking out their radicals, too, if they had any kind of Of character, if they had any kind of courage.
So just because you're weeding people out doesn't mean there's a disproportionate number of weeds.
It just means you're a good gardener.
The left is replete with weeds, and they totally ignore it.
And I often say to them, I go, you talk about white supremacists, like Nancy Pelosi was just talking about white supremacy in the White House.
And I go, there's no Nazis.
And every time you say that, someone goes, oh yeah?
What's this? And they show you some nut bar who lives in South Carolina and you go, all right, let me rephrase it.
Nazis aren't a thing.
And a thing is if you were sitting at a normal dinner anywhere in America and you said, oh yeah, oh, I actually am a Nazi.
And if everyone else at the table goes, then that is not a thing.
Right now, to be a white supremacist or a Nazi would make every table in America gasp.
The whole restaurant would go, what did he just say?
In other words, it's not a problem.
It's not a pattern. But you still have these Bigfoot chasers all over the left determined to find these Nazis under every rock.
It's so frustrating.
Can you imagine, gentlemen, if the left as a whole had the same relationship?
To communists that they expect the right to have to Nazis.
I mean, you have entire departments in universities overwhelmed with communists.
40%, I think, of anthropologists in America are like out-and-out Marxists.
And you can show up just about anywhere you want in a Che Guevara t-shirt.
You can show up with a picture, a button of Marx.
You can take Marxist courses.
You can have Marxist professors.
Can you imagine if they said, well, you guys have Nazis?
It's like... We have a few, maybe, keep kicking them out, don't like them at all, but you guys are overwhelmed with communists, and if you look at the headcount, the communists are far worse.
There's no Nazis. They have Heather Heyer.
They have one death. You want to talk about socialist deaths?
We've got Venezuela. We've got the police in China beating people to death for criticizing them.
We've got people in Russia being jailed for being libertarians.
There's all kinds of death and destruction all over the world today associated with socialism.
Yet socialism is a thing.
You can be at a dinner and have a Che Guevara hat on.
No one's going to gasp.
You have the shirt on. Everyone will go, oh, cool shirt.
I don't get it. Bernie Sanders is a socialist.
Out and out.
Yeah. No problem.
It's the fault of right-wing media.
And that's why...
I don't look up to right-wing media.
That's the fault of right-wing media, to not highlight and showcase every act of Antifa violence.
It was like pulling teeth to get Breitbart to cover documented arrests of people who got arrested.
The Washington Post covered, to their credit, they did more to cover the arrests of the people who tried to commit a terrorist attack on the deplorable than so-called right-wing media did.
And that's the problem.
And then right-wing media, they think they're so much better than Alex Jones, and they think they're so much better than us, and we're just these, you know, French figures and everything, too.
So the reason that the right loses is because it isn't because they don't have the infrastructure, they don't have the payroll, they don't have the headcount.
All they want to do is whine and complain about and reblog whatever's happening in the mainstream media, and they let the mainstream media set the table, whereas all they would have to do—and by the way, this would be great for ratings, and this is why I get so many views, and you guys do too— If they actually did real reporting on all the violence happening by the left and all the rape on the left and all the violence and the pedophiles on the left, their own readership and influence would increase.
But deep down, people who work in traditional right-wing media, they want to work for these mainstream media companies.
They want to get that job at CNN. So they don't want to offend their little media bosses.
Well, I am also concerned that they're afraid of being targeted.
And to sort of pivot back to the freedom thing, this is sort of a note I wanted to ask you guys about.
When you're targeted, as we've all been at various times in our careers, there is this giant whistling sound, you know, this stuka coming down from the sky.
And, of course, you brace yourself, you know, you put your head between your legs, hide under the school desk, you know, 1950s drill style.
And then it turns down that basically what lands is like a rubber ducky or something like that.
And then you end up becoming more popular.
You end up with more influence.
It is one of these weird magical weapons that, you know, you hit the giant, the giant gets bigger.
And I think that they're afraid of being targeted.
And I wanted to know what you guys thought about this, you know, that line from the old song, freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.
Or after you've gone through the fire of being targeted, And having just about the worst things thrown at you that are imaginable, isn't there a great amount of freedom on the other side?
Yeah, there really is.
There's a turning point that happens to you.
It's like a switch that goes off, where, you know, you have your home covered in cameras, and you have panic buttons, and you've got guns ready to fight.
And there's this sort of culture of fear that the left pushes with Antifa...
You know, doxing you and calling your job.
And then a switch goes off and you go, come to my house.
I'll blow your head off.
Punch me in the street.
We'll fight and I'll destroy you.
And that's a really cathartic feeling.
Like you walk into a party to know that you might be hated and you go, good, hate me.
Let's have it out. You want to talk?
Let's talk. Let's do this.
And it's just sort of to become unshackled.
And it takes a few pummelings.
I mean, I lost my ad agency.
I've lost entire career paths.
TV that just are completely shut down.
And that's harrowing.
It's hard on a marriage. It's hard on your life.
It's stressful. You go bald.
But then one day you go, you know what?
I like this now.
Bring it on. Maybe that's God's plan.
That's an evolutionary trait.
He makes you like abuse after a while.
And now I just, I want to fight.
Well, it makes you more psychologically robust.
And if you have the right mindset, then you view it as a unique opportunity to grow stronger as a person because we're out of touch in modern civilized world.
We're out of touch with what a disaster humanity has been.
I don't know if you guys have read Sapiens yet or Listen to the audiobook.
It's a great book. When you trace the course of humanity, the violence, the slaughter, a warring tribe comes in and murders your kids in front of you and rapes your wife in front of you and then they kill everybody.
You even look at what's happening in the cartels and everything.
It has been a curse in existence for most of human history.
And the idea that, oh no, I got people don't like me.
Oh no, people are calling me mean names.
Oh no, they're publicly shaming me and everything.
A lot of it is just we've lived such fragile lives that we're out of touch with just the sheer brutality of humanity.
And then when you accept that and you take a broader picture and a broader view of history and a broader view of yourself in history, then it's me a boring day when they're not attacking me, right?
Well, how about some gratitude, too, from the humanity?
I mean, I saw it when they were tearing down that Johnny Rebel statue, I forget where it was, North Carolina or something.
And he was a crumpled, rusty ball on the ground.
And I just think, Johnny Rebel was conscripted.
It's not a real soldier.
It's a John Doe kind of a name.
And this poor bastard died to the tune of over 600,000 of them from shrapnel and infections and dysentery and God knows what else.
And you think, just leave the statue there and recognize that it was a huge struggle to get here today.
But not only do we have these people spitting on everyone to the right, but they're going back into history and turning their nose up at the horrendous struggle We all went through to get here, from the plague to two world wars, all this stuff.
I just feel like walking down the street going, not worthy, not worthy.
Maybe it's being an immigrant and coming to America.
I appreciate it so much more than these spoiled brats.
But I think a big part of my traditionalism and patriotism is really just a form of gratitude.
Right. I had a thought about freedom that I wanted to get your guys' thoughts, and I'll keep it brief.
I think I would feel a lot more free if other people We're able to clearly recognize and act on evildoers and evil actions.
I sort of feel like we live in this house, and there are tigers out there, and people keep inviting these tigers into the house.
And then it's like, oh, got to get off the couch, and I got to go deal with the tiger, get the tiger out of the house.
And I say to people, okay, four legs, long tails, stripes, big fangs, you can't miss it, stop letting them into the house.
And then somebody's like, oh, look, there's a cute cat at the door, let's let it into the house.
And brr! In comes a tiger again.
I'm going to put up pictures of tigers.
Okay, guys, repeat after me.
Tiger's not in the house. Tiger's not in the house.
This frustration, I think, is kind of annoying because it feels like if this keeps happening...
You don't have a lot of freedom because there's a tiger in the house and immorality and evil doers and evil ideas and so on keep sort of re-emerging and we keep having to deal with them again.
This is like fall of the Roman Empire with different costumes and better technology and this all been done before.
We know enough to be able to avoid these kinds of slides of civilization.
We know enough about the dangers of the state.
We know enough about some of the challenges of multiculturalism.
This has all been done before. And if other people could just damn well recognize these tigers and stop letting them into the damn house, I could get something done, like reading on the couch.
Well, if tigers are Islam, then Nazis are ghosts.
And we're sitting here with tigers mauling people, raping children, and you go, can we do something about these tigers you keep letting in?
They go, no, the problem is ghosts.
And you go, ghosts? I've never even seen a ghost!
And even if there was a ghost, what's it gonna do?
Go, ooh, and pass through me and I'll feel a chill?
That tiger right there has claws!
It killed someone at the Pulse nightclub!
It killed someone in San Bernardino, in Fort Hood!
It's murdering people all over Europe!
I'm concerned with the tiger!
And they go, why? Because he has stripes?
You don't like stripes? You're scared of cats?
Oh, for Christ's sakes!
Literally, for Christ's sakes!
Well, one of the fundamental paradoxes of the human condition Is that we have to view our own experience as being special and unique or else there would be no compelling reason to live.
Why wake up if you're just another speck of dust in the world?
But the downside to that is we think, oh, wow, socialism's never been tried by me.
You know, maybe all these other people, you know, they tried it, but, you know, I've never tried socialism.
I changed the font. This time it's going to work.
Exactly. So fundamentally, that's why I take a sanguine view of humanity and the situations we're in the historical times that we're in is because everybody, every human believes we're special.
We have to or else we wouldn't get anything done.
And the downside energy to that, because all energy has a top side and a downside.
And the top side is you do great things and we are on an amazing path.
I mean, think about where the world would have been.
There's a great book out there called The World Before World War I, right?
Think about the great place that the world would be in is if we hadn't had World War I and we hadn't had all those people slaughtered, if we hadn't had World War II. And then you think, we're about to hit the next evolution, and then Germany goes, no, no, no, we don't want to take the next evolution and go to Mars.
We want to do what the Romans did, which is open the gates To civilizations and societies and cultures that are either incompatible or are going to take generations to adopt to our culture.
And that's the mistake the Romans made.
Here we are, so everything new is old.
Right. Yeah. Politics is two types of people.
It's people who want to be left alone and people who won't leave them the fuck alone.
And for me, Freedom is all about the first group trying to thwart the second group.
And the second group is very shrill, very powerful, and very tenacious.
They're as tedious as they are tenacious.
And they just keep pecking away at us.
They keep affecting our lives.
They keep taxing us and censoring us.
And it's a constant struggle just to be left alone.
Well, we are the crop, right?
And productive people are the crops for those who want to use state power to take our resources so that they don't have to compete in the free market.
So as crops, they're a lot more interested in us than we are in them.
And that's one of the imbalances.
Because we're productive, we're busy, and because they kind of hang off the state stripping of our productivity, they end up not being very busy.
Like all the people who have time to troll and time to harass and time to harangue and time to dox and all.
It's like, don't you have something to do?
Don't you have a place to be?
Isn't there an alarm going off anywhere in your life?
Oh, I'd love to do this, but hey, man, I got places to go and things to do.
Now, let me ask you this question, because this, I think, is something that's a pole in the world at the moment for people who want to be free.
So you've probably heard of, like, the men going their own way, the people who are ghosting, people who are just kind of, you know, warping out of society and living in sort of the upside down of complete independence, and the people who are avoiding relationships and marriage and children and kind of productive engagement in the world.
Do you ever have that temptation?
Or what would you say to people who have the argument or the opinion that, hey, man, if you want to be free, just walk away.
Go gulp, baby. Just walk away.
Go live your life. Go be free.
And when people say, you know, let's move to a community of like-minded people, get out of New York.
What are you doing in New York City? I don't want to give up.
I don't want to be chased away.
And I think not having kids is, is giving up on yourself, giving up on humanity overall.
When you don't have kids, you have tons of time to pester people and pestering people becomes your parenthood.
That's why they talk about a nanny state.
You become the mommy of the world.
And like Merkel, you have no skin in the game.
When you have kids, all of a sudden you have a long game, you care about your grandchildren, you care about this country for a hundred years.
You're part of the world.
And these liberals, they unknowingly have separated themselves.
They're more MGTOW than the MGTOW, playing video games until they're 45 years old and refusing to propose and dumping chicks.
They're just these perpetual teenagers who have given up on life.
The ultimate participation is family.
Well, I take a different approach which is that philosophically I don't have a problem with people deciding I'm just going to check out.
The issue is that I've lived all over the world and been to Chiang Mai and I've seen those people in real life and man is a social animal.
What happens with these people who claim they're going their own way Is they end up giving all of their money to a Thai woman and they completely get destroyed.
It's just empirically, empirically, it's a losing strategy.
I've seen it. They end up killing themselves and jumping off the roofs.
There's all these stories of, you know, the MGTOWs are going to go in and they're going to go to Chiang Mai because it's inexpensive and they're really going their own way.
So you do need a community as a human being.
This is an idea, of course, going back to Aristotle and before that man as a social animal.
Astrosation was viewed in Greek Paldi as the greatest It's the same way with children.
If you look at the empirical data, the first couple of years, you're not really going to like it.
But 15, 20 years, you're going to love it.
And it's kind of like saving for retirement.
When I tell people, hey, put 10% of your money away, no matter how little you make in retirement, you're going to hate that.
You're going to think that was the wrong decision in the moment because humans have a short time horizon.
But in 20 years, you're going to think, wow, what a meaningful event.
And then that also, too, goes back to the idea that people...
They chase happiness or short-term pleasure, transient pleasure, rather than meaning.
And if you're going to go your own way, what you're really saying is, I can't extract enough pleasure from this society that I'm in, which is a very hedonistic point of view, but you're going to have a meaningless existence.
And people can endure unhappiness if they believe that what they're doing does have meaning, does have significance, there is community, there is connection.
Right. It's what Nietzsche says, give a man a why and he can bear almost any how.
So just before we get to discussing what's going on in A Night for Freedom, guys, what is your why that makes you bear the how, the methodology?
My why is family.
It's trying to reverse the damage I did to myself and to the world when I was a left winger.
I was against families.
I was against kids.
I was at pro-hedonism.
And I'm not necessarily against you sowing your wild oats, but the pendulum has swung so far the other way that women and men are just giving up on becoming adults.
And it's a horrible, lonely existence for women.
It's a pathetic, disgusting existence for a man.
And kids are fun.
Like the first seven weeks blows because you don't get any sleep.
But even then, the baby's breath is this magical smell.
It smells like an angel fart.
Or the smell of the top of their head when they sleep on your chest.
Or the way my four-year-old now, he talks about this day.
The way he says today is this day.
Or when he calls people humans and say there were four humans over on Thursday.
He's not wrong. Watching a hilarious TV show every time you're around them.
That's my why. My why is almost kind of framed in terms of why not.
I go back to Patton's speech before the First Army and done, of course, by George C. Scott quite well.
And they're all about to go into battle.
And he said, well, someday when your grandkids are on your knees, you're not going to have to tell them that during the Great War you shovel shit in Louisiana.
And that's kind of how I view my life is, what do you want to be?
Just some, like, schlub who wakes up, doesn't know what you're doing, there's no purpose, you bounce through life, you live some mediocre life.
We've all been granted this amazing opportunity, or granted, we've been, as the existentialists would say, none of us asked to be born.
So there is that sense. My daughter, it wasn't her choice to be born.
That's the choice that I made for her.
But we are here, and we've been given this great opportunity to live heroic lives, to live lives that are exceptional.
Why would you not live an exceptional life?
Why would you not try to live a heroic life?
Why would you be the person who looks back when you have grandkids and say, I was just the average nobody, never did anything with my life, never aspired to greatness.
I never knew a great trial or tribulation.
I never knew the elation of victory.
I was just some boring schmuck.
Who passed time.
What a terrible thing to have to say.
Can I add something to my why?
I hate that argument that people say, well, I'm killing time.
It's like, no, no. Statistically and biologically, time is killing you.
It is a fight you will lose.
So stop killing time and stop bringing life to your world.
Sorry, Kevin, go ahead. Can I add something to my why?
Yeah. When I was talking about family and just being a dad, that's become a radical act that will inevitably save Western civilization.
So what would have been considered a normal, boring existence one generation ago, two generations ago, which is, I want to have a family, I want to be patriotic, I love my country, I love my My culture.
That is now a totally crazy radical thing to do.
So to be a patriotic family man in a liberal city like New York is a radical act.
And ultimately, the goal there is to save Western civilization from this horrible self-hatred, this really depleting ethnomasochism where we say, whoops, we're terrible, we need to be destroyed, we need more immigrants, we need to breed less.
That is the normal The normal mentality amongst my peers.
So I feel like my boring why, which is I just want to be a dad and have a family and have a community and love Western culture, is now in 2017 a crazy radical belief.
Right, right. Okay, so Mike, let's talk a little bit about what's going on.
And I just wanted to remind this is Saturday, January the 20th.
It's coming up soon if you want to come and you really should.
It's going to be absolutely a night, not just for freedom, but a night to remember.
Saturday, January the 20th, 2018 in New York.
What is going down?
What's going to be on the menu?
Well, as we know, Stefan Molyneux rarely goes out in public.
And so we're going to have a public appearance to Stefan Molyneux doing his thing.
Gavin's going to do his thing.
And people keep asking me about programming and I don't know.
We're going to be in a room.
We're going to do a podcast starting at like three or four.
And what are we going to talk about?
I don't know. And I think that's the fun of it is we've rented an incredible venue.
You know, $50,000 is what it's all costing to put this on and everything.
And we rented an amazing venue that when people go, they're going to be blown away.
And we're going to have podcasts.
We're going to have a comedy show with Owen Benjamin.
We're going to have DJs.
We're going to party. We're going to have hors d'oeuvres.
We're going to have libations for those who partake.
And we're going to get a lot of free thinkers and dissonant people in the same room and let the magic happen.
So for those who are wondering if they're going to buy a ticket, tickets have already sold well.
And I tell people I don't do hard sells.
A lot of people, which is frustrating because then people will go, I didn't know you had an event, man.
You didn't hype it enough.
We're already approaching breakeven and we're not trying to make a lot of money on these things.
We just want to get everybody in the room.
But the way I... The way I view things is that this is going to be the beginning of something new.
What is this new thing?
I don't know, but it isn't going to be a boring political event where, you know, Stefan Molyneux talks behind a veneered panel wall behind a podium.
Hello, I'm Stefan Molyneux.
I'm here to talk to you about whatever.
It's going to be artistic.
I tell people, watch Mike Tyson's Undisputed Truth, spoken word, maybe dramatic reading, maybe audience call-outs, maybe dialogues between people.
I don't know. But it is going to be magical.
And for people who want the bullet point in schedule and have been asking me, I've been telling them to their frustration, which is, hey, man, if that's what you're looking for, that's not what you're going to find.
But if you go in just expecting to have a great time and letting the magic of the evening unfold, then you will definitely want to be at a night for freedom.
And there's the next morning thing too, right?
Yeah. And then for the people who do the sponsor thing, we're going to have a private brunch.
So the way I tiered it, just because I am a populist at heart, we will live stream it because I don't want anybody to ever not be able to get our message because of money.
Right. So I start from the populist position, which is that you will never be denied Mike Cernovich because you can't afford Mike Cernovich.
But I'm also starved from the proposition that if you have money, you better shell it out, right?
So, you know, minimum ticket's $99.
It's New York. You know, venues are expensive.
And then there are tiers.
So those who have more money and can afford more are stepping up.
And in fact, we're selling quite a few of the VIP tickets.
So the VIP tickets get you in early for the private podcast.
And the sponsor gets you in for the private podcast.
And they get you access to the VIP and sponsor room.
And then the sponsor gets you the brunch the next day.
So the way it's going to work is all of us will be doing a private, smaller podcast and Q&A with the VIP and the sponsor people.
And then the general admission is going to open to a happy hour.
And then we're all going to go into the big rooms and then kind of like the show is going to begin.
And the show is going to be spectacular, whatever it is.
And then we'll have our talks and our shows.
And then around 9 or 9.30, we'll all fold in.
The DJs are going to come out.
And then we'll party, and it'll be a lot of fun.
And here's the thing. I mean, Mike is not so much for the hard sell.
I, a little bit more, am for the hard sell, which is this.
The studies show, and if you talk to people, I still remember, I've said this to my daughter the other day.
And when I was a kid, about seven years old, My mom was friends with a woman who had a husband who was a pilot.
And this is back in the day when pilots made a fortune.
And we went to their house and I remember that night so clearly and so vividly.
I remember throwing the paper streamers.
I remember dancing. I remember kicking balloons around with the other.
It was an incredible New Year's Eve night.
You know, life has some repetition to it.
You know, life has some, you know, what were you doing 14 Wednesdays ago?
It's like, oh, doing a show.
And if you can trade money, which comes and goes, if you can trade money for memories, That is a good thing to do.
Be responsible, of course, right?
But, you know, beg, borrow, or steal, in a sense, to get this once-in-a-lifetime event.
If this is the start of something great, good.
Then go see the Stones when they were small.
Go see the police at the El Macombo in like 1982 or whatever.
Be there at the beginning. But if you can afford it, it's well worth trading.
Money for amazing memories.
And meet the people in the flesh that have had inspiration to you or encouragement to you or excitement to you.
It is well worth it.
Because if you don't go, you'll have a couple of bucks later, which you won't be able to differentiate.
If you do go, man, you carry that golden egg of a memory in your heart and mind forever.
It's well worth it.
Again, statistically, people who trade money for great memories end up a lot happier.
Well, yeah. One of my only regrets in life Is that Jerry Spence was doing the Jeffrey Figer criminal defense trial, and Jerry Spence is the Clarence Darrow of our time, a legendary trial lawyer.
And a friend of mine said, hey, I'm going to be watching this trial.
I got a hotel. You want to just come stay with me?
And I was like, oh, plane tickets for $500.
And it's like, oh, I don't want to spend the $500.
And looking back, you idiot.
You idiot. $500, that was the last time you were ever going to watch Jerry Spence in trial.
It would have been a historical moment.
You would have learned something. You know, I had it.
You know, I had it. And it isn't like I frivolously spend money.
And I look back and I go, ugh.
And then another one of my regrets is I never watched one of my great influences, Dr.
Eugene Scott, who was this charismatic, weirdo We're good to go.
And I never went to watch him at the University Cathedral in downtown Los Angeles.
Why? I don't know, because I was lazy, because I didn't know how to part—what excuse did I have?
So there really is the sense that the odds that the three of us are ever going to be in the same room at the same time— It's quite low, at least in a public appearance.
It's going to be quite low. And there will be a lot of people.
Here's another thing. You're not watching a State of the Union from people who are trudging along and just want to keep you updated, like if you were to see Charles Schultz 30 years ago and say, how's Peanuts going?
Pretty good, yep, just drawing Charlie Brown and mostly, you know, very round heads and funny little shoes.
He's no Scott Adams. We're at a major turning point now, so you're checking in on us right when the tide is changing.
Yvette Falarka from BAM, the alt-left, just had to pay a college Republican's lawyer fees for a frivolous restraining order she was doing, where we have the Berkeley police quitting in droves over the past few days.
Where are the Berkeley police?
We have CNN having a complete meltdown, becoming the laughing stock.
You got Judd Apatow melting down on Twitter.
This crazy ex-girlfriend that is the left is just burst.
She's just popped over the past even two weeks.
And the tides are now changing in the culture wars where we are about to dominate.
So you're really checking in on us at a very crucial time in cultural war history.
Well, I mean, we do live in historical times.
Yeah, Gavin, you're right.
We do live in historical times, and that's what makes it so fun.
Cryptocurrency, the free speech culture, all these, I call them Bitcoin billionaires, even though they're not billionaires, but the amount of people that I know now who are dissident thinkers, 25 to 35 years old, which is like 5 or 10 million just laying around in crypto, people wouldn't believe it.
So we are on the cusp of what, because unlike, here's why I'm more optimistic, I think, than probably a lot of people.
It's because I've become this network node, and I know all the people who are part of the movement, and they associate with me because I don't run my mouth about who I know.
I even deny if people go, oh, do you know that guy?
I'm like, I don't know who you're talking about, you know, whatever.
I don't know nothing about nobody, right, with Omerta.
And I'm so optimistic because There is real money coming into the movement.
There is real talent coming into the movement.
A lot of guys bought the $500 ticket for a night for freedom just because they did well in crypto.
They're like, nah, I don't even want to go to brunch.
I just want to buy the best ticket because I can afford to buy the highest end ticket.
So there's more of that coming in.
We can't understate, really, what a historical time we are.
And the last thing I wanted to mention too, I don't want to speak for you guys, but I will.
So let me know if I go astray.
So we're in your living room, we're in your ears, you know, you're listening, you're watching, and maybe we seem very big and maybe you're not doing something quite so big and so on.
But this is something, there was an old Sandra Bernhardt album called Without You, I'm Nothing.
And that used to bother me when I was younger.
It's like, what do you mean without you, I'm nothing?
You gotta be yourself, you're independent and all that.
But the reality is that we need you.
Like, we need your participation.
We need your ears. We need your eyes.
You know, something Freddie Mercury used to say, the singer for Queen.
People said, well, how do you sing so well?
He says, well, you know, I got a good voice, but I can only sing as well as the audience wants me to.
And that is really important.
If there's a boisterous and enthusiastic crowd there...
It's going to be way better.
And it's going to reach way more people.
And it's going to be an enthusiasm there.
You know, if you're in the public sphere, it's tough to do a great show to fewer people.
And so for me, at least, the audience energy is essential to creating the best environment humanly possible.
So the vulnerability of being a public figure is we really need you guys.
We need you there. We need your support.
Without you, at least publicly, we're nothing.
And I'm coming to deliver.
That's one thing.
If there's one thing anybody knows about me is I might not know what I'm going to do until it happens.
And everybody showing up is excited to be there.
This isn't the kind of event where, oh, you know, we're the GOP and, you know, we invite a bunch of campaign people and they're going to come up and say, here's why you should vote for me.
And everybody's eating rubber chicken.
Everybody in the room wants to be in the room, which is, again, why I never do the hard sell because It's because I don't want people—like, I had one person go, well, what's on the menu?
And I go, bro, I don't know.
What are you talking—there'll be food there.
I don't know what's on the menu.
And if the menu is what's going to dictate whether or not you come to the event or don't, please do not come.
If you get two drinks or three—three drink tickets or two, and that's your object, don't come because your vibe is wrong.
I want only people who are beating down the door to get in and want to be in there because that's the vibe— That you want.
So it's kind of funny. I've had people say, well, you know, that's a rude thing for you to say if I ask about the menu.
And I'm like, look, I'm just telling you, you know, I don't want nitpickers and naysayers.
I want people, everybody in there, I want to be enthused, just like the two of you are going to be there.
I didn't have to, like, beg you, will you guys please come to my van or I'll never sell tickets and it'll be a failure.
I don't play guilt trips.
I just said, look, let's do something amazing together and let's create a night that everybody is going to remember.
Yeah, we know it's going to sell out, and we know it'll get to the point where we'll have to be beating people off, you know, to get them away from the doors.
I wouldn't be surprised if each of us have to individually beat people off because there's such huge crowds at the door.
I probably would have to beat off probably 10 guys just saying, like, get away from the door, you know, we're full!
And then you get your tennis elbow, and that's the thing, too.
I mean, I haven't given a public speech of any particular magnitude.
I think the last one I gave was in...
Oh, Amsterdam for a crypto conference.
It was like, I don't know, 500 people in the room, 35,000 people online.
But let's put it this way.
I love public speaking.
I've been working on a speech like that is going to be absolutely killer.
And I'm pent up, baby.
I've got to release. I got to get the doves out of my brain.
And I got to get The butterfly is out of my mouth.
So I'm really, really looking forward to it.
And I promise you, it is going to be electric to be there, not just for me, but we got Owen Benjamin, who is downright hilarious, and Gavin and others.
And it's going to be an incredible evening, which is going to energize you like a lightning strike to the spine.
And one quick point on tickets.
I don't want to have to break anybody's heart, but it really devastated me at the deplorable when I had to go downstairs at the check-in, and people had bought forged tickets on Craigslist.
That's how hot the tickets for the deplorable ended up being, was that people went on Craigslist and bought what were forged tickets, and I turned away a lot of people, and it was very sad.
Some of them, in many cases, paid Two or three times, scalper prices essentially.
So my advice to people would be, don't buy any tickets other than from the approved venue.
Don't buy them on the secondary market.
Two would be just buy your ticket because when they do sell out, it's a fire, like it's a fire marshal thing.
I can't just magically pull out 50 more tickets, 100 more tickets.
Once we're sold out, we're sold out.
And that's it. So if you are deciding whether or not you want to go, buy your ticket now because our events do sell out.
Beautiful. All right, so it's anightforfreedom.com.
If you're even remotely interested, just go and buy it.
If you change your mind, you can sell it.
But just go and get the ticket now at anightforfreedom.com.
You can hang with us beforehand.
You can hang with us after at the donor level, and it's going to be a fantastic night.
I really want to thank you, Mike, of course.
You know, I run a conference or two in the past.
People just don't know.
It's like, oh, just get a venue, make some phone calls, and you're done.
It is an insane amount of work.
I really thank you for taking the time to put all of this together.
I guarantee you we're going to work as hard as we can, those who are attending, to make the night an incredible night to remember.
A night for Freedom.com is coming up.
Get your tickets now, January the 20th, 2018, in New York.
Guys, thanks so much for a great conversation.
I really, really look forward to seeing you in, well, I guess about two weeks and change.
Thanks so much for your time today.
Rock on. Thanks, Mike.
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