4297 In the Belly of the Beast! Stefan Molyneux Interviewed by James Delingpole in Brussels
James Delingpole interviews Stefan Molyneux after his speech at the European Union Parliament on Tech Censorship.EU speech: https://youtu.be/hgdcUI-5OAMAudio mastering by идиот; incidental music by Thomas Schweikert!http://delingpoleworld.com/delingpod-6-stefan-molyneux/▶️ Donate Now: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ Sign Up For Our Newsletter: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletterYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ 1. Donate: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ 2. Newsletter Sign-Up: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletter▶️ 3. On YouTube: Subscribe, Click Notification Bell▶️ 4. Subscribe to the Freedomain Podcast: http://www.fdrpodcasts.com▶️ 5. Follow Freedomain on Alternative Platforms🔴 Bitchute: http://bitchute.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Minds: http://minds.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Steemit: http://steemit.com/@stefan.molyneux🔴 Gab: http://gab.ai/stefanmolyneux🔴 Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Facebook: http://facebook.com/stefan.molyneux🔴 Instagram: http://instagram.com/stefanmolyneux
- Welcome to the Gelling Pod with me, James Dellingpole, and my very special and unexpected guest.
I mean, he's been on my list of people I wanted to get on this show for a long, long time, and he suddenly cropped up at this event I went to in Brussels, and his name is Stefan Molyneux.
Welcome, Stefan.
Thank you.
I don't so much erupt and pop up as I emerge from the ductwork or I materialize from the ether.
Well, it was an enormous surprise seeing you there.
I did a double take.
You seem to be a very organised person, whereas I leave everything to the last minute.
So when I was invited to this event that we're all attending in Brussels, I didn't even check who was coming.
So it's really like anybody could be here.
Totally.
And I sort of wrote my speech on the night before.
I saw you, and this is an object lesson actually for people who want to be successful, because you are one of the most successful popular vidcasters.
How would you call yourself?
Uh, that's, yeah, I mean, I would just say alt-media figures, philosopher, or, you know, because I do videos and books and podcasts and all that, so just media dude.
Yeah, okay, media dude.
And you've got an enormous number of followers.
How many have you got?
Well, we just went, of the visible followers on YouTube, which is different from the total number, because a lot of people, because I'm somewhat of a controversial figure, which never seems that way to me, you know, you just look in the morning, you shave, and you say, oh, I'm so controversial, it doesn't really feel that way, you just follow reason and evidence.
So the people who follow me on YouTube who haven't made their subscriptions public, I can't see.
But of those I can see, we just went north of 900,000.
That's a lot.
That is a lot.
I mean, okay, you're not quite PewDiePie.
No, I'm not.
But that is a lot of people, and you must feel validated in some way, because your vidcasts are not kind of...
Well, they're not PewDiePie, for example.
They're quite serious.
They're quite chewy.
People are prepared to sit down for how long to watch one of your... Oh, gosh.
I mean, so I used to do these call-in shows.
I still do them occasionally, but for like a decade, I did these call-in shows where I would take sort of three or four or five important philosophical issues that people had in their lives, whether it could be abstract, it could be relational, and those shows have got three, four, five hours straight.
And I did one of those a week, sometimes two of those a week.
So there was those long form presentations.
I do solo shows, sometimes will still occasionally record in my car.
I do audio books, seven, ten hours and so on.
So it's long form stuff.
But people really like that.
I mean, everyone says, oh, you've got to keep it short and snappy and all that.
It's like, that's true.
And there's lots of people out there doing that, which means I can differentiate myself by going more in-depth into topics, which is sort of my preference.
I get this quite a lot from the listeners.
Rather, the listener.
There's only one listener.
And he, she is known as the special friend.
And I quite often hear from the special friend that they wish that the show were longer.
They say, don't stop it now.
We're happy to have more.
Which rather goes against what the experts say.
I'm sure you get the same.
We used to love this long form stuff.
I mean, as a culture.
I mean, think of Beowulf.
That is not a short poem.
Think of... The Odyssey?
The Odyssey, yeah.
Think of The Odyssey.
Hamlet is a brain-busting piece of text to wedge into your head if you're playing the role.
I mean, these plays can go on for a long time.
Dickens' novels.
I mean, the man was a compulsive writer.
Dostoevsky.
I mean, The Brothers Karamazov.
It's like, you think that the long form started in Russia with, or from the Russians, with Atlas Shrugged.
It's like, You know, I think we evolved for Long Form in particular, sort of Northern Europeans, because you got long cold winters, you need to keep each other entertained, there's no TV, there's, you know, you can only do so much with hand puppets made out of cloth, so I think that we're pretty comfortable with the Long Form stuff, and I get lots of messages from people who are like truckers, and the truckers do not want to be changing the show every 10 minutes.
It's truckers, isn't it?
It's people commuting, people... You throw the headphones on, you're doing your chores, you've got a couple of hours.
I mean, people really like that in-depth stuff.
And also, people nowadays, well, the youth, I don't because I'm not capable of it, but they multitask.
What's it called when you... I watch my kids, for example.
They'll watch TV and they'll whiz through their...
They're Facebook feeds, and they'll absorb all this information simultaneously.
I don't know about that, whether that actually works.
I mean, when my daughter... Well, maybe not your shows.
No, I mean, when my daughter... Even just conversations.
So when my daughter was more into tablets, she would occasionally be like, I don't know, flicking through something and so on while we're chatting, and I'm like, no, no.
I'll wait till you're done and then we'll talk because I find it kind of distracting.
Have you ever had it?
So when I was younger you'd go to a party, you'd see some girl you'd like and you'd want to chat her up, right?
And then every now and then you'd talk to some girl who would be willing to talk to you because there was nobody else around at the moment but you knew.
You knew she was looking for something better.
You knew that because she's scanning the room the whole time, right?
It has a name.
It's called cocktail eyes.
I'm breaking that down language-wise and I may end up in a different place.
I'll tell you who's got the worst cocktail eyes, this is very indiscreet of me, but there's a friend of mine, an old, old friend, I'm sure you won't mind, called Andrew Roberts, who is a very distinguished historian.
He's written a brilliant book recently on Churchill and he's written excellent books on Napoleon and Wellington and so on.
But Andrew, Andrew's tragic flaw is that he's a tremendous snob.
And so when you go to a party, he'll always be standing, he'll happily talk to you and give you plenty of time until there's a duke.
Oh, anybody.
Anyone who's a step up, right?
Ideally a duke or a prime minister or a president is where he likes to go.
At least that's a big step up, not just someone who's slightly more handsome or whatever it is, right?
Oh, totally.
And you know what it makes you feel?
It makes you feel like you're a coach.
So you know when you go to the airport and you can't afford or you don't want to pay for these?
I mean the upgrades are insane.
I've flown first class precisely once in my entire life because I simply can't hand over that kind of money for a little bit of extra legroom.
But you know when you're in the airplane and all these nice happy plump people are sitting there in first class and you kind of shuffle past that into the The sort of Roman galley dungeon of coach.
I always ask when I go, is there an upgrade?
Can I get anything?
That kind of stuff, right?
It's cocktailized, right?
So you always feel like, well, you're a coach.
If I have to fly with you, that's all right.
But I'm always looking for that upgrade.
Do you have any tips on how to get an upgrade?
Well, you're a funny guy, right?
So I find, you know, if you've worked boring jobs, we all have, right?
And it's not that much of an exciting job to sit behind, you know, everyone's late, everyone's stressed, nobody's particularly happy, everyone can't find their kids, right?
A couple of jokes here and there make them feel good.
I hate to sort of say it was kind of manipulative, but I do like spreading joy wherever I go.
Also, you must know a bit about Manipulation.
Because you're a philosopher king.
No, no, no, you fight that.
The whole idea.
But no, as far as like, I do this with waiters.
Because I know, a waiter is like, you're basically a conveyor belt for food and resentment, right?
So you bring food out to the people, bring resentment to the manager.
And so if you can just, a little joke here and there, a little light comment, something to make people laugh.
It's a tiny little, I've never actually talked about this before, but a kind of, just a little sprinkling of joy wherever you go.
A little bit of happiness, a little bit of something surprising can absolutely work wonders with people.
And then if you need something, it's not the, I don't do it because, but if it's there, if you need something, they're much more predisposed to help you because you've helped make their day a little bit brighter.
Okay, well thanks for that tip.
Can I ask you, Stephan, How controversial are you?
Because some of the anecdotes you were telling me the other night sort of seem to imply that you've got this sort of reputation that people accuse you of what?
You've been accused of... Oh, you name it.
I mean, it's the whole list of what everyone accuses philosophers of.
Corrupting the young, not believing in the gods of the city is the ancient one that was levied against Socrates.
And what that means is not believing Or not accepting automatically what everyone worships, right?
So, you know, diversity is a strength, all this kind of stuff.
You say, okay, well, is diversity a strength?
That's a valid question.
And the more people believe it, the more the philosopher says, hmm, let's lift the lid on this and see if this is actually true and see what the data is.
Because everyone says diversity is a strength.
No one can ever prove it.
And in fact, the data goes the complete opposite way.
The actual studies, the actual experts say, you know, there's this radical egalitarianism that says we are all capable of the same things with the right environment, with the right stimulus.
You know, everyone can be, like all the girls can be Madame Curie, if they simply have the right example, if they simply know that there's a woman who's a scientist, that they can suddenly be a female scientist.
And women can do wonderful things, men can do wonderful things, but the data is pretty clear on our limitations.
It's like saying, well, everyone can sing opera at the Met, you know, and it's like, well, yeah, if you've got a great voice, you're willing to do the work, right?
You know, that old joke, a guy comes off the taxi in New York, stands around Times Square, finds a local and says, Can you tell me how to get to the Met?
And he says, practice, practice, practice, right?
And practicing is great, but you have to have the physical infrastructure.
You have to be able to sing well.
If you're athletic, if you want to be a basketball player, it usually helps to be tall.
And these are things beyond your control.
Intelligence is one of these things.
Like, there's a bell curve of intelligence, and nobody knows really how to budget.
I mean, we know how to harm it insofar as, like, if you don't give someone enough food when they're growing up, they may grow up shorter.
Then they otherwise would, but then nobody knows how to change that afterwards.
Same thing with intelligence.
If you just, if you're severely malnourished, although even that seems to be kind of dicey because in Holland, I always get this confused.
Holland, Amsterdam, Dutch, it's all like, just pick a name, people, pick a name.
You're just messing everyone up.
We don't do that to you.
It's like der, die, das in German.
It's like, just give us something solid, right?
But at the end of the war there were children, babies and toddlers, unbelievably malnourished.
And they all grew up to have intelligence indistinguishable from their peers who had had enough food, both locally and throughout Europe.
So we don't really know how to increase someone's intelligence.
There are ways.
Trauma, you know, like a lot of child abuse and trauma can really mess people up.
But there's a bell curve, and nobody really knows how to budge it.
It's not the same for men and women.
It's not the same between different ethnicities.
And again, you never judge an individual.
It's just, you know, when you zoom out, you get these bigger pictures.
And it explains an enormous amount in life.
Now, that's controversial simply because we have this god of the city called radical Environmental egalitarianism.
If you just... You know, like the communists, they say, well, whoever controls the means of production is the dude, right?
And so you have these capitalists who have a factory, you've got these workers.
Now, if we get rid of the capitalists and make the workers control the means of production, they'll be just like the capitalists.
And it doesn't work.
It really doesn't work.
You know, it's like saying, well, there's a guy who's a singer on a stage and then there's a whole bunch of people who get paid less who put the stage together.
So if we get all the people who put the stage together, give the microphones and put them on the stage, they'll be exactly the same as Sting or Freddie Mercury or whoever it is, right?
Yeah, they will.
They will, totally.
And so this radical environmental egalitarianism is the most foundational God that we worship.
It is.
Now, where did this one come from and when did it start?
Well, I mean, the more formal aspect of it comes from the Marxists, right?
This is very much a Marxist idea, that they say, your consciousness is shaped by your relationship to the means of production.
Your consciousness is shaped.
Like, it's not just, well, you know, if you're a worker, maybe you just didn't quite get enough education.
But your identity, your entire consciousness is shaped by your relationship to the means of production.
If you're an employee, you have a particular mindset.
And if you just change someone, not just from birth, but even in the moment, you just, oh, well, let's give them the keys to the kingdom, let's put them in charge, and they'll be just like the boss.
And, I mean, there's times where that could be true.
But there are times where the guy who's putting the stage together is a better singer, You know, if he's working for Bob Dylan, he's a better singer than the guy on the stage.
There's times when that's absolutely true.
And we all know these stories, you know, the goodwill hunting story of the guy who's the janitor, who's doing these wonderful equations on the board at night.
Yeah, was that real?
There actually have been some instances of that.
That was a real story.
Or, you know, some guy who's a software entrepreneur who turns out to be fairly good at philosophy.
You know, could happen any number of ways, right?
Can't say who that might be.
But it's pretty rare.
And so the idea is that, well, you just change the environment.
You know, like, it's the same thing with gender.
You say, well, if we give boys Dolls and we give girls trucks to play with Then we're gonna break down all these gender stereotypes what we know for monkeys that this stuff is it's not more inbuilt Yeah, no, and and we actually know the data again The data goes completely the opposite way not just common sense evolutionary adaptation, but When you have countries that are economically less free women will generally choose more lucrative employment Because you know they need the money for the family kind of things
So you've got, in India, when India was less wealthy, women would be computer programmers, women would be engineers and so on.
But what's interesting is that as the wealth grows in the country, gender segregation sets in.
In other words, when women don't have to be computer programmers and engineers and, you know, the typically male kind of things, What do they gravitate towards?
Teaching and social work and other people-to-people interactions.
Because, you know, guys like things, women like people.
This is a generalization that is really, really supported by the data.
And so, when people have more choice, they tend to become more segregated.
And that's the real issue.
That's a really fascinating thing when you think about it.
We have greater inequality when we have greater freedom, and that drives people crazy.
I'm sure it does.
Can I just say a massive thank you there?
I feel so much better about hating feminism.
I mean, I think feminism is an evil, but I think a lot of us do instinctively feel that feminism is destroying our culture by setting men against women and forcing us into roles that we're not naturally predisposed towards, but Well, see, some women are.
Some women are wonderful engineers and some men are very tender kindergarten school teachers.
What's interesting, I find, is that this is one of the blocks I have talking to my wife.
One of the very few blocks my wife is similar to me politically.
But when we get on the subject of feminism, all bets are off.
She doesn't like the idea... I had a discussion the other night with a feminist that you and I both know.
And we were talking about female comedians.
And I was saying, well, there really aren't many funny ones.
And she got very outraged by this.
She listed three female comedians as if this were proof that women can do comedy just as well as men.
You count the number of male comedians, you count the number of female comedians, and then you look at... Or rock guitarists.
Rock guitarists.
Seriously?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, you're not shredding notes, you're shredding the women's clothes of the audience.
That's sort of the plan.
So there's a couple of fascinating things about that.
Which is, if you still go back to the bell curve stuff, so women have fewer geniuses, right?
We're more of a scattershot, right?
So for men, it's more of a scattershot.
For women, they cluster a little bit more around the middle.
And there's some indication that the IQ may be a little bit lower, on average again for women, but at the very highest levels of IQ, there were virtually no women.
So, when you start getting into the standard deviation above 100, just talk about a white population, 115 or so, there are like two men for every woman.
Used to get to 130, there are like eight men for every woman.
You get to 150, 160, there's like almost no women whatsoever.
Now, what that means is that when it comes to looking at history, Where we really only care about remarkable people.
We really only care.
Look at the history of philosophy.
The average person might know five philosophers.
The average academic may have studied 20.
And that's 2,500 years.
We don't care about the average.
And so when you're looking at the exception at the highest levels of IQ, you're not going to find a lot of women.
And, you know, again, I wish this were different.
I wish we all matched up, because then this egalitarian fantasy would be closer to truth.
But are you aware that what's been happening on the Oxford Philosophy course, and I'm sure probably in universities across the pond, they've been trying to de-gender bias the Oxford Philosophy course, so that there are an equal number of women and men.
Well, where do you find these philosophers from the past who were women?
It's like Mrs. Plato, Mrs. Socrates, I don't know.
And of course, so there's two answers to that, right?
And the one answer is Which I think is the one, I know is the one that's supported by the science, and not just the IQ testing, but the brain volume and the way the brains are configured between males and females.
The one answer is, well look, women in the past were, for 20, 30 years of their life, sort of 15 to 40, were disabled by childbirth.
And that was kind of important, because a lot of children died.
So if you wanted to maintain a steady population, you needed a whole bunch of kids, because a lot of them were going to die.
And it was difficult, not just the pregnancy and the childbirth.
You know, you're a dad, right?
The breastfeeding, I mean, and then you've got to get, you know, there's no particularly good birth control.
And of course, there were Catholicism and other belief systems that would deny the moral legitimacy of birth control.
So basically, you had women disabled by childbirth.
Now then, When they got older, their children were having children, and they were hands on deck as grandparents, right?
And getting water was complicated, and getting food was complicated, and women did a lot of hunter-gathering, and it was just work, work, work, work, work, right?
And that's not oppression, that's not like, you know, oh, we just hate—it's just, that's nature, right?
We happen to have these giant brains.
These giant brains take a lot of nourishment, and they take a lot of nurturing in the womb.
So, we're born premature.
Like, there's something called the fourth trimester, which is the nine months after birth.
We really should be in the womb at that point, because we're so ridiculously helpless.
Like, if you look at other animals, you know, you see the deer, they come struggling out of the mom, and then, you know, it looks like some weird dance of calipers as they get up and learn to walk in the next couple of days.
We don't walk until a year.
Well, we should not be out of the womb, but we basically have to get out of our mother's birth canal before our brains get so big that we splitter like an axe on a cordwood.
I mean, no, seriously!
So, the fact that we have these giant brains means that women are almost perpetually disabled by childbirth throughout human history.
Also, women have less testosterone, and they have less variation at the highest levels of intelligence.
And that's a really solid, scientific, biological, empirical, psychological explanation that says, well, that's why you're not going to find a lot of women.
They were busy creating men who were exceptional, you know?
And if it were different, it'd be great, but that's the reality.
And now there's one answer.
Now, the other answer, as you know, is that men hate women.
Oh yeah, obviously.
No complication, no data, it's just an emotional, like, where are the women throughout history?
Well, they were oppressed.
And that's something that really appeals to some people.
I don't know why, it's like Nietzsche talks about this resentment, I don't know why we're so susceptible to this, woe is me, you know, the minister of doom and gloom from the kingdom of woe is me, oppression, victimization, we're just as good as everyone else and the only reason we didn't show up more is because of Oppression.
It is such an addictive thing for people.
It's like this, and the hook and the bait, the bait is, I don't know what, but the hook is, well, you're wrong.
You're wrong.
They say, oh, well, why didn't, why weren't women doctored throughout history?
Well, that's not that hard to figure out.
If you're a town, and you can only afford to have two doctors, because you just don't have a lot of excess capital, who are you going to have?
Well, if you train a woman, she's going to get pregnant.
And then she's going to be breastfeeding.
And then she might die in pregnancy.
And so, you can't train a woman because then you end up with no doctor.
You have to train the man.
And that's not because we hate women.
I mean, we only exist as this culture because we love women, right?
So, sorry for the long answer, but there's these two poles, right?
Do we look at the facts or do we get seduced by this dark side of resentment and victimization and hatred?
And it's really satanic to dangle this resentment narrative in front of people because it really screws up their entire emotional apparatus, their capacity to bond and everything.
Do you get a lot of hate from women for saying this stuff?
Gosh, no.
That's the funny thing, right, so the amount of love that I get when I'm sort of out in the world is really quite remarkable.
I mean, I go to events and, you know, I will sit there for four hours after a 45-minute speech and I will Chat with people and I get hugs and like people literally only philosophy has changed my life you know we decided to have children because of your love of Parenting and good parenting and peaceful parenting and other things that I talked about and you know I talked about values with my girlfriend and you know we realized we have so much in common we're gonna get like married and and
So, the fact that there's so much love out there for what philosophy does, and yeah, there are a couple of trolls because there's a lot of money tied up in this resentment narrative.
Like, literally billions and billions and billions of dollars are tied up in this resentment narrative.
And, you know, it's like that old risky business thing, you know, in a recession never ever mess with another man's livelihood.
And if people let go of this resentment narrative, and they start accepting the truth, women and men can learn to love each other again, rather than women feeling that men are dangerous, patriarchal, pig-driven oppressors.
You know, that's horrible.
It takes love away from people, it takes bonding away from people, it takes stability away from marriages.
It's toxic and it's really poisonous, so I don't just fight it because in abstract sense it's wrong and it's inaccurate and so on, and that's all true.
But at a personal level, wouldn't you want to do a life's work that brings more love and connection into the world and stabilizes marriages and has men and women respect the contributions we can bring to each other rather than divide and make resentful and destabilize?
I mean, it's an act of love And that love comes back when I meet people.
And yeah, there's a couple of trolls out there, and they make a lot of noise, and they get a lot of attention, but they don't, you know.
We only know Malicious because he prosecuted Socrates.
I mean, otherwise we wouldn't know him.
But who knows the names of the people who tortured Galileo?
Nobody knows those people's names.
Yeah, good point, yeah.
You're very much a A facts-don't-care-about-your-feelings kind of person.
Is there any way you wouldn't go, anywhere intellectually, that you'd be sort of frightened by what Dr. Johnson called the clamour of the times, things you can't say?
Well, that's sort of a Schrodinger's cat question, because if there are things that I couldn't say, I wouldn't be saying them here.
I do think that it's a delicate operation to remove error from people's hearts and minds, and this sort of, you know, the blunt, cold-face stare of, well, you're wrong, and here's the facts.
It doesn't generally help that much.
Getting error out of people's minds breaks brain surgery.
You look like you're throwing hand grenades around.
You know, it's a very delicate operation, and I think that the way that it works for me is And this is going to sound kind of goopy, but it is actually very real.
That if you're motivated by love of wisdom, if you're motivated by love, there's very little that you can't do.
And if you are motivated by anger or contempt or frustration, for me, I really have to check myself.
If that's my motivation, I'm going to knock something over in my attempt to adjust it, and that's not good.
It's not people's fault that they've been lied to.
I mean, we're all stuffed full of errors from day one.
I mean, society exists as a hierarchy because people are lied to.
They're lied to and say, well, if the government doesn't do this, then it just won't get done.
If the government doesn't provide health care, there won't be any health care.
If the government doesn't help the poor, the poor will all starve on the streets.
All of this stuff, which seems plausible, It's not true.
It's the opposite of true.
But we're stuffed full of lies.
It's not people's faults.
You know, the women who are feminists.
I don't hate feminism.
I hate what it does to people.
I hate the resentment.
I hate the hatred that it engenders.
The instability.
I mean, I remember once when I was first learning to rollerblade.
Boy, here's a segue for you.
Lobster!
Right, so when I was first learning to rollerblade, I went down to the beachfront.
There was this wonderful path.
This is quite many years ago.
And I was just rollerblading along, and then there was this young woman.
And you could tell, you know, feminist, right?
I mean, it's the look, right?
Blue hair as well.
It wasn't that bad, but you know, makeup is war paint of submission to the patriarchy or whatever, right?
But, you know, it was a beautiful day, sun was shining, the waves were lapping on the shore, people threw diamonds horizontally in the glinting of the light on the water, and clouds were just the right kind of puffy, and it was a beautiful day, right?
So it was one of these days where, you know, like nothing can get you down.
And so I just said, isn't this a wonderful day, right?
And she looked at me like, Oh no, the patriarch is attempting to oppress me.
Like, you can see this guardedness, right, in women's, you know, is this a Me Too moment, right, long before this, right?
Yeah.
And no, I mean, I, and we ended up just rollerblading along by the water for about an hour, hour and a half.
Having a very fun chat, and it was weird because I could see that she was confused about her reaction to me.
Like, she was enjoying the conversation, and it was like, this is not right.
I shouldn't be, I shouldn't be, you know what I mean?
It's like, and that level of confusion, as opposed to, well, we're just two people out here on a beautiful sunny day, and let's roll the blade long, and it's nice to chat and all that, but I could see, I could really see that struggle.
It's like, there's not, This is not how it's supposed to be.
This is not right.
And I'm always happy to provide those empirical pieces of counter evidence to whatever people's perceptions are.
And that's a shame though.
Just think that this woman was scared and nervous to have a person talk to her.
And it wasn't like we were in the middle of nowhere or anything.
Just to have someone say what a wonderful day it is.
I wasn't in pickup mode.
I wasn't trying to get her number.
It was just, you know, if it had been a guy, I would have said, hey, isn't it a beautiful day?
You know, whatever, right?
It's a real shame how guarded people have to be.
Isn't it a sort of variation, like 150 years ago, she would have been a young Victorian lady concerned about not having her chaperone with her.
Women have different ways, culturally, through history, of being concerned about the male threat.
And now it's me too.
Back then it was the fear of losing your honour.
Well no, because back then there was the good guy.
Who was your husband or your brother or your father or your chaperone?
That was the good guy who was there to protect you against the bad guy, right?
Like Victorian style.
Now, there's just bad guys.
That's the shame.
Yeah.
And the good guy now is the faceless state.
Right.
The good guy is when you get rid of the husband, women still need resources.
They still need to be protected.
They still get disabled by childbirth.
And they still need succor in their old age, which used to come from the children and the grandchildren, the great-grandchildren, and their husband's estate if he died earlier.
But when you get rid of love, you get political allegiance.
Because women still need resources rather than getting it from their husband, they get it from the state.
Which means that they use this power of the state to forcibly extract resources from anonymous men to give to them rather than being loved by a man.
And that allegiance to the state is why the state programs people to reject love.
Let me make a big leap here.
You've studied the rise and fall of civilizations.
How does where we are now compare with previous civilizations?
Like Rome, for example.
Are we in a decadent stage where it's all downhill from here?
Well, yeah.
I've got a whole presentation on the fall of Rome, which people who are listening to this should check it out on YouTube.
It's very similar, but we don't have to record the decline.
If we didn't have this technology, like in other words, if you and I sitting here having this conversation, if we could end up broadcasting this to millions of people around the world, all we would be able to do is record the decline.
You know, like the oncologist, when you're terminal, well, we can, we can manage your pain.
That's all we can do, right?
We can, we can manage your decline.
We can try and make you, you know, that terrible phrase we're all going to hear at one point, if we're lucky, when we're old, well, all that's left is to make you as comfortable as possible, right?
I mean, that grim, bony hand of mortality closes over our esophagus and I'm like, well, I guess my choices are somewhat limited now.
And so if we didn't have this, it would be record the decline and hopefully put the message in the bottle for future civilizations to heed.
But yeah, it's ridiculously similar.
I mean, what was going on at the end of the Rome?
The Roman Empire was a giant welfare state, bread circuses.
We have that.
It was horrifying amounts of money printing, right?
They took their coins and they dissolved their coins into endless bastardized Versions of the former coins, like it got to the point where like there was only 1% gold in the form of the 100% gold coins.
They debased the currency.
They dissolved the family.
Divorce became ridiculously common and easy.
And the hedonism, right?
Orgies and overeating and so on became sort of the norm.
So all of that decadence.
We as human beings, we always want to resist discomfort.
But if we resist discomfort, we die.
This is one of the great paradoxes of living, right?
So we don't like to exercise in general.
But if we don't, we can be unhealthy, right?
We don't like to eat well, because eating badly usually tastes better and is more enjoyable.
But if we simply follow our taste buds, we become fat and unhealthy and all that.
The little discomforts that we're willing to endure give us the big comfort called survival.
And if we have a system that takes away all of the negatives... Oh, you have diabetes?
Don't worry, the government will pay for it.
And I understand that for each individual, of course, you'd want to have that paid for, but as a society as a whole, it causes massive decay.
And then, of course, what happens in Rome is they had fundamentally underpopulation of taxpayers, because they kept having to raise taxes to maintain the empire.
The empire gets progressively more inefficient.
Because the people who spread the empire are incredibly efficient, but then bureaucracy sets in and it becomes less efficient, right?
And so what did they do?
Well, they would tax people in the cities.
Because it's the only way you could tax people.
You couldn't have taxpayers roaming around the countryside trying to collect money from people who had lots of swords on their forearms, right?
It would be, hey, I guess the pigs get something to eat today, don't they?
And so they would only be able to tax the cities.
So what they do is crank up the taxes on the cities, and they would also conscript the young men.
So it became progressively more valuable for the young men to escape the cities and go out into the country.
So they, A, had lower tax revenues, and B, they had fewer soldiers.
And so they had to go and hire mercenaries, right, to patrol the empire, to maintain the state.
And so you've got declining revenue and increased costs, because you can't draft people, you have to pay them instead.
And so, eventually, you run out of money to pay your soldiers.
And then your soldiers come to Rome, and that's it.
And also, of course, multiculturalism.
They had people outside the Roman culture coming in all the time and dissolving their allegiance to the state and so on.
Yeah, multiculturalism, welfare state, money printing, control of the economy, control of interest rates, which is always the case when you money print, because when you money print, interest rates are going to go through the roof, so you've got to crush them back down, which distorts everybody's economic incentives, and it was a giant mess.
It was a giant mess.
And if we didn't have this, we'd only be able to record the decline.
But because we have this, we can tell people, here's what you need to do in order to save.
I'm glad about that.
First time in history.
So tell me, what's the answer?
Well, the answer is, first of all, you have to understand that what has failed is not freedom.
Freedom is not what has failed.
That was inelegantly rephrased.
Let me try that again.
Force has failed, not freedom.
Now, when force fails, they always blame it on freedom, right?
So the 2007-2008 economic crash that wiped out like 30 or 40 percent of wealth in America, that was the result of government compulsion, government coercion, manipulation of home ownership to please minorities and so on.
It was just a giant mess.
And what happens is people say, oh, well, there's a housing crash.
Capitalism is terrible.
It's so unstable.
And that's not fair.
That's not right.
Capitalism wasn't being allowed to operate.
Banks were being forced to make loans to underqualified people so that they could have more blacks and Hispanics in home ownership to bring the numbers up to match, right?
Match whites and East Asians and so on.
And it's not freedom that has failed.
The welfare state is profoundly unfree, because ostracism is the only way you can genuinely help the poor.
Because there's two kinds of poor, right?
There's people who, it wasn't their fault, bad luck, you know, sorry about that, so we'll help you out.
And then there are people who are like, you know, bad decisions, you gamble, you drink, you know, like devices, right?
I have sympathy for those as well, but you can't apply the same metric to both.
You can't just hand out money to both.
Because if you hand out money to people who are genuinely in need and want to turn things around and monitor it and all of that, you can do wonderfully great things.
If you hand money to people, someone who's a chronic gambler or a sex addict or a drunk or something, you're simply making things worse, right?
So, we can't ostracize people anymore.
Like, if I don't approve of someone's choices, like, let's say there's just some woman who slept around and was irresponsible and so on.
Well, what used to happen, as you know, if a woman got pregnant outside a marriage, is she would give the child up for adoption.
That's what used to happen.
And it was better for the child.
Far better.
But to be raised by a single mother is one of the worst things, particularly for boys, that can happen.
It's an environmental toxin, in general.
And it used to be that the girl would have to give up the child for adoption, which would be far better for the child.
To be put into a stable two-parent household was much, much better for the child.
The outcomes are pretty much the same as if the child was born into that household.
But now, and the reason she would have to do that is because a man wouldn't want to marry her if she had another man's child, because biologically we don't want to put our poor resources into some other man's seed.
Or her parents would have to pay for the child and raise the child.
And generally, you know how it used to work, they would go away, you know, the girls would go away for a little while and then they'd come back and nobody would speak of it again.
Or they might pretend that it was her mother's child.
It could be any number of things, right?
And the reason that happened was because we got to judge things.
Now, if the girl was raped, right?
Then we would say, oh my, it's so, so sympathy and that's terrible and we'd, you know.
Those are two very different situations because one is willed and the other is a victim, a genuine victim.
So, this ostracism used to really help people.
Now we can't ostracize people to make bad decisions.
Stigma.
Stigma was a good thing.
Stigma was wonderful.
Oh, the Scarlet Letter is the worst thing in the world.
It's like, you're having an affair, you're destabilizing, it's selfish, it destroys families, like, don't do it!
And yet this whole idea of, like, anyone who stigmatizes someone else is a terrible, judgmental, blah, blah, blah.
It's like, no, that's wrong.
We need to have that capacity in society.
That's how we make the little micro-corrections that keep our civilization afloat.
Exactly, that word judgmental, which is a fairly recent usage.
It's obviously now a pejorative thing, and if this were a BBC show, you and I would both be lamenting the fact that people can be still judgmental when we should have evolved out of this.
But actually, it's not evolution at all, it's regression, isn't it?
Yes, yes it is.
And it is the layering of a peculiarly non-European material landscape on a European mindset.
So we grew up in scarcity.
We grew up in long winters.
We grew up in, you better plan, because if you don't plan for winter, you're not going to make it.
And we know that a lot of people didn't make it, which is why evolution happened for us.
And we ended up with particular mindsets and brains and all of that.
And you look in the tropics.
What happens in the tropics?
Abundance.
There's fruit falling from every tree, you know, fish are jumping out of the lake into your mouth.
You know, it's nuts, right?
Manana.
Yeah, yeah.
And so in those situations, you know, let's say that somebody is not well, right?
And they say, listen, can you go get me a banana?
I don't, I can't, I don't really, I'm not well.
I could just go get me a banana.
If you say no, I mean, you're really a jerk, right?
It's mean.
And yet in Europe, if it's winter and your kids say it's hungry, they're hungry, and it's January, and you've measured out how much food you need until spring, what do you say?
You say, I'm sorry.
Like, kids, I'm really sorry.
No bananas.
Like, we don't have any bananas.
We've got it all measured out.
We can't do it.
We can't do it.
Like, I'm sorry.
And so saying no, it's a winter thing.
It's a cold thing.
Whereas, if you have the government just creating money and borrowing, then you have a tropical abundance in a scarcity mindset.
And so, why would you ever say no to somebody who's poor who wants resources?
Because we've got this, well, you just print it, you just create it, you just borrow it.
There's this sense of infinite resources that central banking and fiat currency gives us.
In the same way, That they didn't raise taxes or lower services in Rome, they just debased the currency.
And so you get this sense that, why on earth would we need limits?
And when you don't have limits, you don't have an economy.
Because economy is based on two foundational principles.
Economics, number one, people's desires are infinite, but resources are finite, right?
That's the really foundational aspect of economics.
And if resources are not finite, the only reason you'd say no to someone is because you're mean and hate them.
Like, why would you say no to somebody who, some woman who wants money because she's pregnant?
Well, in the past you'd say, well, because we don't have enough, and it's also, we don't want to encourage it, and those are tough decisions, they're not easy.
But if you just, well, there's infinite resources, we don't have to raise taxes, and it's not just that, it's war!
Look at America now, 17 years they've been in Afghanistan, 18 years.
The longest war in American history.
Did anyone raise taxes because of it?
No.
They just borrowed.
They printed.
And so, how can you make a rational decision about any of this stuff when the resources appear to be infinite?
There's no reason to have any restraint.
There's no reason to have culture.
There's no reason to have ethics.
There's no reason to have discipline.
And there's no reason to judge people.
There does seem to be a very intimate connection between the debasement of the currency and war throughout history.
You actually can't fight wars unless you borrow or you tax heavily or you debase the currency in money print.
You've got your 900,000 listeners plus all the extra ones that aren't... No, that's just, sorry to be annoying, but that's just YouTube.
Half my show is the podcast.
Right, so on YouTube they're 900,000 subscribers.
I can't really track it or I haven't really got round to one podcast because everybody has their own mechanism for following the show, like iTunes or Podcatcher or something like that.
I want you to have more.
No, it's about 50-50.
We're taking the show on the road now, right?
Yeah, we're taking the show on the road because what happened was that A. the battery ran out and B. we've realised we've got to go to the European Parliament for reasons I shan't explain now.
So we're in a taxi anyway.
What I was going to ask you, I was working my way up to this big question.
The climactic scene of the great Val Purgason Act conversation.
Exactly.
We are so few.
I mean, even with all your millions of followers, and even with my hundreds of thousands of followers, and all those other people out there doing the Lord's work, you know, Jordan Peterson or whoever, we're still, we seem to be outnumbered by, well, Antifa are one expression of this, but there's a kind of, it's very easy, isn't it, to fall for the seductive idea that All right wing ideas are horrible because they are unfeeling.
People like you just care about horrible, hurty, hurty logic and facts and actually there's another way and therefore we need to increase welfare, we need to reach out more to LGBT, XYZ, etc, etc.
And people like us need to be silenced.
So how are we going to fight back against that strain, that self-destructive strain in our civilization?
Well, it's the blue pill, red pill analogy, so we can offer people reason and evidence and other people who are sophists will offer them resources and stuff and a lack of freedom and so on, right?
Yeah.
And so we have, what is it, Kamala Harris just in the US.
She was asked about health care, you know, like, well, what about all this private health care, basically?
And she said, oh, no, none of that.
None of that.
And this is what everyone talked about with regards to Obamacare, that it was a step towards full socialized health care.
And again, what's failed in America is not freedom, but coercion.
The fact that more than half of every health care dollar spent in the U.S.
is spent by the government, that there's massive amounts of regulation, there's limiting of supply through licenses, FDA keeps life-saving medicines off the counter, and so on.
There's us who are making reasoned arguments from first principles and we're being sensible and having conversations and saying that it's not my opinion or your opinion that should win the day, but the facts and the truth.
And then there's other people who are just like, yes, well, enough of this noise.
I've got some free stuff for you.
Now that is a good and evil temptation.
And because I fully accept the moral and practical reality of free will, we at least give people a choice.
Right?
If they were only sophists, then they wouldn't have that choice.
So we have to work hard to help people understand that Choosing voluntary interactions over coercive interactions is a virtue.
Choosing the market over the state is a virtue.
The less coercion we have in society, the better for everyone in the long run.
And so we give people a choice.
Now, what choice will they make?
I can do things to affect that in terms of make a couple of jokes and try and be engaging and all of that.
But fundamentally, there's the salad and there's the donut.
Right there in front of people.
There's a salad and there's a donut.
Now, if there's only a donut and you're hungry, you're just going to eat the donut.
Yeah.
And so we are saying, look, it's better for you.
It may not taste quite as good, but you'll be better off if you have the salad rather than the donut.
Right.
Now, we can't grab people's mouths and jam the salad down their gullets, right?
Tempting though that might be.
Get some sort of tomato-based toilet plunger and, you know, make them eat well against their will.
Yeah.
But we give them a choice.
Now, They fundamentally, everyone out there who's listening to this, and you and me and everyone, we have to make that choice.
We have to make that choice, but at least we're providing a choice.
And in the past, in the decline of civilizations, there was no choice.
Yeah.
There was no option.
There was nobody saying, this is what's happening, here's why.
There was only state... I mean, imagine if it was just the media, just the politicians, and they had complete control, as they have throughout most of human history, along with the church of I say, I'm not filled with hope at that analysis.
And now people have a choice.
For the first time, we can choose to reverse the decline.
We can choose to.
But that's everybody's personal responsibility.
Can I say, I'm not filled with hope at that analysis.
If it really is a choice between lettuce and doughnuts, the doughnuts are going to win.
I see the doughnut in the form of Alexandria occasional cortex.
Here is a woman.
Okay, she's hot.
I mean, hot-ish.
We would.
I think she's attractive.
I make these comments and people are like, no, no, no.
It's like, come on.
She's got lovely skin.
She's got a great shaped face.
She's got those big Stifled socialist eyes she's got.
She has.
She's an attractive woman.
Although, funnily enough, the people who are her harshest critics are women.
Well, that's not funnily enough.
An attractive woman always draws the eye.
Women are much tougher judges of looks than men are.
Because we don't compete with them.
No.
We will trash men who've got a lot of resources.
That's the socialist thing, right?
Well, the rich.
Why do people dislike the rich?
Because they're poor.
And rich guys get prettier women.
I remember my wife having a go at me for liking... You remember Carla Bruni?
The actress, model, whatever, singer?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Chanteuse who was married to... Who was the French president she was married to?
It was Mitterrand, wasn't it?
Sarkozy.
Sarkozy, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mitterrand.
That's going way back, yeah.
And my wife was saying, how can you find that woman attractive?
Her eyes are too close together.
Because that's what men look for.
Her eyes are too close together.
Oh no, but you've got to be attractive now.
No, but that's competition, right?
We don't even notice when our wives have had their hair cut.
That's how shallow we are.
Anyway, I got distracted by that one.
Who's that girl?
Oh, this is going to be like groping around for celebrity names.
She dated, I think, Elon Musk, and she was just in Aquaman.
Yeah, she's one of these women who's just like a hot mess, but very, very pretty.
And yeah, that's real power.
And the funny thing is, is that everyone talks about, well, it's so unjust if you inherit your wealth.
You know, it's so unfair.
Your inheritance tax is like... But for a woman to be pretty is not something that she earns.
She can maintain it.
But you're kind of born that way.
And so when it comes to people who are better than you at things, you can either up your game, get out of the game, or you can just sit there and stare at them in resentment until they give you some crumbs for their table.
And that, unfortunately, seems to be where a lot of people are these days.
Well, I remember as recently as five years ago, I think, I don't know whether you've noticed this, SJW lunacy, woke culture seems to have accelerated.
Sure.
The analogy I use is these aren't the zombies in The Walking Dead, these are the zombies in World War Z. They really move fast.
Sure.
And I remember arguing Look we're obsessed with equality about making everything fair, but what about what about attractive people?
They get to have more sex.
Oh, yeah Well, well, they didn't used to now with the welfare state.
That's the 80-20 rule, right?
So 20% of guys get 80% of the girls right right and throughout human history half half of guys ended up not recreate not reproducing right they didn't have babies because right and And so, in the past, attractive women, before the welfare state, before the dissolution of the sanctity of marriage, a young woman who was attractive would want to get the best possible man she could while she was in her prime.
And because the guys were being, you know, snatched up.
It's like if you go to an... Have you ever been to, I don't know what they call them in England, a garage sale they called in North America?
You know, people are just like, well, we've got a bunch of stuff, we'll just put it on the front lawn and see if we can sell it.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Car boot sale, we call them.
Okay, so if you go at the end of the day, when everyone's packing up, you're not gonna get anything good.
Because, you know, everything's been picked over, right?
And so there was this urgency, you know, you gotta find the best guy you can, you gotta lock him down, you gotta get married.
Because that's how you would use... Now, women use their appeal for not to get a great guy to make the foundation of the family.
They use their sex appeal to have guys help them move apartments.
To get taken out for dinner.
It's all very shallow, silly stuff.
To get what they want, which isn't a family, usually when they're young, but just resources.
To friendzone guys and dangle potential in front of them.
And then what happens is, of course, that as their attraction fades in their 30s, they then try and use that to lock down a guy.
When there's urgency and they're getting older, and also they've been heart scarred by usually a bunch of relationships that didn't work out, so their bonding capacity has kind of collapsed.
And in the past, yeah, you would just lock down the guy, and you'd also want to lock down the woman.
And you get married and you stay married and that's the way things should be and that's really changed now to the point where a woman's attraction is being used for shallow stuff and a man's resources is being used for shallow stuff.
Oh, I got a big screen TV.
It's like that's not really the same as a family do.
A lot of this, again, is a consequence of things like the debasement of the currency, money printing, quantitative easing, whatever you want to call it.
The young now don't even think they're going to get a foot on the property ladder.
They just spend for now.
They have endless avocado on toast because they can't afford a mortgage.
We were talking about this last night at dinner.
One of the foundational drivers for immigration, mass immigration, is to continually maintain property values.
Because after the baby boom, there's a baby bust, and the baby boom drives up property values, and then the baby bust should cause those property values to go down enormously, because there's just less demand, right?
It's like half the number of people vying for the boomer houses, which means that the price of the boomer houses should go down 30, 40, 50 percent.
And that means that people then would have more money to have kids.
That's how society is supposed to fix itself.
It's like the global warming thing.
Oh, extra CO2.
Well, if there was a tipping point that drove us to extremes, we never would be here to begin with.
The planet has to be self-regulating, which means more CO2 means more plant, which means less CO2.
There's this regulatory mechanism.
And that should happen with the market, but it's not being allowed to happen because people are bringing in people from the third world, lavishing them with welfare money.
They use that to rent and buy houses, which drives people to more expensive tiers, and the whole thing pushes upwards to maintain the value of the boom of real estate.
Because we saw what happened in America in 07-08 when the value of real estate dipped.
The entire international financial system almost came crashing down.
They can't have property values go down.
Yes.
You're right.
It's as if the property owning classes said to themselves, what if we can abolish gravity?
And in a way they have abolished gravity.
They've achieved every property owner's dream.
The property that never has a correction.
Right.
Right.
And you know what happens is the longer you push off the correction, the worse it is.
Yeah.
The worse it is.
And this is simply a function of voting as well, because older people vote and younger people tend to vote less.
And so if your property value declines, you're going to vote the people out of power.
Yeah.
And you're going to get really mad.
And of course, you know, because the boomers don't like it when their property value declines, but the young people would love it.
But the corollary of this, and this is why I fear that this is not going to be an optimistic podcast, you've got the young who've been effectively disenfranchised because the political class isn't interested in them, they're only interested in the property-owning classes.
They end up voting for people like Jeremy Corbyn.
They get excited by Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.
Because they think it's freedom that's failed.
And so they go to the guy who says, I'm going to go punish those guys who are, you know, keeping up their property values and so on.
And it's like, but that's not You can't keep up property values without the power of the state, otherwise they're just going to go to market normal.
Yeah, so... No, but listen, very, very few people matter in history.
Now, in everyone's daily life, they're the star of their own movie, and everybody should act that way, and that's perfectly valid.
But in the larger sweep of history, It's competence, excellence, and willpower that win out the day.
At least, that's the best shot we have.
So the fact that we're small in number doesn't particularly matter.
It's like saying, well, you two on stage is vastly outnumbered by the crowd.
It's like, but yes, but they're still on stage and the crowd is not, right?
So the fact that we are sort of outnumbered and there are a bunch of sophists around and so on, Simply means that our quality is going to matter and be distinguished even more.
Yes.
Now, again, nothing is guaranteed because of the free will thing, right?
And so I try not to slide towards pessimism because that's saying I know the outcomes of the work that I'm doing and the work that you're doing and the work that Janice and other people are doing.
I don't know the outcome of that.
I know the outcome that happens if we don't do this work.
For sure.
Right.
Like, if I don't jump off a high building, I don't know how long I'm going to live.
But I know how long I'm going to live if I do jump off a high building, which is relatively short and can be calculated using 9.8 meters per second per second splat, right?
Yeah.
So, we have to...
Do the work.
We have to speak the truth.
We have to get the facts out in front of the people so they have a choice.
Now, they have a choice.
They may choose wrong.
In which case, either we'll have enough time for them to circle back and say, oh yeah, you know, that donut thing wasn't a good idea.
I don't feel so good now.
Or we don't, but the only inevitability is inaction.
That is the only inevitability, and I can't... I mean, we're both fathers.
We don't have the option of inactivity, because our children don't have a voice in the world stage.
My child is too young to have a voice in the world stage, so I have to be the voice for the future that she deserves.
And that's all that we can do, and do it as passionately and as intensely and as humorously and as engagingly as possible.
One of the great challenges for us, I think, and I keep coming back to this in my podcast because I think it's such a good analogy, you must have read Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics, and there's a great moment where he describes how after the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Empire basically collapsed,
All these economic sort of czars or whatever from the Soviet Union came to the West and said, well, how do you allocate?
How do you decide what to produce?
How do you allocate resources when you don't have this year's plan and your five-year plan and your ten-year plan for how many tractors and how many fur hats you can produce?
I can see that on a superficial level, for most people it makes sense.
How can you allocate resources unless you have experts to make these decisions?
And there seems to be this view abroad that one should defer to experts because they know.
People don't trust the market anymore.
So how can you get people out of that basic level of thinking to the kind of level of thinking that we have?
Well, I think it's basic empathy.
Which is, why would you get to tell other people what to do with their lives?
Like, why?
Do you like it when someone comes along and tells you exactly what to do with your life?
Well, no.
Especially if they're well-armed.
You know, that's not a good situation.
So, it's just basic empathy.
People aren't resources.
Stuff in the world is not just resources.
I mean, look at these buildings.
What is this?
This is frozen, vertical thought.
This is people's lives, their plans, their dreams, their sacrifices.
To build, to design and build these homes, people didn't see their kids.
You know, they poured heart and soul into just these, these aren't just buildings.
I don't know about soul, looking at this great concrete building.
So clearly this one sold his soul for money.
Yes.
But even that's an allocation of resources that's his choice to make, right?
No, but so everything that we see, this car, you know, this coat, everything around us is frozen, passionate, sacrificial thought.
Yeah.
The idea that you would just order people around and tell them what to do with their lives, their resources, their talents, everything.
It's hideous.
And we can't live as perpetual toddlers being told what to do.
I mean, we can try, but it won't last.
Because everything that we have here is the result of choice and freedom and markets.
And if we take all of that away, this stuff will last.
Yes.
You know, like if you take someone's car and you don't maintain it, you're going to get to drive it for a month or two or three.
Yeah.
Or maybe six.
Okay, but that's obvious to you and me.
But going back to our friend Alexandra again, she actually said it in an interview.
She said that she dismissed facts.
It's all about my feelings.
It's all about something beyond But she doesn't pay for it, right?
So, where there's no... We have to sort of remind people that where there's no personal accountability or cost, there can't be any virtue.
You can't be virtuous with other people's money, you can't be virtuous with other people's resources.
It's like all the people who say we should take all the migrants in, you know, the old response is like, well, how many are you taking in?
You know, like JK Rowling, right?
And they don't?
No, of course not!
In fact, we'll move as far away from diversity as humanly possible.
Right, we're in front of the European Parliament building.
Alright, so we are going to close this off?
If we can do a few more minutes in there?
Yeah, yeah, I think so.
Okay, thanks.
So, tragically... Third venue, just so everyone knows.
We're like migrating ducks here, trying to finish this show.
Yeah, we're now inside the European Parliament and we've come to see the premiere of...
Borderless.
It's Lauren Southern's work with Cailin about the migrant crisis in Europe and it's, by the way, for people that find this movie, watch this movie, it's an incredible thing.
OK, so we've got to get a coffee, we've got to do all sorts of important things, so I think we should round it up, but what I wanted to ask you to repeat for the special friend is something you said to me about the importance of not trying to be liked when talking about ideas.
I mean, I call it remote control, which is when people will always try and do this to you, right?
So they'll say, well, you've got to debate this guy.
And if you had any courage, you'd tackle this topic.
And what they're trying to do is take over, like an alien.
They're trying to take over your spine, your central cortex, and make your decisions for you.
You know, they're calling you out.
And this remote control happens all the time because we have a two-way relationship with our audience, right?
And you have to strongly, strongly resist, if not outright take out the side of the back by the shed and hit it with an axe handle your desire to be liked, your desire to be popular, your desire for approval, and even to some degree your desire for money.
I mean, I aim at the truth and I do ask people to donate to the show.
But your relationship has to be with the truth.
Because the moment your relationship shifts to, is it popular?
Is it approved?
Am I going to get in trouble?
You lose your relationship to the truth.
And then you're just like everyone else.
Because we're kind of hardwired to want to please the tribe.
We're a tribal species and pleasing the tribe was essential for our survival in the past.
So we all have that impulse.
I don't want to be unpopular.
I don't want people to get mad at me.
But the moment you start navigating that, using those as your guides, you lose the truth.
And it becomes, I think, an immediately pleasing but eventually very shameful pursuit.
Because you now are no longer navigating saying, my goal is to introduce the truth to my audience.
It's not to have the audience approve of me.
I think you've just described the death of the mainstream media.
Yeah, yeah, I think that's true.
They're so worried about what their focus groups... Well, that's... No, they're worried about... They're worried that everyone's like them, because they are vicious attack dogs, right?
So they, if you disagree with their narrative or, you know, what we talked about earlier, radical, egalitarian, environmental side of things.
And I'm sorry, I hate to say environmentalism, it's not about environments, the environment shapes everything and change the environment, change the person.
Human beings are perfectible, if you use the right language in the right environment, everything can be wonderful.
When you challenge that, they get incredibly vicious.
And the one thing that's very true, I think, is that, I say this now like nothing else before, but okay, so when people attack you, they're revealing their greatest fear.
So if somebody attacks you, tries to humiliate you, it means that they're deathly afraid of being humiliated.
Right.
And I ask people to use this knowledge wisely and for good.
No, I've been easy on Twitter recently, actually.
I've been really going after people who try to humiliate me.
And I expose their previous tweets.
Oh, we better go.
I think so.
People who say, this is a funny little battle I got into on Twitter that was very intense.
When somebody was lecturing me about how to communicate with people, and I went and said, you have 11 followers?
Now, it's not like that's not an argument, but it's kind of evidence.
Like if somebody tells me how best to eat and they're morbidly obese, I can at least point that out.
You know, it doesn't mean that they're wrong.
It's not an at-home really?
No, it's relevant to the situation.
So, you know, if I have 400,000 followers on Twitter and this guy has 11, you know, it's like, yeah, please tell me more about how you should communicate with people and how you should spread ideas, you know, because it's like, come on.
Or, if someone's going to give me advice, if the morbidly fat guy is going to give me diet advice, he should at least start off by pointing out that he's morbidly fat.
And say, listen, I know I don't have a lot of credibility because I'm morbidly obese, but here's blah blah blah.
If he doesn't even address that, I just assume he's crazy.
Because, you know, that's the first thing everyone thinks of, right?
And people got really mad at that.
Because I'm saying you have to earn the right to give me advice.
You have to show me your expertise before I listen to you.
expertise you know if you want to tell me everything about how to do something I expect you to be an expert in it first and you can't fake that because you can't fake your number of followers right I mean I guess you can buy them but you know basically and so it's like okay if you want to if you want to give me advice you have to earn it and the fact is that people really want to give other people advice they don't really want to earn the right to do it and giving that as a metric means okay you know go away get yourself 200,000 followers or preferably a million come back and then tell me how to do it but to be fair by that token
Justin Bieber is is why Justin Bieber is not instructing me on how to engage with people from an intellectual standpoint you know I will fully admit that Justin Bieber sings better pop songs than I do I don't know, actually.
Among many, many other things, right?
I mean, so, so, but Justin Bieber is fine.
If I went to Justin Bieber and said, here's how you, you are a pop star, he would have every right to say, well, you're a 52-year-old philosopher and you have like 1% of my followers, and he would be entirely right to say that.
Stéphane, I feel that this conversation could go on forever and ever.
Shall we agree that one of these days I will come out to Canada, where I've never been before, and we'll continue the chat?
We should.
We can also do it remotely, of course, but yeah, we should probably.
We don't want to interfere with the start of the video.
No, we don't.
Thank you very much for the time.
It's been great talking to you.
If people haven't heard of me before, you can go to freedomainradio.com or youtube.com forward slash freedomainradio and help me out.
