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May 5, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:23:38
Freedomain Livestream - Free Speech and Ask Me Anything!
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From free domain, I hope you're doing well.
I am going to be doing a little bit of a chat, I guess, about the big issue that's going on at the moment, which is free speech.
Do we have it?
What are the role of tech companies?
What is the role of government?
Will regulation ever conceivably work?
And what are our options going forward.
These are all dire foundational questions that we need to wrestle with and grapple with.
And it's kind of funny because I thought this was kind of in the rear view.
I thought that this question or this issue of free speech was settled science.
You know, like the earth is a steer and slavery is bad and we should all be equal under the law.
You know, just as ideals I kind of thought the free speech thing was, as they say, done and dusted.
But it's not.
It's not.
It is something that still seems to be A challenge for people to get a hold of, to fathom, to understand, to process.
What is the point?
And there is this terrible thing that's been occurring, I'm sure you've seen it a million times, where somebody says, well, you know, that's not free speech, that's hate speech, that's problematic speech.
You see it, there's a couple of things that really help you to understand when someone is like propagandizing NPC talk, if that makes any sense.
And the propagandizing of NPC talk often has a lot to do with spewing or invective.
It's like when they use the word grift.
It's just one of these things that shows up as Just a whole bunch of stuff that makes no sense.
So you'll see, of course, the general pattern of how do you restrict free speech.
Well, first of all, to restrict free speech you need to have a massive imbalance between citizens and the media.
So what happens is the media, and I'm talking about America, and of course I'm no lawyer, so feel free to... Oh yeah, if you throw up your superchats I'll get to them, I promise.
In America, if you're a public figure, the media can say more or less anything that they want about you, and this is true in other places as well.
In England it's not quite as true, and New Zealand and so on, but in America and other places, the media can basically say whatever they want about you and you have almost no recourse.
Because there's like a standard which says, well you have to prove that they knew it was false, published it anyway, they did it with Meanness, malice in their heart, I mean all things that you can't really establish.
And because this standard is known, people just bypass it or don't record it, right?
So you have to have this massive imbalance, and so what happens is you just start slandering entire swaths of people.
People who say, well, I'm not far-right, but they get called far-right, which is, of course, a euphemism for fascist, Hitler, Nazi, all this kind of garbage.
And then what happens is people start fighting back and they get angry.
And then they say, ah, you see, they're getting angry, they're spewing hate speech, and therefore they insult people more, and then people get even angrier, and you understand how this cycle.
works is really uh it's really terrible um reputation is something that you can what is the old saying you can spend a lifetime cultivating it only to have it destroyed in a moment and a reputation is a is a precious thing and we now have a real bifurcation in society at tim pool who's a very sharp young man and well worth following.
Tim Poole posted something that said it's not that there are these extremists.
He did a sort of survey from the early 90s and then compared it to much more recently and you think of sort of twin peaks like two overlapping triangles fairly close together.
That was the left and then that was the right.
Now you know a couple decades later what's happened is The right has remained relatively the same, but the left has gone very hard left.
The left has gone completely off the rails.
They've been dragged further and further leftwards by race-baiting and class-baiting and all of the resentful hyperbole that I dare say spews out of the mouths of people who believe that every difference in group outcomes is the result of prejudice.
So what's happening now is people are living in two different realities as Scott Adams talked about in the movie you should really watch called Hoaxed at hoaxedmovie.com Scott Adams talks about like two people watching the same movie but they're actually watching different movies because of how they are interpreted in their own minds.
So when it comes to reputation it's this wild thing now where there are people who believe what the media says about people
And say oh well this guy is far right or this woman is an extremist or you know whatever they they come up with right a racist and sexist misogynist whatever right and there are other people who know that the media lies perpetually and therefore those people I won't say they view it as a badge of honor but they simply don't believe what the media says and so these two extraordinarily bifurcated views of the same situation is creating these two
Wildly opposing realities.
And you really can't survive in a society if you have massively opposing... I mean, if your epistemology is different, like your study of or your belief on how knowledge is accumulated, if you're Epistemology is oppositional.
You end up with different metaphysics, almost like a different reality that you're working in.
And if there's not a willingness to come together under the sort of umbrella of reason and evidence, which is always tricky, always tough.
I understand that people have beliefs and all, but if there's this general unwillingness To come together under the umbrella of reason and evidence and negotiate our differences according to objective standards, society can't survive.
Like civilization can't survive.
Civilization is the agreement to tame our angry will-to-power Darwinian ego Under the umbrella of reason and evidence and to allow the arbitration of a third party.
And that third party can't fundamentally be political.
It can't fundamentally be the court system because you can't have everyone taking every disagreement to the court system.
The different reality that people have means that they have no place to meet and negotiate.
They have no place to meet and negotiate.
So I mean there's stuff on the left that I accept and I think they have good critiques of American imperialism.
It'd be nice if they critiqued American imperialism that didn't necessarily immediately just overlap on The dictatorships that they like.
I mean, one of the reasons they were against the war in Korea in the 50s.
One of the reasons they were against the war in Vietnam in the 60s is that America was fighting communist dictatorships.
And so, but there's a good critique of American imperialism.
And there is good critiques of widening income gaps, widening income disparities in the United States.
The middle class is being hollowed out now.
So the identification of the issues on the left I think is fantastic and there certainly are issues with racism and there certainly are issues with sexism, although again it can't be just a one-way street.
Racism can't always mean Anti-black from white.
Sexism can't always mean anti-female from male.
There's lots of more nuance that really should be explored in these topics, but they've got some good critiques and good information to bring to bear on the table.
I'll bring it back to the table, but... and the right have good critiques as well.
The right goes a little bit far, I think, in the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps kind of thing.
There is a tough kind of finger-wagging Old Testament sternness.
So the right which can be kind of annoying it's sort of encapsulated by something I've talked about a long time ago these Old economy Steve, you know, this guy with the feathered hair from a 1970s yearbook, I guess, became famous.
You know, like, work two months in the summer, pay off your entire year of college.
And people say, this guy, oh, you get fired from one job, walk across the street, get another job, you know, just how the economy used to be.
And so the people who had Access to that kind of growth and opportunity and relatively low taxation and so on.
Particularly white males who face diversity barriers that are quite significant.
Excuse me, I can't edit this, but I'm about to sneeze.
Oh, that's attractive, isn't it?
They do sort of say, well, you know, if you graduated with student debt, that's just your own fault.
That's just, you know, and so there's too much.
They understand all of the massive amounts of propaganda that go into college.
That you'll never be a success.
That you can't get anywhere without college.
Which is often transmitted over the internet along the code of companies whose founders didn't complete college.
But, you know, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and so on.
A huge amount of propaganda.
And a huge amount of, you know, college is your path to X, Y, and Z. No particular connection between the needs of businesses and colleges themselves, as I've sort of pointed out in the past.
Businesses should be funding college degrees because that way you get guaranteed job placements when you're done.
And that's actually the way it worked for my dad.
So it's not a new idea of mine.
It used to be much more common.
But there's a huge amount of propaganda and And being able to pay this stuff off is really, really tough.
I think it was in the 90s was under Clinton where they said you can't discharge your student debts through bankruptcy anymore.
And of course back in the day, like way back, a sort of post-Second World War period up to the 70s and sometimes even later, the basic reality was only 10% of the population went to college.
So college really, really meant something.
Because, I mean, as a kind of proxy IQ test, it wasn't too bad.
Now, what is it, 50% of people are going to college, so it's just no longer exclusive.
It's no longer a proxy IQ test.
And, of course, the IQ test should be the substitute for college.
If you really want to help poor kids who are smart, and there are many poor kids who are smart.
I grew up with some of them.
Then you simply say that companies should hire or should be allowed to use completely blind IQ tests in the hiring standard.
Because an IQ test will predict success in a complex job 80% of the time.
80% of the time.
And it's the best metric around.
It would really, really help smart people.
It would really, really help poor kids who then wouldn't be laboring under college but could You know, instead of paying $50,000 or $100,000 for college, they could simply pay a couple hundred bucks for an IQ test and shop that around.
And, of course, the IQ test would have to be, you know, in order to eliminate questions of racism and sexism, the IQ test, you wouldn't know the name, the gender, the age, the race, anything like that would just be completely blind.
IQ test.
And that would be very helpful.
But, of course, that goes against a lot of
Leftist preferences so they're willing to sacrifice the poor in order to maintain their group collision course identitarianism so But yeah, so I mean as you've probably heard there were a number of people who were kicked off Facebook not as far as I understand it for specific violations of specific policies, but just I'm not even going to repeat the pejoratives here, but for being negative in in various ways and And that's a big problem.
So they kicked off a bunch of people who are somewhat on the right, although in general being critical of the left is enough for the left to call you far-right, and then Louis Farrakhan, who was also kicked off and who was also reported in mainstream media as Louis Farrakhan being far-right, when if you look at all the pictures of him with the Democrats, it's a little hard to sustain that particular fiction.
But It's rough it's rough and it is gearing up for election season.
I said some months ago that with the failure of the Mueller investigation what was going to happen was the left whatever came next was going to be worse because they were hoping that the Mueller investigation of course was going to give them grounds for impeachment or at least cripple the presidency and When the Mueller investigation caved, then they had to start doing something else, right?
They're not just going to lay down.
They're not just going to give up the ghost, so to speak.
Because they're just trying to get to 2024.
They want Trump, obviously, not to get in in 2020.
They just need to keep their immigration policies going until 2024, when they have all the demographics they need for a no Republican ever to be elected again in any significant way.
But after the Mueller investigation failed, they needed to start working on, I think, deplatforming, because Otherwise, I mean, they know.
They know.
They know the role that social media played in Brexit.
They know the role that social media played in getting Trump into office and other nationalistic and populist movements.
And remember, for the left, the success of Trump is It's a real catastrophe.
And look, I get a lot of things he's been on.
There's no wall, no prosecutions of corrupt members of the former administration.
There's no control over immigration.
But on the other hand, there's Kavanaugh and 150 other judges have been appointed who are not liberal lunatics.
And the economy is doing well, what's it, 275,000 jobs was the last job growth.
It's well north of 3% growth, which of course Obama said was impossible.
Funny story, it turns out that a guy who's got 50 years or 40 years experience in the highest levels of business knows a little bit more about business than a community organizer.
So the success is really, really bad because the more people who get converted from Welfare receivers to taxpayers.
Well, the less support you have for a big interventionist take and redistribute kind of government, right?
So the success like more people get enough welfare more lowest Hispanic rates of unemployment lowest American rates of African American rates of unemployment in in forever This is all a disaster for the left.
Like, when you're really hell-bent on taking something down, when it gets stronger, well, you're not happy, right?
So what are they doing?
They can't win on arguments, they can't win on the economy, they can't win on the data, they can't win on history, and they get eviscerated by The memes of production, right?
Meme warfare takes them down.
It's too angry and too panicked to be funny.
And the right does have sort of a monopoly on caustic humor that really changes minds.
And this is one of the reasons why you have this terrible legislation going on in Europe to control this kind of copyright stuff.
So they have to start working to de-platform and of course it makes no sense you know that you still have terrorist groups that have full access to Facebook but Paul Joseph Watson does not and Paul Joseph Watson is acaustic and funny and I won't say mild because he's a powerful thinker in his own way and I like Paul a lot.
We've done shows together but it is something that he's not in any way extreme.
Not in any way that I can think of.
And again, I haven't reviewed all of his work, but I mean, I can't imagine.
I just can't imagine.
And this is terrible stuff.
This is terrible stuff.
We need to have conversation so that we can get to the truth.
And this idea, well, you know, Paul believed something bad in the past, or so-and-so believed something that turned out to be false, That's natural.
You know, whenever you're pushing the frontiers of knowledge, whenever you're out there in between the stars, whenever you're out there in the hinterlands, whenever you're exploring virgin territory, you're gonna get lost!
It happens to me, it happens to you if you explore new territory, new ideas, you entertain new thoughts, you look into new data, and then you find out maybe it's not the case, and you, you know, you're adjusting.
You're adjusting.
Lewis and Clark did not take a particular beeline when they were out there exploring North America.
They got lost because they were doing New Territory.
So this idea that you must both be an original and creative thinker and never make mistakes is entirely contradictory.
You cannot have it both ways.
You can't do it both ways.
At all.
So, yeah, Paul believed some things in the past that he wouldn't accept at the moment, and the same thing is true of me as well, and the same thing is true of everyone!
Show me someone who has exactly the same ideas as they did ten years ago, and I'll show you someone who's never grown as a thinker, and who's never taken any risks as a thinker.
And an analyzer of thoughts and events.
So, this digging back a decade or more to find something that was negative or could be sort of mocked and so on.
And, I mean, we all know how this argument works, right?
This argument is so basic, it's ridiculous.
And it's embarrassing almost to bring it up, especially with such an intelligent audience as this.
But, I mean, we know the reality.
The reality is very simple.
The reality is that person X who had some belief in the past that turns out to not be true never started a war in Libya never started the invasion of Iraq and just those two just just those two and it's hard to imagine there's any kind of
I call it sort of the entrepreneurial media, because it's not the corporate media, it's the entrepreneurial media.
It tends to be a relatively small group of people, or sometimes just a solo person, working with, you know, a camera, a microphone, and their best arguments for truth.
So the entrepreneurial media doesn't start wars, doesn't start riots, doesn't start... I mean the destruction of Libya is one of the great catastrophes of world history.
The destruction of Libya It's hard to imagine anything worse that could have happened to North Africa, anything worse that could have happened to Europe, of course, because Libya was the gatekeeper between Africa and the Mediterranean, and therefore Europe.
And this is what Gaddafi said.
He said, you take me out, because he knew, right?
You take me out and, you know, a million boats are going to sail across to Europe.
And you look at what's going on in Iraq.
Now, Iraq is actually doing a little bit better than some people think, but my goodness, it's not doing better for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who were killed, both directly and indirectly.
It's not doing better for the forces.
And I remember talking to a soldier many moons ago who was telling me all about his deployments in the Middle East.
And I do remember saying to him, I said, do you find it odd?
Do you find it strange that you're out there in the Middle East guarding Lebanon and Kuwait and all these other areas in Iraq, that you're out there while America has practically no border to the south.
You know, it's called the Department of Defense.
It's supposed to defend America.
And instead, all the troops are at 700 plus military bases around the world.
And the southern border is just a welfare-enticing walkabout run by cartels.
And by the way, the Pope gave half a million dollars to people crossing the border.
I mean, how that money is not going to end up in the hands of cartels.
I have no idea.
That Pope is... Well, let's not go there.
It's a whole big topic regarding the Pope.
But yeah, it's a wild thing that you have all these troops all around the world.
You've got wall construction in Israel.
You've got wall construction in Lebanon.
Mostly or significantly funded by the United States.
No wall in America.
You've got this was it 700 billion dollar plus a year Department of Defense that's defending everything except America and attacking everything except those coming into America and It's a very strange phenomenon now, it's not strange of course if you understand that the left is courting votes and
And although half of ICE agents are Hispanics and who are doing their very best to try and, you know, if you flee Mexico, you don't want Mexico catching up with you and flowing into your neighborhood.
So great, great respect and honor to those who are working in that very difficult and dangerous field.
But it is a very strange phenomenon.
And what you can talk about and what you can't talk about is just rapidly narrowing in particularly terrible ways.
Where the conversation is choked off, where the conversation is killed.
Very bad things, Fester.
I said this on Twitter.
I said, listen, if your ideas are good, they should be aired so that we can be instructed.
If your ideas are bad, they should be aired so that you can be instructed.
Because if you ban or crush people's lawful speech, Well, it's like a rattlesnake.
I mean, you cut off the rattle, but you don't cut off the head.
Which means that bad ideas flourish, they go into subcultures, they're isolated from more reasonable people coming in and saying...
Don't do it this way, or here's the evidence against what you say, which allows you to, quote, de-radicalize.
I'm not sure what radicalization means, but generally it means being in a hermetically sealed biosphere of misinformation and never poking your head outside of it, which, again, back to universities.
But if we don't have the opportunity to see Where the bad ideas are and engage with them, those bad ideas will flourish without intervention.
And that is not a good plan for society.
And I think it's the last thing I sort of wanted to say about all of this free speech stuff.
I mean I dislike enormously a wide variety of ideologies that are poisonous and dangerous and frankly murderous when implemented in history but I do think that they should have the right to speak.
I don't want to be forced to fund them in particular through university taxes for university subsidies and so on but they should be allowed to speak because I want to you know I want to you know if you're in a fight you shoot up a flare right so you can see what's going on but If you can't see what's going on, we already have lost everything that could potentially tie us together.
We've already lost the big tent where we can meet and re-meet each other.
And those who can't be reasoned with can be contrasted with those who can be reasoned with.
And hopefully, you know, I don't want to say ostracism like they should be banned, but ostracism like reasonable people don't associate with the crazies, right?
So if you want to get into the conversation with reasonable people, then you need to be reasonable.
And if you're not going to be reasonable, you're not going to be part of that conversation.
That's kind of ostracism.
That's not the same as banning people because they should still have access to forms of communication where they're engaged in lawful speech.
But man, it's getting rough out there.
It's getting brutal out there.
It is going to escalate to violence.
That's what happens in history.
I mean, that's what happens, you know.
And this is not an original thought of mine by any stretch of the imagination.
This goes all the way back to JFK, who said those who make peaceful revolutions impossible make violent revolutions inevitable.
And if people are not allowed to be part of the public conversation and change people's minds, even though what they're engaging in is lawful speech, Well, they're not just going to give up.
They're not just going to say, well, okay, I guess I'll just be quiet and conform to the masses.
And the reason why I'm... Voltaire's old statement, right?
I disagree with everything you say but would defend to the death your right to say it.
The reason we say that is because the moment you grant A monopolistic, coercive power to the state, which is the only power the state really has.
The moment you grant that to the state to control speech, you're done.
Maybe it swings your way for six months, but then it's going to swing against you, and then you've got this great prize at the center of the government.
You've got this amazing prize at the center of the government.
And that prize is, wow, if we get into power, we can control speech itself.
We can control language.
We can control debates.
We can control discourse.
We can ban people from the public square.
Oh, how wonderful!
Say, saith the sophists and the coercive idiots, right?
And so, of course we have to have it just as a bedrock principle.
That unless you're directly encouraging or advocating the use of violence.
And, you know, this old fire in a crowded theater, which to my knowledge has never actually happened.
It's just one of these sort of examples that people give.
But Yeah, lawful speech.
People who can't handle debates.
There's a very dangerous combination.
And the dangerous combination goes something like this.
If you are certain and wrong, you're very dangerous.
You're very dangerous because this is one of the things that escalates to violence very quickly.
Because if you're certain You know, I have debates all the time on my show, public and with intellectuals and with Paul Craig Roberts, and with Peter Schiff, and with Peter Joseph, and I have debates all the time.
I have debates with listeners.
They call in, want to criticize my theory of ethics, or you name it, peaceful parenting.
I have debates all the time.
Because I'm certain about some things, but I know what the hell I'm talking about.
So it's fine.
You can be certain if you know what you're talking about.
And then if you are certain, it's like, you know, bring it on, right?
Bring it on.
But people who are certain and they don't have knowledge are terrified of debate because debate will undo the false certainty that is really the basis of their personality.
It's like being possessed by reality.
Or it's sort of like if someone says, oh yeah, I know I'm a Krav Maga expert or I'm an expert in some form of martial arts or something like that, right?
And they're lying, right?
They're just saying it to sound cool or whatever.
Then the last thing they want is to actually get in a fight, right?
Because, you know, if this guy is constantly going on about his Judo expertise or his Karate expertise and annoyingly pronounces it like Pusha, then if there's some fight and people are like, dude, unleash your hand weapons from hell, right?
He doesn't want that test because he's lying.
He's lying about knowing martial arts.
He doesn't want any kind of fight.
And if you're certain, and you're wrong, and you're stupid, and you have no basis, then you don't want to get into a debate.
You just want to hold on to that certainty.
And those people are very dangerous.
To be certain and to be wrong is a deadly combination.
Especially if kind of deep down, you know, you know.
I mean, most people are not pursuing virtue.
They're just trying to get resources.
That's all they're doing.
So if All of these people who are on TV, who are saying, yeah, it's good that they're silent.
They were just spewing hatred.
They contribute no good to our society.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
No understanding of the principle of free speech.
And they are so deluded and so dumb that they imagine that they're always going to have the whip in their own hand, and no one's ever going to grab the whip from their hand and use it against them.
Because it doesn't take a lot... I mean, you don't have to see through time.
You don't have to see from season one of Game of Thrones to the absolute catastrophe of the ending.
You don't have to see through time.
You don't have to be some kind of stone genius.
You don't have to...
recreate Einstein's general theory of relativity using popsicle sticks and silly putty, all you have to do is say, well, if someone's going to get this power, it ain't going to be me forever, because the shifting sands and tides and back and forth of human power and frailty and greed and so on, you just don't want the government to do anything that you wouldn't be willing to give that power to your worst enemy, right?
I mean, of course, right?
We all understand this.
So you just have to be kind of pig, ignorant, stupid.
To say, oh yes, well we should just purge these people from the public discourse because they provide no good to society.
Yet still they've started no wars.
The people who've been wrong about things in the past, even egregiously wrong, they still haven't started any wars.
And if being wrong about things is so terrible, well, communists shouldn't be allowed to speak, right?
I mean, if that's the argument, because communism as an ideology has killed well north of 100 million people in 100 years.
That's a million people a year.
That's a lot.
What is that?
3,000 a day?
30,000 a day?
Oh my gosh, I'm terrible at this on-the-fly math.
I should just step back from that crevasse.
But that's a lot of people.
And advocating for communism, how is that not advocating for the inevitable violence that accrues under communism?
I mean, it's not like you don't know.
How is that not shouting Gulag in a crowded theater.
Anyway, so this, it's all terrible, it's all garbage, and we need to fight back.
Now, as far as government regulation goes, regulating, there have been a bunch of suggestions floating around, and I'll just sort of touch on them briefly here, and then I'll get to the super chats.
Thank you for your patience, my friends.
But, so one of them, of course, is that the difference between A publisher and a platform, which I've touched on before, I'll just mention it briefly here, is kind of important.
So, if you are a platform, then you are a neutral place where people can post ideas.
And then, let's say that somebody says, so-and-so is a murderer on this platform, right?
Well, you're not sitting there saying, well, I approve of this, and I disapprove of that, and this is valid, and this is not valid, and so on, right?
And so if you are a platform, then people can say the most egregious things and you can't be held liable for defamation or whatever it is that they're saying, right?
That's because, hey man, we're just, you know, like the guy who builds the road is not liable for the getaway car from the bank robbery, right?
I mean, he just, they just built the road.
It's whatever, right?
He's not liable for a hit and run, right?
Now, unless you build the road specifically for the guy to get away through the woods or something, like, whatever it is, right?
So, yeah, you know, just have a platform here, man.
People can say whatever they want.
And if someone says something bad, then, you know, certainly if they say something illegal, we'll move it.
But, you know, if they say something bad, you take it up with them, you know, we're You don't blame the glass for the view on the other side, right?
I mean, if you don't like the view, you've got to move.
You can't blame the glass, right?
It's just a clear pain.
People post what they want and we're not liable for the content of what they post.
Now that is a platform.
Now the publisher is a different matter.
So the publisher hires writers and commissions articles and vets and has lawyers and so on.
And therefore they are responsible for What is going on in their magazine or their newspaper or whatever, right?
They're responsible.
They curate, they create, they approve, they have a whole legal department, and so they're responsible for what goes on.
on their platform, which is why Rolling Stone got sued, if I remember rightly, for the frat boy rape stuff.
And Nick Santman is now, I think, suing CNN for considerable amounts of money because they're not just a, hey man, we're just a neutral third party and people just use our stuff and all that.
They're responsible.
In order to maintain your immunity from liability for what's posted on your platform, you have to be neutral.
You have to be neutral.
You can't have your finger on the scale.
You can't say, well, this is, oh, I like these guys.
I'm going to promote them.
I don't like these guys.
I'm going to suppress.
You can't.
You can't.
As far as I know.
Again, I'm no lawyer.
Look all this stuff up yourself.
And so if tech giants are filtering or banning based upon ideology, then I don't see how they can maintain the claim of pure neutrality.
And their business model is only sustainable if they maintain neutrality.
Right?
If they are a platform, not a publisher.
Because if they switch to being a publisher, then they can be sued for the content of what's on their site, and there's no possibility that they can review everything that gets posted.
Obviously.
Obviously.
I don't even need to say it.
There are billions of people using this stuff.
So that is the big difference.
And How that gets judged, I don't know.
Some other people have suggested that Trump could say, look, if you want, if you want contracts from the federal government, then you have to be neutral in how you apply free speech standards.
And you can't be banning people based upon Their lawful speech.
And that's something else that could happen.
And the tech giants take a lot of money from the government or from the taxpayers and so on.
So it's not necessarily you've got to create a ministry of truth and oversee all of these.
I mean, there's lots of mechanisms in place that would solve the problem.
I mean, if the government said Well, you have to show that you're being neutral and it doesn't look like you're being neutral.
If they said that, I don't know what they would say, but if they said something like this to XYZ tech company, they said, look, it doesn't look particularly like you're being neutral because you're letting this groups on who are really advocating violence.
These people have been kicked off who are not advocating violence and so on, right?
So we're going to need to review your neutrality clause of the law.
Now, if that were to happen, I mean, the shareholders would go nuts, obviously, right?
Because it would be threatening the entire value of the company.
And so they would probably say, listen, we're going to do an internal audit, we're going to make sure blah, blah, blah, and we're going to give real training to our people and whatever it is, right?
But the problem is, of course, that the HR departments, I think, have been pretty well radicalized in these companies.
I've gone into the reasons for that in the past so I don't need to sort of do them again here but that's one way that would cause a significant reform because I mean I think these companies do provide a lot of value to the world but if they want to keep this immunity I think they do have to make sure that they don't have their fingers on the scale when it comes to Who they ban, and why.
Alright, I wanted to just do that little bit of an intro.
Thank you so much for your patience.
Please talk about this with people.
Please remind people of the importance of free speech.
Please, please, please make sure that people know that if we lose free speech, I'm not kidding.
This world, this Western world, will scarcely be worth living in.
And there will be many in the long run who may not enjoy that exalted state for long.
All right, so let me just have a quick look down in here.
And see where we are.
Thank you very much for everyone and for your support.
If you want to do freedomainradio.com forward slash donate or just go to freedomainradio.com, there's a little donate button that's also very, very helpful.
But I want to make sure that I get to what people said.
Stephen Mulraney, thank you very much for your support!
Ben I says, hey Stefan, thanks for your content.
Shaolin says, hey Stefan, if you were to create a utopian society, how would you do this?
It's a fine question, my monk-like friend.
And oh, I really was gonna just do the super jets, but I've had a couple of comments.
They don't get under my skin because again, I'm comfortable with, very comfortable with my conscience and all that, but Comments of like, hey Steph, man, what happened to your voluntarism?
What happened to your anarchism?
What happened to your commitment to libertarianism?
And it's like, I don't know.
What does Michael Malice call them?
Midwits?
But that's not, it's not how things work.
Like if you and I are driving to Vegas, I think we've got enough gas to get there.
And then I'm like, oh, Vegas is like 200 kilometers away and we've only got 50 kilometers worth of gas left.
And I say, we've got to pull off the highway and we've got to go and get gas.
Do you start screaming at me?
Hey man, I thought you wanted to get to Vegas!
You're leaving the road that leads to Vegas!
Why don't you want to go to Vegas anymore?
You betrayed Vegas!
You will be one of the things that stays in Vegas, I think.
But I mean, no, you know, I thought we had generations to achieve a freer society.
Demographics say otherwise, so I stopped to get gas.
It doesn't mean I don't want to get to Vegas.
Come on!
It's ridiculous.
So, to create a utopian society, I just released a video, Top 5 Parenting Solutions, which you should check out.
You parent peacefully.
And when you parent peacefully, then children grow up without a fear and obsequience and obedience to authority, which means they're going to view the state as something anachronistic and out of their mindset.
And you'll get more and more people who have less and less confidence in and fear of authority.
Plus, they'll be healthy and self-regulating.
So you won't have all of this dysfunction that people use as the excuse for giving the state more and more power.
So anyway.
All right.
Marussia Dark says, my problem with calling social media a right is eventually you get the blowback of bake the cake, where private forums can't have in-group preference.
Yeah, that's a good... That certainly is a good point.
And this is why some people say, well, if you have over a million subscribers, or not a million subscribers, a million users of your platform, then you have particular rules and so on.
So yeah, that is definitely a tough challenge, right?
So the argument is, let's say that you have An Indians in Indiana forum, right?
And it's like, well, you know, you know, it's generally about Indians from Indiana.
And if a bunch of people who aren't that way, and they say, well, no, we want this really to be for Indians from Indiana.
And it's like, no, everyone has a right to social media.
So you can't write.
So I get all of that.
And how that is solved.
I mean, again, I sort of hate this, well, if you have a million, all right, I mean, but there are different rules for different, like, if you have a different size corporation, like, if you have a certain number of employees, then you have to go into Obamacare.
If you have a certain number of employees, you have to subscribe to diversity quotas and so on, and hire certain groups and genders.
So, you know, maybe you just create a sort of, under this, you're fine, over this, whatever, right?
Again, I know that's not objective, but you know, we have to work with what is.
It would be nice to have a more objective and universal standard, but the only way we're going to get to a free society is if we maintain free speech.
And if we lose free speech, I mean, nothing means anything.
It's all just a matter then of just batting down the hatches and try and ride out whatever hellscape is coming.
So, whatever helps prop up free speech at the moment, I'm for.
Because when you wet finger that candle, I mean, the light goes out all over the world.
So, Zenwork.
Zenwork, thank you for your support.
Frank S., same thing.
Marusia Dark says, Legally, hate is a motive, not a crime in itself.
Well, of course.
Of course.
Of course hate is not a crime.
And of course there's no such thing as hate speech.
It's just a term invented by people who aren't very smart, who want to shut down discourse that they can't answer.
Right?
It's not hate speech.
They hate facts.
They hate facts that go against the narrative.
And so they experience the emotion of panic when confronted with counterfactuals.
And like all that means is Debates are not for you?
Debates aren't for everyone.
Nothing wrong with it.
If you're terrified and faint at the sight of blood, don't be a surgeon.
It's not for everyone.
What's that?
Chris Pine in Wonder Woman?
London, it's disgusting.
Yeah, it's not for everyone.
He's got a wonderful way of delivering his lines.
He's a very, very talented guy and a good singer too, as you'll see.
into the woods he said I think but anyway so people experience this panic when they have counterfactuals and they can't sleep and they're oh right they get really angry It's like, okay, you're just too emotional to debate.
That's fine.
There's nothing wrong with that.
You may be wonderful at other things, like making babies.
It just means you're not good at debating.
You're too volatile.
You're too emotional.
You can't master yourself to the point where you can have a rational discussion.
But the people want to stay in debates because they want to, you know, like when I was a kid I guess we used to dress up as adults, right?
We used to put on, you know, we'd find the one guy who had a dad in the neighborhood and we'd put on his shoes and walk around with a little pipe sticker down and a Sherlock Holmes hat halfway down our nose and we'd dress up like adults.
But that didn't mean we could go vote and open a bank account and take out a mortgage, it just meant we were dressing up as adults and people like to dress up as rational Thinkers who can have a productive debate, but they're not.
They're hysterical.
They're angry.
They're volatile.
They're emotional.
They're immature.
It's not for you.
It's not for you.
And listen, there's no shame in it.
Not everything is for everyone.
And so you have to invent this thing called hate speech because it matches your emotional reaction to counterfactuals, to arguments that you can't push back against.
So you invent this thing called hate speech because somehow ascribing a negative intent to some piece of language.
It's not false argument.
The intelligent thing is false argument, invalid argument, argument not supported by reason and evidence.
It's a rebuttal.
That's how you do it.
But if you have incredibly strong emotional reactions and you hate what's being said, but you can't disprove it, then you just invent this category called hate because hate is a negative emotion.
At least against some people.
You're allowed to hate fascists, and you're allowed to hate some particular ideologies.
You're not really allowed to hate communism, apparently.
But yeah, no, it may be a motive.
Hate may be a motive.
But no, of course emotions are not crime, and of course there's no such thing as hate speech.
It's just something invented by people who desperately want to play act as debaters who can't debate.
All right, Fernando Bugarin, thank you very much.
Esoteric Dichotomy, thank you so much, again.
Hiroshaheed says, missed you in Vancouver, please try again.
F. Antifa, thank you.
Sean Piper says, thank you, Stefan, for all that you do.
Thank you, Sean, that's very kind.
Derek Brown says, where do your views diverge with Ayn Rand?
Now, I've done, I never got to the fourth part.
Events overwhelmed me, I guess you could say.
I made the choice not to.
So with Ayn Rand, I'm down with the metaphysics, down with the epistemology, but the ethics and politics is where I diverge.
So Ayn Rand, her argument is that what is virtuous is that which is good for mankind, that which aids the survival and flourishing of mankind.
But that's a collectivist concept because there are individuals who do enormously well.
I mean Al Gore has made ungodly amounts of money from carbon taxes and credits and climate scares and so on and I mean look at the amount of money that Barack Obama has made and the Clintons left the White House in debt after Bill Clinton was president because of their legal bills and now they're well north of a hundred million dollars or something.
They're doing fantastically well.
So statism works for some people!
That's why There's statism.
It works fantastically for some people.
Some guy from the Middle East who gets to Germany makes ten times his income in Germany for not working than he would have made in the Middle East.
What's that old line?
Why do they fight in the Middle East all the time?
Because it's really, really, really hot and there's not a lot of water.
But no, it works fantastically.
You know, if you're... I mean, you think of the people who come to the West, say from Pakistan, and they've got some elderly relative who's got some complicated medical condition, and then they bring that relative in on sort of chain migration, and then the elderly relative gets pension, gets free access to very sophisticated health care, like...
That's great for them.
Like, that's fantastic.
Who would say no to that?
Well, you know, but principles, it's like it's legal and it's encouraged.
And lots of people say, you know, diversity is fantastic.
So, you know, you go to neighborhoods and there are in the emergency room and in the hospitals, there's almost nobody who was born in the country.
But for those people, you get access to, you know, pretty good health care for free or mostly for free.
So it's pretty good for them.
Power mongers, people who... If you like to torture and abuse people, man, being a prison guard in North Korea is pretty sweet.
If you're a sadist, right?
So it works really, really well for a lot of people.
You can say, well, but it doesn't work for their own abstract interest in the long term.
This and that.
The other is like, hey, you know, if you're a diabetic in some backwoods village in Pakistan and you can make it to a Western country, you survive, you flourish, you thrive relative to where you might be back in Pakistan.
So what do you mean?
Like in the long run and blah, blah, blah, right?
I mean, there is no abstract long run.
There's immediate preferences.
And yeah, there are long term preferences.
I get that as well.
But If you're some woman, you divorce your husband.
Jeff Bezos is going through this now, right?
So you divorce your husband and you get to take half his stuff.
It's legal.
It's enforced by the state.
It's encouraged by your attorney.
And you're mad at your husband.
You're frustrated with your husband.
So you go and you take, what was it, Paul McCartney's ex-wife took him for, I didn't even remember, tens of millions of pounds.
And you can see these ridiculous divorce settlements.
So the divorce laws work pretty well for a woman who wants to divorce her husband and take half his stuff.
It's great for her to say, oh, well, yes, but in the problem, you know, then your kids may not end up getting married because they're considerate, right?
You've got more than enough money for your kids.
And if you don't take that money, it's not like the system's going to fall apart.
And this is public choice theory 101, right?
I mean, let's say some woman says, I don't really agree with these divorce laws and so on, but hey man, there's $20 million on the table.
That's a lot of money.
And all I have to do is tell my lawyer to go get it and I get a check.
It's pretty good.
So this idea that that which is best for the survival of man is the moral No, no, no.
There is no collective man.
There's only individuals.
And so, with regards to ethics, it's not a sustainable theory.
Because then you have to explain why everyone wants all this free stuff from the state.
Well, they want it because it's good for them.
It's best for them.
Oh, well, in the long run... You know, it's... I mean, if you think I'm picking on the left, I mean, look at George Bush the Younger, right?
The 03 starter of the war, right?
In Iraq, right?
What has he got to offer the world if he wasn't president?
I mean he'd be some mid-range executive scamming his way through the oil business and or maybe he'd be have a couple of used car lots under his belt or whatever, right?
I mean instead of he's being written about and he's being feted and touted and you know people hanging on his every word I mean come on he loves the state So many people benefit massively from the state.
I mean, that's what the real war is about.
The real war isn't about left versus right.
It isn't about far extremists.
It isn't fundamentally about free speech.
Free speech!
Like, wanting to de-platform people is nothing to do with any abstract principle.
It's to do with resources.
That half of the population in the West now gets most, if not all, of their resources from the state.
You got half the people taking the money and you got half the people making the money.
And they don't want the people who make the money to wake up to gain any kind of solidarity to push back or anything.
I don't want any of that.
Of course not.
Of course not.
I mean if you've been on welfare for 20 years or three generations you don't I mean, do you want the end of the welfare?
Of course not.
You're going to go insane.
The women who are considering divorcing their husband because they can take half his stuff, they don't want a reform in the family court system or anything like that.
The women who want to have the power to make sexual abuse allegations in divorce, horribly common, did a show on this recently with a fellow, they don't want to lose that power.
Say, oh, well, you know, but it's bad.
Okay, so that's fine.
So then you're saying you have to say to someone, give up $2 million or $20 million of your husband's money because it's bad for you.
And then you have to say, well, there has to be some other standard.
And that other standard is UPP.
Now, of course, because...
The what is best for humanity is not a valid standard.
It's basically utilitarianism writ large.
Or the pretend that all human beings have the same interests.
No, they don't.
Smart people want freedom and less smart people often want the resources of smart people.
I mean, we're not all like salmon in a swift current pointing the same way at all.
That's why diversity doesn't work very well, right?
So because of that, I did spend 20 years working with and puzzling out this whole question of ethics, and because of that, the idea that, you know, at the end of Atlas Shrugged, they just rewrite the Constitution.
Sorry, you know, it's been 57, it's been like forever, right?
That's not, I mean, it's not how it's, you can't have a state.
You can't have a state in the long run.
The state is as immoral as slavery, and you can't just have a little slavery, because it never stays that way.
Let's see here.
NPC076blahblahblah says, as I reread Thomas Paine's Common Sense last month, my mind automatically changed the subject from the British monarchy to our modern-day oppressors.
It was a great time.
You helped me train my mind.
Thank you.
Well, thank you very much for your mind.
Magamexican says, Stefan could throw on a toga and be an extra in a Greek movie.
Message deleted.
Thank you very much for your support.
Mark Moogle, thank you.
Andres Navarro says, Google is removing mines from the Play Store.
Oh, is that right?
Yeah, it's tough.
You know, it's tough with all of this competition stuff and all of that, right?
Oh, Mark Moogle says, forgot to type my comments in.
LOL.
LOL.
Not that I mind helping FDR out with a little more of a donation.
Stefan, I would love to see you discuss censorship with Styx and or Tim Pool.
I was actually just thinking about that today.
So thank you very much.
Willis K. said, Hey, Steph loved your monologue at the end of Hoaxed.
Thank you.
Two takes, no script.
I was very pleased with that.
Hoaxedmovie.com.
Just check it out.
Tony Jabroni says, is digital piracy a service problem or a consumer problem?
Yeah, that's a tough call.
I mean, to create something and then just have people copy it and consume it is kind of frustrating.
I'm not a fan of government laws protecting IP, copyright, or these kinds of things, and Jeff Tucker has written some great stuff on that, so you should read that rather than have me go through the articles again.
The Hobbes ate Calvin.
That's from Calvin and Hobbes.
It's an old 80s cartoon.
I often hear about utility functions in AI development.
Reminds me of conditioning a child to achieve a certain goal.
Is there a role for peaceful parenting philosophy in AI research and development?
Oh, you're dragging me to a pit that makes many people mad.
But there's no such thing as AI.
No such thing as artificial intelligence.
Machines don't learn.
You can program them to do stuff and you can program them to try and detect patterns and adapt their behavior and so on.
But there's no such thing as artificial intelligence.
Intelligence is a giant wetware mystery of the human brain.
Nobody understands it in humanity, although people are getting close with some genetics.
But no, there's no such thing as artificial intelligence.
I mean, I was a computer programmer from the age of 11 until the age off and on of Well, over 41.
So yeah, three plus decades.
I know computers very well.
Oh, well, things have changed.
No, no, no, they haven't.
No, they haven't.
They've just got faster.
Still the same binary.
It's still the same on-off switch.
So no, there's no such thing as artificial intelligence.
It's a, it's a scare myth.
And it's a scare myth designed to get you away from the real danger, which is the state demographics, the welfare state, all this kind of stuff.
So forget about AI.
It doesn't matter.
And it will replace some jobs.
Absolutely.
I mean, there's no question of that, but robots did that in the past and we don't think that they're terminators, right?
So no, don't worry about AI.
All right.
Ray says, Ray Jimenez says, thank you very much for your support.
Patrick Selick says, I believe freedom of speech and the right to privacy are essential, but the Internet is being used for cheap and effective attacks of foreign asymmetric warfare against the West.
Your thoughts.
P.S.
Thanks for everything you do.
Asymmetric warfare against the West.
Okay, so you want to follow Jack Posobiec.
I say this, I know it's Posobiec, but it's Posobiec, P-O-S-O-B-I-E-C, Posobiec.
He's the guy, he's got a whole fourth-generation warfare book, and he talks about things that I don't really understand, you know, like how China is the great strategic enemy and so on, and so I'm not gonna give much of an answer to that.
Double Dog not representing that guy.
Says, would running for office greatly enhance your exposure?
Yes, and would pollute my message.
Paddy Leather says, why aren't you Catholic?
Interview Dr. E. Michael Jones about how Newton was an alchemist who resurrected the platonic forms to justify Protestant corruption in science and economics.
Be Catholic!
That would mean viewing the current Pope as a great authority and the ultimate mouthpiece of divine perfection and I have a little bit of a trouble I have a little bit of a trouble going there with regards to the current Pope.
So, let's see here.
We've got some more.
Let me just check these out.
All right, let me get here.
Exposure.
Okay.
Do we need a right-wing free state project in Canada?
Where should we go?
Maybe Bancroft area?
Yeah, I used to know some people involved in the Free State Project, the FreeTalk Live guys and so on.
We've sort of drifted apart over the years, but I don't know how the Free State... I also have some friends who ended up in there.
I don't really know how the Free State Project is going at the moment, but if anybody knows, please let me know.
John Pickwick, thank you for your support, says, what's your advice for an underachiever?
What would you say to someone who has delayed his life by a couple of years and out people, and I assume that means cut people out of his life, focus on relationships or building a career playing catch-up?
Being an underachiever, I'm surrounded by people not very similar to me.
That is a great question.
That's a great question.
I felt like an underachiever for a lot of my life.
I had a vague sense of my potential and I never felt I was manifested in the way that I wanted to or was able to bring it to life.
In a way that was important.
So I did feel like I could do more or could have done more.
The good news is I don't really feel like that.
I think I'm doing maximum!
Way back in the day, there used to be this text-based adventure game called Zork!
Sorry, John.
But way back in the day, there used to be this text-based adventure game called Zork.
There was Zork 1, Zork 2, Zork 3.
And a friend of mine was quite excited when he found that there was a setting in Zork where you could say verbosity, magic.
Maximum verbosity was like one of the settings.
And maximum verbosity.
And so now I have achieved, I believe it's fairly safe to say, maximum verbosity.
Hey, look, we're running 60 frames a second.
How nice.
And I'm getting shinier.
So when it comes to being an underachiever, It's a good question.
So the Aristotelian argument is you won't be happy until you're exercising your full potential in pursuit of the good.
I think it's kind of true in many ways, if you have a conscience.
An underachiever.
I don't want to give you anything glib or cookie cutter, so...
And I also don't want to say, well, you know, what's wrong with being an underachiever?
You know, it's a relative measure and blah, blah, blah, because we kind of know, we know deep down if we're slumming it or not, right?
So I think if you have a goal that motivates you, and I think that's probably what you're missing, is do you have A purpose.
Do you have a purpose?
Now, if you have a purpose, then you're not just spinning wheels.
So think of a car, like, you know, if you just put it up on a jack, you can rev it as much as you want, it's never gonna go anywhere, right?
Because it has no traction, the rubber is not on the road.
It's not walking the torque, blah blah blah, it's a bit of a cliche, but you know what I mean, right?
So, what is it that you want to achieve?
What is it that would be a goal that would motivate you?
Now, if you have a goal that will motivate you, then you don't have to worry about being an underachiever or not.
And I'll give you sort of a silly example, right?
You wake up in the middle of the night in your house, you smell smoke, you're alone in the house, and your house is on fire.
What do you do?
Do you daydream?
Do you play Candy Crush?
Do you decide to finally get up and Jordan Peterson style avoid political realities and tidy your room?
No!
What do you do?
You get the hell out of your house by hook or by crook by any means necessary.
Get the hell out of your house and if you have to run through fire to get out of your house if that's the only way and then you're you're gonna do it because it could be some affirmative action Firewoman coming in weighing a buck ten who's not going to be able to carry your butt out of the house, right?
So this is an example, right?
You don't feel a vague sense of regret or underachievement.
You're just like, I have to get out of that because you have a purpose and your purpose is to not go flambé in your bed, right?
And have the lead guy from Fight Club come and establish what might have happened.
Was he doing cars?
Yeah, he was doing cars.
Anyway, so you have a purpose and because you have that purpose your mind is wonderfully clarified.
You have a huge amount of energy and you just want to achieve something.
Which is in this case to stay alive and not die from burning or smoke inhalation or whatever.
I think most people die from smoke inhalation.
So if you don't have that purpose You can lollygag away an afternoon, right?
Like that old Pink Floyd song, digging away the hours that make up a dull day.
Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.
When you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking, turning around to come up behind you again.
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older, shorter of breath, one day closer to death.
No one told you when to run.
You missed the starting gun, right?
This idea that You could just fritter away your life exists because you don't have a purpose now.
I think that we naturally have a purpose.
I don't really impose purposes on my daughter, but watching her and interacting with her during the day, she always has a purpose to what she's doing.
She's working on this day.
Why are you working on this?
You always tell me why, why she's doing this, right?
So we're naturally purpose-driven.
I mean, all animals are, because the purpose is survival and reproduction.
So we're purpose-driven.
So the question then becomes, who benefits from you not having a purpose?
And I bet if you dig deep, John, into your history, into your life, there's going to be someone or more than one person who would be threatened by you being very successful.
it would provoke great anxiety in them or self-loathing, self-hatred it could be and they may be so immature that they would then sabotage you so if you're playing small and you have no purpose you are usually serving the pathetic emotional defenses of someone around you who missed the starting gun and did not achieve much with his life or her life
And what they've done, which is what most people do, when, see, there's no failure greater than the lack of trying.
I mean, you always, you never win any race, you don't enter, right?
So it's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
And it's better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all.
Trying and failing gives you an immediate pain that can spur you to greater practice, greater focus.
But if you never even try, you get to avoid that immediate pain, but you slowly accumulate regret and despair, and eventually it just becomes pure nihilism.
Because you've missed the whole point of living, which is to do something with your life.
Just do something with your life.
Hopefully great, or to the greatest of your capacity.
So I studied as an actor at the National Theatre School, studied as a playwright, and I did some acting, and I did some playwriting, and I did some directing.
It was okay.
I liked it, but it was not my particular thing, and it's a very, very left-wing environment, and that was kind of nasty for a while.
Probably even worse now.
Now, let's say that my daughter wanted to become an actress, and let's say she was really good.
If I didn't have closure with my own sort of acting life, Then I'd have a whole lot of complicated stuff around, especially if she started to really succeed, because I'd sit there and say, oh man!
I mean, I remember the day I got the letter from the National Theatre School that I'd been accepted, because they only take... they take less than 1% of applicants.
1,600... 1,700 applicants, they take, I think, 16 people.
So it was a big deal to get in, and it was actually... I remember I went with my mother to see the movie Wall Street with Michael Douglas, where he ended up getting an Oscar.
And I thought it was kind of cool that I got a letter of acceptance at the National Theatre School, and went to see what is a pretty good film with some great acting from Michael Douglas.
So I'd be all kinds of messed up about math.
My daughter, I don't think she does, but she wants to be an actress.
Be like, yeah, go for it, right?
Enjoy, right?
I mean, maybe you'll love it.
And maybe you'll like the environment more than I did.
Spending my life around actors.
Can you imagine spending the rest of your life around actors?
I remember we had, in the theater school, We had a guy come in to, I did a lot of body work, Alexander technique and stretching and yoga and tai chi and all that, and we had a guy come in to film us to sort of figure out where we might be tight physically and what we might change about our physicality.
He filmed us, this was back when filming was kind of complicated, he filmed us and played us back as we did tai chi and he would point out things about our bodies and the actors around were like, Wow I didn't realize my hair looked like that from the back and oh man I got a little bit of back fat and oh man I got to do some workout on my butt and you know this guy was trying to give us some centered body work and everybody was just talking about somewhat inconsequential physical characteristics and he's like oh actress and I was like oh yeah I can I can get that I can understand how that could be a little impatient.
What is the old line how do you give an actor CPR?
So if there are people around you who had potential, who squandered it, then they're going to be very invested in you not succeeding.
In you not succeeding.
When I was growing up, just about everyone, I was often the youngest.
This is sort of a phase.
Sort of a phase.
that I went through for more than a fair it's quite a long time because I was the youngest I when I went to boarding school I was if not the youngest one of the one of the youngest in the um in the school.
My birthday, September 24th, was like right after the beginning of school year.
So I was really, really young there.
And it just kind of worked out that way, that I was just always the youngest.
And so I always felt like kind of small, kind of catch up, you know, particularly in those times where, you know, like, like 11 to 13, or 12 to 14, where there's a huge change in the male body and so on.
So I just felt youngest and smallest and so on.
And when you get imprisoned in this kind of mindset, It's tough to break out of it because you kind of need the permission of people to break out of a mindset because it's so easy for them to reinforce that mindset in you and put you back into that way of thinking.
And so when I decided, like, I have a lot of gifts to share with the world and I want to really do good in the world, I really worked hard to overcome this sense of smallness and insignificance and youngness.
And because you're younger, you're considered to be naive.
Because I was really into philosophy, I was considered to be way too abstract and ineffectual and not practical.
Like, all of this stuff, it was all of these little prisons that people build in your mind about who you are and what your potential is and what you're capable of.
And, you know, you think of Gulliver's Travels, right, when he's in the Lilliputians and they chain him down with these tiny chains.
But there's lots of them.
He could break each individual chain, but he's kind of strapped down with all these chains.
You have to kind of just stand up and snap those chains.
And some people will be like, yeah, you know what?
This was like from years ago and this is not fair.
Like I said this before in the show, like you drop two plates in a family, in dysfunctional families, and suddenly you're the clumsy one who drops everything.
And that's just who you are, right?
And then there's this confirmation bias.
Other people drop things and they say, well, at least I'm not this person who drops things all the time.
And if you don't drop things for a while, it's like nobody notices.
But then the moment you drop them, oh, you dropped something again!
You're the driver!
This kind of cliches, they're not knowledge.
They're very restrictive.
And they can choke the life out of your life itself.
So I would say, who does your underachievement serve?
And if not you, who else?
And can you talk to them about that and get them to release you in a sense?
And if they won't release you, release yourself.
Dear Banner, what are your views about speciesism?
I really don't have any.
Kirkpatrick, do you support mandatory for-profit vaccines by companies who are not liable for damages?
How is that different from taxpayer subsidized illegal immigration with welfare for all?
Well, no, I mean, because I'm a voluntarist, because I want to stay in the society, I don't believe that the government should mandate this stuff at all.
No, I mean, this should be something that is subject to scientific review.
It should be something that, you know, can they spread out the vaccines a little bit more?
I'm certainly no expert on the knowledge.
I was chatting about this with a friend the other day who was saying, you know, like, all I do is question the cluster, the massive cluster of vaccines that are given to kids and suddenly I'm an anti-vaxxer.
And it's like, no, vaccines are good.
I don't like smallpox, you know.
I still have my, what is it, up here?
I don't know if you can see this.
But yeah, I still have, I remember that needle that they gave you for the smallpox vaccine when I was in boarding school.
I'm glad for vaccines.
Do I think that being run by the government and being paid for by the government and having for-profit companies providing massive amounts of vaccines is good?
Well, no, it's not good because it's not moral, because it's coercive.
Double Dog, not representing this dude, says, can you talk about how terrible the type of kids are that run around water fountains until they fall in and tear their shorts?
I did not tear my shorts, if I remember rightly, but I certainly did run around until I fell in.
That's an old story of mine.
Mashin Bahamut says, are we putting too much emphasis on social media because voting patterns ideology are largely genetic?
How many posts actually change a person's mind?
Seekers of truth will always seek the truth.
Right, right, right.
So I pointed this out on Twitter.
Answer to Van Molen, if you're not following me you should.
I pointed this out on Twitter that our political beliefs have significant genetic bases and therefore banning people based upon their political beliefs is practicing a form of genetic discrimination and that's true.
You know, that's true.
And we have tendencies towards truth.
And we have tendencies towards lies, right?
We have tendencies towards confirmation bias of that which comes easiest to us.
And that's why the people who aren't leftists are just better at the truth than leftists.
It's why they can meme.
It's why they're more curious.
It's why they're funnier in general.
Because You know, we live in a leftist world.
We live in a leftist world.
And if you're exposed to leftist views, and you can still criticize the left, where you're indoctrinated with leftist views, and you still criticize the left, you're just smarter, you're just more curious, and so on.
So I would say that there is a lot of incentive.
Somebody taking money from the welfare state can't be objective about the welfare state.
There's a lot of incentive.
And there's also a lot of genetics involved, which is why we need philosophy, why we need to be able to subsume our own particular preferences towards a universal objective truth standard.
So.
And I don't know whether we are preventing disaster or whether we are simply documenting the decline so that we gain Authority when it happens.
Because, you know, people ask me this all the time.
Are we going to make it?
Is it going to do this?
I can't give myself that.
I can't give myself that certainty.
It's like saying, well, I'm, you know, I'm over 50.
I'm destined to gain weight.
So what do you do?
Well, you don't restrain your diet.
You don't increase your exercise.
Okay, it's going to gain weight.
It's inevitable, right?
So the moment you think something's inevitable, the great danger is it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
People say, are we going to win?
I don't know!
It depends what you do!
It depends what I do!
So, do we have any chance of winning?
Well, sure, we have a chance of winning.
Of course, because we're in unknown territory with the internet.
I mean, the numbers of people who tell me they've stopped spanking their children and have decided to have kids at all because of this show is, well, legion.
With legion.
So, I don't know what the future holds.
There is no future but what we make.
Isn't that the old Terminator line?
And I won't give myself that certainty.
Because that certainty will affect what I do.
If I think we're gonna win for sure, then I won't try as hard.
If I think we're gonna lose for sure, I won't try as hard.
And that difference between trying and not trying as hard may be the difference between winning and losing.
So, no.
I won't.
I won't make those predictions.
I don't have those predictions in my head.
I don't even entertain those predictions.
All right.
The Fall of Home says, if the principle is free speech, should yelling fire in a crowd inciting violence be protected?
The idea originated in 1919 to stop a man speaking out against the draft.
We need to push principle.
Yeah, I know.
It's a tough call.
It's a tough call.
The fire in a crowded theater, again, to my knowledge, has never happened.
Incitement of violence?
Well, there was... I can't remember his name.
Was it Mike Brown's dad?
I can't remember, but there was some guy who was like, let's burn this MF'er down and, you know, was definitely trying to get a riot going and nobody punished him as far as I know.
I don't know.
If you teach people rationally, if you have better education, they won't be susceptible to this kind of stuff.
Gary Coleman fan, that's an obscure reference, says, Why is our president afraid to say the words Infowars, Alex Jones, and Milo?
Aren't those the people who got him elected?
No, I didn't.
Didn't Trump share an Infowars video?
I don't.
Anyway, all right.
Martin Madrigal says, hello Stefan, can you please give us your insight on Julius Evola and his ideas as a philosopher?
Would you ever make a video on Evola?
Thank you very much.
Couldn't tell you who that guy is to save my life.
Have I heard the name before?
I think so, but I don't know.
If you can make a case for it, then make a case for it.
All right, let's do a couple more!
If that's all right, my friends, and then we will get back to our regularly scheduled Sunday activities.
I hope you're having a wonderful Sunday.
And again, thank you everyone so much for your support here or at freedomandradio.com forward slash donate.
Oh, a couple more.
All right.
Let's see here.
Somebody said, highly illegal.
Yeah, I don't know what that means, sorry.
Baron Hippo.
Says, thanks.
Appreciate that.
Somebody gave me full-part messages about rebuttals to libertarians like David Gordon on the Mises website.
You clearly demonstrated how their arguments were, dot dot dot.
Tim Franklin.
My friend got his Tinder girlfriend pregnant.
All of us but him saw red flags.
She is far leftist.
He's staying with her for the soon baby.
Baby has same genetic immune disease as her.
Won't let him see family or friends.
what should he do?
Ooh.
Um.
I mean, maybe, maybe he just serves, maybe, maybe his, the purpose of this is for him to serve as a warning to, like, just stop, spray, and pray when it comes to your sperm.
You gotta hoard that stuff like it's the last drops of water in a desert.
Marussia Dark says, Would you debate Scott Adams and Sam Harris on free will?
I wrote an article called, The Origins of Morality Explaining Ethics in Pure Will to Power.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
Scott Adams, I like.
Sam Harris, I'd be happy to debate.
But, I mean, Sam Harris is not going to debate with me.
I mean, because of that sort of fiery moat that's been put around me, it takes a certain amount of integrity and, frankly, courage to say that that's just a bunch of nonsense and I'm a reasonable and rational guy.
But, yeah, Sam Harris is not going to respond to debate requests.
Butterfly Cyclist says, thank you.
Thank you very much.
Prebuiltrain42, loved your content, really helped me.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate that.
Oh, okay.
What happened?
Okay, so people, I think this is related to mesos.org.
People didn't say, oh wow, thanks for illuminating this concept and correcting us and providing us with these new valid points.
Yeah, there are lots of people who claim to be rational who aren't.
Mr. Surrendered says, I'm a Christian student at Iowa State University.
I recently interviewed your friend Roaming Millennial and was hoping to interview you too.
Well, send me a message.
I will be happy to look at that.
Moondog says, Sandra Russ, PhD, in her book Pretend Play in Childhood, Foundation of Adult Creativity, upper middle class white parents encourage this type of play in their kids, which causes leftism, correct?
Pretend play causes leftism?
I don't know about that.
What are your thoughts on the book None Dare Call a Conspiracy?
I've heard the name.
I don't know about it.
Sorry.
John Pickwick says, thank you so so much for your advice.
Thank you.
John Bob says, I've talked to pro-vaccine advocates.
Their argument for why such a large cluster of vaccines is okay is because children are exposed to thousands of pathogens throughout their life.
The cluster is a drop in the bucket.
Yeah, again, I don't know.
I don't know.
You'll have to debate that with people who are experts in the field.
That's not me.
David Lupeka says, Stefan, finding you has shown me what I can strive to be someday.
Thank you.
I will join you in the fight soon.
Thank you very much.
All right, Julius Evola again.
What are your thoughts on working in a bank?
You've got to work somewhere.
A bank is not the end of the world.
Alien, new solution.
By Slavoj Zizek.
Yeah, I mean you can give me these recommendations.
They're gonna kind of come and go.
Give me a case as to why I should read them and it's gonna be much more likely that I'll end up but it's really really tough finding time to read through books in the maybe maybe that I'll find some value or something to do a show in on them.
All right, well, listen, I really, really appreciate everyone's time.
Thank you.
I hope that you will show your support to the people who have been banned and help them out and spread the message and spread the word.
The future is not carved in stone.
I believe in free will.
And whoever wants the future more is the one most likely to get the future.
That's no guarantee, of course.
But it definitely is something that we can aim to achieve.
So fight for freedom.
Fight peacefully for reason and evidence.
Share the good news of philosophy.
Support me or whoever you find best at this kind of stuff or everyone.
You can help me out at freedomandradio.com forward slash donate.
Thank you guys so much for another absolutely wonderful chat.
Oh yeah, let me know what you think.
Let me know.
I'd like to schedule these on a more regular basis, and I was just curious what you guys thought.
What would be a good time?
I was sort of thinking Friday night, but I'm not sure how many of you are out at raves and would not be able to hear me because you're thirsty and disoriented.
But yeah, let me know what you think.
I was thinking maybe a Friday night, but you can let me know in the chat, or of course you can let me know when I post this on Twitter.
I guess not Facebook.
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