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May 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

03:04:05

An Introduction to Freedomain & Stefan Molyneux: The First Discord Ask Me Anything!

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	So without any further ado, let's get this going, guys.
	So, just a quick introduction.
	I'm sure most of you guys are already aware, but for those of you who are not, Stéphane Molyneux is... I'm sorry, am I saying that right?
	Yeah, that's... you know what?
	I can't police the syllables.
	Just go for it.
	And if I vaguely find it recognizable, I'm good to go.
	All right.
	So yeah, Stéphane is the host of the largest philosophy show in the world, with nearly a million subscribers.
	He's the author of many books, including The Art of the Argument, On Truth, and Against the Gods, as well as many others available on his website, which we've linked in announcements.
	Stefan has given speeches, written books on a range of topics, including philosophy, politics, economics, Bitcoin, and many more.
	So, with that, Stefan, would you like to introduce yourself to those people?
	Well, thanks everyone.
	It's a great pleasure to chat with you.
	What could be more fun than a Sunday night roundtable regarding philosophy?
	So, thanks everyone for joining.
	Thanks, of course, to those of you who have supported what it is that I'm doing.
	I'm a donation-based life form, so freedomainradio.com forward slash donate if you want to help out.
	It's been 15 years or something like that now, and it's kind of tragic.
	You know, I was just thinking about this the other day.
	I was looking at a 4K camera, and it's like, as I'm getting older, The resolutions are getting better, and that's not really a good combination, but I have been promoting peaceful parenting.
	I have been promoting reason and evidence and voluntarism and all kinds of good stuff over the years, and I'm very happy with the positive effect I've had in the world.
	I am loved by the virtuous.
	I am hated by the evildoers, and that's kind of the gig.
	That's the way things roll.
	So for those who don't know anything about my philosophy, I'm saying, you know, that's actually technical.
	I shouldn't say my philosophy because nobody says my physics or my biology.
	It's either good philosophy or it's bad.
	It's either valid or invalid, true or false, consistent or inconsistent.
	I start off kind of simple, which is the kindergarten philosophy.
	You know, don't steal, don't cheat, don't hit.
	That's sort of the basis of it.
	It's called the non-aggression principle.
	You should not initiate force against other human beings.
	And if you take that simple principle of the non-aggression, now self-defense is valid, I'm not a sort of 100% pacifist and turn the other cheek ad infinitum, but if you take that simple principle of the non-aggression principle
	and you universalize it some remarkable things happen and this is not uncommon although it is disorienting because if you take something like the speed of light being constant and you universalize that you really get a kind of freaky universe with time dilation and and all relativism and so on uh... from a physics standpoint if you take the position which is now accepted by us but which was really radical in the past.
	You take the position that the world is not flat but rather a sphere and the world is not stationary but rather falling in that everything is falling.
	A ball falls to the earth, the earth falls around the sun, the sun falls around the Milky Way and other funky stuff happens.
	If you take a simple principle And you universalize it, you end up with a very, very different universe.
	One that seems kind of incomprehensible to people who came before, and that's what I have been working on, Lo, these many years, is to say, well, what if the non-aggression principle is universal?
	Well, some very fascinating things happen when you take that approach.
	If you truly universalize non-aggression principle, you end up, of course, with no spanking.
	Right?
	You can't hit children.
	If aggression, physical violence, is only valid in self-defense, it's not like your children are coming at you with a chainsaw, at least I hope not, and so no hitting children.
	Taxation is force.
	It's the forcible transfer of property and therefore taxation becomes morally invalid.
	And the whole concept of a state becomes morally invalid because the state is a collection of people who can, by law, initiate the use of force against others And those others, the citizens, are specifically denied from initiating the use of force against others.
	So you have this wildly inconsistent system.
	When the government prints money, it's called central banking.
	If you print money, it's called counterfeiting and you go to jail.
	If you are poor and you steal what you want to feed your family or get health care, that's still considered wrong and you go to jail for it.
	But if you go to the government and say, I want a welfare state and the government points guns at people to get resources for you and often just enslaves the unborn through national debts and unfunded liabilities.
	That's considered democracy and it's just such a wonderful thing.
	So if you take this sort of simple principle, the non-initiation of force, non-aggression principle, and you apply it to the world, to society as a whole, it's disorienting.
	So much of what we have inherited that we kind of take for granted is not true.
	It's not valid.
	It's not moral.
	And the only way that we can figure that out is to look at foundational moral principles and expand and extend them.
	And this is not, of course, the first time that this has happened in society.
	It would be nice if it was more widely accepted that it could be one of the last times.
	But as you know, the practice of slavery was endemic and widespread and common across all humanity for the last 150,000 or so years.
	And it took the extension of humanity and the principle of self-ownership to slaves to end slavery, at least in the Western world.
	And it's one of the great achievements of the Western world, in particular white Christian males, to work very hard to end slavery, not just in their own countries, not just, for instance, in the British Empire, but in general as a whole around the world.
	And that extension of universality, of self-ownership and of moral rights to slaves ended slavery and helped produce the modern world.
	We can look at this, of course, with regards to the relation between men and women, in that women were considered to be less valid, less human, unable to enter into contracts and restricted in other ways.
	And the extension of universal rights to women also helped to birth the modern world.
	And there's lots of great stuff that came out of it.
	But we sort of have this theory that we're done, you know, like, well, we've done the major things.
	You know, we got rid of slavery.
	We've got equal rights for women.
	We've, you know, but we're not done.
	We still have a long way to go in our moral journey, and the moral journey tends to always be around the universalization of rights, and we have this strange entity in the center of our society called the state, that not only is immune from the moral law it imposes on others, but actually is only considered valid if the state acts in opposition to the moral law that it imposes on others.
	And that's something kind of foundational that I have been talking about from the very beginning of my show.
	That the non-aggression principle means that we help people in a voluntary, peaceful, productive way.
	If you want to help the poor, as I do, I've been given away, I think, a pretty great education for 15 years for free.
	If you want to help the poor, then you should help the poor, but you should not run to the government and have it print money or borrow money or take money by force and hand it out to the poor.
	That is immoral, that is wrong, and it actually doesn't help the poor.
	As we can see, we have a widening Disparity between the rich and the poor.
	The middle class is getting hollowed out and that's because the rich control the state.
	They use it to bribe the poor for votes and the middle class pays the bill and gets kind of hollowed out and eviscerated.
	And of course the middle class in society is like the keystone to the arch.
	You take it out and things tend to fall apart.
	So that's been sort of my particular focus is working on this non-aggression principle and applying it to a wide variety of circumstances.
	Voluntary interactions, voluntary ways of solving social problems.
	How do we get roads?
	How do we get health care?
	How do we help the poor?
	We have this answer called run to the government.
	Have the government print, borrow or steal money.
	and hand it out and we think somehow this power is not going to corrupt people it's not going to corrupt democracy and it's going to produce some wonderful sustainable moral and virtuous system which clearly it's not doing that and we need to revisit this whole paradigm of how we organize society and rather than say well we inherited all this stuff so let's just keep it going and extend and expand it and pretend that it's all virtuous what if we just wipe the slate clean you know as Socrates says start as if you know nothing whatsoever
	And how would we design a moral society from the ground up?
	If we had the non-aggression principle, which I think everyone accepts and understands as a valid principle, if we had that, not just as part of our society, but as the very foundation of our society, we would have a wonderful place to live.
	The poor would be helped, the environment would be protected, and We'd have a sustainable society.
	I mean, the amount of debt that is currently underpinning the world is almost beyond imagination.
	I mean, I was in a mall yesterday, I was looking around all these people, and the average per capita debt in the world is 30,000 US dollars.
	30,000 US dollars!
	That's beyond staggering how much debt, I mean, Japan's GDP, sorry, Japan's debt-to-GDP ratio is well north of 200%.
	America's unfunded liabilities are 180 trillion dollars on a 15 to 16 trillion dollar economy.
	We have horrible systems that prey upon the unborn, that use children as collateral to borrow in the here and now, to pretend to people that the government is adding value, when it, in fact, is just borrowing value from the future.
	And we have had a huge population boom in the world that's largely based upon debt.
	And debt, of course, is unsustainable.
	And so it is my particular goal and hope, I dare say perhaps prayer, to find a way to get people to talk rationally about a system that can't sustain itself so that we can end up with a soft landing to a peaceful and sustainable future.
	So that's just a little bit of an intro into me but you didn't of course come here to hear me ramble and babble on.
	So we are going to go to questions and the mods are going to whisper in my ear like my Socratic conscience and hit me with your best shots.
	All right.
	So, first thing, just to kind of help people get a feel for you and your ideas if they're new.
	Some people have called you a libertarian, some people have called you an anarcho-capitalist.
	Do you accept these terms, or if not, are there other terms you would self-ascribe to?
	Yeah, I mean, I don't like particularly the slicey-dicey ways of categorizing people, because what it involves is a kind of subjectivism.
	So if you are a biologist you're just called a biologist and you either put forward valid or invalid arguments or hypotheses or conjectures regarding biology same thing with physics and math and all these kinds of things.
	So I just like to be called a philosopher because as soon as you say oh he's a libertarian that comes with a whole bunch of preconceptions and a whole bunch of mental categories rather than Encouraging people to evaluate the quality of my arguments.
	So I am a philosopher.
	I put forward arguments and the moment I start to get labeled is the moment that people say, oh, well, I'm just going to look at the label rather than the content of the ideas.
	And so I would not reject libertarian.
	I would not say a narco-capitalist, which is somebody who advocates for a stateless society and the consistent self-ownership and property rights that characterize a free market.
	So they're not wildly inaccurate labels, but labels tend to be the end of thought rather than the beginning of exploration, if that makes sense.
	All right, so I'll now talk to some people from the audience.
	JF has a question to ask in VC.
	JF, are you... Hello, I'm here.
	All right, take it away.
	So Stéphane, I was wondering about your position on libertarianism in the context of existential struggles.
	And one example I take, it's a rhetorical one, but suppose that there is a society in which there are so many other people That oxygen is lacking, that there's no more oxygen, and the mere existence of someone else threatens my existence.
	Of course, it's a theoretical and exaggerated example, but we can see a lot of demoralizing economic relationships in society.
	They kind of fit that example to some extent.
	We could see, for example, migrants coming in a country, stealing jobs and essentially depriving me of a potential ecological space in which I could have survived.
	And so, when does the libertarian contract expire in these circumstances where someone is legitimately have his existence threatened by the mere existence of other agents who are otherwise acting in consensual manners?
	Love me a Quebec accent.
	All right.
	So, it's a very, very interesting question.
	I'm not quite sure we're running out of oxygen.
	Sometimes I feel that way at the end of a long speech, but I'm just going to talk about general market conditions under which additional people are discouraged in a sort of peaceful and voluntary manner.
	So, with regards to supply and demand, if the supply of resources within a society is diminishing, For whatever reason.
	Let's say it's Singapore.
	You're sort of running out of land.
	You can only build up to the sky so many times.
	Then what happens, of course, is the price of those resources increases.
	So if you're running out of land, then the price of land increases.
	And what that does is it says to people, wow, the price of land goes up.
	That means the price of my house goes up.
	That means the price of my apartment goes up.
	That means whatever, right?
	And so there is a market mechanism that when we're running out of resources the price of the resources go up and we know for a fact that when the price of resources tends to go up birth rates tend to go down.
	So it's a self-correcting mechanism if it's allowed to operate.
	So that's one way in which when resources become scarce fewer people tend to come.
	Now if you're talking about sort of immigration and migrants well the problem right now of course is that immigration is a big giant government program.
	It is put forward for a variety of reasons, but in general, the left likes immigrants, particularly from the third world, because the third world immigrants reliably vote for the left.
	I've got presentations called The Truth About Immigration, and there's lots of data-driven presentations.
	I've got all the sources and all the data.
	But in general, people from the third world will reliably vote for the left.
	Now, one of the challenges is that people on the right tend to be more religious, tend to be more Christian in particular, and they tend to have large families.
	People on the left tend to have smaller families, and what that means, of course, is that because political inclinations are to some degree genetic, as all personality traits to some degree genetic, Then what happens is the left kind of runs out of people to vote left because it's hard to convince people, particularly after we see the hundred million plus killed by communism in the 20th century alone, it's kind of hard to convince people of the value of communism or leftism or socialism.
	And you know, got the examples of Venezuela, we've got the examples of North Korea and Cuba and Cambodia and Chile and you name it, right?
	I mean, so Rather than accept that their arguments are bad and wrong, and in some cases outright corrupt and deceptive, the left doesn't want to give up political power.
	So what they do is they import people who are going to vote for them.
	And the way that they do that is with the welfare state, right?
	So the welfare state is this big giant magnet by which people come to live, like in the Middle East.
	You make about one-tenth what you would make on the welfare state in Germany without having to work, right?
	Middle East hot, who wants to work particularly outside?
	So the welfare state is a big giant magnet for people to come.
	I have no problem with open borders as long as it is a free and voluntary society, because then people come for freedom.
	They don't come for just free stuff, because when people come for free stuff, well, that free stuff destroys freedom.
	And so the cost of immigration in the United States is enormous.
	You've got north of 70% of immigrants ending up on welfare.
	The costs of welfare in Germany and the UK are enormous and has a lot to do, not exclusively.
	The welfare state is largely the single mother state, but it's also the immigrant state to some degree, or to a large degree in fact.
	So with regards to more people coming and it threatens your interest, the price system takes care of that very well.
	And I'll sort of give you another brief example.
	So we had a baby boom, as you know, after the soldiers came home from the Second World War.
	And people built a lot of houses, they built a lot of schools, and a lot of extra roads and resources and so on.
	And then the baby boomers are kind of in the process of moving out of their homes, often moving to smaller places and so on.
	So there should be a massive drop in the price of housing, right?
	So baby boomers, there were lots of kids, and that meant that there was a huge demand for housing and other resources.
	Those houses were built, but the price was Kind of high, because there's big demand, right?
	Now, with the baby bust that came after the baby boom, the price of housing should collapse to the point where it encourages people to have more children, right?
	One of the main reasons why Western society is not reproducing very well has a lot to do with very high costs, and that has a lot to do with the cost of housing.
	So normally, because there's fewer people who want houses now compared to the boomers, the price of housing should go down like 50%, 75%, you name it.
	Especially as, well, because people can work from home, the demand for office space is down.
	So just housing, real estate, office space should be going down.
	But it's not.
	Because the current very corrupt system of money printing, illusory toilet paper finance called central banking can't survive a significant drop in real estate values.
	And also, the boomers like to think that their money is pouring out of their houses like some broken ATM that's spraying dollar bills into a tornado.
	And so the government is not allowing or does not want in particular the price of housing to go down.
	We saw what happened in 07 and 08 when that occurred.
	So what they do is immigration drives up the price of housing because immigrants move into a particular neighborhood.
	Sometimes the domestic population moves out and it kind of pushes everything up and even to the point where the mansions become more expensive because everyone's kind of being pushed upstream or up the stairs of price.
	So, I am very much for a free society.
	I have no particular problem with immigration whatsoever.
	However, when the government is taking from people in order to fund vote buying and propping up real estate values and so on, that is a terrible situation and is going to create, I think, a lot of chaos down the road.
	All right.
	Well, I believe I have a difference here in that even under the restricted circumstance of a stateless society, I consider that immigration policies could constitute an existential threat for the inhabitants of a country and therefore could be opposed morally even in a stateless society and could constitute a danger.
	I thank you for expressing your view, and before I leave, I would ask you to consider to unblock me from Twitter.
	You have blocked me from reading a hit piece about me, and it's a totally unjust hit piece that was targeting my family with lies, and I'd like to have the privilege of reading your tweets again.
	Thanks, I appreciate that, and I would say one other thing.
	So in a free society, let's say that you consider immigration to be a big problem.
	In a free society you have the capacity to make your case, to start a movement, to say to people, hey man don't rent to immigrants, don't give immigrants jobs, you can make that case.
	I may not agree with that case, I probably wouldn't, but you can make the case and If you win and you start a movement, then you get a wonderful control over immigration.
	But you have to make the case in a free society rather than run to the government, which I think you would agree with.
	But thank you very much for your question.
	It was very interesting.
	Next!
	All right.
	So next question we have is from a user called... He asks what your thoughts are on Andrew Yang.
	Oh, Andrew Yang.
	You know, it's funny because I...
	I'm in this interesting position with Andrew, which is I like him as a person, while enormously disagreeing with, what is it, Yang Bucks or Yang Cash or whatever they call it.
	He's the guy who wants to give a thousand a month or something like that to people.
	Yes, it is.
	Yeah, we do have a big problem in society at the moment, which is There are a lot of people who are, to a large degree, becoming less employable as society becomes more complex.
	And as robotics take over and as automation takes over, you know, I've heard Jordan Peterson sort of make the case, and the U.S.
	Army also makes the case, that if you have an IQ below the sort of low 80s, well, the Army won't take you because they can't find anything for you to do that's productive, right?
	And so we have this terrible situation where we have increased automation reducing the demand for people who are less brilliant intellectually.
	At the same time, as through a variety of mechanisms, single motherhood, immigration, and so on, we have more people who are less scintillating intellectually.
	And it's a huge problem.
	And as far as how it's solved, I don't really think that just handing money out is the way to go.
	Because generally what happens is, and I know people like Charles Murray have made the case for a guaranteed minimum income and so on, but if you could Get rid of the entire welfare state as it stands.
	The welfare state is absolutely terrible.
	Absolutely terrible.
	One of the worst curses that has ever hit the world in any context, under any situation, in any civilization, any epoch, any era.
	I just want to be perfectly clear.
	It is absolutely A terrible, terrible system.
	It harms the poor, it distorts society, it destroys families, it robs people of fathers very often, and it promotes crime and promiscuity and drug abuse and oh it's absolutely a curse upon society and we would expect that because it's founded on force and the forcible transfer of property is utterly immoral and the wages of sin as we all know are Well, not a tan and a margarita, if I remember my Bible correctly.
	So we do have a problem.
	If you could say, well, we're going to just have a negative income tax, where if you make below a certain amount, we'll top you up to this.
	If you make above this, we'll take it from you.
	If you could replace the entire welfare state with that kind of income transfer, that would be a fairly good transitional phase to a free society.
	But my concern is that people are going to start implementing this guaranteed minimum income or this basic income.
	And you know the way the media works.
	I mean, we all do, right?
	Which is the media says, oh, we found someone to whom this is just not enough.
	You know, they're not eating that well, they're in poor living conditions, and then they take their cameras and they film with slow, tinkling, hallmark-card, weepy piano music all over the place, and then people are like, oh, we've got to up it, we've got to increase it, we've got to have, if you have this many kids, you've got to have more, and then you start getting all of these exceptions and these additional layers of bureaucracy and rules and Then I bet you you're going to end up with just two welfare states, which is guaranteed basic income, which has become as complicated as the welfare state.
	Plus, you'll still have the welfare state.
	Because what politician is going to go in to the welfare state and say, you're all fired?
	I mean, that's... I mean, I don't even know what would happen.
	I mean, it would be astonishing.
	I mean, it's... Good Lord.
	I mean, it would be wild to see what might go down in that kind of situation.
	And man, Because right now, 80% of the money that goes into the welfare state stays with the mid-level bureaucrats and the employees as a whole and the people who are running the fiefdoms.
	It doesn't get to the poor.
	This is why I want to help the poor.
	I want to help the poor.
	The best way to help the poor, of course, is to get rid of government education so people can get a real education.
	The poor are fantastic!
	Fantastic!
	at competing with the rich.
	I mean, I know this.
	I grew up poor and started a software company and all that, and you're really, really good at competing with the rich.
	Why?
	Because the rich have got expenses you don't have, you know?
	The rich have big houses, they have cars, they might have yachts, and so on.
	So they've got to charge more for their services.
	Poor people are fantastic at competing.
	But right now, poor people get stuck in the Roche Motel flypaper of the welfare state, and it crushes a lot of ambitions, hope, and potential, and creates a lot of dysfunctional people through broken families and so on.
	So if you have better education for the poor, if you have charity that actually helps them rather than just mails them checks so they don't riot, then you have a positive beneficial way of helping the poor.
	So I like him.
	I think he's bringing up some very good arguments about how do we take care of people.
	If you could snap your fingers, replace the whole welfare state with his plan, I think that would be something maybe worth getting behind.
	But You know, whenever you want the government to do something, you're never in control of how it gets implemented.
	You know, like, hey, I really want the government to provide national defense!
	Ooh, the national defense would be fantastic!
	Without the government, who would provide national defense?
	And what's happening?
	What's happening?
	I mean, look at America.
	Look at Canada.
	There's no borders to the south for either country.
	And apparently the way that America protects America is to wage endless sand wars in the Middle East and bomb a whole bunch of people who already don't like America, thus creating blowback and tensions.
	And then, you know, invade everyone, invite everyone.
	Let's invade everyone all around the world and then invite them to come and sit on government dollars.
	I mean, you could not create a more volatile and destructive situation.
	So I'm always one for looking for peaceful alternatives.
	I think That Mr. Yang is bringing up some very interesting questions and problems.
	I'm just I'm not skeptical.
	I'm sorry.
	I am skeptical very skeptical of We'll give the government the power to solve this problem and then who gets to actually implement that it's not you It's not me.
	It's rich people who've got their own agendas.
	It's powerful people.
	It's motivated people It's people with sinister agendas.
	They get to implement it not you not me so you hand over this power to the government and And then the worst people in the world generally try to implement it.
	I'm not putting him in that category.
	It's just how it would generally play out.
	And what's that old quote from Bismarck?
	There's two things no sane human being should ever see getting made.
	Number one is sausages and number two is laws.
	And I'm sort of with him on that.
	All right.
	So our next question comes from our user Orthopraxis.
	It's a little bit specific.
	It asks, with the end of the Mueller investigation, do you believe there will be prosecutions over the Steele dossier and FISA warrants on individuals such as James Comey?
	Well, there's the world I'd like to live in.
	Which, you know, is important, because you've got to have a goal.
	You know, if you want to lose weight, you've got to think of yourself with more than one ab.
	So there's the world that I'd like to live in and the world that I would like to live in, of course.
	I mean, Obama knew about it, and Comey knew about it, and...
	Hillary knew about it and this was you know targeted spying of a political contender using the powers of the states and and of course they went overseas to try and bypass the limitations on spying on Americans.
	It was massive intervention by a foreign government in this case the UK in an American election and it was a truly Horrifying witch hunt that was promulgated for two and a half years by the absolutely hysterical and hateful American media So yeah without a doubt this stuff should be it should be prosecuted.
	It should be punished all the way to the top all of the the horrible Garbage can lid should be lifted off this squirming deep state and very bright bright lights should be shone deep down into its squid-like innards held up to the light and so Sunlight being the best disinfectant, it's the only way to clean out the body politic, is through the rule of law and all of that.
	So that's the world I'd like to live in.
	Hmm, wouldn't that be nice?
	That would just be delightful.
	But no, that's not the world.
	What's going to happen is, and listen, Tom Fitton, Judicial Watch, do fantastic work in this area.
	I admire his persistence, if not his biceps.
	Actually, I admire his biceps too.
	But I mean, the reality is that there's going to be a lot of talk, but There's not going to be any prosecutions.
	There's not going to be any, uh, any, no, I mean, there's going to be a lot of outrage.
	There's going to be a lot of speeches.
	It's going to be a campaign issue, like lock her up and all that.
	And, um, no, I mean, okay, let's, let's just compare two things, right?
	Let's compare two things.
	So there's this targeted spying of a political opponent, which is horrendous and, and I mean, just like something out of Kenya.
	So there's this targeted spying on a political opponent, which is terrible.
	And then you go back to, say, 2003.
	There's the hysterical manufacture of the lies that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, which launches a truly godforsaken war that killed hundreds of thousands of people, destabilized the region, And George Bush never got prosecuted for that.
	I mean, he committed, as far as I understand it, the international crime of aggression, which is invading another country.
	It's the worst conceivable crime that you could commit and still be a carbon-based life form.
	I mean, if you were Satan, maybe you could do more, but to invade a country that is not threatening you halfway across the world, making up this nonsense about yellow cake and Niger and aluminum tubes and weapons of mass destruction.
	And you see Donald Rumsfeld, oh they're to the north, the east, the south, wherever, right?
	Making up all this nonsense in order to invade a country.
	Why?
	Because the guy was thinking of getting out of central banking and coming up with a gold-backed or oil-backed currency like Gaddafi, right?
	So if you look at political spying, it's terrible enough.
	It's far, far, far worse than anything that happened to or anything that was committed by Nixon.
	But if you look at sort of the annals of human crimes, the fact that once the deep state got away with, and George Bush got away with, invading a sovereign nation, I'm no fan of Saddam Hussein, don't get me wrong, but there's evil all over the world, doesn't mean you get to invade and kill the population, it's their job to fix it.
	But once the deep state got away with that, you know, I mean, far worse than spying is invading another country.
	And that's just, I mean, you could really make a strong case about Afghanistan as well.
	So, no, it's not going to happen.
	It's not.
	I mean, the best that we can do, I think at the moment, is try and keep people in who aren't going to start new wars.
	That's like, in terms of getting Just justice for existing warmongers.
	I mean, look at Libya.
	Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton combined to destroy the country of Libya, which was a dictatorship, but it was a stable and functioning country without open-air slave markets.
	And you had Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton combining to destroy Libya thus uncorking and unleashing a massive wave of people coming over from Africa through the shattered remains of Libya now run by warlords and slave markets all the way through the Mediterranean into Europe.
	An absolutely dual civilization-threatening move that again resulted in the deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands of people, destroyed an entire country, people growing up in war zones and You can now buy a human being for $400!
	So, if nothing happened to those guys for destroying a country and threatening the continued existence of Europe, I'm not sure anything's gonna happen to people because there was some illicit spying going on on the Trump campaign.
	There's... It's like, well, we couldn't get the guy for mass murder, but maybe we'll get him for a parking ticket.
	It's like, no, I don't think that's how it's gonna play.
	It offends me and any core... I mean everyone, right?
	Everyone feels this way.
	It offends people with a shred of moral decency to the very core.
	What has been going on that the American government has been doing in terms of imperialism and 700 military bases around the world.
	It's appalling.
	It's appalling.
	America, of all the countries in the world, of all the countries in history, should have had the greatest chance to not be complete imperialistic jerks!
	You've got friendly neighbors to the north and south.
	You've got giant oceans to the east and west.
	You have a constitution.
	You're supposed to have Congress declare war.
	There's supposed to be rigorous debate, rigorous debate about war.
	Such is the power of taxation and borrowing and coercion and the military-industrial complex, that even with all of these safeguards, even with all of this security, even with all of this safety and protection, America can't stop itself.
	From roaming around the world.
	Barack Obama dropped 100,000 bombs on the Middle East?
	It just shows you.
	Power will always corrupt.
	Power will always corrupt.
	Can't give people the power of the state.
	Just makes everyone terrible.
	Alright.
	Thanks.
	I want to make sure I get to more than five questions.
	These are great questions.
	Thanks, everyone.
	All right.
	So slight change of pace here.
	Next question comes from Ask Yourself.
	Are you here, Ask Yourself?
	Yeah.
	Can you hear me loud and clear?
	I sure can, brother.
	What's up?
	Okay, awesome.
	Well, I'll start by saying thanks for coming by.
	I really appreciate it.
	So, my question is going to deal with animal ethics.
	It's just a quick yes-no question to start, then the real question.
	You're not a vegan, correct?
	Correct.
	Okay, so you started with an affirmation of the NAP, which I take to just be that you don't aggress against someone who's not aggressing against you.
	So my question would just be, what's true of animals which, if true of humans, would justify not giving them the NAP?
	Not giving them, sorry, what?
	Oh, the non-aggression principle?
	Correct, yeah.
	Well, okay, so we're going to take humanity as a whole, because there's a bell curve, there are outliers and so on, but just humanity as a whole, we're capable of conceptual agreement to social contracts.
	We're capable of understanding the consequences of our actions, we're capable of subscribing to universal ethics, and therefore we are kept under a moral umbrella of the non-aggression principle.
	And animals.
	I love animals.
	I'm a big pet lover.
	I love animals myself.
	But animals do not have the intellectual capacity to enter into conceptual contracts of moral universality.
	You can't negotiate with them when it comes to ethical norms and ethical standards.
	This doesn't mean that we can do whatever we want to animals.
	It doesn't mean that we can wipe them out of existence or anything like that.
	But as far as being covered under Morality, you have to be able to understand morality in order to be covered under a system of morality.
	So I'll give you sort of a silly example I hope just sort of illustrates and then I'll take more of what you want to say because I mean I really appreciate your question.
	So if I'm in Japan and someone thinks I speak Japanese and they tell me some social norm but I don't speak Japanese and then they just run off.
	I can't really be expected to morally follow that social norm because I don't understand Japanese and I don't know what he said.
	Right?
	He could have told me that it's really important to wipe your nose on your host's shoes in Japan.
	It's a great sign of respect.
	Or like, he could have said anything.
	So because I didn't understand what he said, I'm not bound under and should not be judged according to the social norms in that situation.
	However, of course, if I do speak Japanese, then if I disobey the social norms that my host has informed me of, or my friend has informed me of, I'm responsible for that.
	With regards to thinking of ethics like Japanese, animals don't understand conceptual ethics.
	They can't process them.
	And they do have reciprocal altruism and some sort of base, you know, often mammalian attachment to young and so on, which is to be respected.
	But that to me would be why they would not be covered under the NAP.
	Right.
	Okay.
	Well, I think that was a very thorough answer.
	So, this would be my pushback.
	I think that you're essentially giving a sort of two-factor answer.
	So, you're talking about the ability to reciprocate the social contract, but as you noted at the very start of your response, there are humans who would not be covered by that, right?
	You mentioned outliers.
	I take it to mean, in that case, for example, maybe people who are mentally disabled to a certain extent.
	They can't follow the social contract.
	So you cover the outliers by saying, well, I'm talking about this property of humans overall, of having this level of rationality.
	So it's a combination argument, as far as I can tell, which is the combination of rationality and belonging to a species that overall is rational.
	So the pushback I would give you to that point is I would say, if let's say some genetic disease strikes and Humans, on average, are reduced in intelligence to the level of mentally disabled people.
	Would it, at that point, become okay to not extend them the non-aggression principle?
	Well, no.
	See, it depends on where we sit in terms of mental deficiency.
	So, I'll give you some examples that you're very familiar with, I'm sure, just in the realm of law.
	And please remember, I'm no lawyer, but I did watch a couple of seasons of LA Law in the 90s.
	If we look at the defense of insanity, the defense of insanity means that the person was not capable of understanding the moral or consequentialist ramifications of his or her actions when the crime was committed.
	This doesn't mean that the person is free to walk, it just means that we don't morally judge them as having done evil.
	They've done
	some bad thing but they were insane at the time or they had a tumor or mentally disabled in some manner or whatever possessed and so in that situation we have a consequence but the consequence is not a moral punishment we may put that person in an asylum we may give them some restrictions and so on we also when we look at people who are mentally handicapped in some significant manner or mentally challenged i think is the phrase these days in some significant manner we don't give them
	Can I butt in?
	Okay, I just want to be clear.
	I'm not arguing for full moral responsibility.
	I would just be arguing at minimum for a right not to be murdered.
	So just the extension of the non-aggression principle.
	We don't need full moral responsibility.
	I don't think that human beings should obviously be murdered.
	And I understand where you're coming from.
	Of course, you eat a hamburger, a cow has been killed, and I understand all of that.
	Now, the challenge is, of course, that they are not only in the category of human being, but they also have the capacity to create more human beings.
	right so a a mentally challenged person can get someone else pregnant and uh... you know assuming that it's not a massive genetic thing and or doesn't transmit that they can give birth to somebody who is Not mentally challenged or mentally handicapped, which would not be the case with any other species, of course.
	So that's sort of one thing.
	The other thing, too, of course, is it's just a shading situation.
	So somebody with an IQ of 100, yes, morally responsible.
	Somebody with an IQ of, I think, mental handicaps kick in around IQ 70.
	So you see IQ 70 or below really starting to diminish.
	But in general, we just say, OK, category human is subject to the protection of the non-aggression principle.
	That doesn't mean that they get full moral autonomy if they have an IQ of 60 or something like that.
	And we may want to say, look, they can't function out there in the world.
	We've got to put them in a home.
	We've got to feed them, which we wouldn't necessarily do with somebody who had an IQ of 100 or 120.
	So we have a category situation where we just say, look, human beings are covered by the non-aggression principle.
	And you could say, well, but there are some human beings who have less intelligence than an ape and so on.
	It's like, yeah, but they're still in the category of human being, because they are a human being with a mental deficiency rather than a normal ape.
	And so we just have a category situation where we say human beings are covered by the non-aggression principle.
	And where there may be overlaps of intelligence with other species, that's the result of a significant deficiency versus a norm, which is not a standard situation.
	Right.
	Now you feel free to cut me off when you're done with me, but I would just add again.
	So what you've done there is you've kind of added a third property.
	So it's this combination of the ability to reciprocate the social contract, the fact that the group overall can do this, the category.
	So we can talk about those who can't as outliers.
	And then now you've also talked about the ability to give birth to humans who can do this, if you personally aren't a human who can do this.
	No, no, that's not a category I'm adding.
	Sorry, hang on, hang on, hang on.
	That's not a category I'm adding.
	That's a property of humanity.
	It's like saying, well, you have two eyes.
	Well, now you're adding the property of two eyes.
	Well, that's humanity, right?
	And human beings don't have the capacity to give birth.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Oh, yeah, no, no, sorry.
	That's not how I meant it.
	By category, I meant Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you're saying that humans overall as a category, the category being humans, have the ability to reciprocate the social contract.
	So that's what I meant when I was talking about that.
	So it sounds like a three-tiered justification of belonging to the category of human, The fact that the category of human, on average, can reciprocate the social contract.
	And then you added in an additional factor in your last response, where you said it's the ability also to give birth to beings who would be able to do this.
	No, no, no.
	That's not an additional factor, because all human beings, on average, do have the ability to give birth.
	I'm not adding a new factor.
	Okay.
	Well, okay.
	So let's just say there's been three the entire time, then that's totally fine.
	No worries at all.
	So I would just put a reductio to where all three of those factors aren't there.
	So let's say the same flag hits.
	So we have humans who are below that level of intelligence, right?
	So you can't talk about the species having this category level ability to reciprocate morality.
	Let's also say that they're sterile, right?
	So there's no ability to give birth to future beings who are capable of this.
	Um, now my question is with all of those criteria met, would it be okay not to extend the non-aggression principle to these?
	But it would never happen.
	I mean, you're talking about a theoretical that would never happen.
	Right.
	That's fine.
	I could agree with you that that's not likely to come about, but it's testing the logical pieces.
	No, no, no.
	Sorry, sorry.
	I apologize.
	I was completely unclear about that, and I heard it just as I said it, so I do apologize for that.
	Sorry, you're cutting out a bit.
	I don't mean to cut you off.
	Yeah, my bad.
	No, there's no problem.
	So what I mean by that's not going to happen is a society as a whole, a human society, a free society, would not in practicality Except that if you found a human being with an IQ below 50 who was sterile, that you could hunt them and kill them and eat them.
	It's just not going to happen.
	We would look at somebody like that and say, a really, really rough situation.
	I want to help that person, right?
	I mean, just try and make them as comfortable as possible and so on.
	I mean, just to take a sort of silly example, right?
	So if you open up a hamburger restaurant, some people will come and eat it.
	Now, if you open up, I know this is going to be taken out of context, but I'm prepared for that.
	It's going to happen anyway.
	But if you open up a restaurant which says, here we serve the flesh of sterile, low IQ human beings, Like, seriously.
	I mean, no one is going to go.
	It's going to be appalling.
	People aren't going to give you the loans.
	No one's going to come.
	And people are going to think you're just about the worst human being in the universe.
	Now, again, I kind of understand where this comes with animals.
	And my recommendation is, you know, minimize animal consumption and so on.
	And certainly no torturing.
	And this is horrible.
	So I would... there's no practical way that that would be implemented in any society that would be reasonable and free and moral.
	So let me just... I appreciate that and I know that's not the end of the conversation.
	Just shoot me an email.
	Let's have a proper old debate and that would be great.
	I really want to dig into this more but in the interest of other people who may not be fascinated by the topic as you and I are, I'm just going to dip into one question that showed up just at the very beginning I'm gonna yeah, thanks man.
	Appreciate that.
	So this is a question that showed up.
	Sorry mods I'm gonna just jump in and be annoying and answer my own question.
	So one question that showed up at the very beginning Was something like this.
	Hey Baldy, oh, you can't tell right?
	Hey Guy with vaguely British Tour of the Colonies accent.
	Are you running some sort of creepy internet cult?
	Because I hear or I read on the internet that you tell people to leave their families and that's culty.
	So, I mean, I've addressed this a bunch of times before but, you know, bunch of new potential friends out here.
	I might as well look at this again.
	So, let me ask you something.
	So, if you knew a woman, let's say you live in apartment building, a woman moves in next door and she comes from Somalia or someplace where the norms are somewhat different.
	And you hear her being beaten up by her husband.
	And she comes to you and you say, hey, are you okay?
	You know, it sounds like you're kind of being beaten up by your husband.
	That's not good.
	And she says, yes, but it is not permitted for me to leave him.
	It's illegal for me to leave him.
	It's wrong for me to leave him.
	What would you say?
	Well, you would say, I hope, you would say it's not illegal for you to leave him and it's not wrong for you to leave him if he's an abuser.
	Now, whether you would order her to leave him or say you must leave him or you have to leave him, that would probably not be very productive because that's substituting your will and insistence for her moral awakening and choice.
	And if you understand that situation then you understand my situation as a philosopher.
	So I do these call-in shows and over the years people have called in and they've said, I won't even get into the details because you can listen to the shows yourself, but they have said that when they were children their parents have committed crimes against them.
	Whether those crimes are of a sexual or physical abuse nature or moral crimes such as extraordinary levels of neglect or verbal abuse and abandonment and so on.
	And then they say, but I have to see my parents, right?
	And I say, uh, no, you don't.
	You don't.
	And it's a factual, true statement.
	With regards to the parent-child relationship, here's something very foundational to understand.
	And I'm happy to get pushback against this, but you won't be able to push me very far because I've been thinking about this stuff for a long time.
	The woman from Somalia chose her husband.
	I mean, I assume.
	I mean, let's say it wasn't an arranged marriage.
	She was forced at knife point to marry her husband.
	But people choose their spouses.
	Just look in the Western context, the sort of European context or whatever.
	People choose their spouses.
	Now, if a woman is being abused by her spouse, and I think you would say, well, try and fix it.
	Try and solve it.
	Don't put yourself in danger.
	But if you can't solve it, a life of abuse is not a good idea.
	A life of being abused is not a good idea.
	And when I was growing up, this was kind of the norm.
	I think it went too far in terms of, you know, 70-80% of the divorces are initiated by women and the number one cause is, I'm dissatisfied.
	Well, that's not a great reason to bust up a marriage, particularly if there are kids involved.
	But when I was growing up, it's like, hey, if you're not happy, just leave him, honey.
	You know, go be an empowered woman and go do your own thing.
	Kramer versus Kramer style.
	And so, for me, when people say, I have to submit to a lifetime of abuse from abusive parents, my answer is, you really don't.
	You really don't.
	And we should have that as a bloody standard for children.
	Adult children.
	I don't speak to kids about it, of course.
	Adult children.
	Why?
	If you have the right to leave an abusive husband or an abusive wife, you chose that person.
	You dated, you got engaged, you got married, you chose that person.
	And unless you have four elf elbows coming out your ass, you probably had some choice in who it was that you Married, or dated, or whoever, right?
	So, out of a wide variety of people, you chose that person.
	Now, that does not mean, of course, that you should submit to abuse from that person your entire life.
	Of course not.
	Of course not.
	But you had a choice.
	Now, when you're a child, you are born into a family.
	You do not choose that family.
	You do not choose your parents.
	You are there with no will, no morality, no choice whatsoever.
	Now, what that means is your parents should treat you the best.
	Right?
	I mean, I'm a father and my daughter did not choose me as a father.
	She did not choose me to be born.
	She did not choose her mother.
	She did not choose who I chose to marry and have children with.
	So I have to treat her the very best because she is the least voluntary relationship that I have.
	My wife chose me and can leave me anytime.
	My daughter didn't choose me and can't practically leave at any time.
	So we should have the very highest standards with regards to children and this again comes right out of things that I learned growing up which is I was taught and you've heard this a million times yourself so I was taught that a boss can't date his secretary because there's a power disparity and where you have greater power you have greater ethical responsibility now what's greater than the power of a parent with a toddler or a parent with a baby there's no greater disparity of power other than maybe
	Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.
	But that's the greatest power disparity.
	And with great power comes great responsibility.
	So we should treat our children the very best of all of the people in our lives.
	Because if you're a boss, you can be mean to your employees.
	Your employees can just tell you to get lost and they can go quit, right?
	Your kids can't quit you.
	Not in any practical way.
	I mean, I guess they could, but it doesn't really happen.
	It's, you know, better the devil you know in most of these situations.
	So when people become adults, if they say to me that they were abused, then I say, you don't have to spend time with people who abuse you.
	Now my suggestion is consistent, and I've never told anyone to leave their family, but my suggestion is consistent.
	Get into therapy.
	I'm a huge fan of talk therapy.
	I did it myself for years, and it's a wonderful, amazing, powerful thing if you get the right therapist.
	And I've got a show, 1939, about how I think My suggestion on how to get a good therapist, but, you know, get a therapist, talk to your parents, but look, if you can't work it out, if they just continue to abuse you or belittle you or threaten you or whatever, or they're drunks or addicts and so on, it's like, you don't have to spend the rest of your life as a slave to a relationship you never chose!
	And if people want to call me bad for that, I accept that label with great pride.
	Because it is the right approach.
	It is the moral approach.
	And it's the best chance we have.
	for having people treat their children better, which is my number one concern in just about everything I do.
	You know, if you can't get fired, you tend not to do a very good job.
	Voluntarism works in the free market.
	Voluntarism works in the family.
	If parents can't get fired for being terrible, abusive, nasty parents, what is their incentive to improve?
	I'm actually working to improve families by promoting voluntarism, which is perfectly consistent with everything else that I've talked about.
	So I hope that helps, and thanks for giving me the opportunity to explain that.
	And I'm back to mod.
	Sorry for jumping in.
	No worries at all, Matt.
	So, again, just trying to bounce around and make sure we get as many different people, or as wide a variety of questions in here.
	The next one is from Big Hosser.
	He asks what your thoughts are on Donald Trump's recognition of Israel's right to the Golan Heights.
	I'm sorry, you know, I've done a whole presentation, The Truth About Israel and Palestine.
	I'm not enough of an expert on that to give any kind of useful answer.
	I do apologize for that.
	But I will make a note of it and I will try and read up on it and I'll try and put something out on it about Twitter.
	So I apologize for that.
	But I'm not going to be one of these fools rushing where angels fear to tread and get something wrong.
	So I apologize for that.
	But I'll have to take another question.
	All right.
	Our next question comes from Shergal.
	I'm sure, I hope I said that right.
	Anyways, he asked if you agree that socialism is okay when it is voluntary.
	Come on!
	Socialism is okay if it's voluntary?
	It's like saying rape is okay if it's voluntary.
	Well, if it's voluntary, it ain't rape!
	And if it's voluntary, it ain't socialism!
	So one of the key hallmarks of socialism, and this comes out of Marxism, and basically Marxism is just socialism on fast forward, or...
	Socialism is just Marxism on slow forward, from each according to their ability to each according to their needs.
	And Ayn Rand does a masterful takedown of this in Atlas Shrugged with the story of the 20th Century Motor Company, but I guess I won't give you an audiobook reading now.
	But so Families work this way.
	See, the big question is why the hell is socialism even remotely popular given its unbelievably horrific, murderous, destructive, starving, genocidal, war-waging, turning North Korea into the world's biggest open-air prison camp history?
	Why?
	Because this is how we start in life.
	You know, from each according to their ability.
	Okay, so let's say you have a traditional sort of family set up.
	The dad's out working and making the bacon and the mom is home raising the kids and so on.
	Okay, so the kids aren't out there balancing people's books or doing their taxes or bringing food to people and getting tips or anything like that.
	The kids are consuming because that's their need and they don't have any particular ability to produce much.
	So we start off in this situation of from each according to their ability to each according to their needs the adults in particular this case the dad has a great ability to create resources to to win whether it's hunting or or marketing they the adult can do that and the kids have needs and so from each according to so that makes perfect sense that's how we start and that's one of the reasons why socialism is so seductive is socialism feels Right!
	It feels like how we should behave if you think that society is your family.
	But it's not.
	Now why would you come to adulthood still having a great need for society to somehow emulate your family?
	Well, because you're traumatized, because you had a bad childhood, because you were abused, because you haven't grown up, because you don't have closure on the past in some manner, because something bad happened, or a series of bad things happened, and you never got your needs fulfilled in your family, so then you grow up and you go out into the world, and then when someone comes along and says, society should be like your family, a normal person says, No, because that makes me a perpetual child and I've grown up so I don't want society to be like my family.
	I want society to be free and responsible and mature and adult.
	I don't want to be a perpetual child dependent on this permanent coercive parent called the state.
	No!
	I want to be an adult.
	I want to be free.
	But if you haven't individualized or some people call it self-actualized or matured or grown up Then in a sense you're forever a suckling baby mouth in search of a giant tit called the state.
	That you don't think you can make it on your own.
	That you need someone to provide you health care.
	Someone's got to just give you stuff.
	They've got to give you resources.
	They've got to give you housing.
	They've got to give you money.
	They've got to give you love!
	But if you've grown up, you don't want these things from institutions and you don't want them... Politicians can't lie to you.
	You know, uh... Alexandria...
	I mean, so, you know, there's this woman, she posted, you know, health care is a basic human right.
	It's like, no, in a free market, the ability to work and produce and get insurance and save your money and take care of your health, but that's a right.
	You can't say that human beings have a right to the labor of other human beings, because that's called slavery.
	That's wrong!
	So if you've completed your childhood and you've grown up and then someone comes along to you and says...
	We're going to turn all of society into your parents.
	Our government's going to be your parents, and we're going to turn all of society into your family.
	You'd be like, no, I've grown up.
	I don't want to be a child anymore.
	But if you haven't completed that process, it's very seductive.
	It's very seductive.
	And you weaken people by continually telling them that the government has to provide this, that, or the other for them.
	I mean, why is there such a focus on minimum wage?
	Well, the reason there's such a focus on minimum wage is that after 12 goddamn years of government indoctrination and brain-dead stupid stuff in government schools, people come out with the economic utility of your average sea sponge.
	So rather than fix the schools so that maybe people can come out being worth $50 an hour because they know how to run a business, they know how to satisfy customers, they can think clearly, they can be entrepreneurial.
	Rather than coming out being worth $50 an hour, they come out and they're worth virtually nothing.
	They can barely read, they can barely write, they probably have never written a full essay.
	They don't know how to think critically at all.
	But they know that there are 8,000 genders, right?
	They've had drag queens come through, but they have never learned about Aristotelian logic.
	So they come out virtually worthless.
	And then we say, oh, well, no, see, now university is going to fix all that.
	And of course it doesn't.
	It just makes it worse, for the most part.
	But so because the government schools are producing people who are economically useless, we say, well, they're being underpaid.
	It's like, no.
	They're being fairly paid based upon the skills that they have not developed in government schools.
	So rather than fix government schools, we just force employers to pretend that the products of government schools are worth something.
	It's terrible.
	But again, it's inevitable and it's natural because it's easier to pick on employers than it is to take on teachers' unions.
	All right, thanks for the rant opportunity.
	Let's do another question.
	All right, so our next question is a bit related to that.
	GMP asks, what is your opinion on the role of traditional values and religion for the current society and family?
	Religion is a big topic, so I'm just going to focus on Christianity.
	Chicken out, just focus on Christianity.
	So, have you ever done things by trial and error?
	Like, I was trying to fix the coloring on some video the other day and I just kept tweaking it, compiling it, tweaking it.
	I didn't know what I was doing.
	Just moving sliders around and trying to make myself not look like...
	A reject from the Blue Man Group, right?
	So if you've ever done something through trial and error, it's a really, really painful way to learn something.
	And you tend to develop bad habits which you have to get properly trained, you have to kind of undo.
	So to me, here's what religion has done.
	And it's of great value.
	So religion has gathered together things that work and things that don't work.
	And it's codified them.
	And it's not philosophical insofar as there are these foundational principles and we build from those like the non-aggression principle or whatever it is.
	There's these financial principles.
	It's like, well, man, people tried this and oh, man, was it terrible.
	So we're just going to put a ban on that.
	Now this thing that people tried, that actually worked out pretty well.
	So let's promote that.
	And so there's this kind of hard one.
	If you've ever tried to make your way through, like when I used to travel a lot for, for business, I used to have to some, you know, you get up in the middle of the night, you got to pee and you got to navigate some room with a whole bunch of furniture in it in the dark.
	This is before you could just use the flashlight on your phone and you just kind of go slow and you're feeling your way and then you bark your shins and you move and then you're like, man, I should have just stayed in bed.
	And so, to me, religion is the aggregated wisdom painfully learned over thousands of years of hits and misses.
	And it's not philosophical, but the lessons that it has extracted from incredibly bitter and difficult human experience, those lessons are very valuable and we are much better served trying to figure out the philosophical reasons why those lessons exist Why is monogamy important?
	Why is respect for women important?
	Why is treating your children better important?
	Why is it that when women go to work we put our kids in daycare and the daycare workers, I was a daycare worker, I know about this, they don't transmit the values of your ancient ancestors down to the new kids.
	They're, you know, Doing their thing.
	So you can send women to work and then your cultural transmission of values tends to stop.
	Because that's what moms do.
	Moms are the ways in which culture gets transmitted.
	So when you lose religion, generally women will go out to work and they're encouraged to go out to work because it's profitable for the state.
	And it also means that your cultural transmission generally dies and stops.
	And you can see this hostility.
	Every time you see on 30 Rock or Veep or whatever, anytime you see anyone homeschooling, they're teaching their kids that Jesus rode dinosaurs and all this kind of crap, right?
	And they're just constantly hating on this stuff because for the left, cultural transmission of Christian values, of free market values, of limited government values stands directly in the way of what they want to achieve, which is to get rid of everyone's guns, seize the power of the state and go around slaughtering everyone who disagrees with them.
	Sorry!
	You can watch my Poland documentary for more on the history of this, and in Poland in particular, it's at fdrurl.com forward slash Poland, but that's what they want.
	And so, religion gives us very powerful values that are very hard won we should not just go around discarding them and say you know like in the sixties where people said hey you know why don't we all just live in a big giant blob of polyamory raise our children collectively and soap is a bourgeois construct that oppresses us you know because then you get uh... massive STDs
	You get no bonding between adults.
	You get kids raising themselves, which is to say raising themselves badly, which is the inevitable consequence of that.
	And you get a whole lot of lice and scabies.
	And then people are like, oh, yeah, maybe there was something to that, that stuff.
	Now that can be bad stuff.
	I'm not at all a fan of circumcision.
	I think it's a brutal mutilation.
	But nonetheless, We should examine these values and not just say, well, they're all based upon superstition, some would say, and they just got to get rid of them all.
	And it's like, no, no, no, come on.
	This is hard-won wisdom that people suffered enormously to extract.
	And I think just tossing it out is a really, really bad idea.
	Sorry, that was the end of the answer.
	Nobody knows.
	I keep forgetting.
	This is my new format.
	So, our next question comes from a regular actual communist boy.
	He asks, if you've read any books written by a socialist, and if so, which are your favorite?
	Have I read any books written by a socialist?
	And which are my favorites?
	Okay.
	Well, yes.
	So, okay.
	First of all, here's the thing.
	Socialism is the default position within society.
	So it's basically like saying to a kid, a white kid who grew up in Germany, have you ever been exposed to German?
	It's like Yes.
	That's the default.
	I mean, the government schools, they're run by socialism.
	The roads we drive on are run by socialism.
	The mail we get delivered is usually run by socialism.
	The pensions are run by socialism.
	Unemployment insurance is run by socialism.
	The money that went to all the single mothers who surrounded me in the poor neighborhoods I grew up in are all funded by socialism.
	The ideas are all socialistic in school.
	And, you know, when was the last time anyone said to you in school, taxation is theft?
	Well, if you don't think taxation is theft, that's the foundation of socialism, which means that we have moral rules that some people can deploy that other people are forbidden from doing so, and therefore there's no objective morality.
	So yes, I have read a lot of socialist thinkers.
	I mean, I've read a lot of Marx, Proudhon.
	I took an entire course called The Rise of Capitalism and the Socialist Response that, to my memory, was taught by an out-and-out Marxist to Karl Polanyi.
	I've read a lot on socialist theory and practice.
	It's so terribly wrong.
	And it's so terribly wrong because of this.
	Because there's a bell curve.
	And the bell curve is, as I've talked about on the show a lot, It has a lot to do with intelligence, but it's not only to do with intelligence.
	So in the bell curve of intelligence, the average IQ for whites is about 100, and you've got standard deviations up and down, 115 to 85 and so on.
	IQ is the biggest predictor of success in life.
	It's the biggest predictor of income, health, marital stability, educational and occupational attainment.
	And an IQ test predicts success in a complicated job 80% of the time.
	It's the very best metric that we have, the most established and universal metric that we have in the social sciences.
	And IQ explains income disparity.
	IQ explains income disparity.
	Now, for the communists, for the leftists, for the socialists, all disparities in group outcomes are the result of prejudice, right?
	So just take the male-female example, right?
	So for women, there are very few women at the highest levels of intelligence.
	I mean, there aren't that many men, but there's way more men than women at the highest levels of intelligence.
	Men have more testosterone, and men don't have to take five or ten years off their career if they want to have children.
	If you take all these factors into account, and also the fact that women tend to work more with people, and work less with things, and working with people sometimes pays less, and we know that this is true, because when women gain more economic freedom, they tend to cluster around people-centric jobs, rather than thing-centric jobs.
	They tend to become nurses and teachers and so on, rather than engineers and physicists, or people who work with abstract financial instruments, which is quite profitable, I suppose.
	So if you take all of this into account, the disparity – the wage disparity between men and women – disappears.
	So there is no massive rampant sexism.
	against women, there's just that women have different skills, values, attributes, and motivations to bring to the working world.
	And again, you never judge any individual by group averages, but when you're talking about men and women as a whole, you're talking about group averages.
	So the rational answer as to why women don't earn as much as men is a variety of genetics and preferences and the simple biological fact that if you want to have a society that continues, well, women need to have babies.
	And if women want to raise those babies well and breastfeed for the recommended year to year and a half, they've got to stay home in general, right?
	And that's, you know, you can get mad at Mother Nature, but then that's just the way things are.
	I mean, railing against reality is what crazy people do.
	But for the left, they look at the gaps between men and women and they say, it's all sexism!
	It's all bigotry!
	It's all meanness!
	It's vicious!
	Men just hate women!
	Now, even a moment's thought tells you that even the socialists don't believe this.
	Because the socialists also believe that capitalists are driven so much by profit that they'll chisel anyone to make money.
	Now if women were, in a free market, economically completely equal to men, Then capitalists would bid up, out of their own greed and profit-seeking, they would bid up women's wages to match those of men.
	But, objectively, economically, women are worth less than men on the free market.
	Now, the free market, who cares?
	I mean, I've been a stay-at-home dad for ten years.
	Raising kids is a fantastic thing to do.
	It's a wonderful thing to do.
	So, okay, women might get paid a little bit less than men, but women get to Give birth and breastfeed and stay home often and raise the kids.
	A fantastic and wonderful thing.
	Massive respect.
	Massive props.
	You know, for those men who are out there pounding the pavement and fighting traffic and inhaling the diesel fumes of some cough-guzzling nightmare vehicle of Terminator ahead of them, they're like, yeah, I'd really love staying home and making goo with my children.
	That would be super fun.
	It'd be great, right?
	I'd love to do that.
	For the left they look at all disparities between groups and ethnicities and sexes and they are it's all the result of Prejudice and all of this and it's like, no, it's not, it's not.
	And so because they're sort of fundamentally false and they ascribe, they think everyone's a blank slate and the only thing that changes is bigotry plus environment when people are not blank slates.
	So inequality, not of rights, not of opportunities, inequality is essential to human life.
	I mean, it's like saying everyone should have the same opportunity to be a basketball player.
	It's like, no, being tall and having good knees and fast twitch reflex muscles really bloody well helps.
	I ain't gonna be a hair model anytime soon unless somebody wants to see a robust chia pet in my armpit.
	So, the desire, I think this is Solzhenitsyn's quote, the desire to make unequable things equal is the foundation of tyranny.
	And here's your little mental bookmark for this, right?
	Which is number one, the difference between justice and social justice is justice is equality of opportunity, equality before the law.
	Social justice is equality of outcome.
	Now if you think of a running race, right?
	You start the running race, people just run as hard as they can and they try and finish the running race.
	It's not much to do.
	Just fire the gun and off they go and measure who wins, right?
	But what if you want everyone to cross the finish line at the same time?
	Imagine how much control you'd have to do and everything you changed, like if you made the faster runner run slower so that the slower runners would catch up, the slower runners would be like, oh good, I don't have to run as fast because the faster runners are slowed down and then you gotta, like you just have to micromanage everything and it's exhausting and otherwise known as some policies in social media.
	I hope that helps.
	Let's do another one.
	These are great.
	All right, our next one comes from Faraday Speaks.
	Faraday, are you there?
	Okay, I guess we'll go on to the next one.
	Next question here.
	Sorry.
	Next question is, are people in the current generation more or less sensitive than people from past generations?
	Ah, man, you guys got some great questions.
	Are they more or less sensitive?
	I think that they're more sensitive, but I don't consider this any kind of character flaw or anything like that. - Right.
	So Let's just talk about some basic differences between men and women.
	Now, this is all nonsense, just so you know, ahead of time.
	This is not science, this is just my particular thoughts.
	I hope to make a reasonable case, but don't ask me to send you the longitudinal data studies.
	So, in general, men, in our evolution, we had to go out and deal with objective, tangible reality that was incredibly unforgiving.
	Because the source of our resources was either agriculture, which is unforgiving and objective.
	You've got to keep the birds from eating all your seed crop.
	You can't consume your seed crop in the winter.
	You've got nothing to plant in the spring.
	Or we were hunting, in which case, you know, you throw the spear, it hits, it misses.
	It's all objective, tangible reality, which is why, other than some genuine oppression throughout history, science and objective philosophy and so on tended to be developed a little bit more by the male mind, well a lot more, and the male mind generally works with objective principles, reality, which is why guys like working with computers and labs and so on and women generally like working more with people.
	So men's survival and flourishing had to do with a processing of objective, unforgiving, non-manipulable reality.
	Like, you know the old silly thing, and it's kind of a cliche, but there's a little bit of truth in it.
	You know, if a woman's in public and she cries, people stop and say, oh, are you okay?
	How can I help, right?
	Whereas if a man cries, people just kind of step over his sobbing fetus-style body or try and cover him with newspapers so nobody sees the edifying spectacle of a grown man crying.
	So for women in general who were home, and women certainly did contribute to foods and so on, but they were home and they were raising babies and they relied upon a social network to flourish, right?
	The social network of other women who could watch their kids while they went and picked up roots and berries or whatever it was, right?
	So men were dealing more with objective reality and women were dealing more with social relationships.
	In general, on average, tons of exceptions, but that's the general trend.
	So the concept of something like hate speech, which is speech that just really offends you, it's kind of... I mean the closest term in the past would have been blasphemy, right?
	And hate speech is a secular form of a blasphemy law, right?
	In other words, speech that is so upsetting it must be banned.
	Now blasphemy was not considered to be upsetting which is why it was banned.
	It was considered to be against the moral edicts of the time and threatening people's capacity to get to heaven.
	So there was an epistemological or even metaphysical causality as to why blasphemy would be considered a crime.
	But this idea of hate speech is it's just really really upsetting.
	Now statistically women score higher in one of the big five personality traits called neuroticism.
	Which doesn't mean all women are neurotic.
	I always have to put these caveats in because people respond, right, to this kind of stuff sometimes a bit strongly.
	So this idea, you know, and you can see this in this sort of popular meme, literally shaking, you know, like I'm literally shaking and so on, right?
	Well, a man is expected to manage his own emotions, and to show emotional weakness as a man, or to show emotional vulnerability as a man, is generally not a very good idea.
	I don't know if it's changed in the next generation, but it certainly wasn't when I was growing up.
	The idea that somebody would make an argument, I mean I used to have arguments about abortion and the free market and the death penalty, we'd have incredible raised-voiced arguments, and the idea that you'd be literally shaking or you'd burst into tears or you'd say, I hate what you're saying, that would just be kind of embarrassing, like why would you, what are you doing?
	It would be a confession that It would be like fainting at the sight of blood and saying you wanted to be a surgeon.
	It's like, I don't really think that's going to work out for you.
	If you can't handle the sight of blood, you can't be a surgeon.
	And if you burst into tears and you get hyperventilating or, you know, that woman who, when Trump got elected, you know, screaming at the sky kind of thing.
	It's like, that's, you know, the realm of ideas.
	Not really for you if that's your particular bend.
	I would say that because we have a massive catastrophe of fatherlessness in the West, I mean I was raised by a single mother, I grew up without a father, my father was in Africa while I was in England and then Canada, so we have this massive issue of Boys in particular being raised by women.
	It's like that great line from Fight Club.
	It gave me goosebumps when I first saw it many years ago.
	We're a generation of men raised by women.
	I'm not sure that another woman is the answer we're looking for.
	Generation of men raised by women.
	It took a gay guy to tell us that, right?
	But it's very true.
	It's very true.
	I was in boarding school when I was six, so I did see male authority figures, but I remember when I was working in a daycare as a teenager I was the only man who was working there or the only boy I guess at that time that was working there and you know all the fatherless boys kind of glommed on to me and we'd have long chats and it was really touching and I remember having the same relationship with a counselor at summer camp and so on a really really really great guy and we are hungry for male authority figures
	And male authority figures, on average, are different from female authority figures.
	It's just life.
	And if you look at, like, the successful, growing, flourishing cultures, like the Islamic culture, I would say a little bit too far on the male authority figure side, but it's definitely there.
	And you can see this also, although Judaism is matrilineal, there's still very strong male authority figures in, of course, among the rabbis and so on.
	And this was the case with Catholicism, with no female I don't agree with all of these things but you have sustainable cultures which have masculine authority and then you have unsustainable cultures which have diminished or in these modern days particularly for white males or Christian males just castrated authority no authority fundamentally and that's pretty terrible so if you have
	If you're raised by a man, your major concern is getting things wrong.
	If your dad is out there and he's teaching you how to change a tire, it's like, no, that's the wrong tool!
	It's a bit of a cliche, but the concern if you're raised by a man is you get things wrong.
	But your concern if you're raised by a woman is she's upset.
	She feels bad.
	She's offended.
	So if you have a whole bunch of men, raised by women, boys raised by women, then their particular concern is not, is something true, or does it work, or is it valid, is it objective?
	Their major concern is, am I upsetting someone?
	In particular women.
	And this is why men turn to pornography, this is why men turn to video games, because they are situations in which you can't offend someone, generally.
	Because the, you know, putting the paper bag over your mouth kind of hyperventilating upset is not very healthy to society.
	It's not very healthy to society at all.
	I mean, think of the companies and the very restrictive speech policies sometimes.
	A lot of it comes out of a very gynocentric HR departments.
	So, men support free speech.
	White men in particular support free speech the most.
	Free speech is also Dose dependent on IQ.
	Support for free speech.
	To be a free speech absolutist.
	And I've got a whole presentation called The Truth About Free Speech.
	Free speech being essential.
	Free speech is how you cure just being randomly upset because you get exposed to opposite ideas and you actually end up as a better person and a more rich and rounded person.
	But you think it's going to be terrible.
	But, you know, go argue with a fascist.
	Go argue with a communist.
	Go argue with a Nazi.
	And rather than just scream them down and try and de-platform them, make sure that you can know how their ideas are bad and wrong and how to hopefully help them or correct them or at least correct those who are watching the debate.
	So we don't worry about what's true anymore.
	We worry about who's upset, who's offended, who's mad.
	And that's not... that is not even remotely healthy.
	In fact, that's a toxic environment.
	And the truth is having a very tough time surviving in the noxious smoke of offense these days.
	Okay, that's the end for that.
	If we can get another one.
	You said eight hours?
	That's my challenge, right?
	Eight hours was your longest.
	All right.
	It's all right.
	I have my adult depends on we're good to go.
	All right.
	So I'll get my coffee ready.
	So next question we got comes from user Gannon.
	I think he must be one of your longtime fans.
	He joined the server just to get this in here.
	He asks if success is necessary for happiness.
	Is success?
	That's a great question.
	Can I just insert Golan Heights here and say it's too complicated?
	No, here we go.
	No, that's interesting.
	So, yeah, success is involved.
	So, I'm just sort of looking at my own life, and I do that because I think that we're very much in common, most of us deep down, right?
	So, if you have no chance of failure, you will not feel success.
	You know, I don't sit there, you know, when I get out of bed and I walk to go brush my teeth, I don't sit there and say, Made it!
	I made it to the bathroom!
	I'm a champion of walking, you know?
	I mean, I'm pretty much down with the walking.
	I've got it down pat and I don't really worry myself about whether it's going to succeed or not.
	So you have to have the chance of failure in order to experience any particular pleasure in terms of success.
	So I would say that there's two categories of success.
	So the first is, are you successful in the outside world?
	Are you successful in the outside world?
	That you have only some control over.
	The other Question is, have you succeeded in applying your best efforts?
	Have you held anything back?
	Have you pursued achievement to the very best of your ability?
	And this is an Aristotelian argument.
	He says that well-being, what's called eudaimonia, well-being, richness of character, happiness of circumstance and so on, that that has to do with exercising your best abilities in pursuit of the good.
	Now he says in pursuit.
	It's like the pursuit of happiness.
	In pursuit of the good.
	And there's a reason why he says that.
	He says that because you can't control whether you succeed in the outside world or not.
	You can control how hard you work in pursuit of that success.
	Now, if you work hard and smartly and well in pursuit of success and you fail, you won't be as happy as if you succeed.
	But what you really want to avoid in this life And I'm old enough now to have seen people who didn't avoid this.
	And we all have these things, right?
	What you really want to avoid in life is regret.
	Is regret.
	Oh man.
	Regret is one of these things that kind of sneaks up on you.
	But it can really burn you to the ground.
	It can just take your soul and flambé it up into the stratosphere.
	It can slowly erode.
	Like it turns you into a sand in a high wind and you just get blown away into nothingness.
	Regret is a terrible thing.
	It's a terrible thing.
	You know, like, women would sometimes, and men will sometimes talk about, you know, the one who got away, that the guy I should have married, the whatever, right?
	And you will not regret anything that you gave your all to.
	Now, it doesn't mean you'll succeed.
	But if you gave it your all, you will not regret.
	I have no, like, I don't even know if my show's gonna be running next week.
	I don't know.
	I mean, there's so much that's going on on social media these days.
	I mean I have plans and preparations and ways of dealing with it that I don't want to get into here, but I don't know.
	And so, but I can control how courageously and resolutely I speak the truth.
	How much research I do, how well I formulate what it is that I'm talking about, I can do that.
	So, if the entire internet gets shut down tomorrow, I mean, let's just make up some silly example, okay, well, that would be a shame, and I'd find that problematic, but I wouldn't sit there and say, ah, I should have done X. I mean, I look back over 15 years, and I'm like, man, I pushed a lot of envelopes over the years, and I think I did it wisely and compassionately and courageously, and I have no issues with what I have said.
	Even the things that I've said that people take out of context are valuable insofar as they keep idiots from taking up any of my time.
	Nobody on this server at all, I guarantee you.
	But whether I succeed or not in My goal of teaching the world philosophy is not up to me.
	I mean, that's up to you, whether you are interested in philosophy, whether you study it, whether you're willing to share my shows or make your own or whoever shows you think are the best at teaching people critical thinking and engaging people and so on.
	But I've given everything that I have.
	I have thoughts.
	and reasoned and and struggled and communicated and sweated sometimes until my brain is like thermonuclear candle wax dripping down my ears.
	I have turned my brain into a Krakatoa fission-based volcano of supersonic sunness just to get ideas across.
	I have sung songs.
	I have I've done rap, I have done voices, anything to get philosophy and how cool and fantastic it is across to the masses.
	So if I succeed out there in the world, not up to me.
	That's up to you.
	But, well, up to social media giants.
	But I will have no regrets.
	That's really really key because you know the first half of your life is about expansion and growth and challenge but the second half of your life you have to think about it in terms of not having regrets and if you give it your all.
	So success is necessary for happiness but you also want to have control over your happiness and if you say that I can only be happy if I succeed in an external sense then You have less control over your happiness.
	But if you say, if I extend my very best efforts in the communication of that which is important, not just to me, but to the world, you can't... Actually, I'm kind of moved even just thinking about it.
	You can't be happier than that.
	You can't be happier than having given it your all in pursuit of the good in the world.
	of taking the slings and arrows of outrageous slander, of fighting against evildoers, of encouraging those in the middle, and of boosting the good.
	You can't have a better life than that.
	You can't have greater satisfaction or joy or self-respect or anything.
	You can't.
	So, it has to be something you can fail at.
	But you can't fail at giving it your all.
	And I'm very much into that.
	You know, it's a stupid cliche, go big or go home.
	And it's like, yeah, if you can't get involved in something that engages your whole being at its maximum torque, keep looking until you can and then give it your all.
	And I think that's your best chance for happiness.
	Maybe it may in fact be your only chance for happiness.
	All right.
	Thanks.
	That was goosebumps worthy.
	What's that?
	Okay, so next question we'll take from Faraday Speaks.
	Faraday, are you- Yes, can you hear me?
	Yes.
	Hello, Stefan.
	So, I used to be a big fan of- Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	Back away from the mic just a little bit.
	Sorry, it sounds like you're limping.
	Oh, am I better now?
	Yeah, okay.
	You're deep-throated now, baby.
	Oh, sorry about that.
	Didn't mean to blow up your ears there.
	That's alright.
	Okay.
	So, I used to watch your videos a lot, Steph.
	I recently made a video, my descent to the alt-right pipeline, where I came out of right-wing politics, and you were a big driving force for me going into that side of politics.
	But I wanted to come here today and ask you... Hang on, sorry to be annoying, I just... and I'm not trying to break your flow or anything... Oh, no, that's not... I just... I don't... I have no idea what right-wing politics means, so if you could just explain that to me a little... I mean, everybody has their own way of looking at it.
	Oh, yeah, yeah.
	So, um, I found your content.
	And I basically agreed with your libertarian philosophies, became a libertarian, and then kind of drifted down towards conservatism.
	And then finally settling around civic nationalism, what I would have described as alt light.
	And then from there, I came back out.
	And I guess I would call myself a progressive now.
	And what is civic nationalism for you?
	Civic nationalism would have been a strong national identity, strong borders, basically like a more concentrated form of conservatism.
	I would have held very socially conservative views.
	And I really saw it as a way to get towards a free and open society.
	I'm so sorry.
	I apologize and I really don't want to break your flow and we will get to your central point.
	So strong borders, I mean, Can you think of countries in the world that, I mean outside of some of the western countries, that don't have strong borders?
	I mean there's hugely strong borders in Japan and in Saudi Arabia and Israel has a wall around itself.
	Oh yes, yes, so I would have looked up to, yeah, so I would have looked up to a country like Japan for example.
	I saw that as my model for the society that I So it's not, it's not, because there's no philosophy in that.
	You could have, I mean, you know, what else has strong borders is North Korea, right?
	I mean, there's a philosophy to it.
	Yeah, I didn't want an authoritarian government within that.
	Okay, but when it just comes to having strong borders, that describes most of the countries in the world, regardless of how we would morally judge the content of their political system.
	So I'm not sure, again, I'm not sure what civic nationalism means other than border enforcement, which most countries in the world pursue.
	Oh yeah, so I would have criticized countries like Germany for bringing in immigrants.
	And specifically during the 2015 migrant crisis, I was a big critic of immigrants.
	Right, okay.
	So things like that, I would have criticized pretty heavily.
	Liberal, what I saw as liberal socialist policies, I would have criticized pretty heavily.
	I basically wanted a libertarian society, but I didn't think that that was possible as long as immigrants were coming in, voting, taking welfare, things like that.
	Well, to be more specific, right?
	I mean, to be more specific, it's not a question of immigration.
	It's not a question of immigration.
	It's a question of how do the immigrants who come into the West tend to vote?
	And the answer, as we know, is that they tend to vote strongly for the left.
	They tend to vote for more and more bigger government and higher taxes and more social programs.
	And in general, socialism.
	I mean, that's why the socialists want to bring them in.
	It's because it's a voting base, right?
	So it's not just a question of immigration, like immigration good or bad.
	It's a question of the current general post-1965 switch to immigrants from the third world is really the only thing that's propping up the left in the West at the moment.
	Do you have evidence that the left is doing this?
	I'm sorry.
	I think I just lost you there.
	The left is doing this for what?
	Do you have evidence that the left is doing this in concert for that reason?
	Wait, are you asking me if the left likes bringing in people who vote for them?
	Yeah, do you have evidence that that is the reason that they're bringing people?
	Sorry, I don't understand the question.
	Do you think that the left doesn't know... Do you think that the left doesn't know that the current demographics of immigrants vote for the left?
	Well, I wouldn't say that even liberals, for example, if you look at the United States, I wouldn't even say that liberals support socialism unless you're going to paint socialism with a broad brush, but if you're going to say that they are bringing people in for this grand plan to, like, institute socialism, I'd like to see it.
	Well, no, hang on, we didn't get to the grand plan to implement socialism.
	So, for instance, in England you have imams that are commanding their followers to vote for the Labour government, right?
	Do you think that the Labour government, or that the left in general, does not know that the vast majority of Muslims are going to vote for the left?
	Or do you think that the Democrats don't know that the vast majority of blacks, say, are going to vote for the Democrats?
	Do you think that they're unaware of these things?
	They might be aware of that, but do you think that's the plan?
	You think there's a strategy?
	I'm asking for evidence for the plan or the strategy.
	Just because they might be aware of that doesn't mean that it's a top-down thing, right?
	Again, I'm not sure what you mean.
	So, let's say, for instance, if we look at Hispanics in the U.S., Hispanics in the U.S.
	very significantly vote for Democrats, right?
	So, if, let's say, the Democrats were to suggest closing the border to the South, which I know a lot of Hispanics do agree with, or simply enforcing existing immigration laws.
	I know a lot of Hispanics do agree with that.
	But there is a significant number, of course, of Hispanics who would be upset by that, because they want more family members to come in, or they want to be reunited, or whatever it is, right?
	And so, I don't know what you're looking for in terms of, do I think that there's some secret memo written in the blood of newborn piglets or something?
	It's like, I don't know, but I, you know, I'm pretty sure that... It just seems like it's intuition on your part.
	It's not really...
	It's something that you've been able to prove.
	It's just kind of this intuition.
	And then I would further say that liberals are not in support of socialism.
	I mean, you've seen the criticism that even AOC and Bernie Sanders get in the United States.
	And this is because the corporate Democrats are not in support of this.
	They're not in support of even universal health care.
	So I don't see how that you can describe those people as socialists.
	They're typical neoliberals.
	And then once again, I would say, do you have evidence that they are bringing people in as a voting bloc?
	What would you respond to?
	But all the people that they're bringing in are a voting bloc.
	I don't know what you, like, I don't know what you mean in terms of evidence.
	I mean, you know the simple example.
	Are they voting for socialists?
	The simple example is this, right?
	If you want to look at a persecuted minority, you would look at the whites in South Africa, where you have political leaders saying, one bullet, one settler, meaning the whites.
	You have political leaders in South Africa saying, kill the Boer, which has killed the whites.
	You have the police turning a blind eye to farm murders.
	This is a persecuted minority.
	And yet if white South Africans try to get into America or Australia or other countries, the leftist politicians will push against them.
	Why?
	Because they're conservatives in general and they're Christians.
	So, you know, you can say something about the secret memo, I don't think.
	It's a lot of inferences that you're making.
	Now, I agree that if whites in South Africa are being oppressed specifically, then yes, we should give them refugee status.
	But you're making a lot of inferences here.
	That's not an argument.
	You know that, right?
	Saying I'm making a lot of inferences is not making an argument.
	But you're not making an argument either.
	You're just making inferences to say that this is likely their strategy.
	Anyway, do you want to get to the question that I had?
	Well, no, I'm still a little baffled by this one.
	It's sort of like saying, well, do you have proof that Amazon – like do you have proof that they want to make money?
	Do you have proof that they try and keep their cost of production lower than their cost of sales?
	Do you have this all written down?
	It's like that's how it works.
	That's how the system works.
	I mean, the fact that the left switched immigration to a group that votes consistently for the left, you're saying, well, do you have the memo?
	And it's like, I don't need a memo because I understand how human motivation works.
	All right.
	So if you guys are all right with us, I'm going to move it around to just get some more questions.
	Well, hang on.
	I'm happy if he wants to... He said I didn't get to his question, so I'm happy if he wants to ask his question.
	Yeah, Steph, we can talk at another time, maybe.
	Yeah, shoot me an email.
	I'm interested in what you have to say, and it's a fascinating topic, so please do shoot me an email.
	But yeah, okay, if the mods want to move on to someone else, I will.
	I bow to the mods.
	They are the gods.
	Okay, can I get my question in mods?
	Go ahead, guys.
	If you're still into this stuff... Yeah, it's fine with me.
	Okay.
	All right.
	So you were a proponent of the white genocide theory regarding immigration in European countries.
	I'm sorry.
	Sorry.
	Can you just... Again, I hate... I really sound like I'm being annoyingly obstructive, but you just cut out there at the beginning if you start again.
	Yeah, sorry.
	I have a bad connection right now.
	We good?
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	You were a proponent on your YouTube channel of the white genocide theory regarding immigration in European countries.
	Can you give me a quote?
	I'm not sure what you mean.
	What if I said... I mean, I could go back to your videos, but I specifically remember you using that phrase, white genocide.
	But anyway, so... No, no, no, no, hang on, hang on, dude.
	Hang on, be responsible for Christ's sake.
	Be responsible.
	If you're going to start bringing up something like white genocide theory with me... Well, Lauren Southern specifically has a video called The Great Replacement.
	Still talking.
	If you're going to bring up a phrase like white genocide with me, which you know is a massive, charged phrase, right?
	And you don't have a single quote, but you think you remember me using the phrase?
	Come on, man.
	Be responsible about your public...
	I will source it for you if you need it to, but we don't have time for that right now.
	Okay, well let's move on, Mods, and maybe, you know, if people want to bring up highly contentious issues with me, I'm going to need a little bit more than, I think I heard you say the phrase once on a show, be responsible in your public proclamations, and be responsible, that's the least that you should do in such a charged political environment.
	Alright, let's move on to the next question.
	All right, so the next question comes from a user, I really actually can't pronounce their names, sorry, but they ask, what can change the nature of a man?
	What can change the nature of what?
	What can change the nature of a man?
	He's not available to talk, he's just typed in such a bit of a generic question, which I'm happy to take a stab at, but I'd like to ask him what he means by nature.
	Let me see.
	Nylar, are you willing to elaborate on your question?
	Nylar?
	Sounds like he's not able to.
	Hold on, he's typing.
	I can read it.
	Okay, yeah.
	If clarification is always better, otherwise it's just my soapbox, which may not be responsive.
	While he's doing that, I'm going to have a quick look at the chat here.
	Usually it doesn't scold my brain too much.
	Sure.
	If your eyes are...
	No, no, it's fine.
	It's fine.
	I've seen it all.
	I've seen it all.
	Have you heard of the Twitch streamer Destiny?
	Yeah, wasn't he the guy who called for... Well, not very nice things for conservatives, if I remember rightly.
	Yeah, that's not good.
	Is Alex Jones a man you look up to?
	debate with Lauren Sovereign and all that.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I know.
	Once people have that kind of language, it's not a civilized situation.
	Is Alex Jones a man you look up to?
	Listen, I think Alex Jones has done some great work, and I think he's made some terrible errors.
	And, well.
	But again, you know, if you look at the errors that Alex Jones has made, it's, you know, a fairly consistent argument that people need to be aware of.
	Yes, Alex Jones has made some mistakes, and I think he said some things that are wrong, and some things that have caused people considerable pain, as we know from the recent lawsuits.
	But I will say this, If people had listened to Alex Jones, there wouldn't have been an invasion of Iraq, so I'll give him that.
	I'll give him some minus points for Sandy Hook, and I'll give him massive plus points for fighting against the wars in the Central Banking and the Deep State.
	I expect perfection from No Man, and let's keep everything in context.
	All right.
	So again, the original question, unelaborated.
	What can change the nature of man?
	Nylar, elaborate on this.
	What we usually consider to be normal human behavior in terms of self-ownership and all that's derived from it, could it be possibly be changed in the future?
	And would it be moral to have a system that required a fundamental change to what humans fundamentally are?
	For example, a transhumanist Right.
	Okay.
	I think I get it.
	I think I get it.
	Okay.
	So this is a fantastic question, and I'm glad that I got that clarification.
	So I will say this.
	I accept evolution, and we evolved in small, intimate, often genetically proximate, generally genetically proximate tribes.
	That's how we evolved.
	Now that doesn't mean we can't change, it doesn't mean we can't grow, it doesn't mean we can't universalize, but we grew up in 50 to 150, maybe 200 people, very similar genetically, same language, same religions, same culture, same belief systems.
	And if we drift from that, that's certainly possible, but we need to accept that it's going to be a struggle and a challenge.
	Now, how do we transform loyalty to the tribe to loyalty to truth, to virtue?
	Well we have to break tribal in-group preferences within our society because okay look we all know diversity and multiculturalism and so on that the west is invited in a wide multiplicity of religions and and cultures and histories and so on Now, those people, cultures, histories, they want to move to Western countries, and I understand why.
	Western countries are some of the least racist countries around.
	In fact, of the top 20 countries, I think there's maybe one Western country in terms of measurable racism.
	So, Western countries are anti-racist, not just not racist, they're anti-racist, as am I.
	And there's a universality of perspective.
	In other words, we judge a man by the content of his character, not the color of his skin.
	And this is all wonderful, great stuff.
	So people want to come to Western countries because Western countries have given up on in-group preferences and have submitted, for better or for worse, to universal standards of human rights, universal declarations of human rights, equality under the law, universal property rights, and you name it, right?
	So, Western countries are countries that people want to get to, because whites in Western countries have largely given up on in-group preferences.
	Now, the only way that white countries get to stay, or formerly white countries now multicultural countries, the only way that they get to stay positive, productive, and happy, and good places to live, is if the people coming in adopt the mentality of giving up on in-group preferences.
	Because that's the only reason why!
	They want to come to Western countries to begin with.
	There's this universality, this anti-racism, this giving up on in-group preferences.
	So if people come to the West and do not give up on in-group preferences, they're coming to a country that is only worth coming to because of no in-group preferences, and then bringing in-group preferences, which is going to really undermine the way that that society works, and works pretty well.
	So how do you sort of change the nature?
	of a man.
	I think we have to recognize where we came from in terms of our evolution.
	That we did have in-group preferences.
	People preferred their own family to the family of strangers.
	They preferred their own tribe to the tribe of strangers.
	Genetic proximity was like in the mid-range somewhere between your sister and, you know, some stranger.
	Genetic proximity was a value and that's the only reason we evolved and became who we are as a species.
	So that we have to recognize.
	That asking people to give up in-group preferences is a real challenge and it took the West a hell of a long time.
	to do it, and we need to keep encouraging other groups to give up in-group preferences, because if a multiplicity of groups come into the West and don't give up in-group preferences, and submit to more universal standards of truth and virtue and ethics and so on, it's not only not going to work, it's not going to work in a completely catastrophic manner.
	In a completely catastrophic manner.
	So how do you get people to change their ingrained or historical or perhaps even evolutionary beliefs?
	Well, with that little five-letter word we call truth.
	Truth.
	Human beings have objective properties.
	Human beings are subject to the non-aggression principle.
	Human beings have property rights.
	Self-ownership and owning the effects of your actions is foundational to all human beings.
	So we overcome cultural prejudice.
	And there are some cultures that align well with reality.
	And I can't think of a single culture that has no aspect that aligns well with reality.
	I can think of aspects of Judaic culture that align better with reality than Christian culture.
	I can think of aspects of Islamic culture that align far better with reality than this sort of postmodern, subjectivist, gynocentric, Western mishmash.
	So there, in every culture, I can find something of significant value.
	that aligns well with reality, but the fact that cultural beliefs align with reality does not make them philosophical.
	You know, a dog, so to speak, can catch a frisbee.
	That does not mean that the dog is a physicist and can calculate mathematically the angle, right?
	So we need to keep bringing reason and evidence, philosophy and the truth to people.
	And if we do that, we can get them to switch their allegiances to the truth, to philosophy, to reason, to evidence, to objectivity, to our common humanity!
	rather than this ingrained tribalistic in-group preference that is eventually going to set us at war against each other unless we can find a way to realign people's allegiances to philosophy rather than to tribalism.
	And that has been a huge central goal of everything I've been doing in the public square for the last decade and a half.
	So I hope that helps.
	All right.
	Our next question is an interesting one.
	I wonder if you've even had this one before.
	What are your thoughts on abortion?
	Oh, it's terrible.
	Oh, it's terrible.
	It's terrible.
	The real question is, is it terrible like murder, or is it terrible like just... Like, so, for instance, there was a question in the chat window, should prostitution be legalized?
	Yes, prostitution should be legalized.
	Drugs should be legalized.
	I have a bit of a problem, this is an Ann Coulter point, a bit of a problem legalizing drugs when there's a welfare state, because, you know, drug use should be minimized by the need to be productive, if at all possible.
	But taking drugs, while unwise, in my opinion, is not a violation of the non-aggression principle.
	You're not, I mean, assuming you don't steal the drugs or stab someone to get the drugs, right?
	So taking a drug, a hallucinogenic or whatever, taking a drug is not a violation of the non-aggression principle.
	Trading sex for money is pretty sorted as far as a transaction goes.
	It's bad for your soul.
	It's bad for your capacity to bond.
	It's bad for your capacity to love.
	But it's not a violation of the non-aggression principle.
	There may be, and there's significant arguments for this, there may be That these things like addiction and sex workers and so on, that it comes out are violations of the non-aggression principle.
	In other words, if a child is sexually abused, is it more likely that she's going to end up in this kind of field?
	I think it is.
	If a child is emotionally abused or physically abused, is he going to be more prone to looking for happiness in the bottom of a bottle or the bottom of a pill container?
	Yes, we know that for sure.
	And you can read Gabor Maté's In the Realm of hungry ghosts for more on this although his stuff on trump is wretched and and so remarkably lacking in self-knowledge is truly a force of nature but so you can say that things should be allowed Without thinking that they're any good for people.
	I don't think that taking drugs is good for people.
	I think, I know, from my experience at least, that addiction tends to freeze people in time.
	Like I just tweeted about this.
	If you start drinking at the age of 15 to excess, well, you don't grow because you're just dealing with everything through alcohol, which is to say you're not dealing with anything at all.
	And so you just end up becoming stagnant.
	You don't grow and you can be a 45 year old, 15 year old, so to speak.
	So the question with abortion is, Is it murder?
	And if you define human life biologically, then it is.
	It is murder.
	Now, the problem, of course, is that you can't punish the mother without punishing the child, right?
	I mean, well, I guess the child's already dead, but if the woman has children, and you say, well, the lives of children are very important, and then she gets an abortion, and you throw her in jail, then her children become motherless, and that's a problem, right?
	So in a sense, and this is always the problem with mothers to some degree, or fathers if they're single, fathers is that they always have built-in hostages, right?
	They all want to cut welfare.
	Oh, what about the kids?
	What about my children?
	They've got to eat.
	And it's like, you know, guys in 1939, they had businesses, they had jobs, they had careers, they had ambitions, and nobody said, well, who's going to deliver my widgets if I get drafted and go to war?
	It's like, suck it up, you get drafted, you go to war, you know, you've got to deal with it.
	It's the same thing, right?
	The women have to give up the welfare state in the way that men have to give up aggression, because it's just bad for society, but I'm not holding my breath, it's just what needs to happen.
	So I would say that we are going to have to find some way or another to bring people to greater rationality, to a deeper appreciation of what it is to be moral, to be rational, to be consistent.
	We have to find a way to do that, and if we can do that, All will be well.
	And if you can get involved in that program and help people come to philosophy, come to reason, things will be all the better.
	And if we can't find a way to do that, then we're going to have to learn.
	You know, there's only a couple of different ways to learn, right?
	You can learn by reason, you can learn by bitter experience, or you can learn by watching other people and their catastrophic failures.
	So I'll tell you my solutions to abortion in particular.
	So, It's not a woman's body.
	A fetus is not a woman.
	It's not just part of a woman's body.
	You know what's part of a woman's body is her spleen or her kidney.
	Now her spleen or her kidney don't pop out of her belly button, cry, get breastfed, Grow up, get hairy bits, get smelly, get resentful, and go off to college.
	You know, there's no spleen section of the cafeteria in high school, right?
	So it's not just the woman's body, because then how on earth do we differentiate between the fetus, which leaves her body and is supposed to, and the lung, which doesn't and isn't?
	So it is a human life, right?
	Now, a woman who's in a situation where she wants to have an abortion It's a pretty desperate situation.
	I have some sympathy, I have some concern, and the way that it should be dealt with is that she should be able to be financially compensated for giving birth to the baby.
	I hate to say e-baby, but there needs to be a market for babies.
	The market can solve just about every quote conceivable problem.
	So there are lots of, I mean, so there are women who have an excess of fertility, in other words they have more babies than they want, and there are women who have a deficiency of fertility.
	Ten percent of married couples can't conceive or have enormous difficulty conceiving and miscarriages are everywhere, littered with tiny graves all over women's hearts and everything.
	So clearly you have an excess of babies and you have a deficiency of babies.
	So how do you get the market to solve that?
	Well the market solves that by women saying, okay, or men, families saying, I'm gonna pay for your baby.
	Oh, it's terrible.
	It's selling human life.
	Okay, but it's better than the baby ending up as medical waste being hawked around by Planned Parenthood, right?
	It's better than the baby being sucked out, having its skull crushed with a forcep.
	It's better than a baby disappearing up some godforsaken Matrix-style vacuum tube into nothingness.
	It's better for the baby to be bought than to die.
	And so I think that we need to open up this kind of stuff and have the people who really, really care about the babies Go save those babies and you know how this would be handled in a free society is really quite complex.
	I mean I know for a fact that if families were more stable and people were in more pair bonded relationships we wouldn't really have to worry about abortion as much.
	Abortion generally of course occurs when a woman obviously doesn't want the baby.
	The question is why doesn't she want the baby?
	Well either she doesn't want to be a mother In which case, women have 18 different forms of birth control.
	The fact that she can't find a way to have sex without getting pregnant, I don't even know what to say about that.
	Or, she wants a baby, but just not yet.
	Well, I guess my question is, why the hell are Western women waiting so long to have babies?
	That's crazy!
	The average marriage age used to be in the low 20s, now it's in the mid to high 20s.
	And you've got 10-15% of people not having any relationships at all.
	I mean, we're heading for this Japanese style hollowing out of the entire society.
	Why don't women want to have babies?
	I mean, I wish I'd been a dad when I was younger.
	I mean, it's a little tough crawling through those little narrow tubes in the play centers.
	I mean, my daughter's kind of outgrowing that.
	Have babies when you're younger.
	If you have babies when you're younger, then you have less concern about abortion, less issue around abortion.
	So, I don't like it at all.
	I don't particularly think that the solution is to just make it illegal.
	I think that the solution with these kinds of issues, it's much more important to go to the root of the issue, which is why are women having kids so late?
	Why are families so unstable?
	Why is there so much promiscuity?
	And the promiscuity that peaked around my generation is really diminishing for the next generation and the generation after who really aren't having much sex at all.
	So there's a lot of causal issues that are very deep.
	Why do people get addicted to drugs?
	Because in general they've had abusive childhoods and they're not trying to be happy, they're just trying to not be unhappy.
	They're just trying to feel normal, not to get some giddiness.
	And so if we fix families, if we fix incentives, if we remind people, as I have countless times in my show, You know, if you get married and have kids in your early 20s, you know, by your mid to late 20s, you've got another 45 years, if you want, to go have a career.
	But if you start, go get educated, go have a career, then you try and settle down in your 30s, when there are fewer men around, and you're older, and you've hit the wall, and it's just a giant mess, like get married, have kids young!
	and that will solve a lot of these problems so because I'm not a statist I wouldn't say well it's just must be made illegal because I don't think laws laws end up just benefiting the powerful for the most part I mean look at the bailouts right but I would say that there's something fundamentally toxic in our society when half of the children of black women are aborted
	I mean, half of black women say that they have been molested by a black man before they turned 18.
	There's huge problems in the black community.
	It didn't used to be that bad, I don't think.
	I mean, in the 20s, the black marriage was stronger than the white marriage.
	So I don't like slapping laws on symptoms and saying, hey, look, we solved the problem.
	I think we need to look really, really deep into our society and the values that we're transmitting.
	and figure out if they're humanistic, if they are compassionate, if they, you know, I mean, how do we treat the young?
	And I won't do a whole rant on this because it could go for the next five hours, but how do we treat the young in our societies?
	Terribly.
	We treat them terribly.
	We dump them in daycares.
	We throw them in kindergartens.
	They're raised by indifferent people.
	Their parents are too busy.
	You know, I was talking the other day
	about how kids are going to bring mother's day cards to phone cases because that's all they see these days is the phone eclipsing their mother's face and they're going to bond more with over armor or otter or whatever builds these cases and not with people and we use them as collateral to borrow and we bury them in debt and we throw them in terrible schools because we don't want to confront problematic unions and I mean it the way we treat children is absolutely terrible in society and I think that
	The way we treat the fetus is just an extension of that, and we can slap more laws on it, but it's not going to deal with any of the fundamental issues that need to be solved and addressed.
	So I hope that helps, and let's do another question.
	All right, so next question.
	I'll rephrase this one a little bit, just for clarity.
	How does the influence of drugs affect one's ability to sexually consent?
	And what responsibility or culpability does that, you know, the inebriate state of one person place on another?
	Yeah well I mean that's um... I think that's all fairly well answered by drunk driving laws which is whatever you do when you're drunk you're responsible for and in fact it makes it worse right I mean because if you if you're just a bad driver and you drive over a garden gnome Sandra Bullock style then that's bad but if you're also drunk then you're even more punished so uh... drunk uh... drunk sexuality yeah there certainly is a point where consent becomes impossible to achieve in any meaningful way.
	But here's the problem, is that alcohol affects memory, alcohol affects judgment, alcohol affects perceptions.
	You have a hangover the next morning, you look over and, I sort of hate to put it this coarsely, but this is when I was working up north, there was a guy who referred to this as A wolf-lay!
	A wolf-lay, he would call it, although he didn't call it exactly that, but I think you get the idea.
	And the wolf-lay is, you know, you go to bed with someone, this could be a man or a woman, I suppose, and you wake up in the morning, the person is asleep on your arm, and you'd rather chew your own arm off rather than wake them up, because you just feel that bad about it.
	So, the whole problem with rape and consent and so on is, yeah, there's legitimate date rape, there's legitimate, obviously, criminal rape, of which date rape is as well, but
	If the woman has got bruises, and she's got the guy's skin under her fingernails, and physical injuries, and clearly, of course, fighting back and rape, if there's no sign of physical attack, physical assault, there's no witnesses, of course, as there generally isn't, and it becomes a he-said-she-said situation, well the problem is, of course, as you know, that
	To achieve a guilty verdict in a criminal plea, you need to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, which means you need to get to like 95% certainty.
	So proof beyond a reasonable doubt is required for purposes of rape.
	Now, of course, if the man physically attacks the woman, if there's DNA evidence, if there's semen and his skin is under her fingernails, you've got your proof beyond a reasonable doubt and the nasty, vicious man should go to jail for a long period of time.
	But if there's no physical evidence of coercion, it becomes a he-said-she-said.
	Which, to my knowledge, you can't even get to the preponderance of evidence, which is like 50 plus percent.
	It's like his word cancelled out her word, and there's no court.
	The court can't adjudicate, he said, she said stuff.
	That's why you have contracts, right?
	I mean, if I say, oh, you know, this guy lent me a thousand dollars, and he says, no, that guy never lent me a thousand dollars, the courts can't really, but if he signs something, then I have something I could take to the court that he signed.
	So court systems cannot work, cannot function, on two contradictory statements for which there is no underlying physical evidence.
	Just can't.
	I don't think that courts... So what do courts do?
	Well, courts generally just have to say, believe all women, right?
	Because, right?
	And that's not fair, that's not just, that's not right.
	Women can make false accusations and do.
	So I think that, you know, I mean, gosh, if you need to get drunk to have sex, you've got a lot of problems.
	If you need to, like, if you want to have sex with someone who's drunk or high, like, don't you want to be emotionally and physically and spiritually present for the situation and not kind of half out of your gourd and traveling the astral plane of Lucy in the sky with diamonds?
	That's not, I don't think that's good.
	I think that's dehumanizing.
	That's kind of using bodies like a Juergens and Kleenex.
	I don't like it when these situations come up.
	I don't know who's telling the truth.
	He says he didn't do it, she says he did do it, and there's no physical evidence.
	I just have to say, look, I'm sorry, this is terrible, but this is not a situation where a court of law can adjudicate anything, because a court of law can only work on proof, and contradictory statements are not proof, and we all know this, and I don't mean to trivialize the terrible crimes that can happen, but we all know the situation that when we're kids, right?
	When we're kids, some kid pushes us in the playground, and we fall, and we hurt ourself, and the teacher comes over and says, what happens, right?
	And we say to the teacher, that kid pushed me!
	And what does the other kid say?
	The other kid says, no it didn't!
	What can the teacher do?
	Well, if the teacher saw what was happening, that's one thing.
	But generally, the teacher doesn't.
	So what can the teacher do?
	Work it out amongst yourselves.
	Or, well, just play a part from each other.
	Or, like, they can't adjudicate that.
	At all.
	If you say, so-and-so stole my pencil, and then you find that pencil in so-and-so's pocket, then okay, there's some proof, whatever, right?
	But if you say, so-and-so stole my pencil, did you know?
	Then what?
	Then what?
	So society used, I mean society used to recognize, this is going back to the very earlier question, right?
	Society used to recognize this as a problem and that's why no sex before marriage was encouraged.
	That's why there were chaperones.
	And knowing all of this, society had very good built-in mechanisms to deal with this foundational issue.
	Now we have removed all of those Very sensible restrictions on sexuality that were enforced socially.
	Now we can't enforce anything socially because of the welfare state.
	The welfare state means that you can't ostracize people for bad behavior so they can do any garbage they want and you can't disapprove of them, right?
	I mean, so people can do whatever they want.
	The whole, the fact that human beings are ridiculously dependent when they're born, you know, the first year of life is called the fourth trimester.
	It's like all my greatest hits, right?
	But we are ridiculously dependent.
	I mean, orangutans take 10 years to get to adulthood.
	We take a quarter century for boys and close to, like, over 20 years for girls, and a quarter century for boys to reach brain maturity.
	That's 25 years until we reach brain maturity.
	That's crazy!
	And the massive dependence that babies have on parents was foundational as to why you don't have sex outside a marriage, and why you have chaperones, and why blah blah blah blah blah, right?
	So that when you have a child, you're in the confines of a marriage, and The child can be taken care of and all that kind of stuff, right?
	Now, we've gotten rid of all of that and now we have this crazy situation which is exactly what religious and social ethics in the past were designed to prevent.
	Which is, well, you can't be accused of date rape if you have a chaperone on your date.
	You can't be accused of date rape if you're never alone with the girl.
	Or, you know, as the old standard used to be, you have to keep the door to your dorm room open and at least two feet on the ground at all times.
	So we gave up on all of those old rules and now we're trying to jam these highly subjective and ambiguous situations through a court system which can't handle it and has to become unjust to pretend to handle it.
	So I hope that helps and let's do another question.
	All right, the next question comes from a user that's been a long-time fan of yours for multiple years.
	I call her mom, and mom asks, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants government-funded college education.
	Is government-funded education a feasible and or wise idea?
	Well, it's almost like if this person has listened to me for a while, Hi mom!
	Yeah, Mother's Day too!
	Then, yeah, there's no answer.
	So, it's not education.
	It's not education at all.
	It's not education.
	Here's a test, right?
	So, I mean, you go to any college campus and go to a philosophy department.
	Go to a philosophy class, right?
	And say, to the professor or to the students.
	What is truth?
	I can tell you what truth is.
	Truth is when the contents of your mind accord to reason and evidence.
	That's what truth is.
	Truth is the relationship between the concepts in your mind and that which is rational and objectively establishable.
	That's truth.
	Yeah, easy.
	Look at that, right?
	But you go to your average philosophy, and I did.
	I asked these questions.
	I had friends, a friend of mine who directed me in Macbeth was in philosophy.
	What is truth?
	Can't answer.
	I mean, you'll get a whole bunch of polysyllabic squid-brained garbage, but there's no answer to it.
	Truth is whatever works, right?
	Works for who?
	For what?
	In what context, right?
	If Nazism worked for Hitler, does that mean Nazism doesn't?
	You understand, right?
	Stalin liked communism.
	So, just not education.
	I mean, the whole point of philosophy is the truth, right?
	I mean, the purpose is virtue, but you have to have Things that are true in order to be virtuous, right?
	I mean, in order to have a just judgment in a trial, you have to know what is true, who's telling the truth, who's lying and what the evidence points to.
	So you can't have virtue without truth.
	Go to a political science department and go talk to even the upper years in political science and say to them, what is the definition of a state?
	What is the definition of a government?
	They won't know.
	Oh, a group that governs by the will of the governed... That's not... That's not... That's not... I mean, that's a condo board, for God's sake.
	What is the definition of the state?
	It's a group of people who have a legal monopoly on the initiation of the use of force.
	That's a state.
	They don't know that.
	They don't know.
	So, by the time they're in fourth year of university, or graduate school, or whatever, they've now been in school for 16 years.
	16 years!
	Thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of hours of instruction.
	They don't have the first clue about anything real in the world or true in the world.
	They have nothing.
	Nothing!
	Go to a psychology department and ask them what is the definition of mental health.
	They won't tell you.
	They can't tell you.
	Mental health is when you are functioning correctly in relation to reality.
	Which means that you're probably facing a lot of threat from the liebots and zombie heads around you.
	They don't know the simplest of things.
	I mean, you go to a doctor and ask him what health is and disease is, he'll have a pretty good idea.
	You can ask a kid what health is and disease is, they'll have a pretty good idea.
	But go to people who've been studying things for 16, 18, 20, or 25 years.
	They can't tell you anything elemental or essential about what they're studying at all. - Yeah.
	Go to somebody who has a graduate degree in English literature and ask them, what is art?
	What is it for?
	To make you happy!
	Like there's nothing else that fits that definition, right?
	So now, Ocasio-Cortez Or whoever runs her Twitter account.
	This idea that you need the government to educate you, I mean, it's ridiculous.
	I mean, we have the internet now.
	All the great college courses are online.
	I mean, this is crazy.
	You don't need the government to educate you.
	It's a massive scam.
	It's predatory upon the young.
	It's, oh, it's so, it's so vile.
	It's so vicious.
	It's so cruel.
	You sell people on the historical value of a college degree, which no longer exists.
	In the past, the top 10%, the cognitive elite used to go to college.
	Now, everybody goes to college.
	So in many places, more than 50% of the population goes to college.
	I think for men now, it's down to 40%.
	And in some Canadian universities, white men can't even apply for faculty positions.
	Great!
	White men built the colleges.
	Now they can't even get a job there.
	Oh, that's going to end so badly.
	So badly.
	But people can't stop.
	They can't stop.
	And boys can't think for themselves these ways.
	So in the past, college degree meant something.
	Now a college degree means you can get into college.
	And so anything where the supply increases, the value decreases in general, right?
	This is not supply creates its own demand.
	This is like you've got way more people.
	I mean, every organization is a pyramid.
	There's a lot of people at the bottom, some people in the middle, and a few people at the top.
	It's like Pareto Principle, right?
	Or Price's Law.
	I mean, the square root of any group of people produces half the value.
	Ten thousand people company, you've got a hundred people producing half the value.
	They're just gonna make more money!
	And it doesn't have much to do with the college education.
	IQ predicts success far more than college, because IQ to some degree includes college.
	You lie to these teenagers and you say, well, you've got to go to college and here, get $50,000 in debt, get $75,000 in debt for some garbage degree that hasn't even taught you how to think critically, let alone given you any practical skills in demand by any business in the known universe, except maybe some other garbage college that's there to indoctrinate and financially enslave innocent young children.
	It's wretched.
	It's absolutely abominable.
	But of course, Ocasio-Cortez and people like that love this system because you get to get people to pay for their own indoctrination.
	It's fantastic for bad people with bad ideas.
	So you get to lie to kids and then they will cough up money and go into debt in order to be indoctrinated in two leftist ideologies.
	I mean, if you're a leftist, getting people to pay for their own leftist indoctrination is about as sweet a gig as you could possibly come up with.
	Now, in a rational society it would go like this.
	Very clear.
	Very clear.
	I mean, there would be some people who would benefit from college and so on, but in a rational society it would go like this.
	You have some kind of education that would be completely different from what we have now, because there'd be people at home, there'd be more homeschooling, there'd be more local schools, and there would be... I mean, kids should go to work much younger.
	I mean, I got a job, my first job, when I was 10, and it was great, and, you know, all of that.
	So you'd have some kind of education.
	A lot of it would be just local underjob training, and, you know, kids would learn from their parents, and just by doing stuff together, and all of that, right?
	So that's how we evolved, and that's how it would work.
	But if you need somebody really, really smart, It's very simple.
	You just give them an IQ test from an organization that has no idea who they are, right?
	So you would eliminate any kind of bias, right?
	So you'd have an IQ test that would be taken and it would be marked or administered by someone who had no idea who you were.
	Whether you were black, white, hispanic, east asian, south asian, male, female, anything else.
	Completely blind to eliminate prejudice.
	Now with that IQ score, and maybe you'd need to do two, but you know, a couple hundred bucks each, it's way cheaper than college.
	With that IQ score, you would include that IQ score independently verified in any of your application for work.
	And then people would just train you on the job.
	Or if there was education that was required ahead of time, like obviously you don't want to train a surgeon on the job, unless it's, you know, starting with sushi, moving up to Fruit Ninja, and then disemboweling people with a spiky knife.
	If you needed education ahead of time, you would take that test, the IQ test, or whatever.
	It doesn't really matter whether it's a formal IQ test, anything that measures conceptual ability and pattern recognition as an intelligence test, and they all generally work about the same.
	You give people an IQ test, and if education is needed ahead of time, then the IQ test is shown to people, and it's, oh, he's really smart, or she's really smart, so let's educate that person.
	It's going to pay off.
	And then, in return for the education, you work for them for a certain amount of time.
	It's the way it used to work in the past, you know, oh, we'll, you know, we'll fund your graduate degree, but in return you've got to work for us for a couple of years, and if you decide to leave, that's fine, you just owe us the cost of the education or whatever, right?
	Now that would be fantastic!
	Can you think how much human capital is wasted and destroyed every single year by people ambling and drinking and drugging and screwing their way through college to get useless degrees to land up in debt.
	How many smart people are neutered by the fact that they become unmarriable, undateable and certainly un-having children to bull with because they're massively in debt.
	I mean it's an evisceration of some of the smarter people in society to have this whole college garbage going on.
	Because an IQ test is going to predict your success way better than college.
	It's way cheaper.
	It's way more effective.
	It's way more efficient.
	But people don't like blind IQ tests because it reveals IQ disparities between ethnicities and genders and so on, which I've talked about on this show before.
	College can be manipulated.
	An IQ test can't be.
	And for all the radical egalitarians, that's why they prefer it.
	So... No, it's terrible.
	College is a toxic environment.
	Absolutely toxic environment.
	I mean, particularly for whites these days, but for everyone.
	It teaches you resentment, it teaches you victimhood, it teaches you rage, it teaches you all the terrible things.
	I mean, jeez, I can't believe people call a podcast a cult.
	I mean, you don't want to talk about a cult.
	College is a very destructive cult.
	All right.
	Do a couple more.
	Are you guys enjoying this?
	I certainly am.
	So, yeah, let's do a couple more.
	Yeah, I'm loving it.
	I'm sure people are having a good time.
	Let's see.
	The next one comes from a regular user.
	He asks, do you support violating the non-aggression principle if you feel like you're in danger?
	I like how, I like it's like a regular user.
	Not a listener.
	He's like a user man.
	He uses.
	So, if you feel like you're in danger, now that's a very interesting question.
	So, what level of provocation is just in terms of a self-defense response?
	It's a very interesting question, right?
	So, if someone breaks into your house and you have a gun, yeah, you can shoot them.
	As far as, I mean, that to me would be just immoral and I think that's the way it works and I think you've got to stand your ground laws and so on, right?
	So, if someone breaks into your house You can shoot them, because you don't assume that they're in your house to rearrange your furniture in a way that they consider more aesthetically pleasing or that they're in your house because they want to check your dog for worms or, you know, they're in their house because they want to do you harm or steal your stuff or whatever, right?
	So, you know, have they directly harmed you?
	Well, they've harmed your property by breaking into your house.
	Have they harmed... No, I think so.
	You have a reasonable assumption of threat there.
	If some guy is running at you screaming he's gonna beat the hell out of you, well, he hasn't hit you yet, but, you know, I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that he's going to.
	And, you know, I mean, to take a sort of silly example, I have these conversations, I used to, I don't as much anymore, these conversations with my daughter, right?
	So she'd be, like, we'd be playing a game, maybe with a ball, and she'd be about to throw it at me, and I'd say, don't throw the ball at me!
	And she's like, I wasn't going to.
	And I would say, well, am I supposed to wait till you have thrown the ball at me and then tell you not to?
	It's preventive, right?
	I mean, so there are situations where You haven't been harmed yet but you're in direct threat and you can respond, right?
	I mean obviously the police officer doesn't wait until the guy shoots him in order to shoot back.
	The guy just has to have a gun and not obeying orders and not complying with commandments and so on.
	Now of course there are areas in which, let's say you've taken some drug that makes you paranoid, you know, like CNN, and you then believe that People are out to get you and so you go and whatever right?
	I mean so that's clearly not just and fair and there may be reasons of insanity why you get away with that.
	So there's some areas in which it's clear that you have reason to believe you're in imminent danger and therefore you can use self-defense.
	There are other areas in which you know you're paranoid or unstable and people weren't really threatening you, you just thought they were.
	And then there's stuff in the middle and The grey area... See, philosophy can say self-defense is justified and that there needs to be reasonable grounds for deploying the violence of self-defense in order to be justified.
	So it's a moral principle, right?
	Now you don't want to confuse physics with engineering, right?
	So physics is kind of pure, engineering is more practical and applied and has to deal with all the messy realities.
	It's like the difference between geometry and drawing things in the real world.
	You can draw a circle, it's never going to be a perfect circle the way you can define it in geometry.
	So philosophy and law, philosophy can tell you what is moral and what the law should handle, like a free market legal system, a common law system.
	But if you're going to say, how can philosophy adjudicate this individual situation?
	Yeah, that's not...
	It's sort of like physics can tell you the properties and behaviors of matter and energy, but physics can't necessarily tell you what's the best kind of bridge for this kind of canyon.
	Well, that's engineering, right?
	So you don't want to mix up the theoretical with the implemented.
	So philosophy can tell you, yes, self-defense is justified, and it has to be a reasonable level of threat in order for you to activate self-defense in a moral manner.
	But then you say, okay, what if this happens?
	And what if this happens?
	And what if this happens?
	It's like, but that's why we have...
	Justices and lawyers and law courts rather than just everyone brings their problems to a philosopher, right?
	The philosopher defines the principles.
	The actual implementation in each individual instance is more the matter of lawyers and courts and so on.
	So I hope that helps.
	And if you mix up the two, you're asking philosophy to do something that it just can't do, which is to adjudicate every single instance of a potential scenario.
	And that's the job of the courts, not the job of the philosopher.
	So I hope that helps.
	Let's do another.
	Alright, our next question is going to be in VC from Bryn.
	Bryn, are you ready?
	Yeah, I'm ready to go.
	Bryn it!
	Can you guys hear me?
	Yes.
	Alright, wonderful.
	So, my question will most be applicable to economics.
	I'm just wondering, from the outset, what sort of school of economics do you subscribe to?
	Well, I mean, freedom, free market economics is the way that I work theoretically.
	The most practical implementation would be Austrian School of Economics, so, you know, von Mises and Rothbard and so on.
	So, that would be my major approach.
	Okay, so with that in mind then, what I would like to question you on is that given Adam Smith's law of value, there's this predictive expectation that the marginal efficiency of capital will have a tendency to decline.
	And what's sort of interesting is that since 1948, the U.S.
	Department of Commerce has been tracking specifically the sort of stats we would need to calculate the marginal efficiency of capital.
	And what's really interesting is that... Okay, so just for those who don't know all the lingo, just break out marginal utility of capital for people.
	Let's not assume that everyone knows what you know.
	Sure.
	So the marginal efficiency of capital is that given some fixed costs, so it can be either a historic or a current cost, or let's just put it in like super basic terms just to say, you know, something that you you're able to rent out or some kind of factory that you're able to work or just something that you own or some type of cost that is going to provide some kind of production or some kind of value generation.
	And so given that those exist, there's a return on investment.
	So you could say, for example, like when you buy an investment or when you own property and you landlord it out, there's a return on investment.
	Now, what's sort of interesting is that given Adam Smith's law of theory, which was then, you know, further analyzed by Ricardo and then finally by Marx, in most people's eyes, there's this predictive expectation that it should trend downwards.
	And what's really interesting is... Sorry, do you mean sort of the idea, the argument that each additional entrance to a particular field is going to drive down profit margins and, you know, like the early bird gets the worm and so on, or is it different from that?
	No, just that across the market in general, if it were to be the case that you had some kind of capital, the return on investment is gonna be lower over a temporal space.
	So, you know, in 1948, the idea is gonna be that, you know, if I made an investment, I should see something like a 30% return on my investment, generally speaking.
	But if it were to fall, that, you know, maybe today that's just gonna be, on general, a 20% return on investment.
	And so this is sort of formalized by Keynes in the neoclassical period and what he calls the the following rate of the marginal theory of the marginal efficiency of capital.
	And what's interesting is there is an economist called Michael Roberts, who's gone and done all of the work for us.
	And if you ever at any point want me to start linking some of the empirical stuff I'm about to start talking about, just let me know.
	But since 1948, what we've seen is a 22 to 33 percent decrease in the rate of profit.
	However, at this time, there's also been an increase in the overall generation, or the GDP, or the sort of value creation of the market.
	So companies are producing more, but for some reason, their return on profits are lowering.
	And what's even more interesting beyond that is that there seems to be a stagnation in worker wages.
	And it seems to be the case, it seems to be a case that less and less people are being compensated for their work.
	But what's interesting, is that that was also a predictive expectation of Adam Smith and of Keynes and of Ricardo and of Marx.
	But what seems to be really interesting for the kind of Austrian economics that you're supposing is that if we follow this to its logical conclusion, that there's a tendency of the rate of profit to fall, that rate of profit is gonna tend towards zero.
	And so capitalism, by sort of virtue of this tendency, is eventually just gonna become necessarily unprofitable.
	But if that's the case- Well, hang on, okay, but how do you explain the 19th century when worker wages tripled or quadrupled in many places?
	Well, that would be due to industrialization of the entire world.
	And so what I would like Michael Roberts and other people I would be pointing to in a moment have sort of postulated and are able to postulate is that what happens is this sort of crisis tendency.
	So as there's a tendency towards this falling rate of profit, at some point, the capitalists have to expand their market.
	And so, for example, during that period, you had an expansion into urban sectors and also into rural sectors in the form of industrialization.
	And in the form of the development of intellectual developments and intellectual property rights.
	But at a certain point, those things have a tendency to trend downwards too.
	And in fact, if we, you know, look at this as a phasic thing, then there's been this case where, you know, from 1990 to 2015, there's also been, you know, a downward rate of profit.
	So it's not just like that I'm, you know, selecting, you know.
	Sorry, but what is the theory?
	What is the theory as to why there's this declining rate of profit?
	Well, the reason why there's a declining rate of profit...
	is because if it is the case that the law of value has to be described in labor-theoretic terms, as Adam Smith postulated, that the way that capitalists are going to be making money is with respect to taking a cut of the surplus value generation of labor.
	Okay, so, sorry, this is labor theory of value, this is basic Marxism, so just for those who don't know what this means... Well, no, this isn't Marxism, this is neoclassical economics.
	Well, no, but Marx would say that the capitalist profits by paying his workers less than the value of what they produce.
	Yeah, but so it's not just Marx who says that, right?
	So this starts with Adam Smith and Ricardo and then is formalized by people like Keynes and the Neoclassicals.
	Everyone, every business, hang on, every business has to pay its workers less than the value of what they produce, right?
	You can't profit otherwise.
	Just to be clear, I'm not giving you a Marxist analysis.
	I'm giving you a neoclassical analysis.
	All right, whatever we call it.
	Okay, so you pay your workers less than the value of their wages.
	Yeah, right.
	And so the problem is, if that's the case, over time what has to happen is you have to have an increased suppression of labor, or what we would sort of say in neoclassical economics is the power of labor gets broken down.
	Or we would call it wage suppression or wage deflation.
	So, you know, that's sort of just a trivial thing that's occurred, like, since the 1970s, there hasn't been any wage expansion, despite the expansion of value generation.
	Sure, but I mean, hang on, hang on, hang on.
	So, to me, these kinds of analyses over time are very specious, because they assume that the only variable that's changing is Capitalism or worker relations to the means of production or something like that.
	But, I mean, since the 1970s there's been a massive explosion of the welfare state, a wide variety of wars, massive printing of government money, ever-escalating national debt, diversity initiatives, forcing companies to hire people who may not be optimally productive.
	I mean, you name it!
	There have been massive government interferences in the productivity of capital.
	So saying this is somehow a problem of capitalism When the role of government has escalated enormously over the past 40 or 50 years, you're not comparing apples to apples anymore.
	Sorry, I think you're misunderstanding my objection.
	My objection isn't an extrinsic critique of capitalism.
	I'm not looking at capitalism maps onto the world.
	I'm just looking at capitalism only from an idealistic sense, like the Austrians would.
	And I'm just seeing what follows logically from their conclusions.
	So the problem is if capitalism is labor-theoretic, and I mean, idealistically, it certainly seems so.
	Sorry, I'm not sure what you mean by labor-theoretic.
	It just means that the equilibrium prices or the mechanisms by which goods on the market begin to become priced or that they normally revolve around are, with respect to the labor or the fixed capital costs of producing those things.
	And then supply and demand creates fluctuations around that norm.
	That hasn't really explained much to me, I apologize.
	If it's a little late and I'm not quite following you, please forgive me, but I'm not sure that it's explained much to me.
	Sorry, Brennan, if I could jump in real quick.
	Do you have a question?
	Yeah, I mean, I'm getting there.
	So the idea is, you know, given that there's going to be this falling rate of profit and that there's also things like, you know, we see wage stagnation, we see more and more people entering poverty per capita globally.
	No, no, no, but that's not what's happening now, right?
	I mean, poverty is decreasing around the world.
	Well, that's only true if you use the UN's line.
	So the UN's line is at $1.90, but what I would refer you to is Peter Edwards' work out of Third World Quarterly, where if you set the poverty line at just $2.70, More people have entered poverty than left it.
	So poverty is actually expanding globally.
	So it's only if you use this really low value from the 1970s that poverty has gone down.
	So if it's the case that this theory that I'm suggesting makes all these predictive expectations, and once we've analyzed them, And they seem to not be falsified.
	The theory is that this isn't good for capitalism.
	Capitalism is necessarily going to... Here's the thing.
	I don't care.
	And I hate to sound like I'm a moralist, right?
	And what that means is, I respect property rights, and I respect the non-initiation of the use of force.
	Now if being moral results in diminished profit returns over time for capitalist entrepreneurs, like, I don't care.
	That's sort of like saying, well, you know, productivity of cotton picking is going to go down if we get rid of slavery.
	It's like, I don't care.
	Slavery is immoral, and we have to respect property rights, and we have to respect freedom of trade, and we have to respect self-ownership, and we have to respect the non-initiation of force.
	So your arguments may be around, well, what's going to happen in the long run to this, that.
	I don't care.
	I care about what's moral and what's good.
	Well, getting to that.
	So if what I'm saying is true, and there's no reason to falsify it so far, it's mapped onto reality perfectly well.
	The conclusion of that is that capitalism will enter a crisis by which it cannot recover.
	And so the only ways to get out of that are to enter either into like a barbaric state, imagine, you know, Mad Max style, or like full anarcho-capitalism, where there really isn't what we take to be the notion of a society, so people are just sort of exploited, necessarily.
	Wait, wait, wait, hang on, hang on.
	Are you saying that people get exploited in anarcho-capitalism?
	Yeah.
	How?
	How do they get exploited in a system of free trade with no government?
	Well, so the problem is, is any work being done there, like if there's a sort of full societal collapse, and there's no profitability, then I don't really know what society's even going to look like at that point.
	Because there's not going to be any profit generation, so there's no way to... Wait, wait, no, hang on, hang on.
	No, no, hang on, hang on.
	There's no way to pay your workers back.
	Look, if the existing system of money and government doesn't sustain itself, that's not the same as society.
	Government is not society.
	Well, look, the problem is if there's no such thing as profitability, how are you supposed to pay your workers?
	Okay, we're not even close to dealing with the same reality here, because I'm talking about property rights and free trade, and now we're talking about there's no such thing as property, so I don't even know what we're talking about anymore.
	No such thing as profit.
	Sorry, if there's no capacity to profit, how are you supposed to pay your laborers?
	I don't know.
	What do you mean there's no capacity to profit?
	You mean in a free society, there's no such thing as property?
	There's no capacity for a return on investment in your work.
	So how are you supposed to pay your laborers?
	Yeah, I'm going to have to move on because I don't even know what we're talking about anymore.
	In a free society, you have property rights, you have the full right to engage in trade and business, you just don't have a government pointing guns at you and putting their thumb on the scale of justice all the time.
	So, you know, I don't know how society is not sustainable in its current form.
	We've got to look for something better.
	But let's move on to another question.
	Alright, so I don't want to assert myself too much on this, but I think it would be interesting to look at stagnating wages as opposed to compensation, because I know in the last four decades, compensation... Wait, are you the same guy?
	I'm the host.
	Sorry about that.
	You sound like the same guy to me.
	You white people all sound the same to me.
	So sorry, go ahead.
	No, I just wanted to throw in, I think it would be useful for anyone interested in that, look at compensation as opposed to wages, because wages 50 years ago were really the only way you compensated.
	Now, you know, you normally have health care and paid vacation, whereas that used to not be a thing.
	So I think if you look at, you know, wage stagnation versus compensation, you'd see a different story.
	Well, and there's another aspect as well, which I'm sure most people know about, which if you look at the silver content of a quarter in 1960s, it was worth over $20.
	And people got paid like 50 cents in the 1960s.
	And that would be the equivalent of being paid like $25 or $26 now.
	So the problem is it's not so much what's happened to the wages as what's happened to the currency.
	The currency has been ridiculously diluted and bled away and overprinted and over borrowed and over created and so the problem is not with wages.
	The problem is with the government's sort of secret hidden tax of inflation that is destroying the middle class because the poor are protected from inflation to a large degree by increases in the welfare state.
	The rich don't have to worry about as much but the middle class Really get eviscerated by inflation and all those on fixed incomes if they can't change So yeah, this whole thing about well capitalism and profits and this and that and the other Given how much can once the government controls the money supply and it controls interest rates.
	You just don't have a free market anymore That's that's what you most need the free market in so this when people try to analyze the free market by looking at the current system I I don't even know what to say.
	All right, let's move on to another one All right, so next question we have is from Jay.
	He asks, what do you think is the proper role of authority within society, particularly in regards to the individual, the family, and the state?
	Yeah, so there's a funny thing about people who hear anarchism, and I know the word has been largely polluted by people like Antifa and so on, who are not anarchists, as I would understand it.
	They're tyrants and want communism.
	There's an old saying, what does it come from?
	Bakunin, I think.
	And Bakunin said, people think that I reject authority, good heavens no!
	I respect the authority of the cobbler who makes my shoes.
	I respect the authority of the dentist who fixes my teeth.
	I respect, because that's voluntary authority, it's earned, and so on, right?
	So there's people, people listen to me, I think I have valuable and useful things to say, Why did they listen to me?
	I mean generally what I say is going to make their lives more difficult.
	I'm not granting any degrees and you know setting them at odds with their society in many ways and even their personal relationships if people take their values seriously enough.
	So authority is something that you earn through a consistent pattern of accuracy and value.
	You know, if your doctor accurately diagnoses your ailments and provides valuable remedies, or is good at helping you prevent getting sick, well, that doctor has authority.
	They don't have authority just because they went to medical school.
	I mean, there are people who go to medical school who aren't good doctors.
	So authority in a free society is earned by just being Correct in valuable ways to people over time right?
	If you think of an investment advisor who tells you pick this stock or that stock and it's mostly nonsense because of course if they knew so much about investment they'd invest themselves and be Warren Buffett it's mostly just pushing stocks from interested parties but If there is someone who gives you, you know, I mean, I look back over the course of what I've done and I've been right about an enormous amount of things.
	I said Jussie Smollett was going to walk.
	I said that Obama was going to be a disaster.
	I said Trump was going to get elected.
	You know, I said Brexit was going to happen, but it was probably going to fade away.
	I mean, there's lots of things that I've been really, really right.
	about and uh i said that uh you know in-group preferences were going to be a huge problem multiculturalism wasn't going to work as long as the leftists were race baiting and pushing us against each other all the time and i'm pretty good at getting things right because i'm working from first principles and it's not magic it's just philosophy So I have some authority with people because I talked about Bitcoin way back in the day and said it was going to go to thousands of dollars.
	And so I had a debate with Peter Schiff about gold versus Bitcoin many years ago, and Bitcoin now is going up again considerably.
	So I said Venezuela was going to fail, you know, all these things, right?
	I'm pretty good as far as my track record goes so that gives me some authority as long as I stay consistent to the principles that help me predict things accurately in the past.
	So that's where authority should come from.
	It shouldn't come from the state.
	It shouldn't come from the barrel of a gun.
	It shouldn't come from history.
	It shouldn't come from momentum.
	It shouldn't come from superstition.
	It should come from accurate and valuable predictions and preventions of problems.
	So that is how the free market would deal with authority and Anything else that substitutes itself with that is usually being proposed by people who want the value of authority without the challenge of actually being right about things.
	So I hope that helps.
	All right.
	So I just want to say before we go on the next question, we really appreciate you being here.
	I know we're actually over a lot of time.
	We can go as long as you want to.
	Let's do another 15 minutes or so.
	That'd be excellent.
	Okay, I also want to ask anyone, you know, we've linked Stefan's website.
	If you want to go ahead and check it out, read some of his book, I'm sure you guys would enjoy them.
	So next question we have is from the user Wicked.
	Wicked asks, if in theory a state could be formed where every individual had to agree to a social contract or leave the collective, Would this be a morally acceptable form of statism?
	So I think this question is kind of like imagine if there was an island where if in order to immigrate there, you had to first agree to the social contract.
	Well, no, it would not be moral.
	Because the question is, what does it what does it mean by have to?
	So you could Okay, so let me sort of give examples where this could be valid, right?
	So if you rent An apartment, you have a conditional ownership of that apartment, assuming that you abide by certain restrictions, right?
	You may even have in your neighborhood, you can't paint your garage the color of the Greek flag, by big fat Greek wedding style or whatever it is, right?
	So there may be certain standards within a particular community.
	No excessive noise, whatever, right?
	Maybe you can't run Raves out of your garage or whatever it is, right?
	You can't maybe not even allowed to run a business in your home There could be condo restrictions and boards and that kind of stuff how that works in a free market I don't know a lot of that stuff is to do with preventing lawsuits and lawsuits are just insane In what is it in America 15 million lawsuits launched every year and I was watching my the world's worst tenants and so on It's always like well if this could get sued right so there is this trigger-happy launch lawsuits against rich people to get money kind of stuff that is the source of a lot of these rules and that would not be the case in a free society.
	In a free society I think if you take a run at someone with a lawsuit and you lose you pay what you were trying to get from them and all their legal costs and all that so it would limit people to only those who had a really good case.
	So I think you could come up with conditional restrictions like if you wanted a community where there were no guns then you could of course build a community And then you could not sell but lease houses to people on a 99-year lease or something like that, like Hong Kong style.
	You could lease the houses to people and in the conditions of the lease is that you can't have a gun in the house, right?
	So if you want a gun-free zone you can have a gun-free zone and then what will happen is 12 minutes later people will come and rob everyone knowing that there are no guns in the house and then they'll change that, right?
	But although in a free society there'd be far fewer thieves because there'd be far less child abuse.
	It's the only way to get a free society is to have far less child abuse.
	So you could have those kinds of things.
	I guess you could buy an entire island and say everyone here has to agree to X, Y, and Z. I guess you could do something like that.
	But, you know, an entire geographical region?
	Nah.
	You couldn't own all of America.
	You couldn't own all of Japan or something like that.
	So in those situations you could have competing experiments of different styles and societies, I suppose, and then people could just vote with their feet.
	But it would have to be based upon property rights, not on some kind of social contract.
	Because a social contract is contradictory by nature.
	Because the social contract, and I've actually got a video I did years ago called The Social Contract Defined and Destroyed in Five Minutes.
	I actually have a countdown to it.
	So you can have a look at that, but the basic argument is the social contract is one way.
	The social contract says this group can impose taxes on that group.
	Well, if it's universal, then everyone has the right to impose a social contract.
	So you tax me $10,000.
	No, I tax you $20,000.
	No, I tax you $30,000.
	If everyone has the right to impose social contracts, it doesn't work.
	You can't have collective rights and you can't have contradictory rights.
	So if it's a locally owned property that's developed and it's clear in the lease, that's fine, but you couldn't do it for a whole country, at least not morally.
	All right, let's do one or two more.
	All right, so next one comes from Nomad.
	Nomad writes, Stefan, I'm going to be a father soon and I wanted to know how your feelings changed about fatherhood after your daughter was Oh, that's well, congratulations.
	That is wonderful, Nomad.
	I'm thrilled and it is going to be an amazing, amazing thing for you to go through, particularly, of course, if you listen to my show and peaceful parenting and negotiations and all of that.
	You know, it's funny, I've never shared this before, but I'll say this now.
	One of the reasons that, I don't think it changes, I've thought about this extensively, I don't think it's changed any of the arguments.
	I had a tough time becoming a dad.
	I won't get into all of the details about it, but I had a tough time, not emotionally, just becoming a father.
	And have you ever had it where there's some girl that you really, really like, some woman you just, you like and you know you'd be great for her, but she's just dating someone who's terrible and you know it's wrong for her and you know you'd be the great guy for her, but she just, you know, it's frustrating, right?
	You're like, ugh, stop crying on my shoulder and be with me instead, right?
	So when I was having trouble becoming a father, I was hearing all these stories of people who were terrible parents.
	They had terrible parents and so on.
	It's like, ah, you know, I know I'd be such a great dad.
	It's just taking a while.
	It's frustrating.
	And so when my wife became pregnant, I was thrilled from the very beginning.
	I was very excited.
	And, you know, I read stories to the bump.
	My daughter, I didn't know she was a daughter until she was born.
	And I bonded.
	I have loved her deeply since she came to be and it's I mean it's an incredibly beautiful and honorable and honoring relationship to be in and I'm intensely and acutely aware of my need to provide value and quality to her who did not choose to be with me.
	So the way that I parent, as I've talked about before, is I parent in a way that if my child could choose any father in the world she would still choose me.
	That's because she didn't choose me, so I have to act as if she could, and that's the best way to continue to provide value and quality to her as a human being.
	It didn't really change before and after, except there were a few things that were certainly surprising to me.
	I was surprised at how early you could start reasoning with kids, like two, two and a half, you know, she's, you know, she's smart, obviously.
	Right.
	But two, two and a half, she could do some great stuff when it came to, to reasoning.
	And, and she now is because she's getting into sort of the punchy preteen years.
	Uh, uh, she's really feisty with her arguments and, oh yeah, well, you know, I, I think it's delightful and I, I appreciate it and love the fact that she's doing all that stuff.
	So, yeah, I mean, because I was treated as, you know, we treat children like they're dangerously insane.
	You know, they've got to be contained and controlled and, you know, drugged.
	And no, no, like these bombs we've got to defuse into banality over the course of raising them.
	And that's not the case.
	So spend as much time as you can and always make sure that your child knows how much you enjoy his or her company.
	Reason with her and roll with the punches when she or he gets punchy with you.
	Because especially if you're going to raise your child independently, they need to go out into the world.
	They need to be pretty strong.
	And so don't do anything to diminish their power, their sense of power and the authority that develops in them.
	There are things that my daughter knows better than I do.
	I mean, if you've seen me in the Minecraft shows, you'll understand exactly what I'm talking about.
	So those would be sort of the major things.
	I mean, I can't even tell you.
	You'll see as you go along and you'll feel as you go along.
	It's the most beautiful thing in the world.
	And people who harm children feel about as alien to me as can be imagined.
	They're like silicon-based robots from Betelgeuse.
	All right.
	One more.
	Let's do two more.
	Let's do two more.
	All right.
	I really enjoyed that show, by the way.
	The seamless transition between, you know, mining wood from trees to a point about... Yeah, yeah.
	So, next question, before we wrap up here, a user wanted to know if you could tell us a little bit about your latest book, Universally Preferable Behavior, Irrational Proof of Secular Ethics.
	Well, the first thing I can tell you is it's not my latest book.
	I actually wrote it in 2008, I think it was.
	So it's, well, it's older than my daughter.
	So if you want a good introduction to universally preferable behavior, you can check out my book.
	It's available for free on YouTube and in audio form at essentialphilosophy.com.
	That's essentialphilosophy.com.
	You can also get a Kindle for, I made it as cheap as I possibly could to get more people into it.
	So you can get it there.
	Universally preferable behavior.
	is based upon the idea that you can't advocate for a moral system that promotes anything like theft, rape, assault and murder.
	For the reason being that these things cannot be universally preferable.
	You cannot have stealing as universally preferable behavior.
	Because if stealing is universally preferable behavior, then everybody wants to steal and be stolen from.
	But if you want to be stolen from, it's no longer theft.
	If I give you five dollars, I want you to take the five dollars.
	I can't then say you stole it from me.
	So the only way that a moral system can work, or the only way that universally preferable behavior can work, is if we ban rape, theft, assault, and murder.
	You can't have rape as universally preferable behavior, because rape, if it is universally preferable behavior, then everybody wants to rape and be raped, which is impossible, because if you want to be raped, it's called lovemaking.
	Maybe kinky lovemaking, but it's still lovemaking.
	So that's sort of the basic argument.
	And then you could say, well, why should we care about universally preferable behavior at all?
	Well, that's the question.
	That it's based upon universally preferable behavior, that we should have good reasons for what we say, and they should be universal, and so on, right?
	So, it's a great theory of ethics.
	It solves the major problems, solves property rights, it solves rape, theft, assault, murder, which are the four big crimes that need to be dealt with in any ethical system.
	It stood the test of time.
	People have taken countless runs at it.
	Rationality Rules did some videos about it.
	I did two rebuttals to those.
	David Gordon did some.
	There's other people on the internet who've taken runs at it, and I've had countless debates with people on my show.
	And nobody can overturn it.
	This is solid and it is the basis of a fantastic rational system of ethics.
	That requires society to change quite a bit, but so what?
	So did the round earth and relativity.
	So I hope that helps.
	But yeah, so you can check out the books for free at freedomainradio.com forward slash free.
	You can get the audio on YouTube.
	It's also available in audio format.
	You can get a print format, Kindle format for free, audio format, you name it, HTML, and you should read it.
	It's a great book.
	And if you want a more brief introduction, it's the last part of Essential Philosophy, which came out just this year.
	Was it this year?
	Yeah.
	Somewhat recently.
	And also pick up The Art of the Argument.
	It's a great book at theartoftheargument.com.
	All right.
	So last question is from Bubbles and she's going to ask it in VC.
	Well, first off, I want to thank you so much for sharing your wisdom on our server.
	A lot of us have put a lot of work into getting a group of people with different ideas and You know, everything you speak for is, it touches my heart because it's the same message that I try pushing, um, when, you know, trying to build this community up.
	So my question to you is I watched your freedom of speech video the other night and I'm not a big YouTuber.
	I'm older.
	My kids are older, so I've never followed anybody.
	So honestly, I didn't know who you are, but we agree on so much.
	It's, it's phenomenal.
	So my question is moving forward on a platform like this, Will you explain why you think communication and discourse is important to our community?
	That's a great question.
	Thank you for your very kind words.
	It's inspiring to me to hear such a positive response to philosophy.
	Thank you so much.
	I appreciate that.
	So we have to make decisions individually, collectively, and there's only two ways to make decisions.
	We reason with each other or we force each other.
	That's it.
	There's no third mystery.
	There's nothing behind the door.
	There's no third door.
	It's reason with each other or we aggress against each other.
	Now that aggression can be emotional bullying.
	It can be escalation, but generally it involves running to the government and getting the government to force people to do things that they don't want to do or to prevent them from doing what they do want to do, which is wrong.
	You shouldn't use force against people.
	And so when I say, you know, we have to have free speech, we have to have a conversation, it's for a wide variety of reasons – First of all, if we get rid of free speech, we're going to end up in a civil war.
	And I'm not, this is not hyperbole, this is not hysteria, this is a simple historical fact.
	If we lose free speech, we will end up in a civil war.
	The left and the right have become so bifurcated, and Tim Poole did a great tweet about this that really stuck with me, where he looked at the left and right belief spectrum in the early nineties versus now, And the right hasn't moved very much, but the left has gone crazy to the left.
	So it's not so much that people say, like, I didn't leave the left, the left left me, so to speak.
	And this increasing gap is going to end up in civil war.
	And I'm not, again, this is not hyperbole, this is a simple fact.
	It's going to end up in civil war.
	What we need to do is we need to reach Conclusions and reality and rationality based upon discussions, based upon conversation, based upon reasoning with each other.
	And we all have to submit to an external authority.
	Now that external authority used to be the Bible, it used to be God, it used to be the civic enforcement of particular social norms.
	All of those have largely vanished from the West.
	So we're left with what?
	We're left with either escalating hysterical conflict, I mean we basically saw under the Mueller probe an attempted coup against a legally and legitimately elected president of the United States.
	That is a massive escalation in American hysteria and it is absolutely appalling that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton seem to have known and approved of and driven This Steele dossier and this spying and I mean it's absolutely appalling this witch hunt that went against Trump associates and Trump.
	I mean it's a massive, massive escalation in tensions and illegality and hysteria and the legal transfer of power Came very close to not actually occurring and there being a legal coup by the deep state against a legitimately elected US president is absolutely appalling and should have everybody freaking out about how dangerous this is going to be.
	So either we get to reason with each other or we're going to end up shooting at each other.
	Because that's all there is.
	We have to make decisions.
	We have to allocate our scarce resources in society.
	And we're either going to allow people to allocate resources in a fair, legitimate and peaceful way, or we're going to grab the gun of the state and we're going to go right back to several hundred years of religious warfare that characterized the birth of the modern world, at least in Western Europe.
	Because this kind of goes back to a little bit before most of the history that we look at.
	Most of the history we look at kind of stops at the Industrial Revolution.
	Before that there was the Agricultural Revolution.
	Before that was in general several hundred years of religious warfare.
	Because when Martin Luther 1.0 nailed his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg and began to question the unity of Christendom under the Catholic Church You had a massive splintering of Christendom into warring sects, literally warring sects, and every group was trying to get control of the state in order to impose its version of Christianity on every other group and this caused
	Staggering amounts of religious conflict, because there was no way to mediate that, because it was religion, not philosophy.
	And religion, you either have a monotheism, or you have massive amounts of conflict.
	We can see this with the Sunni and the Shiites, with the Protestants and the Catholics in In Ireland, you can see this with some of the multicultural disasters that are occurring in the West.
	If we have people committed to an ideology that does not submit to rationality, it's like pushing two pieces of a carpet together or two pieces of a paper.
	They can't blend.
	One of them just has to go on top and one of them has to submit.
	So, if we don't have the capacity to do two things, one, reason with each other, and two, submit to rational arguments.
	If somebody has an argument that has reasons better, has better evidence, and, you know, just submit.
	You're not submitting to them, you're submitting to reason.
	Now, they may do a little victory dance, but who cares?
	That's just petty and stupid, it doesn't matter.
	But scientists don't lose by saying Einsteinian physics are better, more accurate than Newtonian physics.
	They don't lose.
	They gain, because it is more accurate, it is more valid, it is more true.
	So if we lose the capacity to speak and all of those who wish to use violence are suppressing free speech.
	If you want to know if somebody is really into violence all you need to ask them is what do you think of hate speech?
	I'm telling you if somebody is like oh yeah no hate speech is totally a thing and we should de-platform and shut down people who use hate speech, that person is committed to violence, whether consciously or unconsciously, because that is the inevitable result of us no longer being able to reason with each other, is we will be at each other's throats with sticks and stones and bullets and bombs and anything else that you can imagine.
	And we don't want that.
	There are some people who think they want that.
	Oh, like, let go punch Nazis and stuff like that.
	It's like, yeah, Nazis are, it's a terrible ideology and, and it's an inconsequential ideology in the West.
	The real danger is the tens of thousands of outright Marxists in Western universities.
	Those are, if you had tens of thousands of outright Nazis in Western universities, I'd be like, yeah, that's a big freaking problem.
	We better do something about that.
	I'm not saying punch him, but that's not good.
	But Nazism is a specter invented by leftists to take Your eye off the real problem, which is leftist subversion and Marxist subversion of Western social norms, which historically are very anti-communist in general.
	So, yeah, the people who are pushing for restrictions on speech, the people who push for deplatforming, the people who push for shutting down of speeches, which has happened to me repeatedly, and the people who push for the silencing of arguments that they don't like.
	They are ratcheting up the violence.
	Now the sad thing is, of course, a lot of the people who are pushing for this kind of restrictions, they're never going to end up in the fight.
	They're never going to end up in the fight.
	It's other people who get drafted who end up in the fight and that's really terrible.
	If you silence people because you're a hysteric yourself and then other people have to pick up and fight the fight that you have provoked, that's really wretched.
	And I would say if there ever is anything like that, the first people should be drafted are all those who were against free speech.
	But hopefully with this conversation with all of the other good people in the world working for peace reason and harmony among us all will never ever come to that but i'm not confident that will never come to it to the point where i want to shut my face yet so thanks everyone so much for a wonderful evening thank you massive Thanks to the mods who set all this up and wrangled this great conversation.
	I'll obviously give them the last word.
	My name is Stephan Molyneux, freedomainradio.com.
	You can follow me on youtube.com forward slash freedomainradio, although it's a little tricky to find my videos these days, at least since late January, but you can get me at fdrpodcast.com.
	You can sign up for the podcast, which you're not suppressed.
	If you like the show and find what I do valuable, please, please help out at freedomainradio.com forward slash donate.
	Thanks again for a great conversation.
	Love you guys so much.
	And I'll turn it back to the mods.
	All right.
	Thank you so much for coming on.
	We really, really do appreciate it.
	All right.
	Thanks guys.
	Have a great night.

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