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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:30:25

In Which I Admit Fault And Promise to Improve...

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	Well, hello everybody. It's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
	It is the 20th of the 1st of the 13th, according to the ORC calendar, so I hope that you're all having a wonderful, wonderful week.
	Hello out there to my Facebook friends.
	It's always great to hear from you, and I don't know that you can really call yourself free if you're not free of that kind of reactive rage when I simply state that I'm sad about a $2 donation.
	I mean, that's all. It's amazing.
	It's really fascinating to see that, like I posted this thing on Facebook yesterday as I got a $2 donation and I posted something which says, I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but basically I got a $2 donation and I put a little unhappy face.
	Well, I wasn't too happy at a $2 donation, that's all.
	And then, wow, I mean, it really is fascinating to see the A really amazing amount of projection that goes on from that where people are, you know, he's scorning a listener.
	He's ungrateful. He's ungrateful.
	You know, just astounding to see like a simple communication of an emotional state gets spun into just an enormous amount of bomb in the brain stuff from childhood.
	I mean, obviously from childhood, right?
	And, oh, that post was a mistake.
	He never should have said that.
	It's going to cost him dearly and so on.
	It's like, I don't think that an honest expression of my experience of a particular interaction can be reasonably viewed as a strategy.
	I mean, I was just sharing.
	I mean, I get these 50-cent donations and, of course, since then, some extremely...
	Funny Oscar Wilde types have sent me two-cent donations and so on.
	I've been getting them for a long time, for years and years, and I've never said anything, but it just bugged me yesterday, and I was sad about it, and I just shared that.
	But it really is fascinating to see the amount of volatility that's in this community, which is, of course, supposed to be against the non-aggression principle.
	I certainly wasn't abusing anyone.
	I wasn't saying anyone was bad, or I was just saying I felt sad about that.
	It's a small donation, right? Because PayPal takes like 20% of it and then it does have to be part of my bookkeeping and it ends up costing me more and all that.
	But it really is fascinating to see just what happens when someone is vulnerable.
	I guess vulnerability on the internet is like blood in the water for sharks.
	But that's actually kind of an insult to sharks.
	As far as I've read, sharks don't actually have I think we may have a few openings now, so I will try to get to that in the next couple of days.
	It may be a good opportunity to see I don't know where the criterion of friendship is being upheld or not, but it really is...
	And I do feel it is very sad.
	It is very sad to not be free of that kind of reactive rage.
	I mean, to see that in people, it's very sad.
	I mean, it's like watching someone stumble over something on the road and then stand in the corner for 20 minutes punching themselves in the face.
	It's an ugly spectacle because you see people self-injure so much.
	And I've said this before.
	I mean, this is the very tragic thing about people's inability or unwillingness to intercept their base of the brain flight or fight stimuli.
	You know, like when you have an impulse, you have about a quarter of a second to intercept it before you start typing.
	And that interception is really the essence of civilization.
	It is the essence of maturity.
	It is the essence of wisdom.
	It is the essence of self-knowledge and therefore it is the essence of philosophy.
	If all of our instincts were perfectly on and right and good, then we wouldn't need philosophy in the same way that if we only ever wanted philosophy, To eat that which was nutritious and beneficial to us in the moment, we wouldn't need nutrition.
	If we wanted to exercise rather than sit on the couch, eat potato chips and watch reality television, then we wouldn't need trainers or gyms or weights or anything like that.
	I guess we'd need the weights. And so it is so important.
	Freedom really, in its essence, is freedom...
	From destructive impulses.
	And to free yourself from destructive impulses.
	And by that, I fundamentally mean self-destructive impulses.
	You need to look at your own history.
	You need to look at your own thoughts.
	You need to look at what goes on in your brain.
	And you need to reference your behavior according to principles.
	And so if you end up abusing someone who's not being abusive, that's not good.
	I mean, then you're the abuser, right?
	You're the verbal abuser and, of course, I'm not.
	I'm simply expressing a feeling.
	And it really is truly tragic because I suppose the idea is, oh, I launch hostile things at Steph and that'll teach him, learn him a lesson or whatever it is.
	This is all just a cage that you put yourselves in.
	And that's, I mean, genuinely mean that it's truly tragic to see.
	Now you've done a public wrong and crazy injustice, and of course you've made our community look insane, right?
	I mean, just hysterical and immature and bullying and all of that, and in a very sort of public way, which is not exactly great for the movement, in my opinion.
	But I mean, the movement be damned.
	That's not the important thing.
	But it's harmful to yourself.
	It doesn't harm me. Everybody off and on tries to throw these cages on me or other people who are free.
	The cages are just in your mind.
	The damage is just in your mind and the damage is just to yourself.
	Because what you've done when you erupt in rage and type out some snarling, vicious missive on the internet or wherever...
	What you've done is you've trained yourself in brutality.
	You've trained yourself in abuse.
	You've trained yourself in hysterical aggression.
	And that moves you further away from the capacity for peace, for happiness, for negotiation, for love, for joy, for self-respect.
	And I know, I know that nobody is born that way.
	I know that nobody's born that way.
	My daughter doesn't have a retaliatory bone in her body.
	I know that nobody's born that way.
	I know that people are made that way.
	And I know how they're made that way.
	All that you're showing me is what your childhood was like.
	And for that, I really do have immense, immense sympathy.
	It's a terrible thing to see these parental alters or these authority alter egos come out.
	It's like a replay of the scene in Oliver Twist where Oliver goes up to the prefect of the orphanage that he's in.
	Please, sir, can I have some more?
	You know, innocently asking or expressing a preference or a wish or a desire.
	And then, you know, all the fires in hell rain down on him.
	And this is what anybody with any wise eyes sees occurring.
	The helplessness in the face of a brutalized history.
	That's not freedom, my friends.
	That's not freedom. And every time you indulge in that behavior, you move further from the light and more towards the darkness.
	I mean, you understand that you are probably against censorship in the abstract, but if somebody says something that you disapprove of or makes you angry or more likely expresses a vulnerability that you feel gives you power, You are recreating a kind of censorship within a community.
	And I think that's a very tragic thing to do.
	And it means that it's not clear to you what virtue, integrity and freedom mean.
	So I just wanted to point that out.
	How sad that is how every time this behavior is indulged in, the people who do it end up just putting another lock on the door of their own cages and making sure that those cages get a little smaller, a little tighter, a little more uncomfortable.
	And everything you do greases the slide of repetition for the next time you do it.
	Right? Right? Every lever you pull gets looser.
	Every lever you don't pull gets stiffer.
	And every time you indulge in this behavior, and it is a self-indulgence, and every time you indulge in this behavior, not only, of course, are you acting out the very thing that hurt you the most when you were younger, but after a while, you are pretty much guaranteeing that you'll never be able to open that cage again and get out and have free Equal, peaceful, and reasonable words with people.
	And if you're young, and I would suspect that a good number of the people who type this kind of stuff are young, if you're young, oh my goodness, my friends, I will tell you, I have seen where it leads.
	I have seen where this behavior leads.
	I wish I could show you, you know, like something I read about when I was a kid.
	Sorry, something I read about when I was a kid, which was the Scared Straight program where they took sort of young potential criminals and took them to the prison to see what it was really like and so on.
	But I wish I could take you over the desert to see where you're going so that you could see where you would end up at a time when it's too late to turn back.
	Life, change, growth, self-knowledge, wisdom, virtue, love.
	These are not... Fruits that stay with you, fresh, wherever you go.
	You water these plants, or they die.
	You engage in better behavior, or soon bad behavior is all, literally all you are capable of.
	And I would really like to warn you away from that path.
	I really would. But this is a great opportunity.
	What a fantastic opportunity.
	Because normally, of course, this stuff just escalates into, fuck you, no fuck you, and Everybody just drags their chains and sails off with them, feeling like they're as free as a bird in the night sky.
	But it can be different, right?
	I mean, it can be something that can be learned from this time.
	It can be different. You can see an opportunity.
	You can see a possibility of change.
	You can see a possibility of not letting history win.
	And thus having a different future.
	Anyway, I just wanted to mention that And, uh, let's, um, let's move on with the show.
	Thank you so much, James, as always, for, uh, for going, uh, synagogue to come in to, uh, do the show.
	And, uh, let's move on.
	The very, very good show.
	Uh, good. How you doing?
	Good. Good.
	Um, I actually want to talk a little bit more about the donation to Red Day.
	Yes, please do. Um, I was curious.
	I'm sure you did see the person who claimed to be the actual donator.
	And obviously, I don't know if that's him or not.
	Maybe you have a better beat on that because you may have seen the real person's name.
	But I'm curious what you thought about his response.
	I did see that somebody posted something about it.
	And I think somebody posted it in the chat room.
	Let me just see if I can go and find it.
	You don't have it handy, do you?
	Oh, yeah. So I'm a single father on a budget, have my soon-to-be six-year-olds about 60% of the time and don't have a lot of disposable income.
	I caught a video on YouTube, found it informative, visited the website, read the spiel, figured I'd give a couple of bucks, figured I'd do that continually as I'm able, and this is what I see afterwards.
	I'm very, very disappointed.
	Anyway, I shouldn't have to explain myself to anyone who hasn't taken the time to even consider what my situation might be, and those future donations don't count on seeing any more from me.
	Yeah, so, and your question was?
	My question was sort of, you know, I think it's possible sort of, his story is obviously kind of specific, and he ended up being kind of snarky at the end anyway, but I do wonder,
	I mean, it's possible that people could come in for a first time, you know, have seen like one video on YouTube, and end up on the donation page, and they're like, oh, I watched a video, like, I'll pitch in some, you know, a few bucks here, and like, they sort of Could wander in as a complete newbie and not really understand how much value there is.
	And so I think it's possible that someone who is actually genuinely well-meaning and could become a more active listener could have this happen to them basically.
	Like they could end up being this person. And obviously they are not individually responsible for the fact that Hardly anybody donates, and the people who do donate sometimes don't donate very much.
	So I was curious about why...
	Well, you absolutely see, but this is the interesting thing.
	I mean, it's one of the many interesting things, is that may all be true.
	That may all be true.
	It still doesn't change the fact that I was sad about a $2 donation.
	Yes, of course, of course.
	People think that because I posted...
	A colon and an open bracket that they then can jump to – I don't mean you, right?
	But they can jump to all of these conclusions about what I was saying.
	I was spitting on somebody who's – what if it's his last $2 people were posting on that thread?
	It's like, come on. Guy's got PayPal.
	Guy's got a problem.
	I mean almost certainly he has a visa.
	He has a computer.
	He has internet access. He has a keyboard.
	He has clothes. He has heat, which is not to say – I mean I actually used to refund these donations because I would basically say, look, if you're this broke, I mean please, I feel bad about taking a buck or two bucks from you if this is where you are financially.
	But then people started posting on Facebook that I was spurning their donations and whatever it was.
	Apparently, a dollar isn't good enough for me or whatever.
	They got really upset, so I stopped – Doing that because I actually felt – I mean if the guy is – like if this is his last $2, please don't give it to me.
	Buy something for your kid.
	Save it for a rainy nanosecond or something like that.
	Like if you're that broke, then don't do it.
	So anyway, that's sort of my thought about it.
	I mean, you addressed all the other things that I was thinking of.
	I mean, I was originally called about it because I was really curious about your emotional reaction to the reactions, and you basically hit all of the points that I was thinking of in terms of it being obviously completely okay for you to express your emotions and everyone just being way crazy about that.
	I guess it's somewhat inevitable, but...
	To be fair, the people who have donated weren't – like I didn't get anyone who said, I've donated whatever and Steph's an asshole, whatever.
	The people who donated were – some of them didn't like the post or whatever.
	I think that more so they didn't like the reaction on the post.
	But all the people who were getting so hysterically angry seemed to be people who hadn't donated.
	I think now it's like, well, now I'm never going to donate.
	Now I don't have to worry about donating or whatever.
	To be frank, it can be kind of frustrating.
	If you look at a community like a church, everybody donates.
	In a synagogue, everybody donates to get a 45-minute speech every week.
	One 45-minute speech every week.
	Every single person, even the children, are given money by their parents to donate.
	It is almost, certainly, almost completely 100% donation rate from a community that is, by philosophical standards, irrational.
	And now we have another community which a lot of people are against intellectual property because they believe that the The creators will get paid in other ways.
	So they're against intellectual property, which means that they would be against me charging and enforcing copyright and so on.
	But they don't pay. We have a community that says the free market will solve the problem of the free rider.
	And yet they're free riders and they don't donate.
	We have a community that says we don't need...
	A welfare state because charity will take care of the poor and they're not charitable.
	We should have, of all the communities, and I don't mean to me, it can be to anyone, but we should have, according to our principles, the highest donation rate for those who are effectively spreading the message of freedom and peace and philosophy and wisdom and virtue and goodness and all the stuff that we care about, property rights and so on, right? And I'm pretty consistently good at that stuff.
	I mean, maybe other people have 50 million downloads and have been on TV 20, 25 times and is on the radio at least every week or two talking about this stuff.
	Maybe other – I don't know. Maybe they do.
	I mean, Tom Woods obviously writes great books and has this Liberty Classroom, which is well worth checking out and so on.
	And, you know, Jeff Tucker does great work with laissez-faire books and so on, right?
	But I'm certainly doing quite a bit.
	And for a community that says voluntarism – We'll take care of things, and the creators of intellectual content will be paid to have a 1% to 2% donation rate within that community is a little annoying, frankly, at times. Because I don't think that people get that we need to show people how the society that we want to bring into being is going to work.
	And I think if people – I mean, obviously, if people look at that thread, they're going to say – This community is insane.
	A guy posted about being sad about a $2 donation and a large number of people are just going mental over it.
	Also, this community is having grave difficulty getting out of the low single digits in the donation level when they claim that voluntarism will solve all the known problems in the universe.
	It's a credibility thing.
	And please, I hope everyone understands this doesn't mean donate to me.
	It can be donate to anyone that you think is valuable or worthwhile.
	And if you don't have money, donate a little bit of time.
	You can always spoon soup in a soup kitchen if you want.
	And I'm teaching my daughter about two kinds of charity, so we give...
	To an animal shelter and we also go in and play with the animals, right?
	Because it's not just the money but the deed that counts when it comes to generosity and, you know, this is just one of many things and so on, right?
	But this is something that is important and I think that, I mean, I've tried communicating this six different ways from Sunday to people but it's something that I think people just have a difficult time for whatever reason getting into themselves.
	Does that make any sense? Yeah, yeah.
	I was just trying to imagine, you know, what I would feel like if I was, you know, someone who was new to your show and had wandered up onto it on YouTube and found something and then, you know, ended up on your website and was like, oh, that was good, you know, and it says here on the page that, you know, that $2 is kind of like a cup of coffee or whatever, and so I'm going to donate to that.
	I'm going to pitch him $2 because that was nice, and, you know, he's saying he wants $2.
	I could understand how they could interpret that as meaning that you accepted and wanted $2 donations or $1 donations.
	And then to see it publicly on Facebook would be kind of humiliating or embarrassing potentially, even though you weren't being mean to them and you weren't necessarily – I mean, you were expressing your disappointment.
	So I don't think it was a strategy or anything.
	But I don't think I would interpret it that way.
	But I would still be embarrassed and it would feel kind of like a public humiliation to me.
	But I didn't say anyone's name.
	Well, yeah, but I would know.
	At least I would think I would know.
	If I had just donated two bucks, obviously you could have been talking about somebody else, but it would just feel like...
	That doesn't mean this is what you were doing, but I think it would trigger me because it would feel like being in school, and if a teacher holds up...
	You know, a paper that's been turned in and says, no, I'm not going to say whose this is, but, you know, I can tell it's mine.
	And she's going to now talk about how bad the handwriting is or how stupid the answers are or something like that.
	So I'm not saying that that's all in the same, even the same category of what you were doing.
	But I think it's possible that the person could be triggered in that way because of experiences like that before.
	Especially because the donation page has that $1.50 and $2 level mentioned there.
	Obviously, you don't intend that to mean that you want everybody to donate $2, but it is understandable, I think, that someone could think that that's what you were asking for, and then to have you be disappointed by that may feel kind of confusing.
	Let's step through that.
	That's a fine scenario.
	And I certainly, I mean, if all of those things are true, then I can certainly understand why this person might be slighted, right?
	It doesn't explain everyone else.
	Do you understand? Of course not.
	No, of course not. Of course not.
	Right. So, I mean, this one person is, yeah, I can understand that.
	And, I mean, maybe what happens, of course, since I've run a business and I've been doing this for a long time and know the ins and outs, maybe somebody doesn't just think, okay, well, if I give them...
	Two bucks, then PayPal takes a big chunk and he's got to process it.
	Like, I'll wait till I've watched some more videos and give him something more useful.
	I mean, that's what I would think, right?
	I mean, again, that just may be a difference of experience or, you know, having done entrepreneurial work in the past, I can sort of understand that or whatever, right?
	But the scenario would have to be this, I think.
	The scenario would have to be somebody watches a couple of videos.
	They then come to my website.
	They scroll through and find the donation page.
	They go through the process of a $2 donation or whatever.
	And then they also have to be following me on Facebook.
	Yeah, I know that was the answer.
	Yeah. Oh, hello? Yeah.
	I think my internet may have just sort of kicked up.
	Can you hear me? Yes.
	Yes, you can go ahead. I'll just mute myself while I'm not talking.
	Oh, yeah. So, I don't know if you caught that, but the odds that somebody has gone to my website, gone all the way through the process of making a donation, and is Following me or has friended me on Facebook, the odds that they've only watched a couple of videos are extremely low, right? Yes.
	Yes, I think so. And I thought of that when I saw him post.
	I thought it was kind of weird that he had seen it because it's like, well, how is he following you after just watching one video that did seem kind of strange?
	And this, of course, you know, is this...
	Is this really, as somebody's pointed out, and it's true, you know, I think we've all been in the situation where I have no cash, I have no cash, and I want a coffee, right?
	And so what we do, what I do is I go without the coffee if I can't find any money in my car because I simply cannot go and buy a $1.50 coffee on a Visa because, I mean, the overhead is not fair to the Storekeeper, right? Or if I do, I'm going to go buy a bunch of other stuff and so on.
	So this is not something that people don't have any experience with, if that makes any sense.
	Yes, definitely. Yeah, I just was curious about that other kind of angle about the individual because you were talking about it earlier.
	You covered everything else I was thinking about, but you did talk about it in terms of kind of this This group project and the fact that as a group, we don't donate very consistently, but in your introduction, you didn't address the sort of individual person, the individual low-donator in this scenario, so I was just curious about that.
	I'm sorry, I'm not sure what you mean about the individual low-donator.
	I just want to make sure I understand what you're saying.
	You were addressing all of the people who jumped on the flame bandwagon and you addressed the kind of pattern in the liberty community as a whole of people not supporting their values.
	But you hadn't addressed this individual or even the hypothetical individual, the person who could wander in and donate $2.
	So I was just curious about your thoughts on that.
	Yeah, I mean the likelihood of that is so extremely low.
	Right? It's virtually non-existent, right?
	I mean, so...
	Yeah, so I mean, it just would seem very strange that somebody would have found and followed me on Facebook, gone to my website, gone through the donation process, all as the result of following, of watching a podcast or two, or listening to a podcast or two, right?
	To have listened to a podcast or two, almost certainly they would have had to sign up for a feed, which meant a bunch of downloads and all that kind of stuff.
	Or if they watched it on YouTube...
	Obviously, I don't have any direct costs.
	And then people say, ah, well, you should have a store with goodies.
	Well, that's been tried and it didn't work.
	Oh, you should have ads.
	I just can't do ads.
	I can't. I mean, I want to keep focusing on the listeners.
	And as soon as you start taking ads, you focus on the advertising revenue.
	It's impossible to avoid that.
	I mean, that's natural. And the other thing, too, is that I mean, you know, Nash, what these Sunday...
	You've been a long-time listener and a good friend, and you know these Sunday shows can get pretty intense, right?
	I mean, if somebody's talking about some really difficult and painful stuff, and it's like, have you had your oil checked lately?
	You know, that's jarring.
	I think it's offensive to the sensibilities of the person who's talking.
	And in a way, it's actually kind of offensive to the person selling some product.
	I mean, you don't want to follow some of these listener conversations...
	Or even some of my shows, you don't want to follow that with an ad for your super spangly disco widget because people are going to have a negative experience of an intrusive ad after a very intimate and powerful conversation.
	So it's not fair to the advertisers, it's not fair to the listeners, and it's pretty jarring.
	It just is not something that I think can work.
	And according to the standards in our community, it's not something that needs to work.
	If we can approach 150th or 1 100th, the integrity of communities like I agree.
	And obviously, I'm going to keep donating.
	I appreciate that.
	I really do. And it is a fascinating conversation.
	I'm very glad that the conversation is occurring.
	I mean, I really am.
	I'm very glad. It does seem to be something very interesting to people.
	And it is a very interesting conversation.
	A very interesting question.
	Speaking of being disappointed, it's disappointing to me to see the percentage of the abusive people who are represented in either your Facebook friends or Facebook subscribers because, you know, sometimes it's nice to see, oh, you've got this many friends and thousands of subscribers and a lot of people and then it's like, okay, so two-thirds of them are just trolls.
	Yeah, well, they're not, I mean, I don't know, I don't think, I mean, I think trolls come in and stop problems I think if they had the initiative of being trolls, it would be a little easier.
	But they are reactive, of course.
	And they also, I think, are – people's personalities and interactions are very infectious.
	And so they're seeing a pylon and it's like – Can't resist the gravity will of the collective pylon.
	Must jump on Steph too.
	Can't fight. And it's like, well, come on.
	For a community that calls a bunch of people sheeple, that is not, you know, never, never go with the crowd.
	They're always going in the wrong direction.
	Yeah, it's like, man down, man down.
	Get in while he's down. Anyway, thanks a lot.
	It's like, hey, I can fashion a shift quickly.
	I can get in on this.
	But that is a wonderful opportunity for self-knowledge, right?
	It's a wonderful opportunity to say, how did I end up posting on this thread?
	Or for donators, how did I end up saying, well, you know, I thought it was an unfortunate post from Steph.
	It's like, well, no, it was actually a very honest post from me.
	It was not meant to be insulting to anyone.
	And it wasn't insulting to anyone.
	It wasn't putting anyone down.
	I was simply saying, I was sad about something.
	Right. And so it's a wonderful opportunity for self-knowledge.
	And the show, of course, is kind of designed for that, to give people opportunities for self-knowledge.
	And some of them come in the way that you would hope or expect through conversation and through a rational discussion of thoughts and feelings.
	And some of them come through stepping on a landmine for other people and wondering how you ended up in a minefield.
	So I'm glad the interaction occurred.
	I think another part of it that might be triggering for people emotionally and part of the reason why it did get so emotional so quickly is, on top of the things you've already talked about, that I think a lot of people have experience with parents or teachers using this type of emotion as a passive aggressive manipulation.
	So, you know, the sort of alligator tears that mom might cry in order to get you to do something as a kid.
	And so I think that might have been triggering as well just because people have so much experience with displays of emotion being manipulative that it may have triggered those memories for them as well.
	Well, I mean, I think I thought of that too.
	And of course, you could be right.
	And the truth is probably a wide number of things.
	But I didn't get the feeling or the experience, which is not proof, of course, but I didn't get the experience that the level of abuse in the thread was Was a child, like inner children speaking out?
	So I think more what happened was like some of this you ungrateful little, S-H-I-T or whatever it was, seems to me it would come more from a parent than it would from a child because that would be I get up at 6 o'clock in the morning and I do everything for you kids and you're ungrateful little.
	How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have an ungrateful child, that kind of stuff, right?
	And maybe the sum, the $2 has something to do with childhood as well because that's obviously a very small sum of money and it's more related to allowance than income if that makes any sense.
	So I think that probably what happened was if people have been consuming without donating, that's obviously kind of exploitive, right?
	And it relies on the virtue of others.
	It's kind of parasitical, again, in not evil ways, but certainly it's not exactly the height of integrity to take without paying, especially when you're talking about respect for property rights and all that kind of stuff.
	And if then there is a complaint from the, quote, child in an exploitive parent relationship, then the parent, and particularly if the child is right, Then the parent will most likely explode in...
	A dysfunctional parent would most likely explode in rage and use that kind of bullying to silence the vulnerable and just complaints of the child.
	And I think that would probably be closer to it.
	I mean, you certainly could be right.
	But if people were reacting as children to parents, what you generally find is they avoid, right?
	So they just wouldn't post.
	Or they comply, right?
	Or they just go and send in some donations or whatever because they would be reacting as children to an authoritarian parent.
	But if I'm the child and they're the parent, then that would explain the level of abusive language in the thread, if that makes any sense.
	Yeah, I even...
	One of the comments even had the phrase, like, an attitude of gratitude, which was, like, phrase of the week.
	I remember, like, in kindergarten.
	So, yeah. From the teachers.
	Oh, that you have to be grateful for...
	Yeah, and, you know, Be grateful for what you get kind of thing.
	That's not what a child says to another child.
	That's what an authority figure says to a child who is bringing up some complaint.
	That's what I mean in kindergarten.
	That's what the teachers would say. Yeah.
	Use that exact phrase because it's memorable because it rhymes.
	That's a very talking down to kids way of putting it.
	Yeah. And the other thing too, of course, is that if I did say something That was, you know, unjust or thoughtless or mean or whatever it is, right?
	You know, you can't have a loving relationship without the capacity to benevolently handle bad behavior because we all have bad behavior in our relationships, right?
	And if, let's say that I did something that was just kind of I mean, I don't know how to phrase it because I certainly wasn't being mean or nasty or calling people names or anything like that.
	But let's just say I did something that was insensitive or thoughtless or whatever it was, right?
	How can you have a relationship which is intimate where any error on the part of the other person results in an explosion of rage?
	Because error is inevitable in relationships, right?
	I mean, we all know that.
	And It's not possible to have a relationship that is close or intimate or loving while having this literally totalitarian dictatorship of screaming abusive punishment for any potential error.
	And that's what I mean when I say that it traps people and it alienates them from intimacy and from love.
	Because you can't ever relax.
	Because error is punished by the verbal Gestapos and lockups of primordial rage.
	And, you know, I mean, so if I did say something that was, you know, thoughtless or inconsiderate or something like that, and people can say, oh, you know, tell me more or, you know, gosh, if you'd like to chat about this, you certainly do seem to be down about it.
	I mean, let's find out more about it or whatever it is, right?
	That's a sort of mature and reasonable way to deal with an error, if it was an error, right?
	And that, of course, is not occurring, right?
	And also, this is why I say it's a multi-generational change.
	Sorry, go ahead. You didn't say, I mean, it was an emotional, you know, you were just being emotionally upfront about how you felt about it.
	You weren't saying, this person is, you know, a bad person, or this person is, they're themselves ungrateful, you know, how dare they give me so little?
	I mean, that would have been much more like, I would have been like, hey, like, Steph, why'd you post this?
	Yeah. But, I mean, as it is, you put forward your emotions, and it's like, that's always fair game.
	There wasn't anything you did that I think was unjust.
	I was just interested in the possible misunderstanding on the other person's part that they might be upset because they would feel they had been misunderstood.
	I was just curious about that scenario in your mind.
	Yeah, and look, of course, if somebody was upset, then that's another opportunity for self-knowledge, right?
	Which is, wow, this really did sting me or whatever.
	This upset me. And then you'd say, okay, well, so if I'm sort of working night and day on this grand project and so on and working on this documentary and all that and then somebody sent me $2, how would I feel, right?
	That would be an opportunity.
	And again, that doesn't mean, oh, well, then Steph was right and whoever sent $2 was wrong.
	It's just an opportunity to try and figure out why somebody would be sad to receive $2, right?
	Welcome to my show!
	I would even say largely a communal effort.
	So it's not me that people are donating to.
	It's kind of like a community, right?
	People who donate to me get the message out to people to stop spanking or to have the confidence to go get a raise or get a better job and sort of improves the community, I think, as a whole.
	And two bucks obviously doesn't really go very far in doing that.
	But even if somebody was that way, then they would have the opportunity to ask questions of themselves and of me.
	It could have actually been a very productive effort.
	If it's even true, I'm not sure that it is.
	It's too perfect a story.
	It just doesn't seem kind of true.
	There's a single dad who has no money and so on.
	But if it is true, what an opportunity to have a conversation.
	But if the person then stokes the fire of the trolls by saying, Yes.
	Yes.
	But if only a few people come out of the interaction by saying, I should think before I start abusing people in public – I should try and figure out where that comes from.
	If even 5% of the people posting in that, a couple of hundred people there, if it's 20 or 30 people who end up reflecting on their histories and trying to figure out how they got there and maybe started to work on self-knowledge and all that, then the abuse is worth it because Then, people have been turned towards greater wisdom, self-knowledge, understanding, and they've opened themselves up to the possibility of love and intimacy and connection and all of that kind of stuff.
	That all came about because there were a bunch of nasty people screaming their little lungs out.
	Then it's worth it.
	Then it's a beneficial experience for everyone, I think.
	Well, not for everyone, but for the people who are learning.
	Yeah, I agree.
	Well, thanks. I think you covered all the other things that I wanted to bring up, so I'll let you move on.
	Thanks. You're very welcome. Thanks for that, Ash.
	Sorry about that. Okay, next up today we have, I'm not making this up, Lali Lule Lo from Algeria.
	Ah, I think I may have seen you in The Sound of Music.
	Oh dear. We're not getting any sound from you.
	We're getting sort of a weird buzz.
	Are you there? I think we may have to move on to someone else unless we actually have a spam bot.
	I'm so sorry. We'll move on to Nate.
	Hey. Hey, look at that.
	Facebook is bringing up all my old friends.
	How are you doing? Yeah, it's the original Nate.
	So this time.
	So I had two questions that I didn't think were related, and one wasn't necessarily a discussion question, but the other one is, and now I'm kind of realizing they're related.
	It's kind of related to the last call as well with Nash.
	Lately, I've been feeling some sort of concern and frustration, I guess, with...
	The sources you've been citing?
	Yeah. I pointed this out.
	I emailed you about it.
	But I just kind of wanted to sort of talk about that frustration or like my concern with it because yesterday I think you posted – Something about global warming on your Facebook page.
	I think I posted another article on your Facebook page that nobody seemed to notice or pay attention to, but it was just another article.
	Sorry, this is the one where it seems that global warming has stalled for the past 10 years, that there have not been generic increases.
	To be fair, I have posted rebuttals to the arguments as well.
	I don't know if you've seen those.
	I mean, obviously, I am skeptical of global warming, but I certainly have posted articles that say otherwise to some of the articles that I posted.
	I mean, I don't know what the answer is, of course, right?
	But I think that there's quite a predominance of pro-global warming information out there, so I'll obviously try to balance things a little bit, although I certainly do post stuff that is rebuttals to some of the other articles that I've posted.
	Right. Oh, this article just sort of Refuted the other article that you posted.
	It was basically that I think the overall average temperature had increased by 0.8 degrees Celsius, which they're saying there's strong evidence that this is what's contributing to wildfires and stuff like that, and we're seeing more of these wildfires.
	So I'm just like, as...
	And I've said this before, as...
	Convenient as this is for the government to expand itself.
	I don't think that they're manufacturing this as some sort of scare tactic as they would other things like terrorism and the drug war and stuff like that.
	But I think that this is more of a legitimate issue.
	Do you think you know much about...
	I've never said that global warming is false.
	I think that there's some reasons to be skeptical.
	I mean, as I've always said, I don't have the expertise to know whether it's true or whether it's false.
	Of course, we all understand that the government's never going to be able to solve it and so on.
	But let me, you know, in terms of like, we do have this belief that science is, you know, objective and rational and so on.
	But the vast majority of science, of course, is a government program, right?
	We understand that. And it suffers from all the corruption of this.
	So let me just read you a few things from – I don't know if you've heard about the recent flap about the science fraud website.
	Have you heard anything about that? Uh-uh.
	No. Okay.
	So this guy set up a website called science-fraud.org.
	It's gone now. What happened was he started a website.
	This is his statement.
	He said, Aided by dozens of helpers who both submitted material to the site and helped in analyzing suspected data,
	a triage system of sorts was developed such that only the most egregious examples were posted.
	Over the course of six months, we documented over 500 problematic images in over 300 publications, amounting to tens of millions of dollars in misappropriated research funds.
	Most of the grunt work, pulling PDFs, assembling images, writing posts, was done in my spare time, and the website was funded out of my own pocket.
	For rather obvious reasons, retaliation, personal safety, my own scientific career, it was necessary to run the site anonymously, with most of the work being attributed to a fictitious person.
	Francis de Triusky, an anagram of science fraudster, who could be reached by a Gmail account.
	So, what happened was, to sort of cut a long story short, he ran this sort of wiki-like site, or a sort of anonymous submission type site, and In the space of six months, when it wasn't really very publicized, hundreds of fraudulent science articles, or at least articles that were on the fraud site, and a large number of which ended up being retracted by the publications themselves, were revealed.
	And there is a number of reasons as to why this sort of thing is so necessary, right?
	I mean, so if you're a scientific researcher at a junior position and you discover some sort of fraud, if you reveal it, then you're never going to get your PhD, right?
	Obviously, and if you are a PhD candidate and you are involved in some sort of fraud, you're not going to reveal it because you're going to face retaliations within the academic world.
	If you are a professor, you go against your colleagues.
	You're going to face retaliations that way and so on, right?
	So on every step of the way, there's a disincentive to have these kinds of checks as we would expect in a fundamentally government-run system.
	And so what happened was someone figured out this guy's identity and And he sent around emails to over 100 people in the field, including those whose articles had been proven or at least shown to be problematic, to put it as nicely as possible.
	And, you know, describing the usual troll tactics, right?
	Describing him as a disgruntled hate monger running a hate site.
	And, you know, and so then he got bombarded with threats of legal action and he shut down his website.
	And so...
	I mean, I hugely respect science as a discipline.
	I mean, it's fantastic. It's a wonderful and powerful, just about the most important thing other than the free market that's ever been discovered in human history or ever been implemented.
	But in any government-run enterprise or endeavor, I think skepticism is an appropriate response.
	And that doesn't mean that I know whether global warming is true or it's man-made or whatever it is.
	But I am not convinced of the objectivity of science as it is currently being practiced.
	And of course, there are lots of very nice and great scientists out there who do work with great integrity and so on.
	But there is not a post-publication review process that occurs in the realm of science, and that is troubling.
	Well, how do you think this – Frequency of fraud affects the studies that – do you think it affects any of the studies that have been cited by you for other things like the child development studies and abuse case studies and things like that that you've been citing to support the arguments?
	Do you think that's affected by the same skewed – Well, the climate one is challenging because it's modeled, right?
	Whereas the child abuse statistics are self-reporting.
	And certainly there are troubles with self-reporting, right?
	So somebody says in a four-hour interview, were you ever abused?
	You might not have been abused and then just decide to lie and say that you were abused.
	I consider that likelihood kind of low because somebody who'd want to lie about something as fundamental as abuse almost certainly was abused.
	I mean, a sort of sane, rational person would not do that.
	Yeah, that's it.
	It's actually more likely that they'll not report – they'll report that they weren't abused because what they consider abuse is – like they might have been hit.
	It's acceptable and legal, like spanking.
	Right. And also, of course, when people interview people about child abuse, they generally don't go to prisons, which is where you'll see some of the most egregious victims of child abuse.
	They generally don't go into the drug underworld, the prostitution underworld, the mafia underworld, the gambling underworld.
	They don't go into the gray or black markets and so on.
	They just talk to people, middle class people who have – who are on the right side of the law.
	And so, if anything, of course, that – Tendency goes to under-report, right?
	So I was reading an article the other day where a guy said that the prevalence of sexual abuse, if you take into account the few studies that have been done about people in prison, the frequency of sexual abuse is probably under-reported by 10% to 15% because people just talk to...
	And the same thing is true of the Kaiser Permanente study, right?
	The ACE study run by Dr.
	Felitti, which is the basis of the Bomb and the Brain series.
	He basically – and I point that out that this is almost certainly underreporting, A, because people don't like to report stuff that is abusive, B, because our definition of abuse is probably different from the legal definition of abuse in that I would consider repetitive spanking to be abusive, whereas, of course, it's legal and not considered abusive by the vast majority of people.
	And also, of course, you're interviewing people who are usually middle class, who have really good health insurance, whose lives are pretty functional, and so you're not dealing with the worst victims of abuse, and so it's almost certainly likely to be underreported.
	And so I think that kind of stuff is not modeled, so to speak.
	And of course, if you ask people about the prevalence of abuse, and then you review their medical records to find out the relationship between self-reported abuse and, say, ischemic heart disease or cancers or other forms of ailments, it's It's not modeled, right?
	They either did get cancer in their medical history or they didn't.
	So it's not modeled data.
	Of course, the great challenge with climate science is that it's so intensely modeled.
	But it's also historical because they're looking at averages over time.
	So they're looking back through history and they only really started recording temperatures not that long ago.
	But... But they can go into the ice cores and they can figure out more temperatures that way.
	I think that's not too much of a voodoo science.
	So there is certainly that aspect of things for sure.
	And this is why. I mean, I don't know.
	I mean, it could be anthropogenic.
	It could be that it's as catastrophic as everyone says.
	I do, of course, wonder how Al Gore buys...
	Like when he says the oceans are going to rise 20 feet, why he buys a house right on the shore.
	These are just kinds of things where you say, okay, so this guy is clearly much more knowledgeable about global warming than I am, and he did a whole documentary about it, and he's buying a house right on the shore.
	He also, of course, believes that human activity and energy use is hugely damaging to the environment and he has a house that uses about as much energy as a small village and spends most of his time burning up carbon in the air on airplanes.
	So, I mean, again, that's not proof.
	That's just sort of something that makes you go, hmm.
	Right. I think this is just – it's a concern for me.
	Like, what's motivating me to be concerned about this is – You're the leading libertarian right now, like, out there.
	You're doing awesome, and you're spreading the word about volunteerism and rational thinking and things like that.
	And I guess it just worries me that if you end up – like, you don't want to be that guy that's still saying – or citing the wrong statistics or something.
	Like, the other day there was a – There was an article that explained the difference between violence in the UK and how it's measured over there versus over here, and that they measure prostitution as violence over there, which is just completely strange.
	I don't see how that's violence.
	But they include that in their statistics, so it's kind of skewed in a way.
	Right. And people continue to cite this same thing over and over.
	And the same thing happened with the fraud, which is another example, the fraudulent science that's been going on.
	But the fraud, that guy, the fraudulent study that showed vaccines cause autism.
	And now people just continue to reassert that vaccines cause a lot of problems.
	Ever since this one study...
	Oh, the one that came out in the Lancet in the 90s that they ended up attracting because it was just so flawed, right?
	Right. Yeah, and I mean obviously I've never been anti-vaccine, but go ahead.
	Right. No, so it just – like the libertarian movement has been attracting a lot of really annoyingly sort of unscientific people that – Well, anti-scientific in a way, right? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's the fluoride, there's the aspartame.
	I mean, we don't want to start getting into the orbit, so to speak, of people who say that the moon landings were staged or that kind of stuff.
	Right. I don't – it really concerns me because it's just doing a great disservice if – You know, unless you really, like, are diligent in citing sources that are, like, credible and have – and when I say credible, most of them are – yeah, they're government-funded, but that's all you get.
	Like, there's no – what else is there?
	I mean, there's very few voluntarily funded studies, but some of the studies – Well, there is – sorry, there is a lot of science – sorry, there is a lot of science that goes on in the world in the free market, right?
	Oh, right, with technology and… I mean Apple, computers, airplanes.
	I mean there's a huge amount of science that goes on in the free market and I don't think I would ever say the iPhone is a fraud.
	It's all done with mirrors and tiny little Japanese men with flashlights in your hands.
	I mean talking over yogurt cups and string.
	So I mean there's a huge amount of science that I sort of accept and respect and all of that.
	But yeah, I mean look, I agree and I appreciate that feedback.
	I definitely have… A bee in my bonnet about global warming and I've been open about that.
	It bothers me on a number of levels.
	I think, of course, it is fear-mongering.
	I think there is an injustice in that people will say, well, the anti-global warming stuff is all funded by big oil or big coal or something like that.
	It's like, well, yeah, but if you come up with global warming scare stories, you also get billions of dollars in funding.
	I mean, if we're going to say that on one side there's a financial incentive, let's at least admit that on the other side there's a financial incentive as well.
	And, you know, when I had Bjorn Lundberg, the skeptical environmentalist on the show, I mean, he wrote the book Cool It, which has a solution to global warming that, if I remember rightly, costs about $100 million and can be implemented in a month or two.
	I have to read that book.
	And there has been no activity on that, to my knowledge.
	And so this raises my level of skepticism about the motives of the people involved.
	If they really are just solely concerned with global warming, then clearly they would want to get it done as quickly and as cheaply as possible.
	And if there is a very credible solution that's out there, which I've not seen dismissed or disproven, though, of course, I haven't done an exhaustive search.
	But Bjorn Lundberg seems to me to be a fairly smart guy.
	And I would really recommend just download the book.
	It's on Kindle. It's called Cool It.
	I'm not going to even attempt to explain it because it's also been a couple of years since I read it.
	He's got a very cheap, very effective solution that has been signed off by a large number of other scientists about ways to solve global warming that don't involve carbon tax credits, that don't involve sentencing people in the third world to death.
	Because you understand that the global warming issue as it's currently proposed being solved will cost the lives of many, many people.
	It will kill many, many, many people.
	And that is something that if you want something to be implemented that is going to cost the lives some people have estimated of millions of people, then you better damn well be sure that you're right and also that it is the very best solution to the problem.
	And in the global warming community, I have not seen the evidence that that is even remotely a mainstream position.
	And if Bjorn Lundberg's solution, which is again endorsed by a wide variety of other people, if Bjorn Lundberg's solution is valid, then everybody should be pushing for that because it solves the problem that they claim is calamitous without costing the lives of hundreds of thousands or millions of innocent people.
	Right. It's the same everywhere.
	It's the same frustration. It's the same – even down to drunk driving solutions and the whole taxi racket thing where you would have – if you didn't have a cartelized taxi racket in almost every city where raising the price of taxis all over the place and you can't even compete without joining this cartel – Drunk driving would be solved immediately.
	The state is making millions off catching people who drive drunk because they fine them, what, $6,000, I think, each.
	Yeah, and of course they get to scare everyone with drunk drivers, therefore you need us, right?
	Right, and that's not to mention the horrible road designs and things like that.
	But, yeah. No, I get your meaning.
	Basically, I guess the emotions that I'm feeling that's driving me to – driving my concern about just credibility in general in the libertarian community, and especially with you because you're doing so well, like I'm going – When I send somebody a video about volunteerism or libertarianism, I send them your videos.
	I send them your books, and if they look and look at the sources you cited, I have this desire that they be really good or they be at least strong evidence.
	Some of the people I'm friends with have – Fairly high IQs.
	If I make new friends, they're generally some pretty smart scientific people that will do that sort of thing.
	They'll go and look at the sources.
	Yeah, and if the sources are obviously biased and wrong, then of course they're going to throw the baby out with the bathwater, which I can understand.
	Right. Right. So let me tell you where I think you are correct.
	I mean, obviously, I appreciate the call then.
	I think that in sort of examining my own feelings about the global warming thing, I think that I may be a tad biased on the skeptical side.
	And I think that's important for me to know.
	And it's important for me to counteract that bias.
	Because, of course, I think it's probably at least nine to one skeptical to pro-global warming, so to speak, articles that I – Now, I can sort of say to myself, well, that's just a counterweight or the mainstream media is 100 to zero or whatever, right?
	But nonetheless, I think that that's a very valid criticism and I will certainly work to improve that.
	As far as the sources go, that's a valid question and potential criticism as well.
	I just want to add one example just to be helpful.
	Yeah. Like the source he cited with the Heritage Foundation, like his sources were good, but the Heritage – like citing the Heritage website as a source, I mean their conclusions were incredibly conservative and really bad.
	Like abstinence only at sex education and marriage.
	Which actually increases. Where religiosity is higher, STDs are higher as well.
	Abstinence – It produces more teen pregnancy and STDs as far as I understand it.
	And I agree with that. I mean, to me, it's like if the data is the data, I don't really care.
	Everybody is going to gather the data for a particular set of conclusions, of course, right?
	I mean, otherwise, you're just putting a bunch of hyperlinks together.
	And I disagree with conclusions of a lot of stuff that I cite, but if the data is the data.
	Now, if somebody is going to say, well, everything that the Heritage Foundation says is false, no matter what their source is, then that person's bias may be more important to examine than Heritage Foundation, so to speak.
	We looked at his sources.
	I mean there were a few questions that come up about his citations, which like – there's questions about every study that they leave unanswered.
	Like how do you know this is an increased amount of reporting?
	How do you know if people that are married are less likely to report their husband versus their boyfriend, if they have a live-in boyfriend?
	And just like situations like how do you know if – Whether correlation is causation, of course.
	Absolutely. What if the rise of single motherhood coincided with increases in lead in the paint or lead in the environment, which is fairly statistically significant in terms of violence?
	Yeah, absolutely. And I try to sort of point this stuff out.
	I try to delineate between the stuff that is fairly well established and the stuff that is more conjecture.
	And so, I mean, that's the best I can do.
	I certainly don't have the capacity, and I don't think anyone does, to validate the source data and credibility of every source.
	I mean, I'm a guy, right?
	So that's not going to happen.
	But that having been said, I think that the point of making – maybe what I can do is I can put – rather than just all the links, I can put links with notes.
	Right. Right.
	So I can say, okay, this comes from the heritage.
	I disagree with their conclusions, but here's their source data, which I think is important.
	Does that sort of make sense? That would be really good.
	I know you don't have an extraordinary amount of time when you're making videos and you're leading a libertarian community.
	It's very hard. I mean I wish we could all – like you could have a number of assistants – I mean, if people were actually – if you were at the donation level of most churches, then you would probably have a number of assistants helping you.
	But like we were saying earlier with Nash, it's funny that – No, but you have the right to demand quality because you're a donator.
	I mean, other people, of course, have the right to demand quality, but since you're contributing, if it's any consolation, I am actually paying a researcher at the moment who gets a lot of data and then submits it to me for sort of review and so on.
	And what I can do is I can ask the I can ask the researcher to put in caveats that he may have about the data and to rate its reliability, to do a little research on sources.
	It'll cost a little more, but as somebody who's contributing, you have absolutely every right to ask for quality.
	I don't want it to be like, look, I produced 100 cars today.
	It's true that they fall apart when you roll them off the lot and they have no engines or brakes, but look, I have 100 cars in the lot.
	I don't want it... I do feel a little bit on a treadmill because I notice that when I stop producing videos for whatever reason, if I'm working the documentary or whatever it is, then donations tend to slide.
	So I do feel like a little bit on a hamster wheel in terms of getting material out to grow donations.
	But nonetheless, you certainly have every right to ask for improved quality and I really take that to heart and I will definitely work at least in the first stage of getting Notes on sources to provide context for what it is that is being cited in the videos.
	Does that seem like a reasonable first start?
	Yeah, and I don't want this to be all like criticism of you, but it's like I just have an overall concern about the trends I'm seeing in the libertarian community and the Alex Jones types.
	I don't understand these aggressive...
	People that are joining a non-aggression movement and they're sort of irrational things and they're claiming to be libertarian and things like that.
	It's just really frustrating and you're like the leading guy and you're like the best that's out there.
	So I'm like, no, no, don't pay attention to those guys.
	Look over here. You know what I mean?
	It's just like I'm worried about freedom.
	No, listen, I get it.
	You're introducing your girlfriend to your friends and you want her to wear something hot.
	No, I get it. I get it.
	I will do a couple of crunches and slip into something that would make Dr.
	Frankenfurter blush. How does that sound to you, Nate?
	That sounds awesome. Oh, I'm comfortable now.
	No, that's a great criticism.
	I really appreciate that feedback and I will certainly work to improve quality to the point where you can feel more confident sending out videos and sources.
	I mean... I think I source more than most, and I think I also come up with insights that are important and well-sourced.
	But that having been said, I think that your request for higher quality is a great criticism.
	I gratefully accept it.
	I really appreciate you bringing that up, and I will certainly work to fulfill.
	Thanks so much. I feel so relieved about your response.
	Oh, thank you. It's not an easy thing to call up somebody whose work you respect and say, you know, improve it.
	But I think it's great feedback, and I appreciate that.
	And I still haven't forgotten about I just got the first draft of music for the documentary, and I've been working like mad trying to fit it into the text and all of that.
	So unfortunately, I mean, that is kind of a high priority for me.
	Not that your request to look over gun data is not, but it's just obviously not as high a priority because we need to book the musicians and the studio and all of that to get the music done for the documentary.
	It's going to be like real music, not even MIDI stuff.
	That's incredible. So anyway, that's been sort of consuming me a little bit lately, but it's still on the list.
	I just want to let you know. I can't wait to see it.
	Do you have a projection of when it'll be?
	I hope by March.
	That's definitely the plan. That's great.
	Well, thanks so much.
	I appreciate your response.
	Oh, and thank you for calling in.
	I appreciate that feedback.
	And, you know, I really do want, you know, this kind of feedback.
	I am sort of surfing constantly, and these adjustments are always very helpful.
	So, you know, I really do look forward to the critical feedback.
	And, you know, thank you for providing me feedback without a huge amount of swear words.
	I appreciate that. That's always nice to get.
	Oh, right. That Facebook thread.
	Oh, my God. It's getting worse.
	Ugh. Well, yeah, of course.
	I mean, this is a general hysteria crowd movement.
	It has to run its course, right?
	Yeah, I don't want anyone to see it.
	But, yeah, anyway.
	But look, these are the empirical facts about our community, right?
	Right. It's not pretty, but these are the empirical facts about our community.
	I do have one last question.
	This doesn't have to be a discussion or anything.
	I mean, you can answer it and I'll go off.
	Why is it that we have these types of – the Democrats seem to come off very cleanly – like the left-wing and liberal movement seem to have saner people,
	I guess, the people that are more rational and – Yeah, they're statists, but they just come off looking awesome.
	And while the left-wing Republicans, Libertarians – I mean the right-wing Republicans, Libertarians, they've got the Alex Jones crazies all over.
	And I'm just trying to figure out why we're attracting these people.
	Well, look, I mean, the reality is that who we see in the media that represents the, quote, libertarian position are chosen by the left-wing media, right?
	And so there are lots of very sane, smart, well-educated, credentialed people who could go on, say, Piers Morgan and talk about gun control, right?
	And those people are not being invited on to talk about gun control.
	And, I mean, look, the left is – they're massive manipulators.
	This is why they're drawn to the media and this is why they're so effective at what they're doing.
	It's why they keep winning. And so it's not that there are so many volatile people in the libertarian movement.
	Look, there are lots of volatile people on the left as well.
	But they don't get invited on the left's show, right?
	On the left's shows, they get, you know, all the calm – Quote, reasonable academics to talk about the left's position and whoever they invite in on the right tends to be less calm and credible.
	And I mean, to be fair to Fox, I mean, at least Fox actually does have some, they have lots of left-wing commentators on who aren't frothing at the mouth, right?
	Sean Combs and all that kind of stuff, right?
	They do seem to give more respect to the positions of the left than the left seems to give to the positions of the right.
	And that's just an important thing to understand.
	And Don't, you know, don't take it personally and don't view it as a reflection on you that the left is taking people that are easy to dismiss and putting them front and center.
	It's, I mean, it's cheap ploy, obviously, right?
	Yeah, they are just, I think.
	I mean, it's like, you know, if you hate some guy's diet book, then just find a guy who's 300 pounds who loves that diet book and have him come on the show.
	I mean, it's manipulative as all hell, right?
	But, you know, but it's effective, sadly.
	Well, thanks so much for the call.
	I've actually got to get going, but I really appreciate all your responses.
	No, no, I have to get going.
	No, sorry. I'm just kidding. I don't. I have a few more minutes.
	But, yeah, thank you very much.
	I appreciate that, and great feedback, and I will certainly work to improve.
	All right. Catch you later.
	Take care. Bye-bye. All righty, then.
	Do we have a last brief caller?
	And by that, I mean, of course, a caller in briefs.
	Well, we'll try. Excuse me, we'll try la-li-lu-li-lu again, and if not, we'll go on to Dylan.
	All right.
	So we're either yodeling or going soon.
	Hello, everybody. There we go.
	Hello. It's working.
	You're on. Thank you.
	So this is my first time calling.
	I've been listening to your show and broadcast for about three years now, and I greatly appreciate your work.
	I wanted to ask you, this is going to be totally different from what previous scores were talking about.
	It's not going to be about the $2 donation, although I'm greatly tempted to talk about that.
	I think we spent more than $2 worth of time on it, so let's ask something else.
	Absolutely. I'm going to try to make this as brief as possible.
	So I want to know or hear your take about the recent developments in the geopolitical world.
	You know, all the movements in Northern Western Africa, seen as I'm from Nigeria, so that's somewhat of an interest to me.
	I've seen your review on YouTube about the Kony 2012 videos some time ago, and so I'm greatly interested in having your take on the recent developments.
	So, and we'll leave.
	Okay, well listen, you're going to have to be a little bit more specific.
	I really am not going to come anywhere close to being an expert or claiming to be an expert.
	Do you mean the hostage crisis?
	Yeah, the hostage situation and how...
	I don't know if you've been following it closely, but the hostage situation and how it has been handled, especially the part where there were little or no negotiations with the terrorists.
	I would like to know your position on that.
	Whether we ought to value the lives of hostages or a more aggressive approach against terrorists and what benefits we might have on the long term.
	Do you mean whether to negotiate with terrorists?
	Yeah. Or whether to...
	Well, I... Yeah.
	I can't say that I know, obviously, whether...
	We should or shouldn't negotiate with terrorists.
	The people who say we shouldn't negotiate with terrorists almost never seem to be the people whose family members are actually held hostage by terrorists.
	I don't know the answer.
	I think that the way that I would think that the answer would best come out is through the free market.
	If there was no governments and you went into some dangerous area, then you would have to buy insurance.
	Of course, there is You can buy insurance for kidnapping, right?
	So if you're going to go work in some volatile area, then you buy insurance for kidnapping and as far as I understand it, and I'm certainly no expert, so please correct me in the chat room or anywhere else if I'm wildly astray, but you buy insurance for kidnapping and then if you get kidnapped, the insurance pays off the kidnappers and that's obviously not only negotiating with terrorists but acceding to the demands of terrorists and That's,
	of course, what people want is what they will pay for.
	And so the problem, of course, with having governments negotiate or not negotiate with terrorists is it doesn't reflect the wishes of the people there.
	Whereas if you're going to go into some volatile area where you might be kidnapped, then you can refuse to buy an insurance policy, in which case nobody is going to rush up, at least no insurance company is going to rush up and pay your ransom.
	or you can choose to buy an insurance policy, in which case they will give you a security guard.
	They will advise, I assume, on best practices.
	They will work their very hardest to make sure that you don't get kidnapped, obviously because they love you so much and because it will cost them a lot of money if you do get kidnapped.
	So like all status solutions, it doesn't reflect the will of the people involved or the people whose lives literally are at stake in these kinds of situations.
	So given that there don't seem to be a lot of insurance policies, again, that I know of that say, we will try to negotiate and we will send in SWAT teams to break you out and we won't pay them one thin dime and all this kind of stuff.
	I don't think that they really have those kinds of insurance policies that are out there.
	I think the insurance policies are, if you get kidnapped, we'll pay the ransom.
	So the lack of, you know, we don't negotiate, we send in SWAT teams, the lack of those kinds of insurance policies It would seem to be indicative that they're not what people want and they're not obviously very effective in keeping people alive.
	I think like a third of the time that you try and go and – you know what?
	I can't conceivably quote things that I may have heard on burn notice, so I'm not even going to try.
	But I think that the great thing about the free market is you get wonderful information about optimal solutions – Simply by looking at prices and offerings.
	So if in a truly free market, let's say there's five governments left in the world and they're volatile and whatever it is and for whatever reason you want to go and do business with them, there will be a whole bunch of people who want to give you optimal solutions to kidnapping.
	And in reading through their offerings, you will be very certain that the most knowledgeable people in the world have come up with these options as the best possible solution.
	Does that mean it's forever?
	No, it doesn't mean that it's forever the best.
	It may not even be the best solution.
	But you can be sure that the smartest people in the world with the most experience and the most personal at stake have come up with these approaches as the very best solutions.
	And of course, that's got nothing to do with what the government is doing when it talks tough about terrorists while having no skin financially or emotionally in the game.
	Right. I do have another question on this.
	You say that the capitalist approach would be the most optimal solution, but what if Some of the hostages do have insurance while others do not.
	I think the situation becomes a little bit more trickier in that case.
	And what I'd say I'm mostly interested in is what would be the morality of the choice we should make whether to negotiate with terrorists or not as somebody who...
	Well, yeah, I mean, there's certainly...
	Certainly, the immediate financial solution that would be, quote, logical would be that the people who have insurance would have their ransom paid and would hopefully be released, and the people who didn't have insurance would not have their ransom paid by an insurance company and therefore would have to find some other way of raising the money necessary for the ransom.
	Now, that's one possibility, but...
	I mean if I were running a – let's go into a truly alternate dimension.
	If I were running a hostage-paying insurance company, then I would not particularly want to – let's say half the people had insurance and half the people didn't.
	I would not particularly want for there to be all my people get out and everyone else gets killed.
	I mean that would be pretty bad publicity, right?
	I mean however, quote, just it might be.
	From an economic standpoint, well, they didn't pay the money, therefore, they shouldn't get the risk protection.
	It would not be great PR. I mean, in a way, it would be a great way to sell my services.
	It's like, hey, all these guys who paid insurance came out alive and all these people who didn't got mutilated and roasted live on spits or whatever.
	But nonetheless, it would be not necessarily the best publicity to pull out your own people and let everyone else get killed.
	And so if I were in charge of that, I would attempt to negotiate with the terrorists and say...
	Look, I will pay the ransom demands that you have for everyone.
	And then what I would do is I would attempt to raise the money through some sort of charity and some sort of voluntary way of saying, listen, I'm extending myself $5 million or $10 million to cover even people that we haven't covered.
	I don't obviously want to charge these people, although it would be fair to do so.
	You could, of course, charge them too.
	You could say, listen, I would pay your ransom.
	I would really like it if you would pay me back.
	You couldn't make it a legally enforceable contract, but you could certainly put a lot of pressure on people to pay you back.
	If you paid half a million dollars to have them released, you could ask them to pay you back.
	Some people probably would, but you would definitely… You would get a charity going.
	And certainly the people who were family of the people who didn't have insurance who were trapped in this horrible situation, they would be very driven to raise the money.
	And we know that people can, right?
	I mean, they raise money for bail or they raise money for illnesses and so on all the time.
	So, you know, they would go to their community.
	They'd go to their extended family.
	They'd go to strangers on the internet.
	They'd even get micropayments and so on.
	And they would find some way to make the difference.
	And if it ended up that...
	I ended up losing some money.
	I still think it would be a positive thing all around.
	Obviously, people wouldn't be killed who otherwise would be killed.
	Let's say that as the head of the insurance company, it costs you $1 million or $2 million to save the lives of, say, 10 or 15 million people.
	Well, I think that's a pretty good deal.
	Certainly, economically, it's viable because the average life is worth about $2 million economically.
	So, yay. You've done some good in the world.
	I think you've also raised your Kindness and benevolence rating in the world and that's very important for companies to be viewed as benevolent and kind.
	I mean, there's good reasons why oil companies take out full-page ads in expensive magazines and newspapers talking about their commitment to the environment and so on.
	I think that there would be ways to do it.
	Now, of course, what you wouldn't want to do is just automatically pay everyone's hostage fee I don't want to make it so easy.
	That people will just not buy your insurance.
	Does that make any sense? Yeah, that's what sounds like a sort of medical, a kidnapping welfare.
	So instead of getting your kidnapping insurance, you have to dissuade somebody to pay for it.
	But I guess the somewhat greater question would be, if we do pay every ransom to release these people and these hostages, What would be the long-term consequences seeing as these terrorists are unreasonable people and they are very likely to go on taking hostages?
	Would it be worth the immediate gains, I would say?
	Well, of course, the problem is that if you keep taking hostages, nobody wants to come to your country anymore, right?
	If, let's say, Algeria is a place where you're going to have 50% chance of being kidnapped and held for a million-dollar ransom, then it's going to be $550,000 for insurance.
	So there's an economic disincentive to go to places where there's a high likelihood of being kidnapped.
	As the kidnapping goes up, the cost of ransom goes up, the business incentive goes down and therefore it's a weird kind of self-correcting demand price curve.
	So I think that people who are criminals are sort of understanding that they need to keep the host alive so to speak.
	So even within criminals, there can be like don't steal too much from these guys or they'll shut down their store and they will have nothing to steal from again.
	They milk the cow.
	They don't kill the cow so to speak.
	They don't open up the goose that lays the golden egg.
	So there does seem to be some rough equilibrium that you would expect so that the criminals remain profitable but not to the point where they drive everyone from entering the country so they can kidnap them.
	That would be my guess.
	And so, yeah, that would be it.
	And then what would happen, basically, is you would...
	Sorry, go ahead. I was just going to say that illustrates how the capitalist solution can even work with terrorists.
	I mean, that's just incredible.
	Yeah, I mean, I think so.
	There is... I mean, if there's... Yeah, people will go in and that will draw more criminals but there is, of course, an equilibrium.
	Shoplifters don't steal everything in the whole store and burn the store down.
	I mean, they just take a little bit so that there is enough for them to make a profit but not so much that they kill all parasites.
	Well, except with government and taxation, it's a little bit different because Yeah, I guess that answers my questions.
	All right. Well, listen, thank you so much for calling in.
	Great questions, let me tell you.
	I mean, all super questions.
	Thank you so much to Nash and Nate and yourself for great feedback, great questions, great comments.
	As always, I thank you, the listeners, for your support and your interest and your continued attention in this, as I believe it to be, the most important conversation in the world today.
	And I hope that you're happy with what's been going on.
	I hope that if you have suggestions, comments, criticisms, Whatever that you let me know, I do try to read just about everything that comes my way.
	I can't always respond to everything but I do try to consume it so if you send me a message in some format excluding hieroglyphics, I'm sure that I will at least have a chance to digest it.
	If you would like to donate, aha!
	If you would like to donate, freedomainradio.com forward slash donate.
	As you know, that's always gratefully accepted, and I think that you will very much like the documentary as it's coming along.
	I'm jumping up and down with excitement that the musical score in particular I think is just fantastic.

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