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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
44:27
'Smart People Podcast' Interviews Stefan Molyneux, Host of Freedomain Radio
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Time Text
Hey, is this Stefan? It sure is.
How are you doing, man? Good.
This is Chris. How are you? Oh, hi, Chris.
I'm fine. How are you doing? Good.
And I have John on the line as well.
He's the co-host. How are you doing?
I'm good. I'm trying not to be overly pressured by the name of your podcast.
I've been trying to think of, like, smart words all day.
Yeah. But I just found I mostly couldn't pronounce them.
So I'm going to mime.
I hope this is appropriate for a podcast.
I'm going to mime most of my smart stuff.
That works out fine for the format, right?
That actually works completely.
And some parts, of course, we'll be doing in Braille.
But other than that, I feel it's going to be a scintillating show.
At least that's the goal. That sounds – see, scintillating.
You're already there. Oh, look at that.
Sorry. I meant to mind that one.
It's a disco dance that's very gay, so I hope you won't mind.
I got to ask you.
We were having a five-minute debate on how to pronounce your first name.
I didn't – we had Stefan, Stefan, Stefan.
Which one should we go with?
Actually, because it's a Polish name, you pronounce it Master of Time, Space, and Dimension.
And I hope to be referred to that or as that throughout the entire show.
Stefan is fine. Stefan.
Okay. All right.
That sounds great. Well, thanks again for being on the show.
definitely excited to talk to you.
And, uh, we actually got referred to you by a listener of ours said, Hey, you guys should check them out.
And as a fellow podcaster, we are impressed with what you do and wanted to, uh, just talk to you a little bit more about it and how it all came to be.
And then pick your brain and maybe start some interesting conversation.
Alright, you go for the brain, I'll go for the nose.
My usual combo. We're hoping to just get maybe 30 minutes of your time or so, and that's about it.
Obviously, this is old hat to you.
Do you have any questions or anything before we get started?
No, I'm ready to roll.
Alright, well, we really just wanted to start off and talk a little bit about the brand that you have built, the Empire of Stefan.
And I guess wanted to get a little background on how you got into basically podcasting and YouTubing and writing books.
Seemed like a little bit of a departure from what you were doing beforehand, which I believe was in the IT field.
Yeah, I was – I mean, I've taken a bit of a circuitous route.
I started – I did half an English literature degree.
Then I went to the National Theatre School, studied acting and playwriting and did that for a little while.
And then I finished an undergraduate in history at McGill.
And then I did a master's in history really focusing on the history of philosophy at the University of Toronto.
And then, like most people who leap out of the amniotic sack of academia into the cold, harsh world, I went, What was I thinking?
That was a lot of fun, but what am I going to do with this?
So I mean I've been fascinated by computers and programming.
I sort of bought – I got a job and got my first computer when I was like 11 or 12.
And I'm of that age where it came with 2K of memory.
I was very excited.
And so I ended up back in the IT field.
I was programming the whole time and I co-founded a company.
We grew it. We sold it.
I hung around there for a while, worked at a couple of other different companies at an executive level.
Lots of sales, lots of travel, lots of R&D, lots of good meaty stuff in the IT field.
But I had a kind of a long commute, frankly, and I was tired of listening to audiobooks.
And so I thought, you know, I've been thinking and studying philosophy off and on for the past...
Sad number of decades.
So why don't I share some of the few things that I've gleaned?
So I started to write and record shows actually while I was driving.
And so I did that.
I started publishing them.
They got some interest. And then people said, hey, you know, we could donate to you.
And I thought, well, okay, that might be a little bit of gas money.
And it turned out that the donations were more than I expected.
So after, I don't know, a year or two of doing that, I thought, ah, you know, I've been an entrepreneur.
Let's just take another swing at it.
And so I left my career.
And decided to go full-time into the podcasting world and then, you know, just videos and that.
And I ended up being not too bad at public speaking, so I've done a lot of speaking engagements throughout North and South America and just trying to spread the good old polysyllabic back-rubber philosophy to as many people as I can get to lie down on a soggy mat.
Probably that metaphor got away from me.
Sometimes, you know, the metaphor, you write it and sometimes it just throws you.
That would be an example of the second kind.
No, it worked for us.
And of course, the podcast and YouTube, all that you talk about is Free Domain Radio.
And I was wondering, what is the philosophical basis for what you kind of decided you were going to talk about?
I mean, you have some very...
The staunch beliefs?
I don't know the best way to put it, but obviously things that will garner attention, criticism, and obviously a lot of people enjoy it.
So I was kind of wondering if you could explain to our listeners who are familiar the background for it and the basis.
Yeah, I mean technically the Latin for them is deranged certainties, so I'll defer to the big Latin on that.
Well, the basic idea is That there is objective truth.
It can be discovered by reason in conjunction with evidence.
The old scientific method. Reason in conjunction with evidence is the royal road to a truth that you can really take to the bank.
Oh, that's not a good metaphor these days anymore, is it?
That you can be certain of.
That you can set your feet in concrete and throw yourself to the bottom of the ocean of truth and certainty.
There we go again. Anyway, so the idea is that, you know, Socratic reasoning, as Nietzsche phrased the Socratic approach, reason equals virtue equals happiness, right?
So you have to be rational in order to be virtuous.
You can't be virtuous just by obeying something, by obeying a law, by obeying someone, by obeying a group, by obeying a country, by obeying a dictator or a teacher.
You have to be rational in order to be virtuous.
Now, if you're virtuous, which can only be achieved through rationality, Then the idea is, the dice that you roll is, if I am rational, I can be virtuous.
If I'm virtuous, that gives me my greatest chance.
For happiness. And so that's really what I'm trying to work into people's brains.
So much of our ethical life is either command-based, in other words, do it because someone on authority tells you that it's right or wrong, which is where you end up with these horrible experiments that were done in the 60s where 60 or 70 percent of people would actually push a button and kill someone in America.
If someone in a lab coat, in a simulated experiment, if someone in a lab coat told them to do so, because we're raised to just say, well, that's what the teacher says.
That's what the law says. That's what the government says.
That's what my father or mother says.
That's what culture says.
That's what... Everybody says, that's not a good road to virtue.
I mean, following the herd just usually leads you off a cliff.
On the other hand, there's a kind of supernaturalism which comes from the religious side of ethics, and religion and philosophy are not close.
I would say kind of opposite ends of the spectrum.
And so on the religious side, it's like, well, it's good because there's a commandment written down, but this time not from a person but from a supernatural being.
And that's not a good guide.
Even if you accept that there's a supernatural being who can give you commandments, unfortunately, the way they're received is through people, priests, or through texts which have so many contradictions, have been reinterpreted and mistranslated so many times.
You can't get to the original meaning anymore, even if we accept that there was one.
So if you can't get them from gods and you can't get your virtues from governments or following commandments, where do you get them from?
Well, the idea is that you follow the path of reason and evidence.
And there's good rational arguments for virtue.
I think we can see throughout history that virtue produces good empirical results.
Like when you respect property rights, you get a good flourishing free market and you get the growth of wealth and the elimination of poverty as much as possible.
And then when you have coercion and violence and totalitarian dictatorships, you end up with heaps of bodies all over the place, which is all pretty rotten.
So that's the basic idea.
I accept free will.
I've got lots of arguments for that, so we are responsible for what we do.
I accept property rights, lots of arguments for that.
I accept the non-aggression principle is really the keystone, I think, of any good ethical system.
Thou shalt not initiate the use of force against other people.
You can use violence in an extremity of self-defense.
If Leatherface is parachuting down your chimney currently on fire with a machete in one hand and a chainsaw in the other, yes, I guess you can shoot him in the knee to prevent him from But generally, you can't use force except in an extremity of self-defense.
Respect for property rights, the non-aggression principle, all that kind of good stuff is the foundation of what I talk about, and everything kind of flows from there.
Okay, so there's so much to cover already.
And it's funny because I got to admit, I'm not, I don't like people that feel like they have to stand on a soapbox sometimes.
So I wanted to dislike what you had to say.
But I can't.
I mean, without diving into...
Oh, come on. Try a little more.
Shall I do it in an outrageously offensive accent that is going to annoy most of your listeners?
Shall I just start the whole thing again in some really insulting pseudo-South accent or something like that?
Well, you see, y'all got to...
Let me see if I can help you over that hump.
I do dislike you. No.
How do people dispute?
I would like to know things such as free will and having property rights and non-aggression.
I mean, to me, translated, it's take responsibility for your actions.
You own what you own and don't punch your neighbor in the face.
Those all seem like things that I could get behind.
So where do you meet so much opposition?
Well, it's not the ideals in the abstract, but the ideals in the practice that people and philosophy generally part ways.
So, for instance, spanking.
Not the fun adult with jelly kind, but the not-so-fun punishing-over-the-knee child kind is spanking a violation of the non-aggression principle.
Well, yes. Of course it is, right?
You're not acting in self-defense.
It is the initiation of force against the child.
And so 80% to 90% of parents are still spanking their children.
So is that an immoral action?
Well, yeah. I mean, in a weird way, it's not immoral until they find out.
Right? Until you've – like ethics is a kind of technology.
You can't blame people for not having an iPad in the 14th century, right?
And if people have never heard the arguments, if all they've ever heard is spare the rod, spoil the child or children will run wild if you don't hit them or whatever, then in a sense, they kind of exist in a state of nature.
It's neither moral nor immoral.
But once you make a good case – and I've had experts on the show and I've put forth pretty rigorous philosophical arguments about spanking as a violation of the non-aggression principle – Well, people get a little testy about that because not many of us are out there strangling hobos on a nightly basis, and so we think that the non-initiation of force doesn't really apply to us, but given that 80% to 90% of parents are spanking their children, well, there's an example.
Another example, of course, is taxation.
Taxation is the initiation of force against citizens for the forcible removal of their property, and so the problem with the non-aggression principle I guess the opportunity and the problem, if you apply it consistently, well, by golly, you end up with a society where you can't justify or defend the existence of a state, of a sort of centralized political oligarchy.
And that makes people a little tense as well.
So it's really not the abstract so much.
It's really the everyday stuff where it really bothers people, right?
I mean, how many of us shoplift?
It's not a big problem when we say property rights, but when we start to talk about Centralized control of currency as a form of counterfeiting that is immoral because it's illegal for a private citizen to do but it's considered good or moral for a government to do.
Taxation, which is the forcible removal of property, which is again illegal for a private citizen to do but considered virtuous for a public citizen to do.
Selling off the unborn, kind of illegal in the private sector but just called a national debt in the public sector.
So once you start to get this stuff together, then That's not good.
And the last thing, of course, is religion, right?
I mean, if you found philosophy on reason and evidence, well, then you really have to reject the 10,000-odd supernatural beings that people claim exist and rule mankind.
So, yeah, there's a lot in there for people to – I mean, I'm not getting handed a cup of hemlock anymore because we've made that much progress as a species.
But there definitely is enough in philosophy to make people testy.
But I kind of go with Churchill on this.
You know, Churchill said to a young cabinet minister, a minister once, he said, I heard you have enemies.
Good! That means you have stood up for something, sometime, somewhere.
And I think there's a natural result of that.
No, I actually agree with you on that one.
And clearly the religious argument, that one, no matter what your stance is, somebody's going to hate you and wish you dead.
So I kind of throw that one out.
But the other one still, I have no qualms yet.
So I'm going to move on.
What, John? I actually thought it was interesting because I think you almost said it as a throwaway comment when Leatherhead was coming into your house and you mentioned shoot him in the knee to stop him from doing whatever you would do to him.
There's probably people that you pissed off with that statement because I know a lot of people that are really pro-guns and it's, hey, if you break my house, I'm blowing you away.
I'm not preventing you from doing it.
So even in that small piece that you look at it where it's, I'm going to stop this person from doing something as opposed to, I guess, taking their life for them trespassing on your property.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think the moral argument would be...
I mean, and this is a tough...
I mean, it's a tough call to make in the middle of the night when someone's coming through your window, but I think ideally we'd want there to be – if force was necessary to prevent injury, and it is – I think it's two and a half million times every single year in the United States a crime is prevented through somebody being armed.
So, I mean, obviously gun control is valid and moral, but we would like it to be a minimum of force that is necessary.
Sure. I mean, you don't call in an airstrike because somebody put their toe on your property.
That's sort of what we're – I guess unless you're an Iraqi.
But the idea, of course, is that you really want to use the minimum amount of force.
That's the only reason why I said shoot the knee.
I mean, if some guy is just jumping at you, you do whatever you can.
But again, I mean, this is not particularly common stuff relative to the other kinds of injustices that are going on every day.
Let's talk about evil government.
I feel like there's got to be somewhere in there that you piss a lot of people off.
I tend to be under the belief that democracy is the best bad government that has ever existed.
How do you feel about that?
Well, the way that I look at states is it's sort of like a buffet of tumors and you're sort of dragged there by a doctor and it's like, ah, you see, we have rancid bone marrow carcinoma.
I'm just making – I'm not a doctor.
We have brain jumping zombie head carcinomas.
We have relatively minor stuff which will only make your leg fall off or whatever.
Which one do you want? I think the philosophical approach is I'm really looking for an option called none of the above.
How about a no-cancer buffet?
That would be super for me. I mean you know the quote from Churchill.
He says, democracy is the worst conceivable system of government except for all the others that have been tried from time to time.
I kind of agree with that.
It's just that democracies, they implode – and we can see this happening all around us right now – they implode with depressing heartbeat-style regularity throughout history because the moment that people can figure out that they can vote away other people's money, including the unborn, I mean, it's just a shock attack fest on the next generation.
So I think that we need to at least look at the possibility of societies without a state.
And it's weird for people to think about, of course, but, you know – Weird is good when it comes to philosophy because it means it's something new.
We had societies that had slavery.
All human societies had slavery up until sort of the middle, late parts of last millennia.
And so you say, ah, show me a society without slavery.
Slavery is the national... All societies have slaves.
And who's going to pick the cotton if we don't have slaves?
Well, all these questions get answered when you extend human rights to slaves and turn them into free people.
And when you extend the laws of ethics to the state, then you can't have a state because they are the people who have the legal monopoly on the initiation of the use of force in a given geographical area.
But how does putting a costume on living in a big boob-shaped building, how does that give you separate moral qualities?
It doesn't. So do you think that, say we didn't have this state, this centralized government that could impose its will on you, do you think people would be able to get along based on their own moral compass?
Well, I don't know about – get along is a pretty broad, you know.
Is everyone going to be involved in some multi-planetary tongue kiss?
I'm not saying that would necessarily be the case.
But certainly human beings in the absence of coercion tend to work together pretty well.
I mean we are talking through a whole bunch of internet service providers who – they're not ordered at gunpoint to exchange data packets, but they do.
You can use a cell phone in Brazil – If you don't mind handing over your kidney to someone, you can use a cell phone because they all exchange data based on they want to.
If you look at something like eBay, one of the world's largest employers, 300,000 people get their income through eBay, and eBay resolves its disputes without courts, without police, without anything like that.
I was giving a speech last summer in Las Vegas at Freedom Fest.
I'm actually going to be back there again.
I heard a talk from a guy who – he was a lawyer and he said, you know, I was in South America.
I can't remember where. He said, I got a meal and they double charged me for something and what would I have done?
Gone to the cops there or the cops when I got home?
Nothing would have happened but I just called up Visa and Visa resolved the dispute for me, gave me my money back.
I think we're good to go.
I think we're good to go.
So given that nobody can use it anyway, given that it's incredibly corrupt and unjust and takes forever and can be appealed to the end of time, and there's so many examples of great ways that people can resolve disputes without using the force of the government, let's just sweep away stuff that people can't use that's ridiculously expensive and time consuming and just make way for the stuff which has been proven very effective and cheap and give the poor finally access to the justice that is currently denied them.
Yeah, I mean, it was verbose and it sounded good, so I literally don't know how to come back at that.
You know what I mean? It sounds good.
So the one thing is sometimes I wonder without – and you've put more thought into this than I clearly, so that's why I'm picking your brain.
But sometimes I wonder without this government that – Sorry, but you said these companies wouldn't exist in the first place.
What do you mean? Well, I guess I mean, say we weren't to have, and again, I can speak really only in the U.S., so I guess if you were in Afghanistan and you didn't have these freedoms, you might not be able to do it.
But without the safety that I believe were given through government, it might be more difficult to operate a company or have the structure to do that.
Right. Okay. Well, I mean, of course, if you get rid of governments, you get rid of corporations because corporations are special favorite children of the government, right?
I mean, corporations are basically legal immunity for the consequences of economic and legal actions given to generally the rich who are in control of corporations.
And in return for this privilege, they pay corporate taxes, which is just another way of saying they basically pay – reduce their employees' salaries in order to pay corporate taxes.
But corporations have nothing to do with the free market.
Corporations are at least legal privilege given to the rich by the state wherein if your corporation makes money, you can take out all the money.
You go buy your house.
You can go get yourself a second gold-plated sex cyborg if you want.
I know I have.
And so if you take the money out of the corporation, that's fine.
If your corporation loses money, do you ever have to give it back?
No. It's a one-way money conveyor belt out of the corporation to private citizens.
It never has to be returned. If your corporation makes a lot of money, you get it out.
If your corporation, say, spills a whole bunch of oil in the Gulf, you don't have to give any of that money back.
So it's a very corrupt and corrupting mechanism.
I would very much like to see the idea of corporate personhood out of the window, limited liability out of the window.
It's the best way to make sure that banks aren't going to blow up the economic system if they're the first ones to lose their houses as opposed to now when you have about 3,000 people arrested for Occupy Wall Street activities and zero bankers even prosecuted.
Aaron Schwartz, for copying some data, is harassed and harangued with 30-year sentences to the point where the poor young man kills himself and the bankers just go and trade barbs with the congressman and walk home.
Why?
Because they just bribe the congressman and that's why the congressman don't want to attack them.
So, yeah, I mean in terms of health and safety, environmental regulation, I won't bore you all with the free market or voluntary solutions to these kinds of things.
They've been studied in great detail and people can just do a search on them for voluntarist or voluntarist or anarchist or anarcho-capitalist and there's tons of resources out there.
But the basic idea is that if you run a factory and you as a factory owner are personally liable for the damages that you may cause your employees, well, gosh and golly, I bet you're going to be pretty careful about the machinery that they use.
Whereas if you have this legal immunity, your sense of responsibility towards your fellow man is tragically going to decline somewhat and the legal immunity is the problem in the form of the corporation, not the market-based activity.
So what do you do in a free market?
I mean, what is the alternative to corporations and then how does a business get to that point?
Like if somebody had the idea of an iPad without the backing of a corporation and all that money to go into research and development, It's kind of hard to make the iPad.
So how do businesses or how do, I guess, person-to-person transactions develop into how successful corporations have become?
Yeah. I mean, this is the, if I'm not Genghis Khan, how could I possibly have children argument, right?
He had a lot of children, but it wasn't particularly voluntary.
People are still going to get together.
They're going to get together and create entities or groups or organizations.
I hesitate to call them corporations because that's a specific legal fiction created and maintained by the state.
But yeah, of course they're going to get together.
They're going to get investment. They're going to have contracts between each other and so on.
And they're going to present the contracts to the shareholders and the person who has the best contract is going to win.
And that kind of contract is going to become a template.
And the contract is going to balance shareholder rights with employee rights, with manager rights and so on, and customer rights as well.
So, I mean, I have no idea.
I mean, you can't invent the future.
That's why we need freedom, right?
I mean you can't know what's going to take the place of slaves picking cotton.
You wouldn't imagine that it's giant robots running on crushed dinosaur tree juice sweeping back and forth across the plane.
I mean nobody would guess that.
But what you do know is that people will still get together and cooperate to produce things.
There will be aggregations of entities.
They'll be called, I don't know, iPad Borg machines.
I don't know what they'll be called, but they'll still be aggregations.
It's just that there won't be this specific legal immunity from the consequences of your actions, which has done a huge amount to discredit business.
Business, of course, is completely messed up by the state in so many different ways.
I mean the stock market is completely messed up by the state with crazy regulations, the government controlling the money supply, government controlling interest rates, which is the incredibly sensitive signal that businesses need to know the price of money and the value of investment.
The fact that there's this pseudo-regulation lowers people's defenses because they say, oh, the government is regulating things, so it's okay.
Nothing could be – there's nothing more dangerous when the government is pretending to regulate something because it's like having some illness but it has no symptoms.
It's like, oh, no, I want symptoms.
I want there to be pain if I'm not well.
Of course, the government forces huge amounts of money into the stock market that just plain doesn't want to be there.
Because if you've got retirement savings or other kinds of investments, you have to put it in the stock market or the government's going to take it from you in the form of higher taxes.
So, I mean, what we see now is like a completely mutant zombie portrait of the original that doesn't have anything to do with what a genuinely free market would look like and I think it's just – I hate to point that out too – in too long a segment, I really want to point out that we have to make, I think, the decisions on what's right or wrong according to principles, not according to what might happen or what might not happen.
The initiation of force is wrong and if we accept that, we can't create a special exclusion for government.
That's incredibly dangerous. It's like gun control.
I mean, nobody wants gun control.
You either want guns to be available to human beings in general or you want guns to be only available to the government and not to the citizens.
And boy, has that ever caused problems in history?
Yes, I think it has.
So it's just around having a common moral standard.
And if you have that, a lot of our existing institutions are revealed as not so much on the sunny side of the street when it comes to ethics.
So from a philosophical level, what needs to change For our thinking, because when you look back in history, a lot of stuff has been dictated by religion, governments, and that kind of stuff.
It's kind of in our code now to always look to something to lead us.
Now, when you talk about this, how do I go about thinking?
I'm just thinking out loud here, so I apologize for trying to phrase it.
Yeah, we're going to have to edit that question.
That's okay, though. How do you go about imagining that society?
What is the first step?
Well, the first step is to recognize that in any evolution in human ethics, it's always earlier than you think.
You know, because I mean, I've been working with this stuff for 30, 40, 30 years, I guess, about since I was about 16 or 17.
I've been working, studying philosophy.
So for me, it's like, okay, I get it.
I understand it.
And I've accepted work through it.
For the majority of people, I mean, you're sort of saying, hey, see that fiery gorge, Let's all jump into it. Don't worry.
The winged god Poseidon will take us away to some magical, wonderful utopia where Lady Gaga never got a hip injury and we can dance with her all night long.
So the way it looks from the outside is very different from the way it looks from the inside.
If you look at revolutions or revolutions in history, anti-slavery, yeah, it took about 100, 150 years.
From Mary Shelley Wollstonecraft's publication of Vindication of the Rights of Women in the early 18th century, early 19th century, took about 100, 150 years for the equal rights for women to come across.
So even with the, you know, accelerating mad joy juice of the Internet, instant share and all that kind of stuff, the giant copy machine, as Aaron Schwartz called it, We can accelerate that a little bit, but it's still generations away.
And the way that we do it is we don't worry about the existing institutions.
I mean, the existing institutions only exist because of people's belief in them.
It's a weird kind of thing, right?
I mean, a church is a building without faith.
And a government is a museum without patriotism.
So people's belief in these institutions is what gives them their power.
And that's different from everything else.
It's not my belief that the sun is hot that makes the sun hot, right?
It's not my belief that gases expand when heated that makes them – that's just a fact.
That's a reality. But almost everything that's cultural or social exists because we believe that it exists.
And so you can't fight the institution because that's the mere shadow of a belief, right?
Like, if you want to change where the shadow of a statue is, you don't push the shadow.
I mean, that's just an effect. So you have to change the cause of these beliefs.
And you can do some of that through rational enlightenment, through Socratic questioning, through all that kind of good stuff.
But the vast majority of it is going to have to be done intergenerationally through introducing philosophical concepts into parenting.
I mean, if we raise our children, Without aggression, without dominance, without punishment, without hierarchy, and I'm a stay-at-home dad, have been for over four years now, so I am practicing what I preach, and I can tell you it works out incredibly beautifully, wonderfully, magnificently, fantastically well.
But if we raise our children, Without spanking, without hitting, without yelling, without intimidation, without punishment, then they won't grow up obeying out of fear.
Now, if children don't grow up obeying out of fear or seeking gratification and reward through the arbitrary whims of those in authority, then our current existing Structures, the mental structures which compose society,
state, religion, fundamentally, countries, good lord, bunch of tax forms, but they will approach These institutions, with the same baffled incomprehension as you and I would approach some Martian religion, you know, where they worship some spiral seashell, and I mean, I don't know, they believe that the two moons were defecated by some orbiting god.
We would just say, well, that's kind of weird.
I mean, but have no emotional hold over us.
Like, you know, you flip through National Geographic and you see these, you know, strange stone gods deep in the jungle of the Mayan Peninsula or something.
And if you're not raised in that religion, it's just, wow, that's some cultural artifacts.
But they don't have any – you'd never think of like worshipping them or obeying them.
They're just cultural artifacts because you weren't raised that way.
So if you raise children peacefully and in an egalitarian and respectful fashion, then they will look at the institutions which primarily have come out of bad childhoods.
The bad childhoods throughout history as a weird Martian anachronism and they simply will not have within them the mental structures that mirror and anticipate the structures that people believe in in society, the hierarchies, the excuses for coercion we call the state, the excuses for aggressive superstition we call religion.
they simply won't match those templates.
It'll be a round peg into a square hole, and these things will simply fade away of their own accord.
But it starts in how we raise our children.
I'm actually glad you brought that up.
I know in looking through your stuff, Free Domain Radio and some of your videos, that seems to be a pervasive idea throughout, is kind of the way you raise your children.
And I can imagine that's a subject that you meet a lot of criticism and just different ideas.
Is the opposite approach just, I need to rule with a strict hand?
And if I don't, my kids are going to run around and do crazy things.
Because my girlfriend's a kindergarten teacher, and the kids are mildly insane, and I don't know how to prevent myself from not screaming at them.
So, you know, what's the rationale there?
Yeah, I mean, I was a daycare teacher for years when I was a teenager as well, so I know that.
But of course, I would imagine kindergarten is, what, four or five years old?
Five? Yep, yep.
Something like that, right? Okay, well, so who knows what kind of childhoods these kids have had prior to coming to the kindergarten.
I mean, 80 to 90% of her personalities are formed within the first four or five years of her life, so...
It's like saying, well, there's some weird-shaped pottery coming down the pipe.
It's like, well, yeah, but there's a potter at the other end, a whole bunch of them.
So who knows? Maybe these kids have been put in daycare since they were three months old.
That's pretty tragic. Maybe they come from single-parent households.
I mean, statistically, that's pretty negative for children.
Maybe they've been bullied.
I mean, you know for a fact, statistically, that eight or nine out of those ten have been spanked.
In fact, in England, it's completely like half of parents, half of moms, frankly, will spank their infants before they are one year old.
One year, you can hit a child who's basically a baby.
And then we sort of say, well, you see, kids need a strong hand because they don't listen and because they're aggressive and because they resist authority.
It's like, no, no, no. These are the effects of aggression.
You don't spank because your kids are like that.
Your kids are like that because you spank.
And that's not my opinion.
That's very well established scientifically.
Spanking reduces IQ points.
It produces social difficulties.
It increases the capacity and statistical relevance of bullying.
It has terribly negative effects.
Oppositional defiant disorder, it promotes criminality if it's extreme and continues for a long time.
So if you say, well, kids, they're so crazy, they're so unmanageable, they're so undisciplined, they don't listen, and therefore we need to hit them.
Well, I mean, this is the cause and effect is backwards.
Yeah, I was going to say, I've always found it funny that, I mean, not really funny, but that parents choose to spank their children.
And if I was ever in this room with Chris and he said something that I agreed with, And I just, you know, open hand slapped him.
Beat the shit out of you.
Yeah, like I just could never see doing that to somebody of my, you know, same size and stature.
I just, I've never understood why we choose to do that to these humans that are, you know, a quarter or a third of our size.
Well, and of course, the difference is that, I mean, if you, and I think you meant to say disagreed with, but if you're a podcasting partner, you're podartner, anyway, if you hit him, then he can just walk out and never come back, right?
You hit a five-year-old.
What the hell are they going to do?
They can't leave. They have no legal or economic independence from you.
Of all the people in the world that we should be promoting the non-aggression principle with, it should be children first and foremost.
They're last on the list.
Why do people do it? Well, because the kids can't leave because the parents probably have a whole bunch of irrational beliefs that the kid is curious and reasoning about and they know they either have to aggress against their kid or they have to question their irrational beliefs.
And so they choose to aggress against their kid to protect their irrational beliefs.
I mean, these are just theories. I don't know exactly why anyone would do that, but it is crazy.
I mean, whatever people say, well, you have to hit your kids to keep them in line.
It's like, well, do you say that about your wife?
You know, people used to. People used to say that about wives 100 years ago.
I still do, to be honest.
Well, you have a very liberal wife.
But the reality is that we used to say all of this stuff about women and now it's unthinkable and the same thing is going to happen as well.
Of course, the transition is pretty unpleasant for a lot of people.
I mean the transition to equal women's rights caused the breakup of – Millions and millions and millions of families.
With the result that women's suicidality went down, their depression went down because they weren't locked into these abysmal marriages, the promotion of virtue in the raising of children, I don't know what the result of it's going to be, but it is – That's why I'm always telling parents to stop doing it because if the ethics change halfway through your parenting – and it will happen at some point.
I mean the speed in which feminists began to criticize abusive marriages in the 60s and 70s produced a 300 to 400 percent rise in the prevalence of divorce.
And boy, you don't want to be in the middle of your parenting when the ethics change underneath you, and they will, because the science is so irrefutable at this point.
I mean the American Academy of Pediatrics has come out against spanking.
I think most of the major psychological associations have come out against spanking.
The laws, of course, throughout Europe is that spanking is illegal in most of Europe.
It's going to change here, too. Don't be still using force when society wakes up and realize how wrong it is because then it's going to be very difficult for you and that's why I really counsel as many people as I can to stop doing it now and look for alternatives.
So as our last topic, I want to briefly switch over from babies to how babies are made and that is hopefully… This is the part where we start playing the bad 70s disco music and I slowly begin to rub baby oil on my vast and glistening forehead.
That is it, and this is the part of the Catch Where We Go video.
John told me, and I didn't come across this, but you did, I don't know if it was an article or a video about why men don't want to get married.
I would like to know your theory, because as a man probably on the precipice of that, I'd like somebody on my side.
Well, I am happily married and have been for over 10 years.
I'm joyfully married, so marriage is wonderful, but modern marriage is extremely dangerous for men.
Extremely dangerous. So, of course, since the advent of no-fault divorce, a woman can wake up one day and just say, I don't want to be married to you anymore, and she can just leave, and then you're on the hook for alimony, palimony, child support, and so on until the end of time.
That's a huge problem. One of the things that has occurred, of course, in the modern world is there has been a general displacement of fatherhood by the state.
By the state providing free healthcare, by the state providing child support payments, by the state providing free, though horrible, daycare in the form of public schools.
And so what's happened, I think, as you can see, is that we've gone from Ward Cleaver to Homer Simpson, right?
We've gone from the idea that a man is a valuable, essential, integral part of the family unit to the idea that a man is a decent sperm donor and if he's around, it doesn't cause too much trouble.
I guess we'll put up with him.
But he's kind of an itchy, scratchy, childish lout who I'm probably better off without.
And so it's become pretty risky and pretty contentious for men to get married.
I mean, I think 60 or more percent of divorces are initiated by women and the major reason given is dissatisfaction.
And, I mean, unfortunately, the data is in about what happens to kids in particular when raised by single moms or with divorces.
I mean, it's catastrophic for children.
I mean, men are absolutely essential to the family, but unfortunately, that's just not part of our culture as a whole.
And I had Dr.
Warren Farrell on my show A couple of weeks ago, he's actually coming back to do a two-hour call on this coming Sunday at 10 a.m.
But he's got a great argument, which he says also, generally, in the past, we've chosen people who can't love us.
We've chosen people who can't love us.
So women will choose guys who make a lot of money.
Yeah.
If you're a lawyer, you don't exactly want to see the other person's point of view.
You want to kind of be dominant and win-lose and all that.
And so then they say, well, I married him.
He has a lot of money.
He's a doctor.
He's a lawyer.
But he's emotionally unavailable.
It's like, but that's why he has all that money because he's kind of a cold-hearted guy who dominates and gets money.
And men, on the other hand, will choose a woman who's physically attractive, who tends to be, you know, shallower, self-involved, kind of narcissistic and therefore not able So, I mean, you can bypass all of this stuff, you can surmount all of this stuff, but you've got to have really, I think, basic questions about… How are we going to raise our kids?
Are we going to use coercion?
Are we going to use reasoning? Are we going to raise them religious?
What do we do with in-laws?
I mean, we have to have all these conversations.
There is this romantic comedy thing, the idea that you see, you connect, and love takes you all the way over the rainbow, and that's a very dangerous notion.
I mean, the biochemistry of love is you've got about six months until the hormones wear off, and you sort of stare at each other in a world called reality.
And if you have conversations about values and virtues and basically what I would say philosophical matchup conversations, you have a great shot.
And out of my show, a whole bunch of marriages have – I just actually came from one recently.
A whole bunch of marriages have come out that I think are very successful because there's a value combo.
But in the absence of that, man, you're rolling some serious dice with your testes attached and that can be kind of scary.
Yeah, and it's funny, too, because as a 29-year-old male in the dating game, I don't think that I've ever been on a date or to a point where I sit down with a girl and say, How are you planning on raising a child?
That never crosses my mind, so I think I'm going to fall into this trap for a while.
Well, that's because you're really desiring to fall into something else, which that conversation might not facilitate.
If I'm remembering my late 20s correctly, it would be something along those lines.
So I think we can be frank with each other.
Hey, we can be any soul singer you like.
Well, I know we have kept you on a little longer than we said we were, but it was actually a fantastic conversation.
I really like a lot of things you have to say, and despite my best efforts, I really enjoyed it.
So... Well, listen, just for my listeners as well, since I'll obviously put this out on my own channel as well, if you guys can give your vital statistics, let's put it out to, I got like, I don't know, 60,000 YouTube subscribers.
Let's get it at least out to them if you want to give us your website.
Mine, of course, is freedomainradio.com for your listeners, but what's yours for mine?
Yeah, actually, that's what I was going to ask you.
FreeDomainRadio.com. And we'll put a link to that up on our website and all that.
And really appreciate it.
Ours is WeAreSmartPeoplePodcast.com.
And you can check us out there.
Every Sunday we release a new episode.
So I really appreciate that, you know, the little plug there.
Sorry, are you saying that even after this conversation, you're still going to call yourself Smart People's Podcast, not glib people with artificially intelligent accents who just make stuff sound good podcast?
Oh, that would be kind of a tough URL to get a hold of.
I'm sure that's already taken by some major conglomerate, but I'm glad to know that the name is going to stick.
That's good. I have to admit, I am jealous of the accent.
I've always wanted one, so maybe I'll have to move to Australia for 10 years or something.
Yes, that is a very high price to pay to get an accent, which I don't know that the Australian accent...
Oh, no, here come all my Australian listeners.
I don't know that the Australian accent is the one you want for artificial pseudo-intellectuality.
I think my general tour of the colonies accent is the one that you want, where it's kind of indefinable.
It doesn't give you that really annoying, teeth-grating, I say what?
upper-class British accent.
Neither does it give you the Canadian accent, which just makes you want to stuff a donut up people's nose.
So I think you really want to mix it up a little bit to just...
Don't be too generic. Just be the accent that's slightly smarter without annoying too many people.
I like that. Yeah, and I haven't even heard an aboot or a, so you definitely hid the Canadian.
I'll tell you that much. Excellent.
All right. Well, again, thank you so much for being on the show.
Really appreciate it. And best of luck with Free Domain Radio, although you don't need it.
You're killing it. So, well done.
Thank you so much, guys. I really appreciate the chat.
Let's do it again sometime. All right.
Sounds great. Have a good night. Bye.
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