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Aug. 1, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:12:35
AMBUSHED! Stefan Molyneux Confronted!
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Stefan Molyneux, thanks for being here today on Matt Delia is Confused.
I'm Matt, obviously. When we first reached out to you, I had some ideas about what I wanted to talk to you about, but I've been looking at a lot more of your stuff, and I just thought we might be a little bit scattered all over the place.
I also think we might end up disagreeing quite a bit, so I just want to let that be upfront.
I don't like the gotcha shit.
I don't try to do any of that.
I don't want anybody to, you know, seem like I'm a Lying in wait trying to get you on anything, obviously.
So I just want to lay that out up front.
But I also wanted to give you the opportunity to talk a little bit just about yourself and what you are.
So my listeners, obviously, you have a wide audience.
People know who you are. But if you I know a lot of people throw names at you, so if you could tell me what you are to you, that would be great, yeah.
Ah, the eternal question, who am I? Well, I have been studying philosophy since I was in my mid-teens.
A friend of mine turned me onto it through Neil Peart, the drummer for Rush, and I took, I guess, half an English degree, I did theatre school, I finished up in history, and then I did a graduate degree on the history of philosophy.
And then I surveyed the landscape of what was available for that kind of degree.
And I thought, well, you know, I could go on and do a PhD.
This was in my mid to late 20s.
I got to do a PhD, which I think took about an average of seven years.
And then it takes another five years to get your tenure track position solidified.
And I thought, man, I really, really don't want to have my first steady paycheck in my mid to late 30s.
So I have also been very interested in computers.
I got... When I inherited some money from a grandmother, I converted it into an Atari 800, learned how to code in my early teens, I guess, 12, 13.
I used to spend Saturdays in the computer lab, so I dusted that stuff off in my brain and ended up co-founding a software company to help companies minimize environmental waste.
And I worked very hard on that for quite a number of years.
We sold the company. I did some more work in computers.
And then I had kind of an oddly long commute.
And after a while, you just run out of songs to listen to and audiobooks to listen to.
And I'd heard about this wee little thing called podcasting.
And given that I had a long commute, I slapped a headset on myself and recorded...
The thoughts that had been brewing in my brain since my mid-teens about philosophy, like all the arguments and debates and experiences that I'd had in the realm of philosophy and economics and all the stuff I was interested in.
And I just started, well, publishing it.
I also published some articles.
Well, I made the transition from what's called a minarchist, which is somebody who wants a small government, a government that's largely Focused on maybe police, military, law courts, perhaps prisons, and a government that's like 1% of the size of the current government.
And as I sort of worked that and netted that dough of minarchism in my brain, it kind of fell apart in my head and I ended up a full voluntarist, sometimes called an anarcho-capitalist, technically an anarchist, but unfortunately that word has had its well somewhat poisoned over the years.
It's got some connotations you might not want to use.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I began making the case.
My very first article was the Stateless Society and Examination of Alternatives and I started to publish and for a while I did the drive and I did the podcast and then after a while people said, hey, you know, this is really great stuff.
I'd be happy to donate.
I'm like, okay, maybe I'll get some gas money and so on.
And then eventually I just...
I guess pulled the ripcord or the ejection button on my existing career as a software executive and just started working full-time on writing books, on traveling, on speaking, on engaging with people, having debates, doing interviews.
And yeah, I've covered a very wide variety of topics.
I'm very interested in metaphysics, the nature of reality, epistemology, the study of knowledge.
In particular, I think my contribution is very strong in the realm of ethics.
I've got a whole book called "Universally Preferable Behavior: A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics." I've done a lot of work with people in the psychological field, in economics, and parenting is a big one for me.
Peaceful parenting, you know, don't hit your kids.
The non-aggression principle, do not initiate force against others, has been very much the inverted pyramid foundation of what it is that I do.
And just taking that principle of not initiating force and applying it consistently, it kind of freaks you out.
It's kind of like when you take...
That the speed of light is constant and just kind of apply that consistently, or you take the principle of gravity and momentum and dislodge the Earth from the center of the solar system.
It's kind of freaky, but it gives you a lot of consistency and power in your approach to ethical issues, which I think is foundationally what we're facing as a society.
So I hope that's not too brief nor too detailed, but that's the very brief story of me.
Sure, yeah, yeah, in a nutshell.
So I think I've heard a little bit...
You talk a little bit of your...
In the past, you considered yourself a collectivist, and then you had some kind of transition.
Am I wrong about that? Like, was it...
Did you go from left to...
Spectrum-wise, we're talking.
Well, originally, yeah. So originally, I remember very clearly in my mid-teens, before I got into philosophy, I remember being in a debate and arguing for socialism, which seems like...
If you want to help people and be nice and make sure everyone gets health care and old age pensions and nobody gets hungry and food have children in their mouths, the propaganda that I had received was, well, if you're a capitalist, you're a cold hearted black I'm a cold-hearted person who wants children to work 16 hours a day and the poor to die in ditches by the side of the road.
But you see, if you're a socialist and you care about people and you want them to be happy, and given that I care about people and want them to be happy, that seems like the obvious road.
But then I began to study the economics and the history and got a more accurate representation of the differences between the market and the state.
I shifted very much towards a free market capitalist.
So the trajectory is kind of the typical one you hear where it's, you're young, you're idealistic, it's sort of you're entrenched on the left because of everyone else around you is, and then as you say, you learn more, read more, found your own ideas in, to be not aligned with,
I guess, probably the academy is what you'd consider where you become, I don't know what the word you might use, but that's sort of where, from what I, even in my experience, you know, a lot of In college, I went to NYU. It's just a very liberal place to be, and it's hard to find someone that's more conservative, even if they are.
They're not going to talk about it very much.
That does make sense.
I think I ended up being fairly good at debate and fairly well grounded in my position because, you know, the swimmer who swims against the current just ends up stronger.
It's just kind of the way that things go.
But yeah, it was definitely in high school that I had begun to get more into Austrian economics and free market and stuff.
And definitely by the time I was in university, I was very much against the grain because, you know, there's university and then there's university in Canada, which is...
Kind of a whole different breed.
I mean, it's probably closer to where you were at NYU. Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I guess something, just shifting gears a little bit, you know, asking you about yourself, and I know Google was in the news a ton today, and we can get into that later if you'd like, but I Google you, and the things that come up are Well, at least they put the word scientific in there, I suppose.
Right. Scientific racism and something else.
I forget what it was. Not a friendly moniker.
I'm assuming. I doubt you embrace those things.
Am I right about that? Well, you know, it's one of these classic shoot-the-messenger scenarios, right?
So I think why the term is applied is I accept a century's worth of IQ data that tests that various ethnicities test different on average, and I've always maintained that.
You never ever judge an individual by group averages.
So you deal with each person as an individual.
But when you're going to zoom out to society as a whole, I accept the science.
I accept the data. And you'll notice that the people who criticize me in this manner don't point out the very obvious point that I've interviewed 18 of the world's leading experts in the field of human intelligence from the left and the right.
And sometimes I didn't even know what their politics are.
And they all concur with this.
So what happens is people take a scientific fact and they attach it to me as a mere opinion in order to attempt to avoid the scientific fact of these disparities.
And, you know, obviously, looking you up, there's a lot of your name and the IQ stuff is constant.
I know you deal with this a lot and you talk about it a lot.
I'm sure you're sick of talking about it, but I don't want to dwell on this at all.
My question is one that I haven't heard you be asked.
I guess when I think of this stuff, I wonder not why is it such a light moron, but just why.
Why is it such a talking point, I suppose, for...
Not talking point, that's probably the wrong term, isn't it?
Why is it such a prominent piece of discussion for...
People who share what you think.
No, no, no.
It's not, really. It's not.
I sort of come out of the libertarian tradition.
Libertarians don't like this piece of information.
If you look at the voluntarist community, they don't like this piece of information.
To me, we have this society where we're going to have lots of different ethnicities.
That's the decision that was made.
It's a society we have to work with and we have to try and figure out.
Now, you're going to have disparities in outcome, and it's not particular to ethnicities, right?
So you have disparities in outcome between men and women.
You have disparities in outcome between, if you just look at whites or East Asians or Ashkenazi Jews or Hispanics or whatever, even within a particular ethnic group, there are smarter and less smart people.
It's just the way the bell curve works.
There's a question, which is foundational to society, which is in a free market, right, in a meritocracy.
And we don't have a free market.
And I'm sort of aware that it's kind of the no-true-Scotsman fallacy that, you know, well, that wasn't real communist.
Oh, this isn't really the free market.
But, you know, we can get into that if you want.
There's real clear indicators as to why it's not the free market.
But there's still quite...
A meritocracy around.
And the question is, why do some people make a lot of money and why do some people not make a lot of money?
And the Marxist answer or the leftist answer is environment plus exploitation, right?
So if you're raised poor, then you're going to do badly.
If you're raised rich and you have good schools, then you're going to do well.
So that's sort of the environmental explanation.
I'm obviously boiling it down to less complicated things.
And also exploitation. So the rich are rich because they hoover up the excess value and labor of those who work for them.
They, you know, labor theory of value.
It's the guy who puts together the car and the factory who's making the car.
And then there's all this, you know, monocled, fat, top hat, capitalist, monopoly character caricature of the capitalist who just scoops up his excess earnings and labor.
And therefore, those who become rich do so through exploitation.
Now, Are there environmental influences to success?
Absolutely. Is there exploitation in society?
Absolutely. But that's not all there is.
There is something which has great power to explain the differences in outcome.
And that has to do with IQ. And again, it's not a single lever that moves the world, but it needs to be part of the discussion.
Because if you think of singers or songwriters and so on, 95% of the money goes to 5% of the people.
And that's not chosen by the record industry.
That's fundamentally chosen by whoever likes to consume their music.
It's the same thing in sports, right?
I mean, 95% of the money goes to 5% of the players.
And because they have particular abilities and skills, and there's a work ethic and a commitment and all that kind of stuff as well.
So I find that the simple—and I think it's simplistic to the point of being intellectually offensive—just saying, well, it's environment plus exploitation, whether that exploitation is capitalist in nature or sexist or racist or whatever— That it's simply wealth accumulates out of exploitation plus being lucky in your environment.
It just doesn't hold up to the data.
It's much more complex.
It's much deeper than that.
And I think we need to have a conversation about all of the factors that drive disparate outcomes, not just between groups, but within groups as well.
And I think that the explanation of racism and sexism and exploitation and being born with a silver spoon in your mouth Creates a huge amount of resentment and hatred and fear and discontent and anger and that to me is very troubling.
You know, if we're going to have, which we do have, and I'm fine with it, a multicultural, multiracial society, wonderful.
Then let's all try and get along using as many facts as possible rather than just screaming exploitation, racism, sexism at each other and think that somehow we're going to end up with a functional society.
Right. I mean, I think though...
Conflating Marxism and the current state of the left, is that a bit of an oversimplification?
I don't see many actual communists around me.
I live in LA. Even in LA, we're not really commies.
It's very left, as you know.
It's very liberal. The Marxism claim to me, which I hear you use a lot, Jordan Peterson, a lot of similar thinkers use this term and I don't know anyone who would call themselves a Marxist here.
When you mean here, what do you mean?
You mean your friends? In the political system?
No, I mean, I don't hear Marxist, any politician even on the left talking about communism or Karl Marx as some kind of pinnacle of idealism.
I think it's a bit of an error to look at the far, far, far left and say that that's The exploitation and racism thing.
I mean, that is obviously the left looks at issues of race much more than the right does.
But I guess the term Marxism in a modern sense, I think, is a bit undefined.
And I don't. Can you explain a bit more?
Do you mean it in a classic true sense of Marxism, or are you talking about just using it?
I mean, all you have to do is look at the major planks of the Communist Party.
They've already been achieved in America.
You have to look at the founding of the UN, of the IMF. Both were founded by communist I've got a whole presentation called The Truth About McCarthy talking about McCarthyism.
The State Department was riddled with dozens if not hundreds of communists who helped hand over the entirety of China to communism.
It was the same thing at the end of the Second World War when you had a wide variety of communists who were infiltrated the State Department and were giving FDR advice to hand over Eastern Europe to Russia.
The reality is, I mean, they're not going to be out there trumpeting themselves.
Diane West, who I've ended my show, has got just for your listeners, she's got great books on this talking about the roots of the anti-Trump process that is going on in America that is really hysterical to the point where they seem to be dragging this woman on CNN who talks about how most people she's got great books on this talking about the roots of the anti-Trump process that is going on in America that And they're just throwing her at Trump because they're kind of crazed about it.
And it's called The Red Thread and it's about the fact that Trump was mentored by A fervent anti-communist, and because he is the most anti-communist president, there's a lot of hysteria coming out of things.
And if you look at how the mainstream media deals with communism and socialism, it's generally in a positive light.
And of course, if the left is not ascendant and in an extremist fashion, then why are you reading What you're reading about me in Google, right?
The fact that I'm bringing up something which is a competing theory to the leftist explanation for disparities in outcome in a meritocracy, the fact that there would be this hysteria, this libel, this slander, whatever you want to, these names or whatever it is that you want to call it, would indicate that it's got a pretty strong hold.
And there are tens of thousands of Marxist teaching in...
American universities in Western European universities and so on.
So, no, it's not some sort of red scare.
I see commies in my jam, butty.
It is, you know, some pretty solid evidence that there's, yeah, some pretty extreme leftists out there.
And, I mean, just look at Antifa, very fervent, a lot of them on the hard left and violent and aggressive and so on.
They're regularly defended by the media and their threats and violence is explained or excused or overlooked.
It's a pretty common thread to see.
Yeah, I would say that there's definitely a bias to the media tilts to the left.
I don't think there's any dispute about that.
But really, even on your Wikipedia page, to have those labels put on you is It's very extreme.
I mean, white nationalists as well, I've heard you talk a bit about that, or you'd be accused of that as well.
Especially, I saw a bit about you going to Poland and all of that, and I think that there was a bit of a You know, as far as that goes, and I don't really want to spend the whole show talking about garbage on the Soros-funded website Wikipedia, but yeah, I went to Poland.
And the reality is that in Poland, I was able to put out a meetup on social media.
I was able to meet with a wide variety of people, some of whom I agreed with, some of whom I disagreed with.
I have a very robust debate with a young Muslim person.
And we had debates about nationalism and economics and all kinds of cool...
We talked Bitcoin and it was a great and wonderful evening.
And we were in a...
I think it was actually a former place where they took political dissidents under communism.
It had been converted into a bar and it was a glass enclosed area overlooking the street.
We put it out on social media.
And there was no fear of violence of any kind.
Even though people came there, we disagreed strongly and it was a robust and fun evening.
This is how it should be, right?
When you disagree and you don't just call people horrible names and attempt to stimulate violence against them.
You actually sit down and have a debate like a civilized group of human beings.
And that's what happened to me in Poland.
Now what happens to me elsewhere when I go to speak is there are bomb threats, there are death threats, the police don't show up when desperate stuff is occurring.
You have hard-left activists attacking buses and trying to tip them over.
I mean, it's crazy.
Now, I'm an empiricist.
There is a difference.
Now, whether that difference is that Poland is anti-communist because of its history behind the Iron Curtain, whether it's because there was a lot of Christians there, whether it's because it's a very white country, and white males in particular, demographically and statistically, are the ones who support free speech by far the most out of any ethnicity and gender,
That's a real fact, and I wasn't going to pretend that it didn't happen because for those, like, to take an extreme example, imagine if there was some group of blacks Who wanted to get together, as they should and rightly should, to talk about issues that matter to them.
And everywhere they went, they were shut down.
They were deplatformed. They were attacked.
Their followers were attacked.
And then they went to some country where they could have a civilized discussion of their issues without any attacks.
Would they not talk about that?
Well, of course they would. And of course, I know that people are going to say, Well, because I'm not a white nationalist.
I've never made the claim, and I'm actually not a nationalist insofar as ideally the absence of the nation-state and the state as a whole is the ideal moral system, or I guess lack of system.
But yeah, I mean, people don't want to know the nuances of the argument.
They can't rebut the arguments that I put forward.
So what do they do? Well, they just paint me with as many negative labels as possible so that it becomes dangerous to go out and speak in public.
So if... The white nationalist thing is It's not a label you embrace, in fact, a label you push away.
No, it's not a label I embrace.
Listen, being of another race, being white, being East Asian, being Hispanic, it's not a violation of the non-aggression principle.
This is very, very simple for people to understand.
Racists living in proximity, racists, I mean, it's wonderful.
There's not a violation of the non-aggression principle for people to be of a different race.
I mean, it's kind of a silly thing to even have to say, if that makes any sense.
So, no, of course not.
I just think that there's probably some overlap with the wrong version of, I guess you could call it, actual white nationalism.
What's the overlap? I'm not sure what you mean.
Immigration, the IQ talking point, not from you, but when I look at what people have to say about you, Not in the press even, but just even...
Well, listen, let's not...
I mean, if it's all right with you, let's talk about you and I, right?
So bringing in all this other stuff, you know, I spend a good deal of time not bothering to examine garbage that people say who don't have any intellectual horsepower to handle facts.
Right, right, right. Let's just talk you and I, because if it's something that you believe, let's talk about what you think of what I've said rather than hiding behind what other people say.
So let's just have a direct one-on-one about what it is you have concerns about that you think I might believe.
Absolutely. Just to put a button on it, I make movies, I'm in the film and television industry.
If I were to make movies and my broad base was a very specific type of person, I think that would be something to look at.
And all I'm saying is that If most of your, if you look at it, I know you want to talk about this.
We don't have to. We don't have to at all.
But if you look at comments on a YouTube video that you have, which are, oh, there are thousands.
I mean, you're extremely popular. It gets really gross in the comment section, you know, and a lot of the people that do agree with you What do you mean by a lot?
I don't understand what you mean.
Are you saying that there are CNN articles where people aren't saying aggressive things or there are NBC articles where people aren't saying aggressive things?
Listen, the white nationalists, the far right, they hate me.
I mean, they really, really dislike me because they think that I should be all up in everyone's grill about what they call the Jewish question.
And my answer to the Jewish question, which is basically around IQ and in-group preference, which is perfectly valid.
They really, I mean, just you can look at all of the people who criticize the living hell out of me from the far right.
And so... But of course, if you're just going to read what other highly motivated partisans are saying about me, then you're not going to get much of a picture.
But this idea that my listenership is somehow far right, it's just not true.
I just did a show with a black guy from Nigeria.
I spent two hours trying to help him find what was going wrong with his dating life.
I just did a show, I think it was an hour and a half or two hours, with a guy from India who was abusing his child and trying to figure out how he could not.
I do conversations with women about life and love and family and career and so on.
So, you know, this idea that, oh, you know, there are a bunch of far-right people who follow me.
No, it's just simply not true.
know what to say about it.
I mean, you can find negative stuff on anyone.
You can find negative comments on anyone's videos and thinking that.
Now, the fact is, of course, that the IQ disparities or ethnic, these are real facts.
And of course, if I'm the only person with the courage to step forward and attempt to improve relationships between ethnicities by Well, yeah, that's going to make me a bit of a lightning rod.
But the fact that other people aren't talking about it means that, yeah, there's going to be a bit of a cluster around me, but that's the function of everyone else not talking about it, not me talking about it.
Right. I do think, though, if you're going to have Jared Taylor as a guest, you're sort of courting some kind of controversy there, right?
Someone like that. You know there are going to be people screaming from the mountaintops, this is not the kind of guy that we want.
But why? Why is that the case?
Is Jared Taylor's perspective not something that we can have in society?
I mean, I've had hard leftists like Noam Chomsky on my show twice.
I've had people, I think it was Eric Turkheimer, who I believe is on the left, who was talking about IQ disparities between ethnicities, and we're making a case for the environmental impact of it.
And so why is it that if I have someone...
Now, my understanding of Jared Taylor is he does talk about racial crime disparities, which, again, are facts straight out of the FBI. And he also, from what I've heard, when people have pushed him on policies, he says he wants race-blind policies.
He doesn't want any laws that favor one race or another.
Now, maybe he's changed that, or maybe I'm misinterpreting, so I don't want to talk out of turn, but that's my memory of him.
So equality before the law and talking about crime data that is straight out of the government archives, you know, is this not something that is allowed?
I mean, I have a little bit of a problem.
Of course it's allowed. Yeah, yeah. No, no. I'm just asking.
But why don't you say, well, you've had really hard leftists on the show.
Isn't that controversial?
See, from your perspective.
Because nobody's aligning you with them.
No one's claiming that you're aligned with Noam Chomsky.
But why? Because you're not, right?
What do you mean? Are you aligned with Noam Chomsky?
I mean, he's a socialist. He's very far left.
Would you say that you worry about seeming aligned with him?
There is absolutely things in what Noam Chomsky argues for that I would be behind.
I am behind 150%, which I've talked about in the past.
So Noam Chomsky is brilliant at criticizing and dismantling Yeah.
Yeah. And then there's other people.
I like this idea or this argument that we should have no racial bias in the law.
I think that's kind of the ideal.
Isn't that what Martin Luther King Jr.
was talking about? I guess back before he was somewhat discredited lately.
But what he was talking about, we judge a man by the content of his character rather than the color of his skin.
I think that's wonderful. We should, I believe, have more race-neutral laws, if not a majority or an exclusivity of race-neutral laws.
So there's overlap there.
And I just think let's have the human conversation.
I mean, Noam Chomsky, sorry, Jared Taylor has been on The Young Turks.
I mean, nobody sits there and says, aha, they're aligned with blah, blah, blah, right?
Look, I'm on your show now, right?
Does this mean that, you know, we are now...
Of course not. Of course not.
Of course not.
Let's shift gears a little bit now.
I've heard you talk a bit about religion, and correct me if I'm wrong, you are an atheist?
I am an atheist. You are an atheist.
And not an agnostic, like it can't be proven or disproven, a hard atheist.
I can't remember the exact term right now.
Strong atheist, I think. Yeah, strong atheist, that's it, in that...
I vigorously assert the non-existence of God.
Again, I apologize for my voice.
I'm kind of battling through a little bit of that.
No, no, no. You sound fine. You sound good. You sound cool.
You know what I do? I say I'm sultry.
Like I just smoked 40 cigarettes like Paul McCartney trying to sing a blues song.
Yeah, you should just keep it.
It sounds very, very cool. Try to lose your voice as much as you can, yeah.
Okay, so I guess I bring that up because the place of religion in modern life, I think you might have a, tell me if I'm wrong, please, a softer view on it than some atheists I know.
It's just, there's no place for religion.
Religion is for stupid people, blah, blah, blah.
They take a hard, sort of ignorant line, if you will, or hard line.
Yours is softer. You see a place for it?
Or historically, why don't you tell me a little bit about that?
Well, going back to the, it's a great question, so going back to the foundation of the non-aggression principle, is it more dangerous for somebody to believe in the state, or more dangerous for somebody to be a Christian?
In terms of violations of the non-aggression principle.
So let's say I have a neighbor who's a Christian, and I'm not a Christian.
I was raised a Christian, but I'm not a Christian.
So I have a neighbor who believes in Jesus and the New Testament and the Old Testament and so on.
Well, he can go to church, we can chat about things, and we may have some alignments, you know, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not bear false witness.
I'm down with all that stuff, man.
That's good stuff. And so it is not a violation of the non-aggression principle for us to have different beliefs.
Now, if on the other side, of course, Matt, I have a statist, right, somebody who believes that the government should do X, Y, and Z, well, the government initiates the use of force.
That is the definition of the state.
So when it comes to violations of the non-aggression principle, I'm infinitely more in danger from the statist than I am from the Christian.
Now, why would I be talking about atheism and statism?
Because the two are very co-joined.
So in various surveys that I've seen, and I can send you links if you like, atheists are...
Ten times, twenty times or more, more likely to be on the left than for smaller government.
In other words, atheists have carved out God in their heart and replaced it with state.
I call it state-theism.
You can use whatever phrase that you like, but when I go to Christians and I say, I don't believe in God or there's no such thing as God, we can have a debate and, you know, sometimes it gets quite energetic and I wouldn't say heated because that sounds like oppositional.
We're all just trying to carve our way to the truth.
But when I go to atheists and I say the state doesn't exist, there's no such thing as the state, they literally can't process it.
I get these eruptions in anger.
I don't get blasphemer from Christians, but I get blasphemer from atheists because there is no such thing as the state.
There's buildings, there's uniforms, there's costumes, there's guns.
There's compliance, there's bullets, but there's no such thing as a state.
It doesn't exist. And people say, ah, well, but there's the capital.
It's like, yes, well, there's a church.
That doesn't mean that there's a God.
The fact that there are buildings devoted to the coercive activities of the state does not prove the existence of the state any more than You know, these lunatics who cut their own balls off to join the Halley-Bopp comet have proved the existence of an afterlife on a comet, right?
It doesn't work that way.
So I feel, and I sort of made this case, I was harsher on Christianity in the past, and as I've sort of, I don't want to say matured because that's not really an argument, but as I sort of mulled over things more deeply, I have found, and as I've criticized various communities, right? I criticize libertarianism.
I criticize the left.
I criticize conservatives. I really criticize the hard rightists.
I criticize the...
The fascists, and I've had a whole debate with the fascists opposing his position considerably.
I criticize the Marxists.
The Christians I can criticize, and we can actually have a productive conversation.
But with few exceptions, the atheists just don't, they can't handle this kind of criticism of what seems to be their centrally cherished and very dark deity called the state.
Right. I guess my question is, that's an interesting take, and I I actually totally see what you're saying, but I feel like the state, the difference to me between the state and the church, the state can be changed.
The core, the laws can be changed, right?
The state is shifting and there are new leaders and it's always shifting.
The church is locked in and the belief system is there and that's what you believe and the church is never really changing.
Sorry, you don't believe that Christian doctrine has changed over the 2,000 years?
It's been a religion? I mean, of course, things change.
I mean, the Vatican II, everything changes.
Well, I mean, not to mention the entire fragmentation of Christendom into Catholicism and various sects of Protestantism, right, which was sort of the foundation of the modern era.
So if you have particular beliefs, you can go all the way from Unitarianism to Calvinism.
I don't know if Zunghelianism is still around, but Lutheranism, there are churches of Latter-day Saints and Mormons.
And, you know, although I know that some people wouldn't say every group is a Christian, But you have a buffet and a boutique to choose from, but in an increasingly federalized state system where the federal government in the US, the EU in Europe, the federal government in Canada and other places, the law is just the law.
There's no buffet. You can't pick and choose.
You know, if you want to go to one church versus another, nobody's going to raise much of a fuss.
But if you have a problem with the way your child is being indoctrinated in the government school system, well, it sucks to be you.
You've still got to pay for it even if you pull your child out.
So as far as changeability and varietyability goes, the religion remains in a free market, right?
It remains in a free market.
It's trying to win adherence for better and for worse.
And you can choose whether you want to join or not.
It's not the case with the state at all.
Yeah. Yeah.
Moving on to another hot, fun topic.
I saw a video of yours on abortion, and have your views changed on that from, tell me where, I saw it was around the Kavanaugh, I guess, panic, or whatever you want to call it, when that was erupting here in the States.
I saw something that you posted about Yeah, listen, I just want to, I mean, this is fine.
I'll do the conversation, but I just want to kind of point out that, you know, in the emails, it's like, well, we want to have a discussion about Western civilization and blah, blah, blah.
I don't mind doing the hot button stuff, but you probably should be a little bit more upfront with people to say, I'm going to bring up all the hot topics and, you know, all that kind of, that's fine, but I just want to sort of point that out.
So with regards to abortion, I was certainly more pro-choice when I was younger and the process of being, I've been a stay-at-home dad, my daughter is 10 years old.
And so having raised her from, well, I was talking to her while she was still in her mother's womb, I was reading stories to her because I know that the male voice being deeper travels further through the placenta.
It's like cranking up the bass to the point where your Prius vibrates.
And so just seeing that particular process unfold is really an incredible experience.
I don't know how this would be dealt with in a free society, but I do know that forcing taxpayers who morally deeply oppose abortion, forcing taxpayers to fund abortions, is immoral.
Is absolutely immoral.
That needs to change, for sure.
We should not be taking money from people at the point of a gun at all, of course, right?
But we shouldn't be taking money from people at the point of a gun in order to fund abortion.
I would like to see Of course, whatever we can do to keep children alive would be great.
I think that would be a wonderful thing.
And of course, abortion itself seems to be pretty racially charged these days.
If you are conceived in the womb of a black woman, you have only a 50-50 chance of making it out alive.
I mean, that's pretty nasty stuff for the black community as a whole.
So yeah, stronger families and I also think that far easier adoption.
Like adoption is really complicated and messy and expensive and so on.
I think easier adoption would be helpful.
I think that paying women to come to term.
If you want the baby, fine.
Pay her medical expenses.
Pay her. And that to me, a quote, a market for babies would be great because people then say, oh my gosh, that's terrible.
Like, you've got a market for babies.
It's like, well, it's better than turning into medical waste by pulling their brains out with forceps and so on.
So I don't...
Like the idea of, well, a woman has an abortion, she goes to jail, right?
That to me is not a productive solution.
I'm always looking for sort of more voluntary, positive, transactional, free market solutions.
And there are tons that are out there that are unfortunately kind of really inhibited at the moment by the state.
So I do think that it's a nasty kind of society-shredding System that we have at the moment where so many babies get aborted.
I mean, the numbers are absolutely appalling.
And any society that has that level of abortion in its midst has some serious rethinking to do.
And again, my answer is not, let's have a law, let's throw people in jail.
My answer is, let's think about this in ways that can have more children not be killed.
You know, more babies, more fetuses, if you want to call it that, not be killed.
And I think that's a productive discussion.
Now, shifting into Western civilization, I want to talk a little bit about where we're at, just generally with the rise of, I guess we could call it populism, you know, the economic tanking and leading to populism is rather common, history would suggest.
And I'm curious as to, this is something I actually have no idea about your opinions on, just about, I know you are Canadian, but just about where, with Trump and everything, where do you see this populist movement Well, it's not a new thing. It's merely the re-emergence of an old thing.
I mean, there used to be patriotism.
There used to be borders.
There used to be some fairly strict controls over immigration for the purposes of assimilation.
So Trump is a very, very mild form of something that used to be just Natural.
I mean, if you look at places like Poland, for instance, they're still quite nationalistic.
If you look at Israel, of course, quite nationalistic to the point of big walls and deportations and very strict control over immigration.
So it's really not a new thing.
thing, it's just a fairly mild pushback against this idea that for Western countries, there should be no control over who comes in and lives.
Now, I'm actually a big fan of not having controls over who comes and lives in a country.
I'm fine with that down the road.
But the problem is, when you have it in America, so like illegal immigrants are taking $7 out of the government kitty for every dollar they pay in taxes.
But that's just not sustainable.
When you have the majority of even legal immigrants ending up on some form of welfare or another, that's not sustainable.
And this is not even my argument.
This, I think, is a Milton Friedman argument from many moons ago, which is you can have open borders or you can have a welfare state, but you can't have both.
And at a time when America is north of $20 trillion in debt and has unfunded liabilities of, what, $170, $180 trillion, you know, call me old-fashioned, you know, I grew up very poor.
And when we were broke, we didn't spend money.
You know, we cut our expenses.
And the West, being so heavily indebted and bringing people in who are...
Massive drains on an already depleted treasury is a form of economic suicide.
And it's incredibly cruel to the immigrants because the immigrants were sold, oh, you can come here to the West and this is the kind of country that you're going to live in, but it's not sustainable.
It's absolutely not sustainable.
So these people are taking great risks.
They're giving up their lives, as you know.
The people who come in illegally from the southern border of the U.S., the majority of women are raped along the way.
There is child trafficking.
It's an absolutely horrendous journey.
And they're coming to a ship that the weight is going to sink.
The weight of them is going to sink in.
I mean, you don't hand out tickets to the Titanic if you know what's coming.
My concern is that it's actually a way to destroy the faltering economies of the West, and that's cruel to the domestic population, no matter what ethnicity, and it's incredibly cruel to the people who make these massive sacrifices, who go through these dangers, who end up in a society where They can't possibly maintain what drew them there in the first place.
And so I think it's something...
And again, this is not a minority opinion at all.
A significant majority of people in the West are freaked out about immigration because it just seems to be an ever-escalating...
Importation with no thought about assimilation or a maintenance of existing values and, of course, existing taxpayers, again, of every ethnicity, have very good statistical and economic reasons to be massively concerned about taxes going up, services being cut, and it's...
It's really, you understand, it's not a planned out situation.
There's no... And you can talk to people on the left.
You can say, okay, well, what's the, you know, there are 500 million people who want to move to the West in the world, at a minimum, right?
What's the upper limit? And they generally can't tell you.
And that's highly irresponsible.
Sure, yeah. I mean, open borders certainly is not a solution.
I think, though, where my head goes is I don't even know what a solution...
Would be, because everyone's so far apart on it, and it's such a non-stop problem.
I mean, the problem's only getting worse and worse, and it seems like an actually impossible problem to solve in our current system.
And when I think of solutions, nothing even comes to mind.
Does anything come to mind from your point of view?
Oh, always. Absolutely.
Sure, yeah, yeah. Well, okay, let me just sort of dip in here with a little...
This is something I saw on Twitter the other day, and I've been really, really thinking about it.
It's a very powerful statement. So if you look at 1964 in America, the Civil Rights Act, which for all of its flaws was a, I think, fairly well-meaning piece of legislation aiming to give the black community in America greater access to economic opportunities and education and so on.
I could have criticisms of it, but I really do believe that it was a piece of well-meaning legislation.
Now, the black community in America, it's really fascinating.
After the Second World War, they did very well.
You know, there's the biggest surge of blacks into the middle class.
The black family was stronger in many ways than the white family became.
And poverty as a whole in America was being reduced by a percentage point every single year from the late 1940s up until the mid-1960s, until the Great Society under LBJ and so on, where, you know, the government, I think, was scared of running out of poor people, so it decided to pay people to be poor, which is kind of brutal.
Now, 1964, you have the Civil Rights Act.
Then 1965, you have the Hart-Celler Act that shifts immigration from Europe, from largely whites, but Europe and so on, to the Third World.
Now what happens then is you get a lot of people pouring in who are relatively unskilled and who are going to be competing and do compete with blacks.
So blacks have like one year in America where some gates of opportunity were opened up before they were slammed shut.
By having mass immigration pour into the country and, you know, mass immigration, they don't compete with all of the people who advocate for it, you know, they don't compete with the lawyers, they don't compete with the judges, they don't compete with the newspaper editors or the reporters, or people like you and I probably.
They compete with people at the bottom of the economic ladder.
And they drive down their wages and they reduce their opportunities.
And I think that's just...
I just want to sort of point that out.
This is absolutely terrible for the black community.
I mean, the welfare state and the way that government schools are set up, where the taxes of the local neighborhood pay for the schools.
I mean, you couldn't set up a system more designed to...
It causes many impediments and barriers to the poorest in our society having more opportunities to do better, right?
So I just sort of wanted to point that out.
And now as far as the solution goes, I'm probably going to sound like a bit of a broken record of a time map, but the solution is always the same thing.
Stop initiating the use of force.
You know, whatever we can do to stop initiating the use of force is great.
You know, the big concern that a lot of people have about immigration, because people say, ah, well, you know, it's a nation of immigrants.
America's a nation of... That's not true.
It was a nation of frontiers, men and women, right?
I mean, immigrants come to an already existing society, and again, absent an examination of the indigenous population, which we can do perhaps another time, Sure.
America, as it stands now, was not there when the Europeans came over.
So, and of course, as you know, the founding fathers were explicit white nationalists, right?
They said, we want free men and women white of good character, right?
So if you're going to say, well, you know, we've got to go back to the way it used to be, it's like, I don't think that people really have thought that one through.
With you there. Yeah, yeah. We did that one already.
Well, America did. So the concern is that people aren't coming to the West for freedom, but for free stuff.
That is the big concern.
When you can earn in Germany without having to work 10 times the income that you can earn in the Middle East when you're slaving away under a hot sun all day, there is some significant concern about that.
And statistically, there's very good reasons to be concerned about that because the conversion of particularly refugees slash economic migrants and so on to working, productive members of society is not high.
It is not high, and it is a big problem.
Also, the basic aggregation of the demographics of people particularly coming into Europe, it's young males.
Now, people always say a fighting age, which I think is kind of prejudicial.
I mean, it may be true, but that's not obviously their major purpose there.
But whenever you get an aggregation of young males who can't get married and have kids...
You're going to have trouble. You know, testosterone is reduced when you get married.
Testosterone is reduced further when you have children.
Wife and kids is nature's way of taming the wild beasts of the masculine nature, and there's no path to that in particular.
And that's, I mean, just, you would never design that and think that that was a really...
Good idea. So, yeah, I mean, I believe that, I mean, the welfare state's going to end one way or another.
We can either have a soft landing or we can have a hard landing.
You know, mathematically that which cannot continue will not continue.
So we can either sit there and say, okay, well, we don't have enough money, at least probably for another generation we don't have enough money to pay, like one generation, probably not even that.
And so it's going to run out of money, so we've got to try and transition our way out of this.
We've got to transition out to job training.
We've got to transition out to charities for people who can't work, which are very effective and positive for people, unlike the welfare state, which traps people in this life of poverty and dysfunction.
So we've got to transition out of this kind of stuff.
Because it's not going to last anyway.
And then if you have a reduction of the welfare state and you then have more freedom of association, right?
Forced association is a violation of freedom of association.
Then you can have a society which can be open to people coming in because they're coming for reasons that everyone can get behind.
But again, at the same time, you have to recognize that the people who are at the bottom of your society are going to be directly harmed by a lot of low-skilled immigrants coming in and...
What's wrong with just having kids?
What's wrong with just having babies?
That seems to me like a pretty productive way to have a society.
And, of course, the other aspect, too.
Gosh, the environmental impact of mass migration is staggeringly terrible.
You are taking people from low carbon footprint situations to very high carbon footprint situations.
Now, I understand they want to come, of course.
I mean, I can completely put myself in their flip-flop, so to speak, and say, yeah, I'd probably be making the same, you know, the same journey.
But we don't have any discussions of that.
I mean, just how destructive the environment is.
I'm not just talking about global warming, although that certainly is an issue.
But it's incredibly destructive to bring people in and then borrow huge amounts of money, hand it to them so they can consume like crazy, thus destroying nature's scarce resources.
That is a terrible—and, of course, the environmentalists were well paid in general to not talk about this issue.
There was this debate a couple decades ago, and basically people said, oh, yeah, we'll give you a whole bunch of money if you don't talk about the negative effects of immigration on the environment.
But it is a very, very big—at a time when the West is trying to control its own environmental or ecological footprint— Bringing millions of people in and borrowing money to pay them to consume like crazy is madness.
I saw a study recently speaking at Carbon Footprint and what we as an everyone can do.
It was actually quite a shock.
Just visually, it was pretty wild because the thing that was number one by like a 100 compared to the next one was have one less child, really.
It's just like less people in the world Well, no, but this is what drives people crazy.
And they get very suspicious of that kind of stuff because, you know, I'm not saying you say this, but whoever's writing that, you know, they're targeting people in the West saying don't have kids.
And then do you know what they say?
Oh, sorry, we don't have enough people to pay for your old-wage pensions, and now we've got to import everyone from other countries.
Right? So, okay, so you can say fewer kids.
But then when you import people to replace the kids that people didn't have, people get pretty damn suspicious about that, that it's some kind of bait and switch.
Like, you know, I did this tweet not too long ago.
It was pretty popular where I said, you know, you say to women, well, don't have kids, you know, have a career.
And then what happens is they don't have kids, you import a bunch of people to compete with them, they get kicked out of their jobs, and now they don't have kids or a career.
That's a pretty destructive thing to do.
So if you're going to say to people, there's too many people in your society so don't have kids, and then you import tens of millions of people, That is something that makes people very, very angry.
And it's, you know, that's the kind of anger that can really get ugly.
And so, yeah, okay.
Then if you say, don't have kids, you have to close the borders then, right?
Because you just want fewer people with high consumption.
But if you say, don't have kids, and then you open the borders, I'm telling you, that's not going to end well.
And again, I'm not saying that's your position.
I'm just saying that that's what drives people kind of crazy.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's also, you know, it's don't have kids anymore.
Here, it's almost like controlling, doing what we can to cap our carbon emissions or anything environmentally productive for our society.
If other countries aren't going to do it as well, we're going to fall behind in a few ways.
So it turns into that, if we're going to do it, is everybody going to do it?
Because if everybody's not going to do it, if everybody's going to play by that same rule, then how are we going to have this rule?
Well, and I would say as well that the smarter you are, the more concerned you are about the long-term health of the environment.
And so when you say don't have kids because it's bad for the environment, you're directly targeting the smartest people in society.
And we know that by the time someone's a teenager, their intelligence is 80% genetic.
So if you're convincing the smartest people to have the fewest kids...
I mean, you're literally like a society, you know, like that old joke, some guy's sitting on a tree limb and he's sawing on the tree limb the part that's closest to the trunk.
I mean, you can't sustain a free society when your average population IQ dips below 90.
And so if you are saying to all the smart people, well, you've got to be really concerned about the impact of the environment, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, it's like, okay, well, then you're going to be convincing a lot of people.
If you're really concerned about the impact on the environment, then why are you paying women to have tons of kids outside of wedlock?
You know, why is the government paying?
If you're concerned. Now, I'm concerned with people who have, women who have kids out of wedlock.
I'm concerned about that. It's not the kids' fault and they should be helped and so on.
But right now, the government just keeps firing more and more money at women who have more and more children out of wedlock.
But all the smart people are saying, well, you know, I have to be concerned about the carbon, blah, blah.
It's like, okay, well, we do, but let's have a consistent policy here.
Right, yeah, consistent policy.
I hear that for sure.
And speaking of...
Children, I think that the non-aggression policy, just to get back to that before we wrap up, I'm interested in, and this is something I know less about so you can color me in on this, I'm interested in, I don't even know what the term, it's the children are born in this world.
It's not up to them.
Peaceful parenting is the phrase.
Peaceful parenting. Right, right, right.
Can you talk just a little bit about that?
I find myself really interested in it.
Sure, sure. Well, corporal punishment for adults has been banned decades ago, hundreds, 150 years ago.
In some circumstances, you cannot flog a man, you cannot beat a man, you cannot whip a man, you cannot throw a man in stance or a woman for that matter.
And these are people who are proven criminals, right?
Like they've been found guilty in a court of law of being criminals.
You can't beat them.
Good! You know, I think that's fine.
I think that's a valid and fair approach to the world.
But why do we have this standard wherein children can be hit who aren't criminals?
Come on, if you're going to ban the hitting of criminals, why would you allow for the hitting It's absolutely monstrous, absolutely immoral.
And it's one of the problems with the state of society is that the government only cares about people who vote.
Children don't vote. Which is why children grow up in this horrible environment of terrible government schools with bullies and with drugs and promiscuity and all this kind of stuff and terrible non-education and so on.
Why? Because You know, I mean, kids don't vote.
So kids don't have a say in society.
Kids should have the most say in society because they're the ones with the fewest choices, right?
So wherever you have the least choice, you have to have the highest standards of behavior.
Like I'm married. My wife chose to get married to me.
She chose to stay married to me.
And I recognize and respect that as a voluntary choice.
My daughter, I don't know if you have kids, but my daughter, she's not here by choice.
She didn't choose me. She didn't even choose to be born, and she sure as hell didn't choose her parents.
So where people have the least choice, you have to give them the most respect.
Also, we've had as a standard in our society, as you know, Matt, for a long time, that where there is a power disparity, the behavior of the person in power It has to be of the highest standard, right?
So if, you know, you can't ask your employee out on a date, right?
Because you have power, so you have to have higher standards than that.
You have to have the highest... And the greater the power disparity, right?
This is what drove people nuts, one of many, many reasons about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, right?
Most powerful man in the world.
She's like a young intern and so on.
And so with...
And so if the man is bigger and stronger than the woman, he needs to be more delicate with her, gentle with her, right?
Because he's bigger and stronger. So where you have a power disparity, you have a higher standard of behavior.
Now, as you know, there's no greater power disparity in the world than that between a parent and a child.
Right? Because children aren't there by choice.
And they can't get up and leave.
I mean, I guess you could phone the cops and say, well, I'm being assaulted or abused or whatever, and then the cop's going to show up.
Maybe they'll put you in a foster home.
Maybe you'll be in some facility with a bunch of other kids who may or may not be remotely...
Productive members of your circle and so on.
And kids generally are like, you know, better the devil you know.
And they can't pick up.
You know, you hit your wife, God forbid.
You know, your wife can go stay in a shelter.
She can call the cops. She can go and get welfare.
She is perfectly supported and independent.
And your kids aren't like that.
And so this idea that the people with the least choice and the least independence And the fewest resources get treated the worst is the exact opposite of how morality works or should work and does work in every other situation.
Of the world.
So we do have this terrible, terrible situation with regards to children that the majority of parents, certainly in America, I think in Canada here too, still hit their children.
And what does that do?
Yeah, it just teaches the children that the biggest and strongest person can do whatever the hell they want.
And that is a terrible lesson to teach the children.
We want to teach them how to negotiate.
We want to teach them that Civilized interaction is the way that you resolve disputes.
And, you know, I get it. People always say, well, your kid's grabbing something hot on the stove.
Your kid is running to the road and so on.
It's like, yeah. And if you're close enough to hit your child, you're close enough to gently take your child away from that situation.
You know, you turn your pot handles in towards the back of the stove.
You build a fence.
You know, fences, you know, good fences make good parents, right?
You build a fence, you whatever, right?
You have your children play in the backyard rather than the front yard until they're old enough to understand.
Like, there's so many solutions other than hitting a child.
And it's still, I mean, I wrote, spanking is a violation of the non-aggression principle, I think, over it.
10 or 12 or 14 years ago, did not make me massively popular in the libertarian community, who accepted the non-aggression principle to begin with, and some did work with it.
It's one thing when you talk about the Federal Reserve and central banking and big social policies, which are interesting to discuss.
We talked about abortion and so on.
Listen, you and I aren't going to get up and change abortion laws tomorrow, but it's an interesting discussion point.
But to me, Matt, where ethics matter, where virtue and philosophy matter, It's in the things you can actually change and affect in your own life.
So can you and I stop the predations of war and central banking?
Well, I'll certainly make my case, as I do, against war and against central banking and the international debt slavery known as bonds and national debts.
And, you know, maybe we can move the Overton window a little bit here and there, but when it comes to our actual own lives, where do most people commit the most violence?
With their children. And it is violence.
It is violence to hit your children.
It's actually pretty violent to scream at your children.
It's very destructive to call them names and so on, right?
Like, I can call you a name and, you know, we probably wouldn't walk away as friends, but you wouldn't be, you know, scarred for life or whatever, right?
But, you know, children are molded, susceptible.
They're somewhat shaped by language, largely shaped by language in many ways.
And we treat...
The weakest and most vulnerable members of our society with the greatest amount often of contempt and violence, and then we wonder why our society is dysfunctional.
You know, child abuse and its relationship to criminality.
I've got a whole presentation.
I'm going to just do a shameless plug, although it's not monetized as nothing on my channel is, so I'm not trying to make money from it, but it's called The Bomb in the Brain.
And it's my interview with Dr.
Vincent Valitti who ran this study on adverse childhood experiences and their relationship to Dysfunctional behaviors later on.
Ischemic heart disease and cancer and smoking cigarettes and alcoholism and drug abuse and promiscuity and so on.
And child abuse is a dose-dependent destroyer of our souls.
And it leads directly.
He's got something called the Adverse Childhood Experience, which is something everyone should do.
I think just go through and mark yourself on how you did As a child and negative things that may have happened.
And what he did was he took that adverse childhood experience data and mapped it to life outcomes.
And on a step-by-step basis, a dose-dependent, which means the more adverse childhood experiences you had, the worse was your prognosis in the future.
And it's a one-to-one mapping.
I've got a whole presentation on it.
But the takeaway is that child abuse It takes about 20 years off your lifespan.
No kidding. It's like it makes smoking look like sit-ups.
And so the destruction that is wrought upon children, the dysfunction, and what do we do now?
Well, we drug our children for having dysfunctional effects, right?
Effects of single-family parents, or single-parent parenting, whether it's a mother or father.
It's not as good for kids as dual parents.
And it is something that we as a society really, really need to focus on.
It's what I focus on.
I mean, I do all of these listener calls.
I've done thousands of them over the years and at least hundreds and hundreds.
It's hard to really count because some of them are multiple shows.
And what do people bring to me?
They don't bring to me, oh, I'm really frustrated with central banking.
I mean, occasionally, right?
But what do they bring to me?
You know, I'm going to publish a show today and About a woman who's really worried about her son and you dig into her history and her father was raised by a witch and actually drank her blood at one point.
Now, okay, that's a little on the outside of the pendulum swing, but there's a lot to be learned from digging into this kind of history, from breaking the cycle of abuse and the non-aggression principle is most violated in the back or front hands of parents.
And if we can solve Are aggression there?
You know, the relationship between child abuse and criminality is incredibly strong.
there was a particular gene that shows up in boys, and if those boys also experienced physical abuse, 100% of them became criminals.
100%.
Now, again, it's not an infinite study, so I'm not a determinist about these things, but the boys who didn't experience physical abuse were not particularly likely to become criminals.
And it's kind of like with physical abuse, with beating your children, hitting your children, you don't know.
Like, you know, it's like smoking.
Some people, like George Burns, wanted to smoke cigars and made it to like 100 or whatever.
You don't know whether you're going to get it.
That's why you don't smoke, because you don't know.
Right, right.
I mean, that's wild, right?
But you don't know ahead of time.
And it's the same thing with child.
You don't have a genetic map of your kids.
And there are some kids who are kind of hyper-resilient who will get through just about anything.
And there are other kids who have particular susceptibilities to verbal or physical or, heaven forbid, sexual abuse.
So if we can take the non-aggression principle and bring it to the core of our families, Then we have the greatest chance to build a more civilized society.
Like, I look at all of these people who, they scream Nazi.
I'm not putting you in this category, of course, right?
But they sort of scream Nazi at everyone they disagree with and so on.
And it's like... You know what their childhood was like.
You know that this is just them playing out the verbal abuse that they saw in their home.
And if they had been trained to negotiate and to speak reasonably and to put themselves in other people's shoes.
And I mean, I'm not immune to this.
So, you know, I'm putting myself right in the rogues gallery as well.
But if we can raise our children peacefully and reasonably, we have such a great shot at having a peaceful and reasonable society.
And the child is the father of the man, the hand that rocks the cradle, rules the world.
And so much of what we're trying to wrestle with or wrangle in adulthood is dependent or simply a domino effect of what happens to us in early childhood.
And frankly, Matt, that's what people want to talk to me about.
So, you know, I'm glad that we did these other topics.
I'm fine. You know, that's fine.
And I'm really, really glad that we, as you said, we're going to close up now, that we ended on this topic because that's where I want to give people the most encouragement.
To just find ways to negotiate with your kids.
If you've hit them, apologize to them.
You know, we all make mistakes. Say you're sorry.
Do all the things that you want your kids to do.
If your kids hit someone else, you'd want them to say sorry and promise to never do it again.
So if you've hit your kids, you can fix it.
You can work with it.
Say sorry. Promise to not do it again.
And just, you'll be amazed at what you will be able to achieve if you stop doing that.
You know what I mean? Like, if you just take one behavior off the table, it opens up all these other possibilities.
Right, right. And that's my sort of big takeaway.
That's where the non-aggression principle has the greatest chance to change the world.
Well, just one last question, just specifically about that.
You said something about the libertarian community.
Is there pushback to this?
Because it seems so...
When you talk about that, specifically this, it's just...
It seems... It's extremely important and necessary, and it's hard for me to picture someone who would push back on that, is your experience with this subject in particular.
Is there like a community that pushes back on that from this perspective that you're giving me right now?
Because it seems... Yes, yes, of course.
Yes? Yes, of course. And I would argue, Matt, that the stuff you talked about earlier, these sort of endless slurs against me, why would some...
I mean, the core of what I do is the non-aggression principle and the way in which I strongly advocate for its implementation is in the realm of parenting and the family.
So why would people want to cover me with so many slurs to keep people away from that message?
Because that's the core thing that I talk about, that people should change, right?
You've been on that for a long time, too.
That's nothing new for you.
It's nothing new. I've had countless anti-spanking experts, parental experts on negotiation on my show.
The listener calls are to do with childhood and Like the Indian fellow that I was helping out to not aggress against his daughter.
He'd split her lip, I thought, or he'd cause her lip to bleed and so on.
So I've been doing this forever.
So the question is, why?
I'm in no danger. The world is in no danger of me turning into some Julius Caesar, stride the world, colossus and achieving all of my political objectives.
That's not about to happen, right?
Fair, fair. So it's not like, oh my gosh, you know, he's going to achieve X, Y, and Z. He can get rid of the welfare state and he's going to make taxation voluntary and blah, blah, blah.
Like, that's not going to happen, right?
So what is it that people are so mad at me about?
Well, it's not an abstract thing because people don't get mad at abstractions.
It's not because I'm about to become dictator of the world and master of time, space, and dimension, Steve Martin style, and achieve all of that.
It's because a lot of parents have hit their children.
And they want to keep their children away from what I'm talking about because they don't want to take ownership for having hit their children.
They don't want to have to apologize.
They don't want to have to reform.
They don't want to have to change. So all of this cloud of garbage around me, it's like the rings of Saturn.
All of this garbage is not fundamentally political.
I mean, people don't get that mad.
At abstract political arguments.
They get mad because of what I talk about.
And they get mad at the fact that why are they so few incredibly strong advocates for children?
Because when you advocate strongly for children, who do you run into?
Their parents. And they can be adults.
The parents can be 60.
The kids can be 40. It doesn't matter.
Right? Because I say to people, listen, if you had abusive parents, you sit down and talk about it with them.
Tell them how you feel. Try and work it out.
Try and sort it out. And if they continue to be abusive, you don't have to stay in the relationship.
I don't tell people to leave, but it's a valid fact that you don't have to.
So why is it that people are so mad at me?
Why are they coating me with all of this Well, they did the same thing to Freud.
Again, I'm not putting myself in that category, you understand, but, you know, when Freud first uncovered in Vienna the massive prevalence of childhood sexual abuse, well, what happened?
Well, he was threatened from here to eternity.
He was threatened with stripping of his medical license.
He was threatened with lawsuits.
He was threatened with you name it.
And that's why he converted the actual experience of children being abused by their parents into this Oedipal and Electra fantasy.
Oh, well, they just want to have sex with their dad.
It didn't actually happen. So he betrayed the kids.
And I've argued before that that actually kind of led to World War I. And that's a big leap, and I'm not expecting everyone to accept that.
You can listen to my arguments about it.
But having seen the effects of not standing up for the children, I said this at the very beginning of what I'm doing, that I will never, ever back down in the face of standing up for the kids, of standing up for the children and standing up for their right to not be beaten, to not be hit, to not be abused.
Because if we can't fix that, we can't fix anything.
Yeah, I will give you that for sure.
We're in agreement on that one.
Absolutely. Thanks, Stefan.
I really appreciate your time and hopefully I'll talk to you again sometime soon.
Appreciate it.
Thanks so much.
Thank you.
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