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Oct. 16, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:06:55

The TRUTH About Stefan Molyneux: "Respect the Grind" with Stefan Aarnio

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	Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the show, Respect the Grind with Stephan Arnio.
	This is the show where we interview people who achieve mastery and freedom through discipline.
	We interview entrepreneurs, athletes, authors, artists, real estate investors, anyone who has achieved mastery, examine what it took to get there.
	Today on the show, we have a new friend of mine, Stephan Molyneux.
	Now, he is known for having the biggest philosophy show in the world.
	Free Domain, he handles all the tough subjects, the hard subjects, the really difficult stuff that people sometimes don't want to talk about.
	That's what makes his show great.
	Stefan, welcome to the show. Respect the Grind.
	Good to see you today. Well, thank you, Stefan.
	It's a great pleasure to be here.
	Yeah, it's a battle of the giants.
	Stefan and Stefan today, I'm sure you've had people mess up your name your whole life, so I'm going to do my best to get it right every time.
	Stefan, for the people at home who haven't heard of you yet, tell us, how did you get started and what it is that you do?
	Well, it's funny, since I got these questions, and it's really great to get these kinds of questions because it gives you that zoom-out, big-picture view of your life that I really think can help other people.
	I sort of think of the number of coincidences that sequentially arrange themselves in order for me to be able to do what it is that I do.
	So I started writing when I was a bit—I remember I wrote my first short story when I was six years old, so I've been writing for a long time.
	I debated throughout my childhood and particularly my early to mid-teen years.
	I was in a debating society in college.
	The first time I tried, I came in sixth in the whole country for debating.
	And I also went to acting school, which sounds a bit odd, but acting school is great.
	It gives you voice training.
	It gives you movement training so you get more expressive and it gets you in touch with your emotions.
	And also, you do a lot of improv, right?
	So you get used to thinking on your feet and reacting to things in the moment.
	And so to me, a lot prepared me for it.
	And in the business world, before I do what I do now, I was a software entrepreneur for 10 or 15 years and co-founded a software company and grew it and sold it.
	So I did a lot of the tech work.
	I was the chief technical officer, but I was out in front of clients.
	I was negotiating.
	I was resolving conflicts.
	I was doing demonstrations and training people, of course, internally So it's just been a lot of facing the world and talking about complex things and breaking them down in a way that they are easily digestible and actionable.
	I hate this idea. Philosophy being this ivory tower, like something out of Lord of the Rings where someone just ups there and makes lightning for his own amusement.
	philosophy should be something that people can absorb, understand, and act on in their own lives.
	I'm a nutritionist who, so to speak, wants to get people to actually change their diet and become healthy.
	So a lot kind of led up to what it is that I do.
	Looking back, it's almost like it's a story that was arranged by a higher power, so to speak.
	Oh, wow. Damn, first gong of the day.
	Gong is good, just for everyone who, like, we talked about this before the show, because I grew up at the gong show where I think gong was bad, so gong is not me going over.
	It's not me rambling, although that probably is happening, but gong is good.
	Just remember that. Yeah, the gong is good on Respect the Grind.
	Now, I love what you said there, Stefan, because, you know, you and I have a lot in common.
	I wrote my first book when I was 12.
	My dad used to drive me to acting lessons, and I had a Swedish dad It seems that those things are...
	They're based skills, especially things like sounding good.
	Your voice sounds good.
	And that is something that's highly leverageable now.
	Even like I have an English degree.
	Today, an English degree in 2019 is valuable.
	In 2008, when I got it, there was no content on the internet.
	So the internet content wasn't a big deal.
	Now content's everything. So it seems that the skill sets that maybe weren't so valuable before with the media the way it is and social media is super valuable now.
	Well, this is the thing that I tell people.
	So if you're shy about public speaking, there's lots of organizations like Toastmasters that can get you comfortable with it because it's a superpower.
	Man, if you're comfortable speaking to people and you enjoy engaging with an audience, right?
	There's an old Seinfeld joke about how people are more frightened of death than public speaking.
	In other words, if there's a funeral, they'd rather be in the coffin than giving the eulogy.
	And if you can overcome that fear or that anxiety, then you can do some amazing things.
	Like what an incredible superpower that is to have.
	And also, man, if you're going to be in the media, if you're going to be talking to people in public or especially online, for heaven's sakes, take some voice training things.
	That's your instrument. I mean, you wouldn't sit there and say, well, I really want to be an opera singer, but to heck with taking any opera singing training lessons or anything like that.
	Oh, I want to be a yoga instructor, but I'm just going to figure it all out on my own.
	If you're going to be in the public square, if you're Take voice lessons.
	It will help protect your instrument because this is a very powerful instrument.
	It will help you sound better.
	It will connect your voice to your body.
	It gives you a kind of authority.
	It gives you certainty. It gives you rootedness.
	So there's some technical things.
	Everybody wants to go out and just do the flashy stuff, but there's some behind-the-scenes technical things.
	Anytime you speak for a living, invest in a couple.
	I mean, I took years of voice training lessons both in terms of singing and in terms of just in theater school.
	But invest. You don't have to do years, couple of months.
	Voice training lessons are so helpful and so important.
	And, you know, if you've got a real estate audience, right?
	I mean, you want to have confidence and connection with your voice.
	You also want flexibility in your range.
	I mean, it sounds a bit odd like you're singing.
	But, you know, you want to be able to get kind of up there without necessarily making everyone feel tense and, you know, go down if you need to for solidity.
	You just need to be able to skate around what you can do with your voice.
	It's enormously powerful and an often overlooked kind of skill.
	Yeah, it's incredible. We had the Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort, and he teaches tonality in his sales program.
	And so I've phoned salespeople in my office.
	We got, I think, five or six of them right now.
	And so they're phoning our customers who buy our books and all our things, and they're offering the higher services.
	And it's so interesting with tonality and the voice and the music of the voice.
	The guys who sound the best, they just sound good.
	I have one guy in my office.
	He makes almost 30 grand a month, which is a lot of money.
	That's a lot of money for anybody.
	Young guy, 30-something.
	Young 30. He's making a lot of money.
	And he was a rapper.
	And because he was a rapper, he knows how to sound a certain way.
	And then you have other guys in my office, and they sound like...
	I joke. I'm like the East Indian telemarker.
	Hello, sir. How are you today?
	And nobody wants to buy from the Hello, sir.
	How are you today? Yeah, it's a robot.
	English is a sung language.
	Like, everybody who communicates, I mean, even privately, but particularly publicly, English is a sung language.
	It is not a monotone.
	So everybody's a singer.
	Everybody who communicates is a singer, and you wouldn't want to be a singer without taking voice lessons.
	And I just strongly urge it to people.
	It's one of these often overlooked skill sets that everybody rushes past in order to get in front of a camera.
	Two gongs. Damn.
	You know what? I love that we're going off-roading right away.
	This is stuff that people don't say, but I think it's some of the biggest things.
	So you've got all these soft acting, singing, debating skills.
	Where did you go from there?
	So you had a software company, you learned the business, and then how did you end up starting out Free Domain?
	Well, I have loved philosophy since I was in my mid-teens.
	A friend of mine who listened to the band Rush, which has a drummer who loves Ayn Rand, turned me on to The Fountainhead, turned me on to Atlas Shrugged, and then I got into The Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, which is a great book.
	And then I started reading Aristotle.
	I started reading Plato and the dialogues and so on.
	And Nietzsche was fascinating to me.
	So I just really, really got into philosophy.
	I was absolutely fascinated.
	And the reason for that, if you don't mind a little bit of a personal aside, I think I sort of look back and say, okay, but why did I grab onto philosophy like somebody at the end of the movie Titanic hanging on to a floating corpse or something like that?
	And I think the reason was because I grew up with a lot of mental illness in the household.
	And a lot of craziness.
	And it wasn't like silent staring at the wall craziness.
	It was kind of in your face verbal diarrhea craziness.
	And so when you get a lot of things thrown at you, you get pretty agile and then you get very interested in looking for a shield.
	Like I was just out doing a documentary on Hong Kong and joined the street protests and got tear gassed and it was really quite a wild experience.
	And in it, The protesters, the anti-communist protesters, had these little children's inflatable rafts with them.
	And I'm like, dudes, what? That's not a weapon?
	What's going on? It's like, no, that's a shield, right?
	That's a shield that you can use against projectiles.
	And so for me, growing up, like...
	Trying to handle this acidic wind of craziness coming at me, when I learned about philosophy and rational thought and objective evidence and all of that, I was like, hey, here's my shield, right?
	Here's something that I can use to push back and create a personal space around me to survive this kind of craziness that was in my immediate sort of household.
	So I got really, really fascinated by philosophy.
	But, you know, back, this is in the early 90s when I was going to university, and there really wasn't much in the way of job opportunities back then for, hey, I'm a philosopher.
	I guess you could be somebody on a street corner, you know, yelling and all of that and hoping not to get arrested.
	So I'd always loved computers.
	I went to the computer lab and worked on 2KPEC computers when I was 11 and 12 and so on and bought my first computer with a little inheritance and learned how to program.
	So I ended up co-founding this company to help Fortune 500 companies manage and reduce environmental waste and pollution and so on, and worked there for quite some time.
	We grew the company quite well.
	It had multiple offices, you know, 20, 30, 35 employees, and then we ended up selling it, and I stayed on, and then I quit to do some writing.
	I joined the software field again for a couple of years, and I had a fairly long commute.
	So I'm sitting in my car and, you know, they're boring.
	There's only so many times you can listen to music.
	I got bored of audiobooks.
	So then I thought, well, what if I just record some thoughts?
	You know, it's not like I don't have any.
	So, I mean, I might as well record these thoughts.
	And so I started recording with just a cheap little headset on a little laptop in the passenger seat while I was driving to work.
	Now, I had an hour each way.
	I got two hours of material every day.
	I started writing articles and published them, and I started sharing that podcast link.
	And here's the thing, too.
	Like, I just want to mention this to those because respect the grind, right?
	Respect the grind.
	The reason that I became successful was not because I'm good at what I do.
	I mean, it sounds kind of odd, but there's lots of people who are good at things.
	Like, I have a friend in the music business, and he just said to me one day as part of a conversation, he said, yeah, good singers are a dime a dozen.
	Like, I can do a call.
	I can get you great singers.
	I can get a whole choir full of great singers here in 20 minutes, and you can pay them 10 bucks for three hours or whatever, right?
	great singers are a dime a dozen.
	But people who can write catchy songs are incredibly rare, right?
	So in terms of why I was successful, I knew enough about sales and marketing from my time in the software industry that what I did was I would record a show, I would do an article, and then I would spend, I remember working this out one time, I would spend five to 10 times as And that's the grind. Because, you know, coming up with cool ideas and talking about stuff and writing stuff that's really interesting and engaging, that's fun!
	Going to a bunch of websites and promoting it and putting it into message boards and finding people who might have similar interests and emailing them, well, that's really boring.
	But that's the differentiation.
	That's the grind.
	The inspiration. Is easy, right?
	Like, think of Freddie Mercury from Queen.
	Like, he wrote this song, Killer Queen, in about 10 minutes, right?
	And then it took them months to record it.
	I mean, Brian May, the guitarist, spent two weeks on the guitar dubs alone.
	That's the grind, and that's really good.
	Coming up with the song, oh, that's fun, right?
	And touring and all that, but that grind of just getting it right.
	So creating something is fantastic, like good, that's necessary but not sufficient.
	But then, and I say this to people all the time, how do you become successful?
	It's like, well, first of all, have something great.
	I mean, that I can't help you with.
	But assuming you have something good or great, and it doesn't have to be great, even good, good enough is fine.
	What's going to differentiate you from everybody else on the internet is the grind, is just finding people who Who might be interested in what you're doing and promote, promote, promote.
	Go speak for free, even if it's to 20 people, you know, and just promote it so that it's in front of people because if it ain't in front of people, you might as well flush it down the toilet.
	Oh, a little gong there.
	Damn. You know, Savannah, it's such a huge thing.
	I've written eight books now.
	And my first book, we sold 20,000 copies since 2013.
	So we just grinded out a couple books a day, a couple books a day, a couple books a day.
	And one thing I noticed with books, I've noticed this with books and I've noticed this with platforms and artists and things like that.
	I've heard that to launch a band, it takes a million dollars to build their platform.
	And for my own company and my own platform, I'm like, I think it's cost over a million dollars now.
	So I'm like, wow, it was a million dollars to build the platform of which to sell whatever I want.
	And with books, I'm finding like, man, it costs, let's say, you know, 5, 10, 20, 30 grand to launch a book.
	But then to promote it, you got to spend like a quarter million bucks promoting it or whatever it is.
	People are going to get scared by those numbers, but that can be labor value as well.
	Yeah, sure. You can sweat equity that.
	Yeah, you can sweat equity. I mean, think of like this rapper.
	He's not that big anymore.
	I think he went basically bankrupt.
	But MC Hammer was big when I was younger or young.
	And I remember reading his origin story.
	His origin story was like he recorded stuff at home and he would just get into his car with tapes and maybe even eight tracks back then, but tapes of his music and he'd just go to clubs.
	Because back then you couldn't get into the radio and he just didn't want to have a recording contract.
	He'd just go to clubs and say, hey man, you've got to play this song.
	It's great, right? And he'd just annoy people and corner people until they'd listen to the song.
	And yeah, he had some great music.
	So then you'd say, okay, then...
	Play it. And then eventually, you know, somebody in the club is on the radio and they're like, wow, this is a great song.
	People really love it. They're dancing to it.
	Let's play it on the radio. But he was like months and months and months just driving from club to club with a suitcase or a trunk full of tapes and just giving them around.
	Like, that's the grind.
	You know, coming up and recording the song, that's fun.
	But there's the grind.
	And people don't want to do the grind.
	And I understand that. But you gotta if you want to succeed.
	Right, right. So I've heard you talk about that before in your show.
	So you spend all this time promoting, promoting.
	So you started out with some little clips in your car and some little articles and things.
	How did that grow? Because you're a big-time guy now.
	I mean, your channel's huge.
	Tell me how that snowballed.
	Well, okay, so there's a couple of ways to do it.
	So the grind just kind of helps, but it's slow.
	The other thing that you have to do is look at the numbers a certain way.
	Look at the numbers a certain way.
	So let's say somebody's out there and they promote the heck out of some new YouTube channel.
	And let's say they're completely unknown, like I was back in the day, right?
	And I remember the first time I got 500 hits on a video.
	And I was like, that's great, right?
	And I remember a friend of mine said, 500?
	Look at so-and-so.
	You know, they've got 100,000.
	This is back in the day. I was like user number three on YouTube back in 2006, right?
	And I said, and he's like, those numbers aren't good because other people are getting hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of views.
	And I said, but look, if I was going to go and give a speech and 500 people showed up, I'd be thrilled.
	Like, that's not bad numbers for an unknown person to give a speech, right?
	I mean, so you've got to look at the numbers a certain way.
	And if you compare yourself to the giants, you're going to feel invisible.
	It's like looking at the sun with no, like, just straight-eyed and trying to find a sunspot.
	You can't. So you have to look at the numbers not relative to the greats, who can be your inspiration but relative to where you started from and where you're going.
	So just keep your enthusiasm.
	That's really, really important because a lot of people are enthusiastic when they start And then what happens is they don't get the response that they want or the response that they need.
	And then you can see the enthusiasm kind of – like people blowing out candles in the eyeballs.
	You can see the enthusiasm kind of dying on them like, yeah, I'm doing another video.
	I mean my last video only got 250 views.
	So I guess I'll do another one.
	But you guys really need to share my videos, man.
	Like so you get resentful of the audience and so on.
	So that's – Just keep your enthusiasm, man.
	It's a long haul.
	You know, to go back to the band Queens, my favorite band.
	I mean, they spent 10 years laboring in relative obscurity, being ripped off by every music promoter known to man before they hit it big.
	And, you know, Freddie Mercury was living in a tiny little apartment with mold on the wall, for heaven's sake.
	I mean, it was just, you know, you've got to grind.
	That's number one. Number two, find a way to engage with your audience.
	So one of the first things I did when I created a website was I set up a message board.
	Which, you know, was hard to do.
	And back in the day, there was no sort of install on WordPress, right?
	So set up a message board.
	Engage with your audience.
	Find ways to get feedback, to get information.
	You know, you go buy a sub at Subway, you get something on the receipt that says you get a free cookie if you give us your feedback.
	So get feedback. Find out what people like about what you do.
	Look at the comments on YouTube or wherever it is that you're publishing and see what people say and listen to them.
	Because when people criticize you, of course...
	The instinct is to, like, make them wrong, make yourself right, and so on.
	You can do that, but you won't succeed because people who care enough to give you feedback, even if the feedback is harsh, they're actually kind of trying to help you.
	It's like the coach who says, get up in the morning and run through tires.
	It's like you don't like it, but he is actually trying to help you, right?
	So I went to go and see the movie Joker, and I make notes while I'm watching the movie right in the dark.
	And I missed something on screen and talked about something that was incorrect in the movie.
	And people, like, hammered me hard, right?
	And I defended it because I'm like, I want to defend my viewpoint.
	And people were still hammering me hard.
	So I gritted my teeth, paid $10, saw the movie again, and then put out a video saying, yeah, I was wrong.
	Sorry, you guys are totally right.
	I'm wrong.
	So find ways to engage with your audience unnoticed.
	I did call-in shows very early on where people could call in and we could have conversations about philosophy.
	I spent time on message boards.
	Now it's on Twitter and Facebook and other places.
	Engage with your audience.
	Be someone who takes feedback.
	Your audience, even your critics, even your haters are trying to help you.
	And your haters can help you by guiding you to what bad people don't want you to talk about, which as a philosopher is kind of like where you got to go.
	I like that. That's a big thing.
	I was going to ask you, Stefan, is there anything on your show you won't talk about?
	Because it seems like one of my favorite episodes of your show, I've got to say, I referenced it in my book, Hard Times Create Strongman.
	You had this show on hypergamy where this guy calls in and he had a way too hot girlfriend and she wanted an extra couple daddies or something.
	And I'm watching this show, and I'm like, I can't believe this is happening.
	I think I watched that episode three times.
	I was like, I can't believe that this guy is just being such a cuck.
	Is there anything that you won't take on your show?
	Oh, yeah. No, I get lots of requests for people I don't want to do on the show, for sure.
	Right? I mean, so, I don't know if this is like lifting the lid on the behind-the-scenes stuff, but I get people who say, hey, I'm attracted to kids.
	I'm like, well, don't.
	Don't be that. Don't do that.
	Stay clear of that. But I'm not putting that on the show.
	There are people who have conspiracy theories, and I know that term is overused, and it's like everything that Alex Jones talked about years ago has now – well, not everything.
	A lot of things have kind of come true, and other people who've been lambasted as conspiracy theorists turned out to have something kind of viable.
	But there is stuff that I just wouldn't particularly entertain.
	But other than a few topics – There's an old saying I read from a philosopher years ago where he said, nothing human is alien to me.
	And again, with a few exceptions that I just won't entertain, people can call in.
	I just got an email this morning about a guy who he says, I was the product of rape.
	And everyone keeps telling me I'm just like my father.
	How do I deal with that?
	And it's like, that's a big freaking question.
	And I'm going to talk to him, see if I can help him.
	I was going to say, that's pretty dark.
	He was raped by his father, and they say he's just like his father.
	Ooh. Yeah, that's harsh, man.
	And this is a human being who wants to live and to love and to have a family and to be a father, and everyone's kind of poisoning him with his origin story that is not his fault at all.
	Wow. This is an interesting question.
	Where does psychology, religion, and philosophy, where do those start and where do they end?
	Or is that kind of like a blurry gradient where you can't really find out where one starts and one ends?
	No, no, no. I think that there are particular overlaps between these three disciplines.
	And I'm not talking about mainstream psychology.
	Mainstream psychology is pretty bad these days.
	For those who don't know, science as a whole and psychology in particular is undergoing a massive replication crisis where all of the cornerstones and pillars of the discipline, when people try to retest the original...
	I mean, it's happening in cancer research.
	It's happening even in physics.
	It's happening certainly in the social sciences and psychology.
	So I just want to talk about my particular version of it, which is I just talk about sort of self-knowledge.
	So self-knowledge is really, really, really important.
	So I've been working Twitter pretty hard recently because I'm getting pretty heavily suppressed over on YouTube.
	So I'm, you know, making sure that I'm adapting to the environment and all.
	And so people, you know, they'll say to me, you're disgusting or something like that, right?
	And first of all, you have no idea.
	No, I'm just kidding. But this is self-knowledge 101.
	I just said this to someone the other day on Twitter, like self-knowledge 101.
	The fact that you feel disgusted about me is not proof that I'm disgusting.
	The fact that you're angry at me does not mean that I'm provoking you or that I'm wrong.
	And this self-knowledge to know that your emotions are not objective evaluations of reality is really, really key.
	And if you can't get that, you cannot be effective whatsoever.
	In the world, you can't be effective as an entrepreneur because an entrepreneur is a whole bunch of people hitting you in the face with the baseball bat of rejection 24-7, right?
	Because nobody wants to help you with your dreams.
	Like, wake up, everybody. Everybody's got their own dreams.
	Nobody cares. Nobody wants to help you with your dreams.
	Nobody wants to pump you up.
	Nobody wants to support you.
	Nobody wants to give you money.
	Nobody wants to give you time.
	Not because they hate you or anything like that.
	It's just they're busy.
	And you're just some guy, some face in the crowd.
	You're like a thumbprint face in the background of a Degas painting.
	You're like an extra in the background of a zombie movie.
	You don't matter to them.
	Not because they hate you or they're cold.
	They're just human beings.
	And any more than some guy who wants something from you matters to you.
	Some guy in India wants to be a great singer.
	Good luck, man.
	I'm busy.
	Right?
	So trying to find a way to overcome the inevitable inertia and difference and indifference of other human beings is natural.
	You have to find a way to be of use to people, of advantage to people, and hopefully in a unique kind of way if you want to make some real coin.
	So overcoming that indifference is really, really important.
	And here's the part in the show where I confess that I forgot the first part of your question.
	Can you just write? That's okay.
	That's okay. It was psychology.
	Oh, yeah, yeah. There we go.
	Good. I'm glad I didn't try to remember that while I was going.
	Okay. So, self-knowledge is really important.
	You have feelings, and your feelings are important, right?
	Because there's these two poles, both of which are very dangerous.
	The first pole is...
	Your feelings are everything.
	And you should judge the world entirely according to your feelings.
	No, no. That's a terrible...
	That's what babies do.
	That's a child thing. That's what babies do and boomers.
	No, no, no. I shouldn't get the boomer thing.
	Now, the other pole is this, like, meta-engineering Spock focus of...
	You know, feelings are irrational and to be rational, you can't have feelings.
	Those two poles are equally dangerous and destructive.
	Feelings are very, very important in life because happiness is a feeling and happiness is the one thing that we all want because it's the one thing we all get.
	With one thing we all achieve, not in order to achieve something else, but because it is a perfect state in and of itself.
	So happiness is a feeling. If you eliminate happiness...
	Sorry, if you eliminate feelings, you eliminate your capacity for happiness, and then you just march through life like some husky zombie, right?
	So self-knowledge is really important.
	Respect your feelings. Let them work with you.
	Work with them, because feelings very often are the result...
	Of our prior thoughts, right?
	Feelings very often are the physiological response to our prior thoughts, right?
	So if you think you're unworthy, then you will tend to live in a universe.
	Where rejection confirms your deepest suspicion and acceptance you will perceive simply as a setup for betrayal, right?
	Because you fundamentally believe that you're unworthy.
	So when somebody rejects you, you say, oh, I knew, I mean, nobody's ever going to care for me, nobody loves me, nobody wants me, whatever it is, right?
	Whereas if you're confident that somebody rejects you, I mean, if somebody rejects my show, it's like, wow, you're missing out on a great free resource.
	I mean, sorry, it sucks to be you, but, you know, it's a shame.
	Or if somebody's mad at me, see, they think they're mad at me.
	And again, if you go out into the world, even if you're an entrepreneur in the most non-controversial field, right?
	So let's say you're a real estate agent, right?
	If you're successful, I guarantee you, There are real estate agents out there who kind of hate your guts because you're outselling them, you're outmaneuvering them, you're snatching sales out from under them, you're threatening their livelihood.
	Like, they're really mad at you.
	Now, philosophy is like that.
	You're talking about me. You're talking about me.
	They all hate me. They all have my books and they all hate me.
	Well, they hate you because they ain't you, right?
	That's right. Right.
	So whatever you do, you're going to annoy the hell out of people.
	And even if you're totally compliant and you try not to annoy everyone, you're going to just end up annoying people who see you as compliant and spineless.
	So there's no possibility you can ever go through life without annoying a lot of people, right?
	And of course, if you fail, you'll annoy yourself, which is the most important thing.
	In terms of robustness, resilience, and confidence, self-knowledge is really, really important, and that's what I would sort of put in that psychology category.
	Now, with regard to religion, religion has a particular sphere of influence mostly to do with moral values.
	And atheism has not found a way to replace the moral values of religion, which is one of the reasons why when we lose Christianity, we lose identity, we lose borders, we lose cultural confidence and so on.
	And other belief systems that have retained their focus on values and morals, such as Islam and Judaism and so on, tend to be doing relatively well.
	Certainly, Islam is spreading and growing, whether that's to do with its treatment of women or not is a whole other question.
	So religion has unfortunately attempted to shoulder its way into philosophy and claims rational proof for the essence of its beliefs, which it's not the field.
	It's called faith for a reason, which is belief without or sometimes counter to reason and evidence.
	So I've given this advice to religious people before on the show, you know, stick to morals, stick to values, and challenge atheists on the origins of ethics.
	Because that's where the great strength and power of Christianity is in particular.
	So religion has a particular...
	But they've gone and said, okay, well, no, we're going to start fighting against evolution and we're going to start fighting against physics for the origins of the universe.
	And it's like, no, no, no. But it's all about ethics.
	The belief systems... Philosophy and religion, it's all about ethics.
	It's the same thing for what I... Like, who cares what the origin of the universe is?
	I mean, it's an interesting abstract question, and, you know, I'd pay 50 bucks to know.
	But in terms of how you change your life today to make it better, how you gain moral courage to fight evil and support good, the origin of the universe doesn't matter too much.
	And so religion should stay with ethics and should not attempt to supply philosophy.
	Now, philosophy... Has a challenge as well, which is that the more you analyze the universe rationally, the more you scrub it of moral values.
	And we can't survive without moral values.
	That's what defines us as human beings.
	I mean, animals want to have sex.
	Animals want to eat.
	Animals want to sleep. Animals want to build things.
	Animals want to protect their young.
	All of these things occur in the animal kingdom.
	So how is it that we are fundamentally different from animals?
	We're fundamentally different from animals because we have the capacity to compare proposed actions to ideal standards.
	Lying is bad. Okay, I'm thinking of lying.
	Can I compare that to an ideal standard?
	Theft is bad. Cheating is bad.
	Whatever it is, right? Hitting people is bad.
	Animals don't compare things to ideal standards.
	They simply compare things to their appetites.
	Lion's hungry and goes and chews the ass off a zebra, right?
	But we have the capacity to compare proposed actions to ideal standards.
	And if philosophy is not focusing on that...
	Then philosophy is spinning its wheels and emptying out the moral center of the West, which is causing a terrifying and dizzying form of social collapse.
	And so atheists, okay, fine.
	You want to ditch religion, okay, make that case.
	And there's rational reasons why you can make that case.
	But man, you can't let go of that which is keeping you afloat until you've got something new to hold on to.
	And religion was dunked on hard by atheism, but atheism didn't create a secular system of ethics to replace it.
	And so... You know, it's basically, you know, this is where we took shelter as a society.
	This was the, you know, leaky church sometimes that we took shelter in and knew who we were.
	So come and smash down the church.
	Okay, but now people are just out in the rain and hail and just like frozen frogs falling down on their foreheads and stuff.
	And atheists got no place to take people.
	And that's a huge betrayal, I think.
	I was going to say, there's one thing I heard on your show once that really struck me.
	There's two things. There's one thing I read in Will Durant, and then the other thing is the thing I heard on your show.
	And one thing you were talking about on one of your episodes, you said that A lot of the things we have now are poor substitutes and fragmented versions of religion.
	You know, talking about, you know, there's all these New Age movements and coaches and there's, you know, even Tony Robbins is like a weird bastard religion.
	People go and they sing and dance and jump up and down and they, you know, they're there for 50 hours and they pay money in their work.
	Like, there's a lot of, like, weird little religions now that are kind of popular.
	They're not officially religions. But they serve the purpose of what religion used to do.
	That's one thing that's weird is all these weird little fragmented things to try to fill the holes of the missing religion.
	And the other thing I read the other day, it's a Will Durant quote that just hit me in the head like a brick, and it was along the lines of...
	Never in history has a civilization been able to uphold morality without religion.
	That was a Will Durant quote.
	And he's like, we've never, ever been able to do it.
	When I read that line, I was like, wow.
	We've never been able to do it.
	Like, not even once. It's kind of like, has communism ever worked?
	It's never worked once. And we've never been able to have morality without religion.
	What's your thoughts on that?
	Well, I mean, empirically speaking, it's entirely accurate.
	And there is this terrifying thought, which I think has occurred to most students of history who at least are looking at things objectively.
	And the thought goes something like this.
	What if atheism is injected into society by sociopaths who wish to dissolve the church that stands between them and totalitarian power?
	And, like, why...
	Why does communism hate religion so much?
	Is it because it doesn't like what it perceives to be irrational or anti-rational?
	Well, no, of course not. I mean, communism claimed to be scientific, right?
	Oh, we can make all these predictions and so on.
	And none of the predictions that communism made in its origins have come true.
	In fact, quite the opposite has occurred, right?
	So communism said, oh, the rich are going to get richer, the poor are going to get poorer, and the middle class is going to disappear.
	Well, what happened? Well, the rich got less rich in many ways.
	The poor got wealthier, and the middle class became the dominant force in Western society.
	They said, oh, we're going to outproduce the capitalist nations when we get socialist means of production.
	Quite the opposite occurs, right?
	You know the old joke in Russia, people wait for bread.
	In capitalism, bread waits for people.
	There's this whole bakery full of rows, right?
	And so just, you know, you could go on and on, but communism has no problem with anti-rationality, and it has no problem rejecting reason and evidence, so why does it reject Christianity in particular?
	Well, it rejects Christianity because Christianity has universal ethics.
	Christianity stands between the base mammalian Nietzschean will-to-power lust of your average scrape-of-religion I mean, if you look at the left, if you look at the socialists, the communists, and the fascists often come from the left, like Mussolini was a diehard Marxist who just happened to switch nation in where class used to be.
	But if you look at them, they openly state that they're willing to lie.
	That they're willing to deceive.
	Environmentalists do the same thing. They say, well, we have to create scare stories, otherwise people won't listen.
	So they exaggerate, they lie, you name it.
	I mean, global warming, I mean, they have to triple the effects of CO2 just magically in order to get the results they want, which in business would be cause for an SEC inquiry, I think.
	So if you look at deception, well, deception is part of the animal kingdom.
	If you look at how animals get their resources, They cheat.
	They lie. They steal all the time.
	You can see crabs who have shells to attract mates stealing shells from each other all the time.
	You've got cuckoos dropping their Eggs into other birds' nests.
	You've got a trap spider who hides.
	That's cheating, man. He's not chasing.
	That's cheating, right? You've got dogs that circle, like the hyenas, circle around to get the antelope.
	It's all strategy and falsehood and deception.
	I mean, if you look at the tiger's stripes, it's hiding in the tall grass.
	It's cheating, man. So deception and lying and falsehood in the animal kingdom is common.
	Now, Christianity says, thou shalt not bear false witness.
	You're not allowed to lie.
	Now, a lot of religions say that you have moral obligations, but only, only to fellow believers in your religion.
	To outsiders, you have no moral obligations, right?
	And that's base rank tribalism.
	Now, Christianity came along, and this is the great revolution of Jesus.
	Christianity came along and said, no, no, no, ethics are universal.
	The original commandment was, thou shalt not kill other Jews.
	And Jesus came along and said, let's just take that last bit out and make it universal.
	Thou shalt not bear false witness to anyone, whether they believe in your religion or not.
	And so universalizing ethics was the foundation for the modern world.
	And if you look at the left who are anti-Christian almost exclusively...
	They're perfectly happy and willing to use deception and lies and falsehoods of course to gain power, to gain the power that they want.
	And that is what happens when you take ethics out of humanity.
	We can't be like animals.
	We can't because we're not animals.
	We're human beings. So the only thing we can ever become when we lose our humanity is inhuman.
	That's all we can become.
	We can only become inhuman.
	We cannot return to the animal state.
	Damn. It's going to wake everyone up.
	I like that. I like how you left that little cadence there on the end.
	Stefan, let me ask you this.
	We just slid into it now.
	We're talking about the left. We just slid right into it.
	It seems that wherever you go nowadays, especially if you have an intelligent conversation, you end up bumping up on the left somehow.
	They say you can't have that conversation.
	You can't say that.
	You can't do that.
	You're a racist, sexist, homophobe, Islamophobe.
	I'm out here in LA, and I made friends with a lady, Joy Villa.
	I don't know if you know her. Oh, she's the woman who wore the MAGA dress, right?
	That's right. Yeah, she's a black lady.
	She's a singer. She did a cover of Queen's Song.
	It was pretty good. Anyway, go on. Yeah, she's a good singer.
	I'm hanging out with her. We're having pizza or whatever.
	And I said to her, I said, you know, you get to wear the Build the Wall dress and the Make America Great Again dress.
	I said, well, because you're a black lady, that's cool.
	But if you were like a white redhead with pale skin, you'd be a Nazi.
	And we have this strange world where everything now seems to bump up on the left.
	It's just like you do something that's a little bit interesting, a little bit art, maybe taking a bit of a risk.
	And you bump up on the left. You mentioned you're getting suppressed a little bit on YouTube.
	That's really shitty.
	Where do you think that's going?
	Do you think we're headed towards some sort of civil war?
	What's going on with that?
	Because it seems it gets louder and louder.
	It gets more violent. It gets more crazy every day.
	Where's this whole thing going?
	Well, this kind of suppression is the mark of false thinking, right?
	So if you're confident and robust in your ideas, then you are happy to be corrected.
	You are happy to engage in debates.
	You're a good faith debater.
	In other words, like let's say you and I get into an argument.
	Ideally, of course, we should both be facing the truth as allies and wrestling to get there.
	Like we're helping each other up a mountain.
	We should be in support of each other and we should – like my audience corrects me from time to time.
	I've got a whole series called I Was Wrong About X, Y, and Z and so on.
	And so the good thing is we engage with people in pursuit of the truth in good faith and that's how we get better.
	The truth is a really hard thing to get a hold of for you.
	You need allies.
	You need help. You need feedback.
	We can all fall prey to confirmation bias and anti-rationality and emotional issues and so on.
	So whenever you're shutting down somebody's contribution to the human conversation in pursuit of truth, it's because you are unsure of your ideas and don't want them questioned.
	And that's an emotional issue.
	That's an emotional issue.
	I mean, I've had debates with just about everybody, and they're willing to come at me as hard as they want because I'm in pursuit of the truth.
	I'm not in pursuit of justifying everything I've said in the past or everything that I believed yesterday.
	I mean, I'm in pursuit of the truth, which is why it's an evolutionary process to approach it.
	And it's a human conversation.
	No one person owns the truth that comes out of a conversation.
	So people who want to shut down the conversation, and they do so through moral hatred of the other, right?
	So, you know, I mean, you've probably heard the names I've been called.
	I'm sure you've been called some pretty choice and ripe names as well yourself.
	And that is confession that you can't debate.
	You know, if you're a really good jiu-jitsu fighter, you're happy to get into the ring with people, right?
	So let's say you win, good.
	Let's say you lose, okay, you learn something about A, how to lose, and B, how to win by the person who beat you or whatever, right?
	So, but if you really, really want to win that trophy, but you're not a very good jiu-jitsu fighter, what are you going to do?
	You're going to cheat, right?
	You're going to put something in the other guy's coffee.
	You're going to bribe the judges because you desperately want to win, but you're not very good.
	And people who desperately want to win in the battle of ideas but aren't very good at debating or aren't very rigorous in analyzing their own reason and evidence, well, they want to cheat.
	And so what do they do? Well, they throw in things called hate speech laws, which is a confession of people who don't like to lose and aren't very good at winning that they can't win.
	And so this is terrible because the left talks about diversity.
	And it's not true at all.
	I mean, it's completely false.
	Well, first of all, try being a Trump supporter and getting a job at the New York Times or CNN. I mean, come on.
	They're not interested in diversity.
	And that's wrecking half the population.
	Now, if half the population were black and there were no blacks working at CNN or the New York Times or wherever, people would go insane.
	And I think there'd be some good reasons to be concerned about that, right?
	Yeah. But half the population votes for Trump and some of that is genetic in its origins.
	I mean, political beliefs have significant genetic components.
	So they're discriminating against people on ideology and they're discriminating against people partly based upon genetics.
	And that's perfectly fine.
	See, diversity simply means you cannot ever criticize people who vote for the left.
	That's all diversity means.
	If you look at hate speech laws, there are groups that are specifically identified, and everyone else can go pound sand.
	If you're a white male, people can talk all kinds of trash about you, and you can never really use hate speech laws to defend yourself.
	So it's basically giving permission to attack groups that generally don't support the left, and it's a legal way of punishing anybody who does criticize groups who do support the left.
	And that's not fair.
	That's not democracy. That's not reason to debate.
	So, yeah, the left is extraordinarily intolerant, and intolerance is the mark.
	Well, intolerance is the gravestone, or the turret, really, that you put over the corpse of your bad ideas.
	That sounds like an essay waiting to happen.
	I don't know. I look at how they're doing it now with technology and I look at how they're doing it.
	I read about an app in China yesterday where you can get this app on your phone now and it shows you all the debtors in your neighborhoods.
	You're hanging out in China having coffee and it shows everybody who owes money on a map within 500 meters.
	And then it tells you about these people.
	So now everyone, I guess, is afraid of being in debt or something.
	And then I saw this clip of someone on a train and it said, in English, you know, it was, hey, no smoking on the train and you're going to lose your social currency points or whatever.
	And I look at this and I go, wow.
	And then they've got concentration camps that are harvesting people's organs.
	I'm like, man, this is like, we're in 1939 right now.
	Or they're in 1939 where they're mixing tech and With suppression and what I'm afraid of, kind of like a technocracy.
	We had Laura Loomer on our show here, the most banned woman on social media.
	And poor Laura, she's like 26 years old.
	And I don't know, she was unloading some illegal immigrants on some guy's lawn, some political guy's lawn.
	And now she doesn't have a bank account.
	She can't take an Uber.
	She can't order food on Uber Eats.
	And she lives on Bitcoins and has no social media platform.
	And I go, whoa, that's like a...
	That's like an old Greek exile where they would exile Oedipus or somebody from the town.
	With technology, it's scary because they can just shut your stuff off.
	We're so dependent on these things.
	What do you think about that? Well, I have great sympathy for Laura, and I mean, I don't agree with everything she says.
	It's a usual caveat, right? And not because you don't understand.
	I just want the audience to understand it.
	Yeah. But, you know, listen, I'm not putting Laura in this category, so I just want to leave her in the rear view, but it's sort of an example, right?
	So, believe it or not, one of my most popular shows was a debate I had with a guy who believed in the flat earth, right?
	Yeah. Now, spoiler, I don't believe in the flat earth, right?
	But, you know, I did the research.
	I had this guy on.
	We had a very civil discussion, a very civil debate where he told me that the sun is closer to me than Australia.
	And it was a very productive conversation.
	I've got no issue with someone coming on my show and making cases for things I strongly disagree with.
	I mean, I debated a fascist.
	I've debated communists.
	I mean, I debated a guy who was very, well, I think a little too into animal rights.
	So have people on.
	Have a conversation. Let people come on.
	Make their case.
	Have a debate. That's civilized.
	But then there are people who say some ideas are too toxic to even have public scrutiny.
	Now that's freaky to me.
	Because here's the thing. Conservatives get called conservative, but the real conservatives are the left.
	And they are like hysterical, repressive, inquisition-style conservatives.
	Because what they've said...
	Is that certain ideas are blasphemy, heresy, and to even utter them in the public sphere is evil and must be punished with violence.
	That is incredibly conservative, in a way.
	Like, that's conserving things to the point where nothing grows.
	Because here's the thing. Every advancement in human society, Steph, has been heretical at the time.
	The first people who came up with the idea in the late 18th century that, you know, maybe slavery wasn't Good.
	They were screamed down as, you know, we're going to destroy civilization.
	They're heretics and blasphemers. People who said that maybe the sun, not the earth, was the center of the solar system.
	Again, assuming the flat earth guy is wrong.
	They were, you know, punished sometimes and they were tortured and so on.
	People who first said, yeah, maybe we should let women have equal rights to men.
	It's like, you know, this was going to destroy society and so on.
	Well, that's a whole other topic because it went too far, but...
	So everything that's new that's a progress is considered heretical and radical and appalling and not fit for public discussion and not good for a civilized society and so on.
	So the leftists, by unleashing the dogs of war on people that they disagree with, have said that they are now morally freaking perfect.
	Nothing can be improved on.
	They can never be challenged.
	All of their ideas, no matter how much of a slippery slope or how extreme they become, all of their ideas are morally perfect.
	Anyone who questions or opposes their ideas, even with reason and evidence, is a heretic, is evil, and must be banned from public discourse.
	That is hysterical, and that is far further than the Christian church, even in the fevered nightmares of the left, ever went.
	And this vanity, this narcissism, this megalomania of saying, I am morally perfect.
	Anybody who disagrees with my beliefs is evil and must be driven from the public square and I will support the use of violence against them, is monstrous.
	And as you say, you get rid of religion, you don't get freedom.
	You get cults.
	Hmm. Well, it's almost like we're heading towards thought crime.
	I feel that that's where it's going to go next.
	It's like, well, you thought about it.
	You know, you pushed like on that.
	You pushed like on that girl's Instagram post.
	Therefore... Oh, no. We already have that.
	Man, and I'll tell you how.
	How many times has it happened to you, and I ask this to the audience, you say something on social media, and people imagine the thought processes behind it.
	That's a dog whistle! Right?
	You really mean this, or you really think this, right?
	You know, like, if I point out the factual reality in America that women can't be drafted, ooh, you're only saying that because you hate women.
	Oh, yeah. Like, come on, man.
	I mean, like, this leaping over the words to try and burrow around the imaginary projected unconscious of the guy who's typing is complete bullcrap.
	I mean, it's got nothing to do with anything, right?
	So they're already...
	Coming up with thought crime.
	So I go to Poland. Last year I went to do a documentary in Poland.
	And unlike in the West, unlike in sort of North America, I was able to...
	Meet people. I was able to say on social media, hey, let's get together and talk philosophy.
	And we got together and talked philosophy all night.
	And it was a great night.
	And this happened like everywhere I went.
	I didn't need any security. Like when I went to give a speaking tour in Australia and New Zealand, I needed constant security.
	There were bomb threats, death threats, people attacking the buses.
	I mean, it was some crazy shit.
	It was going down. Was that for you or was that a group of people you're with?
	Myself and Lauren Southern. So I go to Poland, and I don't need security, and I can meet up with people.
	There's no threats. There's no deplatforming.
	Gotta tell you, that's pretty freaking nice, man.
	And so I come back, and I say, you know, that was really nice.
	I don't know, because it's all Christian or all white or whatever, but, I mean, that was real nice.
	And suddenly, I'm a Nazi, white supremacist, blah, blah.
	People, it's already a thought crime.
	Even to praise a country that has treated you incredibly well, Suddenly makes you a Nazi.
	And of course, AOC can go out and watch.
	She just praised Denmark yesterday.
	And it's like, well, Denmark is a very strict immigration policy and it's mostly...
	But anyway, right? So there already are thought crimes and you don't even have to utter them.
	They just have to be imagined.
	And they're like these thought crimes, right?
	I mean, facts don't seem to matter.
	Like every now and then, this thing pops up on Twitter.
	It's kind of become funny where, I don't know, five years ago, I did a review of the movie Frozen.
	And some woman did a...
	I wrote a response to it, which I retweeted on, I think it's now defunct Google +, which then somehow through weird alchemy showed up back on my YouTube channel under my name and it says via Google +, right?
	And it's some woman's review. And the original review is still there on YouTube and you can scroll down and see it and all that.
	But now this rumor has been like half a decade.
	These lunatics have been spreading this rumor that I... Pretended to be a girl to comment on my own video, even though you can see the original.
	I've, you know, posted it a bunch of times.
	Here's the original comment. I just went through Google +, showed up back on YouTube.
	I'd never... Like, I never pretended to be a woman to comment on my...
	But it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.
	Like, it's just the facts don't matter.
	It still just keeps coming up, no matter how many times it's rebutted.
	And when facts don't matter, you sort of aforementioned thing about civil war.
	Oh, yeah. Yeah.
	When people give up on facts...
	Oh yeah, you end up with war.
	Because if you can negotiate, that's why free speech is so important.
	If we can negotiate, we can meet in reality, and we can let reality and truth and evidence be the arbiter of our disagreement.
	The arbiter of our disagreement.
	Like if the tennis player thinks the ball was in and the umpire thinks it out, what do they do?
	They go back to the zoomed-in Camera, and I think there are now programs that determine whether it's in or out.
	Now, objective reality can resolve their disputes.
	You get rid of objective reality, like in this post-Second World War Marxism inspired deconstructionism and post-modernism subjective.
	You get rid of reality. That's the only place we can find peace, is allowing reality and objectivity, reason and evidence to resolve our disputes.
	Otherwise, yeah, absolutely we come to blows.
	We have reason or we have violence.
	That's it. I like that.
	When you get rid of reality, oh boy, that's exactly where peace is.
	I like that. Peace is in reality.
	We can have some sort of agreement.
	I was watching the Netflix documentary on Cambridge Analytica and the Trump election.
	I don't remember the name of it.
	It's something about data. And they were talking about how they're creating reactive media and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of ads and pieces that are reactive.
	And it seems to me that we're in this world now where People are creating media on one side to be reactive and hit that reactive mind.
	And then they want to just bypass all the thinking by making everything reactive, identity, reactive, identity.
	Because the reactive mind, it doesn't think.
	It just looks at identities. It just says, Stefan's a man, therefore he's a Nazi, or something like that.
	It's some stupid logic.
	And that's actually, I think, how the big media companies and a lot of Communication is done now is to create reactive and identity and I don't think it can even go any further than it is now.
	I mean, this is pretty much the bottom of the barrel.
	Oh, no, no, no. Trust me.
	There's a lot further down to go.
	There's a lot further down to go.
	So, I mean, yeah, this is very interesting stuff.
	And this comes back, I think, to an earlier point about self-knowledge.
	So, what the media does as a whole, which is almost exclusively dominated by the left, but what the media does...
	It creates these Pavlovian language associations with people and or institutions, right?
	So, you know, there's white racism, white privilege, institutionalized racism, which means white racism in the West.
	And it becomes completely hysterical to the point where even the great Candace Owens has been referred to publicly as a white...
	And then what they do also, of course, is they will say that they care about particular issues and keep attaching those issues to people, right?
	So they talk about how Trump is throwing people in cages.
	Trump is throwing children in cages, right?
	Even though the photo they constantly shared about that was actually under Obama, right?
	And so they keep talking about all of this.
	And what they do is they program people to have these wild negative reactions to particular stimuli.
	They're bypassing any rational faculty they might possess and simply hitting them in the fields, right?
	Just punching them in the fields until they get this reaction.
	Like, why did Europe open its borders?
	Well, because some irresponsible Turkish dad was taking his kid in an overloaded boat across the Mediterranean because he wanted to get free dental care in Canada.
	And then the kid drowned.
	Now, why that is the fault of people in Paris remains completely unexplained.
	But to a large degree, women had their ovaries twitch in response, mostly because they're so often childless.
	And they cried.
	And it's like, sorry, Europe can't have a border because a Turkish dad put his child in a very dangerous situation.
	Or if you look at slavery, like white, oh, white slavery, white slavery.
	Well, slavery existed in America for a grand total of 84 years, and a war was fought to stop it.
	And the British and the British Empire fought worldwide to end slavery, not just in the British Empire, but around the world.
	So whites have a very noble history with regards to slavery.
	They didn't capture the slaves.
	They bought them, and it didn't last for very long, and then whites fought to end it.
	If you look at the Muslim slave trade, Countless millions taken from Africa, usually castrated in Muslim lands, which is why there are not a lot of blacks in Islamic lands at the moment.
	And if you look at even India in the present, right?
	India has the highest percentage of population currently enslaved in the world.
	By the way, India is also one of the most racist countries in the world, according to various surveys.
	And so if the left cared about slavery and racism...
	They would be nagging the Indians to fix that problem.
	They would be nagging the Chinese to let two million Muslims out of concentration camps, as you talked about earlier, currently kept in China for sometimes pretty nefarious purposes.
	But the left don't care about any of that stuff.
	Why? Because Chinese and Indians generally vote for the left.
	So it's just all about power.
	It's nothing to do with moral standards.
	But yeah, they're programming people that you see a picture of Trump and you see a bloated fascist racist.
	And then that programs you to have a negative response.
	And if you don't know anything about self-knowledge, you'll think that your negative response is some kind of objective judgment.
	And because you don't like someone, that person is bad.
	But the problem is, of course, that can be used to justify racism, right?
	Like, say, somebody doesn't like East Asians.
	Well, does that mean East Asians are bad because they don't like them?
	No, that's wrong. Having a negative feeling about a group does not prove that they're bad or wrong.
	Well, unless that group is Republicans, in which case, you're perfectly justified, you see.
	Right, right. It's crazy, man.
	That's like you can get punched, but you can't punch back.
	Or like in that movie Gladiator at the end when Russell Crowe's got to fight Joaquin Phoenix and he stabs him before the fight.
	He's got to fight him, but he's bleeding out.
	I mean, that's sort of what's happening nowadays.
	Let me ask you this, Stefan.
	Did you have a history degree?
	Is that what I heard once on your show?
	Well, so I have two years of English literature, and then I did almost two years at the National Theatre School for Acting and Playwriting.
	And then I finished my undergraduate degree.
	I switched from English to history at McGill.
	And then I got my master's degree in history, focusing on the history of philosophy at the University of Toronto.
	Okay, so history always repeats itself.
	What point in history do you think we're at right now?
	Like, what year can you name where, going forward, we're going to see things that happened maybe 80 years ago or 100 years ago?
	Where do you feel we're at right now?
	Yeah, I think the closest analogy is very late in the Roman Empire.
	And I've got a whole presentation on the fall of Rome that people should check out.
	You can find it on YouTube.
	Well, maybe you can find it on YouTube.
	I don't know anymore. But, yeah, it's very late.
	So we've got fiat currency, right?
	So made-up money. What happened in Rome towards the end of the empire was, of course, it got way too big and it tried to absorb too many people.
	So it became ethically diverse and highly multicultural, which meant that ethnic conflicts began to erupt.
	It overtaxed its citizens.
	And so what happened was you could only functionally tax in cities.
	You couldn't tax in the country because it was too spread out and, of course, no computers back then.
	And so it raised taxes and conscription so much in the cities that the young men left to go and live in the country.
	And then you couldn't conscript them and you couldn't tax them.
	And so they still needed soldiers.
	And so they turned to mercenaries who did not have loyalty to Rome because they had a lower tax base and they had higher tax requirements to pay the mercenaries, whereas they used to just enslave people.
	What happened was they ran out of money.
	It When they run out of money, they don't end up rationally reversing their policies.
	They just print money.
	The equivalent of printing money back in the days of coinage was debasing the currency by mixing in all kinds of garbage with silver, gold, and bronze coins.
	So it got to be like 90%, 95% of the coins were pure garbage.
	And bad money drives out good money, so people hoarded all the good coins.
	The bad coins went into circulation.
	You got massive inflation.
	And so, yeah, the welfare state was destroying the economy.
	Diversity and multiculturalism was destroying the cohesiveness of the empire.
	Tax receipts were down.
	Expenses were way up.
	And what happened?
	Well, eventually they couldn't pay their troops.
	And then the troops came and sacked Rome and that was it.
	The population of Rome went from millions to 18,000 in less than a year.
	People scattered to the winds.
	And then you had the Dark Ages for close to a thousand years where Europe basically had to huddle back from the shores where all the food was because the Muslims kept stealing Europeans to sell in the Islamic slave markets in the Middle East and North Africa.
	So yeah, it was really, it was absolutely brutal.
	I mean many, many more. I think it was two million white Europeans were taken during this time in a pretty low population.
	And, I mean, the Muslims, to my knowledge, have never done the whole mea culpa and apologize for all of that.
	And the left, of course, loves Islam and Muslims, despite the fact that more slaves were taken by Muslims than were ever taken by whites, and there's not been an apology, to my knowledge.
	And so, yeah, I would say that that's kind of the closest, but the big difference is, in the fall of Rome, we couldn't do this, right?
	We couldn't have this kind of conversation that we can disseminate to hundreds of thousands of millions of people in the long run.
	So we do have incredible technology to bring facts, reason, and evidence to people that has never existed before in human history.
	The dominance of the narrative, the gatekeepers of the narrative were so powerful and so strong throughout human history.
	Like, I remember back in the day, I wrote a manifesto.
	I wrote a manifesto.
	This has got to be in my early 20s.
	And how did I get that manifesto out?
	You wouldn't believe it, man. I took an ad in newspapers and I engaged in written correspondence with people around the world.
	That was it. That's all I could do.
	I couldn't publish it in a newspaper because I couldn't afford the ad space and they probably wouldn't have taken it anyway.
	But yeah, so I wrote a manifesto.
	I mailed it around to people.
	I engaged in mail-written discussions.
	Probably got them still somewhere about that.
	Now... I mean, I did a video on Epstein.
	It got seen by well over a million people in podcasts and views.
	Like, boom, just sit down and 20 minutes later, a million people can be consuming some factual arguments.
	That's... That's the only thing that gives me any kind of hope, frankly, because everything else is just inertia and decay and degradation of history and people wanting something for nothing, which is the foundation of corruption.
	So the fact that we have this is the only thing pushing back against this gravity well of history.
	With the fall of Rome story there, Stefan, which I really think you're bang on, do you think we're going to see Emperor Trump?
	Well, this is the problem, of course.
	I don't think we're going to see Emperor Trump, but, you know, if one of his sons decides to take up the mantle.
	See, it's fine when Justin Trudeau takes over the mantle, although with some gap between Pierre Trudeau.
	But if another Trump steps forward, then the left is probably going to erupt in violence, and that's going to be very hard to manage.
	But, of course, the challenge with America, as is the case with most of the West, is that we're very close to the tipping point where non-leftists won't be electable because demographics have shifted to the point where the left has a certainty on power, right?
	Because they've imported so many people.
	I mean, they can't convince the population, so they just change the population, right?
	I mean, they're not going to give up, right?
	This is why they switched to immigration policy.
	Khrushchev in the 50s and early 60s talked about how evil Stalin was, they realized they couldn't win the intellectual argument anymore.
	So they just decided to switch to immigration to get their way because immigrants to the West are chosen almost exclusively from the demographics that are going to vote pretty hard left.
	And so this is the only issue that fundamentally matters.
	I mean, everything else is kind of nonsense.
	So this is why I talk about demographics.
	This is why I talk about IQ.
	This is why I talk about voting patterns, support for free speech and so on.
	Because demographics is to some degree destiny.
	And if the West cannot gain any control over immigration, it really doesn't matter how many Supreme Court justices you have on one side of the aisle or the other.
	And it doesn't really matter what's written on the paper because everything's going to be decided in the streets with bricks.
	I feel like we need to go back to the only landowners can vote system.
	Well, you could say only people who net contribute to the tax system should vote.
	I mean, everything else would be conflict of interest.
	I mean, if you're getting two grand a month in benefits and food stamps and subsidized housing from the government, you can't vote objectively on tax policy.
	Come on. I mean, everybody understands that.
	I mean, Martha Stewart went to jail.
	For conflict of interest, right?
	And insider trading and all that, and yet somehow people utterly dependent on the government are totally objective about government taxes.
	People who don't pay taxes are totally objective about taxes, even though you're usually a net receipt of other people's taxes.
	Women can vote objectively about social policies, even though they generally pillage men's wallets against their will using the power of the vote.
	But yeah, that was, of course, all the old wisdom is considered bigotry, and all of the new wisdom is considered religion.
	Jesus, man. We got to wrap up, Stefan.
	I'm going to hit you with some rapid-fire questions that I love to hit every guest with.
	Number one, if you can go back to the beginning, 15-year-old Stefan Molyneux, so you're giving yourself a piece of advice at age 15, what would you say to yourself?
	It's going to be a lot more fun than you think.
	Oh, damn. I like that.
	That's a good answer. Top three books that changed your life?
	The Bible, Atlas Shrugged, and Economics in One Lesson.
	Who's that one by? Henry Hazlitt.
	Okay, awesome. Haven't heard that one yet.
	Next one here.
	What is the one thing, the number one thing that young people who are 18, 19, 20 years old need to succeed these days?
	Step away from the screens and into the big blue room where real people are doing real things.
	You mean they got to respect the grind?
	Respect the grind. Awesome.
	Stefan, how can people get in touch with you if they want to know more or if they want to join the discussion?
	Sure. Okay. So on Twitter, I'm at Stefan Molyneux.
	That's S-T-E-F-A-N-M-O-L-Y-N-E-U-X. I'd really love to thank my parents for giving me an unpronounceable and unspellable name in this digital EDM. Well, maybe that helps sometimes.
	You've got two names that are hard.
	I get Steven all the time, and I say Stefan, you're Stefan.
	It's a mess. That's crazy.
	Yeah, I mean, my middle name, Basil, would have been helpful, but then everyone thinks of a rat or John Cleese.
	But anyway, so you can go to freedomain.com.
	You can find me on YouTube for now, youtube.com forward slash freedomain.
	And I'm pretty engaged, like I do listen to Convos all the time.
	I'm on Twitter. I debate back and forth.
	So I'm pretty engaged.
	I'm not like a talking head on the other side of the planet.
	So I'd love to hear from listeners.
	Awesome. Thanks so much, Stefan.
	Respect the grind. Appreciate having you on the show.

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