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Jan. 25, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:49:17

AOC vs Billionaires! Freedomain Ask Me Anything!

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	All right, all right.
	I think that we are going live.
	My friends, I hope you're doing well.
	I hope you're having a wonderful Friday evening as I test a wee new setup.
	And glasses, yes.
	It's the post-50 planet.
	So I hope you guys are doing well.
	And let's see here.
	Why is this not broadcasting to my existing place?
	I am. How are you doing?
	And yeah, hello to Oklahoma.
	We live. And I told it to...
	I'm trying a new way, a new thing, a new beast of ways of getting it up.
	Can you get the audience coming across all right?
	You can see a wee web page that I've got going on.
	And... Post 50, yeah, no kidding, eh?
	Hey, from Haiti to communist San Francisco.
	Hope you're doing well.
	And... Let's see what's going on.
	I'm sorry to just give you this here, but it's saying that...
	Oh, looks like...
	Are we? Are we? Are we?
	Hmm. How strange.
	Anyway, so I guess we'll go live here and let's talk about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
	And here she's got a statement.
	No one ever makes a billion dollars.
	You take... A billion dollars.
	And let's have a look at what she's got to say about all of this.
	And we will break it down.
	Break it down. Break it down.
	All right. So she says, no one ever makes a billion dollars.
	You take a billion dollars.
	Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez slams billionaires for exploiting workers.
	She says, people become billionaires only by exploiting workers and preying on vulnerable and less privileged people.
	Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez argued this week, no one ever makes a billion dollars.
	You take a billion dollars. Ocasio-Cortez told the author Ta-Nehisi Coates, billionaires make their money, quote, off the backs, quote, of undocumented immigrants, minorities, and single mothers, she said.
	You sat on a couch while thousands of people were paid modern-day slave wages.
	So... Coates adopted the role of the hypothetical billionaire and asked the lawmaker to elaborate.
	He said, I'm Joe Billionaire.
	He said, I make widgets. I sold those widgets.
	I'd make billions of dollars. You know, selling those widgets, making those widgets, therefore those billions of dollars are mine.
	Why am I the enemy of health care?
	So it just seems like a little bit random.
	Well, you didn't make those widgets, did you?
	Ocasio-Cortez replied.
	Because you employed thousands of people and paid them less than a living wage to make those widgets for you.
	Dear, oh dear, you didn't make those widgets.
	You sat on a couch while thousands of people were paid modern-day slave wages.
	Billionaires make their money, quote, off the backs of blah, blah, blah.
	The single mothers who are all, quote, literally dying because they can't afford to live, she added.
	Ocasio-Cortez said that capitalism inevitably creates billionaires while others starve.
	Then called for a fairer, more advanced society, saying that we are, quote, at the edges of an untenable system that is starting to crack.
	Democratic presidential candidates, including Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have sounded the alarm on wealth inequality and unequal access to health, education, health care and other critical services.
	Some of America's largest companies, including Amazon, Walmart and Disney, have been accused in recent years of exploiting workers and failing to pay them a living wage.
	Even Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft and one of the world's wealthiest people, recently bemoaned stark inequality and argued that, quote, the rich should pay more.
	First of all, Billy Boy, no one's stopping you from paying more, my friend.
	If you want to go and pay more, no one is going to stop you.
	You can send all the money that you want to the IRS and they will be very happy to hang on to it for you.
	So that is all perfectly fine.
	But let's have a look here.
	So it's easy to make fun of this stuff.
	Like I get that.
	It is ridiculously easy to make fun of this stuff.
	But there is a very real concern here, a very real issue that I think really needs to be understood and addressed.
	The idea that we're just going to push back against socialism and income redistribution and the transfer of wealth and of money at the moment is really, really tough.
	Why is it really, really tough?
	Well, for a couple of basic reasons.
	But here's a reality.
	You may remember back, if you're a little bit older, you may remember back in 2006, 2007, 2008, there was a massive crisis.
	Crash in the value of housing, and there was a huge bailout.
	Now, the sum that people have in their heads of this bailout is about $700 billion.
	A truly staggering sum, of course, but that's really just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak.
	So according to a team at Bloomberg News, at one point in 2009, the U.S. had lent, spent, or guaranteed as much as $12.8 trillion.
	To rescue the banksters.
	$12.8 trillion.
	This is back when, what was the GDP of America?
	Like $14-15 trillion.
	So, yeah, 70%, 80%, 85% of the entire GDP had been lent, spent, or guaranteed to rescue the economy.
	So this idea, well, you know, you can't have income transfer to the single mother.
	You just can't do it.
	You can't have Medicare for all.
	It's really tough to make that case.
	When the predatory, parasitical, blood-sucking leeches at the top of the economic chain are just hoovering up every single spare dollar they can wrestle out of the fetus's unborn, clenchy, goopy hands.
	That is a basic, grim, factual, deep and powerful reality that everybody needs to face.
	So that's the predatory financial classes.
	What about the military-industrial complex?
	Every single hour, taxpayers in the United States are paying over $32 million for the wars since 2001, over $5 trillion in direct costs.
	Through fiscal year 2017, obviously a couple of years ago now, a third estimate of these as different ways that you can calculate the costs at war, puts costs at more than $4.8 trillion, The cost of American war since 2001...
	Through fiscal year 2017 was $12.7 trillion, right?
	So we got $12.8 trillion tied up at one point in 2009 to rescue the, quote, economy.
	And very similar figure, $12.7 trillion in the wars.
	In the wars.
	Well, that is, I submit, a crap ton of cash.
	Right? A crap ton of cash.
	So, listen, when people are saying, why do we have all of this money for war, and we don't have the money to pay people a living wage?
	Well, of course, these two are...
	Related. These two are related.
	So let's close down ye old browser.
	Let me shuffle over to the middle here and let's have a little chat about what actually goes on in the economy.
	Now I have had, for better or for worse, entrepreneurial experience going back Well, I guess you could say going back to my days as a paper route guy, but more specifically going back to my late 20s when I co-founded a software company and grew it and all of that.
	And everybody knows the story, I'm sure, who's been around here for a while.
	Now, that was a massive amount of risk.
	Those of you who've been entrepreneurs, you'll get what I'm talking about.
	That was a massive amount of risk, an ungodly amount of unpaid work for the first year or two of the entire project I took.
	Well, no pay. No pay.
	No pay for the step bot.
	And then I had to go into debt.
	At times I had to sign giant promissory notes so we could make payroll.
	Because, you know, in business, cash flow is king.
	It doesn't matter if you're making a whole bunch of money in two months.
	You've got bills to pay right now, which, you know, you don't pay.
	You don't have internet. You don't have an office space.
	You can't pay your employees. So, I understand that The idea and the argument when people are doing the actual work and they look around and they see these bosses and these bosses well they seem to spend quite a lot of time in the office not building the aforementioned widgets they seem to spend quite a lot of time on the phone on the internet tapping away on Excel spreadsheets and meeting with accountants and lawyers and you name it there's a lot of that stuff going on but They don't seem to be actually making any widgets at all.
	Now, when I worked for a major Canadian corporation back in my 20s, I remember going to visit the factory floor And of course, it was in my suit and I went to visit the factory floor for a variety of reasons.
	Don't have to get into them here. And I do remember all of the people who were on the factory floor having this like, you know, a boss.
	You see, I wasn't the boss, but you know, I mean, they just sort of made that association.
	I remember when I worked in a hardware store, the boss had a little office cubbyhole at the top and back of the store that was just kind of narrow and dusty with all these Shelves and folders and all of that pouring over.
	And, you know, it's easy to say, hey, I'm the one mixing all the paint.
	I'm the one cutting the keys.
	I'm the one cutting the glass.
	I'm the one organizing the plumbing.
	I'm the one who's showing customers around.
	I'm the one doing all the work and you're just sitting up there in an office.
	What are you doing? I don't know because I don't get it.
	But what I kind of understood even at the time...
	And it's funny, you know, these little, you ever have these little conversations?
	People come in and they just tell you something and it just kind of like, boop.
	Ah, I see, I see.
	I remember somebody telling me, they said, well, this is back when I guess a can of Coke was like a quarter or something like that.
	Oh yeah, I'm that fresh.
	And I remember... Somebody telling me, but it only costs two or three cents for the ingredients to make the can of Coke.
	And then, of course, part of your brain is like, well, wait a minute.
	They're charging, it's two or three cents for the ingredients, but they're charging me a quarter.
	That's a huge... And then somebody else said, well, yeah, but you've got the factory costs, you've got the labor costs, tax costs, heating costs, advertising costs.
	And I was like, ah, I've been saved!
	Thank the Lord above!
	Thank... The lords of Austrian economics, somebody has dipped in and saved me from this confusing resentment that tends to prey upon people's minds.
	So when it comes to understanding what value the owner of the means of production brings to the equation, then it's important to understand that you, in and of your physical labor, are worth very little.
	Are worth very little.
	When I worked up north, we had these, they're called pionja drills, which you'd sort of, you'd take these big kind of drills and you'd drill down and you'd attach another top to the drill.
	You'd drill down until you got to the bedrock, which is where the gold, if there was any around, would be because gold kind of sinks down.
	It's very heavy. Now, can you imagine if I had to Well, if I didn't have a drill, a gas-powered drill, I would have to have dug down with a spade.
	If I didn't have a spade or a shovel, I'd have to dig down with my hands.
	I remember the permafrost was a real bitch and a half.
	I remember going out there with a giant flamethrower and trying to get...
	Through the permafrost with the flamethrower, and it virtually did nothing.
	I mean, that stuff was like iron or bricks.
	It was really, really tough to get through, but the drill could get through it pretty quickly.
	So, I mean, if I had to sort of claw my way with my bare hands through the permafrost to get down to the bedrock, which sometimes could be 20, 30 feet down, I mean, it's functionally impossible, right?
	So by having...
	A piece of equipment, which is not a consumable.
	I didn't use it to brush my teeth.
	I didn't use it to read.
	I mean, it was just something that you used in order to gain something else.
	It's a means to an end, not an end in itself.
	By having that piece of capital equipment, the job became possible rather than impossible.
	So, of course, I wasn't paid the total value of what it is that I was producing.
	Of course not. Because they had to pay money.
	For the drill.
	They had to pay for the snowmobiles.
	They had to pay for my tent.
	Heating, it got so cold, we had to use jet fuel to stay warm in our heating.
	And you'd wake up in the morning and the entire heating apparatus would be glowing and half shaking from the need to just...
	And there would be snow on the bottom of the...
	It wasn't a tent. It was like a prospector's tent, which is kind of like a canvas hut.
	And they had to fly me out there, and of course they had to have insurance, and they had to have their offices, and they had to have their map readers, their geologists.
	They had to file all of the claims to make sure that what I was pounding into the trees would actually be recognized legally.
	All of this stuff had to be done.
	Now, I'm doing the work, but the question is, why is the work valuable at all?
	The work is valuable because of all of the other stuff that's hard to see that's floating around it, right?
	So when I was a waiter, I would go into the kitchen and I worked at Pizza Hut.
	Back in the day, they used to have five minutes or free for their meals, right?
	If your meal is not out in five minutes, it was free.
	In other words, they gave you a coupon for a free meal next time.
	And you had to get their drinks out first.
	I mean, it was really quite the hurly-burly, right?
	But the reason why I was paid, I got a wage, a fairly small wage, and then I got a lot of tips because I was a pretty, I guess, fairly charismatic waiter.
	And so why was I getting paid?
	Because somebody had built the restaurant, somebody had ordered all of the ingredients for the pizza and paid the electricity bill and the advertising and the cleaning and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	And that's why... I have to surrender part of my, quote, productivity because my productivity is only enabled because the restaurant has been built around.
	If I carry around a bunch of trays in the woods, I'm not going to make anything.
	And I wouldn't make anything, of course, right?
	So understanding that the worker and the employer, and I even find these terms prejudicial, of course, workers are And the employers are generally working as well.
	But understanding that you surrender part of your wages to the person who's creating the environment that makes you productive because you're much more productive in that environment than you would be without it.
	I couldn't make any money as a waiter in my house or...
	In the park or wherever, I couldn't make any money as a waiter.
	So somebody had to build the restaurant around me so I could make money as a waiter.
	It wasn't that I was losing money.
	I was gaining money. We could have saved a couple of thousand dollars by not having snowmobiles and pionjar drills up there in the frozen tundra north of Nikina.
	But it would have taken forever to dig one hole.
	It was really not that productive.
	So because I'm paid, in a sense, for the number of holes that I can drill, that sounds kind of dirty, but because I'm paid for the number of holes that I can drill up there, I'm willing to surrender some portion of my income so that the drill can be paid for and we can have a snowmobile, because that way I can drill like a hundred times as many holes and get paid more.
	But it's hard for people to sort of fathom this.
	Now, the other thing I wanted to mention, and I'll get your questions in a sec.
	The other thing I wanted to mention is, how is it possible that people don't see this?
	I mean, I guess it's possible.
	Obviously, it's quite... I don't know if they see it and they just obscure it for the sake of sophistry or they just don't see it at all.
	But how is it possible? For people to not see this, when they say, well, the capitalists are underpaying the workers.
	But the government is responsible for training the workers.
	The government is responsible for infusing economically valuable skills into the minds of children.
	I mean, that's what it should be doing, right?
	So if people graduate From 12 years of government education, not even worth 10 bucks an hour, shouldn't people say, hey, maybe our education sucks?
	I'm going to make that sound, sucks!
	Maybe our educational system sucks.
	Maybe we're just not teaching kids economically useful skills.
	And maybe we should work on fixing that rather than force the capitalists to pretend that our dumped-down employees or that our dumped-down students are actually worth more than they are.
	Because I'll tell you this.
	I mean, the people I know who became successful were the people who had a passion for knowledge outside of school.
	I don't know if this happened to you. You can let me know in the chat.
	But If you had a passion for something outside of school, then you had a chance to make something of yourself.
	So me, I borrowed the computers whenever I could, learned how to program.
	I would go in on Saturdays and learn my assembly and machine code and basic and all of that.
	On the PET 2K computers, there was an Amiga.
	Back then, there was a VIC-20.
	That was some big text, man.
	An Atari 400 and 800, and you'd just figure it out and learn how to code.
	And there'd be a whole bunch of people there who would try and figure things out.
	And I remember begging my mom, and she did say yes to this, because you always had to have an adult there.
	And my mom actually did come and sit for the day, and she read because I desperately wanted to get in.
	And, you know, I was the kid who lived the closest to the school, so...
	If you had something that grabbed you outside of school, like my friend who became an economics professor, he loved reading about economics.
	And I loved computers.
	I loved logic.
	I loved philosophy.
	And I read a lot of history.
	And so all of that stuff ended up having value to me.
	But if you don't have any particular intellectual pursuits or hobbies or interests outside of school, I mean, you graduate barely literate.
	Barely! Literate in anything.
	And that's one of the real tragedies, that if you're not trying to encourage intellectual pursuits outside of school, you're really, really crippling people economically, and it's a brutal thing to go through.
	And, of course, when you hear or when people say, well, the school system sucks, people then say, well, of course, the solution must be more spending, more spending!
	I mean, it's not true at all.
	It's not true at all.
	In the 1950s and 1960s, when America had a much better education system, it was spending much less per capita when you adjust for inflation than it does today.
	So if you look from the early 1970s to 2003, spending per capita on education doubled.
	Japan spends one-third as much per capita as America does, has much larger class sizes, and vastly outperforms the US. Well, of course, we know there's a lot of complex reasons for all of that.
	This fantasy that you can just get other people to pay for the deficiencies of terrible government education and family-destroying government policies is really a very, very tempting thing.
	There are devils abroad in the world who desperately want you to surrender any responsibility to give in to resentment and to rage and to greed and to say, it's those guys who are stealing from me and those guys are going to pay!
	And I talked about this.
	Please, everybody, go.
	To FDRURL.com forward slash Hong Kong and watch, you know, grit your teeth.
	It's really good. This Hong Kong documentary that I put out late last year.
	And it's really, really important to watch this because I really go into great detail about all of the mechanics by which the rage and resentment fostered by the communists ended up costing the lives of tens of millions of people.
	Tens of millions of people.
	You may, of course, have heard about, well, you see, all of there was huge taxes in the 50s and 60s, massive government taxes, 90% taxes, this, that, and the other, right?
	And, I mean, in 1980, the top 1% of American earners paid 15% of all of the income taxes.
	Now, When the rich are supposedly getting away with murder and not paying their fair share, instead of the top 1% of Americans paying 15% of all income taxes, the top 1% of Americans now pay over 30% of all income taxes.
	That is pretty wild.
	I mean, it's funny because I didn't really learn about this until I went into the business world because I didn't sell to consumers.
	I didn't have a consumer product that I'd built.
	It was a business product. In other words, I was a business selling to business, which is called B2B or business to business, which is a huge economy and in some sectors really dwarfs, of course, the business to consumer economy.
	But the business to business economy is huge and really is the foundation of worker productivity.
	Worker productivity is the foundation of Whether you have an economy that grows or an economy that doesn't grow.
	Simply giving people more money and having them go and spend it does not raise worker productivity.
	Worker productivity is raised...
	I'll give you a tiny example, right?
	So we had to customize our product.
	We didn't reach, at least maybe the company's still running, maybe they've done it now, but we didn't reach the holy grail of an uncustomized ship-and-forget product.
	So we had to customize...
	Our product for each client.
	And this was a lot of work and testing all of these changes was a lot of work.
	So what I did Was I spent probably two or three months of sort of nights and weekends labor creating something I called the Database Builder.
	Now, the Database Builder would allow you to enter into a table all of the changes that you want from the database.
	Like, add this field, remove this, make this drop down, and this new form, and blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
	And... We would then go through all of those changes with the customer before anything had been changed in the database and in the GUI, the form that overlaid the database, the forms.
	And we would get a sign-off on that.
	Okay, here are all the changes that you want.
	And then, it was really cool, you would literally push a button.
	And the code that I wrote would go in and make all of the changes to the database and all of the changes to the GUI interface.
	It would add, it would remove, it would resort, it would create new dropdowns, it would just...
	And then it would go and create...
	All of the changes to the reports, right?
	So you make a new table, a new form.
	You need a new report. You can print it out.
	If you adjust existing tables and forms, you need new reports and so on.
	And it would go through and it would make a log of everything and it would test everything and all of that.
	We also had a little code where you double-click on a date field and a little date pop-up calendar comes up.
	You double-click on a number field, a little calculator pops up.
	And I wrote code to add all of that to every...
	Number and date field in the system.
	And so I wrote code that automated the process and made it consistent of changing the database.
	Now that allowed us to produce...
	Sorry, to produce databases far more quickly because before what we would do is we'd say, oh, we want all these changes.
	You'd document it in a big word document and then you'd hand it to the programmers and they would replicate it in the database by hand and then you'd have to test it like crazy to make sure everything flowed perfectly.
	Whereas in this, we actually used the script for the table changes and the form changes and the report changes.
	We used that as the way of verifying what was going to be changed.
	Then you push the button.
	It runs a script.
	It changes everything.
	It was really cool stuff.
	And it even built a web interface right down the road.
	When I worked with companies in China to help them create control pollution, they needed a web interface as well.
	So what it did was it also created the script for the web pages.
	And so like one button changes the tables.
	It changes the queries.
	It changes the forms.
	It changes the reports.
	It changes the web interface.
	Boom, boom, boom.
	All documented, all logged, and all signed off.
	And it allowed us to produce our changes much more safely, much more consistently, and much more quickly.
	I mean, it tripled the speed at which we were able to produce our systems.
	Now, what that means, of course, the systems were selling between, like, the low end was about $100,000, the high end was over $1 million, and so on.
	So by tripling the speed at which we can produce these databases, I made everybody more valuable.
	Now, that was me just working nights and weekends for two months to create this.
	And then, of course, you know, we further honed it and fixed it up from there.
	But it was really, really...
	And also, it was a great sales tool, because I would be doing a demo, right?
	And people would be saying, oh, but it's missing this thing.
	And I'm like, boom, here we go.
	You know, we put in these fields, we remove this field, here's the script, here's the output, you can even log in on the web site and see the changes immediately.
	And people were like, whoa, because this is back in the 90s.
	This was like super-duper self-productive.
	Self-generating software was kind of like a big new idea.
	Now, of course, we never ended up selling the database builder, as I called it, to end clients.
	We used it as an in-house tool.
	I did actually have thoughts about turning it into a consumer product, but I never really got around to it.
	But that's an example of something that's internal that is built that then makes people more productive.
	So we started gaining more sales.
	We hired more people, and we could pay our employees more because they were more productive.
	But they were more productive because I built this big, giant system for producing databases in an easy – and you almost didn't really even have to test it because it would tell you if it had any problems.
	You could accept that it worked fine if it did.
	So to make people – To have them earn more, well, you need to improve education or you need to tell people, hey, your education sucks.
	You need to find a hobby that has some economic relevance.
	I don't care if it's taking engines apart and putting them back together or trying to figure out how your Xbox works or trying to figure out how to make Pac-Man on a tablet or whatever it's going to be, figuring out, you know, getting fascinated by plumbing and running water.
	You have to find something outside of school that's going to add economic value.
	And you have to let...
	Capital accumulate in the hands of the most competent people.
	Because there's this fantasy, right?
	This fantasy that rich people, they just bathe themselves in liquid golds of golden showers, I suppose.
	They just bathe themselves in gold and they're just buying stuff and enjoying it and absorbing it and so on, right?
	Okay, well, if they buy stuff, that kind of creates work.
	But rich people, what do they do?
	Well, there's only three things you can do with money.
	You can save it, you can spend it, or you can invest it.
	It's all you can do. Now, of course, remember, the government is leeching away your money with inflation all the time.
	So you've got to do something to protect your money.
	So what do you do? Well, if you save it, it's unlikely that you're going to get enough interest on your savings to even deal with inflation.
	So you're going to be leeching money.
	You're going to be losing money because of the soft pilfering of counterfeit currency from the Fed and other central banks is continual, right?
	So, but even if you save it, what you're doing is you're giving it to the bank who is probably going to lend it out to someone to buy a car, buy a house, invest in their own business or start a business or whatever it is, right?
	So, you know, that's doing some economic value.
	If you buy stuff, well, you know, it's getting economic churn going and that's not too bad.
	And of course, if you invest it, then you're creating jobs.
	Some of those jobs were temporary because most businesses go under within the first five years, but some of those jobs will really grow and flourish and gain, right?
	So, this resentment, this resentment, this resentment is really, really chilling and it just arises out of not understanding the benefits that economically competent people have.
	People who know how to take risk, people who know what to invest in, people who are willing to take those risks, they are the ones who create the jobs.
	The structure in the environment that adds value to the average worker is being generated by large sums of money and people taking significant risks.
	Now, explaining all of that, you know, what has this been like, 20 minutes?
	I mean, it's not that hard to explain, and you can explain it in a way that most people understand.
	But you do have to understand these things in order to explain them.
	And, you know, the biggest catastrophe ever to happen in the West.
	You know, it's so frustrating to deal with all of these problems and issues that are arising out of decisions made before I was born, before you were born.
	The decisions to turn education over to the government was, I believe, the most catastrophic decision Western civilization has ever taken.
	The most catastrophic decision.
	Because once you turn education over to the government, you lose competence.
	You lose...
	You can't maintain a free market system when your education is communist or socialist, to be as nice as possible about it.
	When you're saying that government, guns, power, forced redistribution is the way that we educate children, how can you then maintain in the long run a free market system?
	A voluntary, peaceful, negotiated free trade system.
	You can't. Because if free trade is good, then it should be used to educate children.
	But if the education of children, which is one of the most important, if not the most important, activities a society can be engaged in, other than having the children in the first place, but if the education of the children cannot be left to the free market, Then how can people grow up to respect the free market when the very environment of their education is the opposite of the free market?
	Well, the answer is, of course, they can't.
	And that's why I believe that until The educational system is reclaimed, is moved back into the free market.
	It's going to be almost impossible to reverse anything because now, of course, it's going even further into the highly leftist Marxist indoctrination camps of higher education, so to speak.
	Higher education is lower indoctrination.
	So... Isn't it great to be dealing with the problems put in place 150 years ago by governments taking over the education system?
	It's kind of embedded.
	It's going to be pretty tough to pull back on that.
	Well, hopefully we won't have to wait for a crash and a reset, but I kind of think we are going to have to wait for that.
	All right. Let me get some questions here.
	Thank you very much for your listening and your patience.
	Let me just... Zoom in just a smidgey smidge here.
	By the way, is it coming through okay?
	Is it coming through okay?
	All right, let's see here.
	What can we get in terms of questions?
	Stefan, is women in the workplace a bigger issue in society compared to things like the Patriot Act, red flag laws, heroin prohibition, etc.?
	So, listen, okay, so with regards to women in the workplace...
	I want to preface this answer by saying I'm a free market guy from top to bottom, back to front, soul to soul.
	Soup to nuts, as they say.
	So, I want everyone to have completely free access to the completely free market.
	And that has nothing to do with women having...
	There have been problems with women being in the workforce.
	So, women shouldn't be this. Do whatever you want.
	Be free to do whatever you want.
	That hasn't been said. There are certain aspects that are going to limit, on average.
	Again, individuals, right? You never judge these things.
	But group averages matter when talking about women in the workplace as a whole.
	So, look... If a woman doesn't want to have kids, and you know, I get a lot of this on Twitter.
	Oh, what if women don't want to have kids?
	It's like, how do you know that's going to be the case for her whole life?
	How do you know she's basing not having kids or that decision to not have having kids?
	How do you know she's basing that on accurate, factual information?
	Maybe she had a really crappy childhood and she thinks that's what it's going to be like if she has kids.
	Maybe she's never heard of peaceful parenting.
	Maybe she's never heard of anti-spanking.
	Maybe she faints at the sight of blood and doesn't want to think of circumcising her son and has never heard that that's barbaric medieval monstrosity, horrible thing to do.
	So maybe she's just not been exposed to better information.
	Maybe she looks at her mother, who worked and tried to raise kids and juggled everything and just had a terrible time and said, well, I don't want that!
	Okay, then you can say, well, you know, you can organize your life so you can stay home and your husband can work and, you know, it can be a pretty civilized way to go, at least for the first sort of five, seven years of your kid's life, right?
	So, or maybe she's just lost in a haze and blur of 20s hedonism and isn't really thinking about What her life is going to be like when she's 60 and has the sexual market value of your average turnip and still has a quarter century or more to go in life.
	So people say, well, what if you don't want to have kids?
	It's like, well, smokers don't want to quit smoking.
	Doesn't mean they're right. And it doesn't mean, of course, everyone.
	But if the woman, you know, genuinely doesn't want to have kids, or maybe she's infertile or whatever, then, you know, go for it.
	She can achieve a huge amount.
	I mean, there are questions around proportionality of males and females at the very top of the IQ spectrum.
	There are questions of testosterone and sort of basic aggression and assertiveness and so on.
	But, you know, there are remarkable women who defy every stereotype and every average who can go and do incredible things.
	In the business world.
	And you can hear, of course, these women at the dawn of the computing era who did some amazing things and created compilers and did wonderful things and all of that.
	But the fact that you know them by name kind of tells you a little bit about the averages.
	So, yeah, women should be perfectly free to pursue whatever education and careers they want to.
	But if the woman does want to have kids, well, that's not something you can just kind of easily navigate around.
	Because if you want to have kids...
	Well, I remember working with a woman many years ago who was pregnant, and she was throwing up a lot.
	She had to run out of meetings in order to throw up, because she had morning sickness that kind of went on for a little bit more than the morning, and she was not getting any sleep, and she was complaining that she had to kind of sleep on her side, which she doesn't like to do.
	She couldn't sleep on her belly.
	She was waking up to pee every hour, just tired.
	You know, it's... It's a glorious little vampire in there, so to speak, right?
	I mean, it's draining you.
	And it's tiring to make a whole new human being.
	And then she had what was an episiotomy where they had to cut her vagina in order to get the baby out and, you know, stitch it back up.
	And that's all kinds of not fun, I imagine.
	And... So she was tired and then the breastfeeding and breastfeeding was terrible.
	She was like, she would take like three hours to breastfeed sometimes and that basically the baby would be ready for the next.
	Breastfeeding is one of these things really complicated.
	You'd think it'd just be pretty easy.
	But it's not like you're pricking your finger and feeding a vampire.
	I mean, it's... It's really complicated, and you've got to get these nipple guards if the baby chews, and it's painful, and it's uncomfortable, and sometimes it can take forever, and there's mastitis, which is infections that can happen in the milk ducts.
	I mean, it's a whole complicated thing that goes on with that, and, you know, this idea that she was just going to be a...
	Staunch and stalwart professional while going through all of this stuff and the hormones and the mood swings.
	I mean, it's a huge deal to produce and nurture a human being.
	And so, yeah, women in the workforce, you know, go for it.
	You know, go and go to town.
	But the odds of a woman not wanting kids being at the top end of the IQ spectrum, which I think you need a lot of times to succeed, and also having the level of assertiveness and aggression that is necessary to get to the top, that is very uncommon.
	I mean, don't get me wrong, it's uncommon among men as well.
	But it's much more uncommon to have this cluster.
	It's much more uncommon for women.
	So when you say, oh, well, you know, women, aim to be a board member, aim to be, like, that's kind of cruel.
	Some will, and some deserve to be there, and fantastic, more power to them, go sister, soul sister, gotta get that dough sister, have all the power that you want, I'm, you know, great.
	But on average, it's not going to happen.
	On average, it's going to happen.
	It's not going to happen for most men, and it's really not going to happen for most women.
	So most women who are going to go into the workforce, they're going to have, you know, youthful energy and this, that, and the other.
	Then they're going to get into the late 20s, early 30s.
	They're going to have their toss-aside-the-party epiphany days.
	They're going to want to settle down with a good man and that, and they're going to have some anxiety.
	They're going to have some worry. They're going to have some baby rabies.
	They're going to have A challenge, a distraction, right?
	Because time's ticking away and eggs are getting dino-enabled and all of that.
	And partly because of that stuff and just partly because, you know, lack of naked male-based aggression and so on, the testosterone stuff...
	They're probably not going to make it much past middle management, and middle management is kind of like the shite sandwich in the corporate, right?
	At the bottom, you can just go home, right?
	And at the top, you're well compensated, but middle managers, they get to stay late and they're not paid that much, and it's really not a very satisfying environment.
	I only did it for a little while, but it's not a very satisfying environment to be a middle manager.
	I did it once at a company.
	I was managing about 20 or 25 coders and testers and designers and so on.
	And I remember they sat me down once, a couple of months after I first got to the position, and they said, you know, we really think we're underpaid.
	We really think we're underpaid.
	You know, I talked to my friends.
	They said, I talked to my friends. They're making like $10,000, $20,000 a year more.
	Now, if it was my company, first of all, that never would have happened because I like to pay people more than – I'm not total Fezziwig, but I like to pay people more than the going rate because I ask a lot.
	I mean, there were nights and weekends and travel and all that.
	And I was really happy to mentor people.
	One of the coders really wanted to learn how to do sales presentations and marketing stuff, so I would take him out with me to exotic locations and we'd give – he would sort of learn how to give these presentations.
	It's great. I don't want to do it all the time, so it's great if you do.
	So if it was my company, first of all, that never would have come to pass.
	But even if it had come to pass somehow, I would have...
	Being able to make that decision to allocate the extra money to pay people more.
	Because job retention for customized software or detailed software packages is very, very important.
	It's absolutely essential. When somebody's developed knowledge of a million-plus line code base, you really got to hang on to those people like Grim Death.
	So they've got to be happy, right?
	And this is kind of the...
	The slavery of being the manager.
	Oh, the manager's in charge. The manager's like, no, you're really dependent upon the goodwill of people and their work effort and their work ethic and so on.
	And so I ended up, when I was a middle manager and my employees said, we want to make more money, I had to order a whole survey package of salaries in the region and based on job experience.
	And I had to create a whole presentation.
	I had to go to the chief financial officer.
	Then I had to go to the CEO. Then I had to go to the board.
	I had to present all of this stuff.
	And now I did end up bringing quite a bit of compensation out of the company for my employees.
	I ended up, if I remember rightly, we increased payroll costs.
	It was over $120,000 a year that I got extra in payroll for people.
	Some people more and some people not as much.
	But this was kind of funny, you know, when people are like, well, you've got to pay people a living way.
	Just like, I... Helped increase the salary of people quite considerably as a manager, not just by, you know, hiring people and creating jobs, but also when I was a middle manager, getting my employees' wages up.
	So it's just kind of funny when I hear all these people, it's like, we're going to go tax the rich.
	It's like, why don't you just start a company and pay people more?
	Like, instead of just yelling at everyone else, why don't you just go and solve the problem that way?
	So I think what happens is you get sold this kind of Tough Sigourney Weaver working girl kind of lifestyle that you're going to have this cool power suits and you're going to go out there and do Julianne Hoch style presentations and clean up and power suits and wine bars and all this kind of stuff.
	It's just a bit of an illusion.
	Again, it's an illusion for most men and it's a bit more of an illusion even for most women.
	So I think it's just very cruel.
	I just think it's very cruel to hold out For most people, but a little bit more women, this fantasy that you're going to be out there to being some table-pounding power broker at the top of the food chain economically, it's not going to happen.
	It's almost certainly not going to happen.
	All right. Let's see here.
	Yeah, governments can't run things as well.
	Just look at the UK National Health Service.
	Oh, it's brutal. You know, Jamie Oliver is a very charismatic chef, and he did a show not too, too long ago, 2015, I guess a half decade or so now.
	On the NHS and basically it was on sugar, but it was on how 27,000 children back in the day in the UK had to get significant numbers of teeth pulled just because of tooth decay.
	27,000 children a year.
	There was just this giant conveyor belt of medieval teeth yanking for the sake of Tooth decay.
	It could not recover.
	And, of course, sometimes that tooth decay spreads to the adult teeth, and, I mean, it just becomes absolutely brutal.
	And then there's follow-up and x-rays, and, oh, I mean, it's just—think of that.
	Just think of 27,000 not insignificant drugging and teeth yanking and follow-up and stitches and this, that, and the other.
	I don't know. I mean, it's brutal.
	And of course, diabetes is becoming a huge issue in his show.
	He was talking about how in the NHS there were 700 amputations per year, and he compared that to the amputations that came out of the Afghan war, and it was much more.
	I think it was like 20 times. 20 times the amputation from diabetes than there was from war.
	That's really, really quite something.
	All right. Let's get some questions.
	Right here. The English do not brush their teeth.
	I don't know that.
	Because it's new. It's new, right?
	Question. Do you think it would be a good idea that a shy, introverted man with no friends visit a strip club?
	I would say that it's not a good idea.
	It's not a good idea.
	Strip clubs are surreal, squalid, desperate pits of man desperation and pitiful, confused lust, lost money drinkingness.
	I mean, it's just...
	I mean, it's really not a good environment, not a good situation.
	I mean, it is meat on display.
	You might as well be a butcher out there poking half a cow to see if it meets the scratch.
	It is dysfunctional, broken people, often drug addicts, often alcoholics and so on, often with significant body dysmorphia issues and often being exploited by organized crime, shaking their TNA for cash.
	Now, it is, I saw, it was actually just today, I saw a little wall poster of this girl's It's kind of unfair, but it's a little bit of, like, bitter truth in it.
	It's this girl looking at this really complicated mathematical equation on a blackboard, staring at it and saying, oh, eff it, I'm just going to become a stripper.
	Because there's this money that's available to women that is just mind-blowing to men.
	Like, how is this possible?
	How is it with this Beldafin or Dolphin or Beldafin, whatever her name is, some gamer girl or whatever, she sells her bathwater.
	I mean, she sells her bathwater.
	I'm not sure that's going to be my next business plan, but let's just say it might be conceivably on the table, right?
	So, she sells her bathwater.
	Can you imagine? What would I sell?
	Well, how would I market my bathwater as a 53-year-old philosopher?
	Uh, Philosophy froth.
	Bubble brain bath.
	I don't know. You guys can come up with stuff if you want.
	But, you know, just about anybody, any woman reasonably attractive can throw on a video game, point a webcam at herself, and just start making $5,000 a month.
	I mean, it's really, really, really sad.
	It's really sad.
	And Belle Delphine, her name is...
	Well, of course, that isn't her name, of course, right?
	But... Yeah, it's really sad.
	I don't think, see, shyness, I mean, shyness is a very sort of interesting thing.
	There are extroverts and introverts and so on that I think is sort of genetically based.
	But shyness is one of these things where you might be shy or you just may be surrounded by really awkward and strange people.
	Now, going to a strip club ain't going to help that because the strip club is populated with, you know, desperate losers and addicts and it's just horrifying.
	It is the dregs of society down there.
	And I don't think that's going to make you feel less shy.
	I think it's going to make you recoil from human contact even more.
	All right.
	Let's see here.
	Hey, Stefan, I'm listening to your old podcast from 2005 to 2006.
	And I have a question.
	Do you still believe that teaching your children religion is abuse?
	And yes, that is a case that I made in the past.
	And yeah, I mean, I think that there are certainly aspects of teaching your children religion that could be considered abusive.
	And I think I would make the case that they are abusive.
	But I'm not talking about, you know, Jesus loves you, tell the truth, don't steal, don't kill.
	I'm not talking about the moral lessons.
	You know, this is sort of more on the extreme side, but it's like you are inherently sinful.
	You were born evil, and you have to pay people a lot of money just to be...
	I think that's abusive.
	I think telling children that they're born evil through original sin, through no fault of their own.
	I think telling them that they're going to hell.
	Now, listen, I think that if you are an immoral person, you end up living in a kind of hell.
	So there is this sort of psychological hell of guilt and self-approach.
	Or if you have no conscience, I think it's even worse because there's no capacity for any kind of human connection, even with yourself.
	As a human being. So I don't mean like saying you will end up in a bad place if you sin, right?
	If you kill or steal or lie continually and so on, right?
	So I don't believe that the moral lessons of Christianity exist.
	The majority of the moral lessons of Christianity, as it's practiced by the majority, I don't think that's abusive.
	And in fact, I would argue that teaching the moral lessons of Christianity is far less abusive, far less abusive than teaching children about anal sex when they're in grade six.
	I think it is far less abusive than all of this really invasive and destructive sex education.
	Obviously, it's far less abusive than And children's access to pornography, which according to some reports I've read, is appalling and starts when they hit the double digits and so on.
	So there's a lot of nihilism.
	It's a terrible thing to teach children that their civilization rests on the genocide of natives and that all the wealth that their parents have has been stolen from You know, helpless and dependent and poor people and that their entire society is racist and sexist and homophobic and you name it, right? That, to me, is really abusive.
	So telling kids, don't steal, don't use violence, don't lie, that's not abusive.
	And, you know, when I made those arguments back sort of 15 years ago, woke culture was still over the horizon.
	I mean, in terms of how it is now.
	Like, when I went to college...
	Back in the day, this would be, gosh, 30 years ago, 25, 30 years ago, I could strenuously argue for the free market and small government.
	I was an objectivist back then, and it was okay.
	I think now you can't do that.
	Now it's become so charged and everything is so volatile and indoctrinated that you can't really do that.
	So I think that the abuse that is...
	Being targeted towards children is coming from the government.
	It's coming from the left.
	It's coming from the agnostics.
	It's coming from the Marxists. It's coming from the atheists a lot of times.
	And that's really changed.
	You know, the atheist community loved me until they realized I was anti-communist.
	So I hope that makes sense.
	I hope that makes sense, and thank you very much for bringing that up.
	Do I think that meditation is helpful?
	I actually do think that meditation is helpful.
	I think hypnosis can be helpful.
	I think meditation can be very helpful, and I've done both.
	Stefan Molyneux, given that state force, by definition, violates UPB, do you have any personal respect or disdain for individuals who decide to join state law enforcement?
	You know, here's an interesting question.
	And I would say that if you were going to be stopped by a cop on the highway, would you want that cop to be into small government and voluntarism?
	I kind of would. So I think that you can do some real good as a police officer.
	And there would be this kind of job in a free society as well.
	So I think that it's not automatic contempt.
	But of course, you are signing your voluntary job.
	Choices, your voluntary moral choices are a little bit being signed away because at some point there's going to be some law that you have to enforce that goes very much against your conscience and that's going to be tough.
	So, let's see here.
	Affirmations are helpful? I don't know.
	Let's see here. What else can we talk about?
	Could you compile a book list on your website with book recommendations?
	Yes. Yes.
	But look for my conversations that I've had with Dr.
	Pesta, P-E-S-T-A. So let's see.
	Thoughts on Tulsi suing Hillary?
	Okay, so I don't know much of the backstory about this, but a couple of interesting things.
	So Tulsi Gabbard is suing Hillary Clinton because at some point Hillary Clinton intimated that Tulsi Gabbard was a Russian asset.
	And so she's suing Hillary Clinton for a considerable sum of money.
	And if I got this right, I think...
	I'll look that up and get things more right.
	So a couple of interesting things about this.
	In the States, man, it's pretty tough to sue for defamation.
	It really is, especially if you're a public figure.
	I mean...
	Elon Musk called the guy a pedo.
	And he's not, as far as I understand it.
	And in the sort of court...
	Argument of the court battle, they ended up not awarding the guy any damages.
	Elon Musk got off the hook for calling a guy who's not a pedophile a pedophile.
	And I think the argument was, well, nobody believed it because royalty posed with the guy and if they believed it, they wouldn't have posed with him.
	So nobody really believed it, blah, blah, blah, right?
	Rachel Maddow, I think, is being sued and her argument, let me just double check this because, you know, I want to be accurate.
	Let's see here.
	Rachel. Let me just...
	I think... I'm pretty sure of this, right?
	Yeah. Rachel Maddow sued for $10 million by one American News in defamation case.
	This is from September 10th, 2019.
	And this is the one with Jack Posobiec, who's well worth watching in just about every conceivable characterization.
	And... If I remember rightly, I'm going to double check this, right?
	I'll do this live because, you know, there we go.
	Oh yeah, here we go. So Rachel Maddow's defense to the One American News defamation lawsuit is that on-air statements shouldn't be considered fact.
	Maddow's lawyer referred to her rhetorical hyperbole in a $10 million defamation lawsuit brought by One American News Network.
	So the host of the Rachel Maddow show claimed that the One American News Network, quote, is really, literally, is paid Russian propaganda, is paid Russian propaganda, right?
	So, the defense motion claimed that the liberal host, quote, So, she says...
	That OAN is really, literally, is paid Russian propaganda.
	Really, literally. And it's like, no, no, no, it's just rhetorical hyperbole.
	So, I'm no lawyer, obviously, but rhetorical hyperbole is something like this.
	If you've got a coffee maker who says, world's best coffee!
	Okay, is that false advertising?
	Well, it's rhetorical hyperbole.
	It's like... Greatest French fries in town.
	You know, I mean, is it really capable of being proven true or false?
	It's just, you know, I have the best philosophy show in the world.
	Whatever, right? I think it's true.
	But that's rhetorical hyperbole.
	So, yeah, she can say it's literally this, but there's no, no, no, it's just rhetorical hyperbole.
	So it's really tough.
	You know, you can, in America, you can call someone a Nazi.
	And that's not defamation, according to what I've read, right?
	It's really, really hard to sue people for defamation in the United States.
	So, you know, does a suit have a big chance of winning?
	I don't know. I mean, I'm no lawyer.
	I would guess not.
	But what is really interesting about this, let me just pull this up.
	I want to make sure I get this correct, right?
	So, she's suing Clinton, right?
	Hillary Clinton. And I'm going to get her phrase.
	This was kind of buried in the...
	Oh, was it fake news?
	Oh, dear, oh, dear.
	Okay, never mind. Well, I'm glad I looked that up.
	Okay, I'm glad I looked that up.
	Okay. So there was fake news out there that she'd included.
	I don't feel suicidal at all when she was suing Hillary Clinton.
	But anyway, so it looks like that's fake news.
	So good. I'm glad I caught that.
	You know, it's really tough to catch everything that goes on in this world when it comes to news flying by.
	So interesting.
	Interesting. All right. Oh, and what was there else?
	What else was there in news?
	I want to just check this in the defamation news.
	Let's see here.
	I'm going to try one.
	No, I don't think I can find it.
	Oh, yeah, here we go. Yeah, I think this just came up.
	January 23rd.
	Yeah, it was yesterday, right?
	Charles Johnson filed a complaint January the 16th in the Houston Division of the Southern District of Texas against Verizon CMP Holdings LLC, HuffPost.com Inc., and Andy Campbell alleging libel.
	And according to the complaint, Johnson is involved with, quote, conservative political causes.
	He alleges that a February 17th, 2019, Huffington Post article authored by Campbell, titled, quote, two GOP lawmakers host Chuck Johnson Holocaust-denying white nationalist was a, quote, hit job, suggesting he was a, quote, white supremacist, white nationalist, and anti-Semitic.
	Johnson seeks monetary relief in excess of a million dollars, trial by jury, and all other just relief.
	And, uh, yeah.
	Yeah. We shall see.
	We shall keep our eyes peeled, and we shall see how that goes along.
	So yeah, I think it's just crazy how far it's gone in terms of really tough to sue people for really, really crazy stuff.
	All right. Let's see here.
	Burke. Ooh, I'd like to talk about Burke.
	Let me just see where I lost that.
	Yeah, three things need to be satisfied for defamation.
	Says someone it's not true.
	Suffered a loss and damaged character.
	And, uh, also it is, um, if you're a public figure, I think they have to show actual malice, which is a complicated thing as far as I can tell.
	So anyway, in other words, that somebody published something that they knew was false when they published it because that's the actual malice.
	Now, um...
	Again, I'm no lawyer, so please, you know, go check this.
	This means nothing. This is just my particular opinion.
	So, all right. Let's see here.
	Someone says, Hey, Steph, I sent you an email about desperately doing a call-in show.
	I'm a 24-year-old black male with a stutter, feeling inert, lack motivation, failure to launch, procrastination.
	I desperately need your help. Please send it to me again.
	I'm so sorry, my friend.
	Send it to me again. I will...
	Desperately worked to make time this weekend.
	Pretty damn booked, but I will find a way.
	I will find a way.
	We'll make it work.
	All right. Let's see here.
	Oh, yeah. What do you think about the conservative idea that true individualism only exists within a social community that gives it context, not in some abstract freedom of oppression sense?
	True individualism.
	Okay. I mean, so this is the question of who are you in the absence of...
	Who are you in the absence of a society, in the absence of a tribe, in the absence of, you know, we're social animals.
	I don't know that we're a huge amount without all of these things.
	You know, the kid raised by wolves in the middle of nowhere doesn't really become very human, you know, and if you miss that language window, you can never really learn language after sort of the age of six or seven or eight.
	You can get an approximation, but not a real thing.
	So I was certainly much more of an individualist when I was younger, but that's when I was a hot-to-trot dating madman who could make his own way and didn't need nothing for nobody, no how, nowhere.
	And now that I am married, I'm a dad, and I've got a community of like-minded parents, and I love spending time with them and their kids.
	Community is great.
	You know, community is great.
	And, you know, it can be a little tricky to find community with real shared values.
	But, you know, when the world keeps calling you crazy or evil, then it's nice to have people around you who know how unjust and untrue that is.
	And so, yeah, strength comes in many ways.
	It comes from integrity.
	It comes from having the right values.
	But it also comes from community.
	So I think that the atomization or massive individuation that occurred a lot out of the objectivist movement, to some degree the libertarian movement, is a problem.
	It's a problem. All right.
	Let's see here.
	Could you do the truth about Jesus?
	Well, that's nothing too ambitious now, is there?
	Right? So...
	That is interesting. It is tough to find the time to do the big, deep presentations at the moment.
	It's a lot of backstopping, some of the deplatforming stuff.
	So it is a lot of behind-the-scenes work that's going on at the moment.
	All right. How do you know if you should bring up past dysfunctions with your parents, physical, sexual, verbal abuse, or if you should just give up the relationship?
	Oh, man. I'm so sorry.
	I'm so sorry. That's a...
	It's a horrible question to have to ask, but I respect and appreciate you asking it, and I think it's a great question to ask.
	So I'll give you the very brief synopsis of the argument I've made consistently for like 15 years as a public figure.
	So if you suffered abuse at the hands of your parents...
	Now, I'm talking about abuse that would be criminal under the law.
	I'm not talking about necessarily, you know, they didn't teach me that taxation is theft, right?
	How many... Like, I'm not, you know, they didn't teach me about voluntarism or whatever, right?
	But, you know, the stuff that, you know, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and so on, let's just talk about that stuff first.
	So stuff that, where your parent would, like, be a criminal if they had been found out at the time and convicted of that offense, right?
	So the first question to ask is, is it safe for you To confront your parents on these issues.
	But confront doesn't mean sort of scream at them, but just, you know, talk about what happened.
	How it affected you and so on.
	Is it safe for you to do so?
	Now, if it's not safe for you to do so, please don't do it.
	If you confront somebody who molested you and that person becomes violent because they're afraid that you're going to talk about it online, that you're going to destroy their life somehow, please don't push the buttons of violent, unhinged people who have a really bad conscience.
	Please don't do that. That would be a terrible thing in my opinion.
	If it is safe, then the next question you have to ask is, what do I need to know that I don't know?
	Right? So if you clearly remember the abuse, let's just say physical abuse, right?
	So if you clearly remember being beaten with implements or like all the stuff that would be illegal, again, I'm not talking about, you know, some spanking when you were younger, which I don't agree with, of course, right?
	But it's not at the level of, you know, beating you black and blue with a belt buckle or something.
	So what is it that you need to get out of that conversation?
	Now, if you're looking for an apology, if you're looking for, well, first of all, if you're looking for an acknowledgement that it happened, then you need to understand that, you know, to me, if you have a clear memory of it happening, it happened, right?
	I mean, that's, you know, that it happened, you know, I'm not saying you could prove it in a court of law, but it's the court of your opinion that really matters in this situation.
	So, you know, accept that it happened, accept that it was real.
	And then the question is, okay, well, what do you want to get out of confronting someone who beat you black and blue with belts or bats or whatever, right?
	Or wooden spoons or rolling pins or you name it.
	I've heard it all, right? What do you want to get?
	It's an interesting question.
	It's a powerful question. Do you want acknowledgement and apology?
	Perfectly fair, perfectly valid thing to ask for, again, assuming you can do it safely.
	Let's say you get the apology.
	Let's say that you get the acknowledgement.
	I guess acknowledgement first, then apology.
	Okay. How is that going to change?
	Were you going to be like, oh, what a relief.
	Now I know it was real. Okay.
	But you're surrendering your capacity to process what is real to someone who's abusive.
	Because here's the thing. If you go in looking for someone to confirm what happened to you and they deny it, then you again have put yourself in a situation of intense psychological harm at the hands of somebody who at least was abusive in the past.
	And I think in denying what happened to you is now being abusive in the present.
	It's not a good position to be in, to reinflict that abuse on you, yourself.
	It's going to be destabilized, it's going to be upsetting.
	But it also may be like, okay, well, there's not much to get here.
	When I sat down and confronted my own mother, she had this...
	No, there was a lot of denial, a lot of I don't remember that happening.
	Not that didn't happen because that would be – she was like – she was smart enough.
	She's very cunning, right? She was smart enough to know that if she said – she said, I don't remember it or, you know, I have memory lapses or, you know, I've been ill and blah, blah, blah, right?
	But there was also – I could see there was this cunning like, hmm, can I get away with this?
	Will he buy it? I could really, really see that process and go, what can I get away with?
	How far can I push this so that I don't alienate him, and I don't deny anything that happened, but I also don't end up taking any responsibility?
	So you get a lot of gaslighting, some fogging, and all that kind of stuff.
	At least I did. And I couldn't get that, you know, sort of in a sense, that plug in the socket to get that connection of what actually happened.
	And... But that, to me, that's closure, right?
	That's okay. So the reality of what occurred for me is not going to be acknowledged by my abuser, and that's closure for me.
	Okay, so there's not going to be any apology.
	And you know what that does, though?
	First of all, it breaks the cycle, because when I was a kid, I couldn't confront my mother in those ways, or in that way, because she was too big, too violent, too strong.
	She held the purse strings. She held the legal power.
	I was a kid. I had nothing or nothing, right?
	You were completely in a state of nature when you were a kid.
	So I couldn't confront her when I was a child.
	Confronting her as an adult broke that cycle.
	It allowed me to act.
	Now, the other thing, when I confronted her, and this was not just one meeting, this was a series of meetings, but when I did confront her, and I was not able to get my needs met, so to speak, she denied acknowledging and apologizing and all of that, accepting that she had done wrong.
	So what that gave me was kind of an odd relief, which was, well, I can't get what I want from my mother even in my 20s.
	How on earth could I have gotten what I wanted from my mother when I was 5 or 10 or 15 or whatever?
	After 15, she was out of the house, around 15.
	So... It gives you a sense of real relief, like with you, with all of your adult faculties, with all of your adult independence and your ability to sort of walk out to your own place and all of that.
	If you can't get what you want out of your parents when you have independence and an adult mature mind, then you'll never accept any blame or responsibility for not getting what you want out of your parents when you were a child.
	When they had much, well, infinitely more power.
	So it gives you a kind of, okay, well, there was no chance to have any kind of reasonable relationship when I was a child.
	Because even when things were much more equal in terms of power, I couldn't get what I want.
	I couldn't get what I want.
	So that's important. If you can find that you get what you want out of your parents, they do apologize, they do acknowledge, they...
	And it's not just a one-time thing, but it becomes more of a lengthy conversation because a lot of people will apologize and say, I'm so sorry, and then they hope you'll never bring it up again.
	But that's not having a relationship, right?
	You can't just... I remember when I was a kid, I read some inappropriate book called Wifey by Judy Blume, who had previously written Are You There, God?
	It's Me, Margaret, and a whole bunch of kids' books.
	And then she wrote this book about an adult, sex-hungry, zipless F, Erica Young-style woman.
	The book was called Wifey. And she had a husband who, when he married her, he said, look, I'm marrying you.
	So, you know that I love you because I'm marrying you.
	I do not have to tell you that I love you ever again.
	You'll know that I love you because I'm staying married to you.
	And that was his big speech, and she married him anyway, right?
	And then she was like, well, he's not telling me that he loves me.
	But you don't just say to someone, I love you, and I never have to say that again for the next 50 years, because I'm still here, therefore it's implicit, right?
	I don't think that's a reasonable thing to do.
	Now, you don't have to keep a conversation about child abuse going for 50 years, but if it's just a one-time thing, they're just saying it and praying you never bring it up again.
	And that's not good.
	That's manipulative as hell, right?
	They should keep bringing it up with you until you're satisfied, until you get closure.
	So if you can get what you want out of your parents, fantastic.
	If you find out that you can't, it really releases you from any guilt or responsibility you might have felt as a child.
	Let's see here. Should all drugs be illegal?
	Do you mean like illegal drugs?
	Like sort of hard drugs or whatever?
	No, I don't think so. I mean, but you fix childhood, you fix drug abuse.
	All right, let's see here.
	Do you think Epstein was murdered?
	It's, you know, it's an interesting question.
	I mean, I've had... Dr.
	Kevin Wicasse on the show a couple of times.
	There are certainly pathologists out there and doctors out there and people who've examined the evidence who can't picture that he hung himself, you know, that this is a bed sheet and he was able to break his hyoid and that there was these, like, Garrott-style wounds, like my little scar here or whatever.
	So there are people out there who...
	I mean, I didn't examine him.
	I'm not a doctor, right? But there are people out there who really seem to know a lot and can't picture and can't fathom how he died in the way that the authorities claim that he died.
	But we'll never know.
	Nobody will ever face any justice.
	Like, I'm kind of getting to this, right?
	Like, I mean, I might as well just sort of say this briefly, right?
	Because, you know, I see all of this stuff out there, you know, like, oh, the net is closing in, and the 4D chess, and Barr is doing this, and Sleepy Sessions is doing that, and QAnon has got this.
	But it's like, no, no, no, no, no.
	Come on, no one's...
	Biden's not going to jail.
	Hillary's not going to jail.
	Obama is not going to be retroactively impeached.
	Like, none of this is going to happen.
	None of this is going to happen. The media is too on board.
	Half the population is too indoctrinated.
	It's not... I mean, the people who falsified FISA warrants are not going to face any justice.
	No, I'm sorry.
	Like, I mean, I'm sorry. We just...
	You've got to accept. I think you've got to accept this.
	It's not defeatism.
	It's just... It's just the reality.
	It's just the reality. I doubt the ball will ever be built.
	I doubt, strongly doubt that any immigration will be limited or controlled or anything like that.
	So, you know, if I think Epstein was murdered or not, I have strong doubts about the official story.
	I don't know for sure. But I'm not sure that in the long run it really matters because nobody's ever going to find out and nothing's ever going to happen.
	What do you think of a high IQ dating site?
	I think it's very interesting. I think it's very interesting.
	Dammit, Steph, I burnt my beans.
	It's your fault. All right, let's see here.
	Thoughts on Meghan and Harry.
	I, for one, support their decision.
	You don't walk away from being a princess and pay back the money if you're a radical feminist or a hypergamist.
	Yeah, you know, I don't really think that much about Meghan and Harry.
	I can understand just sort of what's going on.
	I think that...
	I mean, somebody was saying online that they're going to be divorced within five years.
	I think that if it wasn't like the prince and princess stuff, that was going to be true.
	But aren't they searching for a house in Canada worth like it's more than $10 million or something like that?
	So I think that there are significant value disparities between the two.
	And I think that they're going to struggle on, but I think he's going to become increasingly miserable because she's never going to be happy.
	She's never going to be happy. This is one of the, you know, you've got to really avoid the mindsets that are going to leave you in a state of perpetual discontent.
	And I have to remind myself of this really on a regular basis, right?
	There's only so much you can do.
	You can't fix the world. You can make your case and people are free to accept or reject it.
	But yeah, Meghan Markle, she's never going to be happy because she believes, as most people do, that all group disparities result from evil injustice and bigotry and racism and sexism.
	And that's the only reason there are any group differences.
	Now, of course, we know better and she's not going to be able to fix it with her Nagging, her virtue signaling, her discontent.
	She's just, you know, this is the thing with, you know, society is hierarchical.
	It just is. Think of the music industry.
	It's hierarchical. If you've got the triple combo, right?
	Like if you're really good looking, you write great songs, and you have a great voice, well, you're in Katy Perry territory.
	You're in Taylor Swift territory, right?
	You're in Selena Gomez territory.
	I don't know if she writes her own songs or whatever, right?
	Now, if you have two out of three of those, you can still do pretty well, right?
	There's Meghan Trainor, there's Fifi Dobson, there is...
	Oh, Fifi Dobson's pretty good looking, though.
	I don't know if she writes her own songs.
	But Kelly Clarkson wrote some of her own songs and so on, right?
	So, if you have the look, if you have the songs, if you have the voice...
	But those people are extremely rare.
	But that's hierarchical.
	It's hierarchical in sports, right?
	95% of the money goes to 5% of the people.
	It's hierarchical in the entertainment industry.
	In acting, 95% of the money goes to 5% of the people.
	And you can look up the Pareto principle for this at the square root of any group engaged in a meritocracy.
	The square root of it produces half the value.
	So 100 people out of 10,000 produce half the value.
	And 10 people out of those 100,000 produce half of that value.
	So you've got 10 people out of 10,000 producing a quarter of the entire value.
	And if you don't pay them according to the value that they're generating, they simply won't produce that value and the business will go bankrupt.
	So you have to pay people what seem like obscene amounts of money.
	And that's how the whole system works.
	In podcasting, 5% of people make 95% of the money.
	On YouTube, 5% of the people...
	It's just a meritocracy.
	Like, it just is.
	I know that's not an argument, but seriously, it just is.
	It just is. Now, getting enraged about the meritocracy, what does that mean?
	Well, instead of the meritocracy being voluntary, the meritocracy becomes an aristocracy and it becomes violent.
	You have the voluntary meritocracy, which benefits everyone in the long run, just about everyone, and then you have the violent meritocracy of the state, of communism, of socialism, of Marxism.
	Like, I mean, the fact that Joe Rogan came out in support of Bernie Sanders?
	Now, of course, I understand why he turned on me, what was it, five or six years ago, and after having me on the show for a bunch of times and saying, hey, you're a great guy, anything I can do to help out your career would be wonderful, just boom!
	You know, brings me in and has queued up all of the troll nonsense that has ever been leveled against me, and I've got to do the bob and weave out of nowhere for that.
	You know, you should tell people if you're going to ambush them so they don't fly out and waste their money on a bunch of crap, right?
	But now, of course, I understand.
	Like, I'm a free market guy.
	You know, he's obviously left-leaning if he's going to vote for Bernie Sanders and has high praise for Bernie Sanders.
	And, you know, Bernie Sanders, like, let's...
	Don't kid yourself, man.
	This guy is...
	Well, I'm going to read you.
	I'm going to read you a little bit because this kind of makes...
	I've done the truth about Bernie Sanders, so you should check that out.
	But yeah, he's not just the old mild-mannered democratic socialist, right?
	So this is from the New York Post.
	This is from the New York Post.
	You know what? I can bring this up, I think.
	Let me just futz around with this whole new funky-dunky system here.
	And let's see here.
	Yeah, I think I can do this.
	Hang on, let me do this. I'm going to bring this up.
	All right.
	Don't be fooled by Bernie Sanders, says the New York Post.
	He is a diehard communist.
	Let's just go through some of this, right?
	This is from 2016.
	And self-described socialist Bernie Sanders looks more like a serious contender than a novelty candidate for president.
	The liberal media elite have suddenly stopped calling him socialist.
	He's now cleaned up as a progressive or pragmatist, but he's not even a socialist.
	He's a communist! Mainstreaming Sanders requires whitewashing his radical pro-communist past.
	It won't be easy to do. If Sanders were vying for a cabinet post, he'd never pass an FBI background check.
	There'd be too many subversive red flags popping up in his file.
	He was a communist collaborator during the height of the Cold War, rewind to 1964.
	While attending the University of Chicago, Sanders joined the Young People's Socialist League, the youth wing of the Socialist Party USA. He also organized for a communist front the United Packing House Workers Union, which at the time was under investigation by the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
	After graduating with a political science degree, Sanders moved to Vermont where he headed the American People's History Society, an organ for Marxist propaganda.
	There he produced a glowing documentary on the life of socialist revolutionary Eugene Debs, who was jailed for espionage during the Red Scare and hailed by the Bolsheviks as America's greatest Marxist.
	This subversive hero of Sanders, denounced even by liberal Democrats as a traitor, bashed the barons of Wall Street and hailed the triumphant Bolshevik revolution in Russia.
	This is Eugene Debs. Those Russian comrades of ours have made greatest sacrifices, have suffered more, and have shed more heroic blood than any like number of men and women anywhere on earth.
	They have laid the foundation of the first real democracy that ever drew the breath of life in this world.
	In a 1918 speech, Debs reaffirmed his solidarity with Lenin and Trotsky, despite clear evidence of their violent plunder and treachery.
	Sandra still hangs a portrait of Debs on the wall in his Senate office.
	In the early 1970s, Sanders helped found the Liberty Union Party, which called for the nationalization of all U.S. banks and the public takeover of all private utility companies.
	Anyway, so he took several goodwill trips not only to the USSR, but also to Cuba and Nicaragua, where the Soviets were trying to expand their influence in our hemisphere globally.
	In 1985, he traveled to Managua to celebrate the rise to power of the Marxist-Leninist-Santinista government.
	He called it a heroic revolution.
	He lobbied the White House to stop the proxy war and even tried to broker a peace deal.
	Oh, anyway, it goes on and on, and you can look this up.
	It just goes on and on.
	So... There was a couple other things I wanted to mention here.
	Communist sister cities he adopted.
	And yeah, it's nasty stuff.
	It's really nasty stuff.
	He is a definite snake of the grass and a highly, highly dangerous individual to have around at the moment.
	And so the fact, of course, that Joe Rogan would praise this guy.
	And this is after Project Veritas has Sanders field officers talking about how wonderful the gulags were and how they're going to have to throw all people right of center into re-education camps.
	And you know what that means. You know what that means.
	So, yeah, it's absolutely monstrous stuff.
	It's absolutely monstrous stuff.
	Alright, let's see here.
	Would you give your opinion on the gun march?
	Well, you know, it's fine.
	It's good that there's a gun march out there.
	It's good that they're pushing back against the gun grabbers.
	But, you know, again, it all comes back to demographics.
	If the left continues to keep importing people who are anti-gun, well, you know, it doesn't really matter how often you march.
	Oh yeah, the Project Veritas.
	Yeah, the Project Veritas, the guys, the Stalinists who were working for the Sanders campaign, I don't think they've even been fired.
	Sanders has not been confronted.
	He's not had to disavow or anything like that.
	It's crazy. Yeah, he honeymooned in Soviet Moscow.
	And of course, Sanders praised the Soviet dictatorship just like two years before it completely collapsed.
	He said, oh, the future is so productive, blah, blah, blah.
	Yeah, it's just monstrous.
	Uh, it's just, uh, it's just monstrous.
	All right, let's do a couple more.
	And, uh, yeah, nice to see everyone this Friday night.
	I hope you guys are having a good evening.
	I hope that you're enjoying the conversation.
	Is there any way I could talk about philosophy with you during a call-in or something?
	Maybe there's a place I can offer a longer question.
	Yeah, just email me.
	The email is on the website at freedomain.com.
	And, uh, that would be, uh, that would be great.
	Let's see here. Do you regret sleeping with other women before you met your wife?
	I think it was unwise.
	Should AOC have kids?
	I think that, you know, kids ground you in a way, right?
	So Julianne Howe or Hach or whatever her name is, the woman who, she's a Daughter of a Mormon, I think the youngest of five kids, and her dad was like way up in the Republican Party and so on.
	And yeah, she's doing some pretty nutty stuff.
	Like she's got this energy cleanse that makes her look like she's shitting Satan out of her butt.
	And I think that kids kind of ground you.
	Like I said on Twitter, it's like woo-woo versus womb-woo.
	That if you have kids, it can kind of ground you and bring you back to sense.
	I mean, I don't know if it'll happen with AOC, but...
	It wouldn't hurt.
	All right. America has maybe five good years before hell on earth begins.
	Well, you know, there is, of course, this demographic issue where the people who are least friendly to traditional ideas of Western freedom are still wending their way through childhood and getting to voting age, right?
	So there's the sandcastle, there's the tsunami of demographics, and when the two meet, it's going to be...
	It's going to be quite exciting. Well, this is why.
	One of the reasons I want to sort of put out ideas about freedom and all of that.
	Melbourne here. Met you in 2018.
	Hope you can come back and are treated more respectfully.
	Yeah, well. What is it I tweeted about in Canada?
	Let me see here.
	I want to get this all correct.
	All right.
	So what have we got here?
	Yeah, that's right. Omar Khadr to be speaking at Dalhousie University.
	And you can look at Khadr's background and what he's been convicted of.
	Omar Khadr to be speaking at Dalhousie University.
	This guy is pretty bad.
	Pretty bad. He's been referred to as a convicted terrorist.
	And I mean, when Lauren Southern and I tried to give a speech at a Canadian university, we were pretty much run out of town with pitchforks.
	So, all right. Alright, let's do one or two more questions.
	I would really, really appreciate that.
	And I will get the live streaming sorted out completely and totally at some point.
	But it is...
	Alright, let me just get back to where the heck were my questions...
	Where were my questions again?
	I knew them. I really do.
	I really did. Oh, I moved away.
	I moved away.
	What have we got here?
	Sorry, let me just get back to where the actual comments were.
	Let's just say I do have a couple of tabs open.
	I'm afraid. Did I put it here?
	No. All right.
	Hang tight. I will get there.
	I will get there.
	Okay. Well, that's not it.
	Oh, geez. Sorry.
	Wrong place completely. I'm looking in tabs and it wasn't tabs.
	All right. Let's see here.
	How does responsibility for the creation of something give us exclusive rights over that thing?
	Greetings from Brazil. Well, greetings back to you.
	Creation is something that gives exclusive rights over that thing because that thing would not exist if you didn't create it, right?
	So if you catch a fish and you remove it from the bottom of the lake and you put it on someone's frying pan, the fish existing as a consumable object only occurs because you caught it, right?
	So of course you... Property is fundamentally about creation.
	Like if you create a song, if you create a poem, if you create a podcast, you're creating something that didn't exist before.
	And so... You have to understand that if you want to—I mean, sorry, that's an annoying way to put it.
	I apologize. To understand property rights, you have to think about criminality.
	So if Bob goes and strangles a guy, Bob has killed a guy.
	Bob is responsible for the murder.
	He is responsible for ending the life of some guy, right?
	He owns that murder, 100%, because he's created that death, which wouldn't have existed if Bob hadn't acted.
	So if you understand that moral responsibility is the same as property rights— Then you understand that if somebody is 100% responsible for a murder, they're also 100% responsible for what else they create, which hopefully is much more positive than a murder.
	So when you get confused about property rights, just go back to criminality.
	Okay, thoughts on the Wuhan virus.
	So this is this virus that has been racing its way through China.
	It's touched down in Washington.
	There's a confirmed case in Europe.
	There's a suspected case, at least I last heard suspected, in Hong Kong.
	And it's nasty.
	It's a, you get shortness of breath, you can get fever, it can induce pneumonia.
	It's really, really bad stuff.
	Now, a couple of theories as to how it came about.
	The city that was first on lockdown, I think 11 million people locked down, is home to a research lab on pathogens.
	Maybe it escaped.
	There's another argument that it came from people eating bats.
	So Jack Posobiec this morning said, good morning to everyone except those eating bats, which is similar to the AIDS virus, HIV virus, which came out of, at least according to most researchers, believe that it came out of eating monkeys.
	I've even heard darker arguments as to where it came in terms of man's relations with monkeys, but...
	Yeah, it's bad stuff.
	It's nasty stuff.
	You're not going to get the truth out of it with regards to the Chinese government.
	It does remind me, of course, of SARS. And I think north of 16 people have died, and there have been a significant number of infections.
	The Chinese are building, like they're taking one week to build an entire hospital out there.
	The totalitarian nature of Chinese society does allow them to deal quite swiftly with this stuff, but it also gives them a great incentive to downplay its seriousness.
	So I don't think it's going to be some global pandemic, but it definitely is bad, and as usual, we probably won't find anything out about how it started, and nothing will be done to prevent it again.
	All right. Was I a Chad?
	I was, in fact, a Chad.
	Do you consider Michael Savage an insightful genius?
	I don't. He's an American radio show host, right?
	Savage Nation or whatever. I've never really listened, so I really can't answer that.
	My apologies. What are your favorite type of chips?
	Poker chips? So, my favorite type of chips, like, for food?
	Well, this is going back a ways, because I can't have this stuff in the house anymore.
	You get over 50, you just can't eat that stuff.
	Yeah, I mean, it's not...
	I like Misfickies.
	I like a spicy Misfickies.
	They have a jalapeno Misfickies.
	It's pretty good. I have a weakness for ruffles.
	Sour cream and onion chips...
	With onion dip. And again, I'm afraid I'm going to have to drool a little bit here because I haven't had them in years, really.
	But yeah, those were pretty good back when I used to eat that stuff.
	All right. I bet Steph has 100 plus tabs open at all times.
	Why only 100? All right.
	Let's see here. Thoughts on meat-based diet for optimum human health.
	Veganism is literal death of humanity.
	I... I don't really know much about nutrition.
	I keep going through these.
	I'm not much of a foodie that way, but I do keep, like, you know, every now and then somebody will send me a documentary that's like, this is the very best thing ever!
	It gives you the strength of ten men.
	It's Popeye's spinach on a plate.
	But the reality is I just kind of drift back to the stuff I used to eat, but less of it.
	And so... I don't know the answer to what you should eat.
	All right. Let's see here.
	Yeah, chips are like drugs.
	Good for a little bit, but bad long-term.
	Do you think victims of very abusive childhoods who grew up with a decent people despite that experience is a good source of hope for society?
	Yes. Yes, it is.
	It absolutely is.
	And you can do great things and you can have great power in the world if you overcome a bad...
	A bad childhood.
	Do you think anime should be banned?
	No. No, I don't think so.
	Parlez-vous croissant un petit peu?
	I have kind of a restaurant in French.
	I remember one of the first French phrases I learned when I was in Paris.
	Je voudrais un croissant pour les deux.
	I would like a croissant of the gods.
	When I become rich beyond measure, I'm going to build a Japanese-style thermal bath in my house.
	Do you want to stop by then? Keep me posted.
	Keep me posted. All right, let's see here.
	Thought on meat's catastrophic effect on the environment.
	Yeah, I think...
	I mean, I think cutting back on meat is not a bad thing to do.
	And I would say that I have...
	It's just a mild, abstract concern.
	Like, I tried vegetarianism for a couple of years, but it just didn't give me the energy that I needed.
	So, you know, try and minimize meat, and if you can do with less of it, I think that's for the best, but I don't think it's any particular ethical thing.
	Can you talk about circumcision?
	I have a number of times got a number of shows on that.
	So, all right.
	I think we are running low on excellent questions.
	Let's see here. Stephen, you are brilliant.
	What if free will is proven not to exist by incomprehensibly intelligent AI? Will you admit you're wrong?
	Sorry to be blunt, but that's kind of a jerky thing to say.
	If I'm proven wrong, will I admit that I'm wrong?
	Come on, man. Come on.
	That is bad.
	That's a bad thing to say. Of course, if I'm wrong, I'll admit that I'm wrong.
	But here's the thing, right? Which is, if I'm wrong about free will, I'm not responsible for being wrong about free will because I never had any free will to be right.
	What do I think about feminism?
	It has gone from equality to female supremacy because in a state of society, the revolution never knows when to end, right?
	In a free society, you achieve a certain thing and then funding for it will diminish.
	But when you have a government-funded I've never had a lap dance or touched strippers' breasts.
	Thank you very much. All right, let's see here.
	Should porn be banned?
	Well, I don't think children should have access to it, if that helps, but that is a very challenging question.
	Stefan, what is your favorite country that you visited?
	Well, I mean, oh, good question.
	So I was in Morocco. I went from Morocco to China.
	I spent basically three or four weeks not seeing any English science.
	So Morocco is beautiful.
	It's incredibly vivid.
	And the sand, the red of the earth, the green of the foliage, the blue of the sky is very striking and very powerful.
	And I remember when I was in Morocco...
	I'm parking a car and just having a walk in the desert, climbing a hill and seeing a village in the distance and thinking, what would my life be like if I had just grown up in that village and I could see, you know, the kids playing and people walking around as this village in the middle of the desert in the middle of nowhere in Morocco and just thinking, okay, well, like, who am I as an individual that if I'd been born there, I'd have been a different person, right?
	I know that's a bit abstract and all of that, but...
	I thought that was physically very lovely, but, you know, I mean, a bit of a depressed people, in my opinion.
	It's a very oppressive belief system.
	China was not a big fan. I didn't see much pretty stuff in China.
	I've lost a lot of time in Beijing.
	Africa, very vivid, very powerful, but again, the politics were, I mean...
	There's a very jumpy population there and for reasons that I think we can sort of understand now.
	Ireland is beautiful.
	Scotland is lovely.
	I love that rugged, semi-cold, windy, blustery kind of environment.
	And so I think that's lovely.
	I haven't been to Japan, though I'd love to go.
	And I've not been to sort of like Thailand, Korea, Singapore.
	I loved Hong Kong. I loved Poland.
	They were very powerful places for me to go, very safe places for me to go, which is becoming increasingly rare these days.
	And the Rockies were lovely as well.
	I've been to a bunch of the States, but mostly for business.
	I didn't really get much fun time around there.
	And many years ago, I did a very backpacky tour of Mexico and Nicaragua and Belize, which was...
	It's very cool and very, very pretty.
	And I also did a speech in Belize some years ago as well.
	So, yeah, that was a favorite country.
	It's tough to narrow down.
	Tough to narrow down. All right.
	What is your favorite Rush song?
	I would say Red Barchetta.
	Barchetta? Red Barchetta. All right.
	When are you having Scott Adams back on?
	It's a good question.
	I will look into that. Will Bitcoin change the world?
	Yes. But it's not going to be a pretty transition.
	All right. Stefan, Max from the UK. What would you advise for a co-founder of a tech company that feels like he doesn't deserve a seat in the boardroom?
	Oh, is that like frauditis?
	Like people are going to find out that I don't know as much about things as I whatever?
	Well, I just recognize that you have, of course, a right to...
	You have a right to be there. You have a right to be there.
	You have a right to speak.
	And it's not, you know, in a way, it's not up to you to judge the value that you add.
	It's up to other people to judge the value that you add.
	So just give it your best shot and see what kind of value you can bring.
	And you might be very, very surprised.
	Stefan, I want you to ask me anything.
	All right.
	Let's see here.
	Stefan was one of the first to talk about the potential of Bitcoin.
	Looking back on his perspective from the early days is profound.
	Yes, I think that's true.
	Stefan, what basis do we have for reason?
	We just use it because it works.
	But why? What grounds reason?
	So reason is derived from the objective behavior of matter and energy in the universe.
	And that's why it works.
	Would you consider doing a breakdown of Marxist literature like Kapital?
	I love the Karl Marx video.
	Yes. I think that I would like – Kapital is a big and sloggy thing to get through, but I was thinking of just basically reading through the Communist Manifesto and going in more detail about that.
	Stefan, do you think we'll be able to get Trudeau out of office next election?
	It seems unlikely because the importation of pro-leftist voters into Canada is so enormous at the moment, far bigger than is being discussed at any public forum from what I've seen, that it seems unlikely.
	I mean, they're just importing people who are going to vote for them, which means, you know, well...
	Can I ever make someone fall in love with me?
	No, you pursue virtue and let the chips fall where they may.
	It's like saying, can I make myself healthy?
	Well, you can pursue healthy behaviors and hope for the best, right?
	What are the chances that this is all a simulation?
	Zero. And you can read my book Essential Philosophy, which you can get at EssentialPhilosophy.com.
	And you can...
	You can get that.
	It's also free on YouTube, and the audiobook is free, and so I make a very good case as to why there's not a simulation in there.
	All right. Let's see here.
	Why do women always think about sex?
	Well, I can't speak about any, but I'm sure during this live stream it's been constant for them.
	Constant. You've mentioned a family connection to Adam Smith in the past.
	What do you think of doing a presentation on Adam Smith?
	That's a good idea. That's a good idea.
	Stefan, is there any hope without revolution?
	I don't think that there's going to be a peaceful outcome, unfortunately.
	I mean, we gave it a good shot.
	We really did give it a good shot.
	But no, I don't think...
	I mean, right now we have a...
	I mean, there's a legal coup going on in the United States.
	So... Yeah, you know, if you want me to go on someone's show, just, you know, ping them and explain to them that Wikipedia is not true and all of that and, you know, get them sorted out that way.
	And, you know, like, if you want me to do a presentation as well, listen, this is an open invitation.
	Like, if you want me to do a presentation, you know, give me a ping and...
	Give me a PowerPoint that's well-sourced, and I'll check the sources, and I'll go over it, and I'll chat about it with you.
	You could really help me that way in terms of if it's something you're passionate about, then put together a presentation, and I'd be very, very grateful for that, as I think that would be the answer.
	All right. Recently you said, forgive me for paraphrasing, that it doesn't matter what the question is, the answer is always more freedom.
	Does this contradict your position on building the wall?
	I talked about this in a podcast or a live stream a couple of weeks ago, the whole case for why the taxpayers own the country, so to speak, and have the right to protect it.
	Will you be inviting any more science and intellectuals on the show?
	Yeah, you know, it's interesting.
	So, I mean, I did, oh gosh, 14 years straight of interviews off and on, maybe certainly 12 or 13, and I've interviewed hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people, and right now, there's not a lot of...
	I'm not really excited about some new field or some new idea or some new argument.
	I mean, I'm enjoying the show very much and I'm enjoying sharing my thoughts.
	But, you know, I've gone through these phases where I'm like, wow, I'm really into IQ stuff or I'm really into the R versus K stuff or I'm really into the bomb in the brain stuff or I'm really into this, that or the other, you name it, right?
	Or cryptocurrencies and so on, right?
	So right now, I'm at a bit of an ebb for like really passionate topics to sink my teeth into.
	So I'm sure it will come along.
	But right now, it hasn't.
	And I'm still, you know, reading and casting about and so on.
	But, you know, fill my inbox.
	Let me know what's cool.
	What do you think of examining the monstrous life of William Burroughs?
	Oh yeah, guy was a monster.
	I mean, probably about as bad as Picasso.
	Yeah, just terrible. Just terrible.
	Right. Yeah, okay.
	Is it morally justified to jail communists advocating for violence?
	Well, I don't know about morally justified, but it seems to me that, you know, if you were to deny the Holocaust or deny how terrible the Holocaust was, You would be, you know, out of even impolite society for the most part.
	But you can have Bernie Sanders apparatchiks talking about how great the gulags were and denying that they were ghastly and horrible.
	And, yeah, it's totally fine.
	Totally fine.
	All right. Very tempting.
	All right. Well, thanks everyone so much for a lovely evening of chatting.
	I think the stream came through relatively okay, so maybe I won't have to re-up this.
	Maybe I will. But please don't forget to help me out at freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	I really, really appreciate that.
	Subscribe star is where I've got dozens and dozens of bonus shows and all that kind of stuff.
	Really, really great stuff. So if you could help me out at freedomain.com forward slash donate, I would really, really appreciate that.
	A couple of new donation options down there below on that.
	And really, really appreciate everyone dropping by tonight.
	It was a really, really great chat.
	And yeah, I will talk to you guys next time.
	And yeah, maybe next time we'll do an actual call-in show because those were fun as well.
	So yeah, have a great, great night, everyone.

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