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Feb. 16, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:48:02

What's Wrong with Feminism? Ask Me ANYTHING! - Freedomain Livestream!

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	So, let's see here.
	Is respect subjective or objective or a mix of both?
	How do you know when someone deserves your respect?
	Well, there's sort of two answers to that, right?
	So, one is you know that they deserve your respect when they accord with values of, you know, virtue and integrity and honesty and not just blind courage but knowing when to push, when to pull, when to advance, when to retreat.
	You know, courage is a complicated thing.
	You don't want a deficiency and be a coward.
	You don't want excess. And be foolhardy.
	And so when people are caught with rational values, then they are deserving of your respect.
	But there are times when you feel like you respect someone and you're not exactly sure why.
	There are times when somebody is deserving of your respect, but you don't feel it.
	Like respect is a feeling, not just a moral judgment.
	And it's fine to have abstract moral judgments like, you know, I should ideally be attracted to this person, but I just don't find them attractive.
	That is the peculiar mix of intellect and emotion that we all have to wrestle with in this life.
	So the way that I work with it is if somebody is deserving of respect, then I will give them respect.
	If I don't feel the respect but they're in accordance with my values, that either means that my emotions are somehow out of whack with my values or the other person's behavior is out of whack with my values and my emotions are telling me of the difference.
	So it can be quite complicated, but...
	Let's see. Oh, that's funny.
	Let's see here. Alex Jones went through.
	Well, you know, it is the interesting question of whether, say, people in Ireland, whether they want to continue or not, whether they want to survive or not.
	And you can't really create that in people.
	They can become so demoralized by endless propaganda that they don't want to continue.
	And that's particularly an issue.
	Let's see. Does Discord take over audio?
	Yeah, I don't know what's going to happen.
	I'm going to try. You should definitely run it through Discord.
	I'll try and run it through here as well.
	But I don't know if I can sort of split it all, whether I can send the audio to Discord and to here as well.
	We'll see. But I just wanted to drop by and just remind you guys of the debate that's coming up and say hi to everyone, of course.
	And... What are the best ways to deal with a situation where you're being told you're hateful and you already struggle with self-hate?
	Do not be in a situation where somebody is telling you that you're hateful because usually they're not kidding.
	And hateful is a dehumanizing term that is a prequel to emotional or verbal or even physical abuse.
	Do not stay in a situation where somebody is abusing you to that degree for sure.
	Alright, alright, alright, alright.
	So it looks like we are good to go on this Saturday night.
	That song's gonna be in your head now.
	It's like a brain virus.
	In a good way. In a good way.
	So, of course, thanks so much for the invite, guys.
	It's a real pleasure to be here.
	This is a Saturday night in my 50s.
	It is a long way from a Sam Cooke song.
	But, yeah, thanks a lot.
	How should we start?
	Well, so we do have some people here that aren't familiar with you.
	I'd give an introduction, but I feel you probably know yourself a little bit better than I do.
	So would you mind introducing yourself for anyone here that's not familiar with who you are and what your beliefs are?
	Sure. Well, of course, I hate to be annoying, but the first thing that I would say is, they're not just beliefs, man!
	They're not just beliefs. They are, of course.
	It's like saying to a scientist, what do you believe?
	Or a mathematician, do you happen to hold the belief that two and two make four?
	The whole point of philosophy is to identify rational, consistent theories to accord them.
	With the current facts of reality, which is known as empiricism.
	And of course, it's really nice if not only do they explain the general movements of history, but give you a valid basis with which to predict, well, what's coming down the pipe with regards to history.
	So I am an empiricist.
	I am a rationalist. This means that reason and evidence are the strict guidelines by which I pursue truth in the world.
	I am a moralist.
	I am not a theist, but I do believe in universal ethics.
	I do believe in the right of self-defense.
	I do believe and accept the non-aggression principle.
	And I know I just said belief, belief, belief.
	I don't like it. But given that I'm not going to dip into all of the proofs for these particular...
	Philosophical and moral positions I accept the validity of the non-aggression principle which is you shall not initiate force against others but you are perfectly within your rights to use force to defend yourself against aggression.
	So... Reason, evidence, virtue, non-aggression, and negotiation over violence wherever humanly possible, although these days I'm doubting how humanly possible it is going forward.
	So that's a sort of very brief intro.
	My training, I started reading philosophy in my mid-teens.
	And I studied it for quite some time.
	I started my undergraduate in literature.
	I did almost two years at the National Theatre School studying acting and playwriting.
	I did an undergraduate, finished that at McGill University in history, and then I did a graduate degree focusing on the history of philosophy.
	Then I was an entrepreneur in the software field for quite some time, but from about 2005, my gosh, 15 years now, Oh, my career is so old it can almost drive a car.
	I have been working to bring reason and evidence to the masses, to bring the joys and impactful immediacy of philosophy to the masses.
	Because most people think philosophy is this weird abstract realm where you try and figure out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin or whether Adam, who's made in God's image, has a belly button or not.
	I find that really...
	Annoying and frustrating with regards to philosophy, so I really try to bring it to life in people's hearts, minds, and daily activities.
	I've been doing a call-in show since almost the very beginning of the show.
	Thousands of people by now have called in, and we've talked philosophy, how it can help you in your daily life, help you make better decisions, help you avoid getting divorced, help you avoid being cruel to your kids, help you advance in your career, help you stand up for what's right.
	And what's good in society without falling prey to some self-destructive miasma.
	Self-destructive and self-destructive, I guess, to miasma in this world.
	In which, you know, reason and evidence is becoming fairly increasingly imperiled and difficult and problematic.
	So I love philosophy and I have been doing this for a long time.
	And I have a number of free books out there.
	My show's been downloaded or reviewed close to 700 million times.
	I get about over a million books downloaded every single year.
	You can find me at freedomain.com.
	You can find me on youtube.com forward slash freedomainradio.
	And the books are free and the show is free.
	There's no ads. There's no sponsors.
	I'm a donation-based life form.
	So if you would like to help me out, which I would enormously appreciate, particularly in this very challenging year of Our Good Vision 2020, you can go to freedomain.com forward slash freedomainradio.
	Donate. But hey, as the old saying goes, enough of my yakking.
	Perhaps we can get to the lovely listeners to this Discord channel.
	And maybe I can bring something of value to what it is you guys are doing.
	All right. So for everyone in here, we do this pretty much on a weekly basis.
	We've got a lot of good events scheduled, particularly, you know, obviously this one, but next week, Stefan is going to be debating Vosh on here, on basically, shoot, I'm at a loss for words for it right now.
	I had it.
	So is it Vosh?
	Is that how, because he's kind of like Smaug, Smoog, Smaug from Lord of the Rings.
	I mean, nobody really knows how to pronounce it.
	Is it Vosh? Yeah, as if it's a V-O-S-H. Bosh Vosh Bagosh.
	That's Bolshevik Vosh Bagosh.
	Okay, Bosh Vosh Bagosh.
	He's got a new nickname for me, and that's really all that needs to happen from here.
	All right, sorry, go ahead. So, yeah, we're going to have Stefan and Vosh debate next week on what exploitation is and the morals or ethics of capitalism.
	Now, related to that, Dictionary asks, how do you define socialism?
	Well, I mean, very, very briefly, socialism is a system wherein the state can virtually at will violate the property rights and liberties of the citizens.
	Because... I think?
	There is no such thing as a government, no such thing as public ownership of anything because public ownership is a violation of the non-aggression principle and a violation of property rights because it is a small group of people who are usually armed to the teeth, unilaterally establishing their right to take your property.
	And if you resist them taking your property, they can escalate force until you die or comply.
	That's the basis of the taxation system, which is completely immoral and will at some point in the future, if we have a future, be viewed with the same moral horror that we look back on the institution of slavery.
	And they will wonder how we lived with it for so long, just as we wonder how people all throughout the world and all throughout human history lived with the institution of slavery for so long.
	And so socialism is when the state begins to take over the means of productions.
	Socialism is largely complete within the Western countries.
	Governments control the money supply.
	They control the interest rates.
	They control the credit system.
	They control the universities.
	They control the roads.
	They control the pensions.
	They control the welfare state.
	The government controls the...
	Educational system from pretty much kindergarten all the way through to postgraduate to one degree or another, explicitly and overtly when it comes to kindergarten through sort of grade 12.
	It's all run by the government, and then it has a huge amount of influence, though not necessarily direct control, through licensing, through student loans and all that, through universities and so on.
	And so the sort of, I mean, the basic ten planks of the Communist Manifesto have largely been implemented throughout the West.
	There are still significant vestiges of the free market.
	But they are increasingly on the retreat.
	Actually, it's reversed itself a little bit under Trump.
	This is a huge debt-based system, of course.
	Every human being in this modern semi-socialist or mostly socialist system, every human being in the world is sustained by 30,000 American dollars in debt, which is utterly unsustainable and foreshadows a terrific amount of suffering in human society.
	And I would like to avert that suffering if humanly possible.
	I don't think I can, or you can, or any of us can, unless we all act as one, which doesn't seem to be too likely at the moment.
	But I hope that at least when the crash comes, that people will recognize that it is force that has failed, not freedom.
	It is violations of property rights and of human dignity, independence, and integrity that have failed, not freedom.
	Freedom, because when the crisis comes, every totalitarian in the world, from AOC to Bernie Sanders and back again, want to use that crisis in order to further enslave humanity.
	And if we understand that it is force that has failed, not freedom, when the crisis hits, we can hopefully turn in the right direction.
	So that's my very brief overview of socialism.
	I will, of course, be getting more into it in eight days with Vosh.
	Very brief. So, moving on.
	So, we're going to have a bunch of questions.
	These are all over the place.
	This is roughly how an AMA goes.
	And just want to say, some of these are, I think, trying to respond to previous things.
	If they've got a false premise built in, don't yell at me.
	It's not me. I'm just reading up.
	No, no, hit me. I'm ninja'd up, baby.
	I'm ready to roll. All right. So, Berkharov asks, why do you believe feminism is a form of socialism?
	Why do I believe feminism is a form of socialism?
	Well, first of all, feminism comes out of the fundamentalist Marxist faith, their cult-like religiosity, which is really an insult to religion.
	So the way that the Marxists work is this.
	All disparities in group outcomes must be the result Of exploitation and theft and violence and humiliation and degradation and control and subjugation and you name it.
	That's the fundamental. So anytime, let's say, men make more money than women.
	Well, what is the Marxist answer to that?
	Sexism, patriarchy, male privilege, toxic masculinity.
	That's all they have.
	It's this broken record that breaks necks if there are differences in outcome between various ethnicities.
	Oh, it's racism, it's white privilege, it's ethnic hatred, it's like whatever they can find, wherever they can find a difference in outcome, they scream blue murder and say that the only reason That this outcome difference exists.
	It's because of vicious, mean, exploitive, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
	So they do this with men and women.
	They do this between various ethnicities.
	They do this between rich and poor.
	And the true factual answer as to why there tend to be group differences...
	It has a lot to do with the biology and the capacities of human beings.
	So if you look at something like men making more than women, there are a number of reasons for that, which are all perfectly valid and perfectly fine.
	The first, of course, is that men tend to choose more technical fields where the pay tends to be higher.
	If you want to make $100,000 coming right out of college, it's pretty damn easy to do.
	all you have to do is choose petroleum engineering.
	And, you know, for a lot of women, that petroleum engineering tends to be lubing themselves up on a webcam, which is really quite tragic.
	But women tend to want to work with people and men want to work with things.
	And the way that the supply and demand works in the modern economy is that people are less valuable to work with than things.
	So guys like to work with computers and they like to work with engineering.
	And they like to, you know, there's lots of exceptions.
	Don't get me wrong.
	We're just talking.
	I mean, these two circles really do overlap quite a lot.
	But...
	But men have higher testosterone.
	At the higher levels of intelligence, there are many more men than women.
	Women tend to cluster around the middle of the IQ band and men are higher up.
	There's just many, many more men.
	At the higher reaches of IQ, there are like 10 times more men than women.
	And so... IQ tends to be very predictive of income.
	It tends to be very predictive of a wide variety of things.
	And so that's one reason.
	Of course, women very often want to work part-time.
	They want to have flex time because they want to have kids.
	And let's, you know...
	On bended knee, give a lovely round of applause to the ladies who have the children because without that, well, there ain't you and there ain't me and there ain't any future either.
	So you can make things equal in a sense in the workforce, but only at the expense of not having children.
	And as you can see, as female equality and now female supremacy has escalated in the West, now the vast majority or a significant majority in certain fields, vast majority in some fields, it's women.
	Women are more in college.
	Young women earn more than young men.
	And what's happening of course is that as you jam more and more equality of outcome economically between the sexes, Your birth rate collapses.
	Of course. Of course it does, right?
	And so when you look at group disparities, you can say, oh, well, that's an interesting phenomenon.
	I wonder what's going on.
	Or you can just, you know, put your hands in your ears, blindfold yourself and scream racism, sexism, exploitation, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, from here to eternity, thus provoking a massive amount of social hatred and conflict.
	And so the fact, you know, I want men and women and different ethnicities and races, all should be equal before the law, all should be afforded the same freedoms, but for a variety of reasons, you're going to end up generally with different outcomes.
	And sort of if you look at, I don't know, Japanese and Chinese people, like the East Asians.
	If you look at basketball, well, you're just not going to see a lot of them.
	Now, does everyone think, well, you know, the reason why you don't see a lot of Japanese people in basketball is because all the basketball owners are just racists who hate Japanese people.
	I mean, come on. We've got to be a little bit more intelligent and a little bit more curious about the reasons for group differences.
	Some of them are unjust, and some of them are just, and varying degrees.
	It's a very interesting and complex question, but the leftists short-circuit it by saying, well, the only explanation is usually toxic masculinity, toxic whiteness, and so on, which is a horrifying blood libel against males and against whites, and of course is creating and provoking massive amounts of which is a horrifying blood libel against males and against whites, and
	So the reason that I say that feminism comes out of socialism is that feminism is predicated on the belief, the fantasy, that the only reason why men and women end up with different outcomes in life is because men hate women.
	And that is so ridiculous.
	It is so offensive.
	It is so toxic and so destructive that it needs to be fought with every fiber of our moral being.
	All right.
	Our next question here comes from WeGotBugsFellows.
	They ask, how are basic laws against things like murder, theft, and force under the NAP? Could you genuinely trust a society to universally uphold to that standard of non-aggression?
	Well, no. I absolutely could not.
	I could not imagine a society where the non-aggression principle was never violated.
	It's impossible. Human beings are susceptible to corruption.
	Human beings are susceptible to the love of power.
	And human beings are highly susceptible to becoming addicted to subjugating, controlling, bullying, and exploiting other human beings.
	That's just natural.
	We're We're apes with less hair.
	I guess me with a little bit less than even the average, right?
	So evolutionarily speaking, we wanted power.
	We wanted power over our environment.
	We wanted power over others.
	Up until sort of about 150, maybe 175 years ago, the most valuable resource to gain control of was not gold or metal or gold.
	Land, it was people. That's why slavery was so popular.
	So we love to subjugate, we love to control.
	Given that that's a basic reality and fact of human nature, whether you believe it's evolutionarily driven or whether it's driven by Adam and Eve's sin and the fall of man in the Garden of Eden, it's not particularly relevant.
	The reality is we're highly corruptible as a species.
	Because of that, we can't have a government.
	Because a government is a giant magnet for all of those sophists who wish to lie and bully and control and subjugate others, to promise you free stuff that has you slide into tyranny.
	You know, socialism and communism, you can vote your way in, but you're going to have to fight your way out, and a lot of you aren't going to make it.
	So, yeah, human beings are very corruptible.
	Now, the recognition of that is that because human beings are corruptible, we cannot allow for human beings to gain a monopoly of power in society through the agency of the state.
	It's just a basic recognition.
	People who say the government should do stuff have this weird fantasy that there's this magic group of angels that can never be corrupted, and those magic group of angels who are uncorruptible are just magically always going to end up with the power over the state and never misuse it for their own benefit and never have their children serve on the board of...
	Gas companies in the Ukraine!
	Human beings are corruptible, so that's the basic reality.
	Now, however, that having been said, if you want to make a free society, the first place that you need to start is parenting.
	First place you need to start is childhood.
	If children are raised peacefully and rationally, if you don't hit them, if you don't scream at them, if you don't hurt them, if you don't verbally abuse them, if you don't neglect them, if you love them and treat them well, then they will grow up Peaceful.
	They will grow up without a desire to hurt other people.
	They will grow up without a desire to exploit other people.
	Because what is it that stops us from exploiting others?
	Well, it's empathy. And empathy is something that you have to have modeled to you as a child to develop strongly as you grow up.
	And if it's not modeled to you as a child, it's like 13 major sections of the brain that all need to align perfectly.
	So before you turn five years old, in order for you to have empathy, and if they don't align that way, if you don't get taught empathy as a child, as in your early childhood, it's almost impossible for you to develop the capacity later.
	You know, it's like if you get malnourished as a child, you might grow up to be three inches shorter.
	Having more food later doesn't make you taller, it just makes you fatter, right?
	So, if you focus on what I call peaceful parenting, which is that the non-aggression principle, first and foremost, must apply to children before it applies to anyone else.
	Because children are in the least voluntary relationships in the world.
	I mean, you can choose your girlfriend, you can choose your job, you can even choose which country you live in because you can move.
	But the least choice...
	In any relationship in the human landscape is the choice, and it's not a choice.
	the least chosen relationship is child to parent.
	I mean, parents can choose to have children, can choose to keep children.
	Children are there with no choice whatsoever.
	And we generally understand that where the choice is least, where the freedom is least, the moral standards have to be the highest.
	And yet we do it kind of the other way.
	Because children can't escape us, we often treat them very, very badly and thus guarantee that we're going to raise a bunch of maladjusted, difficult people who are going to be prone to violence and addiction and promiscuity and...
	There's manipulation and sophistry and propaganda and all sorts of terrible things.
	So when it comes to crime, it's very clear, and the data is very clear on this.
	I've got a whole series on this called The Bomb in the Brain, that if you treat children well, they will grow up to be much more peaceful and much more respectful of others and much more productive and much better at negotiating and much less susceptible to temptation, to What's called a short time preference, which is to grab and run rather than to earn and buy.
	So I focus a lot on parenting.
	I focus a lot on making the world a better place through encouraging parents to be more peaceful, to be more rational, to be more present, to be better parents.
	And I have myself been a stay-at-home dad.
	My daughter is 11 now, so it's been a real honor and a privilege to spend That time with her and I can tell you all my theories, thank heaven, all my theories have come to fruition and they work.
	So very briefly, the technical, and I've got two books on this which you should check out at freedomain.com.
	They're both free and they're in a variety of formats.
	You can get them on YouTube as well, audio, PDF, text and so on.
	And one is called Everyday Anarchy and the other is called Practical Anarchy, which goes into this in more detail.
	But very briefly...
	If you are suspected of stealing from someone, everybody has what are called dispute resolution organizations.
	This is just one way it could work.
	I mean, nobody can design an entire society, which is why we need a free society.
	But what I would like is if somebody comes and steals my TV and I think I know who they are, they'll call up my dispute resolution organization and say, hey, I've got this guy on film in my house stealing my TV.
	So then they'll go and talk to that guy and say, you know, you've been accused of this.
	Will you submit to whatever, right?
	Will you let us search your house and so on?
	Now, he will also have his dispute resolution organization.
	It could be the same one as mine or it could be a different one.
	But they all have reciprocity agreements the same way that cell phones have reciprocity agreements and you can go to Australia and use your cell phone.
	And he will then accept this and they'll search his house.
	If they find the TV, then, you know, he's going to suffer some kind of punishment.
	What that would be, I don't know.
	I don't know if prison's the best way to do it.
	I don't know if economic ostracism is the best way to do it.
	I don't know if some big fine is the best way to do it.
	I don't know. Because these things have generally been in the province of the state, the hands of the state, so we don't know what the most productive thing is at all.
	Now, of course, then the question is, well, what if he just refuses to comply with all of this stuff?
	Well, then economic ostracism kicks in, right?
	Then the bank says, okay, we have a clause which you sign voluntarily, which we explained to you at the time, which is if you don't submit to a dispute resolution organization or a DRO request, then your contract with us is null and void, and you have 30 days to vacate the premises.
	And then their bank says, oh, yeah, that little thing where if you don't comply with a legitimate request from a dispute resolution organization, we're closing your bank account.
	Like all this kind of stuff.
	Economic ostracism is incredibly powerful, and it's very peaceful.
	It's not a violation of the non-aggression principle as long as it's in the contract, right?
	As long as it's in the contract that you sign, and this is how society would work.
	And eventually people would just comply and say, okay, you can search my house or, you know, oh yeah, I did take it.
	I, you know, I'm a bad guy.
	Here's the TV back and I'll pay you a thousand bucks extra and so sorry, right?
	And, you know, but you could say, well, what if he just refuses and refuses?
	Well, then, you know, he's not allowed on people's streets.
	He's not allowed to rent a place.
	He's not allowed to buy groceries.
	He's not allowed to have electricity delivered to his house.
	And not, you know, this is everybody voluntarily ostracizing this guy.
	And then maybe he just goes and lives in the woods.
	Okay, well, he's basically effectively banished himself and is no longer a problem for society as a whole.
	So ostracism is the way to go, but because we've had governments and courts and police and so on, largely ineffective and mostly used to, I don't know, protect Andrew McCabe and Elizabeth Holmes, then we haven't had a chance to explore these other ways of resolving these kinds of disputes, but there's significant evidence that they work and work very well.
	So that's a sort of very brief way.
	Of looking at that.
	I hope that that makes sense.
	And for more, of course, I know that that's not a complete answer.
	Please go to freedemand.com.
	Check out the free books, Everyday Anarchy and Practical Anarchy.
	All right. And for anyone who joins us and wants to invite their friend, send them a link, Discord, GG, Salou Paula.
	Our next question comes from TheBeyondMan.
	he asks what are some healthy ways to build self-esteem what are some healthy ways to build self-esteem i would sort of i mean one of those words may be somewhat redundant i don't think there's an unhealthy way to build self-esteem so self-esteem for yourself is basically the same as respect for others which i was just talking about oddly enough in the little live stream esteem.
	So self-esteem for yourself is basically the same as respect for others, which I was just talking about, oddly enough, in the little live stream I did to test the output and remind people of tonight's AMA.
	So self-respect occurs or is generated when you don't aim at self-respect, but you aim at the behaviors that produce self-respect.
	So if you think of health, you can't aim directly at being healthy.
	Like you can't sit there and say, I want to lose 20 pounds.
	I I'm just going to aim at losing 20 pounds.
	That doesn't do any good, right? Because your goal is an effect of other actions, right?
	So if you want to lose weight, you've got to exercise more, you've got to eat less or eat better or whatever, right?
	I'm no expert in this area, but that's what you have to do.
	So you can aim at the behaviors which produce the effect called weight loss.
	It's the same thing with health.
	If you want to be more healthy, well, you've got to exercise, you've got to eat well, you've got to get enough sleep and all this kind of stuff, right?
	And not take benzodiazepines.
	So when you aim at particular behaviors with the goal of achieving an effect, well, that's the only way really you can achieve it for the most part, right?
	You want bigger muscles, you've got to move the metal usually in a dark place.
	So when it comes to self-respect, then you have to pursue the behaviors that will generate effect.
	Self-respect, self-esteem.
	And I'll list a couple of them from my perspective.
	So first of all, honesty is very, very important.
	See, we live in a society, and it used to be much more sort of top-down.
	Like, how are we enslaved?
	I've got a whole video on this.
	It's hard to find these days on YouTube, but just do a search for it, the story of your enslavement.
	We don't have a top-down ancient Greek or ancient Roman style hierarchy where we are slaves directly owned by the rulers.
	We're neither serfs who trade certain freedoms for protection from Muslim slave traders and so on.
	We have instead, we can choose our own jobs and the rulers have found it much more effective and much more efficient to tax the product of our relatively free labor rather than owners directly.
	Because when you own people directly, they lose incentives, they lose enthusiasm, and they lose ambition and all that kind of stuff.
	So... We enforce this system, not vertically, not vertically.
	We enforce the system with each other horizontally.
	It is, in effect, slave-on-slave violence that maintains the subjugation of our societies.
	So, I mean, if you look in America, you have the glorious godsend First Amendment, right?
	So you can, and the Supreme Court has specifically rejected this fantasy socialist notion of hate speech, like you can just attach a negative word to speech and just make it illegal.
	You have a First Amendment. So you can say very powerful things.
	And how is it that you are silenced?
	Well, you're silenced out of fear of social ostracism, of people digging up old tweets, firing it off to your boss and saying, this guy's a bad guy, getting fired and ending up living under a bridge or something like that, right?
	So it's horizontal slavery that is our big issue at the moment.
	And if you subjugate yourself to that horizontal enslavement, that fear, not of your rulers but of your fellow citizens, you're going to just not have self-respect.
	Now, at the same time, you don't necessarily want to go and drop every truth bomb everywhere.
	The truth is not a sword to be drawn at all costs.
	You've got to have a little bit of Sun Tzu, art of war, bob and weave maneuvering that's going on because there are some challenging predations in the intellectual and social landscape that we all have to navigate through.
	So, you know, pick your battles and so on.
	But if you just surrender and conform, then you're not going to have any self-respect in the same way that if you just blow yourself up by dropping truth bombs everywhere no matter what, then you're probably going to...
	Well, you might respect yourself, but you may only have a smoking crater where your former life was.
	So you do have to have honesty.
	Now... This honesty can be to do with politics.
	It can be to do with a wide variety of things.
	Or it can just be to do with being honest with people in your life.
	If you have unsatisfying relationships in your life, you sit down and say, you know...
	I've got to tell you, out of respect for the friendship, I'm just not feeling it.
	Like, I'm not really enjoying the friendship.
	And it could be me. It could be you.
	It could be something between us.
	It could be, I don't know, but let's sit down and talk about it and find a way in this relatively short passage from the here to the hereafter how we can have a better and richer and deeper relationship.
	So that's... An honest statement.
	And if, though, you just sit around watching sports ball and not talking about anything, well, you're going to lose respect for yourself because you're just not being honest.
	You're not being authentic. You're not being yourself.
	You're not being truthful in your relationships.
	And lying, well, you know, we all get to lie long enough in the grave, right?
	Let's tell the goddamn truth.
	In the world as it stands and we've got all eternity to lie in the grave and not tell the truth.
	So let's tell the truth while this divine spark motivates us in this brief flash of corporality.
	So be honest.
	Be outspoken.
	Be courageous without being foolhardy.
	And don't put up with...
	Don't put up with people who make fun of you all the time.
	Don't put up with people who mock you all the time.
	Don't put up with people who are boring.
	Don't put up with people who are abusive.
	Don't put up with people who dismiss The grandeur of every potential we all possess.
	We are all so much greater than we think we are and we allow other people to constantly, you know, wet finger the tiny flame of our soon-to-be-a-bonfire candlelight and just live with reasonable courage, live with reasonable assessment and taking a risk.
	Risk losing relationships to tell the truth because you can't have any relationship if you're not willing to tell the truth.
	Share controversial material, maybe even like this, right?
	And just don't Put up with mediocrity, with, what is it, brick and cat on a hot tin roof said, mendacity!
	I can't stand it! People are so mendacious, so hollow, so shallow, so blurred lines, nothing, talker is empty, it empties out of human potential with an endless wave of dusty tsunami-like trivia.
	So if you act in a way That you would respect in another.
	Think of yourself like if you're watching a movie.
	What do you want the hero to do?
	Well, you want the hero to sort of stride up and tell the truth.
	You want the hero to stand for the truth.
	You want the hero to not bite his lip and bite his tongue and bow down so that petty people can ride roughshod over any potential he might believe he possesses.
	You want him to fight his way.
	You know, like I watched this movie with my daughter...
	It's an old movie now, I guess, with a formerly whole Michael J. Fox, Back to the Future.
	And Crispin Glover plays this guy, and you want him to not be a self-subjugating, nerdgasm, loserbot throughout the whole movie.
	You want him to say something, to do something, to stand up for himself.
	And we're all yearning for that in the people around us and in the movies that we watch.
	How about you do it in the mirror, become the hero of your own movie, and that's a very powerful way that you can gain self-respect.
	And I don't think there are any shortcuts.
	You've just got to do the difficult task of being honest in a world that has, to put it as nicely as possible, a fairly uneasy relationship with honesty.
	Alright. So myself, Stefan, I've been looking at changing some hygiene products.
	What kind of hair conditioner do you use?
	Is there anything you'd recommend? What kind of?
	Well, I don't know. If it's any consolation, I used tea tree shampoos.
	And I guess I should get some sort of state-sponsored subsidy on facial cream because I don't just have a forehead.
	I have an 8 to 12 head.
	So I've got to do the tsunami wash of facial cream all the way up to the ground.
	So, yeah. And then, you know, just stick my head in a bowling ball wax dispenser and I'm good to go.
	All right. So our next question comes from Daddy Nomad.
	Daddy, are you here? Yes, sir.
	All right. Go ahead. So, Stephen, I want to thank you real quick for coming on.
	I was the one who invited you here.
	I really appreciate you coming on.
	It's already quite enjoyable.
	Hold on one second.
	I wanted to know, where does value come from?
	One of the biggest debates we have on the server a lot, especially me as a libertarian and our NCAP, against communists, is Essentially, the value of labor and the value of things.
	A lot of people say, well, it's subjective, and it's just how you're born in this stuff.
	But I think that it's a little bit differently.
	So I'm curious, in your words, where do we derive value from?
	That's a great question.
	But of course, value...
	I mean, it's one of these dodecahedron, flies-eye, multiple disco ball kinds of words, right?
	Because you could be talking about economic value.
	You could be talking about sentimental value.
	You could be talking about values in terms of morals.
	So I just want to make sure, and it could be other things too, but where do we want to land this helicopter, so to speak?
	Sorry, I hear communist and I just think of the word helicopter.
	That's just my word association test, but sorry, go ahead.
	Yeah, and when I say communist, of course I'm meaning mostly statist.
	But yeah, we do have a lot of communists on here.
	But what I'm referring to in the sense is economic value, especially with the value theory of labor, it's one of the very hard things to get through because anarcho-communists do agree with me and you.
	They do agree that a stateless society is preferable, but what they, of course, want is a commune, and they believe that any kind of labor that is done under the employment of somebody else is theft.
	And I'd like to hear how you— A free society allows for local experiments in the absence of property rights.
	A communist society doesn't allow for local experiments in actually having property rights.
	So a free society is much more tolerant because if you want to not exercise your property rights, you cannot exercise your property rights in the same way if you don't want to exercise your right of self-defense or you don't want to enforce a contract.
	You're perfectly free to not do any of that.
	So Let me just give a brief, a very brief history of this, because it's one of these things that, you know, like, it's like a vampire movie that never ends.
	Like, you know how in vampire movies, they kill the vampire, you know, and then they bury the vampire, and then they're leaving, and the vampire's hand comes out and grabs their ankle, and dun-dun-dun!
	You know, it's like one of these endless, psycho, mealy-mouthed Stephen King novels that boo scares you for no particular reason, because the man never knows how to end a story.
	But anyway... So the labor theory of value comes out of Marx, and it's interesting to note that it's not taken seriously by any modern economists, which is why, you know, if you want to know where the Communist Manifesto is being...
	But assigned, which it is massively assigned twice the level of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, which is tragic, of course, it's coming out of the arts department.
	It's coming out of the humanities.
	It's coming out of history, which, you know, you could say intellectual history, okay.
	I think 10% of the assignments are coming out of English literature.
	Come on, it's not English literature at all, right?
	So... Marx put this book out, 1848.
	It didn't really have any prominence until 1871 or so.
	And then what happened was, within four years of this tract, this nonsense becoming relatively popular, it was completely debunked by the economists of the day.
	And no economist takes...
	The Communist Manifesto or even the Marxist theory of the labor theory of value.
	Nobody takes it seriously. It has been completely explained away.
	I mean, we're not just talking about von Mises.
	We're not talking about Rothbard in particular or Hayek or any of these other people.
	We're talking about, I mean, the marginal revolution.
	We're talking about the subjectivist revolution.
	Reality of value.
	So sorry for all this technical garbage.
	Let me just scrub that from my brain and sort of start from the basics.
	So the Marxist argument goes something like this.
	You have a bunch of workers who are producing $20 an hour worth of value.
	But, you see, they're only getting paid $18 worth of value by the capitalist.
	And the capitalist is keeping $2.
	Now, only the labor creates the value.
	So the only reason there's $20 worth of value is because the laborers are creating stuff.
	They're putting the wheels on the cars.
	They're sewing the buttons on the dresses.
	They're slapping the back on the iPhone.
	I mean, it's only the laborer that produces value.
	And so the laborer, the worker, should get the $20.
	The fact that he only gets $18 is a total rip-off because he's producing $20 worth of value So the capitalist is skimming two bucks worth of value off the top, and he's ripping everyone off.
	So what the workers should do is they should take control of the factory so that they can pay themselves the 20 bucks, kick the capitalist out on his ass, and have him stop taking 10% of their labor for producing nothing whatsoever, right?
	So that's the general theory.
	It's so ridiculous.
	It's so ridiculous. Studying this in university is like having a required course on Klingon anatomy for a doctor.
	It's like, you know, you're not studying anything that's real, that exists, right?
	There's no such, I mean, okay, so how is this nonsense?
	Well, it's not the labor that produces the value.
	It's not the labor that produces the value.
	I mean, come on. It is hard to dig a ditch and fill it back in again.
	I mean, that's horrible. It's sweaty.
	It's exhausting. Your bones are sore.
	Your muscles are sore.
	Your tendons hurt. But if you dig a ditch and fill it back in again, how much value is that?
	Well, zero. So that's a very, very hard job.
	And how does it produce value?
	Well, what's the difference?
	If somebody pays you to dig a ditch, it's because they want a ditch to be there.
	It's the desire of the person who pays you that creates the value in what it is that you're doing, not just your labor.
	Now, once you understand that, then you understand the role of the capitalist is multifold.
	And you also understand that the worker is getting a much better deal by working in a factory than not working in a factory, right?
	So the capitalist, I mean, if you want to create a factory that produces computer chips now, you've got to spend like $10 billion to build it, research it, make it clean, and build in all the machinery and all of that.
	So it's very expensive to build computers.
	These factories. But they so enhance worker productivity that it's staggering.
	I mean, if you look at Henry Ford sort of back in the day, right?
	He changed from originally when they built cars, they just had a car in the middle, and all these workers would come and bring all of these pieces to the car and bolt it together, and it was ridiculously inefficient.
	They were always getting in each other's way, which one went first, which one went second, the timing, and it was all crazy, right?
	So what Henry Ford did was he had a brilliant idea.
	He said, well, let's have an assembly line.
	So we'll have a car, like the basis of a car at the beginning, and it'll go down the assembly line, and each worker will do one thing for a couple of days, right?
	They'll bolt on the wheels, they'll bolt on the steering wheel, they'll put on the doors, and it just went flow.
	And it made everyone so productive that the price of a car went down enormously, and he could afford to pay double the average wages, even though the work was less arduous than it was before, because it was just so efficient.
	Now, If you want to build a car and you are just a guy, like one guy, you want to build a whole car, I mean, you've got to become an expert in everything.
	You've got to order all the pieces.
	You've got to assemble them all yourself.
	It's ridiculously inefficient.
	But if you work in a factory and Henry Ford is taking care of ordering all the pieces and paying all the taxes and doing all of the deductions for your paycheck and handling your paycheck and dealing with the unions and dealing with the regulations and health and safety and government and OSHA and you name it, well, you can just...
	Build a car! And you make a lot more money working for Henry Ford building a car than if you were building a car on your own.
	So if you were building a car on your own, just sort of take modern numbers, right?
	If you were building a car on your own, you might maybe make $10 an hour.
	But if you build a car using Henry Ford's system, you can make $30 an hour because you're just that much more efficient.
	Now, how do you get triple your wages?
	For free? Well, you don't.
	You are, in fact, making $35 an hour, but Henry Ford is keeping $5 of that because he built the damn factory, and you're still way better off.
	If you do it at home, you're making $10 an hour.
	And if you go to Henry Ford's place, you're making $30 an hour.
	So you're way better off than if you were on your own.
	And so this idea that somehow the capitalist is just sitting there, you know, with his monocles and picking lint out of his belly and playing Doom 3 and doing nothing of any value while the workers produce all the value, it's complete crap.
	It's complete garbage. And of course, Marx never worked a day in his life.
	I mean, he's like Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders didn't get a real job until he was 40.
	He was kicked out of a commune for being too damn lazy.
	He's never run a business, never founded anything, never had to manage employees, never had to pay payroll or deal with that.
	I mean, no clue what they're talking about.
	Marx, I think once he tried to get a job on the British Railway and they said, you're...
	Handwriting is too awful.
	We can't hire you.
	I mean, you're just a loser, right?
	And even Marx's own mother said, I wish he'd stop writing about capital, actually start making some.
	I mean, he was an idiot.
	He was a—I mean, I don't mean an idiot intellectually.
	Obviously, he was well-read and well-educated and all of that.
	But economically, he had no clue what he was talking about.
	He had never— Worked in the field.
	And of course the reality is that through Engels he actually exploited workers to attack the system that gave them their profits.
	So, you know, I can carry a bunch of plates around in the woods.
	I'm not going to make any money. But if somebody builds a restaurant in the woods and I go there, I can make money.
	But I didn't have to pay for that restaurant.
	And so the worker is gaining significant increases in his income by using The capitalist factory.
	And the capitalist is gaining value from the worker by the worker using the machinery.
	But the machinery doesn't just appear out of nowhere, out of nothing.
	The machinery has to be bought and built and planned for.
	Plus the worker, now that you understand that it's the subjective desires of the consumer that drive the value of what the worker's doing, well, just making the damn car isn't enough.
	You also have to make it sexy.
	You have to take it to car shows.
	You have to drape bikini models on top of it.
	You have to have it really, really shiny in a showroom.
	You have to have really, really cool guys to sell them and make it funky and fun.
	Elon Musk could make the most boring cars, but he looks like...
	It's like blazing Buck Rogers suppository spaceships out there on his car floor and so on.
	So there's a whole bunch of other cool things that you need.
	You need to have advertisements on TV and magazines and on the web.
	You have to deal with finance companies about how best to finance the cars that you want to sell.
	There's so much that you have to do rather than, hey, I put a wheel on a car.
	I mean, yeah, I get you've got to put the wheel on the car, but there's so much more.
	To actually getting the product into the hands of a customer willing to pay for it that the moment the workers take over the means of production, it's just ridiculous, right?
	Because they sit there and say, well, we bolted some wheels on the car.
	Why isn't it selling? Because now you don't have the marketing.
	You don't have the sales arm.
	You don't have the management arm.
	You don't have the planning for next year's model and what features it should have.
	And do you know how much goes into planning?
	What features to put into a car?
	I mean, how much surveying you have to do?
	I mean, how much engineering and science you have to do to even figure it out?
	I mean, it's insane how much computer programming you need to do to figure out how to make a car that works in these funky new modern ways.
	I'm not just talking about the self-driving, but, you know, the adaptive cruise following of cars, the beep-beep when you're about to back into an old lady, all that kind of cool stuff, right?
	So the Marxists look at the system and they say, well, the capital is just ripping people off!
	And they sow these seeds of discontent and frustration and class hatred.
	And I mean, it's not because they care about the workers and it's not because they hate the capitalists.
	They just hate the system.
	They hate the productivity of the system.
	They hate the system that they feel excluded from because they're almost universally losers with very little emotional self-control who don't know how to be productive and useful to their fellow members of society and just turn out Heath Ledger, Joker style that just want to watch the whole damn world burn.
	This could be a little bit of a presage to next Sunday's debate with Vosch.
	But yeah, so the labor theory of value is nonsense.
	Labor is necessary but not sufficient to provide value.
	All value is subjective. All value is subjective.
	There are some people who want to pay $100,000 for a car that I wouldn't be seen dead in.
	There are some people who really like...
	Superman trading cards from 1977.
	I could care less about those things.
	I mean, there are so many sectors of the economy that are fundamentally incomprehensible to me.
	I don't know why 95% of the mall has to be shoes, handbags, and cell phones.
	I have no idea. I have no idea.
	I have no idea why people go to Vietnamese restaurants and order those bowls of soup that just don't taste good.
	But, you know, I'm sure they taste really great to the Vietnamese food lovers.
	And I'm sure that there are people who would follow me to a restaurant and say, why on earth are you ordering this freaky thing?
	That doesn't make any sense at all, right?
	So if you just look at the economy as a whole, just go on eBay, go on Amazon, look at the categories.
	It's crazy what people like out there.
	You know, before I became a father, I didn't even know all of the crazy stuff you could buy for your kids.
	I had no interest in it, right? Value is subjective.
	People will pay $10,000 for Manalo Blahnik shoes or Hermes bags or whatever and it's like to me like two plastic shopping bags or I guess paper now and I'm good to go.
	You know other people like me are constantly fiddling with ways to get better audio and better video and more even sound and richer sibilance and so on.
	Other people are like I don't know I just point my cell phone at myself and do a video right?
	So It's all subjective.
	And once you understand that, then no one's ripping anybody off.
	Everybody's just trading voluntarily to the betterment of all.
	Thanks, Dan. I know.
	You guys never know when I'm ending, right?
	Sorry. I should do the beep.
	I should just do that. Over and out.
	Breaker, breaker. Something like that, right?
	All right. Sven Brender asks, how does the free market help those that are disadvantaged more than welfare programs work?
	I love the implication that welfare programs help people as a stance.
	Well, they help people on a five, but how could you do more?
	Okay. So, first of all, look.
	I have great sympathy for people who are disadvantaged.
	There are people who don't have a lot of skills.
	Like I know earlier that I said we're greater than we are, and I think that that's very, very true.
	But there are people who are born with physical disabilities.
	There are people who are born mentally disadvantaged.
	There are people who are born just with a lot of problems.
	Of course, the first thing that should happen in a free society is you buy insurance for this kind of stuff, right?
	So you have your health insurance, and I know health insurance got a bad rap in the United States because it's all government-run, government-controlled, government cartels.
	I mean, it's ridiculous. You know, like 100 years ago in America, you could get...
	An entire year's worth of free medical coverage for one day's wages.
	One day's wages.
	That's how it used to be. In fact, government control over healthcare was initially instantiated because doctors were frustrated that they couldn't earn enough money because the workers' associations that were the health insurance of the time were bidding them down too much, and so they started to get licensing and restrictions, and then they convinced Congress after the Second World War to only allow...
	Doctors to write prescriptions before you could just get stuff yourself.
	And so healthcare should not be at all expensive or as ridiculously expensive as it is now.
	But anyway, so of course if you have a child who's born with spina bifida or multiple sclerosis or who has childhood leukemia and other horrible and difficult and genuinely, gosh, let's help people kind of things, well, of course you should have insurance, right?
	Of course. Now, if you didn't have insurance, that's kind of a problem.
	Now, people want to help you, but they don't want to help you so much that nobody bothers buying insurance anymore.
	Because if it's just like, oh, I didn't buy insurance.
	I saved myself a couple of hundred bucks a month.
	It was really cool. I got to do gambling online instead.
	And then, oh, my kid got sick.
	Okay, I got to go to my neighbors and friends.
	They all got to pay for it. It's like, well, then if everybody pays for it, nobody's going to bother getting insurance and the whole system kind of falls apart, right?
	So we do want to help people, but you have to distinguish between people who are disadvantaged through no fault of their own and people who are disadvantaged because they made terrible decisions.
	Now, the people, no fault of their own, we want to help them, and we know we want to help them because people vote for the welfare state on the assumption that the welfare state is actually helping people.
	So we know that the majority of people want to help others.
	And we also know that when government spending and taxes goes down, in particular when taxes goes down, charitable spending goes up.
	So we know that when people keep more of their own money, they will help others out.
	And Bernie Sanders, of course, is driven by the desperate desire, desperate fear that everyone around him is just like him because he gives almost no money to charity whatsoever.
	So I guess Marxists are driven by the desperate fear that everyone is like them and just selfish and nasty.
	So how do you differentiate the deserving poor, like people who need your help through knowing that they just had terrible things happen?
	It's not their fault.
	Well, the government can't do that, and there's no particular interest to do so.
	The welfare state is just a way of keeping people dependent on the government.
	Now, of course, it's gotten to the point, because you've now had multiple generations of people who've grown up in households where no one's had a job, It's just a way of making sure that people don't burn down the cities out of fear and terror of actually having to get jobs or whatever.
	So it's just become this terrible, massive system.
	But, you know, this fine person who asked this question, like, you care about the poor.
	I care about the poor, which is why I don't charge for my podcast.
	It's why I don't charge for having conversations with people even if they never end up getting published.
	Like I won't charge for philosophical conversations with people because I want people to get access to philosophy without having to go and spend a whole bunch of money on a degree and defer their earnings like I did and so on.
	So I care about the poor.
	You care about the poor.
	But if you just give money to people with no standards, then you end up making the poor worse and worse and worse because you're now an enabler and you're not a charity.
	So charities need to be very compassionate, very sensitive, and very strict.
	So if some guy says, oh, man, I need money because I blew all of my money on hookers, blow, booze, and gambling, well, giving him more money, you know, I guess the casinos and the drug dealers and the hookers and all of that, they like that.
	But it's not particularly good for his life, right?
	So... Charity is a very delicate thing to pursue in this world.
	You want to help people who are genuinely in need, but you don't want to enable people who are making disastrously bad decisions.
	And, I mean, we know how this changes.
	When the government gets more strict, so there was a program, I think it was California, could be some other place in the U.S., where they said, look, we're going to stop paying additional child benefits if the woman is not married and has, like, her third child, right?
	So what happened?
	Well, women just stopped having their third child.
	And you could argue that's kind of like a positive thing in a way, right?
	So you do want to help people, but just firing cannon loads of money at people is an absolute disaster.
	First of all, out of every dollar you spend on the welfare state, only about 20 cents of it gets to the poor.
	The rest of it is all just taken up by the bureaucracies and the unions and, you know, pretty corrupt hangers-on to the poverty industry.
	So you're not really helping the poor that much when you're talking about the welfare state.
	And the other thing, too, of course, is that the government gets more and more in debt.
	And when that debt has to be paid off, the poor tend to be hurt the most.
	And the last thing I'll say is...
	You know, it's called the poverty trap for a reason.
	So a woman in America who has two kids and is on welfare would have to earn the equivalent of $70,000 to $75,000 a year U.S. just to get the same amount of money that she gets in free stuff through the government.
	Now that, I submit, is a real trap.
	Because basically, if she went out and got a job paying $75,000 U.S. a year, which is a pretty damn good salary...
	She would effectively be taxed at 100% because if she stayed home, she'd get the equivalent value.
	That is terrible.
	And of course, you don't just walk out of a welfare situation and get a $75,000 job.
	That usually takes, you know, 5, 10 years of hard work to get there.
	So she'd be taxed at 150, 200% for years just to break even.
	And then maybe down the road, she would end up making...
	50 cents on the dollar if she got a job for $125,000 or $120,000 or something like that.
	So it's a really, really terrible situation and it's really destructive to the poor.
	It traps people in poverty.
	It creates a situation where when the debt has to be paid off, the poor are going to suddenly be cut off from that money when the economy crashes or the...
	You try and hyperinflate yourself out of a debt situation, and it's going to be absolutely brutal on them.
	That's not how you help people.
	That's how you enslave people and entrap them.
	All right, and our next question comes from Whiskey Renegade.
	He asks, are there objective morals, and if so, how do you prove them?
	There are objective morals.
	There are objective morals.
	I've got a whole book on this called Universally Preferable Behavior, a Rational Proof of Secular Ethics.
	Now, the first thing to understand is the grave danger in the world is not immoral actions but immoral theories.
	You can protect yourself against a thief or a murderer or a rapist or whatever.
	You can arm yourself.
	You can live in a safe neighborhood.
	You can protect yourself. There's lots of things you can do to protect yourself.
	But you can't protect yourself against taxation.
	You can't protect yourself against national debts.
	You can't protect yourself against hyperinflation.
	You can't protect yourself against the distortionary effects of interest rates that have wildly diverged from the natural cause and effect of supply and demand.
	So when it comes to morality, the greatest enemy that you're going to face is immoral moral systems.
	So, the first thing that you want to do when somebody proposes, let's say somebody says, well, there's no such thing as morality, right?
	Then you would say, okay, is it true that there's no such thing as morality?
	Yes. So, is it better to say things that are true or say things that are false?
	Well, it's better to say things that are true and it's true that there's no such thing as morality.
	Boom! You've just detonated their argument.
	If they're saying something that is true...
	Then they're saying it's better to say something that is true than something that is false.
	Okay, now we're getting somewhere.
	You can't say there's no such thing as truth because then you're claiming a truth statement.
	You can't say there's no such thing as morality because you've at least now said that it's better to speak the truth than to speak falsehood, which makes honesty a virtue.
	If someone comes and says, we should never respect property rights, Then you simply have to look at their lives and say, do they have property?
	Right? Or you can just, to take a silly example, you can just start to take their shirt from them.
	Right? And like, hey, what are you doing?
	It's like, well, I'm just going by way.
	So it's pretty easy to disprove people's moral nonsense.
	Everything is relative. Oh, is that an absolute statement or is that a relative statement?
	Oh. If it's a relative statement, then it must be relative to something that's not relative, in other words, absolute, in which case something is absolute.
	And if it is absolutely true that everything is relative, then they've just admitted that there's an absolute truth called everything is relative, which means that statement is not relative, right?
	So it's very easy to just dismantle this stuff.
	So this idea that there's no values, no truth, it doesn't matter, right?
	So we have to engage...
	In the reality of universally preferable behavior, the moment someone tries to convince you of something or tries to change your mind about something or tries to tell you that something is true, they've already accepted universally preferable behavior.
	Even if they say to you there's no such thing as truth, is that a true statement?
	Well, yeah, okay, then there's such a thing as truth, right?
	So it's not are there universal ethics.
	The only people who genuinely believe that, you're never going to have to deal with because they're never going to come out and talk about it, right?
	Those people are irrelevant and inconsequential and invisible really in the intellectual, moral, and social landscape of mankind.
	So don't worry about those guys.
	It's the sophists who come out and say there's no such thing as truth.
	Everything is relative.
	All value is subjective, right?
	I mean moral value, not economic value.
	Economic value is subjective.
	So don't worry about any of that stuff.
	The only question then becomes, okay, what is universally preferable behavior?
	Nobody's going to argue against it, because the moment they argue against universally preferable behavior, they're enacting universally preferable behavior, as I talked about.
	So the question is, what is universally preferable behavior?
	Well, stealing cannot be universally preferable behavior.
	Why not? Okay, so I got a pair of glasses here, right?
	My glasses, right?
	I got the middle-aged fisheye thing going on.
	Right, so I have these glasses.
	Now, can we say that stealing my glasses is universally preferable behavior?
	No, we can't.
	Because if I believe...
	Like, let's say you walk into the room and you steal my glasses.
	But if I believe and you believe that stealing is universally preferable behavior...
	You can't steal my glasses because I want you to take them.
	Why? Because stealing is universally preferable behavior.
	But if I want you to take my glasses, you're not stealing them.
	If I want you to take my glasses, you're not stealing them.
	Then you're like the guy who's driving past my house and I put a little table out there and said, free, take me, please.
	You take it. You didn't steal because I want you to take it.
	So stealing cannot be universally preferable behavior.
	Rape! Cannot be universally preferable behavior.
	Even if you were a crazy guy and you had a moral theory called rape is universally preferable behavior, then everybody must want to rape and be raped at the same time.
	But if you want to be raped, then it's not...
	I mean, it could be kinky role-playing or whatever, but it's not rape.
	Right? I mean, you may have a safe word involved, but it's not rape.
	Right? It's the same thing with assault.
	If everybody wants to assault and be assaulted...
	Then the category ceases to exist, and then it's like two boxes in a ring.
	They're both in there wanting to assault and be assaulted.
	They can't charge each other with assault.
	So rape, theft, assault, murder, these things cannot be universally preferable behavior.
	Now, the non-aggression principle can be universally preferable behavior.
	You and I can both be in the room and not...
	Be violent towards each other at the same time.
	You and I can both be in a room and respect each other's property rights.
	You and I can both be in the room and not rape each other and not kill each other and not assault each other.
	Rape, assault, theft, and murder cannot be universally preferable behaviors, but a ban on these things can be universally preferable behaviors.
	Indeed, it's the only thing that can be with regards to these Items.
	So I go into this in more detail in my book, but once you kind of just really, really work that through your brain, it takes a little while to get there, but you'll see that everything that we accept as moral can be universally preferable behavior.
	And so when people say, what is value?
	Well, values are universally preferable behaviors.
	Now, that doesn't mean everyone will prefer them all the time.
	That doesn't matter. If you want to lose weight, it's universally preferable that you eat less and exercise more.
	That doesn't mean everyone's going to do it.
	That's the reality, right?
	So just because these are universally preferable behaviors, they allow you to push back against immoral, self-contradictory, exploitive, and destructive moral systems.
	Moral lies, right?
	Moral falsehoods.
	When you can push back against destructive moral systems, you open the way to a truly free and benevolent society that does not assume human perfectibility or human perfection, but rather accepts that we are imperfect and therefore cannot handle power, and therefore the non-aggression principle should rule supreme, at least as much as it can.
	So I hope that helps.
	I know that that's a big, meaty, deep solution to the challenge of morality in the absence of gods and government.
	Because, you know, how do people deal with morals in the past?
	Well, first they said, well, God says so.
	But the problem is that's not philosophical.
	And if you don't believe in God, well, then you have no ethics with regards to those things.
	And the other thing that people say is, well, it's wrong.
	And therefore, the government will punish you for that.
	But that puts the power to define morality in the hands of the government, which is the least moral agency in the modern world.
	So I hope that helps. And again, for more on that, oh, I've got a book called Essential Philosophy.
	Again, it's free. Essentialphilosophy.com, where I go into this with platonic dialogues and examples, and hopefully that will clear it up.
	All right. So, you know, time flies.
	We're having fun. We're already an hour in here.
	Real quick, I actually want to ask you about a potential event.
	We're trying to create an event, basically a libertarian roundtable.
	We're going to have Adam Kokesh and most likely, depending on scheduling, Larry Sharp and Keith Knight.
	Is that something you might potentially be interested in?
	Oh, I love chatting with libertarians.
	So, yeah, I would be happy to chat with that.
	How is Adam, by the way?
	I have not heard from him in a while.
	He seems to be doing really good.
	He's engaged. And he seems pretty happy.
	Good. Good. Good to hear.
	Let's see. Gabe asks, could you name one comment you've made that you wish you could take?
	Oh, one comment that I've made that I wish I could take back?
	Mm-hmm. Ah.
	Um... Well, I mean, that's an interesting question, right?
	I mean, it's an interesting question, and...
	I'll give you a couple of examples, right, of things that have been willfully misinterpreted that I've said, right?
	So, you know, there's websites out there complaining that I said, I don't view humanity as a single species, right?
	Because apparently this is racist or something like that, right?
	So... I remember when I was on Joe Rogan for that third and final time, and Joe Rogan was like playing me back things that I'd said.
	And it was like, oh, I hope I didn't say anything crazy.
	But I don't. I don't say anything that's crazy.
	So when I heard about this, I went back and listened to the show.
	Like, I don't believe that humanity is a single species.
	I can't imagine saying that with regards to race, because it's not true.
	Races are subspecies, but they're still part of the human race, still part of the same species, right?
	Yeah. So I went back and listened to the show, and lo and behold, I wasn't talking about race at all.
	I was talking about the relationship between criminals and their victims, like a predator-prey relationship.
	So I was simply talking about, it was a biological analogy for the predator-prey relationship between criminals and their victims, right?
	Nothing to do with race. But of course, it's just that little snippet is taken out there.
	Now, do I wish I had never said that?
	Well, I don't really think that's the case because then I can't say anything.
	Because, you know, I'm aware, like I'm on this constant scroll of like, could they snip this?
	Could they snip this? Could they make this or that bad, right?
	So, that's sort of one example.
	The other was when I said that the breeding arena of the species needs to be cleaned the F up in a moment of passion, right?
	Now, of course, people hear that little snippet of, oh man, he's into eugenics cleaning up the breeding.
	It's like, that's not what I was talking about at all.
	Eugenics is a big giant government program, and gosh darn it, I'm an anarcho-capitalist, so I don't like big government programs.
	I was talking about...
	Not having abusive, crazy, and destructive people around your children when you're raising them, right?
	It's very, very important. So that's all I was talking about.
	So, you know, people have misinterpreted a whole bunch of stuff that I have said.
	I mean, it's willful. They're just trying to sort of make me look bad and all of that.
	And I think on one website I saw they even put in square brackets around something.
	They just inserted something they wanted, they wished I'd said rather than me.
	So when you think about it, I've been doing, like I've done...
	Well, I've done 5,000 shows.
	Not all of them have been released.
	But if the shows that have been released is like 4,500 shows, which is thousands and thousands of hours of me talking and interacting with people.
	And, you know, people have to go back to 2013 and they have to...
	Find some sentence, snip it up, take it out of context, and then repurpose it.
	So I gotta tell you, I'm pretty freaking proud of that.
	I'm pretty freaking proud that I've talked about really challenging and difficult issues in compassionate and sensitive and emotional ways.
	I mean, they can make up stuff.
	People always say, well, they quoted me out of context.
	It's like, but that is out of context.
	If I'm talking about criminals and their victims, which has nothing to do with race, and then people say, he's talking about race.
	It's like, that's just a lie.
	It's just false. People say I'm into eugenics when I'm talking about not having insane, destructive people around your children when they're growing up.
	That's not eugenics.
	There's no eugenics program that says have sane people around your children.
	I shouldn't laugh because eugenics is no laughing matter.
	But it's so ludicrous.
	So, you know, when these things erupt from time to time and, you know, these lies spread themselves across the internet and people believe them or whatever, and it's like...
	What can I do? Can I just not say anything because something could be taken out of context?
	I don't really think that's the answer and it's kind of an integrity test to people.
	And hopefully what it does is these lies about me that they bring people to my show.
	You know, like I'm sure there are people who are listening to this or watching this who think I'm some terrible guy, right?
	I mean, I have to please my conscience, not the trolls, right?
	I mean, this is like Socrates with his demon, right?
	His daemon, he said. Like, he just has to listen.
	If his conscience is bothering him, then—and it does for me sometimes, but not in any of this stuff, because I have spoken with honor and dignity and respect and compassion and with truthfulness about these difficult issues.
	So, I can't censor everything I say because people could slice and dice.
	That's surrendering your autonomy to trolls and liars and manipulators.
	So it is my hope, of course, that people hear these things and they say, oh my gosh, this guy is just the worst.
	And then they come and they listen, right?
	I mean, just want people to listen, right?
	And what happens?
	Well, they... They hear me talk and it's like, okay, well, that's a bit of an unusual idea, but he's not crazy.
	Okay, well, he's got some justifications for that.
	I don't really agree with it, but, you know, he's okay.
	I'm waiting for the evil.
	Nothing yet. Boy, he must be holding it in like a guy with the trots after an Indian meal, but nope.
	No, nothing yet. And eventually they're like, holy crap, this is a nice guy.
	I'm a nice guy. I'm a friendly guy.
	I'm a positive guy.
	I'm a happy guy. I love humanity.
	I love the world. I love the future.
	I love ethnicities. I love men and women and blacks and whites and Hispanic.
	I love us. I love us all. I just want us to get along and the only thing that can bring us together...
	Is the truth! And once we have the truth, we can stop hating each other and blaming each other and falling into this Marxist pit of having rage at each other for differences in group outcomes.
	You can't ever judge individuals, but you zoom out enough, you can judge groups, right?
	And not morally judge, but judge how they end up with different outcomes and have that as a question that can bring us together.
	So, ah, you know, do I regret saying stuff?
	I don't, you know, I mean, every now and then I'll say something that later turns out to be not true.
	I mean, the one that sort of pops into my mind, I think...
	I did a show called The Truth About Nelson Mandela, and I made a claim that he'd wanted to nationalize the banks, and I thought I had a good source.
	It turns out it wasn't a good source, and so I put a note in.
	So yeah, I mean, look, I've done thousands of shows.
	Every now and then I'm going to make a mistake, and what you do is you say, okay, I made a mistake, and here's the correction, and so on.
	I don't think that's a bad thing because to have that as a bad thing would be to say that perfection is a standard that is required.
	And, you know, come on. Certainly if the mainstream media comes at me about that after they blew up Iraq, it seems kind of silly about all of that.
	So I do believe that I have acquitted myself in a challenging intellectual field with honor and respect and dignity and the people who want to, you know, twist my words into something that's quite the opposite of their original meaning.
	Oh, one other thing.
	So it's kind of funny. I don't know if you guys remember way back in the day, there was something called Google +, which was Google's, I think, Facebook or Twitter or something like that.
	And it linked into your YouTube account or something like that.
	So I did a review of the movie Frozen that I was very, very pleased with.
	It's a great review of the movie.
	Lord knows I watched it enough with my daughter, so I got a lot of the themes.
	And there's this woman who quoted and had a very positive response to it.
	And I quoted it on Google Plus.
	And then somehow it ended up back on the YouTube comments.
	There was some backdoor pipeline or something like that that put it back on the YouTube comments.
	And it says, Stefan Molyneux via Google Plus.
	And then there's this woman's comment, right?
	And then, like for the last, gosh, when did that movie come out?
	For the last, like, half decade, there's this rumor been floating around the internet, racing around the internet sometimes, that I had a sock puppet account and logged on to this as myself and pretended to be a woman.
	I mean, I don't know what to say.
	I mean, you can actually go and find the woman's original comment.
	It's right there. Plus, it says in all the screenshots people say via Google +, right?
	So, I mean, do I wish I hadn't tweeted that?
	Do I wish I hadn't reposted that woman's comment to the now-defunct Google Plus?
	No. Because if you think, well, what if anything I do could have some negative repercussions?
	I mean, not that it's had hugely negative repercussions, just kind of an intelligence test, right?
	So, no, I mean, I think I've done pretty well overall.
	Overall, I think I have a good track record, and I haven't had to do a lot of retractions, and I am pleased and proud with what I have done with the show.
	All right.
	You mind if I ask a related question?
	Can you hear me?
	Yes, go ahead. Related question?
	Yeah, so something that's quite related.
	When considering immigration policies, do you think that individuals should be looked at on, you know, an individual basis and their qualifications?
	Well, I mean, the government can't do that.
	I mean, the government can't look at people at an individual basis at individual levels.
	My particular concern with immigration is that immigration in particular is harming the poorest members of Western societies.
	When you get lower-skilled people pouring into your economy, they're going to do one of two things.
	They're either going to go on welfare...
	And welfare raises taxes and welfare raises rents, right?
	Because people move into poor neighborhoods and they get subsidized housing and they get welfare to pay for it and all that.
	It harms the school system in many ways because especially when you get multi-languages coming into a school system, you have to divert hundreds of billions of dollars over time to deal with multi-language and multicultural issues, right?
	So it harms the poor the most.
	And, you know, the left used to pretend that they cared about the poor.
	They used to pretend that they cared about workers.
	And it's just, it's not true.
	Those who are looking to restrict or limit or end for the time being immigration, I mean, we're the ones who care about the poor.
	We're the ones who care about the communities that are in the most need of having their rents as low as possible, of having less congestion, of having better schools, of having higher wages.
	And immigration as well, of course, is not what it used to be in the 19th century where it was kind of make it or break it.
	Now, immigration, people aren't coming for freedom a lot of times.
	They're just coming for free stuff.
	It's a big giant government program of selling off the future wealth of the unborn for the sake of buying votes in the here and now.
	And it comes from both ends of the political aisle, right?
	The left loves immigrants because they tend to vote for socialism.
	They tend to vote for the left.
	And the right loves immigration because it tends to drive down wages.
	But if you can think about this, right?
	Think about the people in, the whites in South Africa are going through a terrible, terrible time and have been for quite some time.
	They are a significant minority now.
	It used to be parity of the population.
	Significant minority now.
	They are wildly discriminated against in the job market.
	Even though the whites are a small minority in South Africa, they are still discriminated.
	programs and they can't be hired.
	There are hundreds of thousands of whites living in shanty towns and ghettos because they can't get jobs.
	They're not allowed to get jobs.
	There are farm murders and the crime rates are horrific and South Africa is like the rape capital of the world.
	It's horrible, right?
	So if we're concerned about people who are living in a state of danger and being treated unjustly by the legal system of their society, and now they're just talking about outright land appropriation in South Africa and where's the compassion or help for them, right?
	Well, that's not the case because those people tend to be quite conservative and would vote for more conservative policies and programs, smaller government and free market policies.
	And also they speak English, and a lot of them are very skilled and professionals.
	So if you get a bunch of, let's say there were a bunch of lawyers from South Africa who wanted to come into America or Canada or whatever, well, they could probably get reaccredited pretty quickly.
	They speak English.
	And see, then they'd be driving down the wages of lawyers.
	Same thing with doctors.
	How many newspaper reporters are going to be threatened by somebody who comes in from Somalia?
	Well, they're not about to displace the newspaper reporters.
	They're displacing the manual laborers.
	They're displacing the people who work in convenience stores.
	They're displacing ditch diggers and so on for the most part, right?
	And so the sort of educated...
	Cultural and political elites, they're not being displaced.
	Their wages aren't being driven down.
	It's the poor. It's the people most in need of an economic system that works for them, that helps them get to the middle class.
	The middle class has shrunk catastrophically in the past half century.
	Catastrophically. From over 60% down to 40%.
	Middle class, America's being hollowed out.
	The West is being hollowed out.
	And a lot of it has to do with the fact that the path from poverty to the middle class is being hacked down regularly by mass immigration.
	It's brutal.
	And I think of the blacks in America who suffered so much under slavery, under segregation, under Jim Crow, and now being sold down the river by a godforsaken elite.
	That wants to import voters and change the electorate.
	Why? Because they can't change the minds of the electorate.
	And once more, the black community is being thrown under the bus for the sake of the mad pursuit of largely white political power.
	Monstrous. Monstrously unjust.
	And I don't want to speak for her, of course, but Candace Owens and Blexit are doing great work along these lines to try and wake people up to these basic realities.
	So these are just the facts on the ground.
	The people who helped build America, the people who helped build the West of every race, every color, every hue, those people...
	Need the freedoms. And they need increased wages.
	They need better working conditions.
	They need an incentive to change dysfunctional ways of life.
	And as long as this massive wave of endless immigration comes pouring in, those people are getting knocked back down to the bottom and they're staying there.
	That, I submit, is monstrous.
	That's it. Alright.
	Next question comes from Sensek.
	Sensek asks, how would an end-kept society deal with the coronavirus or epidemic?
	How does it apply to someone who is carrying a virus, knowingly or unknowingly?
	I'm sorry, I don't mean to laugh, because by God is it ever a serious issue.
	But, first of all, It is a statist society that has produced the disaster of the coronavirus.
	I mean, let's not kid ourselves about that.
	So the question as to whether or not it's an engineered bioweapon still remains largely open and probably will never be solved.
	But there's significant indications that this could be an accidentally, I assume, I hope, accidentally released bioweapon.
	Because China, you see, is a very, very big place.
	And China has just one highest level biological lab.
	China is enormous.
	And wouldn't you know it, this incredibly highly mutational virus with a reproduction rate of somewhere between 4 and 6.7 just happened to emerge in this giant country Just a couple of miles from the Wuhan laboratory.
	Oh my gosh, what a weird coincidence that is.
	Now, whether, as some believe, it was stolen from Western laboratories, whether it was invented there, extracted from bats, who knows?
	So if it was some kind of weapon that was released by accident...
	Well, that's not really a problem you can lay at the foot of a voluntary, peaceful, stateless society because that's a government program right there.
	But let's say it did come from bats, although the Chinese have for a variety of reasons, some to do with the famines of Mao, some to do with this traditional medicine garbage fantasy that they have.
	That, you know, various animals have properties that help various parts of the body, which is, you know, not scientific and just folklore garbage, right?
	So Chinese have been eating weird stuff for thousands of years, but just suddenly, by gosh, you know, right next to the Wuhan biolab, it emerges.
	But even if we say it was just some weird accidental mutation that came from bat soup or whatever the hell happened...
	It was the Chinese government that sat on it for week after week after week.
	And it's the Chinese government that, according to reports I'm getting from people in the region and people near the region, it's the Chinese government that is still arresting and threatening people who tell the truth about what's going on.
	And if it wasn't for social media, we wouldn't have a clue.
	So, the reality...
	is that the coronavirus and its spread around the world is the result of an excess of government and any government is an excess of government so let's let's be clear about that the problem is being caused by the state either because of the weapons thing and or because of the cover-up that continued for quite some time and still continuing now Let's look at how this would be handled in a free society.
	Well, in a free society, you would have insurance companies that would guarantee people's access to healthcare.
	Now, those companies would have a massive incentive to keep infected people away from their citizens.
	Why? Because if a lot of citizens get ill...
	They can't afford it.
	They'd go massively into debt.
	You'd have to sell the houses of the people who ran the company because there wouldn't be this garbage corporate shield that exists in the modern West where people can do the most appalling things with their corporations, yet their personal assets remain immaculately inviolate from repercussions.
	That would not exist.
	I would not do business with a bank that could drive It's savings into the ground, and then everybody would get to swan off with their yacht and mansion who was in charge.
	No way. I want...
	Like, I'll stop short of extracting their kidneys with a spoon, but everything else that can't be nailed down, I want going to the auction block if they screw up that bad.
	Not only do I not want bailouts, I want...
	Them to be wearing the proverbial barrel with a strap if they act that badly in the care and custody of the assets put into their control.
	But there would be massive incentives for the healthcare companies to make sure that people didn't come in.
	Now, what would they do? Well, they would pay people to go into quarantine and say, hey, man, I will give you a quarter of a million dollars to sit in a hotel room for a month.
	Why? Because it's way cheaper than the cost of infection.
	And they would be people working night and day to track people and find people and offer them massive sums to be quarantined.
	Because it's way cheaper. Now, the government doesn't have those incentives.
	And the government, of course, is now far more concerned with stopping the spread of imaginary racism than very real viruses because it's all politically correct garbage and because the Chinese have a big vote and a big sway in the economic life of the West and so the governments don't want to annoy them.
	Although it's funny because one can only be quote racist against the Chinese people who carry the coronavirus because China is a mono-ethnic state that puts Muslims in concentration camps and doesn't allow anyone else to live there.
	So you can only be racist against the Chinese because the Chinese are, by Western definitions, far more racist than Western countries.
	It's just one of these weird little paradoxes.
	But the economic impact does not accrue to the people who are letting people come into the country who might be infected.
	I mean, is any government official going to go bankrupt and lose his house because the infection spreads?
	No. And without these kinds of incentives, you're just going to get this weird politically correct garbage rather than things that actually keep people safe in the world.
	Alright. So our next question here, thanks for the good one, Sensek.
	Next question comes from Mike Escape.
	He's got a question that's near and dear to his heart.
	Mike, are you here? I am.
	Something about an aorta you said?
	Sorry. Bad joke. Bad joke.
	Sorry. It's Saturday.
	It's decaf. Go on.
	Oh, oftentimes this question is considered silly, but I do ask it of all the AMAs and all interviews I've participated in.
	And hopefully you don't get scrutinized over your answer, you know, but there's no real answer.
	It's just your answer. And the question is, a lion or a cheetah?
	Which would you rather fight? I would rather fight a cheetah.
	Yeah, I would rather fight a cheetah because...
	The lion has such size and strength and power that they could knock you over.
	And once you're on the ground, you know, prostate, I mean, they can have their way with your jugular pretty much as they see fit.
	A cheetah's main strength is its speed.
	And since I'm not going to be running from the cheetah, but rather turning to fight it, I would rather have a lighter animal that would be more susceptible to the swing of a stick than a lion would.
	And so, and of course, if the cheetah was running at me full tilt boogie, I'm going to be able to dodge a little bit more effectively and efficiently.
	So, yeah, I would much rather fight a cheetah if I had to choose.
	And also, of course, cheetahs are solitary hunters.
	And I know you said lion, but lions generally hunt in packs.
	And so once you're surrounded by lions, I mean, you can see them take down an elephant.
	You're pretty much toast. But...
	I think you would have a fairly reasonable shot.
	You know, it's like a story that I remember, or a question that I remember.
	Let me ask you back this, right?
	bounce this one back so would you rather fight a pit bull or a two-foot shark in the water that's a good question it is uh What kind of water are we in?
	Well, let's just say that, you know, you were a ways out, I don't know, like 500 yards off, you know, fairly shallow, whatever, you could stand or whatever, but yeah, there's a two-foot shark in the water, or you'd have a pit bull on land.
	Right. My first instinct would be the pit bull, since I'm more natural in that environment, versus in the water, that's the shark's environment.
	Yeah, no, I think that's quite right.
	You can do something to escape the pit bull, even if it's just climb a tree, but you're kind of stuck with the shark, right?
	Right. And a pit bull biting you, while really very unpleasant, would not necessarily bring a lot of other animals, but a shark that bites you blood in the water, who knows what else could be around, right?
	Right, and then if they did get a hold of you, a pit bull can't drag you off at speed where you don't have a lot of control, right?
	And versus a shark, which could take you...
	But not a two-foot shark probably couldn't drag you too far.
	No, no. Yeah, I think you're right about the environment issue.
	The environment is pretty key.
	You're much more used to fighting things on land.
	And of course, on land, you can generally get a hold of a weapon of some kind, right?
	Something that you can hit with.
	But underwater, you can't see, you know?
	I mean, it's really hard to, you know, and they move really, really fast and all of that.
	So anyway, it's just sort of an interesting question I remember when I was a kid.
	Also, I think, you know, I could distract a pit bull with a treat in my pocket.
	I am a treat.
	Is that a treat in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?
	Yeah, I get it. That sounds vaguely like bestiality, which was not my intention.
	Oh, look, there's something else that people can clip and put on a website somewhere.
	So our next question comes from the user Lido.
	They ask, how can we combat the rising threat of AI? That is very interesting, I guess.
	And now, is this someone who is online?
	Yeah, let me see if it's in the chat.
	Did you want to ask a clarifying?
	No, no, I just, I mean, what is the threat with AI that he's considering?
	I don't really understand what the threat is.
	I assume it's automation and replacing jobs?
	Well, did he walk over to your house to deliver that question?
	Did he hire someone?
	Did he send it by mail when we announced this a week ago?
	Because that would have helped employ people.
	I mean, why would he ask this in the chat when he could have hired someone to deliver it to you?
	Doesn't he like that person's job?
	Come on. I mean, if it wasn't for technology, we'd have to have this as a conference and people would have to fly in and we'd have to hire a conference room and we'd have to hire, well, security these days, right?
	We'd have to do all of this crazy stuff.
	Why are we doing this online when, you know, do we not care about people's jobs?
	You know, it's kind of funny. Everybody likes eliminating other people's jobs when it's suitable to them, but when their job gets eliminated, suddenly it's the worst thing in the world, right?
	So just, you know, this is the general principle when it comes to philosophy as a whole, man.
	Don't think about theory.
	I mean, I know this sounds kind of weird, talking about philosophy.
	Don't really think about theory.
	Think about, first thing you want to do is, what are you doing?
	And I don't mean this in an accusatory fashion, right?
	So what are you doing, right?
	So, you know, if you drive to go and pick up your groceries, man, you're stealing someone's job because you could hire someone.
	To go and pick up your groceries.
	If you have a problem with your computer and you fix it yourself, man, you've just stolen a job from the Geek Squad, right?
	If you grow your own food, my gosh, what are you, crazy?
	That's terrible, right?
	If you don't buy a car, my gosh, you just stole all these jobs from the people who make cars and all that, right?
	So don't think about these big abstractions.
	Think about how it is That you deal with and act in your life, right?
	I mean, I've sort of had this funny sort of thought.
	I mean, it's probably nonsense.
	I'm sure it is nonsense, right?
	But I sort of thought, okay, what would life be like for me if there wasn't sort of podcasting and videos and all of this kind of stuff?
	Like, what would my life be like? And I remember, so when I was younger, I've always enjoyed listening to sort of audiobooks and speeches through audio and stuff like that, right?
	And I used to have to do this.
	On cassette tapes, which is like really going back in the day.
	I didn't really do it on 8-tracks, but I used to do this on cassette tapes.
	C60, 60 minutes of tape, good.
	C90, ooh, you get extra music, but you're risking it because the tape gets really, really thin and could wound into your cassette player.
	C120, yeah, three plays and you're doomed, right?
	But I remember thinking, okay, I've done 4,500 shows, so this would be...
	Like a, I don't know, like a 10 by 10 foot case of audio tapes that people would have to order rather than being able to download stuff pretty easily on your phone or your computer.
	You can go to fdrpodcast.com for sort of more on that, right?
	To get the show.
	So, or, you know, if that wasn't possible, I guess I could go to people's houses, knock on their door and say, hey, Would you like to talk philosophy at all?
	I've got this really cool system of ethics, you know, Jehovah's Witness style, right?
	Just knock up on the door. Hey, I've got some good news for you.
	I've solved the problem of secular ethics.
	And then people would say yes or no, but I'd be like door-to-door philosophy guy, you know, maybe sell you a vacuum or two, some encyclopedias to go along with it, right?
	But that would be my life.
	I mean, it wouldn't be my life because I couldn't make a litig at that probably, right?
	I mean, the JDS do, but that's a different kind of gig, right?
	So all progress eliminates jobs.
	I mean, that's just going to happen.
	If you look at 100 years ago in America, 90% of the population was involved in farming or delivery of farm goods or transportation of farm goods.
	Like 90% of the population.
	Do you know what it is now? About 2%.
	So America went from 90% farm jobs to 2%, and I think it's even lower than that now.
	This was about 10 years ago.
	It's about 2% or 1.5%, right?
	90% to 1.5%.
	Where did everyone go?
	I mean, do you have 80% unemployment?
	No. Jobs will get eliminated all the time.
	That's called progress. It really is called progress.
	If you ever want to get a sense of this, you can pick up the first season of Downton Abbey, and you can see just how many people it used to take to run a household.
	And it was mental.
	Now, when I was...
	First in the business world, there were these quaint things called secretaries or receptionists.
	And every big boss had an employee, usually a woman, who worked for him, who took phone messages and scheduled appointments and typed up documents and handled his mail.
	And, like, it was a big deal.
	Millions and millions of women.
	You may remember something, if you've really gone back in time, called shorthand, which was you would dictate something And the woman would write it down, and she would write it down in shorthand so that you wouldn't have to go slowly, and shorthand was a way of transcribing someone in real time.
	And then she would type it up, and, you know, back in the day when I first took typing, was the only damn useful thing I ever took in school when I was a kid, was a typing class.
	You know, if you wanted to center something, you didn't just...
	Hit CTRL-E or whatever it is on the Mac.
	If you wanted to center something, let's say it was 20 characters, well you'd have to count in.
	If you go to the middle, count back half the 20 characters, this was the deal.
	I remember the first time that I saw the output from a laser printer, because back in the day you'd had these dot matrix printers, which would be these things striking against these ribbons to actually create impressions.
	And you couldn't really do fonts and you couldn't do graphics or really anything like that.
	I mean, these big giant snoopy graphics which went on for page after page.
	So, and I remember the first time someone showed me a computer that could do a laser printed document and the amount of, if you ever did reveal codes in WordPerfect 5.1, you'd see, like, just the amount of programming he had to do to output a document.
	There was no WYSIWYG, right?
	Like, what you see is what you get.
	It was nuts.
	There was no preview, just to keep printing and trying, right?
	So, just to take the secretaries, there were millions and millions of secretaries across America, and then what happened was you started to get automated voicemail systems, you started to get computers, you started to get email.
	For those, some people who like to use it, I love to use it.
	There's voice dictation and all of this kind of stuff, right?
	Now, nobody said, my God, we can't let voicemail systems and computers and email occur because all of these secretaries can lose their jobs.
	Well, yeah, they did get weaned off slowly and they lost their jobs over time and they retrained and they did other things.
	This is tough.
	This is tough.
	But the alternative is what?
	The alternative is stasis and stagnation.
	The alternative is to go back to the Middle Ages, where everyone was tied to their job, where you weren't allowed to compete with each other.
	You know, in the Middle Ages, you could get in trouble with the local authorities by pretending to sneeze when someone walked past your stall at the local medieval fair.
	Because if you pretended to sneeze, then someone would say, God bless you, and you'd say, thank you very much, and then you might get into a conversation about what to sell them.
	That's how restrictive the medieval guilds were.
	Do you want to go back to that?
	Because, you know, medieval life, despite what Jay Dyer says, you know, it had a couple of negatives too, you know, like half the population dying before the age of five, you know, little things like that.
	60% of Europe dying under the Black Death, right?
	So, automation.
	The problem is not automation.
	The problem is that we have a system That has created a near permanent underclass of people who have a very, very difficult time finding a way to flourish in a modern economy.
	And you can sort of look back to the opening of idiocracy for this in a very graphic way.
	We have been paying people to have more and more kids with fewer and fewer skills and fewer and fewer opportunities.
	The schools have been getting worse.
	The way that it should work, of course, is that the smartest people should have the most babies.
	But because of propaganda and because of some economic incentives and so on, the smartest people have been having the fewest babies and the least smart people have been having the most babies.
	Now, the problem is that automation is coming whether we like it or not.
	And if it was the case that we had a free system, then...
	It would be like I've talked about with the Jews, right?
	So with the Jews, sorry, everyone gets tense when I say this.
	It's nothing bad, right? But the science is pretty clear that the smartest Jews had the most children for like 700 years.
	And they can tell this. The rabbis were the smartest in general because you had to know so many languages and so much history.
	And the smartest Jews had the most kids.
	And so Jews have ended up with a very talented and intelligent group of people.
	And we have, you know, I hate eugenics, I hate dysgenics.
	Both of them are giant government programs that produce moral horrors and huge problems in society.
	The problem is not that we have automation coming.
	The problem is that we have a social policy that drives society against the possibilities that automation can produce.
	And Those of us who've been against the welfare state as immoral and destructive from the very beginning, well, you know, we have a clear conscience with regards to all of this.
	Now, the solution to this is always peaceful.
	The solution to this is always voluntary.
	The solution to this should be to...
	Stop the welfare state.
	To stop the massive redistribution of income.
	To remind people that parenting is wonderful and it's not a low-rent breeder situation to have and enjoy.
	Listen, I'm a smart guy. I have loved being a parent more than just about anything else in my life.
	I love being married to my wife.
	I love being the father of my daughter.
	And I love talking to you people on Twitter.
	A wonderful Saturday night.
	These are great glories of my existence.
	So if I'm a smart guy and I really enjoy being a parent, the idea that, oh, you're just going to be a breeder, a broodmare, that's just a completely sociopathic view of parenthood, like you're just some matrix-style vat that produces babies.
	Come on, we're not freaking alligators here.
	We're supposed to nurture and care for our young, and it's a beautiful thing to do.
	So, yeah, the solution to all of this is freedom.
	It is opportunity for people who are no longer on welfare, and it's voluntary charity for people who can't make it.
	And that's the only way that we're going to get through this in any kind of peaceful way.
	All right. And so just again, for people who want your fireside chats, they should go to FDR podcast.com.
	Yeah, so you can go to freedomain.com.
	That's where the majority of what you can get from me is.
	You can also go to fdrpodcast.com if you're kind of an audio guy, and you can subscribe there through the various subscription services and so on from that.
	But I hope we're not done yet, man.
	I'm just getting warmed up here. So, yeah, we're actually almost two hours in.
	We can go as long as you'd like.
	If you'd want to, just tell me when you need to go to bedtime, whatever it is.
	When to go to bedtime? Dude, I'm 53, I'm not 80.
	It's 946.
	I'm going to need some Ovaltine and an eyepatch.
	Yeah, just let me know.
	If you wouldn't mind, I'd like to talk a little bit about scheduling that roundtable before we finish up here.
	Yeah, so I want to get back into these questions here.
	Serenity now is someone who's been a fan of yours for a while.
	And they said they've had an issue with...
	It's awkward to say, but masturbation, and they thought your videos have been the last one, and they want to know more specifically.
	I'm sorry, just right after you said masturbation, I'm afraid you cut out for a second there, and I have a feeling that this is something I don't want to guess the missing words.
	Okay, so they've been a fan of mine for a while.
	They've had trouble with masturbation.
	Does that mean they've had trouble masturbating to my videos per se?
	Or is there something else to it?
	Like, should I take my top off?
	Or should I sell them some bathwater?
	Like, what's the goal here?
	I just want to make sure I understand the issue.
	Yeah, they're hoping to get some bathwater to help with that.
	No. So they were saying that your videos have been...
	But they'd like to know more specifically, what is the relationship between emotions and temptations?
	You could have asked that in a more abstract way without thinking about me imagining you starting a crotch fire like you're trying to light up a match or something.
	All right. Well, so, okay, why do we need reason?
	Why do we need philosophy? Because the animal, while an essential part of our existence, is not going to lead us to long-term happiness.
	You know, if we had the lifespan of rabbits, we could bang like rabbits and be happy that we didn't have to worry too much about our retirement.
	But, you know, life is long.
	You know, somebody the other day on Twitter was like, hey, man, life is short.
	It's like, no, it's not. It's really not.
	It's a long-ass time to be alive.
	You know, if you're lucky, you make it 80, 90, 100 years or whatever.
	That's a long-ass time to be alive.
	It's kind of what I remind people, what I remind women, right, about how, you know, you go mostly infertile at 40 and you still got another 40 or 50 years to go.
	What are you going to do? We don't have any family and your sexual market value is going to collapse and no one's going to want to really date you except maybe guys who are 70 who want you to creak their way into the great eternity.
	And so, yeah, life is long.
	You've got to plan for it, right? So, you know, we all have appetites.
	You know, my particular nemesis is a buffet.
	I've got to stay away from buffets because I grew up poor and hungry.
	So for me, a buffet is a chance to just stuff myself stupid because winter is coming and you never know what you're going to eat again.
	You know, all of these old tropes that are sort of ground into your Spinal fluid, it seems, by early childhood experiences and all that.
	So I have to really restrain myself when I'm at a buffet.
	And, you know, I'm pretty good at it now.
	You know, I weigh less now than I did when I was 18, so I'm doing okay.
	And it hasn't all just redistributed, so I'm doing okay with weight and all that.
	So with temptation, you know, whether it's food or masturbation or having an affair or whatever it is.
	Right now, look, I mean, masturbation is...
	It's not a moral evil.
	I mean, you're not breaking a contract with yourself.
	You're not initiating the use of force unless you're flogging yourself, in which case, well, you're initiating the use of force against yourself, which may be unpleasant and distasteful and not great, but it's not a violation of the non-aggression principle.
	So, you know, as far as morals go, you know, it's not that big a deal.
	With regards to other temptations that have sort of more moral qualities to them, are you tempted to steal?
	Are you tempted to be abusive?
	Are you tempted to be violent? Well, these things will give you short-term satisfaction at the cost of long-term stability and happiness, right?
	I mean, so I just want to give you an example of something I talked about on Twitter just yesterday or the day before, I think it was, where I said that women who have sex with you quickly do so in order to cover up their personality disorders, right? It's kind of true, right?
	And some guy was talking about this very powerful statement where he said, we used to view sex as a drug.
	The endorphins released as a drug.
	And, you know, you had to really manage access to this drug, which was why you had to get married and be in a monogamous relationship and so on to get access to this drug, because it's very powerful, right?
	And it is, I mean, sexuality and sex and the joys of sexual activity and orgasm, it's very close, it's very bonding, very powerful, high trust, high value, and a beautiful part of life.
	It makes up for taxation, I guess you could say.
	And... If a woman is going to give up sex really quickly, it's because she wants you to overlook reasons why you might not want to date her.
	And if you want to know who's a quality woman to be with, it's the woman who says, you know, she has like a three-month rule or maybe it's a six-month rule.
	And it's like, you know, we've got to get to know each other.
	We've got to find out if I like you because, you know, it's a dangerous thing, particularly for a woman, to put yourself in a sexual position.
	I mean, you're naked. You're pinned under some guy usually.
	And if you don't know much about him, it could be a dangerous, you know, looking for Mr.
	Goodbar kind of situation. I mean, there are a lot of freaks and creeps out there, right?
	And you don't know if that person has an STD. You don't know if they secretly enjoy hurting women.
	You don't know if they secretly enjoy getting women pregnant and then just buggering off.
	Who knows, right? Could be, you know, poking a hole in the condom for all you know, right?
	Might slip off the condom right at the end and something awful could happen, right?
	Whether it's an STD or an unwanted pregnancy is tough, right?
	So... Why do we say no to that kind of temptation?
	Well, of course, for a man, like, you want to have sex.
	And for a woman, you want to have sex, too, right?
	But why would you say no?
	Because the costs of that kind of sexual activity are enormous.
	They could be explicit or implicit, right?
	So the costs could be explicit in terms of, you know, STDs, stalking, danger, violence, you know, weird attachments.
	It could be any number of things.
	It could also be the case, of course, that For a guy, you sleep with some woman quickly.
	It turns out she's got some psycho boyfriend and she didn't tell you about it.
	He finds out. Next thing you know, you've got to move town.
	There's crazy stuff that goes on in the world out there.
	And so these are all things that you have to think about.
	Getting to know someone... So, you know, if you go around having a lot of sex really early, again, you're really rolling the dice.
	And the explicit stuff can be dangerous.
	The implicit stuff is even more hazardous, particularly for women, that divorce is dick-dependent, right?
	It's the triple D, right?
	Not the triple Ds you like, but the dick-dose-dependent, right?
	The more dicks you have, the more likely you are to divorce, the less likely you are to have a stable relationship.
	And so for a woman in particular, I don't think the studies have been done for men.
	I think men can survive promiscuity better because we're sort of more designed for it just in terms of sperm and egg ratio.
	But for women to have a lot of sexual partners renders them...
	Too risky to marry given the current family court situation and it's really tragic.
	So in which case what's happened is they had maybe a little bit more sex when they were younger but then they're going to face this massive desert of being 40 plus and not really having much sex at all.
	So it's like okay well you had some sex now and you don't have sex then for the last half of your life or at least not much and that's pretty tragic.
	You end up being maybe a practice trampoline for the youngins and all that but that's about it and it's pretty humiliating.
	So, when it comes to temptation, it's just a matter of time preference, right?
	Like, to take a silly example, nobody who's condemned to death who gets a last meal worries about their cholesterol or whether they're going to gain weight, right?
	Because they're going to be dead in six hours or whatever, right?
	So, then you don't really have to worry about it so much, right?
	And you have to think about the long-term consequences of what it is that you're doing, assuming you're not focusing on a moral issue, in which case, you know, like it's a moral issue and it's an absolute.
	But when it comes to temptation, if you are, let's say, addicted to masturbation, okay, well, what does that mean?
	Well, that means that Especially if you're using pornography, it means that you're going to probably end up with erectile dysfunction.
	You're going to be fearful of having real sex with a real person.
	You're losing the drive and desire to go out there and talk to women, I assume, if you're a man, right?
	And so you're basically going to develop a very firm handshake and a life of sexual isolation and despair.
	Well, that's... That's not fun.
	Will you give up some fat-based orgasmic pleasure in the here and now in order to enter into a mature, enjoyable sexual relationship that can last the rest of your life?
	It seems like a pretty good deal to me.
	So these may be things that you just want to hold on to and hang in the balance when you're making those kinds of decisions.
	And the deferral of gratification is the foundation of civilization.
	Listen to Stefan. He will get you laid, somebody says.
	Yeah, yeah. No kidding. You don't want to be able to snap a tennis racket and not be able to open a door for a woman.
	All right. That's it.
	See, at least one of us was uncomfortable with that topic.
	Probably should have been both of us, but all right.
	Alright, so our next question comes from Jordan.
	What might be the issues of men who seek sex and disregard morals but still value a long-term relation?
	What should the person do to achieve a successful relationship but still crave sex and money?
	Okay, that seemed to be working both ends of the candle, so to speak.
	So can you just read through that again and make sure I understand?
	Yeah. What might be the issues of men who seek sex and disregard more but still value a long-term relationship?
	What should the person do to achieve a successful relationship but still crave sex and money?
	Oh, yeah, okay. So first of all, you know, we all crave sex.
	I mean, dudes in particular, but yeah, we all crave sex.
	So that's, you know, if crave sex is not really an issue, right?
	So the question is, do you want...
	The most and the best sex in your life or the way that you do that is in a long-term committed relationship, marriage in general, right?
	That's where you're going to get the best and longest and most enjoyable sex, right?
	So, you know, if you want sex, then, you know, find a great woman and get married and learn what each other like and all those kinds of cool things, right?
	So that's...
	I don't see that as an either or.
	Well, you know, what if I want a lot of sex?
	Okay, well then... Get married, you know, and stay in shape and eat well and, you know, keep your diamond-hard youthful boner pointing at North Star from here to eternity, right?
	So that's what I would say, that it's not an either-or situation.
	And that's the best that you can get out of life with regards to sexual activity.
	It's not just my opinion.
	There's some good facts behind this.
	All right. Anything else with regards to this or any other topic that's in your mind?
	We've got tons of them.
	So, Francisca writes, You said that you can't decide immigration question on an individual basis.
	What if the love of your life is in another country?
	Should you not be able to immigrate, assuming you want your kids to grow up with both parents around?
	Also, greetings from Denmark.
	From where? Denmark? Yep.
	Ah, Denmark, where people are surprisingly fat.
	Well, look, stop dating people from other countries.
	God's sake. Like, it's not complicated, right?
	There are no nice people in your neighborhood?
	Come on. I mean, this idea that, oh, the love of my life is in another country, it's like, well...
	Of course, if there was no such thing as this endless immigration, you wouldn't be getting involved with people from another country.
	You'd be like everyone else, and you'd pretend to want to stay in touch if you met someone and had a fling overseas, and you never would bother.
	So this is an effect of mass immigration, not a justification for it.
	Okay. Let's see here.
	There was a good, interesting question here about Neuralink.
	Yes, Richard writes, what is your stance on Elon Musk's company called Neuralink?
	It is basically a small computer connected to tiny wires inside your head.
	With it, he claims he can modify memories, muscle movement, and our vision.
	Oh, my God. I don't know much about that.
	And Elon Musk is one of these Shakespearean figures of significant light and significant darkness all combined into one.
	He shouldn't have called that guy a pedo if I remember the story correctly.
	And I think he's done some pretty dicey things in the business world, though he is, of course, a man of enormous energy and talent.
	I don't know much about this company, but I will tell you this.
	Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer a little old willpower, knowledge, wisdom, and philosophy when it comes to altering my behavior.
	I don't necessarily want to jam a nine-volt battery up my ass and pretend that I've been enlightened.
	Okay.
	Let's see.
	All right.
	Don says, thank you very much, Stefan.
	You helped thousands of people here in Brazil.
	I'm one of them. And in the name of some Christian community, libertarian Christian communities, I helped to form here in Brazil.
	We have been growing steadily for a number of years now, despite a few setbacks.
	Oh, sorry. That wasn't an extra question.
	I just wanted to say thanks for that. No, I appreciate that.
	That's always nice to hear.
	And, you know, I'm pretty private with my emails, but I wish you guys could see the inbox.
	I mean, people say, well, how do you keep going?
	You know, it's tough out there.
	And it's like, yeah, it is tough out there, but it's beautiful in here.
	And that's where I get my sustenance.
	All right. And Mole writes, hypothetically, If anthropogenic climate change is a problem, would there be a role for government in our current world?
	Would there be a role for government?
	No, no, no.
	No, come on. I mean, that's like saying, well, if slavery was economically efficient, would you support it?
	It's like it's a moral issue.
	It's not a practical issue.
	The issue with government is moral.
	Government is a violation of the non-aggression principle.
	And if you think that you can get a positive long-term good effect from a fundamental evil, then you're on a different moral planet than I live on.
	I don't care about what disaster could possibly justify massive systemic and fundamental violations of the non-aggression principle.
	Maybe you're concerned about the temperature 100 years from now and you're willing to sell off your freedoms and the economic futures of the unborn, but dear God alive, even by the government's own numbers, Even by the government's own numbers, they're going to spend $100 trillion to affect the future temperature by about half a degree Celsius in 100 years.
	Come on. Boy, that's crazy.
	That's crazy. So, yeah, I get it.
	I get it. I get it.
	I mean, parts per billion, parts per million, CO2, yeah, it's over 400.
	Yeah, all right. So what?
	Do you know that there have been times in the planet's history...
	Where the concentration of CO2 was 8,000 parts per million?
	20 times higher than it is now.
	Do you also know that the planet is constantly losing carbon dioxide?
	Because trees fall over, they get buried, and not as many trees grow up.
	So the planet is constantly, the world is constantly losing carbon dioxide.
	Human beings, out of the enormous goodness of our heart, rescued the planet by digging up that CO2 and releasing it back into the atmosphere so that plants don't die.
	You understand, at around 150 parts per million, plants die.
	And we were heading down that way.
	We have saved the planet with SUVs.
	It's incredible what we have done.
	We are a giant healing bomb on the CO2-starved greenery of the entire planet.
	We have done a magnificent job of saving the world and all life on it.
	Because, you know, the plants go, we all go, right?
	So we've done an immensely wonderful job of digging all that CO2 up.
	Releasing it back into the air and saving all of plant life, all animal life, all ocean life, and all of humanity.
	We have done it just by idling our cars at a gas station.
	I mean, it really is an amazing, beneficial, wonderful job that we've done for the planet as a whole.
	So yeah, we were running out of CO2. We're digging it up.
	We're putting it back out there.
	And lo and behold... The plants are loving it.
	Plant growth is up enormously.
	You know, there's a reason why they put plants in greenhouses to do really well.
	As human population goes up, this is how amazing the planet is.
	What makes you believe in a benevolent creator and designer?
	It's how amazing the planet is.
	As the population of human beings go up, you release more CO2 in the atmosphere, which allows us to grow more crops to feed the people who are new.
	That's incredible. There's no...
	I mean... If the planet was subject to these runaway situations, there would be no life.
	It would have gone to one extreme or another.
	The planet is a self-balancing mechanism, right?
	More CO2 means more plants which consume more CO2 and produce more oxygen and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	We know all of this, right?
	And of course, if you want...
	Okay, here's my solution as well, right?
	If you want the government to solve...
	The climate issues. Then the government needs to do two things.
	Number one, stop immigration.
	Because immigration takes people from low-carbon footprint countries to high-carbon footprint countries.
	And the second thing is, stop borrowing and printing money.
	Because borrowing money is producing massive increases in consumption of our scarce resources in the here and now.
	Oh, also, stop foreign aid.
	Which is paying people to have way too many children, which can't be sustained because foreign aid is all coming out of debt.
	It's paying people to have way too many children in countries, which is also bad for the environment.
	So, yeah, there's lots of things that the government can do, mostly to do with not doing things that the government does.
	All right. And Punished Jokey asks, what are your thoughts on brave anti-fighting against fascism everywhere?
	I'm sorry, you're going to have to run that one by me again.
	What are your thoughts on brave Antifa soldiers fighting against fascism every day?
	Oh man, it's bad.
	Oh, don't get me started.
	So, gosh, I mean, I guess my first real encounter is with the...
	I don't want to say all the leftist extremists are Antifa and blah blah blah, but just, you know, for whatever we want to...
	There's a formal organization and then, I guess, informal organization.
	Then there's just a general mindset, right?
	So to just lump them all in one category, right?
	So the far-left activists, the first time I really encountered them was last summer, summer before last, when I was doing a speaking tour with Lauren Sutherland in Australia and New Zealand.
	And, yeah, it was monstrous.
	It was absolutely... It was feral.
	It was brutal.
	I mean, they attacked people.
	They attacked buses. They tried to tip buses over.
	They threw giant batteries at bus windows.
	I mean, it was just monstrous.
	And we couldn't even speak in New Zealand because of various threats.
	And so, anyway, then I tried to give another speech...
	In Vancouver, I was going to speak at a university there.
	We were chased out of there with violent threats.
	I was going to speak at a church, but there was aggression against the church members.
	The church members phoned the cops.
	Cops never even showed up. And I said, look, this is bad.
	You think they're going to stop at me?
	You think they're going to stop at me? Come on.
	Now, now, as far as I understand it, the far-left activists have shut down significant amounts, if not all, of rail travel across Canada.
	Well, that's interesting.
	Now, a lot of the chemicals that are used to purify the water supply are delivered by train, which means that this could have some negative or threatening effect on the water supply to Canadian cities.
	Yeah, well, you know, I'm half and half.
	I'm like, oh, gosh, that's really terrible.
	And the other thing is, well, you know, this is what happens when you don't listen to your philosophers.
	This is what happens when you don't listen to your philosophers.
	You think they just shut me down and that's it?
	They just go home and they're all done?
	You know, they shut me down and nobody really came to my defense.
	Few people, but not many.
	And now, because you're thirsty for virtue, you might get thirsty for actual safe drinking water.
	It's not good. But, you know, if people don't listen to reason, they have to listen to bitter experience.
	I didn't make those rules, but I sure as hell can't break them.
	All right. Anything else?
	All right. Next question we've got is from user Kasky.
	They want to know, why are you so obsessed with fertility?
	First of all, the word obsessed is about as intellectually stimulating as the word creepy.
	It's not an obsession.
	It's not creepy at all. No, come on.
	I'm laughing because they said it's a bit creepy.
	No, yeah, yeah, they said it's a bit creepy, I guess.
	It's like this metronome.
	Like, everyone thinks they're so original, but when you're like the sort of central hub of like these radiating spokes, like think of a bike wheel, like the central hub and all these spokes that go out, right?
	So everyone, all of the spokes think that they're being so original, right?
	But when you're at the center, like I got 450,000 followers on Twitter, I got 925,000 on YouTube, I got a bunch on Facebook and other places, right?
	Right. So, you know, this is not anyone's fault.
	It's just the reality. You need to get this view from time to time.
	It's that everyone thinks they're being so original.
	You know, most times you're not.
	And you're obsessed.
	It's creepy. Twitter's business model should just be to charge 10 cents for everyone who responds with creepy and obsessed when it comes to basic facts about biology that have been suppressed by nasty people in the media, right?
	Well, I don't need to say nasty people in the media.
	I just need to say the media.
	I think everything else is implied.
	So, no, I'm not obsessed with fertility.
	I think that...
	It's nice to be alive.
	You know, it's a good thing your mom was interested in fertility.
	It's a good thing your dad was interested in fertility.
	Otherwise, you might not be around to type brain-dead stuff like creepy and obsessive into a chat window.
	What's creepy? I'll tell you what's creepy.
	What's creepy is when you see the mainstream media talking about motherhood Child raising.
	The continuance of the four billion year march out of the single-celled subterranean lake that we all started from, the four billion year march, which only continues if you blow a load near an egg.
	What's really creepy is to see that referred to as Well, women are more than just broodmares.
	Women are more than just egg repositories.
	More than just incubators.
	More than just breeding machines.
	It's like, what the hell is your major malfunction, you bunch of sociopaths?
	I'm not talking about the guy or girl who asked this question.
	Sorry, I did too many tough guy voices.
	I've got to take a swig of water here, but...
	That's creepy as hell. It's creepy as hell to talk about the joys of having, raising, and morally instructing, and intellectually instructing, and learning from, and laughing from, with, and playing with a child.
	A beautiful fruit of your fertility.
	To create life, to create a mind.
	To populate it with all of the bright lights of joy, happiness, wisdom, and virtue that you can summon.
	That that process is referred to As being an incubator.
	That is like cold-ass, freaky, Terminator-style, deep-rooted, empty-headed, soulless psychopathy.
	Now that's creepy.
	Saying to women, oh, you should go and work in a cubicle and grind your way through Excel spreadsheets and just freeze your eggs for later.
	That is creepy.
	That is saying, you know what?
	It's probably a good idea to have kids when you're young and your eggs are plentiful and you're healthy.
	You've got lots of energy and you can bounce back and lose the weight pretty easily and you can play with your kids.
	My daughter's 11. I had kids late.
	I'm not talking out of turn here.
	I know what it's like on the other side of things.
	I'm 53. I'm a smidge creaky.
	My daughter's like, hey, let's go play in the snowbank.
	And I'm like, I will.
	I will because I love you, but it's, you know, it's making me feel a little creaky.
	Have kids when you're younger.
	It's not, you know, I'm glad.
	It worked out well for me as a parent because I got to stay home doing the show and spend more time with her.
	So that's great. But what's wrong with saying to women, these are the facts?
	Yeah, look, I didn't make these rules, man.
	This is just nature. If you're a woman and you're 30, 90% of your eggs are dead.
	If you're 40, 98% of your eggs are dead, and the ones that are left, you know, they're...
	I'm not saying you're necessarily going to give birth to a pterodactyl, but, you know, they're a little creaky, a little risky, right?
	The risks of genetic disorders, the risks of Down syndrome, autism, like, it's higher.
	Getting pregnant is tougher in your 30s, and it's virtually impossible in your 40s.
	These are facts. And there's all of this antinatalist, have kids later, have promiscuous sex, don't worry about it, enjoy your youth.
	Go find yourself.
	You know how you find yourself?
	Have some babies. Find yourself as a parent, as a mother, as a father.
	Then you won't have to worry about finding yourself because you'll already be there.
	Your life, oh, why does my life not, how do I get meaning in my life?
	Create, grow, and instruct the human mind.
	That's meaning. That's life.
	That's purpose. That's value.
	And I can't help but notice that all the people who are complaining about me talking about the joys of creating life are alive themselves.
	It's the greatest cure for selfishness you can imagine to just have some children and love them as I hope you were loved when you were a child.
	What's creepy is saying to an entire population, stop having children.
	Be selfish.
	Be barren.
	Be lonely.
	Be isolated.
	Be unimportant to anyone past your sexual prime.
	What's creepy is hiding all of the very powerful, deep, and important stories of all the women who gave up family and motherhood and childhood.
	Why? To be some corporate drone in the veal-fattening fluorescent pens of corporate profitability?
	Giving up the continuance of a 4 billion year long chain of being for the sake of grinding out some TPS report on a depressed Saturday night?
	And trying to grab some guy And have him take you to some Blanche Dubois dark restaurant and not laugh too much so he doesn't see your laugh lines and doesn't realize that you're sitting on Welcome to Jurassic Egg.
	Spared no expense.
	Got my Botox.
	Got my hair dye.
	Been doing my face exercises to keep my cheekbones taut.
	Got my lipstick. Got my makeup.
	But guess what? There ain't no plastic surgery, no Botox for eggs.
	There are no butt fillers that make your eggs younger than they are.
	Everything else is a fantasy and a delusion.
	I don't care how your face looks.
	What matters is whether I'm going to get good babies out of your middle bits.
	Sorry, that's just the reality of life.
	Reminding people of that is really important.
	When was the last movie you saw about a woman...
	Crying when she's 50 because she's facing 30 years of being invisible to society because younger women will have sex and nobody wants her.
	She's not bonded to anyone.
	She doesn't have children that she invested in who love her.
	She's not the matriarch of a growing brood of wonderful people.
	She's not the wise lady that everyone goes to when they have problems.
	She's not able to transmit the values and virtues of homemaking, of cooking, of corporate endeavors if that's what she chose to do, of how to get along, of how to resolve conflicts, how to resolve disputes.
	Oh no, what do we get instead?
	We get these weird geriatric dino egg fantasies of Bridget Jones's diary, where suddenly she's magically lost weight and two impossibly handsome billionaires are just trying to be with her when she's 43 years old.
	Come on!
	I mean, there's Pierce Brosnan, but that's a religious thing.
	Come on. Nobody talks about these realities.
	A man's sexual value tends to increase into late middle age.
	If you keep yourself fit, if you stay healthy, if you don't gain too much weight, who cares about the balding thing?
	It can look great. But as a man, you gain more resources, more wisdom, and your fertility remains largely untouched until you're quite old.
	But for a woman, man...
	It's harsh. Like, all of the sexual power and supply and demand benefits that women get when they're 20 are gone over 40.
	It reverses itself.
	Like, young ladies, they need to hear this stuff.
	All the men who are chasing you and trying to get you to go out, they're gonna go.
	They're gonna vanish. It's not you they're after.
	It's sex, satisfaction, prestige, status.
	When they can't get that from you, and if you don't, if you fail to develop qualities of personality and utility in a long-term relationship because you're riding the shallow surf of male hormones and sexual desire, man, you're going to get dumped on an endless, dark, volcanic ash beach with no one in sight for half a freaking century!
	It's brutal out there.
	I'm old enough to have seen it.
	And it happens to men too, but it's worse for women because women can't reverse it.
	Men can say, okay, that's it.
	I'm done screwing around.
	I'm going to get myself a proper job.
	I'm going to get myself educated.
	I'm going to get in shape. And they can emerge in their 40s and they have value and they can have babies.
	Women can't turn back the time.
	They don't have that time to make up for the mistakes because they can't revitalize their eggs.
	A man can up his income, but women can't.
	Reverse the time drag on her fertility.
	And it balances out.
	And man, I've seen it. Oh, man.
	Oh. I have seen attack ships on fire at the gates of Orion.
	And I have seen women vanish into the desert of middle age like tears in the rain.
	It's not pretty. And it drives women crazy.
	They get neurotic.
	They get hysterical.
	They get a lot of hypochondria, a lot of aches and pains, a lot of...
	But they go to the doctor because they want to talk to someone.
	They're lonely. They're isolated.
	And they haven't developed or maintained the skills yet.
	And they're out of demand.
	They're out of demand.
	And they're so used to that easy demand of male lust that once it's gone, what do they have to offer?
	Oh, it's horrible. So, the fact that I've seen this on the other side of 45, and I've seen this in my mother and my mother's generation.
	My mother is a very attractive woman.
	And she rode...
	Sorry, that's probably the wrong way to put it.
	She surfed male desire for a long time.
	And you know when she was 40?
	I'll tell you, I didn't figure this out until years later.
	Couldn't figure this out. So she was 40.
	Sorry, let me just go through this.
	So she was 40. I was about 10, maybe 11.
	And one day, she just didn't get out of bed.
	Didn't get out of bed. I'd go to school.
	She'd be in bed. Face to the wall.
	The wall, right? I'd come home.
	I'd make her some tea, put lots of sugar in it, thinking maybe she needed some energy.
	She wouldn't talk to me. I'd go back to school, come back.
	She spent day after day after day just lying in bed.
	Now, I didn't know why that happened at the time.
	I was like 11 or whatever, right?
	What did I know? But actually, you know, I was 11 because that's when she turned 40.
	And now I get it.
	She hit the wall. She stared at the wall.
	She hit the wall because she got deep down in her bones that 40 is that time.
	She can't offer anyone any more kids.
	And, yeah, I mean, you know, she was slender, always was slender, which means that a nice figure but a bad, you know, it shows more on your face when you don't have that subcutaneous fat, right?
	And, you know, she still had some boyfriends from here and there, but, I mean, it was really terrible.
	It was really a fall from grace from a woman who was incredibly highly in demand because, you know, she was a smart, literate, educated, well-spoken person.
	I mean, she was mad and violent and all of that, but, you know, she could put on a really good presentation.
	And man, when she...
	It's like watching a stick insect if you're taking a shower.
	Like watching a stick insect and the water's washing it down.
	It climbs for a little bit and then it just sloshes down.
	You want to see creepy? You want to see a woman's fall from sexual power?
	Man, that's some creepy stuff.
	And trying to help women avoid that kind of fate?
	Man, if that's creepy, I don't know what to say, man.
	I don't know what to say. I'm the catcher in the rye, man.
	I'm trying to catch this sexual vanity that's inculcated by demons in the media and trying to turn women away from...
	A true disaster.
	A true disaster.
	And also, too, I mean, I've got to tell you this last thing I make, last point I make on this.
	Our economic system is on its last legs, my friends.
	You know this. I know this.
	Math knows this. Peter Schiff tweets about this.
	It's a fact, man. This recovery in America, look, it's nice to see, and it fulfills a lot of free market predictions and estimates, and I'm glad about a lot of it.
	But it's still a debt-based shitshow house of cards.
	If it was real money, yeah, free market principles are operating in that way, but it's not real money.
	It's all debt and artificially low interest rates and money printing and it's, you know, it's cocaine.
	Hey, I'm happy, right? Again, because the money's printed, there's still free market principles that are operating and I'm glad for it and it's a better position than we would have been under, or America would have been under Hillary.
	But let me tell you something else.
	Real brief. Real brief. I appreciate this is a long topic, but this is really important for people to understand.
	Real brief. What is going to happen to these childless women when the money runs out?
	You said that again.
	You need to understand this.
	What is going to happen to these childless women when the money runs out?
	Hey, they got kids.
	They can move in with their kids.
	They got kids. Their kids are going to find some way to make a buck and they're going to share.
	And you say, oh, well, what about the childless men?
	Well, you know, men are used to rolling up their sleeves and getting back to work.
	What is going to happen to all these women with no families when the money runs out?
	You don't care for those women?
	That's your thing, man. I'm sorry that you don't care.
	I do. I'm sorry about what happened to my mom.
	I really am. I wish people had told my mom the truth about what happens post-40.
	I wish my friends, moms, who all went slowly crazy over 30 or 40 years, I wish I'm so mad at the people who don't tell the truth to women.
	And men, listen, you guys got to settle down too.
	Like stop making feminists by banging women and pumping and dumping and treating them like Kleenexes.
	Like this is creating more bitter feminists and screwed up women.
	Just stop it. Just stop it.
	Find a good woman and settle the hell down and grow the hell up.
	It's your internet dad talking.
	You know it. You know it.
	I know it. I wish someone had shaken me by the ears and told me about that when I was studding around in my 20s.
	It's terrible. It's terrible to use people in that way.
	Sexuality is for bonding and family and children and stability and civilization.
	It's not for dumping your load and hitting the door and changing your number.
	So... It's not going to last.
	These women aren't going to get their pensions.
	They're not going to get their free healthcare.
	It's not going to happen. And if you don't have kids and you're post-war and you're a woman, at least develop strong and secure friendships.
	At least develop a community.
	We can only isolate ourselves based on the delusion of plenty, and that plenty ain't going to last.
	All right. Question or two more?
	This is great. I really appreciate the chance to chat with you guys about this.
	All right. Well, thanks, Dad.
	Next question comes from Diesel.
	Diesel writes, Due to the nature of life, matter, energy, and the universe, all requiring a beginning and a cause, isn't a belief in God far more rational than atheism?
	I don't know. I mean, I don't know whether or not the universe needs a cause or not.
	I don't know. I mean, matter and energy can't be destroyed or created.
	They can only be transferred from one form to another.
	I don't know. If the universe needs a cause or if it's just eternal, I don't know if it needs to start, I don't know if it needs to be created out of nothing.
	But of course, from a philosophical perspective, and I'm not, you know, I'm very sympathetic to the ethics and virtues and values of Christianity, so this is merely a philosophical perspective.
	From a philosophical perspective...
	Saying that God created things doesn't answer any questions because what you're saying is some incomprehensible being for some unimaginable reason in some incomprehensible manner did something.
	Well, that's not an answer, right?
	If you want to believe in God, please just keep it in the realm of faith.
	Do not try and tie it into science.
	Do not talk about the Big Bang or quantum physics or anything like that.
	Do not talk about... Irrational numbers and do not pursue ontological proofs.
	Do not look for the uncaused cause.
	It's just faith.
	If you try and drag it into the realm of philosophy, you're going to lose that.
	And if you want to keep your faith, keep your belief away from philosophy.
	Because philosophy will undo that belief.
	And if God wanted you to believe based upon reason and evidence, then God would have made his existence both rational and evidentiary.
	God chose not to make his existence known to you in an empirical, rational, objective, material, scientific way.
	And that means, if you believe in God, that God wants you to believe in him according to faith.
	And if you try and drag faith into the realm of reason, it will lose.
	Just as if you try and drag reason into the realm of faith, it's ineffective.
	Keep the two separate.
	Have your belief. Do not try and use philosophy or science to justify your belief.
	It will not work, and it will undo you.
	All right. So I really appreciate you coming out.
	You spent two and a half hours. It's been great.
	Oh, one more. Let's do one more.
	You guys have the greatest listeners other than my listeners that I think I've just about ever heard.
	So these are fantastic questions.
	Alright, so I'll put out one more and then if you wouldn't mind just step aside and try to figure out something with scheduling for that.
	So we've had multiple questions here about YouTube censorship.
	It is a private company.
	What are your thoughts on YouTube censoring or deleting certain channels?
	Well, look, I don't want to talk about YouTube in particular because that's to single out one particular organization when this is a giant challenge that is facing every organization.
	So, you know, get comfy because this is like everyone says, oh, no censorship.
	Look, okay, I mean, I get that.
	But if you're a business person, you have to operate in the real world.
	And reputational damage and boycotts and hysteria and mobs and sympathetic people within your own organization.
	These are all issues that you have to deal with.
	There's no big magic button or switch that makes everybody perfectly in accord with the First Amendment.
	And so it is a complex and challenging situation.
	If you are selling ads on your platform, if...
	Particular controversies drive away advertising, right?
	And everybody remembers that this started to some degree with Andrew Anglin.
	And in particular, it escalated when the Wall Street Journal started publishing material, or I think it was one central article that's happened in other places too, regarding PewDiePie, right?
	And so there's a lot of complex stuff that's going on in the business world.
	But if particular...
	People drive away advertisers from your platform.
	That is a very real business issue.
	Now, you could say, well, too bad, right?
	That's not how business works.
	If you are the CEO of an organization, I've never been CEO. I've been chief technical officer.
	I've been head of marketing.
	I've sat on a board.
	I've never been CEO. But if you're CEO, you have a fiduciary responsibility that is very serious to maintain or increase the value of your share price.
	a mob, if you have a media, if you have reporters that are targeting particular issues on your platform and that results in the driving away of advertising, you have a problem.
	Now, again, one thing you can do is you can say, well, we're just going to hang tough and we're going to let things shake out and we're going to, you know, I can make the case for that.
	And that's a good case to make.
	And you really could say that that's what should have been done.
	But that's a very, very, very principled position.
	And it's very risky.
	And if you take that position as the CEO, you could have a board revolt as your share prices go down, as your advertising revenue goes down, and people could just toss you off and it may not.
	So, you know, people have very complicated decisions to make regarding these kinds of things.
	It's one of the reasons that I have not taken advertising in my entire time as a public intellectual.
	I don't take ads. I don't take ads.
	I don't take ads. And I've been demonetized on YouTube, so I can't even get super chats or anything like that.
	So that's why. Please do freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	So that's sort of a very real issue.
	Now, in the realm of social media as a whole, well, they enjoy particular legal protections in American law in that everybody knows this, right?
	Keep it very brief. So they are not liable for the content of what is put on their platform.
	So if you remember, Rolling Stone had this case of supposed rape that happened in a frat house and so on.
	got sued.
	You know, CNN got sued and settled with Nick Sandman because CNN has exercised his editorial control over the content of their news show, right, in the same way that Rolling Stone exercises editorial control over the content of the magazine and so on, right?
	So if you are a publisher, then you are liable for the content of what you publish, and you can be sued, or there could be slant, or there could be liable, there could be who knows, right?
	Now, the deal that was made with the social media platforms was they said, look, you are a platform, which means that you cannot be held liable for what people publish Because you don't exercise editorial control over what's on your site, right?
	That's the deal, right?
	So the big question remains, and it is a very important question, you really could say it's the question of the age at the moment, is are the social media companies publishers or are they platforms?
	Now, if they're platforms, then they enjoy the immunity.
	I think it's Section 230 of communications, whatever, whatever, right?
	So they enjoy their immunity from lawsuits for the content of their platforms.
	Now, the argument against that is to say, well, look, if they are only targeting one particular group of thinkers, then they are exercising editorial control.
	And because of that, they lose or they should lose their immunity under this particular legal configuration that has them remain immune from any lawsuits regarding the content of their platforms.
	Now, I don't know the answer to that.
	Obviously, I'm not a lawyer and so on.
	I think it's a very interesting question.
	I think that if you are going to enjoy immunity from legal consequences for the contents of your platform, then you have to be neutral.
	You have to be neutral. The moment you start exercising editorial control, in other words, the moment that you have a wildly inconsistent pattern to who it is that you de-platform.
	I mean, there are enormous numbers of communists on social media platforms, just as there are in universities and, I believe, in the media, in Hollywood, in the arts, and so on.
	Let's just talk about social media.
	There are enormous numbers of communists on social media.
	Now, communism as an ideology advocates for the forceful overthrow of the state and the forcible seizure of the means of production.
	Now, some would say, well, it's got to be evolutionary and so on.
	Yeah, but, you know, you just read Lenin, right?
	I mean... Very, very clear.
	It's called Marxist-Leninism a lot of times, right?
	Lenin was like, no, screw the slow and steady approach.
	We're just going to, you know, fire up the Kalashnikovs and the muskets or whatever it was at the time and we're going to just go and take it.
	So if it's like, well, you know, the incitement of violence or whatever it is, it's okay.
	Well, communism is at its very core.
	A violent ideology.
	There's a reason why the far leftists are violent.
	It's because it's a violent ideology.
	It's an ideology that states that the use of force is not only allowed or accepted but encouraged in most circumstances in the pursuit of the revolution.
	That they will seize the means of production by force, they will overthrow the bourgeois state by force, and they will take violent totalitarian control over the country.
	I mean, that's right there in the Marxist-Leninist ideology.
	So, does that radicalize people?
	Yeah, it really does.
	Is that the application of the use of force?
	Yeah, it really, really is.
	Has it had incredibly destructive and negative effects throughout human history?
	Well, yeah. There are 100 million goddamn gravestones in the 20th century alone from the predations of communism.
	Is communism a greater threat than national socialism or, as the communists decided to rename it, Nazism so they didn't have to say the word socialism?
	Well, yes! It bloody well is!
	How many Nazis are in universities?
	Virtually none! There are no Nazis in the universities.
	There are thousands and thousands of outright Marxists.
	Just in American universities, tens of thousands of outright Marxists.
	Across Western universities.
	Just alone. Just alone.
	You know, Sycopedia has some unbelievably harsh and negative things to say about me.
	So harsh and negative that they've actually locked it so that other people can't edit it.
	You know, Che Guevara actually murdered children and reportedly raped his maid.
	I've got this whole presentation on the truth about Che Guevara.
	It's not really a negative thing to be said in the Wikipedia, right?
	Is that neutral? Is that neutral to have a far more hostile and vicious assycopedia page for a guy who's happily married, never committed a crime, raising his children,
	supports anti-circumcision, peaceful parenting, anti-spanking, Constantly advocates for peaceful and voluntary solutions to have a page infinitely more hostile to me than a rapist and child murderer like Che Guevara, right?
	This is not objective.
	Come on. This is not neutral at all in any way, shape, or form.
	So here's the question, right?
	So if person A—I was going to say me, but I don't even want to put that out as theoretical.
	So if person A was advocating for the violent overthrow of the state and the forcible seizure— Of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of people's property, would that be considered a just reason to take that person off social media?
	Come on, we all know the answer to that.
	Imagine that person was a Nazi calling for the violent overthrow of the state and the forcible transfer of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of private property.
	We all know how that would play out.
	So... If the social media companies are neutral, then why are communists on there?
	Well, you could say, okay, well, communism, you know, it's an ideology and it's, you know, most people don't adhere to that violence.
	Who knows, right? Who knows, right?
	Okay, okay. So then you kind of lose the high ground when it comes to saying, well, you know, this person said some mean things.
	It's really tough to sustain that.
	So if you're going to allow Hamas, if you're going to allow communism, it's really tough to say that the real problem, the real danger is, I don't know, whoever, right? Whoever's been kicked off lately.
	It's a tough call, right?
	Now, again, the companies do have to operate within the social and political and ideological milieu of modern society, wherein communism is praised, and this endless imaginary ogre of modern-day imminent takeover Nazism is waved at everyone.
	So they didn't make the world that they have to operate in.
	They didn't make the jitteriness of advertisers.
	They do have to deal with that fundamental fiscal reality.
	So I don't like the censorship.
	Okay.
	I think that it's going to be negative for...
	I mean, it is going to be negative for society in the long run because it's going to further fragment society.
	It's kind of nice if we have a common square where we can all get together and hash out ideas, find the good from the bad, the right from the wrong, the true from the false, right?
	But what happens is, of course...
	People get kicked off one platform, they'll just go to other platforms, more alternative platforms perhaps where the mainstream quote doesn't go, the quote mainstream doesn't go, and that just means that conversations are developing in isolation from each other.
	Now that's bad. That's like same planet, different worlds.
	That's where civil wars come from.
	When people are developing ideas in almost relative isolation from each other, you can see this.
	2015, 2016 onwards, you can see the left and the right diverging.
	There are graphs. There are whole sort of Venn cloud diagrams of like the divergence of cross-talk from the left to the right.
	That's not good. That's not good.
	But, of course, now it's hard to stop that snowball that's already in motion.
	If the decision had been made back in the day, That, you know, hey, unless we get a court order, it's staying up.
	Well, that would have been a stand to take.
	And there are some places that take that.
	That's ThinkSpot, right? Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin's platform.
	That's their rule, as far as I know it, that unless they get a court order, it stays up, right?
	And the other thing, too, like once you break that line and say, well, if it's offensive or it's upsetting or this or that or the other, then, okay, well, what happens?
	Well, then a bunch of Commie trolls will come in and post outrageous stuff and then say, oh, look how outrageous this stuff is, as if they didn't post it themselves, and then try and get that platform shut down.
	It's this whole horrible maneuvering that goes on when that line of free speech is broken and cracked, right?
	Then it just becomes maneuvering and politicizing and, you know, are you aware that this person said this terrible thing?
	And, you know, it's taken out of context.
	It doesn't matter. They don't care.
	The reaction... It really gets to be a mess.
	And I think in the long run, a lot of social media companies may end up running afoul of this platform versus publishing distinction.
	If that is the case, the business model of the major social media companies does not work if they're treated as a publisher, not a platform.
	And so, you know, they're not seeking my advice at all, of course, but my advice would be to say, look, we are going to destroy this company if we lose our legal protection.
	Like, the company cannot possibly.
	I mean, even PostSecret, which was this place where you can send in postcards of your secrets so you've never told anyone else, they tried to create an app years ago, and they couldn't keep up with the amount of trolls sending in garbage in their app, right?
	Even though they had a huge staff working like 24-7, just couldn't do it.
	Couldn't do it. So, and that's just like a place with physical postcards.
	Like, imagine, online, you can't possibly police the content.
	So, you know, if they were asking my advice, I would say, look, you're going to have to publish a policy that says we're not getting dragged further down into this censorship debate because we owe it to our employees, we owe it to our publishers, and we owe it to our shareholders.
	We have a fiduciary responsibility to maintain the value of this company.
	And we may take a hit because there are goosed advertisers, but the reality is that if we end up exercising due to political pressure, editorial control, or what is perceived to be editorial control, we risk losing the legal protections we have under Section 230.
	And we can't afford to do that because that would be the end of our business model within a month.
	I mean, the companies would be gone and I don't know how many hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars would be wiped out of the economy.
	That would just be a complete disaster.
	So that's my particular thought.
	You know, is communism an incitement to violence?
	Well, that's an interesting question.
	You know, if you can imagine creating some belief not called communism that was calling for the same outcomes as communism...
	You would not do well.
	And, of course, philosophy doesn't care about how long something's been around.
	It only cares how true it is.
	So there's a lot more to talk about.
	And, you know, it's been a long and completely delightful, I hope, for you guys, too, and fascinating evening.
	And I'd like to also thank the thousands of people who are joining us on the live stream on various platforms.
	I really, really appreciate everybody's...
	Thoughts and feedback. I also want to thank the hosts for this wonderful conversation.
	Really, really enjoyable.
	Absolutely some of the best questions that I've had in 15 years.
	Hugely enjoyable. And so for people who want to check them out on Discord, it's Blue Politics.
	Blue Politics. I guess I won't even spell it out because you're all smart enough to spell that for sure.
	Thanks so much. Is there anything you guys wanted to do?
	FreeDomain.com, please help me out.
	FreeDomain.com forward slash donate.
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	So thanks everyone so much.
	I'll of course leave the last words to the wonderful hosts who had me on this evening.
	Alright, so yeah. Thanks for coming out, Stefan.
	Anyone here on the server who's interested in announcements, we've got links to his Twitter, his YouTube, and freedommain.com.
	Please check those out.
	And if you check our events channel near the top of the server, We've got upcoming events next Sunday.
	We're going to have Walter Olson from Cato Institute Senior Fellow on at 2.
	And then at 8, of course, Stefan is going to be having a conversation, I guess.
	I'm not sure if this is...
	I think we rephrase this as a conversation.
	I'm sure with Vosh it may turn into a debate.
	But, you know, it is talking about the source of human wealth and what exploitation is.
	That's 8 p.m. on Sunday.
	And that's all I've got. Thanks so much for coming out.
	May I bother you for another five minutes of your time?
	Yeah, yeah. We'll close this down and we'll talk about the other stuff after, right?
	All right. All right.
	Thanks, guys, so much. A real pleasure.
	And I guess we'll see you on Sunday and hopefully we can do this again at some point.
	It was really, really great.
	And look at that. We did almost three hours and only dropped 480 frames.
	Not bad. All right.
	Thanks, guys. Take care. Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest Free Domain show on philosophy.
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	So thank you so much for your support, my friends.

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