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April 22, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:10:31

Comedian Dave Smith and Stefan Molyneux: HOW FREEDOM SURVIVES PANDEMICS!

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	I'm here with the great comic Dave Smith, and we are going to talk about, well, a wide variety of topics, some of which, of course, will be suggested by you, the kind and gracious and wonderful listeners, and some of which we will be, well, deciding for ourselves, damn it. Dave, thanks a lot for taking the time today.
	And I guess just give me a brief overview of how life for a comic who's used to being on the road has changed since the commie virus came to town.
	Well, first of all, thank you for having me.
	It's always a pleasure to speak with you and your audience.
	Yeah, life for a comedian and a New Yorker has really changed quite a bit.
	I'm out of the city at the moment.
	I skedaddled, got the wife and daughter and got out of there.
	I was hitting the road pretty hard and working out a new hour of material and getting to meet fans and shake hands and all that stuff.
	That all came to a screeching halt, but I consider myself very fortunate.
	Especially with what's happening to so many people around the world.
	I'm healthy, my family's healthy, and I'm able to still make a living off the podcast.
	So I consider myself one of the lucky ones.
	Let's get people to know about your podcast and where to find it.
	Oh, yeah, sure. It's part of the problem.
	It's available everywhere. Podcasts are available, and it's up on YouTube as well.
	But if you want to subscribe, you can go to gasdigitalnetwork.com.
	Tell me a little bit about the...
	I mean, I know you're not all comedian, but you're one of the few that I know.
	What is your work process like?
	Like, occasionally I can rip off a good joke just in the flow of the moment, but if I would ever sit down and try and write jokes, it would just feel like, I don't know, squeezing a puppy out through my armpit or something like that.
	What is your...
	A process for writing comedy.
	Yeah, well, I actually, I'm the same way.
	And a lot of comedians have different styles, and everyone has their own process.
	But I'm the same way. I like to kind of have an idea sometimes in my head, and then I like to go on stage and try to deliver it and mess around.
	And then I audio record my sets and then listen to them later.
	So when I'm writing down, I'm usually just writing down like, oh, OK, I figured out the joke.
	So that joke, this joke, that joke.
	But I like to be spontaneous and kind of vamp when I'm on stage.
	And that's usually how I do most of my good writing is on stage.
	Oh, so you just want to remember...
	Actually, I remember the band, the Guess Who, came up with American Woman.
	And the reason they came up with that song, they didn't actually write it.
	They were just jamming on stage.
	Someone in the audience happened to be recording...
	They're jammed and said, you know this, that riff is really good.
	You should actually think about writing a song.
	They're like, you know, that is a really good riff.
	Maybe we should, you know, so it's funny just how that live stuff can just germinate into something wild.
	And so, because I've seen, you know, the post-it notes and the, it looks like a conspiracy theorist wallpaper sometimes watching comedians organize the jokes and all of that.
	But do you record stuff and then have it played back?
	Or do you just kind of remember, oh, that was a good bit in the middle?
	Well, I will remember sometimes, but I'll record it just on my phone, just like hit the audio recording, just because sometimes you end up forgetting them.
	But I love that song, and I didn't know that story.
	That's really cool. But on some of the live speeches that you've given, back when you were allowed to give live speeches, not just because of the studio band, yeah.
	No, but not just the commie virus, but the living commie virus, the physical commie virus that would come shut down your speeches.
	You've been getting commie viruses left and right.
	You've done all of these videos.
	An insane amount of shows you've put out.
	And then you have the ones where it's like a live speech.
	And there's something different about that.
	It's a different energy when you're up in front of a room actually speaking to people and not just communicating this way to people.
	And so there's something about that with comedy that it's just a different energy when you're in this live performance and there's people there responding and laughing.
	And I got to say, I miss that.
	Oh, that back and forth with the audience.
	The audience is someone to dance with.
	It's someone to play with. You're not just up there like they put a television screen up there and you're just broadcasting.
	It's a real back and forth.
	And if you can get into that dance with the audience, it's incredibly relaxing and makes it for a very enjoyable experience.
	And of course, you do have to do something live that you don't do just on a broadcast.
	And so that playing back and forth.
	How does it work with you?
	We're just waiting for people to fill in here.
	Apparently, nobody got any notifications.
	Thanks, YouTube. I appreciate that.
	I'll throw a couple out on Twitter here.
	But what is it like playing with the audience?
	Because, of course, you know, there's the good, there's the light and the dark.
	There's the angel and the devil in the audience when it comes to comedians in particular, which is those who are enjoying what you're doing and those who are like, man, I could have been a comedian, but I didn't.
	I was too chicken, but at least I can troll this comedian by being a heckler.
	I mean, how does that work out for you?
	Well, usually, I mean, at the point I'm at now, when I was going on the road, the room is pretty filled with my audience.
	So at this point, if somebody's going to try to heckle me, they're going to have a tough time because the rest of the room is already on my side.
	But in... Previous, you know, years when I didn't have a following, I mean, I've had, you know, drunk New York City crowds, plenty of hecklers before.
	And there's a very different, you know, there's all these weird like social psychology things that go on.
	So if you come up and you like if you tell like two or three jokes and they get big laughs and then someone tries to heckle you, it's very easy to shut them down because now you've already established yourself as the funny guy in the room.
	And this guy's going against the funny guy.
	So you can kind of slam them pretty easy.
	The toughest one is when you get up there and you tell one joke that doesn't get a laugh and someone heckles you from that.
	So you haven't established yourself at all, you know, and now this guy's like challenging you in front of the in front of the group for dominance or whatever.
	But there's, you know, you kind of you learn different techniques.
	Usually you try to let them hang themselves and find a way to make them alienate themselves from the rest of the crowd, you know, but it's it's it's fun.
	I enjoy that stuff.
	And it is.
	I've always found comedians and hecklessness.
	It's a very weird relationship to me.
	Maybe you can sort of break it out for me.
	I know this is not the central topic of what we're talking about, but I'm interested nonetheless.
	I'm not a big fan of Harry Styles.
	He just strikes me as a kind of low-rent David Bowie.
	But anyway, I'm not going to go to a Harry Styles concert.
	I can't imagine... Planning my evening around, I'm going to go buy a ticket to a Harry Styles concert, and I'm going to stand at the front and go, You suck, Styles!
	Like, all night long. Like, okay, I just don't like the guy in particular.
	He's fine, you know, but that is an odd thing.
	Do you think it's just thwarted comedians, or what is the story with Heckler's?
	Yeah, I think comics get it a little bit worse, right?
	Because even if you were at a concert and someone plays a song that you don't particularly like, you still kind of just clap when the music is over.
	I mean, it's just kind of polite.
	And there's something about it where, you know, someone's playing an instrument.
	And most of the time, I mean, unless you're a musician yourself, You're looking at that and you're like, well, I can't really do that.
	So they just did this thing that I... But when you're just talking and trying to be funny, some drunk idiot in the front row is like, I can talk and be funny.
	So there's just this kind of thing where there's not that respect level kind of built in.
	And then there are...
	It's weird, but I think it's somewhat like the same psychological trait as people who will post things in a comment section or on Twitter.
	These kind of... Not that if somebody, you know, if somebody were to post something like on a comment section of one of your videos, and they went, you know, I think Steph is flawed in his reasoning on this, or this is what I think is, you know, nothing against that.
	But I'm talking about the ones where someone will just post, oh, these idiots don't know what they're talking about.
	You're like, why would you add?
	This adds nothing. You made no point.
	You're just trying to destroy rather than be constructive at all.
	But as the internet has shown us, there's a whole lot of people who really like to do that.
	No, but what is the difference?
	So there's a lot of people in my life, like I grew up surrounded by people who were like, like seriously, awesomely funny, like get people in stitches and all of that.
	They did funny songs.
	They tried to write skits and all of that.
	But there's something so fundamentally and enormously different about being funny at a dinner table and funny in front of an audience.
	I don't think people recognize what an Evel Knievel Canyon that is to motorcycle lacrosse.
	I loved one time someone asked Jerry Seinfeld, they go, were you the funny one in school?
	And he said, he goes, we were all funny in school.
	And then everybody else got jobs.
	And I just thought that was like the perfect summation of the whole thing.
	It's like, yeah, funny is, you know, I've known people growing up who were like some of the funniest human beings I've ever known in my life.
	But stand-up is a little bit different.
	It's a very specific thing.
	It's not... Are you funny as much as can you tell funny?
	And are you comfortable telling funny to a room full of people?
	Because I also know, you know, people who are like really, really funny, but would not be comfortable getting up in front of a group of people in the same way that I'm sure, you know, a bunch of people who are just tremendous writers, you know, like somebody who could just write the greatest, you know, like, like book you've ever written.
	And you'd be like, Oh, my God, this guy is a genius, but could not I could do a podcast or could not do a video presentation or wouldn't be a great speaker.
	It's a different skill set and sometimes people have one and not the other.
	You kind of have to have both in order to be a stand-up.
	So it's in the same way that, you know, again, like there's, like, I don't know, there's been some really smart libertarian anarchist people.
	I don't think I could think of any of them who could do what you do exactly, if that makes sense.
	Like, it's just a different skill set.
	Well, I did get the last blue background.
	That's true. I've caught at the market on blue shading.
	Okay, so what we're going to talk about today, thanks to everyone who's dropping by.
	So I don't know if this has happened to you, Dave.
	It happens to me on a semi-regular basis.
	And the speech goes a little something like this.
	We kind of want to break that out and help people understand how a truly free society can deal with a pandemic effectively.
	The speech goes a little something like this.
	Steph, you used to be a principled guy.
	You used to be a voluntarist.
	You used to be an anarchist.
	You used to be a libertarian.
	And now you're cheering whatever it is, X program or whatever it is, or X restriction on the free people's movement around the world or whatever.
	And you're such a sellout and you've totally betrayed your earlier principles and so on.
	And I don't know if you get this.
	Like every time you try and apply principled Philosophy to the hurly-burly of actual politics, you know, politics being the art of the possible, what you can actually get done rather than what the ideal would be, everyone just kind of gloms onto you like mosquitoes on a dead elk with this kind of like, you sell out, you sell out, you sell out.
	Now, I listened to my conscience quite a bit.
	I was really struck by Socrates' stories about what he called his daemon, not the mat kind, but the kind of conscience kind.
	And I listen to my contents a lot.
	And there are times where I'm like, hmm, you know, I'm kind of drifting a little here and I go back.
	But my conscience is pretty quiet about all of the political stuff that I get involved in because I do have kind of a longer arc view of what it is that I'm trying to achieve, which I'm not, of course, promulgating because to say it would be to fail to achieve it.
	How have you, because you do definitely take philosophical principles, libertarian and anarchic principles, apply them to politics.
	Do you get this rat-tat-tat of sell-out, sell-out, shill, shill, gatekeeper, gatekeeper, whatever it is, a grifter.
	Grift is another big one.
	And how do you feel that fits in with what you're doing?
	Well, I've gotten a lot of criticism from random libertarians for my immigration position, which I'm sure you're no stranger to.
	But just because I basically being convinced by several people and you were one of them that, truthfully speaking, there really is no correct libertarian answer to immigration as long as government is controlling the borders.
	And that's there's really what you have is in the same sense that if you said, you know, the libertarian position is that the government shouldn't run the schools and we would rather abolish public school.
	That would be the libertarian answer.
	Let private institutions educate children rather than the state propagandizing them.
	However, if you have public schools, should the government let anybody who wants to walk into them?
	I mean, it's no more libertarian or less libertarian, but one seems really crazy and destructive and terrifying, and the other seems preferable while we're not in a libertarian world and we don't have our own libertarian defenses.
	Certainly a private school, we can be fine with them not letting anybody walk in.
	So it's a tough situation where you're not going to have a perfect libertarian answer in this situation.
	There is no answer where there's not an initiation of force against peaceful people.
	Either way, open or closed, or anything in between if the government's controlling them.
	So I've gotten some heat for that.
	And then what I get a lot of heat for, more than anything else, is just the people who I've had pleasant conversations with.
	who I guess you're not allowed to have.
	Well, yeah, I mean, you're one of them.
	And people like, I had Nick Fuentes on my show a couple of times, and I had Michelle Malkin on my show recently.
	And people who I just think are kind of interesting.
	And the fact that, and it's not as if I don't, you know, make clear where I disagree with them, but there's this weird game that you kind of have to play that a lot of libertarians have fallen into where you can talk to anyone on the left.
	I mean, I never got...
	I was on a Jimmy Dore show, and I had him on my show.
	Because, you know, okay, he's a left-wing guy.
	I disagree with him on a lot. But you know what?
	He was really, really great on the Trump impeachment, on the Mueller investigation.
	He's really great on war and peace and, you know, a few other things that I really admire about him.
	So I had a real friendly conversation with him.
	We agreed a lot. Not a peep.
	No problem. Nobody gives me any crap for that one.
	But if I talk to Nick Fuentes and have a nice conversation with him, then I get all of this hate, oh, you know, you're alt-right adjacent or whatever it is they call you.
	So I just don't play by these rules that are clearly designed by the left, that you can go as left as you want to, but if you take one step to the right, then all of a sudden you're evil.
	And so I just... You know, I'm in this game to tell the truth.
	And so I have no problem just being like, yeah, I think these rules are BS. Well, it's funny, you know, I had a couple of conversations with Noam Chomsky.
	And nobody ever said, wow, that must mean that you're a linguistics professor at MIT or something like that.
	I mean, that must mean that you're a socialist or an open borders guy.
	It's like, no, just having a conversation.
	I find his explication of anarchism very interesting.
	And he's got a lot of great criticisms of U.S. foreign policy and all of that.
	But, you know, you have one conversation with Jared Taylor, and suddenly you're suiting up into a peaked white hat or stuff like that.
	And it's really, really sad.
	I mean, we really should have as many conversations with people.
	I've had Nick on my show. I've had Michelle on my show and all of that.
	So, yeah, it's just a sad thing.
	But it's people who can't debate, right?
	All they do is try this silly guilt-by-association game.
	They find the most reprehensible views of someone you've ever talked to and say, ah, you're endorsing, you're giving a perspective, you're giving a viewpoint.
	The moment, you know, hands back.
	It's Pulitzer Prize for covering up the Holodomor and all of the Soviet crimes is when I'll start worrying about guilt by association.
	But the left doesn't worry about it at all.
	I mean, good Lord, Barack Obama got elected when one of the Weatherman underground terrorists was kind of heavily involved in getting him started.
	So the idea that we've got this guilt by association stuff, it's lazy, puerile, intellectual garbage.
	All right. So thanks for that.
	Let's talk a little bit about...
	You know, there's no atheists in foxholes, you know, maybe because they're too smart end up being conscripted.
	I don't know. But this idea that there is no libertarian, there's no...
	Freedom absolutist in a pandemic.
	And it is kind of troubling to me that at the moment it's like, wow, you know, we really are in a big bind here.
	This is really, really terrible stuff.
	We better call the government.
	I really don't like that as a whole.
	Like, society's fine as long as there aren't any big crises, but the moment there aren't big crises, boy, you've got to call the government because they're just the big policeman who's going to come in and make everything right.
	How have you been sort of processing the pandemic from a libertarian viewpoint or an anarchic viewpoint?
	Well, it's, you know, I've heard the same things being said, that there's no libertarian in a pandemic.
	I saw lots of blue check marks saying this is the death of libertarianism.
	This is the death of the, I mean, like, who could possibly defend the idea of a free society when obviously...
	We need the strong hand of the state to make sure people are forced to be quarantined and make sure that people who need help are taken care of and all of this.
	And what I've tried to do, for the most part, is...
	Well, two things.
	I mean, I guess number one is to talk about what governments have actually done.
	And it's really quite something to live through.
	I mean, what has been the most monumental failures of government on a global level.
	I mean, just mismanagement, incompetence and evil all on a massive global level.
	And that this is somehow supposed to be the example that this is why we need them.
	Because the one scenario that you would dream up in your mind where this would prove that we need this government the most, they fail at that, and that's supposed to be proof that we need them all the time?
	And then I try to talk about how a free society could handle things like this and what would be done.
	But to me, what I really try to focus on right now is just the failures of government because they're, you know, they're everywhere.
	Oh, it's... Oh, I can feel that Vesuvius rant starting down in my belly.
	So I call it the losing the house principle, which is if somebody is making predictions or making decisions and they're not in danger of losing their house, I frankly don't really care what they have to say.
	Like if you screw up as a comedian, at some point you're going to stop making money and you're going to lose your house.
	If I screw up in what I'm doing, and I don't mean offending people, that's kind of the job, right?
	As it is with you to some degree.
	But if I really screw up, Then I'm gonna lose my house.
	Now, that gives you a complicated set of variables to work with, right?
	Like you wanna push the open window, you wanna challenge your audience, but at the same time, you don't want them to, well, I guess not just take your house by not donating to you, but burn down your house because you've offended them too much.
	So this issue of who loses their house?
	And one of the things that really drives me crazy, I've been thinking a lot about the airlines lately, right?
	So the airlines are taking massive hits, probably some of the biggest hits, except for those, I guess, who thought that the price of oil was going to keep going up.
	But the executives who were flying in and out of Wuhan, who were flying in and out of China, they let those flights continue.
	And airlines are tanking, right?
	So maybe they'll go into bankruptcy, maybe they'll be taken over, whatever, right?
	So what happens is their employees could lose their houses, right?
	The people who didn't have any influence in making the decision about whether to fly these German-infected planes back and forth from China to the rest of the world.
	So the employees, right, the pilots, the stewardesses, the pursers, the baggage handlers, the ticket counter men and women, they all could lose their house and they had no influence over these decisions.
	Now, the executives of these airlines are worth millions and millions and millions of They get paid millions and millions and millions of dollars a year.
	So even if the airlines go completely tits up, those guys, they're not going to lose their houses.
	That seems to me so terrible.
	In other words, the people who have the most consequences have the least input In those decisions.
	And that is really terrible to me.
	It's like, well, I don't study, but I get your marks if you study.
	That's just the worst conceivable incentive.
	Now, that's not a free market, because there's this whole corporation thing.
	It's this legal shield to mean that if there's profits in the corporation, you get to take them out and buy a house.
	But if you completely screw up your corporation as an executive, nobody can reach through that veil of corporate legal personhood and take your house back.
	Now, that's a new thing in the free market.
	That's relatively recent.
	In the past, if you ran a bank and you ran that bank underground, you lost your house.
	You would end up living under a bridge, so you were really, really careful.
	But all of this, sucking up all the money, buying all of the stupid toys in the universe, and if you screw things up, you get to keep it all?
	Oh, that to me, and that would not, I would never, ever want to do business with a company in a truly free market where the executives could get to keep all the profits and would face no personal consequences for the losses.
	Yeah, and of course, on top of that, they get these bailouts from the government.
	So then they get the bailouts, they get everything.
	I think a lot of times people have this idea that if the airline companies were to not receive bailouts, that there's no more planes, that the planes would disappear.
	The planes evaporate! Right? It's like, well, no, what you would want is to absolutely that you would want companies to fail who shipped this disease in.
	I mean, you would want for the future for airline companies to be very concerned With things like this, and to know that there can be bad consequences.
	Now, what you said about the legal protections from the state for corporations, that's spot on, and that's terrible.
	And I think it's one of the worst things that the government does, because it always gets blamed on the free market, even though these are all government rules that protect big corporations.
	But it is, I mean, look, there's the amount of cronyism that's going all around, and it's not just from I mean, it's like everything.
	The Kennedy Center is getting, you know, $25 million over this.
	Harvard! They say they're not even giving the money back after they've laid off their cafeteria work and sitting on a multi-billion dollar endowment.
	Yeah. And the point that you were making about the people who aren't actually at risk and whose homes aren't at risk, this is so dominant all around the culture right now.
	I mean, it's just despicable to watch these Hollywood elites talk about how, hey, we're all in this together.
	We just got to stay home.
	You know, everybody.
	I mean, look, we all got $50 million in the bank.
	Just hang out in your mansion for a big deal.
	What's the problem?
	Meanwhile, there's like, you know, some married couple somewhere with, you know, three kids who has been, you know, scrapping and saving to open a restaurant for the last 15 years and just opened it up.
	And they're watching their whole life go down the toilet right now.
	And that someone, you know, Alyssa Milano is going to be like, hey, guys, we're all in this together.
	Let's just stay inside.
	Like, we're really not in this together.
	We're in very different situations.
	Oh, a bit of the whole kumbaya crap a little bit later because this, like, we're all in this together.
	It's like, anybody going to get mad at communism?
	Oh, no, no, no. We're just going to hug each other and, well, this terrible thing just fell from the sky, Dave, and we just have to find some way.
	It's like an asteroid. There's no way to have predicted it.
	There's no moral situation involved here.
	No, let's do it now. This communism thing, I feel that this treacly, gooey, syrup-up-the-nose kumbaya crap of hugs and soft piano music and sad people staying inside, it's all there to drag us away from looking at the real beast in the room, which is the communist government of China that covered things up, that released the virus into the world.
	Even if we say, hey, you know, it was completely from bats.
	Let's go with that. That's just completely fine.
	I know the new rules. So let's say it's completely from bats.
	What is absolutely incontrovertible is that the Chinese government covered it up.
	And they covered it up with the participation of the communists in charge of the World Health Organization.
	They covered it up, despite the fact that Taiwan was repeatedly warning the World Health Organization that China was covering it up.
	They sealed themselves. They sealed Wuhan off from China, but let Wuhan people go out and infect the entire world.
	This is... This is the communist virus and all of this obfuscating, let's just hug and play soft piano and stare at our teddy bears and grieve this mysterious shadow that has passed over our land.
	It's like, no, that's not...
	That's not how things work.
	It's certainly not how it worked when I gave speeches.
	People got really angry and protested me and attacked buses and all that kind of stuff.
	Where's anybody protesting the Chinese embassies?
	Like, this is just not happening.
	It's like this is massive, giant cover-up to rescue the reputation of communism from its inevitable effects.
	Yeah, and in addition to all the stuff that you just said, that there were these doctors in China who blew the whistle on this thing early and were silenced by the Chinese government.
	And there's no question, the Chinese government did this to the world, one way or the other.
	And the truth is that our government, for being in bed with the Chinese government and these kind of global government organizations like the WHO and all this stuff, That they did it to us as well.
	And then of course, you know, just our government giving all of the wrong advice and impeding all of the progress that could have been made.
	I mean, there's this thing where they're like, there's a shortage of masks in the country.
	Like, you're really telling me this huge first world powerhouse that's the United States of America Can't produce enough masks.
	Like, I can be having a conversation with you.
	You know, okay, I'll give you ventilators even.
	That's a sophisticated piece of equipment.
	But masks? And then you realize, oh yeah, it's regulated as a medical device by the FDA, and this is why they can't produce enough, because they have to get approval, and this takes forever, and there's all these hoops.
	But yeah, the stuff on China is really, really disturbing.
	And I wish that some people would, you know, like, sparse it out a little bit.
	It's not, you know, it'll be...
	A lot of people will say like, oh, well, you're blaming China for this because I am blaming the Chinese government.
	I have no problem with the Chinese people.
	The Chinese government is the worst thing that's ever happened to the Chinese people, with maybe the exception of previous Chinese governments.
	But, you know... Maybe they're better than Mao Zedong was to the Chinese people, but they're pretty brutal.
	I mean, it's like, no, I don't look at those doctors who are blowing the whistle as my enemy.
	I think those are our friends.
	Those are good people who tried to do the right thing.
	But the Chinese government who silenced them and locked them up for that, they are evil and should be recognized as such.
	But, you know, China, of course, has been lending our government trillions of dollars for quite a while now.
	They're completely in bed with them.
	There's all types of these shady, you know, the Hunter Biden making all that money in China.
	That's just the tip of the iceberg.
	There are all types of politicians who are bought off by Chinese businesses, which are basically the same as the Chinese government.
	And it's a real big web of corruption.
	Well, China is much more dangerous than North Korea.
	And the world's response to North Korea has been to isolate it, to quarantine it, to put trade restrictions on it, and to harass it and so on.
	I mean, can you imagine writing an article saying, you know what we should do?
	You know, we make a lot of our medical supplies here.
	But what we should do as a country, as a culture, as a civilization, we should outsource the vast majority of our essential medical production To North Korea.
	That would be a fantastic business plan.
	Everybody would look at you and say, what are you crazy?
	You can't do that. I mean, it's a dictatorship, and it's going to give North Korea a massive amount of leverage, power, and control over us, and that would be a terrible thing to do.
	And yet, it seemed to have been perfectly natural, absolutely accepted, and a good, sensible business plan to outsource the vast majority of the essential stuff, except for food, which, you know, is tough to move around, as goods and services and medicines are.
	People are like, yeah, let's have a Chinese communist dictatorship, have massive sway over our finances, our electoral process, our manufacturing, all the stuff which we, I don't know, kind of need to stay this side of the six-foot-deep hole in the ground that we're all destined for eventually, but which we're being accelerated towards just a little bit by the communists in China.
	Yeah, and you never seem to hear that much about the outrageous humanitarian abuses by the Chinese government.
	I mean, it just doesn't... You hear in the corporate press, you hear a lot about if there's a war we're interested in starting.
	You'll hear a lot about what Saddam Hussein does or what Bashar al-Assad or one of those guys.
	As soon as they won a war, then we really care about somebody cracking down on human rights abuses or something like that.
	But, you know, you don't hear much about China.
	I've heard more about Russia's treatment of gays than I have, which is like, I don't know, you know, like they're not allowed to get married or something like that.
	But it's not what the Chinese are doing.
	They're not throwing them in death camps.
	You don't hear about...
	That China's human rights abuses and Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses and any of the countries that we're like, you know, our government is in business with, those things tend to get overlooked.
	And just, you know, in addition to that, the idea of taking money from the Chinese government is, I mean, that is blood money.
	And not even just by like our anarcho-capitalist principles.
	By anyone, you know, whenever, which I know you've done a million times before when you present the ideas of anarcho-capitalism and People will say something about the social contract or democracy.
	Well, we elect these leaders and therefore there's kind of this consent, so it's not really theft.
	Now, that's all flawed reasoning for its own.
	But how about China? I mean, they're not a democracy.
	People didn't vote to have this government in there.
	So that is clearly just stolen money.
	It's blood money that they've taken from their people.
	And then our government will just accept this money and there's no problem with that.
	People should be outraged about the idea of doing business with China in any capacity.
	Well, okay. So let's go take a little wee ride on the analogy train here, Dave.
	So imagine that this babysitter wants to come and babysit your kids, right?
	And she's, I don't know, she's 15 years old and she's taking the babysitting course and so on, right?
	And you're like, wow, I really do need a babysitter.
	It'd be great to go out. You know, this is hearkening back to the days when we could...
	Go out. But anyway, so you want to hire this babysitter, right?
	So, you know, you get her name, do a little Google search, right?
	And funnily enough, she's got a channel on some video site.
	And what she does is she cuts open kittens.
	She kills with a rock and she cuts them open and holds it up and says, this is fun, right?
	She's like some crazy kid with a melted Barbie, right?
	Just really psycho stuff, right?
	Now, would you say... Yeah, that seems legit.
	Let's have her be a babysitter.
	I'm sure that would be great. You know, let's hire Queen Barbie vivisectionist to look over our kids, right?
	You'd say, well, no, not only will you never be my babysitter, but I'm calling the cops because what you're doing is absolutely horrendous.
	Now, kittens are one thing, and we care about kittens, but actual human beings are quite different and of a different moral category.
	And, of course, as I talked about, the Fallon guy, representative or practitioner on my show a couple weeks ago, China...
	Opens up people and sells their organs on the black market for organ transplants.
	You can phone up a maid-to-head order for the Chinese government to go take a political prisoner, unzip him like a body bag, take out his organs, and put them in you, and then toss his remains in the Yangtze.
	I mean, this is unbelievably horrendous stuff.
	Yet, of course, the mainstream media, what do they do?
	Well, they go after people like you and me.
	Why? Because we talk about peaceful parenting in a voluntary society and scientific facts that people don't like.
	But they won't go after They won't go after an actual regime that tortures, mutilates, opens up, and sells organs from live political prisoners to whoever wants it.
	In fact, Israel had to ban this because people were heading out to go and get this kind of stuff.
	In other words, oh yeah, no, next Thursday on the 17th, I'm going to get a kidney from China.
	It's like... How do you know that exactly?
	No, no, no. The guy's on the conveyor belt.
	He's on the assembly line. And covering up these crimes.
	Look, it's one thing to cover up these crimes, which is absolutely appalling.
	But the degree to which the mainstream media has gone after people like me and people like you, oh, man.
	The fact that they're hurting now, after covering up the crimes of communism, the fact that the mainstream media is hurting from the commie virus.
	I don't like karma, but I don't dislike karma either.
	I'm kind of on a neutral position with regards to this.
	Yeah, I know what you mean.
	And of course, covering up, as you alluded to earlier in the show, covering up the crimes of communists has been what the mainstream media has been doing for about a century.
	This is all over the world, in Russia, in Vietnam, in Cuba, I mean, all over the place.
	And it's had really devastating effects on humanity.
	You want to talk about a virus.
	Communism itself has been the worst virus ever.
	Uh, that, that humans have had to deal with at least in the last hundred years.
	Um, and, uh, yeah, it's, it's really, it's outrageous.
	And, and to see, you know, the, um, the, the, the guys at the World Health Organization covering for them while they were doing all of this stuff, it is the, the amount of damage, you know, not just the, um, the, the, whatever it is, uh, uh, amount of deaths.
	I don't know what we're at right now in the, in the country.
	I mean, I've, Keeping track every few days, but a lot of people have died.
	But think about the fact that there are, I think the last count was something like 26 million people just in America who had applied for unemployment insurance since this shutdown.
	And that's just people applying for the insurance.
	That's not counting anyone who's working under the table.
	That's not counting like people, you know, the cabbies and Uber drivers.
	Or just general South America. Yeah, yeah, sure.
	Who aren't eligible for these programs.
	I mean, so there's just the actual number.
	I mean, who knows? It's probably when this is all over going to be close to 40-50 million people who have lost their jobs over this.
	That's just in America. This is happening all over the West.
	This is all happening because of like you said, one way or the other, because of the Chinese government's either failures or what seem more reasonably to be, you know, downright evil response to this thing.
	And there should at the very least.
	I mean, I'm not like advocating a war or anything like that.
	This is a country that has H-bombs.
	I don't think we're going to get into a hot war with a country like that.
	That option went bye bye a long time ago.
	But we should at least be aware of it.
	We should at least be saying none of us want to be in business with the Chinese government.
	There should be some type of consequences, and it doesn't seem like there's going to be.
	Well, this manufacturing of hysteria about imaginary Nazis as opposed to a real clear and present danger coming from totalitarian China is one of the great misdirections.
	You know, like those magicians.
	I mean, don't get me wrong.
	I kind of like magicians, but in a way, but they're kind of annoying.
	Like, I know you're cheating me. I just don't know how.
	Right? But this sleight of hand where...
	This, wow, there's a couple of crazy Nazis in America, and that's what we're going to focus endless amounts of attention on, as opposed to a massive threat coming in from China that has now manifested itself in a very real fashion.
	What's actually happened, this is kind of a weird thing.
	What's actually happened, Dave, is that government overreach and government incompetence has now risen so quickly.
	It's like, you know, like that boiling frog analogy.
	You know, you put the frog in, you slowly raise the water, it dies, it goes into hot water, it jumps out.
	So what's actually happened now is that government incompetence and overreach and, you know, walking past the Bill of Rights, trampling on the Constitution, unhinged arresting people for having their kids play in playgrounds kind of stuff, people are actually noticing that the temperature has gone up really fast.
	And so rather than this being the death of libertarianism or the death of voluntarism or anarcho-capitalism, this is a wonderful opportunity.
	And I hate to say it's a wonderful opportunity in the midst of such disaster, but I'm kind of an optimist that way I try and, you know, great.
	Wikipedia has written bad things about me.
	Well, at least they spelt my name right.
	So I guess there's publicity, right?
	But there's something about that that I think is just part of the human condition, and it's kind of tragic that sometimes it takes really awful things for people to wake up.
	And there's a reason why the liberty movement probably had its best time right after the financial crisis in 2008.
	And there were these wars that were raging on that were just clearly becoming disasters.
	Nobody could defend the Iraq War anymore.
	In 2004, 2005, 2006, they were still trying to.
	But by 2008, 2009, no one could defend the war in Iraq.
	Clearly, Afghanistan wasn't being won.
	And there was this huge bust in the business cycle.
	And really, the kind of Austro-libertarian anarchists were the ones who had an explanation for that.
	And that ended up leading to a really big kind of moment for libertarians.
	And figures like yourself became wildly popular.
	And there was a lot of more people like me were brought into the movement and discovered these ideas.
	So I agree.
	I think there's a real possibility right now, especially if people just understand that even if you get past moving past the Chinese government's response to this, if you just assume that's all done and that happened and there's nothing we can do about it.
	What our government in the United States of America did to our people is just I mean, I cannot overstate how evil it was.
	First of all, you had the CDC and the FDA, when it first started coming over here, their first advice was, don't worry about masks.
	And you know what? You really shouldn't wear a mask.
	You're probably too stupid to figure out how to put it on.
	Go ahead, Chinese person. Exactly.
	There's no problem with it.
	Literally, Nancy Pelosi, come down to Chinatown.
	Come on, let's hang out with these guys.
	There's no problem here, guys.
	There's nothing to worry about. Then they wouldn't allow tests to be produced.
	They wouldn't allow masks to be produced.
	They wouldn't allow ventilators to be produced.
	They slowed down everything.
	And then when it got bad and they realized this was a serious situation...
	When they were kicking these tens of millions of people out of work, this is not people who just are too lazy to work and they want a handout from the government.
	These are people who want to work and the government is telling them they can't.
	And while in the hour of need...
	When people's lives are being ruined, they took that opportunity to rob the American people and to send trillions and trillions of dollars to the big banks.
	In the moment where people were at their most desperate, they went, this is an opportunity to exploit this crisis.
	It was the greatest heist in history, has just happened over this last month.
	I think it's up to $7 or $8 trillion total.
	I haven't been following that story as much, so if you can explicate it for me and for the audience, because I've heard rumors, but I've been focusing on other things.
	So what's going on with the bank bailouts?
	Well, the real bailouts to the bank are from the Federal Reserve.
	So the Federal Reserve just immediately printed up about $4 trillion and extended it to all the big banks.
	And since then, I think they've put another trillion dollars into the big banks.
	So that's the first thing they do is that.
	And then, of course, you had the $2.2 trillion stimulus package From the Congress.
	There were all types of corporate welfare and handouts to their friends and big companies.
	And then the average person gets a crummy $1,200 and that's how they justify it.
	It's like everyone gets $1,200, yet it's a 300-page bill.
	Thomas Massey, who I just had on my podcast a couple weeks ago, who's one of the last quasi-principled people in the American Congress, He was outraged by this thing.
	He goes, it's a complete... They didn't even vote on it.
	They just crammed it through.
	And nobody was in Washington.
	The Congress wasn't there, so it just kind of got crammed through.
	And then, now that it looks like they're going to add another $500 billion in the second round, there'll probably be another round after that.
	But the total number comes out to be somewhere near $7 trillion.
	That's just been, and I mean, this is the future of America has just been completely sold out, and all for big bankers and big corporate interests.
	This is what the government has done, and it is really just, it's morally criminal.
	Well, the whole foundation of this modern dangerous delusion is that the government has money.
	I mean, this is a weird thing.
	They're not some rich uncle who saved and scrimped and had a great business and just happens to be handing out candy because he read The Christmas Carol once too many and he's just fire-hosing money all over the family.
	The government has no money. They can send you $1,200.
	But if they've just printed that money, all that's going to happen is it's going to get diluted to the point where it's not really going to be worth anything.
	They don't have any money.
	I was doing a little bit of things last week on Twitter.
	People saying, Congress is funding this.
	Congress is paying for this.
	It's like, no, they're not. They have no money.
	Once you understand that the government doesn't have any money, and all it can do is borrow and print in order to give you the illusion...
	That it has value. It can add to the equation.
	Once you pierce through, that's the real matrix, man.
	Once you really understand the government doesn't have one thin dime to its name, all it has is a bunch of guns pointed at people who are productive.
	That's all it has. It's not even redistribution.
	It's dilution. It's indebting the next generation.
	It is a form of intergenerational enslavement.
	And it's just vote buying.
	Once you understand that the criminals, disorganized crime is the mafia, sorry, organized crime is the mafia, disorganized crime is the government, and you recognize they've got no money at all.
	That's one of the first illusions that I had to sort of pierce through in order to get my way To a free society is stateless society.
	Statism is enslavement.
	Statism is coercion.
	Statism is violence.
	Statism is exploitation.
	Statism is the actual target we should have compared to this fantasy that somehow starting a business makes you an exploiter from a Marxist standpoint.
	Let's look at the giant, well-armed, machine-gun, tentacled monstrosity at the center of society that's only solution for everything is to buy and rob and steal and cheat and lie.
	Yeah, and it's not even as if it's this kind of academic hypothetical argument of should we take from the wealthy and redistribute it to the people who need it or something like that.
	You're taking from the working class and distributing it to the rich.
	It's indefensible.
	And yeah, of course, I mean, I completely agree with you.
	And this is the essence of why I am an anarchist.
	The government cannot do anything except rob people.
	That's all they're capable of doing.
	If they rob you through taxation, that's the most direct form.
	If they rob you through printing money, it's just robbing the purchasing power of your money.
	It's in effect the exact same thing.
	And if they borrow money, it's just a promise to do one of those two things in the future, which is, again, the same thing.
	And the state is the enemy.
	The state should be the enemy for everybody.
	They are the ones that are facilitating all of this, all of this horrible response.
	It's all coming directly from the state.
	And then, as you pointed out before, they make up these enemies, the Nazis, the racists.
	Those are the people who we have to go after.
	Meanwhile, like when Biden's campaign, his first campaign ad, was about Charlottesville, as if that's relevant to anything because three years ago there was a rally of a couple hundred people who are bad.
	That's why we need to elect Joe Biden.
	These statists who act like they hate Nazis, they have no problem with actual Nazis.
	Obama and Joe Biden fought a war in Ukraine.
	They had a regime change there and worked with real deal Nazis.
	Not like the made up kind, like real national socialists.
	Not to mention that freaking, you know, NASA had no problem absorbing a whole bunch of Nazis after the Second World War.
	These people have no problem with Nazis.
	They just use this as like a boogeyman to come after other people.
	But don't get it twisted.
	The real Nazis are the people in control of the state right now.
	They're the real fascists.
	So let's talk about something that happens quite...
	Sorry, here I am ordering you what to talk about.
	Much like a Nazi. But no, let's talk about the common pattern that happens.
	So when people hear a stateless society, a society without a government, it's like...
	And they're defenses, which are well-programmed defenses.
	This is not organic thinking.
	Because, you know, if we have a neighborhood watch or we have a neighborhood community or some sort of community group in our neighborhood, we would never sit there and say, well, what we want to do is disarm everyone.
	We want to arm these couple of people and whatever they say goes and we have to obey them or they'll lock us in a tiny basement somewhere.
	I mean, we would never sit there.
	It's perfectly organic to work for voluntary and peaceful and negotiated solutions to society.
	Anarchism is the only philosophy that recognizes two fundamental things.
	One, human beings have a great potential for evil.
	And two, power corrupts.
	You put those two things together and you come up with anarchism.
	Also, you know, the principle, the application of the non-aggression principle and so on.
	People's minds get blown and the defenses come up.
	You know, we've all had these conversations about a jillion times, you know, the roads, the poor, the health care, the sick, the old, all that kind of stuff.
	But this one is like, OK, well, it's very nice to have your little anarchic fantasies.
	But when a big problem like a pandemic comes along, you need the government to make it all come together and make it all work out.
	The pandemic one's kind of new.
	Frankly, it feels like it's a whole new vacation for me from the Maroads situation.
	So how do you think a free society, a voluntary society, a society without a state, in other words, a society that recognizes that power corrupts?
	Let's say there is a pandemic.
	It's not like the whole world would become free.
	Let's say America was a truly free society.
	A disease starts to erupt over there in China.
	Then what? Yeah.
	And just to add to your point, I mean, even if the whole world were to become free, it is still potentially possible.
	There's viruses. I mean, bad things happen.
	And anybody who tells you they have a solution where nothing bad will ever happen again is just full of crap.
	Like, that's just utopian nonsense.
	And so, yeah, okay, a virus, a pandemic, maybe something much worse than COVID-19.
	I mean, it could happen.
	There have been worse pandemics in the past.
	So I would say that, first of all, And part of this is me pointing to the example of what the state has done in this situation.
	But what you'd want, it seems to me, particularly in the COVID situation, right, is you'd want mass testing, you'd want a larger capacity for the hospitals.
	That was the big fear from the very beginning, which doesn't seem, thank God, to have come true.
	But the big fear was that the hospitals were going to be completely overrun and you'd have people dying in stairwells and things like that.
	You want masks produced, ventilators produced, all of these things.
	Now, all that having a government has done has slown all of this down.
	There's just a ton of rules and regulations about how exactly you can produce ventilators and masks.
	There were labs, very reputable labs, that were trying to produce tests For COVID that were turned down by the FDA. Now, I'm not saying in a free society we would just want to buy a COVID test from, you know, some guy in his basement who's making it and we don't know if they're real or not.
	But if there's a lab, a reputable lab that's been doing really great work for decades, yeah, we would probably want them to be producing tests if they say that they've gotten it.
	There's no reason why the government has to be the ones to check up on that.
	You could have some third party.
	They're going and getting tests from China.
	China doesn't have the FDA, so what's wrong with American companies doing it?
	It would be much easier to have a fast response to this situation.
	The other thing I touched on is the hospital beds.
	This has been a major problem.
	Now, what you have all throughout the United States of America are these certificate of need legislations.
	Basically, what it says is that the hospitals have to agree to give you permission for you to build another hospital.
	And when people think of hospitals, they don't think of business, they think of public service, but anyone who's owed money.
	I just wanted to mention to everyone that Dave and I are in fact lobbying the government so that if you want to start another podcast or channel, you're going to have to go through us.
	And I'm very grabby.
	I'm very grabby indeed.
	It will be quite a violation. And of course, even when people aren't like bad people, if you line up all of the incentives the wrong way, it might be really easy for me and you to start convincing ourselves that, you know, we've got enough podcasters and people could really do other things.
	And, you know, it's like you kind of make your own incentives work in your mind, you know, ethically.
	So there's a lot of that.
	So I don't know how many hospital beds there would be in a free society, but there would certainly be more.
	There's no question about that.
	There'd be more. So we'd be better prepared for that.
	And I would also point out in terms of, I think the one that people have the toughest time with to me is like the quarantine aspect, the isolating aspect.
	And the truth is that if you look all around you, I think?
	Is that they think libertarianism is all about inclusion.
	But truthfully speaking, property rights are about exclusive rights.
	And there can be as much inclusion or exclusion as the property owners want.
	And I see all around me, like miracles in the market.
	Things even before it was legislated.
	Nursing homes stopped letting people come visit.
	It was just like, no. It's a sad situation.
	My wife's grandfather is old and in not good health and in a nursing home, and she can't visit him.
	And it's sad, but you know what?
	It's like, this is the most vulnerable population here, so sorry.
	No visitors coming in. They made that call before the government told them to.
	Supermarkets had limited...
	How many rolls of toilet paper you can get because people were going crazy and buying lots of rolls of toilet paper.
	And they were like, no, no, no. We want to serve all of our customers.
	There was no law that made them do that.
	So the market responds to these things in ways much faster, much more effectively, and without the evil of arresting someone and throwing them in a cage for having a catch with their daughter in the park.
	You know, it's just a much better solution.
	And I've also thought about, as I said, the airline.
	So if someone were to mail you a package containing some virus, right, they put a virus in the package and they mailed it to you, that would be considered a criminal action.
	Now, when you're picking up people from overseas that you know are at the epicenter of a dangerous new virus and you are delivering them to a new society, it seems to me that the same criminal action Intent is there.
	In other words, you're profiting by taking these people's money, and then you are delivering people who are being infected with their disease to a virgin territory, right, where people don't have herd immunity, where it is untested on the local immune systems and so on.
	So that, I think, in a free society, of course, there is a difference between civil and criminal complaints and so on.
	There would be civil complaints, for sure, but it would be a criminal action.
	To knowingly deliver risky items, whether it's, you know, sarin in an envelope or whether it's a human being infected with COVID-19, there would be criminal action.
	So I think that the heads of the airlines, because the airlines are the problem, right?
	This to America, right?
	So they, of course, in a free society, wouldn't be able to hide behind corporate immunity.
	They wouldn't be able to filibust all this way.
	There would be no bailouts.
	And also, even if they survived the criminal actions or criminal complaints, they would lose their houses because people would sue them for causing the death of a loved one by delivering the bioweapons of perhaps unwitting Chinese passengers to local airports.
	So there is an accountability there that under the current legal system, Doesn't really apply.
	Like, people are saying, oh, we're going to go and sue China.
	It's like, yeah, well, China's banned and they're a communist government, which everyone knows, but who actually brought...
	The virus to America, to Canada.
	Well, it was the airlines, right? In which case it would be okay.
	Who runs the airports in a free society?
	They would be privately run. Did you allow planes to land carrying people knowing that there was a significant danger that they could infect the local population?
	Well, boom. You know, you've got criminal complaints, you've got civil complaints, and you're going to lose your house.
	The prospect of going to jail and the prospect of losing your house, that is going to concentrate people's minds and give them accountability.
	But what's going on right now is people are making all these predictions and making all these decisions.
	There's no accountability for any of them.
	And I've said this before.
	If someone doesn't lose his job, For making a bad series of predictions, I don't care what they have to say.
	They've got no skin in the game.
	It doesn't matter to me what they say.
	And we can see how these pandemic projections have been wildly off and who's losing their job because of it?
	Who's losing their jobs because other people are losing their jobs, getting addicted to drugs, committing suicide, stressed, getting sick?
	Who's losing their jobs because of these Not just faulty, but wildly off by factors of 10 or more pandemic projections.
	They're not losing their jobs. And so the wonderful thing about a truly free society is everyone has some skin in the game.
	you actually face the consequences of your own decisions rather than right now running for a bailout, retiring to your country estate, never having any concern.
	People needed to make those decisions back in January, back in February to say, got to suspend flights, guys.
	It's like, yeah, but you know, it's gonna cost us money.
	It's like, yeah, well, you know what's really gonna cost us money?
	Spreading this disease, even if you take out the moral aspect, which should be front and center. - Yeah, and then on, absolutely spot on, And then on top of all of that, the problem that we run up against is that politics just take over everything that the state does.
	So if Donald Trump were to say, hey, I really think we should tighten restrictions on travel to China, then once again, well, Trump said it, so that means the Democrats have to be completely against it.
	And he's racist and he's that.
	Now, of course, you know, now they'll say, oh, Donald Trump didn't respond quick enough and lock everything down.
	But we all know what they would have said if Donald Trump had tried to lock things down in January.
	They would have said, he's Hitler!
	See, here's the proof.
	And this is, so now you get this just mind numbing pissing contest where Donald Trump says, hey, I think we need to open up soon and get back to work because this is really destroying the economy.
	And so then de Blasio, the mayor in New York, has to dig his heels in and say, no, we're going to be locked down for the rest of the year.
	And it's just this thing where in, you know, not that there's no such thing as politics in other areas in business and things like that.
	There are. There are favorites and there are, you know, these feuds and battles that go on.
	But in government, it's like all they have.
	And so it just takes over the entire system.
	And it's really just terrible because people are scared and hurting and they're looking to these people to be their leaders.
	And you get these people who demagogue.
	You know, Andrew Cuomo, who gets up there and says...
	If these actions can save one life, then it'll be worth it.
	And it's like, no, I'm sorry, sir, but that is not how a cost-benefit analysis works.
	You don't just say, if we save one life, this is worth it.
	We could all never get in the car again tomorrow, and that would save one life.
	But actually, we've decided that the unthinkable destruction that that would cause is worse than one life being lost.
	You actually have to think about these things like an adult and not just demagogue them.
	And you don't get that. I think I'm going to go.
	You know, the financial risk or the financial consequences of them going out and infecting an unknown number of people is in the millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars, right?
	Or trillions, you know, which may be the case with this long-term slowdown throughout the West.
	So if you look at that big trough, what's wrong with saying them, okay, you've come off this plane, Got a 14-day quarantine.
	Now, don't sweat it though, man, because we're going to put you up in a beautiful hotel.
	We're going to pay you $50,000 to be quarantined for 14 days.
	And you're going to love it.
	And, you know, we're going to make sure your kids are taken care of.
	We're going to, you know, like mafia style, your hubby goes to prison or something like that.
	What's wrong with, like, wouldn't that have been a great, great deal to just, even if people do kind of get off the plane and there's some risk or whatever, Just go and bribe them with whatever it takes to sit in.
	I mean, would you take 50 grand, assuming you're not a dad, to go sit in a beautiful hotel and watch TV or work out at the gym if they can keep it private?
	Just pay people to do it.
	I mean, it's such a great cost-benefit analysis.
	Everybody just thinks, well, you just got to threaten people.
	It's like there's positive incentives that could be fantastic, and companies would very gratefully pay that in order to avoid the consequences that we're seeing now.
	Yeah, that's a really great point.
	And I didn't even think about it like that.
	But that's a really great point. And the truth is that we're paying either way.
	I mean, the taxpayers are paying, we're paying to imprison them, we're paying for the policeman's salary to go round about like all these things have costs either way.
	And even as you said, look, I mean, I would, I would be, you know, Very, very upset.
	That's an understatement to not see my daughter for two weeks.
	But if someone were to explain to me, like, look, we think you just came from a dangerous area and there's a real chance that you could end up getting your daughter sick if you go see her and don't stay here for the two weeks and we'll make sure she's taken care of.
	We're going to send this check to your wife.
	They'll have everything they need.
	I could probably be persuaded that, yeah, this is probably the best thing for the health of my wife and daughter, which really is my number one concern.
	So that's, you know, and yeah, that's a really, really excellent point.
	That positive rewards can be just as much, and I think psychologically there's some evidence that that's actually more effective than negative repercussions.
	I remember, very quick tangent, because this just came into my mind, but I remember...
	No, no tangents on this show, Dave.
	You know the rules. This is a tangent-friendly show.
	I know that. Wait, there's something that's not a tangent?
	Okay. So I used to, my very good friend, Luis J. Gomez, is a hilarious comedian, also a peaceful parent.
	And he, I'm very close with his son, who's like seven now.
	And I remember watching him, this is back when he was like four, and I was babysitting him.
	Which I used to do regularly, like I would come spend time with him.
	I've known him his whole life.
	And I remember I was saying when he would just, you know, as a four year olds tend to not always listen to you, especially four year old boys.
	And when you're trying to kind of get them to do something, or it's time to do this, it's time to go home or whatever.
	And I would say, and I said this a couple times to him, where I'd say, hey, James, I'm going to tell your father that you weren't listening to me.
	And when I would say this when he was four years old, it would make him very upset, you know, because he really loves his father.
	He doesn't want to be, you know, reported back that he did something bad.
	And I remember it would be really upset.
	And I did it like twice.
	And I just didn't like the way it felt.
	And I was like, oh, man, I'm like creating this bad moment.
	And he's nervous. And he's weird.
	And then it just like a light switch just flipped in my head where I just went, oh, James, if you if we get our shoes on and we go now, I'll tell your dad how great you are for me.
	And then he would do it. And now I'm like, oh my god, I'm not creating this horrible moment.
	I'm just flipping it to positive rewards.
	And you're not using his dad as a threat again.
	Yeah. You don't want to be fostering that, right?
	But that is... Right, exactly.
	And I... I recognize that immediately, but that is kind of part of the peaceful parenting thing is like when you take the kind of violent response off the table, then you can get creative and find these nonviolent and like positive ways to do it.
	And it was like the second I did that, I was like, oh my God, I can't believe that didn't come to me right away.
	And OK, I understand the whole world isn't four year olds.
	But yeah, we could really focus on that type of response as a society to, you know, reward people for doing the right thing rather than throwing them in a cage, which, by the way, it's not the best place to be in a pandemic.
	Well, unfortunately, Roger Stone is probably going to find that out in a week or so.
	OK, so given that you've voluntarily, I will say, opened up the peaceful parenting box, let's just do a couple of minutes on that.
	Peaceful parenting is the app.
	It's the most powerful application of philosophy in your life because we can't go single handedly and the Fed or change foreign policy or control pandemic responses.
	But we can apply the non-aggression principle in our own lives, in our own relationships.
	And there's no more important, more powerful and more moral place to apply it than in parenting.
	But people are just kind of used to back of my hand stuff when it comes to parenting.
	So what's happened with your daughter?
	And I forget how old she is now.
	Sorry for that. But how's that been working out for you?
	Well, she's, she's 16 months, and she's just incredible.
	And she's, you know, kind of, you know, drunk running around doing that little 16 month old walk where they're falling off balance.
	And, and she's just, you know, movement than horizontal movement at that age, right?
	Yeah. And since I decide drifting forward a little bit, yeah, we jog.
	It's really the best.
	For anybody who's out there who maybe are thinking about having kids or planning it out in the future, there's really nothing better than being the father to a little girl.
	I know you know that experience as well.
	It's incredible. I was passionate about peaceful parenting from listening to you.
	Also, it just kind of I think was always my instinct.
	Like, yeah, that's really wrong to hit kids, but I really heard you break it down into a thought-out philosophy, and I was like, well, this is just obviously the case.
	That was way before I had kids.
	But now having a daughter that's 16 months old, the fact that people hit their kids at this age, and they do, it is...
	I just, I cannot wrap my head around it.
	I mean, it's like, you know, my daughter is 16 months.
	So what happens when they're 16 months is they're kind of walking, but they're not, you know, they're not the most coordinated.
	So they fall. This happens a lot during the day.
	They fall over. They hit their self.
	They bump their head. They do this.
	And it's horrible every time.
	I mean, every time she hurts.
	You'd rather take the blows yourself, right?
	Oh my god. I'll hit the ground.
	Just don't you hit the ground. I mean, it's like probably about 70 times a day my heart just skips a beat.
	Little death magnet.
	How's your day going? It's 90% of being a parent to a one-year-old is stopping them from doing something that would kill themselves.
	Like, no, no, no, no, no. We don't do that.
	That would be a disaster.
	You can invite the angel of death as an adult, but right now daddy's fending him off.
	Yeah, but the idea that we would, you know, create a situation where she's hurt, create that mentally and physically, it's really horrible for me to think about.
	And the fact that it's accepted.
	She gets hurt and she comes to you for comfort.
	If you hurt her, where does she go for comfort?
	Yeah, yeah. And the fact that it's accepted and, you know, it's like what you were saying, it's twofold.
	It's not just that it's the most applicable area of our philosophy where we can actually put it to real use, but it also says something about you if you don't put it to use there.
	Then you don't really believe in any of this stuff to begin with.
	Because as soon as...
	The only reason why it's acceptable to hit children and basically nobody else in society, with the exception of grown men, if they're being threatening or violent, we really don't accept hitting anybody else in society.
	The reason why it's acceptable is because they're just too small and too weak and too...
	Not, you know, developed in the brain to do anything about it.
	They have no legal recourse, and you can just do it.
	Yeah, I mean, if I were to hit my wife, which of course I also would never do, but that's not nearly as immoral as it would be for me to hit my daughter.
	I mean, my wife can leave me.
	She can call the cops. She's Italian.
	She might win that fight. She might just She's a biter then.
	It might just end up working out bad for me without any other recourse.
	But the fact that we would just accept this idea of physical violence to correct behavior, but only amongst children is just...
	It's a moral outrage that is indefensible.
	And this is one of the things people get very, very bothered when you bring up this conversation because there's a real emotional connection to it.
	Oftentimes, you're pointing out that somebody's parents were really bad parents.
	Oftentimes, you're pointing out that someone themselves has been a pretty bad parent.
	And that's a very bitter pill to swallow, especially when you realize you don't really have an argument to back up why it's okay.
	But that just means it needs to be discussed that much more.
	Well, you know, you can see this flip around.
	Not all. Some libertarians have very much embraced this, Dave.
	But, you know, taxation is theft.
	Yeah! Spanking is child abuse.
	What? No, no, no.
	Right? It's like, well, one, you can do something about.
	The other one, you can't. And it's very easy to focus your moral outrage on things that are beyond your control when you try to bring philosophy and morality into the things that you can actually control.
	That's when the rubber meets the road and you find out if your values actually work.
	And I'm just, you know, telling people, I mean, I'm a little further down the road than Dave.
	My daughter is now... 11, and it works beautifully.
	It works even better than I can have imagined.
	So that's the plus.
	All right. Well, listen, thanks so much for your time today, Dave.
	Always a great pleasure to chat.
	You had mentioned that there are some road-driven comedians who are having a really, really tough time.
	I wonder if you could give some advice to them because, you know, this is not a very funny time for them at all.
	Yeah, it's challenging.
	I mean, I know there are some people who are getting creative with doing stuff on Zoom and trying to do, you know, kind of reach out to their audience that way.
	But the one thing that we do have going for us is that we have the internet and you can kind of, you know, reach out to different people and try to be creative.
	So that's kind of my best advice.
	I think that people, a whole lot of comedians got into podcasting and thank God for that because otherwise it would be that much worse.
	But it's not just that the clubs are closed down temporarily.
	We really don't know what's going to happen going forward.
	Certainly, a lot of these businesses in general are not going to come back.
	I know the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warrens of the world think that if you own a business, that basically means you're a billionaire.
	That's the same thing. But in reality, as anyone who's ever owned a business knows...
	Quite often, there are razor-thin profit margins, and some of these places are never coming back.
	Also, the psychological effects of this virus, a lot of people may not really want to go sit in a nightclub where you're right on top of other people.
	So there's going to be a real shake-up in the comedy scene, and I think people got to start preparing for that and getting adjusted.
	And don't count on the government checks to be your go-to.
	Yeah, it's really important to remember there is no post-COVID, right?
	There is no returning to the way things work.
	Maybe they'll come up with some completely wonderful vaccine that's perfectly safe, but that's going to be a long time.
	I mean, 93% of vaccines have failed their first trials, and you really don't want to take 1.0 of an operating system or a vaccine, come to think of it.
	So really, really plan for the long haul.
	You know, holding your breath while underwater can keep you alive for a little while, but it's not a long-term strategy for that.
	We need to get the scuba gear of forward planning.
	And I've told people from the very beginning, yeah, don't really plan.
	This is a permanent part of our epidemiological and social landscape and our economic landscape.
	Just, you know, don't hold your breath in thinking that you can surface anytime soon.
	It's really time to adapt.
	And so just give people once more your vital statistics on the web to make sure they can get a hold of what is a truly excellent podcast.
	Oh, thanks so much. Well, I'm ComicDaveSmith on Twitter.
	The podcast is part of the problem.
	You can get it at GasDigitalNetwork.com or iTunes or YouTube or any of the other places you get podcasts.
	And as always, it's a pleasure and an honor to speak with you, Steph.
	Well, thanks, Dave. A great pleasure, too.
	All my very best to you and your family.
	And just a reminder, people, I'll put the links to this below.
	Be sure to check out Dave's show.
	And thanks a lot for your time today. All right.

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