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June 11, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:49:07

Philosopher Stefan Molyneux: University Guest Lecture

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	Stefan, thank you very much for joining us. thank you very much for joining us.
	In a previous video, you were talking to, I believe, a guy named John.
	I forgot his last name. But you were talking about philosophy and how philosophy is no longer a thing in the educational system.
	And I've been doing my best and I've been trying really, really, really hard to...
	Get philosophy into all my classes.
	I've been going to a series of people that I could think of as being suitable to actually help me out with my students and philosophy and this and that and the other.
	I think that you're one of the people that I find the most suitable because your way of speaking is Very easy to understand.
	I mean, yeah, there's philosophers out there that no doubt are great philosophers, but I mean, me as a teacher, I can lose them in five minutes, never mind my students.
	So that's been my problem.
	But I want to talk about today of the importance of philosophy in everything.
	How it helped us to develop technology, science, how it enabled us to get to where we are today.
	And for the most part, we have had some great success using philosophy in education for a number of years, but it seems like lately we're just losing it.
	It's kind of like a one-way philosophy in terms of what's going on in the U.S. Like, oh, you know, we're only going to teach Marxism and that's it.
	We're not going to show any other kind of viewpoints, any other kind of philosophies.
	Nothing. It's just a one-way street philosophy.
	And I think that's hurting the educational system.
	It's hurting people.
	It's hurting everything.
	And it's driving...
	The world is crazy at this point, especially the developed world.
	What's your take on this?
	It's a pretty wide net to cast.
	I have no problem with that.
	So, philosophy, it's our birthright.
	It's what makes us human.
	It's what differentiates us from the animals.
	You know, the animals all get hungry.
	The animals all want to have sex.
	Some of the animals take care if they're young.
	They sleep and they're tired.
	Stretch when they're cramped.
	And what is it that makes us different from the animals?
	It has to be something pretty important.
	And what makes us different from the animals is our capacity for abstractions, our capacity to take immediate sense data and to stretch it out and to make it universal.
	You know, there's the famous story of Sir Isaac Newton.
	That he's sitting under an apple tree.
	You know, an apple falls on his head.
	And he then goes from there to develop a universal theory of gravity from one apple falling all ahead.
	Now, an apple can fall on a monkey's head.
	An apple can fall on the head of a aardvark or a gnu or whatever, a kangaroo.
	And they're just like, well, that was annoying.
	Or, yay, food or whatever.
	But they can't Abstract from an individual occurrence, something that impresses itself on your senses, to a universal law like gravity that stretches across the entirety of the universe.
	Billions and billions of light years across that delves deep into the cellular structure and the atomic structure of matter, all the way out to the biggest supergiant star in the galaxy.
	And one thing, one little germ of an idea that we get in our minds can stretch across the entire universe, allows us to peer back through time and comprehend what is far beyond our senses.
	And that capacity is philosophy.
	And you say, ah, well, some of it's physics.
	Well, sure.
	Some of it's biology.
	Absolutely.
	Some of it is geology and so on.
	But all of these rely upon philosophy's ability to map what goes on in our mind out into the real world.
	You know, it's a funny thing when you think about it, and this has driven some philosophers crazy, literally crazy over the years.
	We are stuck inside a skull prison called a head.
	You know, I can't touch you.
	You know, if we're in the same room, you know, I can put my hands on your shoulders and I can say, hey, how's it going or whatever.
	You know, But my brain is not touching you.
	My brain is getting electrical signals from my skin going through my nervous system, being processed in my brain.
	You are hearing me.
	But you're not directly hearing me.
	Your brain can't listen to me psychically or telepathically.
	It all has to come through the evidence of the senses.
	You see me, but your brain doesn't have little windows that it opens up and directly looks out into the world.
	The light waves hit the eyes.
	They're transmitted by the optic nerve to the brain, which assembles them into a moving visual image.
	We're trapped inside a movie theater thinking that we're looking at the world.
	Now, philosophy, the whole point of philosophy is to sort out the relationship between what goes on in the head, what goes on in our minds, and what is going on out there, which we cannot directly perceive.
	And you can really freak yourself out about this when you think about that everything that is occurring is a whole bunch of electricity coming into your brain from senses that themselves can make mistakes, right?
	I mean, I know Taiwan is not a desert, but, you know, if you've ever been out in a desert or you've seen those images of a desert, you're standing and you're looking out at the sand dunes and you see, what do you see?
	Halfway to the horizon or near the horizon, you see beautiful, shimmering lakes.
	And you're like, well, Mike, why on earth are there lakes in a desert?
	And of course, you realize that it's a mirage.
	It's just light waves bouncing between differently heated layers of air and makes it look like water.
	Of course, you can see this in Taiwan.
	You can see this on the roads, right?
	When it's really hot and the road is really flat, you can see it looks like there's puddles all along the road.
	Our senses can make mistakes.
	We can hear things...
	That aren't there. We can see things that aren't there.
	We cannot see things that aren't there if you're walking through.
	We've all had the experience where you're walking through a room and you forget that somebody left the drawer open or there's a little low table there and you crack your shin on the table.
	It's like, ah, that reminds you that the world is real, even if you can't.
	See it. And so we have a couple of pounds of brain that never directly connects to the outside world.
	It's a very bad day if it ever does because it means your skull is open.
	And our brain can't feel any pain itself.
	You can cut into a brain.
	It doesn't feel any pain.
	We're stuck inside this little prison of a skull.
	We have the senses that are giving us information, and we need to sort out what's actually going on.
	Now, animals don't really do any of that.
	They don't think about, at least to our knowledge, they don't think about how the senses work or what is the relationship between thoughts and reality, because we can also imagine things that don't exist, you know, fire-breathing dragons and unicorns and Orcs and elves and, you know, Dungeons and Dragons characters and floating beholder eyes with eye stalks and all this magic rays.
	We can all think of things that don't exist.
	But how do we know that they don't exist?
	How do we know what is real?
	That's called metaphysics.
	How do we know what is true?
	That's called epistemology.
	And how do we know what is good, what is virtuous?
	And that's called ethics. Now, a lot of philosophy has been, I don't know, kind of crazy over the years.
	It's been kind of crazy because we do have to try and figure out what is the relationship between things that exist in our mind, things that come in through the senses, and things that we push out from the mind out into the world.
	And you think of all the technology.
	And expertise and electricity and cabling and lenses that is required just for us to have this conversation that we're having right now.
	It's a pretty wild thing to think about.
	And all of that comes because we have an accurate and correct understanding We're good to go.
	This electrical storm calls reality into something that is coherent, something that makes sense, something that is not only understandable but controllable.
	As the old saying says, nature to be commanded must be obeyed.
	If you want to get a spaceship to Jupiter, well, you better be pretty accurate and well understand gravity and centrifugal forces and propulsion and so on.
	So, philosophy is something at its base that babies figure out pretty quickly.
	I mean, I have had the privilege of being a stay-at-home dad for 11 years, watching my daughter grow up.
	I mean, she's a great person.
	She's also a fantastic experiment about how the brain works and how quickly we can understand things.
	Animals have a correct, instinctual correct relationship.
	With reality. Like a dog, if you roll a ball behind a couch, the dog will try and move the couch to get to the ball.
	It's called object constancy.
	And babies, when they're, you know, four or five months old, will realize that if you put...
	And I did all these things with my daughter.
	If you put a ball under a blanket, originally they were just like, ball's gone.
	Ball is not in my visual...
	Field, so it's disappeared.
	Poof, right? Like those people with the blankets who run into closet doors frequently on YouTube.
	Now, after about four or five months, though, a baby will...
	You put the ball under the blanket, the baby will say, oh, wait, no, it's still there, and it will pick up the blanket to find the ball.
	In other words, out of sight is no longer out of mind.
	There is a sense of object constancy in the world.
	That transcends just what is going on in your eyesight and that's when the baby begins to understand reality and this happens so instinctively and so instinctually That philosophy has to account for all of this and has to understand and explain all of this.
	And the way that philosophy explains and understands this is it says that the mind is part of the universe, but the mind is not a mirror of the universe.
	So an animal's mind is mostly just a mirror of the universe.
	I mean, animals will do a little bit of building and a little bit of tool manipulation and so on.
	But basically there's the universe, there's what goes on in the animal's mind, but there isn't any concepts or ideas in the animals about the universe.
	So what is our relationship to the universe?
	Well, we can understand the universe in a way that no animal can ever understand the universe because the universe is composed of principles.
	Now, there's matter and there's energy.
	Those are the only two things that really exist in the universe.
	But the way that matter and energy behaves...
	is universal, is consistent, and is predictable.
	If it wasn't, we couldn't have this conversation because there wouldn't be enough stability in the behavior of matter and energy to transmit this information.
	So we can bring principles to understand the universe that do not exist in the universe.
	So mass attracts mass.
	That's called gravity. But the idea of gravity and the law of gravity does not exist.
	The scientific method does not exist in the universe.
	A whole bunch of trees all clumped together does exist in the universe.
	But the concept called a forest does not exist in the universe.
	That exists only in our minds.
	This is really, really important because you were talking, of course, Daniel, about Marxism.
	A class, rich, poor, middle class, these do not exist in the world.
	These do not exist in the world.
	You can say, ah, yes, well, some people are the richer and some people are the poorer.
	Absolutely.
	But the concepts called class do not exist.
	A country exists as a physical entity.
	A nation is something that exists in the mind.
	The laws of physics are derived from the behavior of matter and energy.
	The laws of men, the laws of society, the laws of courts are created by the human mind.
	So we have not a distorted but not a one-to-one relationship between what goes on in our mind and what goes on in the world.
	And knowing philosophy is there to help us understand how we can say something is true.
	Because if we don't know what is true, we can certainly never know what is good.
	I mean, to take an example, we all understand that murder is wrong.
	But if we have no way of knowing whether someone's alive or dead or who may have done it or what may have been the motive, then we can never figure out whether something was, in fact, ever murder.
	If we don't know what is, if we don't know what is true, we can't ever know what is right or wrong, good or bad, just or unjust.
	And the first principle of philosophy is to figure out what is real.
	Well, what is real is what is out there that is consistent and universal and which we can measure by all the combined evidence of our senses.
	I'll give you a tiny example.
	So, you can all do this at lunch if you want.
	You can take a glass of water and you can put a pencil in it.
	Don't put a pen in it, it gets all mussy, right?
	You can put a pencil in it, right? Now, if you look at the glass of water, where the pencil meets up with the water, it looks like it bends, right?
	It looks like it, because the water refracts the light, right?
	So, when you look at the pencil, it looks like the pencil is doing a little, they call it a dogleg here in the West.
	I don't know if you have a similar phrase out there.
	It does a little zigzag, a little zigzag and goes down, right?
	And so to your eyes, it looks like the pencil is bent a little or shifted a little.
	But then when you run your finger down the pencil, you realize that it's not.
	So now you have a contradiction between your eyes and between Your touch in the same way if we're in that desert and we see a lovely lake, or we think it's a lake.
	If we go to where we think the lake is and there's nothing but sand, we realize that our eyes have been fooled.
	So that's why philosophy needs evidence of more than one sense to know what's real out there.
	The universe is separate from the mind because the universe is passive.
	It just sits there.
	I mean, outside of the animal and plant kingdom, right?
	Outside that which is living.
	Rocks just sit there. The sun orbits.
	The moon orbits.
	We orbit the Milky Way and everything just does what it does.
	And it doesn't will its own decisions.
	It doesn't move of its own accord.
	And so that which we can measure objectively using the evidence of the senses that exists independent of our preferences.
	Like you can talk someone into giving you money, right?
	You can't talk... A rock into giving you gold or even an ATM into giving you money.
	So what exists outside of her mind that is universal, that is consistent, that is measurable by the senses, that is real.
	And when you make a statement about reality, it has to be universal, it has to be rational, it has to be consistent because that's the way that reality works.
	Reality is universal. Physics laws are universal.
	Reality... It's consistent.
	A rock today is a rock tomorrow.
	It may be a smaller rock, it may be sanded down, but it's still a rock.
	Objects don't randomly change their nature.
	So physical laws are universal.
	Rocks are universal.
	You see a rock, you've got the Mars rover roaming around Mars, and if you see a rock on Mars, You don't say, I have no idea what that is.
	It's a rock. It's a rock on Mars.
	It's a rock on Earth. It's a rock, I don't know, there probably aren't any rocks on Jupiter because it's mostly just a gas giant, but it's a rock on the Moon.
	It's a rock. Let me just finish.
	So trying to map what is in our mind to what is out there in the world is the primary task of philosophy.
	And it's actually, it should be very simple.
	Because a five-year-old can do it.
	A six-month-old baby can do it.
	A monkey baby can do it.
	But for some reason, there's great profit in philosophers making this insanely complicated, I think largely to control people, But we all have the ability.
	That's why I say it's our birthright.
	It's something that we do automatically.
	It's something that animals do non-conceptually.
	We have the additional bonus of concepts, so it should be even easier for us.
	And that's why I'm able to explain philosophy quite easily, because it's really not that complicated.
	Because if it is that complicated, we shouldn't be giving moral instructions to children any more than we would teach them about quantum physics.
	Yeah, that was a lot to absorb.
	Very well said.
	As you mentioned earlier, we have the opportunity to do this because of technology, the internet, and you know, I look at the internet and it's definitely one of the greatest things that has ever happened to humanity.
	I'm also doing research in biology.
	I don't know if I mentioned that to you before.
	Actually, molecular biology.
	And I can go on the internet.
	I can go on YouTube and search a method or procedure for doing an experiment using the mouse model.
	And I can find hundreds, thousands of very useful and very purposeful methods Unfortunately, when I look at all these methods, I see maybe 20, 30, 40 views, maybe 3 or 4 likes.
	And then you switch over to what's trending.
	And I kid you not, at one point, I saw this video trending.
	Someone uploaded a video of a dog taking a poop in slow motion.
	With classical music to it, and it had like, I don't know how many millions of views, and I'm thinking, why is it that people, they just don't care for essential and useful things in life?
	Why would they rather waste their time on it?
	So, you know, here comes the other side of the internet.
	It could also be the worst possible thing that happened to humanity, because it seems like nowadays, It's just the wrong type of influencers that they get a platform.
	So here's another problem.
	People that would have never had a voice before the internet because they were just dumb and then they had nothing purposeful and useful and usually like publishers and Other means of selecting important and useful information would have just eliminated them.
	But with the internet, you can no longer eliminate them.
	And it seems like they're the ones that are taking over the influence.
	They're taking over people's time and life and so on and so forth.
	And it seems that nowadays, it seems like many, many people, especially students, They no longer really want to think.
	They no longer really want to philosophy.
	They no longer really want to get involved into exchanging important things, important ideas, moving forward.
	They're just sort of like waiting to be entertained, to find stuff online.
	So I developed a new method of assessing or testing my students.
	So, what I do is I make them do assignments online.
	So, for example, if I have them read an article of some kind, hopefully that's online, I make them to comment or to do their homework directly online.
	Why? Because I want them to get the feeling that, look, if you have something good to say, maybe we can fill up the internet or the online world with essential things as well,
	not only junk. And maybe somebody will come over or will come across your idea and they will comment to your comment or they will comment to your opinion and this way we can also spread a good message instead of just allowing the internet and YouTube and any other link or whatever to fill up with just junk and things that are Not essential.
	So, of course, some students, they like it.
	They think it's a good challenge to interact with people around the world.
	And quite a lot of students, they don't like it because they prefer the old method of memorizing a bunch of words and then taking a quiz in class.
	And it's just the teacher who's going to see it, and that's it.
	But I realized that, you know, in today's environment...
	And with the technology that we have, with the internet and so on and so forth, that's no longer a method that really works, especially for most of the courses that are related to social sciences, which can much more benefit from a system where people can go and do their homework online and they can interact with people from around the world and exchange ideas and learn a lot faster and a lot better and so on and so forth.
	I don't know. What's your take on this?
	If we look at the realms where the greatest progress is happening, we really look at physics, we can look at medicine, biology to some degree.
	These are the areas, and technology, of course, engineering, these are the areas that we're having the greatest progress.
	And so we have to look at those areas and say, well, why?
	Why is engineering and physics and so on having such great progress?
	And if you look at psychology, they've had a whole, what to call it, the replication crisis, like huge numbers of the psychological experiments.
	Even those that were the bedrocks of particular theories, they're all just garbage and they can't reproduce anything.
	And half of cancer research in some areas can't be reproduced.
	And it's just, it's terrible.
	And sociology, the social sciences are terrible.
	So the question is, what's the difference?
	And I think that the difference is pretty clear.
	So in physics, there's no subjectivity that can win the day.
	There's no amount of bullcrap, to put it as nicely as possible, that can win the day.
	In physics, you've got the ultimate arbiter, the judge, the jury and the executioner of your theory, which is empirical testing.
	You know, the fusion in the jar thing, right?
	You're old enough to remember the fusion in a jar thing, right?
	And it turned out to be complete nonsense because no other scientists could reproduce it.
	So if you look at engineering, something works or it doesn't.
	If you look at business, people either buy it or they don't.
	It succeeds or it fails, and there's an objective metric.
	Now, some of the objective metric is reality itself is in physics, and some of it is the test of the free market.
	Do people want to buy it?
	Will they part with their money?
	You know, that old meme of the guy from Futurama, shut up and take my money.
	You know, like, will you actually be able...
	To sell it. And then there's an objective metric called price.
	Can you sell it for enough to cover the costs and make a little bit of money?
	So if you look at the areas that we're succeeding in, those are the areas where it doesn't come down to a battle of wills.
	It doesn't come down to lying or manipulation.
	I mean, yeah, there's fraud in business, but usually that doesn't last too long in a free market.
	It's when there's something that is objective.
	That's where we succeed.
	It's like you can have the fastest race car in the world, but if your wheels are two inches off the ground...
	It doesn't matter how much gas you put in.
	It doesn't matter how much you stomp on the accelerator.
	You're not going anywhere.
	And what puts the wheel on the road is objective metrics.
	Absolute facts.
	Because then we can get rid of what doesn't work.
	We can embrace what does work.
	And there's very little disagreement about these things.
	Nobody sits there and says, well, a 486 is a worse chip than a 386.
	It's like, it runs faster.
	If at the same price, you get more bang for the buck.
	This is going back a ways. Boy, I don't even think they make anything with those things anymore.
	But So when we look at philosophy, the question is, what is our objective metric?
	What is it that allows philosophy to become like physics?
	And why isn't it like physics?
	Why aren't we having great leaps and bounds and great leaps forward, to use a terrible Maoist phrase, in philosophy?
	It's because philosophy has turned on itself and has turned reason into a superstition.
	It's like physicists saying, well, let's give up on the scientific method and let's consult philosophy.
	The casting of chicken bones to figure out, or tea leaves, or reading tea leaves to figure out what is true and what is false.
	To turn against your core mechanism of determining truth from falsehood.
	To turn against the scientific method and to turn into rank superstition or storytelling.
	So philosophy has been used to attack philosophy.
	In other words, as you say, it becomes really boring.
	It becomes really abstract.
	In fact, I read some sections of philosophical works recently on my show and everybody was like, I have no idea what any of that means.
	And that's almost by design, really.
	So philosophy has abandoned reason.
	Reason and empirical testing are the hallmarks of philosophy.
	Marxism is anti-rational because it says that the fundamental component to human beings is something called class, which doesn't actually exist In reality, I might as well say that the fundamental component of human beings is disco light unicorn horns that don't actually exist in reality.
	A biologist would just look at you and say, like, you're not well in the head, you should not.
	You should go lie down, put a cold compress on your forehead and stop talking about things that don't exist.
	And so Marxism is anti-rational.
	Marxism is self-contradictory.
	Marxism's predictions don't come true.
	In fact, the opposite of those predictions...
	And so because Marxism is driven by fundamentally psychopathic envy and greed, they can't let go of their theory because it's a drug.
	Everybody knows a drug will destroy you, but if you're addicted, you can't quit.
	So people can't quit Marxism.
	And reason and evidence has destroyed Marxism, so the only way you can maintain a hold on Marxism in your mind is to destroy reason and evidence, which is what intellectuals have been doing since the 1950s, and in particular since the 1960s.
	They have been destroying reason and evidence.
	Now, you see, science is just some European patriarchal cisgendered construct that is not valid.
	And everything has become political.
	Everything has become subjective.
	Because in order to save Marxism, philosophy had to kill philosophy.
	It had to oppose reason and evidence.
	And so now philosophy is the worst thing in the world as a whole because it is A, really boring, and b, highly dangerous.
	And those are the two things.
	See, people will accept something that's dangerous if it's exciting, you know, like wingsuiting or deep sea diving or parachuting.
	It's dangerous, but man, it's exciting.
	Or they will accept something that's boring if it's not particularly dangerous.
	You know, like just, I don't know, having a nap in a hammock and listening to some music.
	Something can be kind of boring, but it's not dangerous.
	But if something is boring and dangerous, that's really bad.
	So philosophy, by eliminating reason, has become completely pointless and boring and annoying.
	But at the same time, if philosophy leads you...
	To opposing something like Marxism or this massive hysteria about racism or questioning the patriarchal view or the view of the patriarchy as endlessly sexist and destructive towards women, then it goes from being very boring to being incredibly dangerous for a lot of people because you can get doxxed.
	You can get kicked out of school.
	People are contacting...
	Other people's employers saying, hey, they're not posting their support for Black Lives Matter.
	You should fire them. And people can get kicked off payment platforms and people can get physically attacked in the streets.
	So they've made philosophy really boring.
	And if you pierce through that boredom and get to the truth, then it becomes highly dangerous.
	And that's warning a lot of people away from the study of philosophy, except for fools or courageous people like you and I. Can I interrupt for a second?
	Okay, so do you think that riots are exciting and dangerous at the same time?
	Do you think that's why they're happening?
	Or what's the deal?
	I mean, you know, we see all these riots in the U.S. I mean, you don't see them anywhere else in the world.
	I mean, I don't often think that...
	I mean, I've never seen them happening in Asia, for once.
	Trust me, you know, there's a lot of...
	Things that are happening in Asia, and there's a lot of accidents.
	I mean, I'm pretty sure that police in countries in Asia, even in the most developed, like Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, sometimes accidents like what happened to poor Floyd, Mr.
	Floyd, they do happen.
	But people may protest, or they may Shout at the police or something, but they're not going to destroy their own country like you see it happening in the US. And I'm pretty disturbed because,
	as you know, my folks, my parents, they immigrated from a communist country where, and by the way, you know, in a communist system, worse things have happened than what happened to Mr.
	Floyd, but nobody has ever Turn around to destroy the country, to loot, to burn, to do all these sorts of things.
	But the riots don't have anything fundamentally to do with George Floyd.
	He's a pretext, right?
	But they're not out there protesting this guy.
	There's something else. Sorry, go ahead. It's because they're exciting and dangerous at the same time.
	Well, no. So, I mean, it's Marxism.
	I mean, this is not my fantasy.
	I mean, Black Lives Matter was founded by Marxists.
	They have a cop killer as one of their patron saints, so to speak, and it's been driven by hard leftists in the mainstream media, and so it is just a straight-up Marxist revolution.
	This is how the U.S., Political elites have destabilized countries all over the place as they foment racial division, they foment class division, they get people to attack each other.
	I talked about this in my recent documentary on Hong Kong and China, that they just go in and if there's not a race issue...
	Such as in China, generally fairly mono-ethnic culture, at least in many locations.
	They have the same black-white gap that's in the US. But in China, it was pretty simple.
	They went to the poor people and they just said over and over again that the only reason you're poor is because that guy's rich.
	And the only reason that guy's rich is he's stolen from you and he owes you and he hates you and we're going to help you get back what's yours.
	And they arouse lies. All of this resentment and this hatred and this envy.
	And they're just really good at, you know, you get a fire that's going out at a campsite, you lean over and blow it and you get it to spark back up.
	And they're just really, really good at sowing division and resentment and fear and hatred.
	And so this is what's going on.
	They're using a sad incident.
	It's really sad what happened to George Floyd.
	And it happened to about 10 other unarmed African Americans in a country of 325 million.
	It happened 10 times. This is not any kind of epidemic.
	Even if you control for population, more whites get shot, more unarmed whites get shot by police than blacks.
	So it's nothing to do with anything that's significant to the country, obviously significant to Mr.
	Floyd and his family and his community, and I respect all of that, but this is not a big issue in America.
	But you have this vivid footage of this guy with a white officer kneeling on his back, kneeling on his neck, and the guy dies.
	And it's very easy to just whip up a frenzy of fear and hatred and resentment and violence about all of this.
	It's a tragic situation.
	I mean, the fact that he was high on fentanyl, which is an incredibly dangerous drug that can actually mimic a lack of ability to breathe.
	The fact that he had traces of methamphetamine in his system, the fact that he had traces of cannabinoids in his system, the fact that he violently resisted arrest while having a very diseased and broken heart and 90% blockage in one of his arteries.
	And the fact that he died not of any kind of knee to the neck, but he died of cardiac arrest, cardiopulmonary arrest.
	The fact that they tried to keep him still, the fact that this occurred during a pandemic when everybody was terrified of coronavirus.
	And one of the symptoms of coronavirus is not being able to breathe.
	And the fact that he said he couldn't breathe even before he was down on the ground.
	Like, none of that matters to people because they see a guy dying and they're told it's a racist white cop and you're being hunted in the streets.
	And, you know, the language is so inflammatory.
	And people just get gripped up.
	It's the ancient enemy of civilization of the sophists who can sow division and get people to hate each other.
	Like you can get the rich to hate the poor and you get the poor to hate the rich and you get men to hate women and women to hate men and blacks to hate whites and whites to fear blacks.
	And if you can get that...
	Those seeds sown in a society, you just sit back, you grab your unholy popcorn and you watch the crap show that comes down the pipeline.
	But it's not because this guy died.
	This guy was not a hero.
	This guy was a violent criminal who had performed a home invasion, jammed his gun into the pregnant belly of a black woman, threatened to kill her if she didn't give him money and drugs.
	He had a history of drug use, which also weakens the heart.
	He had his first children, his youngest children.
	He had abandoned them for 15 years.
	They didn't even recognize him when they saw a black man on the news.
	I mean, this was not any kind of hero.
	I mean, then people say, well, does that mean he deserved to die?
	It's like, I don't know what deserves has to do with any of it.
	If you do a lot of drugs, if you don't take care of your health, if you violently resist officers and your heart dies because you have heart disease, I don't know what deserves has to do with any of it.
	But he was not killed.
	And the coroner's report is very clear on this.
	He was not killed by either strangulation or asphyxiation.
	So it wasn't a lack of blood to the brain.
	It wasn't a lack of air to the lungs that killed him.
	It was his heart that gave out.
	That's very sad.
	Is that worth destroying a country over?
	Of course not. But the point is not George Floyd.
	George Floyd... It's the pretext to raise a lot of racial tensions and hatreds to provoke this kind of violence so that the Marxists can get what they want, which is to begin to disable the law and order within America.
	And they're already going for this now.
	For something that happens to only 10 black Americans unarmed over the course of a year, they're now talking about dismantling Entire police departments, which is of course what the Marxists want, because that sows more chaos, it gives more power to criminals, they can then expand it out, and they can get the kind of civil war and the kind of chaos that will let them be able to seize power, obviously armed by other communist nations like perhaps China or other places.
	So yeah, it's not, George Floyd is...
	It's a sad story. It's very significant to the people in his life.
	It's not significant in the general story of America.
	They're just raising it so that people will get so angry at each other that they will cast reason aside and begin to fight.
	And whenever they can get fighting going, they can divide and conquer quite easily.
	Now, I... Okay, if people like me and you, of course, we...
	We pretty much agree on this.
	And not only us, but there's black people of character like Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Jesse Peterson, Larry Elder.
	I mean, I can name you quite a few of them, and they will all say the same thing that what me and you are saying.
	Now, however, you know, the Most Americans, and even the majority of blacks, they will never listen to even black people of character.
	But I would say that perhaps if the president will go before people and say, look, we have the facts, we have the evidence, we know that more white people die than blacks on any given day, any given year, by police, and it's Because police are doing their job and sometimes that's how it is.
	You have some casualties of war, if you want to call it that way.
	I think that perhaps instead of people that are de-platform and people that, in a way or another, are not really being able to make the influence that I would hope that it should, Perhaps the president of the United States can go out there and, without fear or anything, just state the facts.
	And he hasn't done it yet.
	And I'm just curious whether or not he's going to do it one day, because it seems like it's always happening.
	And by the way, I sent you a video of that brave young lady that was black, which went out.
	And I don't know if you've got a chance to see it.
	That she went up against Black Typho Matters the other day.
	I don't know if you've got a chance to see that video.
	If you didn't, I think you'll be very surprised.
	She just went up and the first thing she said was that, do you even care that a lot more people get killed, especially black people, get killed by black people and you guys don't say a thing about it?
	You know, she was I couldn't believe it.
	She nailed the nail in the coffin.
	And now she started being attacked, black and white, by all kinds of black activists.
	And they're all saying, oh, she's not very black.
	She's just a puppet for white people and all this nonsense.
	I'm just really, I don't know.
	I feel very bad for her.
	And I don't know what might happen to her in her career, because she's got a master's degree and she's got a good job.
	But, you know, lots of people like her and lots of people think she's telling the truth.
	But she's still in danger of losing her job and, you know, having all these repercussions and all kinds of bad things happening to her.
	Well, I mean, so there's a lot in what you said.
	I'll just give a quick sprint through at least the major issues as I see them.
	And this comes back to the first issue that we were talking about, what is true.
	What is true? Now, when you start to look at a guy with a white cop kneeling on him who's saying, I can't breathe, I'm dying, and the white cop continues to lean on him, it's real easy, it's really easy to sit there and say, you know, this is a pig racist cop who's killing a black man for whatever, whatever.
	And it's really easy to get that emotional emotion.
	And if all we ever needed was emotions, well, we'd just be animals.
	Animals have very strong passions, very strong emotions and they just act on them without the intervening block of reason.
	And, of course, one of the big complaints the black community had over the years, which I completely understand, even though more white people than blacks were lynched, was lynching.
	And lynching was the extrajudicial judgment of someone prior to them going through a court process of confronting their accusers, of relying upon evidence and being able to subpoena witnesses and get exculpatory evidence handed over.
	And so innocent until proven guilty is very, very important.
	And blacks hated it, and rightly so, when someone said, hey, that black guy did something bad.
	Let's go string him up.
	Right.
	Because that's not a process of law.
	That's not a just process.
	Now, of course, the shoe is kind of on the other foot where there are a lot of blacks, not all, a lot of blacks are saying, oh, this guy is a murderer and, you know, he should fry and blah, blah, blah.
	It's like, yeah, I mean, the video is tough.
	And if all we ever had to do was just feel our way through life, we'd be closer to apes than humans.
	We have these emotions and we should respect our emotions, but we also have to process the facts as well if we are to be civilized.
	Otherwise, we really are just going to descend back into some pre-Stone Age primitive society where, you know, we rape whatever is sexy to us and hit over the head all of our enemies with a rock.
	So we do have to compare the thoughts in our mind to the facts in reality.
	You have to wait for the autopsy.
	You have to wait for the coroner's report.
	You have to wait for the physical evidence.
	You have to wait and you have to wait and you have to understand.
	And if people had waited for the facts to come out, they would have a very, very different perception.
	But the whole point, of course, of the leftists, of the mob, that they try to get the mob to march and to get in a frenzy.
	Because once the mob goes into a frenzy, and I think this is the trouble that President Trump is having.
	Once the mob goes into a frenzy, standing in front of the mob is a pretty dangerous thing to do.
	It's a pretty dangerous thing to do.
	If some mob thought that a black guy raped a white woman and someone stood between the mob and the person they thought was the rapist, that's a pretty dangerous place to be.
	And so for Trump, politics is called the art of the possible.
	Can I do it?
	Not what is the right thing to do, but can I kind of get away with it, so to speak?
	And for Trump, he's cornered in this position where he has to kind of nod at this hysteria over the tragic, almost certainly unpreventable and medical death of this largely career criminal.
	He has to stand and make sympathetic noises.
	Why?
	Well, for two main reasons.
	First of all, the American press can get away with the most appalling lies about people virtually without any cost to themselves.
	In America, you can call someone a Nazi who's not a Nazi and you really can't, especially if you're a public figure.
	Because the standard in American law is not that you lie about someone and therefore that's bad.
	The standard is that you lie about someone and that person you lie about has to prove that you did it maliciously.
	Which is, of course, a mind-reading bit of nonsense that is impossible to uphold.
	And, of course, even if you are doing something malicious in lying about someone, and I've had more than my share of lies told about me, of course, if someone wants to go after someone who's lying about them in the press and they're a public figure, you have a virtually impossible standard of proof.
	You've got to prove that they knowingly lied about you, that they knew it was false, that they did it out of maliciousness.
	And this is all complete nonsense.
	It's absolute complete and total nonsense.
	Nonsense and highly dangerous.
	So it has given the American press in particular such an appalling level of being able to lie about people that everyone is now terrified of the press.
	The real bullies in America are the press because they can really work to destroy your life and you have almost no capacity to hold them to account.
	Now, what Trump could have done, and he actually talked about this in the past, was the libel laws need to be reformed in the US to the point where if you suffer economic, psychological, emotional damage from lies told about you by the mainstream press, they should be liable for it.
	In the same way that if you run a restaurant and someone writes a big review online or in a newspaper saying that they found rat poop in the soup...
	And your restaurant goes out of business, they have, just as if they set fire to the restaurant without even the benefit of you getting insurance, they have destroyed your business.
	They should be liable.
	So Trump had talked about this because, of course, he suffered through such lies in the media and has continued to suffer through such lies in the media continually, but he has not changed, or I guess, I don't know, he can't just snap his fingers and do it, but there has not been a movement that On the Republican side to try and change the laws to give people some capacity to stand up to the bottomless, immoral, destructive bullying of the mainstream media.
	Now, because Trump hasn't done any of that, he's got a big problem, which is that most people don't get reality from facts.
	They get reality from the media.
	And the media is...
	A made up space.
	The media is shadow puppets.
	The media is Plato's caves.
	The media is a manipulated reality.
	The media has about as much relationship to reality as a video game does to war.
	It's a weird recreation at best.
	But because people are constantly looking at the media rather than looking at the facts, because they're looking at people weeping and wailing and gnashing over George Floyd rather than reading the level of fentanyl in his system and the fact that his heart gave out and the fact that he had heart disease and hypertension and a wide variety of other incredibly dangerous ailments or reading his criminal history, Because they're looking at the media rather than at the facts, they're in a manipulated, they're in a dream.
	It's like a psychosis, like a psychotic person, a person going through a psychotic break, will run down the street literally believing that he's being chased by demonic buffalo that are on fire and want to eat his soul.
	And he'll turn around, he'll see those creatures, and he will run in pure terror down the street even though they don't actually exist.
	And because people are looking at a movie, they're looking at a made-up fantasy land, rather than at the actual facts, they're trapped in these lies.
	And the American legal system allows media moguls to get away with the most appalling stuff.
	So that's number one. Number two, of course, is social media, I believe, is really swaying the election.
	And we know this. From various data and also from the confessions of people in social media, even at the very top, that they desperately don't.
	Well, they didn't want Trump to win in 2016, and they sure as hell don't want Trump to win in 2020.
	So Trump has not, has still not pressured Congress to start removing the Section 230 immunities from social media companies because they are not neutral platforms anymore, if they are not, right?
	This would need to be examined and so on.
	So the mainstream media, like the news and the newspapers and those websites, is bad enough, but you start to put in what's going on on social media, then what's happened is Trump doesn't have much of a mechanism to get the truth out to people who were lost in the psychotic delusions of mainstream media and the tilted playing fields of the social media companies.
	So what can he do?
	He has to, to some degree, go along with the delusion in the hopes of being able to manage it.
	But I think to stand against it would be really, really tough right now for him.
	Okay, I would like to ask Sufan for anything that you want to raise up, something that's on your mind or something that's very important to you.
	Now is probably a pretty good time to If not, we'll just go on and you guys can try to think of something that's important.
	What I really want to talk about next is, is there anybody?
	Anybody want to ask a question?
	Not yet? OK. You guys?
	Not yet? Yeah?
	Would you like to ask something?
	No? Not yet.
	OK. I think a very important thing is how Taiwan or how China is going to react to all of this, because obviously China is looking for any occasion or any bit of possibility to...
	I know, you know, it seems kind of crazy.
	Some people, some conspiracy theories, It started out that maybe China might have something to do with it.
	But I look at it this way.
	China has a lot of investments in the US, and they for sure don't want the rioters and the looters to burn down and destroy their assets.
	So I'm not really going that way.
	But who knows?
	Sometimes you might do what What's that Roman guy?
	I think Crassus, was it?
	So he allowed some of his men to be, or some of his men and army to be decimated and to perish just so he can win the war.
	So, you know, Why is it that China cannot do this?
	Why is it that they won't allow some of their property and investments to be destroyed just so they can win the war?
	I don't know. But I do believe that if the U.S. is going through a very, very tough time, I think Taiwan is in some tough situations as well, because the U.S. He is an ally and they have promised to come to aid to Taiwan if China does anything out of the ordinary.
	But in a situation like this, when the US has plenty of its own problems, I don't think they're in a very good position to start worrying about places globally.
	Well, yeah, I mean, there's a lot in that as well, of course.
	So China is a very large holder of American treasuries.
	And I think everybody's pretty aware, given how much debt has been taken on, particularly since the start of the coronavirus crisis, America has just been printing and spending money like crazy, like late Roman Empire diluting the currency with everything you can find in a fishing pond kind of stuff.
	And so American treasuries and their capacity to pay back bonds and their capacity to carry this kind of debt, nobody with any mathematical acuity at all believes that this is sustainable.
	I mean, the current system is absolutely and completely and totally unsustainable.
	I mean, the debt that America owes is far more than 10 times its gross domestic product.
	And so it can't pay its bills and that time is approaching relatively quickly now.
	Traditionally, what happens is when economies do well, governments hand out a lot of money to people, right?
	You've got the welfare state, you've got free housing, free health care, lots of different ways that the government just hands out all of this money.
	And it also hands out jobs to people, you know, just they call pencil pushers, probably a term for them in Taiwan as well, but people who just sit around and collect big fat government Paychecks and pensions and so on and don't really produce anything of value and often stand between people who want to do things and their goals, like bureaucracies that you need licenses to do everything and so on.
	And so what happens is when times are good, governments borrow money, they print money, and that encourages overpopulation.
	I mean, if you put a big nutrient into a Petri dish, you get more whatever's in the Petri dish, right?
	And so people are encouraged, you know, they have a lot of kids, and because times are good, and there's no reason to limit things, and so on, and there's a lot of immigration, and people come for all the free stuff.
	So the population of America, of course, has swollen enormously, right?
	As is the case in other places as well, of course.
	We're talking about America. And a lot of those people aren't frankly the smartest people in the known universe, right?
	Because traditionally, it used to be the wealthy who had the most children, because the wealthy could afford to have those children, and the poor had fewer children because they couldn't afford to have children.
	Those children. And now it's quite the reverse, right?
	So the wealthiest people or the smartest people are having the fewest children and the least wealthy.
	And it's often, although not perfectly correlated with intelligence, are having the most children.
	And so this is what happens in good times, is that you end up with this big, big population of people who...
	Not terribly economically productive.
	Full human beings should have all the rights and perfectly accepted as equals under the law and so on, but not particularly helpful when it comes to building and maintaining civilization.
	Now, unfortunately, what's traditionally happened in history is that when the government has promised too much to too many people and it can't pay its bills, it always does the same thing.
	It goes to war.
	Because people will accept privations.
	They will accept not getting stuff, not getting free stuff.
	They will accept rationing in a war.
	They won't accept it in peacetime.
	And then what the government does is it calls up a whole bunch of people to come and serve in the armed forces.
	And then what it does, and this is actually why...
	The IQ test was first implemented in America was to separate the smart people from the less smart people so the less smart people could go on the front lines and the smart people could be kept back to do other things.
	In other words, the less smart people were thrown into the fires of war because the government couldn't pay them everything it had promised.
	That's a very traditional, very continual thing.
	That happens in the world.
	It's a very tragic thing, which is one of the reasons why I'm not a fan of governments at all.
	But this is a cycle that happens.
	Same thing happened in Rome. Same thing happened in the British Empire.
	Same thing happened in Europe after the 100 years peace from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the beginning of World War I. Now, of course, you can't really have war between nuclear powers.
	So the way that governments deal with not being able to pay their bills is instead of going to war overseas, They start a war internally, right?
	Because you can't start a war with China because China has nuclear weapons.
	But you can start a war in Detroit.
	You can start a war in Chicago.
	You can start a war in Los Angeles because they're not nuclear powers.
	And this is a way that you can eliminate what is perceived as the excess population.
	And it's brutal and it's horrible, and I really, really oppose it.
	And you can also get people to accept that the government isn't going to be able to pay them.
	Because there's a big emergency, you see.
	There's a war. And so you can't.
	Well, we've got a civil war.
	We've got an emergency. We can't pay your bills.
	And it would be selfish of you to even ask us to.
	And so my particular concern is that America and other countries, of course, as well, are going to fall into this internal conflict, which is part engineered by the government to escape paying its bills, part engineered by the communists and the socialists so that they can create divisions to allow themselves a takeover.
	But it's going to be heavily opposed by the traditionalists, the conservatives and so on within America who tend to be the most armed groups.
	And you're right, of course.
	America's allies overseas are looking at this with great dismay.
	Like the policeman, his house is on fire, so he's not available to help you in the local situation.
	And there is reason to be concerned, which is why I'm spending so much effort, and many other people are as well, Trying to cool everyone's anger and rage by bringing facts back into the conversation.
	I'm crossing my fingers.
	You know, I don't know if it's going to work.
	I know it won't work if I don't do it or if other people don't do it.
	But the only way to stand up against the mob is to cool their outrage with calm and reasoned facts.
	It's up to them whether they choose to be cool by that or not.
	But the best and only chance to keep places like Taiwan safe is to cool the rising tensions in America and in other places.
	And the only way to do that is with facts, with reason, with evidence, with philosophy.
	And philosophy is the shield that stands between China and Taiwan, China and Hong Kong.
	And that's why I was so eager to talk to you and your students.
	And I want to continue on this thing about philosophy, because it seems like a lot of people, even back in the US, although they know what's going on, they know it's bad, and they just don't really want to do anything about it.
	They're like, oh, I'll start worrying about it when it's really, really bad.
	Or I have a friend who is a contractor.
	So for contractors, even during The coronavirus, they had no problem whatsoever.
	They kept working and working and working.
	And he works like a maniac.
	And I know that he's a good person, and he stands up for the truth and for what is right.
	But when I was talking to him the other day, he said, you know, it's not my time now.
	Eventually, when the time comes.
	But the problem is, you often talked about it, and I often think the same thing.
	When you mentioned about the devil, that the devil wants you to know that he's won after you can't do anything about it.
	So a lot of these people, they're going to try to do something when they can't do anything, they won't be able to do much at all.
	So that's why I try so hard to get my students to think about that they are of age when they need to start Taking things more seriously and kind of, you know, video games are cool and, you know, doing all this stuff online, it's nice.
	But if we don't do things for our own country, if we don't do things for our own lives, there might come a time when we would love to do anything we can and there's not much we can do.
	And then we kick ourselves for everything we could have done in the past but failed to do.
	So that's why you do as much as you can.
	Whenever-- you don't want to wait for the best time to come, Whenever you have good time and you have a little bit of time left over, you want to start delving into other things, like what's going on around the world?
	Who are my friends around the world?
	Who are our allies?
	What's going on in the US? I was on it.
	As soon as it happened, I already knew about the riots and stuff like that.
	Most Taiwanese didn't know about the riots for four or five days.
	They're like, whoa, really? When did that happen?
	Oh, wow. Finally, they started finding out about it.
	A lot of them, they thought, you know, that happens all the time.
	That's what happens in the US. The US is famous for that.
	And whether the US is famous or not for riots, that's besides the point.
	It hurts. It hurts the US and it hurts the world.
	And you should be concerned about it and perhaps take it more seriously when things like that happen.
	And each and every time, it's getting worse and worse.
	I mean, now there's a lot more looting, a lot more burning, a lot more friction with the police, a lot more people getting injured.
	You know, it's getting more and more serious and, you know, I really wish that hopefully, you know, the U.S. has helped a lot of countries worldwide, all the time.
	I just hope that in some way or another, other countries can start Lending in a hand and helping out the U.S. a little bit.
	But it seems like most countries are doing the opposite.
	They're putting more fuel on the fire by denouncing order and civility.
	I look at England and I look at a few other places.
	They start to have civil unrest and disorder and chaos.
	How is that helping?
	How are you going to help a place or a country or a people that have been helping the world for so many years?
	Well, I mean, not designed to help, right?
	I mean, this Diana West, an American author who's got a great series of books on communism, she repeatedly says, when people say, well, what about this contradiction?
	And what about that contradiction?
	You know, like, we've had this amazing, amazing, terrifying situation that has gone on in America and in other places here in Canada, too.
	We were told, first we were told, hey, man, two weeks, man, we just need two weeks to suppress the curve because we don't know what this thing is that's come out of China.
	It could be really bad.
	We need data and we need to flatten the curve because we don't want to be overwhelmed should coronavirus spread as wildly as it appeared to be doing at the beginning before the facts came in about its level of lethality, its level of dangerousness, right?
	So people are like, you've just got to stay home a couple of weeks, and we've got to just get a handle on this thing.
	Now, I didn't think the government should force people to stay home, but I was very much behind, you know, hey, we've got a whole new thing here.
	It could be very dangerous.
	It could be a bioweapon.
	It could have escaped from this bioweapons lab.
	I believe that it did, and there's lots of evidence coming out that it was man-made.
	So we could have a potentially engineered bioweapon that's loose in the world with unknown effects on the general population, unknown spread potential.
	So to me, it was like, yes, take a week or two, stay home if you can, you know, and not that the government should order it, but we should, you know.
	And a lot of people were like, okay, for the sake of humanity, for the sake of the elderly, for the sake of not knowing how bad this thing is, okay, We'll stay home for a week or two.
	And then it stretched out.
	And then it stretched out.
	Now you've got people's month after month after month here in Ontario.
	We've still got emergency lockdown orders until the 19th of this month.
	And this is like three months or whatever, two and a half, three months into it.
	And now we've got people saying, well, you can't resume any kind of normal life until there's a vaccine.
	And it's a coronavirus.
	There's never been a vaccine for a coronavirus.
	They're still working on vaccines for AIDS decades after it first came out.
	So the idea that, A, there'll be a vaccine or, B, that it'll even be remotely safe is very much up in the air at the moment.
	And so people feel that was a real bait and switch.
	Just stay home for two weeks to save millions of elderly people.
	It's like, well, yeah, that's a reasonable thing to ask.
	And then it's like, nope, now you're stuck at home.
	And now you can't go surfing.
	And now you can't take a walk.
	And now you can't, you can't, you can't, right?
	And, you know, tens of millions of people have lost their jobs.
	Hundreds of thousands of business owners have been absolutely destroyed, right?
	And people say, oh, well, you know, this has to be really bad.
	Man, the spread of coronavirus, no gathering in public places, social distancing, stay home...
	This has to be like to destroy tens of millions of jobs, to destroy hundreds of thousands of businesses.
	It's got to be really, really important for society to not have this disease spread.
	And then what happens?
	The riots.
	The protests.
	And now all of the exact same medical professionals who are saying, my father died.
	Dan, I couldn't go to his funeral.
	Because I wasn't allowed to fly.
	I know people who've lost elderly relatives as the result of COVID. They can't go.
	They can't have a gathering.
	They can't have a wake. They can't have a ceremony.
	They can't go to church.
	Because, you see, this virus is so potentially dangerous.
	We've got to have everybody strapped down at home.
	But then... But it's okay for them to have their church being burned up and destroyed.
	But then when you have the riots, you have tens of thousands of people all congregating, and the health professionals aren't saying, this is bad, everyone should go home.
	Hey, I get that we can't force everyone to go home.
	What they're saying now, the exact same professionals who said, you've got to stay home or the world will end, are now saying, well, Okay, coronavirus is kind of dangerous, but we should let people protest because racism is even worse.
	And that is, like, people are just, like, this is a crack in the whole simulation.
	This is the matrix just turning into those digital streams of green diarrhea.
	This is people saying, oh my god, they're liars!
	Good people had to stay home, but looters are welcome to whatever they get.
	People can't go walk their dogs.
	But you can march down the streets and intimidate the hell out of everyone because racism is so bad.
	Racism is worse than a potential bioweapon ripping its way through the elderly and vulnerable in society.
	My God! And all of these predictions that came out of the Royal Imperial College and Ferguson and other people in other places, all totally wrong.
	Not even close. They can't figure out with data The spread of a virus three weeks out, but, but, they believe that they can predict the weather in 100 years.
	And that we should all give up the comforts of civilization to shave a tenth of a percent of a degree off the global climate by the end of the century.
	So there's a huge crack in people's belief in authority.
	There's a huge crack in people's acceptance, even of medical authorities, now that science has become politicized.
	Medicine has become politicized.
	I mean, the arts have always been politicized.
	The media has always been politicized.
	But people thought that the people in the white lab coats...
	Weren't lying to them the whole time.
	And now, it's all revealed as hideous propaganda.
	And it's a tragedy for people's faith in authority, but it's a huge opportunity for philosophy.
	Well, speaking of science and how this insanity has impacted science, a few weeks ago, actually, Maybe a little over a month ago.
	We've sent a little article to Science, the Science Journal.
	I think you're familiar with that.
	It's one of the most popular journals in the world.
	Now, interestingly, I don't know if you've gone through the articles in the Science Journal and Nature Journal over the years, but lately they are devoting A section, both science and nature are devoting a section that is called Nature China and Science China or something like that.
	So I'm curious, why is it that they're devoting a part of their journal for China only But not to any other countries.
	It makes it kind of very interesting.
	So when we sent this, OK, so we sent this article talking about, because there was this big thing in science, well, in all science journals, how different people and places are handling the coronavirus.
	So we wrote a nice little article about how Taiwan has has been so successful in dealing with the coronavirus.
	But at first, they're like, well, Taiwan is China, so we don't need to worry about this.
	But we're like, no, because I was arguing back and forth with the editor.
	And we're like, no, because China uses an authoritarian system.
	We don't. So we want to share with the world what methods have worked so perhaps other people in the world and countries, they can benefit.
	After going back and forth a few times, she said, oh, you know, it's okay.
	You can upload it as an e-letter.
	Now, the problem with e-letters is that instead of them being on the front section or page of a new issue, they get put back all the way to the other articles that they are related to.
	So, you know, basically it's kind of like shadow banning science.
	Finally, we did that because we said, hey, it's better than do nothing.
	And guess what? They didn't even want to upload the e-letter after they told us, go ahead and upload it because we'll put it up.
	So I don't even know if there's a point to even argue back and forth with the science journal to upload this letter because it definitely seems that China is determined to have nothing coming out of Taiwan, nothing positive, nothing that would show even a remote Or a tiny degree that we're doing anything as good as they are or even better.
	So, you know, I totally agree with what you're saying, that now it has taken over science as well, you know, all this insanity.
	And I'm hoping to write an article about it, and hopefully that's the thing.
	You can't find any decent source where they will publish your article because, you know, The media won't do it.
	And the conservative media, they just have so few sources and so little influence that it's almost not even worth, I mean, I guess it is.
	And I'll probably try to talk to one of the more conservative medias and reveal all this nonsense and all this Terrible things because, you know, if we could have published that article, we could have hopefully saved or given some advice to people in other countries and show them what they could do and how to fight this pandemic and what kind of things have worked in Taiwan.
	Because look, face masks are relatively cheap.
	It's a lot cheaper to increase the production of face masks.
	Than to start producing ventilators, which take months, and you have to redesign the assembly line and all this and the other.
	And you need a lot of expertise.
	Yes, absolutely. But here's the funny thing.
	While China was selling faulty face masks to countries around the world for the problem which had caused, while Taiwan was giving away free masks, good and functional free masks to countries around the world, And nobody would want to publish this.
	I tried talking to science about it, and I'm like, yeah, because there were articles saying, oh, China's methods to stop the coronavirus in China have worked so well, and they have such a great strategy.
	I'm like, yeah, such a great strategy, similar to the one of selling faulty masks to the world while other people are giving them away for free.
	What is the strategy in this?
	Of course, you never made it to publication, but this is what we're dealing with.
	And I'm so frustrated because, you know, I picked this topic since I was a kid to do science and to research science.
	And I never once thought that it was going to get to this, that essential science is actually going to be blocked by politics and nonsense and Marxism.
	And you call it.
	You name it. Well, this was going on back in the 90s, but it's certainly accelerated more now.
	Sorry, did you have some questions from the students?
	I wanted to see if the students were prepared to comment or to say anything in relation to what's going on in the world.
	I mean, I think these are things that are affecting all of us, or they're going to affect us.
	And I did get, by the way, Dan, I did get some very nice messages from your students after the last chat saying, not apologizing for their shyness, but saying that they felt a little shy about it, but really appreciated the talk.
	So I'm fine if there are not a big overflow of questions.
	We can either finish early or chat a little more, but I really do appreciate the kind messages that I got from people who were like, I felt a bit shy to talk, but I appreciated the conversation.
	Okay, so as Stefan said, if you are not comfortable to talk about things right now, feel free to comment on this video or on his site.
	He also has an email.
	You can send messages.
	We'd be more than happy to answer any of our questions.
	So, anybody wants to...
	Anybody wants to...
	There's a written one.
	There's a written one in the private chat.
	What to do for the protest?
	So that must be America, right?
	Could be, yeah.
	It's me. Oh, it's you?
	Oh, so you're wondering what can be done about those protests?
	How can you help?
	OK, go ahead.
	We have someone that's...
	We have trouble with white people and black people at the same time.
	What would you help black people to avoid this kind of disaster or help white people prevent them from this long-term or this chaos?
	All right.
	I had a little trouble hearing that.
	Dan, if you could just give me the question again.
	Let me refresh that. Definitely saying basically that both black people and white people are suffering from this incident.
	Obviously some people are suffering because others are looting and breaking and hurting them physically and emotionally and you name it.
	But you know what's interesting is that many people that are not Rioting and they're not they don't agree with what's going on but they actually do support those that are looting and they're destroying and burning things and I think the last question is how can we help both parties you know those that feel that they can go out and break and ravage and destroy and those that There are things that are being destroyed.
	There are things that are being broken.
	And I think we already mentioned it, but you have people that want to go to work, and they're willing to die so they can work and they don't have to be a burden on the government and on other people.
	But the government won't let them work because of Corona.
	Now, there's other people that are Out there destroying and burning and ravaging things, but the government is supporting such activities and people because of corona or whatever the ridiculous reason might be.
	So the question is, is it what to do about the riots?
	Yeah, is there anything that can be done to help both parties, you know, those that are protesting and those that are Well, look, as far as the destruction of property and businesses goes, you've just got to stop that.
	I mean, if you're a government that has laws, then you have to enforce those laws.
	And a lot of government laws I don't agree with, but I do agree with rules that you shouldn't be out there stabbing people.
	You shouldn't be out there killing people.
	You shouldn't be out there beating people up or stealing or setting fire to churches or grabbing everything you can find that's not nailed down.
	In a store, protections of persons and property is really the first job of the state or of any rational human society.
	You've got to protect people. You've got to protect property, kind of in that order.
	So the looting really does have to stop.
	Now, It's not that tough to stop looting.
	It's not pretty. But you give people warnings.
	And you then shoot over their heads.
	And then eventually, this is what the government does.
	This is how laws are enforced.
	And people have become so sentimental about the government and about laws because it's become everybody's kind of sugar daddy and best friend, so to speak.
	But you enforce the laws, and laws are enforced at the point of a gun.
	And you're either going to enforce the laws or you're not going to enforce the laws.
	Now, they've kind of chosen to not enforce the laws, and what that does is it informs everyone else that if you get enough people together, you could just go break the law.
	Now, that's always kind of been true in society.
	They can't arrest everyone kind of thing, but people are getting a really, really clear example of what it means to get enough people together so that the government can't control you or has refused to control you, right?
	So national guards have been called out a number of times before.
	Looters have been arrested.
	People who resist arrest have been shot if they are aggressive with the police and they endanger the police and so on.
	So, I'm not a big fan of the government.
	I don't like the way that it does things at all.
	But if you're going to have that system, it needs to protect persons and property because you can't have a conversation while criminals are running rampaging through your society.
	Like, you can't have any kind of rational conversation.
	So, at some point, the riots might burn themselves out.
	At some point, the government might decide to enforce the laws despite what the media is going to do.
	But, you see, Trump doesn't have a strong incentive.
	To enforce the laws because the rioting is all occurring in Democrat-controlled regions.
	Chicago and Minneapolis and so on, these have all been controlled by Democrats for 50, 60, 70, 80 or more years.
	Democrat governors, Democrat police chiefs, Democrat, you name it.
	They're all Democrat mayors.
	So why would Trump want to send in troops To save Democrats from their own terrible policies.
	Because then the pictures are Trump ordering troops, and then there's blood in the streets, and people are gunned down, and it's chaos, and he's a fascist.
	And I mean, at some point, the pain in these communities, hopefully, will shock them into maybe rethinking their voting choices.
	You know, vote libertarian, vote something else, right?
	Well, just don't vote Democrat.
	Because that is one of the pain points that It's this endless pandering that the Democrats have, particularly to blacks, to some degree to Hispanics.
	And Trump doesn't have a big incentive, unfortunately, to go in and take all of the bad publicity that comes from cleaning up the mess that a half a century or more of Democrats have created.
	So maybe the solution is just, hey, you want to get rid of the police?
	Get rid of the police. You want to defund all of this stuff?
	You want to have some sort of other option than police?
	Yeah, go for it, right? Now, maybe that'll work.
	I would love to see private police forces.
	I would love to see people not having a one-size-fits-all solution to policing.
	Of course, it won't work out that well because it's a government program to defund the police, so it's going to be worse, and then things just get worse and worse and worse.
	And sometimes people or an entire city, they have to hit rock bottom before they change.
	You know, sometimes you can't enable the drug addict, right?
	If they won't listen to reason, they just have to...
	Their life has to get worse until they bounce, until they...
	Like an alcoholic, right?
	They just have to lose everything and then maybe they'll find a way to stop...
	Drinking. So there's no philosophical solution while there's so much violence floating around in the environment.
	Now, if this is somehow quelled or if this somehow burns its way out or whatever, I don't think it will.
	I think we're going to go straight on to guerrilla warfare from here.
	I think there's going to be low-grade attacks and arson and looting and you name it, right?
	So I think all of that stuff is going to start because it's about the revolution.
	It's not about George Floyd.
	It's not about racism. It's not about black-white relationships.
	It's about trying to get a communist government into power, a totalitarian government into power.
	So now that they've got this far, they've managed to get the cops to back down.
	They've got the media on their side.
	They have the Democrats on their side.
	Democrats have been completely co-opted by hard leftists.
	And so... We're good to go.
	It's not a conversation if it's a one-way street.
	Like, if it's just black people saying to white people, you're racist and you're terrible people and there's institutionalized racism and slavery and colonization and imperialism and white privilege, that's not a conversation.
	That's just verbal abuse, right?
	And that's not going to be part of any productive solution.
	There does have to be a two-way street.
	Do the blacks have issues in America that they have a right to complain about?
	No. By God, they do.
	They absolutely do.
	And I would argue that most of those issues have to do with the government.
	Because the government, in poor black communities, the government runs the housing.
	The government runs the roads.
	The government runs the schools.
	The government runs the sanitation.
	The government runs the healthcare.
	The government runs the welfare state.
	The government runs licenses just about everyone.
	They're living... in a socialist hellhole to begin with and when the government controls just about every aspect of your life and your life is terrible The solution is not more government.
	The solution is less government. So I think that the blacks in America do have a lot to complain about, and those complaints should be listened to, and solutions should be offered.
	The solution just can't be white people kneeling and washing the feet of black people.
	That's disgusting. That's degrading.
	That's humiliating. That's just going to cause more problems.
	Now, do whites have complaints about blacks in America?
	Of course they do. And some of those are very real and valid complaints, just as the complaints that blacks have about whites in America, a lot of whom are Democrats and who run their cities.
	Yeah, they have reason to complain.
	And whites do have a reason to complain.
	Yeah, there's a lot of illegitimacy.
	Yeah, there's a lot of criminality.
	And the criminality is not just because of racist cops, because there are surveys done continually in America They're called crime victimization surveys.
	And the crime victimization surveys that are done in America almost perfectly match the arrest records in America.
	In other words, it's not that cops are arresting black people for the crimes that white people do or East Asians do.
	Cops are arresting black people because black people commit a very significant amount of crime in America, and that's kind of scary for white people.
	The amount of interracial violence is vastly more blacks attacking whites than whites attacking blacks.
	So dysfunctional societies, lots of welfare dependencies, broken families, high criminality— On both sides, if it's just a one-sided thing, then it's just garbage.
	That's just abuse and that's just going to make things worse.
	Can we actually have a dialogue?
	And is there a capacity for leaders in the black community?
	And some have, but is there a capacity for more of them to stand up and say, you know, we've got problems in our community that aren't directly the fault of white people.
	And maybe, just maybe, we can look in the mirror and figure out what we can improve because this blame game has got us really stuck.
	Now, if we can have that kind of conversation...
	There could be some progress.
	If not, we're just going to keep circling the drain.
	But why is it that...
	Why is it that you think a lot of black leaders, I would say, you know, people like Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams, didn't they have Washington, Jesse D. Peterson, Tommy Syed Moore or whatever his last name is?
	Sotomayor, yeah. They all say the same thing over and over again.
	It starts in the family.
	It starts in the family.
	The black family is shattered, like you said.
	But why is it that the majority of black people just don't pay attention to them?
	Why would they listen to them?
	I mean, these are people that are honorable.
	I consider these two guys, Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell, some of the The best economists in the world.
	I mean, they can lay out all the problems and all the issues that are wrong with what's going on in the welfare state.
	And people are accusing them of, oh, it's not enough that we give them so little money.
	Now we want to take even the little money that we give them.
	We want to take it away. So it's all this nonsense that people that attack them with It seems to overpower and reach people, reach the black community in one way or another, but not the good message or the right message of all these black people that are successful, they're educated.
	Okay, Penn Carson is another one.
	He's also explained the fact that, look, I grew up without a father, but I understood How important is it to have a father in my family?
	He's been a good father, I assume.
	His family is functional and they're very successful.
	He's one of the best neurosurgeons, I believe.
	The black community and the black leaders just won't take them seriously.
	Yeah, I mean I think it's a human temptation to blame other people rather than to take responsibility.
	That's not obviously confined to the black community.
	It's a general human problem that if your life is a mess, it's easier to blame other people.
	This is what Marxism does, right?
	If you're poor, it's easier to blame the rich guy and say, he stole from me, than it is to look at your own life and see what you could have done better.
	Or maybe to say, well, the rich guy is just really smart and really talented.
	I'm just not that smart.
	You know, there's a reason I'm doing this rather than doing big opera concerts because, you know, I'm not a great singer.
	So, I mean, I'm not going to sit there and say, aha, the Luciano Pavarotti stole my singing voice.
	You know, he just, he's a better singer.
	So he gets to do the concerts where he sings and I have these great conversations, which is actually probably better for the world as a whole, at least I hope so.
	So when we fail in life, it is a pretty universal human instinct to blame external forces.
	You know, like we always have this, somebody loses a video game.
	I did this one. We all had this when we were kids.
	You lose a video game, and the first thing you say is, the joystick's broken, man.
	You know, it wasn't getting my input.
	Or like, there's just this temptation to To blame external forces and it gives you a sweet relief in the moment because you don't get too self-critical but it paralyzes you.
	into being self-critical to the point where you improve.
	Now, white culture tends to be a little pathologically self-critical.
	Like, I mean, it's great that it's self-critical, European sort of waspy white culture.
	It's great that it's self-critical because there's a lot of progress, but that degree of self-criticism can be easily leveraged by other groups To subjugate and to humiliate, right?
	Because we take on the burdens of the world, and it was called the white man's burden.
	It was the white man's burden to go out and civilize the world or whatever you want to call it.
	That was a real thing in the 19th century that was believed.
	It comes partly out of Christianity.
	It comes partly out of a high-trust culture.
	It comes partly out of whatever other factors are going on.
	So when you have a group that has significant issues and you have another group around that will beat themselves up over the other group's issues, that's a bad combination.
	It's a bad combination because it means that because whites will rush in to take the blame for what's going on in the black community, oh, slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, blah, blah, blah— And the natural tendency that everyone has to blame others for their own problems, that creates a really unfortunate vortex where whites are doing a huge amount of harm to the black community by taking on all the issues.
	To me, the real racism is saying to the black community or to any community, hey, it's not your fault.
	It's all my fault. It's all our fault.
	You had nothing to do with it.
	It's all our fault.
	And all we can do is keep apologizing and give you money.
	But that's a terribly racist thing to say because it's saying that the blacks have no moral agency in their own lives.
	They have no capacity to make better decisions.
	They have no capacity for self-reflection.
	That's not true.
	That's not true at all.
	And taking on this burden...
	It's so destructive to both parties.
	And for white people, just stop doing it.
	It's easier said than done, I know.
	So that's number one. And number two is that it's really impossible.
	Imagine that you're in a business relationship with someone and you don't speak the same language, so you have a translator, right?
	But let's say the translator...
	Has some desire to break up your business partnership.
	Well, the translator is going to change what you say into something more offensive.
	You know, like you say, I think that I would like to save a little bit of money on this production process.
	And then the translator goes over to the guy and says, he thinks your wife is really ugly.
	Right? And then the other guy says, well, no, I'm sure he didn't say that.
	Go back and ask him to rephrase it, right?
	Right? And then the translator goes back to you and says, well, he thinks that your wife looks like a dog, shaved its butt, and is walking backwards, right?
	And now, how long would it take for that business relationship to get pretty unpleasant or to fracture completely?
	Well, it wouldn't take very long at all, right?
	So what happens is...
	The media is that translator between, say, blacks and whites or rich and poor or men and women or whatever.
	And so if you say to the black community, ah, you know, there's some things that you guys could do better...
	The media goes to the black community and says, that guy is racist and hates you, right?
	Or whatever it is, right?
	And if the black community has a complaint about the white community, often the media will then go and say, the black people are completely right.
	It's 100% your fault.
	Therefore, the blacks don't have to do anything to fix their problems, which is another way of keeping the blacks...
	Down a lot of times, subjugated on the state, dependent upon handouts, and it's just terrible, brutal stuff, right?
	I don't hate anyone, any group at all, but boy, if I did, the first thing that I would do is try and tell them nothing was ever their fault, because that's a way of sealing someone into a tomb of futility and pointlessness and anger and helplessness and rage and Just, hey, there's nothing you can do.
	It's all everyone else's fault.
	It's the structure. It's the system.
	It's patriarchy. It's institutionalized racism.
	There's nothing you... My God, how much do you have to hate a community to completely take away any moral authority they might have?
	Sorry, go ahead. There's a question that a student asked.
	It reads, if Floyd was an Asian, what would happen in the U.S.? If what?
	If Floyd was Asian, what would happen?
	What do you think would have happened?
	Oh, you'd never hear about it. No, of course, right?
	You wouldn't hear about it at all, right?
	You wouldn't hear about it at all.
	Of course, East Asians, to be differentiated from the South Asians, who are like the Indians and so on.
	So the East Asians, what are they called?
	They're called the model minority.
	Because when, I don't want to say you all like there's some big blob, right?
	But when East Asians come into meritocracies, they come into free markets, whether it's in Taiwan or Hong Kong or, gosh, just about anywhere in the world, East Asians do incredibly well.
	I mean, I've talked about this before.
	East Asians have some of the highest IQs in the world.
	East Asians have incredible spatial reasoning capacities, far in excess of Caucasians, of white people.
	And white people have strengths and weaknesses, just as every other ethnic group has their strengths and weaknesses.
	And so East Asians are called the model minority, right?
	They commit the least amount of crime.
	They commit less crime than white people do.
	They make more money than white people do.
	And again, strengths and weaknesses...
	There's some arguments that East Asians as a whole are not quite as creative and innovative as, say, white people.
	But, you know, it's all just strengths and weaknesses.
	There's not any superiority or inferiority as a whole.
	There's just, you know, strengths and weaknesses.
	And again, this is all just big collective blobs.
	You never would judge an individual from any group by these standards.
	So if it was an East Asian, well, okay, so what would have to happen for it to be an East Asian, right?
	So an East Asian would have to have a significant history of very violent crime.
	Hmm. Okay.
	That's pretty unlikely to begin with.
	You know, in Japan, the police can't even figure out what to do.
	They just walk around trying to look for litter that somebody's dropped, which never happens, right?
	So, history of violent crime.
	Not super likely, right?
	Okay. How about a history of incredibly self-destructive drug use and potential drug dealing?
	Does it happen? Sure.
	Is it common? Sure.
	No, it's really not.
	And then the East Asian would have to be knowingly passing a counterfeit bill, right?
	Because the bill was wet.
	It was literally running.
	We think the ink was running on this bill, right?
	And so the East Asian would have to be high on drugs, have a history of violent crime, be passing a counterfeit bill, and then the East Asian would have to resist arrest and attack a cop.
	Hmm. Like, all of these improbabilities would have to mount up, plus the East Asian would have to have heart disease, hypertension, and was it sickle cell anemia or something that's more particular to the black community, and this just doesn't happen.
	There was a blonde woman who was shot by a Somali cop.
	She was unarmed. She was not threatening him.
	He was shot by a Somali cop, a black cop.
	The Somali cop went to prison for it.
	There were no riots. Look at the violations that have been done to people in Hong Kong.
	You know, some of their social media personalities have had their entire channels removed.
	Martin Li, the writer of the Basic Law, got arrested by the Chinese.
	Oh, sorry, got arrested by the local police.
	I mean, there's no riots.
	I walked in Hong Kong with the demonstrators for an entire day.
	We ended up with a face full of tear gas and all of that.
	No riots. There was no looting.
	There was no destruction. There was no, let's go fight communism and steal the plasma TV. There was none of that.
	So if this was an East Asian, maybe you'd hear about it because it's just like so wildly improbable.
	But East Asians, you know, high IQ, a lot of social conformity, a lot of respect and deference to authority.
	And when I was in San Francisco filming...
	My documentary on California, the meeting was a lot of East Asians complaining about the level of black crime in the neighborhood and they can't walk down the street with their cell phones out because someone's going to steal it.
	And it was not the Black community complaining that a lot of East Asians were attacking them and taking their stuff, right?
	I mean, so, yeah, I mean, obviously it's possible, but it would be such an unlikely series of events that I've certainly never heard of it.
	And that doesn't mean anything other than my personal experience, but it seems improbable.
	Yeah, I think the point that a student was...
	Hoping to hear is whether a riot and looting would have happened.
	No, not at all.
	Even if it was some unjust, racially motivated murder of someone from Hong Kong or China, there might be peaceful protests, there might be some marches, but the idea that half of Chinatown or Little Taiwan or Whatever, that they would be on fire and that people would be running through the streets, you know, punching horses and, you know, attacking cars.
	That wouldn't happen. It almost certainly wouldn't happen.
	Okay. Any questions before we end the session?
	No, I guess not. Okay.
	Well, I think what is probably going to happen that the students might Send you a few questions here and there.
	Send them in.
	If there were more questions afterwards, just send them through email.
	I'd be happy to write back.
	I think you'll be noticing who they are by their name, the little Chinese characters.
	If you can address those first, I really appreciate it.
	Thank you so much again, Stefan.
	I kind of wanted to get into another issue about why black people suffer Genetically from hypertension.
	I did a study on vitamin D and actually UV light exposure.
	And this might have to do with the fact that they bring to a place where they don't get as much UV light as they used to in their native places.
	And this is actually beginning to affect them.
	Over the generations.
	Over the many generations they've been living in places like Minnesota or Seattle.
	Right. There's not a lot of sunshine, right?
	Yeah. You know, nobody tells them, hey, and here's the thing.
	They've done a study where they said that people with more melanin in their body, they have to have at least five to six times more exposure than people like me and you and the pain stations.
	But, you know, actually one doctor came out and said, hey, look, I can't really tell this my Black patients, because they will think that I have something against them or I'm not discriminating against them or something like that.
	So nobody tells them that, hey, go out there and get more sunlight.
	Or vitamin D maybe would help, even supplements, yeah.
	Well, actually, vitamin D doesn't really help because when you expose your body to sunlight, we've done some studies and tests, you get a lot more factors, health factors, than just vitamin D. I'll defer to you on that.
	We can talk about that issue another time.
	Maybe this might have something to do with why they behave the frame.
	It's all sorts of questions.
	But again, because we can't talk about biological or genetic differences between the races, we can't talk about things that would genuinely or could genuinely help the black community or the white community, East Asian community, South Asian community, you name it.
	Because that's just such a taboo topic that genuine help really can't be done.
	And, you know, again, the suffering increases until the truth is revealed.
	But listen, thanks very much for the opportunity to chat with you guys.
	It was a great pleasure.
	Thank you so much, Stefan. We look forward to next semester, hopefully, to have you again.
	All right. Thanks, everyone.
	Take care. Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest Free Domain show on philosophy.
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