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July 31, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
53:08
TECH CEOs GRILLED BY CONGRESS!
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Well, good evening, everybody. Stefan Molyneux from Freedom, Maine, 29th of July, and it is but a brief 90-odd span days until we get to the U.S. election across the finish line to the brave new world that awaits.
And, of course, today, well...
I will tell you about my day today, and I will ask you about your day today.
So my day today was doing various middle-aged stretches and exercises while watching six hours of coverage as the CEOs of various tech companies were performing.
Kabuki grilled by members of Congress under oath.
We had CEOs from Google, from Facebook, and from Amazon.
So these guys were all sort of, quote, in the hot seat.
Twitter, notably, absent.
I guess they had a pretty exciting couple of weeks.
So, they weren't around, I guess, after their monumental intergalactic hacks of recent, wherein it is said that their admins made a kind of game of figuring out where celebrities were based upon inner access to their IP, and they kind of made a game out of trying to get into Beyonce's account.
I guess there's a lowercase b, there's an uppercase b, and then there's a queen b, and that's how you get in.
So, Yeah, that's quite something.
Did you guys watch? Just out of curiosity, did you watch any of this stuff that was going on today?
Did you keep it?
All CIA owned.
It's funny because I just did a release.
You should check it out on BitChute.
I released a show today, which was my daughter and I doing a review of Animal Farm by George Orwell.
And it's interesting because the movie that was made in the 1950s was actually directly funded by, I think it was the CIA, by the US government.
It's part of, you know, this is back when the US government was nominally anti-communist.
Oh, isn't that interesting?
I actually have a spider in my studio.
Hey, let's hope it's not a poisonous one put in here by the aforementioned CIA. Just kidding.
I'm just going to end up like some woman on this flight from Australia with her leg blowing up like an elephant holding in a sneeze.
So, yeah, it was funded by the U.S. government.
That's kind of how they got the whole movie going.
That's why there was an ending in the movie, which was quite different, in fact, quite opposite from the ending of the book.
Still not as grim as the ending of 1984, which was just about the kind of book that makes you put your head on a table and never wish to raise it again.
But, yeah, so that is what I was doing with my day, and, man, it was quite – that was quite something.
And what can I tell you?
So I'm just trying to sort of figure out if you guys did watch anything, if you did see anything, or whether you want a quick recap of all of this kind of stuff, because it really was something else to see.
It really was something else to see.
Now I'm just going to drop into here, my free domain server, and see...
If people have questions for me there as well, I'm happy to answer some questions.
I'm happy to do a WeAMA.
And we shall see where it goes from here.
Recap. Okay, so there was...
I don't want to get into the specifics of the details of...
What was being said because it doesn't really matter these individuals who are in charge of these companies.
Of course, it matters to the shareholders.
It matters to them as a whole.
But there are sort of these larger principles.
I'm aiming to get into the whole philosophy aspect of things because, as you know, I'm taking an indefinite break from current political events for a variety of reasons, mostly due to the fact that there's quite a lot of Well, parts of the West that are on fire, which does not seem to be burning down neighborhoods.
Taking over neighborhoods, not an argument.
Oh yeah, so for those of you who want to check it out, one of the things that I'm working on is I'm reading a book that I wrote 20 years ago that I absolutely, completely and totally love.
Uh, it's called almost, and you can pick it up at, um, oh gosh, what is it?
Let me just get my, uh, I should have this on the tip of my tongue, tongue, tongue, freedom.locals.com.
That's freedom.locals.com.
You can just do a search down there for my novel.
Almost, uh, you should check it out.
It's a really good book.
If I do say so myself, and I really, really did enjoy and do enjoy, uh, reading it.
And so, um, um, I wanted to, that's sort of one of the things that I'm working on.
Got a variety of other projects that are cooking on the back burner, but okay, so let's do the recap.
So with regards to these CEOs, what was going on today was they were being brought in to Congress to answer questions about, well, the Democrats were coming from an economic standpoint and in general, and the conservatives were coming at it from a censorship standpoint.
And this has been in the works, I think, for about a year.
They've done a whole bunch of interviews, and they've done a whole bunch of research, and then they had a bunch of questions.
So from the left, well, from the Democrats, the general questions were along the lines of, are you using your monopoly power to create a situation or a system of unfair punishment for smaller companies?
You know what?
This spider is going to drive me a little crazy.
Let me just get my out of the argument and not make an argument with the spider.
Hang on.
It's too distracting.
Hold on.
Hold tight. Now, that's what I call an argument.
All right. So, that is...
So generally the idea, you know how this kind of works, right?
So one of the examples, I think it was diapers, right?
It did come from a woman, but that's just because reasons.
So the argument is that if you have a sort of very large and powerful system, quasi-monopoly in the market, then when a competitor comes along, you lower your prices to drive that competitor to the brink of going out of business or actually going out of business.
And then you can pick up that competitor for pennies on the dollar with regards to their stock price or their share price or the general purchase price of all of these things.
And so that's sort of the argument that was put forward.
And it is a very old argument.
And it is a very false argument.
See, I just want to tell you guys a little bit about monopolies in the free market.
This may seem like an odd time after the last couple of weeks, but I'm going to do it.
Anyway, so monopolies in the free market.
Now, So, let's say you got four companies, right?
And the four companies all produce steel.
And let's say iron, so I don't get steel with this homonym double meaning, right?
So, these four companies all produce iron, and they say, you know what?
We're going to raise our prices 50%.
And they all get together in some smoky backroom, and they all agree to raise their prices by 50%.
Well, here's the problem.
The problem is that They don't have a formal, above-board, enforceable, legal agreement, right?
They have a wink-wink, nudge-nudge, say no more kind of agreement, right?
So then what happens is, let's say one of them decides not to raise his prices 50%.
They say, hey, next week we're all going to raise our prices 50%, right?
And then one of them, of course, doesn't raise his price 50%.
Well, what happens?
He gains or she gains a massive amount of market share.
And this is the big problem with monopolies because they're not enforceable.
What happens is anybody who breaks ranks scoops up a massive amount of market share.
Now, what could also happen is that one of them is in there to, quote, raise prices 50%.
He's not actually going to do it.
What he's going to do is he's going to run to the newspapers with a recording of the meeting and say, you know, this is how terrible my competitors are.
They want to just raise prices unfairly, unjustly, badly, and so on.
And so it's really, really hard.
Now, the other thing, of course, that happens is if all of the local producers of iron do somehow manage to raise all of the prices, nobody breaks ranks, nobody decides to shaft the competitors by running to the media or publishing themselves the meeting that they all dishonestly agreeing to raise their prices.
And so... What happens, of course, is it creates a huge market demand for cheaper iron, and that market demand is either supplied by local producers or they are supplied by overseas.
People start shipping in because the prices have been raised so much, so that's a huge It's a huge, you know, nature abhors a vacuum and the consumer abhors a monopoly or a quasi-monopoly.
Or, you know, what could happen is the first in command of all of these companies decide to raise prices and, of course, Everybody else in the company, like the chief financial officer, the chief information officer, the human resources head, they all kind of know that there's no actual financial reason to raise all these prices.
They're all going to suspect some kind of collusion and some kind of monopoly approach.
The shareholders are not going to be very happy, of course, because when the price goes up, the...
The value of the share prices goes down because when you drive prices up, even assuming you can somehow get a hold of a monopoly, keep foreign steel out and keep foreign iron producers out, keep domestic producers from producing the iron, what happens is the demand for iron is going to go down.
People are going to find some other substitute or some other reared in metal or something.
They're going to find some other way to...
Get the results of iron without actually using iron.
So it reduces the value of the shareholders and you can actually get sued for that if you knowingly take particularly illegal or quasi-illegal methods and you end up reducing the value of people's share prices.
That's not pursuing your fiduciary responsibility as a CXO and therefore you can get into a lot of trouble.
So here's the problem.
When it comes to these kinds of monopolies, these things always break down.
Yeah, there's, you know, people who are all going to get together, but nobody trusts each other.
Nobody trusts each other. It's, I don't know, many years ago I had a friend.
He got together with this woman while she was pregnant with another man's baby.
Then it turned out she wasn't actually hugely trustworthy.
It's like, yeah, she cheated with you, so maybe she'll cheat on you.
So when you get together with people for pretty shady and shaky purposes and it turns out that they're not very honorable people, well, of course they're not honorable people.
They're going to turn around and betray you or they're going to not jack their prices up and scoop up all this market share and so on.
And so that's...
Really bad. That's really, really bad.
So as far as all of that goes, you can't keep monopolies in a marketplace without the government.
And this is why these corporations who want monopolies will always go to the government.
So how do they go to the government?
Well, they go to the government and they say, you know, buy local and they raise tariffs from overseas.
That eliminates Some overseas competition.
What else they will do is they will make it incredibly complicated and expensive to start a competing business.
So there will be health and safety regulations.
There will be environmental regulations.
There will be massive amounts of complicated tax implications.
There will be, you know, like shipping and like it would just get...
Crazy nuts, right? So my daughter runs a candy store.
It's a very good candy store, by the way.
She is terrifyingly good at making candy.
So kiss farewell to my teeth.
I'm going to end up with, you know, wide gap, toonstone, missing hockey mouth after a while.
But anyway, she's not satisfied with the volume of sales she gets from me, although she should be.
And so she's like, oh, you know, it'd be great if I could just ship them around the world.
And I'm like, yeah, it would be. But it's probably going to be a little complicated.
I mean, you've heard these terrible stories of the police arresting, not arresting, but shutting down kids' lemonade stands because they don't have some permit or something like that.
So what you want to do is you just want to make it insanely complicated and convoluted and expensive and exhausting and red tape.
And that's not banning competition.
It's just kind of...
Making it really, really unpleasant.
And that's, you know, one of the problems why, you know, Mr.
Webcam, a little bit of charisma, fairly nice microphone with a sneeze shield keeps me safe in these troubled times.
So, you know, I can go broadcast and so that's a challenge for people who are losing eyeballs to me.
And I guess we all kind of have some idea what they've done with those challenges.
But... So, when it comes to monopolies, really, really tough.
Now... When you have sort of big, powerful companies, yeah, they do seem very large and very imposing.
And there are efficiencies of scale and network efficiencies, right?
The more people who use a particular network, the more valuable it becomes.
So there's all of this really, really cool stuff.
But, but, but, but, but, but...
These things don't tend to last too long.
Innovation comes along.
People get tired of particular platforms and, you know, they go, say, from Twitter to Parley or Parler, as it's known in America or other places as well.
And so it's really, really tough to maintain monopolies.
And in fact, it doesn't really work very well.
So another thing that happens, I did this video years ago.
I'll just recap it really, really briefly here.
What a great pleasure just to chat with you guys again tonight.
So another thing that happens, let's say that there's five businesses in a particular marketplace, and one business does well, and so it starts to buy up other businesses.
Well, then what happens is those other businesses They become more and more expensive because every business, let's say you've got 30% and you want to snap up five other businesses with, you know, 15% or whatever it is, right?
So, or close to 20%, 17%.
So what happens is, you know, the first business is going to cost you X amount of dollars.
The second business is like, ooh, I guess he's going for a monopoly so I can jack up my prices.
And then the third business, they all just get progressively more expensive.
And so as a business, you're taking on more debt and liabilities.
And then you have, of course, you got to wire all the IT systems together.
I have a lot of experience with that.
And it's a really big, giant mess.
You've got to try and merge skill sets.
You've got ambitious people you want to keep around who don't maybe like the new culture.
Like there's a whole bunch of mergings that are a big, big problem.
So this is really, really tough.
Really tough to make these go.
So with regards to, it's a little bit of history for you.
I want to sort of pull this up and it is really, really helpful.
Let me just see here. Let's see.
Yeah, I'll put the streams up.
I'll put the streams up afterwards.
Don't sweat it.
Don't sweat it. And so let me bring up something that I wanted to read to you guys.
Because this is one of the things that came up in this show.
day long and virtually endless also interrupted for technical reasons interview of these four major tech CEOs which was you know we've had these antitrust laws for 100 years and the robber barons and the gilded age and there's this you know big giant story in American history that sort of 1865 to the early 1900s was just the age of the robber barons who pillaged the U.S. consumer and destroyed competition
heartlessly and ground man pastores under heel like Bambi under the foot of Godzilla and so on and this uh is yeah almost completely a lie It's almost completely and totally and utterly.
A big, fat, stinking lie.
So this is from Fee, which is well worth checking out.
Fee.org, Foundation for Economic Education.
So I'm going to just read a little bit here.
It's really, really important stuff because this is where a lot of this antitrust stuff came from.
And the first thing to understand about that trust-busting antitrust stuff, the complaints almost never come from the consumers.
Almost never come from the consumers.
The complaints almost always come from competitors, right?
Because if you can't compete for whatever reason, you can't compete, then what happens is you either go out of business, you find some way to compete, or you run to the government, right?
And you run to the government and you say, oh, they've got a monopoly power, you know, to which my answer would be, well, Are monopolies efficient?
See, if monopolies are efficient, then it actually serves the consumer for there to be monopoly power, right?
Because the consumer is choosing the monopoly, right?
Because if the consumer wants that particular brand or wants that particular way of doing things, then the consumer is choosing the monopoly, and therefore the monopoly is serving the consumer's interest, right?
So that's not a big deal.
So if you say, ah, is the...
Monopoly efficient. Is it chosen voluntarily by the consumers?
Okay, well, then what's the problem, right?
That's number one. Number two is if you say, well, no, you see, it's not efficient.
It's destructive to the economy and it's bad for the consumers.
It's like, okay, well, if it's inefficient, then you should be able to go in and compete, right?
And beat them out and so on, right?
So that's the sort of questions that I would ask.
But This story of when there was unfettered capitalism, right?
This whole Charles Dickens, children being stuffed up chimneys and going to work in bottling factories at the age of six and so on.
This highly sentimentalized and factually not just inaccurate but anti-accurate view of the foundations of capitalism is like, well, you don't want to return to dog-eat-dog capitalism.
You don't want Farmer Jones to come back and run Animal Farm, do you?
So let's look at some of the facts, right?
So this is from Capitalism Worked But We Were Told It Didn't.
And I'll put the...
You know what? I will be shockingly efficient and I will put this into the chat here.
Boom! And let's see here.
And I will show that here.
Yeah, the myth of the robber barons.
Why it persists.
Okay, let's just have a quick look here.
So studying the triumph of American industry is important because it is the story of how the U.S. became the world's leading economic power.
The years when this happened, from 1865 to the early 1900s, saw the U.S. encourage entrepreneurs indirectly by limiting government.
Slavery was abolished, and so was the income tax.
Can you imagine?
1917 in Canada, highly temporary measure.
103 years. I'm sure it's just about to end.
Federal spending was slashed and federal budgets had surpluses almost every year in the late 1800s.
Slavery abolished. Income tax abolished.
Federal spending was slashed.
And federal budgets had surpluses almost every year in the late 1800s.
Can you imagine? That's what drives me nuts.
This coronavirus stuff, as you know, has just created this massive Nagasaki-like glowing hole where the federal governments, state governments too, budgets used to be already running heavily in the red.
It's just become a complete Stanley Kubrick elevator-style blood-red deluge from hell, right?
And, of course, governments are supposed to save for just these kinds of emergencies, but they don't because they can just print, print, print, print, right?
Or borrow, borrow, borrow, right?
So, yeah, just this is what happened, right?
Now, according to Marxist theory or leftist theory, when you shrink the government and there's more...
Entrepreneurs, there's more capitalism, more free markets, then it should be a disaster, right?
It should all be a complete and total mess.
So this time period was a big challenge to progressivism, to leftism, and so on, right?
So if you can't actually get the negative results that your theory predicts, well, you can just wait a while and then just make them up because the people aren't around who remember it, right?
So, to some extent, this article says, And when politicians sometimes veered off course later with government interventions for tariffs,
high income taxes, antitrust laws, and an effort to run a steel plant to make armor for war, the results again often hindered American economic progress.
Free markets worked well, government intervention usually failed.
Why is it then that for so many years most historians have been teaching the opposite lesson?
They have made no distinction between political entrepreneurs who tried to succeed through federal aid and market entrepreneurs who avoided subsidies and sought to create better products at lower prices.
Indeed, most historians have preached that many, if not all, entrepreneurs were robber barons.
Now, of course, for the best explication of this in semi-modern literature, you turn, of course, to the massive ex-Russian brain-dump doorstopper of Ayn Rand, known as Atlas Strugged, and read that, where she has, of course, a very strong differentiator between market entrepreneurs and political entrepreneurs.
Movers and shakers.
The Dagny Taggart versus James Taggart, the Orrin Boyle versus Hank Reardon and so on, right?
So, most historians...
Sorry, um...
Most historians have preached that many, if not all, entrepreneurs were robber barons.
They did not enrich the US with their investments.
Instead, they built the public and corrupted political and economic life in America.
Therefore, government intervention in the economy was needed to save the country from these greedy businessmen.
You understand, right?
So the catalyst for this negative view of American entrepreneurs was historian Matthew Josephson, who wrote a landmark book, The Robber Barons.
Josephson, the son of a Jewish banker, grew up in New York and graduated from Columbia University, where he was inspired in the classroom by Charles Beard, America's foremost progressive historian and a man sympathetic to socialism.
Beard was nothing less than a spellbinder, Josephson recalled, and Beard's lectures helped guide him on the path to radical politics.
So, anyway, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Beard convinced this guy to write a book denouncing the men who had launched America's industrial power.
Beard said of America's capitalists, Oh, those respectable ones!
Oh, they're temples of respectability!
How I detest them! How I would love to pull them all down!
Happily for Beard, Josephson was handy to do the job for him.
He dedicated the robber barons to Beard, the historian most responsible for the book's contents.
So he began research for his book in 1932, The Nadir, like the bottom trough of the Great Depression.
Businessmen were a handy scapegoat for that crisis, and Josephson embraced a Marxist view that the Great Depression was perhaps the last phase in the fall of capitalism, the triumph of communism.
In a written interview for Pravda, that's not the place that makes handbags, but the place that, I guess, rests its bootstomp and feet on the necks of the proletariat.
In a written interview for Pravda, the Soviet newspaper, Josephson said he enjoyed watching, quote, the breakdown of our cult of business success and optimism.
He added, the freedom of the USSR from our cycles of insanity is the strongest argument in the world for the reconstruction of our society in a new form that is as highly centralized as Russia's.
So anyway, he traced the troubled capitalist system of the 30s back to the entrepreneurs of the late 1800s.
Thus, by explaining what he thought was the wasteful, greedy, and corrupt development of steel, oil, and other industries under capitalism, Josephson was explaining to readers why the Great Depression was occurring.
I am not a complete Marxist, Josephson insisted, but what I took to heart for my own project was his theory of the process of industrial concentrations in Volume 1 of Marx's Capital, which underlay my book.
So, he was never trying to write any kind of object or factual book.
He did almost no research, mainly used secondary sources that supported his Marxist viewpoint.
As he had written in the New Republic, boy, this is someone you want to base your historical analysis on.
He said, quote, far from shunning propaganda, we must use it more nobly, more skillfully than our predecessors and speak through it in the local language and slogans.
So he wrote a bunch of dramatic stories and anecdotes and innuendos that demeaned corporate America and made the case for massive government intervention.
So the Robert Barons, where the phrase came from and was certainly popularized, is riddled with factual errors.
On page 14 alone, Josephson makes at least a dozen errors in his account of Vanderbilt and the steamships.
Here is one sentence with three errors.
Now that's actually not...
That's kind of impressive in its own special way that you can create three errors just in one sentence.
So the quote from the book is, So first, E.K. Collins was never the head of the Pacific Mail steamship line.
In fact, he had no connection with it at all.
Second, Vanderbilt and William H. Aspinwall, the actual head of the Pacific Mail steamship line, were never blackmailing each other.
Third, the Pacific Mail steamship line, not Vanderbilt, was the chief plunderer.
Vanderbilt had no subsidy, and the Pacific line did.
In fact, Vanderbilt, through his love of low prices, exposed the federal subsidy as a scandal.
Oh, through his low prices, sorry.
So perhaps more important than all the heiress, Josephson missed the distinction between market entrepreneurs like Vanderbilt, Hilt, and Rockefeller and political entrepreneurs like Collins, Villard, and Gould.
He lumped them all together.
Anyway, so...
It is really, really wretched.
So Josephson enjoyed writing about my scoundrels, he said, and when The Robber Barons came out in March 1934, it became the number one bestselling book of nonfiction in the U.S. for six months now.
You understand, these things don't happen by accident.
You know that, right? Like, there's a concerted effort in the back rooms to make this stuff float to the top, to make it popular and all that, right?
I won't get into this in more detail.
I'm sure that you can read the article for yourself and it's worth reading the entire book called The Myth of the Robber Barron.
It's really, really good. But this, of course, is what people are basing their analyses of contemporary capitalist, quote, monopolies on.
So... Just wanted to share a couple of thoughts.
Can take a couple of questions.
We don't have to go too late tonight.
I know I'm still rebuilding the audience.
It's funny, you know, because I see a couple of comments of like, hey, live views are down.
It's like, yes, yes, they are.
Yes, they are. Of course.
Of course they are. There wouldn't be any point deplatforming me if the views didn't go down.
And I don't know.
It's funny. What do you do when you run into massive obstacles?
Do you just roll over?
I mean, you keep working.
You aim to do better. You aim to improve.
You aim to... Win back even more over time.
You understand how all this works, right?
So, here's a couple of thoughts.
So, okay, first of all, watching the government, which is a monopoly of force, complain about a mostly voluntary quasi-monopoly like Facebook or Google or, you know, whoever, right?
Or Apple and so on.
The government being an absolute direct monopoly, it's sort of funny.
It's like, well, monopolies are bad.
You see, they're bad for the consumer.
They're bad for innovation.
They're bad for creativity. There's no competition.
But the Federal Reserve and government schools are fantastic, and if we ever were to get rid of those, boy, it would just be terrible and chaos.
I can understand how, when you unknow the nature of the state, seeing the government complain about quasi-monopolies in the remnants of the free market while keeping an eye on death grip on money printing, debt, Interest rates and the indoctrination of the young through government, quote, schools, it's just kind of a little precious, to put it mildly.
And that kind of stuff drives me just a little bit super batty as a whole.
So, oh, Dr.
D. Gristle, good to...
You are happy to have me back?
I'm happy to be back.
Trump signed new executive order to combat censorship.
Dude, did he now?
Did he now? Isn't that interesting?
I should probably have a look at that, don't you think?
All right, hang on a sec here.
Oh, look at that.
There's all these graphics you can put in as well.
How interesting. All right.
Glad you share what you are working on now, Stefan.
Yes, I appreciate that.
Thank you. That is very...
That's very nice to be working on.
I'm very happy to be working on it as well.
And, oh, can you share what you're working on?
Yes, I am working on reading an audiobook of my book.
You can get it from freedomain.locals.com, which is worth checking out there.
And I am starting to work on some more historical presentations as well.
But, you know, I won't – I'm not going to lie to you guys.
It was a – the repeated blows knocked me a bit on my butt.
And so I do – I have been sort of recovering, I suppose, and getting my mojo back and all of that.
So, New Jersey boy, was there anything from the congressional hearing today that you appreciated or enjoyed?
I mean, it was a lot of watching that dance, right?
So the dance...
Sorry, I don't know how to...
I'm just trying this thing.
I was going to do this locally, but it was kind of stuttery for some bizarre reason.
But I'm just trying to see if there's any way to take this thing off.
I don't think I can. No, I don't think I can.
All right. Captions?
Captions?! All right, never mind.
So I did enjoy watching this dance, right?
So this is how the dance goes, right?
And it was a little tragic.
I guess some of these guys are lawyers, but anyway, so the dance goes something like this.
So you ask Jeff Bezos or Tim Cook or whatever.
You ask them and you say, what about this thing from 10 years ago, right?
And they say, ooh, you know, that's kind of a long time ago.
I don't have any specifics on that.
Nothing comes to mind. However, this is our general policy in dealing with this blah, blah, blah, right?
Okay, that's quite the dance, right?
And then they come back and say, yes, but what about that specific thing?
Which I haven't given you a chance to look into ahead of time.
And then they say, yes, well, again, you know, I don't remember.
This is a long time ago.
You're really testing my memory and so on.
But in general, blah, blah, blah, right?
So that's the one thing that goes on.
I'm not sure how necessary it was to have five-minute...
Hallmark-style piano brown muffin nostalgia shots of people's personal histories and how much they love their customers for five minutes from each of the CEOs at the beginning.
And so the other was, of course, you know, I thank you for your question.
That's a very important question.
I share your concern in this matter.
We take these issues very seriously, blah, blah.
Like, how can you... Filibuster your way with an appreciation of the genius and brilliance of the question.
So watching that, Pac-Man, you know, eating up seconds as it goes through.
That was kind of interesting to watch.
The other thing, of course, is any specific question is responded to with a general statement of principles.
That's Kind of inevitable.
And then any attempt to drill down on specific answers, if they can't evade, they will say, I don't have that information or I don't recall that information, but at the same time, my office will get back to your office at some point and so on, right?
So asking people for generic commitments, always...
Do you commit to not use slave labor?
Yeah, okay. Do you commit to diversity?
Yeah, okay. Do you...
Do you commit to not interfering in the 2020 election?
There did seem to be some...
Anyway, I'm sure you can see those particular highlights.
All right. Let's see here.
If you guys have any other... I look great.
Well, thank you. I'm sure it's all the camera.
Jenny says, I'm sorry I came late.
I was playing a video game. Glad you're still on.
We haven't forgotten you. You will rise above it!
Very nice. Thank you very much.
Stefan, you mean so much to us.
Even if they shut you up forever, you have made such an enormous difference in so many lives.
I appreciate that. I wouldn't appreciate all the sentiment, but I appreciate that as a whole.
Postgec world says some right-wingers like myself give you a hard time.
If we didn't care at all, we wouldn't even bother.
Should remember that. You have to love a good generality.
In general, yes.
You will rise above the censorship and lies about you and things will pick up, view, cast, donations, etc.
Hope you're doing well. Yes, I'm doing all right.
I'm doing all right.
How much did I miss? I just got here.
I can start again.
Do you like to eat shredded cheese straight out of the bag?
Well, can I... Can I give you a little secret?
A little tiny secret? A little tiny secret?
Well... It depends if anyone else is in the room.
Because if someone else is in the room...
It's basically the comment is...
Hey, Cro-Manian barbarian dude...
How about you eat like a civilized human being and get a plate?
If no one else is in the room...
I guess, you know, they say morality is what you do when you know you can't be caught.
Cro-Manion is what you do when you know you can't be caught.
I will tell you a brief story of Cro-Manion Steph.
Cro-Manion Steph.
So Cro-Manion Steph is a guy who he's so dedicated and focused on abstractions that petty realities fade away, inconsequential.
They are akin to A mosquito on the outside of a giant 747 blasting its way to the Eternal Island of Truth, which is kind of the opposite of Epstein Island.
When I'm working on stuff in particular, I can go without eating.
In order to finish something, my bladder will be like a water balloon hitting Michael Moore's belly, being shot from a cannon.
And so I will sort of forget some of the normal things that you need to do.
I mean, Adam Smith was kind of famously like he'd put butter in his tea.
He was walking and explaining some idea and he actually just fell into a pit that someone had dug because he was so into the idea he didn't even see where he was going.
I'm not that bad. But I definitely can get kind of abstract.
So I was working on...
The book, I was actually working on the book that I'm reading at freedomain.locals.com.
You can get that there.
So I'm working on this novel.
And it's a tough novel to write.
I mean, there's some family history in there.
The novel is the story of a German family and a British family from the First World War through the Second World War.
And it's a lot of...
A lot of European history, a lot of family history, and, you know, famous people are in it, and I sort of try and explain the world and sort of what happened, and it's really quite a novel.
It's, gosh, close to 400,000 words.
It's Lord of the Rings length, I guess.
But anyway, so I'm working on this, and I'm like...
When I'm working hard on something, my body is like, okay, fine.
You don't have to pee. We won't tell you that you're hungry until you're just about to faint and or burst, right?
So you go pee and then I'm like, oh my God, I've got to eat something, right?
And for the last little while, the light in my kitchen had been out.
But I was living in a little apartment at the time and, you know, the light from the balcony would come into the kitchen and I'd be okay or I could go somewhere to get something to eat or whatever, right?
But anyway, I was like – I was actually like when I get too hungry, like I feel a little weak, my hands shake, you know.
It's nothing serious or anything but it's just, you know, I know that I'm really, really hungry.
I got to eat.
So anyway, I flipped the light on.
I completely forgot that the light was out.
It was dark. The kitchen was kind of tucked away and the light from the living room didn't go into the kitchen much at all.
And I'm like, oh man, I know I've got some peanut butter in here somewhere.
And I was just like, you know, I'll take a couple of spoons of peanut butter and that will give me the strength to go and get some food or maybe I'll find something else in the kitchen or whatever, right?
So, I didn't have air conditioning in the apartment.
I think it was in the bedroom, but nowhere else, and I didn't work in the bedroom.
So, I was just in a pair of shorts, and that's it.
I was in a pair of shorts, and I had one slipper on.
Because, you know, that's the kind of classy Clark Gable guy that I was back in the day.
So, I can't find the peanut butter.
Now, of course, when it's dark, you don't want to grope around.
For some reason, it was under the sink. So, you don't want to grope around under the sink and just eat stuff.
Because, you know, it could be...
Cleaner. It could mean something that gets rid of cockroaches and you, so to speak, right?
And so I was like, oh, man.
I know there's a peanut butter down here.
I can't find it. It's too dark. So what I did was I turned on the stove.
It wasn't a gas stove. It was just one of those ring stoves, right?
Like those slow-burning mosquito things.
But, you know, all glows at once, right? And so what I did was I rolled up the newspaper.
And after, you know, desperate smokers would do this too, I guess, right?
So you roll up the newspaper and you light it from the rings that are on the stove that you've turned on, right?
And I'm like, okay, I have...
Oog has fire!
I have the fire. Now I can squat down and I can find my peanut butter.
I don't know if you ever had that zoom out moment, you know, that zoom out moment where you're like, hmm, I believe that in my life trajectory I might have taken a bit of a wrong turn at Albuquerque, right?
And I had one of those zoom out moments.
Dude, you're 31 years old or 32 years old.
You're mostly naked and you're looking for food, holding up a torch, A burning piece of paper like you're in Quest for Fire.
You have become virtually indistinguishable from a pasty bald ape.
And this is not really...
I mean, it's great that you're writing this book.
I appreciate it.
But maybe, just maybe, we don't have to look for food Like, we're hoping to vault and trampoline forward into the Stone Age at some point.
It was just one of these, hmm.
And so I was like, you know, I'm like, okay, I put this out.
I'm like, okay, the book awaits.
I gotta get some clothes on.
I gotta go and get some light bulbs.
And I gotta go and get some food.
And I gotta go and get some civilization.
I'm living like a cave fish in this...
You know, squalid sky pit of creativity.
So that's my massive turning point, a little bit of a turning point in my life where I was like, you know, you just can't let basic life necessities and skills atrophy to the point where you're looking for food using fire in a pair of shorts.
It just was not the way.
It was not the way that things would go.
And let me just tell you, too, it probably was a good idea that this was all dealt with by the time I met the woman who would become my wife.
It probably was a good idea.
And it's funny, too, right?
Bachelors. Oh, The Bachelor Life.
A friend of mine and I, many years ago, we wrote a script, a half script for a movie.
It was one of these, you know, piano movies where children are talking about difficult things that happens to them as a child.
And the movie was going to be called Raised by Bachelors.
And it was going to be kids who were like, well, he didn't really do laundry, but he would tell me to wipe, like, fabric softener on my armpits.
LAUGHTER I don't know.
I just found that we had these whole scenarios of like these – what it was like to be raised by bachelors and that he would – it was okay if I didn't bathe but he would make me stand and spin like a ballerina while he sprayed air freshener on me.
Stuff like that. It was a friend of mine and I, we were both bachelors, and this was sort of after I went through this oog, want fire and peanut butter moment, and it was just, I don't know, for me it was funny.
Maybe you guys would find it. I don't even know if I have it anywhere, but it was just a whole bunch of scenarios of things that were just very funny.
Raised by bachelors, if you had the right child actors, it could have actually been very, very funny.
But, you know, it's just one of these 12 million projects that occur in life.
And I guess I will release this idea to the wild in case anybody wants it.
But it was really... We had...
It's one of these things where...
I don't know if you've ever done this with friends, but it's where you have so much fun with an idea that it's almost like way more fun...
Writing down the ideas and coming up with the ideas than it ever would be to follow it through.
I guess that's the difference between people who just write things down and people who actually get things done.
Somebody says, Steph, I have peanut butter atop my fridge.
I got you. Yeah, yeah, so that would have been better.
I'm still afraid to eat things in the dark.
I just am.
Just call me crazy, but that's the way things go.
Okay, let me just check one or two more questions here and see if...
Let's see here. Tyler asks, Loving Almost, that's the name of the novel, was a scene of the boys playing war taken from your childhood?
I'm incredibly proud of that scene, just by the by, because it weaves in and out of the game As a real thing, from the perspective of the children, I don't know if you guys played war games when you were kids.
I did. A lot.
I grew up on war comics.
I grew up on the Second World War.
I grew up on England's Finest Hour.
I grew up on war movies.
And I remember as a little kid, you know, charging for St.
George, fighting for St.
George. I grew up...
With a distant, echoed love of the Empire.
And so, you know...
I mean, it's funny, too, because, of course, I was born, like, 21 years after the end of the Second World War, but it still was a very powerful thing in British consciousness, of course, as you could well imagine.
So, yes, I did play a very large number of war games as a child.
And so that did actually come from that.
And it's funny, you know, like these windows.
these windows to the past where you just start thinking of something and what happens is this like this window this portal it's like you step through it and you're a kid again or young again or whatever and you just step through the stuff and it just it comes to life like no time has passed like you're back there like you're doing it and i do have of course a pretty bittersweet relationship to the past to the past and
The past was very tough in many ways for me, as it was for a lot of people in the world.
But back in the past, I had a very strong belief that I could escape a crazy family to a sane world and...
I don't quite have that sky-topping Odin Hill finger-tapping optimism as much anymore, which, you know, you want to be realistic and so on.
That's very, very important.
All right.
Let's see here. I used to play war games big time as a child.
I was in the Army, too, when I grew up.
We played war on cowboys and Indians.
I didn't really do cowboys and Indians because it's not really a British thing, but we did cops and robbers, of course, right?
People are demanding $2,500 a month for universal basic income.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Well, you know, there are significant portions of the population in the West, in the world as a whole, who are, to a large degree, fairly functionally unemployable in a modern economy.
To a large degree. Not entirely, but there are many more people in particular areas than there are And it's not their fault.
It's not the fault of the market.
It's just a mismatch between skills, opportunities, and demand.
And so my solution to all of this stuff has always been, you know, we sort of need to understand this stuff.
We need to have sympathy. We need to get together.
We need to be charitable. I want the government to run it, of course, because that's fruit of the poison tree.
But yeah, we do need to have some real sympathy for people who...
Through no fault of their own, in particular, are going to have a very, very tough time fitting into a modern economy.
And it is, of course, has always been my goal to generate sympathy for this kind of stuff.
But we'll see how this plays out as a whole.
Let's see here. Somebody says, I'm on disability, $756 a month.
When my mom dies, there's no way I can live on that.
Wow. I'm sorry about that.
I'm sorry about that. That is really, really tough.
Is it the kind of disability where you can't do any work?
I mean, you type here.
I mean, I know that that's obviously easier than...
But, you know, because there's disabilities that are physical where your mental agility is still there.
But, of course, there are disabilities that are mental, but then you wouldn't be typing this stuff, I'm sure.
But then there are disabilities that result in significant chronic pain where it's tough to concentrate and all of that.
So, yeah, I'm sorry about that.
That's really, really tough.
That's really tough. You know, the welfare state is, I mean, I know disability is not quite the same as the welfare state, but disability, of course, in America, the disability system has, well, it's resulted, I think, to some degree in a lot of medication of kids for these, quote, mental disorders, ADHD and all of that.
Because, you know, you get additional payments.
Is it through Social Security you get additional payments if you have a disabled family member, particularly a child?
And it was originally, of course, for polio victims and so on, but it kind of has turned into something else entirely.
So somebody says, I knew a guy one time who got really fat to get on disability.
Yeah, no, I remember meeting a guy once who, you know, claimed to have all this back pain but seemed to enjoy a very rousing game of Frisbee golf on a regular basis, so...
SSI disability is definitely abused quite a bit.
It's really tough, you know, it's really tough.
One of the, I mean, I've said this before, but, you know, one of the reasons why I really have, I mean, I have the intellectual reasons, and I think they're all valid, but, you know, the emotional motivations for me, the welfare state is particularly brutal because, in many ways, it took my mother from me, right?
Because I was paying my mother's bills, and that gave me a certain kind of authority with regards to her, right?
Because I could say, listen, you know, happy to pay your bills, but, you know, you got to get some exercise, you got to go see a dentist, you know, maybe see a therapist and help you with the stress of your blah, blah, blah, and all that stuff, right?
And because she was able to flip over and get money from the government, I lost any kind of practical influence over my mother.
She could basically just tell me to go take a, as the saying goes, a long walk off a short pier, and there really wasn't anything that I could do, so...
That's a real shame. Okay, so people are saying the stream is lagging just a smidgey smidge.
But that's all right.
That's all right. I wanted to...
I actually got to get a little food before I go to bed.
It's one of these days where I was working pretty hard and kind of forgot to get my num-nums on.
So, all right.
But listen, a real pleasure to chat with you guys.
Thank you so much.
I did not watch the bar hearing yesterday.
No. No, I just, I mean, I'm not, I don't want to talk about politics.
It's just that I don't really think anything's going to come out of it.
I mean, it's, I don't think anything, I don't think much is going to come out of today, but I really don't think anything's going to come out of all of that.
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Okay, I'll do that another time.
Sort of how would the market handle monopolies, disability, and so on.
It's really, really great questions.
And, you know, the short answer is I don't know.
But there is a longer answer, which is taking various market principles and applying them to this kind of stuff.
So I will get into that another time.
But, yeah, I just wanted to say thank you so much for dropping by.
Please, you know, like and share and subscribe and all of that.
Kind of stuff.
I know it can be a little volatile to share what it is that I do, but I think we really do have to take our best shot at keeping reason and evidence front and center in these challenging times.
But yeah, thanks everyone so much.
Have yourselves a great, great, wonderful evening.
I appreciate you guys dropping by.
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