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Dec. 10, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:56:13

STOP SELF-SABOTAGING! Wednesday Night Live from Freedomain

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	All right. Bum,
	bum, bum. Bum, bum, bum.
	Here we go. Here we go.
	Let's see, let's see, let's see.
	Good evening, everybody. This is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain.
	Hope you're doing well. Welcome.
	To a slightly different setup. I've been in the studio all day and I've just decided I am going to do something a little different.
	Just a little change of pace, little change of scenery, nothing to panic about.
	And look at that. I've hit my microphone because I have a blacktop on it.
	It's magic. It's a kind of magic.
	So good evening everybody.
	Hope you're doing well. How is life out there in the land of philosophy, my friend?
	My friends, how are things?
	What's new? I have got your chat streaming away up here, and I am happy to hear what you have to say.
	Is it coming through okay?
	Coming through okay? You tell me.
	You tell me. All right.
	So, feel like giving me the chat, or not so much.
	You guys can hear me? You can see me okay?
	Hello! Coming through?
	Yes, no? It's your parenting book coming out.
	So I've got myself a deadline in my mind, really the only place these things exist, which is end of January.
	I was hoping to get it out for Christmas, but a fair amount of research that needs to be done on it.
	So yeah, that will be...
	That was the case. You're still in mandatory forced isolation hotel lockdown in Australia.
	Man, when you go to Australia, and I was talking about this with a friend of mine, you go to Australia, man, it's, I mean, they tackle you at the airport.
	They just lock you up. They just lock your ass up, don't they, right?
	It's pretty wild.
	It's pretty wild as far as that goes.
	Everyone's fine. First time catching a stream.
	Welcome. Welcome.
	Welcome. Welcome. Blew my mind with the last Duke pastor chat.
	Oh, restream notification still says...
	Oops. Sorry.
	One-man operation. Sometimes a few things slip through the cracks.
	What can I tell you? So, yeah.
	Sorry. Good night from the betterlands.
	Good night. That means you're going to bed?
	You're going to bed, is that right?
	I'm going to just throw a wee little thing out here, just to let people know what I'm up to, where I'm doing, and get people sorted out that way.
	I'm so sorry, I should have done this before, of course.
	But, you know, for those who like to lift the lid into what it is that I do, and I'm sure there's not that many of you, I just had a pretty important call that I was on that went a little bit over and all of that.
	So, let me just throw this out here.
	And, yeah, everyone, copy this link to the right of the chat bar and share on your social media so more people will know to listen in.
	I think that is a very good idea.
	I think that is a very good idea.
	So yeah, glive.tv forward slash free domain, if you could follow me there.
	Yeah.
	So people are saying life is great.
	That's fantastic. Australians can survive six foot tall spiders, but not COVID. They're scared of the COOF. Yeah, so if you can share dlive.tv forward slash free domain, if you can share that on social media, I would be thrilled beyond measure.
	Thrilled beyond words, I tell you.
	And listen, I'm here for you guys.
	If you guys have topics, I am really, really happy to hear about them.
	I'm going to get myself a wee bit more comfortable here.
	I'm happy to hear about topics.
	I'm happy to chat about what you guys want to chat about.
	I'm all ears. I have some topics myself.
	Yeah, we'll spread some lemons around.
	Hi, Austin. How are you doing?
	Nice to meet you. Thanks for dropping by tonight.
	And I appreciate that.
	And I'll start on a topic and wait for a couple of questions.
	Does this sound good? Hey man, if you've got a yearning burning question, throw it in.
	I'm happy to run it through the big chatty forehead.
	If you are shy or waiting, if you are curious but yellow, then I am happy to wait.
	First live stream, quality is great.
	Well, good. I appreciate that.
	So you're saying there was no point getting a studio.
	That's what you're saying to me.
	Hello to William. Thank you very much for dropping by, William.
	Nice to meet you. Disaster cupcake.
	Nice to meet you as well.
	Bless you, Steph. Made myself a whiskey mac and tossed a log of the dying fire here in northern English Dales.
	A whiskey mac.
	Oh, I know. You get a big mac, you blend it with whiskey, and you throw in some trail mix.
	Yeah, that's hearty.
	What do you think the future will be for Hong Kong?
	Oh... That's a sad tale, man.
	That is a sad, sad tale.
	You know, Hong Kong is...
	Like, you could not invent a place that's a more powerful indictment of central planning communism and a more powerful...
	Advocacy for free markets.
	And you should watch it. I interviewed the guy who wrote Hong Kong's Constitution, a bunch of other people, and it's really an amazing experience.
	So, you know, Hong Kong is incredible because the reality is that you've got pretty much a genetically identical population.
	Because, you know, you say, oh, well, you know, communism fails in Russia, you know, but Russia has a particular history and a bit of serfdom and lack of education.
	And, you know, whereas in Germany, maybe it would work, a better educated population.
	But here you have, like, a double-blind experiment, right?
	So you take a genetically identical population, Hong Kong, mainland China, and you carve off the two systems.
	As you know, I go into the whole history of this in my documentary, Hong Kong, Fight for Freedom.
	And you say, okay, we're going to take this section of the population and we're going to give them a free market that came out of 19th century British devotion to genuine free markets, which was about the freest concept of markets that has ever existed.
	You really can look at 19th century England.
	And you're going to take this population, hive it off from China, and then you're going to take China and you're going to put it through a bunch of civil wars, and then you're going to have the communists take over in the late 1940s, and then you're going to see what happens to these two societies based upon whether they have free markets or whether they have central planning.
	And Hong Kong, just about the most free place on the planet.
	I mean, it's... I can't talk about it without getting emotional, just how heartbreaking it is to see what's happened to Hong Kong.
	Hong Kong was going to be like the America, right?
	Where do you go when the shit hits the fan completely?
	Where do you go? Well, it used to be you'd go to America, right?
	And maybe you'd say, oh, we'll go to Hong Kong, right?
	But, you know, it's not looking good out there, man.
	You've got people pulling down tweets all over the place.
	You've got activists getting arrested.
	You've got a merging of the Hong Kong system with the Chinese one-party state system.
	And it's, you know, they were desperately fighting, man.
	Like I was out there, I was moved enormously by the courage and the fight that was going on.
	In Hong Kong for the liberties that they so desperately want to keep.
	But it's not looking good.
	I mean, you can start a business for almost nothing.
	It's an incredible opportunity over there.
	They are They have the most amazing technology, the most amazing ways of banking and paying for things, and no welfare state, and it's an amazing population, a population that facing this tsunami behemoth of totalitarianism to the north, they have really dug in deep and were relying on the world to some degree.
	And I remember thinking about this back in the 90s when Hong Kong was handed over back To China, right?
	And I'll make the speech in the documentary.
	I'll give you a very condensed version of it here, right?
	Because, you know, the Chinese were saying, hey, man, you signed this contract, man.
	It's like a 99-year lease.
	You signed this contract. You know, if there's one thing that communists are known for, it's really honoring ancient contracts.
	Spoiler, they never honor ancient contracts, right?
	So China was really putting pressure on Britain, of course, when Britain signed this 99-year lease for Hong Kong, there was no communism.
	Communism was still just a theory.
	I mean, this was still close to 20 years before it even got implemented in Russia in 1917, right?
	So when, you know, it's a material change.
	It's a material change in the entire situation that occurred between the late 19th century and, of course, the late 20th century.
	But of course, you know, it's very easy to appeal to the British sense of honor and decency and fair play and you name it and to say, well, you know, man, you guys did sign a contract.
	You know, you really have to honor that contract.
	You know, to which I would turn to the Chinese or to the communists as a whole and I would say, okay, let's look at how well you honored contracts over the course of your takeover of China.
	So the Chinese...
	It had an amazing system, pre-communist, an amazing system of land control and land ownership and land transfer.
	They had very, very detailed contracts that dealt with topsoil versus mineral rights and it was all very complex.
	It was generally enforced peacefully and in a sense colloquially or from a community standpoint.
	And Ownership was established and there were registries of land and there was land transfer registries, all very complicated and sophisticated stuff.
	Chinese, of course, a brilliant group of people, a brilliant race, and as you know, were very sophisticated in having paper currency, IQ tests, basically tests for bureaucracy and a pretty stable society for thousands of years before Europeans really got around to doing anything productive.
	And This entire immense, amazing, complicated system of land ownership, land transfer, mineral rights, topsoil rights, lease, and ownership system, when the communists took over, I mean, the whole thing was just completely obliterated.
	It was completely destroyed. You know, they always talk about land reform.
	Land reform is... It's like universal basic income.
	It's just a lie for stealing, right?
	And so they came in and just blew away all these contracts.
	And these contracts had existed for hundreds and hundreds of years regarding land in China.
	And when the communists came in, of course, they just completely destroyed the existing system of contracts that had gone back a lot longer than the 99-year lease that the British had over Hong Kong.
	So this is why I'd never be a diplomat, right?
	Because the communists would come to me and say, hey, man, you got to hand back Hong Kong, because you signed a contract, I'd be like, well, okay, did you guys respect contracts when you took over?
	Did you respect the multi-century contracts regarding land?
	No, you just blew them away. Why on earth would we feel obligated to honor a contract regarding land with a group of thugs who never, ever honored a contract regarding land in their entire existence?
	You've got to be kidding me.
	Oh, man. I mean, it's literally like, you know, you have some guy who's like a professional car thief, and you know he's a professional car thief, and he's like, yeah, I'm going to go park your car, man, because it says right there on the wall, you know, you go park your car, the attendant's going to, I'm the attendant, you park the car, he's like, well, I don't care.
	I just don't care, right?
	So, yeah, it's not going to go well for...
	For Hong Kong, unfortunately.
	You know, we're in the realm now in society.
	Let me guys tell you where we are.
	I mean, it's not even an argument.
	It's just a fact. Okay, so where are we in our society, in our arc of civilization?
	So we are in the arc of civilization where major life events, major political events are decided by a threat, force, intimidation, outright violence.
	I mean, that's where we are. This is Weimar-style stuff, right?
	So when the Nazis, the National Socialists, and the Communists, the International Socialists, were vying for control over the decaying mixed economy of Weimar Germany in the 1930s, Political questions were decided by intimidation.
	They were decided by character assassination, beating people up, outright assassination.
	And unfortunately, that's kind of where we are.
	And I say this, of course, because I used to be able to go out and give speeches.
	I love giving speeches. I love being up in front of a crowd and playing with the crowd and engaging with the crowd.
	But, you know, starting a couple of years ago, it became kind of impossible to give speeches if you're not agreeing with the mainstream narrative.
	Not because people wouldn't show up, right?
	That would be a free market solution.
	People say, I don't like what Steph has to say.
	I think he's a bad speaker.
	He's not interesting. He's not engaging.
	And he's not original.
	And it's all by rote.
	And I don't care. Or he's offensive.
	He's wrong. He's this.
	He's that. So you wouldn't show up and you would maybe organize boycotts so that people wouldn't show up.
	And that would be the sort of free market, civilized solution to disagreeing with what I had to say in a public square, right?
	But that's not what happens, right?
	It started about five or six years ago, really.
	And of course, I've been doing this for 15 years.
	So for a good 10 years, I could just go and give speeches and You know, I mean, there'd be people who disagree with me and I would engage with them and sometimes even debate with them in the Q&A section, but I would go out and give speeches and that's how it Works, right?
	I mean, that's what civilized human beings do.
	I mean, there are lots of people who give speeches and say things or make arguments that I find incredibly offensive and horrible and horrifying and so on.
	It's like, you know, make your case.
	I'll do a rebuttal.
	Some people will organize boycotts or whatever.
	But then starting about a half decade ago, and it was a couple of Faints, they're called, where you're probing to see what you can get away with.
	It started in Detroit at a men's rights conference where bomb threats were phoned in.
	I was speaking with an ex-Canadian senator, and there were Bomb threats regarding this Auguste and austere woman politician from Canada.
	So you might not give the speeches anyway.
	And of course, these were all reported to the authorities and the authorities should have pursued people who were, you know, phoning in bomb threats to a peaceful congregation of human beings discussing ideas.
	Not too much happened. And now after that, things cooled down for a little while.
	You could still go out and give speeches.
	Things went pretty nuts in Australia about two and a half years ago.
	And then after that, it just became practically impossible.
	They gave one more speech in Orlando last year.
	And that was about it.
	Because wherever you try to give speeches, it's not boycotts.
	It's not counter-arguments.
	It's not immune articles in the newspaper.
	I mean, it's just straight-up bomb threats and death threats.
	That's what conditions the public discourse these days.
	And so we're in the realm in society where, because violence is working very well for the people who are committing it, and I reject all forms of violence in civilized discourse, because violence is working so well, you're just going to get more and more of it.
	And we're in the sort of baying jackal...
	Carotid artery, fang, yellow, tooth-tearing part of society, and it's pretty sad.
	I mean, it's pretty sad. We should, of course, have done a whole lot better, but...
	You can, you know, and to me, like even saying to people, oh, I don't like what you're posting.
	I'm going to contact your employer and try and get you fired and try and destroy your reputation and try to destroy your source of income.
	It's a form of terrorism to me.
	It really is. It's a form of terrorism.
	And because terrorism is the use or threat of violence to achieve a particular political goal.
	And we are, and it's funny because I just finished...
	A week or two ago, the audiobook reading of my novel, Almost, which you should really check out.
	It's free. You can just get it, audiobook.
	And I really poured heart and soul into it.
	I actually have been sleeping badly because it was held to record in many ways emotionally.
	And it's been tough to...
	I've been listening to it again just to check on the voices and check on the narrative pacing and style and all of that and see if there's anything I want to change.
	Now I have a little bit of distance from the early part of it.
	It's... It's keeping me up.
	It's giving me wild dreams about family, youth, childhood, history, everything.
	I mean, it's an incredible book and you should really check it out.
	You can get it for free. And in it, I talk about the rise of political violence.
	And frankly, we're living that right now.
	And there's a lot of people who suspect the United States that there was a lot of corruption over the course of the US election.
	And I just did a whole podcast on this today for like an hour and a half about the reasons why people were so greedy for the Fine people hoax, you know, the lie, pretty much the most destructive lie in the history of American politics, or the history of America, really.
	The most destructive lie was that Trump called neo-Nazis fine people, that Trump is a fan of Nazism and that all of his supporters are fans of Nazism.
	Because once you pull that out, once you pull the N-bomb out and you start applying it to people, Well, of course, people would use force to prevent the rise of Hitler.
	People would use force to prevent the rise of fascism, or some people would use force to prevent the rise of communism.
	So once you start throwing the Nazi bomb at people, all civilized discourse grinds to a halt.
	That's sort of the purpose of it. The purpose of that kind of wild escalation is to substitute force for reason, which is the whole wrestling of Social discourse from force to reason, or at least debate. That's really been the whole purpose and path of civilization.
	And, yeah, we're just losing it.
	I mean, I've lost it.
	And other people will lose it.
	They don't stop with me, obviously, right?
	So, yeah, unfortunately, we are just in that situation where might makes right.
	Or, as I say in my novel, an evil character says, it's not a spoiler, he says, The beautiful thing is that might doesn't make right.
	Might makes right irrelevant.
	And yeah, it doesn't matter what facts you have.
	It doesn't matter how many scientists you have behind you.
	It doesn't matter what data you bring to bear on the question.
	If you go against the powers that be or the people who depend upon the powers that be to take your income and give it to them by force, If you do that, if you step outside those bounds, yeah, I mean, they'll just try and destroy you.
	I mean, this is not a debate situation anymore.
	This is not facts, reason, evidence.
	It's not even insults. It is straight up trying to destroy people's lives.
	And that's because the rhetoric has escalated to the point where half the U.S. population It's generally and genuinely perceived to be Nazi supporters because of the lies of the media.
	You know, and it's funny too because now Facebook is cracking down more on what they call hate speech.
	Although they're saying, well, if it's against males and whites and, you know, maybe Christians, it's not really that big a deal.
	But they're saying, well, if it's fake news, if it delegitimizes the election, YouTube's doing this one where if you question the results of the election or think there may be fraud or all of that, even though this big Texas lawsuit is still winding its way through the court system and none of this stuff has been totally, like, finally resolved, right?
	Then they're going to ban you because, you know, questioning the legitimacy of an election is really bad, unless, of course, For four years, you claim that Trump was only installed because he was an asset of Vladimir Putin in Russia, right?
	I mean, that, of course, completely delegitimize the election.
	But that doesn't matter, right?
	And again, it's just kind of boring.
	I mean, it is, you know, there's these double standards where there are pretty credible allegations of fraud in certain areas.
	Again, none of this has been proven, right?
	And finally, but there's a lot of affidavits floating around.
	And it is kind of suspicious that Giuliani got COVID right now, right in the midst of all this legal battle.
	But yeah, there are genuine questions.
	If it's genuinely reasonable, which I don't think it was based on the Hillary-funded source of the Steele dossier, or the DNC-funded source of the Steele dossier, If it was reasonable to ask, well, maybe the Russians helped Trump to get in, is it unreasonable to say, well, maybe outside elements, open society elements, maybe the TICOMs had something to do with possible...
	Hinky stuff in the election?
	Okay, well, you can't ask that, right?
	I mean, you can, but then you'll get kicked off this ScrewTube platform, which is just repulsive.
	It's just repulsive these days.
	It's absolutely repulsive.
	What's going on there?
	And, you know, because I remember back in the day when it was actually a free speech platform.
	So, yeah, it's...
	Unfortunately, discourse is mumbling down around us all, and because of that...
	We are not likely to have a very peaceful or idealized outcome to all of this.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're right, right.
	So Reese says it's to the point where someone mentions hypocrisy on the left and you're like, well, obviously.
	And people are like, I can't believe that the left is like, that's what they do, man.
	And listen, the right has its own hypocrisies as well.
	So I'm sort of pointing that out.
	Hey, you guys feel like getting some lemons?
	Shall we distribute some rewards?
	27, 26.
	You can subscribe. I think you subscribe or something like that.
	Yeah, thank you, Philosopher.
	Wait, Psylosopher?
	Psylosopher is gifting five subscriptions.
	Well, thank you very much. That's very kind.
	I appreciate that. Opinions on the Final Cut album by Pink Floyd.
	Ooh, really?
	Damn, came in here with a great mood, but now I feel pessimistic.
	Yeah, listen, I'm really, I'm sorry about that.
	Like, I really am. I don't mean to do that.
	But, you know, I think it's important to keep a A clear eye on these things, right?
	So let's see here.
	Let's see here.
	Okay.
	Do you guys mind if we do some music?
	Can we take a break?
	I guess it's not like we're going to end up a whole lot more optimistic by talking about Pink Floyd albums.
	So, I am a massive Pink Floyd fan.
	Okay, I can't go all the way back to Uma Guma, but I am a massive Pink Floyd fan.
	The musicianship of those guys, particularly Gilmore on guitar, that's absolutely staggering.
	I'm not much of a guitar aficionado, but I mean, hearing the guitar solos on Comfortably Numb, or even the playing with yourself to the radio on Wish You Were Here, It gives me goosebumps.
	I mean, talk about a guy who can make a guitar sing like nothing else I've ever heard.
	Plus, he's a pretty good blues singer.
	I mean, you want to hear him sing...
	Oof!
	Pulse is one of their albums.
	I remember I got it back on the days of CD and it had a little flushing pulse.
	It was a live album of theirs.
	Coming back to life is the guitar opening to that, plus the first half where he sings before it kind of speeds up and gets kind of lame.
	Amazing, amazing vocals.
	And the guitar is...
	I mean, the man's at one with his instrument.
	It's like watching Prince in that While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne extravaganza.
	I mean, people who have that command and control of instrumentation, it's like listening to...
	Stevie Wonder on keyboards or Freddie Mercury vocally improvising with the audience.
	I mean, just people who have that level of control over their musicality, I just find absolutely fascinating.
	It's incredible. And I, you know, I studied violin for 10 years.
	I was in an orchestra, but I never got particularly great at it.
	And so people who just have that, you know, Eric Clapton, pick up the guitar and merge with it like you're a cyborg and make it do whatever you want.
	That, to me, is just incredible.
	You want to hear a great Eric Clapton.
	Sting did a song. It's not a great song.
	It's called It's Probably Me.
	And then he did a version with Eric Clapton.
	It's just amazing what Eric Clapton brings to this stuff.
	Well, he did the solo on my While My Guitar Gently Weeps, the original Beatles version, right?
	So the final cut album...
	Oh, it gives me goosebumps when...
	Okay, so one of the great things about Pink Floyd is they mix other media in with their music, right?
	So they'll bring in clips from old movies, they'll bring in sound effects and backgrounds and all of that.
	And there's one where it's talking about the Holocaust and you hear this cattle car In a train, open.
	And the way it rolled from left to right in your earphones, it literally gave me goosebumps.
	And it was an incredibly powerful thing.
	I think this was Roger Waters' penned album.
	So his hatred of Margaret Thatcher was kind of boring and kind of predictable.
	Although I've soured quite a bit on Margaret Thatcher since I found out she covered up a pedophile scandal in the House of Lords, I think it was.
	It was pretty wretched.
	So... You want to hear something amazing?
	And I don't mind if you go listen to this and come back, right?
	Maybe not now, but...
	So there's a song called The Gunner's Dream.
	Floating down through the clouds, memories come rushing up to meet me now.
	It's a lovely song, and there's a howl in it that blends into saxophone that is just one of the most perfect merges of voice and instrument that I've ever heard.
	This dream is driving me insane.
	Anyway, it's a beautiful song, and...
	Amazing musicianship. And Two Sons in the Sunset is fantastic.
	So yeah, it's an amazing album.
	And you know, it always strikes me when people are producing that quality of music Why they would just decide, I'm going to go solo.
	You know, like if you're in Queen, why on earth would you produce a terrible album like Freddie Mercury's solo album?
	It was really... I loved the guy.
	But man, that was a bad album.
	And I mean, I don't know if it was drugged or self-indulged.
	And the guy who actually commissioned the album said it was like the worst deal he ever made in his entire career.
	And I think he just about bankrupted an entire record company.
	But yeah, it was pretty bad.
	So yeah, I... Side, side three of the wall.
	I mean, just amazing.
	Amazing. Got a little black book with my poems in.
	Got a bag, got a toothbrush and a comb in.
	But I'm a good dog, they sometimes throw me a bony.
	That's a great...
	It's depressing as hell.
	I feel... Tired as a tourniquet, dry as a funeral drum.
	I mean, the man's got problems.
	Roger Waters, the man has got some problems.
	But yeah, it's just amazing, amazing stuff.
	So musician-wise, you really can't get much.
	Your position on all this is so pure and important.
	I would say that...
	We're talking about the free speech stuff, right?
	All right. Didn't know you were on DLive.
	Love is alive!
	Steph, do you regret not starting your own video platform when you had the audience to support it?
	No, I don't.
	See, if you've been in business, and I'm sorry, this is kind of a pompous and annoying way to start it, but I assume you're not an entrepreneur.
	So if you've been in business, you recognize the very important aspect called the division of labor.
	The division of labor is really, really important.
	And If I start my own video platform, like just for me, bandwidth costs are going to be insane and it's going to bankrupt the show, right?
	So I would have to start a video platform service, which would also be shared with other people.
	And then given my reputation among the normies as, you know, the second coming of the devil himself or something like that, then It would be tough to attract people who weren't crazy, deranged, wrong, evil, bad, you name it, right? And again, I'm a free speech kind of guy, but if they're on my platform and then I'm sort of tied into it, then the attacks would escalate.
	And, you know, you understand it.
	It just wouldn't It wouldn't work out very well.
	I focus on writing the books.
	I focus on doing the shows.
	I focus on my listener conversations, my call-in shows, and there's a lot of technical stuff that goes on behind the scenes, like we're resurrecting playlists from the old YouTube channel and all of that.
	And there's a lot of stuff that's going on behind the scenes that you guys don't really see until it sort of pops up.
	I've actually gathered together a bunch of my best interviews, which you can find at freedomain.com.
	You can just click on And there's a whole list of them, which are playlists back, you know, stuff with Noam Chomsky, stuff with Jordan Peterson, Dinesh D'Souza, gosh, Diamond and Silk, Jesse Lee Peterson, Duke Pesta, Peter Schiff, like all, you know, all of the stuff back in the heyday of when I was doing, gosh, sometimes two or three interviews requiring a reading of a book or more per week.
	And so... I'm sort of focused on the production of quality content to get involved in a big giant business and manage that In the counter-currents or crosswinds of general psychotic levels of media hatred for virtue, that's not a good combo.
	You know, that's not a good combo.
	So, I mean, I get the kind of jerky leading question part of it.
	Do you regret not doing this thing that would have been totally sensible and saved you back in the day?
	Yeah, well, no, no, I'm very comfortable with the decisions that I've made, very much.
	Smashing Pumpkins? Okay, so the only song I know from them is 1979.
	Here's my problem.
	Billy Corgan, I'm not a big fan of his singing voice, and unfortunately, because I like to sing myself, the singing voice quality of the band is more important than just about anything.
	Yeah, I've heard he's really great. Do I like R.E.M.? That's me in the corner.
	You know, not bad.
	Everybody Hurts is a great song.
	But I never...
	Let me tell you guys something.
	So for me, a band is really interesting when they have a great deal of variety.
	You know, Pink Floyd goes all the way from, like, throw yourself off a cliff music to Saint-Tropez from Echoes, which is a really great...
	As I reach for a peach slide right down behind a sofa in Saint-Tropez.
	You know, it's just a pleasant little ditty.
	And I like bands, you know, if you have barnyard animal sounds in your song and you're not like old McDonald's, bands that really push the envelope as far as creativity and originality.
	Also bands that, you know, a lot of different variety, a lot of take risks, bands that take risks.
	And, you know, with R.E.M., I'm just not entirely sure.
	And it was a very cynical band, you know, shiny, happy people.
	Holding hands, you know, that's very cynical.
	Oh, well, if anyone's happy, they've just got to be empty-headed, and that's very cynical.
	Too cynical for me by half.
	The magic of Gilmore on the guitar is he uses a slide as if he were playing blues but playing rock instead.
	Stefan, you probably like Cyberpunk 2077.
	That's a new game that's coming out.
	Is that right? David Bowie's last album was excellent.
	I like Bowie.
	I liked his earlier stuff.
	I did go and see him on the Serious Moonlight Tour, which was not very good.
	Boy, two acts that weren't that great live.
	Yes, and David Bowie.
	That's not particularly interesting.
	I love John Anderson as a singer, but as a performer, I mean, you might as well have a wooden statue up there singing falsetto through its nose.
	Animals was life-changing.
	Yeah, because you get something where people are playing very seriously.
	It's something I remember from theater school.
	One of my movement teachers said, play like children play, really seriously.
	And it's like, yeah, that's right. But children play really seriously.
	I have a whole scene in...
	It's not a spoiler, but a whole scene where I dive into the children's play of how they reenact World War I in the trenches in the woods near their home when they're kids and have these endless battles of the gardens, they were called.
	And you think really, really seriously, yeah.
	Do the lyrics of Pink Floyd talk to you on a deeper level or is it mainly the instruments?
	So the instruments for sure are important, but Pink Floyd has some absolutely goose bumpy lyrics.
	So, okay. You know who's bad at lyrics?
	Every single Queen member is bad at lyrics.
	I mean, those lyrics are just not good.
	I'm sorry. I've fallen in love.
	I've fallen in love for the first time, and this time I know it's for real.
	And it's like, okay, wait.
	If you fall in love for the first time, Then how can you know this time it's for real?
	Like, that's a complete contradiction.
	It doesn't make any sense. And so, yeah, they're not good.
	They're great musicians, great songwriters, but their lyrics suck.
	I mean, their lyrics suck.
	You know, even Brian May talking about being the victim of pedophilia, right?
	I was just a skinny lad, never knew no good from bad, but I knew love before I left my nursery.
	Left alone with big fat fanny, she was such a naughty nanny, hip big woman, you made a bad boy out of me.
	Right? That's being sexually molested by your nanny when you're a toddler, right?
	That's straight up child molestation right there, right?
	And... Again, not bad lyrics, but a little disturbing.
	A little disturbing when it comes to that.
	But Pink Floyd just had some incredible lyrics.
	Taking away the moments that make up a dull day Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way Digging around on a piece of ground in your hometown, waiting for someone or something to show you the way.
	And, you know, just waiting, not planning, not doing, not getting things done.
	And then one day you find 10 years have got behind you.
	No one told you when to run.
	You missed the starting gun.
	Oh, yeah, that fear of being left behind, which is what drives a lot of workaholics like Pink Floyd.
	Yeah, really great lyrics.
	There is no dark side of the moon.
	Matter of fact, it's all dark.
	That's amazing. I mean, that's amazing.
	Money, it's pretty good.
	Pretty good as far as lyrics go.
	Most of the lyrics on the wall are just chillingly good.
	Chillingly good. And yeah, very poetic.
	So yeah, lyrically, they're very, very good.
	Some of the best out there, in my humble opinion.
	What is the purpose of music in educating the youth?
	Those are two separate categories, right?
	There's the purpose of music as a whole and educating the youth.
	So the purpose of music is to connect us through a deep, empathetic, rhythm-based vision of our shared emotions, right?
	So we read to feel that we're not alone, right?
	The purpose of music, just as the purpose of, in particular, first-person novels is Is to develop empathy, right?
	To develop empathy. You know, it's kind of weird when you think about it.
	We never know what someone else is feeling directly, right?
	They can say, I'm sad, I'm happy, I'm angry, I feel bemused resignation or whatever, but we never know.
	We never know what the hell is actually going on in someone's heart directly.
	We know, and sometimes even our own hearts are kind of Opaque, right?
	I couldn't figure out why I was sleeping so badly.
	I'm like, oh, yeah, and I'm revisiting my childhood, my family history, and Europe slide into war through political violence.
	I can see why that might be upsetting.
	But we don't know.
	All we have is what people report to us, and not just in among us, but people can be pretty good liars, and it's pretty hard to know what's going on with people, right?
	Whereas in a novel, unless you have a really unreliable narrator, you know, where a guy says, I thought this, I said this, I did that, and it turns out they're just lying.
	If you have an omniscient narrator, so the omniscient narrator is, it's the way that I like to write.
	I'm not a big first person kind of guy.
	I like the omniscient narrator.
	So the omniscient narrator is, you know, so-and-so walks in the room.
	He turned to this person to the left and he thought, wow, that person looks really weird.
	You know, he sat down, he had an itch in his groin, but he scratched it through his pants pocket on the front.
	And then he looked up and a person who came in reminded him of a floating pumpkin that he dreamt about last year.
	And it was a very strange associate.
	Now, of course, if somebody's just walking into the room, sitting down and glancing up, you have no idea what's going on in their head.
	But if you have a narrator, an omniscient narrator, and it's kind of a rule in literature that the omniscient narrator can't lie.
	The omniscient narrator can't say, you know, so-and-so thought back with horrified, guilty pinpricks to the terrible assault that he'd committed last year.
	That has to be considered a true statement.
	It's like lying in stage directions, you know, exit stage left, pursued by a bear, which is one of the famous things in Shakespeare.
	You can't lie as the omniscient narrator.
	Like, if you say, so-and-so thought about the horrible assault he committed last year, and it turns out he never did commit a horrible assault last year, that's really, that's bad.
	That's bad form, right? Now, if somebody says...
	I was thinking about this or that or the other, and they're lying to you, or it turns out that they're telling a story to someone else and they're lying about it.
	Okay, that's within the bounds of art.
	But the omniscient narrator is absolutely fascinating, absolutely fascinating, because, and I notice this in my own fiction writing all the time, it's an amazing process, wherein you say, and I have this all the time in my novel, like so-and-so, he awoke from this dream.
	Right now, the dream is in there for a reason.
	It's to drive the story, to give depth and resonance to what's going on in the character's waking life, and to give you a sense of their unconscious and their depth, which is really where we connect, right?
	We don't connect at news of the weather, or look, it's sunny outside, or can you believe what the Democrats did today?
	That's not where we connect. Where we connect is really at the deepest and most heartfelt and core aspects of humanity.
	And so fiction, in particular, omniscient narrative fiction is Actually gives you a sense of what it's like to be in somebody else's head.
	You get to try on another life for size to see what it's like.
	And the reading of fiction in particular has been tied to the growth of empathy.
	And if you sort of look at 18th century plus the development of the novel, particularly the third-person omniscient narrative novel, coincided with the rise of Empathy for slaves, the end of slavery, empathy for children, the ending of various brutal practices against children.
	So the novel has had a lot to do with the growth of empathy, which you simply don't get from any other medium.
	There's no other medium wherein you can weave in and out of people's minds, like smoke through a house, and really get a sense of where they're coming from and what motivates them.
	I have characters in my novel, they wake up, they have imaginary conversations.
	Now, they never tell anyone about those imaginary conversations.
	The same way my characters wake up and they've had a dream, they never tell anyone about that dream.
	So how the hell would anyone know?
	Think of all the dreams you've had in your life.
	You've never told anyone about them and now they've probably vanished like morning mist from your brain.
	They're gone forever.
	But I could write down that a character had a dream even if he never tells anyone.
	Anything. You know, I've seen where one woman is looking at her husband, she has a pretty tough relationship with him, but at one point she just loves him, just loves him, and remembers things in the past, and so she never tells anyone about that.
	Oh, no, she does, many years later, tell someone about that moment, but not in the same detail that I describe it.
	So, when you get, you know, when you listen to the wall, you're understanding Roger Waters' experience growing up With an obsessive, virtually Munchausen by proxy, claustrophobic mother and its effect upon his life, particularly combined with the toxicity of fame and money and drugs.
	And you really do get to be invited into, I mean, my podcaster, like, you get to be inside my brain.
	I'm describing what's going on in my brain very honestly and directly, so you get to be inside my brain.
	And it's not that, you know, it's wonderful for you to be inside my brain, but it's wonderful for you to be in somebody else's brain.
	It gives you relief from yourself, and it also teaches you to put yourself in the shoes of other people.
	And that is the foundation of having good relationships and love in life, so.
	Any chance you will move to Blaze, your audience would be huge.
	Yeah, but they're a political thing, right?
	They're a political channel or they're a political website.
	Is that right? Do you like classical music?
	I do like classical music, but I will not consider myself much of an aficionado.
	So I like classical music for when I'm writing.
	I like it in background sometimes, but I wouldn't say I sit there and...
	I like my music a little bit more growly and a little bit more meaty.
	I like a lot of the blues and stuff where it puts some hair on your chest.
	I remember, gosh, growing up without much of a male influence outside of a couple of years in boarding school.
	When I was working up north after high school, saving up money for college, I would just grab fistfuls of tapes from convenience stores.
	I didn't even care really what was on them because I would listen to music when I was doing some of my boring work.
	And I grabbed a collection of blues Everything, everything, everything gonna be alright this morning!
	Anyway, it's really meaty.
	And I remember, you know, that...
	And the background, the drummers and the guitars were like yelping and whooping.
	And it was just so manly.
	It was just so manly.
	And I remember just being completely enthralled by this.
	Because my mom was into all of this...
	You know, hyper-gay, semi-abstract angel garbage like the Roy Conniff singers.
	I want some red roses for a blue lady.
	Like, I really dislike that music intensely.
	And she also was into, oh God, the Christmas.
	I can't even listen to that Elvis Christmas album.
	I just can't. Mama love the roses.
	I can't. It's just too goopy and too for me by half.
	So I like music that's got a little bit more...
	You know, got some balls to it.
	And Blues do that pretty well.
	And Sam Cooke does that really well and all that kind of stuff.
	So yeah, I'm not doing politics, man.
	Listen, I'll do politics.
	Okay, I'll explain to you.
	I'll explain to you something. Let me just make sure I haven't missed any other big questions because I want to make sure that there's a reason to be here live, right?
	Yeah. Blaze TV is owned by Glenn Beck.
	They have several political channels as well.
	Wasn't Glenn Beck the guy who rolled his face in Cheetos to make fun of Trump?
	Yeah, I don't know that that would be a great place for philosophy.
	I don't know. Blaze TV isn't supposed to be political, really?
	Yeah, well. So, okay.
	Let me tell you guys something, okay?
	So, I get these comments, and this is not responding to people in the chat here.
	Sorry, let me just turn that off. Hey, look, it's going back.
	I'm just kidding, it's not. But this is a response to people as a whole.
	I'll probably cut this out and do its own little bit here, right?
	But let me tell you guys something.
	For all the people out there who...
	They're constantly yelling against me for being candidly, for not taking on this topic or that topic or whatever their particular thing is that they think I should be doing.
	And boy, if you were your balls for taking on this or that or the other, right?
	So here's the funny thing, right?
	So what people really don't seem to understand is that courage is not an individual phenomenon.
	You understand? Well, sorry, that's not a phrase that you would understand just from hearing it.
	I'll repeat that, though, because it's really important.
	So you've got to know this, because people will try and goad you into self-destructive behavior, right?
	They will try and goad you into taking on fights you can't win.
	They will try and goad you into poking the bear till the bear takes your head off.
	So one of the ways that you get people in trouble, in serious trouble, I don't just mean like, you know, mean articles or bad comments or whatever, right?
	Haters. But one of the ways you get people into real trouble is you just try and goad them.
	Into entering fights they can't win, which may destroy them.
	And there are those fights out there.
	There really are those fights out there, right?
	So when I say that courage is not an individual phenomenon, what I mean is this.
	So if you imagine you're in a trench in the First World War, and you have to go over the barbed wire into no man's land, and you have to Go and take out some machine gun nest, right?
	So the difference between courage and self-destruction is usually numeric.
	It's usually numeric. So I want you to imagine this.
	So imagine that you climb over the top of the trench and you climb under the barbed wire and you're just about to start charging into no man's land.
	You look to your left and you look to your right.
	And there's no one. There's no one there.
	Are you gonna keep going?
	Well, if you are, then it's just because you want to die.
	Because if you're gonna stand up and you're gonna charge a machine gun nest and you're the only guy there, they're just gonna shoot the shit out of you and you're gonna die.
	And death is probably the most pleasant way out.
	You could hang on the barbed wire for two days before they cut you down and bury you in bits, right?
	So, If you're one of 10,000 people, you don't need as much courage as if you're one of 1,000 people, like charging across the plane or whatever it is.
	If you're one of 1,000 people, you need less courage than if you're one of 100 people or 10 people.
	And if you're the only person, that's not courage, that's suicide.
	You understand, right? That's not courage, that's suicide.
	So when people goad me into...
	Taking on a topic that they want me to take on.
	I think I've displayed significant and enormous courage over the years in the topics that I've taken on.
	But when people goad me, I'm enormously suspicious, and you should be too, when people goad you into taking on topics that are not something that you're into or want to do or want to take on, and perhaps you have particular concerns about it for reasons that make sense, right? So, what I do is I say, okay, look back over the last year, right?
	De-platformed from a variety of places, and between, I don't know, between, let's just say, Twitter and YouTube, like 1.5 million people, right?
	Who will follow us? Now there's some overlap.
	Maybe it's 1.25 million people or whatever it is, right?
	Now I've gone to a bunch of new social media platforms.
	You know, I've gone to Parler.
	I'm on Rumble. I'm on Library, Brighteon, BitChute, MeWe.
	I mean, people say, oh, you spread yourself thin, you spread yourself thin.
	But, you know, there's lots of different people on those platforms, right?
	And so I know that there were people who were very keen on what it is that I was doing and what I had to say.
	And, you know, when you look at...
	Let's just say BitChute.
	You know, I like BitChute. I mean, I think what they're doing is really technologically innovative.
	They're taking a lot of bullets like Gab and so on, but I look at places like BitChute, right?
	I say, okay, well, I had a million subscribers on YouTube and I have like 73,000 subscribers.
	On Bitshoot. And I'll be frank, you guys can look these numbers up.
	It's not particularly shocking, right?
	And I'm lucky if a video gets 10,000 views on Bitshoot, right?
	Now, it was back in the day.
	I remember when I was working with Mike, we put out an interview.
	If the interview didn't hit at least 50,000, it'd be like, oh my gosh, that's terrible, right?
	I mean, average views, like 100,000 on YouTube.
	And of course, some went much higher.
	Now, Parler's pretty good for exposure, I'll be honest with you guys about that.
	And you should follow me, Parler, P-A-R-L-E-R.com.
	You should follow me there. And I got about 108,000 people there.
	So, you know... About a quarter of what I had on Twitter.
	And engagement there is really good.
	And it's a really nice community. And they really are committed to free speech.
	And they should be enormously applauded for what they do.
	Which means, of course, they're going to be endlessly attacked for what they do.
	Because that's during the age of political violence, right?
	So... When I look at...
	People say, oh, he's gone from YouTube.
	So I'm one website over.
	So what do you have to do to follow me on Bitchute?
	Or... So what do you have to do?
	Okay, so I've got my neck out here on the line.
	I'm taking bullets left, right and center, getting deplatformed, having my income hit like crazy, all this kind of stuff, right?
	To bring essential truths to the world, right?
	So that's what I'm doing. Now, for you out there, in order to continue to give me views and kind of make it worthwhile and all that, what do you have to do?
	Well, you've got to go over to BitChute, let's say, and you've got to sign up, which takes maybe 30 seconds, and then you have to click on subscribe, and then you have to watch a video.
	Well, even if you subscribe, right?
	And so what I do is I say, okay, so there's lots of people out there who really want me to take on a lot of risky things, even more risky maybe than some of the stuff I've already taken on, although I can't imagine what is more risky than the stuff I've taken on or whatever, right?
	And so what I do is I say, okay, well, currently about 7% or 8% of my YouTube listeners followed me over.
	Seven or eight percent. So, in other words, most people, I know, you know, the YouTube stuff, who knows how much of it was, you know, people who signed up a year ago or whatever and weren't really watching.
	It could be, right? Obviously. But what I do is I say, okay, so people are having – it's too much work for them to follow me or it's too difficult or maybe they don't want it on their record, their social credit score or something like that.
	Or maybe they consider it's bad or someone's going to find out or whatever.
	Okay, that's fine.
	You know, that's fine.
	That's totally fine. Everybody's got to get their own level of risk, right?
	But, of course, if it's too tough for people to follow me over to a new platform – Then those same people should shut the hell up when they tell me to take risks.
	Okay? Just shut the hell up.
	Just stop talking because you're absolutely ridiculous.
	You don't know how ridiculous you are in the eyes of anybody with any sense of acuity.
	But if you're like, hmm, Steph should take on these giant risks, these massive giant risks.
	But I don't want to risk being seen as one of Steph's followers.
	Okay? I don't mean a follower like intellectually.
	I just mean following me on some social media platform.
	Even anonymous ones.
	Even ones that are blockchain based.
	Even like I'm on Twitch. I'm on Float.
	I'm like... Right?
	So it's like, Steph, you really should take these giant risks.
	And you should really put your neck out on the line to save Western civilization.
	And I'm like, well, you know, you could help me by spending 30 seconds signing up someplace and following me.
	No, I'm not going to do that.
	Well, then shut up the hell of it.
	Just shut the hell up about risk.
	Like, I'll take on the risks if I get the followers, obviously, right?
	Because it's a risk-reward scenario, right?
	But if the majority of the people who were into what I'm doing don't want to follow me to a new platform, and listen, I love chatting with you guys, and I'm not saying I'm unhappy about any of it.
	I'm just saying that these are the facts.
	But I'm saying courage is a collective endeavor.
	So, you know, if you want me to take on challenging topics, even more challenging topics than the ones I've taken on, whatever they might be, And the first thing you need to do is get my listener count up.
	Right? I mean, obviously, right?
	I mean, I'm out there promoting.
	I do these things and I'm out there trying to get people to sign up.
	But you could send out, oh, you should sign up for this guy on this particular social media platform.
	Or you should sign up for him on wherever, videos or whatever.
	But if you're like, hmm, I don't want to do that because that could be risky for me because you have a bad reputation in some circles and therefore I might look bad.
	It's like, okay, so you don't want to take any risks.
	I mean, I'm not mad at you for not wanting to take any risks, but then shut the hell up about the risks you want other people to take.
	Okay, just shut the hell up about risks you want other people to take if you're not willing to take any risks yourself.
	That's just bullshit.
	You know, that's literally like...
	Hiding in the cafeteria and screaming at people that they have to go over the wires into the machine gun fire, right?
	I mean, that's just, that's pathetic.
	That's so pathetic, I can't even tell you how contemptible a behavior that is.
	And again, I'm not mad at you for not wanting to take any risks.
	If you don't want to take the risks...
	I don't think it's a wise decision.
	I think it's kind of cowardly, but I'm not mad at you about it.
	You know, maybe there's some such, maybe you're very prone to stress.
	Maybe you're recovering from some illness.
	Maybe you don't have any money. Maybe, I don't know, whatever it is, right?
	Whatever it is that you're not taking risks.
	Maybe you're a coward. I don't know, right?
	But it could be, I'm not going to get mad at you.
	I'm not going to sit there and castigate you and snarl at you and call you a terrible human being and a betrayer of civilization.
	I'm not going to do that. Because I've got some compassion and some empathy and some depth and some soul and some fucking morals, okay?
	Like, I'm not going to do that.
	But for those of you who are out there saying, Steph, you're a coward if you don't take on this, that, or the other, and you're not encouraging people to follow me on social media, get lost.
	Like, just go away and take your pathetic, cringing, vermin cowardice some other place, okay?
	Let's see here. Bitch, it is growing.
	People are just...
	I do a good job. Thank you very much.
	I said goodbye to YouTube and cancelled all my subscriptions when Stefan was banned.
	I think that's very reasonable.
	I'll quote Trump. What the hell do you have to lose by partnering with Blaze TV? From what I understand, you can post any content you want.
	Well, I'll tell you what.
	Let's save some time.
	You ping Blaze TV. I think I know how it's going to go.
	But you... Ping BlazeTV and you tell them to get in touch with me.
	And we'll see.
	We'll see how that goes.
	Getting banned from social media is a blessing, honestly.
	Well, it's certainly a mixed bag, for sure.
	A lot of people will be leaving YouTube now that voter fraud is a banned topic.
	Yeah, you mean...
	Censorship...
	See, for idiots and fools and cowards and unwise people, censoring other people is a real thrill.
	It literally gives them a dopamine high to shut people up and silence them.
	It's a form of the exercise of power, and we know that the exercise of power over other human beings is highly addictive.
	It is a drug. It's a literal drug in your system.
	You get dopamine, which is one of the biggest reward systems the bodies have.
	It mimics cocaine. It mimics cocaine.
	And so what happens is, you know, the way that drug addiction works.
	So when companies get crazy on their censorship stuff, the way they're supposed to be brought to heel is through the mainstream media.
	But unfortunately, the mainstream media is also crazy for the censorship stuff at the moment, too.
	So you have two drug addicts both encouraging each other to pursue their addiction.
	And yeah, it will destroy the companies, of course.
	But since when have drug addicts cared about destroying their source of income, right?
	Let's see here. What else do we have here?
	Don't change your content.
	Do not let the sensors win.
	Yeah, I don't know what argument you're making there, so feel free to expand upon it.
	I would appreciate that. If you create content, please, for the love of God, back up your stuff on your own devices.
	Yeah, all right. Blaze TV banned Gavin.
	Oh, Gavin McGinnis, is that right?
	Blaze TV is a waste of time.
	They are proudly displayed on YouTube.
	Ask yourself why. Yeah, well, unfortunately, that's pretty bad, right?
	That's pretty bad. So why are people being censored in the chat?
	You mean this chat here?
	I don't know. I don't know what example you have.
	I don't want Stefan to join Blaze TV because I want him to be beholden to philosophy only.
	Well, that is...
	You know, that has always been the big temptation, right?
	That's always been the big temptation is, do you, would you be, would I, it's something I ask myself on a regular basis, because, you know, it's not like the temptation ever goes away, but yeah, the big question or the big temptation is, okay, would I be willing, or what would I be willing to take to have something stand between me, philosophy, and you?
	Right now, it's you and me, baby.
	It's you and me, a webcam, a mic, and philosophy.
	That's it. That's the sum total of the conversation.
	It's a straight line, man. Philosophy, me, you, or me, philosophy, you.
	I have this a straight line. You throw other people, other vectors in, other agendas, other this and that and the other, then it becomes.
	That's why I never took advertising.
	It was pretty clear to me.
	That if I took advertising, I would have a point of pressure that would make me very susceptible to self-censorship.
	Because people would then say, oh, if you don't like what you're saying, we target your advertisers.
	And then they run the show, not you.
	And then I'm not in the business of delivering philosophy to you.
	I'm in the business of delivering you to the advertisers.
	And that's a very, very different thing, right?
	Yeah, of course, yeah, that's why you should donate, right?
	Freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	I still dream of Trump taking down Section 230's abuse in a way the left can't keep censoring.
	Yeah, I mean, pretty bad, right?
	It's pretty bad. So, I mean, imagine you're on the phone and you're talking about, I don't know, your arguments or evidence for election fraud, and the line goes dead.
	And then you get an email from the phone company saying, hey, we really didn't like the direction that political conversation you were having was taken, so I'm afraid you can't have a phone or a cell phone or a landline or anything anymore.
	Sorry about that. But, you know, we think that that's disinformation and we just can't do it.
	Sorry. We loved having you as a customer, but you crossed the line and you don't get a phone anymore.
	I mean, can you imagine? Well, you shouldn't have to imagine.
	I mean, that's probably the next thing that's coming, right?
	You just can't communicate at all.
	And yeah, so the Section 230 thing, it's too, like, how do you counteract the concentration of power?
	Like that's really the fundamental question of political science.
	At least I think it should be the counterfeit, the sort of fundamental question of political science.
	So human beings have a tendency, of course, as you know, to aggregate, to create in-group preferences, to attack out-groups and service in-groups.
	Now the in-groups could be religious, they could be genetic, they could be racial, they could be gender, they could be political.
	So you tend to...
	We're tribal animals.
	Because the whole purpose of the modern society is to pretend somehow we're not tribal animals and everything is going to be fine.
	But, you know, Tower of Babel is a powerful story for a real reason.
	So human beings will aggregate, will develop rapid in-group preferences, and will demonize outsiders.
	That's what we do.
	Evolutionarily speaking, it tends to fall along genetic lines.
	Of course.
	I mean, if you demonize those whose genetics oppose yours and you lionize or support those whose genetics are in line with yours, then that's how evolution works.
	You understand, right?
	That's why birds mate with birds and not, you know, sea otters.
	so you Given that human beings have this tendency and there's no way to get rid of this tendency.
	There's simply no way.
	Like, you will get rid of that tendency when human beings are no longer mammals.
	And gravity is reversed and time goes backwards, right?
	We're never going to get rid of that tendency.
	I have to fight that tendency in myself all the time.
	And if you spend time around kids, you'll see this happen with kids all the time.
	Like, kids...
	It's crazy, man.
	Kids get loyal to cereal.
	Kids get loyal to toothpaste.
	My toothpaste is Crest, like it's some big thing.
	They're like, oh, I like Captain Crunch.
	We've got to get Captain Crunch.
	They get loyal to a crazy cartoon captain on a box of sugar bombs in the morning.
	Kids will just get tribal that way.
	I remember as a little kid playing soccer and screaming, forward for St.
	George, because St.
	George fought the Dragon, and I thought that was really cool.
	In hindsight, I'm not entirely sure it was super cool, but nonetheless.
	So we're tribal.
	And what do we want?
	We want to create a group.
	We want to rapidly exhibit preference and loyalty to that group.
	And we want to demonize opposing or outside groups.
	And I fight this tendency in my show.
	I fight this tendency in my life.
	I mean, you have to, right? To be wise, you have to, right?
	Fight these tendencies. It's not like some original sin.
	It's just to be philosophical, you have to, to some degree, put that stuff aside.
	So, given that human beings are crazy addicted to power over others, given that we are always going to flow towards in-group preference and out-group demonization, how do you deal with that?
	So, like, if we understand that there is no Garden of Eden we can return to, that we're dealing with flawed, evolved, power-hungry, in-group-preferencing, out-group-demonizing, bald apes, like we're dealing with a powerful, essential, gorgeous, brilliant animal, then what do we do?
	Like, if you take that as the foundation, Human beings will always seek power.
	They will always seek dominance.
	They will always prefer their own group and demonize the out-group.
	Like if you accept that, which is the foundation of evolution, right?
	If you accept that, you say, okay, well, given that human beings will always do this, what kind of society can we have?
	Well, you can't have a society with a government.
	You just can't. It's tempting.
	Government is magical. Government is magic.
	Government is, oh, we've got these problems.
	They're kind of tough to solve. I can't figure them out.
	So, government!
	I can't quite figure out how we'd pay for roads.
	I can't quite figure out how national defense would be done.
	How would we have police? I don't know, but government!
	This is a magical answer.
	And it is, you know, people pull this government shit out of their ass and then think they've solved something.
	And it literally is exactly the same thing in physics as saying God.
	You know, where did the solar system come from?
	God, right? You haven't answered anything.
	You haven't answered anything.
	How should society be organized?
	Government! How should the poor be taking care of?
	Government! How should we pay taxes?
	You haven't solved anything.
	In fact, you've made it worse.
	Because you have the illusion of an answer.
	And an illusion of an answer is much worse than no answer.
	Because at least when you have no answer...
	You still keep looking, right?
	If you're absolutely certain you know where you're going and you're wrong, that's worse than not knowing where you're going because then you're still looking for landmarks.
	You're still trying to figure things out, right?
	So, you know, various belief systems are put forward that all rely upon the denaturalization of man.
	If we could have people Who genuinely put the interests of everyone else above themselves, then we could have a communist utopia.
	Now, of course, one of the great lessons of von Mises is to point out that it doesn't matter.
	Even if you could invent such a fantastically non-human human being, then you simply couldn't allocate resources because you've got no price mechanism which signals supply and demand and scarcity and desire, right?
	Or, you know, I don't know. The feminists are like, well, if we could just have men...
	Who didn't have testosterone, who weren't aggressive, who weren't ambitious, who didn't fight hard for what they want, who didn't go out and conquer the world, who didn't make civilization.
	If we could just have that, it would be wonderful.
	We'd live in paradise. No, you wouldn't.
	Because men are exactly as women chose them to be.
	Over millions of years of evolution, Women chose the men that they liked, the men that they found attractive, the men they wanted to have kids with, and that's why men are the way they are.
	So for women to say, well, the only reason we're here is because thousands of generations of females chose these male characteristics.
	Now, if we could simply have the opposite of all of those male characteristics, it would be perfect.
	It would be paradise. It's like, oh, come on.
	Let's populate the world with the exact opposite of human beings and then we'll achieve paradise.
	Now the Christians, the people want to say what, you know, my thoughts on Christianity was more of a critique.
	So the Christians solved this problem beautifully.
	Solved this problem beautifully.
	And they say, okay, we're in a fallen state.
	Satan runs the world. And original sin means just about everything you want is screwed up.
	Okay, so you've tamed the beast within by putting ecclesiastical spears against the charging horses of our baser natures, right?
	It's not perfect, it's not philosophical at all, but it's pretty powerful.
	It's pretty powerful.
	So... If you look at something like, I don't know, universal basic income.
	Let's pick anything. Universal basic income.
	Or the accumulation of immense, censorious and political moving power, such as in the social media companies.
	So once you understand and say, okay, how are we going to...
	So social media companies are going to get very big, they're going to get very powerful, and people are going to get really addicted to controlling others.
	Because that's going to happen.
	It's going to happen as sure as the sun's going to rise tomorrow.
	Human beings... Love having power over others, and social media is a lot of power.
	So the first question you've got to ask yourself is, okay, what's going to be the countervailing measure to the accumulation of power in society?
	Because if you have no countervailing measure, Society will grow like a tumor until it collapses.
	Power will grow until it eats itself.
	And like millions and millions and millions of people die in that whole process.
	So you're basically condemning to death millions and millions of people.
	So whenever you... Okay, so social media companies got the internet.
	Okay, well, these companies are going to get a huge amount of power.
	What is the countervailing force to the accumulation of that power?
	Now, section 230 says, oh, there isn't going to be any.
	It's not going to be any. Because we've got this ill-defined thing.
	Well, as long as you act as a platform, not a publisher, you're okay.
	Okay, well, what's the enforcement mechanism?
	It's like I did this when I was doing Brexit stuff many years ago.
	The European Bank or the EU, the European Union was sort of gathered with the idea, well, members can't run more than 3% deficits or whatever the hell it was.
	I can't remember the numbers, but something like that.
	3% deficits every year.
	It's like, okay, well, they're going to want to run more deficits than that, right?
	Because deficits are like crack cocaine for politicians because they get to pretend that they're producing and providing value when they're just stealing from future generations, right?
	So, when people propose a rule and there's no enforcement mechanism or no countervailing pressure to the accumulation of power that inevitably is going to follow that rule, well, I don't care what they have to say.
	They're living in a dream world.
	They're not even remotely part of reality.
	But people say, oh, universal basic income.
	Okay. So, there's going to be some group of people who are going to determine at some point who gets what resources.
	And those people are going to develop their own in-group, and they're going to give resources to their in-group, and they're going to withhold resources to the out-group.
	How are you going to countervail that?
	Basic, functional, factual, evolutionary, we're bipedal mammals reality.
	And nobody ever has any answers to that.
	Nobody ever has any answers to that.
	Okay, given that human beings lust after power and are addicted to controlling other human beings, Now, in a voluntary society, in a peaceful society, in a stateless society, and I've written about this extensively in everyday anarchy, in practical anarchy, you can get those audiobooks, you can read, you can listen along there at freedomain.com forward slash books.
	Tons of countervailing.
	The whole society is, in a sense, designed on the basis and the reality of the knowledge that people lust for power, will favor the in-group and demonize the out-group.
	I mean, you can see this happening in America at the moment enormously.
	This massive favoring of the in-group and demonizing the out-group.
	It's natural. You can't fight it.
	I mean, you can fight it if you want, but you're going to lose, right?
	What email of yours can I send, BlazeTV?
	Operations at freedomain.com.
	Operations at freedomain.com.
	All right. It reminds me of single moms for blaming their ex-husbands for being losers when they were the ones with the power to choose them or not.
	Well, sure. Like I was just talking about this in a podcast today, right?
	So, single moms, it's an order of magnitude question, right?
	Is it more important for a woman to choose correctly the father of her children or to be one of the millions who vote for the leader of her country?
	Which one impacts her life more?
	Which one would you expect her to devote more resources to becoming good at?
	Choosing the father of her children or Or choosing or being one of the millions of people who might choose the leader of her country?
	Well, of course, of course.
	And so a woman who can't choose correctly the father of her children, should she be allowed to choose the leader of the country?
	Now, you could make the same argument for men as well, right?
	Some man who ends up in such a disastrous situation that he's got to beg for charity, live on welfare, you know, whatever it is, right?
	Okay, well, he can't choose even his own career wisely or correctly, so can he choose the leader of the country?
	Of course, the anarchist answer is, no, there shouldn't be any leader of the country any more than there should be owners of slaves.
	But women want to play the victim when they make bad decisions.
	But then when you point out the logical consequence of them making bad decisions, which is that their capacity to make decisions should be restricted, right, in the same way that if you have repeatedly been convicted of a DUI, driving under the influence, then your capacity to drive is restricted, right?
	You might have to blow into something.
	You might have your license taken away because you've made a whole series of bad decisions.
	Therefore, your capacity to make decisions should be restrictive.
	That's the whole point behind jail.
	You've made a whole series of bad decisions.
	Could be theft, could be rape, assault, murder, who knows.
	You've made a whole bunch of bad decisions, and therefore, you see, what should happen is your capacity to make decisions should be restricted.
	In this case, your decision is very restricted because you're in jail.
	So when people make bad decisions, it's very common for a society to say, okay, we're going to restrict you making bad decisions.
	The same thing happens in bankruptcy.
	If you've so organized or rather disorganized your finances to the point where you have to default on tens of thousands of dollars or maybe even more of debt, then your capacity to make decisions is restricted.
	You're not going to be able to get a loan.
	You're not going to be able to get a credit card.
	You've made so many bad decisions that your capacity to make future decisions becomes restricted.
	So, the benefit, of course, of declaring bankruptcy is you get to walk away from your debts.
	The negative, of course, is that you then have a bad credit rating, you can't get a loan, you can't get a, maybe not even a credit card, anything like that, right?
	Otherwise, everybody would simply walk away from their debts, right?
	Run up debts and walk away. So, for women, they love to say, and men do this in other ways, too.
	I'm just talking about women and single moms, since that's the topic that came up.
	So, women will say, well, I couldn't I couldn't choose a good father for my children.
	Or generally what they say is, oh, he promised me the world, he seemed perfect, and then he just turned on me.
	There was no way to know ahead of time.
	In other words, she said, I have no idea how to choose a good person.
	I have no idea how to figure out who's virtuous and who's evil.
	I have no idea how to figure out who's lying to me, who's telling me the truth.
	I have no clue. But I'd sure love to vote on a politician because, you know, politicians never lie.
	In other words, if you can be fooled and lied to and completely taken in to the point where you're going to let a man bust a nut inside you in a fertile window and produce a child, then how on earth can you be expected to figure out which politician is lying to you?
	If you can't even figure out which man you're having sex with is lying to you, how on earth can you figure out which politician is lying to you?
	You can't, right? Obviously. So what happens with the single mom phenomenon is they say, I couldn't make a good decision.
	And then you say, okay, well, that means we should restrict your decisions.
	No! That would be sexist.
	Okay, well, you know, it's a pretty good gig.
	It's a pretty good gig, right? All right.
	What else do we have here?
	The answer is gold and silver.
	The banks here in Canada have none.
	Sold off to China, right? Yeah, that's true, right?
	Yeah, see, philosophy, of course, is designed that...
	The only out-group is people who are anti-rational.
	And since people who are anti-rational will often resort to violence, it's pretty good to be oppositional to the out-group since the out-group is going to be oppositional to you.
	All right. Repeal the 19th.
	No, I don't. No.
	No. No, I would say, no, I don't believe in repeal the 19th.
	I mean, you could make a case that anyone who gets more money out of the government than they pay in taxes, which would include the military-industrial complex, can't vote because it's a conflict of interest, right?
	Do you think technology can hyper-evolve humans for the worst or best?
	No. I do not believe that technology is going to save us.
	All right. You guys ready for a little treasure chest?
	29, 28, you get yourself some lemons.
	Always puts that YouTube song in my head.
	Have podcast downloads been affected?
	Not as much as videos, of course, but yeah, for sure.
	Because you have an audience, right?
	You have an audience, and then what happens is if you are suppressed, heavily censored and suppressed, then what happens is your capacity to Maintain or grow the audience.
	Like, people will stop listening to me.
	I mean, I don't know why, because I'm so charming, but people will stop listening to me for various reasons.
	They forget, or they get interested in something else, or, you know, they get just tired of the uphill climbing by the skin of your teeth world of philosophy, and they take a break and all that, and sometimes they come back, sometimes they don't.
	So there's natural attrition.
	I mean, you think of, you know, think of some product you used to buy you don't really buy anymore, for whatever reason, right?
	So there's natural attrition, and the way that you deal with natural attrition is you get a new audience.
	You get new audiences. So the point is, when you take a mortal wound as a massive deplatforming, then what happens is it takes quite a while to bleed out.
	And I don't know if we're in the bleeding out phase or the recovery phase.
	I mean, that's not up to me. I can only produce shows that I think are really, really good.
	I can continually post about them, and I can encourage you to do the same, but I can't go out and grab people and wouldn't if I could to make them listen.
	Life don't give me lemons.
	Alright, please don't mute trolls unless they're being really disruptive.
	It just gives them more fuel.
	Yeah. No, so the troll thing, you know, you have to understand.
	So there are trolls that are just like weird, dysfunctional people, triad of personalities, and they're just lonely and bitter and angry at the world that failed to protect them as children.
	I would tell you the psychology of trolls is pretty simple.
	It doesn't mean trolls are simple. They can be quite complex.
	But trolls are enraged at a world that failed to protect them as children, just like criminals are enraged at a world that failed to protect them As children.
	And, you know, this is something I talked about with Jesse Lee Peterson, right?
	So why are Black women so angry at Black men?
	Well, because half of Black women report being raped by Black men before they turn 18.
	And there's not anything that you and I, in particular, can do about that directly.
	That's going to have to be something the Black community solves itself, right?
	So when children are abused, they grow up very angry at society.
	You know, criminals steal because they've been stolen from.
	And the trolls are very angry at the world because when they were helpless as children, the world, people around them, damaged them.
	And we can survive people damaging us.
	What we can't often survive is the collusion of society as a whole in that damaging, right?
	So the fact that my mother beat me up when I was little...
	I could survive that. What I've had a much tougher time dealing with was the basic reality that everyone heard it because we were in a thin-walled series of apartments for, I don't know, like she beat me up for like 12 years, right, until I got her size and then I pushed back hard and it didn't happen again.
	She switched, as women do, she switched from physical to verbal abuse, just as they often will switch from being sexy to being naggy, right, when that tipping point happens.
	Not my wife, who's wonderful, but some women.
	So it's much tougher.
	To recognize that society colludes in you being abused and that's what the abusers rely on.
	Like, what did my mother rely on to abuse me?
	She relied on the fact that she knew for sure that no one was going to call the cops, that no one was going to come knocking on the door, that no one was going to record it and send it someplace.
	Nobody was going to call, child protective services, nothing like that was going to happen.
	So she could, you know, gleefully beat the crap out of me, bang my head against doors, throw plates and knives at me.
	She could do all of that stuff.
	With me, like, screaming in terror and crying.
	And she could do all of that.
	And there were, like, probably, you know, top, bottom, sides, 50, 60 people who could hear it going on.
	You know, not every night, but a lot of times.
	And this happened in England.
	This happened in Ireland.
	This happened in Canada.
	And we lived in one apartment building.
	We lived in three different apartments in the space of a couple of years.
	So, you know, probably...
	Conservatively, maybe a thousand people heard me being abused as a child.
	And they did fuck all about it, right?
	Teachers knew about it.
	Priests knew about it.
	My family members, extended family knew about it.
	Neighbors knew about it.
	Just about everybody in my environment.
	And so the thousand people are just the people who lived within audible, like direct audio exposure to sounds of brutal child abuse.
	But in terms of the total number of people who knew or who had strong reason to suspect, it would be in the thousands, thousands of people.
	And My mother, and this is something my mother understood about the world and I didn't.
	I was very naive about this stuff.
	This is sort of thinking back to sort of 2008 when the first sort of cultic accusations came sailing in.
	Because I was like, you know, well, I guess I was just bad luck.
	You know, I guess it's bad luck. I just had people who didn't act or didn't care.
	Maybe they liked hearing it. Maybe it excited them or they preferred it or something.
	So I sort of go around helping adult victims of child abuse and helping get them into therapy and saying, you don't have to spend time with abusers if you don't want to and all that, right?
	But my mom understood the world way, way better than I did when I was that age.
	And, you know, I was old enough to know better, but I didn't.
	Because she knew that if you try to help children, adult children who were victims of child abuse, if you try and help them, the world will turn on you and defend the abuser.
	She knew that, which is why she felt confident enough to abuse me within earshot of a thousand people.
	She just knew that.
	She understood that. She knew that.
	And I didn't know that.
	Or rather, I guess I kind of did, but I just didn't want to admit it, right?
	And this is why children don't get helped, right?
	This is a funny thing that happens in society.
	I was just podcasting about this today, so I'll keep it brief.
	But it's a funny thing that happens in society.
	When I say funny, I mean like the exact opposite of funny.
	But the way it works is this.
	So there's a massive amount of sentimentality about children in society, right?
	Oh, we care so much about the kids.
	I'd do anything for my kids.
	I live for my kids. My kids are the greatest thing in the world.
	I love my kids so much.
	You know, society, we care so much about our kids.
	I'd sacrifice anything for my children.
	I'd do anything for my children, right?
	So then you say, okay, so society claims that they really, really care about their children.
	So what would it look like if we designed a society around what was best for children?
	Isn't that an interesting question, right?
	What would society look like if we designed society around what was best for children?
	Well, single parenthood is very bad, very bad for children, extremely dangerous for children.
	Children are more than 30 times more likely to get seriously abused when there's a man around or a An adult around is not biologically related to them.
	It's brutal. Brutal on kids.
	We certainly would never have any system which produced intergenerational national debts because children being born into as they are now, a million dollars worth of indebtedness is absolutely brutal on them.
	We would never have daycares because daycare is terrible for children.
	We would never have government schools because government schools are terrible for children.
	we would make sure that bullies could get evicted or ejected from school.
	But we don't allow that to happen anymore because racism or whatever.
	And our entire society would be enormously different if we actually took seriously our protestations that we actually care about children so much.
	We do almost anything for children.
	Oh, I do anything for my kids, right?
	Oh, well, you're going to give up social security because they're being taxed in the future to pay for it.
	Oh, no, I'm not going to do that.
	Oh, we're going to get rid of government schools because they're brutal and violent towards children and indoctrination camps Oh, no, we're not going to do that. Oh, okay.
	Well, if you're a mom, oh, I'd do anything for my kids.
	Okay, well, would you give up your career to stay home with them when they're young so you don't have to dump them in daycare?
	Because you're not really making that much money after childcare expenses anyway.
	Oh, no, no, I'm not going to do that.
	Well, then shut up about how much you care about your children.
	You don't. You're just saying that.
	So that they feel obligated to what you can exploit them later.
	Children are the modern serfs.
	Children are the slaves of the future.
	Absolutely brutal.
	New Jersey boy, thanks, is gifting five subscriptions.
	Let's see here.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	DLive is better than Blaze TV's live streaming ability.
	I think as here, I think people intuitively are not as attracted to atheism and recognize that something more is needed for them at times like these.
	Yeah. I agree with that.
	I agree with that.
	Stephen Molyneux used to have one of the biggest philosophy pages on YouTube, but he can't even crack this number of people on D-Life.
	Yeah, so that's interesting.
	I mean, are you sharing the stream?
	I don't know what it is. It's a funny thing, you know?
	This fucking complain bullshit.
	Just, well, your views are much less.
	Then do something about it.
	If you care about philosophy, you think I've got interesting and important to say about philosophy, and I sure as hell do, then you get out there and you drive the numbers up.
	Because you're standing back from the success or lack of success of what it is that I'm doing as if you're not an integral participant in it.
	I just think that's kind of funny.
	I just want to empower people and just sitting back there and saying, well, these aren't the kind of numbers you should be having.
	It's like, okay, well then go do something about it.
	Philosophy is important. Go do something about it.
	But people would much rather complain.
	Sorry, so let me finish the troll thing, right?
	So the troll thing They're very angry at the world for failing to protect them.
	And it's worse than, so society doesn't just fail to protect children when they're being abused.
	It actually will exalt their abusers.
	And should the children grow up to talk about the child abuse, they will still defend the abusers.
	And the more morally clear the child is, the more they will attack the adult child and still defend the abusers.
	You understand, you can't get out of being a child victim.
	You can't. You simply, like the way society is constituted right now, you will forever be a child abuse victim.
	Forever and ever.
	Amen. And you know why?
	Because you either shut the hell up, suck it up, and pretend it didn't happen, in which case there's a conspiracy of silence.
	And you can't be honest and authentic about your experience.
	Or, with moral clarity and outrage in your soul, You stand the fuck up and you call out the abusers and you call out abuse as a whole, in which case society will side with your abuser and attack you.
	And I say this at great personal experience.
	You will never not be a victim of child abuse.
	You will shut the hell up about it and lie about it, in which case the abusers have won because they've shut you up about the greatest crimes that have been inflicted upon you.
	Or... Or...
	You speak up about your abuse.
	You name and shame your abusers, and you support other victims of child abuse, in which case society will defend your abusers and try to destroy you.
	We can never grow up in the world that is.
	Now you can change that. You can change that.
	But I can't change that alone.
	Maybe we can together.
	Maybe we can together.
	Can you speak on the growing importance to create our own economies in light of the exclusion of dissenters from the new woke order?
	However, Well, yeah, I mean, you should certainly try and become as self-sufficient as possible, and you should have a community around you, for sure.
	So, yeah, so with trolls, you can't...
	You can't...
	So trolls, what's happened is they were abused as children and they feel so helpless and so victimized that their sole mission is to displace those feelings of victimhood and helplessness onto other people by creating impossible situations for everyone else, right? And this is what, trolls aren't a big problem.
	They're not really a big problem because you just ban them, right?
	In the same way that if, you know, you're having a pool party and someone's peeing in your swimming pool, you just Kicked them off your property.
	They're peeing in your swimming pool.
	Sorry, man. You can't pee in my swimming pool.
	So if people are behaving in a dysfunctional manner, but what happens, of course, if they put you in an impossible situation because they behave in outrageous and insulting and destructive manners, and then when you ban them, they'll gang together with other trolls.
	They'll create alternative platforms where they'll diss and insult you, and then they'll scream that you're a hypocrite and you're a censorious and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	So they're trying to put you into a situation where you can't win.
	You either take the abuse I think?
	They can't be happy. They can't be productive.
	They're not going to contribute much to society.
	They never have children who look up to them with wonder and worship.
	They'll never have a wife who comes home to them and just loves the fact that they're home and can't wait to chat with them.
	And they're just never going to be happy with themselves.
	And it's a tormented and tortured and awful, awful existence.
	And the immediate thrill of displacing their own pain and humiliation onto others by creating the same impossible situations for others that they themselves experience as children, that thrill wears off over time and they're left in their 30s or 40s with nothing, less than nothing.
	No relationship skills.
	No positive contribution to society.
	Nobody who cares for them.
	Nobody who loves them. Nobody who would go out of their way to help them.
	Nobody who will even pick up groceries if they have to quarantine or anything like this.
	Really, really a sad, sad life.
	And I hope that people will break out of it.
	And, you know, if you really want to do that, you know, I've got a whole series called The Bomb and the Brain.
	You should figure out how your brain was rewired by child abuse so that you end up reproducing abusive behaviors.
	Don't have to do it. It doesn't have to be that way.
	You can reform. You can change.
	You can become... Better you can stop enacting, you know, all the pain that you suffered as a child to inflict it on others just means you've become the abuser and you've lost completely.
	You've lost everything.
	You've lost completely. And I know that you're stronger than that deep down and you can fix it.
	All right. One or two more questions.
	Oh, got a couple of comments.
	Yeah. Let's see here.
	Oh, my. Oh, my.
	That's pretty funny. Sorry, I invited someone to play Among Us.
	It was 2.55. Third time.
	Ooh, I hope your phone was off.
	Sorry about that. Sorry.
	All right. Last question or two?
	Any comments? Issues?
	Criticisms? Let's see.
	I don't know why some people are...
	Yeah, so, I mean, if people are being verbally abusive, you shouldn't put up with that online.
	There's any more than you'd put up with that in person.
	It's just bad. I mean, it's just bad.
	And of course, the other thing, too, is that, so I said there's two kinds of trolls.
	So the second kind of troll is not a real troll.
	It's somebody who comes and posts like Nazi, Nazi, 1488, Heil Hitler on people's channels just to discredit them, to take screenshots.
	Oh, this is the kind of followers this guy attracts.
	You should ban him. And so, yeah, I'm sorry.
	You just can't be around. You just can't.
	Okay, I just missed this.
	So, bomb in the brain?
	Oh, gosh, it was.
	I don't know. Did we ever get this one sorted out?
	Let me find out. I think it's bombinthebrain.com.
	I think we got that sorted out.
	I think we did. Yes, we did.
	So you can go to bombinthebrain.com, bombinthebrain.com, the true roots of human violence.
	The whole series I did, three presentations, plus an interview, plus a postscript and prescription.
	And then I did a whole presentation in Toronto with Life about all of this.
	All right. Do you have any idea where self-sabotage comes from?
	I do it and I can't really stop it.
	More than an idea.
	I know exactly where this comes from.
	I know exactly where...
	So self-sabotage, it's not self-sabotage.
	We don't just wake up in the morning and decide to start punching ourselves in the face.
	So when people have set themselves up in opposition to you, if you succeed and they fail, it's extraordinarily painful to them.
	And this is usually the case if you have parents, right, who...
	Act in a certain manner, behave in a certain way, and you choose a different path, then they're heavily invested in your failure.
	Because if you succeed, and you've taken an opposite moral approach to them, if you succeed, it means that they've failed.
	And so they wish to sabotage you so that they don't experience the bottom-falling-out Mariana Trench, godforsaken Grand Canyon horror of having completely fucked up their own lives.
	So... I had family members when I was younger who pursued status.
	Now, if there's one thing that can be said of me, it is that I have not pursued status.
	In fact, I've taken on topics and positions and approaches that have immensely harmed any kind of status that I could have.
	And trust me, I have the skills and abilities to have gone for pretty high status if I wanted to.
	So, the people who focused on status...
	Really, really want to see me fail because having rejected status and gone for truth and integrity instead, they really, really want me to fail.
	And, you know, it's almost for certain if you're listening to this show, oh man, I hate to tell you, I hate to break this to you, man.
	It is almost for absolute certain that there are many people in your life who are desperate for you to fail and fail spectacularly so that they can feel they made the right decision.
	So that they, like when I was younger, When I was younger, I went to theater school and I wanted to be an actor and a playwright and a director.
	And I won't get into the whole story, but I ended up not pursuing it.
	Now, for a couple of years there, though, I would keep track of the people I went to theater school with.
	And if they were failing, I was happy.
	Or happier, or at least not.
	Because, you know, if they all went ahead and succeeded and had these wonderful movie star careers, I'd be like, ah, that could have been me, right?
	And so for a little while thereafter, I quit the acting world, the theater world.
	I would check in on people, and it'd be like, oh, so-and-so hasn't worked in forever, and so-and-so.
	Oh, this person just showed up in a commercial, and I never saw them again, and blah, blah, blah, blah.
	I'd be like, okay, so I made the right decision in not pursuing this.
	Now, a couple of them, and I won't get into any names here.
	It's not their fault they went to theater school with me 32 years ago.
	But it's so funny to think.
	In 32 years, I'll be what?
	86 years. So funny to think that from my early 20s to now, I could still be alive in that stretch of time in the future.
	A little more creaky. We're still alive.
	But one of them I know did well, but then also got married to someone who was not...
	Not a good partner, in my humble opinion.
	Anyway, so when you make a decision, you know, this is an old Gore Vidal, I think Gore Vidal said it, it's not enough that we succeed, our friends must also fail, right?
	I mean, and so when you take an opposite, you've got to understand this battle, and I talk about this in my novel, Almost, again, free, freedomain.com forward slash almost, that when you take an opposite moral approach to someone, and truth versus status is very much an opposite approach.
	You know, love versus money, say.
	Or truth versus appeasement.
	Integrity versus over-conciliation, over-appeasement, right?
	When you take these opposite approaches, then you're invested in other people's failures, and other people are invested in your failure.
	Like, I'm sorry, that's just the way that life works, man.
	It's just like... If you know there's only one deer around and you go north and the other guy goes south, only one of you is getting that deer.
	Maybe neither of you will, but for sure.
	If it's north and you go south, the north guy is getting the deer.
	If it's south and you go north, the north guy is not getting the deer.
	You're getting the deer. Right?
	So in the hunt for happiness, if you take an opposite approach from people in your life, They're rooting for your failure.
	And, you know, deep down, you're kind of rooting for their failure as well because if they succeed, it means you failed.
	So if you think like you've got some walkie-talkie with the guy who's gone north to get the deer and you've gone south to get the deer, if he found the deer, got the deer, took down the deer, the deer is mine, you're like, oh, man, that means I'm not getting the deer.
	It's the same thing with happiness.
	If you take an opposite moral approach, somebody goes north, you go south.
	And you both want happiness.
	If he ends up with happiness, genuine happiness, and you've done the opposite thing, you're screwed, man.
	You're toast. You're going to have to double back, and you're going to have to admit being wrong, and you're going to have a hell of a journey.
	You know, every mile you go in the opposite direction is two miles because you've got to take a mile back, right?
	So it's really, really god-awful if you take an opposite moral approach from people you grew up with and...
	If they achieve happiness, you're screwed.
	And if you achieve happiness, they're screwed.
	And if they're older than you, they're quadruple screwed because they've invested so much time into whatever, right?
	They're the wrong way of doing things, right?
	And, you know, if you look at the people in your life, your parents, maybe siblings, when you look at those people, some of them have taken an opposite moral approach to life.
	And if they've gone north and you've gone south, man, there's only one deer.
	There's only one deer in these woods.
	If you get it, they're not getting it.
	And if they've got it, you ain't getting it.
	And so, yeah, we're invested in...
	Let's say you're starving and your family, your kids are hungry.
	You want the guy to not get the deer.
	The guy who goes north, you want him to not get the deer, you understand?
	Because if he gets the deer, your kids are going to starve.
	So when he calls you up, you call, hey, you seen anything?
	No, I didn't see nothing.
	Oh, thank God. You see anything?
	Yeah, I'm just closing in on the deer.
	Damn it! Damn it!
	I should have gone north, not south.
	He's now getting the deer and your kids go hungry.
	So that's self-sabotage.
	It's not self-sabotage.
	It's people who are invested in your failure because you did something opposite from them and only one of you gets the deal.
	There was one other question.
	Thank you.
	Do you think you will ever patch things up with Rogan?
	What's funny too, I don't think about the Joe Rogan thing anymore, but I know people do.
	No, there's no chance of patching things up with God.
	And yeah, no, no.
	This one stream has been fantastic good, but thank you.
	Thank you very much. I really, really appreciate it.
	Stefan says, such valuable things.
	It's all I can do to focus as hard as I can to understand.
	Well, I appreciate that, but of course you can...
	You can re-listen, of course, right?
	Status sounds an awful lot like statists.
	Yeah, well, that is quite a bit.
	I'm not moving on from 1913.
	Yeah, Foundation of the Fed. Yes, yes, yes.
	Let's see here. You mentioned you aren't a fan of Dune in a live stream.
	I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on it, if you have any.
	Oh, this is the one with Kyle MacLachlan and Sting and some floating fat pimply guy.
	I just, I don't know. I just don't remember it much.
	I remember there was a friend of mine's girlfriend I went to see the movie with and she was like, and I'm like, I don't like this movie.
	Oh, and then Patrick Stewart was in it with long hair.
	Anyway, and I said, I don't really like this movie.
	And she said, oh, you're just jealous of Kyle MacLachlan's hair.
	He does have a nice head of hair.
	What can I tell you? But a mess.
	I don't know. Should I watch it again?
	Dune? It didn't become a franchise, did it?
	So... Any chance you could quickly explain your argument over why rights don't exist?
	Okay, so I'd be happy to.
	So... First thing to understand is that concepts don't exist in the way that tangible things do, right?
	The concept forest doesn't exist in the same way that a tree or a group of trees does, right?
	So a concept doesn't exist.
	Now, rights is not a property of your body or a characteristic of your body.
	It's not like your temperature.
	It's not like your eyebrows.
	It's not like your spleen or your spine or the fact that you have some vague magnetic field, right?
	So rights don't exist.
	In the way that physical things exist.
	Now, the concept truth doesn't exist in the same way that physical things exist.
	I'm not saying that everything which doesn't exist is purely subjective.
	You try and walk through a tree, it doesn't work, right?
	You define a tree as a car.
	You can't get into it and drive away, right?
	So concepts are imperfectly derived from instances.
	And what I mean by that is in any conflict between a concept and the thing it describes, the thing it described wins.
	And that's the basic scientific method.
	In any conflict between theory and experiment, the experiment trumps the theory.
	If your theory says something's going to happen and the opposite happens or it doesn't happen, your theory is false.
	It's never that your theory is correct but matter is behaving badly.
	It needs to be spanked. So when people say, I have a right, what are they talking about?
	Well, it used to be, I have a right to be free of violence.
	Now what it means is I have the right to use violence to get what I want.
	But people have a right to healthcare.
	Okay, that means that they can point guns at doctors and force doctors to provide them with healthcare.
	People got a right to housing. Okay, you can point guns at builders and force them to build.
	It basically is just making everyone into slaves, right?
	Everyone who doesn't claim to have these rights.
	So rights don't exist.
	And, you know, Americans are kind of waking up to this at the moment, looking at what's going on in the court system these days, that laws are just abstractions, you know?
	I mean, they're not being pursued objectively.
	They're not being enforced objectively.
	They've turned it in-group preference, right?
	You know, Democrats never indict Democrats, right?
	So it's become in-group favoritism and the demonization of the out-group.
	Just ask Michael Flynn, right?
	So... So this reality that rights don't exist is really, really important.
	So what is a right? Well, a right is, people say that it's a right to a claim on behavior of other people.
	So if you say, I have a right to healthcare, it means you have a right to force other people to provide you healthcare.
	If they disagree, they can go to jail, get fined, get shot if they disagree or whatever.
	Or you can say, I have a right to I have a property right.
	I have a right to my property.
	But what does that mean? That means that you have a claim that other people should not take your property, right?
	And here's how you know that the word rights is so weird, is that at the moment, is that rights both mean that you have the right to maintain your property, but if you have a right to healthcare and housing and education, then you have the right to force other people to give over their property, their time, their resources to you at the point of a gun.
	So rights both mean the protection of property and the massive violation of property at the same time, which is why you know that the concept is kind of strange, right?
	So I didn't have anything to do with rights in my book on ethics, which again, you can get for free at freedemand.com forward slash books.
	It's called the universally preferable behavior, a rational proof of secular ethics.
	It's a pretty long book.
	Good book. I think it's a great book, but if you want a shorter version, you can pick up essential philosophy at essentialphilosophy.com.
	And that has a shorter description of universally preferable behavior.
	So I don't talk about rights because if, if you say I have a right To my property.
	And somebody else says, I have a right to force you to pay for my bad choice, or whatever it is.
	How do you resolve which right is correct?
	A right is a claim to control the behavior of others.
	Well, what if those other people don't want that?
	They don't want you to control their behavior.
	Well, what does the right do? It doesn't do anything.
	I have a right not to be robbed.
	Well, the robber doesn't care. He's going to rob you.
	I have a right to my property.
	Well, thief's going to take it anyway.
	I have a right to not be assaulted. Guy's going to punch you anyway, right?
	So a right is supposed to be some metaphysical claim to control the behavior of others, but it only works for people who already respect your rights.
	So it's kind of like I've always said this idea of morality in general is like diet books for slim people.
	Because if you have a moral claim, it's like, well, the only people who are going to care about that are people who are moral already, and you don't have that much to worry about from them.
	So the idea of rights and claims and this and that and the other, the only people that you really have to worry about that are the people who are never part of those conversations anyway.
	In other words, moral exhortations work with moral people.
	But they don't work with amoral or immoral people.
	And so a right is such an easily hijacked word to the point where it's now become not the right to life, liberty, and property, but the right to enslave other people for your own personal needs.
	And the fact that a word has been stretched so far tells you there's something fundamentally wrong with this formulation.
	So instead of rights, I talk about properties.
	Human beings have properties. We are mammals.
	We are bipeds. We are mortal.
	We are easily injured. These are all properties that human beings have.
	They're not... It's like the property of a tree is made of wood.
	If you get a flesh tree, it's something else, some freaky thing from a dream or some Lovecraft novel, but it's not a real thing, right?
	So rights, unfortunately, I mean, it's kind of like the word anarchy.
	It's become so corrupted by control freaks that the word rights, you either have to redefine it to the point where half the population does not know what you're talking about.
	You need a new way of approaching what it is to be moral.
	And I would suggest you can talk about properties that human beings have, but universally preferable behavior is the way to talk about it, in my humble opinion.
	So I hope that helps.
	All right. Does UPB describe property or prescribe property?
	You can't prescribe a property because a prescription is an ought and a property is something that is.
	So human beings have mass. You can't say human beings ought to have mass because they do, right?
	I have the ability to defend myself and my property.
	That's a better argument. Well, yes, but unfortunately, if somebody then comes along who has a better ability to take it away from you, then they have the better argument.
	So that's not the way.
	That's not the way to go. What do you think about teaching children about Santa Claus?
	Listen to a super old episode of you where you sounded skeptical about it.
	Yeah, I'm not a fan of it at all.
	I'm not a fan of it. Don't lie to your kids.
	I mean, you can withhold truths from them, right?
	I mean, you don't say when they're three.
	Here's some Play-Doh of how human beings are made, right?
	You don't have to do that, right? But...
	No, you can tell, look, it's a great story, it's a funny story, and you can put it to kids like it's an interesting story, it's a fun story, but you wouldn't put it out as something that's actually real and true because it's going to mess with their sense of reality.
	What are your thoughts of the practice of people blocking each other in online communities?
	Does it violate the non-aggression principle?
	I don't care. You can block people all you want, there's nothing wrong with it, right?
	All right, so let's see here.
	Did you see the video of the Santa Claus saying he wouldn't give a Nerf gun to a four-year-old?
	Yeah, well, that's just a boy.
	It's an anti-boy thing, right?
	And, you know, it's really, really important to remember that a lot of this sort of woke culture stuff...
	Let's throw out some lemons if we can.
	So a lot of this woke culture stuff is to do with disabling the U.S. military.
	So the world has a huge problem.
	The U.S. military is the equivalent of the British Navy, the Royal Navy, about a century, maybe a century and a half ago.
	So when you have an overwhelming military force in the world, the rest of the world has a huge problem because they want to do bad stuff.
	And with a world policeman, originally the British that ended slavery, now America that's tried to make the world safe for democracy, and of course very badly.
	So when you have a very powerful military force, you have a problem.
	You've got to find a way to disable that military force or render it less powerful to get it out of your face so you can continue to do terrible things to your own population, as the rulers want to do.
	So what do you do? The way that they worked it out in Al-Qaeda was they said, okay, well, we can't take on America militarily directly, blah, blah, blah, right?
	So what we'll do is we'll provoke an attack and then draw America into a war where we can ride around with IEDs and little machine guns and flip-flops on the back of a pickup truck and pick them off one by one and bleed the treasury dry and destroy them through a war of attrition.
	Wars of attrition, I mean, that's how America ended up defeated in World War I, was simply that the Royal Navy blockaded Germany Basically starve them out.
	And so with America, the other way, of course, that you disable the power of the American military is you fill it full of woke culture.
	And so you've got to have women in there and you've got to have all of these politically correct pieces of...
	Crap, regulations and so on, that all just completely disable the power and strength of the American military.
	So you've got to understand, a lot of the history of the post-Second World War has been countries figuring out various ways to disable the U.S. military so they can get on with bad stuff.
	Is Richard Dawkins a midwit?
	No, he's a smart guy.
	He's just, he's compromised by being paid by the state, right?
	People get paid by the state and it's a little tough to think that they could be objective when it comes to power.
	The British ended slavery by buying all the slaves from the owners.
	The US forbade this kind of an exit with an amendment.
	Believing in Santa Claus messed me up.
	I was depressed about the world for a long time when I found out that the nice guy didn't exist.
	Well, and, you know, you eventually come to the point where you recognize that your parents lied to you.
	That's not good. I don't think that's good.
	All right. We have one more question.
	Thank you very much for gifting these subscriptions.
	I really, really appreciate it.
	And, yeah, freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	Should we switch that little caption?
	Why don't we? Follow me, I will follow you.
	All right. freedomain.com forward slash connect.
	That is the way.
	To follow me. Tons of places to follow me.
	And I'm posting to a lot of them.
	So you can get all that. Freedomain.com forward slash donate to help support the show.
	I really, really appreciate that.
	And I really want to thank you guys all for dropping by tonight.
	We're going to keep this going.
	On the Wednesday evening, 7 p.m.
	Eastern Standard Time. I really, really appreciate you guys dropping by tonight.
	And don't forget to like, subscribe, and share all that kind of stuff as well.
	And if you've got a couple of Litecoin, you can throw it to me at freedomain.com forward slash donate.
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	And love you guys so much for dropping by tonight.
	It was a great pleasure to chat with you.
	Thank you for all of the great questions and great comments.
	Really appreciate it. And lots of love from here.

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