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Feb. 14, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:32:15

Has the Time for Arguments Passed? Anthony Johnson Interviews Stefan Molyneux

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	And good morning. What's going on?
	Anthony Dream Johnston here today, co-founder of the Redman Group, founder of 21 Convention, 22 Convention, 21 Studios.
	Here today with another episode, episode 135 of the Redman Group, The Grand Return of Stefan Molyneux.
	He's a returning guest to the show.
	He's been on several times, and he's an alumni speaker of the 21 Convention.
	He's also one of the world's most infamous philosophers alive today, and he's an ex-YouTuber.
	He had about a million subscribers before he was, unfortunately, Alex Jones not too long ago, about six, seven months ago, something like that.
	He's also the founder of freedommain.com, where you can find him today.
	You can also find him on Altec, BitChute, Gab, Mines, places like that, Rumble.
	Without further ado, please help me welcome back to the Redman Group, Mr.
	Stefan Molyneux. How's it going, man?
	Good, Anthony. How are you doing?
	Thanks for having me on. Yeah, doing good, man.
	Really glad to have you back on the show. I know it's been a while.
	It's been crazy times you live in, so it's really nice to have you back, like returning from the dead almost, back on YouTube here.
	I feel I should make some appropriately gurgly sound at this point.
	But you know, just because you're off particular platforms doesn't mean that you're dead.
	It just means that you're off the Titanic and onto the lifeboats, which get you to someplace better.
	I know for people, and I had the same thing when other people I followed got deplatformed.
	It's like, poof! They've vanished.
	They've gone. And it's like, no, no, they're just one house over.
	Just one website over.
	You can continue to...
	I had this analogy when I got kicked, and I was sort of saying, people were like, oh, man, I love your stuff.
	I've been following you for 10...
	Wait, you're on a new website?
	Oh, yeah, I can't follow you there, man.
	I mean, you can't type in one extra address.
	It's just not possible.
	But, you know, people are sort of making their way over, and I think as some of the hellacious stuff is coming out, particularly about Facebook and Twitter, with regards to particularly child sexual exploitation on those platforms, it's not too bad a thing to see that smoking moral crater in the rear view.
	Yeah, I've seen reports that Facebook and Twitter are some of the biggest delivery methods of pedo porn in the world, which I was not aware of until I heard about it.
	See, you can find just about everybody in a thousand-person selfie during a Capitol riot, but apparently you can't deal with pedo porn on the internet.
	Apparently that's completely impossible, which I don't believe for a second, but yeah, so that's...
	It's been a transition, but I'm still alive, heart still beating, mouth still talking, reason still reasoning.
	And if people want to find me, they can find me at freedomain.com forward slash connect.
	Tons and tons of places I post on a regular basis.
	Still doing videos. In fact, I'm doing an investment roundtable now because the same forces that kind of got me kicked off social media are also inadvertently driving up the price of crypto.
	So I've got a bunch of crypto experts.
	We meet a couple of times a week to discuss the market and what we think about various valuations and so on.
	So it's an interesting transition, and I'm a nimble guy.
	I'm like a mammal at the feet of the dinosaur, so I'm willing to dodge and dart and find a new home.
	Yeah. You know, on this same issue, though, before moving off it, I wanted to ask you, what did it feel like to just get Alex Jones like that?
	I mean, you're on a level with someone like Donald Trump and Alex Jones who are getting just erased from mainstream internet anyway.
	I agree with what you're saying, though. It's like a Titanic.
	It's sinking ship. And people are getting the lifeboats to other platforms.
	But to see that go down, like I have a huge channel too, obviously.
	We have almost 2,000 videos.
	You had probably like 3,000 or something.
	But I know if I lost my channel today, it'd be like my house burning down almost.
	It's over 10 years of work I've put into it, and you put even more, like 15.
	What did that feel like to go through that?
	So, this is a philosophical approach, and I want to sort of share this with you, share this with your listeners, because absolutely, life is going to throw you some serious curveballs, and they're going to be covered in Vaseline, they're going to be totally unfair, the umpire's going to call it wrong, and you're going to trip and break your shin, right? Stuff like this is going to happen in life.
	Now, my particular form of willpower, and sometimes it is just like a muscle-y willpower, is, okay, How can I make this the greatest possible good?
	Even if it's something I wouldn't have chosen myself, obviously I wouldn't have chosen that, but how can I make this the greatest possible good?
	Now, there's always a way.
	There's always a way to do it.
	Now, I started this show in pure philosophy.
	And also, I started pretty early on helping listeners with personal issues, bringing philosophical principles to bear on, you know, parenting, on dating, on marriage, relationships with parents, work issues.
	I just had a call last night with a guy who was suicidal and got him to turn around his thinking because philosophy is really powerful that way.
	It's buoyancy. It's buoyancy in the sort of down current of the world.
	So for me, it was like, okay, so I've been deplatformed from the major What does that mean?
	Well, what it means is that I can go back to my first love, which is pure philosophy.
	I mean, I was in politics for half a decade, maybe seven years or whatever, and I enjoyed it.
	I thought it was interesting, but it did get a little bit repetitive, like, oh, the Democrats are being hypocritical, the Republicans are being spineless.
	Oh, boy, it just feels like Groundhog Day all over again.
	And you have actually left politics at this point, right?
	You put out a video recently about that.
	I left politics around the de-platforming time.
	And that was sort of my decision, which is to say, I'm kind of bored of politics.
	I felt that there was important things to discuss in the political realm.
	I'm really bored of politics, but I felt a sort of obligation, given the size of the audience and the intensity of interest in politics, to continue to deliver political content.
	So for me, it was like, okay, I'm kind of bored of politics and...
	I really want to get back to core moral philosophy and also I'm writing a book at the moment which we can talk about if you like on peaceful parenting.
	Oh yeah, nice. Yeah, I can really focus on all that stuff and it's the kind of thing where what's the best possible choice that I can make in these circumstances To end up with the best possible outcome, the kind of land on your feet stuff.
	And I knew it was going to be tough for the audience because, of course, talking politics attracts a lot of people in this sort of highly charged political environment.
	But, you know, I sort of put this out there to everyone, like really, really challenge yourself to say, okay, so this particular avenue has been blocked.
	What other avenues...
	Can I choose that is going to make the blocking of this avenue not such a bad thing or perhaps even a good thing?
	Because it's a funny thing about life, Anthony.
	It's a really funny thing about life.
	I really have to fight my vanity.
	And my vanity, of course, is not based upon my amazing hairdo.
	My vanity is based upon the delusion that I know what's good or bad.
	I mean, it's a funny, funny thing.
	Now, of course, something like cancer, yeah, that's bad.
	But all the people who win the lottery, of the people who win the lottery, the vast majority of them end up completely destroyed in life.
	They get divorced. One guy was a cocaine addict.
	I think he was a Canadian. He won the lottery.
	He was a cocaine addict. Of course, he blew his money on coke, ended up in prison.
	And he's like, man, prison is a way better place for me to be than out there with lots of money.
	So it's really, really hard to know.
	What's good or bad in life?
	It's like what they, I think it was a Chinese philosopher who was asked what he thought of the French Revolution.
	He was asked this quite recently and he said, it's too soon to tell.
	It's only a couple of hundred years. They can't tell.
	Was the fall of Rome a good or a bad thing?
	Actually, it was a pretty good thing because being a serf was better than being enslaved in the Roman army for 20 years.
	So it's really hard to say, okay, oh, this thing I didn't want, oh, this deplatforming is like, and I have to say, I don't have the omniscience to know.
	Whether this is a good or a bad thing yet, it's too soon to tell.
	Now, if I sit around the grave of my social media accounts and cry tears and mourn and think this is the worst thing ever, then by golly, it's that old Hamlet line, there's nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
	But if I say, okay, so this avenue is blocked, what's another avenue?
	That I can go down.
	It's kind of like you're on a road trip and the road is blocked and then you end up on a detour that takes you to a beautiful little town where you spend a couple of days and meet the girl of your dreams.
	Like, you don't know. You don't know always what is going to be good or bad in life.
	And I have to fight my vanity saying, oh, this is a bad thing.
	Like, in many ways, it's been a positive thing.
	I'm back to my core love.
	I'm off the revolving door, Groundhog Day of politics.
	I'm writing a book on peaceful parenting, which I think is going to have more effect than yammering about the Lincoln Project.
	So, yeah. And you probably feel like you're not walking on eggshells anymore, right?
	Because on YouTube, it was always, any second you could ban for anything.
	And obviously, in the end, you were even with no community strikes.
	But now on Gab and Rumble and these places, you can say whatever you want, basically, right, within the law.
	Well, yeah. And of course, everybody flocked to Parler, as did I. And I had, I don't know, 120,000 people following me on Parler.
	Because you know what they say, you know, just go build your own Twitter.
	Oh, well, you can't do that.
	So it's hard to know.
	It's hard to know what is going to be a positive and a negative.
	Although we have preferences in the moment, there's definitely been huge positives for me in this transition.
	And I sort of invite people.
	It's sort of like if you're bored in a relationship and then the woman breaks up with you.
	And you're like, oh, that's terrible.
	Wait, is it really that, you know, I mean, is it really that terrible?
	It's a tough question to ask.
	And so I just sort of wait to see how things play out.
	Just wait to see how things play out.
	That's an important thing in life.
	And don't have the vanity of believing you know for sure whether something's good or bad at the moment.
	Yeah, it's kind of like the internet's rapidly changing to characterize your position, so if I'm doing it right.
	Yeah, the internet's rapidly changing, and you're at the cutting edge, though, really, where it's going, I think.
	Bleeding edge, probably, but...
	Yeah, bleeding edge. It's a funny thing, right?
	I think you probably grew up somewhat like I did with a very argumentative and very intelligent group of friends.
	And I remember arguing, basically puberty hit, my voice dropped, my balls dropped, and my arguments started flowing.
	That was sort of the juice.
	And I remember arguing.
	We would argue the death penalty.
	We would argue capital punishment.
	Sorry, those are redundant.
	We would argue abortion.
	We would argue just about everything under the sun.
	I was in the model UN at school making lots of debates and arguments and all of that.
	And here's the strange thing about social media.
	Because the argument, the debate, is the oldest and most civilized form of human conflict.
	Because we agree to submit our perspectives to reason and evidence.
	And to adopt the conclusions of reason and evidence as our beliefs.
	And it's a very civilized, and really it's the only civilized way of interacting.
	Now, can you imagine? Like, I'm sure you argued with a lot of people over the course of your life.
	It's kind of what we do on the internet, right?
	Mostly I just get screamed at, but argue sometimes, you know.
	Yeah, so there's an argument. Okay, so can you imagine?
	Can you imagine having an argument about death penalty or abortion or whatever with a friend of yours when you were a teenager?
	And you make a really good point.
	He doesn't have much of an answer.
	And then he says, hey, Anthony, you know what?
	Screw you, man. I'm getting you fired from your job.
	Can you imagine just how, like, What?
	What are you talking about getting me fired from my job for a debate, for an argument, for facts, for reason, for evidence?
	You're insane. It's not even about the job, though.
	It's about the consequences, right, of losing the job.
	Can you imagine losing an argument?
	I mean, this is stalker behavior.
	Can you imagine you ask some girl out when you're a teenager, right?
	You ask some girl out, and she says no.
	And you're like, all right, man, I'm going to get your dad fired.
	Like, that is seriously bunny-boiling stalker shite.
	And this idea that if you can't answer someone's arguments or you're upset at someone, that you're going to silence them, that you're going to get them fired, that you're going to destroy their source of income.
	Or can you imagine if...
	I mean, that would be...
	So evil, so deranged, so psycho-stalkery, and yet we've come to accept this in our public discourse as a whole.
	We've come to accept, you know, like this woman who was on the Star Wars show, right?
	She posted some stuff and, you know, comparing the dehumanization of the Jews to some of the dehumanization...
	Of conservatives, right? Yeah, it's a strong point.
	Is it totally invalid? You know, you could make a case that there's some validity behind it.
	And of course, that's just the cover story.
	You know, Nazi analogies after they've called Trump Hitler for the last four years and shocked about Nazi analogies seems a bit specious at the moment.
	But that's it. So people disagreed with her.
	They didn't like what she said.
	They didn't like that she wouldn't put pronouns in her bio.
	So they're going to try and destroy her life and get her fired.
	They got her fired, right?
	And all of that. I mean, that's stalker stuff.
	You don't agree with me.
	You won't go out with me. You don't agree with my perspective.
	So I am going to try and destroy your life.
	That is... I mean, when I was growing up, and I'm sure that was the camera.
	I know you're younger than me. But when I was growing up, that kind of behavior...
	Would be in the tiny sliver minority of true psychopathic or sociopathic behavior.
	You won't go out with me.
	I'm going to spread a rumor you've got a venereal disease.
	That's insane. And yet now, in the public sphere, we'd be like, yeah, of course.
	Well, that's hate speech. We've got to silence that person.
	We've got to destroy their source of income.
	We've got to try and destroy their reputation.
	And it's like, that's not an argument.
	And hanging on to that, can we have a debate about things, which is in the political realm has kind of passed the point of no return in many ways now.
	But, you know, when you've got people on mainstream TV saying, oh, yeah, Republicans should be labeled as domestic terrorists, it's like, I'm not sure another PowerPoint is going to solve this problem at the moment, I'm afraid.
	That's a great point. We have a comment from Graham Miller, a friend of mine.
	He said, the time for argument is over.
	So I want to hear your thoughts on this, Stefan.
	There's a spiritual war with souls at stake.
	If someone cannot begin with that premise, there's nothing to discuss.
	My main focus here I'd like you to focus on is the time for argument is over.
	Are you concerned that we're at the end of an age where argument and debate is the forefront of how people deal with each other?
	Well, I am concerned about that, for sure.
	I am concerned about that, for sure, because...
	I mean, if you look at the impeachment trial, right?
	I haven't been following it very closely, but I've dipped in here or there, right?
	So the impeachment trial has used deliberately edited tape to obscure the reality of what Trump said, which was march peacefully, go peacefully, right?
	A lot of times they just kind of drop that out of the context.
	Avoiding exculpatory evidence when you are in hot pursuit of someone's malevolent behavior or impeachable behavior.
	If you don't turn over exculpatory evidence, if you selectively edit and deceptively edit statements made by someone that you're charging, doesn't the case just get thrown out?
	Like by any standard of reasonable law, It's grounds for mistrial.
	It's grounds for charges being dropped.
	If you withhold exculpatory evidence or selectively edit things to make people look bad.
	This selective editing, it's been used for me because I've got so much material.
	There's always some place where someone can cut off what I'm saying or talk about it out of context.
	There's some website where people are saying, oh, Steph said I don't view humanity as a single race, right?
	And they just sliced that up, right?
	And so what does it sound like?
	I think that some races are not human.
	That's not what I was talking about. I wasn't talking about race at all.
	I was talking about a predator-prey relationship between criminals and victims.
	And I said, of course, I know human beings are the same race.
	It's just a biological analogy for looking at predator-prey relationships in criminals and victims.
	And it's not a particularly original thought.
	They're called predators, right?
	sex predators or child predators.
	So they'll just slice a little bit.
	It's like going to the Bible where it says, the fool in his heart has said there is no God.
	And then just saying, oh, the Bible says there is no God because I'm just going to slicey dicey that stuff.
	And when people are doing that, right, then you have this challenge, right?
	You have this challenge, which is you have to phrase everything to the point where nothing, even sliced or diced, could be taken out of context.
	And once you're there, like once you're in that situation where you feel a giant clusterfrag of completely amoral people are pouring over everything that you say in real time, trying to find a slicey dicey thing to get you, once you're there, I don't know how you can have a productive debate or conversation.
	This is another reason why I dropped out of politics is the stakes got so high.
	And you can't have a conversation with anyone if you feel like everything you say could be sliced or diced and taken out of context and be used to try and destroy you.
	I mean, that's just... I mean, if you had a relationship like that, I mean, my God, could you imagine meeting with an ex-wife and she's recording absolutely everything and going everything on your social media and she's trying to get you destroyed because you divorced her or something?
	That was just like, you can't have a relationship like that.
	You can't live like that.
	And I think that's where politics is at the moment.
	Yeah, it's like being in an abusive relationship, even trying to have a debate at this point with a lot of these people.
	You mentioned recently, well, not recently, but I put out a video of you recently.
	We'll throw it up here for a second.
	And it's a clip from your workshop you did at the 21 Convention.
	I remember it, and I took a mental note of it, you know, when I heard it.
	And you said the cancel culture is a dress rehearsal for mass murder.
	And in a way, I just called it digital genocide, but also it's leading to, I think, real genocide.
	It's doing really good, too. It's got almost 50,000 views in just over a week, which for our channel is, like, awesome.
	Can you expand on that statement, too, though?
	Cancel culture is a dress rehearsal for mass murder.
	It's also on the image of the show.
	Yeah, I mean, it is.
	Historically, this has been the case.
	You know, there's seven stages of escalation of particularly statist violence.
	And the first thing, of course, is that you associate violence.
	This is in the hate speech, and I know hate speech is not a thing in the US, but it's a thing in most other places where you say, okay, this particular argument, this particular perspective is the same as a criminal behavior.
	And that, of course, is very dangerous.
	There are lots of people out there who have absolutely abhorrent views to me, and they should be allowed to speak those views, because how on earth Can we dissect and remove terrible errors within society?
	And by remove, I simply mean discount, right?
	Like debate and argue and put them aside.
	In the general social discourse, how can we do that if we don't have the speech visible and prominent, if it's out there?
	We don't want, like, you know, your immune system is supposed to be able to figure out which are the bugs and which are the healthy cells.
	And it's supposed to destroy the bugs and protect the healthy cells.
	But if your immune system can't find the bugs and can't fight them, Well, that's what, AIDS or something like that, where you end up being taken over by every bad bug because you don't have it.
	So, to me, criminalizing speech is absolutely reprehensible, and it is a confession of intellectual impotence, because you should be able to argue against bad ideas pretty easily.
	And the worse the ideas, the more, you say, offensive or negative the ideas, the easier they should be to argue against.
	And so when you silence people as a whole, when you criminalize speech as a whole, And the criminalization is interesting, right?
	Because certainly in America, because there is free speech in the Constitution, right?
	So because there's no such thing as hate speech in America, the left in particular has focused on the deplatforming issue because they can't silence people legally, so they have to silence them through threats and boycotts and ostracism and outrageous...
	exaggerations and mischaracterizations and so on.
	And it's designed to say that some people are so malevolent in their language, right?
	And that's kind of a female perspective, if that makes sense, because, you know, men tend to fight with fists and women tend to fight with words.
	And so for men, the worst thing that you can happen is kind of lose a physical fight, but you'll often shake hands afterwards because we're used to competing with each other and then shaking hands afterwards.
	But for women, what they generally tend to do, since they don't fight as much physically, they tend to go for reputation, they tend to fight with language and that kind of stuff.
	And so I think as women have gained more prominence in society, which I think is a great thing, One of the things that's happened that's a negative thing because of the power of the state is that speech has become viewed as criminal in some ways or people should be destroyed for certain words, certain ideas, certain arguments, even if they're fact-based, even if they're science-based, doesn't really matter.
	You can see this with COVID all the time.
	So what happens is If you silence people as a whole, it's a big question.
	Well, what do they do? What do they do when they're deplatformed?
	What do they do? Which is why I put out a call, like, don't radicalize, based on deplatforming, because that's kind of the trap, right?
	People get deplatformed, they radicalize, and then the state moves in, right?
	So, when you silence people as a whole, that you can't even hear this person's speech, you can't even hear your silence, then you've erased that person.
	Now, what happens if that person keeps talking?
	Well, you already have the principle that that person cannot be heard in society.
	What happens if that person keeps talking?
	Well, then you have to start escalating to threats.
	And what happens is you threaten venues, you call in bomb threats, you try and get riotous mobs to attack the venue.
	This has happened to me in various places, of course, when I go to give speeches.
	And so then you de-platform people from their physical presence, you de-platform them digitally, and then a lot of people get radicalized.
	And they say, no, screw you, I'm not going to get silenced.
	And then what happens?
	You know what happens? It's escalation, it's escalation, it's escalation.
	And so if you silence people, but they keep talking, you're going to continue to escalate, and the end result of that is straight-up murder.
	Now, what are they really trying?
	Is it really about censoring speech or is it about censoring or killing off how people think?
	Because it seems like censoring speech is a method to do something else.
	You said killing off. I didn't quite catch that.
	Sorry, you said killing off what? Is the censorship of speech, like of you, most notoriously, but many other people as well, in ways we don't even see sometimes, algorithm, manipulation, all this crap, it's almost like the censorship of speech is not really about the speech, it's about the ideas.
	They want to kill off and they want to control what people think?
	Is that your view? By controlling the speech?
	It's certainly a big topic.
	So... If you have something like criminal speech, I mean this is the big hypocrisy of the entire system and I hope everyone's got their helmets on because if you haven't heard this, it's going to blow your mind, right?
	So this is the incredibly giant hypocrisy that is going on in the world in the West as we speak.
	My speech. My speech has liberated people.
	My speech has got people out of bad relationships.
	My speech has got people into great relationships.
	My speech has got people to stop circumcising their baby boys.
	My speech has got people to stop hitting their children.
	My speech has contributed to a massive reduction in violence in society.
	Got hundreds of thousands of families, could even be millions by now after 15 years, who are not hitting their children, who are not brutalizing their children with unnecessary and destructive surgery.
	So my speech has added to the peace of this world.
	And the non-violence of this world.
	Now, when I was growing up, Marxists were everywhere.
	It's even more the case now.
	There were Marxists in high school.
	There were Marxists in the universities.
	There were Marxists in the media.
	And if you look at something like Marxism, if you're going to say that there's a relationship between speech and murder, Marxism is number one.
	Number one across the world, across all humanity.
	We're talking over 100 million people slaughtered in the 83 years from 1917 to 2000.
	And that's just what people can vaguely figure out.
	They can't even get it within 10 million to any kind of accuracy.
	So you've got a set of arguments, a set of ideas, a set of perspectives.
	Not only do they fairly directly lead to the slaughter of 100 million people, and no matter what people think of me, you can't put that on me.
	You can't put that on my speech.
	Now, not only are Marxists celebrated, broadcasted, And pumped up in academia, Hollywood, media, you name it.
	Not only is that the case, but taxpayers are forced at gunpoint, through the tax system, to fund and broadcast Marxists.
	Marxists don't get deplatformed.
	Marxists, in fact, get tenure in government schools, where the media as a whole, often filled with Marxists, We'll propagandize children into going into the sweet death embrace, the logicita embrace of Marxism through universities, and end up in debt, propagandized, hating their society, and unable to function in the remnants of the free market.
	So if you're going to talk about hate speech, if you're going to talk about speech that is destructive, people are going to look at me?
	Are you freaking kidding me?
	Are people going to look at me, Mr.
	Peaceful Parenting Guy, Mr.
	Science and Reason Guy, and say, oh, that guy, man, that's dangerous, destructive speech.
	But let's make sure that we fund the Marxists whose doctrines have led to the deaths of 100 million people plus in less than a century.
	Let's make sure those guys get government protection, government funding, government tenure, and remain unmolested and unopposed in everything that they do, But this guy out there talking about no spanking.
	Ooh, boy, you know, that's a bad guy.
	We've got to silence him. This is how far things have gone.
	Marxists don't debate.
	They don't debate. There is a certain irony in how much you've advocated for peaceful parenting, not hitting your children, not circumcising your boys and stuff.
	You are an advocate of peace philosophically to the extreme in ways that are really important.
	And I wonder if it's, say, a telling over time that, you know, your advocacy for peace like that, especially in the home, it's a sign that it's highlighting, you know, how far things, like you're saying, how far things have gotten.
	I haven't thought about the irony before, though.
	It's an interesting point. Because other people, you know, deplatformed just for stupid bullshit reasons, hate speech, nonsense, but they're not advocates of peaceful parenting and anti-circumcision like you are.
	Yeah, if you're ever going to draw the causality or the dominoes between speech and death, you would focus on Marxism first and foremost.
	Well, actually, you'd focus on statism as a whole, because governments murdered a quarter of a billion people in the 20th century outside of war, just straight up shooting people and throwing them in ditches.
	A quarter of a billion people.
	That's called democide, right?
	Yeah, it's democide, right?
	So if you're going to talk about speech leading to violence, and you're not talking about Marxism, I mean, you're an indoctrinated, useful idiot who's paving the way to hell itself.
	And of course, this is not discussed at all, because hate speech is a tool used to silence critics of Marxism, used to silence critics of the advocates for violence.
	And Marxism is a violent, revolutionary, insurrectionist doctrine.
	But a couple of people wandering around the Capitol, well, apparently that's an insurrection.
	But tens of thousands of outright Marxists indoctrinating the young in American universities, well, that's just, I mean, that's intellectualism, man.
	That's higher education.
	I mean, it's like we live in a clown world and it became increasingly difficult to describe this because, you know, when people's mindset is so propagandized, That even the slightest whiff of reality causes them to go into mental epilepsy.
	You know, it's kind of tough.
	You know, the analogy is if you had a plague running.
	I mean, if you're a doctor, right?
	There's a plague running through the land, and the plague is destroying lives left, right, and center.
	Like, nothing. Like, coronavirus is, you know, it's a pretty bad thing, but your death rate is pretty low.
	I'm talking about, like, a serious China virus, like the Black Death, or the Spanish flu, or whatever, right?
	You've got a plague running through society, and you're a doctor, and you've got a pill, man.
	It's going to cure it. It's going to cure that plague, man.
	It's a beautiful thing. You've worked night and day for 20 years, and you've finally got one pill, man.
	You're going to be cured, and you're going to be immune from the virus.
	And you get your sack full of pills, you go out into the town, and unfortunately you find that the propaganda has preceded you, and now everyone believes that it's your pills that cause the disease.
	And that people are told that if they don't take this pill, they'll survive, but if they take your pill, they'll die.
	Now that's pretty tough.
	You've got a cure. You've got a cure.
	But everyone thinks that your cure is the disease, and that you are not a healer, but a mass murderer in the making.
	Now, you got the cure, and you said, come on guys, take this pill.
	Look, I'll take it. I'm fine.
	Look, it's wonderful. And there's nothing that I prescribe to the world that I haven't already imbibed myself.
	Peaceful parenting, non-aggressive relationships, ostracism of abusers.
	It's all stuff. I don't, you know, I guinea pig myself before I talk to the world.
	So I've taken all these pills and have a great life.
	But, you know, it's pretty tough because you're going to spend all of your time not administering medicine but trying to overcome propaganda.
	And the mob, the more you try, and of course for a lot of people, the more you try and tell them this pill will cure you, the more they believe that you're trying to kill them.
	And then they're like, well, we've got to take this guy out because he's trying to get us killed.
	And it's like, no, no, no, trying to save you.
	So it's pretty tough to overcome that level of propaganda.
	And for me, when it's like, okay, I'm spending more time trying to overcome propaganda than actually advancing ideas, it's like, it's kind of boring because...
	It's been shown scientifically that when people have a fixed mindset, a mindset that they've been propagandized into, not something they've arrived at through reason and evidence, just a fixed mindset, that when you apply counter evidence to that, when you apply counter evidence to a fixed mindset, you harden that mindset.
	You actually reinforce bad beliefs with better information.
	Unfortunately, it's just the way...
	I don't think it's a humanity thing.
	I think it's just a bad education thing.
	That actually reminds me of narcissism.
	When they try to treat narcissists with clinical NPD, it actually backfires.
	You make the narcissist more intelligent, more wise to how they're going to be investigated or discussed.
	Oh yeah, there was a study, I think it was done in Sweden or someplace up north of Europe.
	And what they did was they got a booklet and they...
	They asked people to argue, and there was an argument, right?
	I can't remember, it's an abortion or something like that.
	There was an argument, a moral argument, and what happened was they asked people to argue that moral case.
	And then they asked them to turn a couple of pages, and then they asked them to turn a couple of pages back, but the pages were stuck together to the point where the opposite moral argument that they had just made showed up, and they asked them to argue that again.
	And the vast majority of people completely reversed their moral position with no comment.
	They argued very convincingly for the opposite moral argument that they just made.
	And they had no knowledge of it even afterwards.
	They're just in the moment.
	Like, can I just win this case in the moment with no larger integrity or perspective of any kind?
	And, you know, when you're dealing with...
	You're trying to construct a rational world and the only materials you have is water.
	You can't build anything.
	And until people try to get some sort of integrity or at least recognize that contradictions are not a good thing...
	It's really tough to build any kind of future in a societal sense.
	In your personal life, in your personal relations, you can do wonders.
	But as far as society goes, people are shapeless.
	They're formless. You can't make an igloo out of fog.
	And eventually, if things get so bad in society, it will interfere with your personal life.
	Obviously, genocide, gulags, shit like that.
	You know, you can self-improve all day long and get wealthy, but if you end up in a gulag, if you mean you were gulag bunkmates, you know, what does it really matter?
	You know, I mean, I think we're still a ways from that, and, you know, you've just got to keep your eyes on...
	You know, there's this old Gary Larson cartoon, The Far Side.
	I always remember this. There's two cavemen outside a cave, right?
	And there's this big giant... Glacier, right?
	And one caveman, it's like 10 feet from the cave, right?
	One caveman turns to the other and says, say, Thag, is that wall of ice closer today?
	Because, you know, we were down to 10,000 people in the last ice age for all of humanity.
	We were like this close to winking out of existence completely.
	So you've got to keep an eye on that glacier, man, and know when to hit the road.
	I mean, when it was Alex Jones screaming about it in 2009, it seemed to waste off.
	But in 2021, it seems not so far.
	Still, you know, months or years out, who knows, right?
	Could happen six months or not, could happen six years, could happen ten years.
	But, you know, when it happens, it happens fast, right?
	I mean, it catches you by surprise.
	Some people flee. We actually had a question here from Graham again.
	I thought maybe you'd want to hit this.
	He said, Stefan, at what point is it more wise to abandon ship and expatriate from the country instead of remaining in fighting?
	Well, I think the key is when you can't win, right?
	I mean, that's pretty...
	It's almost a tautology, like when should you stop fighting when you can't win?
	But that's kind of important, right?
	When you can't win. And I think...
	When you can't win is when you can't change people anymore face-to-face.
	Online is one thing, but face-to-face.
	Your brother, your cousin, your father-in-law.
	When you can't change anyone's mind face-to-face with all of your direct eye contact and handshake and facts and data and all.
	Online, it's always kind of loosey-goosey.
	But when you can't change anyone's mind face-to-face, I think that's a pretty solid indicator that you can't win anymore.
	Well put. I wanted to move off of cancel culture and politics here.
	I know we're getting pretty deep into it.
	There's more to discuss here. I want to talk about philosophy.
	You mentioned you're writing a book on moral philosophy.
	Before we get into that, though, I want to get to that, but I want to discuss epistemology.
	So this is the branch of philosophy, the theory of knowledge, how we know things, in my understanding.
	What is your take on epistemology, and how does it differ from someone like, say, Ayn Rand, for example, with objectivism?
	Now, epistemology is, I mean, it's an unfortunate polysyllabic mouthful of a sentence.
	It's just, how do you know what's true?
	How do you know what's true? It's a very interesting thing, and I did this sometimes in debates when I'd be online.
	It's a very powerful thing to do, right?
	Because cancel culture, and I know we're off the topic, but just to mention it and sort of bridge the two, cancel culture says, I know what is true, I know what's right, I know what is virtuous to the point where I'm willing to destroy people's lives who disagree with me.
	Well, that's a lot of knowledge, you know?
	And so when people are into this kind of stuff or you get into these ferocious debates online or these attack sessions or whatever it is, right?
	You can go a long way.
	You can do a lot of good. Just ask people, oh, how do you know what is true?
	Like, that's an amazing moment.
	How do you know what is true?
	What is your definition of truth?
	What is truth? Because everybody wants to jump over, like they want to go straight into politics or maybe ethics, and they want to jump over the two most important things in philosophy.
	Metaphysics is what is real.
	Epistemology, what is true. And I did a 17-part introduction to philosophy way back in 2007 or 2008.
	I kind of laid out the whole case for this.
	I've been studying this for a long time.
	Got to ask people what is true.
	If you don't know what is real, you can't know what is true.
	If you don't know what is true, you certainly can't know what is good.
	We also live in an age where...
	We live in a post-truth age, right?
	I think Scott Adams puts it that way.
	But it's not a post-truth age.
	That's the problem. It's not a post-truth age.
	It's a post-methodology of truth age.
	Because people claim things are true all the time.
	People call me a white supremacist.
	They think it's a true statement.
	It's completely false. So they make truth claim statements all the time.
	We've just lost the methodology of actually thinking about how...
	Things can be true or false. So you ask people, what is real?
	How do you know what is real versus what is not real?
	It's a big question. It's a big question.
	How do you know? I mean, to take a sort of silly example, but it's pretty common in rational philosophy.
	How do you know that your dreams at night are the unreal and your waking life is the real?
	How do you know? It's a pretty important question, wouldn't you say?
	How do you know the real from the unreal?
	And if you know the real, then you're on your way to knowing what is true.
	Because if you know things are real, objective, rational, they exist, then you can start to say things that are true.
	So truth is the relationships between concepts in the mind and what they describe in the real world.
	That's truth.
	So if we have a definition of animals called cold-blooded, no hair, give birth to eggs, We've got reptiles or something like that, right?
	If we've got a category, they live in water and land.
	We've got amphibians. If we've got they grow hair, give birth to live young.
	A warm-blooded, we've got mammals.
	And so if we say, is a wolf a mammal?
	Okay, that's a question. Is it a true statement to say that a wolf is a mammal?
	Well, you studied the wolf. Oh, it's got hair.
	Oh, it's warm-blooded. Oh, it gives birth to live young.
	Okay, that's a mammal. So we've got an objective set of characteristics out there in the real world that exist independent of our consciousness, right?
	Wolves are around longer than we are.
	And so wolves pre-exist humanity, therefore they're not contingent upon humanity perceiving them.
	Some things are contingent upon humanity perceiving them.
	But, I mean, they don't exist outside the mind.
	Like, morals don't exist outside the mind.
	The scientific method doesn't exist outside the mind.
	Numbers as a concept don't exist outside of physical instances.
	They don't exist outside the mind.
	It doesn't mean they're subjective or relative or anything like that.
	So once you know...
	In objectivism, they call them relational entities.
	So they're considered real, like you're saying, objective, but they relate, they exist only in relation to a human being, like you're saying.
	Right, right. So if you look at a bunch of trees and shrubs, bushes all clustered together, you can say, oh, that's a forest, right?
	Okay, the trees exist, the space between them, the air or whatever that exists, the roots exist, the leaves exist, all of that exists, objective, independent of her mind.
	In other words, if all humanity was gone...
	If we all just got yeeted out of existence tomorrow, would the trees still exist?
	Well, of course they would. Now, the concept forest, that's a collective entity.
	That's a collective concept, right?
	Now, forest as a concept is what we use to describe this gathering of trees and bushes and shrubs or whatever.
	Now, the concept forest does not exist in the world.
	But that doesn't mean...
	That the concept is purely subjective because it claims to describe the relationships of real things in the world.
	You know, if you go to an atom Nowhere is inscribed proton, electron.
	These things aren't written down.
	These are concepts that we have to describe atoms.
	But that doesn't mean that it's purely subjective.
	That doesn't mean that an oxygen atom is somehow magically exactly the same as a carbon atom, just because the concept oxygen doesn't exist in the world, the concept carbon doesn't exist in the world, but it doesn't mean that it's subjective.
	And the idea that things don't exist in the world, therefore everything is subjective, Well, that's radical subjectivism and it's actually a form of mental illness.
	It is directly a form of insanity because if you try to live that consistently, you'd be locked up or in fact you'd be dead, right?
	Because if everything's subjective, why don't you just walk off a building and decide the air can hold you up?
	Just because the concept gravity doesn't exist in the real world, it doesn't mean that mass doesn't attract mass.
	In fact, we only have the concept gravity because mass does attract mass.
	So this all sounds very abstract, but it's really, really important.
	You've got to know what is real. And then when you make statements about what is real, they're either accurate or they're inaccurate.
	If you say trees are made of whale blubber, well, unless you're dealing with some really freaky Inuit carvings, you're not, in fact, accurate.
	If you say that whales are made of Of wood, whales of the ocean that are alive, you're inaccurate, right?
	You're wrong. So once you know what is real, then you're going to create concepts to describe what is real in the world.
	Now, if those concepts are accurate, then it's a true statement.
	If they're inaccurate, it's a false statement.
	Once you know something is true, then you at least begin to gain the virtue called honesty.
	You can't be honest if you don't know what is real and you don't know what is true.
	So anybody who cannot answer those questions online, in your life, I don't care, wherever, anybody who cannot tell you what is real and what is true, And the methodology they use to determine those things, they cannot be honest.
	Because there's nothing to be honest about.
	They have no idea what truth is.
	It's about as honest as a dog can be.
	In your view of philosophy, there's a direct connection between epistemology and morality.
	And it sounds like your view of morality is informed by this, yeah?
	Your new book? So, morality...
	Oh. Let's see if I can accordion this down into bite size.
	So, people who want more, I've got two books on morality.
	One is called Essential Philosophy.
	You can get that at EssentialPhilosophy.com.
	Another one is called Universally Preferable Behavior.
	You can get that at FreeDomain.com forward slash books.
	They're all free, and in fact, my book on ethics, UPB, has been translated in Spanish recently, so I hope people will check that out if that's your native language.
	What's the title of the new one? The title of the new one is called Essential Philosophy.
	Oh, that's the new one, okay. And it deals with the simulation hypothesis, it deals with the question of free will, and it is a very rapidly compressed version of my argument for morality, and it also includes a bunch of Socratic dialogues of people debating these things so that you can get the pros and cons of these things.
	If truth is a value, now if truth is not a value, you don't ever want to debate with someone who says truth is not a value.
	Like if they don't know what's real and they don't know or don't care what is true, well, a debate is the pursuit of truth.
	And it's sort of like if you're hitchhiking to Albuquerque, then you want to get into a car with someone who's heading to Albuquerque, right?
	You don't want to hitchhike with someone who's going the opposite way.
	And so if your goal is Albuquerque, only accompany people who are going to Albuquerque, or at least through Albuquerque, right?
	So if a debate, the purpose of debate is to find some kind of truth.
	So if people don't know what's real and they don't know what's true, you can't debate with them.
	It's a useless exercise.
	It's a useless exercise.
	In fact, it's an insult.
	It's an insult to debate, to debate with people who don't know what is true.
	So, in a debate, truth has got to be the goal.
	And people have to know what's real, they have to know what's true.
	These are sort of bare minimum things.
	They also have to commit...
	I think Ayn Rand had a saying, it was, reason only works on the reasonable.
	And people are completely irrational, completely unreasonable.
	Reason has no effect on them.
	They have no interest in it. I think that's what you're saying.
	Yeah, and it often has a negative effect on them, and it provokes anger.
	Yeah. It provokes anger and rage, because you're pointing out that they are not...
	They're not deploying what makes us human.
	My God, what is it that makes us human?
	Why are you calling me rather than my goldfish?
	What is it that makes us human?
	It's our capacity to abstract.
	That's what makes us human.
	That is the one defining characteristic.
	That we see things in the world and we can abstract universal principles.
	And the real life examples, the real life examples of that then are people just screaming in the streets, the triggering, the people that, like when Trump won his nominee or the presidency back in 2016, 2017, people screaming literally in the streets and in the ether, right?
	So that all comes from philosophy, though.
	This isn't just random people getting upset.
	It's the way they think and what they believe about the world, right?
	Well, they've been emotionally brutalized and terrorized into thinking it's the end of the world because a nationalist gets elected.
	And this comes all out of this World War II thing.
	World War II was perceived to come out of nationalism, and therefore any nationalism is bad, and it's all a complete misreading of World War II. But, I mean, that's probably a topic for another time.
	But this idea that something feels bad, therefore it's morally wrong, Is not the most elevated human conception, right?
	This literally is at the realm of bad dog, right?
	You ever have a dog, right? It's the tone that matters, right?
	Bad dog, you know, the dog gets upset, right?
	And I'm not saying, you know, don't do that with your dogs.
	You want to be peaceful doggering as well as peaceful parenting.
	But that's how you train animals, is when they do something you don't like, you provide a negative stimuli.
	And that's at the level of a circus bear in Russia.
	That's at the level of a tiger occasionally not biting off either C. Fried or Roy's head.
	I think one of them died recently.
	So something feels bad, therefore it is bad, it is wrong.
	is at the level of pre-consciousness, at least pre-human consciousness.
	So the idea, oh, Trump got elected, that means it's automatically bad, and therefore Trump is morally wrong for making me feel bad.
	I mean, that is, I mean, you can't debate with that.
	And people, unfortunately, have just been programmed into, well, if it feels bad, it is bad.
	And that's a kind of moral hedonism, that it's the same level as some guy being 400 pounds because he just likes to eat pasta and Candy, right?
	I mean, well, exercise feels bad sometimes, so I'm never going to exercise.
	I mean, we would recognize that as pure hedonism or somebody who's like, well, I don't really like going to the dentist, so I'm just not going to go to the dentist.
	We'd say, that's not a wise thing.
	Well, no, going to the dentist feels bad.
	It's like, but we don't just exist to avoid feeling bad all the time.
	I mean, again, that's just at the level of being, it's almost an insult to animals because animals can't do better than that.
	And so this idea that, oh, wow, something feels bad.
	Can you imagine? I mean, a friend of mine got his knee crunched some years ago in a judo competition, and the rehab was brutal.
	You know, he had a nurse come over, and the rehab on his crunched knee was just horrible, and he was in tears.
	He was a stoic guy. He was a Scotsman, right?
	He was a stoic guy. And he was kind of in tears.
	That was so painful. But nobody ever would have said, well, you've just got to avoid that negative stimuli, and hobbled around with a...
	Twisted up knee for the rest of your life.
	No, you gotta embrace the suck.
	You gotta embrace the hurt. Because a lot of times through the hurt is knowledge and wisdom and power.
	And we've got this weirdly, softy, goopy, hedonistic, decadent society where people can be so easily programmed into thinking because something feels bad in the moment, it's somehow morally bad.
	You can't run a society that way.
	You can't even run a herd of wildebeest that way.
	And unfortunately, people are either going to have to learn to embrace the suck, as they say in the army, or things are going to suck a whole lot more down the road.
	A related question I have written down I want to get into.
	We see Christians today getting persecuted left and right.
	They're one of the main...
	Somehow they become one of the main enemies of the woke left and the feminist and these neo-Marxists, these neo-communists.
	Why do you think that is?
	Why is Christianity such a threat to the establishment today?
	Why are they being attacked?
	So all of them, too, not even any particular denomination, I think.
	It's like all of them in America and the West.
	Why is that? Christians are by far the most persecuted group in the world at the moment.
	And once more, I reiterate my apology to criticism, my apology to criticism, to my harsh criticisms of Christianity back in the past.
	So Christianity is intensely powerful.
	And it's the closest thing to philosophy that I've ever seen out of theology.
	Because Christianity, its power is manifold.
	But one of its greatest powers is its universalism.
	The universalism of Christianity was a huge step from the Judaism that it came out of.
	The Judaism that it came out of was in-group preference.
	The original commandment was that, thou shalt not murder other Jews.
	Jesus came along and said, no, no, no, thou shalt not murder.
	Let's universalize this.
	And so going from tribal in-group preference to universal ethics, and you combine that with the Socratic method and with Aristotelian ethics, you get the amazing universal rights of the modern world.
	I mean, it truly is a, you know, we are a Greco-Roman Christian ethic.
	It's universal. There's no penalties for deconversion, unlike Islam.
	It's not high barrier to get in, unlike Judaism.
	And the ethics apply equally to non-Christians as they do to Christians.
	You owe the moral obligations to follow the Ten Commandments equally to non-Christians as you do to Christians, which is, my argument for ethics, universally preferable behavior.
	And the move from tribalism to universalism was the spark that lit the Enlightenment, was the foundation of the scientific method.
	The foundation of the scientific method Is that physical principles are universal.
	It's kind of tough to get that if you don't even have a moral universality.
	So the universality of Christianity is very powerful.
	Also, Christianity gives people something to fight for other than immediate hedonism, which is the path to heaven, getting right with God, being one with Jesus, and that gives you the moral strength to go through The pain and the difficulty of opposing expansions of secular power.
	Because the goal is not hedonistic comfort in the here and now.
	The goal is getting to heaven and doing the right thing.
	And of course, the powers that be don't like people who stand up against what it is that they want to do.
	So Christianity is very powerful as far as that goes.
	Christianity also says that The morality of every human being resides within themselves and their own conscience, and thus it opposes collective judgments.
	I mean, Marxism is entirely based upon determinism, which is anti-Christian, because Christianity says you have free will because of your soul.
	And it escapes the materialism that is often used as a justification for determinism, right?
	The justification for determinism is, hey, man, every part of your brain, every part of your consciousness is a mere physical entity.
	And physical entities do not have free will.
	Therefore, you can't have free will because you are just a giant moist robot, as Scott Adam says, or a machine of causality.
	And you can't write.
	Christianity bypasses that or solves that problem theologically by saying, well, you have a soul which is not material and that's where your free will comes from.
	Because you have free will and your moral responsibility is individual, not collective, and you can't judge people, oh, the rich are this, oh, the capitalists are this, which is what Marxism does all the time, and there is no historical determinism, In Christianity, it's the will of the individual, and Marxism is all about historical determinism.
	This leads to this, leads to this.
	And so Christianity is extraordinarily powerful as a tool against tyrants, and it's no accident that the admixture of Greek or Roman philosophy plus Christianity in Europe was the spark that lit the fire of the modern world.
	That comes directly out of that.
	Didn't occur in other countries, didn't occur in other cultures, didn't occur in the Middle East, didn't occur in India, didn't occur in China.
	It occurred in the West.
	And that powerful combination of reason, Socratic method, universality of ethics is astonishingly powerful and philosophically accurate.
	Morals are Universal.
	And the last thing I would say as well, Christianity solves the problem of resentment.
	Like, why is it that societies that succeed self-destruct?
	Why is it that the average life of a country tends to be 250 years and the average life of a reserve currency, world reserve currency, tends to be about 100 years?
	Because a society succeeds because it is free.
	With freedom comes inequality, right?
	You get economic freedom.
	Some people are going to get super rich, right?
	It's called the Pareto Principle, which is the square root of Of any group of individuals in a meritocracy, in a productive endeavor, the square root of those individuals produces half the value.
	You've got a company of 10,000 people.
	100 people will produce half the value.
	And of those 100 people, 10 will produce half the value of that.
	In other words, out of 10,000 people, fully 25% of the entire value produced by 10,000 people is produced by only 10 people.
	So of course they're going to want to get their reward.
	Of course they want to get wealthy. Of course they want to have more authority, because otherwise you won't get the productivity out of those 10 people.
	We learned that under socialism.
	So when you get a free market, you get inequality.
	Now, the Marxists, what they do is they say to all of the people who aren't super wealthy, they say to those people, You see that guy with the nice house and the beautiful wife and the great car?
	You see that guy? Do you know why he has that beautiful house?
	Do you know why he has that beautiful wife?
	I feel like I'm in a talking head song at the moment.
	The reason why he has all of that money, my friend, is that he stole from you.
	He stole from you. He exploited you.
	He exploited your ancestors.
	He's living high off the fat of the sweat of your entire clan.
	Now, I'm going to go and get you to live in that beautiful house.
	Hey, you might even get a taste of that beautiful wife.
	And all you have to do is follow me.
	And I will get back what was stolen from you.
	I will get back what is yours, what is rightfully yours.
	It was stolen for you because you were underpaid.
	And you should get the product of all of the value of your labor, even if that other guy risked life and limb and financial security to build the factory that gives you so much productivity.
	That doesn't matter. He's an asshole.
	He stole from you and I'm going to go steal it back.
	Now, Christianity solves that problem because Christianity says resentment is a sin.
	And the important thing is not the gathering of material wealth, but of spiritual wealth.
	So the antidote to the resentment that comes from the inequality bred by the free market in Christianity is focus on getting into heaven.
	Don't worry so much about the rich guy.
	Oh, and by the way, the rich guy is probably a bad guy because it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.
	So Christianity solves the problem of resentment that is so ably exploited by the Marxists, because the Marxists will go in and they will wedge and turn people against each other.
	I did a whole documentary centering on this when I was in Hong Kong in 2019, right before COVID. I went out and joined the protesters, took a couple of facefuls of tear gas, quite an exciting documentary.
	People should check it out, freedomain.com forward slash documentaries.
	And what happened when the Chinese, when the Communists got into China is they turned everyone against each other.
	Anybody who had slightly more was portrayed as an exploiter and they fired up everyone's resentment.
	And we all, we all feel this.
	You know, we all, I think it was an old New Yorker cartoon.
	Two guys sitting in a bar and one guy turns to the other and he says, how's your life going?
	And the other guy says, you know, it's not bad, but I'm still not Sting.
	Because, you know, when I was growing up, Sting was like the guy, right?
	He was like a good-looking, slender, great singer, great musician, talented, rich, famous, you know?
	And it was like, so, you know, everybody looks at that and says, oh, man, I want to get me some of that.
	I want to get me some of that.
	And... This is really off memory.
	The movie Taxi Driver, there's a bunch of people with a shard of a bathtub and they're saying, oh, this is when Errol Flynn had more chicks in the bath.
	You can see the level go up. And all they're doing is holding a little shard of some Hollywood orgy that they can't ever participate in.
	People get kind of mad.
	And how do you deal with that?
	How do you deal with one answer is looking at the bell curve of IQ. Another answer is the Christian answer.
	The worst answer of all is the Marxist answer because that will shred you from top to toe.
	Before moving off to Christianity, obviously Jesus is more than a heroic figure to Christians.
	They worship Him, right? It's part of the Holy Trinity in my understanding.
	But do you think there's an element as well of Christians viewing Jesus heroically like that?
	Dying for their sins and things like that?
	Because when I think about the hatred against Christians today that comes to mind, He's a heroic figure.
	He's like the ultimate heroic figure in their entire worldview, right?
	Is there something there? Well, I mean, If he's the son of God, you kind of should worship him, right?
	I mean, that's the domino that would come down from that belief system.
	And if he was the perfect moral being, then, you know, the bracelets that Christians wear, what would Jesus do?
	Exactly. I mean, that is a powerful shorthand for the right thing to do.
	That's a powerful shorthand for the right thing to do.
	And... For the leftists, you know, what is the right thing to do?
	Well, it's to scour for offense and try to destroy.
	Well, that's not a very good moral rule to have because they're so short-sighted they think somehow this is not going to be turned against them.
	Of course it is. I mean, the communists are very clear.
	Liberals are the first to get the bullet.
	Just like in the Soviet Union, right?
	When the hardcore believers, the Leninists or whatever, they were the first to go once the Stalinists took over it.
	Oh, yeah. I mean, because if you're willing to betray the last system, you're going to be willing to betray this system.
	So people don't understand.
	I mean, the people who are really signing their own death warrants are the middle left.
	The hard left, you know, they're going to fight like tooth and nail, right?
	And they'll go down blazing.
	But, you know, the sort of soft left, the middle left, they're creating a system that is going to gulag them faster than just about anyone else.
	Damn. Now, before moving entirely off of, I don't want to leave this area yet, a discussion of Christianity.
	Now, a lot of Christians obviously have faith.
	Their beliefs are based on the absence of evidence.
	This is cornerstone of my understanding of how they understand the world and how they practice their religion.
	So in your view, what is the relationship between reason and faith?
	And obviously, too, there's millions of highly intelligent Christians.
	They have PhDs.
	They're smarter than me in many cases, right?
	So what is the relationship there between reason and faith in epistemology and in your view of philosophy?
	That's a great question.
	And I'm going to answer it differently than I would have answered it a couple of years ago because you've got to keep growing, right?
	Otherwise there's no point, right? So the choice...
	That I thought was more valid when I was younger was the choice between faith and reason.
	So, faith is not just belief without evidence.
	So, for instance, I don't have any evidence that there's not a teacup floating around Jupiter or, you know, whatever, a diamond floating around Jupiter.
	I don't have any evidence that there is or isn't, but I could accept that there could be, right?
	So, faith tends to be belief Not in the absence of evidence, but in the presence of counter-evidence, right?
	So one of the arguments is, is God all-powerful and all-knowing?
	Well, if he's all-knowing, he can't change the future.
	If he's all-powerful, he can change the future, but if he can change the future, he can't be all-knowing because he's got to know the future, right?
	So if he knows the future, he can't change it.
	So he can't be both all-powerful and all-knowing.
	These are logical problems that is sort of atheism 101, right?
	Okay. Now, so to have faith is to say it's a divine mystery.
	It goes against reason and evidence.
	I'm going to believe it anyway.
	Now, in the past, I looked at the metaphysics and the epistemology and said, well, that's not philosophical.
	That's not valid, right?
	Okay. And you can certainly make that case.
	It's a good case to make. But what I thought, Anthony, when I was younger, I thought, ah, you know, the choices between reason and faith.
	No, that's not actually the choice.
	In the real world as it has played out.
	And that was my naivete.
	And it also is the fundamental problem of a younger man and a younger woman is to mistake the world for yourself.
	And to say, hey, man, if I'm offered reason, fantastic.
	I'm sure that's going to be everyone.
	I'm sure everyone's going to love reason just like I do, you know?
	And, you know, reason is going to be, I don't know, like Kate Upton in her prime, just about everybody's going to want to get with that, so to speak, right?
	But that's not the way things played out.
	The choice is not between reason and faith.
	The choice is between faith and cult.
	Because faith comes with responsibility.
	Faith comes with the restraint of our animal nature.
	Faith comes with the anti-Nietzsche spears of avoiding the mere mammalian will to power that characterizes the modern world.
	Faith means tell the truth.
	Thou shalt not bear false witness.
	Faith means thou shalt not steal.
	Faith means thou shalt not murder.
	You remove faith.
	You don't get reason.
	You get cults, where people get indoctrinated and run as rampaging mobs across the landscape trying to destroy anybody their masters point at.
	It turns human beings into a form of feral...
	Half-braindead attack hyenas.
	So I'm thought, hey, you know, let's push back against faith because that way we'll open the gateway to sweet, sweet reasons.
	Like, nope, we open the gateway to the hell of cult.
	Of cult behavior.
	And if you look at modern liberalism, it is a cult.
	It is a total cult.
	It indoctrinates people.
	It punishes them for any kind of deviance.
	It rewards them for compliance.
	It trains them as you would train a rabid puppy.
	It is a brutal cult.
	Cult. So here's my take on faith, the Christian faith in particular, my take on the Christian faith is that it does not survive the philosophical tests of metaphysics and epistemology, but the faith has people land on universal ethics, which is what we need.
	So it's the question of if you have a doctor, would you rather the doctor give you the right prescription with the wrong methodology Or would you rather the doctor give you the wrong prescription with the right methodology?
	Well, I just want the right medicine.
	I really don't care how the doctor comes about getting it.
	I just want the medicine that's going to cure me.
	And it's sort of like if someone says...
	Oh, I don't know. I think you need to take this pill because I think that you have this disease or whatever, right?
	Let's say you don't have this disease, but the pill cures you of some other disease that he didn't even know you have.
	Okay, you're still cured, right?
	So the Christian faith has you land on universal ethics.
	It has you land on the ethics that I mean.
	My argument for ethics says rape, theft, assault, and murder.
	Those are the bad things.
	Double plus on good. Can't they?
	Can rape, theft, assault, and murder can never be universally preferable behavior for the simple reason that Theft cannot be universally preferable behavior because theft is when you don't want someone to take your property.
	But if theft is universally preferable behavior, everybody must want to steal and be stolen from at the same time.
	But if you want to be stolen from, it's not theft anymore.
	Like, you know, if you take something from your garage and you put it out on your front lawn saying, take me, and someone takes it, they didn't steal from you because you want them to take your property.
	It's not theft. You can't call the cops and say, hey, this guy stole...
	Something from me that I offered up for free and said, take me, right?
	And the cop would just laugh at you, right?
	So that's a very brief explanation of the ethical theory, but that aligns with Christian ethics.
	So if reason leads you to universally preferable behavior, and the Christian faith leads you to universally preferable behavior, and the supposed scientific socialism of Marxism leads you to genocidal tyranny, I gotta throw in with the Christians, because although philosophically it's the wrong methodology, it gets you to the right place.
	And that's why both the Christians and myself tend to be opposed, because the powers that be survive by pretending that there's more than one morality.
	And we see this all the time.
	You know, if you are a black group or Hispanic group, you're allowed to have entire organizations that promote your racial self-interest, right?
	But if you're a white person and you try and start that group, you're a Nazi.
	Like, we see these kinds of double standards all the time.
	When the Democrats violently protest the results of an election, when the Democrats say, go out and harass people in the streets and drive them from your communities, when the Democrats say, fight like hell, Well, they're just passionate about their politics, don't you know?
	When Trump says, fight for your country, protest peacefully, well, suddenly he's going to be impeached for inciting an insurrection, right?
	I mean, it's so boring to come up with this, point out these things all the time.
	But that's the opposite of universally preferable behavior.
	That's when ethics become completely contingent upon the power-seeking group.
	If Group A does X, totally virtuous.
	If Group B does X, totally evil.
	The protests in the Capitol were a violent insurrection, even though everybody in that Capitol wanted a continuation of the American system of government.
	They disagreed with the results of the election, but they wanted a continuance of the American system of government, absolutely completely and totally.
	They just disagreed with an election, so it was not an insurrection.
	They didn't want to replace the government, and that for sure is pretty clear, right?
	So, BLM and Antifa rioting for months, hundreds of people killed, billions of dollars of property damage.
	Well, that's just, that's the language of the unheard, man.
	They're protesters, right?
	But then, of course, if there's violence from the Trump side, and the level of violence is still pretty undetermined, Nobody knows what the officer died of.
	As far as I can tell, it's not been released.
	And other people who died, died from, like, strokes and heart attacks and medical emergencies.
	Yeah, it was an exciting day. And out of thousands and thousands of people, some people didn't have the tickers to take it, which is a real shame, but it's not quite the same as Valley Forge, for God's sakes.
	Well, then you got Ashley Babbitt, too, the chick who was killed.
	He was shot by Secret Service or Capitol Police or whatever.
	Well, we don't know who shot her. They won't release that information.
	They won't release the circumstances.
	They won't release the name of the officer.
	Nobody's been charged in the death.
	Of Sicknick, the officer who died.
	I mean, originally they said he was, what, bludgeoned by the fire extinguisher.
	Now it seems he was tweeting that night to his brother and died at some other point.
	Now he's being cremated. He can't even do an autopsy.
	I mean, come on. So the sophists will all say, well, we've got this moral rule that's an absolute because we like this group.
	They vote Democrat or whatever.
	But then if this group that doesn't vote Democrat does exactly the same thing, they're totally evil, well, Universally preferable behavior shreds that.
	Christianity shreds that.
	Thou shalt not bear false witness or you're going to hell is a pretty powerful incentive to not lie your ass off in pursuit of political power.
	But there's nothing like that in the left.
	The pursuit of power is the thing.
	The power is the drug and they're addicts.
	And you all know, if you've ever dealt with an addict, They'll totally emotionally terrorize you.
	They'll lie. They'll steal.
	They'll cheat because they gotta have that drug.
	And the only ethic they have is getting that drug.
	And that's power.
	And Christianity, power corrupts.
	This world is run by the devil.
	Control over other human beings thwarts their free will and bars both them and you the possibility of getting into heaven.
	And that's a pretty powerful ethic that goes directly against the Nietzschean will to power that characterizes the modern left.
	Yeah, and you know, I find myself in a lot of the same positions you're in.
	My conference increasingly has Christian speakers at it, pastors, reverends, Jesse Lee Peterson, for example.
	Another one's Michael Foster, a pastor.
	And he calls us, Michael Foster, the pastor, calls us co-belligerents.
	Because in the end of the day, if we go to the gulags, we're going together, right?
	The left's not going to care.
	They're not going to care if I'm an objectivist and he is a Christian Baptist or Protestant or whatever.
	They're not going to care. But you oppose the me and you and him.
	We all oppose the woke and, you know, the communism and crap.
	They're not going to give a shit, right?
	They'll just, you know, bullet in the head if they can get the first opportunity anyway.
	So we're co-belligerents, and I feel very much like you about Christianity.
	I grew up a Christian myself, I was Catholic, but I left that and became an objectivist over 10 years ago at this point.
	They are all co-belligerents, right, against the enemies of civilization.
	Well, it's kind of like if you're facing an army, you don't care who was drafted and who volunteered.
	On the other side, right?
	I mean, so yeah, no, without a doubt, you know, our lot is in with the Christians.
	And, you know, there's a lot more of them than there are of us.
	And, you know, here's the other thing, too, right?
	Here's the other thing, too. So I criticized Christianity very strongly when I was younger, and unjustly, to be fair, and again, with the apology.
	But you know what happened?
	Christian groups never attacked me.
	Never. In fact, I've been invited to speak at Christian conferences and gone and happily made the case for various Christian principles.
	So the love your enemy stuff, you know, it's there.
	It's real. It's incredibly powerful.
	It's incredibly powerful.
	Now, the groups that have attacked me, I honestly can't think of a single Christian group that has attacked me, even though I've attacked Christianity.
	Now, I'm a humble enough guy that that moves me to my core.
	That the people I've attacked returned with love and invitation.
	The people I did not attack, and in some cases even defended, attacked like crazy.
	I mean, I'm an empiricist, man.
	I go with the facts.
	I go where the facts lead me.
	And that's powerful stuff for me.
	And that's irrefutable evidence of some pretty beautiful behavior.
	And that comes out of the Christian commandment, and that's...
	Oh, it's deeply moving to me, man.
	It's deeply moving to me.
	Yeah, it's certainly a lot better than the treatment we get from the feminists and the woke and the communists and stuff.
	Yeah. Question, what's been your experience with advocating for peaceful parenting with regard to Christians?
	How do they respond? There's some debate on this, obviously.
	I've seen, you know, what do those Christians say?
	Spare the rod, spoil the child.
	Right, right. There's different ways they can try to rationalize non-peaceful parenting.
	So what's been your experience? It's been very positive.
	In fact, I would say that the Christians have responded the most positively of the groups that I've talked to about peaceful parenting.
	Libertarians, not quite so much, and so on, right?
	So, I think one of the reasons for that is...
	Well, Jesus said, of course, whatever you do to the least among you, so do you also do to me.
	And the idea of spanking Jesus would be anathema, and rightly so.
	And I'm sorry for the vaguely comedic image, but that's how ridiculous it would be for a Christian.
	And... It's hard to imagine, too, Jesus beating his own children if he ever had children.
	Yeah, I can't see that.
	And also, spare the rod, spoil the child.
	You know, it's one of the challenges of translation, right?
	So rod is not a stick you hit a child with.
	The original intent behind spare the rod, spoil the child, the rod refers to a shepherd's crook, which he uses to lead his flock.
	Now, a shepherd doesn't beat his sheep.
	You know, he uses the rod to lead his sheep somewhere, better pastures, and so on, right?
	And so, spare the rod, spoil the child is, if you do not provide moral instruction to your children...
	They will turn to seed.
	And we indubitably know that this is the case because modern government schools are indoctrinating kids and terrifying them with creepy sexual stuff and so on, right?
	I mean, some of the child sex ed in Ontario was designed by a guy who was, I mean, absolutely appalling with regards to his relations to children, to put it mildly.
	So, yeah, of course, if you don't teach your children to be moral, they will grow up without the protuberance consciousness and moral reasoning that characterizes us as fundamentally human.
	So, spare the rod, spoil the child is, yeah, if you don't give your children moral instruction, they will grow up to be amoral power seekers.
	Because... Humanity, because we're still 99% mammal and 1% human, so it's pretty easy for the mammal part to overcome the human part, right?
	So when you make that case, and when you say, are forced conversions valid?
	Well, no. Force in the infliction of an idea inflicts only fear.
	It doesn't implant the idea.
	It's like beating someone with a tree and trying to turn them into a forest.
	You've got to plant it, right?
	You've got to plant it and grow it.
	And so from my standpoint, and you know, the circumcision stuff too, like why on earth would God create a foreskin if you were just supposed to saw it off when the baby was a couple of hours old producing lifelong trauma.
	Most Christians don't do circumcision though, right?
	Sorry, go ahead. Most Christians don't practice circumcision.
	Only in America is it really normal.
	I think like in South America, for example, they don't do circumcision, the Christians...
	Right, right.
	But there's still a lot who do, and I think it is an affront to being made in God's image, right?
	So I think that it's been...
	And your view, is male circumcision evil?
	Oh, absolutely. Without a doubt.
	It's totally evil. It's totally evil.
	Now, this doesn't mean that everyone who partakes of it is irredeemably evil, because there's a lot of propaganda and all of this.
	And sometimes it's even done against the choice of the parents.
	I sort of heard this, like the child is just delivered that way.
	But morally, oh, it's a complete violation of the non-aggression principle.
	It is, you know, hacking off a third of the penis of a newborn baby boy.
	It is absolutely and completely and totally immoral.
	Do you believe it's a violation of the oath doctor's take?
	Oh, yes. First, do no harm.
	The foreskin, not only does it not do harm, the foreskin is pretty necessary for a life of sensual pleasure.
	It's pretty easy to clean, and you couldn't imagine cutting off a woman's breast because she might get breast cancer down the road, and even the whole foreskin and cancer and all that kind of stuff is way overblown and all of that.
	So, oh yeah, no, without a doubt, without a doubt, it is an absolute brutal assault on the most vulnerable aspect of the male body, and it is done without choice.
	It is often done without knowledge, informed knowledge of the parents, and it is a great evil that, of course, in the future, We look back at things like hamstring hobble slaves.
	They cut the Achilles tendon of a slave who kept running away so that he couldn't run.
	And we'd look at that and we'd say, my God, that was absolutely inhuman.
	A violation to cut a healthy part of the body for the sake of dominance and control.
	Well, come on. And the idea that there...
	Aren't there Hollywood celebrities out there who use...
	Skin creams and facial creams made from the foreskin of circumcised boys.
	I mean, that is just straight up satanic.
	You couldn't imagine, like, body parts of babies being used to fluff up the beauty vanity of rich celebrities.
	Like, you couldn't imagine a more satanic transfer of value.
	I don't know if that's true, but I wouldn't be surprised, to be honest.
	I mean, Peter Wood, Hollywood, it's all a bunch of insane crazies.
	Before moving off epistemology, we're going to have to wrap up soon, but I did want to ask you a more thing about epistemology.
	So I may disagree with the statement that we live in a post-truth age, but we do live in an age of fake news and all kinds of garbage like that.
	For example, even in the self-improvement industry and fitness industry and the manosphere for dating coaching, all this stuff, frauds are very prevalent.
	That's been the case for decades, and that's probably going to be the case for a long, long time, right?
	But my question to you is, how can people who study, the men watching the show, the men who study epistemology, if they take an interest in it after the show, how can epistemology help them navigate the world and their own personal lives?
	Self-improvement, understanding fake news, how to spot it, propaganda, even just like with trying to improve yourself, people selling bullshit courses and stuff.
	How does epistemology help an individual?
	Well, you already used the word bullshit, so I'm going to take that as full permission to continue with the language.
	Yeah, so philosophy is skepticism.
	You know, like that old house show, you know, like everybody lies.
	Yeah, I mean, whenever I see a claim, I just think, oh, it's bullshit.
	No, maybe it's not, you know, and so on.
	So you see anything on the internet.
	You see news. I mean, you and I have conversation.
	You know, I make claims. I make arguments.
	Just assume that I'm not telling the truth, that I'm, you know, programmed or have some nefarious interest at heart or whatever.
	You know, somebody calls you on the phone and says, hey, man, I've got a killer stock for you to invest in, you know.
	This shitcoin is going to the moon.
	It's like, oh, bullshit, right?
	I mean, just be skeptical and have a very high barrier.
	Like, think of the number of people you've met over the course of your life.
	Like, for people like you and I, It's in the tens of thousands, right?
	And think of the number of close friends that you have.
	So the vast majority of people, in a sense, don't make the cut.
	And it's not because they're bad people.
	It just might be personal compatibilities or geographical location or age or whatever it is, time of life.
	So the vast majority, think of, you know, if you end up getting married, right, you've probably been interested in A whole bunch of women, right?
	And, you know, of the hundreds of women you've been interested in and maybe the couple of dozen that you've dated or whatever, however it's played out for you, like one person makes that cut.
	One person makes that cut.
	99% of everything is crap, right?
	Except this show, which is all gold, baby.
	Actually, be skeptical about that too, right?
	But no, I mean, this is also the Pareto principle, right?
	Which is most of the music that people produce, even the stuff that's on the radio, it's pretty bad, right?
	And it's not going to last the test of the time.
	It's not going to be Hey Jude or Bohemian Rhapsody or anything like that.
	So... If you see something, well, first of all, if you see something that's too good to be true, it is, right?
	But whenever somebody comes to you with something, especially if they're new, like if they've built up credibility with you over time, like I've been doing this for 15 years, I think I've got a pretty good reputation.
	I think I've worked pretty hard to earn it.
	So it doesn't mean believe everything I say.
	It just means you've got to let your guard down after a while, right?
	If your wife says, I had a dream about an elephant last night, you don't say, lies, lies!
	At least I hope you don't, right?
	You've built a genuine relationship with your audience and your fans.
	Yeah. I mean, I think if you see people take risks and stick their neck out to tell the truth and take the punishment like a man, so to speak, okay, hopefully that gets some credibility.
	I can't control that in the audience.
	I can control what I do but not what people do with what I do.
	But... Yeah, it's just, you know, you see something, you hear something, bullshit, right?
	You know, bullshit, right?
	Somebody comes to you and says, oh, you do a lot of talk, like they're online, they come to you and they say, oh, that's a lot of talk.
	What are you going to actually do about it?
	It's like, yeah, that's a fed. They're trying to lure you into saying something crazy so that, right, just bullshit, right?
	Get your boogaloo on, man.
	Let's go. Yeah, or, you know, whatever you see that's going on in the media.
	Oh, yeah, I just, I mean, I don't believe any of it.
	I mean, I don't believe any of it.
	And that doesn't mean that there aren't certain people who've earned my trust over time.
	It doesn't mean that everything is a lie.
	But I'll do investigations.
	Certainly something like the Capitol riot.
	First 24 hours, believe nothing.
	I mean, maybe there's some truth in it, and you certainly can believe your own eyes, but yeah, just don't believe any of it.
	Someone offers you, there's a foolproof way to bed women.
	It's like, well, first of all, You're just making more feminists, right?
	Like, if you just use women for sex, all you're doing is making more bitter, angry women who are going to be susceptible to feminists, so you're just, you're shitting in your own future nest, and you're also destroying your own capacity to pair bond.
	You're destroying women's capacity to pair bond, which means fewer children are going to get born, more divorces are going to be happening, which is harming your fellow men and your future of your civil rights.
	So don't, A, don't do that, because I got a daughter now, right?
	So don't do that. And B, even if somebody makes some claim like that, It's almost certainly not true.
	Because, you know, it's one thing I've noticed about these dating coaches.
	They're all pretty good looking guys.
	They all got great hair. It's the only reason I'm not a dating coach, by the way.
	But yes, it's true.
	If you're a good-looking guy, you got great hair and abs and all that, yeah, you can slide up to women and you can be all kinds of confident.
	And it's like, wow, it just works.
	It's like all the women who are like the secret.
	The universe just provides you with things.
	You just have to ask for what you want and put it out there in the universe.
	It's like they're all hot chicks. Yeah, ooh, wow.
	Men give you resources if you're attractive and you're going to call it some philosophy.
	Ooh, it's the universe.
	No, it's not. It's gonads.
	It's not the universe that's giving you stuff.
	It's male hormones that's giving you stuff.
	So, yeah, just assume that nothing is true until proven otherwise, but then allow yourself to build up trust with people.
	That's a very logical approach to life.
	In fact, I think it would be the pinnacle approach to life, right?
	People making positive claims, you have to assume that they need to prove those before you accept them.
	But in our age, it's not how people think.
	Last question on epistemology, I promise.
	What is the relationship, if any, between epistemology, how we know things, right, and abusive relationships with BPD women or men, if you're a girl?
	So personality disorders, basically.
	Is there an attack there from those kind of people or what's the connection?
	Yeah, that's a very great insight, Anthony.
	It's very, very well phrased and very, very fertile ground, so to speak.
	So abusive relationships are fundamentally a tax upon epistemology because that's what gaslighting is, right?
	So gaslighting is, it comes from an old movie where a guy tried to make a woman crazy by constantly interfering with her perception of reality, telling her things weren't true that were and were true that weren't.
	So in relationships that I've had in the past that were dysfunctional, The woman would say something.
	It'd be kind of shocking, something negative or whatever.
	And then you'd bring it up at some later point and she'd be like, I never said that.
	I never said that. Now, I mean, I don't know.
	Back in the day, there were no cell phones.
	You couldn't record anyone. But let's say you record it and then you play it back.
	Then she'll say, well, I said it, but it was you who made me say it.
	You're responsible for my bad behavior.
	And so it's an attack upon your capacity to process reality.
	And if the woman, like when, if you yell at the woman, then you're an abuser.
	But if the woman yells at you, she's passionate and you made her do it.
	Right? That's an attack on universality.
	That's obviously a straight-up appeal to hypocrisy.
	It's also DARVA, right?
	Deny, attack, reverse victim order?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely, yeah.
	So when people...
	Attack your capacity to process reality.
	They attack you the most fundamental aspect of who you are as a human being.
	Because if you can't process reality correctly, you can't ever trust yourself.
	You can't ever trust other people.
	You can't ever be confident.
	You can't ever feel you're deserving of good things.
	And it is an attempt...
	Like, people who genuinely can't process reality correctly are insane.
	And being insane is worse than being dead.
	And I... I won't get into many details, but I've known a few crazy people over the course of my life, and it's a fate worse than death.
	So people who attack your epistemology, they attack your capacity to process reality accurately, are trying to push you into a kind of living hell, where you're so turned upside down, you trust yourself so little, that you're easy to control, manipulate, and exploit.
	You can lie people into giving you resources.
	And it is a brutal, brutal experience to go through.
	The only thing that I can say is that if you've ever gone through something like that...
	Nobody comes between you and reality ever again.
	Like if you learn from it, you get this, you know, it's like the illness that almost kills you and then you're bulletproof to that illness.
	And so if you've had people really try and shred your epistemology, and my focus on metaphysics and epistemology comes out of dysfunction.
	I grew up with an insane mom who was actually institutionalized, who was consistently attacking my sense of reality.
	It's all scar tissue.
	Like it's not all, he's such a great philosopher.
	It's like, okay, I think I'm pretty good.
	But this is all just hard-won scar tissue.
	This is battle scars. This is like, don't step in a bear trap because I don't have a foot.
	That's how vivid it is to me.
	So fighting for truth and reality and against insane gaslighting, well, that characterized my youth.
	I only survived as a mentally healthy adult because I fought like holy hell against that kind of disassembly of the human mind that characterizes abusers and gaslighters.
	So Don't ever doubt.
	If you remember something clearly, and if you want to write it down, don't ever let people talk you out of your relationship to reality.
	It is a brutal thing to experience, and it's also bad for them because it gives them too much power over you, which corrupts them further.
	Yeah, when I had a BPD experience many years ago, not too many years ago, about five years ago it ended.
	But I analyzed it in a speech I gave called Marrying Medusa.
	I don't know if you've seen it. It's on YouTube still, believe it or not.
	It's got like half a million views when viral.
	But I analyzed the relationship from a philosophic perspective, which is the main point of view I had then.
	And I could feel immediately studying objectivism, I was like, this is a long-term attack on my epistemology.
	She wanted to manipulate my view of reality.
	I think a lot of guys in the manosphere who come out of those relationships feel much the same way, but they can't articulate it like you did.
	Well, you'll also get it from your single mom.
	Like, you'll get it from a mom who's divorced in that she will attempt to layer her own resentments against your father onto both him and you and your relationship to him.
	And she will attempt to insert yourself so that she blinds you and tells you what you see.
	And, you know, that's a seeing eye dog that's going to lead you right off a cliff to mix metaphors perhaps a bit too much.
	In the Manister, we call them son-husbands when they develop these toxic relationships, single moms with their sons and stuff.
	Oh, yeah. Can confirm.
	Can confirm. You're the greatest.
	You're a monster. It's like, oh, great.
	We got one last question from the audience here, and then we'll wrap up.
	Stefan, do you feel that universal truth can be fully realized apart from Christianity?
	Well, yeah. I mean, this is why I'm a philosopher, not a theologian, right?
	So universal truth is something that philosophy I've praised Christianity in terms of its ethics, in terms of metaphysics and epistemology.
	There's big challenges, right? So one of the things that had to happen for the modern world to occur was for...
	The universe to be perceived as objective and universal, right?
	So the laws of physics applied everywhere, the laws of biology and evolution had to be developed and so on.
	In other words, the universe described in the Bible as a universe subject to the will and intervention of God had to be put aside for the scientific method to be developed.
	Because the scientific method doesn't have any stars, like unless there's a miracle, right?
	There's no asterisks there with footnotes, like, oh, this is the universal law, unless it's a miracle.
	So, in a sense, God had to be removed from the physical universe and his intervention into the physical universe for modern science and therefore the modern world to be developed.
	And so philosophy, because it works, rational philosophy works well with defining what is real, defining what is true, defining what is good.
	It ends up very similar to Christian ethics, but it doesn't have that, you know, fairly major hiccup of the Dark Ages when Christianity was in its ascendancy, and there was a fair amount of hostility to science.
	Now, it's not as great, and I did a whole show with Tom Woods about this some time ago, the hostility to science that's portrayed through atheists was not as strong as it is portrayed, and there was a lot of support for sciences, but Moving the Earth from the center of the universe to orbiting the sun, moving the sun from the center of the universe to orbiting the galaxy, and now there is no center of the universe whatsoever.
	These were particular challenges to a fairly literal interpretation of the cosmology of the Bible, and it did delay the development of science quite a bit.
	So, yes, I think that universal truth is the province.
	Of philosophy. Ethics has to a large degree been the province of religion and in the West Christianity.
	And I, you know, fear dislodging it from Christianity because then you just get the aforementioned hyena jackal cults that just roam around the countryside taking down anybody with a couple of grains of truth in their bag.
	Yeah, it's almost like, you know, America and the West can't survive without Christianity.
	I've thought a lot I'm an objectivist to the bone, similar, I think, to you.
	You're not an objectivist, I know, but I feel like you're very much on the same page.
	The argument for ethics is different from Ayn Rand's and I think supports the voluntarism that I propose as the solution to social issues.
	But yeah, I mean, as far as the basics of truth and reality goes, there wouldn't be a dime's worth of difference between me and an objectivist.
	But can America survive in Canada and the West without Christianity?
	It seems like the answer for the time being and for a long time is going to be no.
	Well, I mean, this is the old question.
	Do you push forward? Do you circle back?
	This is a big question in society.
	Do you push forward? Do you circle back?
	Is there a reasonable situation by which we can bring tens of millions of people who are agnostic or atheists back into Christianity?
	I don't know that there's a particular path that way.
	Do we push on to philosophy?
	Well, that's certainly been my goal and all of that.
	And we certainly can't survive without truth.
	But for advocating philosophy, you were digitally murdered in public on the internet, I would say.
	Yeah, but that's not always the worst PR for a philosopher.
	So was Socrates more physically, right?
	But it's one of the reasons we remember him, so...
	Yeah. Stefan, it's been really great having you on the show today.
	We're a little bit past one, so we'll wrap up.
	I appreciate your time. Everybody, make sure you check out freedommain.com.
	Check out Hong Kong, Fight for Freedom, other documentaries he has on his website here.
	And connect with them on all tech.
	It's really big, obviously. He's not on YouTube anymore.
	He's on BitChute. He's on Odyssey.
	He's on Library. He's on Rumble.
	He's on Gab. He's on Mines.
	Any of the platforms I'm missing?
	Parler, but it's dead for now, right?
	Yeah, who knows if that's ever coming back.
	But yeah, all of the stuff is listed there, and I would really recommend it.
	And if people want to help out the show, it's been a rough year.
	It's not essential. It's been a rough year for everyone.
	Freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	Great. And your books are on Amazon, right?
	Most of them. They're free, but also on Amazon?
	Yeah. So The Art of the Argument, you can get it at theartoftheargument.com.
	That's the only one I charge for.
	The rest of them are all free.
	You can get The Art of the Argument on Amazon.
	You can also get it on audible.com.
	Oh, last thing, too.
	I've got a great audiobook.
	It's a novel I wrote many years ago about the rise of political violence across Europe in the 1920s and the 1930s.
	It's a great book. It's totally free, and you can get that at freedomain.com forward slash almost, because almost is the name of the book, and I'm immensely pleased with that as a novel.
	And if you want to, my original side was artistic.
	Not even business or philosophical.
	I was in the National Theatre School.
	I took writing courses and wrote novels and plays.
	So if people want to see the artistic side of me and I think experience a really great novel for free, I hope that you will check it out.
	Sounds good. All right. Thanks, man.
	And thanks for a couple of plugs at the end.
	It's the only plugs I'm working with these days.
	All right. Thanks for watching episode 135 today.
	We'll see you next Saturday. Before you leave the video today, hit like and leave a comment.
	Comments help a lot. It's like hitting the like button 10 times, so I appreciate it.
	See you then. It's Stefan. Hope to see you back on the show sometime.

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