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May 31, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:35:48

WHAT IS REAL?!? Stefan Molyneux Interviewed by a Critic

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	Stefan, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining me.
	Well, thank you very much. A great pleasure to be here.
	So, I will admit to being someone who just excommunicated you from the libertarian milieu.
	I distinctly remember doing it, in fact.
	I was in the Tom Woods Facebook group, and he was having you on his show, and I was just outraged.
	Oh my God. Who would talk to Stefan Molyneux?
	He's a racist and a Trump supporter, even worse.
	Thankfully, I have retired from gatekeeping, kind of like you've retired from politics.
	And I heard you on another podcast, and I really was taken with some of the stuff that you said just in passing.
	And so I reached out to you, and you graciously responded very, very quickly, and I appreciate that.
	And so here we are. Before we get into it, why don't you go ahead and kind of introduce yourself?
	I know you've got kind of a long bio, which is great.
	So talk as long as you want about who you are and what you do and what you do.
	It's a brave host there, man, saying talk as long as you want.
	I got close to 5,000 shows.
	No, I can keep it brief.
	So I was born in Ireland.
	I grew up in England, lived for a little while in South Africa.
	I was moved at the age of 11 to Canada and got into philosophy in my mid-teens.
	I studied English acting, playwriting, history, got a master's degree in the history of philosophy, was in the software field for about 10 to 15 years as an entrepreneur, and then had a long commute, got tired of audiobooks, heard about this new fangled podcast-y thing, and I started recording shows in my car.
	And I started publishing them, and then after a while, people said, well, these are pretty good, or as they used to say when I was growing up in England, these are a bit of all right.
	And they said, yeah, maybe we could throw a couple of bucks your way.
	I'm like, eh, you know, maybe get a little gas money or something like that.
	But it kind of hit a swell.
	It kind of hit a movement, and I ended up taking a rather extensive and exciting pay cut to start podcasting full-time, which I've been doing since 2007 or so.
	So I've been kind of doing this for 16 years full-time for 14 years.
	And you've seen a bell curve.
	I don't mean to bring in the bell curve as a theory, but the bell curve of intelligence as a whole.
	That's sort of the trajectory of my show.
	And I'm kind of on the double black diamond downward slope at the moment, which is why it's nice to get a little bump and hiccup from people like you.
	Because I got...
	I was doing philosophy and economics and all kinds of cool stuff back in the day, self-knowledge, anti-spanking and all that.
	And the siren song, you know, that Ulysses thing, the siren song of politics kind of grabbed me by the short and curlies and yanked me in a particular direction.
	I became interested in the election of Trump.
	And this was something that I'd always said to libertarians who, you know, very big on Ron Paul and so on.
	And I said, look, if you believe that there's any kind of political solution, you should absolutely, completely and totally throw yourself behind it, 150 percent, do everything you can in the environment to try and achieve some political solution to creeping socialism.
	And when Trump came along, it was just so tempting.
	It was just so tempting because he was such a giant finger Up the gaping Achilles nostril of the mainstream that it was just so Wonderful to throw him against the flashbang that illuminated the deep state and the entrenched powers and given the blowback that both he, his family, his friends and so on have all received.
	What is it, Roger Stone now being sued for two mil by the IRS? I mean, it's pretty brutal, right?
	So I thought that was interesting.
	I also was a very big, like most libertarians, anti-war person and Hillary was basically promising to start About three wars, if I remember rightly.
	And the fact that Trump, as the first U.S. president in kind of forever, to not start a war, I thought it was worth throwing that, you know, keep a couple of hundred thousand people in the Middle East or maybe more in Russia and so on alive, seemed like a pretty good We're good to go.
	Last summer, and that was information that was good to get.
	And I have since been focusing on, again, sort of back where I started, the self-knowledge, the philosophy, the economics, particularly crypto and Bitcoin.
	I've got mixed feelings about Biden because the goal, of course, with Trump was to have him try and grow the economy away from the state so that some of the unfunded liabilities could be taken care of and you wouldn't have a giant economic crash.
	That worked to a relatively small degree.
	He turned out to be a borrow-and-spend maniac, just like all the others.
	But he did do some deregulation.
	He did some tax lowering and so on.
	There were some green shoots of economic activity coming up.
	But since Biden has gotten in, and this is when I started doing all the crypto stuff again, I was into crypto in like 2010, way back in the day, talking to Bitcoin conferences and so on.
	But I got back into crypto because with Biden hitting the gas on the helicopter money scenario, the money enema that never seems to clean anything out, I was like, wow, this is going to be Great for crypto.
	Bad for the U.S. economy, but great for crypto.
	And the giant gas pedal of the truck heading over the cliff of the U.S. economy into sort of fiscal Thelma and Louise deep canyon territory.
	Biden's really hit the gas on that, which has really swelled the value of crypto.
	It seems like no matter what happens, I land on my feet, which is a good thing, I suppose, because I feel like I've spent about 12 and a half lives of my nine in internet danger and bringing uncomfortable truths to an unwilling audience.
	So that's where I stand right now.
	I'm really, really focusing on econ and crypto and, you know, the usual self-knowledge and peaceful parenting and helping people apply philosophical principles to their personal lives.
	But yeah, I've been off politics since last summer and...
	It's not something I particularly miss, to be honest.
	I don't mind talking a bit about politics if you have some thoughts, but it's not my core focus at the moment.
	I have reputational negatives, of course.
	I can't think of a single thing on the totalitarian left that I haven't viciously opposed, strenuously opposed.
	I talk about IQ differences between ethnicities, between males and females.
	I'm very I'm positive around families and kids, which for the psycho depopulation agenda is a bit of a thorn in their side and very much against totalitarianism, of course.
	Being against Nazism is kind of pointless because Nazis don't have much power these days.
	Being against communism, well, you kind of run into some heavy spears as you charge forward on that particular battlefield.
	So, yeah, that's the sort of long and short of where I am.
	I had my day in the sun where I was doing, oh my gosh, I guess, I mean, in total, I've had about three quarters of a billion views and downloads.
	I've done about 1.2 million books a year.
	So I'm a fairly decent Arizona-sized crater in the cultural landscape, but definitely the moves against.
	What I have been doing, which of course are not argumentation-based, but simply duct tape over the mouse silencing case, have struck pretty hard.
	But all that means, of course, is mainstream outlets lose their credibility over time, and you go from the dinosaurs that give you a high view to the mammals that are nimble, which is kind of where I'm at now.
	Yeah. What do you think the mammals in today's ecosystem, so to speak, are?
	I mean, I know you're heavy on BitChute.
	Are there any others that you're kind of bullish on?
	Yeah. I mean, so BitChute library sort of now morphing into Odyssey partly, I assume, because of their troubles with the SEC or rather the SEC troubles with basic reality.
	I do think that Rumble is a great platform.
	I like Brighteon and so on.
	And Locals, I'm on Locals as well, which also has a really, really good video platform.
	And so there's a lot of places now.
	I mean, I've got my, you know, I'm sort of farming from a 747.
	You know, there's bales of seeds going out the window and just seeing where they land and grow.
	But yeah, there's a lot of really great platforms out there.
	Unfortunately, of course, because people like me are no longer available in mainstream platforms, the slice and divide gets wider.
	Because I was one of these people who kind of bridged gaps between left and right in many ways, because a lot of the left stuff I liked.
	Their previous focus on free speech until they had power, and then they got corrupted by the ring of power.
	And their previous focus on anti-imperialism and anti-war, which now that they've got power, they seem to quite reverse themselves.
	You know, like the BLM Marxists who are against private property until they can buy five homes in a weekend.
	So, unfortunately, there isn't that kind of bridge anymore.
	The gap is widening, the pier and the dock separating, the legs, the plunge, all seems to be coming.
	And I'm a little bit of an accelerationist at the moment, not that I particularly need to be because the acceleration is happening, but grab your crypto and enjoy the decline seems to be the best position these days.
	Yeah, it seems to be. I'm getting more and more heavy into trading crypto, although with the volatility, it's hard to keep my emotions out of the picture there.
	We're not very well emotionally constituted for trading.
	You know, I mean, most day traders lose money because, you know, when it's going up, it's like, oh, that's too high to buy.
	And then when it starts to dip, people are like, oh, I'll just wait till it goes down a little further, then I'll buy it.
	It's like, oh, it's gone out well, it's too high to buy.
	And then eventually what happens is you just FOMO yourself into some cocaine-addled buying frenzy at the top, and it's the same thing in reverse happens when it goes down.
	I'm a bit more of a buy-and-hold kind of guy, or have-and-hold kind of guy, because I have enough of a rollercoaster just breathing on the internet these days, so I'm not sure that I need to add methamphetamines to my cocaine diet, it would seem.
	Yeah, I think that's probably smart.
	And I'm using bots for a lot of my trading activities.
	Ooh! You like Ryan Bacon in the nude, don't you?
	Yeah, I do. It's fun, though.
	And numbers have been going up, so, you know.
	If it works, man, if it works, you know, you can't argue with success, but what's the point, right?
	So, yeah, well, good for you. I'm going to have to start taking some profits here pretty soon, though, because like you were saying, the fear, uncertainty, and doubt gets the better of you sometimes.
	Where do you sit on the Doge thing?
	I've been like no development on that thing for like five years or something and it just seems to be like a meme coin.
	I mean, what is the story with that?
	Well, it started getting pumped by Elon, of course, and then it became even more of a meme because Elon himself is kind of a meme, is my opinion on it.
	I mean, you know, he has the ability to, I mean, he made stainless steel rockets just because he wanted to see what, you know, these weird stainless steel rockets would look like.
	Oh, come on. I mean, he's about the most successful African-American that there is.
	So, I mean, that's not a bad thing.
	Yeah. Okay, so the reason that I wanted to talk to you today, and I thought that this was so profound.
	You were on Buck Johnson's podcast, and I'll link to that episode, too, because it's a great interview.
	You were talking... First of all, you were talking about...
	Leaving tech for podcasting.
	And you also mentioned when you ask the same question about your wife, or you use the same technique about asking your wife to marry you.
	The quote is, if you can ask yourself the right questions, the answers in life become easy.
	If you're living a foolish life, most of it is about avoiding the right questions.
	How... How does someone identify the right questions so that they know that they're asking them and not living foolishly and avoiding them?
	It's a big question.
	Right. One moment.
	This is a coffee-sip question.
	Maybe I'll just snort it from the table with a credit card and a straw.
	So, no, I mean, this is a very, very good point, and I'm always vaguely pleased when people catch the needles in the haystack of the word torrent coming out of my mouth and find some value in it.
	That's great. And it is.
	And I was listening on 2x speed, too, so you know it really hit me hard.
	Oh, so sorry. I'll do it fast for now so we can have a comment.
	No, it really does just come around to the right question.
	So when it came to politics, one of the questions that I asked myself last summer...
	I did a whole presentation.
	I did a full-year course on the fall of Rome.
	I read tons of books. I did a big, famous presentation on the fall of Rome, which was money printing, multiculturalism, open borders, and debt.
	So, you know, nothing to do with the present.
	Totally unrelated. History is just the same damn thing over and over, just with different costumes.
	And the question was this.
	So if you look at the last 150, 200 years of the fall of Rome, And you think, my gosh, how many people worked themselves into a frenzy to try and stop the fall of Rome?
	How many people debated and argued and got into politics and wrote endless speeches and articles and cast their pearls of wisdom in the public square to be trampled by the welfare-hungry people?
	And what did it do?
	And what did it do? There's a certain pendulum to world events when you have a government.
	I mean, when you don't have a government, there's unicorns and roses and things that we can't even imagine how wonderful they would be.
	But when you have a government, there's just this grim predictability to the momentum of human affairs.
	And because we exist in a barely human landscape at the moment, It's practically impossible to dislodge naked mammalian self-interest with mere language.
	In other words, talking people out of what they believe they need to survive at a biological level like the welfare state or the status that they've become completely addicted to, which is sort of the welfare warfare state as a whole, the military-industrial complex and political power and so on.
	We need philosophy.
	We need abstractions.
	We need universal moral standards in order to combat the base, you know, balls and spine mammalian drive for the acquisition of resources with the least amount of effort and the greatest and most profitable ownership in human history, balls and spine mammalian drive for the acquisition of resources with the least amount of effort and the greatest and most profitable ownership in human history, which is
	So we have this will to power, this Nietzschean got to have, want to dominate, which is how we got to the top of the food chain, became the apex predator, not only of the nature of animals and plants and the earth, but ourselves as well.
	And so we live in a landscape where the word sacrifice has become...
	Impossible. Now, part of that comes out of objectivism in the libertarian community, and there's a fair amount of – I'm ambivalent about it as a whole, sort of selfishness and sort of, quote, rational self-interest in the libertarian and objectivist communities.
	But the idea of sacrifice is something that I grew up with very strongly, both as a Christian and as somebody who was still able to grab the remnants of fading glories of the empire and – The British experience around the world.
	But we've lost, it's the fall of Christianity and the inability of philosophy to create and extrapolate and impose a universal moral standard.
	What's happened is, because I define who we are as humans, what it means to be human, is to have a higher and universal moral standard.
	I would say morals is the one thing that differentiates us from I mean, dogs know physics.
	You throw a frisbee, they can run and catch it pretty easily.
	So dogs know physics and plants know where the sun is.
	And there's lots of things that go on that we can also replicate.
	But the one thing that we can do that...
	Nothing else in the universe that we know of as yet can do is to what I call universally preferable behavior, to extrapolate what is good for us to what is good for all and to have universally preferable behavior, which is morality as a whole.
	Now, there's a theological basis of that in Christianity and other religions.
	My work on universally preferable behavior and philosophy is the provision of that in a secular sense.
	But if we don't have A higher standard by which we can evaluate potential actions.
	All we do is lie, control, bully, manipulate, undermine, pretend to be good while stealing under the table.
	All of the general leftist tropes that have dominated society.
	So if to be human is to have universally preferable behavior, a sense of morality by which we can evaluate Our proposed actions.
	That's what it is to be human.
	We don't have that anymore, and we haven't had that really since post-World War II as a whole.
	And so for me, we don't live in a world populated by what I would define as The majority of people are fully human, right?
	I mean, obviously we're human and biological and all of that, but philosophically speaking, morally speaking, we have simply become bald mammals as a whole, seeking power, seeking domination or seeking submission as a way to achieve domination in the Cry bully, victim dominance culture that has emerged.
	But we don't have what makes us the most fully human, so we don't even know what questions to ask anymore.
	What is good? What is just?
	What is true? What is virtue?
	What is evil?
	What is good? We don't really have those questions, so we don't have any way of evaluating where we're going.
	But we still need to make choices, so we make choices based upon ideology, manipulation, And we pretend morality because a very good way to get resources is to pretend morality.
	And I mean, it works, right?
	Again, we've got this negative, you know, laser painting stuff that goes on in the world where, you know, you, sorry, just thought I'd blur it out for a second there.
	So somebody calls me a racist, and I understand where you're coming from.
	If somebody calls me a racist, and you're like, oh, stay away from that guy.
	He's got laser painted on his forehead, and he's a bad guy.
	Of course, the word racism is not an argument, and it is, as we know.
	It's amazing to me that the leftists can publish their war plans for 100 years, and we're still surprised when everything happens, right?
	I mean, 100 years ago, the Communist International said that they were going to import and stimulate racial conflict in order to take down America in particular and the West as a whole.
	In the Second World War, they very clearly said that they were going to use the word Nazi, fascist and racist in order to destroy the reputations of their enemies so they didn't have to engage in productive arguments and so on.
	And so it is relatively easy to shut people out of A public life by simply manufacturing quotes.
	I mean, the quotes that people use against me are entirely manufactured.
	Even to say they're taken somewhat out of context is completely manufactured out of whole cloth.
	And so to ask the right questions fundamentally is around, okay, what is good?
	What is true? What is right? What is worth sacrificing for?
	And if you don't know what morality is, then morality will be used to control and subjugate you.
	And words like racist or Nazi or fascist or white supremacist or whatever will be weaponized against you.
	And you have no defense because you don't know what is worth sacrificing for.
	And therefore, if there's nothing worth sacrificing for, why would you take the hits to tell the truth?
	Now, of course, when I grew up, thou shalt not bear false witness and tell the truth and shame the devil.
	Tell the truth though the skies fall.
	That was all foundational. Of course you sacrificed for the truth.
	Of course you sacrificed for the truth.
	For two reasons. One is the truth is the most important thing in the moral universe.
	If you don't have the truth, you can't have anything else.
	You can't have wisdom.
	You can't have knowledge. You can't have love.
	Because love is our involuntary response to virtue, if we're virtuous.
	And you can't have virtue if you don't know the truth, because you have nothing to have integrity around or toward.
	And also we, of course, have inherited the capacity to have these kinds of conversations because people told the truth in the past and suffered enormously for telling the truth.
	I mean, the people in the Middle Ages who dared question the truth.
	Earth-centered model of the universe.
	I mean, a lot of them were burned at the stake and suffered a whole lot more brutal punishments than, oh no, I lost my Twitter account.
	I mean, I don't want to minimize it, but what we have to suffer is nothing compared to what people in the past had to suffer.
	And because I'm so incredibly grateful for what has been given to us as a culture, as a civilization, I mean, the property rights, the relative liberties, the relative free speech, and this amazing communications technology, I'm so incredibly grateful for it.
	That I'm the kind of guy that if I inherit a million dollars, I'm not going to squander it on a bunch of useless crap.
	If I inherit all of these values, I'm going to do my very best to add to them rather than subtract from them through a cowardice, which would be incomprehensible to our ancestors.
	The question of how do you ask the right questions?
	Well, you have to ask the questions of metaphysics.
	What is real? You have to ask the questions of epistemology.
	What is true? And then you have to ask the questions of morality.
	What is good? And if you don't have those questions relatively handy, and they're actually pretty easy to answer as a whole, We already have the answers.
	We already have the answers.
	We just don't like to apply them consistently because that puts us in conflict with people in power.
	But if you know what is real, you know what is true, and you know what is good, well, then you can evaluate your proposed actions according to a universal standard of truth and morality.
	And that's what it is to be human.
	And we've lost that.
	And now we just have a bunch of cunning, bald mammals running around pretending to be good as a mechanism for securing dominance and power and resources.
	And we don't even know anymore what questions we should be asking because all of the fake answers that we have that gain us power are so seductive.
	That they have eclipsed even the absence of knowledge that characterizes, foundationally, our entire civilization at the moment.
	And that knowledge wasn't lost. It was totally stolen.
	It was totally robbed. Like postmodernism and relativism and subjectivism and, you know, Foucault, the most cited modern intellectual, the most cited modern philosophical intellectual, was an absolute cavernous, satanic beast of a proto-human.
	I mean, the man knowingly infected others with AIDS. The man was an absolutely degenerate, hideous human being into sexual torture.
	He, according to a recent report from a contemporary, he went to foreign countries out of France and paid to rape children.
	And this is the guy who's at the center of modern intellectual thought.
	You know, people make up lies about me and I'm like, the worst guy in the known universe!
	But you have actually A child rapist at the center of the Western canon of modernity, and people are like, well, okay, he was a little edgy.
	It's like, oh my God, we live in hell.
	We live in hell.
	Now, there is a gateway and a path back to heaven, but right now, everybody's like that stupid dog in that meme, you know, this is fine.
	You know, flames and pedophiles and all that raining down like, you know, hell's own diarrhea, and that's where we're sitting.
	So I know I haven't sort of said, how do you know the right questions?
	But the first question is, okay, what is real?
	Because if you don't know what's real, you've got nothing to stand for.
	Because you're just standing for, like, how much are you going to stand for and take a stand for to defend the physics of your dreams at night?
	Well, you're not. Because they're not real.
	So if you don't have anything real, there's nothing to stand for.
	If you don't have anything that's true, you've got nothing to stand for.
	And if you don't know, as a result of not knowing what is real and what is true, you don't even know what is good, it's going to get run over by people who will do the sophist trick, right?
	The ancient enemy of Philosophy is not falsehood, but pretend knowledge.
	The ancient enemy of Socrates was not fundamentally Miletus, but the sophists, the people who pretended to know what they didn't know in order to control, manipulate, and extract resources from the gullible.
	And right now, I mean, people look at someone like, I mean, oh God, you're going to talk Sartre.
	Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, they were regularly engaged in massive rampant promiscuity with his students and just ghastly, ghastly human beings right at the center of the canon.
	People don't even notice. People don't even care.
	Oh, they're French. Kind of ridiculous, right?
	So right now, we're in a situation where we have had all of our answers robbed from us, all of our answers stolen from us.
	And we're currently in this void.
	Now, out of that void can come enormous creativity because there was clearly a lack of robustness in the old answers if we were so willing to give up on them, if they were so easy to take from us, so to speak.
	So there is a kind of void of potential that's in there, but I'm not sure it's heading in the right direction at the moment.
	So that's sort of, I'm sorry, that's a bit of an abstract answer, but hey, I'm a philosopher.
	That's kind of what I do. Sure.
	That's sort of where I would start, and more specifically, and I'm happy to get into more specifics, but I don't want to guess what specifics you would like to sort of examine, so I'll turn it back to you.
	Well, let's go with those three things, real, true, and good.
	What does it mean?
	What is reality?
	So reality, yeah, reality...
	Well, yeah, and when judging what you're talking about, I mean, obviously, this microphone is real, because it's sitting in front of me, but...
	At least I think it's real because it's sitting in front of me.
	Is it really? Reality is the consistent evidence of sense data that comes through our senses, right?
	That's what reality is. So if you and I are standing in the Gobi Desert and we're looking out across the dunes and all that, and you're thinking of Franz Herbert and I'm thinking of philosophy, and we're looking out over the dunes and I say to you, hey man, there's a lake out there.
	And you say to me, well, you know...
	Light waves can bounce between differently heated layers of air and probably looks like a lake, but it's probably a mirage, right?
	Okay, well, that's because we only have the evidence of one sense, the eyes, right?
	And the reason we have five senses is you can't just trust one because one can be Delusory, right?
	Or it can make mistakes.
	Or rather, not that the sense makes the mistakes.
	All they do is they don't say there's a lake.
	That's a conclusion. Our eyes just say, this is what you can see.
	This is how the light waves are bouncing around, and that's accurate, right?
	So then, let's say we walk out into the Gobi Desert because we have the common sense of the average soap dish, and we go and we gamble about You know, room of the view style in the lake and we splash each other and we scrub each other down, we drink deep, we fish.
	Okay, well, now every single one of our senses has confirmed the evidence of the existence of the lake, right?
	Because now we're swimming and it's consistent and we don't suddenly wake up and we're in our own beds or whatever.
	So it's consistent and it's universal.
	Now, that's reality.
	Reality is what... It consistently comes to us using the multiple matrix evidence of the senses.
	You know, like if you have a pen and you put it in a cup of water, it looks like it's bent in the middle, right?
	Because the refraction of the light of the surface, right?
	So you look at that, you look at your eyes and say, oh my gosh, it's dog-legged, it's exact, right?
	But then you run your finger down it and it's not, and the touch supersedes the sense and you say, okay, it's just an optical trick and so on.
	So it has to be the consistent evidence of the senses.
	That's how we know What is real?
	And then what is true is conceptual statements that we make about what's real, right?
	So you said, that's your microphone right now.
	Of course, it could be that that's a pretend microphone, you know, and you've got some other device or whatever it is, or someone sold you a microphone that doesn't work and you're coming through your webcam mic or whatever, but, you know, you touch it, you use it as a microphone, it consistently records sound, you tap it and the lines go up on your squigglies or whatever.
	And so... If you say that's a microphone, well, you've got the consistent evidence of your senses, your touch, your hearing, and all of that, and your voice.
	And so if you say that's a microphone and that's a conceptual label that's attaching to the consistent evidence of your senses, then that's what is true.
	That's what is true.
	And we can get to the UPB side in a sec if you want, but I just wanted to know if that very quick sprint through metaphysics and epistemology is relatively comprehensible.
	Well... And push back, man.
	Hit me hard. I'm ready. I'm ready.
	To me, like, an objective reality is...
	Hang on. You just said, to me, an objective reality.
	Right. Exactly. Those two things don't exactly fit together.
	Go ahead. Right. Well, and that's the problem.
	Yeah. When I think of objective, I think of something that's inherent to the object itself, not as something that I'm perceiving in the object itself.
	To me, the fact that I'm perceiving it makes it subjective, not objective.
	Why? Where am I going wrong there?
	No, why would it make it subjective?
	Because it's my interpretation of that thing.
	Whether or not the pen is bent doesn't depend on my sensing that.
	It's a trait of the pen, not of my interpretation of it.
	Well, but you have to understand, of course, that the word real only exists because we have the constant delivery mechanism of the senses.
	So the pen itself, if we look at the pen itself, the pen itself doesn't have a concept of straight or bent or in water or real or true or false or moral or good or bad, right?
	These are all concepts in our mind.
	So our mind, of course, as you know, is stuck inside this flesh prison.
	Yours has a roof. Mine doesn't.
	Right? So... Our minds are stuck inside this flesh prison and we're constantly getting this information from our senses.
	And that is true of all organic creatures in one form or another, right?
	So the only reason that we have the question of real or true or false is because we don't have...
	The Kantian things in and of themselves.
	You know, like we look at this pen and we say, well, I can't see the inside of the pen.
	And I can't see the infrared of the pen.
	And I can't see the gravity waves of the pen.
	Whatever it is, like I can't see every atom of the pen and so on, right?
	But the whole concept of real occurs because we need to have a way to describe things that have characteristics independent.
	So real is a word that is used to describe that which has characteristics independent of consciousness.
	So saying, well, I don't know what is real.
	Well, of course you don't know because we're all getting this information.
	Like I'm looking at you through my eyes.
	I'm hearing you through my ear.
	I could touch the screen.
	Oh, it's a little stubbly. Look at that.
	I can touch the screen and all of that, right?
	But everything is coming in and it kind of freaks you out a little bit when you think about it.
	Like the matrix, right? The matrix is a great analogy because that's our life.
	My brain can't touch the pen.
	I mean, I guess I could stick it up my nose or something and chopstick my neofrontal cortex, but my brain can't touch the pen, right?
	And when you think about that, it's kind of freaky.
	Everything in your life, you can't, you know, I got a little curtain here.
	I could sniff. My brain can't touch the curtain.
	I mean, hopefully there's nothing that's touching your brain, because when stuff touches your brain, you tend to die.
	Because, you know, you've lost your skull or whatever.
	You've got some spike going through your nose or something.
	So we can't...
	Our brain can't touch anything in the world.
	It all has to come through the evidence of the senses.
	So we need a word for things that exist...
	Independent of our subjective perceptions.
	So, for instance, you cannot walk through a wall.
	Now, you can listen to Pink Floyd's The Wall, and you can imagine what it's like to be a proto-Nazi whining about the death of his father 40 years ago or something like that, but you can have an analogy like, oh, he seems to have an emotional wall, but the actual physical wall you can't walk through.
	And so there are things that, you know, there's a barrier to understanding, right?
	Okay, there's a barrier to understanding, and this is the big question of philosophy.
	There's a barrier to understanding.
	That's an analogy. It's not a...
	Not a physical barrier, right?
	But when I was shooting my documentary in Hong Kong and getting tear gassed in the face for standing up against incipient communism, there were physical barriers that were not metaphors.
	Very physical barriers that were in the street and you had to climb over them, you couldn't walk through them and so on.
	So we need to have a word to differentiate between ideas that don't exist directly in the real world And ideas which describe things which do exist directly in the real world, which every evidence of our senses confirms, right? So when we have the word real, you say, well, it's subjective.
	Okay, everything that comes to us has a subjective element.
	Because we can't touch things directly with our brain, and there is no knowledge, as Kant demands as an impossible standard of knowledge, there is no knowledge of things in and of themselves.
	I can't touch the pen. I can't touch the pen with my brain.
	And even if I could, I would just feel a sensation of poking.
	I can't put the pen in my brain and have myself absorb all of it like a god who would know things flowing through every atom.
	So we have to have a word for something.
	That exists independent of our preferences.
	Like, I may want to be outside in the sunshine and never get a sunburn, right?
	I may want that. I may dream about that.
	Like, I've dreamt about, you know, being in a resort in the Caribbean and never getting a sunburn.
	I never need to put on sunscreen when I'm in a dream, right?
	So we have to have a word for realities that can't be manipulated and realities which are open to or, of course, horror concepts That describe things that can't be manipulated, like you can't walk through a wall.
	So real is a word that we use to carve, like, you know, I got this wall here, right?
	So on this side is the concepts which are, you know, there's a barrier to understanding, right?
	So this side, this is the stuff that's not real, it's concepts that are manipulable.
	On this side, there's like a physical barrier, and we need a word that It describes the differences between those two things, and real is one.
	And the true is when our concepts match the stuff that's out there.
	I call this a pen. It's actually a stylus, but tablet.
	Anyway, it doesn't matter. I call this a pen.
	Is that a true statement? Well, it has the characteristics of a pen.
	You can write with it.
	It was made to be a pen, and when humans create things, it's much more conceptually accurate.
	I guess you could grab a piece of charcoal out of the Fire and right with it, but it's not like the charcoal was designed for that.
	When human beings design stuff, it's very easy to conceptually categorize, right?
	Because it's created for a particular purpose.
	So when you say, well, everything is subjective, it's like, well, yeah, of course, because we can't touch reality directly with our brain without dying.
	But we still need a word for things which we can will and change and control.
	Like if I have a barrier to understanding something, I can push through that barrier By working really hard to understand it or whatever, right?
	So I can push through and understand things.
	But if there's a physical barrier, there's no amount of mental gymnastics or willpower or effort that is going to have me walk through that barrier.
	That will never, ever, ever happen.
	And so we need a word for things which we can change with our minds alone, like if I have ignorance, I have a barrier to understanding, I can will and change my behavior and get stuff, versus stuff that we simply can't change with our minds.
	We need a word to differentiate those two things, because if we can't figure out the difference between those two things, what we'll do is, you know, let's take another analogy.
	I love analogies myself, so.
	Let's take another analogy, right?
	So let's say that we are sowing the seeds of knowledge here, right?
	We're sowing the seeds of knowledge because we're going to record this.
	We are recording it. We're going to publish it.
	People are going to think and understand.
	Oh, the two sides of the wall and the pen.
	It's like, I'm going to understand things.
	It's going to be fantastic. So we're sowing the seeds of knowledge, which we can do just by having a conversation.
	However, if you and I are farmers, like in the real world, and, you know, winter's coming, and it could be one of those godforsaken Canadian winters, or it could be one of those, what is it, seven-year Game of Thrones winters, which is a great analogy for fiat currency collapse.
	But anyway, so you and I can't sit there and say, we are going to sow the seeds of barley through our conversation, right?
	It's not going to happen.
	We can sow the seeds of knowledge, because it's an analogy, right?
	That's not something that's, you know, but we can't sit there, you and I, in a field really concentrating on barley seeds and have them appear in the ground.
	Never going to happen. And if we don't know the difference between those two things, Then we say, we're going to sow the seeds of knowledge.
	You and I are going to show up at everyone's house and offer to have conversations.
	I can be very efficient, right? Whereas if we sit there and say, well, we're going to sow the seeds of barley in the same way, we're going to starve to death in the winter.
	So knowing the difference between these two things is really, really important.
	You can't survive if you don't know the difference between the real and the unreal.
	Now, unreal doesn't mean invalid or anything like that.
	We are genuinely sowing the seeds of knowledge as a metaphor, but survival is essential that we know the difference between the real and the unreal.
	I mean, just knowing that the sun in your dreams doesn't give you a sunburn, but the sun in the real world will give you a sunburn.
	I mean, if you want to not explode into skin cancers when you're 50, you've got to know the difference between these two things.
	And so when you say, well, everything's subjective, it's like, yeah, that's a given.
	But we still need a word for things which we can't manipulate with our brains, external, tangible, material, reality, and things that we can adjust or manipulate with our brains.
	And we need the stuff we can't adjust or manipulate with our brains, because we've got this whole conceptual thing going on, right?
	We need the scientific method, which doesn't exist in the real world, to accurately assess, analyze, predict, come up with conjectures, hypotheses, theorems about.
	So we need something that doesn't exist in the real world, like the scientific method, or reason itself.
	In all concepts, right, we need all of these things in order to actually control and understand things in the real world.
	So the universals in our mind need to map onto the universals in the world.
	Nature to be commanded must be obeyed so that we can become the apex predators that we have, if that makes sense.
	So, let me try to rephrase this in ways that my brain works.
	I love analogies too, but I need to conceptualize it too.
	So, if I say to you, Stefan, let me borrow a pen, and you hand me that stylus.
	Well, you show me your stylus.
	I'm not holding it yet. And I see all of the accidents of a pen.
	It looks like a pen from, you know, the distance that I'm at.
	And you hand it to me and I see that it doesn't have a ballpoint or a felt tip or, you know...
	You try to write on paper and it doesn't work.
	It needs a tablet, right? And so it doesn't like meet the telos of a pen.
	Like it's just not acting like a pen should act.
	So objectively...
	At one point, I interpreted that as a pen.
	And then when I started trying to use it as a pen, my senses were like, no, this isn't a pen.
	This is an iPad stylus or whatever.
	So at what point does...
	So is objective reality like the interaction between our sensory perception and maybe like the accidents in essence of the object?
	So yeah, I mean, this is the cool thing about philosophy.
	So we have at the very bottom of matter, we have Atoms, right?
	And you can slice and dice into quarks.
	We'll stop at the atoms level because below that, all is madness, right?
	So we've got these atoms and the atoms behave in a completely consistent manner.
	A completely and totally consistent manner, right?
	So, I mean, the three states of water, right?
	You've got water, ice, and vapor, right?
	They all have, you know, particular temperatures they're going to change at.
	They all have predictable properties.
	You know, ice is a solid temperature. Water vapor is a gas kind of thing, and water is a liquid.
	So these all have, H2O, all has particular characteristics which are very predictable, very stable, very universal.
	You look at a carbon atom, which is the essence of who we are as life forms, and it's all very predictable, all very stable, right?
	Silver, gold, you name it, right?
	I mean, you have a gold atom, you get a phone call from Peter Schiff.
	That's just a property of nature.
	It's just the way reality works, right?
	And if you have a Bitcoin atom, you will get a call from his son.
	Anyway, so atoms and gravity and strong and weak atomic forces, radiation, all of these things, they all have stable, predictable, universal properties.
	Now, because everything is composed of matter and energy, and matter and energy, through the evidence of our senses, are completely and perfectly stable.
	Now, that doesn't mean they never change or anything, but their properties are stable.
	If you cool water below zero degrees Celsius, it's going to freeze.
	You know, if you heat it above 100 degrees Celsius, it's going to turn into water vapor and so on.
	These are all very predictable things, and there's no way to avoid it.
	It's universal, it's absolute, and so on, right?
	So the properties of atoms are universal and absolutely stable.
	Now, because the properties of atoms are universal and stable, We can come up with universal conceptual descriptions of the behavior of matter.
	So we can never walk through a wall.
	And don't give me any of this secret door.
	No, this is a wall.
	You could pay me $10 billion or by this time next year, half a Bitcoin to walk through this wall.
	It will never, ever happen.
	I can't get through it. Can't get through the wall, right?
	Never happened in this or any other, like any universe that we know of and it's just not going to happen, right?
	So because atoms Are so foundationally stable in their behavior, particularly at the sense data level.
	Like I know there's all this quantum physics stuff and all of that.
	All of those funky little wrinkles, they all cancel themselves out by the time we get to sense data, which is why the walls are so stable and the pen is stable and so on, right?
	And yeah, there's entropy and so on, but even entropy is predictable and stable and the carbon atom never changes into something else, right?
	So, or at least not without massive amounts of energy and transfer.
	So because atoms are so foundationally stable, we can come up with concepts that describe the behavior of matter and energy that are universal and perfectly true.
	A carbon atom is a carbon atom is a carbon atom.
	Water has three properties which change based upon very predictable temperatures.
	Gravity will always cause mass to attract mass.
	You can't walk through a wall.
	These things are all true, and our very highest and most abstract concepts are based upon the stable, immutable, and predictable patterns of atoms and energy.
	Okay. I think I like that.
	I think that sits well with me.
	Okay, I am not going to harass you about rampantly subjective statements about universal truth.
	It sits well with me, like a good Indian biryani.
	I like it.
	It's like, it doesn't matter whether you like it or not.
	Go ahead. Right.
	Well, that's... No, but it connects with something very human about us, right?
	Which is we get that our abstractions do tie into reality in some manner.
	And they do. They do.
	Right. So that covers ontology and epistemology, right?
	I think.
	I think we...
	I think I accept what you have said about reality as true.
	Or at least...
	Oh, he's got to pull back.
	He's got to pull. The tide is turning.
	He's got to pull back. At least acceptable.
	I'm not going to push back.
	I might pull back a little bit.
	Well, listen, you've got to stew on it, right? And like all sensible people, you have to push to find exceptions, and I get all of that.
	So, yeah, look, I mean, this is a big, jagged pill to swallow.
	Some people take it orally, some people not so much.
	So, yeah, you sit on it for sure, but that's where I've settled.
	But go ahead. Okay, so let's get back to the original question.
	You're on Buck Johnson's podcast and you're recounting this story.
	You were sitting in your car, you had recorded your podcast in your car and you asked yourself, does the world need another tech executive or does the world need more philosophy?
	Where are we in that question right now?
	Oh, I absolutely, completely validate and honor the decision that I made 16 years ago to pursue philosophy in the public sphere.
	I first started on the Rockle.com and then branched out from there.
	So yeah, I mean, there are tons of tech executives.
	And I think technology is great.
	I'm glad that there are tech executives.
	Otherwise, you and I would be talking to ourselves, which is not particularly productive.
	So the fact that there is tech, but in terms of supply and demand, in terms of supply and demand, do you want to be rare?
	Because the more rare you are, the more valuable you will be if people have a need or preference for what it is that you do.
	And so there are a lot of tech executives and I was pretty good as a technologist.
	They started coding when I was like 11 and I was pretty good.
	Let's not get into good yet.
	We've only covered real and true.
	I want to do this in order.
	So I was fairly competent and my skills were in demand as an executive.
	Like I founded a company, co-founded a company, grew the company, I've sold the company and the company is still in existence and it's still doing good work in the environmental field and all that kind of good stuff.
	But when it came to supply and demand, There were so many people crowding into the tech space, which was great.
	Again, I love the competition.
	I think it's wonderful. There weren't a whole lot of people crowding into the practical, useful philosophy space.
	Because, you know, philosophy, there are people who have wonderful abilities to abstract, synthesize, to make arguments, to...
	They have a hunger for consistency that drives them with a sort of Newtonian passion towards organizing principles in...
	Consistent arrays, and those people are identified by the powers that be as fundamentally dangerous to the lies and sophistry that control us, because power is all about moral inconsistency that presents itself as moral superiority, which we can get into in a sec.
	So what happens is the people who are really good at thinking, reasoning, organizing, debating, organizing their thoughts, And have this pipeline down to the sort of core spinal muscularity of the mind that makes us the most human.
	What happens is the people in power say, oh man, those guys, those men, those women, they are bad for us, man.
	They could set the whole apple cart over.
	They could undo the whole scheme by which we have been ruling human beings since we jumped up from eight form 150 grand years ago.
	So what they do, of course, is they drop these breadcrumbs.
	And they say, oh man, you're really good at this?
	Oof. You know what would be fantastic?
	You know what we can give you?
	Hey man, we can give you a job.
	You're only going to have to work like 10-15 hours a week, maybe.
	And, oh, you know what else?
	You can never be fired.
	Oh, wouldn't that be nice? Oh, and you know what?
	Every couple of years, just take a whole year off.
	Well, we'll still pay you. You can take a whole year off.
	You can write whatever you want.
	Nobody has to read it.
	Nobody has to care about it.
	It can go and sit in some dusty-ass bookshelf in the back end of the library.
	Nobody's going to care. We'll still give you 200 grand a year, 150 grand a year.
	How does that sound? All you have to do is be completely freaking irrelevant.
	That's all you have to do.
	All you have to do...
	Is trade any power or potential to positively affect society in the path of reason.
	And we'll pay the living crap out of you.
	We'll give you four months off in the summer.
	Does that sound pretty good?
	Four months off in the summer. And every couple of years you can go to the Bahamas and write a book about the ontology of nouns.
	And no one's going to care.
	It's not going to change anything. It's not going to matter.
	You're going to live this life of quiet, futile, overpaid, pampered house pet, domesticated emptiness, quiet desperation, fading to nothingness.
	And yeah, we are new to you.
	We will new to you. We'll turn you into a eunuch, but you'll get to sleep on a bed of gold.
	And that's the deal, right?
	Because those people are constantly a threat to the people in power.
	Now, when the internet comes along, people like me...
	Some would say a-holes like me.
	We come along and we say, because, you know, I was doing a master's degree.
	I was considered a top student.
	I could have muscled my way into academia, except for the whole white male thing, which doesn't seem to be quite so much in vogue as it used to be.
	But I can come, and I'm not even remotely tempted by that stuff.
	To me, tenure... I mean, that's just castration.
	Tenure is – because, you know, it's funny how even free market economists accept tenure, even though they know, they say, you know what really drives excellence in the free market?
	Competition. Wait, I don't have to get fired?
	I can never get fired? I don't have to produce anything of value in the free market?
	Oh, I'll take that. And it's just a good example of how power corrupts just about everyone.
	And even if we gave everyone a PhD in Austrian economics – They still wouldn't say no to free stuff even though they call it immoral.
	So people like me come along and we say, oh no, actually, philosophy is for the people.
	Philosophy is not for the academics, not for the ivory towers, it's not for conferences in sunny places, it's not any of that stuff.
	It's not for the circle jerk of polysyllabic masturbation known as modern academia.
	It's for the people! It's for the people!
	And so we come and we say, here's how...
	Metaphysics, epistemology, and morality can actually make your life better.
	You know, I'm here to change people's diets, not write diet books that nobody reads, right?
	And so we come along and without the gatekeepers, it's pretty tough.
	You know, it's pretty tough because I'm not even interested in the breadcrumbs that could lead me to, well, pampered irrelevance.
	That's like not even remotely interesting to me at all.
	And so the fact that we've got philosophy directly connecting with the audience for pretty much the first time since the days of Socrates when he would go out into the marketplace, and I can't believe the guy stole my business model.
	It's ridiculous, right? Because he would go out into the marketplace and he would say, hey, man, I'll talk philosophy with you for free.
	You know, maybe just buy me a falafel and we'll call it a deal, right?
	Because that's kind of what I do.
	I give away just about everything for free, and if people want to donate, they can, and we'll try and find a way to make it go online.
	That way, and that, of course, keeps me focused on the audience.
	It also makes me hard to kill because if you have advertisers, people put pressure on the advertisers to shut you up, which they did, of course, for Rush Limbaugh and all that kind of stuff forever.
	So because I've got a decentralized donor network, it's very hard to nuke me from orbit.
	And so we have...
	A philosopher or a group of philosophers, and I'm not the only one, philosophers talking to people and trying to provide value in the genuine free market of ideas for the first time in 2,500 years.
	And we all know what happened the last time, so I'm trying to stay nimble on the ground here because...
	My predecessor, the other bald guy, didn't come to quite such a storybook ending, so it's important to know when to be in politics, and it's important to know when not to be in politics.
	As you probably know, Plato tried to get into politics.
	He ran for office in Syracuse, and he did actually pretty well, so well that they kidnapped him and sold him into slavery, and it was only because one of his former students happened to catch sight of him at a slave market that he was paid for and freed, so it is kind of important to know when to hold him, know when to fold him, as the old song says.
	I actually didn't know that about Plato.
	Oh, yeah. Okay, so here's what's real.
	You were a tech executive who podcasted from his car.
	These are two skills.
	You have skill in technology, you have skill in philosophy, and communicating that philosophy to people over the internet.
	So that's real.
	You ask yourself the question, does the world need more philosophers or more tech executives?
	The supply and demand, obviously, there's way more tech executives.
	Whether, you know, whether your talent as a tech executive is, like, the supply and demand for your specific skill set and level of talent might be a little bit different.
	But if tech executives are a dime a dozen, then that's the situation.
	Well, I mean, it's also a relative scarcity of skills, right?
	I mean, so making philosophy of value to the average person, that's not the most common pipeline in the known universe, right?
	I mean, there are, you know, many wonderful thinkers and so on.
	But in terms of actually making philosophy a practical life skill that makes people's lives better, I mean, that's pretty rare.
	And, I mean, there is also a certain amount of vanity and pomposity in making this choice as well, which is, I've always wanted to go big.
	You know, I mean, how many tech executives are going to be remembered A thousand years from now.
	How many tech examples?
	But whereas, if you get it right in philosophy, I mean, you ascend to the pantheon, man.
	I mean, you have constellations named after you in the future.
	You get studied forever. Now, I don't want me to be studied.
	I'm not that interesting. I want to be, like, if I had a bad webcam, you couldn't see me very well, right?
	So the good webcam manufacturer wants you to not even think of the webcam, right?
	If you make a great pane of glass for a beautiful view, You don't want people sitting there saying, wow, this is an amazing piece of glass.
	You want them to not even notice the glass.
	You want them to just see the view.
	So I want to be completely invisible in the equation as a whole.
	I just want to be the portal.
	I don't want people to talk about me.
	I want people to talk about philosophy.
	So you'd rather be a window than a painting?
	Oh, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.
	Because people getting interested in me, I'm not transferable, but principles are, right?
	So it's like people saying, I'm really interested in Steve Jobs, but the last thing I want is an iPad.
	Okay, well, Steve Jobs is only of interest because of the iPads that people want, right?
	So I thought as well, again, part of the vanity thing, and I think it's kind of proven true for better and for worse, but I was like, okay, I want...
	To do things that will be remembered, I want to show up in the future.
	I want to become immortal, so to speak, right?
	And the best way to do that is philosophy, because philosophy outlasts the time that is.
	And you can just think of this, right?
	Can you name me a single business executive from the time of Socrates?
	No. No.
	I mean, I assume they existed.
	Oh yeah, there were business people in the time of Socrates.
	There were traders, merchants, you name it, right?
	Can you even name a single politician from the time of Socrates?
	Well, apparently Plato, but...
	Well, that was a bit of an aborted political career.
	He was a politician like I have a Mohawk.
	You know, there's more potential than actuality in that situation.
	Can you think...
	I mean, you could probably come up with a couple of famous artists from Plato's time.
	I mean, Aristophanes, of course, wrote a famous satirical play about Plato, which actually was pretty harmful to his reputation because the artists...
	You piss off the artists and it's really tough to make a go of it.
	But when it comes to the time of Socrates...
	You really only remember the philosophers and maybe one of the politicians, two of the politicians, but mostly because they brushed up against the philosophers in opposition and a couple of the artists who really towers from ancient Greece forward.
	Well, it's the thinkers. Now, it's a little bit less true from the time of the Roman Empire, because the Romans were kind of shadow cast by the philosophies of ancient Greece.
	You'll remember some of the warlords, the generals, some of the politicians, and a few of the thinkers, of course, right?
	I wanted to stand high enough that the shadow lasts for a thousand years, and the only way to do that is to go to the very stratosphere of human concepts, which is the very essence of humanity, which is the widest concepts, and to come up, or at least to me, I wanted to take on the greatest challenge, the greatest challenge of all philosophy throughout the ages, which is, can you define morality without a god and without a government?
	Can you do that? And that was, of course, the big brain-melting expedition that I went on, which culminated in my book, Universally Preferable Behavior, which 12, 30 years ago now, I've debated it countless times, and every single one of the people I've debated with has ended up not agreeing with the principles as a whole, because that's really kind of brain-bending, and maybe it's happened later on.
	But certainly the four major bans, the bans on rape, theft, assault, and murder, yeah, everybody has to accept those, and that's the great treasure of the system.
	I mean, if people don't understand the whole thing, but they at least accept that you can't have rape, theft, assault, and murder as universally preferable behaviors, I'll take that.
	You know, I mean, I'll take that.
	You don't need to know computer science to run an iPad, and you don't need to know all of the philosophical arguments to understand why rape, theft, assault, and murder are bad.
	So, you know, if that's solved, that's the holy grail.
	I mean, that's the thing right there.
	And defense of property rights through UPB and defense of anti-spanking through UPB, all of these things.
	Defense of the non-aggression principle through UPB. That's the big thing.
	And so that was part of it as well, which was, can I do more good for the world?
	Yes, because we need more morality than we need, you know, we need 50% more morality compared to 1% more technology, which is probably all I could have offered given competition in that space.
	My skill set was unique enough in so far as I do have, and you say tech and philosophy, they're not that dissimilar.
	Because being a programmer means you have to organize all of your thoughts and crystallize them in logically consistent and efficient formats.
	And being a good communicator, I did a lot of voice work and improv work and communications work in theater school because an actor is communicating the portal by which the story gets to the audience through the actor, right?
	So a lot of kind of accidental skills came together, plus I have a vaguely fruity Yeah, actually, it's interesting to me that you and Curtis Yarvin of Menchus Moldbug fame both were tech executives who became philosophers,
	broadly speaking. He's more of a political scientist, I guess, or political philosopher, and you're more of an ethics philosopher.
	Where do you think that came from?
	Why do you think it is that there's so much overlap between a good tech executive and a good philosopher?
	So, I mean, there definitely is the...
	You have to bow to reality in business, right?
	Your spreadsheet doesn't matter.
	Your final sales figure matters.
	Your projections don't matter.
	So you are continually making predictions and refining them according to Objective feedback.
	And this is the scientific method, right?
	The market and the scientific method have a lot in common, or at least they used to before the government swallowed up all of science and crapped out a bunch of technologists.
	So you're constantly making predictions, and this is going to be valuable.
	Customers are going to like this. You're constantly getting that feedback.
	So all of business, and particularly tech creation business, is about having a hypothesis, having a conjecture.
	Customers will pay for this.
	They'll like this. They'll... Value it.
	And then creating it and putting it out to the market and testing it and refining it.
	And so this is very much the process of science as well, where you make predictions, you go out and you test them against empirical reality, you refine them according to that.
	And so projections, business plans, manifestations of products, because I would do both the business plans from a tech standpoint, and I would also, I was head of R&D as well, so we would go off-site with a bunch of programmers and I would mostly design, and they would certainly design some aspects of it.
	And then I would go out into the market and sell it, because I was one of these rare technologists with a good capacity to explain things and do presentations.
	So I would have my theories, create the stuff, go out into the world, and see if it worked, see if it sold, see if it actually got the empirical evidence of price and profit in the return.
	So I think that process has really helped a lot.
	Also understanding that having something great really doesn't matter if you can't get it out in the world, right?
	Everybody has a great idea in their drawer.
	Everybody has a great idea in the back of their mind.
	You do, and I still have a bunch, you know, but it matters really only when you get out there.
	So I tell people, how do I become a podcaster?
	It's like, well, it's a lot of slog, man, because you can have...
	Great stuff in your head.
	You can have great stuff on your hard drive.
	You can have great MP3s.
	If nobody knows about it, you're not doing a service to the great ideas you have if you don't get them out there in the world.
	You know, I mean, it's not much point having a kid and locking them in your basement, right?
	It's kind of cruel, right? And so I would tell people, you know, I would spend, and this again comes out of the business experience, I would spend about 80% of my time not recording, not thinking, not writing, but simply promoting.
	I would go to conferences.
	Even if people didn't really know me, I'd muscle my way in.
	I would go to forums and post.
	I would buy ads. I would craft those ads.
	I would just call up people who didn't even know me and say, oh, check out my podcast.
	And I'd just be, you know, the gadfly, the annoying guy.
	And so when you've been in the business world, having your product doesn't matter if you can't market and get it out in front of people.
	And, of course, a lot of people who are intellectuals have this, hmm, the idea should speak for themselves.
	You know, I shouldn't get out there and grab it in the marketplace.
	It should be like a flare that goes up from my brain and people should just worship it like some Aztec god of vanity or something.
	And me knowing it's like, no, you've got to muscle this stuff out into the world.
	I mean, nobody cares about the fact that I want to be a philosopher.
	No. Nobody cares about the fact that I have a great idea about ethics.
	Nobody cares. They're all busy.
	They got stuff to do. They've got bills to pay.
	They've got women to pursue.
	They don't care at all.
	So I've got to make it as engaging and as charming and enjoyable as humanly possible.
	I've got to get it out in front of people.
	I've got to Because in the business world, the software that I was selling was very complicated and very technical and very, again, scientific, environmentally kind of stuff.
	And so you would literally make probably 500 phone calls to one sale.
	And so learning that the vast majority of everything that you create in the world, the vast majority of people are going to be Absolutely indifferent to.
	And in fact, they're going to feel annoyed that you're trying to get it in front of them.
	That's just the nature of the beast.
	And you and I do it all the time.
	You know, like everybody, you see these lists.
	Oh, some movie came out. You and I don't care.
	I mean, this is the movie maker who's probably spent five years of his life and gone half broke trying to get this movie out.
	You and I don't care. We're like, oh, wait, there's a perfectly timed screams cut on YouTube.
	I'm going to go watch that instead, right?
	So knowing that most people don't care, Most people are not only indifferent, but actually kind of annoyed at your insistence and trying to find a way to overcome that.
	So if you've had training in the business world or you've had experience in the business world, you know what it's like to have an idea, to create something, to push it out there and know that nothing in your life is going to sprint on its own, right?
	It's got to be. It's got to be something that you get behind and push.
	And not only is there... No shame in that.
	There's shame in not doing that.
	Like if you have a great idea, then you have to get behind it and push its glory rolling fire log out into the human consciousness.
	Like if you have a cure for some horrible disease, you've got to be relentless in getting it out there because lives hang in the balance and even more lives hang in the balance from philosophy than they do from any cure to any disease I know of.
	Yeah, I think you're right.
	So, lives hang in the balance through philosophy because philosophy is how we learn what is good according to universally preferable behavior.
	That is a very good echoing of some very positive syllables, but I would go much more basic than that.
	Sure. Which is, lives are lost when we initiate the use of force.
	We understand that if somebody goes and strangles someone, then the dead person has died because of the initiation of the use of force.
	Lives are lost in perpetuity through death.
	Lives are lost in slices through theft.
	Because if I go and steal, like let's say you spend all day creating something and I go and steal it, I just stole your day.
	And I also stole your motivation for future creation.
	So you make a shed, I steal the shed.
	What's your motivation to go and make another shed?
	I've stolen a whole series of sheds.
	And then you tell stories about how I spent all day making a shed and some guy stole it.
	Other people are like, I'm stealing sheds all over the place, not just yours, but everywhere.
	And so... I mean, look at these lockdowns.
	These lockdowns that have been going on now, what, 14 months?
	It's a hell of a long... I think it's still two weeks on Pluto, though, so something like that.
	But, I mean, everybody's talking about the deaths.
	But if you look at...
	The real cost is the babies who aren't being born.
	I mean, across the Western world, there are millions of babies who have not been born.
	I can track this on the birth rates.
	Millions of babies who have not been born because of these lockdowns.
	Now, it certainly is true that the lockdowns might have saved six months off the average lifespan of the population because, you know, the average death rate of people who die from COVID is actually higher than the average lifespan of the West, right?
	So the average people who die at like 79 or 80 years old, the average lifespan is like 77.
	Like, they're already past the finish line when they end the race.
	And if you compare that to the millions of babies not born, and you just add up the amount of human lifespan years subtracted from the universe, that's absolutely appalling.
	People's entire existence, entire lives have been stolen, which is, again, but it's the seen versus the unseen.
	You know, we see old people fall over, we don't see babies not being born.
	But if you have that in your mind's eye, right, Bastiat's old seen versus the unseen, that's the real cost.
	And nobody's really even talking about it as far as I can tell.
	But yeah, so lives are lost when you violate the non-aggression principle.
	And the whole purpose of philosophy, at least when it comes down to it, is morality.
	Everything else, you know, science has metaphysics, right?
	Science has to study what is real versus not real, which is why there's not a lot of biological conferences on the innards of unicorns, because unicorns don't exist.
	As far as we understand it, there's nothing on how do Klingons process alcohol and how do dragons fire breath weapons.
	I mean, you may get a couple of geeks on D&D forums talking about that stuff, and Lord knows I would have been one of them in my teens.
	But physics deals with the real, so physics is totally around metaphysics.
	We share that with science.
	We share that with dogs.
	Dogs have to know what's real and what's not.
	And epistemology, I mean, there's tons of stuff around.
	The whole scientific method is epistemology, double-blind experiments in the medical field.
	That's all epistemology. How do we know what's true, what's valid, what works?
	So we share metaphysics, we share epistemology with a wide variety of other disciplines.
	But the one thing that philosophy has that nothing else has is the study of ethics, study of virtue, universally preferable behavior, what is good.
	Not just what is true, but what is good.
	If we get that right, then we can work to undermine and eliminate institutional falsehoods about the virtue of violence.
	Because what is a state other than an institutional falsehood about the virtue of violence?
	Ah, taxes are the price we pay to live in a civilized society!
	Blech! You know, the only philosophical response, right?
	Slavery is the price we have to pay to pick cotton.
	It's like, no, come on. There's got to be another way to do it.
	There's got to be another way to do it. So if we universalize the non-aggression principle, you cannot initiate the use of force.
	We push back against taxation.
	We push back against the state.
	We push back against the most central violent organizing principle of society, which is where the danger to all of our lives comes from.
	So, I mean, to take a simple example, the multi-quadrillion, black hole, vacuum-sealed, grand chasm-to-infinity Mariana Trench hole of debt that the world is currently laboring under is all based upon the violations of the non-aggression principle.
	You cannot take out a debt on my behalf.
	I cannot take out a debt on your children's behalf.
	I cannot unilaterally impose a debt upon you And I cannot go to your house with a weapon to extract value from you for my own particular social schemes and plans.
	All of those things are completely illegal, and rightly so, because they're immoral.
	They're initiations of the use of force.
	However, we get this brain-bending, mobius-strip, acid-up-the-nose reversal when it comes to the state.
	And suddenly, well, that's good.
	That's right. That's moral.
	To which philosophy says, No.
	No, it's not. There is no such thing as a state.
	It is a concept.
	There is no such thing as a forest.
	That is a concept. There are trees, there are shrubs, and they may be aggregated in particular geographical proximity, but there's no such thing as a state.
	There's no such thing. Concepts are not real.
	It doesn't mean they're subjective or whatever, right?
	I mean, a tree, if you've got a concept called a tree and you identify the tree accurately, that's true.
	But a crowd does not exist.
	Individual people exist.
	The crowd is a concept we use, and the crowd does not exist.
	This is the anti-collectivist stuff, which is really epistemological.
	The crowd does not exist.
	The individuals exist. The concept is something we use to describe it in our minds.
	It's really, really important. Because if we have something in our minds that contradicts the properties of that which it describes, we've made an error.
	If I say all mammals are warm-blooded, except for this pen, we'll call this pen a mammal, and let's call a reptile a mammal, too.
	Is a reptile cold-blooded?
	Well, yes. I thought you said mammals were warm-blooded.
	Yeah, but let's just throw that in anyway.
	Well, obviously, that's a categorical error, and you'd be laughed out of any biological conference if you propose such a thing, right?
	You'd say, well, all mass attracts mass, except for this pan and a lizard, right?
	It wouldn't make any sense, right?
	So where you have the exceptions, you have falsehoods, you have lies, categorical errors.
	So when you say the government has the right to initiate the use of force, well, the government doesn't exist.
	So what you're saying is some people who wrap themselves in a concept that doesn't exist have the opposite moral rights of everyone else.
	That makes no sense, even remotely, logically.
	And it doesn't describe anything true in reality.
	It would be like saying, you and I, you and I are going to get together and we're going to call ourselves the anti-gravity club.
	Look, it's working!
	It's working! Right?
	I mean, just because you and I call ourselves the anti-gravity club doesn't mean that we're suddenly free of nature's grip that upon my ass seems to get stronger every single year.
	Right? So we can't wrap ourself in a label that contradict the fundamental nature of what we are.
	But if you wrap a certain group of people in the concept police, the concept government, And describe them the exact opposite moral characteristics of everyone else.
	You're saying that there's a category that can override and reverse the existential properties of that which it describes.
	It's completely and totally false.
	And it's the root of war, of theft, of violence, of predation.
	If governments couldn't force you to use their currency in order to pay their imaginary debts called taxes, There would be no central banking.
	There would be no intergenerational debt.
	And because we are floating on this helium-fart backdrop of imaginary money, enforced at the point of a gun, and we have swollen the human population literally by billions of people because we have created imaginary resources by preying upon a future which cannot possibly sustain our greed,
	when that money runs out, Billions of people, and your listeners just need to grok this and work it into your skin.
	When that money runs out, when that imaginary money hits with the very real bill that comes from math and reality, billions of people are going to face death.
	Billions of people are going to face death.
	Now, again, when it comes to do we need more philosophers or do we need more tech executives, the tech executives can't keep those people alive.
	Philosophy might be able to, because philosophy can say what is morally wrong and can engineer a soft landing out of the predatory stratosphere of central banking and fiat currency.
	Fiat mean, of course, by decree, by violence, by force.
	Let it be. So that's why you chose philosophy over being a tech executive.
	You wanted to save lives. If you have the right question, would I rather...
	I mean, I took, what, a 75% pay cut to start doing this stuff, right?
	So would I rather have more money if I have a fairly unique ability to try and save lives through reasoning, through communication?
	And I know that I have. We're talking abstract billions.
	Okay, I haven't saved billions of people, but I know for sure people write to me every week saying, oh, my philosophy has saved my life.
	It got me out of bad relationships.
	It got me out of addiction.
	It got me out of, you know, uselessness, nihilism, emptiness, and all this kind of stuff.
	And, of course, I have, in the work that I've done, the non-aggression principles, one of the very early essays that I wrote, which I circulated pretty heavily in the libertarian community, which is, does spanking violate the non-aggression principle?
	Well, of course it does. Because the only thing which allows you to use force is self-defense.
	And spanking is not self-defense.
	It's not like the kid's coming at you with a chainsaw.
	You've got to spank them into coherence, right?
	Or into personal space.
	And so I have anti-circumcision, of course, hacking off a third of penis skin for no medical benefit.
	It's a complete violation of the Hippocratic Oath and an absolute violation of the non-aggression principle.
	So keeping kids away from brutalizing trauma such as circumcision, peaceful parenting, not Having children be hit or beaten.
	In fact, I'm very much like no punishments reason with the kids no matter what.
	So yeah, I mean, I've certainly saved some lives.
	I've certainly saved, you know, millions of kids from being circumcised and or beaten and or abused in other ways.
	So that's a lot of good.
	That's a lot of good. And I would much rather have that in the rear view than a pile of extra money.
	Because... You know, you only need one dinner a night.
	You can only ever be in one room at a time.
	What does it matter if you have more rooms or more dinners?
	You just get fatter and lonelier, right?
	So that, to me, when you have those right questions, it's like, well, I could make money for myself.
	Okay, good. That's nice.
	I've got no problem with money. I'm a free market guy.
	Or, or, or...
	I could try and liberate the world from the most ancient tyranny.
	I could apply the non-aggression principle in a sphere and field wherein people can actually do something about it.
	You know, you and I can't snap our fingers and end central banking, but the greatest violation The non-aggression principle occurs in the home of parents and children, without a doubt.
	I mean, you have, it depends on whether it's the black community, the white community, the East Asian community, but you have escalating levels of spanking.
	It's, I think, 80-90% of the black community, 70-80% of the white community, 60-70% of the East Asian community.
	The vast majority of children are being hit on average, on average, several times a week.
	So that's a violation of the non-aggression principle we can actually do something about.
	So when I sit there and say, well, I could have more money, but basically I'm being paid so that children can continue to be beaten.
	Now, would you take that offer?
	If somebody said to you, oh, I'll give you a ton of money, but I'm going to have to beat a whole bunch of children in order to give you that money, you'd be like, hmm.
	Don't get me wrong. I have no problem with money.
	I just don't want it covered with the metaphorical blood of children, right?
	And so if you get those right questions, would I accept a million dollars if it meant a million children got beaten three times a week?
	No. Because I would take no pleasure in that money knowing where it came from.
	So you get asked the right questions.
	And knowing, I mean, I was very keen on the anti-spanking stuff, non-aggression principle, right from the beginning of my show.
	And I know I've done the math, back of the napkin stuff.
	Millions of kids are not getting hit because of what I did.
	And that's just what I can calculate.
	It could be any number of things, right?
	And this is from this show.
	You say, I'll get back to you quickly.
	Well, of course, they talk about this is non-aggression principle, good stuff.
	So when you ask those questions...
	I mean, it's pretty easy to make the right choices.
	You just have to put things in their proper context.
	Now, does that mean every tech executive is getting rich because children are getting beaten?
	No! Because they don't have the reasoning, they don't have the philosophy, they don't have particular the passion, the communication skills, whatever it is.
	And I'm glad that they're doing what they're doing because I can't talk about children not getting beaten if Zoom tech executives are not.
	So thanks Zoom tech executives for making this possible.
	It's a team effort.
	Well, and knowing what we know about the higher profile tech executives, I don't want them doing philosophy.
	I mean, I would...
	Could you imagine if Jack Dorsey was trying to explain what he believes about ethics to an audience?
	Well, but Jack Dorsey is doing philosophy in a way, right?
	Because Jack Dorsey is saying, you can speak and you can't.
	You're right and you're wrong.
	Yeah, that's true. I mean, the gatekeeping brutal censorship that goes on in Twitter, like the election-changing, trajectory of America-changing censorship that goes on in Twitter is...
	Absolutely. Well, it's really anti-philosophy, right?
	It's saying that perfectly lawful, peaceful speech cannot...
	Exists on this platform because power, right?
	And this is why we need a free society.
	Because, I mean, if you imagine how much Twitter gets corrupted by power, imagine how much worse it is for governments.
	Now, of course, a lot of what goes on in Twitter and YouTube and other places and YouTube, what are they?
	YouTube just awarded themselves a free speech prize a day or two ago.
	It's great. I'm awarding myself a great hair prize as well.
	It's just kind of funny, right? Those companies, a lot of the power that corrupts them is because of their relationship to state power.
	Because, I mean, the worst thing that Trump did in the run-up to the 2020 election was say, we're going to strip the Section 230 immunities from these companies.
	It's like, dude, dude, come on, man.
	You can survive without these companies, but those of us who took a couple of risks, maybe correcting some falsehoods about you, it's kind of like your girlfriend picking on some giant bully and then running behind you.
	It's like, dude, that's not really a good plan at all.
	So a lot of these tech companies, they want to bring the left into power because they're full of so many Democrats that the left will never go after them with any stripping of any immunities or any antitrust actions.
	So a lot of the corruption that they have is...
	Trying to survive in the shadow of state power, and I get all of that.
	But, I mean, this is where, you know, blockchain and that kind of stuff, which is where I tend to spend more of my time now is on blockchain communications technology, whether it's social media or videos or podcasts and so on.
	Because at least there's something where the, you know, when you've got kids and you've got something on the stove, you always put the boiling pot of water on the back where they can't reach it.
	Okay, that's blockchain with power.
	It puts it where people can't reach it, man.
	That's the only way it stays safe.
	So I'm going to ask one question that feels not germane, but this is something that you said earlier that could potentially land me into trouble.
	And I don't want to get in trouble with my audience or with something that spills over.
	No, no, please clarify whatever you want. That's fine.
	Yeah. So you said, and actually this might actually be a lesson for us, for me and my audience.
	You said Elon Musk is the most successful African American in American history.
	And... So when you say that about Elon Musk, who's South African, and he's white...
	No, but he is technically an African American if we take that heritage, right?
	Right. So it's technically correct, but culturally, it's...
	Problematic, which is a terrible word.
	No, I'm happy to hear.
	I mean, it's kind of a joke, right?
	And it's designed to have us think differently, right?
	And the purpose of it is not to say anything about race or anything like that.
	It's just that, to me, it's really fascinating when you point that out.
	It kind of crosses wires in people's heads.
	And the question, of course, is why?
	Right. So... Is it important to you that those wires get crossed?
	Or is it important to you that you're seen as edgy?
	Or is it something else that's important to you that you make that?
	Or, I mean, it could have just been you were gauging my reaction to it.
	No, I mean, I can tell you why.
	I think it's an important statement to make, right?
	And I'm glad that we're unpacking it.
	It's a good thing to circle back on.
	So he is an African-American, right?
	He was actually born in Africa, unlike a lot of the blacks in America, right?
	So then the question is, well, why is it wrong to call him an African-American?
	Well, because he's white, right?
	Okay, so you're saying everyone from Africa has to be black, which means that you reject diversity.
	So why would you reject diversity from Africa when diversity is a value?
	That's the big question, right?
	He's saying, well, if he's from Africa, he has to be black.
	Well, why? Africa's full of diverse things.
	The population of South Africa is 8% white.
	And so if you're saying, well, no, that's something wrong with that.
	He can't be African-American because African-American means black.
	It's like, well, there's lots of people who live...
	That's like saying that Canada just means white, which is false.
	There are lots of people who aren't white who live in Canada.
	And so it is a very interesting thing because what it does is it has people think, well, it's wrong to call someone from Africa...
	African-American, even though he is absolutely an African-American, because African-American must mean black.
	It's like, but then you're rejecting the entire diversity of Africa.
	And if you reject diversity, isn't that a bad thing?
	I mean, because we're told diversity is a strength, we should embrace diversity and more diversity is good.
	So what it does is it crosses people's wires, which is really an important thing to do, because if you hold a belief without examining it, You're just a mouthpiece for propaganda.
	When you have conclusions that you don't understand, the process by which you arrived at those conclusions, you're very dangerous.
	I don't mean you, like you particular.
	But when you hold conclusions that are significant and important in the world and you haven't reasoned them through and you haven't thought them through and you speak them as if they're true and you know them, then you're a dangerous person because you are full of propaganda and full then you're a dangerous person because you are full of propaganda and
	And the purpose of unraveling these kinds of contradictions in people's brains is everybody knows this sort of gray-faced NPC meme, right, where, you know, the NPC says something like, oh, it doesn't matter that very few people get sick from the coronavirus vaccine because it's a very small percentage, so it doesn't matter that very few people get sick from the coronavirus vaccine because And then people say, well, very few people actually die from coronavirus, so that is a tiny number and therefore we're not in any danger.
	And then the guy gets angry, right?
	And so what happens is when people invest their sense of self-esteem, their personality, their virtues, their values in programmed conclusions that they have not thought through, then when contradictory information comes their way, What happens?
	They become aggressive.
	They become aggressive.
	Now, this aggression might be typing something mean.
	It might be rage quitting a conversation.
	It might be trying to get you deplatformed.
	It might be physically attacking you.
	As you know, when I would tour various places, death threats and violent attacks upon supporters and all of that were the norm.
	And why? Why?
	I was not saying anything that was false.
	I was not saying anything that I wasn't willing to debate and be corrected from.
	And we had, you know, I toured with Lauren in Australia, and we tried in New Zealand, but it didn't work because of bomb threats and death threats.
	We had two and a half hour shows and well over an hour were open Q&A, no filters.
	Anybody could come in and could ask and challenge and we had debates and I provided data and I got corrected and I appreciated those corrections because that's called civilization.
	Is you actually engage with people you disagree with.
	You don't silence them.
	You don't try to destroy them.
	I mean, you and I may have disagreements.
	I promise I'm not setting fire to your house.
	I promise I'm not going to try and get you deplatformed because that would be a confession of intellectual impotency and failure.
	So the reason why it's important to put these thoughts and to challenge these narratives in people's minds is that violence in general Arises when people's sense of identity and virtue is challenged by contradictory information that they cannot process.
	Because our personalities are like our immune systems, and when a foreign object comes in, our tendency is to fight them, right?
	And that's why you want to found your personality on reason and evidence and a process of thinking, because then you can't lose your personality from contradictory information.
	If I say, I pursue the truth, Then if somebody says, well, what you believe is not true and here's why and here's why and here's why, I haven't lost my personality.
	And if you want to drive to Vegas and you take a wrong turn and the GPS says recalculating, do you sit there and say, you traffic bitch, how dare you correct me?
	And then you take it, you throw it out the window and you back your car up and you drive it over a couple of times, right?
	Well, no. You say, oh, man, I'm glad I got a GPS because I would have ended up in Utah or something like that, right?
	So when you have a goal called getting to Vegas, anything which helps you get to Vegas is a good thing.
	And if you have a goal called getting to the truth, everybody who disagrees with you, everybody who opposes you, it's wonderful because you can't be certain of things until you've subjected them to robust opposition, obviously, right?
	The sword gets sharpened.
	By sparks, you know, the muscle gets stronger by resistance and so on, right?
	So the reason why I will occasionally throw out things like that is that people will be like, oh, I can't think that.
	That's wrong. That's bad. It's like, no, that's really good.
	Because, look, if I did say something offensive and ugly and so on, then I would be happy to apologize and correct and retract and so on.
	But saying something factually true should never be offensive to people.
	Saying something factually true should never be offensive to people.
	And if you are offended then you have been programmed.
	If you are offended by the truth then you are in the service of liars.
	I mean, the Satan argument for the religious, right?
	What is he called? The prince of lies, the master of deception, the master of lies.
	If you are offended by the truth, it's because you have been told to avoid the truth.
	And the reason you're told to avoid the truth is so people who lie can maintain their control over you.
	So it's a minor...
	Shot of liberating potential.
	Because some people will sit there and say, wait, he said that Elon Musk is an African American?
	Well, that's bad. That's wrong.
	Why? It's a factual statement.
	Why are you upset by a factual statement?
	Well, it goes against, and it's racist.
	It's like, why is it racist to say something that's true?
	Because then what they've done is they've taken a true statement, wrapped it in a pejorative called racism, and therefore you can't examine that which is true.
	Well, understand, when people train you to run away from the truth, they're training you to reject that which makes you the most human, that which makes you the most virtuous, that which makes you the most courageous, where they can get you to run away from the truth.
	You're running away from who you are.
	You're running away from what is, what is real.
	You're weakened. You're emasculated.
	Because only the truth can be used to fight lies.
	And the fundamental lie of oligarchical power can only be fought by the truth.
	So that's just a little thing.
	It's a little thing to say, hey, can you handle the truth?
	Can you handle the fact without getting too upset?
	Now, you again, you talk about it, processing the reasoning it through.
	But it is really, really important that I will certainly say things that are true but considered unacceptable.
	And the most fundamental question is, who the hell told you that the truth was unacceptable?
	Who the hell told you that a factual statement was offensive?
	And why would they tell you that?
	And why would you believe it?
	Well, out of fear. Because you fear the aggression that comes from openly stating a factual statement.
	The question is why? Well, I mean, when I talk about IQ differences between ethnicities, it's not because I think that's a great fun topic.
	It's because if we can't discuss these things, we will forever take different outcomes as evidence of racism and institutional racism and white racism and so on.
	And what does that do?
	That escalates violence within society.
	That escalates tension, hostility, and hatred within society.
	And of course they want races fighting with each other.
	Of course, you know, we're supposed to look at each other askance and fearful and blame every failing on everyone else because then we don't look up and say, hey, who's running the show here?
	Who's actually really in charge?
	You know, it's like that old Monty Python thing where these...
	In the life of Brian, right?
	They're all supposed to go and kidnap some guy and they all end up fighting amongst each other and then the Roman guys just leaning on their swords like, oh, good Lord.
	Let them fight. Let them fight.
	At least they're not challenging us, right?
	So it is important. Why can't we say things that are true?
	And in fact, it's gotten even worse now.
	Now we say things that are false and everyone praises it.
	That's the flip side of punishing the truth is rewarding falsehoods.
	All right. Well, I think we should leave it there.
	I really appreciate your time.
	I've learned a lot about reality and truth and goodness.
	We didn't get into greatness, which I think Dave Smith got into some trouble for calling you the great Stefan Molineux.
	So I might make a pun on that.
	No, I think he just – no, sorry.
	I think if I understand David correctly, he means cheese grate.
	You've got to ask him to spell it out.
	Because I do like cheese.
	I'm a dairy fan. So when he says the great, he just means I like cheese.
	Cheese grater or something like that.
	Or maybe he said grape because that's the shape of my head.
	I don't know. It could be anything. Alright, Stefan.
	Why don't you tell people where they can find you now that you're not on YouTube and Twitter?
	You can find me buried deep in your conscience.
	Okay, so that's a UPP thing.
	So yeah, you can find me at freedomain.com.
	I just wanted to mention I've got a free novel that's out there after the deplatforming.
	I also wanted to do something to bring beauty rather than challenges to the world.
	I wrote a novel about the rise of political violence from World War I to World War II across Europe.
	It's a very big, epic novel.
	I read it as an audiobook, which was where my acting training kicked in.
	And I think it's a really great book.
	People can find that at freedomain.com.
	freedomain.com forward slash connect is the various places you can get me on the web.
	And listen, I really do appreciate the invitation today.
	I know that in a few circles I can be considered a slightly challenging guest.
	I really do appreciate you trusting Your audience with me.
	And I hope everybody understands I'm a nice guy and I'm a good guy.
	I'm trying to do real good in the world.
	And that does involve, of course, you can't do good without annoying evil doers.
	And hopefully people will understand that's kind of the metric at work.
	But yeah, thank you very much for the opportunity to speak with your audience.
	And it was a great pleasure to chat.

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