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Aug. 16, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:57:58

How to Survive Your Own Destruction - Philosopher Stefan Molyneux interviewed by Joseph Cotto

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	Good evening, everyone.
	I'm Joseph Cotto, and let me tell you about an epic story of victory, defeat, friendship, betrayal, heroism, cowardice, deep respect, blind hatred, and above all else, the struggle for survival.
	It is my new book, Runaway Masters, A True Story of Slavery, Freedom, Triumph, and Tragedy, Beyond 1619 and 1776.
	Check it out on Amazon by following the link below.
	The paperback is $9.99 US, while the Kindle order is $4.99 US. If you are a Kindle Unlimited subscriber, you'll be able to read it for free.
	Hope that you enjoy the book.
	But tonight we are here to chat with Stefan Molyneux.
	And I will just say briefly, some people watching this probably were following the StreamYard link before.
	Stefan, how's it going?
	Good. Just wanted to let your viewers know, of course, I'm not Gottfried.
	Right? Because, you know, it says, Godfrey, Cotto, I'm not Godfrey.
	This is like going to see Godly and Cream, and there's Godly and then just like a little pint of cream next to him.
	That's all. That's all we've got.
	But yeah, thanks for having me back on.
	It's nice to be on YouTube again.
	I'll be dodging a little bit here and there as we move, ninja style.
	But yeah, good to be back.
	And how are you doing? Doing well, Stefan.
	I'm glad to see you on YouTube.
	Obviously, you rose to a level of prominence on this platform in a way that I never can with Godfrey, York, and Paul for all of his intellectual greatness.
	And arguably, your success is what doomed you on YouTube.
	Have you ever read that story of Icarus?
	Yes, that's right.
	I'm really... Icarus is the story of a guy who's like, I'm going to learn to fly the height of the gods.
	I'm going to go right up past the stratosphere.
	I'm going to see whether the world is round or flat.
	And he puts wax on his back and he staples all these big giant wings to his back and he flies up and gets too close to the sun.
	The sun melts. The wax that detaches his wings to his shoulders and he plummets down to the depths of the ocean.
	And in this, I guess I would be Icarus.
	And the wax would be philosophy and the sun would be actual truth, which people don't want you to get to.
	So that's the story.
	But hey, we've advanced massively.
	I'm reading The Trial and Death of Socrates to my daughter at the moment.
	And let's acknowledge society has moved forward to the point where nobody's asking me to drink any hemlock.
	They're just asking me to rebuild myself in other areas.
	I've been cordially invited to be elsewhere.
	And so, yeah, we've made 2,500 years not killing philosophers anymore.
	De-platforming is infinitely more civilized.
	And we haven't come as far as physics have come.
	We haven't come as far as medicine has come.
	But as far as social tolerance goes, we're not doing too badly these days.
	Relatively speaking. By the way, if you have a reasonable, responsible question for Stefan or myself, please do leave it via Streamlabs.
	The link has gone out.
	Leave it as soon as you can. Thank you very much in advance.
	Stefan, we're going to be discussing different things tonight.
	Later, we're going to get to the institution of slavery, which I'm sure is a philosopher you have many interesting takes on.
	I obviously do as well.
	But before any of that...
	We will talk about what it's like to deal with smears, particularly damaging smears, which are intended to cause maximum harm to one's public image.
	How does one rise above this?
	How does one manage to essentially keep his or her head above water when people are throwing from all different directions this toxic water in one's direction and they keep trying to dig a ditch that you can't get out of?
	This is something that a lot of people are going through now, people who never thought they'd have to go through it.
	Because of the culture that our society has found itself in, it is a culture of, I would say, the atmosphere is similar to what happened in Salem, Massachusetts, quite a few centuries ago.
	It's that sort of fanaticism.
	And a lot of people are just being dragged through the mud.
	You are a libertarian, obviously.
	I know of another libertarian who was smeared as all kinds of crazy stuff like white nationals, white supremacists, blah, blah, blah.
	And the guy is just a libertarian who's a very, very intelligent scientist.
	And the people who cast these smears do so, I've seen, in a way that does not typically have what you would call anything in the way traditionally will be considered to be adequate source material.
	It's very bombastic.
	It's designed to be like a 10 second soundbite or something that you read in less than 30 seconds.
	And it's just designed to make people hate the person, even though the substance is not there to back the rhetoric itself.
	And I find the whole thing to be quite bizarre in a way, but very scary in another way.
	Now, obviously, you've had a lot of experience with this sort of lynch mob, its mentality as well as its real-world effects.
	You can speak to it in a far more profound manner than I can.
	So anything to say starting off tonight?
	Yeah, it's a great question and my sympathy goes out to those of us who are waving the searchlights of reason and evidence at the sky only to draw the bombers of idiotic social hysteria our way.
	But here's the thing, Joseph, and I would invite everyone out there to sort of recognize something that I think is kind of foundational to anxiety or worry or concern about these kinds of things.
	When you worry or when you fear these kinds of attacks, what you're saying is you know for sure that they're bad.
	Now, I'm going to be 55 next month, so I'm going to hitch up my suspenders, cast aside my whittling, sit on my grandpa's chair on the back porch, and say a couple of things that I've learned.
	First of all, how do you know it's bad?
	How do you know that it's bad?
	It's unpleasant. It's a lie.
	It's bad. But how do you know it's fundamentally bad?
	It's like this Chinese diplomat, I think, in the 19th century.
	Somebody said, what do you think of the French Revolution?
	He says, it's too soon to tell.
	And he's right. So a lot of things which I really disliked and it bothered me and was negative actually turned out to be an enormous positive.
	And just because you don't like something doesn't mean that it's bad.
	And just because you like something doesn't mean that it's good.
	So with this kind of stuff, first of all, you can't be free if you fear being hated.
	You cannot be free as a human being if you fear being hated.
	Now, I'm not saying don't have any caution.
	I understand the mob can be dangerous and this and that and the other.
	But if you fear being hated, people will sniff that out, you will self-censor, and you will end up a compliant non-entity disappearing into the vortex of history like you weren't even there.
	So if you want to take a stand, if you want to think for yourself, if you want to bring facts, reason, and evidence to the world, you have to make friends with being hated.
	You have to recognize that that is the deal.
	If you invent some amazing tool that tracks down robbers, Thieves, rapists and murderers, do they like you?
	Of course they don't!
	When you are doing good, provoking the outrage and hatred and hostility of evildoers, that's the gig.
	It's like if you're a cancer researcher and you say, well, I don't want to do anything that's negative to the cancer cells, I mean, you'll get your ass fired.
	Because that's the gig.
	The gig is to do things which are harmful to the cancer cells.
	And so if you are, and the better you are at it, the worse the blowback will be.
	If you're trying to spread reason, truth, and virtue, then you will get the blowback because evil is a force.
	It defends itself. It fights back.
	Now, it doesn't fight back fair, but of course, if it fought back fair, it wouldn't be evil.
	Now, that's just kind of the deal, right?
	So, first of all, you have to make friends with being hated.
	Secondly, being able to, or rather I should say, Focusing on speaking to the most wise and the most intelligent is foundational to having a strong effect in the future.
	And the more you're willing to forego present popularity, the more you can impact the future.
	I mean, we were just talking at the beginning of the show, just before the show, about Socrates.
	We know the name of Socrates as the founder, really, of modern epistemology in particular, like the search for knowledge.
	Now, if Socrates had wanted to gain the good opinion of the majority in the time in which he lived, he would have just been another sophist and his name would have vanished completely.
	Being willing to disagree with the present is the only way of casting a long shadow Not for vanity's sake, but just for goodness sake.
	If Galileo hadn't defied the church, if Plato and Aristotle had been in search of popularity, we would not know them.
	All heroes have to be willing to be unpopular in the present.
	All moral advancements are foundationally about being unpopular in the present.
	We're going to talk about slavery. Slavery was driven by largely Quakers, largely white male Europeans.
	From the 17th century onwards, it took a couple of generations to eliminate this gorgeous slavery to a large degree.
	I mean, substituted with tax serfdom.
	But hey, let's at least say it's better to be a slave who can choose his own job than a slave where somebody else chooses your job for you.
	So those people were enormously unpopular.
	People spat on them.
	People cursed them. People dragged them to court.
	They were enormously unpopular because the world is inert when it comes to morality.
	Everybody in their time thinks that they're right and the morals they believe in are good and there can't be any improvement.
	And so when someone comes along and says, let's take this moral principle that you accept already and believe, like for me it would be the non-aggression principle, right?
	You don't go around punching people in your life.
	Let's take that principle, let's expand it as far and wide as humanly possible, and then you end up with a small to no government society where you don't hit your kids, you know, that kind of stuff, right?
	And so when people who are complacent in their moral certainty in the moment, as almost all humanity is, then when you come along and you say...
	You're probably not quite as good as you think you are, which is fine because until you know, you don't know, right?
	And so when someone comes along with a more consistent set of morality, people get really mad because it interferes with their sense that they're really virtuous and they've reached the pinnacle of virtue.
	There's nothing more moral that can be done.
	In other words, they get a sense that in the past they would have defended slavery.
	In the past, they would have defended rape as a weapon of war.
	They would have defended all these terrible things in the past.
	They would have been the people hunting down the Salem witch people.
	They would have been the people joining with the Nazis or the communists in hunting down the proletariat or the Jews or the gays.
	People like to think that they've learned the lessons of history, but the lesson of history is you have to be very humble about the morals and very critical about the morals you accept in the world.
	But it's so much easier to just slide into the straitjacket of morality as it's told to you and think, well, we can't be any better, can't be any more moral.
	And then annoying people like you and I come along and say, we're not done.
	We're not done, people. Come on.
	We've got more to go. We've got more to do.
	We're not even close to done the moral journey of mankind.
	And isn't that kind of cool? We've still got things to add to the moral journey.
	So you want to speak to the wise people.
	You want to speak to the smart people.
	You want to speak to the curious people.
	And to the people who lie about you and besmirch your name and drag you down with rhetoric into the bowels of hell...
	Those people, what they're doing is they're creating a shield around you so that fools who are easily misled don't approach you.
	And so you get to focus on the better and more important conversations.
	Because if you get dragged down into engaging with every idiot in the present, the future which desperately needs you will lose you.
	And the advancement of the species will be crippled and fall.
	So watch the people who...
	Besmirch your name do, is they keep fools away from you.
	Because the fools read stuff, oh, yeah, he's a bad guy, oh, right?
	And then they just wander off and go and bother someone else and shave down and erase their potential to positively affect the future.
	So I'm not entirely convinced that things like deplatforming, that things like lies and smears and so on are necessarily a bad thing.
	Plus, of course, you get to show the great virtue of integrity, of moral courage, of certainty.
	Of self-assurance? Of being able to rise?
	Because what do they want to do?
	It's the last thing I'll say. What do they want to do when they smear you?
	They want to arouse two emotions in you.
	Fight or flight, right? Fear and anger.
	Fear and anger. That's what they want to do.
	Now, if you fall prey to fear, then you curl up into a ball, you stop being a public figure, you go and hide in the mountains, you fake your own death, whatever you're going to do.
	And then you're gone, right?
	And then you said, okay, well if people say mean things about me, I'm out of here, which doesn't show a huge amount of moral courage, I would think.
	The other thing, of course, is they want you to get angry.
	They want you to get bitter. They want you to get enraged.
	They want you to no longer reason with a song in your heart and a spring in your step and a clarion yodel in your voice.
	They want you to sit and fester over the negative and horrible things that people have lied about with regards to your name and obsess about the negative thoughts they're implanting in people.
	And that way, you become unappealing, right?
	I mean, I was like, oh, I can't believe the things that people are saying about me.
	They're so mean. They're so vicious.
	It's so unfair. How long are people going to want to listen to somebody who's really embittered?
	Or somebody who's vanished.
	They can't, if you vanish out of fear.
	So you have to find a way, I think, to stay positive, to stay engaged, to stay engaging.
	And remember that the degree of hostility is the degree of virtue.
	The degree of hostility is the degree of virtue.
	Now, I believe that virtue brings love.
	Love is our involuntary response to virtue, if we're virtuous.
	If we're evil, then we feel hatred and all of that.
	So, I am loved by my wife, I am loved by my friends, I am loved by my daughter.
	Now, if the price of that love...
	Is virtue. And the price of virtue is being lied about by evildoers, then I have a stark choice.
	I can either attempt to appease the evildoers and thus lose the love of my wife, of my daughter, of my friends, and eventually, of course, of myself, in which case I've simply sacrificed everything that's glorious good in my life for the sake of evildoers or liars.
	Or I can say, hey, that's the price.
	That's the bill. That is the price.
	If you invent something that tracks down criminals, criminals will hate you.
	But all the people you've saved from criminality will like you or love you or whatever.
	So I just accept that as the price of doing business, so to speak, that because I did a huge amount of good in the world and continue to do it, The bad people aren't going to like me.
	I mean, that's the deal.
	It's like saying, well, I don't want to love anyone because we're all going to die.
	It's like, well, that's the deal, man.
	You can then curl up into one of these little balls like an armadillo and then death is one to begin with.
	Then you won't expose yourself to loss, which is...
	The dark side of the shadow side of love.
	You won't expose yourself to that because I'm so afraid of losing.
	I'm not going to gain or win anything.
	Well, you've just lost then your whole life rather than at the end of your life or the end of the life of someone you love.
	So that's the deal.
	We are mortal. Whoever we love is going to die or they're going to Live with us dying.
	And if you do good, evildoers will drive a lot of people away from you, which allows you to focus on what's most important to the future, because, you know, to hell with the present, if that makes any sense.
	Yeah, it's interesting because obviously your philosophy is one of dealing with, you know, adverse situations that are totally unfair and making the best of them and essentially learning from them to build a better situation.
	If I have that right in a nutshell, is that correct if I have a good premise?
	If you can turn a negative into a positive, then you've mastered anxiety.
	If you generally have a confidence that you can take a negative, learn from it, improve from it, and turn it into a positive, then you have that judo move that whatever crap life throws at you, you can turn into something golden.
	And so you have to just say, okay, first of all, I don't know that it's bad.
	I may not like it at the moment.
	But I don't know that it's bad.
	Like when I was younger, I was like, hey, I'm going to be an actor.
	And I went to the theater school and so on.
	And, you know, it was pretty socialist, pretty communist and pretty, you know, they didn't like me.
	I didn't like them. And all the plays were about hunting down the proletariat and the poor, all noble victims and heroes of evil.
	You know, it was Mr. Burns with iambic pentameter.
	And I was like, okay, that's not for me.
	Now, of course, I wanted to be an actor and a playwright and a director.
	And I did act and I did write plays and I did direct plays.
	And it didn't really work out for me.
	I went into academia. And it's like, you know, I could kind of see the social justice warrior, anti-white stuff coming down the pipeline.
	I'm like, I don't know about that.
	Went into business. Really liked the business world.
	I spent a lot of time as an entrepreneur in the business world.
	I loved it. I was a young single guy.
	I got to travel, got to...
	I cut multi-million dollar deals sometimes.
	It's great, great stuff. But the business world has its own levels of corruption.
	And so I went into a lot of fields and I wanted those fields to work out.
	And for various reasons, some to do with me, some to do with the environment, it didn't work out.
	And thank heavens it didn't work out because now I get to do this wonderful thing.
	It's like all the breakups I had with girlfriends before I met my wife were sad.
	You know, it was sad because I was breaking up with the woman and it didn't work out.
	Or it was sad because the woman was breaking up with me and it didn't work out.
	And usually when the woman broke up with me, of course, I wanted the relationship to continue.
	But then I say, every woman who dumped me or every woman I dumped so that I could be with my wife, we'd be married now for 20 years, love her enormously.
	She's the one. Everyone who I was sad about not having in my life was just clearing the way to the person who was the best to have in my life.
	It's the same thing with my career.
	As you pass this half-century thing, you look back and say...
	I kind of judge things in the moment rather than trusting in a deep, fundamental way, and this would be a religious way for a lot of people, that you are moving to the right place.
	And if stuff hurts in the moment, it doesn't guarantee that it's bad.
	It doesn't guarantee that it's going to hurt in the long run.
	And all of the people that I admire were attacked in history.
	Like I have William Molyneux.
	My direct ancestor was best friends with John Locke.
	And they said some things skeptical of the divine right of kings, and they were chased all over Ireland by the king's soldiers and had to hide in haystacks.
	And, you know, it's like, hey, at least I'm not in a haystack.
	So I'm still doing somewhat better than my direct ancestor.
	But yeah, you have to...
	Go with the principles. Go with the truth.
	Go with the honesty. Go with the directness.
	And let the chips fall where they may, because the future is not written from the detritus of the present.
	The future is written from the most consistent and most honest, and to some degree, sadly, most appealing people in the present.
	And it does... I'm tired of the bad people being more charismatic and the bad people getting to write the future.
	And now that we have these kinds of direct conversations, I think that we can have a way for people to judge the present and who was saying what and what were the facts that were behind what they were saying and who was acting with courage and nobility and conviction and who was acting out of panic and fear and hatred and hostility.
	We'll see. It's not up to me.
	All I can do is my best and most positive way to bring the truth to the world.
	But I think we got a chance to kind of break the bad guys winning and writing the history because we have these direct conversations which are never going away.
	It's interesting because obviously the people who are what we would call the forces of destruction, perhaps to be kind, they do enjoy using smears.
	They use highly emotional language that is intentionally thrown out there to provoke a mindless response from people that, and the purpose of that is to destroy the reputation of those who are thought to have unfashionable views so these people will be silenced.
	It's really a form of intimidation.
	And if you look at how this functions in society, one sees that nowadays.
	It's remarkably effective.
	I mean, your YouTube page is one such example.
	There were so many, you know, rather ridiculous complaints launched against you in the years running up to when you were banned.
	And on YouTube, you were more popular.
	Free Domain was more popular than a lot of mainstream news outlets.
	You know, like, it had more subscribers than they did.
	And it certainly got more interest than they did.
	Especially before YouTube started jamming up its algorithm to favor, you know, those who would consider to be ad friendly.
	So it's really interesting to see how these very destructive people do these very underhanded things, and yet it proves successful to them.
	And from their perspective, they have won.
	What would you say to that point of view?
	Well, I concede to them the victory in the moment.
	Yeah, I was deplatformed and there was a transition and all of that.
	But I wanted to push back against something you said, which was you said that they destroy your reputation.
	My reputation is not theirs to make or to break.
	My reputation is only mine to make or break, and my reputation is my relationship to universal values, honesty and integrity, to virtue itself.
	So people can say bad things about you, but they don't have fundamental and final control over your reputation.
	Look, if people had fundamental and final control over the reputation, we'd view Socrates as a bad guy who was in fact corrupting the young and not believing in the gods of the city.
	My reputation is not owned by other people.
	So I just wanted to push back against that.
	Now, as far as, did they win?
	Okay, so why was I deplatformed?
	I mean... Could be any number of things.
	The fact that, you know, Google seems to have been somewhat involved in funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan.
	I shouldn't laugh because it's completely astonishing and appalling.
	And, you know, I did a big documentary, as you may know, on Hong Kong and China, the dangers of China.
	And I was working to bring a lot of racial conciliation together by bringing scientific facts to bear on differences between ethnicities so that we can start to deal with these as genuine facts rather than Marxist set against hysterias that are going to lead to social collapse if we don't find some better way to get along.
	So, lots of things were going on, but a lot of it had to do with the fact that I was doing a lot of politics.
	Now, when I started my show, I really didn't do much politics at all.
	I got into politics.
	I always find it interesting, and, you know, there is that old quote from Plato that says, the price of not being involved in politics is to be ruled by your inferiors.
	So I got involved with politics.
	Now, since the deplatforming, I was like, okay, it's a smaller audience, obviously.
	And I was not that interested in doing politics anymore.
	So what's happened is I've returned to the essence of the philosophy show that I started.
	There's a story about Plato that Plato, listening to himself, said, oh, I'm going to get involved in politics.
	So he ran for office, for a political office in Syracuse.
	And he was pretty good. Plato, as you know, one of the best writers of dialogue and prose in Western history.
	Apparently Aristotle was great too, but we don't have his original writings, of course.
	So Plato ran for office, and he was really good, and it looked like he was going to win.
	So his opponent had him kidnapped and sold into slavery.
	Fairly effective, I suppose.
	I'm sure that Michael Lindell is taking up his course even as we speak.
	So... And how did he get freed from slavery?
	He was up on the slave market, and one of his former students happened to recognize him and paid about 40 bucks to free him.
	And if Plato had gone into politics rather than writing his dialogues, he would have disappeared in the more of history.
	Could he have done some good in the moment?
	Yeah, I guess so. But he would have disappeared from history.
	And so not focusing as much on the tug and pull and push of the everyday, and rather instead devoting myself, as I did at the beginning, to larger and more universal principles, I think is going to help the future a lot more.
	And does it do negative things in the present?
	Yeah, I mean, I hope so.
	I mean, I think I had some positive effects.
	But are you willing to sacrifice Short-term gains for long-term gains.
	Are you willing? So for me to focus on philosophy, core philosophy, again, is going to be of much greater benefit to the future.
	I'm also working on a book on parenting, which I think will really help things as well.
	So YouTube and other places, Twitter and other places...
	Arguably, and I think it's a pretty good case to make, have burned me in the present so that I can set fire to the future.
	I can illuminate the future.
	I can do better things in the long term by focusing on core principles rather than ending up being sold into slavery and hopefully a former student will have 40 bucks in his toga.
	Now, what do you suppose is the mindset of these people who want to ban people from YouTube for doing, just talking about philosophy and current events as you did, and of course they make up crazy stuff all the while to encourage the ouster.
	Where do you suppose they're coming from?
	What is their motivation?
	Do they have a philosophy behind what they're doing, anything that could be described as something that's sophisticated at least?
	What do you think about them and what they offer to the world?
	How much time do we have?
	Let me just check the time here.
	That's a big question. I will try and boil it down because obviously I've had some time to give it some thought.
	Well, first and foremost, we have to remember that we just talked about the American government.
	So the American government holds trillions and trillions of dollars in its power.
	Right, through its funding mechanisms, through its money creation, through its debt creation and so on.
	Trillions of dollars makes people kind of crazy.
	You know, it's funny, we see all of these heist movies, like movies where, you know, this group of individuals has stolen something, but it turns out they end up fighting with each other and they all end up dead in some Tarantino gun to the forehead in a circle scenario.
	So there are trillions of dollars at play in the government.
	And when people genuinely believe that state power is necessary for their survival and the survival of their children, right?
	So when people believe that the redistributionist power of the state is necessary for them to live, you know that old saying that there aren't any atheists in foxholes?
	Like when you feel that you're in grave mortal danger, right?
	Then some guy wobbling on about the immorality of the welfare state, if you think it might get traction, you've got to take him out.
	You've got to take him out.
	Because if he gets his way, in other words, if I got my way, then we wouldn't have a welfare state because it's funded on coercion.
	It's deeply immoral. It decays society.
	It creates a half-slave population of people who vote for more and more government.
	And it sets human beings against each other in a fairly civil but ultimately destructive civil war of legality and liquid money transfers.
	So if I'm coming thundering along, right, and I'm saying, ooh, welfare state's immoral and so on, well, there are...
	Tens of millions of people and, you know, arguably if you look at half the American population depends on the government for its income or a large proportion of its income.
	So, you know, the libertarians come in and we're sunny and we're optimistic and, oh, well, people are going to listen to reason because it's about morality and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	And then people are like, you know, I'll paraphrase this old line from Risky Business, you know, in a recession don't F with another man's income.
	Yeah. And so people who've now been three generations deep into the welfare state, they could be single moms, they could be, you know, they could have three different kids by three different dads, and they're not going to come out into the street themselves, but I've always made the case that, you know, the sort of Antifa and people like that are kind of the shock troops sent out by the single moms to make sure the welfare state continues.
	So it is a war of resources and not a war of ideology.
	And there are very few people, and it may not be a bad thing, Joseph, that there's very few people like this, but there are very few people who will sacrifice material gain for a principle.
	Most people, I mean, will talk about principles, but fundamentally it's about material gain.
	And so how many people will sacrifice the money they genuinely believe they need to live for an abstract principle called free speech being exercised by me in direct opposition to their immediate material interest?
	Now, I talk about the welfare state, but military, industrial complex, and so on, all of these things.
	I did a lot of pushbacks against the race-baiting narrative around...
	Trayvon Martin around Michael Brown.
	And of course, I was just about to release me talking with a white cop and a black cop about the guy who knee on the neck guy who died and so on.
	Right.
	George Floyd.
	Sorry, name escaped me for a sec.
	And so the fact that we were, you know, white cop, black cop and me were having a really productive discussion about this this case that goes against, you know, because if the Democrats can whip up enough, you know, anger and fear in the black community, the black community will vote for them to protect them from evil white Republicans or whatever.
	Right.
	And so they want that power and the people dependent upon them feel that they need the money from the state.
	So if you come between You know, like some guy's dying of thirst in the desert and you stand between him and the oasis, well, you're going to have a thirsty-sized guy hole in your chest as he gets through you to get to the oasis because he's in a state of desperation.
	He's in a state of dependence.
	He's in a state of panic. And so when people come along and say, well, according to these abstract principles, you shouldn't be getting this money.
	You know, it's...
	I mean, imagine standing outside a convenience store, right?
	And some guy's like, hey, I just won the lottery for $5 million.
	And you say, I'm sorry, I can't let you cash that because, you know, the government doesn't actually have any money.
	So it's just printing it and borrowing it.
	And it's immoral. And it's, you know, it's a form of coercion and so on, right?
	And what's the guy going to say?
	You are right. I completely agree with you.
	Rip, rip, rip. I'm not going to take this $5 million.
	Yeah. Come on. I mean, you and I would have a tough time doing that kind of stuff, right?
	So when you're standing between people and their lottery winnings, they don't care if there's some abstract principle that says you should be allowed to stop me from getting my lottery winnings.
	And, you know, I mean, the military-industrial complex didn't like Donald Trump because he didn't start a war.
	He was like the first president since I've ever been alive and probably for a couple of generations before who didn't start a war.
	So hundreds of billions of dollars or trillions of dollars.
	What was the war in Afghanistan? $2.2 trillion, just as a bare minimum, not even counting the long-term health consequences and costs.
	And I mean, my God, you look at the average IQ of Afghanistan, there's absolutely no way they were going to end up with a Jeffersonian democracy at the moment.
	And so, you know, the stuff that I was talking about, this is completely predictable.
	I don't even bother following it anymore because it's like, oh, I've got to see to the end of a movie I've seen 300 times before.
	Just in case it's different this time, they might have changed it.
	You know how this stuff goes, right?
	So yeah, you stand between people.
	Yeah, sorry about that. Wait a second.
	Here we go. Sorry about that.
	I think I had some kind of weird...
	I think somebody else in Canada dialed into the internet, so we had to elbow them aside.
	No, but I was saying that I agree with you about when you've seen a movie 300 times before, is it going to be any different the 300 first time?
	And obviously, it applies very much to what's going on now with U.S. foreign policy.
	Yeah, so I would say that...
	I'm willing to give up.
	I'm willing to burn reputation, so to speak.
	I'm willing to burn viewership and prominence and all of that for the sake of the truth.
	I could say that makes me a great guy or whatever.
	It's just my particular compulsion.
	I'm not sure I could do it any other way.
	But that's relatively rare.
	And maybe that's fine.
	You know, for evolution to occur, you need a big stable gene pool and then you need a couple of mutations.
	And so I don't mean buying one of the mutants.
	I don't mind being one of the mutants, but we do need those people in society.
	But the vast majority of people have adapted to the current society.
	And the current society is trillions of dollars of redistribution.
	And... It's based on debt.
	It's absolutely unsustainable.
	We know that in history when governments run out of money, they just go to war and kill people because they can't pay the bills.
	And so people have adapted to the current system.
	If you talk about changing the current system, They're not happy.
	I mean, it's like if you've got fish that have adapted to a particular temperature and then you say, you know, it'd be great if we cranked it up 10 degrees.
	I mean, you put your hand in to do that.
	If they knew what was going on, they'd try and chew your hand off like a bunch of Amazonian piranhas on a cow.
	So, yeah, you try to change the current system, which people have adapted to survive on, and they don't believe that they can survive any other way.
	And they view you as a life threat.
	They view you as an existential threat to the continuation of their lives, of their kids' food or their yachts if they're armed sellers or whatever.
	And, yeah, I guess more power to them.
	Let's see who wins.
	You know, by the way, I will just say that if you have a reasonable, responsible question or comment for Stephan or myself, please leave it via Streamlabs.
	We will be getting Streamlabs shortly.
	Before we do, though, you know, right now we see wokeness, and it's not just, I think, a political perspective.
	I really think it's a religion.
	It has all the hallmarks of an organized religion, and I think it's sort of like a replacement religion from what Christianity used to Be in the West.
	And it's fascinating to me that people have embraced wokeness as quickly as they can.
	It's really just caught fire over the last several years, but it has really caught traction, specifically among young people and women.
	That's not to say all young people and all women are woke, but they disproportionately are.
	And I wonder, as a philosopher, Does this tell you that people need to have some sort of irrational belief system, generally speaking, to function?
	Does it tell you that maybe they're victims of their own circumstances?
	How do you view this rather unfortunate phenomenon?
	Well, it's a shadow cast by state power.
	It doesn't have any life in and of itself.
	It's a shadow cast by state power.
	When the state can keep millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people, billions of people around the world alive through the drip, drip, drip of counterfeited, stolen, money printed, borrowed on the necks of the next generation money.
	Well, what are we paying for?
	What are we paying for?
	In other words, when you are in receipt of stolen goods, you don't feel particularly good about it, and it's not a very honorable position to be in.
	So the moral horror of being dependent upon, you know, like Tony Soprano's wife, right?
	A predatory and violent system creates a massive need for moral justifications that you're a good guy, not a bad guy.
	And the only way that you would ever give up that stuff is if you genuinely understood the morality and ethics and realities, both biological, emotional, psychological, physical, political, whatever.
	If you actually accepted realities, you'd have to change your position.
	If you accept that taxation is theft, then living off tax money It's like being a slave owner.
	We'll tie the slavery thing in, we'll weave it in here and there as we go forward.
	So when you have half the population living on unjust, coerced money, then you create a massive demand for a moral system That obscures the violence of its origins and justifies the redistribution.
	So how do you justify the forced redistribution of trillions of dollars?
	Well, you say, of course, that it's just returning stolen money.
	You say, hey, men, the rich guys are only rich because they stole from you, or maybe not from you.
	They stole from your ancestors.
	They stole from you. If you were slaves in the past, if you were serfs in the past, if you're a woman and you were oppressed, they stole from you and we're just taking it back.
	Well, then it's like, oh my God, I'm not a parasitical person who's living on a steady river blood of coerced cash.
	No, no, no. The government is bringing things back to me that were stolen from me.
	And so wokeness is this belief that all human beings are the same.
	All human beings are the same.
	And therefore, wokeness The only reason that some people have more and some people have less is exploitation, corruption, theft, sophistry, whatever it's going to be.
	So that's the basic idea.
	And of course, that's a great idea for people who are on the receiving end of the brilliance and sort of atlas-shrugged geniuses of productivity that characterize a meritocracy in a free market.
	I mean, we all know this principle, right?
	That the square root of a...
	Any group in a meritocracy, the square root of the total number produces half the value, right?
	You've got a company of 10,000 people.
	100 of them are producing half the value.
	And, you know, we all know this.
	Like, I don't know, when you were growing up, you know, you go to karaoke with your friends, right?
	There's always that one guy.
	I mean, there's always that one guy who's like, Billy Joel, no problem.
	Billie Holiday, no problem.
	Billie Idol, no problem.
	Right? Billie Bob Thornton, I don't know what they're singing, right?
	So there's always that one guy who's just like, he opens his mouth and it's like, It's like an angel crying in your ears.
	He sounds that good, right?
	But he's like one in a thousand.
	And the music industry, 99% of the money goes to 1% of the people.
	It's the same in the sports industry.
	It's the same in the cooking industry.
	It's the same in podcasting, in YouTube, in social media.
	You know, 99% of the eyeballs go to 1% of the people and they tend to be over-tanned with butt implants.
	Sorry, no disrespect to the Kardashians.
	Love you guys. But anyway...
	So, this idea that everyone's equal, therefore the only way things could end up unequal is because of theft and predation, is driven by the need to justify living off government money.
	Wokism is not a philosophy that is pushed out into the world.
	It's desperately grabbed at by people who need to justify their dependence on an immoral system.
	And we saw the same in the past.
	Go back to the slavery thing, right?
	The slavery thing, and we can talk just about sort of American slavery, although this happened in other places as well.
	So the original justification with slaves was, hey, man, we won.
	We won the war.
	Like, we own your ass, right?
	You're inferior. And then over generations, they would get this vanity and, you know, we're the elites and they're the toiling masses and we wouldn't want to dirty our hands with physical labor or anything like that.
	But you end up with moral justifications to prop up and support an unjust and immoral system.
	And of course, the American justification for slavery, despite the cries of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights and so on, that all men are created equal, was, well, you know, they've got a soul, but they've got a ways to come, and we're shepherding them into salvation and so on, right? And we're superior, they're inferior, and...
	Wherever you have an unjust system, there's a massive thirst and demand for some twisted, weird morality that's going to make the system be right, and particularly those who are on the unjust receiving of stolen goods, like the slave owners or, in this case, the people who are receiving government money, they need to tell themselves so they can get to sleep at night and wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and not want to punch it.
	They've got to tell themselves that it's a good thing.
	And so if you are taking money from other people through the power of the state and somebody points that out, they're getting dangerously close to the truth that's going to unravel your smug self-satisfaction that you're just getting your own stolen goods back, right?
	And that's really, really tough for people But there is just this desperate need to believe that people are just the same.
	If you've got more, you must have stolen.
	We're going to steal it back for you.
	And so people then get to feel smug and self-satisfied and they get well paid as well.
	And that's a pretty powerful combination.
	Indeed it is. I mean, it really is.
	And it's a combination that obviously is winning for the left right now.
	The wokeness, like other, what one could call utopian systems, or I say they're really dystopian, but I think we get the idea.
	It can't last. It can't function.
	It's not something that is able to go on for any serious length of time in the real world.
	But it is immensely useful as a narrative to get people to turn against each other and to get them to do things for certain people who want power out of the anguish of these folks who function essentially as pawns on a chessboard.
	Oh, for sure. And the only way that you can deal with what people perceive as economic inequality is with massive political inequality.
	You dial up one, you dial down the other, you dial down the other, you dial up the one.
	So if you want to make everyone equal in terms of income, then you have to have a massive, powerful, overarching state that can forcibly transfer trillions of dollars, which is a near infinite gap of power between the citizen and the rulers.
	So the only way you can achieve any approach to economic, quote, equality of outcome is to have a massive, powerful state which is vastly more unequal than anything the economy could ever end up with in a meritocracy.
	The political difference between – I mean look at Joe Biden, right?
	Joe Biden, whatever we think of his doddering, dangerous grandpa, bad parent of the universe ways, he's like, oh, you want to take us on?
	Well, we have F-15s and nukes, right?
	And it's like, okay, that's true.
	Thank you.
	I don't know what that means about January the 6th.
	But anyway, what that means, of course, is that, yeah, you have to give people the power to create their own money, to run the education of the children, to borrow at will on the next generation, to have weapons of mass destruction.
	They can point overseas or at home to have massive influence, if not direct control over the media.
	So you have to have a small elite with rights that you and I not only could not even conceive of, but anyone with half a soul would run screaming from.
	It's the most corrupting thing in the universe.
	So you have to create almost two different classes of human beings with completely opposing rights.
	You and I create money out of nothing.
	We're counterfeiters.
	We go to jail, but it's the foundation of state power because through the Fed they get to pretend that they're adding value when they're simply adding coupons based upon the spleens of the next generation being sold to foreign banksters.
	So if you want economic inequality to be solved, the only way to do it is to create massive totalitarian levels of political inequality.
	And, of course, you've got to pursue the former while hiding the latter.
	And you've got to portray the government as some benevolent referee that is simply righting a wrong historically.
	But, no, if you're really concerned about inequality, you have to look at the average citizen versus the state.
	And if that doesn't trouble you, I mean, then you're kind of beyond reason.
	And now we will go to StreamLazline.
	Like I said before, if you have a reasonable, responsible question for Stefan or myself, please do leave it via Streamlabs.
	We'll leave it as soon as possible.
	Please don't save it off at the end.
	Thank you very much. Okay.
	From Landry Chamberlain.
	Hey, Steph, my sister, who's gotten two abortions, had a kid in prison she lost custody of to my parents and killed a seven-month-old baby in a car wreck, is pregnant again.
	Why the hell is this happening?
	Also, have you ever had a conversation with Gabor Mate?
	So, as to why your sister is pregnant, so, when a man and a woman really love each other...
	Okay, so...
	I have had a couple of conversations with Gabor Maté, and he's a Canadian doctor and an expert in psychology, although he's not a psychologist as far as I know.
	But he's written some fantastic books on child abuse and adult trauma and, in particular, addiction.
	I really recommend his book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts.
	It's fantastic. With regards to your sister, I mean, I don't know the details of the history, but when people act irresponsibly It's because somebody else is paying the price for their irresponsibility.
	If you kind of bake this into your brain and you look across the world, it's fairly clear.
	If other people pay the price for your irresponsibility, then you have almost no incentive to stop being punished.
	Irresponsible. Like, if I could smoke and then some random space alien on Betelgeuse gets lung cancer, what's my incentive to quit?
	Somebody else is paying the price.
	And you know what this is like.
	If somebody is continuously in debt and running up ridiculous bills that they can't afford, and their parents keep jumping in to bail them out and pay off their credit cards, what are the...
	What's the likelihood that they're going to develop financial responsibility if other people are constantly bailing them out?
	And this sometimes happens with ourselves.
	If you knew for sure that you could cheat on a test, you know, I was reading somewhere online that, you know, now they've got all these Zoom classes this year and so on.
	And so this one woman was writing and saying, you know, I hated the idea of cheating, but I knew everyone else was doing it.
	And so if you can get away with cheating...
	Because you can't be monitored.
	You're just on a webcam or whatever, right?
	If you can get away with cheating, what is the likelihood you're going to study really hard?
	Well, some people will, like some people will, but most people will fall when the consequences of their own negative behavior don't accrue to them.
	Now, the state is a big giant mechanism where it promises irresponsible people, oh, don't sweat it, man.
	Take it easy. Don't get uptight.
	Don't get tense. Something bad happens.
	No worries. We'll catch you, baby.
	We'll just catch your fall.
	We're going to just take care of everything for you.
	Don't freak out. Hey, did you marry the wrong guy?
	Did you have children with a guy who turned out to be an alcoholic?
	Or maybe you knew he was an alcoholic, but he was really pretty.
	Don't worry about it. You can have a no-fault divorce, you get welfare, free dental care, free health care, and we're going to chase his ass from here to Timbuktu to make sure he pays you a huge amount of money.
	And if he doesn't, we'll throw his ass in jail and then we'll get mad at him for not being able to pay his bills, right?
	So, in the past, of course, if a woman chose the wrong man...
	What happened? She just had to grit her teeth and get through it.
	Or she could run away, in which case her name would be kind of mud.
	Or she could move back in with her parents.
	Or like if a woman, a teenager got pregnant, right?
	I mean, I'm not quite old enough to remember this, but I heard rumors of it when I was a little kid.
	You know, the sort of typical 19th century shock and horror novel where the girl...
	Gets pregnant. She's 18.
	She gets pregnant. And the guy's a bad guy.
	He was in the military.
	He seemed very upright.
	He spoke very well, but he was just a player, man.
	And he knocked her up and hit the road.
	And she's stuck pregnant now.
	Well, she would jump on a trampoline or she would take weird spirits to try and abort the baby, but the baby would usually survive.
	So what would she do? Well, the parents would send her away to Switzerland and she'd show up in an Ibsen play three months later.
	And then or the child would be taken in with the parents and you remember these stories from when you were younger, right?
	I thought she was my sister.
	I thought she was my mother.
	It turned out she was my sister or something like that, right?
	So what would happen is the young girl would have the baby and then they would pass it off as a late baby of her mother, right?
	And maybe people would know, maybe they wouldn't, maybe they'd suspect, but if a woman got pregnant out of wedlock, I mean, it was really rough.
	And the parents would have to often pay.
	They'd have to pay for the travel.
	They might have to pay for the baby coming up or whatever.
	They'd have this shame. And so parents, because the parents bore the brunt of the financial and reputational hit of a teen pregnancy, what do they do?
	Well, they didn't have chastity belts, at least not for a while, but there would be, remember chaperones?
	Remember these things from like the 50s and so on?
	Like a man and a woman in their teens, they could not go on a date unattended.
	They couldn't go to Lover's Lane.
	They couldn't go park someplace.
	They would be, hey, bring him over for dinner.
	Let's have a cookout. If you want to go to a movie, you know, your Uncle Joe is going to come with you and snore in a most unromantic way to your right.
	And you can't – like in university, a woman was not allowed to close the door to her dorm room.
	Like you couldn't – so because parents faced direct consequences to their daughters getting pregnant or – and of course, you know this too – shotgun wedding.
	This is something that Joseph and I knew when we were younger.
	A shotgun wedding is, oh, did you knock up my daughter?
	Yeah. You're getting married to her.
	And if you don't get married to her, I'm putting enough lead in your butt so you can be picked up by a car magnet.
	And so the man would be like, oh, if you don't want to marry the girl, you better not be having unprotected sex because you're going to be forced to marry her.
	And so when individuals, this is all prior to the welfare state, so when individuals, when parents, when the local community and the girl and the The boy, when they directly and personally paid for unprotected sex outside of wedlock, they really, really worked to control it.
	Now, the welfare state comes in, and what happens?
	Oh, did you get pregnant?
	Ah, here's a free abortion.
	Or you could put it up for adoption.
	There's no shame. No shaming single mothers.
	They're strong, noble, TM, whatever, right?
	Stunning and brave, right? Stunning and brave.
	But this is simply because the parents...
	Don't have any direct financial costs to unwanted pregnancy.
	So the real tragedy is that your sister probably has an irresponsible streak to begin with, which would have been tamed in the past.
	Because she or your parents would have had to directly pay in reputation and $200,000 at least to raise a child.
	And for $200,000, can you prevent your daughter from getting pregnant?
	Bet you can! I bet you with that kind of money on the table, you can make it not happen, so to speak, right?
	And just, you know, get married and take it from there, right?
	So, your sister, irresponsible to begin with, but unfortunately, because she lives in a society where the government runs around cleaning up after her, she's got no incentive to tidy up her life herself.
	And the real tragedy is not only how much she suffers, but what's happening to the kids, right?
	Indeed. And there's one from Mark Rojavik.
	We'll get to it in a minute, but there's also one from Douglas Edward84, and I believe he'll be leaving soon, so we'll get to it now.
	From Douglas Edward84, Stefan and Joseph, have either of you seen the shocking study from Brown University showing severe declines in cognitive abilities among children during the COVID pandemic?
	It's up to a 21% drop in IQ at this point.
	How did our leaders get so callous?
	His data is a little incorrect.
	Sorry to correct you. You said it was 21% down.
	That would actually be a huge improvement.
	It's a 22-point drop from 100 IQ average to 78 for COVID babies and COVID toddlers, which is beyond catastrophic.
	It is absolutely beyond catastrophic.
	Now... So this is a study out of Rhode Island, mostly white babies.
	And I know it's a little tough to get IQ of a baby, but they can develop mental milestones.
	Do you recognize this?
	Do you know your colors?
	What are your reflexes like?
	And so on. And they can approximate this into an IQ, which is actually pretty accurate.
	So for the white population, the IQ is always averaged out at 100.
	It's a moving goalpost every year.
	IQ has been declining, but it's always 100 when they rejig it.
	So it's a pretty good study.
	And what they did was they took historical studies with all of the same metrics for measuring intelligence.
	And they compared babies and toddlers.
	And of course, they're not giving a baby who's three days old any kind of intelligence test, right?
	But they've got babies and toddlers, right?
	And we've got COVID babies now.
	You know, they could have been born at the end of 2019, early 2020.
	You know, we got 17, 18 months on them now.
	And so you can definitely test things there.
	And it's a mostly white cohort because different ethnicities on average have different IQs.
	But they normalize for that.
	They said mostly white. I don't know the exact percentage.
	And the reason for that is because you want to compare apples to apples.
	Or I guess in this case, snowballs to snowballs.
	So what they found is IQs going from 100 average to 78.
	Now, that's not...
	Fixed in stone forever.
	So genetics have a big deal to do with IQ. By the time you're in your late teens, 80% of your IQ is genetics.
	Now, 20% is a lot to work with, so it's not like the end of the world or anything like that, but that is sort of the reality of the situation.
	I would imagine the reasoning that they put out seems to be, well, you know, parents are home.
	They're trying to work two jobs.
	They're stressed. They can't spend too much time with their kids.
	So what do they do? Well, they drop their kids into a crib and maybe they strap an iPad with Lion King on it or something.
	I'm probably dating myself.
	I don't know what the new thing would be.
	Boss Baby 6000 or something like that.
	And so the kids may not be getting...
	You know, hand-eye coordination.
	They may not be getting eye-to-eye contact.
	They may not be getting skin-on-skin contact, which develops empathy.
	They may not be hearing age-appropriate, high-pitched, ooh, it's a lovely belly, you know, this kind of stuff that you do with kids that helps them learn language.
	You know, they hear their mother droning on about sales projections in the next room.
	room, it's not quite the same as playing choo-choo train with their applesauce or something like that.
	So the sort of theory is that with the kids being at home and the parents being at home but being very distracted for eight to 10 hours a day, that the kids are just not getting enough eye contact and one-on-one stimulation or toy changes or somebody playing with them and so on.
	And are you a dad, Joseph?
	No, I'm not. Okay, so you'll know this when the time comes and somebody pulls off your hat and starts to eat it other than me, which we'd be doing if we were in the same studio.
	But, I mean, I've been a stay-at-home dad for 12 and a half years.
	I actually just released a show that I did with my daughter today upon her outrage.
	We read an article together on all the reasons not to have children.
	And as a child, let me tell you, she had some thoughts about that, which I appreciated and enjoyed.
	But when you have a kid, I mean, that's it, man.
	That's your thing. I mean, that's your thing.
	I used to write two books a year.
	I became a dad and that was it, man.
	No two books a year.
	And I don't regret it.
	It's a wonderful thing. Books are not going to outlive you in that way, and they're not going to hold your hand when you slip into the great beyond or anything like that.
	But yeah, the eye contact, the hunger for playtime, the showing them the world, the getting them involved in games and all of that.
	It's a wonderful process.
	And normally the kids would be going to daycare or they'd have a nanny, but the daycares were closed, the nannies were unavailable, and the parents were both working.
	This is a combination of lockdowns, which I enormously oppose.
	I mean, I oppose this.
	People get mad at me about my thoughts about COVID, but they forget that it was March of last year.
	I said, like, no lockdowns of any kind, right?
	And Belarus just released their...
	They had no lockdowns.
	Like Sweden, very few.
	Belarus, no lockdowns.
	And Belarus and Sweden...
	Well, Belarus has just released their numbers.
	They're... Exactly the same as every other country around them, despite the fact that they didn't completely eviscerate and disembowel their economy.
	And now, what was it in England?
	There are one million extra alcoholics because of lockdowns.
	So, yeah, so what's happened, of course, is that we set up a society...
	I don't know, it's kind of a weird thing.
	We set up a society like there weren't going to be any sudden bad white swan events.
	Like the unexpected, out of the blue stuff that just shakes you up.
	You know, we all have this in life.
	You know, you're trundling along, doing your thing, and you get that phone call.
	You know, whatever it is going to be, like something bad has happened, or maybe it's something good that's happened, completely out of the blue, completely unexpected.
	And COVID is just one of those things.
	Now, in the past, we had societies that were able, that were full of people actually able to assess risk.
	Actually able to assess risk.
	And if you can't assess risk as a society, you collapse at the first sign of a problem.
	And so, Joseph, you were a kid, right?
	You climbed up giant monkey bars.
	You drove your bike too fast.
	You jumped over streams that you couldn't jump over.
	I remember going on a rope and swinging out under a railway bridge over...
	And my friends and I were like, hey, how many times can you swing?
	And of course, we were all macho little idiots, as I still am now today.
	So I was like, my friend did four, I'm going to do five.
	And of course, my muscles locked up, paralyzed, gave out and I fell onto these rocks and had to limp home.
	And, you know, so you learn how to manage risk when you're a kid, because you're out there doing stuff.
	You know, if you ever look at these playgrounds from like the turn of the last century, I mean, they're giant, massive skyscrapers of death.
	And the insurance companies and the paranoid moms would never allow these things to exist anymore.
	Even my daughter has noticed that playgrounds are getting more boring as she gets older, not just because she's getting older, but because everything's got to be soft and gentle and careful and Right?
	So it used to be that we would be out there in the world, particularly as boys, testing our limits and learning how to live with and manage risk.
	Because there's no such thing as a life without risk.
	Like all the kids and the moms are like, oh, don't go out.
	You could get into trouble. You could get kidnapped.
	It could be dangerous. You could fall and hurt yourself.
	It's like, okay, then they just sit on the couch and they get diabetes.
	You haven't solved the problem of risk.
	You've just made it a certainty rather than just a possibility.
	Right? So we used to have a society that could accurately gauge risk because we let children take risks.
	Now we've got these bubble-proof kids that can't go anywhere, can't do anything.
	Diversity has destroyed the cohesion of the neighborhoods.
	And they just sit home and they can't assess risk.
	So then when they grow up and somebody says, there's a killer virus, right?
	And then they go out and they survey people who've been glued to the mainstream media.
	And they say, what do you think your odds are of dying of coronavirus?
	What do you think it is? And people are like, 14%.
	14%?
	It's SARS-CoV-2.
	It's not like the bony hands of the Grim Reaper.
	You know, you're off by a factor of, what, a hundred?
	What are your odds of dying of coronavirus if you're not in three categories called obese, really old, comorbidities?
	Virtually nil. And yet people, after 18 months of fear mongering for the mainstream media, they think it's a 13.5% chance of dying if you get COVID, which is so far off.
	It's not insane because, you know, fear porn sells, but we don't have any capacity to assess risk anymore.
	And so we built our whole societies like we were never going to run out of money.
	There was never going to be any kind of big change in healthcare or anything like that.
	There was never going to be another pandemic, even though there have been like, what, five since the Spanish flu?
	We've just built these whole societies and we've just lulled everyone into, oh yeah, you can go into debt.
	You're never going to get fired. You can have massive government programs.
	We're never going to run out of money.
	And we can have women just go to work like kids are never going to get sick from a pandemic or people aren't ever going to have to stay home because of a pandemic.
	So feminism was set up with this idea that government's never going to run out of money.
	Government's always going to be able to prop up women's wages through direct employment and forcing them to be paid more than the market would probably otherwise determine and subsidizing them with massive amounts of free childcare, like there's such a thing as free.
	And then something like COVID comes along, and the women are all working, no one's taking care of the kids, and apparently their brains are falling out of their armpits now.
	The situation with COVID, I think what it's done to society is insane.
	I always was very much anti-lockdown for, I think, some very obvious reasons.
	And one of those reasons, I think it contributes to what the Brown University study showed to get to Douglas Edwards point.
	It makes people unable to be all they can be.
	I'll put it very kindly.
	And I did hear about the study, but I had not seen it at length.
	I'm glad for the clarity that Stephan provided about it.
	And, you know, our leaders get callous.
	I think Stephan outlined that as well because there's very poor risk assessment.
	Also because I think they realize that the people who they're leading are less intelligent than previous generations were.
	And there's the expectation that people are much easier to control then.
	And so clearly, you know, when leaders have a situation like that, they get very callous indeed.
	So anyway, very good question from Douglas Edward.
	Let me just add one other tiny thing, if you don't mind, which is, because we can't assess risk, people have this, well, people haven't risked.
	Like, my daughter was in a running race once, and a girl who didn't show up got a participation trophy.
	Like, she wasn't even, like, not only did she not win, but she got a participation trophy, and, you know, this was kind of mind-blowing to her, right?
	Like, when I was a kid, I'm now that age.
	When I was a boy, boy, did we ever have no TV. So when I was a kid, though, there was first, second, third, and who cares?
	First, second, third, and don't even care.
	And you worked hard to get first, second, or third.
	And second and third sucked.
	And if you didn't show up for the test, you got an F. And if you didn't study, you got an F. And if you got more than a couple of Fs, you got left behind the whole year.
	There were consequences. But now, of course, people have this weird belief that nothing bad should ever happen to them.
	Because again, we've had this coddling.
	It's a nanny state. And a nanny means you're forever staying in the nursery and you can't ever grow up.
	So people have this weird thing like, well, nothing bad should ever happen to me.
	Well, you know, life is messy.
	Life is bad. Bad things can happen.
	I just wake up one day.
	Hey, I got cancer. Do you smoke?
	Nope. Are you healthy?
	Yes. Work out all the time.
	Just bad luck. Bad things happen.
	And yes, you know, I mean, my particular argument came out of the Wuhan lab.
	I mean, come on, of course it did, right?
	But bad things happen.
	Yeah, you've got a communist government that covered up the origins of the pandemic going directly against the most solemn treaties they'd signed to get into the World Trade Organization.
	The first thing on the list is make sure you tell us if there's a pandemic.
	You have to. Otherwise, you can't be part of the World Trade Organization.
	And they're like, yeah, we do want to be part of the World Trade Organization.
	That's good for us.
	I don't think we're going to do the pandemic thing, though.
	Like, you guys are going to just have to guess.
	And we'll be sure to close down internal travel and let, you know, hundreds of thousands of people fly out into the West and other places when we know there's a pandemic.
	So if that's okay, we'll take the world trade, not the pandemic thing.
	So yeah, bad stuff is going to happen.
	And we set up this whole society where two people are working like the kids.
	We're never, ever going to need additional resources.
	And now, you know, for whatever crazy reasons, they've shut down the schools, even though kids don't really transmit it, kids don't really get sick from it.
	They shut down the schools. Well, of course, you know, it's not like the teachers are really enjoying all of the lovely students they have now, raised by single mothers and bad culture and rap music and, you know, who wants to get held by a seven-year-old at knife point for half your day?
	So they're real happy to stay home, I think, and you can't get the teachers back into the classroom for love or money these days.
	But, yeah, we just, we've set up this whole society, like life is not a slowly deteriorating house of cards, which it is.
	You never know what good or bad things, you know, how many times have people, you know, like that old Mike Tyson line, everyone's got a plan until they get punched in the face, and it's great to have plans in life, but you could get hit by a bus tomorrow.
	You could wake up and have something weird growing out of your side that turns into a space alien that eats Ripley.
	I mean, who knows, right? So the fact that we've got this society where we deny the fragility of life, we deny the vicissitudes of life, the white-spawn events of life, and people are then completely shocked when bad things happen.
	And I don't know, I guess we just have to learn these lessons again.
	If you think that nothing bad can happen in life, you don't really treasure all the good things that happen.
	Very true. Life is yin and yang, so to speak.
	There is the darkness and the light.
	There is the good and the bad.
	And a lot of people do want the state to make it so there's only good, but as Stefan mentioned, it holds them back and it prevents them from growing beyond a very...
	Well, that's because we don't believe in the devil anymore, right?
	And so this is the oldest story all the way back to the very beginnings of human history.
	The story is always the same.
	The devil will give you a benefit you haven't earned and you will like it at the beginning.
	It'll turn to dust in your hands and then eventually you have to give up your soul and it was never worth it.
	And it's the whole thing.
	The government's going to keep you free of problems.
	It's going to pay for everything.
	It's going to cover up all of your mistakes.
	It's going to educate your children.
	It's going to give you free health care and pensions.
	And it's going to take away all the dangers and vicissitudes of life.
	And then it's turning to crap in our hands.
	The bill is coming due now, right?
	The bill is coming due now.
	Governments are threatening doctors with license pulling if they oppose the general narrative of what's going on.
	And that's not science.
	That's not science at all.
	That's back to, you know, like religion throwing scientists in prison.
	So now the bill is coming due.
	And now everyone's like, well, this isn't what we want.
	Because in the past, the people who made the bad decisions and sold their soul for the sake of a security that never came to pass...
	They were the ones who paid themselves.
	But now we had a wealthy enough society that the people who made all these terrible decisions, the bill gets passed to the next generation or two.
	And that's, you know, we talked about if you cover up people's mistakes, they have no intention to improve them.
	Yeah, the boomers are going to get their pensions, but nobody else is.
	And so they, in a sense, sold their freedom for security, but they get all of the benefits and it's the next generation that pays all the costs.
	And that's one of the problems for the wealthy society is you can pass the buck down a generation, which means what incentive do you have?
	To be responsible and guard freedoms, because you get all the free stuff, and everyone else gets all the price for it.
	Very true. In a way, very predictable, but very true.
	And it's just shocking that people don't really learn cause and effect.
	Anyway, from Mark Erzavek, speaking of evil, did any of you see that Richard Lewontin died last month?
	I think I might mispronounce his name, but Lewontin, as some might say.
	Might know that better.
	He was a scientist, he was a geneticist, and he wrote a book called Not In Our Genes.
	He was of the Stephen J. Gould school when it comes to nature and nurture.
	And obviously, I don't take the Gould, Lewontin, Lewontin, whatever school very seriously.
	But the perspective that Lewontin had and Gould had it even more radically That genes are not essentially a serious, something that makes a tremendous degree of difference in terms of how people are who they are.
	I find that argument to be absolutely absurd and tremendously damaging.
	So I can see why Mark related a rather negative opinion of the late Richard Lamont.
	Stephan, anything to say about what Mark brought up?
	Yeah, I mean, so Stephen Jay Gould wrote a book called The Mismeasure of Man, which was basically a response to Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve, right, from the 90s.
	The Bell Curve arguing that average IQ differences between ethnicities and the free market doesn't care about your ethnicity, but it really does care about your IQ. Because the higher IQ, generally the more economic value you can bring to bear.
	Not always the case, but in general, it's a trend.
	And they didn't come down to environment or genetics.
	They remained resolutely agnostic on the matter.
	And so Stephen Jay Gould wrote a book called The Mismeasure of Man, and I have not read the detailed debunkings of it, but I've read enough to be fairly satisfied that a lot of the arguments that he made were not good.
	See, the races, I think, can get along well, but we've got to have facts.
	And we can't blame every discrepancy in racial outcomes to white bigotry.
	I mean, of course, the communists want us to do that, because then we end up all at each other's throats.
	But the people, it's funny, because the people who say, well, race is just a social construct, will then talk about white privilege.
	You've got to pick a lane, man.
	I mean, if all race is a social construct, then don't talk to me about white privilege because there's no such thing as white.
	Like if you go to Wikipedia, now the term Caucasian is like, well, that's an old classification based upon a more primitive science akin to phrenology or whatever, right?
	It's like, okay, so if there is no such thing as race, then don't talk to me about white privilege.
	Don't talk to me about any of this kind of stuff.
	But of course, that's not how the game is played when you're just seeking power and willing to use any means to get it.
	Agreed. You know, it's really interesting.
	I just saw a book. This sort of gets us into the discussion about slavery.
	Before I say that, I will say, if you have a reasonable, responsible question or comment from Stephan or myself, please advise Streamlabs.
	Leave it as soon as you can.
	We won't be on here forever.
	Thank you very much. Now, you know, it's interesting because I just read about a book called, what is it?
	The Tax Code is Too White or the Whiteness of the Tax Code.
	Or something like that. No, see, I had like a tax code that was all white.
	Like you just open up the book and there's no print.
	It's not white enough.
	It could be all black too.
	I don't care. I just don't want any text at all in the tax code.
	That's my theory. Anyway, go ahead.
	I hear you. No, that's my ideal tax code as well.
	But, you know, this person was a...
	What was she?
	I believe she is a lawyer and a law professor.
	And... She is, you know, a black female, and she was arguing that the tax code is inherently racist against blacks to the favor of whites.
	And there was a black tax professional who wrote a scathing review of her book.
	He was someone who believes that, you know, there's structural racism and all that in the world.
	But he just thought it was crazy that the fundamentally non-racial tax code was being treated in a racialized manner.
	And I'm, you know, obviously not a tax professional of any kind.
	Thank heavens. I mean, that's the kind of job you had to.
	You commit suicide. The fact of the matter is that you see all of this relentless, not just politicization, but racialization of stuff now.
	And it's done to get power.
	That's really what it is.
	It's about advancing a certain ideology so a certain movement, one could say, of people reigns supreme over another group.
	And it doesn't have to make sense.
	It doesn't have to be Well-founded.
	It's just something done for power's sake.
	And now that brings us to the slavery issue.
	Slavery is obviously a terrible thing.
	It's gone on since time immemorial.
	It's very much part of the human story.
	But nowadays, when people bring it up, at least in our society, they tend to do it in a very politicized way that is meant to advance a certain political group over another group, not to understand history as it actually happened.
	And my disdain for that situation is what led to me writing this book.
	And I'm very glad that I did.
	And, you know, certainly I knew a lot about slavery before I wrote the book, but I learned a great deal more in writing the book And anyway, I thought it'd be interesting to communicate some points about slavery that a lot of people would either probably find totally beyond belief, or they would think that it's, you know, it's just so out there that they, even though they believe that they could hardly believe it.
	And essentially, you know, the book is about slave ownership by American Indians, blacks.
	No, no, no, you can't talk about that, Joseph.
	There's not, nobody profits from that.
	There's no guilt to be mined and exploited.
	You can't hammer the white guilt vending machine by pursuing that narrative.
	Oh, no. When I point out that the natives had rape as a tool of war, they had genocides, they aimed to genocide each other, they owned and traded slaves, they tortured children, and people are just like, no, no, no, I saw Graham Greedman, a movie called Downstairs with Wolves.
	He was like a totally nice guy.
	What are you talking about? I've got the documentary of a Hollywood movie.
	What are you talking about?
	Like, just No, you're absolutely right.
	And I did stress in the book that it's not that the Seminoles, who are still an American Indian tribe here in Florida, but I don't say that they're savage or bloodthirsty.
	They're basically like any other group of people that have fought to ensure their survival over the ages.
	And while I don't make a political...
	The book is not a political polemic at all.
	It's a work of historical assessment that I wrote, hopefully, to read an epic novel.
	But at the same time, My point in communicating these facts about slavery is to show people that the matter should not be politicized and that it's a very multifaceted matter, a complex matter, where no group of people comes out smelling like roses, so to speak.
	In the case of the Seminoles and their slaves, it was actually the white man who ended Seminole slave ownership of blacks.
	And a lot of stuff happened after that.
	But to this day, actually, on Seminole reservations, there's still segregation, which is really something that a lot of people would not believe.
	And so I really think that the whole slavery matter is something which we need to understand in a humanistic rather than a political sense.
	As I mentioned early on in the book, or actually this might have come at the very end.
	Slavery is something that comes out of a very unfortunate facet of the human existence, if you will.
	And it's a desire of people to want absolute control over other people and for some people to grant them that control.
	And as a result of that, you have situations where people are kept in bondage.
	But, you know, people are slaves in different ways.
	Nowadays, there's human trafficking.
	People could also be a slave to a certain ideology.
	So slavery is not just something that you have on antebellum plantations back in the day.
	It's all the white man's fault, white man evil, blah, blah, blah.
	And I hope people would understand that.
	And certainly I would hope that the book did something to educate people about the matter.
	But I really, you know, slavery is definitely something that people should speak about.
	But they should speak about it accurately and within a proper historical context, not, you know, this politicization craze that we see now, which basically is an agenda against Western civilization, arguably against civilized society more broadly, and certainly on a specific level against whites.
	Yeah, there was a phrase that I heard about when I was a teenager.
	You've probably heard the phrase, too.
	No good deed goes unpunished.
	And I remember thinking, oh, that's rather cynical.
	How could that be true? I mean, I'm sure everybody would be very happy about good deeds and so on.
	So the big story in history is...
	Okay, there's two things. First of all, Nobody had a clue that you had labor-saving machines.
	This is something post-industrial.
	Nobody had a clue that there could possibly be such thing as a combine harvester or a steam engine or whatever you've got that's going on.
	Nobody had any clue.
	Throughout all of human history, Physical labor had to be done by someone.
	And the idea that there was labor-saving machinery, it wasn't even considered.
	It wasn't even on the table.
	Nobody knew until we got the meritocracy of the Industrial Revolution, which finally let the productive people get a hold of the means of production to produce the modern world.
	So it's like, well, we got to eat.
	And the only way we can eat is if there are slaves.
	That was the knowledge throughout human history.
	And if you say, well, they should have known better...
	Okay, what's the big, massive insight that you have that's going to dictate the future?
	I bet you don't have one, and so asking people to have in history what you don't have in the present is ridiculous.
	To me, asking people to say, oh, well, we should just have a non-slave society is like saying, well, how come the doctors in the 14th century didn't prescribe antibiotics?
	They suck! Those doctors suck!
	It's like, no, why didn't they have MRIs?
	Come on, I mean, it's ridiculous.
	I mean, morality is a form of technology, and asking people to go ahead of things is like asking you to teleport at the moment because it's not here yet.
	So that's number one. Number two, as you know, all cultures, all societies, all throughout history, all practice slavery.
	I mean, the slave trade from Africa to the Middle East was 20 times, 20 times larger than the slave trade from Africa to America.
	And in the Middle East, they did a lot worse, the slaves.
	They did a lot worse, castration, eunuchs.
	The reason why they took millions and millions of slaves, not really any blacks in the Middle East, because they were really, really horrendous.
	And so, you know, they got rid of all of their slaves through brutal torture and destruction.
	So they don't have a problem with being called slaves.
	It's just weird, right?
	So as we talked earlier, the Quakers, the white Christians, the Protestants, I mean, they're the ones who ended slavery.
	So you'd think that the whole world would say, oh my gosh, you guys pulled off the biggest moral, political and military coup in human history.
	You actually took, and it was mostly England, you took blood and treasure for a hundred years, used the power and might of the empire, To interfere with, end the slave trade, which was going from black to black, black to Muslim, Muslim to wherever, right?
	You took your entire blood and treasure on a moral mission from God himself to end the human scourge of slavery, thus ushering in the modern world.
	You cannot have a modern world without slavery because there's no incentive for labor-saving devices when your labor is essentially dirt cheap.
	So you'd think, in any objective view of human history, you'd say, wow, you guys get the gold medal.
	You come in first. As far as a moral mission to end slavery, which no other culture, no other race, no other religion, no other history, no other empire had ever even remotely thought to do.
	In fact, the empires were fought not to end slavery but to get more slaves.
	So you'd think, to me, the end of slavery is the greatest moral advancement in the history of mankind.
	Now, whether you like it or not, it was the tighty-whities with their little ships that made it happen, right?
	That's just the way it is.
	It's not because I'm white.
	That's just objectively throughout history, 100,000 years of human history, it was...
	The white Western European Quakers and Protestants and Catholics to a smaller degree who worked incredibly hard for an incredibly long period of time, not just to end slavery in their own countries, not just to end slavery in their own empires, but to end slavery all around the world.
	And they fought wars and they bribed and they bought and they nagged and they lectured and they wrote to end this.
	And it was I mean, we call the end of smallpox a great moral good, certainly was, but it's nothing compared to the end of slavery.
	And look, other races, other ethnicities, other cultures have their own moral triumphs, but this one, which I consider the biggest one in human history, you'd think there'd be a couple of attaboys.
	You're like, nobody's saying, you know, let's go worship the statues of all the abolitionists, though that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.
	A couple of attaboys.
	Would not be the end of the world, would it?
	Not to me, not to you.
	What did I do? Long before my time, which may be a shock to my younger listeners.
	And yet, and yet, and yet, the only culture, ethnicity, religion, race, whatever you want to call it, that ended slavery around the world is the only culture that's blamed for slavery.
	The only culture that is blamed for slavery.
	Now, I'm going to tell this to the world as a whole.
	If you want people to do good things, how about you stop shiting on them for doing good things?
	Just a possibility.
	You know, if you want your kid to tidy up after themselves, how about you don't punch your kid every time they tidy up?
	It's just a thought. How about in the world, stop punishing!
	Groups and people for doing good things and the greatest moral good at the end of slavery.
	How about you stop banging on and on and attacking everyone?
	Because you see, it's the same empathy that caused the end of slavery that is now responsible for the irrational guilt about slavery.
	You know, I don't blame a little Japanese kid for Pearl Harbor because, you know, I'm not a collectivist.
	I'm not, you know, that would be a horribly unjust thing to do.
	And blaming the race that ended slavery...
	As the only slave owners is moral madness.
	And again, but it's only facilitated by the state because if you can get people to feel guilty about something, they'll pay you to make the guilt go away, which just means that you'll get more of the guilt next round because they want more money.
	So yeah, that's my sort of two cents on it.
	Oh, very much, very worthwhile.
	I'll just make a quick correction to something I said before.
	I said that my take on, my humanistic take on slavery came at the end of the book, actually came at the beginning, my faux pas there.
	But, you know, it's interesting because one thing that happened here in Florida, and I obviously covered this in the book, Was that the British came here when the state was still a Spanish colony and the U.S. really wanted it, and there was the War of 1812.
	And the British actually built a fort where they actually armed runaway slaves, that kind of thing, and they gave them freedom if they pledged allegiance to the British crown.
	It was run by an abolitionist Whose name was Captain Nichols.
	He later became a knight and a general.
	And he was, you know, a passionate, passionate opponent of slavery.
	And it was the white man essentially going against other white men, which were the Spaniards and the Americans up in Georgia.
	And the Spaniards didn't mind the British there because the Spaniards were very feeble at that time in Oldie, Florida.
	But they didn't like it when some of their slaves began running away to the fort where they were offered freedom under the British crown.
	But the fact of the matter is, is that when people reduce slavery to this, you know, sort of white man evil narrative or white woman evil, they were a female slave owner, which there obviously did happen in certain cases.
	It's crazy because whites actually, as the story I'm telling here relates, whites actually went up against other whites in order to offer freedom to slaves.
	So the fact that people don't get the nuance here is absolutely ridiculous.
	And the story I'm talking about didn't happen like in the 1400s in South Africa or something.
	It happened Right where I am, here in Florida, in the 1800s.
	And so the history is not terribly, terribly far removed.
	But at the same time today, people are bundling all whites together as being collectively guilty of slavery.
	Meanwhile, just a few hours away from where I am, without even leaving the state, there's a place where whites set up a military fort.
	Sorry, they offered slavery or freedom?
	Sorry, offered freedom from slavery.
	My faux pas again.
	No, you finished your story. Yeah, they were offered freedom.
	Yeah, so they were offered freedom from slavery at this fort, and the fort was constructed specifically for the purpose of battling whites who lived in a slave-owning society.
	So, you know, the whole white man evil narrative absolutely does collapse when people look at it, but at the same time, it's as if they ignore evidence that goes against the narrative, or they're just ignorant of it, and they have absolutely no interest in being enlightened.
	Which leads me to believe these people don't really care about learning from the facts.
	No, it's just money. No, it's, you know, follow the money, right?
	I mean, if you can make people...
	And here's the thing.
	I mean, the average, you know, like the numbers were like four or five percent of whites owned slaves in the South.
	And the average white person hated slavery.
	Because it drove down his wages.
	And also, he would be conscripted into slave hunting expeditions, where he'd have to go out into the swamps in the middle of the night and get his ass chewed by alligators and mosquitoes.
	And I'm not sure in Florida which is worse.
	I think they're basically just flying alligators and waterborne mosquitoes.
	And so he would be out there in the middle of the night saying, oh, I love slavery.
	I'm an unpaid slave hunter and my wages are half what they could be in a free market society.
	So, no, it was terrible.
	It was terrible for everyone. There were a few ruling elites, as there were throughout all of human history, who got their power unjustly.
	And the other thing, too, is like slavery was a government program.
	It was a government program.
	You had to have the government...
	To enforce slavery, it would never occur in a free market because somebody runs away from you and you've got to pay yourself to go and catch them and bring them back.
	It's never economically viable.
	So slavery was entirely a government program and yet the socialists put so much faith in the government and yet so anti-slavery, which they should be, without recognizing that the exact same institution, in principle, that they want to make everything right was what made everything wrong to begin with.
	Yeah, it's really crazy that people nowadays take these bizarre perspectives on slavery where everything is reduced to a racial level, or it's used the past in a racialized sense, of course.
	And Ghana has apologized for their role in the slave trade.
	I mean, the whites didn't go and get the slaves.
	The whites only bought them from the ports because the average lifespan for a white person in Africa is 13 months back in the day, right?
	Dengue fever and malaria and sleeping sickness and type, like whatever, right?
	So the blacks were, again, I don't, I mean, I don't like any kind of collective guilt.
	I don't like any kind of historical guilt.
	That's all nonsense. But if we're just looking at the facts of the matter, there couldn't have been slavery without the blacks catching the slaves and delivering them to the whites on the coast.
	And so, yeah, I mean, it's – everything in history sucked.
	Like, everything in history sucked.
	If you and I had to go back and get 14th century dentistry, we'd probably want to chew our own head off with a spork.
	So everything in history sucked.
	I mean, I remember a friend of mine many years ago said – he was reading about the Middle Ages.
	He said, like, okay, like, imagine you're kissing a woman who's never brushed her teeth.
	And it's like, ooh, that's some jungle mouth.
	Me, I'm like, in the morning, I don't kiss my wife before, like, bringing massive exfoliant sandblasters to my gums, you know?
	And it's like, you are kissing a woman who's never brushed her teeth.
	Now, I get it. It wasn't quite as much sugar and blah, blah, blah.
	But still, I mean, what's that line?
	I won't give it directly, but that old Monty Python movie, you know?
	I must be a king.
	How do you know? Well, he hasn't got crap all over him.
	It's like, yeah, that's history sucked for everyone.
	And trying to find winners and losers in history is like trying to pick someone out of a mosh pit.
	Yeah, it really is something else because nowadays there is what one would call a renewed interest in history, but not a real interest in the facts of history.
	It's an interest in politicizing every facet of the present that one could find and using history as a rationalization agent for this.
	I think that it's really scary because I'm actually seeing books now.
	One of the books was titled something to the effect of when blacks rule the world or blacks invented everything.
	And then there are also other books about, you know, whiteness, you know, which is they're supposed to provide a historical context as to why whites are evil.
	And looking at all this stuff, it's frightening that people would, number one, think that something as stupid as one race controlling the world could, you know, somehow be the foundation of the human story.
	But it's also stupid to think that, you know, somehow one race is inherently diseased or deficient.
	And yet so many people are buying into this garbage.
	And if one race is inherently...
	And I hate racial supremacy of any kind.
	But if one race is deficient in some manner morally, then it's not that race's fault, clearly.
	Because, you know, like let's say race X, oh, they're just evil.
	It's like, well, if they're all just evil, then it's not their fault because they have no moral choice.
	You know, there's no morality involved, but there's no choice.
	And when you create a collectivized moral damnation, you're taking away free will and therefore morality from the entire situation.
	But, I mean, again, we can talk about these things.
	They're interesting.
	But, I mean, it just comes down to money.
	I mean, it just comes down to money and power.
	I mean, the communists in 1922 and the Communist International, I talked about this in my show like over 10 years ago, and many people know it, but...
	Yeah, they said, oh, well, we're going to just, you know, bring all the races together and then just provoke racial animosity until there's chaos and then we can take over and just set everyone at each other's throats and all of that.
	And as long as we're fighting each other and not looking up, we don't really see the powers that run things.
	But, you know, it's funny.
	They can publish their battle plans a century ahead of time and people are like, well, no, that can't be.
	That's a conspiracy theory. It's like, this is what they wrote and this is what critical race theory is.
	It's all just a way of ginning up racial animosity and Of course, myself and lots of others are trying to find ways to cool things down, but that's not what the leftists want.
	So I guess we'll just have to learn the hard way, as generally seems to be the case in history.
	Yes, indeed. It's a shame that people, I believe I mentioned this before, don't learn from the past.
	They don't put cause and effect together.
	But generally speaking, they don't seem to.
	And that creates no litany of problems for the present as well as, quite obviously, the future.
	All right. Do we have any other cues?
	Let me see. As a matter of fact, why don't I make it now?
	This is the last call.
	If you have a reasonable and responsible question or comment for Stefan or myself, please leave it by Streamlabs.
	Or an unreasonable criticism about my wardrobe or forehead.
	I don't have a forehead.
	I have a seven head.
	Anyway, go on. It's really...
	But all the craziness that's going on now did lead me to write the book.
	I think that is something which needed to be done.
	I hope people learn from it.
	But as I just said, I'm very skeptical about people learning from the past.
	But at least I think I've done my job as to, you know...
	You know what it is?
	It's about...
	Is your conscience clear when things go bad, right?
	So if you have knowledge that can help the world and can help cool things down between opposing groups, if you withhold that knowledge and things go bad, you feel bad.
	Because I could have, you know, maybe I could have, right?
	I mean, I've been doing this for 40 years.
	I started in my mid-teens.
	I'm in my mid-50s. I've been doing this for 40 years.
	Now, so I'm backing off from politics, let other people take over.
	I'm sure there are people better out there to, better equipped to do it than I am at this point.
	Because, you know, I'm getting a little over the hill, right?
	So, but for me, it's like, okay, I don't know what else I could have done.
	I mean, I could have, I guess, taken my intestines and used them to spell things out in the snow or something, but I don't, like, genuinely don't know.
	And, you know, you writing books and having these conversations, having me on, which sometimes could be tough for people.
	It's like... I just, I just want to, if things go badly, I don't want to feel that I could have done more.
	I don't want to feel that I could have done more.
	Because that's really, that's a terrible feeling.
	You know, you've probably known, like, you're younger than me, but we've lived long enough to have seen the grim arc of regret in people's lives.
	Everybody knows someone and probably more than one person.
	They just regret.
	They didn't follow their dream.
	They didn't ask that girl out.
	They didn't invest in Bitcoin.
	They didn't like whatever it's going to be.
	And they just regret.
	And there's no regret worse than moral regret.
	And when you have a good facility for understanding history, for communicating, and you can get...
	I've always had this kind of Jedi superpower of saying the most controversial things in a way that only triggers people later.
	Like later, they're like, wait, he said what?
	But at the time I'm like, you know, and so if I have this, these are the droids who are looking for stuff, you kind of need to use that for good.
	I just, no matter what happens, I do not want moral regret.
	And so, yeah, you'll write the books.
	You'll have these conversations. We'll reach the people that we reach, and they can make their own decisions about what to do with this information.
	But if you have, I mean, if you have a magic word that cures a disease, and you're like, nah, you know, I don't really like that word.
	It leaves a bad taste in my mouth or whatever.
	It's like, okay, well, you've been given a kind of weird power You should kind of use it for good.
	There are no superhero movies where the superhero gets this amazing power and then go sing karaoke or do nothing with it or whatever it is, right?
	Like it would be the saddest movie known to man.
	You'd be so frustrated. Get the superpower!
	Do something! And if you have the superpower of communication, you've got a great thing in your life, but you also have a responsibility.
	With great power comes great responsibility, blah, blah, blah.
	And so we don't know how things are going to go because we can't control the world, because we're not megalomaniacal leftists or hardwriters or whatever.
	And what we can do is we can control how committed we are to communicating the truth, whether that lands this cycle of history or next cycle of history or the cycle after or the cycle after.
	It doesn't really matter. But at least we put our footprints in the sand so we can at least know that we were here.
	Yeah, most certainly. That's something I very much find interesting or attractive about writing, is that long after I'm gone, hopefully people will read my stuff and glean some knowledge from it that could make their world and hope maybe, maybe just even the world around them a better place.
	And there are fewer things more rewarding than that from my perspective.
	As we do wind things down here, Steph, but I guess I have two questions for you.
	The first is, will you be writing any more books in the foreseeable future?
	Well, yeah, so I wrote The Art of the Argument, which you can get at artoftheargument.com, and I also wrote Essential Philosophy, which boils down my metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics into one tidy package.
	I even included some Socratic dialogues for oppositions, and I tackled the question of, is this a simulation, that old Rene Descartes question, and so on.
	So those are out, and of course, people can get all of my books for free.
	I do have a novel.
	Nobody knows really my artistic history, but I was doing art long before I was doing philosophy, although the philosophy very much informed my art.
	And I have an epic novel, like huge Lord of the Rings style novel from...
	It's English and German history, European history, World War I to World War II, opposing families, English and German.
	It's an amazing book. People can get it free.
	I've recorded the whole audiobook with my acting training and all that kind of good stuff.
	So you can get it at freedomain.com forward slash almost.
	And yeah, currently I'm grinding my way slowly and painfully through a book on parenting called Peaceful Parenting, which at this point, at this level of progress, my daughter's children will have to finish at this point.
	But you know, Some books flow and some books are like, I don't know, pinching out Indian food three days later.
	Sorry for the graphic imagery, but it does happen that way.
	So yeah, I'm working on that at the moment.
	You know, it's interesting, before I posed my last question, you said something in response, which you said.
	I did not want to write a book about politics, current events.
	Obviously, as soon as you write that, the book tends to be anachronistic in one way or another.
	I figured it'd be good to talk to people about facts of history that have some relevance to their situation now and the situation of people in years to come.
	And this history, which is freely accessible, but it's been quite lost on the overall majority of people since I knew something about it and since I was keen on learning more about it.
	I figured that it would be good to write about it and give it to the world because then hopefully they could do something productive with it.
	And obviously the product of that is this.
	And I didn't want to write a fiction book because...
	I'm sure your fiction book is great.
	I'm going to check it out as a matter of fact.
	But there's so much nonfiction out there that people could learn from that they have no idea about it.
	They have very misinformed ideas about it that I thought if I could help sort of nudge them along toward knowledge, maybe something somewhere along the line good could come of that.
	So that, you know, this is the product of that mindset.
	I don't know how successful it will be, but I certainly did try.
	It'll be a runaway hit.
	Possibly. Wouldn't that be nice?
	But it really would be good if people would learn from it.
	But, you know, interestingly, the title, I'll just, you know, because a lot of people wonder about that.
	What the hell is that all about?
	Runaway masters. How could that be?
	It's because the Seminole Indians were runaways from other tribes, principally the creeps, and they were slave masters, obviously, here in Florida.
	So they were The Runaway Masters and also the name Seminal is actually derived from Runaway, but not in English.
	So that's the explanation for the book's unique name.
	A lot of people think it's some sort of racial joke or something like that, but it's not.
	It's not. It's actually something much more serious that some people are quite stumped by, but I hope in a positive way.
	Good, good. Well, yeah, give me the link to the book and I'll, when I republish this, I'll include that as well.
	Well, certainly I will. And the last question, Stefan, before I just check Streamlabs and then we go.
	I really do, I suppose, I really would like to figure out your take on philosophy in modern life, because it seems to me that less and less people Have a real interest in having any sort of consistent life philosophy.
	And I'm not a big believer in public polling, but I did see a poll or an article from several years ago, which indicated that there had been over the span of like three decades a big drop in people.
	Who had found it to be of any importance to have a consistent life philosophy.
	And as a philosopher yourself, I imagine this is something of keen interest to you.
	So do you think that people today are interested in having consistency in their actions, which is to say, a serious life philosophy?
	Or do you think that people are just sort of rudderless?
	Is it somewhere between the two?
	What is your take on the state of the importance of philosophy in the lives of most people nowadays?
	So, to me, when you look at modern thought, because the power structure of the elites, the ones in charge, run the educational system from cradle to grave, pretty much, right?
	So, when you look at the contents of people's minds in the modern world, all you have to ask yourself is, is that convenient for the powers that be?
	And it's clear, postmodernism and the destruction of Christianity, the destruction of universal values, the destruction of morality as an objective discipline, the destruction of critical thinking, the destruction of the Socratic method, all of this is...
	beautiful for the powers that be.
	Because if you can't think, you have nothing to stand up for.
	You have no integrity.
	You have no possibility of opposing power.
	The only way to oppose power is through consistency.
	I mean, other than armed might, which is certainly not my wheelhouse and which I would reject in almost all circumstances.
	But the only way that you oppose power is through universality and consistency, right?
	So how did we end slavery in the world?
	We ended slavery by saying we're going to take the idea of personhood and extend it to everyone because you had to look at the slaves as less than human as livestock in order to justify and maintain your power over them.
	So... What happens is the people in power invented morality, at least in the way that most people experience it.
	Because if you're a thief, the first thing you have to do is convince other people to stop stealing.
	Because if everyone's a thief, there's nothing to steal.
	Nobody's producing anything. It's just bare subsistence, right?
	And when bare subsistence, people will fight you to the death, right?
	If somebody's going to take a hundred bucks from you, you're probably not going to fight them to the death.
	But it's your last piece of bread.
	You will, because without it, you'll die.
	So the first thing you want to do if you're a thief is convince other people not to steal.
	And this is why you have this wild contradiction of the people in charge saying, don't counterfeit while the brr of the money printing press goes on behind them, and don't steal while they impose taxation upon you.
	And, well, it's important to oppose misinformation while lying to students for, you know, 20 years straight through education.
	So, is it convenient to the people in power that people are rudderless?
	Well, sure. Because...
	If you bring the question of consistency, you dissolve hierarchy.
	Because hierarchy is, there's a universal morality, asterisk, we're exempted from it.
	Thou shalt not steal!
	We've got to tax you, right?
	You can't counterfeit, but we go, right?
	So you claim universal morality while exempting your group, and that's the very definition of power.
	So anybody who advocates for universal morality, which was the great and powerful innovation of Jesus, right?
	Jesus was, it's not our tribe, it's not our group, it's not just Christians.
	These are universal morals for everyone.
	And this is why Christianity was the only religion that could have ended slavery, because it was a universal moral system, unlike other religions which are in-group tribal preferences and out-group be damned, right?
	So whenever you universalize morality, you take an axe to the base of the tree, the power.
	Because power survives on universal morality, but it must exempt itself from universal morality in order to gain the fruits of power.
	There's no point subjecting yourself to thou shalt not steal if you're on the receiving end of tax money.
	You want to keep having that tax money.
	So, for people to not have a coherent or consistent or rational set of morals, whether they come from Christianity or philosophy, Christianity and UPB, to me, it's sort of two sides of the same coin.
	UPB is my approach to ethics.
	Again, free book at freedomain.com.
	So, for people to be rudderless, It's perfect for those in power, because what's the definition of a rudderless boat?
	Something that the wind will blow in any direction.
	You can't steer it.
	It has no motive power of its and no motive direction of its own.
	Any way the wind blows is where the boat is going to go.
	That's what rudderless fundamentally means.
	Now, rudderless is totally seductive to the young.
	Because the young are, if anything like me, hedonistic idiots.
	You know, you pursue pleasure, you pursue dating, you pursue travel, you pursue money, you pursue sex, you pursue whatever it is, right?
	And it's just like, woohoo, yay, fine, you know, because you're living for the moment, you're living for the now.
	Unfortunately, that's what culture has indoctrinated into the young.
	Live for now, and what the culture has also said is all old people...
	All old people are racist.
	All old people are prejudiced.
	What is it that Oprah said?
	I can't wait for all the old, basically white people to die, right?
	And so when they cut you off from the wisdom of your elders, and there is some wisdom with your elders.
	They've lived through a lot, right?
	So when the powers that be cut you off from the wisdom of their elders, they just replace themselves and then they can order you around because we all need guidance in life, particularly when we're young.
	So the point of the elders is to tell you That the consequences of hedonism in youth is depression and anxiety for the second half of your life.
	I mean, that's the lesson, because we've seen what's on the other side of hedonism.
	It's burnout, it's exhaustion, it's neurasthenia, it's hypertension, it's health issues, it's anxiety, depression, lack of bonding, lack of community, lack of future, lack of connectivity to people around you.
	Hedonism burns you out, but it's incredibly appealing to the young.
	In the same way that we talked about the lottery ticket earlier, right?
	Winning the lottery destroys most people's lives.
	I remember when I was younger with my daughter, we'd read these, you know, oh, here's what happens if some guy won the lottery.
	There's a guy in Toronto who won the lottery.
	He ended up in jail where he said, this is way better for me than winning the lottery because I can't get cocaine in jail, right?
	At least not easily. So the elders...
	Need to be able to tell the young and sometimes even aggressively through ostracism and criticism in force the consequences of hedonism is a form of emotional death.
	Like you burn yourself out and you become impossible.
	The hedonic treadmill just goes right off a cliff and you get this sad sack stuff later on in life where you're just dragging your butt through the day.
	So a coherent philosophy is I have to act in a way that protects my future self.
	I have to act in a way that is universal and moral, and I have to hold other people to account to universal values.
	And the universal values aren't complicated.
	Don't hit, don't lie.
	It's a big philosophy, right?
	Don't hit, don't lie. Don't initiate the use of force.
	And do not bear false witness.
	That's really all it comes down to.
	We expect four-year-olds or three-year-olds to adhere to those moral rules.
	I mean, if you get a three-year-old who hits his sister, you say, don't hit, right?
	If he steals a kid or grabs a toy from another kid, don't take, right?
	Don't take other people's stuff.
	Don't lie. And don't initiate force.
	That's all it comes down, I guess, is three, right?
	Respect for property rights, honesty, and non-aggression, right?
	And you universalize that Well, the state is not justified.
	The collective guilt is no longer profitable.
	Because, you know, it's easy to run to a government and say, go get me these reparations.
	It's kind of tough to knock on people's door and say, hey, would you mind giving me some reparations?
	I'm like, no. Let's talk.
	That's a complicated question.
	It's a lot of time and effort, right?
	So people do lack a coherent philosophy.
	They're no longer listening to their elders.
	They've been cut off from that.
	And you know, in every kid's movie, and I stopped watching them for this reason with my daughter, in every kid's movie, the kids are wise and smart and strong and caring and thoughtful environmentalists and egalitarians to the core, and their parents are just clued out and weird and not helpful.
	And, you know, they're just always trying to alienate you from the wisdom of your elders so that they can substitute their own propaganda in its place, which is designed to keep you in that state of hedonism until you can no longer achieve happiness.
	And then they'll turn your unhappiness into aggression.
	Which they can then use to target the people they don't like.
	You see, the feminists, right?
	Oh, you know, plenty of time for kids later, or You've got to enjoy. You've got to never be dependent on a man.
	Have a great career and be cool and snappy and sex in the city and stuff like that.
	And then women hit 40 and they fall off the cliff, right?
	They hit the wall and now men aren't dating them and they're not interested in them and they get mad.
	And then that bitterness gets turned into aggression against the next generation of women who they then program to repeat their mistakes.
	And the bitterness gets turned into any man who points this out.
	And there's this rage against the manosphere and all of that.
	So, yeah, if you can program people to make bad mistakes for long enough, they get filled with such sadness and such anger that they become very easily weaponized against your enemies.
	And to do that, though, you've got to deny them critical thinking and universal morality.
	And the first step was Christianity.
	The second step was me.
	And the next step is, oh, I don't know, but I'm keeping my eyes peeled.
	Yeah, it's interesting.
	Before we go, some people say the decline of Christianity that leads to rank immorality.
	But if you see a lot of Christian churches today, they're basically incorporating wokeness into their doctrines, which makes me think that people have to not just be, or they functionally, they need something more than just being told words.
	The words have to have some relevance to them.
	And people nowadays, for whatever reason, don't seem to want to believe in having a sort of ethical principle set, as you mentioned.
	It's much better for them to have this sort of, you know, oppressive, group-based, tribalistic hatred that they carry around everywhere.
	An organized supernatural religion, which traditionally in the West is Christianity, nowadays, generally speaking, is no bulwark against this most unfortunate new phenomenon.
	Well, so women as a whole tend to be drawn towards more egalitarianism for a wide variety of reasons.
	One of which is actually quite important is that women tend to cluster around the center of the IQ curve and men tend to be spread a little bit more at the higher end.
	And so for like every 12 men with an IQ over 150, there's like one woman, right?
	I mean, so as a whole, men, I mean, I grew up with a pretty smart crew and like Some of the men that I, boys, I guess I knew when I was growing up, which is incredible.
	I have a friend who's a professor of economics.
	His math skills were off the charts.
	I couldn't match them even close.
	Another friend of mine is the head of a department in engineering.
	Again, his spatial reasoning was beyond belief and his understanding of mechanics was astounding to me.
	And so for me, growing up, I had my own particular abilities that other people envied and so on.
	And so men, we tend to know extraordinary men, particularly if we are ourselves a little bit above the curve as a whole.
	Some of that's genetic, some of that's just IQ, but a lot of that is hard work and perseverance and pushing through obstacles and so on.
	So men, we know enough extraordinary men that the idea of egalitarianism is like, no, it's not a thing.
	You know, and particularly in sports too.
	I mean, do you ever know these people?
	They're just like, you know, they pick up a bat and it kind of fuses with their hand and they just become at one with the bat and it's like they can point where it's going to go and all of that.
	And, you know, kids who pick up skates and are doing like, you know, triple axles in three and a half minutes and stuff.
	And so with sports and with the other kind of meritocracies that men compete in, We all know the extraordinary people.
	So that Pareto principle, like the square root of a group produces half the value, we kind of get that.
	Because we're on a team and there's the one guy who just scores all the time, right?
	Or that one goalie that is like a brick wall, nothing ever gets through.
	And so we know people way off the average as men.
	And we know this on both sides, right?
	We know the total dummies and we know the incredible smart people.
	And so we engage in meritocracy and competition where we see truly extraordinary people, men usually, And so we kind of accept this.
	Women, again, tend to cluster more around the middle.
	They probably don't know that many extraordinary women from an intellectual standpoint.
	And, of course, they exist now.
	They're just on average.
	So for women, it's a little tougher to think because they don't deal with this extreme in meritocracy and ability.
	It's a little easier for them to say, well, you know, things should just be more equal because...
	But the idea that when I looked at my friends, like the guy who became a professor of economics, all he did all summer was read economics.
	And he had a program called Mathematica.
	He would chew through all these equations and show me what was going on, and I just tried to smile and look pretty at that point.
	And so the idea that I would compete with him in this field is completely ridiculous.
	Of course, he should be doing that and I should be doing this because of my skills and all that.
	But women, because they cluster more around the middle, it's kind of like a weird thing for them to think that the CEO should be paid 200 times more than the worker.
	Well, it's like, well, yeah.
	I mean, that makes total sense to us because we just know those people who are like, oh, can he be on my team?
	Because he's fantastic, you know, and I can't compete, but at least I can ride his coattails, so to speak.
	So I think it's just one of these things.
	And of course, the difference where women do see things in terms of, let's say, physical beauty tends to be unearned.
	It tends to be unearned. And so the idea that extremes are rare and unjust, I think, settles a little bit more into women's heads than men, which is why, you know, when women get the vote, you get redistribution and socialism and so on, right?
	I think it's one of these things that it's just kind of hard to get away from.
	So sorry, that was a big long answer to I know it was your last question, but...
	Oh, no, it's fine. No, it's fascinating, actually.
	Thank you very much. For providing the answer.
	It really is something else, I suppose, that the state that society is in.
	But some people say it's destined to get better.
	Some people say it's destined to get worse.
	I think that things are going to keep sliding downhill for quite a while.
	But that doesn't mean there aren't going to be a few bright spots along the way.
	And I hope to essentially create as many of those bright spots as I can.
	At the end of the day, perhaps that's all any of us really can do.
	Yeah, I mean, I think we're just dropping breadcrumbs in the forest so we can get back to a more rational place and then go further, you know, get to hopefully a universal and rational place.
	And I don't know.
	I don't like the idea of destiny because it sounds like things are going to happen.
	I mean, just keep telling the truth.
	Keep being out there, pushing forward the facts.
	Write books like Joseph's. Do shows like we've done together.
	Even if it's just little comments here and there, as anonymous as you want, just push back to the narrative.
	Every little bit helps.
	And you never know who you're going to wake up and who you're going to inspire and who you're going to spark a thought in who may have infinite talent or infinite resources and can really change things.
	So never stop pushing.
	Never stop pushing back.
	And we'll...
	We'll see. It's not let's wait and see.
	We'll see what the combined effort of our actions will be.
	And I think we have to assume it's positive.
	Otherwise, it's not much point having any of these conversations, I think.
	Yeah, positive in one way or another, but probably not positive in the way that any of us would imagine right now, but certainly history has a unique way of taking twists and turns which leave people flummoxed.
	And I say that as someone who enjoys making reasonable predictions about the foreseeable future, although I have no claim of knowledge as to what's going to happen for sure in any case.
	And I certainly don't even know what's more likely than not to happen, specifically 10 years down the road.
	So anyway, Stefan, thank you very, very much for coming on today.
	It was an outstanding discussion.
	Very glad we were able to have it.
	I really, really enjoyed it, and I'm sure that the people watching did as well.
	Well, thank you very much. A great pleasure to chat again, and we'll do it again.
	And I really appreciate the invitation.

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